The sticker on this fairly well-packaged digipak tells "The ultimate collection of classic unholy black metal from Norway’s favorite sons featuring rare and unreleased tracks. Over 70 minutes of pure blasphemous mayhem." I disagree. So… how shit is it? How funny are Fenriz’s liner notes? And, as I’m sure most of you will be asking loudest - ARE THERE ANY NEW FUCKING PICTURES OF FENRIZ!?!?!?!?!?!

Most important bits first: yes, there is a picture of Fenriz. Whether or not it’s new I can’t tell, but I haven’t seen it before, so it’s probably good enough for all the groupies. There’s a picture of Nocturno Culto as well, that seems to have been taken along with the one in the Total Death booklet/gatefold, which means he has hair! How ’bout the liner notes? Well, no, they’re not that funny. Funny, yes, but not as funny as Fenriz’ has a tendency to be. They tell of Darkthrone’s history up to and including the recording of Soulside Journey and has words like "metalfriend," "not-very-happening," "satan" and "panzergodly." As far as the tracks go, we all know the majority of them, the interesting ones being "Snowfall" off the A New Dimension promo, which sounds, amazingly, just like the tape does. "Archipelago" off the Thulcandra demo, which manages to sound *worse* than the tape, something I cannot fucking realize how Peaceville can have overlooked. Live tracks "Eon/Thulcandra" and "Soria Moria" from a show in Oslo, 1989, whereof both sound fairly good considering how old the recordings must be. "Soria Moria" is one of the two tracks on this CD I didn’t already have, and I hadn’t even heard of it until promo sheets advertising this thing popped up. The track is entertaining enough, sounding like what you would’ve expected from Darkthrone in 1989, similar to the Thulcandra demo, and having certain things in common with Goatlord tracks. Then there’s an edited version of "Neptune Towers" from Denmark in 1990 or whatever, as also featured on the Roots of Evilness, Live bootleg, which sounds FUCKING AWFULLY SHITE, as anyone who has heard the beyond-awful bootleg it is probably stolen right off knows well. Interestingly enough, the liner notes fail to note where or when this song was recorded, as they also did with the last interesting track, "Iconoclasm Sweeps Cappadocia", that sounds like it could be a rehearsal track of some sort, I don’t know. It’s rather good, although Nocturno Culto’s (or Ted’s, whichever you’d prefer) vocals are way, way too loud in the mix and have ten times the reverb they should have. He sounds considerably constipated as well.. So, is Preparing For War worth buying? That depends. If, like me, you already have all the albums, demos and bootlegs, you’d do better tracking down tape trades of the three tracks you don’t have (that being "Eon/Thulcandra" and "Soria Moria" live in Oslo and "Iconoclasm Sweeps Cappadocia" from wherever). If you have all the records and would like a somewhat limited look at what has been going on "behind the scenes" as well as a bunch of tracks you already have, buy this and be annoyed that the cover looks terrible. However, if you don’t already have all of Darkthrone’s Peaceville material, I suggest that instead of buying this compilation, you FUCK OFF.

Written By: Angry Norse