Profane Order - One Nightmare Unto Another (2023)^{Release ID: 42625}

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.