Artist: Skyforger
Title: Kurbads
Type: Album
Label: Metal Blade Records

I have to admit that the first few listens to this left me wanting to put the boot in after weighing up several things about the album. Luckily the music has grown on me and ‘Kurbads’ is not a bad album. My main problem in saying this is that then again, it’s not particularly a good Skyforger album. This is their first release in seven years, although the Latvians have been active during that time live and have played some corking shows that I have seen and enjoyed. There have been a couple of line up changes, a guitarist and backing vocalist who plays much of the more traditional instruments in the band, nothing too drastic though and the core of the group remains intact. They bowed out with two excellent albums in 2003, ‘Thunderforge’ an incredibly serious folk metal album and the evocative and more traditional ‘Swordsong.’ I always looked on this group as one of the more serious bands playing this type of music and was a bit alarmed on listening to new album Kurbads. Well the group are now on a major label Metal Blade for a start, then one looks at the album art and it kind of speak for itself and is in a word childish rather than serious. The idea behind the album is thematically recreating in musical form legends from the 19th Century centred around mans fight against mythical forces or as Henry Rollins would sum up ‘Hero Time.’

Then you get to the music itself and it struck me as all a bit jolly, mead swigging stuff with lots of horns designed to make the mittelalter festival crowd go mad. Looking at festival dates coming up for the band I have to wonder if they have perhaps changed their game plan a bit in order to appeal to more people and have to say playing this back to back with ‘Thunderforge’ I know which side of the band I prefer.

I really am not enamoured with opener ‘Curse Of The Witch’ which comes in with wolves howling and Predator sounding croaks. It sounds like a different band with rock star guitar solos and guttural vocals. It just seems to try too hard to sound heavy \\metal// for its own good. The more traditional ‘Son Of The Mare’ pipes up with a solid hey nonny nonny melody flirting with a fist pumping mindset. Yep it certainly is the sort of thing designed to get you swilling mead and banging your head to the delirious flute sections. I do feel myself being a bit of a killjoy as perhaps with the exception of the opener, on the whole this is a good fun album. It doesn’t have much of the former original spark of the band behind it though and it is a case of party metal, which is undeniably going to go down like a lead balloon with some of their older fans. On the plus side I would like to catch the band with a beer or six inside me live and there is no denying the head banging bravado behind full pelt songs like ‘The Devilslayer.’ Right where did I stash my kilt?

http://www.skyforger.lv
http://www.myspace.com/skyforgerofficial