ILDRA - Eoelland Re-issue
Heidens Hart Records
As we all know, popular music goes through trends and metal is not free of all of that. A decade ago extreme metal had a few legitimate trends going on. I say legitimate because the hipster crap a joke and not worthy. But yeah ten years ago you had the thrash revival petering out. Old school death metal was making a come back and is still going strong today. You also had the rise of bands into pagan folk metal.
These were bands who were influenced by the olden days, especially of their native lands or, in certain circumstances, wishful thinking. The hokey terms were battle metal or viking metal. Some act were truly into their nation's folk music heritage and used it into their sound. And of course there were the true pagan folk acts who had more of a black metal heritage. This is where ILDRA comes in. When I saw their name in the promo email I thought I recognized it.
I've said it many times yes I am a fan of the whole pagan folk metal genre. I got hooked on it a decade ago when it was a trend. Of course I was already listening to bands playing that style of music prior to learning wow it's called pagan folk metal. Hell for years I just called it great music. Thank you unknown person who came up with a genre term. But anyways I went into the SFM666 archives to see if I had written about ILDRA before and the answer was no. I've got stacks of CDs on the shelf by pagan, folk, viking, battle metal bands and here's one I missed out on originally.
ILDRA's Eoelland originally came out in the Spring of 2011. It was their only full length release. Prior to it the band/artist (no one really knows other than they're/he's English) had a few demos starting out in 2004. So let's be clear they were not trendy. When I listen to this now my first thought is wow a lot of people followed along this band's pagan folk style. There's a huge amount of acoustic guitar usage. Theirs definitely some viking era Quorthon influence here. Basically post Hammerheart is what I'm referring to as well as the use of sound effects (aka: sounds of clashing battles and crashing waves).
On a whole Eoelland reminds me of GRAVELAND's latter work. I'm talking about when Rob Darken (who by the way was never into the shit he's been accused of by the pc police) went from straight up black metal to more pagan folk style. Musically everything is on the melodic scale with plenty of epicness as well as blackened room to breath. The whole release is slightly less then an hour of tremendous pagan folk music that will capture the true believers.
http://www.heidenshart.nl/
https://heidenshart.bandcamp.com/album/e-elland
No comments:
Post a Comment