They've been around since 1984, this band of German misfits.  Starting off as a punk/thrash combo in West Germany, NECRONOMICON have been turning out their brand of no-nonsense heavy metal for the better part of four decades.  A year after the teutonic thrashers formed, MEGADETH released their on-the-cheap debut "Killing Is My Business...And Business is Good" after Dave Mustaine's departure from METALLICA. I know this not because I'm an endless font of rock and roll knowledge (although compared to my other mid-life peers, I'm a veritable Wikipedia), but because I walked into a small, boutique record store in Virginia Beach that year when I was seventeen and plopped down a ten-spot to buy the vinyl.  When I brought it back home to listen to it, it struck me as being poorly produced compared to the major label shlock I was into (I'm talking to you, Udo Dirkshchneider and friends!), but there was clearly something maniacally magical happening in those songs.  To this day, Killing is My Business is a minor classic, a throwback to when the demarcation between thrash and punk was a few guitar leads here and there, but both genres were aggressively do-it-yourself, and that spirit lives on today, even in the hour of music put out by these old school krauts.

"Constant to Death" is not so much an homage to MEGADETH- as it stands, long-time member and original NECRONOMICON vocalist Freddy was probably singing in that thin growl well before he'd ever heard of Bay Area thrash metal.  But there's definitely a SYMPHONY OF DESTRUCTION thread of barbed wire winding its way through the music.  And it's music that grows on you, which in many ways makes writing reviews like this sometimes a bit disingenuous.  At first listen, there are things that could be easily dismissed: at almost one hour, the album is bit long in the tooth and those same teeth seem to all have a similar bite.  But listen to "They Lie," "Stored in Blood," and "The Guilty Shepherd" a half-dozen times and you start to realize the genius behind these tight exercises in thrash metal economy. The songs relentlessly groove, the guitars chug like a runaway train, the leads are tight and not overly flashy, and Freddy manages to dig blood-covered gems of melody out of the corpse-ridden mud. DESTRUCTION, KREATOR and SODOM are other old school German bands that have managed to reinvent themselves by holding the melodic core of good thrash metal.  NECRONOMICON can put their names in that list of GOATS.

While not particularly memorable, "Constant to Death" is a consistently enjoyable record that stays true to the spirit of late '80s thrash.  The band keeps it catchy enough to keep you coming back for more, and with repeated listens the record pays off.  The issue with this, however, is how long will you keep coming back to it?  There are a lot of solid bands putting out good, workman-like thrash, and while I don't think the guys in NECRONOMICON really give a shit whether or not they are reinventing the wheels of metal, there's something to be said for trying to find moments of originality in a genre that is painfully stoic in its commitment to formula.  NECRONOMICON has this formula figured out, and that's probably alright by them.