Arafel – For Battles Once Fought

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NoiseArt Records
Produced by Slawek Wieslawski & Wojtek Wieslawski

When you name your band after the Hebrew word for “fog” and hail from Tel Aviv, claiming to play ethnically-influenced black metal, you honestly don’t have to do that much to be awesome. The Middle East, and the land of Palestine in particular, has been the center of so much world conflict, not just in the last 50 years but in the last several thousand, that one would imagine black metal from there would be fairly easy to produce. Hell, Jerusalem’s Melechesh does it alright, so why not Arafel?

Arafel throws away all that potential on For Battles Once Fought in order to turn in some halfhearted Children of Bodom worship that takes even more of the balls out of that already long-neutered band. Sword’s Hymn starts the ball rolling in a painfully generic direction with the sounds of swordplay laid over horn (but keyboard, really) fanfare and chanted vocals. It redeems itself a bit when the band kicks in with some second-rate Amon Amarth riffs and growls, but the presence of the keyboards roiling underneath the mix keeps the song from reaching its potential. They aren’t used for accent, or for melody, or for anything remotely useful. They’re just there.

This, along with the admittedly pretty terrible vocalist, is the biggest problem with the album. It would be a lot easier to overlook the fact that For Battles Once Fought is an overly clean, overly melodic so-called extreme metal album that doesn’t break any new ground if all we had to hear were the mediocre but ultimately inoffensive riffs and melodies. But we’re forced to hear the keyboards, too, and they’re uniformly awful. It makes it hard to even define the genre that this falls into. They try to make folk black metal, but it certainly never sounds like it. They ruin every promising riff or melody with an equally bad one, and although they probably make practically no money off their music, they appear to be trying awfully hard to get picked up by the kind of label that signs Children of Bodom worshipers to lucrative deals. If bands like these are the future, I’m retreating to the past.

“ halfhearted Children of Bodom worship ”

Tracklist: Sword’s Hymn / Kurgan / The Siege / 1380 The Confrontation / The Last Breath of Fire / Im Feld / Wolf’s Hunt / Death of Archaic World

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2011, Albums, Black Metal, Arafel