It’s quite obviously getting more and more difficult to establish an unknown band these days and therefore almost uninvoidable that something extra (besides the music) is needed in order to gain a bigger attention right from the start. To achieve this, most bands try to come up with a (supposed-to-be) outrageous image, while others consider namedropping as a more clever marketing idea. Israel’s NAIL WITHIN do belong to the second category here. They not only recorded their selftitled debut with German Thrash producer legend Harris Johns at his Spiderhouse Studio in Berlin, they additionally also invited a bunch of wellknown people to help them out, turning their debut full length album into something a little bit more special. So, as a result, Mille (from KREATOR), Robert Gonnella (ASSASSIN), Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg (ex – AT THE GATES, LOCK UP, THE CROWN, THE GREAT DECEIVER etc.) and Ze’ev Tananboim (SALEM, who also co-produced the record with Johns) all contributed guest vocals to some of the band’s own compositions. And the coice couldn’t be any better as all of them have this rather hearsy / shrieky / aggressive type of voice which is kinda similar to the one of NAIL WITHIN’s main vocalist Yishai Swearts, who actually kinda sounds like a mixture of those four individuals. Musically NAIL WITHIN also remind me a bit on late AT THE GATES (which means the more straight ahead, aggressive, right into your face period), with several hints of classic 80s Thrash, while their songwriting comes across even more varied sounding and full of excellent guitarwork (in terms of the riffing as well as some great melodic twin guitar leads!). It’s quite obvious that the band has big potential and the excellent production luckily compliments this talent and power in an almost perfect way. To find out a bit more about their obviously quite weird sense of humor, you should make sure to check out the (professionally filmed) video for ‘Dirty – Coloured – Knife’, which is also featured on this disc. Sick! So all in all this is a quite cool debut, unfortunately packaged in a way too modern way (can’t stand these currently way too often used type of covers at all – hell, gimme back some old clichés instead!!). A promising band though!! All further info at: www.listenable.net