WOLFCHANT — A Pagan Storm (review)

Album · 2007 · Folk Metal

5/5 · 2011-01-26
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A Pagan Storm is the second full-length album by Wolfchant, released in 2007. It is the last album they released before they began collaborating with Rebellion’s Michael Seifert as a second vocalist, first as a guest on Determined Damnation (2009) and then as a full time member with Call of the Black Winds (2011). As such the sound on A Pagan Storm showcases a slightly different Wolfchant than on their more recent and more widely distributed material.

The music of Wolfchant is difficult to accurately tag, because of the way the vocals really contrast with the music. It is easiest to consider them a folk metal band, but there are other elements in their music that need to be acknowledged. The main one of these is that their vocalist Lokhi uses a black metal style of growling for the most part, though there are some growls more akin to death metal in the album. As such Wolfchant could possibly get tagged as a black metal band. However I feel that this would be incorrect, as vocals aside, there is little to do with black or even death metal here. Instead the music is highly melodic, often making use of lead guitar lines to create a folksy sound as opposed to using traditional folk instruments along with the standard metal setup, though they don’t shy away from using a wider range of instruments with Lokhi contributing mouth harp and drummer Norgahd also contributing accordion and recorder work. But mostly it’s just the traditional band setup of vocals, guitars, bass and drums at work here, and the results are pretty special. To provide some variation in the vocals there are also some clean passages, but these are courtesy of a choir consisting of Lokhi and Norgahd along with Asgaroth and Saroel of Lost Legacy and Nattulv of Festung Nebelburg (who joined Wolfchant for a time after this album).

There are plenty of highlights on the album, hitting us from the second track (A Pagan Storm) onwards (the first, Growing Storms, being an intro). In my opinion they keep hitting us with highlight after highlight right from this point through to the seventh track, Winterhymn. Lokhi isn’t the most understandable of vocalists but there is something about the way that he deliveries these Pagan themed lyrics with that energetic folk metal backing that makes the songs really addictive to the point that some of the chorus sections could even be considered as having lyrically hooks, especially in the third track, The Path, which is one of my all time favourites from the band. The choir is used sparingly, appearing in only four of the eleven songs, but when it is used it fits with the song well and helps to add more folk metal appeal to the music.

After Winterhymn the band gives us a couple of songs with German lyrics. Personally I think the album takes the smallest of down-turns here, because from Stärkend Trunk aus Feindes Schädel onwards I just don’t feel that the album has any more highlights to offer, though these songs are still pretty good and by this point the band has delivered so much material of high quality that it doesn’t matter so much, and nor does it diminish the fact that A Pagan Storm is, all things considered, a masterpiece of metal music.

(Review originally written for Heavy Metal Haven)