I have Folk Metal as one of my specialties, so I have a heard quite a few ways to combine folk music with Metal: with Viking Metal (many, many bands), Black Metal (ISENGARD, FINNTROLL), Death Metal (ENSIFERUM, SVARTSOT), Heavy Metal (CRUACHAN, SKYCLAD), Power Metal (FALCONER, ELVENKING), Doom Metal (MAEL MÓRDHA, PRIMORDIAL) and Progressive Metal (AMORPHIS and to some extent TÝR.) Alright, what is the point? The members of SIROCCO are presenting one sort that I haven’t heard before: Thrash/Folk Metal.

The base of this music is a Thrash rhythm, not wild and not very far from Heavy Metal sometimes, but still clearly Thrashy, in my opinion. With “The March Through Crimson Frost”, these Irishmen have created an interesting album, that builds on the often stable concept of creating folk feeling almost without folk instruments. The treat here is the really good guitar-work that manages to both keep the Thrash and still weave speedy folk-like guitar melodies that actually remind me of MITHOTYN. In the same way as those great Viking champions, SIROCCO’s guitar-work is quick and full of shifts, which resemble the way that folk music works. The singing is of the typical, slightly disharmonic and shouting style that is so frequently used in Thrash Metal. The vocals do range from straight-out shouting to fairly harmonic singing though. The bass and rhythm guitar do well in adding strength and force to the rhythm and the drumming is very solid throughout.

What is great with this record is that the songs just keep getting better throughout the course of the album. “Winter’s Solstice” in the middle of the album is a very good song with swift melodies, but when we reach the two last songs – “God’s Salvation” and “Forsaken Shores” the real highlights reveal. The two tracks in question are fairly different from each other: while “God’s Salvation” is the most aggressive song on the album with the vocalist really sounding like a brute, “Forsaken Shores” is one of the more controlled songs and reaches the highest quality of the album through a good and varied structure, where the nicely played guitar parts come in at the right times and are accentuated by a calmer and more harmonic singing.

I have read that the earlier work of this band has mostly been instrumental, so I am grateful that they have abandoned that path, because I wouldn’t have had the patience to enjoy the melodies if they were all instrumental. This is a good offering from a band that is carving out an own niche in the expanding genre of Folk Metal, and even though I feel that this is a band that still has a lot of development left to do to really nail that mature sound, I appreciate this album and recommend it to those enjoying Metal combined with folk, maybe especially if you are into WAYLANDER, MITHOTYN or SKYCLAD. (I realize that those are very different bands, but they all resemble different aspects of SIROCCO’s music). Go ahead and get this one!

(Online March 17, 2008)