Band:	Krigavar
Album:	Krigavar
Style:	Folk metal
Release date:	2009
A review by:	Bas

01. Zomerzon En Heidebloed
02. Bolverk's Verhaal
03. Odin's Lied
04. Hamer Van De Dondermaker
05. Jagersmaan
06. Wat Zullen We Drinken [bonus track]

Yeah, you knew this is an amateur pagan metal band as soon as you saw the cover. So is it good? I'm not too sure to be honest. I think the guitar work is really standard. I think the vocals, probably mainly the raspy growling type with a few clean choruses in between, aren't very remarkable, slightly under average I suppose. I think the drumming is done with a drum-machine and is mainly mid-tempo. As far as I can tell the variation within the songs is very low and I have the feeling there isn't even a tiny speck of originality on this demo, except perhaps that they're singing in Dutch (which I can only tell by the song titles anyway).

Usually I'd be able to tell you all of these things confidently. However this self-titled release has one of the worst productions I've ever heard. That's one thing I know for sure.

While listening to it I have to turn up the volume twice as loud as usual to hear anything at all. Even then there are parts of it where I can't even tell for sure if they even use electric guitars or not. Often it's only folk instruments and vocals and the drumming somewhere in the back. Sometimes the bass guitar is way too loud in the mix, sometimes it's rather the opposite. It's a fact that it's very well possible to get a good production on self-produced material nowadays. However this demo has a sound-quality to it that not even Norwegian black metal bands from the early 90s would have wanted to disfigure their songs with. Trying to see through the mists of bad sound and discovering the music hidden underneath, I only found them to be a under average, genre-typical band in a metal style that has too many bands playing it anyway.