Um... Eluve-what?

 

Whilst I continue to work up the motivation to press on with Cherry Tree and beyond, the next band that's going to be concurrently taking up many strokes of a virtual pen will be Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie. 

The story behind this decision isn’t that interesting, but in brief, I’m always trying to discover new artists – I mostly focus on records that came out during the year that it is so my new music is new-new, but I’m trying to get better about also delving into the recent and less recent past.  I often have YouTube videos playing in the background while I work on certain things.  One channel (reaction channel “The Kel N’ Rich show”) featured a song by Eluveitie.  I was mildly intrigued, and decided to give a few listens to an Eluveitie record chosen at semi-random – knowing nothing other than it was the final record before the Cellar Darling split (see below), I went with 2014’s Origins.  And I was fucking blown away. 

Origins very quickly became one of my favorite musical discoveries of 2023 and I could not get enough of it.  Not being particularly well versed in the band’s style(s) of music, I was curious whether I’d be able to articulate why exactly I love Origins so much, and also whether the rest of the band’s catalogue would reveal a hidden treasure or simply that they’d captured Benjamin-lightning in a bottle once with the perfect confluence of poppiness and heaviness.  Either way, it should give me something to try to write at length about.

I definitely appreciate that, given all the artists in the world to blog about, it’s a bit unique for the two I focus on to be the National and Eluveitie (and Cellar Darling).  Unique in a fun way, hopefully.  For some reason I’m reminded of a comment on an internet thread somewhere that I can no longer remember about how Kids These Days just listen to all the music at once free of context.  The person making the post apparently had somehow heard from some tween or teen girl that he met or overheard in passing or something listing her three favorite artists of all time, and it was seemingly the most random three picks possible.  Her favorites were Elvis Costello (I think, not sure about that one), Motley Crue, and Paramore.  Well, I don’t know if I can top that combination for sheer randomness, but it looks like I’ve fallen into trying.  If I do a deep dive into the music of Fish (AKA Derek Dick, the Scottish prog-rock singer-songwriter) at some point, maybe that could serve as the new champion for the most random combination of rock artists possible?

Rather than blog semi-real-time reactions, for Eluveitie I’m going to try to dissect the records track by track, after a few listens.  Maybe in single posts, maybe a few per record, depending on how much I have to say.

 I’m coming in with this basic knowledge:

-         ) Eluveitie are a moderately big deal within a fringe scene.  Their main claim to fame is that they somehow commit completely, and equally, to being a melodic death-metal band and to being a Celtic folk band; rather than separate the two sides of their identity, they do both at the same time.  Except that than they also did a couple of records that were pure female-fronted folk music and not metal.  Their lyrics tend to concern Celtic history, tradition, and mythology.

-       ) It seems their first two full-lengths are their most popular among the die-hards, but that each “era” has its supporters.

-       ) One of the biggest barriers to entry for me may be their tendency to pepper in songs and, in a few cases, entire records, that are sung in Old Gaulish rather than English.

-        ) The most common criticisms of the band are

o   1) that (in the opinion of some) all of the songs start to sound the same once you know their formula

o   2) that (in the opinion of some) on the metal side, their riffs and compositions are nothing special, and

o   3) that (in the opinion of some), main songwriter and sole permanent member, Christian [Chigrel] Glanzmann, is a dick.  This opinion does seem to be common among many of his former bandmates, many of whom left under acrimonious circumstances, although in most cases they’re not very open about the specifics.

-       )  Speaking of acrimonious departures, the folk-metal band Cellar Darling consists of several key ex- Eluveitie members, including the latter band’s near-founding drummer and secondary songwriter Merlin Sutter, and its longtime secondary vocalist and songwriter Anna Murphy.

-        ) The band is named after a Gaulish phrase found in some graffiti that according to the band roughly translates to “I, the Helevtian,” with “Helvetian” in turn being a word that can mean “Swiss” in the right context. 

-        ) I don’t actually know how the name is pronounced.

-        ) Besides Origins, I write this having already had a few spins each of Spirit and of Cellar Darling’s This Is The Sound.

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