SABATON – Coat Of Arms

What is with Sabaton’s eternal obsession with WWII? Ever since Primo Victoria, there is no end to the history lessons. History is an important thing to remember, however, when it comes down to music, one or two releases is maybe sufficient, especially when it is about the same historical subject. Coat Of Arms is Sabaton’s official fifth album. From what seems like the Second World War will never end until its life will be sucked out.

Again we are in with the main two fronts of the war. Along with those, there are tributes to the Jewish people (a sort of a holocaust memorial anthem), Polish rebels of the Warsaw uprising and the usual Metal oriented praise song. Overall, Sabaton’s manner after Metalizer (2002), began to soar in a way. With the constant theme, the material on display is no different from stuff shown on Art Of War and even worse.

Even with a stronger production at their side, Sabaton lost their material writing talents of Primo Victoria and Attero Dominatus. The previous Art Of War began sinking the ship with yet another reprisal of its previous release. Here on Coat Of Arms it is merely the same story possessing similar colors. The album somewhat failed to make an attraction. Most of the tracks are banal and uninteresting both musically and lyrically. Through several examples of average illustrations such as “Midway”, “Aces In Exile”, “Screaming Eagles” and “Uprising”, there is not too much to hope for.

Maybe the one feature that was too much is the keyboards. The use of keyboards in Sabaton was from the beginning. However, Coat Of Arms shows the stronger leading roles of the keyboards while driving the lead guitars away. As a word of advice, the band should be creating more lead guitar riffage. This is supposed to be 80s driven Heavy Metal. In future albums, Sabaton should try and intensify the parts of the lead guitars, because on most occasions it is nicer to hear lead guitars than keyboards (especially on this album).

Other than that, Coat Of Arms, while not serving as a true Sabaton prize, has some encouragement. Providing tracks as “Coat Of Arms”, “The White Death”, “Metal Ripper” and “Saboteurs”, this more or less is the same type of Heavy Metal from the first albums, where Sabaton had their glory.

To summarize, Coat Of Arms showed the commonplace and not that creative side of Sabaton. As kind of War Heavy Metal fans, they should stop exploiting the subject and take on other interests, maybe different wars.