One of my favorite contemporary Japanese black/thrash bands, Abigail has been kicking out their awesome blackened thrash hysteria since the early 90's with a wild, wonky mix of Venom and 80's garage thrash metal and that inherent weirdness that you usually expect to find in Japanese metal. Most of their stuff has been pretty hard to come by though, usually going out of print fairly quickly and/or being released on really small labels that can take some effort to track down, but a couple of Abigail's newer releases have popped up on the ultra-cult Nuclear War Now! label, making them a bit easier to stock here in the store. That's great news for those of us who are totally addicted to the raw, punky perverted speed metal and filthy sex obsessed lunacy that these cats (who include members of psych-metal gods Sigh and black thrashers Barbatos) traffic in, with albums like Forever Street Metal Bitch and Lust And Intercourse loaded with their scumbag thrashpunk and their deliberately ridiculous, adolescent Satanic sex fantasies of songs like "We're the Pussy Hunter" and "Teen Age Metal Fuck". Yikes!
This 7" EP from 2007 has Abigail hooking up with one of their 80's proto-thrash heroes, Brian Llapitan from cult American metallers NME, paying tribute to decased NME guitarist Kurt Struebing by covering a handful of their songs. Abigail has long cited the primitive black metal/thrash of NME as one of their key influences (along with the likes of Motorhead, Venom, and Bulldozer) on their own whacked-out pervo-thrash style, and on this four song EP the band tears through material off of NME's 1986 debut album Unholy Death, the first three tracks ("Black Knight", "Stormwarning / Blood & Souls" and "Lethal Dose") firmly in the Venom/Motorhead speed metal tradition, but the fourth track a peculiar cover of "Of Hell / Thunder Breaks Peace", which is improvised guitar noise, weird effects and demonic growling...pretty cool! The vocal duties are split across the two sides - Brian from NME handles the lead vocals on the first side, and Yasuyuki from Abigail does the b-side vocals. It's a blast. Comes in a B&W sleeve that's designed in the same style and layout as the original Unholy Death Lp jacket.