Фронт (aka FRONT) - Der Wasser der Köln

It's a shame that a lot of these Russian bands are still a bitch to track down online (or at least they are for someone who doesn't speak Russian/know how to read or navigate Russian websites), because there's some damn fine metal out there I would love to have on my computer. It took a few days of searching and downloading to find a copy of this, but it was well worth the time and effort.

FRONT are a thrash metal band, hailing from Saint Petersburg. They're actually still active according to metal-archives (with their latest release coming out in 2009) . There's this kind of "eastern european metal sound" that you find in bands like Torr and Drakar, that Front definitely have. Metal-archives user UCTYKAH does a much better job of reviewing both the music and the historical context in which it was created than I ever could (excerpt below, entirety here):

FRONT's 1986 demo "Metallizacija" is usually credited for being a pioneering piece of thrash metal in the former USSR, anticipating recordings by other thrash brethren like SHAH, BLACK OBELISK, CLINIC and others. The vast majority of Russian metal during the days of the iron curtain was quite watery, let's put it this way, so whatever brutality that FRONT were able to generate back in the mid-80's was a breath of fresh air, despite garage recording and the band's less-than-stellar performance. Said demo, however, along with the above mentioned bands' albums are but smaller bricks next to a cinder block that was 1990's "Der Wasser Der Koln". The iron curtain already went down but the USSR would still stand for another year, so placing this album in that previous era seems the right thing to do.

The most striking aspect here is what a big fat rabbit FRONT were able to pull out of a hat. It seems like the band were looking right through the water and, due to some lucky coincidence or favorable planet alignment, tapped all the right sources and absorbed all the right influences from such monoliths as CELTIC FROST, AMEBIX and SLAYER, to name a few. Given the limited information flow from the West, it is quite possible that the latter was the only band FRONT may have been directly familiar with at the time. And yet it did not prevent "Der Wasser Der Koln" from bulldozing its way through the turning point of the era.

ARTIST: FRONT

ALBUM: DER WASSER DEL KOLN

GENRE: THRASH METAL

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