Voland – The Grieving Fields

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7.5

• Band:
  Voland
• Duration: 00:33:16
• Available from: 25/04/2025
• Label:

• Dusktone

Streaming not yet available

Four years after the last EP, the promising “Voland III: царепоклонство – the cult of the Tsar”, the Volands, Italian duo dedicated to a sumptuous and belligerent belligerent Symphonic Black Metal, return to the music scene.
“The Grieving Fields”, the debut of ours on the long distance (and under the auspices Dusktone), is an album crawled by the mephitic clouds of the battlefields of the last century, in which he dressed epicity and solemn sadness walk side by side; The opening with “277” and “Saturn” – both also chosen as individuals – represents very well this conceptual and musical dichotomy, with spot on chopped refrains and a rhythm as various as pressing in each variation of time.
The Volands went on in their way, whether dug in the ruthless snow of the steppes or scattered with debris and trenches: in this album we find an even more intense and well -kept work in the production and in the orchestral arrangements, an integral part of the identity of the group has always been, but here with a really important specific weight; They are the skeleton of “Don” or “Armiir”, but they do not remain in the background in really any time. Once again, the reference to formations such as Fleshgod Apocalypse or Stormlord arises spontaneously, noting how, also in this case, ours have managed to give their own personal imprint to that chiaroscuro of triumphs and miseries represented by the symphonic parts, combining them with taste to the nice game of clean/dirty voices that alternates (in various languages, with fluidity), as a trine of other times, thirty abundant minutes of music.
As for the black part, in this case we are close, in the intentions to the most recent rotting Christ (with distant echoes of dimmu borgir) or to the conterraneous formations above: it is a pleasure to note how it has the opportunity to go out into the open (“Rodina”, but also in the two singles), above all thanks to a muscle rhythmic section and always willing to launch into the breathless, as they require the canons of the breath. Gender, even if the risk that it is a little suffocated by the riot of orchestrations is always a little present.
On the end, a certain folkent vein also emerges (in the rhythms of “Varg”, in its winds and in general in the built atmosphere, culminating in a guitar solo as unexpected as well as spot on), capable of enriching with a further nuance a job full of ideas, despite the reduced duration: far from being that manta of Osteria Gasconiery as happens elsewhere, And support that plot of sad but glorious decadence that the flies seem to want to pursue in this work, always maintaining Russia as a latitude 'of the heart', but flying over the ground and the blood down with a look that seems more composed and melancholy than in the past (feelings certainly children of the times in which we live).
“The Grieving Fields” is a good confirmation for Haiwas and Rimmon, and we are sure it will be properly stationed in the stereo of fans of the genre: if the Bergamo duo will be able to synthesize even more their souls, working to create a proposal in which they are simultaneously in balance and in even more fluid and intense dialogue, then we will see something precious sparkle “In the land that burns among the flashes of steel”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryld6xayeza