Nuclear Blast – 2012 – Switzerland
The new album from this Swiss band is truly a masterpiece of Celtic Folk Metal. I don’t like to use this term and specially, I don’t like to combine it with the word masterpiece in times like this when this Subgenre is becoming so trendy, but in this case I have no other choice. Eluveitie gives more quality music than most of the bands from this Subgenre and they do it a lot better than most of them. On this album are 17 tracks from which some of them are more some kind of bridges between songs. These bridges are only some instrumentals or they have some speeches in them. This gives to the entire album a very nice touch and makes it like some kind of journey into ancient times. You can listen to this album in a row without skipping songs and still, you want to hear it again. It also would be useless to pick some songs out of it and just listen to them. Off course, not all the songs are good as some others, but it doesn’t mean that they are bad and in case of this album to skip. “Scorched Earth” is a perfect example for how the bridges between the songs give to the entire album a special touch. In this song you can hear some samples of wind with some melancholic and mourning vocals while in the back of it, you can hear from time to time bagpipes and underneath that all the is something from the keyboard which reminds me of some old Mortiis. It sounds like a song that would perfectly fit on the “Braveheart OST”. This song is like a moments of calmness before and after the storm between two fast songs. I won’t go now into it by speaking about every song from this album, but I have to speak about some of them. “A Rose for Epona” is a track which reminds me a bit of some new Within Temptation. It is one of the calmest songs here on this album and surely it will be a great hit among the fans, but I have my problems with that Within Temptation touch in this song because I am not a fan of the new sound from this Dutch band. All in all, I guess that this will be one of the albums that will mark this year and that it will open a lots of new doors for this band.
8/10
