Folkstone – Dead Nature

vote
7.5

• Band:
  Folkstone
• Duration: 01:02:20
• Available from: 21/03/2025
• Label:

• Folkstone Records

Streaming not yet available

Who would have said that the 'beer break' would end? Six years without a folkstone album – if we exclude the collection “Tales from Taberna”, sold only live during the Tour 2024 of the Bergamoes – they made themselves heard, and the wait for “dead nature” was palpable from the Reunion show to Metalitalia.com Festival 2023. We do a little order, however: the Orobic Marmaglia remains led by Lore and Roberta, even if you can safely say. That Edo, Luca and Maurizio (respectively battery, guitar and a plethora of traditional instruments) now also represent a nice piece of history of this adventure that began over twenty years ago. Not only that: Silvia Bonino's harp also returns, which plays a fundamental role in the foreground in many of the songs that make up this painting.
If the dead nature is in fact a pictorial genre, here it is understood instead as the kingdom of materialism: a great confusion in front of which the mocking skull of the folkstone smiles in a melancholy way.
Let's clear the field from any doubt: this album is one hundred percent as it could have been expected, that is, a reconfirmation of the skill of the Bergamo players in taking the extermemo and giving him that poetic vein that had in particular distinguished “diary of a last”, where the band returned to his steps after the not exciting “oxidian”.
There is therefore no more time to talk about raids and drunks as they once were, but you make a drop to toast on an unknown and a little bleak future. Of the 2017 album, however, “dead nature” is treasured, especially in the hat -trick of songs entrusted to Roberta's voice as “marble tears”, which dilute the initial edged that starts with “alabaster” – the latest single released, capable of really bringing us back in time – where Marco Legnani and Gianka demonstrate all their skills with Bombarda and Ghironda, and finds another intense moment with the devastating “empty” Losing ”, a song that we are sure will also tear you a tear.
For those who follow the band since the beginning, therefore, we are a reconfirmation after another, with a formation inspired after these long years of pause: also thanks to the sound of the study excellently created in the studio by Maurizio, this time as a producer, capable of bringing the sounds back to a typically German taste of understanding folk metal. What is heard is a return not so much to the origins, but to the great masters of the genre as precisely in extremo and subway to Sally, which play overpowering in rhythmic songs such as “rubble”, perhaps the most successful piece of the disc, already anticipated in 2024.
The mix of Bouzuki, flute and harp stands widely in the numerous detachments that enrich and embellish the songs, without ever taking anything away from the most metal part with which, as in the old days, we find a certain harmony, where even the new purchase Steve Ferrovecchio on bass proves to be able to integrate perfectly, enriching the rhythmic part.
You cannot then not spend two words on the songs that see special guests perform together with ours: from Modena City Ramblers, who embellish with delicacy and “fragile” melancholy, up to “The Loser Factory” with the Punkreas, where the song we already knew acquires an even more angry nuance, almost as a singing of revolt. The Sadist's work of Trevor on “Mediterranean” also stands out, with that knock on the “Islam Punk” that brings us back almost at the time of “Holy Land”, while “Mala Tempora Currunt” is the most classic of the instrumental laps made to dance to the uphol in the middle of the pit with the contribution of the Daridel.
Of the final triad, the pieces that stand out most are perhaps not accidentally dedicated to women: the “Persia” schandmauliana tells of an Iranian rock, while “on the shore”, where Roberta becomes Barda and poet, is dedicated to those who put themselves on the side of women victims of violence.
To close everything, as had already happened in the past with other discs of the Folkstone, a reinterpretation of a song and a cover: the gritty Spanish version of “Another time”, where Roberta can finally sing as it has been going on for years on the live, and the epic cover of “The last Thule” by Francesco Guccini, the final rest of the final rest of a great pirate, for those who do not know the original.
Take the oars on the boat, it can be safely said that the folkstone have returned: without strange artifices or particular elements, but with their usual way of understanding music and folk metal, with an audience now increasingly transversal to the metal scene alone.
“Dead Nature” is a mature and capable disc, in our opinion, to season very well, who will not fail to make the old fans happy and will surely like to also who have never heard of the folkstone, albeit the magic formula is always that … but that's okay.

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