Sabaton: big fans of cybergoth dance videos
TIM TRONCKOE/PRESS
IF YOU’RE ACCUSING Sabaton of writing the same album 10 times, you can get fu— alright, fair enough. This record is literally based on the same thing as the last one. The Swedish power metallers have carved a lucrative, ludicrous niche penning odes to military conflict, soldiers and historic events across nine full-lengths; their 10th succeeds 2019’s The Great War, recounting more valour and grief from World War I.
This won’t change your mind if you think Sabaton are daft or a bit tone-deaf. It is overblown. Melodramatic. But that doesn’t mean it’s one-note – Joakim Brodén’s metal crüe have always had a knack for conveying emotion. If you view the orchestral swells and thighslapping key changes through the lens of, say, an opera, Hollywood movie, or Iron Maiden doing Paschendale, it makes much more sense.
Take Christmas Truce: it’s a piano ballad that quickly escalates into a full scale, Yuletide knees-up, aping the stuff soldiers would have rowdily sung during the 1914 ceasefires on the Eastern Front. In the chorus alone, there’s enough pathos – real understanding of that bittersweet, morbid camaraderie – to make an impact: ‘And today we’re all brothers / Tonight we’re all friends /A moment of peace in a war that never ends’.