Review
The Last Stand is Sabaton's most streamlined record, and that tidiness is both why it works and why it stops short of their best. Most of the ten songs run a little over three minutes, leaving little room for detours: riff, chorus, next riff, with the arrangements rarely pausing to breathe.
Keyboards carry more weight here than on earlier albums, sometimes sitting level with the guitars and sometimes standing in for them. The spoken diary passage slows the momentum briefly before The Lost Battalion picks it back up. Choral layers thicken the refrains, and the drumming never lets up. Where guitar solos appear, they do more of the expressive work than the riffs.
This anniversary package mostly serves completists. The bonus tracks, two of them covers, are uneven, and the live footage from the 2016 Sabaton Open Air show is more valuable as a document of the band at that moment than as a reason to replay the album. Newcomers will find the strongest case in the opening stretch; longtime listeners get a tidy collection rather than a reappraisal.
