Mercenary (album)

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Mercenary
Studio album by Bolt Thrower

admission

September 3, 1998

Label (s) Metal Blade Records

Genre (s)

Death metal

Title (number)

9

running time

46 min 52 s

occupation
  • Guitar: Gavin Ward

production

Ewan Davies & Bolt Thrower

Studio (s)

Chapel Studios, South Thornsby

chronology
... For Victory
(1994) 		Mercenary Honor - Valor - Pride
(2001)

Mercenary is the sixth studio album by the English death metal band Bolt Thrower . It was released on September 3, 1998 via Metal Blade Records and brought the band their first chart placement .

Origin and background

In 1997 the singer Martin van Drunen left the band after he lost all his hair due to illness and did not want to go on stage bald. Since Bolt Thrower could not find a suitable successor and van Drunen still refused, the band contacted van Drunen's predecessor Karl Willetts, who was studying cultural studies in Birmingham at the time . Eventually, Willetts agreed to help out on this album.

At the same time, negotiations with Earache Records about the termination of the contract dragged on . According to guitarist Barry Thompson, Earache had put some "nasty clauses" in the contract so that the musicians had to sit out the time. Negotiations with their new record company Metal Blade Records dragged on. The musicians used the time to rehearse extensively. The recordings finally took place at Chapel Studios in South Thornsby . Was produced Mercenary Ewan Davies and the band.

In the run-up to the recordings, guitarist Gavin Ward dealt with mercenaryism and met with some mercenaries. The texts deal with modern warfare and the acoustic impressions of war. After the band had rejected four designs for the album cover, a picture by the military painter Peter Archer was used. There were further delays because of the mastering . Three versions by American producers were discarded until Barry Thompson took matters into his own hands.

Track list

  1. Zeroed - 5:46
  2. Laid to Waste - 4:40
  3. Return from Chaos - 5:04
  4. Mercenary - 5:54
  5. To the Last ... - 5:24
  2. Powder Burns - 4:46
  3. Behind Enemy Lines - 5:18
  4. No Guts, No Glory - 4:07
  5. Sixth Chapter - 5:40

The digipak version and the Japanese version of the album also contain the song Infiltrator . In the digipak version, Sixth Chapter 15 is followed by ten-second titles with which you don't hear anything.

reception

Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Albums
Mercenary
  DE 87 09/21/1998 (1 week)

Frank Albrecht from the German magazine Rock Hard gave the highest rating because “the death metal scene needed exactly this impulse” and because the band “celebrates this sound masterfully without moving away from it”. The Rock Hard editorial team voted Mercenary “Album of the Month”. Christian Rosenau from the online magazine Bloodchamber described the album as a "balanced mixture of natural hardness and half-fast headbanger passages, supported by a powerful voice and frequent solo play" and gave eight out of ten points. For Jason Anderson of Allmusic, however, the album "lacks the material to qualify as a significant bolt-thrower album."

Mercenary reached number 87 in the German album charts.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Robert Müller: Return of the Warlords . In: Metal Hammer , May 1998, p.104
  2. ↑ Robert Müller: Horny War? . In: Metal Hammer, October 1998, p. 48
  3. ↑ officialcharts.de: Bolt Thrower in the German album charts
  4. ↑ rockhard.de: Rock Hard - Mercenary
  5. ↑ bloodchamber.de: Bolt Thrower - Mercenary
  6. ↑ allmusic.com: Mercenary - Bolt Thrower