Sabaton

So I recently discovered this band. Suffice to say, any band that makes Gustavus Adolphus into an epic Metal hero is made of pure awesomesauce in my book.

edited 15th Jan '16 9:13:32 AM by SantosLHalper

Am I the only one who remembers when this band was small but kind of a minor darling in the power metal community back in maybe 2006?

edited 10th Jan '16 6:35:29 PM by StillbornMachine

I love their WWII songs. They essentially introduced me to Simo Hayha and apparently were inderectly responsible for Karel Janousek getting a Wiki page.

I love all the obscure history they bring up as well as the songs about known events, like Uprising.

edited 11th Jan '16 11:21:24 AM by Sisi

started listening to them about a month ago, some of their songs have a habit of brining a manly tear to my eye

Sabaton is friggin' amazing.

I can say the same. I even saw them live last year.

Sabaton is an awesome band to listen to while playing Cossacks: Back to War.

Their metal tribute songs like Metal Crue and Man of War (about Manowar) are fun listens as well.

Primo Victoria is one of my all time favorite metal songs.

My fave songs are the Art of War, Carolus Rex and Night Witches.

I've been listening to them recently They were recommended based on other bands I like.

I liked the songs I currently have Carolus Rex stuck in my head.

They are so awesome that they became a (DLC) soundtrack of EU 4

http://store.steampowered.com/app/415680/?l=portuguese

I usualy think it's a stupid idea to buy extra music BUT IT'SFREAKING SABATON

all we need now is Sabaton DLC for Total War and Civilisation

edited 7th Mar '16 2:15:35 PM by FieldMarshalFry

I'm already playing an ETW Campaign as Sweden set to Carolus Rex.

(Or campaigns... I'm starting to realise invading Moscow is a pretty bad idea. No wonder Carolus Rex lost...)

edited 9th Mar '16 3:58:57 PM by SantosLHalper

when I played Empire as Sweden I ended up conjuring Russia, Prussia, the Dutch and Poland Lithuania before I was halfway through the campaign... sure I had the odd uprising but my standard Line Infantry spam put em down quickly, you're doing something wrong!

One thing I have noticed about Sabaton... is since the refugee crisis started a lot of their videos have been flooded with Islamohpbic comments, it's kinda depressing...

Metal in general flirts with far right douchebaggery a bunch so to be fair it's not really something unique to Sabaton. See: NSBM.

it's strange since a lot of metal bands are rather left wing, take Rammstein, they have an entire song that basically says "WE'RE FUCKING LFFT WING!" while Sabaton refuse to go into that, since a lot of there lyrics are about the futility and horror of war I would say puts them left of centre

Metal's politics are usually rather murky but I personally find that as you start going to the more extreme genres things start veering rightwards especially in black metal. Also I'd be a little skeptical of using Rammstein personally given their fanbase is associated more with the industrial/alternative/hard rock crowd among some musical reasons. I'd say metal as a whole generally takes up a lot of generally "rebellious" aggressive positions and inevitably this means a lot of shock-jock ones crop up rather quickly. In my personal experience however there have recently been more considerate bands and fans; A Sound of Thunder's Nina Osgueda for example has a lot of progressive views concerning immigrants and others from bands like Noble Beast, Zealotry, Mortal Decay, Obesequiae have epoused a lot of less sensationalist, more left leaning speech lately. Unfortunately it's not quite enough to drown out the Breitbartards.

I'd say this is dependent not just on what metal's "values" (however they are constructed) as much as the environment it grows up in. Metal is strangely conformist in that way in spite of its claims to the opposite.

edited 10th Mar '16 12:51:57 PM by StillbornMachine

Joakim Brodén (the vocalist and songwriter alongside Pär) of Sabaton has espoused some fairly progressive views before. In particular he explicetly says people who see Nazi beliefs in their songs are delusional and in one interview he talked about how there's metalheads who veer too much into the Viking culture (the discussion came from when an interviewer asked him how he came up with Swedish Pagans), and went on an epic rant about how some people cling to the, what, 0.5% of supposed viking blood they have in their veins and act superior and xenophobic about it, while the actual Vikings were people who welcomed arab merchants and mingled with pretty much any ethnicity.

Fuck those ultranationalists. If I were the head of the band, I would make an epic album about something like the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire (with a lament about the Armenian Genocide in the latter half, of course) and donate all profits to a charity helping the Syrian refugees integrate in the EU to show them their opinion on the crackpot Eurabia Islamophobes.

edited 20th Mar '16 6:21:40 PM by SantosLHalper

I wouldn't be surprised if their popularity sharply dropped afterwards and they found themselves the targets of frequent online harassment. Granted, it would be nice to see the rest of the community take a similar stance.

Who cares about what celebrities think.

I don't care about peoples political affiliation the only thing I care about of a celebrity is if their movies, tv shows, or music is good.

That should be the only thing that matters, just ignore the rest.

To be fair, I was mainly venting when I made that post.

edited 23rd Mar '16 12:47:19 PM by SantosLHalper

Well if a Nazi makes a good tv show, even if it is a good tv show, I wouldn't want a Nazi to receive my money so he could fund his Nazi projects. That's an extreme example, but it's mostly that. It's not a problem if they have different political opinions from me, but things like a band who goes out to call their fanbase to go about burning churches and lynching people seems like a wise band to not give my money to.

About the Ottoman Empire concept album idea, it would be interesting but Sabaton tends to stick to the 20th century as far as history goes. Their only major breakaway was Carolus Rex, and that was for nationalistic purposes (Swedish history for a Swedish band after all). They could perhaps talk about that region's participatioon in the world wars, like the leaders of the Arab Revolt in WWI.

You know what would provide them with a vast amount of non-Europe-related material in the 20th century? The warlord era of China. It's a goddamn mess.

Actually they should really veer a bit to the Asian theater of WWII (which is thus far only covered in Midway and Nuclear Attack). Par Sundstrom has said that they have already conquered Europe in fanbase terms, and they're in the process of conquering the Americas, but what he'd really like to do is do something for Asia.

also The Art of War, Sun Tzu and all that