(DGR continues his very long history of writing about the music of Finland’s Wolfheart at NCS with this review of their new EP Draconian Darkness II, out now via Reigning Phoenix Music.)
Wolfheart have developed many patterns for themselves over their career and we have dove headlong into them many a time with each successive album. One of the more common ones for the Wolfheart crew in recent years, since their Napalm Records and then current Reigning Phoenix signings, is to hammer together an EP or single in between albums and unleash it closer to the end of summer.
The name Wolfheart remains in constant discussion then, with releases like Skull Soldiers carving the path for the EP segment of the crowd and songs like “Iku-Turso” laying the groundwork for the occasional loose-laying single. It’s meant as a sort of comfort food for those of us who’ve taken to the band’s formulation of melodic death metal, forged in fire yet epic enough to soundtrack mountain climbing in a blizzard, something present that is consistent in quality with the album prior but still has a shiny newness to it to tide people over.
Wolfheart‘s latest gathering of material of this ilk arrived in late-September, entitled Draconian Darkness II, offering up a continuation of the group’s 2024 release Draconian Darkness and containing an oddball mixture of material to satiate the completionist in us all: Two new songs, one live track, an acoustic take on a Draconian Darkness song, and the orchestral segment of a different one of the same album.
It goes without saying that Wolfheart have found their groove in that aforementioned forged-in-fire ‘epic melodeath’ sound and they don’t stray from it with the two new songs for Draconian Darkness II. This could be assumed as well, given the direct connection between last year’s Draconian Darkness album and this collective of extras and newer material. Their genesis lay in the same inspirational font, so the conclusion is simple:
There are completionist nerds like yours truly who love this sort of stuff – alternate takes on previous songs, orchestral numbers, the rare live track when it doesn’t just sound like the same song plus crowd noise – and those who may only be interested in the two extra singles, “Carnivore” and “Forefathers”, will likely also love diving into Draconian Darkness II. For the rest who may be on the fence and are curious what all that previous babble was about, the interest may wander a little more.
“Carnivore” and “Forefathers” run in a similar musical vein, though they are a little less grandiose than many of the symphonically backed songs on Wolfheart’s main Draconian Darkness album. Where they draw most of their similarity is that they are big and burly songs, built around the kind of massive grooves Wolfheart have been toying with since their Skull Soldiers EP. They are less about ‘the army riding across the snowy fields’ style of double-bass-driven gallop and more of a heavy to-and-fro.
“Forefathers”, for instance, could even be treated as a continuation of the “Ancestor” single that Wolfheart unleashed ahead of their King Of The North album cycle. Similar well of inspiration to draw from, similar ideals, and massive thundering rhythm sections to help construct the whole musical creature. That it shares blood and run-time with “Carnivore” before it is what makes it fit within the confines of the Draconian Darkness segment instead.
The surprising part for both songs comes not from the musical front then, but instead the vocal delivery, wherein the three-fer wrestling team of Tuomas Saukkonen, Lauri Silvonen, and Vagelis Karzis are all on the attack, and in many cases – especially “Carnivore” – it’s a bellowing death metal growl in comparison to the more mid-range yell that has long been the chosen vehicle for the Wolfheart crew. It must come with the territory that when you traverse the stygian realms of the low and slow, so too must your vocals match, even in the scrying bones and folk-inflected epic mountain climbs of a Wolfheart album.
Your other three extras on this fine addendum are – like mentioned before – more for the nerdiest among us. There’s value to be found in the acoustic take on “The Gale” and the orchestral version of “Grave”, both of which were big songs for Wolfheart. “Grave” may be one of those that is permanantely affixed to the group’s live set these days anyway, so there is definite shared familiarity if you’ve never crossed paths with the song in its original form but have caught them on one of their many hard-touring festival runs.
Both songs work as pleasant backgrounds when broken out on their own; “Grave” becomes suitably epic and sounds like a proper movie soundtrack with all of its various stringed accompaniments, and an acoustic take on “The Gale” calms the storm that the song was named after. They’re not the most integral things to the overall Wolfheart catalogue but them breaking those two songs out and adventuring with them is interesting to witness. In the flow of the whole EP, they’re a little more scattershot but one has the sense that with the inclusion of the live track the issue was less ‘musical flow’ and ‘sequence of songs’ and more of a value-add propostion from a marketing front, so Draconian Darkness II didn’t have to just stand on the strength of the two well-muscled four-minute groovers.
When the Wolfheart army marches, they are thunderous. We know this much from the previous album bearing the same name; a direct continuation is going to perpetuate that trend without us having to worry about a sudden polka break in the middle of one of the songs. Draconian Darkness II has two solid, four-plus-minute beasts in song form and then a collection of extras for the obsessive crowd. Skull Soldiers had a similar idea in its musicality; the songs were massive, leviathan-esque steps wherein each drum hit and following guitar strum seemed to shake the ground before it.
In other words, Draconian Darkness II isn’t so much a giant soaring above the skies with orchestal accompaniment or humongous battle simulacrum but instead songs of heaved earth and laborious tasks. “Carnivore” and “Forefathers” are as much of the mud and muck that goes into building the eventual longhouses and meeting halls that these albums evoke as they are of the ‘epic’ side of melodeath.
Wolfheart have made much of their imagery of songs being forged in fire and the two new songs here are ones made for the forge. The live number and song reinterpretations afterward are pleasant additions but not the most necessary. As an addendum to Draconian Darkness, this extra chapter is befitting and fine.
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