Description

Polish pressed music cassette. Clear Takt Music cassette with white text.

Poland is probably the country that had the most record labels in the world that only released cassettes. But even though there were lots of labels the market was still small as they only printed these for their own market inside of Poland. And a label in one town maybe lacked the distribution for another town and so on. A Warzaw or Krakow label might print more copies of a tape then labels from a smaller town. So even if there are thousands of releases you will notice how rare some are if you start to try to list the catalog number of one particular label. Some cassettes just rarely shows up. One of the bigger cassettes labels were Takt Music in Warsaw. They started in 1990 as Tact then changed name in 1991 to Takt Music who existed up until 1994 before becoming a major pressing plant in Poland and changing the name to Takt. One label that had almost the same logo was Tak! Cassette that were run by the Polish studio Bis Records. Some of their cassette had the text “kaseta prezeznaczona do sprezedazy wylacznie na terenie polski (only for sale within Poland) while their releases sometimes also could be found in Ukraine. Some Tak! Cassette releases came on Takt Music tapes suggesting that this actually could be run and manufactured by the same people

Once on the verge of breaking the platinum sales barrier and transforming the “Big Four of Thrash” (Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeth) into the “Big Five,” the members of Testament were trying to simply stay afloat by the time they released this, their fifth album. In fact, The Ritual is a microcosm of the entire thrash metal scene. Once seemingly indestructible, by 1992 the group was crumbling towards an ignominious end, and despite possessing the genre’s most technically gifted guitarist in Alex Skolnick and one of its most fearsome growls in vocalist Chuck Billy, Testament was obviously going down with the ship. Yawn-inducing, production-line moshers like “Electric Crown,” “So Many Lies,” and “Deadline” dominate the album; brief flashes of inspiration, such as the intro riffs of the title track and “As the Seasons Grey” are few and far between. Ironically, the disc’s most uncharacteristic track, “Return to Serenity” is also its best. With its beautifully ethereal melodies, the song is one of the band’s greatest achievements. Alas, it was also one that arrived too little, too late to save Testament’s classic line-up, which would splinter immediately after The Ritual’s release.

Track listing:
1. Signs Of Chaos
2. Electric Crown
3. So Many Lies
4. Let Go Of My World
5. The Ritual
6. Agony
7. Deadline
8. As The Seasons Grey
9. The Sermon
10. Return To Serenity
11. Troubled Dreams