Five weeks after Germany reunified on 3 October 1990, the four men from Essen delivered a record that reads like the front page of that autumn. Out through Noise in Germany and Epic in America that 6 November, Coma of Souls set its headlines in steel type, an ecological catastrophe, the appetite for war, the brown shirts creeping back onto the streets at home, and then ran the presses so hard that the riffs tore through the paper and splintered the type trays underneath. It was the fifth Kreator album. It is the first one that sounds like it was aimed.
Recruited from Sodom, where he had played on Agent Orange in 1989, lead guitarist Frank "Blackfire" Gosdzik took the place of Jörg "Tritze" Trebiatowski, and by the summer of 1990 he was in Los Angeles with Mille Petrozza, bassist Rob Fioretti and drummer Jürgen "Ventor" Reil, tracking at Eldorado Recording Studios and Image Studios under Randy Burns, the same producer who had built Extreme Aggression a year earlier. The tapes then went across to Music Grinder for the mix. Same producer. Same city. A different lead guitar, and the whole record turns on it.
The newcomer with the Sodom pedigree does not make Kreator softer. He makes them sharper. "When the Sun Burns Red" holds its breath on a few bars of clean guitar before the downstrokes slam shut like a stamping press on sheet metal, Petrozza barking his ecological warning over a refrain made for a thousand throats, while Blackfire's harmonised leads slice melodic lines across the top of the riff, a blade the band had rarely unsheathed before. The title track follows at full velocity, all relentless picking and leads that sing where earlier Kreator solos mostly screamed. "Coma of Souls" is the record's thesis in four minutes: the old speed, the new aim, no quarter given to either.
Then the tempo drops, and the record gets more dangerous rather than less. "People of the Lie" is the mid-tempo stomp, a riff that plants a boot on every downbeat and grinds it in, aimed squarely at the neo-Nazis back home, and it was the song chosen for the first video. It became a live staple, and it is easy to hear why: Petrozza does not preach on it, he marches the listener straight into the argument and leaves no exit. A protest song with a pit inside it.
Then the tempo drops, and the record gets more dangerous rather than less.
The longer builds and the shortest blasts show how much control Burns and the band had learned. "Terror Zone" spends its sombre melodic introduction gathering troops, hardens into a march of rifle butts on a barracks door, and only then lets the thrash break loose in a full charge. "World Beyond" is two minutes of pure attrition, a sprint that ends before it can tire. "Twisted Urges", under three minutes, lets a harmonised figure ring out once before its riffs lock together, tight and relentless, gears meshing at a machine tolerance the band of Pleasure to Kill never tried for. The filmed clips for "Terror Zone" and "Twisted Urges", along with the title track, went onto the 1991 home video Hallucinative Comas.
Nothing this tight comes free. Side two runs short of new ideas before it runs out of songs. "Agents of Brutality" and "Material World Paranoia" still have teeth, but by "Hidden Dictator" and "Mental Slavery" the mid-tempo cadence that made "People of the Lie" so ferocious has become a habit, and the last ten minutes circle the same ground instead of taking more of it. The production is the other price. Burns gave the band a clean, separated, professional sound, every instrument audible and nothing smeared, and it is the right call for songs this busy. It also sands a layer of rust off the blade. Next to Extreme Aggression this is the more controlled record, and a little of the old recklessness went into the controlling. Coma of Souls never sounds reckless. It sounds engineered to last, and it has.
Thirty-six years on, the songs that carry the record still carry it: the first side is as good a run of five songs as German thrash produced in that decade, and "Twisted Urges" belongs with them. Without Coma of Souls the line from the raw early albums to the Kreator of the decades that followed has a hole in the middle, the moment where four young men from the Ruhr learned to write for melody and aim without dropping the speed, and stopped shouting at the world in order to report on it, page by page, in steel.