Onkel Tom is truly a source of fun… Listening to this album makes you feel like you’re in a wild west saloon or on a Latin beach. Tom Angelripper, the commander-in-chief, probably got annoyed with all those doing Thrash/Punk these days and said, “The world is ending, you’re just slapping necks and flicking fingers, but when we do it, we do it like kings.” With Onkel Tom, they really went all out on fun. No whiskey, beers, or Lopezes and Marias from the Latin shores were left untouched — they gave them all a proper beating. Especially, this was the best answer to some German bands who kept rebelling until the Berlin Wall fell.
They say “strong beers, beers by the space-load,” but Onkel Tom actually went back to the roots of beer: Irish beer songs, German beer songs, mixing them with their own German country music and metal, adding a touch of Punk and AC/DC as the barley, and launched their own brew.
Ein Schöner Tag is Onkel Tom’s debut album from 1996. The recordings also feature choir vocals. My personal favorite track here is “When The Beer Goes Marching In,” which, true to its name, is a march used by Southerners when beer arrived at the camp, and it perfectly matches the following track “In München Steht Ein Hofbräuhaus.” Together, these two perfectly summarize the album’s overall sound.
Strong, fun, drunk, and broke… Why broke? Because it captures the joy and pleasure that drunkards feel when they spend their last money on alcohol and stumble down the street singing. The tracks “Medley” and “Delirium” add a special flavor. Alex’s tight hard’n’heavy solos in almost every song are also noteworthy.
So if you start with 3 beers, by the fourth you have a Hawaiian cocktail, followed by 4 shots of tequila fired by Tom… Then it’s whiskey and beer back and forth. With rhythms decorated by harmonicas and the maximum fun atmosphere, although it’s not obvious in this album, Onkel Tom combined with Sodom’s hardness in later albums makes them one of the coolest Thrash/Punk bands around.