?Classics? of power metal #7: FALCONER - Falconer (2001), early impressions

Past exposure to this band/record:  Zero.

I've been looking forward to this one way too much, I think.  

I come in ready to open some new horizons with Falconer, since they always pop up as the supposed unique PM band that everyone needs to know about.  Since we finished with Adramelch, I've spent a lot of time basically in the realm of traditional German-style power metal and, well, the last few records I've written about are variations on that theme.  Often interesting variations, to be sure.  We had traditional German PM in the vein of Helloween except in its rawer form with Death Or Glory, except backcrossed with various early-80s forms of metal with Glory To The Brave, except front-crossed with the rest of the rock and metal world with The Dark Ride,* and except with an ensemble cast with The Metal Opera.  Fine, fine.  But, look, I started this writing project wanting vicissitudes.  I wanted to hear some bands pushing at the edges of what power metal can be.  Now finally we've got a group out of Sweden that's supposed to be as much folk metal as it is PM... and I have been known to love me some folk metal.  Yet the musicians involved come from a black metal background, so if that permeates Falconer... hey, I'm always on board with either a few rasps or some icy tremolo-filled atmospherics if it'll help keep things interesting.  Yet the singer is supposedly unique even within power metal, folk metal, and black metal, supposedly doing suspiciously non-metal things with his voice... sounds cool.

So, I wanted a change of pace, and I'll be getting one now, right?  All of those things, plus recognizably power metal with its big catchy hooks?  Falconer have a big body of work with a clear beginning and end, and pretty much everyone who's heard of them advocate for them.  I'm basically coming in poised to fall in love with this band.  

 

In other words, our starting point is an impossible amount of baggage.  All of the above needs to be kept in mind when processing why exactly I'm a little disappointed.  It's going to take a few listens to separate the record itself from the record in my imagination, and learn to love it or not for what it actually is.

To be clear, I am writing this intro** before having heard a note of Falconer.  I just know that expectations are going to taint things.  The record is pretty much guaranteed to feel somehow disappointing after spins #1-2.  In some way, it won't be what I signed up for.  Right?

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[Listens to Falconer]

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Okay... believe it or not, I'm not disappointed.  If anything, we have the opposite problem.  If anything, my wanting to like the record has pushed me to like it too much.  This honestly sounds pretty thoroughly great.  Not exactly what I was expecting, because as above I didn't quite what to expect.  But I can tell that it's a great record.

Most surprising element of Falconer to me is probably that it's straight-ahead metal.  Right away you have rapid fire drumming and down tuned crunchy riffs.  I tend to expect folk metal to have, like, lutes and flutes and shit, or keyboards at the very minimum.***  Here the keys are used sparingly, tastefully adding texture to the bridges and outro of "Upon The Grave Of Guilt," "Wings Of Serenity," "Substitutional World," and perhaps best of all, to add a tiny subtle texture to the main riff of "Mindtraveler."  There's the intro to "A Quest For The Crown," of course, but that's brief, and for all I know could be just acoustic guitar.  The rest of the time, we have clearly classic guitar/bass/drums metal , mostly played by just three guys (with some studio overlays and the like).  The metal riffs are recognizably baseline power metal in particular, most obviously on the eagle-themed "Wings Of Serenity," which can only be described as an "Eagle Fly Free" for the Dream Theater generation.****  Honestly, there are a lot of things that impress me about Falconer, and the foremost of which is how without doing much more than occasionally strumming instead of picking the guitar, the band are able to clearly incorporate folk traditions into music that's so firmly nested within a classic power metal toolkit.

Because those vocal melodies are lilting and lyrical.  I can't call them other than clearly European folk inspired.  Vocalist Mathias Blad sounds like he can belt with the best of them, but he sticks mostly to a pleasant mid-range that lets the emotion in the songs come through.  Mathias comes from a theater background, but his singing is more modern-rock than Broadway, while comfortably fitting into a metal band.  He's got heft and weightiness, with a total absence of posturing.  Could Stefan (I believe he's both the main musician and the principal/only songwriter) have picked a voice that more perfectly matches the material?  He's really good at this.

The other most striking thing about these songs to me is - and this is helped by both the lyrics themselves and the way Mathias sings them - how morose they are.  As noted, the Stefan's guitar/bass patterns are pure power metal, and you hear some power metal appropriate quests on songs like the delightful "Mindtraveller."  But that's not the vibe of most of the record.  I mean, we start with a song that includes the lyrics

As I look into the mirror, I do not see my face

Two lying hollow eyes are staring back, with a look of shame and disgrace

...And continues in that vein.  It doesn't get much cheerier!  Most of the songs are about the narrator's misery, or the narrator decrying someone else's immorality.  Falconer's soaring-eagle song is all about looking down contemptuously on humanity.  Hell, Falconer's "whoa-oh-oh" filled sailing song seems to consist entirely of helplessly watching the ship sink!  I originally was going to go after "The Quest For The Crown" for finding a dopey narrative to match its haunting melody, but then catching a single word on second listen that I missed the first time completely changed what the song means to me.*****  When they give us songs that aren't cheery exactly but at least allude to history and mystery without being mopey about it, like "The Past Still Lives On," those are the light moments.  Quality darkness - not faux-edgy nonsense about Satan or corpses or whatever, but songs that really go to dark places - tends to be sorely lacking in the power metal I've heard, and I am absolutely here for it coming from Falconer.

I'm really having a hard time finding anything wrong with Falconer.  Granted, this is early-listening glow, so I may cool.  The songs might end up being too samey... but, I think it's more that they all start from a similar base but all go different places and have their hooks sunk into me by the end.  I'm maybe not confident the choruses have the big memorable hooks you find on something like The Dark Ride or The Metal Opera, though I do think these tunes are going to keep growing on me.  One example: "Heresy In Disguise" has what on paper ought to be a weak hook, just the title, yet in context, coming as the resolution of the chord set up by the previous measure, I think it works.  What else?  I guess the longer pieces do make my mind wander a bit, so the likes of "Substitutional World" are relative weak points for me at the moment.  I feel like the hookiness maybe starts to run out of steam in the back half of the record.  Just an early impression, though, as always.  Gotta listen a bunch more to test that theory!

Stray thoughts:

There's some kind of percussion hidden in the background of "Lord Of The Blacksmiths" that sounds like the precise hit of a hammer on metal!  Neat.

Is it weird that despite being the atypical "bonus track," the one I want to listen to over and over is when they bring in a lady guest vocalist to do a Swedish-language duet rendition of an old ballad, "Per Tyrssons Döttrar I Vänge?"  Of course it's a cheery sounding song about a folk tale that's about tragedy, because, Falconer.

Favorite track:  "Per Tyrssons Döttrar I Vänge" [if it's on the playlist, it counts as part of the album!]

Runner up:  "Wings Of Serenity"

Least favorite track:  "Substitutional World"

Preliminary rating:  4.5/5

Next:  More on Falconer whenever I get around to it!

*Ironically one of the more unique records I've written about so far.  Leave it to Helloween themselves to get us away from stuff that all sounds like some form of Keepers-era Helloween.  As I've quipped elsewhere, shockingly some artists known as innovators and pioneers aren't big believers in rigid adherence to subgenre conventions!

**Its first draft, anyway.  I did go back and edit.

***Yeah, folk metal isn't a monolith, I know.  I've heard the convincing argument that folk metal as a subgenre doesn't have standardized elements or a fixed taxonomy, because every single folk metal song is by definition a fusion: a mix between metal (of one kind or another, from one of its estimated three hundred subgenres) and folk music (of one kind or another, from one of humanity's estimated three hundred million folk traditions, all of which predate the electric guitar).

****I hope that term makes sense, since I'm just spitballing here.

*****The word that changed everything was "moat."  See, at first blush, sounds like a story about a spirited hunt for a missing magical Macguffin, and then years later some kid stumbles onto it.  Fine, whatever, magic bullshit and maybe some chosen-one bullshit.  Well, no.  The story plays totally differently if you realize that he finds the crown in the moat.  It was there the whole time, sunk amongst all the other (literal) shit emitted by the castle.  Someone dropping an object in a moat inspires a national manufactured crisis, huge amounts of money and manpower being completely wasted in a time of actual famine, looking for a piece of jewelry.******   This band is just acid, all the way down, and I fucking love it.

******Good thing in these enlightened times we're better than all that.  I mean, who could even imagine twenty-first century leaders ignoring all of his people's actual needs in favor of waste or entertainment!