Eluveitie - Slania (Album)
Eluveitie’s new album, Slania, is a masterpiece. I will open with that statement and stand by it. Having not heard of the Swedish 8-piece before, I was a little apprehensive when I first played their music. Described simply as ‘folk metal’, an always-touchy category, I was envisaging just another watered-down metal band, perhaps with a few acoustic instruments thrown. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.
The album cover for Slania is unmistakably pagan-metal, with a child in black robes holding a sword on the banks of a barren lake. On the back of the album, the band falls for the stereotypical metal posing-in-a-forest shot, but actually makes it look good through the addition of traditional Celtic robes, bows and arrows, ram’s heads, and other such old semi-mythical objects. The song listing on the back threw me for a while, and it was only when I played the album that I really understood – rather than the standard tracks 1-12, Eluveitie have created 99 tracks to carry their twelve tunes; each track averages around 30 seconds in length, and they fit together seamlessly to create a 50-minute album of 12 songs. Eluveitie’s way of being different with a completely standardised industry tool – interesting eh.
To the music. ‘Folk metal’ bands often (very often) have the problem of balancing the folk with the metal; either the band will get derision from hardened metalheads, or there isn’t enough tradition and variation in there to earn the ‘folk’ tag. However, ‘Folk metal’ is not nearly an adequate description for Slania. ‘Celtic pagan death metal’ is better, but still doesn’t do Slania justice; the album is an explosion of raw power. Hard, fast, heavy playing at high technical standards generates a spinning vortex of driving drum beats (which are often amazing on their own) and flowing guitar riffs. This, coupled with some of the best vocal screams and shouts I’ve ever heard in a band, create songs better than thousands of dedicated metal groups. And it’s all perfectly balanced by the folk instruments. Intertwined in each song, forming part of the metal, are whistles, panpipes, bagpipes, flutes, violins, and traditional instruments such as the bodhràn and the hurdy gurdy. The complex weave of each song is undeniably pagan folk, yet pure, powerful, beautiful metal. Tracks such as Inis Mona blow me away every time I hear them.
There are many acoustic solos in Slania, in songs such as Bloodstained Ground, and even the completely traditional Anagantios, which are quite good in their own right. However it is the perfect combination of vocals (in ancient Gaulish I might add), metal and folk that makes Eluveitie transcends the normal work of folk-metal bands. Imagine Moonspell with greater melodic range, Finntroll with many more true folk elements, or Moonsorrow, quite simply, on crack. This might give you some appreciation for the epic majesty of Slania.
