The War to End All Wars

The world can be a very grim place, and it's shown in its history and its present; people are born, they grow up, and due to the delusion of power from some tyrannical leader they go die in a war, attacking foreign nations or defending their own fatherland, or an ideology they may not even believe in, and then we have Sabaton making goofy songs about it!

Sabaton were the band that introduced me into metal that one fateful day in which someone shared their 2010 song "White Death" on an online forum, and I decided to listen to it, which was something I rarely did. Ever since that one click, I became a music maniac, and Sabaton were until fairly recent one of my favorite bands; now they're a stain left on my last.fm top 5 that will take years to erase. While Sabaton's old songs are still good, the fact that they haven't changed a single bit and only worsened with time makes their older stuff retroactively bad to my ears.

The swedes offered us a decent-enough effort in 2019, "The Great War", which was cliché and boring at times, but catchy and enjoyable to listen to while doing something tedious. Sadly, after that album pretty much every single thing they've put out has been mediocre at best. "The War to End All Wars" has decided to pretty much continue this streak of creative stagnation, which is certainly surprising coming from the seasoned and skilled musicians that form this band. All I've been able to find in this release has been disappointment and boredom; I've come to artistically despise whom once were my favorite band.

What Sabaton's 10th studio full-length has to offer is a series of lame riffs, repetitive chord progressions, uninspired and copious lyrics, and very formulaic song structures with very few twists or interesting moments worth noting. I can hear the entirety of the band's discography in each of these tracks, all of these songs could very easily be in any of their previous albums, and if I had to listen to bits of each track, I'd probably not be able to tell what album they belong to. It's the exact same type of rhythmic riffing, with anthem-like choruses, Broden's almost obnoxious raspy voice, and the occasional shreddy leads that are more flexing guitar skills than actually providing much to music; basically the equivalent of anime fan service for power metal enthusiasts.

Now, to be fair, there's a decent variety to the compositions we can find here, be it good or bad. We got the very formulaic power metal songs such as the opener "Stormtroopers"¹, the heavier mid-tempo tracks with choirs and power-chord-chugging-based riffing such as "Lady of the Dark", and the fast berserker tracks such as "Hellfighters"... And we also have "Soldier of Heaven" which sounds like a typical '80s hard rock song, complete with a heavily reverbed drum intro with toms that's for some reason reminiscent of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", synths, and a quiet verse with a bass playing in the background. At least the album isn't just one monotonous pile of computer-generated music, but to be honest, I can't be totally sure that a computer isn't writing Sabaton's songs at this point; perhaps Nuclear Blast found the key to infinite mainstream metal music already in an AI they themselves programmed.

Although already a giveaway from the album's title, the lyrics focus, once again, on the Great War. Although the lyrics themselves are okay-ish, they're basically Frankensteins of all of Sabaton's previous lyrics. I imagine that the lyric-writting process of the band goes like "Find a battle or event, and grab words from a pool, and make it all sound flashy"; 'fray', 'son of [countries]', 'trenches', 'foes', 'rages on', and other words and sentences are repeated throughout not only this album, but the entirety of the swede's discography; at this point it sounds like a parody. The Great War occurred over a hundred years ago, so it can be really hard to grasp the sheer magnitude of this event when maybe two or three people who lived through it remain among the living, being well over a hundred years old, and when the last veteran died a while ago now. The horror of the Great War is still hard to compare: muddy trenches filled with corpses and putrid odors, gas attacks, thousands of soldiers as young as 15 rushing towards a curtain of fire coming from the enemy trench... Sabaton fails at making any of these events justice, or to even try to portray them as the horrors they were, no, instead they sing Disneyfied tales that appeal to the casual listener. While they may be small history lessons, they're really just lame and almost insulting to the memories of those millions of lives lost to the war.

"The War to End All Wars" falls short of any appeal to someone who might be looking for an interesting musical effort, and it is instead an album clearly aimed at the mainstream metal listener who isn't looking for the intricacies in the music, or who probably hasn't developed an extensive taste in music as to compare Sabaton to other lesser-known bands that might even share a similar lyrical topic or aesthetic and deliver way better music, at least in my opinion (looking at you, Civil War and 1914). Unlike them, all I hear here are heavily recycled pompous metal songs that are as predictable as they can be, just a drowning man struggling to swim back to the surface, the remnants of Sabaton's credibility and seriousness rotting away at the peak of their fame. This here album might be catchy at times, flawlessly produced, heavily marketed, and very flashy, but it feels empty, uninspired and boring.

Here is where I lay to rest all the hopes I had of this band bouncing back and finally writing good music again. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

¹The Spotify release skips Sarajevo and begins with this track, at least as of the time of writing this review.