format: Mini-LP
year: 1989
country: Belgium
label: Surprise Records
#: SR 899LP014
info: innersleeve w/ pictures
style: Thrash Metal
Side A:
Side B:
Muslims + toilet humor + clueless European teens... There's sooooo many ways this could have gone south and I guess we should all thank our lucky pentagrams that we don't live in that alternate universe where a C-grade Belgian 80's Thrash band started WW3 and ended life on earth as we know it. Thank you, cosmos.
"C-grade you say??" Yeah, they're pretty bad - and that's me being diplomatic. Frankly the only reason we're bothering with adding them to this archive is because I've heard from reliable sources that it's possibly the most rare 80's Metal 12" from Belgium, so shoddiness or not, add it we must. On a positive note there is absolutely zero false advertising present, as Moshlim sound pretty much exactly like you'd expect from looking at the front sleeve. Now I should point out that I'm quite the fan of old corny crossover like Ludichrist, The Dehumanziers, Extra Hot Sauce, Wehrmacht etc but those bands had cool, fun & memorable songs while these kids didn't. To their defense they might have been slightly younger at the time of their debut's release than their predecessors, so there's really no reason to spew too much venom over them, especially since they declare verbatim in the opening track that "we just play for fun".
As far as comparable descriptors go, Extra Hot Sauce
is pretty close, but there's more classic Thrash Metal present here, so obviously also Nuclear Assault, especially on the A side. On the rather brutal title track they even touch on EP-era Witches Hammer for a brief moment, while the final "Invasion Of The Snobs" mixes in some more punky as well as crossover riffing. It all sorta kinda almost works at times, but there's simply too many flaws, fumbles and chaotic track-composition to follow through.
Then suddenly, it struck me: these guys should be almost exactly the same age as me, playing almost exactly the same kind of music that I was into at the time, meaning: If me and my friends had started a band and released an album at the same time as Moshlim, we could very well have sounded identical. With the tiny exception that we would probably have sucked even bigger balls.