Review of Battalion - Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War

There was a time when Belgium’s Shiver Records/The LSP Company were prolific as heck churning out record after record of home grown talent, unusually favoring the chunky, recognizable Belgian sound such as Battalion, Insanity Reigns Supreme, Warbeast Remains, Welkin, Moker, Ordeal, The Seventh and even the odd classic release such as Axamenta’s Ever-Arch-I Tech-Ture. But I had not got anything from the label in a few years, until the third album from the aforementioned Battalion showed up in my mailbox out of the blue.

And while not a game changer, this band and album, as with 2005s Winter Campaign ( which I recall reviewing for digitalmetal.com) and 2008s Welcome to the Warzone deliver what you would expect from Belgian death metal and Shiver Records; big burly, chunky death metal. And the band’s simple home grown hues along  the war mongering themes will please fans of Bolt Thrower, Jungle Rot and Humiliation, as the band deliver simple salvos of  chug-tastic death metal, thought a few surprises pop up there and there.

One such surprise starts the album with “Revelation VI:VIII” a somber  acoustic intro, but its short lived as Ruben Luts growls ‘c’mooooooooooon!” to start “Sacrifice to the Nuclear Cross” and get things going for real, bit also has its own little acoustic melody lurking underneath the blasting or mid paced, chunky death metal.  And a few other such injection litter the otherwise predictable, effective barrages of “Hellcommader Reign”, “The Cancerous Riot” or slow churn of “Volcanic Death”.

There’s the cool old timey propaganda sample to start “Old, Cold Rivalries”, there’s monkish male choirs in  the riotous “Orb of Alteration” and a cool melodic solo and  little off kilter stutter and stagger in “Another Taste of Carrion”. Then “The Final Congregation” ends the album as it started – with some more acoustics to complement the song’s more somber mood. And these little, slightly different parts keep the otherwise standard death metal a little more interesting, if still in the realms of simple and sturdy, much like Belgium’s death metal scene as a whole.