Sabaton - The Great War

Gentlemen... welcome to Dubai

I've started and restarted this review like four times now, struggling to find the most apt comparison I can to truly illustrate why I hate Sabaton so much.  And, stupidly enough, I think the best comparison I can manage is fucking videogames, so bear with me for a detour right at the start.

Call of Duty has been a total fucking juggernaut in the videogame industry for well over a decade now, maintaining a yearly release schedule that always rakes in enough cash to fill a tugboat, and one thing I find equally fascinating and frustrating about them is the claim made by both the writers/developers and the fans is that they are allegedly completely apolitical.  The short version of my critique is that that position is laughable.  The games are loaded with uncritical worship of soldiers in bloody warfare, rife with glorification of torture and mass destruction (the newest game in the series literally takes the Highway of Death incident from the Gulf War, where American soldiers opened fire and led a miles-long path of destruction on a fleeing army and civilians and attributes it to Russia instead), disdain for rules of engagement and safety for non-combatants, and a proclivity for supremely edgy shock value like a mission that sees you gunning down hundreds of civilians in an airport or vaporizing a little girl with a car bomb.  Whether they mean to or not, they act as pure propaganda, showing how fucking cool the military is and how fun it is to destroy everything you see, because negative consequences never materialize thanks to the omnipotent writers always ensuring that every terrible thing you do results in the only deaths being the Bad Guys anyway.  Pilot that drone and rain fiery death upon the faceless white splotches on the screen, soldier!

Whether Sabaton means to or not, their similarly detached odes to warfare, regaling listeners with stories of heroes who overcame the odds and distinguished themselves in battle show how fun and super cool war is.  Even when explicitly terrible consequences are spelled out in the text, just like the car bomb turning an innocent child into pulpy mist in Modern Warfare 3, they're presented with pumping aerobics-metal anthems that sound like a god damned party.  Swedish rockstars singing Happy Metal epics with catchy choruses and bouncy synths is a totally innocent thing on its own, and hell that basically describes Battle Beast and Powerwolf if you change the country of origin, two bands that have some incredibly good albums in their discographies, but the difference is that these bands aren't writing tunes about recent conflicts that led directly to the deaths of members of their fans (and my) families.  Maybe I'm a sensitive little snowflake, but this just comes off wrong and it always has.  Is there a tasteful way to write about the Nazi occupation of France in WWII?  Sure, but it sure as hell isn't the way Sabaton did it, which was by rewriting the Scarface soundtrack to include lyrics about how badass Erwin Rommel was.

Now, in 2019, they made a move that was simultaneously ambitious, savvy, and idiotic.  Ambitious because their ninth album, The Great War, is a concept album about... well, The Great War, World War I.  This is a huge event, and one of the holy grails for nerds interested in modern warfare (or as modern as a century-old conflict can be, I suppose).  It's not nearly as covered in popular media like WWII is, so there is a lot of relatively untouched ground to cover.  They're already one of the biggest bands in the world, but this is a move that would help them stand out even more, especially since a huge chunk of their fanbase doesn't even really care about metal as a scene or culture.  Sabaton are adored by history nerds and gamers, and they can be a great gateway to educating people on subjects they know little about.  They're quite aware of this fact as well, utilizing their social media presence to give rundowns about what their songs are actually about, giving profiles of soldiers highlighted in their songs, and even releasing alternate editions of their albums (like this one) to include added narration and historical explanation.  That is partially what makes this move so savvy, the other part being that by setting their stories exclusively from 1914 to 1918, they can't accidentally write any songs where they make Nazis the good guys purely because they didn't exist yet.

The reason this idea is also idiotic is because it's Sabaton writing a bunch of songs about The Great Fuckin' War.  You could see this trainwreck coming from a mile away.  Sabaton is way too tone-deaf to cover a period as brutally miserable as this.  There is an old, now deleted, review by occasional-genius droneriot for Alestorm's first album that points out that one of the greatest flaws that band suffers, apart from their songs not being any good, is that they portray pirates in such an upbeat way.  A pirate's life fucking sucked, it was full of months on open water, dodging privateers and army vessels, fighting off starvation and scurvy purely because they had nowhere else to go or because they were lunatics who got off on the high of such a dangerous life of crime.  Drone posits that this reality contrasted with Alestorm's fluffy, happy, Disney-fied "YO HO HO" shit mixed like oil and water, and it created an insurmountable dissonance that even great music couldn't have truly overcome.  Running Wild also utilized the major key and catchy choruses, but their pirates still struggled and fought for survival, they didn't throw fucking keggers every day.  This same principle applies to Sabaton.  The Great War was terrible.  This is the war of mustard gas, trench warfare, grinding battles of attrition that saw entire villages worth of young men killed in the line of combat.  This is the exact wrong place for smiley, jaunty tunes with fun, catchy vocal lines.  This is such a toothless, inoffensive rendition of cruelty and hopelessness and it feels like the exact thing that would happen when somebody with no ties to the conflict tries to write exciting rah-rah bullshit about it.

If you actually want to know about the music, it's lame.  Most of it is more boring and forgettable than outright awful, though some tracks still can't outrun the tide of shit that is the execution here.  Sabaton's formula was predictable already, but even with the addition of ReinXeed's Tommy Johansson (a brilliant guitarist with an impeccable knack for melody), they are clearly fresh the fuck out of ideas.  "Great War" has a main synth line almost indistinguishable from the one found on "The Last Stand", nearly every track uses the same drum beat, the verses always see the guitars drop out before crashing back in the pre chorus, most songs are the same length and follow the same pop song structure, you've basically heard the whole damn album after you've heard the first track or two.  Joakim Broden still has a distinctly gruff voice that I actually love, it's great to get that mixture of rattly grit with such an immaculate command of melody.  I'd say I wish he was in a better band, but Sabaton seems to be his band more than anybody else's so I doubt it would help much.  And hell, in a vacuum, "82nd All the Way" is a great tune, with a maddeningly infectious main hook that's been stuck in my head for days, and "The End of the War to End All Wars" is actually pretty solid as well, being the first and only time they drop their overly synth-heavy approach to songwriting and employ a more orchestral approach, making it truly feel like a desperate last stand before the fighting finally ends.  But apart from those two tracks, I don't remember a damn thing about this other than how teeth-gratingly terrible "The Attack of the Dead Men" is.  The only real difference between this and the previous eight albums is that Johansson brings a few more guitar solos than usual to the table, otherwise it's a dorky mess of lameness that we've heard plenty of times before.

The black cloud of how awful of an idea it is to present one of the most devastating and bloody conflicts in recent memory as a fun collection of smiling singalongs hangs over the album from the opening seconds and never dissipates.  Conceptually, at their very core, Sabaton is a broken band.  They trudge along, squeezing out another glossy turd every few years do the rapturous adoration of the Granfalloon of Wehraboos that they've unwittingly attracted, but they've upped their grand total of good songs to a piddly four or five.  Every single track tries to spell out how awful and unfortunately cruel the war was, but they're presented as fun three minute pop songs with lyrics about how important it is that we go to battle go to battle go to battle!  I know it's probably unfair to be expecting thoughtful nuance out of Sabaton, but that just proves my overall point.  They are dreadfully ill-equipped to be tackling the subject matter they so frequently do.  Imagine that famous footage of British soldiers trudging off the battlefield, dead-eyed thousand-yard-stares adorning a majority of their faces, hands shaking, emotions deadened, friends lost in pieces behind them, futures uncertain, unwanted.  Now imagine that footage overlaid with pumping major key metal about how fucking badass warfare is.

Spec Ops: The Line, is another game from the era of Call of Duty's unquestioned industry dominance.  It's another high-octane military shooter, but the difference is that it shows how senseless and awful everything that happens is in some of the most brutally gut-punching ways possible.  It gives you a drone and tells you to rain death on the white splotches, but afterwards you walk through the rubble and realize that those white splotches were refugees fleeing the fighting you caused.  You walk slowly, horrified at the scene before you, stepping over the charred corpses of mothers holding their children, while other characters point directly at the screen and call you, yes you, the player, a monster who was so high on the bravado of utilizing high tech equipment to liquefy "the enemy" that you just murdered hundreds of innocent people.  You wanted to be a hero, but you're not.  The best possible result you can achieve by completing the game is shooting yourself in the head after dooming an entire city of innocent people to death.  The only way to truly win is to turn off your console and not play in the first place.  This is what war is.  This is the power fantasy you wanted, now face the music.  Sabaton is the uncritical "apolitical" worship of whitewashed heroics and ticker tape parades of Call of Duty.  Bands like 1914 and Black Kirin are the dirty, bloody piles of corpses unspoken behind the broken soldier as he weeps over what he's witnessed of Spec Ops: The Line.

I know those bands sound absolutely nothing like Sabaton.

But that's precisely the point.


RATING: FUCK YOU