A Challenge Of Honour – Wilhelm Gustloff

In a good attempt it is all that left from the effort made to create this conceptual work.
One need to be so naive and short minded in order to believe that to leave a loop repeating over and over on the sampler machine its the most brilliant thing that one can listen within the parameter of industrial music.
Well thats precisely the case of this work, the general attempt in order to create a dramatic feeling, a sense of tragedy and horror its frustrated by the mediocre use/abuse of the sampler.
Song "1938" its the best example of what would be the general unfolding of all of this work. A powerful horn that repeats itself ad nauseum, but hell yes industrial music its supposed to be about this! but not that way! you can even hear the subtle "click" of the sequence just before it does start again, and the loop doesnt have a good sense of rythm also, it does sound cut and out of harmony, the horn its great but the feeling its that the sampler its incomplete or like a snake eating his own tail but up to the waist!
From there we just hear a couple of samplers of the german movie about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff,which its boring again, just plain samples without anything more in between an audio documentary or a industrial piece? set yourself in!
The whole thing continues like this, in almost a plain sequence, the old formula of horns plus martial drums and then some more movie samplers until the song "Ehret Das Leben" Wow! one may say, now things seem to change this song starts in a powerful way even the old legionarie spanish song seems great and then the horns and the violins, but nah sooner you notice how the drums start to become out of tempo with the general orchestation, the autor didnt intended to cause that, it was a poor use of samplers!,he tried to make a massive assault of drums over the exploding voracious horns and violins loop but...unfortunately succumbed in his try.
After that the album becomes an enigma. theres no sense of continuity. the work its supposed to be about Wilhem Gustloff tragedy and until that moment it took a conceptual more or less clear idea on the matter. But the following song "only stones remain" throws us in a different place, and from there everything becomes an entire different thing.The
Seems like a complete different work musically and conceptually speaking. Its a lot like Darkwood sound or even Sol Invictus, no industrial attempts anymore just plain apocafolk!
What does have to do "Ritual suicide" with Wilhem Gustloff?
or "Havamal"? or even "Archangel"? seems like recordings from song nine belong to recordings that had not anything in common with the idea or at least that does not belong for anything to the Gustloff project.
Theres a first part in this album, the industrial part about Wilhem Gustloff after that youll hear a compilation of tracks of different ideas and music styles and THAT is a great mistake in the production of this album.

So my general opinion its that this was a good idea totally wasted and fucked up probably by the inexperience of the artist (this album its in fact a reissue of his first work on cassette) and the total lack of a good producer.

good effort...nothing more. better check the other releases in order to get a better idea of this awesome project.