Review Summary: A mixture of World War II and Sixth Century B.C. China. Seriously, Swedes are strange when it comes to power metal.
Power metal is getting stranger and stranger by every album released within the genre. The themes are getting wackier and wackier. There are the normal dragon slaying dungeon crawling, story telling bands in Rhapsody of Fire, Dragonforce, Dream Evil, Kamelot, and Blind Guardian. When Lost Horizon released their first album Awakening the World in 2001, a new powerful emotion was released within the genre: the power of will and believing in yourself. Well, a few months ago, I came across this band called Sabaton. Looking at their lyrics and song titles, we have come to see a new sub-lyric genre of power metal. Welcome to
The Art of War.
In the past the band dealt with World War II themes. This doesn't change, but it gets stranger. The album also deals with the sixth century B.C mythical figure Sun Tzu. Yeah, it's weird. Nevertheless, despite, it's strange theme, this turns out to be a nice surprise for 2008.
Lets get the bad out of the way first. First the drums. This is going to be short; it's power metal, the drums are the rhythm section so they aren't going to be special. But when the bass can be heard louder than the bass drum as is heard in
The Price of a Mile, then you have a problem. Another problem is the guitars. They play an Emppu Vuorinen, post Wishmaster, role as they are stuck to the rhythm section. Although there are nice solos in
Cliff of Gallipoli and
Talvistola.
Thankfully the positives are really great. Vocalist Joakim Broden has a unique vocal style that I haven't heard before, kind of like a rougher version of Russell Allen. He keeps the same high emotion throughout the entire disc, especially during the choruses where his range is shown.
Panzerkampf is a perfect example. It's catchy, epic, and amazing, although the backing layered vocals give the effects its maximum. The war lyrics fit Joakim's voice percfectly, and overall he gives a very convincing performance, though at times it seems forced as in
Union {Slopes of St. Benedict).
Now we reach the best part of the album and band in keyboardist Daniel Myhr. He single handily drives the album forward in the instrumentation department. This is first obvious in the best track
Ghost Division (which is about Rommel's tank division during the invasion of France). The amazing synths steps the song to the next level both musically and vocally. As cheesy as it sounds, I could see the band in a tank playing this song as they were about attack the helpless French.
Cliffs of Gallipoli is Daniel's another standout track. Again he carries the whole band in this mid-paced affair. Even when the keys aren't at the center of the instrumentation, as seen in
40-1 and
Panzerkampf, it still seems that Daniel is still managing the direction of the songs.
The Art of War is a nice solid power metal album. A great, but sometimes overdone, vocal performance blending together with some of the genre's best use of the keys make this extremely epic. Leaving the guitars to the back burner at times is a flaw for this disc. That, plus the addition of a stupid intro/outro and instrumental that all use this annoying female voice deduct a bit off of the final score. This isn't the best power metal album, but it definitely isn't bad, especially with the addition of a song of the year contender in
Ghost Division and inclusion of other solid power metal songs in
40-1 and
Cliffs of Gillipoli.
