Winterfylleth – The Mercian Sphere

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The current obsession in the black metal world is to meld that genre with folk music. Typically, bands will look to the traditional music of wherever they hail from to supplement the black metal elements of their sound. In Eastern European nations, this means odd instrumentation and chanting in a foreign tongue, and it requires a fairly tolerant palate to be stomached by Westerners. English blackened folk (folkened black?) metal is somewhat easier to choke down. After all, just about every prog rock band from the 1970s mixed English folk guitar with their Mellotrons, so when a black metal band decides to do the same it feels almost natural. Winterfylleth are probably the best and most important band making English black folk today. They can sing about national pride and heritage without the product feeling awkwardly Aryan, and their songs are uniformly triumphant and majestic in tone. Their debut, The Ghost of Heritage, is one of the better black metal debuts of the last decade. The problem with its follow-up, The Mercian Sphere, is that it’s basically The Ghost of Heritage Redux. Sure, there’s a couple of interlude tracks with violin and acoustic guitar only, and a few songs incorporate more clean, chant-style vocals than anything on the album’s predecessor, but some of the black metal compositions on here can be laid on top of songs from The Ghost of Heritage without any noticeable differences leaping out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; Winterfylleth know what they do and they do it well, but at a certain point, sameness passes into unoriginality – and a re-recording of Defending the Realm from …Heritage makes this effort look almost lazy. Winterfylleth are still a great band, and their latest album is still worth a listen, but for fans of their earlier work, there’s undoubtedly going to be a desire that they do something more the next time they commit notes to wax.

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2010, Albums, Black Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Winterfylleth