28 June, 1914: Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
28 July, 1914: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. A chain of alliances kicks off a multinational conflict, sparking the European powder keg of World War I.
12 September, 1914: The German offensive into France is halted at the Battle of the Marne. The Entente and the Central powers rush to outflank each other, effectively zipping a body bag across Europe that stretches from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea. Both sides dig in and fortify. The front line will barely move more than a few kilometers over the course of the next four years. Millions will die fighting over what has become hellish, unearthly terrain.
A war on the precipice of time–French cavalry get a glimpse of the future of warfare
This is the first major international conflict Europe has seen since the Napoleonic Wars–warfare tactics have not caught up to the Industrial Revolution. Death has become wholesale, mechanical. Up over the lines for a valiant charge by the cavalry don’t mean jack against barbed wire, machine guns, gas, aerial surveillance, and artillery with the capacity to wipe out entire cities. Yet both sides continued to press in a battle of attrition–the term “meat grinder” could not be more effective.
December, 1915: The Second Chantilly Conference is held between the Entente powers. France commits to the Somme Offensive, intended to be an effort by the collaborative armies to push for a swift end to the war.
21 February, 1916: Germany makes an assault on Verdun, kicking off one of the deadliest battles of the war. France allocates a portion of its forces from the planned assault at the Somme to the meat grinder of Verdun.
1 July, 1916: As the slaughter continues in Verdun, the Allies, underpowered, push ahead in the north with the planned Somme Offensive. It will not only be even deadlier than the wholesale slaughter occurring at Verdun, it will become one of the deadliest, most hellish battles in human history.
23 May 2010: Sacramento, California’s Minenwerfer took on Verdun with the B-side of their 2010, Western Front-focused debut, Volkslieder. The near 20-minute epic feels torturously reflective (think “Erblicket Die Töchter Des Firmaments” from Filosofem). The perspective here translates like a shell-shocked soldier breaking down in the trenches as the horrors he’s witnessed catch up to his psyche–it’s a chilling way to conclude another twenty minutes of otherwise vicious, thrashy black metal of war.
From the opening harrowed scream of the trench whistle, Feuerwalze leaps from the hells of the trenches and into the sonic equivalent of a first person swan dive into the horrors of no-man’s land as witnessed at The Battle Of The Somme.
A discordant outburst instantly destabilizes the triumphant charge of the opening sample–the band explodes into the soundscape. The harsh chord choices fly like chunks of dirt and debris from the exploding shells. The drums pump with adrenaline, simultaneously fueling the charge and providing its greatest obstacles. From belt-fed machine guns to drum fire mortars, the percussion is merciless in its inhuman execution. Coupled together, it makes for Minenwerfer’s most oppressive, bleakest endeavor yet. It’s instantly desensitizing, cold yet violent. The leads light up like flares over the smog of battle, exploding like brief, blinding flashes of light above the waves of grinding violence–”Cemetery Fields” matches the stark grey tones of the album’s setting, cover, and production.
Killing Technology, 1916 edition
The harrowing whistle screams again at the start of the title track, this time delivered in the heat of battle by a wailing pinch harmonic dive–awesome touch! Not a moment is spared, however. The rush through the hellish ruins of a few kilometers of French countryside soldiers onward. The somewhat Voivodian “Piggy” chords take a more prominent note at the opening, particularly the concluding riff at the 0:55 mark. It’s as though a crude, primitive Killing Technology emerges in the fog of black metal war in the way tanks made their first crude, yet effective, appearance at The Somme. Imagine the psychological effect of seeing an armoured war machine for the first time, even in its most primitive form it must have seemed like something out of a sci-fi comic come to life. There are accounts of German troops surrendering in terror at first sight of these otherwise clunky, unreliable machines! Minenwerfer’s tech clears the trenches however–the band’s skill has become more and more ironclad across their body of work.
One track bleeds into the next, fall behind or get too far ahead and you’re victim to friendly artillery fire as much as that of the opposition. Feuerwalze begins to take on an entirely different meaning–it truly is a dance with fire, panicked survivalism sandwiched between walls of exploding earth and clouds of chemical weapons. The forceful gales of Pure Holocaust take on an entirely different meaning in the summer of the Somme, as the wind shifts down the battlefield with “Eternal Attrition,” carrying with it a deadly wall of chlorine gas. In stark contrast to aforementioned “The Battle Of Verdun,” the vocals are near-indecipherable, driving home the panicked in-the-moment feeling of trying to pull the gas mask out of it’s tube and onto the face amongst the ongoing carnage. This feels more like what I’d imagine the inner screamings of a soldier experiencing this in real time sound like than any sort of conscious lingual thought or moment of reflection.
Star shells illuminating the battlefield. Night and day no longer have meaning on the front.
The atmosphere is rife with the stench of diesel and artillery smoke and engineered, mechanical death. In a strange harmonious contrast, and, as always with Minenwerfer, there are these little moments of heroism and humanity in the form of solos. While such moments have been present since the onset of the band, the lead work has grown simultaneously more skilled and expressive in recent works: the naive romanticism of the charge of the cavalry in the face of death on the split with Flak, the drive to survive the biting cold and hold the line on Alpenpässe, the daredevil aerial feats of Der Rote Kampfflieger (complete with Yngwie cover to drive home the palette they’re painting with). The solos that emerge from the haze of Feuerwalze, in comparison to their highlight roles on the aforementioned works, feel like they’ve less room to breathe and maneuver–by design. Perhaps this is the most realistic portrayal of naive (or romantic?) heroism on a battlefield as vicious as The Somme. Every breath counts, so even a few seconds taken to pull a comrade up from the drowning muck of mud and blood in the pits of a hollowed crater becomes an act of brazen selflessness in the face of realized nihilistic terror. Despite the fluid technical execution on Feuerwalze, the solos as a metaphor for heroism take on an even bleaker meaning as they become swallowed by the oppressive cloud of sound. From the hammer-ons that flurry across the dense fog like white-hot machine gun rounds at the conclusion of “Cemetery Fields,” or the valiant leap from the muddy cover into the maw of death on “Feuerwalze,” or the delirium-laded solo on “Nachtschrek,” the leads burst like illuminating star shells in the fog of war–eventually fading as they’re consumed by the sound. In the confusion it is difficult to determine if they are pillars of hope or flames for the moths, but such was the reality of the hailstorm of the feuerwalze.
There is something in the sudden end to the concluding track of “Labyrinth Trench Sectors” that continues to haunt me. The way the music builds like it’s taking a final charge to the chaos and drastically cuts. The only sounds that remain are muffled explosions, the distant cry of mortars, the occasional filtered breath of a gas mask or the clopping of hooves that speak to the line the Western Front represents–not only as a a battle line across a continent, but a line between two eras of humanity. The line is drawn between hearing a statistic of a million casualties and facing the reality that every one of those lives were cut short in the mindless mechanical slaughter that Minenwerfer are portraying with Feuerwalze. It’s a line that draws its darkest ink in the scarred earth of The Somme.
Feuerwalze is available to preorder on LP/CD/cassette through the Osmose Productions website and digitally through the Osmose Productions Bandcamp. North American copies will be available to order through the Minenwerfer website upon arrival.
