Review Summary: Finntroll maintains their outlandish approach to folk metal, while showing some maturity and writing the catchiest music of their career.
Finntroll. Their name alone is quite questionable. Ever since their first release, they’ve done very little to progress their sound. They’ve always been a superbly zany band, that served nothing more than to listen to something different than the common rabble for once. Finally, Finntroll is truly back and with a vengeance. Without losing any sort of their certainly unique sound, they’ve release what is their most considerably catchy album to date. The album in itself is simply one giant song, but doesn’t suffer from the burden of growing old. Highly recommended with large quantities of ale, very loud speaker systems, and a few friends - Blodsvept is Finntroll’s first step to perfecting the sound they’ve been so close yet out of touch with.
Let’s be bold, and go out on a limb to say that Blodsvept should be categorised as folk-power-zany party metal with black metal influences. Every part on the album serves its part to the whole, and varies from downright insane fun to serious black-party-folk metal, as with track three, När Jättar Marschera [When Giants March]. Aside from being a part of the whole, every song is still distinctly its own entity, and they all use their own arsenal of instruments. It’s almost absurd to say that Blodsvept is a
stale album. Even if they take just about every catchy tune imaginable in the folk genre, it all flows terrifically. Folk musicianship at its best.
However, Finntroll does need to work on much before they can obtain their full potential. The first and foremost is learning control. As well as the album flows together, the band needs to learn how to create a barrage of different emotions, and how to use more scales. Create more diminishing patterns, to show emotions of atonement, emotions of loss, and emulate the feeling of unadulterated evil. To create a more distinct story rather than a mere adventure. Man vs. Wild, and Christianity vs. Atheism aren’t wars fought by those with smiles on their faces. None of this matters, however, as nothing on the album is in English. If you cannot understand the lyrics, then simply assume they’re about Johan Nord fighting a Giant Sabre Cat in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with a rock and a few smiles, then the music all makes sense.
Pros:
(+) Superb, positive feeling music.
(+) Decent production.
(+) Superb songwriting.
Cons:
(-) Music doesn’t fit the lyrical approach.
(-) Scandinavian language, hard to understand for even native speakers.
