Blood Feast - Kill for Pleasure (1987)^{Release ID: 4828}

The debut studio album from New Jersey based thrashers Blood Feast is a raw & aggressive affair that sports a take-no-prisoners approach. The noisy production has the sort of authentically raw 80's underground atmosphere that old tape traders like myself would be comfortable with & it works pretty well for this material with the out-of-control guitar solos having a fair bit of Slayer's Jeff Hanneman & Kerry King about them even if they're not on par from a technical point of view. It's also worth noting that there's a fair whack of hardcore punk about Blood Feast's style which adds a little more violence & intensity to some of this material in a similar way to early Sodom. The obligatory loose execution that was so common in extreme metal at this point in time is well represented but its not anything too extreme.  

Vocalist Gary Markovitch's delivery sits somewhere between the gravel-throated style of Exodus front man Steve Souza & the growly death metal grunting of Possessed's Jeff Becerra & Death's Chuck Schuldiner but there's a bit of variety in his approach between the individual tracks. Actually Blood Feast are often mentioned as a prominent influence on the young US death metal scene & are regularly referred to in the same terms as the more brutal thrash bands like Demolition Hammer, Kreator & Morbid Saint. I'd suggest that there are definitely a couple of tracks that border on death metal amongst this lot (mostly because Markovitch starts to head further in that direction) but I wouldn't say that "Kill For Pleasure" is as consistently intense or brutal as the bands I mentioned & the instrumentation doesn't veer too far off the path of aggressive US thrash metal. There are a couple of really great mosh-pit worthy numbers here though (see "Venomous Death" & "The Evil") & thankfully the highlights are strong enough to compensate for an inconsistent tracklisting sporting as many failures as there are successes. 

Overall, "Kill For Pleasure" is a flawed but enthusiastic effort that has enough quality thrash metal on offer to keep me bobbing my head. I actually prefer it to Blood Feast's more highly regarded "Face Fate" E.P. from later the same year. But what's with the album title?? Surely Blood Feast had heard of Kreator's hugely influential "Pleasure To Kill" album at this point, hadn't they? 

For fans of: early Exodus, "Show No Mercy"-era Slayer, Possessed.