Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Release date: March 4, 2022
Production: Sabaton
Album length: 45.21 min
Genre: Power Metal
Rating: 8.0/10
Hmm… a lot has been said about Sabaton. Especially over the last fifteen years. Our music outlet’s encounters with the band, back when they were still right at the start of their career, are unforgettable. Back then nobody took them seriously, and then they slowly started stealing the show from the established bands that took them out on tour. If Therion still got off pretty well on January 31, 2007 at Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna, Hammerfall had it much worse in April 2009 in Maribor and Zagreb. By 2012, Sabaton were already headlining the last night of the final edition of Tolmin’s Metal Camp, which later grew into Metaldays. Today Sabaton are a gigantic power metal machine. They fill halls with several thousand people with ease and rank among the headliners of the world’s biggest festivals. Truth be told, though, they didn’t bring anything all that special to the masses that wasn’t already familiar, musically, from the past. What they did do was study the iconography really well and merge it with their metal with great success.
If you can’t be bothered to study, especially history, or more precisely the history of wars and warfare, it’s enough to just listen to Sabaton and follow along. Well, that history is written the way the Anglo-Saxons direct it, but we won’t get into why that is. Especially not right now, in 2022, when we’re still witnessing the horrors of war on this planet, be it in Yemen, Syria or Ukraine. Anyway, Sabaton love to tell tales of wartime heroism. Over the years they’ve actually become real specialists. So their albums are no less appealing on that front than on the musical one. And yet. Let them lead you through the art of warfare. The troops are battle-hardened, and “The War To End All Wars”, their tenth album, shows no sign of the institution letting up. They found the perfect market niche by combining epically pompous heavy metal assaults with stories of wartime heroism and other gunpowder-related episodes.
Since you can find all the facts online, in this piece we’ll once again focus more on the musical character of the new Sabaton album. The standout is Dreadnought, in which the band sings about the Battle of Jutland between the German and Royal navies at the end of May 1916. It’s a great mini epic suite with a distinctly melodramatic streak. Among the fast-paced assaults, besides Stormtroopers (a crushing march through thick and thin about the special German units of World War I), Lady Of The Dark stands out, for example. It tells the story of Milunka Savić, the most courageous woman warrior of World War I, who fought for King Alexander. Besides the dramatic chorus, the song also features a clever guitar solo in the middle eight. In short: Sabaton being Sabaton. Anthems, one after another. Soldier of Heaven opens on rhythm samples, and had it carried on that way, it could have taken Sabaton to Eurovision. The chorus is one we’ve surely heard from the band somewhere before, built so that a whole hall can bounce on catapult springs at their gigs. On the other hand, the very neat ballad Christmas Truce ‘breaks up’ the marching character of the album, with orchestral arrangements grabbing the attention. The opener Sarajevo (the story is about the cause of World War I, the official one, anyway; let’s leave the bankers aside for a moment) builds a dark atmosphere at a mid-tempo to begin with, and then comes the wild, previously mentioned Stormtroopers. Sabaton thought of everything here, too. If the album’s opening points to the start of World War I, the closing Versailles ties in with the armistice that ended it. A theatrical finale in the style of a movie ending. As a whole, the album shows that Sabaton once again put in a huge amount of commitment and worked diligently on the arrangements.
Even if the band reached a kind of artistic zenith with “Carolus Rex”, that doesn’t mean they didn’t write a bundle of ‘poisonously epic anthems’ afterwards, which is how Sabaton have kept the substance of their music reliably solid all along. And even though the band no longer surprises, they handle the studio work very deftly whenever it’s time to serve up a gripping package that pairs theatricality with metallic hunger. Sabaton constantly chase the atmosphere of a story from the battlefield, trying to bring it closer to the listener with extra arranging tricks, and they’ve also become quite skilled at dramatizing the middle instrumental sections, where they pull off effective atmospheric swerves. Most of it, of course, is still carried by anthemic choruses, which are here again in abundance and where nothing is imaginable without Joakim’s one-of-a-kind voice. The new album and its predecessor “The Great War” (2019) are pretty evenly matched in this league. Quality, good, solid, but not top-tier. All told, though, “The War To End All Wars” is a slightly stronger effort. It has more successful moments of drama theater, with the fine-tuned touches focused on individual parts. So with “The War To End All Wars”, too, Sabaton will easily hold on to their pedigree as one of the most popular metal bands of the last fifteen years.
Guys, when it comes to storytelling, you’re still in debt to your Slovenian fans. We’re waiting for the story behind the saying: “The early morning hour is the grave of Slovenian lads.” The Isonzo Front and the maneuvers of young Rommel in the Breginj Corner!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. Sarajevo
02. Stormtroopers
03. Dreadnought
04. The Unkillable Soldier
05. Soldier Of Heaven
06. Hellfighters
07. Race To The Sea
08. Lady Of The Dark
09. The Valley Of Death
10. Christmas Truce
11. Versailles
Lineup:
Joakim Brodén – vocals, keyboards
Pär Sundström – bass guitar, backing vocals
Chris Rörland – guitar, backing vocals
Tommy Johannson – guitar, backing vocals
Hannes Van Dahl – drums, backing vocals
Guest musician:
Bethan Dixon Bate – narration on tracks 1 and 2
