MP - Get It Now Black Vinyl LP

Text by DYING VICTIMS PRODUCTIONS official site.

Originally released in 1987 on the short-lived Steps Records, Get It Now, was the second recorded statement of Germany’s MP. Their debut album from the year before, Bursting Out (The Beast Became Human), retained all the electricity and urgency of youth, and subsequently become a cult record for its raw verve. A year older and presumably wiser, the power-trio unleashed a more finessed follow-up in Get It Now. While the band hardly wavered in their approach between the two albums - still spanning the early hot-rockin’ throes of post-NWOBHM to the nascent rumblings of speed metal and its subsequent thrash offshoot, and of course the more mainstream stylings which lingered across all those idioms - MP here focused their songwriting into a more streamlined push ‘n’ pull that was 100% HEAVY METAL personified.

And yet, its year of release provides some (in-hindsight) context for Get It Now’s unique and underdog nature, which has thankfully made it an enduring album. Not only in Germany but across the world, traditional metal was on the decline as “hair metal” crept up the pop charts and thrash metal exploded all across the international underground - and lest we forget the first album-length rumblings of death metal. In this landscape, where subgenres started taking hold and “heavy metal” as both a term and especially a musical style & subculture became much more defined, MP doggedly defied the norms and stuck to their increasingly gleaming guns. As such, Get It Now retains a rich, metal-for-metal’s-sake balance between slick ‘n’ speeding burners and grimy fist-shakers. And while the debut album conspicuously nodded toward metal culture with “MP (Metal Priests),” here do MP continue to acknowledge that culture through the wider world’s acknowledgement of metal culture with “Rocktober Blood,” about the cult horror film of the same name. Elsewhere, the production was taken up a couple notches without losing that raw verve that so endeared the band’s debut album, arguably making Get It Now the fullest expression of MP’s true metal might.

MP continued on for one more album before changing that moniker to Melting Point, the title of their 1992 album still under the MP handle. Like many overlooked albums within the metal pantheon, Get It Now never truly got its due “back in the day,” but thankfully, it sounds surprisingly fresh today, and RELICS FROM THE CRYPT hopes this dog will have its day with this long-overdue reissue!