Band:	Brymir
Album:	Wings Of Fire
Style:	Extreme folk metal
Release date:	March 06, 2019
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Gloria In Regum
02. Wings Of Fire
03. Ride On, Spirit
04. Sphere Of Halcyon
05. And So We Age
06. Hails From The Edge
07. Starportal
08. Vanquish The Night
09. Lament Of The Ravenous
10. Chasing The Skyline
11. Anew [feat. Noora Louhimo]
12. Reaver [Japanese bonus]
13. Skyline Instrumental [Japanese bonus]

Guitarist Joona Björkroth joined Battle Beast in the wake of Anton Kabanen's unceremonious departure, the point at which some fans began to despair that the Finnish sextet had become too poppy, that the "Beast" was gone. Well, first of all, shut up, because the new stuff is good, too [read: better]. But if No More Hollywood Endings is still too Hollywood for you, Brymir can offer five times the Beast.

On first stepping into Wings Of Fire, it might seem unwarranted to draw the comparison to Battle Beast in the first place. Where Battle Beast takes a strictly traditional approach to heavy metal in the midst of dalliances with sugary pop music, Brymir deals with a whole different dimension of heaviness. Wings Of Fire is first and foremost an exemplar of the extreme power metal style that has become Finland's trademark over the years: you'll hear pieces of Wintersun, Kalmah, and Whispered (minus the Japanese stuff, obviously) littering the place with epic blastbeat choruses, sanguine choirs chanting big words, alternating coarse and clean vocals - the whole glacier.

In fact, Brymir has more aggressive tendencies than many other artists in this style; within the shrouds of choirs, keys, and strings lie the bones of songs more brooding and deathly than anything Ensiferum or Children Of Bodom would be expected to write. "Ride On, Spirit" borrows the ominous brass of Septicflesh between blooms of cold choruses, and time after time the swarms of stabbing strings prove themselves more than the window dressing that they are for so many other bands. The band sometimes pushes into death metal when it drops the orchestrations entirely, and the occasional twist of a chord suggests black metal. When not as downright heavy, Wings Of Fire dips into an Insomnium-like atmosphere, a vein of melancholy that runs in the midst of these grand melodies and shows itself in the dreaminess of synths and the frigid indifference of certain choral parts. This sometimes manifests itself as a lighter, post-hardcore sort of sound, as on "Lament Of The Ravenous," when the dreaminess kicks up a little into higher registers.

But Wings Of Fire does have a sweet tooth: there are the dancing synths in the title track, the continuous epic velocity, and the catchy opener that begs to be played on a big stage. The sound is thick with layers of vocals and keys that outfit these heavy songs in attractive trim. There are certain cosmetic similarities in the keys and guitars such that "Hails From The Edge" doesn't sound at times like too much of an abstraction from that most accessible side of Battle Beast that they've been exploring recently. Perhaps it's nothing more than the sense that there's a common creative voice in these projects. It could also be that by this time I've simply lost my ability to distinguish between genres of music as long as there's a catchy chorus involved. Whatever the case, Wings Of Fire will likely be satisfactory to someone who can appreciate both the heaviest and most melodic sides of power metal.