V: Hävitetty bridges folk metal with an intense dose of symphonic black sound. With songs clocking close to thirty minutes, it’s progressive. Moonsorrow elegantly layers their folk compositions with some rich symphonic keyboards. Songs do take the frequent detours down the rabid blast beat-tremolo picking passages, but consistently maintains that mythological theme.  In short, listener should be ready to get teleported to the land of legends and poetry – of ancient Finnish folklores.

“Jaasta Syntynyt , Varjojen Virta” starts with the sound of scorching wood and progresses headlong into an absolute death like aggression — peaking right around the 7 minute mark. Sound of that crackling fire simply exemplifies the lull Scandinavian winter ambiance. Song leads to more folk instrumentation, but it’s always interleaved with some biting sound. Mid-paced riffs, screeching black metal vocals and that restrained sonic onslaught — all makes for a captivating thirty minutes.

“Tuleen Ajettu Maa” starts with two minutes of eerie chants and guitar strumming, but rather quickly explodes into riffs. Even here the pattern of composition remains the same – folk instrumentation building up to some aggressive passages — but finally receding back into mellow sophistication.

Scorching firewood, whistling northern winds and pagan chants — all tend to conjure up vivid mystical imagery — almost like we are reading high fantasy. Finnish lyrics, mandolin, accordion and mouth harp – all essential folk elements layered with an Emperor like symphonic artistry. A mandatory listen.

Image Attribution:

By Cecil (Own work) [<a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0″>CC BY-SA 3.0</a>], <a href=”https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMoonsorrow_MTR_20110617_23.jpg”>via Wikimedia Commons</a>