"Folkish Tales with thrilling metal-sounds"

To catch their audience and lead them into their own world from the first track onwards, the Swiss band DELION only needs to play an intro. Officially this world is called „Folk Metal", but it also includes certain aspects of other genres such as Melodic-Death-Metal, at least that was my first impression.

Already the harpsichord-beginning caught me, the whole intro reminded me of the main-theme of a fantasy-videogame. Especially the crow-sounds created an authentic atmosphere. The connection to the first regular song was rather abrupt and the growls brought a certain heavy sound into the setting.

This will carry on through the whole album, which mixes folk- and metal-sounds - a medieval-sounding basic melody with additional metal - and always guttural vocals, but the vocals never sound the same. Albums without any clean vocals lose tension most of the time, because of the massive use of grunts the aggression and emotions seem to fade away. But this is not the case with "Tales Of The Northern Realm", on the one hand the five-song-album is too short to sound boring or repetitive and on the other hand the singer uses a good variety of grunts and growls. Furthermore the album has appealing instrumental parts, this counts for the work on the guitars as well as on the other instruments.

DELION all in all create a mystic atmosphere with their second album, some parts reminded me of the beginning melodies of the Italian composer Amadeo Minghi. Furthermore they achieve to create songs with folkish melodies, which do not lose the ability to be catchy despite their heavy tunes.

The only negative aspect for me personally is the typical and repetitive scheme of the album. Especially for non-native speakers the English lyrics could be incomprehensible most of the time, for example "The Queen Of The Ancient Northern Realm" became rather uninteresting, because of the similar sounding verses. But the rest of the album makes up for this problem. All in all the album is a good piece of work, which exactly offers enough intensity to listen to all five songs in one session. I would like to see more of this in the future!