Wiking 1940 – Destruction of Dresden (2017) (original) (raw)

Review by Lucius Vorenus.

Wiking 1940 is an act I would generously describe as some genuinely confused crap. Even adjusting for the fact that they have a session member named Lord Himmler, they’re still really effeminate.

Destruction of Dresden is the kind of album that could only be written by someone whose most sacrosanct fantasy involves the crew of a Avro Lancaster flying a suicide mission with a deadly payload into his lubed up airspace. It’s standard fare for the genre: riffs that better bands let fall out the arsehole of history surge and slow under throwaway percussive transitions to showcase a thematic direction that’s significantly worse for wear 77 years on, punctuated only by the occasional drum fills that sound like the bald guy from Cradle of Filth exceeding the weight limit on the assisted dip machine at the gym.

It’s pretty clear from how the post-black screamo vocals and the unconvincing shouting parts are granted undue prominence in both the arrangement and the mix that this is not an album for people who like music for fundamentally musical reasons, it’s a riffless talky for the nascent alt-right inversion of the garden variety atmospheric black metal dullard: deep cover egalitarians who listen to extreme music in an act of self-aggrandizing juxtaposition and gleefully patronize their own mental image pageantry of dead and unworkable beliefs about post-Christian ethics couched in a thick melange of reblogging tank pictures on Tumblr and passive-aggressive redditor suicide memes. The remaining tracks appear to be uninspired martial ambient pantomime for people who heard Douglas Pearce prolapsing and thought ‘well, ain’t none of us getting any younger’. The comparison to Death in June is actually really apt insofar as Wiking 1940 also wish Russian 23 year olds would run a train on them the way their Slavic unibrow granddads ran trains on German women after Hitler lost the war because he was stupid enough to trust a bunch of fucking Italians.

Now that I get to talking about it, what’s with these wops engaging in Nazi cosplay all of a sudden? At least Mortuary Drape dug up some old lady’s grave instead of the graves of the Waffen-SS. Those dudes died by the sword and all these guinea pretenders can do is sit at home getting spit all over their iPad. These guys are one Les Légions Noires castle away from a Pasolini film about gay fascists eating shit and sodomizing boys. If you think Mussolini is proud you swapped the rosary for the reacharound, you’re in for a soupy fucking pizza my friend.

I dunno, man. I just question their commitment. Maybe it’s impolite of me to prognosticate, but I feel like they’ve got about three years before they switch sides, though I suppose in this case that would mean that Fettuccine 1943 might eventually make a good album.

Luckily for them, they’re dealing with the least discerning demographic since unmarried mothers of multi-ethnic children. Oh yeah, speaking of British people, I wanted to reiterate that the people who support this expendable plurality of influence retread acts on Bandcamp are the kinds of dudes whose top 10 albums change depending on both their audience and whether or not they have a good rapport with Jobcentre Plus. It doesn’t matter that you were in the Blood & Soil Discord, you’re a Xanthochroid listener at heart. No, shut up. Listen to me. Things will never get better for you. You will live in Croydon. You will die in Croydon.

Metal is about force, not fashion. This isn’t a joke. Nazifur war metal convention goers fundamentally misunderstand the power dynamics at work here. If Wiking 1940 thinks Jon Nödtveidt wouldn’t have stabbed them in 1997 for pledging to Shädman’s Patreon then they need to get the fuck off the computer.

Tags: 2017, Ambient, black 'n roll, homoeroticism, Italy, national socialist black metal, noise, nsbm, poseurs, review, screamo, War Metal, wiking 1940