WINTERFYLLETH
“THE HALLOWING OF HEIRDOM”
Album Review by Dark Juan

8/10

WINTERFYLLETH is:
Chris Naughton – Lead Vocals, Guitars
Simon Lucas – Drums, Percussion
Nick Wallwork – Guitars
Dan Capp – Vocals, Guitars, Bass
Mark Deeks – Vocals, Synth, Strings

I’ll get straight to the point today. This is NOT a metal album. Sure, Winterfylleth are one of Britain’s best black metal bands, and based in Manchester which is always a bonus for a Bury lad like me, but they have always had this kind of pastoral edge to their music, based on their knowledge of and fascination with the England of old. This is Winterfylleth giving in to their fascination. The best way I could describe the music on The Hallowing Of Heirdom is the most gothic of British folk music. It’s acoustic, dark, brooding and mysterious – the ghost of England’s past come to regale you with tales of glory gone by dressed in her tattered finery, her voice still rich, beautiful and mellifluous, but you can see the flesh peeling away from her face and the interplay of muscle and tendon as she speaks.

Every song on here tells a story. Every song is a universe unto itself. The musicianship is splendid, the vocals haunting and the atmosphere bleak. Imagine a snow covered moor on the tops on the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire on a steel grey, cold day in November and you get an idea of the sense of alienation from the modern world this record gives you. This is the kind of record you can go and FEEL. It’s almost primordial. It’s excellent. But it is not heavy metal. And I am reviewing this record for metalgodstv.com so I am having a bit of a dilemma. Winterfylleth are a metal band. But they have recorded a folk album. Am I to mark it down because of the lack of metal? Or do I mark it accordingly to the spell it weaves over the senses and the conjuring up of misty fens and farmland and peasants working the land? The record is remarkable in the way the music hypnotises you into remembering folk memories of a time gone by when Britain was green, pleasant and pastoral, as opposed to the horrendous shit pit fortress it is today. I’m captivated, sitting in my house in rural France, sipping French beer as I listen and I yearn, YEARN for the England of the past. My England. The land of moongleam and meadowsweet. The land of forests, nymphs, fairies and mysteries beyond human knowledge…

Fuck it. I’m a sad old goth and proud of it. This record is marvellous as it appeals to the sense of beauty I have inside me (which normally expresses itself in the beauty of violent music) and calls me back to my ancestral homelands. Oh, Lancashire, my County Palatine, how Winterfylleth makes me miss the IDEA of you. Your moors, your villages, the Trough Of Bowland, the innate hardiness of your people and if I had had another son his name would have been Aethelwulf… But not Blackpool. Blackpool can go fuck itself. It’s like the brassiest of cheap whores selling itself dressed up in pink, face smeared in horrendous pancake makeup and cooing to the passing men in the cracked voice of an aging, broken woman. Winterfylleth good, Blackpool bad. And Morecambe? Don’t even get me started…

The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has now regained its customary hatred of everything and everyone after a brief moment of weakness and awards Winterfylleth 8/10 for an interesting, thoughtful and magnificent record of dark wonders. It can’t be ten because it is not even a little bit metal. If I were a reviewer for gothgodstv.com it would have been ten. But, it is an ESSENTIAL listen. Anyway, 8/10 corresponds to the large pool of blood found that would have the County Sheriff and possibly some housecarles investigating it.

TRACKLIST

The Shepherd
Frithgeard
Aecerbot
Halgemonath
Edler Mother
Embers
A Gleeman’s Volt
Latch To A Grave
The Nymph
On Cydig
Resting Tarn

https://www.winterfylleth.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/Winterfylleth/

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