Artist: Barbaric Oath
Country: Germany
Label: Caligari Records
Formats: Cassette EP / CD EP
Year: 2026
Honestly, I had missed the ‘Attack Attack Attack!’-demo tape from 2024, even though it was released by the Dutch label Night Terrors Records. After all, you can’t always be on your A-game, can you? But with this new EP, released by the American label Caligari Records on both cassette tape and CD, I have the chance to set the record straight. By the way, with a band name like Barbaric Oath and the title ‘Sword, Sorcery, Vengeance,’ it’s easy to be misled. This has little to do with muscular, oiled-up Epic Heavy Metal. No Manowar or Eternal Champion here; this is straight-up, undiluted Black/Death Metal. With a barbaric edge, that is.
Barbaric Oath may serve a completely different musical genre, but song titles like ‘Crom Cult’ ‘Sword And Sorcerer’ and ‘Dragon Lord’ show that, when it comes to sources of inspiration, there is indeed an overlap with the Heavy Metal bands influenced by Robert E. Howard’s Conan. This duo, who also play together in Putridarium and can be found in the lineups of bands such as Into Coffin, Nekus, and several other bands from the German Extreme Metal scene, channel that source of inspiration into a decent dose of Black/Death Metal.
A decent dose of Black/Death Metal, not outstanding. While the music is definitely good enough to entertain for the full 20-minutes, it might be just a bit too standard to revisit very often. The why?-question is quite a hard one to answer. Everything on this 5-tracker is well performed and comes in a heavy production, but it just lacks that little spark of something special. The label mentions musical resemblance to Mythos, Belial and early Bolt Thrower. But to be honest, I have a hard time finding anything of those bands in what Barbaric Oath serves us here. Or well, to certain extent, a lot of nowadays Death Metal can be traced back to a bunch of such early adopters and wayfinders in the genre. But as a whole, Barbaric Oath suffers a bit from a lack of identity and basically finds itself stuck in a rather meaningless and formless blend of Death Metal and Black Metal, in which the former takes up the largest part of the music and the latter is more or less only evident in the Black Metal-esque blast beats. Not bad, but just decent. Close, but no cigar, I’d say.
