Stojar “At Twilight of Battles By The Hammer Of Thunderstorms”
Stygian Crypt productions
Oh shit… How long tittle!!! It’s not the longest one which I saw in my live, but… Anyway, the one which you can see is only translation. Originally album has tittle in Russian, but since Cyrillic would look strange for the most of readers (not for me, anyway – I can read it without problems) than you have its English version here.
So now after this introduction you know that STOJAR comes from Russia, to be more precise – from Yaroslavl. The city has long history and really huge meaning for history of whole country. By the other hand the fact is that if not Vikings city could be not found (practically renamed from Temerevo). Besides city and whole Principality of Yaroslavl became a part of Grand Duchy of Moscow, in some way progenitor of today’s Russia, in the second half of 15th century. Today it has ig economic, cultural and so on meaning, but it’s mostly about the region. Reason is that even if there live something like 630.000 people it’s rather not so very big city – as on Russian conditions.
By the way, band is active long eleven years. Well, with this activity (at least in this record meaning) there was variously coz between a demo and first album there were eight years of break. The fact is that in 2012 the band participated in compilation released by Ural Pagan Metal Production, but anyway… However, now we can listen to “At Twilight…”, so let’s talk about this full-length. It contains eight songs (of course in Russian – especially that one of the main topics of lyrics is patriotism, but I’m not sure if it’s about Russian or this earlier one and if it’s only about patriotism or maybe nationalism) of something what musicians call by Folk Metal. Well, maybe I’m not an expert on this field, but… OK, but hell with terms! The fact is that we have here a lot of violin, from time to time some kind of pipe and keyboards and so on. But is it enough to use adjective “folk”?!? You’ll judge it better by yourselves. I know only that melodies played especially on keyboard (but not only) connote to me with something what’s far, at least in my opinion, from any kind of Metal and even Rock. The worse is that sometimes I can’t connote it with any Folk music. Not as I said once, at least I think so, I never was, I’m not and I’ll never be expert on the field of Folk Meta or in general Folk music, so…
Anyway, music is rather calm and very melodic. Of course there happen more, let’s say, brisk fragments. For example “Molotom grov v sumerki bitv” is almost all like that. But next “Na kolodnykh kamnyakh…” sounds for me like musicians would like to something like Metal ballad. Well, ballad it’s for sure, but it has unfortunately nothing to do with Metal. To be honest it’s also hard to say about this song that it has something to do even with Rock. Anyways, this music surely provokes to dance, but I’m not sure if this dance calls pogo – at least I’d don’t do it hearing music like that! But it doesn’t of course mean that there aren’t people who’d do it! For the end of this review I’ll tell you that the only two things which I connote with Metal here are quite heavy riffs and coming sometimes (definitely too rarely!) Yarosvet’s growling. By the way, he’s the only one who’s in the band since its birth… Mostly sings Evgenia Vitlugina with her, of course, clean voice.
OK, I know that playing like that has quite big number of fans. So for them it’ll surely be “something”!!! For me it isn’t, but let’s be honest. It’s absolutely not my cup of beer!
Contact: stojar@bk.ru
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