Historical themes and personae are quite a common subject in metal lyrics. If you care to listen, metal offers many a great history lesson. More recently, interest may have shifted a bit from wars, battles and conquests to prehistoric cults, but the big fights of mankind will probably continue to fascinate and inspire metal bands for a long time to come. Almach’s debut album Battle of Tours thus follows a long-established tradition. At first glance, theme, cover art and album title seem in no way special or exceptional. On closer inspection, however, things look quite a bit different.
The Battle of Tours was fought on 10 October 732 in present-day France between Frankish forces under Charles Martel and Muslim forces under Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. The Frankish forces won decisively. The Arabs retreated, never to return. According to numerous historians, this was one of the major turning points in European history. If the Francs had lost, the Arab armies most likely would have taken over the entire continent. Instead of the Bible, the Quran would have been taught in Oxford.
This historic battle between the Orient and the Occident which probably helped lay the foundation for the ongoing dominance of the latter is the thematic basis of the album at hand. As album cover serves the most famous depiction of the battle, created by Charles de Steuben in 1837 and displayed in the Palace of Versailles. It depicts a romanticised version of the two main characters fighting each other – which they probably never did.
The album starts out with a track named after the Muslim commander, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. The soundscape, created primarily by keyboards and percussion, reminds me of film scores and features details like bird shrieks and hardly audible, raspy vocals. The atmosphere is one of approaching calamity. The keyboards provide melody and the drums, sometimes galloping, sometimes double kicked, drive the story forward.
The second track, Battle of Tours, begins with battle sounds. You can hear men shouting, cheering, grunting, saber rattling and horses neighing and charging. This is quickly followed by doom-laden keyboard sounds soon joined by woeful female vocals. To an undercurrent of double kicked drums, an Arabic string instrument, possibly an oud, establishes a connection to the Middle-East, as do Arabic-sounding melodies played out on flutes.
The remaining four tracks continue in similar fashion. After Blood Brother, Temple of Old Gods and Sons of Umayya, Yamrā ends the album on a melancholic note employing again keyboards, percussion and xylophone.
Almach claim to be from Kabul, Afghanistan, but this claim still needs to be verified. Circumstances as well as infrastructure, or rather the lack thereof, would make it very difficult for a metal band to be active in that country and to record music. For a variety of reasons, I’m betting on France as country of origin.
I didn’t know about the Battle of Tours nor about its historic importance and I enjoyed the musical history lesson Almach have created. The arrangements and compositions are sophisticated and effective, although the means seem to have included nothing too fancy.
So… if you’ve got the time, why not read up on a historic battle that lay the foundation for a power imbalance that is active to this day and that continues to cause casualties. Almach’s Battle of Tours will provide an excellent soundtrack for your reading.
(8/10 Slavica)
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