Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Kanonenfieber - Menschenmühle (2021)

Hailing from Germany, Kanonenfieber (cannon-fever) have released a debut album that covers the expanses of both black metal and death metal over nine World War 1 themed tracks.  The album was made to commemorate the countless victims of WWI and uses reports, documents and letters from the war to give real authenticity to the recordings.  You get spoken word extracts from broadcasts at the time and also the artwork is an anti-war poster by Mihály Biró considered the founder of political poster art, so there really has been a conscious effort here to explore the subject matter of the album in as much detail as possible.

In terms of musical content you get hateful black metal vocals (which are all the more enhanced by being done in German which just adds perfect edge to them), interwoven with harsh blackened death metal that is used really well to ramp up the pace and add further intensity to tracks.  There's even an acoustic, folk number at the end sang in a clean yet benign and resigned tone that really underlines the futility of the war.  The artist/s (there's no much info on who the band are or how many of them there are in the band) uses the sounds of the battlefield to good effect without giving the feel that this is some Marduk record and they use pace really well with most tracks having some genuine traditional/heavy metal moments.

When you are dealing with such a sensitive subject matter that has been done to death many times before (Hail of Bullets and 1914 I am looking at you) it is easy to fall into some niche metal marketplace, but Kanonenfieber are too smart with their content.  They reflect the controlled chaos of war in their song writing and structures.  The superb pace change in Grabenlieder where they use gunfire to bring in the death metal part of the song is superbly timed.  They even have some sense of melo-death to Grabenkampf  as it plays out from within an almost doom style structure.

I literally stumbled across this album on Instagram when one of the journo's I follow there shared the cover on Bandcamp Friday and I have since gone and purchased the CD and t-shirt from the record label Bandcamp page.  One of my neatest finds of 2021 thus far.