Violator
Scenarios Of Brutality

December 2013
Released: 2013, Kill Again Records
Rating: 4.0/5
Reviewer: Helias Papadopoulos

Are you ready for friendly and violent fun? How long can you keep a nostalgia act running and keep it fresh and exciting? Pretty long apparently if you are Violator. And even longer if you begin to branch out from that nostalgia and add your own flavors to the mix.



With SCENARIOS OF BRUTALITY Violator has continued to carve out their own identity. When you are listening to this album, you won’t easily confuse it with other neo-thrash releases, you can tell that it’s Violator. And that’s good. Extremely good! As Violator albums tend to do, SCENARIOS OF BRUTALITY starts out with an awesome atomic blast ‘Echoes of Silence’. Other major highlights include the excellent, Slayer-style beatdown of ‘Dead To This World’ and the dramatic ‘Endless Tyrannies’. The latter track which begins with the declaration, “The people from our land has lived under fear, military madness financed by the empire”, which may sound clichéd on the page, but is executed so well that you cannot help but get pumped when listening to it. With some excellent guitar work and a punishing rhythm section, there’s much to love on SCENARIOS OF BRUTALITY.



There are many moments where the band seems to be sliding off the tracs into the fiery chasm of speed and early death metal territory, but they manage to skirt the line just enough to still sound like thrash, absolutely thrash! And while there is nothing wrong with this in principle, you sometimes wish they would go more in a different direction and just let the screams and growls fly. But then you hear a song like ‘No Place For The Cross’ and you think… yea never mind, just keep doing more of this!

It’s true that sometimes the band still sounds like a derivative of their 80’s heroes, especially Slayer, Kreator and Forbidden. But you don’t mind! There are strong enough moments to make you either not notice or not care enough to hold it against them.



If thrash or metal are your things SCENARIOS OF BRUTALITY will make a welcome addition to your music collection. The bands turmoil has been pushed through into the recording of the album and provided great thrash results.