Better Off Dead

Frank Blackfire, who played guitar on Agent Orange, is not on this record. The band is Tom Angelripper on bass and vocals, Chris Witchhunter on drums and Michael Hoffmann on guitar, and Harris Johns produced and engineered it, as he had the previous album. According to the credits it was recorded at Music Lab Studios in Berlin and mixed at Dierks Studio in Pulheim, with the production and the mix done over August and September 1990. Andreas Marschall painted the sleeve. Two songs are covers. "Turn Your Head Around" is a Tank song written by Algy Ward with Mark and Peter Brabbs, and "Cold Sweat", found only on the CD and the cassette, is the Thin Lizzy song by Phil Lynott and John Sykes, dedicated here to Lynott. Tom Angelripper wrote all the other lyrics, and the music is credited to the band. "The Saw Is the Law" came back the following year as a single in a reworked "Splatting Version", together with "Tarred and Feathered" from the CD and "The Kids Wanna Rock", a song by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. Steamhammer (SPV) released the album in October 1990 on LP, CD and cassette. The ten-song LP came in an embossed sleeve with the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve, while the CD and the cassette run to twelve songs, with "Cold Sweat" after "Capture the Flag" and "Tarred and Feathered" after "Resurrection". The band's own discography lists the LP's ten titles and prints the lyrics of all twelve in the CD order. Next Plateau Records released it in the United States, and the Japanese CD, TECP-25561, carries the same twelve songs as the German one.