Review by Morpheus Kitami for Sodom - M-16 (2001)

There's this stereotype in my head of Sodom whose playing style is to fire off a bunch of dark songs machine gun-style. This worked well in the '80s and the early '90s, but then the rest of the '90s happened and unless you were playing to 5 people in Hungary, you stopped playing thrash. Sodom were not a band who could do anything but thrash well, and thus everyone pretends that the '90s never happened. M-16 is a return to form for all those people who missed Code Red.
Modern production does Sodom no favors, I've gotten a couple of headaches while listening to this album. It's not the worst such album, but the guy's voice along with the guitar tone and the driving sound of the drums does not make for a good mix. Which is funny, because the obvious comparison is to the soundtrack of Doom. It basically sounds like a hi-res version of those classic midis. A nice, dark sound that should be punctuated by the rhythmatic sound of a shotgun blasting away hundreds of pinkies.
So, the album lives or dies by the quality of the riffs. It's not terrible by any means, but it isn't exciting either. None of these songs are memorable, and if played in isolation, one would assume it was a nice imitator of Sodom rather than the real deal. Perhaps it is that nice in context bit that makes Sodom Sodom, and I just never noticed it until now.
I do find the choice to end the album on the incredibly annoying Bird is the Word annoying. Why a completely serious band would all of a sudden include a novelty song on one of their albums is beyond me.