MINENWERFER - Feuerwalze
Osmose Productions
Over the past bunch of years MINENWERFER have become my favorite US black metal band. Oddly enough this is the first time I've ever written about em because I had gotten their releases always a year or more after they came out. The band, who are a two piece act hailing from California (yeah I know go figure?) started out in 2007. I first learned about em in 2015 when I bought a six song EP by em, Kriegserklarung, which came out the year before. Since then I've been a huge fan for many reasons.
MINENWERFER (which means mortar) is a black metal act whose music is dedicated / inspired by the horrors of World War One. Now look you can be a kvlt type who screams Satan, be anti religious and swear by the Nordic battles of the north lands which you've never been to. But I'm a military veteran and I'll just say that the inhumanity towards your fellow human beings in a combat situation is far worse than listening to a BM album.
Be that as it may, long before I was into black metal I was reading books about World War One and it wasn't a great war. The reading material I was checking out were more first person accounts which makes MINENWERFER's music, on here or past releases, come across as a soundtrack to a human death sentence.
As the whistle blows on the opening track "Cemetery Fields" you know men climbed out of trenches and charged into which was pretty much a fire-ring squad. Add to that if they found cover it was in an artillery shell crater filled with muddy water and maybe the rotted body of a fallen friend. Harsh vocals provided with the horrific bombastic beats by this band is probably nothing compared to the real shrieks of horror given forth by grown men back then.
As I listen to this album I cannot think of anything other than artillery bombardments, machine gun fire and death. That's a pure homage to the riffs, blastbeats and guitar soloing. I always thought one of my favorite death metal bands, GOD DETHROWNED did a great job with their trilogy of WW1 as far as war metal goes years ago. But that was death metal.
On this album you can actually envision the rats feasting on the dead body of a fallen comrade. MINENWERFER push the at-tee' with realization on "Eternal Attrition". Harsh reality with pure blackened sadness, you're gonna die and nothing is going to stop it. I thought 2019's Alpenpasse was an amazing piece of work. This new one has be in a shock and awe state. The vocals are not just screams of war but also like the angel of death conveying it's love over the battlefield. While the guitars, bass and drum work push the savagery of war without regards. This album is a brilliant piece of black metal work.
https://www.osmoseproductions.com/
LISTEN HERE:
https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/feuerwalze
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