CNOC AN TURSA — The Giants of Auld (review)

CNOC AN TURSA — The Giants of Auld album cover Album · 2013 · Folk Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
J-Man
Pagan metal has a reputation as a fairly silly genre among most metalheads, but every now and again a great band pops up to prove that there's more to the genre than just imagery and instrumentation gimmicks. Enter Cnoc An Tursa, a relatively new band from Scotland that blends black and folk metal together for their debut observation, 2013's The Giants of Auld. Unlike most bands labeled as pagan metal, Cnoc An Tursa's focus is much more on the 'metal' side of the equation than the 'pagan' side, as guitars are always dominant in the mix and the folk elements are fairly subtle. The Giants of Auld does a fantastic job adding folk-inspired melodies and atmospheric keyboard work to epic, melancholic black metal without ever detracting from the lethal metal energy. The result is an album that still ticks all of the pagan metal boxes, but sounds substantially less cheesy than many other bands in the genre.

The Giants of Auld is a triumphant debut in nearly every way, but I do have to mention that the metalcore-styled vocals are a minor blemish on the overall experience. Although they don't cripple the album, they are by far the weakest link in Cnoc An Tursa's sound - I can only imagine how much better this album might be with obscure howls and shrieks, but this is more of a personal gripe than an actual fault of the album. The bottom line is that The Giants of Auld is still one of 2013's best debuts, and anyone with a liking towards atmospheric, epic, and folk-inspired black metal deserves to check it out.
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