Falconer Sweden

"Drawing on both power metal and folk music - tipping more towards the folksy side than the pure power metal side I think - this has got to be the best folk metal release, I have heard in a long time (closely followed by Skáldmöl's "Baldur" and not quite beating Skyclad's "Jonah's Ark").

Most of the melodies, and many of the riffs themselves, follow folk melody patterns, which also applies to the vocal melodies, sung to perfection in Mathias Blad's smooth and solid mid range voice. The vocals are exclusively sung in Swedish, and I must say that Swedish sounds fucking awesome in this context. It also adds a further folksy dimension to the overall music (at least to me, who grew up with a lot of folksy Swedish TV-shows). This album also features the fiddle and other traditional Swedish folk music instruments, but they are never dominant in relation to the metal instrumentation.

A lot of the tunes are in a midtempo pace, although there are some more uptempo parts, and some of the guitar riffage is quite groovy, but you can also expect black metal-like tremolo stuff, and there are even some blastbeats now an then. There are also elements from traditional metal and, of course, power metal, and I really like how the guitars make use of harmonies, and how heavy they sound compared to a lot of power metal.

If you like Nordic folk music and heavy metal music, then this album should definitely be up you alley. A strong contender to the title of folk metal album of the year.

(review originally posted at metalmusicarchives.com)"