Wehrhammer - 2015 - Sturmtruppen

 

Breath Of Pestilence – BOP033  656.03MB FLAC

Sturmtruppen is not merely a reissue with bonus material. It places the same ideological and musical construction on two operating tables, thirteen years apart, and asks the listener to examine what repetition preserves, what it tightens, and what it attempts to overwrite. The original Deutsche Sturmtruppen occupies forty-seven minutes; the 2012 rerecording repeats the seven titles in the same order but compresses them into slightly more than thirty-eight. Nothing has been replaced by a newly written argument. The old declaration is rebuilt with less temporal space around it, as though persistence itself were being offered as proof of conviction.

That makes this double CD a study in reenactment. Most artists revisit early work because they believe improved technique can uncover an ideal version hidden inside primitive execution. In Wehrhammer’s case, the process carries additional political weight. The material is not only musical. Its vocabulary of burning crosses, assault troops, blood, death, annihilated divinity, and fallen Christians belongs to a project openly associated with National Socialism and racism. To rerecord it is to reactivate that symbolic machinery rather than leave it confined to a rough underground document from the turn of the millennium.

The original version has the longer shadow. Its riffs advance through repetition rather than intricate development, creating the sensation of commands being reinforced until they no longer require explanation. Krieg’s guitars and bass occupy a narrow, abrasive field while Dunkelheit’s drumming gives the music a bodily instability absent from the more mechanically programmed Wehrhammer recordings. The sound is crude but not entirely shapeless. Melodic figures repeatedly surface from the distortion, offering just enough contour for each song to become recognizable before the surrounding harshness wears its edges down again.

“Reich der brennenden Kreuze,” the realm of burning crosses, opens with an image that can support several kinds of hostility at once. A burning cross may signify anti-Christian destruction, racist terror, or the theatrical consumption of one symbol by another. Given Wehrhammer’s documented ideological framework, that ambiguity cannot be treated as innocent mystery. The music converts the image into territory: not one cross burning at a particular site, but an entire realm organized around the spectacle. Fire becomes architecture.

“Nacht der Schatten” and “In Finsternis der Tag erwacht” give the album its nocturnal cosmology. Night, shadow, and the day awakening inside darkness are familiar black-metal materials, but here they function less as solitary communion with nature than as preparation for collective movement. Darkness hides individual faces and makes the marching body appear unified. The songs’ repeated melodic contours produce atmosphere while also demonstrating how easily atmosphere can become ideological camouflage, giving ordinary hatred the scale of destiny, myth, or natural law.

“Tötet den Gott” and “Am Tag an dem die Christen fallen” position anti-Christian violence as a promised historical transformation. Black metal has long used blasphemy to attack religious authority, hypocrisy, and inherited moral control, but Wehrhammer’s wider politics complicate any simple reading of rebellion. A project attracted to hierarchy, racial ideology, and authoritarian collective identity is not abolishing domination merely because it attacks Christianity. It is disputing which power should rule. The music’s stern repetition embodies this contradiction: revolt is voiced through structures that sound remarkably like obedience.

The title track presents the most direct fusion of sound and militarized identity. “Sturmtruppen” originally referred to assault troops developed for rapid attacks during the First World War, but the word’s later political and popular associations make it impossible to hear as a purely technical military term. Wehrhammer turns it into a collective self-image. The individual listener is invited to imagine entry into a hardened formation whose strength comes from discipline, homogeneity, and an enemy positioned outside the group.

Yet the original recording constantly betrays the fantasy of perfect formation. Its rough production, human drumming, unstable balance, and solitary origins reveal not an army but a very small number of people manufacturing the sound of one. That fracture is musically revealing. The record’s imagined mass is assembled through overdubbing, repetition, and symbols. The “we” must be constructed because the actual recording room contains no advancing column.

The 2012 version attempts to close that fracture. Shorter performances give the songs less empty ground and make the album feel more concentrated. The rerecording does not reconsider the early material so much as discipline it, trimming extended passages and pushing the same sequence toward greater efficiency. Where the first disc sounds like an ideology being formed through primitive black metal, the second sounds like that ideology returning after years of rehearsal, more certain of its chosen gestures and less interested in hesitation.

The shortened title “Sturmtruppen” is especially intriguing. Removing *Deutsche* does not neutralize the piece when every surrounding association remains intact. It may instead broaden the formation, turning a specifically German designation into a more general identity available to anyone willing to enter the march. The absent word becomes conspicuous because the listener has just heard it on disc one. Revision does not erase the earlier declaration; the double-CD format keeps both visible.

The cover reinforces this collapse of chronology. A sepia scene of executions, gallows, armed figures, damaged buildings, and public violence is presented as though historical atrocity were an antique engraving suitable for contemplation. Distance can make suffering look ceremonial. Bodies become compositional details within an attractive ruin, while spectatorship replaces responsibility. The album performs a related operation by transforming war into repetition and atmosphere, removing hunger, fear, bureaucracy, civilian death, and physical mutilation until only command and destructive grandeur remain.

Sturmtruppen is therefore most revealing when heard not as one album twice, but as a record of ideological memory. The first disc shows the original construction; the second demonstrates the desire to inhabit it again. Improved control does not produce moral development. It makes the old enclosure more efficient. The listener is left with two versions of the same march and an important question: when an artist returns to early material, is the past being examined, repaired, or recruited for another advance?