THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR – Nature's Cadence

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Faithful to their recent trend of an album every three years or so, the Americans The Flight Of Sleipnir are back after their last “Eventide”, from 2021, a very good album (have they made some bad ones, after all?) which however seemed a bit of a transition for the band, released after a compact album like “Skadi”. And this new “Nature's Cadence” is also the third album in which the original duo formed by Csicsely and Cushman has expanded into a four-piece (among other things for this album it is worth noting the entry on guitar of Jeremy Winters in place of David Siegler), and perhaps it is precisely this running-in to which we owe a compactness of sound and a greater cohesion compared to the previous work, perhaps vaguely more undecided on the direction of the excellent work (which for example contained some black matrices, absent here).
This new work, “Nature's Cadence” – five songs for just under forty minutes (perhaps a stingy running time) – seems to us to be purely rooted in the roots of the Colorado duo, bringing their sound back to a cauldron that is difficult to label, in which heavy metal, doom, progressive and who knows what else mix under the aegis of a perennial melancholy, with a narrative devoted purely to the contemplation of nature, always with a basis in Norse mythology, whose epic nature conforms within fleeting sonic brushstrokes.
The sound in fact seems to branch out into a jumble of different inspirations (but we are not surprised) that present very emotional ups and downs between more rhythmic passages and others more introspective. The opener, “North”, with its eleven minutes works very well in its being a well-rounded business card to expose more or less what will happen during the album: a fast start, a very evocative stop, clean and non-clean voices, a cadenced pace of doom base, and a very marked feeling of sadness.
The first name that comes to mind is definitely Wayfarer (“The Woodsman” and “Wanderer” in a very evident way), fellow countrymen and equally good at outlining a sort of detached melancholy, but also Agalloch and distantly we would say also Primordial. The guitars have a very central role, obviously, in some moments reaching truly delightful solo peaks, as in “Madness”, with its interlude proggy.
In general, a delicate technicality cloaks all of “Nature's Cadence” without ever taking over, sewing layers with layers of truly warm and poignant expressive levels, only apparently simple, in reality capable of taking the listener by the hand first timidly, then without freeing him. You plunge into heartbreaking vocal sorties trying to free yourself from almost hypnotic sensorial whirlwinds (listen to the main riff of “Vingthor”), which repeat themselves, an estrangement, an excursion in which you feel enraptured.
Or maybe we're just looking at a really great album, which is always a pretty valuable thing, and probably one of the best of this group.
Make it yours, you will hardly regret it.