The Blood Calls for W.A.R.!

A couple of years ago a few friends and I listened to a bunch of lowly rated and/or awful looking metal albums over the span of a few months. The main goal in this was to find unintentionally funny music, but also to see if any infamous lowly rated albums (like The Unspoken King or Illud Divinum Insanus, for example) were better than they were made out to be. With that being said, Der Sturmer’s 2001 album, The Blood Calls for W.A.R., belongs to the former category.

As far as I am aware, this band is somewhat known for being NSBM, but the lack of reviews on here makes me think that most metal fans probably haven’t heard of or listened to them. I personally became aware of them through their album A Banner Greater Than Death because someone reviewed it on another music website I frequent. After stumbling across the band, I took a quick look at their other albums and realized that their debut, The Blood Calls for W.A.R., sounded like absolute garbage and, as a result, I thought it would be a good album to listen to as part of the aforementioned “challenge” or whatever you want to call it. Since then, the album has become an inside joke with those friends that listened to it with me due to just how bad it is.

The music that Der Sturmer plays on The Blood Calls for W.A.R. is a mix of black metal and RAC and they play both horribly (not that the latter was ever good to begin with). The black metal songs on this album are, no joke, some of the lowest quality shit you will ever hear. For example, on the opening track “Der Sturmer”, the riffs are extremely simplistic tremolo picked garbage that goes absolutely nowhere and basically loops for 4 minutes straight while some guy grunts into the mic the whole time. Every single black metal track (5 out of the 9 songs) does this while the drum machine plays the same recycled drum beat over and over again with no variation whatsoever. The only other thing that happens besides this is that samples from Nazi propaganda films and other white supremacist stuff play at random intervals, usually at the beginning of the songs, but sometimes just over the music. As you can probably tell by this description, it is mind numbingly terrible.

The remaining 4 songs on the other hand are much more structured, but are still complete trash. These songs are just RAC/punk crap with very simplistic “catchy” riffs and choruses that I guess you are supposed to sing along to. The lyrics on these songs are straight up laughable (especially due to the bad grammar), and these tracks in general are probably the funniest on the entire record. “When Totenkopf Rises” and “The Hammer Falls on Zion” are probably the funniest of the four, so they might be worth checking out if you can find them.

NSBM is usually pretty bad/bland crap, but The Blood Calls for W.A.R. manages to fall short of even those standards. This album is, no joke, one of the worst metal albums I have ever sat through in my entire life, but luckily the unintentional humor saves the album from being as painful as something like Nation by Sepultura or the latest Disturbed record, Evolution. The people on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet who claim this is “trve” and “brutal” seriously need to get their hearing checked. With that being said, I’ll give the album one point simply because music came out of the speakers when I hit play.

NSBM once again proves itself to be the worst subgenre within metal. I probably would be able to look past the band's idiotic lyrics if the music was good, however it isn't. It's really bad.

There's barely any progression throughout the album, it always feels like the same 2 or 3 riffs played over and over again for 40 minutes. At first, the album was endurable. Though somewhat generic and uninspired, it was ok. However a full album of the most unoriginal, lazy riffs is simply destined to fail. I could barely tell each song apart, at points I even legitimately wondered if they were using the same riffs over and over again. All riffs follow the same pattern, a somewhat industrial sound, mixed with an early Mayhem-type riff. Now that I think about, this seems like a blatant ripoff of ''Deathcrush'', though much less interesting, and an added nazi theme.

There are recordings of old Nazi speeches and war sound effects scattered throughout the album, so much so that it's actually a bit of an annoyance. It just sounds so damn out of place, and makes it quite hard to ignore their neo-Nazi ideas. For every track, there are at least two Nazi/war sound effects, and it gets old really quick. The drums are another thing that's quite boring. Constant blast beats, no rhythm or tempo change whatsoever. And what makes it even worse is the fact that the drums are quite predominant in the mix, so it isn't easy to ignore.

The vocals are simply atrocious, they sound like a failed attempt at imitating the vocals from ''First Spell'' by Gehenna (and for those not familiar with them, they're raspy, whispery, and lower pitched shrieks). The vocals just sound like an excessive smoker's normal voice, which makes it quite easy to make out the vocals. And I assure you that this isn't a good thing. It's just praising Hitler whilst wishing death upon Jew, Muslim, black people etc... and their glorification of Hitler and Nazism actually reaches the point where it's disturbing.

In conclusion, ''The Blood of W.A.R'' is a pathetic attempt at an album, and it highlights the aspects of black metal that I despise. I wouldn't recommend this album to anyone. What can you expect from a band that ends a song by repeatedly shouting ''white power'' anyway?