The debut album from the Richmond blackened death metal band Battlemaster is finally back in stock! The RVA metal scene has become pretty well known thanks to bands like Lamb Of God and Municipal Waste, and a few years ago, another band emerged from the River City, one that hardly even sounded like they were from the U.S. let alone from below the Mason-Dixon line, who blatently channeled the blackened fury of Scandinavian metal with tongues firmly in cheek. Warthirsting And Winterbound totally kicked my ass when we first heard got this album in stock, with ten tracks of epic blackened metal that moves back and forth from wintery Immortal-style gallop and triumphant Amon Amarth viking thrash, awesome riffs, pounding propulsive drumming and precision blastbeats, icy frostbitten atmosphere and a weird vocal attack that mixes regular deep death metal growls with a high-pitched munchkin screech that's pretty fucking awesome! It's like having a snarling androgynous hobgoblin howling over the majestic black metal attack and sounds totally nuts, and this fits in well with Battlemaster's Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy role-playing obsessed themes and references that surround their music (see songs like "The Mindflayer's Addiction", "Dungeoncrawl", "Power Word: Kill", "This Mead Is Making Me Warlike"). So yeah, there's defintiely some silliness behind Battlemaster's Scandi-thrash assault, but you'd never think that from the music, which is played totally straight and is a ferocious as anything that's come out of the European death/black scene in recent years. Except maybe for the extended acoustic coda that closes the album out, which almost sounds like a black metal interlude stretched out into a haunting piece of Appalachian folk. Like how their buddies in Cannabis Corpse and Municipal Waste pay homage to brutal Floridian death metal and old school crossover thrash with a sense of humor, so do Battlemaster with their vicious Scandinavian blackthrash cocktail, turning the cliches and goofy imagery that you'd normally find in the lyrics of "Viking" metal bands from the icy north into brilliantly over-the-top satire that nevertheless rips like hell!