Kommandant-Stormlegion

Planet Metal
2008

There are occasions where an album can start out promising, but then the potential can quickly fade if the band doesn’t do enough to expand on their sound. That’s about how I felt during the course of this album from Chicago’s Kommandant. The cover is of a simple design and the music is also of a similar simple design. It’s a serving of early thrash/death/black metal with all of the basic components, but not a whole lot more. I hear some early Kreator, Sodom, Venom and others as prime influences. Kommandant play fast, fairly heavy thrash without a great deal of variation. The vocals are raw and fit in just fine although there is no effort to push or attempt to do more than the basics. The production is slightly fuzzy and very similar to mid-80’s underground thrash releases. That approach very much complements the music. The first almost half of “Stormlegion” had me hanging in there. This is very much the type of music I was enjoying twenty plus years ago as a I wore out cassettes, yes cassettes from those early thrash bands. My problem with this release was that about halfway through I knew where this was going and they made no attempt to doing anything that their influences didn’t accomplish two decades ago. Their lack of creativity actually made the album feel long even though it clocks in at under forty minutes. Fans of old style thrash who just love any display of that style might be interested. However for those looking for more, I would say that Kommandant have just served up a rather routine album of re-hashed ideas.