SabatonThe War To End All Wars

Sabaton need to stop writing songs about World War One. The First World War was one of the most brutal and destructive wars in human history, when the terms “mechanised warfare” became reality and people were slaughtered on an industrial scale.

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The battle of the Somme claimed more than a million lives. It wasn’t called The War to End All Wars for nothing, although, in retrospect everyone was wrong about that.

Sabaton’s problem with focusing their songwriting on conflict isn’t the stories they tell – there should be more tales about the Harlem Hellfighters, for example, who had to overcome massive racism in their home country before being hailed as heroes by the French – it’s in the way they tell them. The band’s totally predictable, cheesy, bombastic, mid-paced march-tempo power metal with Joakim Broden’s gruff but thoroughly one-dimensional, mid-range vocals presents the horrors of war like the greatest party of the season. Rousing sing-along choruses to be shouted back at the band by beer-swilling hordes at summer metal festivals is not the kind of vibe that songs about disastrous military campaigns like Race to the Sea should inspire.

The lyrics tell some truly stirring tales, but Sabaton treats their subjects as if the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan was a Monty Python sketch.

Paschendale isn’t one of Iron Maiden’s greatest tracks but Bruce Dickinson is such an expressive singer that he injects it with the pathos it needs; on Metallica’s Disposable Heroes, James Hetfield delivers the lyrics with a seething rage at the waste of humanity. Broden sings every song the same way, as if The Valley of Death is an invitation to a horns-up boozer down the pub and not a track about a battle in the Balkans that killed ten thousand. 

Musically too, The War to End All Wars offers no surprises from the string of albums Sabaton has already released. Tommy Johansson’s neo-classical guitar work is a highlight but it adds further bombast to a multi-layered polished sheen where there’s already too much going on, and all of it is completely standard, cookie-cutter metal offering very little in the way of real inspiration or variety. Even when they sound like they’re about to go a bit thrash, like in Hellfighters, the guitar crunch lasts all of a few seconds before it’s drowned in overzealous keys and synths. The lyrics tell some truly stirring tales, but Sabaton treats their subjects as if the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan was a Monty Python sketch. This is a band with literally no self-awareness and The War to End All Wars is utterly generic nonsense.

STANDOUT TRACKS: Hellfighters, Dreadnought, Christmas Truce
STICK THIS NEXT TO: HammerFall, Gloryhammer, Power Wolf