Ladies and Gentlemen, we are, apparently, at war. Not the sort of war that has been on your television news broadcasts, but with technology and appliances the world over. So say the slightly crazed minds of the creators behind Killer Refrigerator. The Fridge And The Power It Holds (Independent/self-released) is KR’s second album of scatalogical humour set to an old school death and thrash metal soundtrack that is every bit as bonkers as you might have already begun to suspect.

Kicking off with ‘Terrorvision’, I had a mental image of black drainpipe jeans, white high tops and old Stormtroopers of Death t-shirts as the band dive headlong into an absurd, whirligig of frenetic thrash metal and punky vocals . We move into more mid-tempo classic thrash territory of ‘Slaystation’ which is eerily like early period Nuclear Assault and no bad thing in my mind. ‘Shower Thrashing Death’ is two minutes of aural stupidity but I mean that warmly. Let’s be fair, any band that calls a song ‘Shower Thrashing Death’ and has a lyric that proclaims the coming of the “toilet gods” and how we will all “bow down to the toiletries!” is not exactly taking itself too seriously. And neither should we.

There’s an echo of Kerry King running through ‘Slave to the Easy Bake’ and a bassline that Dan Lilker would have been proud to call his own. On the title track, it’s totally apparent that this band have a complete love of thrash and death metal that despite the obviously stupid nature of all of this, it’s done with a large degree of love and affection.

In much the same way that Evil Scarecrow have appropriated and twisted the black metal genre then so Killer Refrigerator have taken old school thrash, horror tropes and high school humour and created a small part of the musical universe that is uniquely theirs. It’s unequivocally lightweight and a bit samey in parts: there is only one joke here and whilst it’s amusing enough, you can’t possibly keep on telling it without it wearing a little bit thin. There’s a level of inevitability about that but whilst it’s here, the band are smart enough not to outstay their welcome.

Fresh, stupid, silliness.

6.0/10

Killer Refrigerator on Facebook

MAT DAVIES