Reviewing albums in a half-decent fashion, like a great many things in life, can be anything from the equivalent to finding a long-hidden secret compartment in an impossibly complex desk full of nooks and crannies, to propositions so blunt and straightforward that if they were people, they’d be borderline rude. Having reviewed a lot of the former type lately, and thus spent hours poring over minutiae that put an album in one genre over another, it’s actually quite fun to find myself with one of the latter. And as simple, straightforward albums, with a single, easily explained USP go, Viking War Trance is an absolute belter.
While I do want to point out that neither of the above categories is inherently better than the other (I own and love plenty on both sides), one of my very specific joys in life, both as a metalhead and as a reviewer, is the occasional album that tells you exactly what it is in early on, and then proceeds to be that one, simple, uncomplicated thing from start to finish, usually with a fair bit of welly involved. I reviewed an album like this last year by a band called Heathen Foray, which was called Oathbreaker, and it was exactly the same sort of thing – I understood the album in its entirety within the first ten seconds, and while I greatly enjoyed it, there were no surprises, no hidden meanings, no subtext, just a superb chunk of loud, brash neopagan-ish metal, that’s almost certainly better live.
Eihwar have actually taken this a step further if you can believe that, because I didn’t even have to listen to the fabled ten seconds. Based on the band name, the album name, and the press blurb alone, I knew what I was getting into here. In fact, the picture painted was so vivid that I promptly didn’t touch the album for a week, for fear that it wouldn’t live up to the image it had presented to me. After all, it really wouldn’t be the first time an album has made spectacular and fantastical promises of this sort, only to turn out to be a fairly mid sort of completely ordinary metal. In a review sense specifically, I seem to spend half my life wondering if whoever wrote the blurb and/or named the album were even listening to the same thing that got sent to me, because I’ve seen some pretty incredible discrepancies on that front over the years. Like Altari last year, and their allegedly completely normal, unremarkable, straight black metal album, that was regular, ordinary black metal in the same way that I can totally take or leave Alcest.
As for Eihwar, the promises made by the press blurb in particular, were pretty big ones. They (or possibly their record label/PR company) describe their musical offerings as “festive and furious neo-viking music whose primal force is based on technoid machines, mixed with trance vocals, shamanic drums and traditional Nordic sounds”. Which, if true, would certainly put them in a fairly unique corner of metal. They also go out of their way to make sure you know that they don’t take themselves too seriously, which is always a good sign when it comes to certain flavours of metal in my experience: “Many bands have explored the Pagan & Norse worlds over the last 15 years seeking atmospheric, acoustic and ritual sounds with great seriousness. This is not the path EIHWAR chose. Although the musicians of Eihwar are virtuosos in their acoustic traditional instruments, their goal is to bring some fun… and as much chaos as possible during their concerts, provoking the craziest trance on dancefloors”.
All of which sounds like a damn good time, to put it mildly.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Eihwar are going to be everyone’s cup of tea – I’m not convinced they’ll appeal to a majority (or even a significant minority) of the metal scene. But if the words “Viking War Trance” have piqued your interest, and you desperately want this to be the album that that title implies: firstly, hi. You’re clearly my kind of people. Secondly, I am genuinely and unspeakably delighted to be able to tell you that it is indeed the album it promises to be.
Which makes it a slightly strange proposition to review really, because there’s nothing here that needs picking apart while I attempt to describe what’s going on musically in ever-increasingly esoteric metaphors. It is what it is, and exactly as presented, to an almost bloody-minded degree. A spade is a spade, and Viking War Trance is a Viking War Trance album, who knew? Eihwar already know exactly who they are, what they’re about, and what they’re doing, so there really isn’t a huge amount to do as a reviewer beyond say that their self-description is exceptionally accurate, they do the whole Viking War Trance thing very well indeed, and I really rather like it. It hasn’t changed my life, but not every album has to – sometimes it’s just about having very loud, slightly surreal fun, that lets you escape from everything for about an hour. The trancey beats on this album have proved absolutely superlative at lodging in my brain and keeping me distracted from pretty much anything and everything else around me, while the traditional Nordic elements in the vocals and instruments are really, really well done.
So yeah, there isn’t really much else to say about it really. It’s weird, it’s a lot of fun, it’s exactly as described, it’s very well executed, and it’s…Viking War Trance.
(8/10 Ellie)
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