Even though I only owned issue # 2 of Finland’s HAMMER OF DAMNATION zine back in 1992, I still remember it vividly. It was one of the zines I really enjoyed for quite some time and revisited frequently as a result. But if you have a look at the list of interviewed bands in that particular issue, you’ll easily understand why: IMPALED NAZARENE, TIAMAT, MAYHEM, DEMIGOD, BEHERIT, THERION, BLASPHEMY, POSSESSED, SAMAEL, SENTENCED… Somehow you could say that HAMMER OF DAMNATION was a typical underground zine of its time, in the vein of SLAYER MAG, HOLOCAUST, ISTEN, PUTREFACTIONE or PEARDROP (just to name a few here). Editor Niko “Skorpio” Sirkiä, who was running the zine all by himself, also used to be the vocalist of the Funeral Doom band THERGOTHON, so he was definitely deeply rooted in the underground at the time. But the fact that Death Metal and then Black Metal started to turn into a mainstream phenomenon, resulted in Niko’s loss of interest in these genres, so the zine unfortunately developed into the Industrial / Goth / Electronic direction with issue # 4, which I wasn’t aware of until I got this very cool book edition, that features all of his issues. With this drastic change of content, also the layout changed, from the typical cut & paste type style, with gory borders and all the good stuff, towards a way cleaner and more experimental direction, which I can understand, but still don’t like. Like many other book editions of old fanzines, HAMMER OF DAMNATION is definitely worth checking out, especially if you have been around yourself in that exciting time, since it brings back a lot of good memories of a scene that still communicated via snail mail, while new exciting bands had to be discovered through tapetrading, flyers and zines like this. The book edition comes with a white hardcover, with a black embossed logo on the cover and Niko himself wrote longer, personal introductions to each single issue, which are all very interesting and entertaining. As a bonus you’ll get unpublished material that was supposed to be released as the sixth HAMMER OF DAMNATION issue, as well as “Grinding Death” # 1, the very first fanzine that Niko put together before his journey with HAMMER OF DAMNATION started, plus a couple of his old newsletters and flyers from 1992 – 1997. So, if you’re an old school Death / Black Metal fan and still have space left on your bookshelf, this one is definitely worth adding as well. www.darknessshallrise.de