TANKARD The Morning After Picture LP

Hammerheart picture LP reissued of this German Thrash classic!

The Morning After. Even just naming this album should be enough to send a room full of thrashers into a frenzy. It’s where the band cemented their spot among the best 0,1% of thrash metal musicians and had everything they have been doing thus far come together in a perfect package. It’s where the Germans that we would later know as jolly, high-functioning alcoholics would reach their creative and performative peak. And yes, I can already hear the snarky thoughts forming in the mind of a reader “But I thought you said Chemical Invasion was already perfect”. To that, I can only muster the very esoteric and half-assed explanation that some perfects are just perfecter than others. Now, allow me to delve into the riff-madness that is the third – and the best – Tankard record.

Comparisons to predecessors are unavoidable in the case of any band with more than two releases, but since Zombie Attack dwarfs in every regard to both our subject and Chemical Invasion, I’ll just stick with the latter one. The lingering punk influences previously present are all but gone, replaced with technical proficiency at all instrumental fronts. It’s still the off-kilter riffage that we got introduced to on Chemical Invasion, but somehow they managed to break the switch and turn it up to eleven. Even as the album starts with the mighty Commandments, guitars are jumping all over the place, switching between buzzsaw-esque shark-bites and heavy artillery of post-solo grooves. It’s insanely intense even without taking Gerre’s mind-bogglingly aggressive vocal performance. He might have been great on the sophomore, but what he does here is so much sharper, so much more in-your-face. The way he spits through your very head screaming “Thou shalt not waste and thou shalt not spill / Just drink your beer” matches perfectly with the crunchy guitar tone and the vivid snares, resulting in the second-best opening track in their catalogue.

And since in my previous two Tankard reviews variety was such a focal point, let’s talk about it again! Most of The Morning After’s content is straight forward thrashers perverted in such ways that every song has something that stands out. F.U.N. starts with a cheeky little bass lick, girlish vocals, then it introduces some oddly satisfying guitar wizardry and even some of the dreaded cowbell! All this comes together in such a F.U.N. track (I’m sorry) that you can’t help but sport a shit-eating grin the whole time. But before my review devolves into a track-by-track, let’s just do a rapid fire round of the most unique moments. The ruthless title track is jam-packed with more riffs than an entire Metallica album, the Spermbirds cover is a nice little break between the endless alcoholic rage (they pulled it off goddamnit!), and Feed the Lohocla just seamlessly transitions from one core-memory-making lick to the next.

Sure, there is no grand instrumental epic like Chemical Invasion had, but instead of that we got an organ section and some actual grindcore, showcasing Gerre could have easily had a career in extreme metal. And allow me to circle back to him for just another second because it really cannot be overstated how intense his performance is. His style of aggression is a lot different than Mille’s for example, going for the “I’m gonna beat you senseless then make-out with your girl drunk” approach instead of the coked-up serial killer vibes Germans usually go for. But do not mistake the lack of seriousness for the lack of enthusiasm. He gives everything he has, often letting out such high-pitched screams that I’m genuinely worried for his vocal cords!

I acknowledge that the last full-length album of the classic Tankard line-up might have had some production predicaments, but both the 2005 and 2017 remasters fix them entirely (though I don’t mind the original mastering either, I still strongly prefer the 2005 one). Every instrument sounds lively, vivid, and distinct from each other with enough edge left to make it characteristically Tankard!

The Morning After is the Tankardest Tankard album there is, and I believe their commitment to doing their own thing with such energy is what makes this their best material to date. It simply encapsulates the fun-having, socially charged essence they got in the purest, most refined way possible. I love it! In fact, I love it so much I’ll make the controversial claim that this isn’t only the best German thrash metal album of all time, but it’s also by far the best thrash record in the roughly 40-year history of the genre. It beats Show No Mercy, it beats Taking Over (though second spot still goes here), it beats Mind Wars, and it most certainly beats all the albums I’m not listing out of respect for everyone’s time. This obscene perfection is precisely why the next couple of records – while still great in their own right - get a bad rep. But I’m getting way ahead of myself now…

The highlights of the album are everything between the first phone dial spin in the intro, and the last nanosecond of the toilet getting flushed in the outro.