Månegarm - Vargstenen

This material is amazing !

Extremely underrated... A great mixture between acoustic, folk and melodic black metal

I listen to a lot of Viking/Folk metal, and the genre is over-saturated. That being said, this album should not rank as highly as it does here. There are albums from Amon Amarth, Equilibrium, Windir, Nokturnal Mortem, even Svartsot that smash this album to peices. The instrumentation is just okay, and the vocals...shudder. They made me cringe every time the lead tried to "sing." He should stick to screaming and leave the clean singing to the backup vocalist who can actually, ya know, sing. Awful. I give this album a 5. It's not terrible, but the vocals in particular just kill the whole thing for me.

Its blackisg folk, nothing whit BM, and a bit neo folk elements, if we know evolution its not bad, but I think next one must be in old school BM touch
btw a bit sounds like Falkoner?

Written by flightoficarus on 10.10.2014 at 17:00

I listen to a lot of Viking/Folk metal, and the genre is over-saturated. That being said, this album should not rank as highly as it does here. There are albums from Amon Amarth, Equilibrium, Windir, Nokturnal Mortem, even Svartsot that smash this album to peices. The instrumentation is just okay, and the vocals...shudder. They made me cringe every time the lead tried to "sing." He should stick to screaming and leave the clean singing to the backup vocalist who can actually, ya know, sing. Awful. I give this album a 5. It's not terrible, but the vocals in particular just kill the whole thing for me.

Wouldn't say that copycat Equilibrium smahes this album plus this isn't best album what this band has to offer.

Possibly their heaviest and arguably most blackened release in their discography, but not necessarily their best I'd say. Pretty solid blackened folk album overall but the title track "Vargstenen" is the clear highlight for me, standing out head and shoulders above the rest of the songs.