What you should be listening to: Wolf - Legions of Bastards

There's two things that you could be doing right now. You could either be listening to the brand new album Legions of Bastards by Swedish speed metal band, Wolf. Or, you could not listen to the album Legions of Bastards by Swedish speed metal band, Wolf, officially making you a lame, shitty poseur who fails at metal and everything else in life. The choice seems pretty easy from where I'm standing. 

True metal people like myself, and I'm hoping you, have a handy metal math equation that we utilize when making decisions about our hard rock listening. The formula, is as follows:

80's > 90's

Obviously, this formula made a lot more sense when it was still the 90's, and the pain of popular 90's rock was still freshly stinging. Even though we're in the decade after the decade after the 90's, I consider the above equation to be more of a statement that declares the musical superiority of the 80's over the time periods that followed. It rings true with every decade that followed the 80's. Not to say that there hasn't been some great metal music released in the past two decades, but nothing produced these days is even close to worthy of holding a candle to the iconic masterpieces released during the time period that shifted the world from making only music that sucked, into making music that was awesome. Sure, there was the 70's, where heavy metal music was first being figured out, but it wasn't until the glorious age of big voices, big hair, and tight pants, that metal was fully established as being the best and only music worth listening to ever.

So with that said, the awesome thing about Wolf, is musically, it sounds like they don't have a clue it's not the 80's anymore. Awesome. I'm not going to call this neo-thrash, because it's not. Neo-thrash bands are like animatronic dinosaurs; mechanical creatures trying to look like, act like and sound like beasts that are long since extinct. But the band, Wolf? These bastards are Jurassic Park. These are living, breathing dinosaurs, causing prehistoric mayhem in an era they don't understand, and refuse to adapt to. If I didn't know any better, and you told me Legions of Bastards was released in 1985 or 87, much less 2011, I probably would have believed you. 

 

Now, is this a sound that's been done before? I'll be the first to admit: absolutely. Many times by many bands a very long time ago. This isn't anything you haven't heard before. I have to say however, this is speed metal done so flawlessly and played so viciously, that this band is a prehistoric animal I very much want walking modern day Earth.