A Review of the 2009 album "Hordes of Chaos" by German Thrash Metal Band Kreator

German thrash metal band Kreator really hit their peak as a band with their melodic masterpiece thrash metal album Enemy of God in 2005. I’m sure the question on the minds of many fans was how good could this band be after hitting such a peak? The answer is that they were still a force to be reckoned with musically because their 2009 album called "Hordes of Chaos" continues with the tradition of fusing melody into fast thrash. This was also the band’s first album to appear on the Billboard 200 Charts in the US, ranking or finishing at #165.

The first song which is also the title track is a song about a society where everyone is against everyone else while there is a power struggle that has been created because of a tyrant’s willingness to make the population endure hardship. The song might as well be a description about what happens in many countries of the world. Escalation is a song about a population rising up to protest against the loss of dignity and the years of mentally hurting the population to the point that they have become furious of this kind of injustice. There is an escalation to free the human race from these kinds of actions. The chorus is especially melodic.

Amok Run begins with acoustic guitar that we heard from this band four years earlier. The song is about a person that has seen his heart become vandalized and his soul has become tainted. But sometimes in life, running can be very counterproductive. I also see a riff resemblance in a way to the song called The Man Called Nothing. I guess Jeff Waters must have heard about this band earlier in his life and decided to list them as an influence. Absolute Misanthropy is a song that is lyrically similar to this one. The band tries to convey lyrically that it is only a matter of time before the world evolves and awakens, seeing the injustice that surrounds them. In the song called Destroy What Destroys You, the message is that the world must wake up to living their dreams and doing what they can to bring light into this world so that the darkness can be rejected. Radical Resistance is a song that is basically about rejecting what leads to the rise of fanaticism and political terrorism. So, people around the world must unite to fight against these forces of darkness. To the Afterborn continues in the melodic style of this band and it is a song about what happens when one generation after the next is ruled by tyrants when these people are born and come into this world.

So what is the bottom line on this album? It is a good one but just not as good as Enemy of God. The strongest songs on the album are the title track, Escalation, Amok Run, and Absolute Misanthropy.