Arkona – Yav

Russian Pagan Folk metal band Arkona were founded in 2002, and in the last few years have been starting to build a larger following in Europe and other parts of the world, helped by several tours and a date at the Metal Female Voices Fest where they won over a large part of the crowd with their impressive live performance.  The band has had an amazingly stable lineup, with the departure of their original drummer earlier this year being the only change to the lineup – pretty good for a band thats been going 12 years.

Yav is the band’s seventh studio album, and although I’ve got the live album “Decade of Glory”, this is the first time I’ve listened to one of the ir studio albums, so I was looking forward to hearing how they sound on album.  The answer is that they sound great.  There’s more variety here than I was expecting, and a lot of richness.
The vocals range from clean singing to harsh snarls or growls (both from Masha), there’s a mix of traditional instruments used alongside the more modern metal instruments (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards), and this means that you get a really good heavy metal sound as the base with the flutes and other traditional instruments giving it that folk sound as well as a lot of extra interest.

Obviously I can’t comment on the lyrics since the band sing in a language I don’t speak – i.e. Russian, but a bit of use of Google translate shows the song titles to include “Empty villages call”, “The witch”, “Indigo child”, “City of dreams” and “Embraced by sedition”, all of which fits the folk metal genre.  Happily as bands like Rammstein have proved, you don’t need to understand the lyrics to enjoy listening to the songs, and so I’ve been really enjoying the album.

This isn’t a short album.  Despite only having nine songs, it clocks in at around 68 minutes in length, with songs ranging from just under 5 minutes long, to over 13 minutes long.

Powerful Russian Pagan/Folk metal from Arkona – a great album.

Track listing:

1. Zarozhdenie
2. Na Strazhe Novyh Let
3. Serbia
4. Zov pustyh dereven’
5. Gorod Snov
6. Ved’ma
7. Chado Indigo
8. Jav’
9. V Ob’yat’yah Kramoly