Pagan

Cruachan's "Pagan" is a very strange beast indeed. Where most folk metal albums consciously choose to combine folk music with one specific kind of metal, whether black (almost everybody), melodic death (Eluveitie) or power (Elvenking and others), this Irish outfit seems not to have decided what style of metal they like best, preferring instead to do everything they feel up to.

Thus, we have some impressive black metal vocals on tracks like "Michael Collins" and "Pagan" sharing the same CD with a track like "The Gael", which features female vocals sounding almost like a rather weak imitation of those female-fronted bands we all know and either love or hate. There's even a traditional-sounding instrumental or three and a metalised drinking song, both of which are tropes of viking metal.

With all of these diverse influences thrown in together, it's perhaps inevitable that some of the album at least will sound very half-baked, and this is the case here. Unfortunately, one of the half-baked sections is the opening track, which is a remarkably uninspired retelling of the political career of Irish nationalist Michael Collins. Most of the lyric sets him up as the heroic figure most Irish people revere him as, before the final lines feature the stunningly banal comments that "Many people did not agree with him" and "He gave his best, what more could he do?" These are hardly the final lines that a folk metal song extolling a hero should conclude on - particularly as Collins was killed by a fellow Irishman. These are, frankly, lyrics that any school-aged history student would be embarrassed to write.

Ironically, there's also a retelling of the legend of Brian Boru, who is given the full epic-heroic treatment and ends up sounding a lot more interesting.

Another track which seems to suffer from a shortage of inspiration is "A Thousand Years", which is largely an instrumental disguised as a song with female vocals. The female vocals are sung over backing which veers from riffing guitars to tinkling keyboards with little or no warning. This seems to be a result of a lack of ideas, rather than anything else.

There's also an over-reliance on instrumentals. Admittedly, the band performs these very well and on traditional instruments, but sticking two of them one after the other near the end of the album feels like a mistake.

When we look beyond the somewhat ungainly combination of influences, and the rather odd combination of vocals presented (they do fit together after a fashion, just not obviously so), what are we left with? As with a great many folk-metal albums, the melodies remain the key, and these are incessantly catchy. Indeed, in between the first time I listened to this album (and didn't much like it) and the second, it was my memory of the melodies that made me curious enough to see if I'd misjudged the album.

Overall, this is a remarkably uneven effort from a band that could very easily achieve a lot more with the skills that it has to play with. Personally, I rather enjoy it, but I'm not sure that listeners just getting into folk metal, for example, would be as keen.