Leaves’ Eyes – Black Butterfly

Label: AFM Records
Releasedate: 22-11-2019

Leaves’ Eyes are the historians of metal. Every album puts to music a chapter of Nordic mythology or one of the Nordic sagas. The musicians’ fascination with myths and the powerful nature of the Nordic countries is tangible in all their compositions. Every Leaves’ Eyes album is a soundtrack for a history told in multilingual concepts.

The first track and also the album titlesong ‘Black Butterfly’ does not disappoint. It grabs you and lures you into their established and epochal sounds of beautiful and pure female voice and low male growls (described by former singer Liv Kristine as ‘Beauty and the Beast’) from an excellent vocal battleground against an exceptionally well-written metal composition.

‘Serkland’ starts off heavy, akin to Alestorm, but then settles down to a full symphonic track which is a bit reminiscent of a sea shanty. The combination of the voices, heavy metal and classical instruments compliment each other and sounds bombastic.

‘Night of the Ravens’ is a typical symphonic female fronted track, as I have heard so many of through the years of many other female fronted metal bands. Nevertheless their music is very strong and the use of multitracking Elina’s voice in combination with choral voices sounds extremely good. The hight tempo of this song makes it very pleasurable to listen to and had me tapping my feet. Lovely and recognisible melody, laced with heavy guitars.

The last track on this album is called ‘Stille Nacht’, which is German for the well known Christmas song ‘Silent Night’ composed by Austrian Franz Xaver Gruber in 1818 based on the lyrics penned down by Joseph Mohr, a young priest, two years before. It is a lovely acoustic rendition of this ever popular song, which has been recorded by so many singers across many music genres. Very different from the usual Leaves’ Eyes music but the clarity of Elina’s voice is showcased here.

This album is only a little snippet of what Leaves’ Eyes stand for. To really appreciate their work you should listen to some of their previous albums, as these 4 tracks do not present what this band really can do.

Line up:

• Elina Siirala – Vocals
• Alexander Krull – Vocals
• Thorsten Bauer – Guitar, Bass
• Micki Richter – Guitar
• Joris Nijenhuis – Drums

Tracklist

• Black Butterfly
• Serkland
• Night of the Ravens
• Stille Nacht

Links:

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