Band:	Finsterforst
Album:	Zerfall
Style:	Pagan folk metal
Release date:	August 2019

01. Wut
02. Zerfall
03. Fluch Des Seins
04. Weltenbrand
05. Ecce Homo

A 36-minutes-long song! Take that, Moonsorrow!

Finsterforst used to be one of Moonsorrow's clones, and while they found their own sound in the meantime, it is still Moonsorrow who they are closest to with their long epic blackened folk songs. They did get more and more of a sense of identity which culminated with 2015's Mach Dich Frei. But after that, I was a bit worried that it would be hard to take them seriously anymore, with their music being so sober and all, after... you know... so I expected not be able to fully connect with the album's atmospheres after hearing this same band cover a Miley Cyrus song. Turns out I was wrong.

Zerfall pushed the boundaries of how long a Finsterforst album could be, but they've always been over 70 minutes in runtime, and Zerfall is only longer than the next longest one by like three minutes, it is the longest nonetheless. And similar to ...Zum Tode Hin, it is spread out across five tracks, but unlike it, it's not as evenly spread with the gargantuan closing track that I referenced in the intro, "Ecce Homo". And obviously with such a runtime, it's reasonable to question whether the material is spread too thin and forcefully elongated. Yes, some parts do feel like they drag on for a bit, but there really isn't much that I'd really wanna cut from it. Instead, the small number of tracks makes the album flow much better as a whole with track transitions not being very noticeable. This makes the immersion into the album's atmosphere much deeper, so much so that the runtime feels almost justified because of how immersive it is.

"Epic" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, which made it lose some of its meaning, but if it's fit anywhere, it is here. A lot of it is due to the choir-like vocals, but even without those and at its most straightforwardly metal, there's a lot of emphasis on creating a massive sound through the guitars and keyboards. The music being so intricate helps a lot, as it always feels like there is something important going on in the music, instead of just filler. There's plenty of variation in pace and in the melodies and between instruments that keeps the music from ever getting boring by focusing too much on just maintaining an atmosphere. Thus, Zerfall hits two birds with one stone. The music is both engaging due to how well it is arranged, and immersive due to it feeling like a cohesive piece with a lot of atmosphere.

Sure, not much has changed in the sound from the last album, and the accordion still feels underused, but despite the lack of difference Zerfall feels like it has such a greater scope, as if it amplified everything that made them great before. They may have bit a bit more than they could chew at points, but moments like that are rare in between some of the best music that they've written.