moonsorrow varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa

Released: 21 February 2011 Label: Spinefarm

Finnish epic-metal band Moonsorrow's latest release Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa is their sixth full length album, and as the title translates into "As shadows we wander in the land of the dead," you can well imagine that plenty of musical jolliness awaits.

It's shameful really, as I am a big fan of Finnish music, that this CD is my first experience of Moonsorrow, and I have to say that it is a monumentally powerful, yet instantly accessible slab of symphonic pagan folk prog metal.

If it didn't already exist, you'd have to invent the genre! It's almost as if this CD provides a soundtrack to the most brutal and uncompromising sword and sorcery film that has never been made.

There are actually only four songs on this release, albeit rather long ones clocking in between twelve and sixteen minutes each, with the remainder of the tracks being ambient atmospheric interludes, and largely consisting of the sound of booted feet trudging through snow, as the bleak winds of the tundra whip at coughing fur-clad figures as they march towards the battlefields.

The opener Tähdetön is certainly an epic of some magnitude. It is a melodic, but still chuggingly heavy track which builds in multiple layers of well-composed intensity. There's even a jaunty folk middle-section which adds an extra level of scope. The riffs are huge-sounding, the production impressive and everything about the sound is larger than life, and this kind of full-on approach, makes the album so evocative.

Huuto begins with some fabulous acoustic atmospherics before exploding into an enormous wall of heathen carnage. The track combines a crunchingly elegant rhythmic chord-pattern, with soaring orchestration, giving it the epic sweep of a movie soundtrack.

The album closer is another slow moving sprawling epic, lumbering over the frosted and blood stained landscape like an inexorable juggernaut of metal. The drums are pretty frenetic even if the music itself maintains a measured pace.

This album is not a riff-fest by any means; rather, each song's structure takes a number of musical phrases and explores them in depth, with different tempos, and orchestral arrangements, getting as much power and atmosphere as possible from the compositions.

Overall this is a most impressive album, it sounds huge, it's instantly likeable, and the riffs are both awesome and satisfyingly heavy.

by Steven Hargraves