Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Addiction can cost and yet in some cases the thrill of the chase is worth it, especially when it leads to a road previously unexplored and one that doesn’t cause harm or specific danger to anyone; it is the addiction of a music nature, a compulsion to attempt to understand the arts, in any of its languages or forceful communications, that leads to deeper enjoyment and perhaps a flirtatious infatuation that just keeps giving.

There are many things that lay beyond the English Channel that for many are obscured by the fact that looking inwards is a destructive hobby, that the craving for hearing something new and possibly even having the barest dip into enlightenment is to court an unlikely obsession that just doesn’t fit into the narrow and perfectly straight mind. It is a shame for in that mindset lays stagnation and stagnation is an ideal so far removed from French metal sensations Kopper8 and their blistering album Addiction.

Addiction may come at a price, however as the pounding hammer of French steel crashes into the war like stance provided by the band, it is comes flooding into the realization that some addictions, some new obsessions are worth gate crashing into, that by purchasing a ticket for the main overall event, you are allowed to wallow in the sideshows and the pit. It is after all a pit that is most welcome to bounce in as Addiction takes hold.

The kick-ass destruction on offer in Addiction is such that it could stoke a volcano’s wrath and yet it also offers a guiding hand, a friendly embrace on the genre that cannot be ignored.

Tracks such as the aptly named Beast, the superb La Haine, Hate God, Born To Die and L’eloge De La Folie all crack open the fires, that burn the craving deep into the listeners mind and ask only that it heard with the same spirit of open frankness that the French band offer.

A scintillating and tremendously cool album, one that make’s music become hungry and full of yearning.

Ian D. Hall