Falconer in my eyes is one of these bands that will never become huge, though they have such potential. I think this has something to do with the band's border walking between epic / power / melodic / folk metal. They balance so well on this rope of genres that they bring in mind Skyclad. Too thrasy for the epic / folk metal fans yet to folky / epic for the thrash fans! Add to this the return of the original singer that carries around a rather unique toned voice classifying him in the category of love or hate vocalists and you have a bizarre recipe of success (?).
Their new album, Northwind, is the fifth one. And how do you describe this (and in general every single) Falconer album? Well for starters you take a base of melodic / power metal. Than you add epic lyrics and some folk touches and there you got it! Is this a recycle of the band's previous works? Well I can't really accuse them for such a thing. After all there are too influences in Falconer's playground that obviously (and like every other band does) some patterns are fixed.
The opener of Northwind is also the best song in this album. In this track you can pretty much discover the entire list of influences of Falconer. From there on the more folk oriented and guitar driven mid tempo Waltz With The Dead, the atmospheric and dark Himmel Sa Trind (in Scandinavian) and the more massive metal driven Blinded are some of the really interesting songs in this album.
Production wise this album has a warm and direct sound that gives extra weight on the guitar and vocal lines. With Northwind Falconer release another good album that might, or might not, raise their popularity higher but for sure will keep them in publicity. In my opinion Northwind is probably their second best work (after their debut) up to date.