A Review of the Albums Endless Pain & Pleasure to Kill Essay

German thrash metal band Kreator got off to an entirely different start musically than what we hear on their later albums. Their studio albums Endless Pain & Pleasure to Kill released in 1985 and 1986 are two examples of this drastic difference. These first two albums are albums that have much more raspy vocals by Mille Petrozza that are difficult to understand and there are more screams by him. Normally I don’t include two album reviews in one article unless it is a comparison and contrast kind of article but since the lyrics of Pleasure to Kill leave a lot to be desired, we must include two album reviews.

Those of us that have followed the German thrash metal scene over the years know the elite skill and talent of thrash metal bands from this country. Perhaps we should do things a bit differently and review the album Pleasure to Kill even though it came after the album Endless Pain and here we go with two thrash metal albums from one of Germany’s finest thrash metal bands!

The album Pleasure to Kill starts off with a good and short instrumental song called Choir of the Damned which has a nice acoustic feel to it as we then see the musical style of this 1986 album which consists of extremely drowned out and raspy vocals by Mille Petrozza as the song lyrics focus on morbid subjects. Pleasure to Kill is the weakest album by Kreator because not only are the vocals harsh and rushed but combined with the morbid lyrical titles and the fact that there isn’t much musical variation on this album, these qualities alone make this the weakest album by Kreator. What are the pros of this album? The solos are respectable and there is certainly melodic riffing in songs such as “The Pestilence.”

As for the album Endless Pain, this album starts out with the title track and Mille’s vocals are so raspy that it sounds like Dave Mustaine’s did on the early years of Megadeth. The next song called Total Death actually lyrically brings attention to what happens when the politics of a country gets corrupted as they become too addicted to using weapons for the wrong purposes. Unless we take steps to de-nuclearize and reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal the security of the world is in jeopardy. “Flag of Hate” is a song that sees vocals lower than what we have heard before and it sounds like that “snake” kind of voice that you will hear in 1994’s “The Bleeding” by Cannibal Corpse. But this album came out in 1985 when heavy metal was still developing so in that time period, artists were creating albums with speed, fast solos, and raspy vocals lots of times. This album contains laughs, screams, and low shrieks from Mille Petrozza and I call these first two albums by Kreator a sort of “practice run” musically as they would get much better. The riffs would become more melodic, there would be a higher likelihood of acoustic parts in the songs and the songs overall would be of much higher quality than what we hear on Endless Pain. Living in Fear in the beginning is a song that kind of sounds like the song No Remorse by Metallica. It is really unusual to hear Kreator having such a drastically different sound and vocal style in their earlier albums given the fact that these guys have been playing under the style of melodic thrash metal. Even though that is the case for these first two albums, not all is bad musically here in these early years.

How does the album Endless Pain compare to Pleasure to Kill? The band’s debut is more of an 80’s thrash metal feel whereas Pleasure to Kill has a death metal feel to it because of the vocals. The vocals on this debut are sort of similar to the vocals by the band Sacrifice (a 1980’s Japanese thrash metal band) however these vocals are not rough and drowned out like the vocalist from Sacrifice but they are raspier with much more screams added in.