when i was on vacation the last two weeks of august, my girlfriend and me were visiting family. luckily the relatives are living in the ruhr and rhine region of western germany. so all quite close to each other. of course when we were visiting cities like dortmund, cologne and düsseldorf i checked the local stores and tried to secretly include them on the trips. of course my girl smelled the rat all along.
when we would stay in front of a store i planned to say something like: "what? is that a record store with lovely vinyl i might want to spend money on right in front of us? man, what a coincidence! i mean, i love records and this is a record store. probably i should take a look inside." fortunately my girl and family knows me quite good and so my sophisticated deceit wasn't necessary.
i scored a nice lot of records and will deal with them in no particular order across the next months. the first one to start off with is the latest bitter end record 'illusions of dominance'. i actually wanted to order this when it came out from per koro. my problem was that i badly wanted the second to rarest colour way, a merge pattern, badly and as the most common colour is clear vinyl, it was very likely for me to get this version when ordering from a distro.
therefore i was very happy to pull a copy of my desired colour from the racks of cologne's underdog store. it took bitter end five years to come up with a new record, just like all out war this year. and just like all out war, bitter end delivers! the predecessor 'guilty as charged', which i also obtained at underdog two years ago, was a scorcher and 'illusions...' is just as good. if not a bit better. pummeling hardcore mixed with some harsh thrash metal and their very own feeling for melodies and solos. check the album at their bandcamp and get this bad boy! 733 copies made. deathwish inc. 2015.
