Ah, the memories.

Where have those days gone; the days when there was no ecstasy, no iPods, no downloading, chatrooms, text-messages or those other niceties that the youth of today are immersed in.

We had tape-trading (cassette tapes, little square things you put into a gadget called a ‘tape recorder’. Tapes would be sent from one music fan to another via snail mail – no, we hadn’t even heard of e-mail back then), fanzines (yes, made from paper!) and the record store (remember those?).

There was this bunch of teenagers who were mostly preoccupied by beers, pussy and music. I never cared for the beers, and girls I was too shy for at the time, but it was the dawn of my growing interest in music.

One of the releases that made an impression on my beer-loving friends was the EP ‘Alien’ by a German band called Tankard. Everything they did was about beer! Can you believe it?! Aaaargh, fuckin’ brilliant, that! Even my mates who didn’t like metal in particular fell for this concept, and how could they not?

What I saw in Tankard was not so much that it was about beer. Rather, I saw them as a fresh take on the stuff Kreator, Destruction, Sodom and the other German meanies did. They made a sound completely of their own and stayed true to that. Even to the point where I got bored with it sometime by the mid-nineties. But that’s oftentimes the way it goes, innit?

With this best-of, I can’t help sensing that a Tankard renaissance is coming upon me, and as scary as that may sound, I think Tankard should be honoured just a little bit bringing a new, lighter dimension to thrash metal back in the eighties – without losing the core qualities of thrash metal: heaviness, speed and the down-played element of punk attitude.

Although ‘Best Case Scenario’ is a rerecording, you will not as a casual fan of Tankard hear the difference from the original tunes. The great difference in my ears is the advances made in recording techniques. Otherwise Gerre and his hardy men sound strikingly like…Tankard anno 1986. And they should. I really can’t see Tankard sounding much different than (Empty) Tankard, 666 Packs, Zombie Attack, The Morning After, Alien, Space Beer, Chemical Invasion and the other classic beer anthems.

Spitze! Prost!