Время Мары

I have all the Butterfly Temple albums and after careful thought, only Time of Mara provides as much consistent mastery of folk metal. You will not be hearing an album full of accordions or flutes, these only appear occasionally, but instead this album is more progressive folk metal in the vein of Vintersorg.

The instruments are fast, heavy and melodic and draw inspiration from death and black metal more then they do from doom metal. The speed sometimes slows to give variation in the album and creates a melody that leads to the climax in the song. There is just enough folk elements to qualify it as a folk metal band but it is not over done. The are only there where you would expect them and there would be no improvement in this album if they added more folk elements. The instruments perfectly craft an album that does not need to be criticized becuase it does not feature enough individual folk elements.

The lyrics are all in Russian but they are intelligently written and dramatic about the lives of the Slavs and fantasy. There is a clean male voice, male growl voice and sometimes even a pleasant female voice that sounds natural and pure, as opposed to being only a gimmick. The male clean vocalist is my favourite part of this album, he sings the catchy choruses that make up the climax of the songs. The growl vocalist has equal time to share with the clean vocalist but gives this album a more aggressive sound that really makes you want to kick some ass! The female vocalist usually sings in the background of either the growls or the clean but she offers a folk sound to the vocalists especially in the few songs where she is actually the lead.

The only complaint about this album is that it only has 10 tracks, and that the last track, Podruga, takes almost a quarter of the whole album, clocking in at 15 minutes! The song is actually more a compilation of 2 of their old songs from previous albums but it would have been better to just seperate the track into 3 seperate ones. There is one new track but it does not shine out and would be forgettable if they did not include the bombastic and jazzy trumpets. Once again it shows how this album can salvage any error. This is a very highly recommended album for people to get into Butterfly Temple.