Ígéret

If you’re a folk metal band, there are a lot of pitfalls you can plummet into. For a lighter, faster folk metal group, it can be too easy to throw away all caution and restraint and descend into a cycle of polluting the scene with the annoying jigs and humppas that are the hallmark of the below-bottom shelf Finntroll knockoffs. While Dalriada clearly owes a debt to groups like Korpiklaani (whose main man Jonne Järvelä actually guests on this album), Ígéret is a more diverse and mature outing than one would expect, every bit as serious and nuanced as Falkenbach's and Arkona's best while still delivering some seamlessly integrated moments that briefly call the “Let's Get Drunk and Prance Merrily Through the Forest!” school of folk metal to mind.

Dalriada is a band far lighter on its feet than the slower, darker folk metal outfits like Moonsorrow but never ventures near the depths Trollfest and other such bands whose sole purpose is to annoy everybody with their fast-paced, obnoxious party metal inhabit. While Dalriada is a more lively and cheerful group, calling to mind imagery of a festival celebrating the solstice or a bountiful harvest rather than a grim heathen battle march, the care and artistry they put into this album is obvious in every note and progression, except the ones found in the intro, which seems lazily improvised, and the outro, which seems to just be 50 seconds of the band and Järvelä goofing off.

Several of this album's most standout tracks are built on the juxtaposition of jaunty folk melodies crammed with energetic but focused violin performances or quick-paced humppa-esque rhythms and parts that are a bit more sober. The bouncy ‘Hajdútánc’, a song nobody can praise highly enough, gifts us with the catchiest verses ever, the violin sawing perfectly complimented by Laura Binder’s clean and harsh vocals. While a good number of these songs, like the title track and ‘Leszek a Hold’ have some jig-a-jigging moments (especially the former, whose midsection is made up entirely of them), things always slow down for the choruses, where Binder and at least two backup singers let loose a slowly evolving, layered series of vocal lines that effectively tie each song together. Even in Ígéret's more joyous or seemingly frenetic moments, nothing ever seems shallow or poorly thought out. Every transition makes sense, whether they’re smooth or abrupt, and everything between the intro and outro belongs where it is.

Session musician Attila Fajkusz is the real star of this album, as his expert work with the violin is indispensable to many of these songs. He remains ever busy in the album’s quicker moments, his violin weaving some of the catchiest patterns you’ve ever heard in a folk metal release. Binder is a great asset to the band as well, her soulful vocals and her straightforward approach perfectly fitting the band's lighter approach to folk metal and her rarely-utilized harsh vocals having a monstrous tone but somehow never seeming out of place. The metal instrumentation, except for the surprisingly vibrant and expressive guitar solos, is somewhat faceless here, with the drums adding plenty of momentum and metallic zing to the folky proceedings but the riffing and the bass forming an indistinct background layer that buttresses the folk instruments and a keyboard with some kind of accordion-mimicking effect but does little else.

The dimensionlessness of much of the rhythm guitar sections barely detracts from the album, though, because they accompany some truly exemplary folk melodies and that is where Ígéret derives most of its strength. Whether it’s in the Hungarian hoedown near the end of ‘Hozd El, Isten’, the folky off-kilter march in ‘Kinizsi Mulatsága’ or the slower, more emotive sections in cuts like ‘Leszek a Csillag’, the album flows from one brilliantly conceived and executed bit of folk metal to another. Igeret is a stunning show of compositional skill that’s epic and serious, with just a taste of that party metal vibe, but not enough of one to harm the album’s credibility.