ARCH ENEMY — War Eternal (review)

Album · 2014 · Melodic Death Metal

5/5 · 2014-06-28
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that Angela Gossow, the band's vocalist since fourth album Wages of Sin (2001), has stepped down from the band and been replaced by Alissa White-Gluz, formerly of The Agonist, apparently on Gossow's recommendation.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.