Sabaton
The Art Of War

Let's be honest: what a bore!

The brave Swedish warriors Sabaton, reaching their fourth album with this "The Art Of War," deliver yet another album of knightly blows, war, epicness, and so much love for Manowar, Grave Digger era "Excalibur" and the early warmongering Blind Guardian.

Musically speaking, we're faced with a product in full eighties new wave style, where you hear the usual epic choruses, the usual epic galloping, the usual epic riffs, and the usual things that can't help but make fans of the most epic and Manowar-esque heavy metal rejoice and jump out of their seats.

The album, however, isn't bad, and that's what annoys me the most. To be fair, a band that can offer something dynamic, fun, beautiful, rightly pissed off, melodic, and..... so very heavy, why does it have to get lost in the gaudy and the obvious, with the usual rocky riffs and usual lightning-fast solos, fast enough, melodic, and always sharp. It shouldn't! And, always strictly, without breaking the mold.

And if in "Firestorm" we hear ".... DIe, Die..!!!" we shouldn't be so surprised because it will be the most natural thing in the world.

Songs like the opener truly deserve all the gold in the world, as do the immense doses of epicness in "Ghost Division" and "Unbreakable," which prove to be truly winning songs with the right ingredients precisely dosed.

But the question is: where's the guts? Why do we have to endure in 2008 yet another group, technically skilled, very good (and that's undisputed) providing a musical offering that's been repeated by countless other musical groups without even a shred of novelty? Even if they venture into "Cliffs of Gallipoli" with His Majesty John Oliva and his Savatage with a refrain that's practically a copy-and-paste of "Edge Of Thorns," this album just doesn't do it for me.

Returning to the beginning: what a bore!

Sabaton are good, they've surely matured (four albums in, it's only right) but they seem like Manowar, and together with the other aforementioned bands, poor fellows who will involve all lovers of power metal and heavy in general but who won't say a damn pinned cap to anyone who seeks a shred of novelty within metal and music in general.

An album to listen to but to be locked away in the drawer after the first couple of listens. A real shame.