Warfare. Based on religion, moral standards, economic disagreements, lust for territory and power, need for independence, and so on. Tribal madness, returning each other to dust with nothing more than spears and crude clubs. Fearless Spartan weapon masters attacking, outnumbering enemy masses. Germanic berserkers gnawing on their shields, turning into mad frenzy and bringing wild slaughter to organized Roman legions. Heavily armoured knights crashing down in countless arrow rains. Crusaders, blindly following their religious leader, punishing heretics and recapturing the Holy Land. Rows of musket soldiers shooting at each other simultaneously or being crushed as a whole by large iron cannonballs. Panzer divisions, bombers, nuclear rockets, causing mass destruction… endless, ongoing battles… In the grim darkness of the future there is only war. And the great thing about this all is: massive loads of black metal lyric-inspiration! For some reason, I’ve never listened to Sammath before, though it exists already since 1994. Probably because in the Dutch black metal scene only very few good bands exist (like Perditor, Fluisterwoud and some others) and so I focused my attention elsewhere. This album was a truly nice surprise; Sammath seems to be a great addition to Dutch black metal. Jan Kruitwagen, creator of Sammath, was - until now - the only bandmember, taking care of all instruments, writing the music and lyrics. On this album he gets the help of Koos Bos who handles the drums (apparently replacing the drum computer).

Dodengang is diverse melodic black metal with a blazing raw sound. Diversity is created by a lot of changes in pace and beat, melodic parts shifting with fast, raw and intense parts. Also, your attention is often focused on certain instruments, like bass guitar intermezzos for example. A great deal of the music is supported by melodies, building up an intense atmosphere. They inspire a melancholic, haunting and hypnotizing and sometime violently victorious feeling. The dangerous thing with melodies is that some of them are getting boring after a few listens. There are definitely some influences in riffs and song structure from Norwegian and Swedish bands, like Gehenna, Dissection and Naglfar, but the fast melodic rawness also resembles to a band like the Germanic Moonblood. Overall though, the music has a very own sound, probably mainly caused by the backing melodies, something that seems hard to achieve in the current black metal overdose. From an instrumental point of view, guitars and drums are outstanding. It is nice to actually hear bass guitar lines, though bass is not always really tight (well, the drums make this straight). Also, the biting evilness of the vocals is often hard to hear, being mixed more to the background, which is too bad in my opinion. Time for you to give this album a listen and for me to check out some older Sammath albums!