Triumph Through Spears of Sacrilege

War metal has been a genre that has remained mostly underground, hidden and safe from the endless hordes of black metal kids who dedicate their internet lives to praise the same old fucking bands with crystal-clear productions and mindless blast beats over generic riffs while thinking they're the Devil incarnate and that they know everything there is to know about black metal. The extremely caustic and abrasive nature of most of these bands make acts such as Marduk or Dark Funeral look like children thinking they're tough.

This demo starts off with a haunting and quite effective intro, the audio comes from the beheading video of Mohammed Mutawalli, basically a crazed muslim shouting some radical islamist bullshit before they cut the guy's head off, after this short samples we can hear some highly distorted screams who don't come from the actual video but still manage to fit in very well, there's also some muslim chanting in the background. The intro really adds to the atmosphere and prepares you to a brutal audial assault which begins shortly after with "Preaching for Mass Suicide." A song which starts at full force with drums blasting and guitars shredding loudly, creating a caustic and unforgiving wall of noise coupled by unintelligible screams by Heathen, the music slows down shortly and then comes back again at full and brutalizing speed.

The guitars have a really thick and crushing feeling thanks to their low tuning and high distortion, however as usual on many war metal bands, the faster parts of the songs usually relegate the guitars into a secondary position in order to continue building the constant wall of noise; but when the song slows down their savage edge becomes apparent and hooks you instantly. The bass is almost inaudible so i'll just omit these. Vocally the performance is outstanding, Heathen spews and vomits pure raw and undiluted hatred, channeled through throat-ripping shrieks and screams; the influence of Revenge/Conqueror in Damaar's music is quite obvious both in the musicianship and the vocal style, yet this band takes it to new extremes of pure rage, there are occasional growls and grunts that are enough to keep this album from sounding boring.

The atmosphere here is amazing and is probably the best representation of what war metal is all about; this pummels you into submission and continues to destroy your eardrums without any sort of mercy. The combination of drums, guitars and vocals take you to a hellish battleground where corpses lie everywhere while the carrion birds fly above you. The music right here sounds quite honest and sincere in it's approach and very few bands actually manage to channel their rage into their music and Damaar is one of them.

All in all, Damaar's debut into the war metal genre is a brilliant one. Like I previously said, very few bands sound as honest as Damaar does, the band may bring nothing new to the realm of war metal, but they surely produced a slab of absolutely uncompromising rawness and brutality, the lack of a full-length or at least an ep is truly a tragedy, since this demo promises and delivers a lot, if you're a fan of war metal then this demo is a MUST listen.... No exceptions.