Scribed by Sandre the Giant
When you’re a young lad, venturing into the big city for the first time as a university student and also a metal fan getting his first taste of live shows happening in a town regularly and independent music stores chock full of CDs that you’d never found at home, some of the first ones you find are your long term favourites. Such is the tale of me and Mercenary, Denmark’s premier power/groove/thrashers and their 2004 record, ’11 Dreams’. Twenty years on, it still remains one of the records that shaped me as a music fan.
September 2005 I saw Mercenary support Nevermore at a tiny gig in Glasgow (along with Dew-Scented actually, how good were they?) and, while Nevermore were the reason I bought that ticket, I wanted to look into their support bands before I went so I wasn’t totally uninitiated. The title track from their 2004 record ’11 Dreams’ was available on the Century Media website back then as a free download mp3 (websites used to do that, before streaming existed, CM and Relapse’s sites got me into a lot of bands that way). I was utterly spellbound by just how heavy it was and yet how melodic and catchy it was too. Remember, just a small town boy… I bought my CD of ’11 Dreams’ that night at the merch stand, and it started a love affair that continues to this day. It is an album that has a perfect weighting between super catchy melodic passages and yet keeps that edge to their sound that gives everything a bit of bite to it. ‘World Hate Center’, ‘reDestructDead’ and ‘Sharpen the Edges’ are all great examples of how you can mix these sound into a cohesive whole and sacrifice nothing. The title track is still the one for me though, a bombastic rampage that still has its hooks into me.
’11 Dreams’ is one of those records that showed me that I could take a risk on a band I’ve never seen in the pages of a magazine or on music tv. In fact, they were the first band that I saw at a gig that I didn’t know already going in and it taught me a valuable lesson about always turning up for the support, because you never know what gems you’ll unearth. It is a principle I’ve stuck with ever since, I call it the ‘Mercenary Principle’ and it has done me well over the years. ’11 Dreams’ is that record you throw on when you need something heavy but catchy as all hell, and most of their following work has been just as good. It remains a subtly important record in my metal journey, and it fucking kills too which helps.