Review Summary: Run of the mill NSBM.
My original interest in this demo came from the fact that the man behind Donar's Krieg is also in Eljudnir, a fairly competent NSBM group from Belgium. This demo is not quite on the same level, but certainly has a lot of similar qualities. It starts with one of the most commonly used intros in the NSBM scene, namely Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries". Okay good song, but just using it as your own as an intro.... questionable as to the "artistic value" of such an action. After the intro all the material is original compositions, and much different (obviously) from Wagner. There's no real purpose to the intro.
Donar's Krieg has a typical Belgian sound to it, very crunchy and treble based guitars, with lots of distortion, and obvious home recording quality. The guitars sound alright when isolated, but paired with the drumming and vocals everything becomes a little cacophonous, even for the genre, because the drums/vocals/guitars don't really fit together. They all sound very separate, and without any truly memorable riffs or particularly insane vocal passages it's hard to distinguish this from any other raw run of the mill black metal band while the guitars are tremolo picking away with blast beats underneath.
One redeeming quality of the demo is that it uses clean guitar passages fairly often to give some variation and change of pace to the compositions. These passages are welcome, and perhaps also enhanced by how bland the sections around them are, which undoubtedly heightens the apparent quality of a clean section. Another variation (which is more irritating though) is the German third reich samples that seem mandatory for most small NSBM projects. I could personally do without a random section of German spoken samples while the double bass drum pounds away under it in the middle of a song.
The ideology doesn't come through either (aside from the samples), and while I do not regard highly or vice versa avoid NSBM there's not much here beside song titles and band member affiliations to suggest it. No martial sounds, no nationalist or traditional folk melodies, but rather more straight forward black metal.
I suggest steering clear of this release unless you have experience with bands like Eljudnir, Elfenbloed, etc. Not essential, and you're not missing out on anything here, the album really only has severe niche appeal. The clean sections are a nice change of pace and make the album listenable and not too tiresome in it's entirety, but the riffing and vocals fail to provide anything unique to the demo.
