Warfare Machines was the final album from German black/death doom duo Deinonchus, a war-obsessed screed delivered via a mix of driving, mid-tempo death doom and tortured black metal that came out in 2008. Ever since I got the new Bethlehem reissue on Red Stream in stock, I'd wanted to dig into the catalog of this offshoot band that featured members of Bethlehem and shared some of the same traits as the legendary dark metallers. Much of the older Deinonychus stuff is hard to find, but I finally tracked down this full length through the Italian label that just released the first album from Nihil Novi Sub Sole, the new martial industrial band from Deinonychus frontman Marco Kehren. The older Deinonychus stuff was pure death doom, but on their last album, the band went for a more straightforward death metal sound, with faster paced songs, mostly mid-tempo, and lots of thunderous double bass drumming and melancholy doom metal heaviness. The vocals were always one of Deinonychus's trademarks, usually delivered as a anguished, high pitched scream on older releases that sounded alot like the extreme vocals that Bethlehem used, but here the wailing screams are replaced with a more traditional death metal delivery, a deep gruff roar that still occasionally breaks into the hysteric panic of Marco's earlier performances. And where their older albums were consumed with suicidal hopelessness (again, much like their cohorts in Bethlehem), Warfare Machines is a bleak concept album about warfare and genocide, particularly dealing with World War II and often narrated from the perspective of a soldier. Some of the highlights of the album include the melancholy doom and doleful chanting vocals and stretches of monstrous death doom of "Napola", one of the slowest and heaviest songs on here, and the blazing Teutonic black metal of "MG-34", with it's dramatic intoned vocals and spiteful shrieks. The most intense track is probably the closer "Morphium", a short blast of black doom and twisted ambience, the riff becoming lost amidst swirling morse code transmissions and whispered military communiqu�s.

Deinonychus closed the book with their most direct, death metal influenced album, combining downer death metal and militant black blast and lots of driving Katatonia-like gloom. Great stuff. This comes with the jewel case enclosed in a printed o-card.