The Five Stormtroopers reviewing Sabaton – The War to End All Wars: Anton Stenlund

4/10

I wasn’t too fond of Sabatons last album The Great War (2019), and I guess I’m even less hyped to this next album being a sequal to that album. In my review of The Great War, I mourned the lack of originality and how much the band had started to repeat themselves. Unfortunally, these thoughts come back as I listen to The War to End All Wars.

The talking voice-over bugged me a lot on the last album. Here it is conviniently positioned to the opening and closing track. It still gives a pretentious touch to these two songs that just ends up being two overblown hymns between all the talking parts putting out information. It gives me a hard time taking it all serious. Fortunately, there is nothing but straight forward songs on the actual album there in between, and when it’s just about the individual songs, the album works a whole lot better. Sabaton still knows how to put together catchy refrains and strong melodies! The only problem is that when they are all stacked upon each other, you realize how they all sound the same, and before the album is through I’m just fed up with it.

Just like with The Great War, I lack that special feeling Sabaton used to give me. When I reviewed that album, I went back to listen to my old favourites, The Art of War (2008) and Carolus Rex (2012) to see if it was me or the band that had changed. But the classics still held up strong, so I guess somewhere along the line the band have just dipped the same tea bag too many times, and the taste has just gotten way too thin.

For me, I think the problem probably is that the band has locked themselves to hard to this ongoing war image. I’m not saying they need to start singing love songs or anything, I just wish that when they set out to make new music, they actually start making new music instead of just a new lyric theme. When you get a new Sabaton album the question is not how it is gonna sound, but what war they are going to sing about. When they first started out their career, the image was fresh and new, but now it feels more like a prison that holds the band back from evolving. It just ends up predictable and boring, with the whole album sounding like the most typical Sabaton song repeated eleven times.

A lot of these songs are actually quite good, most of them really. But as a whole, The War to End All Wars just becomes too close to self parody. Like when they make a christmas song, of course it is about the christmas truce 1914! That’s just too obvious.

But before I wrap this quite negative review up, I wanna bring out something really positive, and that is the guitar solos. All troughout this album, Chris Rörland and Tommy Johansson plays great guitar solos that lifts every single song up a notch! Perhaps they can build the next album less around keyboard orchestrations and football choirs, and more around guitar melodies? I’d like them to!

Artist: Sabaton
Title: The War to End All Wars
Label: Nuclear Blast
Date of release: 4/3 -22
Time: 45,21
Rating: 4/10
Standout track: Dreadnought