ELUVEITIE - Evocation I: The Arcane Dominion (2009)

Now sans the Kirstler brothers, but with Päde Kistler on bagpipes and vocals, here's another Eluveitie record!  I obviously wasn’t listening at the time so I don't know how this was received – a band that previously fit closer to death metal than anything else is now releasing an acoustic female-fronted record sung only in Gaulish that’s part one of a two part story?  Um...?  For what it’s worth, scrolling through reviews from the time suggests that acoustic records were all the rage at the time, and that Eluveitie were actually making a very expected move similar to what some of their peers in the folk-infused metal world were already doing.

 

I’m arbitrarily making the rule that when this band engages in its “folk” side and does a record with no English, I’m not required to do the same track-by-track breakdown I do for their “metal” side.  That way I can focus on the listening experience.  (And that helps me out because then I don’t have to make comments about a track like “Memento,” about which I have nothing in particular to say, ha.)

 

 

Anyway!  On the one hand I’m not wild about starting with “Sacrapos – At First Glance” despite the fact that it actually does have English in it, because the voiceover about the “she” who is about to dismissively consume me is just so cheesy.  If it’s supposed to help explain what the record is about to a neophyte it fails at that, and due to the voiceover it doesn’t work as music.  I can’t, however, not note that this is Anna Murphy’s first writing credit for the band, and so the piece of music (which is fine, it’s just the voiceover I don’t like) is something she either composed or found.  This is relevant because, well, she’s the main singer here.  And to that end, the first “regular” song, "Brictom" is about as good an introduction to the Evocation experience as one could hope for.  The chanted lead-in is the same kind of start of a track that could fit on Spirit.  Then we get to the main instrumental melody line, in which what sounds like Anna’s hurdy-gurdy gets the catchiest patch.  Then we get to a slightly less interesting but still clear chorus, that’s punctuated by Chigrel’s voice abruptly taking over to punctuate the climax of the chorus with a good solid growl.  Basically, it sounds like a pop-metal song with different instruments.  The listener is now eased in to what to expect from this record.  I wasn’t quite able to come up with a coherent meta-narrative in which Chigrel gradually hands the record over to Anna as it moves on.  However, if one were trying to present this new Anna-fronted incarnation of the band in a way that would be readily digestible to an existing Eluveitie fan, one would lead with an intro track that she wrote and then do a song like “Brictom.”     

 

The whopping sixteen tracks seem a bit more manageable when one realizes that at least at first, we're alternating interludes with "real" songs, and a bit less manageable when one realizes that some, like the overlong title track, will be drawn out instrumentals or mostly instrumentals.  I don't have much to say about either in that category.  Certainly nothing on the record sounds unpleasant, but for an uncouth American like me the level of engagement is naturally going to wax and wane when it's neither a style of music I necessarily flock to nor in a language I understand.  Of course, sometimes the mood is able to grab this listener by the throat - for example, on most recent listen, the thumping drum beat imbued "Within The Grove" (credited writer: “traditional”) with a sinister intensity and drive that clicked with me.  And other times I tuned out.  Fairly easy to predict that sort of mixed engagement.  Even within the same song, I may be put off at first by the throaty male chant-growl (over what sounds like one single held hurdy note) of something like “Nata” and then a minute later decide I’m intrigued by this sort of sound I don’t normally listen to.  But maybe not for long. 

 

That overall is my biggest issue with Evocation I.  I can’t appreciate a concept album if I can’t understand the words, and then I also have no “in” to what the bridging songs are going for.  If there’s any kind of album-long arc, rising or falling action, that sort of thing, I can’t discern it.  I can’t say I learned anything meaningful about Karnonos from having listened to an alleged concept record about him…

 

 

So, after a run of folkier songs, the question is, does Evocation I rock?  Sometimes it does!  Chigrel is anxious to reassert his presence here and there, taking lead on tracks like the short but lively "The Cauldron Of Renascence.”  But from a standard pop-metal standpoint, the clear central track is “Omnos,” which unsurprisingly was the lead single.  Despite the sparse acoustic strings, it’s got a clear rising and falling melody (and a classic Eluveitie bridge with the pipes).  Anna takes lead and Chigrel adds spice to the incredibly catchy chorus.  This sounds like Eluveitie despite the different format, and I kinda think it rocks.  (I wouldn’t have guessed the lyrics, according to online translations*, would involve a wolf and an analogy, with sexual overtones, about loss of innocence or something.  Eluveitie remain a really fucking weird band.)

 

In another universe I could see “Omnos” performed in a more standard (for Eluveitie) folk metal style, on a record with other songs like it.  It could be interspersed with extended mostly-instrumental-with-some-spoken-word interludes like the strings-first “Carnutian Forest” that neatly winds it down.  We kind of get a look at that alternate universe, since one of the bonus tracks on the streaming versions of the record is an “early metal version” of “Omnos,” with rock guitars on the chorus, a drum machine part that presumably would have gotten fleshed out once Merlin got his hands on it, Chigrel in full growl mode during this vocal parts… basically, sounding like the sort of song that Eluveitie had previously written.  Kinda goes to show that the Evocation project isn’t as much of a stylistic departure as one might think, since a song written in “metal” mode could so easily be transposed into “folk” mode.  It would have worked perfectly well in metal form, but I think that the song is a little more powerful in its finished version, giving the melody more room to breathe.

 

 

Moving on, after the aforementioned “Carnutian Forest,” we get “Dessumiis Luge.”  That is certainly a track that stands out.  And, interestingly, is credited to Anna and, for the only time of which I’m aware, fiddler Meri Tadiḉ.  The vocal delivery is just really different.  All Anna here, and it almost sounds hip hop inspired, although not quite, the way the vocals split the difference between chanting and screaming over the ominous strings and thumping drum.  DL sets a mood better than the songs specifically designed as mood pieces do.  Not sure I’ve heard a sound quite like this before.  The mood I get from it is surveying a war-obliterated wasteland, although I went back and forth in my head about whether I thought it was from the POV of the destroyer or the destroyed.  According to the Internet’s attempt at a translation, the song is actually about invoking the ancient gods for retribution-y purposes, which I can buy.

 

One more tune that I’d like to specifically highlight from the back half is “Voveso In Mori.”  Merlin’s drumming is most obvious on the softer numbers, somehow, and here the drums are outright intense, a big part of why “Voveso” works as well as it does.  I’m also struggling to find a way to describe the guitar tone, but it sounds like a down-tuned acoustic guitar.  Maybe it says more about my frame of reference than it does about the music, but my brain parses it as some hybrid between late grunge band Days Of The New and the clean-vocals parts of Opeth.  Here the melody isn’t metal at all, going with a relatively pure melodic lament of a vocal.  Wikipedia lists Anna and Chigrel as co-writers, but Metalstorm, for whatever it’s worth, credits it to Anna and Merlin, which would mean we’re kind of getting a very early taste of the Cellar Darling group writing music together.**

 

The last standard song of the package is “Ne Regv Na,” another folk song with few or no metal elements in which the lyrics are traditional Gaulish.  Anna, fully front and center by this point, sings it with poise and conviction, like she wrote it.  We then return to the “Sacrapos” melody but without even a cheesy voiceover to explain what we’ve heard; guess I just have to let the subtitle of “Sacrapos - The Disparaging Last Gaze” speak for itself when applied to the plaintive sounding buzzing violin abruptly dropping away so that the record can end on a minute of chimes.  I’m sure that says… well, something or other.  And I’m sure there’s more to Evocation I then I’m getting out of it, but all I can say is that it dragged a bit but that overall I enjoyed listening to it.

 

 

A few other tidbits:

- Former Spirit era band member Sarah Wauquiez guests on one song, so that’s nice.

- Anna is playing flute here as well as hurdy-gurdy, although I don't think that necessarily influences instrumentation here, since the band has always gone heavy on the flutes anyway.

- In addition to the aforementioned bonus track, the streaming versions also include a two-minute piece called “Slania (Folk Medley)” that seems to be mostly based on “Elembivos.”  This caused me to spend minutes going back and forth trying to figure out whether all this time “Slanias Song” and “Elembivos” have had the same base tune.  And I think so!  But somehow still am not sure!  They layer a bunch of other stuff on top of it in both tracks.

 

- Favorite track:  "Omnos"

- Runner up:  “Dessumiis Luge”

- Least favorite track:  "Sacrapos – At First Glance”

- Rating:  3.5/5

 

Definitive running list of records by Eluveitie that I have listened to so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality

1)  Slania

2)  Spirit

3)  Evocation I – The Arcane Dominion

 

On to Everything Remains (As It Never Was) whenever I get around to it!

 

*of course, as Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out in nearly every speech he ever gave, not everything you read on the Internet is accurate.

 

**with MetalStorm further crediting the lyrics to Sarah, to make things even weirder.  This isn’t the song that she plays on.