DESTROYERS – The Miseries Of Virtue

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, many Metal bands all over Eastern and Central Europe dropped tons of releases to the Metal world that embraced them in a tight grip. The late Thrash Metal band, Destroyers, were one of those groups, a band that it’s story was sadly cut short after it disbanded of unknown reasons posterior to 1991, the year when this album “being reviewed” as originally unleashed.

Destroyers started thrashing in 1985, with the rise of Thrash Metal in Western Europe (mainly in Germany) and Northern America, as an excellent spawn of Sodom, Kreator and the Bay Area Thrash followed by Metallica. The Polish group implemented many elements that were both used on those two giant scenes and mixed them up to create better compositions of Heavy and Thrash Metal while complicating the music with an approach that still conserved the enjoyment and loose mind of Thrash Metal.

A year after featuring on two split records (up until 1988), the Destroyers released their debut album, under Tonpress Records, A Night of the Lusty Queen. On its original form the album was released in Polish and only later, on that same year it was released in English under Barricade Records as a welcoming reprise. If you have craving for a limited edition release of the album, you can also check it out on Metal Mind Records as a remastered version with tracks both in English and in Polish.

Two years after the debut, Destroyers progressed further and unveiled their second, and sorrowfully their final release, The Miseries Of Virtue. This album was a major step for the group from several reasons. First, they perfected their connection with the rest of the Metal world as they issued the release in English prior to making a Polish version of the album. Second, their overall production took a step forward and it sounded a lot similar to German and American Thrash. Third and the most important of all, Destroyers made great attempts on idealizing their material, both lyrically and musically. Their featured music is stronger and fiercer than their debut as they upgraded their status to the higher levels of Tech Thrash Metal music of the greater and older scenes with assorted, overwhelming and high quality progressed tracks. The best of them were “The Miseries Of Virtue”, the spiking speedster “Historie d’O”, mythological “Odyssey”, its sexy companion “Nymphomania” and the creativeness of autocracy followed by the views of “The Craft Of Tyranny”. These tracks were the last remnants of the band’s extraordinary writing skills and performance abilities.

When it came to the lyrics, Destroyers used their original themes of Sex, Domination, Satanism and Alcohol to produce a dark and sometimes a mysterious eruption of uneven and maniacal form of music. This factor leads to another amazing and interesting characteristic of the group. As it related to darkness, Satanism and such, it cannot be ignored that the atmosphere surrounding the band shared the same sensations of King Diamond and Mercyful Fate. The first signs were very easy to recognize as the band’s theatrical and dramatic vocalist, Marek Loza, used his voice with bitter melodies followed by a semi-operatic “police car” singing pattern that was (and still) mostly familiar on King Diamond and Mercyful Fate records.

Through Loza’s diverse voice ability, the Thrash Metal of Destroyers is like a Thrash version of the Danish singer’s two projects yet in a heavier and progressive scale. Next, some feature of the music and parts of the lyrics also have correspondences to the Danish giant and his way of writing, although there aren’t “plays” and theater ventures on the Destroyers’ menu, however, “Odyssey” and “The Craft Of Tyranny” proved that there are some points which are very common on King’s tunes.

After the release of The Miseries Of Virtue Destroyers the band called it a day and every dude took a different route for reasons that didn’t vent to public knowledge. With such great potential for a great career, their short heritage should be kept and spread out for future bands. For the spreading and remembering, you have Metal Mind Records, a label that once again helped the Polish and world Metal scene to understand who was great in the past. As on the first album, Metal Mind offers the whole album in Polish alongside the English version while adding another track “Birth of a Courtesan” (Narodziny Kurtyzany), which is also a showcase of classic Thrash demonstration.