Call of the Broken Souls

Call Of The Broken Souls is the second album from Spanish black metal band Dantalion, following their 2006 debut When The Ravens Fly Over Me. (The band, incidentally, is named after the 71st spirit of Solomon’s Goetia, a Grand Duke of Hell.) Although I just called Dantalion Spanish, they are in fact from Galicia, the north-western province of Spain, and, as anyone who knows Spain can testify, these regional identities count for a great deal, be they Catalonian or Castilian, Basque or Grenadan – or Galician. In this at least, Dantalion share common ground with the Galician ethnic revivalist band Sangre Cavallum, who are the only other band I know to fly the Galician flag.


A Galician folk tradition provides a strong conceptual framework for the lyrics of Call Of The Broken Souls – the ‘Santa Compaña’, or ‘Holy Company’, a mythical procession of dead souls which acts as a harbinger of approaching doom and which has parallels with the Wild Hunt traditions of Germanic northern Europe. The cover of Dantalion’s album depicts this spectral procession, in a manner reminiscent of the ‘Blind Dead’ series of films by Amando De Ossorio.


And so to the music. Call Of The Broken Souls has eight tracks totalling 46 minutes, with all songs but one sung in English. This is well produced, mid-tempo black metal with plenty of slower interludes and effective uncanny atmospheres, with Netzja’s guitars doing most of the work. Dantalion aren’t one of those gothic metal bands who assume that keyboards equal atmosphere, although there are occasional sound effects, of crows cawing and so on. Their overall sound can be compared to that of German bands like Orlog, Helrunar and Drautran, the Swedish band Shining, or Dantalion’s Danish labelmates Angantyr, so it makes sense for them to be on Det Germanske Folket. ‘Prophecy Of Sorrow’ has a rather lovely acoustic guitar duet intro, and the lengthy ‘Wandering Along The Paths’ is probably the highlight of the album. I don’t discern any amazing originality in Dantalion, but they do what they do perfectly well.


This review was originally written for Judas Kiss webzine:
www.judaskissmagazine.co.uk