Wehrmacht "biermacht"

In 1989 I remember seeing ads for this record in magazines like "Rip" and "Metal Mania". The thrash metal and crossover scenes were in full swing and I was really caught up in the movement.  This record looked really cool to me, the album art featured a Mad Magazine style illustration of the denim clad longhairs riding a tank made out of a beer keg. Totally appealed to a seventeen year old version of myself.  My friends and I spent a lot of energy searching out illicit means to obtain beer. An essential part of headbanger culture was "partying" which translated to a handful of dudes chugging warm beer on a garbage picked couch in a vacant lot.  This album cover promised a soundtrack for this endeavour.  I never found the album.  It's promising purpose haunted me though for years.  As the world would have it the record label that produced the album went belly up in the early nineties.  The record went out of print and thrash metal ran it's course and evolved into a prefix for other subgenres of metal.  About ten years ago thrash metal had a resurgence and new bands began paying homage to the sound and aesthetic of the thrash metal heyday.  I was poking around the new bands and enjoying the nostalgic appeal which led me to reexamine the discs of my youth. This in turn led me to study what critics believed to be the essential releases of thrash.  In those article I rediscovered this album's art and hunted down a reissue online.  I would have loved chugging warm Genny pounders to this as a teenager, but as a 44 year old I'll crack open a micro-brew IPA from Vermont and sip while nodding in approval on headphones as not to wake the kids. It's blurry fast and all mid-range production washing over me (through headphones) like a siren song to a simpler time. Well, this is what I'd be doing if I hadn't written this at 8am after walking my kids to the school bus stop.  The next beer I drink is for you #wehrmacht , it took us a while to hook up and both of our hangovers probably last a great deal longer now, but I'm glad I followed through and gave this album a chance three decades after it's release.

Death "scream bloody gore"

From the slap-your-forehead-can't-believe-noone-thought-of-this-before band moniker to the incredible Ed Repka album cover this was an album no metal head passed over. The debut "scream bloody gore" by #death is a feast of hesher delights.  It was released in 1987 on the heels of the Greatest Metal Year.  I had been enjoying the birth and perfection of thrash metal and my new found love of skate punk and hardcore, while we were very close to the birth of Death Metal this release was harbinger of what was to come.
I was lucky enough to have been paying attention to all this music at the time. I was still occasionally hanging with my old guard of headbanger friends cruising for pot and drinking in fields and was spending more time with my punk crew of friends skateboarding and drinking on drainage embankments.  Both groups loved hard fast music and I could personally cross pollinate the friends with the music of the dudes they'd never met.  I remember on this trip to a record store with my metal comrades I showed the other two guys this cassette and we all bought a copy unheard  (one of my friends bought the vinyl and if he still has that pressing should visit ebay).  We played it in the car on the drive back to our neighborhood and by the second track "zombie ritual" we were all exalting the album's virtues.
I thought with the tempos and frantic guitar my skateboarding brethren would really enjoy this tape as well but they were all turned off by the vocals, which kind of puzzles me to this day because they weren't melodramatic in an operatic way or any sort of gutteral grunt. The vocals were in fact not unlike a bunch of the crossover hardcore bands at the time (corrosion of conformity comes to mind).  It's when I began to realise  (and parade) that my musical tastes transcended social lines.  I felt it a shame that they would be bigoted to cool music just because of a clique mentality, but at the same time I relished in new music of all sorts (I was big into dire straits and Bruce Springsteen at this time too but those are other stories).  My path to obsessive collector was already paved.
If the horse you lead to water isn't drinking then just put headphones on

Possessed "seven churches"

I was drawn to this album cover like a moth to a flame. For as long as I can remember I've been attracted to the "evil" aesthetic. In comic books I always preferred the villain's costumes, the monsters in movies were what I waited to see and when I discovered heavy metal I had found a sub-culture as obsessed with this stuff as I was. 1985 was an exciting time to be a metal head, the burgeoning thrash metal scene was starting to release great albums (though we didn't know what was just around the corner: 1986 is the greatest year in heavy metal history).  Someone's mom had given us a ride to Cavages Records in the mall, it was our mecca at the time because it had a dedicated "heavy metal" section. They carried releases you wouldn't find at department stores, they carried albums like #possessed "seven churches". Now I've mentioned the album cover but I want you to realize that while it's iconic it is also terrible: just some conflicting fonts on a black background (admittingly the band's logo: pointy calligraphy aflame is cool but I have no idea what they were thinking with the samurai font for the album title).  What makes this album cover so hide-it-from-your-mom awesome is that big light grey inverted cross. Aww yeah, that's the spot.
The record is proto thrash and as far as I know coined the term "death metal" with one of their song titles. It's fast, sloppy and evil sounding. Unintelligible lyrics with swirling heavy guitars and a drummer that sounds like he's struggling to keep up but it all coalesced into an awesome album. The band, though we didn't know it at the time, we're all teenagers. They spoke to us as only co-generational hesher could. Also of note: Larry Lalonde was in this band. He's the guitarist in Primus that no one ever paid attention to.
A couple years ago I got to catch the band live, though the only remaining member from this album was bassist/vocalist Jeff Becerra. Jeff was confined to a wheelchair, I'm not sure the cause, but the guy sounded great and he thrashed around on stage in that chair with gleeful abandon. It was awesome and I finally got into a pit for the song "holy hell" so that's a bucket list tick off.