Band:	Kvaen
Album:	The Funeral Pyre
Style:	Melodic black metal
Release date:	February 28, 2020
A review by:	nikarg

01. Revenge By Fire
02. Yee Naaldlooshii
03. The Funeral Pyre
04. Septem Peccata Mortalia
05. The Wolves Throne
06. As We Serve The Masters Plan
07. Bestial Winter
08. Hymn To Kvenland

Blashyrkh is so nineties, welcome to Kvenland.

Jakob Björnfot (Autumn: Death, ex-The Duskfall) is the multi-instrumentalist behind this one-man band and on Kvaen's debut full-length he is joined by some very talented guest musicians, particularly drummers, since Jakob plays everything on here but the drums. The Funeral Pyre blends Swedish melodic black metal with second-wave Norwegian black metal and '80s thrash/speed metal, but Kvaen is really its own blizzard beast playing music that brings the glaciers, the darkness, and the fog of the Nordic lands inside your living room.

I first listened to the album a little over a month ago, following a recommendation of the fellow Metalstormer that lives at the northernmost corner of Europe, and I was impressed with it as a whole from the beginning. However, it took me a while to actually spin the whole album and I sincerely have no idea how many times (more than a dozen and I am not exaggerating) I put "Revenge By Fire" on repeat before deciding to move on to the other tracks. In my humble opinion, this song is absolute perfection as far as melodic black metal goes; it has an opening riff that sounds as if a swarm of wild African bees have invaded the Scandinavian woods and it becomes even more memorable when you later hear it with tremolo picking, it features a melody that portrays all the emotional and physical isolation of the northern winter, and then it breaks into a pure thrash attack, first with groove and later with blast, before coming full circle with the aforementioned melodic hook.

Moving on to the rest of the album, you realise that by the end of the second track, "Yee Naaldlooshii", you have heard the word 'fire' more times than you can count with both of your hands' fingers. Not in vain though, because this piece of music does breathe fire across a frostbitten landscape, with ferocious howls cutting through the northern darkness, thundering drums emulating the chest beating of winter demons, and surging riffs spawned in icy dungeons, paired with blazing leads that soar high over snow-covered realms. Most of the songs storm their way in, with "The Wolves Throne" being the exception that offers a few minutes of slowing down. Ingenious moments such as the outro solo of the title track, the thrash pummeling and the neoclassical solo in the middle of "Septem Peccata Mortalia" or the galloping epicness also in the middle of "As We Serve The Masters Plan" are only a few of the hooks that this album is full of.

The instrumental closer, "Hymn To Kvenland", gives a sense of fulfilment, as if you have reached the kingdom in the north after a wild ride through white landscapes, and you can actually picture Jakob Björnfot soloing away in the distance, under the aurora borealis.

The Funeral Pyre is the raging fire that eternally burns at the foot of mountains whose peaks are shaped by winter storms, and it is where all the blackened hearts go to die.

"Here in the dead cold lies no peace
No fire will melt the ice you breathe"