Since the last few articles on this site have mostly surrounded the quite obscure and, some may even say "niche", genre known as war metal (also called "bestial black metal" for some reason), I thought it was fitting that we should conclude this epic saga with a review of the no less epic book "War Metal Beast: The Brutal Chronicles of Bestial Black Metal".
This wouldn't be the first time we have done a book review here on Voice Metal. Far from it, in fact. Looking back at the past two years alone, we have already reviewed "Slaves to the Grind" and the "Heavy Metal Master Class", both of which have an excellent reputation in underground extreme metal circles. And to be completely transparent, we also reviewed "Racist Metal: Exposing the Racism and Xenophobia in Heavy Metal Music" by the French heavy metal expert and controversial author Antoine Grand, a book that was much less well received if you will. But most of the works reviewed here have all been extremely popular within the heavy metal underground and beyond.
So what about the current big "hit" of the year, the famous "War Metal Beast: The Brutal Chronicles of Bestial Black Metal"? Let's find out if it lives up to its stellar reputation.
By the way, you can buy the War Metal Beast book here: https://www.amazon.com/War-Metal-Beast-Chronicles-Bestial/dp/B0G14VLKC9 (clean link, no affiliate bulls**t)
The Review of "War Metal Beast: The Brutal Chronicles of Bestial Black Metal"
The first thing you notice when reading War Metal Beast (this is how I'm going to refer to it from hereon), is that it's freaking massive. It's huge. There are something like 73 chapters or something. On war metal... who would of thought that such a "micro-niche" genre, comparable in size and scope to something like extreme goregrind or blackened noise metal, could generate so much writing? So much hype? So much drama?
Well, the very first point the authors try to get across, is that war metal is far from a "micro-genre" or whatever. Much to the contrary, many of black metal and death metal's most notorious bands - be it Incantation, Warkvlt, Phantom, Marduk, Von, Peste Noire, Absurd, Darkthrone, and even more modern stuff like Taake and 1349 - have at some point or another been referred to as "war metal" (or bestial black/death, in the case of Incantation notably).
So a "niche genre"? War metal? Not quite. On the contrary, it's a genre rapidly growing in strength and popularity... some say it's even bigger than grindcore in the current year.
The problem, as you will see if you read the book, is that it's very hard to define "what war metal really is" on a more foundational level than the abstract and superficial aesthetics of corpse paint, monochrome album covers, intentional minimalism, chromatic riffs, blast beats, short songs and heavy distortion.
Many see war metal as a rebellion against the overtly commercial and poserish "symphonic" black "metal" of modern mallcore bands like Dimmu Borgir, Carpathian Forest, Old Man's Child, Satyricon, Emperor, Demonecromancy, Ulver, Borknagar, Antekhrist, Nargaroth and the rest of the "radio rock in corpsepaint" troupe of clowns.
But bestial black metal, in its quest for extremism at all costs, also brought in some excesses as well. In their own way. Many bands - we will not throw out "names" as a "diss", but if you read the book you'll know - are pretty much indistinguishable from the late "three note" punk bands that populated, and polluted, the later stage hardcore scene, and led to its eventual demise (and the rise of speed/thrash metal, but that's another story altogether).
So would I recommend this book? If you want to know more about war metal, hell yeah. There are very few resources out there better than "War Metal Beast: The Brutal Chronicles of Bestial Black Metal", and none as comprehensive. Just beware: it's not a metal book you can finish reading in just one afternoon. It's really, really dense. In a good way.
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