Of Battle and Ancient Warcraft

This album has long been a favourite of mine, a 1.5 man black metal project that never really got noticed, but encapsulates the gritty nihilistic side of black metal really well. If you want something freezing cold, furious, arctic, and strangely spiritually dangerous, then Of Battle and Ancient Warcraft is for you.

Every song sounds like it was created from chemical fire, and Swedish ice, there's nothing except cold and really fast, or cold and slightly slower with a bit of dissonant melody. It has the relentless tempo of Dark Funeral, but with Dissection-esque melody, and -37% production values. The late 90s were in some ways the peak of obscure, misanthropic extreme metal. It grew up but never had the random eerieness and danger that the 97-01 period oozed.

Retribution (track 2) was sort of released on magazine cover cds as the 'single' of the album, but really it's not that accessible, and while we're all used to every kind of extreme metal nowadays, at the time there was still an underground feeling to the weirder ends of black and death metal, and it certainly still sounds odd, gritty, and authentic. Angelfire and The Sword of Death show more melody and catchiness, but overall Of Battle and Ancient Warcraft veers between very fast, and moderately fast, with either some Nodtveidt melodic awareness, or just plain dissonance.

Imagine Darkthrone but with no userfriendlyness, and 3 times as fast.

Ugh, this is the one album I utterly regret buying. I've bought albums before I regret buying, but most were bought in bulk, and none were this unlistenable. This one made me not buy albums blind anymore for a long time (hey it was cheap and the cover looked interesting enough).

And when I say unlistenable, I don't mean 'White-metaller discovering Panzer Division Marduk'-unlistenable, I mean 'Blegh this kinda really sucks'-unlistenable.

For example the opening track 'Armageddon Arrives' has a simple structure, with a simple guitar-riff. Nothing wrong with it, and nothing wrong with the fact that as I listen I can predict when the riff-change will come despite not having listened to it in a long long while. But this predictability builds up a sort of tension, that needs to be released by changing the riff into something (at least equally) worthwhile, and this is a promise that's not kept. In fact this is a common phenomenon on the album: a slight tension builds up due to the predictable song structure, and then a mediocre riff kicks in avoiding tension-release, frustrating the listener.

When Battlelust isn't engaging in predictability however, it's mainly busy with producing guitar-fuzz. Any direction at such a moment is hardly discernible, and changes are seemingly purely random.

Sometimes a song, like track 5, The Sword of Death, will start promising, as if the song will actually be an epic, but then it swiftly degenerates into the band's trademarked standard episode of machinegun-drumming, wall of guitarfuzz and bland lyrics being spit out one after the other.

Chaos doesn't need to be a bad thing in black metal, in fact it sometimes seems a prerequisite, and some bands use it to their avail. This band, however, does not. Chaotic song structures (at the points they're not just predictable mind you) should at least have some point, and that shouldn't be to be filled in with bland standard riffs (can you call dull monotonous riffs standard actually?).

The only moment this album gets remotely interesting is when on one track they introduce a keyboard element into the song. Unfortunately this is just on one song. I don't recall which one, and this time I'm not going to listen long enough to tell you...I'm putting it off again, and this time for good..I'm selling this coaster. The only way this album doesn't suck is when you expect the worst of the worst possible, then this album is only mildly sucking donkey testicles.