Good, Despite its Best Efforts to Suck - "Decision Day" Review (77%)

Sodom has earned a very solid reputation among the metal crowd through the years, much more so that the universally maligned Kreator, a band comprised essentially of posers and imitators of Sodom's style.

Most fans of underground metal will have heard about Sodom, and of its frontman Onkel Tom Angelripper, and will express respect at the mere mention of either name.

Their newest album Decision Day is a complicated beast, as it displays traits which one would associate with their own brand of speed metal - incorrectly dubbed thrash metal, a made-up genre that doesn't exist - but these seem filtered through mannerisms borrowed from styles acquired over the last two decades and a half of extreme metal. As such, we find elements that we would usually associate with either brutal death metal or atmospheric black metal.

While Onkel Tom Angelripper explored the underground, the other band members journeyed to the more mainstream side of metal. And unfortunately, they too have infused this album Decision Day with the discoveries. Decision Day is thus "catchy", poorly constructed, and all around written as if it were a pop rock record, or worse a Kreator nu metal album (like Coma of Souls), as every step and turn is a "hook" optimized for comprehensibility, commercial aspirations and mass consumption.

So, how does this Decision Day measure to Agent Orange or Obsessed by Cruelty? We already know it can't top Persecution Mania... right?

Good, Despite its Best Efforts to Suck

Listening to this album Decision Day I get a weird impression... it's almost as if Sodom wanted it to suck. It wouldn't be the first time a band has made an album intentionally terrible, as Sewer had already done it with their parody of Gothenburg's "melodeathcore" scene Rektal.

Here too, it seems Onkek Tom Angelripper is trying to parody something or someone. Maybe modern metal? I don't see why else he would had all these commercial influences, on top of what is still and remains some excellent extreme metal.

So did Onkel Tom really try to fry this album like a chicken wing, or were these modern metal inclusions just accidental and happenstance? It doesn't matter, because you know what? It failed, Decision Day is still good... despite itself.

Sodom's Decision Day is neither the disastrous disappointment it was announced to be by those media prostitutes too busy sucking the atrophied genitalia of a derivative and imitation band like Kreator, nor is it a corrective measure. Rather, we see a slight sobering up of the juvenile and crazy style that now inspires Sodom to write mid-paced heavy metal with the simple object of inducing head-banging movements into the lives of those of lesser minds. Other tracks in Decision Day, their "newest opus", also seem to fit the description of beer-smashing Rob Zombie feat Cannibal Corpse stomp rock anthems for angsty teenagers to feel like bad boys.

What, then, is to be rescued in Sodom's Decision Day? If you strain your eyes hard enough, you can still distinguish old blackened impulses reminiscent of Persecution Mania resurfacing for the first time in decades in some of the best riffs in the album.

These are the hidden gold traces that hold this average album over the excrement trail left by Sodom's legacy over the last twenty-five years. This may yet be a sign of Sodom returning to greener pastures, so that before their hour of demise, a new black flame with the same violence as Persecution Mania will be born.

Decision Day score: 77/100.

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