The War Metal Thread

Maybe you two can help me.  I'm into more diverse albums, in black metal terms my favorite examples are The Work Which Transforms God, Verisakeet and Eternity of Shaog.  So which war metal albums are the most diversified?  I know a lot of them are pretty samey, as I've read.

The whole concept of war metal is intended to be pretty limited by its very definition to be honest Rex (i.e. complete worship of metal's most extreme elements) which has probably got a lot to do with why people like Sonny & I love it. There are a few artists that sit somewhere between war metal & other genres like death metal & grindcore (see Infernal Coil, Teitanblood, etc.) but you're not gonna find any acoustic interludes or long progressive improvisational sections here. You're still looking exclusively at pure hatred, vengeance & goat sodomy. Ultimately, if you don't like the more popular bands like Blasphemy, Damaar or Archgoat then war metal is probably not the subgenre for you.

The whole concept of war metal is intended to be pretty limited by its very definition to be honest Rex (i.e. complete worship of metal's most extreme elements) which has probably got a lot to do with why people like Sonny & I love it. There are a few artists that sit somewhere between war metal & other genres like death metal & grindcore (see Infernal Coil, Teitanblood, etc.) but you're not gonna find any acoustic interludes or long progressive improvisational sections here. You're still looking exclusively at pure hatred, vengeance & goat sodomy. Ultimately, if you don't like the more popular bands like Blasphemy, Damaar or Archgoat then war metal is probably not the subgenre for you.

The music itself is fine, I'm just looking for something that's likely to amaze me, something I'd put in my top 500.  Otherwise, these kinds of albums will end up being 9/10's at best.  Although, it's totally possible to "worship" the concept of hatred in multiple formats.  We've got dissonant death, grind, deathcore, black noise, etc.  And the thing is I've found some albums with genre tagging somewhat like this on RYM, but the problem is that most of the songs are tackling all these genres based on a "signature sound," so the so-called variety loses its quality.

Besides, if my Emperor ranking proves anything (4, 2, 3, 1), I'm a very against-the-grain metalhead.  So I don't really mind looking like a weirdo with it.  But I do still have a certain standard of five-stars, so it didn't hurt to ask.  Thanks anyway.

You guys aren't gonna believe this, I found that album I was looking for.  It took effort.

Cabinet - Claustrophobic Dystentry (2022)

Genres: War Metal, Death Metal

Subs: Noise, Dark Ambient, Post-Metal, Black Noise

In my recent curiosity pertaining to the controversial war metal genre, I started, but didn't finish, dozens of war metal albums that I would shut off in the event that I noticed am obvious flaw, usually the monotony.  I finally ended at a Lynchian journey into the very essence not only of hatred, but of darkness and despair.  It's much like a Hell album, but more appropriately for the North and the Horde rather than the Fallen.

This is a surreal exercise in atmosphere, not in conventional music.  What rhythm you may expect from this album is largely absent, which in most cases, even for the unwritten rule of it set by BBM as a whole, ends up being a flaw.  As Daniel pointed out here, war metal is often about the worship of hatred, although I find that this can be achieved through multiple forms, and thus, through a diverse album.  And so, we have a Gira-style reliance on atmosphere and sound rather than melody, one that drags you through its terrifying world with little ambient / noise surprises here and there, oftentimes flawlessly produced.  Sound effects turn into instruments and instruments turn into atmosphere, rather than just playing monotonous music.  The best example of this may be Hallway of Dacryocystotomic Depriciation.  Even immediately afterwards on the next track do we get an extraordinarily fuzzy guitar carefully raising in volume behind the foreground of a clearly produced static buzz accompanied by blowing winds, and pairing with these fuzzy death guitars are clearer and more polished post-black tremelos that somehow pair with the death fuzz flawlessly.  This all happens in the first MINUTE of Eternally Pendulemic Flourescent Bulb / Deteriorating Interminably.

Never before have I heard a metal album that is so rhythmless and so full of imagination at the same time.  This is music at some of its most reliant on presence before rhythm, and successful as well.  It took a real creative genius to achieve something like this and manage to mix clear production with fuzzy production, sadness with anger and ambiance with terror so beautifully and so disgustingly.

10/10.  Easily making it somehwere in my top 10 black metal and death metal albums at the same time.

Profane Order - One Nightmare Unto Another (2023)

I think it is fair to say that most people see black metal as a cold genre. It isn't just it's fascination with the northern realms of forests, mountains, ice and snow, but also a coldness of emotion and a steely, frigid and spiteful attitude to everything from death to religion. War metal, however, I would suggest, is a very hot genre, it's atmosphere and aesthetic feeling very much like a flaming blast of furnace-heat as if issuing from the very gates of Hell itself. This is an atmosphere that Profane Order have replicated on One Nightmare Unto Another exceedingly successfully. The tracks here are blistering and fiery affairs that seethe with a hot-blooded rage and visceral savagery so typical of the war metal aesthetic.

What it doesn't have, however, is the muddy and messy production that can sometimes render war metal releases into barely discernible blurs of chaos. This isn't by any means a precise production job as you may hear on a tech-death album for example, but it also doesn't neuter the visceral power of the tracks under a cloying layer of muddiness, rather striking a decent balance between chaos and legibility. The sound is thick and chaotic, exhibiting the looseness I associate with war metal that says "these guys are barely hanging on by their teeth" as they pummel and pulverise their way through the album's twenty-five minutes. Not always typical for war metal, though, the riffs are perfectly audible and show a bit more variation than may sometimes be on offer, such as during the slower, more brooding moments of closer Of Bile and Malice.

I surely love me some Blasphemy and Beherit, but I am not such a "trve" war metal purist that I believe you should barely be able to discern any sort of riff or melody to experience that authentic death metal experience, so I am perfectly good with this kind of production job, because behind it Profane Order still have that unquenchable war metal fire in their bellies as they spit out savage and brutally blistering salvos of incendiary hatred and blasphemy.

4.5/5

Blasphemy - Fallen Angel of Doom (1990)

Genres: Bestial Black Metal

I need to really thank Metal Academy for motivating me to explore more war metal.  A couple days after I get back in black metal, this thread shows up and suddenly a bunch of war metal albums are being reviewed.  And of course, there are bound to be a couple reviews for the most famous BBM album ever: Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom.  In Daniel's review here, he wrote: "Blasphemy managed to combine all four of the major extreme metal sounds of the time (i.e. death metal, black metal, thrash metal & grindcore) into one swarming mass of largely indecipherable noise."  And he was right.  It was ONE noise.

I heard this album on DMS, a YouTube channel that provides full metal albums with high sound quality, and that includes really dirty sludgy albums with the proper production for the job.  This is just having come off the back of checking out various Teitanblood and Infernal Coil songs, as well as re-evaluating a few black, prog  and death albums.  Pretty much every song shares a 98% DNA similarity.  The production here is only there for the brutality, defeating its own purpose as you can barely here anything beyond the drums which are more or less doing the same thing for all 30 minutes. This production doesn't even sound as dirty or noisy as good black albums tend to be.  it's just bad.  Also having come of the back of the much lesser-known Cabinet's album Claustrophobic Dysentery, which mixes death and black with occasional doom, noise and ambient for very weird sounds, in comparison this album feels more like a bunch of jokers recording a bad demo for a major label rather than an actual studio album.  I'm not kidding.  That's EXACTLY what it sounds like.  it doesn't even get creative with the concept of non-studio works like Bee Thousand did with the concept of Beatles bootlegs. The heaviness was definitely cool at first, but they practically beat it to death, and they only show their most imagination through small bits in the LAST TWO SONGS for crying out loud.

This album will be mimicked many times throughout history, but most will likely succeed because... DAMN.  This album might be brutal, but that's the only strength to me.  Otherwise, it's more boring than Bob Dylan's Shadows in the Night and Trapt's self-titled.  Stick with Teitanblood, Cabinet and Goatpenis.  This is the single most overrated album I have ever heard.  I haven't hated a beloved album this much since that obsolete helf-star rating I gave the Ramones debut years ago (upgraded to a 9/10, bion).  Please tell me the other one will be better.

32/100

Blasphemy - Gods of War (1993)

Genres: Bestial Black Metal, Black Death Metal

After being sorely disappointed in Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom, I was practically begging this album to show more imagination.  I've already found a few bestial black metal albums that I'm really impressed with, and I was hoping that Blasphemy could recreate that for all of their popularity.  This album would have to do.

It was pretty obvious from the first track that these guys were making improvements over their overrated debut.  The production was studio quality, so the dirtiness of the album was overall more effective.  And there were a few little changes in the songwriting as it was much less samey and annoying.  The distinction between black, death, thrash and grind was much clearer here, as we do have a few shorter songs working their way into deathgrind territory, and slight progginess helps create moments of the other three genres while the album remains consistent.  Bottom line, this album had imagination.

But does this mean that I think the different songwriting makes it brilliant?  No, just better than before.  The sad truth is, I don't really get a lot out of these songs as all the different types had already been done better by the likes of Venom, Bathory, Napalm Death, and Death themselves.  This is still pretty basic extreme metal.  I mean, some songs are much better than others, but nothing here really "sucks," it just gets a little boring occasionally.  It eventually gets to the point where the band is recycling all the same tricks in an effort to make things look more imaginative than these things are.

So I'll give this album major points for the obvious improvements over the debut.  Honestly, I wish these guys had continued into a third album because I would've liked to see where they were headed next.  Gods of War is at least a full star over Fallen Angel of Doom, and it's a shame this sophomore release gets second banana to the simple-minded debut.

57/100.

I agree with you that "Fallen Angel Of Doom…." is overrated & would take "Gods of War" over it pretty comfortably.

Archgoat - Whore of Bethlehem

Genres: Bestial Black Metal

Alright, so after having been disappointed with Blasphemy's work, I was really hoping my ventures into Archgoat wouldn't become a disaster. Cabinet and Caucasian Concentration Camp are my go-to acts for comparing the good and the bad, as each bands meets their extreme very well.  And Archgoat, having their fine share of albums needed for any BBM collection (if there is such a thing), were practically a must do for me.  So, I started with one extended play which I won't be reviewing here, just to get a taste for their sound first, and then decided to move through their debut upwards.

After than dark ambient intro, it was pretty obvious that the studio-quality production already gave it a serious advantage over Blasphemy's albums.  Thanks to the perfect production, the heaviness is more enjoyable than Blasphemy.  All that was left was to see how the songwriting went.  And lemme tell you, among the mindless thrashing, there were some MAJOR breaths of fresh air in the "give you a break and put something new on the table" department.  Early on, Lord of the Void makes a point of slower doomy moments, and eventually just bursting into seriously unpredictable territory without breaking format, mood or genre.  But I decided that unless the band mixes it up a little more, I'm not going to give it the best rating.  And Dawn of the Light largely did that, although I appreciate the slow Sabbath midsection.  But no matter which song came next, it ended up sounding like a shameless rehash of the last song, so I don't really get the feeling that these guys are bringing war metal to its fullest potential and are just standard.

Archgoat is way better than Blasphemy, that much is obvious.  But this is the kind of album that satisfies raw headbangers and thrashers who need a metallic atmosphere, and are nothing short of the very norm that they set up for black metal musicians everywhere.  Archgoat's proven they can perform a black metal song with the fury necessary, so let's see them try to do something else.

64/100

Archgoat - The Light-Devouring Darkness (2009)

Genres: Bestial War Metal

OK, so in my bestial black metal ventures, a single album was all it took to prove that Archgoat is a bit better than the iconic Blasphemy.  In my earlier review for Blasphemy's debut album, I said that they have invented a standard but it would be easy for many bands to beat them at it.  It's pretty obvious that Archgoat was not only one of the bands that were struck with Blasphemy, but would surpass them.  Having said that, surpassing the two Blasphemy albums is not a difficult task to me, and their debut was a decent experience.  How would their next one turn out?

After the dark ambient into and the first song, I thought to myself it would just be a rehash, but I would soon be proved wrong.  The next two songs showed a careful death doom slow pace which was simplistic but fairly hypnotic.  If not for their standard sound, I would've been awestruck with it, but remained only impressed with the decision.  But then track 5, Sodomator of the Doomed Venus (I typed that shit out and I need to wash my hands) steals the show with a short, black punkish display of spasmatic percussion and raw noise.  The noise is further touched up on in the once again simple but purely black title track.  So by this point, I'm quite a bit more impressed with their attempts at further exploring extreme metal itself on this record.  I mean, I still have an obligation to call this album out for low-grade songwriting, but they're doing much more with this album while maintaining the strengths of their first.  The group also makes room for more melody during the slower and doomier moments, but are improving their melodic prowess a little bit in the faster moments, too.  Not much, but still.

So while Archgoat clearly still have some training to do in the songwriting department, they've been able to touch up the concept of innovation a little more.  Having said that, they don't often overcome the monotony of the first album, but at least they're trying.  Easy improvement and a nice direction forward.

68/100

I'd actually suggest that Archgoat offer significantly more variety in tempo than 99% of other war metal acts.

I'd actually suggest that Archgoat offer significantly more variety in tempo than 99% of other war metal acts.

Thankfully.  I just don't feel much of a difference in other areas, though.  There are still noticeable amounts of the "write the same song" syndrome there, although it feels more like they're recycling the same few ideas throughout the whole, albiet once again better than Blasphemy did.

Two more bands should be enough to finalize a decent top ten.  Right now it looks more like a collective best-of ranking of multiple acts.

Profane Order - One Nightmare Unto Another (2023)

Genres: Bestial Black

I've been putting of the more recent BBM band Profane Order for quite some time ever since I started exploring BBM, mostly to look into the classic bands like Blasphemy and Conqueror.  But these bands are hardly satisfying my undying craving for imagination, as most of these classics were either decent, OK or bad.  Profane Order is at the front of the modern BBM scene, which isn't that big but is still relevant for black metal fans if they want the most extreme metal they can get (depending on the production and abilities of the acts).  Since this 2023 album has gardered much attention, and it is 2023, this had to be my first album by them despite it being their third.

Dirty or clean, I need my production to be JUST RIGHT for whatever sound the band is going for.  It's true that dirty production, which is more fit for BBM, could've easily worked with this album.  But the clean production still works perfectly.  You get the most of its metallic abilities, as much as the production of Ride the Lightning did for that album.  On top of that, Illusory's vocals are fucking badass.  These screams aren't just maniacal wails of black metal creepiness, but angry bursts of energy with a small bit of that classic heavy metal aura.  I mean, it was so perfect for the album that I wanted to scream out with him, even though I don't have that ability and I can't understand the words at all.  This combo of production and vocals makes for a perfect example of what war metal should be while vaguely recalling some of the layout and sound traits of the classic early 80's genres that would inspire black metal.

But you know me.  I have to criticize something that sounds samey.  This is yet another case of effectively writing the same song over and over again.  And while this metal sound is top-notch in production and aura, the sad truth is that this tells me that the band is capable of tackling a couple more different types of songs.  I mean, you CAN write different types of songs, even within just war metal, and there's hardly any of that.  But the constant jam factor of the album keeps things so hard and headbanging that the album maintains its presence throughout.

So in short, I like this album well enough.  I'm writing this while listening to Slave Morality, and as I expected, they didn't break form from the previous stuff.  Having said that, they maintain their enjoyable vibes without any other blemish, so this is an album I'd recommend just based on the merit that the strengths of the album are perfect, while the flaws are expected and partly made up for by the strengths.  This manages to be essential for a BBM list based on the skill, not on the history or influence like some early BBM works.

75/100

Profane Order - Slave Morality (2019)

Genres: Bestial Black

Now that I'm exploring more bestial black metal works, usually one band every couple days, I'm finally at one of the modern icons of the scene, one that's gardered a lot of attention in recent time: Profane Order.  If you've hard their popular third album, One Nightmare Unto Another, you'd be familiar with their high jam abilities and flawless production.  They weren't always so squeaky clean, however, as many consider dirty production more "appropriate."  I, however, consider whether or not the decision works for the album and nothing more.  Before their skillful and enjoyable, but samey third album ever saw the light, they made this modern icon: Slave Morality.

The metallic rush of this album is bombastic.  The idea of a BBM's sound and production are more akin to a thunderstorm rather than the average snowstorm, so don't expect any Paysage d'Hiver atmospheres here.  We have the sound of metallic thunder at its maximum output, as one can tell from surprising tracks like "Ancient Blood" which is among one of the most metallic things I've ever heard.  I almost gave that track five stars.  And it's quite obvious that all the songs aren't QUITE the same, even though some moments feel too similar to moments from other songs not to take monotony into consideration.  But varying riffages, solos and tempo changes are must-dos in this album.  And thanks to the slightly dirtier production than their next album, we get another flawless metal atmosphere but with a stronger emphasis on what we expect from BBM.  The band easily has a masterful look on what production techniques and traits are needed for a proper metal album.  Check out the track "Perverse Demonaic" and see what I mean.

So this is easily one of the most fun things I've ever heard in a genre which has been more or less OK to me considering the classics output.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: a classic like Fallen Angel of Doom by Blasphemy is so poorly-produced, poorly-written and overrated that it has to be easy for later BBM albums to surpass it.  But even if that was a tough challenge, this album makes it look easy.  We get all of the strengths of the popular One Nightmare Unto Another, but with whatever flaws coming later being more focused on and improved in comparison to many BBM albums of this age and the past.

83/100

Sarcófago - "Christ's Death" demo (1987)

The Brazilian extreme metal legends pick things back up after the disappointing "Satanic Lust" demo from earlier that year with a release that was more savage than anything we'd heard from them previously. In fact, I'd argue that this demo represents perhaps the earliest example of genuine war metal. The intensity blew my socks off back in the very early 1990's & it's still something to behold even today. I still prefer Sarcófago's first demo "The Black Vomit" overall though.

3.5/5

I'm back, fellow cuntfuckers.  And what better way for me to celebrate being back than to review the newest album by my favorite bestial band.

Cabinet - Hydrolysated Ordination

Genres: Bestial Black Metal, Blackened Death Metal

Cabinet, also known as Sxuperion since 2014 and member of Oreamnos since 2023, is garnering favor among underground metal fans as one of the most unsettling metal musicians of all time due to a perfectly healthy sense of texture.  His album Claustrophobic Dysentery is my current pick for the best war metal album of all time for its masterful use of noise and ambient as frightening textural instruments while the black and death metal guitars reached extremities unheard of before.  I wasn't going to listen to a lot of metal albums for a while sine I want to get some more albums of other genres in my top 1000, but for Cabinet I will maliciously and gleefully break that rule like a Kitkat bar.

On "Masticated Inurnment of Dysphagiactic Soils," We start with an oddly dissonant death take on black noise which intentionally varies in production quality going from too noisy to proper to totally atmospheric, and we see the shifts just like this through the entire album.  it's like a fucking Neurosis track.  This is the typical genre-shifting behavior I expect from Cabinet, but they're clearly more focused on the black noise atmosphere taking a stronger, fuzzier charge than what was seen on previous albums.  The four minutes here masterfully shift from one place to another, while its noise also creates an industrial atmosphere that gives it an almost science fiction approach.  The way I see it, this has to be classified as an avant-garde metal album, as its experimentation is heavy and unrelenting.  Just listen to track 9, Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush, and tell me this does not qualify as an experimental album.

For the best example, the title track shows no hesitation in delivering weird and wild collections of black noise and dark ambient teaming together to create unsettling Blut Aus Nord style atmospheres.  This is the slowest track so far, and definitely the most disturbing, as there is less of a mechanic feel to it and is more traditional in the vein of general extreme metal.  This welcome addition to both the diversity and flow of this ever so unpredictable with a singular strong persence throughout really displays Cabinet's unwavering willingness to fuck around and just creep you out to the point of vomiting.

Some of these songs, however, are pure experiments in texture.  While these two minute songs will be packed with shifts from one general sound to another, these songs still feel too short in the end, especially since four of these songs take up the entire middle section.  This is a similar criticism I give to several songs on Low by David freakin' Bowie.  Although, the progression of these songs was nice, and almost akin to the variety of the so-called "melody" that took up much of side B of Abbey Road.  The nature recordings at the end of track 7 were especially welcome.  Even within the two minute songs, we never know what robotic or ghostly sirens will overtake any noisy, industrial guitar rhythms or when the next tidal wave of pure black noise will assault us.  However, it should be said that, while "Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush" is a fine example of this experimentation, its second half is too long and a little unwelcome.

Well, I'm once again very happy with the direction Cabinet took.  I've been eagerly awaiting another Cabinet ever since I discovered them, and I was hoping this would end up just as experimental as ever.  This is a finer example of what trying to be creative with an otherwise lacking genre can do.  Bestial black metal needs more bands like Cabinet, and along with Claustrophobic Dysentery, this is proof.  Even though this album has some flaws stemming from lengths, this is a weird and unique black metal album and one that I highly recommend.

96/100

Antichrist Siege Machine - Vengeance of Eternal Fire (2024)

Antichrist Siege Machine are relative newcomers to the war metal scene, their debut EP hitting the stands in 2017, but they have taken the genre by the scruff of the neck and laid down some pretty brutal stuff in the seven years since. With latest album, Vengeance of Eternal Fire, ASM have really hit their groove with a release that delivers an all-out aural battery without the muddy production values that robbed so many of their predecessor's releases of any clarity. Yes, I know that muddy, chaotic sound was part of the appeal of early war metal releases from the Blasphemies of this world and I love that archetypal sound too, but here, thirty-five years on from those earliest canoniacal war metal classics, the genre has moved on from that and the best modern war metal acts don't need to hide behind poor production because they have the chops to produce brutal and blasphemous sounds whilst allowing the listener to actually hear everything they are doing.

Of course the basis of war metal is an unholy alliance of death and black metal, with varying proportions of each within the mix. ASM tend towards the more death metal end of the war metal spectrum, dropping occasionally into quite "groovy" slower death metal riffing, just enough to break things up and provide a little variety, but not so much that it distracts from the overarching blitzkrieg that comprises the vast majority of Vengeance of Eternal Fire and shouldn't be seen as any kind of treasonous act against war metal orthodoxy. The drums sit fairly prominently in the mix, so the blastbeats are given plenty of focus, almost as much as the blistering riffs. Interestingly drummer Scott "S.B." Bartley is also the vocalist, so it must be quite a feat when playing live for him to sing whilst launching salvo after salvo of blastbeats. His vocals actually seem to sit lower in the mix than his drumming, thus giving them a distant, buried feel, despite their bellicose viciousness. The high production values allow the listener to distinguish the riffs far easier than on old-school war metal releases and to appreciate the finer details which may have been lost in the past.

I must say, as much as I love OSWM, I do like the fact that a band like ASM employ a cleaner production style, which does make appreciation of the nuances of war metal much easier - and I say this with no ironic intent because it is obvious that, despite the inherent (almost) continuous blasting and breakneck riffing, that these guys really have great command of their instruments and their overall sound is tight, aggressive and technically solid. At the end of the day, they write killer riffs, have a powerful delivery and are extremely capable of capturing the witheringly blasphemous intent of true war metal. For me this is the band's best release to date and call me heretic if you must, but I think this is capable of standing against the very best that war metal has to offer. To (mis)quote the intro to the Fallout 4 video game "war metal... war metal never changes". Except when it does!

4.5/5