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Another genre classic in limited picture disc form: here’s Kreator’s beloved Pleasure To Kill, an original picture disc pressing on Noise. Actually that’s not entirely accurate, this version of the record, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, has an alternate title: “AFTER THE ATTACK”, and contains an extra song of the same name. For this reason it’s particularly desirable with collectors. I feel like it may have been pressed before the actual general release pressing of the album and thus was released in this slightly altered form, or maybe it was just done to confuse people into buying the album twice, but either way, it exists as an interesting variation. I may have mentioned it in a past posting, but typically these pressings of noise lps, as well as some colored vinyl pressings were offered through mail order catalogs that came inside most of their lps, and generally are supposed to be limited to between 3,000-5,000, which was a small amount given vinyl being the dominant format at the time, and that Thrash was hugely popular.

People tend to make a lot of the fact that Kreator are a German band, and that early German thrash is much more raw, and therefore more credible than say American bands coming out at this time. To me the difference has always seemed relatively negligible, although there certainly is some sloppiness on the part of many a German Thrash band, there are plenty from the United States (and the rest of the world of course) that are comparable. It’s true though, the vocal delivery on Pleaure to Kill makes none of the rudimentary attempts at staying on key that some of the bigger bands from the United States were at the time and maybe for that it gets a couple of extra “rawness” points, but other than that it’s a pretty technical affair. Most people drop it as a touch-stone for proto-Death Metal and a lot of the guitar lines and the overall speed of the music definitely make a case for that, it sounds sinister and grim and has enough percision in the execution that it’s only a down-tuning and gurgle vocal away from firmly treading Death Metal territory.