By Monk
Now and again, just by pure fluke and accident, we stumble across a band by complete and total coincidence. Not a band with a massive PR or record company campaign behind them: just one out there, ploughing their own furrow and hoping someone picks up on what they’re doing… Such is the case with the Lyrre, whom I discovered while trawling a certain video streaming channel owned by a certain billionaire in search of clips to accompany a review… It was one of those moments that stopped me in my tracks and made me say to myself “mmm… that’s interesting…”
So, here we are, three months after making initial contact with the band, and I find myself downloading a link to their self-released debut album, in the hope that interest would indeed be justified, and my appetite to hear from this Polish collective both satiated and satisfied. I need not have worried on either account.
Despite billing themselves as a symphonic metal band, it is very clear from the opening bars of the opening, title track that Lyrre fit more comfortably into the heavy folk rock mien, with their use of traditional instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy intermingling more comfortably into the crashing guitar riffs to greater effect than the more subdued use of synthesized orchestration. That’s not to say that the album doesn’t have moments of symphonic pretension, most notably on the bombast of the likes of ‘North Star’ and ‘Divide And Conquer’, both of which also feature some battering ram riffage, but the folk elements ultimately poke through the complications.
The album’s middle third takes on a darker twist, dense folk miens intermingling with blackened riffs and swirling dervish dance rhythms as Michalina Malisz’ haunting vocals accentuate the darker themes evoked in this section of the album, one moment haunting and melancholic, the next ironically uplifting yet simultaneously unsettling. And that last word perhaps best sums up the overall experience evoked by this album, as it doesn’t settle neatly into any generic trope, but rather moves, in places unsatisfyingly, between the various planes it surfs.
Having said that, while ‘Not All Who Dream Are Asleep’ is perhaps not the best dark folk metal album you are going to hear this year (but, then, we’re less than four months in), it certainly is a more than worthy addition to the generic canon and definitely one worth exploring, especially by fans of the bleaker, darker aspects of the mien.
- ‘Not All Who Dream Are Asleep‘ is out now.
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