One of my favourite things about reviewing metal albums – and there are many – are those moments when you’ve spent so long poring over a single album that you’re temporarily sick to the back teeth of it and anything like it, only to open your next album and find something completely and utterly different. Having spent the last few weeks reviewing albums in various black, doomy and deathy veins, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciated Requiem for Eirênê kicking off with an organ. For starters, folk metal is an old love that I don’t listen to half as much as I used to, but also there is such thing as too much of any one genre, and it’s always nice to hurtle round one of those musical hairpin turns that metal is so very good at, and settle into something made temporarily new and shiny.
And as openers go, A Moment Approaches Eternity is a damn good one. It’s not quite as clean a break with my recent reviews as first impressions implied, as a crashing chunk of doom heft lands on you a minute or so in, but in all other aspects, it’s quite the palette cleanser. It also sets Isenordal’s stall out not only very early on, but also pretty accurately, in that it’s frankly difficult to know what you’re listening to. Like, I can name the component parts, but I don’t really have a name for the whole thing. Ye olde Encyclopaedia Metallum describes them as pagan black/doom, to which I can only say yes, but also no? I can see where the description’s come from, but like so many things in life, there’s more to it than that.
For starters, there’s that organ, which is a criminally underused instrument in metal as a whole (shoutout to Satyricon’s I En Svart Kiste), there’s gently meandering, classical strings, there’s delicate female vocals, there’s slightly off-kilter melodies, there’s stately groove riffs accompanying chattering harsh vocals. Then there’s the absolute juggernaut that is the overall sound. This album does not care who you are, what you think of it, and it gives even less of a fuck how you feel about coming along for the ride that is Requiem for Eirênê, it just continues, relentlessly, inexorably, and you can either proceed with Isenordal, or get out of the way.
Moving on from the beast that was the opener, Await Me, Ultima Thule achieves a similarly mammoth sound, but with more vocals, harmonising, a slower pace, and more doom than you can shake a stick at. I’m having flashbacks to the time at the Damnation Festival preshow where Celeste basically punched me in the chest with one of their warmup riffs (before I’d even fully entered the room, no less) and what followed was the one of the most delightful sonic bludgeonings I’ve ever experienced. I staggered out to the smoking area afterwards feeling like I’d been beaten up, and it was glorious. So far much of Requiem for Eirênê seems to be in much the same vein: music that you don’t so much hear as physically feel. Somehow even the sparser parts, consisting of little more than vocals, lilting melodies and far-off drums, have just as much heft behind them. This creates a slightly odd effect when the faster, heavier, generally more brutal side of this track kicks in towards the end, because despite being just generally significantly more of everything, it’s somehow less heavy than what came before.
And then, just as it could all become too much, the floor abruptly falls out of it all, and we get the title track: five minutes of what is essentially pure baroquey folk, with only the faintest of metal sensibilities. It’s both gorgeous and a welcome respite, but it also makes me slightly wary that Isenordal are going to happen to me harder than ever once it’s over.
And yes, of course they do. Epiphanies of Abhorrence and Futility flirts with more organ and strings pleasantries for a short while, then that crushing, multifaceted doom plus god knows what sound lands squarely back on your head, with the sort of weight that feels like it should give you a solid neck-ache. What follows is in places lighter and more varied, but the doom facet lurks throughout and is ultimately never far away. Then, as the final ringing notes of track four hang in the air over breathy, murmured vocals, the final behemoth of the album growls into life.
Starting with riffs that sit somewhere between Sabbath and traditional black, Saturnine Apotheosis initially continues in much the same vein as its predecessors, which is still very well put together, but maybe just a little repetitive at this point. The gently snarling harsh vocals giving way to straight folky voices is a nice touch though, even if they do fade out a bit too…politely given how sinister they sound. As the track progresses towards the end, mournful strings, faraway vocals and scuzz give the feel of a procession. Not necessarily a funereal one, but certainly sombre, and possibly not entirely what it seems. Think earnest folky sorrows, hemmed in by oppressive woods, with just enough of the Wicker Man (the original – behave) about it to be entirely pleasant. Pretty melodies trudge across something darker and more guttural in the background, which threatens to overwhelm the delicate balance at any moment.
Then, it all goes a bit proggy, and the last few minutes are an increasingly frantic (by doom standards, anyway) whirl of all the above elements charging towards – fittingly enough – apotheosis. Finally, as suddenly as it picked you up an hour earlier, it’s gone. On exactly the same note as it started no less, which if you’re like me and you put everything on repeat, sort of deposits you back at the beginning and leaves you a little discombobulated.
So, there we have it, the…experience that is Requiem for Eirênê. I still feel like I didn’t so much listen to this album so much as give in before it ran me over and carried on – with or without me. It’s a curious mix of genres and musical elements that I’m at least familiar with individually, but not so much when they’re all mixed up together like this. It’s very well done and put together, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants a searingly heavy, doomy album to keep the world at bay for an hour (I’ve already recommended it to the friend I was at that Celeste set with). With that in mind, I don’t know that this is necessarily going to enter regular rotation, but for those moments when I actively want to be crushed under the sheer weight of such an album, it definitely works.
(8/10 Ellie)
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