Broken – Landkrieg

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5.0

• Band:
  Shrewd
• Duration: 00:42:40
• Available since: 07/03/2025
• Label:

• Testimony Records

Streaming not yet available

The chitpets continue their evolutionary path with “Landkrieg”, an album that marks a second attempt to renew that Old School Death Metal formula that had characterized their first works. If the first two full-lengths of the group, “Panzerdoktrin” and “Eisenzeit”, were a concentrate of martial death metal with influences that ranged from Bolt Thrower to the Hail of Bullets, with some raids in the Swedish style of the classic dismember, for some time the German band has been trying to expand its sound spectrum. The first signs arrived with the previous “Feldwärts”, whose stylistic direction, rather atmospheric and melodic, is now resumed and expanded by the new “Landkrieg”, another chapter that tries to position itself halfway between the past and a new musical identity. Here too we find songs that recall the death metal origins of training, but many others explore more airy territories, with complex structures and contaminations that sometimes seem to be inspired by a reality that has always been engaged in experimentation such as disbursement compatriots. However, the attempt to enrich the sound with these streaks and a less direct approach does not always work, so much so that the album ends soon to seem like a compromise that could not fully satisfy the purists of the genre or those who seek a more decisive detachment with the past.
A striking example is “Til Jeret Undergang”: a unnecessarily twinstant piece, which does not affect heaviness or manage to seduce with effective melodic lines. A sense of indecision is perceived, a difficulty in finding a synthesis between the different souls of the band. This uncertainty is also reflected in songs such as “Den Mörka Nattens Lejon”, which introduces a riff with a flavor Morbidangeliantaken directly from “Immortal Rites”, without this finding a consistent sequel in the rest of the album.
Said of an interesting contribution of the bass, which is confirmed as one of the most distinctive elements of the proposal of the chitching, the points of interest within the album this time they prove few: in this claudicating development, for example we point out the enveloping melody of “of siege and besieged”, which manages to evoke a sense of desolation and melancholy. Unfortunately, a rare moment, lost in a sea of ​​ideas that seem not to dialogue with each other.
The same attention to the historical concept, although appreciable, cannot save the disc from a feeling of fragmentation: the narrative on the thirty years war that the quintet has decided to face for this album is in fact detailed, but does not find an equally incisive musical equivalent.
In short, the chitpets seem incorporated into the same syndrome that at some point hit other compatriots such as the deserted fear: an interlocutory phase, in which the desire to experiment risks suffocating the primordial strength that had made them rather convincing to the beginning. “Landkrieg” is not a completely quality album, but it is a job that leaves a sense of incompleteness, with precisely little substance on the front purely death metal on the one hand and a melodic vein not exactly contagious on the other, as if the vision of the group was too brainy, weighed down in its trying to stay behind structures that do not seem very clear. To reach the level of inspired and above all very concrete colleagues on the stylistic front, such as Night in Gales or Kanonenfieber, they serve a greater clarity of intent and a less tangled sound.