(Below we present DGR’s review of the new album by Finland’s Wolfheart, which was released on September 6th by Reigning Phoenix Music.)
Much as we joke about it – yours truly in particular has created enough material to 3-D print a house – Finland’s Wolfheart have become a hallmark of consistency on a near unchallenged level since their inception. Save for a brutal year-over-year album schedule a few discs ago, Wolfheart have been a band you could set your watch by. Every two years, without fail, ballpark eight or so songs and about forty minutes of music. In fact, it wasn’t until the band’s Napalm era that Wolfheart flipped their career paradigm on its head by putting out albums with seven and nine songs.
It won’t shock then that a discussion of Wolfheart‘s newest album Draconian Darkness is going to contain a lot of familiar shades to it, because with consistency comes familiarity, and familiarity leads to an odd approach in reviewing their discs wherein you almost reset-to-zero with them every time and approach a new album at face value.
Which is interesting, because in a lot of ways you could view Draconian Darkness as a double-album with the one that preceded it, King Of The North.
Each album released by Wolfheart has the potential to recontextualize the group’s career up to this point. Wolfheart‘s nature of iterating, sidestepping, and lateraling their way through their musical career has kept the band centered on a musical throughline that has long been defined since the group’s very first album. Roughly translated: Often, the newest Wolfheart album becomes the definitive Wolfheart album save for the personal favorites that you’ve picked up along the way.
Draconian Darkness is no different in that respect, and due to that becomes the album that can be best used to describe Wolfheart‘s sound to those unfamiliar with the Finnish melodeath group. Melodic death metal of course, has its many off-shoots, and though the name conjures up the quick one-two thrashier punk riff-work that defined the genre for a while – probably why it so easily loaned itself to the metalcore scene – Wolfheart are of the ‘epic seeking’ variety. Their music at its core is just as equally folk-metal as it is melodeath, and honestly, they’re one of a select series of groups that defined a sound with their song titles and then became defined by it.
Wolfheart‘s music formed itself a while ago to match the titles and so they sound like a blacksmith’s forge, placed high upon a snowy mountain, each song a journey of hammer striking steel with sparks flying out of the building, the only moments of beauty coming from the occasional soft section or breather written into a song, a concession to a butterfly landing on a windowsill, everything inside some permutation of ice or fire.
The tough-guy permafrost that has long encased Wolfheart has thawed a little bit on Draconian Darkness – though much like the way Wolfheart have remained intransigent at times when it comes to progressing forward, that little bit of thaw could eaisly be taken with a grain of salt – with what seems to be the most clean singing that Wolfheart have employed to date. Draconian Darkness is still built upon a foundation of hefty yells and gargantuan guitar rhythms, yet Wolfheart must’ve realized somewhere along their new path of having nine songs instead of the classic eight that they have a little more room to stretch musically.
Draconian Darkness contains no interludes or anything of that style to puff up the tracklist; it is nine songs that for the most part stick around the four-to-five-minute range, the outlier being the gloriously titled and snappier song “Death Leads The Way”, a song that manifests itself into sound so quickly that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Burning Sky” before it had never ended.
The fire and ice ratio on Draconian Darkness is three to one across the nine songs this time; the aforementioned “Burning Sky”, “Scion Of Flate” and “Trial By Fire” being the three main suspects there. Ice may lead the opening act with the large number of “Ancient Cold” – and also a gorgeous landscape-shot music video – but Draconian Darkness has another spectre dominating its backround inspirations, as death itself takes up three songs as well, with “Grave” and “Throne Of Bones” laying back-to-back toward the end of the album and the aforementioned “Death Leads The Way”… leading the way.
“Grave” does provide some much-needed adrenaline to the back third of Draconian Darkness, at first masking itself as if it is going to be a calm and pensive number before the band steamroll that opening piano segment flat into the ground and go for a classic scorched-earth approach. The main melody itself remains a constant refrain within “Grave”; the initial piano lead metamorphizes into that lead guitar bit and allows for the blastbeat approach to drumming behind it to dominate. A solid 86% of “Graves” auditory heaviness probably comes from the drumming alone.
On the other hand, its follower “Throne Of Bones” is a traditional epic and demonstrates quite mightily the band’s taste for some halting orchestral stringed instruments to very lightly amplify the already massive chorus segment of the song. It is composed largely of guitar work and martial prowess familiar to Wolfheart‘s songwriting but it does make for a solid one-two punch for the morbidity-obsessed among us.
Those strings, for what is is worth, are one of the more common elements throughout Wolfheart‘s bigger songs on Draconian Darkness. They’re noticeable early on as they lay the foundation of the aforementioned “Ancient Cold” and become a pretty consistent median upon which Wolfheart rest the melodic work of the album. They’ve been a part of Wolfheart‘s overall sound for some time now, but Draconian Darkness turns up their degree of importance a little more. It was as if Wolfheart looked at the similar ambitions of the nine songs on King Of The North and recognized them as if it was the one step left for the group to really turn up the volume on.
Again, as we take our turn wielding the blacksmith’s hammer, do we state that Wolfheart have made a solid career of consistent music that slowly iterates upon the album that came before it. You could, in that sense, view Draconian Darkness as a younger, more sing-song sibling to King Of The North. Even the artwork, having looked like a bone ritual after Heilung‘s luggage was accidentally left on the band’s doorstep, is fairly similar between the two. They may be split up among different record labels but as an overall representative of the recent Wolfheart experience, treating Draconian Darkness as a sibling is the direct conclusion to draw – though its nine songs are about nine minutes shorter than its older brother, showing that Wolfheart did hew some of the fat off between albums.
Credit due to the band though, we’d be getting side-eyed by people if we didn’t state that somehow, in spite of Wolfheart being fairly stubborn with the core of their sound, the band still haven’t made themselves come off as stale yet. They’re still somehow managing to draw from a deep well of music on Draconian Darkness, so that although much of the album is familiar and its blueprint well-recognized, you’ll still have a good time.
Wolfheart have long become one of those bands perfect for the discography shuffle. Their album and EP collective have been an impressive testament to their songwriting style existing as a solidly built idea from the get-go — crazier, given that much of the band’s music was born out of a handful of projects that had come before it, with Before The Dawn‘s Phoenix album serving as an almost proto-Wolfheart disc. They’re great as gateway artists, and likewise as music to drift along to when you need a soundtrack for an epic struggle up the path of a mountain. Draconian Darkness fights well within its weight class and makes a fairly impressive showing along the way.
https://wolfheart.rpm.link/draconiandarknessPR
https://www.wolfheartmetal.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WolfheartRealm