March 2023 Feature Release - The North Edition

Another month flies by, which means it's time to select a new feature release for The North. It's my choice this month and so I have gone with the sole full-length from Canadian war metal duo, Conqueror - 1999's War Cult Supremacy. War metal doesn't get much exposure on the features, so it would be great to read what you all think of it either below or in review format.

In common with genre trailblazers Blasphemy, Conqueror were a British Columbia war metal band, forming in 1994 and splitting in 2000. War Cult Supremacy is their only full album and was released in 1999. I know most people, including a significant number of black metal fans, don't enjoy war metal and, in all honesty I get that. However, to me, an album like War Cult Supremacy reaches back down into the brutal and bestial roots of Man and can be utilised as a kind of primal scream therapy. War metal is chaotic and thundering, it is relentlessy brutal-sounding and it is unforgiving. It speaks back to the days when men ate what they could kill and they had to kill what threatened them to survive. War metal isn't intended to speak to the modern, reasoning man in all of us, but rather to our primitive nature, red in blood and claw.

This Canadian duo have that primal primitivism down to a tee, with their chaotic blend of death and black metal that does little except pummel away relentlessly at your ears and mind with little regard for tunefullness, song structure or technical mastery. The drums batter away relentlesly in what seems like a permanent blastbeat, hugely distorted riffs fire off in all directions, guitar leads are virtually non-existent and J. Read spits out the lyrics in a flurry of incoherent fury. The production values are very low, not unusually for 1990's war metal, which adds to the chaotic nature of the album as any detail or subtlety just disappears into the tempest of speed and distortion. There are actually some good songs buried under these layers of visceral chaos and brutality, The Curse, for example is an energetic maelstrom with a throbbing central riff and the title track is a blitz of black metal bombardment that fans of late 90's Marduk would recognise easily if it was slowed down a bit and the production values were higher.

War Cult Supremacy is an album that is meant to engage the listener on a gut level, not on a cerebral one. For proof look no further than the lyrics to Chaos Domination (Conquer the Enslaver) - "Chaos domination conquers the enslaver, The new order of the Conqueror is here, The absolute laws of nature replace the deficient laws of humanity". Not that the lyrics are a big part of what War Cult Supremacy is about as they are all but indecipherable, but they do illustrate the philosophy behind the music. Even the anti-christian stuff, I think, is more about man's laws being stripped away and replaced by the chaos of war and conquest.

Some may say that I am full of shit and this is just a couple of guys who can't really play very well making a damn racket and hey, maybe you're right, but when I listen to this it sweeps away all the unconscionable bullshit I have filled my head with during the day and replaces it with a mad, chaotic joy just for being alive - and that is no mean feat my friends!

4.5/5

I don't have time for full reviews at the moment as work & family life are too hectic at the moment with my wife due to give birth to my third daughter in a week but needless to say that I really enjoyed this feature. Conqueror have managed to produce a very consistent release here although the better tracks tend to be the tighter ones. I would have preferred there were more of the super-intense chromatic guitar solos that the war metal subgenre is known to champion (think Bestial Warlust) but that's not a major criticism because the vocals are gnarly & the blast-beats are relentless. Sure, it's really hard to make out the riffs in this wall of white noise so this isn't a record for the faint hearted but your more seasoned underground extreme metal fans should take solace in the sheer rawness & ferocity on offer which is pure savagery. War metal is very much my bag though so I think I was always gonna enjoy this one.

4/5