By Monk
There are very moments in life, whether it be that of an individual or a wider entity such as a band, that can and could be described as “defining”. For Heri Joensen, founder, frontman and main creative force behind Viking metallians Týr it could be argued that one such moment – a musical epiphany, if you want – came when he made the decision to team with the symphony orchestra of his native Faroe Islands and discovered that he could, indeed, team his love of both classical music and folk metal into a glorious, homogeneous, symbiotic singular entity, which now has resulted in, almost five years of traumatic labour later, not only the band’s most ambitious and bravest album but also its most declarative, most cohesive and most cogent to date.
The above preamble should not indicate in any way that Týr have strayed too far from their roots and transformed themselves into something completely different from that with which we have become familiar over the past two decades. Far from it, as ‘Battle Ballads’ delivers everything we should expect from a Týr album, or any album by an artist working in the progressive folk metal genre, as many of the miens and tropes are still as omnipresent as a warhammer hanging over the skull of a vanquished foe. It’s just that Joensen has taken things to the next level and at the same time managed, both eloquently and expertly, to achieve the finest of balancing acts…
And that is to produce an album that, at one and the same time, sounds huge yet simplistic, delivering massive sweeping soundscapes yet doing so without any sense of needlessly grandiose pomposity. The (admittedly synthesized) orchestrations, often discreetly lurking in the background, accentuate and complement the more hard-hitting metallic moments with subtle confidence and alluring alacrity.
The approach is best exemplified on my favourite track, the beautifully crafted and atmospheric lament of ‘Torkils Døtur’, which dominates the middle of the album with its combination of traditional folk, blackened thematic, crashing harmonics and simply captivating layering of contrasting yet strangely compounded complementary dynamics. An awesome track to which I have been returning time again for deeper aural exploratons…
This is an album that well and truly lives up its name in respects of both words contained therein: music which provides the heroic soundtrack for historic victories on blood soaked battlefields and also for the subsequent victory feasts with the triumphant warriors regaled with tales of their feats of bravery and bravura by ever eloquent and flattering bards.
- ‘Battle Ballads‘ is released today (Friday 12 April).
- ‘Best Of – The Napalm Years’ is released on 31 May.
- All content © Über Rock. Not to be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Über Rock.