Review: FOLKODIA “Battle of the Milvian Bridge”

FOLKODIA Battle of the Milvian Bridge
Stygian Crypt productions

Well, I beware of writing in the very first words what music the reviewing band/project/artist play. But in view of the name you have above it’ll be anything wrong with doing this. Especially that you already know that. So, this international studio project was formed in Autumn 2007. Since this time they released seven full-lengths (Battle of the Milvian Bridge is seventh one) and as far as I know every album was recorded in more or less different line-up. Anyway, all current members coming from such countries as Greece, France, Monaco, Italy, Germany and… Argentina. These members are also involved in several other bands/projects, by the way.

So this is as clear as a day that everything’s played well here. Well, in the beginning I told you, actually, you guessed because of the name, what guys play. They call their creativity Epic Folk Metal and this is probably good etiquette, even if in my opinion this is not like that, at least not at all. It can be connected with my orthodox approach to Metal and critic one to term Folk Metal, of course. However, I think, even if there’re some clearly signs of Folk music (instruments like flute, accordion, etc. and from time to time singing’s way of female vocalist), this is still Power Metal, first of all. Especially riffs, solos and mostly very melodic vocalizations say us about it. The fact is that there’re some parts of Death Metal growling or not too clean vocals here, but it doesn’t take place too often and generally you can easily recognize what bands are the biggest influences for guys who wrote the music on this album. I haven’t heard previous ones, so I can’t say anything about music enclosed on them, compare it to what we have on Battle of the Milvian Bridge to do with and stuff like that. Drumming is calm and I didn’t noticed any radical changes of tempo. It surely doesn’t mean that this is monotonous or something! Passages happen quite often and Dennis uses cymbals also, what in my opinion always make music more interesting, often as well.

However, music is rather easy-going and somehow sophisticated. In the same time guys don’t play anything complicated, there are no unnecessary displays. Songs’ structure is relative easy and classic what doesn’t mean that it’s completely foreseeable or even more, without imaginativeness! Well, in general 7th full-length is a quite solid one, but this is also anything what will go down in history of Metal or even sub-genre. But for fans of such melodic playing with Folk elements, growling and operatic vocals it should be nice to get to know this album and this project, if they didn’t earlier.