Description

Rare original 2001 press. Double album on black vinyls with lyric insert. Limited 888 copies

Extreme black metal from Wroclaw, Poland by Robert ‘Rob Darken’ Fudali.. They released six demos between January 92 to 94. Absurds frontman and convicted murderer Hendrik Mobus (a.k.a. Jarl Flagg Nidogg) had penned lyrics to a song called ‘White Hand’s Power’ which he gave to Graveland. This track and anothter track was released as a demo tape after the second album ‘Thousand Swords’. The track served to stoke controversy and the band got under some right wing politics scrutiny. No Colours released a third studio album with the the track on it under the same name as the demo ‘Following The Voice Of Blood’. The final album may very well be Graveland’s answer to Bathory’s ‘Blood, Fire, Death’ less from a strictly musical viewpoint than as an artistic transition point. Both albums see their respective composers moving from playing fast, chaotic black metal into the realm of slowe, more epic and more melodic Viking metal. Graveland’s album finds Darken effectively blending the two approaches throughout each of the album’s tracks, brewing a unique, though very, very recognizably Polish, kind of sound. This double album has the Vlad Dracul themed ‘Impaler’s Wolves’ ep as bonus. This ep contains two tracks from the ‘Carpathian Wolves’ album totally re-recorded and arranged. The songs in question, ‘Impaler Of Wallachia’ and ‘In The Northern Carpathians’ (tracks 5 and 4 from Carpathian Wolves, respectively), are excellent choices, being two of the best tracks on the album. Rather than simply re-record the same songs, Darken re-interpreted them significantly. The arrangements are basically untouched, with only intros and outros added to both tracks and the tempos brought down a few notches. The production is quite different, however. The drumming is noticeably cleaner, and the guitars more crisp than on the originals. It is the keyboards that have had the most re- tooling; different patches are used throughout, to great effect: ‘Impaler…’ sounds much more sinister with the tubular bells instead of the eerie ‘horror house’ keyboards of the original. More keyboard parts are added to ‘Northern Carpathians’, with that ‘triumphant brass choir’ patch added over a lot of the main riffs. While that may not sound like so many changes when put into words, it’s the overall effect of the songs that see the most changes, with even the subtle variances having great effects in the way the songs come across – more epic and almost doomy in spots.

Tracklist:
1. Intro
2.White Hand’s Power
3. Thurisaz
4. Following the Voice of Blood
5. Forge of Souls
6. Raise the Swords
7. And the Horn Was Sounding Far Away
8. Fed by the Beasts
9. Outro
10. Impaler Of Wallachia
11. In The Northern Carpathians