Gladenfold - Nemesis
I’m going to start this review off with a question: have you ever listened to an album without knowing anything about the band or artist and you were kind of blown away by it? I hope so, especially if you’re a music fan that takes chances in the dark, you’ll find some bands and artists that blow you away on the first listen. Gladenfold, a Finnish power metal / melodic death metal band, is that band for me right now. I didn’t know anything about this band, other than what I just said, thanks to finding a review of their new album, Nemesis, on Angry Metal Guy’s website. The album just came out a week before writing this, so I thought I’d check it out, especially since I’ve been coincidentally in the mood for some power metal, thanks to playing the 2018 God Of War game that takes place in the Nordic realm of Midgard, and takes on the Norse pantheon this time around. Power metal is the perfect genre of music to listen to when you play that game, am I right? I read the review of Nemesis, and they praised it quite highly, so I thought I’d give it a listen myself, and sure enough, I love it. I love this album enough to say that it’s in my top five of my favorite albums of this year. I don’t say that highly, because a lot of albums this year haven’t really blown me away the same that this album has, along with a few others on my list (Undeath’s new album is another good example; that just came out two weeks ago, and I absolutely love that one as well). I haven’t heard a lot of outright bad albums, but a lot of stuff has just been kind of “meh,” but this... This is awesome.
I mentioned that Gladenfold’s sound is a mix between power metal and melodic death metal, which is really nothing new all in itself. You can argue that a band like Children Of Bodom is power metal with death metal vocals, or even bands like Unleash The Archers have dabbled in melo-death a bit. On some of their albums, they’ve got some harsh vocals mixed with some melo-death riffs, and they work really, really well. This band makes those two sounds work extremely well together, but they also add a folk-metal accent to their sound, too, but it’s not extremely in the forefront. They have some very slow, mellow, and folksy parts, but they don’t encompass the whole album. A lot of this album is very power metal, but it’s not super cheesy or corny. The album cover isn’t really that corny, either, and you can tell a lot about a power metal album through it artwork. If the album cover is over the top and corny, you can almost guarantee that the album itself will be, too. The album cover for Nemesis is honestly kind of awesome, and that’s one thing that drew me to it. The music itself is just as good, and everything is executed extremely well. The vocals are fantastic, both the clean vocals and the harsh vocals (I was surprised at how well they mix epic power metal and menacing melo-death, but the vocals in particular are great), the instrumentation is a mix of sweeping and brutal when it needs to be, and the overall sound is just really cool and refreshing.
I will admit that this album could have used a trim, as it’s 53 minutes and it’s a little long for that, but that would be unfair to any song on this album, since every song on here is killer. A lot of the songs kind of blend together, too, but that’s not the album’s fault. A lot of albums in that vein do that, even just within metal itself, but at 53 minutes, it’s a little lengthy. I’ve been listening to this album a lot during the week, and for good reason, it’s the main album I’ve been coming back to. The fact that it’s a bit long doesn’t bother me too much, either, since I love playing it, it’s just a bit too long for its own good. That’s why it helps a little bit when the band takes a break from their heavier styles of metal and moves for a more folksy / folk-metal style. A few songs are a bit slower and more mellow, like I said, and it helps to break up the album a bit. Man, this album is awesome. I can’t stop singing its praises, because it’s one of those records that really blew me away when I first heard it earlier this week. I might keep playing it for the next week or so, just because I love listening to this thing. It’s a great mix of heavy and catchy, especially adding the melo-death elements, and it never feels jarring or weird, either. Some albums feel like that; I’ve listened to a few in that vein, where the clean vocals or the harsh vocals felt so out of place, it was really hard to past that. With this one, however, it doesn’t bother me, because the transitions are so seamless. Even when they take a break and slow things down, they can move into a melo-death passage later in the song and it works extremely well. If you’re a power metal fan, or a melo-death fan, I’d totally listen to this, it’s way too good.
