The Saga of the Draugr

Heulend Horn is a little known project hailing from Argentina. The style is epic/symphonic/folk metal with a bit of black metal thrown in. This album is a concept album centered around Vikings.

Upon first listen I was totally blown away by this release due to it being really ambitious and have so much going on but unfortunately it failed in the test of time department. Even in just the second listen through I started picking up on the negative aspects.

The biggest gripe I have with this release is that Curwenius is just trying to do to much here. It almost becomes a chore trying to keep a list of all the different instruments Curwenius plays. It is pretty amazing that he manages to play all these instruments including the guitar, flute, drums, horn, keyboards and some other instrument that sounded like a harp that I couldn‘t put my finger on. Now I welcome more instruments but quality is better than quantity. Many of the different instruments sound over repetitive at times and they just come and go to abruptly far to often leaving much to be desired in the songwriting department.

The mixing of this album is also a rather large defect. The instruments don’t seem to fit together very well and it sounds a little to ‘clean’. I don’t tend to like it as much when you can hear so many different layers in the mix, but rather I prefer it when much of it blends together as this gives the music depth. The music needs to sound as one rather than a bunch of different entities which Curwenius failed at.

Like the songwriting the vocals also leave much to be desired. The clean chanting style vocals that are found in many Viking and Pagan bands range from weak to simply atrocious. Curwenius fails to maintain a note and just slips in out of multiple notes. The clean whispers are ok but have the potential to sound much more atmospheric if they were mixed in better. The vocals are just to high in the mix and to create a good atmosphere you need to be able to hear everything else. The raspy vocals I assume are coming from the guest musician and they are performed very well but again they could have been mixed better.

I have heard Heulend Horn compared a lot to legends, Summoning. In some areas such as “The Raid of the Drakkar - Wolf” the drum tone sounds virtually identical to Summoning’s Stronghold and the Horns sound the same to. It is just a shame that this album has not been mixed to the perfection that Stronghold was.

The unorthodox instruments and the rather odd way that guitars are played (the strumming style) is unique and Curwenius shows that this could potentially work very well Often Curwenius does succeed in creating a very epic atmosphere and again exhibit’s a lot of potential but just fails to maintain this for long. This however does give much hope for future releases.

Overall this is an enjoyable release but increasingly loses my interest with every listen as it just doesn’t stand the test of time and much polishing needs to be done in a few areas for future releases but this album is just screaming potential.