More one-man black metal from the US, and again those foreign lemmings who say we 'Yanks just can't do BM right can go fuck themselves. Rather than simply fellating a certain album for ten years and calling it a scene, the US has bands that keep looking for original takes on black metal, both in musical elements and in artistic conceptions. Luftwaffe Raid is an example of the latter. Warharan is the man behind this band, and he's taken the imagery and even the sounds of the Third Reich and cobbled it together into something that is definitely black, and definitely metal, but isn't NSBM as you'd think when you hear those two magic words. It's more of a concept album, in a way, with the songs interspersed with newsreel audio from the days that help tell the story of the rise and fall of Germany in WWII. The intro before the first song begins with a newsclip describing the start of the war. Then the war begins, as "Red Sky at Night" charges out of the gate with some heavy riffing and slightly-strange black metal vocals - a cross between the conventional rasp and a more hoarse whisper. Odd time shifts, sections where the song just stops while the guitar starts a new riff, bizarre harmonic intervals just keep the listener guessing what will come next. After that is another newsclip, an exhortation speech by A.H. himself - just before more bizarre, chaotic black metal in "Nachtjagdgeschwader". And so it goes... throughout, these bizarre, chaotic songs are interspersed with audio clips you get basically a telling of WWII from the German side - it begins with the invasion and ends with a clip announcing the death of Hitler and fall of Germany. It's a musical treat in its own right because of the sheer weirdness of the bizarre songs, but the original concept around it just makes it that much more interesting. Highly Recommended.

*NOTE on this release: I was given a promotional CDR of this by Warharan for review, but it seems that it has since been released on tape by Total Holocaust Records, and Warharan is currently searching for someone to do a CD release.

© 2003 lord vic