Ross Bay Cemetery at Victoria, British Columbia, opened in 1872 and holding twenty seven thousand graves, a cold evening, and a young musician crossing the threshold with a demo tape in his coat. Ryan Forster told Bardo Methodology in January 2017 that he had walked onto the grounds at Ross Bay and felt warm winds coming the other way, and that when he handed the tape to the band he had come to find they looked entirely uninterested and put it in their pockets. The band was Blasphemy. The graveyard gave its name to the whole cult.
War metal is what came out of that transaction and the thirty years after it, and it is the one branch of the extreme metal family that no amount of production money has ever been able to civilise. It is also, as categories go, one of the more slippery, because almost nobody inside it uses the term.
What the word covers
Take the working definition first, because it is narrower than the noise suggests. War metal is a music built on a raw black metal core, loaded with death metal and thrash aggression, and played at a velocity that makes comparison with grindcore reasonable rather than rhetorical. The riffs are chord shapes rather than figures. The drums run at a single flat extremity with the fills used as punctuation. The vocal is a bark rather than either a growl or a shriek. The production is not merely rough; it is arranged so that the individual instruments cannot be separated by ear, and that inseparability is the point rather than an accident of budget.
What the style deletes is more revealing than what it keeps. There is no melody carrying an argument, no verse and chorus, almost no clean guitar, no keyboard, no dynamic contrast worth the name, and no interest whatsoever in the listener finding a way in. A war metal record is a rehearsal room recorded from inside a collapsing building, and the collapse is the composition.
The other names for it are worth knowing, because they turn up in the same conversations: bestial black metal, bestial war metal, and simply black death. Members of the Melbourne band Bestial Warlust are generally credited with putting the two words war and metal together in the first place, which is fitting, since Australia produced as much of this music per head as anywhere on earth.
Vancouver, and the graveyard the scene is named after
Running under three earlier names since 1984 and settling on the fourth in 1987, the Vancouver band put out the Blood Upon the Altar demo in 1989 and then Fallen Angel of Doom through Wild Rags Records in August 1990, ten tracks in half an hour, and there is no serious argument about what happened next: everything filed under this heading descends from that half hour. Gods of War followed in 1993, the same year the band crossed Europe on a tour billed as the Fuck Christ Tour alongside Immortal and Rotting Christ. Nuclear War Now! Productions reissued the debut in 2007 and Ross Bay Cult did it again in 2015.
What grew around them in western Canada is the closest thing the style has to a headquarters. Conqueror was assembled out of the wreckage of two previous bands by James Read on drums and Forster on guitar, released War Cult Supremacy at the end of the nineties, and lasted barely long enough to be photographed; Nuclear War Now! Productions eventually put everything the band ever recorded onto one double album in August 2016. Revenge came directly out of its ending and has proved far more durable, to the point where Heavy Blog Is Heavy called it the strongest band working in the style in a 2015 survey of the whole area.
James and I started out in 1996 after the demise of both our bands. Through isolation and tunnel vision, by putting our minds together, we forged our own distinct sound.
Ryan Forster, in Bardo Methodology, 25 January 2017
The production is not merely rough. It is arranged so that the instruments cannot be separated by ear, and that is the point.
Finland, Australia and the rest of the map
Founded at Rovaniemi in 1989 by Marko Laiho with Jari Vaarala and Jari Pirinen, and with the stated ambition of making the most primitive and savage black metal imaginable, Beherit spent four years earning a reputation for stage presentations involving animal remains and then made Drawing Down the Moon in 1993, a record that keeps the filth and adds whispering, synthesiser and a hypnotic drift that nothing else in the style had attempted. Laiho then abandoned metal for dark ambient for two years, which tells you how little interest this scene has ever had in consolidating a position.
Archgoat started in Turku the same year, around twin brothers who still run it, and then did something almost unheard of: they stopped in 1993 and stayed stopped for eleven years, on the stated grounds that the music was becoming commercial. They came back in 2004, released Whore of Bethlehem in 2006, and have since put out six studio albums through Necropolis, Hammer of Hate and Debemur Morti Productions.
The Melbourne band left Vengeance War Till Death in 1994 and Blood & Valour in 1995 before ending in 1997, and their countrymen in Sadistik Exekution had been going since 1985, when the bass player met the singer outside an Iron Maiden concert in Sydney, and had put The Magus out in 1991 through Osmose while refusing in public to be called a black metal band at all. Florida answered with Black Witchery and Desecration of the Holy Kingdom, singled out in that same 2015 survey for keeping the black metal cold intact where the rest of the style burns it off, and the map has since filled in with bands in Spain, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile and Peru, most of them working through the post and none of them interested in a domestic audience.
The labels did the archiving
No radio, no press and no shops meant that the survival of this music has depended entirely on a handful of small labels willing to keep unprofitable catalogue in print. Wild Rags handled the first one. Osmose Productions carried a good deal of the European end through the nineties. Nuclear War Now! Productions, working out of Austin, has done more than anyone since to reissue the founding records and to put the current bands into circulation, Hells Headbangers has done the same from the other side of the country, and Ross Bay Cult exists so that a band can reissue its own history without asking anybody's permission.
That dependence on tiny operations is also why the discographies are so hard to reconstruct. Pressing runs of five hundred, split releases traded rather than sold, cassettes with hand written labels: the paperwork this music generated was thin at the time and much of it is gone, which is why so many entries in the chapter this belongs to carry a year and a label and nothing else.
What it is not
War metal is not blackened death metal played badly, and the confusion between them is the commonest error in this area. Blackened death metal is a graft: two legible traditions kept audible at once. War metal is a refusal, and what it refuses is legibility itself. A blackened death record wants you to hear the riff. A war metal record wants the riff to arrive as a single undifferentiated mass and leave without explaining itself.
It is also not the same thing as extremity for its own sake, whatever the sleeve art implies. The best of these records are constructed with a great deal of care about exactly how much information to withhold, which is an editorial decision and a difficult one. The worst are what Forster complained about in the same interview: improvised amateur recordings put out because the format looked easy to copy.
One last distinction, since the iconography invites it. The imagery here is military and occult, drawn from warfare as myth rather than from any actual politics, and where an individual band has attached real politics to it that is a fact about that band and belongs in its own entry rather than in a definition of the style. Anyone who wants to hear how far the opposite pole of the genre sits from all this should go straight from Fallen Angel of Doom to symphonic death metal and listen to what the same decade produced when a band decided the answer was more information rather than less.
