I love this band! Middle Eastern black thrashers Arallu are back again with a brand new album of their "barbaric Mesopotamian black metal", their first since 2005's The Demon From the Ancient World that I raved about last year when we first got it in stock here at C-Blast. These Israeli thrashers have been competing with Melechesh for the title of true "Mesopotamian black metal" for years, and they tend to get short shrift with a lot of Melechesh fans and writers, but I still think that Arallu's Middle Eastern-influenced metal is an entirely different sort of beast than the more technical and polished music of Melechesh. Sure, both of these bands utlize traditional Arabic instruments and scales in their music and have the same all-consuming obsession with Mesopotamian mythology, but Arallu excel at stripped-down, primitive blackthrash that takes all of it's moves from early Sodom, Slayer and Kreator, with loads of ripping monochromatic thrash riffs and speedy, sloppy drumming, and fronted by band leader Butchered's blistered rasp. It's an atavistic, messy approach compared to Melechesh 's more progressive sound, and though a lot of Arallu's music tends to blur together, I still can't get enough of this shit.

Obviously, one of the main reasons why the two bands are constantly compared is the use of traditional Arabic percussion and horns that show up throughout all of Arallu's songs, and there is a LOT of that going on with Desert Battles, even moreso than Arallu's last album. The constant flux between the ripping Sodom-on-crank blackthrash and the blasts of hyperkinetic Darbuka drum circles and the queasy roar of Arabic horns makes for a seriously psychotic mix. There's still a lot of references to Mesopotamian folklore and imagery in these tracks (especially with songs like "The Demon's Curse" and "The Keeper Of Jerusalem"), but much of these images that Arallu conjure up are more like metaphors for the ongoing social unrest in the Middle East than fantasies of Djinns and desert kingdoms and stuff like that. Bottom line, though, Desert Battles fucking shreds, a blazing assault of crude, barely-hanging-in-there thrash laced with awesome Araya-style screams and filthy atonal solos galore, and loaded with their trademark detours into manic Middle Eastern instrumental freakouts that sometimes blend right in with the razorwire black metal. Killer!

The disc also has some CD-ROM content that connects you with a video for the song "Battleground".