Warrior's Tale

Hardly a reviews miniseries – only a threesome of albums which, coincidentally, happened to fit well under the same umbrella, as part of the June 2023 Metal-Archives Reviews Challenge.


Looking back to the humble beginnings of a band with a now substantial discography is always an interesting experiment, and Finnish epic metal heroes Battlelore is no exception. Warrior's Tale, 1999; that's where it all began. And it began, naturally, with Middle-Earth: when your first song is called The Ring of Power, and includes a loud declamation of the famous Lord of the Rings recitation (y'know, Three Rings for the Elven-Kings under the Sky, etc.), your intentions couldn't be clearer.

Now, Tolkien worship set aside, which Battlelore are we talking about? Amongst the musicians playing on this demo, only guitarist Jyri Vahvanen will still be part of the band at the time we're writing these lines, twenty-four years later. No dedicated keyboardist yet, for a mostly guitar-driven work; no elven-voiced Kaisa Jouhki, either, but instead a guest female vocalist who performs but a couple of timid, low-mixed lines on the opening track. And once you've remembered that, before founding Battlelore, the same Jyri Vahvanen had played the guitar for Horna, less surprising will appear the presence of a Gorthaur behind the drumkit, who contributes to confer a disquieting black metal touch to the whole, and especially to the second track, Black Legions - a far forerunner to the We Are the Legions which will sprout eight years later?

Still, as with all early Battlelore, the true king there was harsh vocalist Patrik Mennander, as mad and goblin-esque as ever. Goblins don't growl – they bark, they bite. Passion at the rawest. Tommi Havo, who didn't seem to hold a guitar back then, tries to support him the best he can with his cleans, throwing his whole bellicose dedication in his lines; still this excess of passion, not helped by a mix which makes him resonate abnormally loud, often sounds more goofy than impressive.

Concerning the songs themselves, The Ring of Power is an unexpectedly strong, and harsh, composition, oscillating between speed metal and melodic death metal to deliver some of the best riffs they'll ever write, well-supplemented by Mennander's angry voice. Why they never re-used it is a sad mystery, considering it could have competed with pretty much anything on their 2002 debut album, and even, with a better production, with many of their later songs as well. Too different from the more epic/symphonic sound they'll soon be aiming at, perhaps? By contrast, the ample middle part of the slow Raise your Swords, is already one-hundred percent Battlelore with its prominent keyboard, majestic and proudly synthetic at the same time – and indeed, they'll recycle this very keyboard line many years later in their other eight-minutes long epic, Doombound. The seeds were planted.

The level fluctuates a lot, obviously, and we're not talking only about the sound here. Raise your Swords wastes far too much time with slow, pedestrian riffing before it finally lifts off, and could have easily been reduced by half, while the instrumental acoustic/atmospheric outro is of little interest either. The overall impression remains amateur, even though some of the musicians involved could already boast a little experience – think Horna, again; and this amateurism won't totally disappear before a couple of extra releases. But that's part of the charm, too. Less immediately catchy than its successors, Warrior's Tale nonetheless occupies an honourable rank in Battlelore's discography, the rank of the yet raw, untamed Battlelore, already roaming through the savage plains of First-Age Middle-Earth, before even the Sun and Moon were born.

Highlight: The Ring of Power