Torchbearer – Warnaments (2006)
Year: 2006
Label: Regain Records
Track Listing:
- Dark Cloud Gathering
- Last Line Of Defence
- Burial Waters, Deepsome Graves
- Swift Turns Of War
- The Stale Drownings
- Battlespawn
- Where Night Is Total
- Sealer Of Fates
- The Blunted Weapon
Subculture Media ‘Warnaments’ – Torchbearer Review:
What’s this? An album with early 20th century war ships on the cover? Not a completely uncharted theme in the wonderful wide world of metal, but a relatively rare one. My curiosity was peaked. The album bore the band name Torchbearer, I’d never heard of them. I then saw the title of the album, Warnaments, and couldn’t help but smile at the apparent pun.
A familiar name suddenly sprang forth, Christian Alvestam, of Scar Symmetry fame. His presence quickly lead me to one conclusion; Swedish death metal. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, the Gothenburg sound is my prefered poison, but the album was marked 2006 and the band still hadn’t caught much attention 5 years later.
Worried that I might just have stumbled into another one of the genre’s endless, half-hearted me-toos, I made the purchase. What greeted me at the initial push of the play button was silence… And then the slow but steady pinging sound of sonar started to sneak in. “Great. Another cheesey, overly dramatic intro that’s going to take ages just to build into the same old dreary, slowpaced-“, That’s all my brain managed to process before being assaulted with a defiant wall of blast beats, an epic soaring power-metalesque lead melody and a savage string of death gutturals that would make a grizzly bear forget to use the woods.
The next 34 minutes and 31 seconds taught me to never judge a book by it’s cover again. This album kicks ass on every level. Torchbearer play a thrashy, unrelenting variant of their genre. They have an uncanny yet subtle Slaughter of the Soul tinge, enough to pay homage without crossing the clone-line (check out the riff at 1:10 on the opening track). There isn’t an element to this album that doesn’t deliver. The production is tight as all hell. The guitar and bass work are precise and innovative without giving into overly technical wankery. Par Johansson’s vocals are caustic and primal, yet intelligible with well thought-out content.
As good as the rest is however, the centerpiece of this album is the drumming; Henrik Schonstrom is a freak of nature. He goes from virtually treating his kit as a lead instrument, mirroring the guitar work with complex patterns, to unleashing frenetic maelstroms of blastbeats in the blink of an eye. There is more to this album than just pure asskickery however, it actually gets quite intellectual, so feel free to stroke your goatee knowingly while listening to it. The lyrics tell the story of a lesser known ocean battle in World War 1 from the perspective of a soldier (sailor?), they’re quite insightful and it’s well worth pulling up a written copy. Moreover, the composition actually seems to attempt to emulate the sounds and atmosphere of a war zone, the best example of this is the track “Swift Turns of War”. Crank your speakers up and you can almost feel the shells exploding around you. The only complaint I have about this album is that I wanted more than 34 minutes of it. This under-appreciated gem is a must-have for extreme metal fans of any genre.
Review by Matthew Ward