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

This Canadian duo first came to my attention around a decade ago through their 2016 "Marked by Malice" demo which I quite liked at the time. They've since become a mainstay of my war metal listening habits as their proper releases all took things to another level from that initial release but this is the first Profane Order record to receive a proper review &/or rating from me for one reason or another. Like many of the sizable Canadian troop of war metal bands, Profane Order is made up of just the two members in multi-instrumentalist & Spectral Wound drummer Illusory & guitarist/bassist L.A. who enjoys his very first appearance on a Profane Order release here. Profane Order is very much the passion project of Illusory though who has been consistently filling the world with hatred, hypocrisy & death since 2015. "One Nightmare Unto Another" is very fine example of that too.

For Profane order's second full-length, we find the duo partnering up in the studio with Illusory's Spectral Wound band mate & guitarist Patrick McDowall to produce a record that nicely balances the abrasive qualities of all good war metal with just enough clarity to keep everything audible. In saying that, the wall of sound is still quite compacted with Illusory's face-melting vocals & pummeling blast beats kept very closely tied to the rhythm guitars, although the fairly uneventful guitar solos do tend to stand out in the mix. When the chaos reaches its peak, you can struggle to make out the riffs for a few seconds but you're generally given the time to successfully pull them out of the musical cesspool before the duo change course again (as they regularly do throughout the short twenty-five minute run time).

With just seven songs on offer, "One Nightmare Unto Another" has a tendency to fly by in no time, although that's not generally a concern for a war metal release as your ears can only take this sort of battering for so long. The tracklisting is extremely consistent though so it's very hard to select highlights with the vast majority of the tracks being of a very similar standard. The one that stands out to me is actually the shortest of them in "Suppression", although I really enjoy closer "Of Bile & Malice" too. Each of the songs expresses a similar musical theme with both the black metal & death metal components playing a strong role in the holistic message, although a few of the thrashier riffs do display a strong affiliation with Slayer's classic era too. Despite that, it would be quite easy to simply label "One Nightmare Unto Another" as blackened death metal as it's so clearly a combination of the two but the sheer chaos of its execution sees it always maintaining its war metal integrity.

War metal nuts will no doubt enjoy the experience because its everything it claims to be on the tin with the outstanding cover art being very much in line with what you've come to expect from a high-quality war metal release. If you were already a fan of the group through releases like 2017's "Tightened Noose of Sanctimony" E.P. or their 2019 debut album "Slave Morality" then you'll no doubt find "One Nightmare Unto Another" to offer a similar level of appeal. If pushed, I'd probably suggest that I regard those two releases as being just slightly ahead of this one but there's not a lot between them & I've thoroughly enjoyed being flayed to within an inch of my life by Profane Order once again.

For fans of Antichrist Siege Machine, Antichrist & Pig's Blood.

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.