Artist: Tankard
Title: “Beauty & The Beer”
Label: Locomotive Records
Release Date: 9/12/2006
Genre: Thrash Metal
Rating: 3/5

Since their inception in 1982, the band Tankard have been the self-proclaimed “Kings Of Beer”, and this title is held like a regal honor as the band delivers song after song about the glories of drinking and being drunks. While I am not sure about “Alcoholic Metal” being a new sub-genre of the Thrash angle I have to admit that this is a fun album to listen to. One can envision putting this one in the stereo and finding a circle pit being started around the beer keg. Since this is pure Thrash with little added experimentation the listener will find that musically there is a lot of repetition in the way the tracks hit you. The band keeps the same tempo and the same style on most of the songs but what saves them from becoming a boring listen is the rather amusing lyrical content. Almost every song is about the bands favorite past time – drinking beer and lots of it. Singer Gerre explains his very complex band song-writing process as first we decide on an album name, then we do the cover artwork and then songs get written around that. One cannot be sure if he is serious or just kidding around for when it comes to Metal music, the strangest circumstances come into play when it comes to play in song creation. The players of the group are definitely a tight unit with Gerr (vocals), Andy Bulgaropulos (guitar), Frank Thorwarth (bass) and Olaf Zissel (drums). Of the tracks presented here the best ones would fall to “Ice-olation”, “Rockstars No. 1”, and “Beauty And The Beast”. There is a very solid level of production on the album and it holds up across the recording very nicely allowing a certain consistency that one wants in this type of music. However, don’t expect anything that will make you change your mind if you are not a Thrash fan from this one, or expect to have your mind blown. You can expect that this record will get more amusing as more and more beverages are consumed in a single sitting and inspire a lot of “beer goggled” head banging. This is a group that the Budweiser and Coors people need to bring on as celebrity endorsers yet given their German heritage those two beers are probably an insult to the fine art of alcohol consumption. With all this beer talk I guess the best way to close this review is by saying “It’s Miller time”.
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