Necrotica I've long considered Arch Enemy one of metal's great guilty pleasures; while they never achieved the overall level of quality many of their contemporaries reached in their heydays (Dark Tranquillity, Children of Bodom, etc.), they've been known to have a really fun anthemic quality to their music nonetheless. And that's what it really comes down to... I don't think many people take the band's music very seriously, but judging by how flat-out entertaining songs like "Nemesis" and "Silent Wars" are, this point can be pretty convincing. Unfortunately, it doesn't always mask the sad truth that much of Arch Enemy's output is hopelessly generic, particularly when it comes to both guitar leads and the primary riffs that serve as the basis for each song. Aaaaaand unfortunately, that's a serious problem when it comes to a genre like melodic death metal, with which both of those factors prove to be two of the most important elements of a band's sound. Both the leads and riffs are the primers that hold the songs together, and lead guitarist/primary songwriter Michael Amott has proven his penchant for creating bland motifs and solos for the last 10 years or so. However, there was one glimmer of hope on the horizon when looking at War Eternal: the fact that Angela Gossow would be replaced by The Agonist frontwoman Alissa White-Gluz. While Gossow was a great death metal singer, some fresh blood in the band would at least hopefully prompt some change in the band's dynamic and style. Well, that's wishful thinking, isn't it?

War Eternal proves that getting too comfortable with one specific style over time can prove fatal to a band's work, the entire record being littered with bland composition after bland composition. While there are some interesting moments here and there, such as the soft clean guitar-driven intro of "You Will Know My Name" or the electronic experimentation of the bonus Mike Oldfield cover "Shadow on the Wall," they aren't frequent enough to distract from the overall mediocrity at work here. First of all, the production is about as lifeless and synthetic as things can get, completely draining the impact of the more inspired and heavy riffs on the record; the whole album suffers from the same overproduction as many of the mainstream deathcore records from bands like Suicide Silence and Emmure. Compare this to records like Children of Bodom's Halo of Blood or Carcass' Surgical Steel, which have a clean sound to them but just enough rough edges to make them sound menacing. However, of course, the music itself doesn't help the band's case at all.

After listening to this album many times, I can safely say that I remember almost none of it; the riffs and melodies are so uninspired that it's simply remarkable that nobody from Century Media told them to alter their work before packaging it for record stores. Along with the production adding to the mediocrity, there almost seems to be a general lack of interest from the musicians as well. The title track, for instance, utilizes a grand total of one note (C) for most of its main riff, before devolving into a boring mid/fast-tempo set of melodies that sound recycled right out of a Carcass record. Songs like "Stolen Life" and "As the Pages Burn" go more for the "fast and brutal" approach, only to feature even blander riffs that end up muddled under White-Gluz's overdone vocal performances anyway. Speaking of which, Alissa's vocals aren't all that remarkable here; while it's nice to hear someone other than Gossow in this band for a change, Alissa certainly doesn't sound as inspired here as she did in The Agonist. However, I'll admit that the clean vocals she occasionally employs are a nice change in pace from the typical growls and screams... one just wishes they were perhaps used a bit more, honestly. When you get down to it, though, the compositions are what absolutely kill this record. Even a song like potential highlight "Avalanche," with its interesting keyboard arrangements and neoclassical vibe, instantly kills its own inspired intro with an extremely weak verse; once the keyboards come back in, the experience just feels inconsistent and underwhelming.

As if I haven't hammered the point into your heads enough, the entire album is just so damn uninspired and bland. It goes beyond that, though... it may sound tough for a metal album to put somebody to sleep, but this could easily do the trick. Every good moment on this record, such as the occasional usage of a dark atmosphere or some of the vocal highlights, is completely raped and pillaged by every boring riff and the choruses that define the phrase "going through the motions." The entire package feels synthetic, unappealing, unimaginative, sloppily written, sloppily paced, and just awful from almost every conceivable angle. Even with a new singer, War Eternal is just a depressingly lifeless mess of a record. Look on the bright side, though: at least it makes for a good coaster for your beverage, as well as a good substitute for reading bedtime stories to your kid(s) at night!

(Originally published on Sputnikmusic)

666sharon666 I have a funny relationship with Arch Enemy. Being the completionist that I am, I own their entire back catalogue and didn't hesitate to also pick up their tenth offering War Eternal either. The change in vocalist from Angela Gossow to Alissa White-Gluz didn't affect that decision in the least, but here's the thing, I can't honestly say I'd rank Arch Enemy among my favourite bands. I'd always rated them relatively consistently at the 4 stars range, with a couple of ups and downs along the way but, I've never ever considered them to be an act capable of producing something really top tier.

At first War Eternal didn't change my mind on that score at all. Another 4 star, more of the same album. So maybe they threw some symphonic elements in on a few songs and they changed vocalist (and one guitarist) but seem really minor things when listening to the end result: The album otherwise sounds exactly as expected. I expected to listen to it a few times and then shelve it for a while and maybe I'd think in a few months time 'okay I'll listen to that again now', which is what I've done with every new Arch Enemy album since discovering them. Only that didn't happen. I kept wanting to listen to it. Eventually I conceded that it was a grower and began to think of it as a 4.5 star album, putting on par with Rise of the Tyrant, which is the album I'd have called their best up until this point. A few other albums may have distracted me along the way to reaching the point where I wanted to write this review, but unlike many others that I've heard and shelved I still kept going back to War Eternal even now, over two months since the album was released. That's not something that Rise of the Tyrant can lay claim to.

That's what really what made me write this review (which I hope reads coherently come its conclusion and not a bunch of my ramblings). It wasn't an album I thought I'd bother about much after a few listens but here I am still enjoying it as much as I did upon release (more, actually) and I guess I have approaching twenty full listens to it already, if I haven't surpassed it. That's probably almost as many as all nine previous albums put together. I'm not exactly sure what it is about War Eternal that makes it so addictive; certainly Arch Enemy didn't do an awful lot different compared to just about everything else they've ever done, but despite how many listens it may have taken I am confident in saying that this is the best thing the Swedish melodeath act have ever done. I'm not sure there's a moral to this little story-review but I guess the bottom line is that War Eternal isn't an album that deserves to be written off after just a listen or two. It is without a doubt the most surprising release I've heard this year so far. I just can't figure out how the fuck it happened, not after all this time.

Attribution: http://metaltube.freeforums.org/arch-enemy-war-eternal-t3708.html

Kev Rowland 19 years on from when Michael Amott formed Arch Enemy, the band are showing no sign at all of slowing down, and in fact sound revitalized on this album which to my ears is probably their best to date. With guitarist Nick Cordle (ex-Arsis) and vocalist Alissa White-Gluz replacing Amott’s younger brother Christopher and long-time frontwoman Angela Gossow in 2012 and 2014 respectively, one could have been forgiven for thinking that this album would play fairly safe, but actually they have added additional elements of commerciality and melody that previously just weren’t there previously and have taken a step forward. Cordle’s first appearance in Arch Enemy was on the “Under Black Flags We March” video (from 2011’s ‘Khaos Legions’) but this is his first full-length release while White-Glutz (ex-The Agnoist) only joined the band earlier this year. There is no doubt that when Angela Gossow was brought in to front the band for the ‘Wages of Sin’ she not only made a huge difference to the band, but also changed the view of women in extreme metal. Now, given that Alissa has only just joined the band it would be interesting to understand just what impact she has had on the album in terms of the musicality (vocally she is very similar in the most part to Angela), so it is possible that Nick Cordle has had the greater effect on Michael, as the guitars are truly linked as one yet this is now way so much more than a death metal band with symphonic and melodic influences.

What we have now is a band that is truly combining the best of melodic and death, using symphonic when it makes sense, and using blistering guitar runs, duets and solos that mean that Daniel and Sharlee have to be at their very best to enable the rhythm section to stay in touch with what is going on at the sharp end. Produced by the band and mixed and mastered by Jens Bogren (Opeth, Paradise Lost) at Fascination Street Studio, the Swedes’ 10th full-length is unrelentingly brutal yet remarkably polished. If ever a band was going to bring death metal truly into the mainstream then this is probably the act to do it, and this could well be the album. Stunning from start to finish, with incredible note density and ferocity combined with melody and harmonies, this is one hell of an album.

Arch Enemy are re-energised and on the very top of their game – I can’t wait to catch these guys on tour. 5*’s all the way..

adg211288 War Eternal (2014) is the tenth full-length studio album Swedish melodic death metal act Arch Enemy. It is their first album in three years, following on from Khaos Legions (2011) and it brings with it a couple of significant line-up changes to the group. The one everyone is talking about is of course that Angela Gossow, the band's vocalist since fourth album Wages of Sin (2001), has stepped down from the band and been replaced by Alissa White-Gluz, formerly of The Agonist, apparently on Gossow's recommendation. But in my mind the more major change is that War Eternal is the first Arch Enemy album to not feature both of the Amott brothers, Michael and Christopher due to the latter's departure in 2012. Christopher Amott actually left the band once before but returned before the band recorded new material. He is replaced here by Nick Cordle, who was previously with Arsis.

Even with the line-up changes and both new members sharing song-writing duties with Michael Amott the music on War Eternal is by and large what you should expect from an Arch Enemy release if you've heard even one of them before. The new line-up has certainly seemed to revitalise the band though; except for the addition of some symphonic elements on the songs You Will Know My Name, Time is Black, and Avalanche (an element they used in a much smaller amount on Cruelty Without Beauty from Khaos Legions) the music is Arch Enemy by numbers but done with a much higher level of consistency than I've ever heard from them. This is some really furious and epic sounding melodic death metal here, a real step up from Khaos Legions which I found disappointing. That album just sounds positively tame by comparison. Aside from the typical Arch Enemy intro/interlude/outro type tracks the band just deliver melodic death anthem after melodic death anthem. Tracks like On and One and Down to Nothing took a little longer to click than the well chosen promo tracks of War Eternal, No More Regrets and You Will Know My Name but the album has reached a point for me that it's just kept on giving in such a way that I can't honestly say any song here is particularly lesser or better than another. The symphonic elements are definitely a nice touch too, adding another dimension to the Arch Enemy sound. They're definitely seasoning rather than the flavour of the dish here so those who haven't been overly enthralled by the current wave of symphonic death metal acts don't need worry too much, though I personally would like to hear Arch Enemy explore this territory even further.

Alissa White-Gluz proves a more than worthy replacement for Angela Gossow, though there is an undeniable interchangeability factor between vocalists when the music is entirely growled (although that's not quite fully the case here as there is a tiny use of Alissa's clean singing during Avalanche). It's quite hard to say which vocalist I prefer (original vocalist Johan Liiva doesn't really get a look in for me) but with Alissa the band do have the option to further expand their sound with more clean vocals should they ever wish to, as she's also a really good clean singer, as is made evident with her work with The Agonist. I'm not necessarily saying that adding clean singing would be the right thing for Arch Enemy to do to follow War Eternal up, but I've always found the band's discography to be quite patchy, so it's actually comforting to know that they have options to follow-up what has to be the first Arch Enemy album that's shown true growth as a band.

War Eternal is a rare thing for me; a melodic death metal record hasn't hooked me in this much in seven years, the last time was in fact Arch Enemy's own Rise of the Tyrant (2007), which was the Arch Enemy album I would have dubbed their best (while admitting to having not heard either Black Earth (1996) or Burning Bridges (1999)) up until this point. The band's albums in my experience tend to have a lot of initial wow factor, only to find that my opinion of them declines as I become more familiar with them. That was certainly the case with the albums I actually discovered the group through, Anthems of Rebellion (2003) and Doomsday Machine (2005). It hasn't been the same story with War Eternal at all, quite the opposite in fact. What first appeared to be one of the more solid Arch Enemy releases worked its way up to second favourite regard, and then proceeded to even surpass Rise of the Tyrant due to it's frankly addictive qualities. It's only been out a couple of weeks at the time of writing, and I think I already must have spun this one more in that time than I have any of their other albums. For the time since I started listening to them I feel inclined to hand out a 5 star rating. A very unexpected 5 Star rating at that.