Latest news with #Wardruna
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'An airier touch on a record of extraordinary scope': Wardruna's Birna
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Can a project as rooted in the past as Wardruna truly be considered progressive? The Norwegian group utilise recreated Viking-era and Stone Age instruments to explore ancient cultural and mythological themes. This is a place where experimental archaeology meets pure creativity. There are sounds and instruments that distant ancestors might have been familiar with, but arranged and expressed in a way that might never have been heard until the band spearheaded a burgeoning movement of Norse-inspired folk – and certainly not by modern ears. With no way of knowing what music those ancients actually created, Wardruna's contemporary vision marries subtlety and complexity to an elemental power. Moments on sixth album Birna (named for a she-bear in old Norse mythology) are sparse and simple – but these compositions are as meticulously constructed as any modern prog opus. The old Nordic themes also have a timelessness that resonates through the ages. Having previously pored through runes and ravens, here they consider the bear and everything that it represents, symbolically and mythologically. That might seem a narrow focus, but through it they explore the cycle of the seasons and man's relationship with nature – a subject as relevant today as it ever was. Given the bear's reputation for savagery, Birna could have easily trod some of the more aggressive ritualistic paths that have endeared them to metal as well as prog and folk fans. Instead, the majority of the album has an airier touch. The title track revolves around Lindy-Fay Hella's haunting vocals and bright choral arrangements, and there's an early three-track set-piece that takes the listener into hibernation and back again. Ljos Til Jord (which translates roughly as 'Light To Earth') musically represents the transition from sunlit world to beneath the ground while Dvaledraumar ('Hibernation Dream') is a 15-minute segment of found sounds and deep, trance-inducing ambience. Finally, Jord Til Ljos ('Earth To Light') returns to the surface with beautiful strings and playful flutes welcoming the spring. Himinndotter celebrates the notion of the bear's mythical origin as a celestial being, with the voices of the Norwegian women's choir Koret Artemis reaching up to whatever heavens are appropriate. Hibjørnen provides a much sparser counterpoint, with chief visionary Einar Selvik evoking skaldic traditions with a simple vocal and plucked lyre accompaniment. The closing trio of songs do go deeper and darker, rounding off an album of extraordinary scope. Birna is on sale now via Music For Nations/Sony.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Heilung might've played Glastonbury, but Birna shows Wardruna are still the grand daddies of Nordic folk
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Wardruna are less a band than a natural phenomenon. With their sixth studio album, the Norwegian collective continue their ambitious quest, crafting a grandiose form of world music that's earthy and primal while at the same time an essential part of the here and now. Birna, in very Wardruna fashion, focuses on the life cycle of the she-bear. It weaves together themes drawn from animism, pre-history and folklore with meditations on the natural world and the never-ending wheel of life, death and rebirth of which we are all a part, whether we dwell in teeming cities or shun human company completely. From slow, quiet thuds to scrabbling explorations and moments of thrilling abandon, the album follows the wandering path of its ursine muse, at times foraging, resting in a death-like sleep or painfully bearing young, at others rising up to rend and devour. The voices of founder Einar Selvik (craggy, ageless) and Lindy-Fay Hella (pure, eldritch) lead the fray, bedding in amidst strings, elegiac horns (literal ones, not the brass band kind), willow-bark flutes and stirring, deeply resonant percussion. The album opens with a muted heartbeat, the slow, rhythmic pound taken up by insistent drumbeats that soon become lost amid an orgic clamour of drones, voices and creaking strings. Dvaledraumar rests a hopeful, rough-hewn vocal line alongside portentous strings and a glowering atmosphere that's reminiscent of late-period Neurosis, while Ljos til Jord incorporates lilting flute and birdsong and Himinndotter pits rich, choral arrangements against voices that are rasped and ragged to the point of gurgling. Things are at their most dramatic with the breathy, pounding gallop of Skuggehesten and rousing closer Lyfjaberg, a piece that could variously be construed as either a funeral hymn or a life-affirming cry of triumph. As with immediate predecessor Kvitravn, Birna is expansive in sound as well as approach. Yes, the album is steeped in history, and conjures natural sensations that range from the feel of rough tree bark and freshly upturned soil to the smell of crushed pine and fresh animal shit. But for all the stretched hides and whittled bones that are pounded, rattled, plucked and blown, the album also has a foot very much in the present thanks to the low-key ambient crackles, field recordings and undeniably catchy melodies on display. This mix feels very on-brand for mastermind Einar, who's equally at home scoring TV shows and videogames, lecturing on Norse tradition and quite possibly flaying an elk in the bitter wilderness to get the parts he needs for a new duffel coat. As fascinatingly learned as it all is, Birna, like all Wardruna releases, is ultimately something better felt than understood. It prickles the skin, energises the soul and seems powerful enough to conjure a sense of near-cosmic communion whether you're surrounded by thousands in an amphitheatre or on your own, in your bedroom, with the curtains mardily closed. More than 20 years after their inception, the band remain a genuine force of - and for - nature, and Birna is a perfect, powerful statement whether you want to hibernate and hide from the terrors of the world or wake hungrily to face it anew. Birna is out now via Music For Nations / Sony. Wardruna's UK tour starts in Liverpool on March 17, for the full list of dates visit their official website.
