Okay, searched as hard as I might, I simply could not find the album cover for War's Total War. So, no artwork. Sorry. This disc is long out of print. If you want to hear it, you need to track down the compilation We Are...Total War. That album has all 7 tracks from Total War on it. On to the band. War is a Swedish black metal supergroup whose line-up for this album consisted of Tony "It" Sarkka (Abruptum, Opthalamia, Vondur) on vocals and guitars, David "Blackmoon" Parland (Dark Funeral, Necrophobic) on guitars, Peter Tagtgren (Hypocrisy, The Abyss) on drums, and Mikael Hedlund (Hypocrisy, The Abyss) on bass. That being said, you can pretty much guess what they sound like. Yeah, raw Swedish black metal. I personally think Marduk's Opus Nocturne is the best reference point. These are short (a-minute-and-a-half to three minutes in length) songs which cut straight to the chase: no technical riffing, no elaborate vocals, no frills. Even the song titles are rather obvious: "Satan", "Total War", etc. Pretty good stuff. But for better executed raw Swedish BM...try the old stalwarts (Marduk, Dark Funeral, et al).
War has returned for another salvo of black metal madness! On this album, the line-up slightly shifted. Jim "All" Berger (Abruptum, Opthalamia, Vondur) now handles the vocals, Lars Szoke (Hypocrisy, The Abyss) now handles drumming, and David "Impious" Larsson (In Aeternum) handles bass duties. This is also a hard to find album. Very few sites sell it on the net. Your best bet is to try and track down the We are...Total War compilation. But that disc only features seven of the 11 songs off of We are War. "Hell", "Execution", "Kill God", and "Infernal" are only available on this album. Do what I did: whatever you can't find, download off of file-sharing sites! Yeah...on to the actual actual album. The sound quality is improved (Peter Tagtgren is producer), but War still plays vicious black metal with a Swedish guitar sound. I still hear Marduk here! Except this time, it's more Panzer Division Marduk than Opus Nocturne. These guys are incredibly fast, and totally primitive! There is a major problem though. Some of the songs cut off in the middle. There are parts where it just trails off unfinished, or parts where the song just stops! I don't know why, but this could have been a 4½ album if it were fixed.
