Atmospheric Black Martial Metal With Ukranian Ethnic Folk Elements
This is THE Hate Forest album, the masterpiece that perfectly sumarizes everything they stand for: Honor, Pride, Land and the struggle of their people. With 4 traditional folk songs and 3 black metal songs, one might wonder if they're not getting less Hate Forest in this release. Well, you're not, since the folk songs make a total of 8 minutes, more or less, while the black metal ones make for 30 minutes of pure war. And I mean "war" in the true sense.
Leaving the folk tracks for last, let us concentrate on the black metal, the true reason we all got this release. The guitars are great, with long, kind-of depressive, and yet so full of pride, riffs, that also let out a shriek of ukranian folk on some moments. The drums are completely different from previous HF releases. The drumming is now more slow, completely militaristic, like the ones found in Martial bands like Arditi, Von Thronstahl and others of the genre. On the other hands, the vocals remain the same: deep growls and great shrieks from Roman and Thurios, both sounding like two ghosts in the fucking battlefield that the music creates, or maybe as narrators of the events that unfold. I don't know a word of ukranian, so I don't know what they tell.
On to the folk songs, they consist of women singing traditional ukranian songs. The first three are great, and really set the mood for the bm tracks, some being sang with a choir of women, which gives a sense of home and company, while one is only a woman, singing alone with a voice full of grief, as if she misses her dear husband. The last song is, in my opinion, the one flaw of this album. It's the most irritating thing I ever heard, because there are women talking, and one really tuneless drunk lady singing, which pisses me off really bad.
In a few final words, this is the greatest album I ever heard, with only that one final flaw, but since you can stop the music after the "Glare Over Slavonic Lands", it's okay. If you like atmospheric bm and bands like Arditi, you need this right away!
Sample:
youtube.com/watch?v=Z4TMYwLOSGA&list=RDZ4TMYwLOSGA&start_radio=1
