An Unholy Black/Middle-Eastern Black/Death Metal band from Israel. May 5th, 2021 saw the rebirth of their (2009) fourth studio album Desert Battles — Descending to the Sands.1 The album was released through Ah Puch Records.
Introduction:
Arallu, Desert Battles: This review will evaluate every aspect of the album, from its intricate musical composition to its production. Our analysis will provide valuable insights to help you determine if this album is worth adding to your collection.
The First Three Sins of Desert Battles
Let’s start by discussing the first three sins of Arallu and their album, Desert Battles.
The First Sin, The Strings/Keys: Features an extreme-fuel-driven twin mixture of brutal, atmospheric/melodic black metal and down-tune death metal with swift riffs/rhythm sections while adding Middle Eastern instrumental sections. The Second Sin, The Vocals: This involves harsh, cold (full of life) vocals interwoven with howling screams. The Third Sin—The Percussions: Delves into the vast world of fast adrenaline/slow tempo – of extreme drum patterns and blast beats
The Fourth Sin: Overall Discussion: To create music so that you can feel and taste their music and homeland
Immediately, the listener presses that play button, and the listener is welcomed to a world of unorthodox creativity of various components of over fifty minutes of nine equally vigorously composing songs.
So, marching onto the Desert Battle Realm, where the listener is welcome to the opening track of a dusty sound of the Middle East-folk instrumentation introduction.
With Old Form Of Evil, being the first song following the intro, which opens to some wired sound FX, harshly spoken words, thrash shredding, and drumming. This leads onwards into the remaining album that delivers a burning passion through each song. At the same time, this unites the whole album around a single notion of capturing/embracing the middle-eastern desert and folk music with blackened death atmosphere/folk-thrash feel throughout the release.
Desert Battle is full of life, the creativity of a musical structure that truly captures something honestly within their music. Arallu puts so much effort into bringing their music to life of powerful lyrical content. They have excellent devilmanship in their piece, not just in this release, but also in others they have created and remastered.
At the same time, Desert Battle is a full-on throttle blackened war anthem that delivers not slightly darkened death. Offers the listener the enjoyment of carnage of different tempos, heavy-thrash shreds and drumming, rhythmic, melodies/ditto rhythm sections, chord shredding axing, incorporating various middle-eastern folk instruments, evil-harsh vocals with the classic Slayer screams. Darkly atmosphere soundscapes/theatrically moments, transfixing twisty ‘n’ torturous anthem of capturing a sound of their own.
Arallu doesn’t just play Middle Eastern Blackened Death Folk metal; they make their music so that you can feel and taste their music and homeland and call this demon “Middle Eastern Black Metal.”
The album comes to an end with the last song, Battleground (live). We want to give a shoutout to Arallu for letting us review their album, Desert Battles. Now, we’re going to wrap it up by talking about the final three sins and concluding the review.
You’re Listening to “Desert Battles”
PlayThe Last Three Sins
Let’s discuss the last three sins, our thoughts on Arallu and their album, Desert Battles.
The Fifth Sin, The Memorabilia: Is that for us, Desert Battles is a must for your collection; regardless, both versions are a fruit of art, and you won’t be disappointed with either release. I love this version because it is louder and more precise in sound and production (to capture the whole experience of the theme/music throughout the album) while keeping it brutal and unholy.
The Sixth Sin, The Artwork:
I love both artworks, but the remastered version suits the band’s music and lyrical theme better.
The Seventh Sin, Disrelish:
Nothing to disrelish within the musical spectrum of Arallu, and their album, Desert Battles.
This concludes the Arallu, Desert Battles review.
Track-Listing:
- Al Macbara
- Old Form of Evil
- Possessor of the Code
- Desert Battles
- The Demon Curse
- The Union of Babylon
- The Keeper of Jerusalem
- Millchama
- The Doom Beating
- Desert Battles (2009 version)
- Battleground (live)
Arallu is:
- Butchered – vocals, guitars, and bass
- T.K.O.R. – guitars
- Richard – drums & percussion
- Yaniv “Soul Beating” – percussion, wind instruments
- Yonatan – strings, drums
- Desert Battles were remixed, remastered, new artwork and the vocals re-recorded, reshuffled tracks, two exclusive bonus tracks from the original version of 2009, and retitled as Desert Battles. ↩︎
