Poor old Siegfried, he’s not really been the same since Roy got bitten in the neck by one of their tigers has he? Nope not that one? Oh right a band from Austria with a bit of a daft name then. They could have called themselves Wolfgang after their guitarist perhaps, that would have been just as silly! Hold on though, there is a reason for this moniker. After all was Siegfried not also the legendary slayer of dragons and the hero of epic poem Nibelungenlied aka The Song of the Nibelungs and also the same hero played homage to by Richard Wagner in his ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ opera cycle? Well this is the crux of the matter and we have somewhat mad Austrians playing their own interpretation of this heroic saga. It’s taken a while too since ‘Eisenwinter’ in 2003 which at the time I reviewed and enjoyed. I have also in the past had a bit of a fiddle with Wagner’s Ring so know roughly where they are coming from and was intrigued by this being put in a metal concept. One would expect flamboyance, bravado, pomposity, absurdity and theatricality here really and yes, in a way that’s exactly what you get.

This is not quite as grand and overbearing as one would perhaps expect if say Therion went about it, I was surprised on plopping this album on to find it having a running time of only 43 minutes. Therion would no doubt have employed several large orchestras and done it over a 2-3 hour triple album and as for Wagner himself…. Well in his defence it did take him 26 years to complete.

I am pretty sure the austere intro to opener ‘Der Ring Der Nibelungen’ is directly reinterpreted from Wagner but doubt he would have ever anticipated quite what is to come next. Basically we get a galloping musical assault and no less than three singers joining in the melee, two males adopting clean and harsh and one female in the form of Sandra Schleret who maybe familiar as she is also the current voice of Elis (whose new CD this also turned up with). Orchestration is subtle and heroic and is not over the top like it could be and this actually adopts a style that owes parts black metal as well as the expected power metal range that one may have expected, this makes it more than listenable in my book rather than a cheese-fest that would have instantly been flung at the bin (sorry I mean other writer). ‘Fafnir’ with its symphonic zeal and rasping sinister vocals emphasises this brutal edge and the clean vocals joining in really marry these two styles together well. The spoken growls sound a bit like an evil Goblin too and really work well as you are literally dropped into a Grimm fairytale, one that comes with a warning perhaps, ‘here there be dragons.’

‘Brunhild’ as it should, gives Sandra the chance to really put her vocals at the centre of the song and with a male choir coming in behind them sound pretty damn grandiose. Elsewhere on ‘Totenwacht’ she pretty much steals the show but those lurking evil vocal rasps and moments of bombastic and almost Teutonic instrumentation are never far away making this a lot more than just a simple album of female fronted ‘Goth’ metal.

Despite the wide variety of ideas packed into a short running time this album succeeds rather than bewilders and baffles like it probably should do. Sure you probably will need to give it a few listens for it all to make sense but it’s a rich and rewarding feast of inventiveness, taking a tried and tested formula and turning into a metal odyssey.

http://www.siegfried.co.at

Pete Woods

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