Number 88. That is where M-16 entered the German albums chart in 2001. Twenty years later the remastered anniversary reissue went to number 27, and somewhere between those two figures the world caught up with a record that had been right the first time, the tenth studio album of Sodom, released by Steamhammer on 22 October 2001, six weeks after 11 September, with the Vietnam War flattening every track from the opening drum roll to the closing cover like a barrage over a paddy field. Bad timing. Great record.
The trio that had already named a 1989 album after a jungle defoliant, Agent Orange, came back two and a half years after Code Red to finish the job properly, Tom Angelripper on bass and vocals, Bernemann on guitar and Bobby Schottkowski on drums, hauling eleven songs into Spiderhouse Studios between July and August 2001 with Harris Johns at the desk as co-producer, recording engineer and mixer, for what turned out to be the last record the band and Johns would ever make together. Angelripper gave the reason twenty years on.
That was the last album we recorded with Harris Johns, because Harris wasn’t at all into digital recording.
Tom Angelripper, Decibel, 18 November 2021
So this is where one long studio partnership ends, on the seam between two eras of studio craft. In the same Decibel interview he insisted the concept was never planned: "When we started writing songs, we never thought about doing a concept album, or whatever." Fine. The whole record is about Vietnam. The band visited war sites and a war atrocities museum there while the album was taking shape, and one song carries a sample from Apocalypse Now and another a sample from Full Metal Jacket. If that is not a concept album, it is a very disciplined accident.
The record wastes no time proving it. A military drum figure marches "Among the Weirdcong" onto the field, and from there M-16 tears through riff-led thrash of the old Teutonic tonnage, aggressive from the first bar, the downstrokes fed through the songs like a belt of rounds through a door gun, every link the same calibre, no jam, no pause to let the barrel cool. It does not ask permission. It never stops to explain itself either.
The song that carries the record’s reputation slows down to do it. "Napalm in the Morning", named after Colonel Kilgore’s famous line in Apocalypse Now and carrying a sample from the film, drags the tempo down into something mournful, a slow march across burned ground, and in its second half a lead section rises out of the smoke and crosses the smouldering rhythm guitars like a gunship skimming a tree line at dawn, cold, unhurried, flattening everything underneath. It is the best thing on the album, and the one that stays when the rest is gone.
The title track stands beside it as the second high point. "M-16" gives the rifle its name and the album its spine, and between them the two songs hold the middle of the record like a pair of sandbagged positions that no amount of shelling will shift. Further down the line, "Marines" grinds heavier and slower still, with Full Metal Jacket at its back, and makes the oldest argument of every war record worth owning: the fast songs thrill, the slow ones do the damage.
If that is not a concept album, it is a very disciplined accident.
The weakness is not in the songs. It is in the mix. The 2001 sound is the real quarrel, because it is either a murk that blunts the guitars and smears their definition or exactly the mud a jungle war should be fought in. Angelripper takes the mud as a virtue, telling Decibel on 18 November 2021 that "the production is very good". I take it as a flaw. These riffs are tempered steel, and a mix that wraps tempered steel in wet canvas throws away half its edge before the first shot is fired. The 2021 remaster exists for a reason.
Then the closer. "Surfin’ Bird", the 1963 novelty hit by The Trashmen, draws the same line the mix does, either a grin after the body count or a wrong turn at the final checkpoint. It belongs. Kubrick put the very same song on the soundtrack of Full Metal Jacket in 1987, so a Vietnam record that ends on it is not losing the plot, it is finishing the citation. A novelty song after ten tracks of napalm is a soldier’s joke told in the right barracks, and soldiers’ jokes were never meant to be tasteful.
M-16 is for anyone who wants German thrash with a subject and the discipline to hold it for eleven tracks, three musicians who picked a war and gave it no quarter. Start with "Napalm in the Morning", then the title track, and if the original mix bothers you, own the remaster instead of skipping the record. Skipping it costs you one of the hardest hitting albums in the Sodom catalogue, the record where a veteran band stopped firing at everything and aimed at one target.