review: Arallu -- vinyl reissue of 1999 debut "The War on the Wailing Wall"

Arallu

The War on the Wailing Wall (1999)

Essential Purification Records

September 22, 2020

Essential Purification Records (Austria) is releasing the Arallu (Israel) debut album on vinyl. Here is a review of the album, in case that you have not heard it.

Nowadays the “Mesopotamian” black metal royals Arallu have seven albums, the most recent being 2019’s En Olam. They continue impressing extreme metal fans that hear the band’s Middle Eastern-influenced music. However, before reaching this point, it began in 1997 with a demo, and then 1999 with this album. The vocals are classic-style black metal intensity. The rhythm section blazes through the songs, and the guitars speed on through. Arallu nowadays is intense black metal, or black thrashing metal if you will, with prominent Middle Eastern instrumentation and melodies, and through two decades they have perfected their headbanging metal.

On this debut they show some inkling of their later sound. Song number five is called “Mesopotamian Genie” and you can hear the “Mesopotamian metal” coming through. “Barbarian Wasteland,” for instance, also shows the beginning of Arallu’s later sound that they are known for. You have to listen carefully to the background sounds, for example. Here’s the big reveal: according to Metal Archives, this is a two-person endeavor with Avi Caspi on guitars and Butchered (Moti Daniel) on drum programming, bass, guitar and vocals. Maybe there weren’t big crowds of musicians running to form black metal bands in Israel at the time. Probably not! Anyway, the “Mesopotamian metal,” compared to today, is here in a small degree.

This first album is an unrelenting black metal blasting album. It’s aggressively fast (drum programming can go very fast, right?), and the vocals are the serious business of taking the vocal cords to the limit. In 1999 Sweden’s Marduk took black metal to the edge with Panzer Division Marduk. That same year Israel’s Arallu must have surprised extreme metal fans in their country with this tight, sharp album. A humble but fun and raucous start.

arallu.bandcamp.com/album/the-war-on-the-wailing-wall-2020

"The War On The Wailing Wall" (Digital only) by ARALLU