Sorrow of the Wind

“Sorrow of the Wind” is probably Woodtemple’s most folk release, but that’s not really saying much considering the album’s only claim to folk is having clean strummed passages and allusions to some vague conjuration of pagan imagery. No, “Sorrow of the Wind” is still, at its heart, drawing heavily from Graveland, even if all the acoustic work makes it one of the band’s more original releases, at least superficially anyway. In the end, the album fails to escape the trappings of Woodtemple’s other works and even falls into some holes of its own.

Getting right down to it, the production really kills whatever momentum “Sorrow of the Wind” is trying to have. The sound quality and the mixing are worse than those of the past few releases. The uninspired croaks and, worse, the awkward whispers from Aramath are irritatingly fore-fronted in the mix, while the guitars strum a fuzzy mess in the background. The drums, manned by a session musician I imagine, come out decently, but nothing really enters the sound with force because the production doesn’t allow it. Even the keyboards, which for the most part take on a faux-flute sound, limp along in the background, regardless of what’s going on with the other instruments. Nothing, however, is played that badly. Being the one solid member of Woodtemple, Aramath is clearly a talented musician, but the album’s production and repetitive compositions don’t do him justice.

What do come out with clarity are the clean guitar sections, which are allowed to be more subdued because of the atmospheric way in which they’re used here. They consist of simple, stringy chords that enhance the album’s mysticism and allow the percussion to shine through with tribal forcefulness. There’s a problem with them, though: their repetitive nature does not make their over-usage interesting. Each of the three main tracks begins with a strummed passage that sounds incredibly similar to the next. It’s bad enough that the metal parts of each song fail to separate one track from the other, but to have them all start the same way is consistently one-dimensional.

Nevertheless, “Path of the Runes” is probably the most enjoyable song on “Sorrow of the Wind,” which says something considering the track is an instrumental peon compared to the others. “Path of the Runes” is basically three-and-a-half-minutes of the strummed sections that appear in the main tracks, but it works well as a focused atmospheric piece. The tribal percussion and the light layer of keyboards in the background add to the magic of the song, even if the composition is repetitive to the point of being dull, but that’s Woodtemple for you.

“Sorrow of the Wind” would have been a lot better if the production would have given the music that feeling of heaviness which is so necessary for this sort of grandiose, call-to-battle atmosphere. Perhaps, however, this album is going for a more pensive tone, in which case the longwinded tracks are desperately in need of something more interesting and original. Aramath’s dull vocals and repetitive style of composition cannot sustain themselves over such lengthy durations, and I don’t think even cosmetic changes to the sound quality could have made the album escape mediocrity. “Sorrow of the Wind” ought to have been emotionally charged, but instead, like some other Woodtemple releases, it leaves the mind as quickly as it entered.

The new release from Woodtemple, "Sorrow of the Wind", consists of six songs and has a duration short of thirty-eight minutes, which may be a bit too long for what could really pass as an EP. The "Intro" and "Outro" tracks serve well to hold the musical theme together for the rest of the tracks, but overall give a "Cliff Notes" view to the folk style of the artist. Simply put, it's a bit too repetitive, too much of a good thing.

Aramath, who commonly handles all instrumentation except drums, has no problems articulating his inspirations in musical form. Whether his ideas make any sense is another issue. The first main song on the album is "Rise The Horns Up To Battle", close to eleven minutes long. The introduction to the song is only nominally different than the "Intro" track preceeding it. The clean guitar strumming is very nice and soothing, and actually somewhat intelligent. You have one bar with strums alternating between major triad and major seventh chords, which then varies across three other bars by way of the figured bass tone for each bar. Not too long thereafter, the metal starts in. The "plugged-in" guitars are playing the more or less the same arrangement. Again, the instrumentation is competent and believable. However, there's not really a true sense of rising any horns up to any battle here. The metal segments alternate with the much more folky, clean-guitar segments very abruptly, almost a cut-and-paste job, if you can picture it. And so, in a bit under eleven minutes' time, you have experienced what this album is "generally" all about, musically.

Another issue to address is that of Aramath's much-less-convincing vocal techniques. His "death vocals" are rather poorly attempted and, thankfully, seldom heard. It sounds as though he mixed the death vocals in higher so that he wouldn't have to shout. It is a rather unprofesional "glottal" technique which, given practice, anyone can "master". In other passages, he uses a kind of tormented groan-whisper, which is even less satisfactory. The issue of mixing is even more noticed at these times, and again, not commonplace on this recording. Finally there are these unearthly battle cries that are heard "in the distance", which come off sounding more like agonizing moans. Perhaps this was the effect he was going for; it is difficult to tell.

During the purely-folk passages, there are really great keyboard sounds used, emulating that of flutes and strings. The melody and harmony construction are not complex, but intelligently used. They are reminiscent of the old patches from the days gone by, of the Mellotron and Moog from the 1970's, which in this reviewer's opinion, add a very nice old-world touch to the canvas in the aural landscape created aptly by the melody.

The drumming, which again was outsourced, is okay; there's nothing really special to remark about here. There are no blastbeats used anywhere in the recording, although some passages emulate a blastbeat pace by doing "extended drumrolls". To me, it does not sound tacky as with the generally poor mixing on the album it still allows you to enjoy the rhythm of the song without ruining it by being imprecise as blastbeats sometimes can be. The other thing is that across the entire album, the tempo changes very very little, another issue in the argument for shortening the tracks dramatically for EP length. Even though there are a few musical theme changes across the six songs, the tempo resides always in the same 90 - 100 bpm neighborhood.

As to the sound effects, I'd have to say that they are lacking charisma. The album both opens and closes with a wind effect, to state the theme of course, that sounds a little too contrived. The sound sample of the falcon, or whatever bird used, gives no sense of ambience when you consider that it's just the same sound several times over. It really drives home the feeling that someone was pushing a button to make that sound happen at the called cues. So, yeah, more work could've been done in the sound effects department.

The mixing and production on this album are not the greatest. 'Fairly good enough' would be the call if it was Aramath's aim to bring out the more folky sounds of the strumming clean guitars and other acoustic elements. As for the integration of the black metal passages, both the mixing and production were insufficient, but that never stopped any black metal artist from recording
in the past!
All in all, were the lengthy songs an average of four minutes in length instead of eleven, "Sorrows of the Wind" would've made a great EP, and the issue of redundancy would've scarcely been noticed. I'm comfortable enough moving my rating past the halfway mark, so I'm giving it a 64 out of 100.