Leading the charge on the more rock side of country is Whiskey Myers. From traditional country, to bluegrass, to Southern rock, from the land, sea and air, fiercely independent artists unwilling to compromise are challenging the status quo. It’s broad-based, multi-pronged, encroaching on the boundaries of Music Row from all flanks. Unfortunately, though, events have overtaken Sabaton as they have so many others, and The War to End All Wars is best put on the back shelf until better times blow in.The country music revolution isn’t being pushed forward by just a few high profile dudes like Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, and Cody Jinks. These would usually be amusing to throw beer about to at Download Festival.

Or what of “Christmas Truce”, which sounds like a musical showtune on Rammstein steroids. It sounds ultra-macho to the point of comedy.Ĭertainly, when I first heard it a few weeks back I recall finding the preposterousness of “The Unkillable Soldier” entertaining a cod-Wagnerian chorale about the long and storied career of Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton De Wiart, a man wounded more times than seems possible, throughout almost every conflict of the first half of the 20 th Century.

Under normal circumstances, in our meta-aware world of Call of Duty and films such as Inglorious Basterds, you’d have to be cantankerously po-faced to take its fist-pumping pantomime metal bombast very seriously. It is, after all, essentially a series of songs they couldn’t fit on their 2019 album The Great War, a companion piece with more numbers about World War I. When they planned and played this album, it must have seemed simply another in Sabaton’s long line of similar collections of fist-pumping tales of bygone conflicts. But when military history is actually happening in Europe in all its bloody grotesquery, The War to End All Wars doesn’t seem so appetizing. They’re Amon Amarth for military history geeks. The band have made a career of absurdly OTT story-telling songs of real world battles and those who fought them.

New sabaton album 2022