Elffor "Malkhedant" CD Slipcase

Reissue of Elffor's 7th album with new artwork and two exclusive bonus tracks.
Slipcase CD with 8 page booklet including a poster.

I've only recently become familiar with Elffor, the one-man project from Basque, which I assume is a province in Spain. Overall I like what I've heard so far in Heriotz Sustraiak, Unblessed Woods and so on. A very strong Summoning element and strong conceptual direction exemplified greatly, or cheesily, in Elffor's cover art which exclusively and persistently features frontman Eol in black metal garb usually holding chains in the left hand and some sort of sickle or axe in the other propels this work and kept me interested. As with previous releases, the lyrics are primarily in Basque, an indigenous proto-European language native to this songwriters homeland.
As another reviewer mentioned, Malkhedant is significantly more infused with traditional black metal elements than his previous work. However, I wouldn't agree that this takes away from the music all that much as those elements have been present, and even dominant before such as in Heriotz. A definite early highlight is the shift from this more traditional black metal sound into a medieval atmosphere during the song “Gerlarien Kondairak” where keyboards and clean vocals are first introduced as a major element that is more consistent in the following songs. In this two or three minute section screeching guitars and howling low end vocals fall away to reveal clean female vocals and a delicately patterned keyboard tone that transported me back to times of medieval splendor. This section likely influenced the cover artwork which again features Eol on horseback, this time a plague-ridden dark ages setting.
Eol is clearly a very skilled and talented producer of black metal at this point and should be regarded alongside the likes of Werwolf and Rob Darken in terms of sheer technical accomplishment. I doubt that he will though, since this style of epic/depressive music doesn't appeal to even a majority of black metal fans. Their loss is my gain, of course.
As far as downsides to the album go, all I can say is that I'm not the hugest fan of the shrieking vocals and I feel like they sort of take away from what feel like Eol's best assets vocally, there being his low-end rasp and that haunting sort of Bathory-viking chant that pops up towards the end of the record. That's just my personal preference in extreme metal vocals though, and I also feel like the last song “Eldhr” might be a little redundant until it's fadeout and wall of male-choir vocals make me again reflect if not long for a buried past of battles and triumph.

Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...