Once upon a time, Chrigel Glanzmann had a great idea. And that was to merge Pagan Folk with Death Metal. Not many expected this to work, but after a fair amount of trial and error, he succeeded, and Eluveitie was the end product that stuck with the audience.
Since the zine’s inception, the RMR crew covered a whopping six full-length records of this band. Out of which Everything Remains (as it never was) and – strangely – Evocation II – Pantheon fared best. Let’s be clear, lavish coverage such as this for one band is pretty unusual @ RMR. And now, the band’s newest piece – Ànv – just exploded into our review pipe. This better be good, because the 2019 concoction Ategnatos couldn’t quite rip the old geezers over at the review desk out of their semi-somnambulant state. And that was a pity. Because we wanted moar, so much moar. High expectations abound.
Since Ategnatos released, more lineup changes happened over at Eluveitie, adding to a mile-long litany of musicians spent on the pagan altar of this Swiss act. The band shrank down to a 7-piece, which is – come to think of it – a good thing. Key members like violin-adept Nicole Ansperger left in 2023. Whereas the Hurdy Gurdy crowd seriously shipwrecked somewhere along the way after the last record aired and got replaced with Lea-Sophie Fischer for violin duty as well. On this record, Hurdy Gurdy duties are shared between her and Matteo Sisti. The man who left his touch on Ànv but departed from the band in 2025 shortly thereafter, with no replacement in sight at the time of writing this piece. That’s some turnover right there.
First off, Ànv won’t greet you with the dreaded trademark monologue for once. Instead, Emerge provides a full-blown (somewhat pasty) intro, complete with a pretty graceful bridge into Taranoías. And why not? Even if those intros won’t add diddly squat to the quality of any metal piece. Taranoías leads directly into a pretty standard rumbling Eluveitie tune, but – at an overly frantic pace.
Glanzmann in full-throated form roaring away with Swiss-German tainted English growls and Fabienne Ernie in superb form, as always. And the rest of the gang, fiddling, fluting, and riffing away as if there was no tomorrow. In other words, this first part feels like a damn rush job with a few refinements missing. Fast and furious at all costs, to the point of causing some sort of epileptic attack to whoever listens. Just go ahead and check the attached video, the godawful cinematography tells the story pretty well.1
And that’s symptomatic for the rest of the record, too. Ànv undoubtedly is Eluveitie and vice versa. But then, a somewhat hidden compartmentalization shows its ugly visage a few times too many. You get flashes of one style or the other, but hardly a coherent and freely flowing concoction that’ll grip your guts and never lets loose until the end hits with a vengeance. And that means that the record lacks flow and exudes the sickening feeling of a disjointed piece that stops making sense after a while. On one hand, the band’s sound leans way too much into mainstream-driven metal o’ the light, such as Awen, for instance. Eluveitie always provided a more commercial track on every record, and the latter is the one. A predictable and somewhat boring blurb that the band tried to salvage with some metallic progression toward the end. A honey trap many a commenter shipwrecked on.
You, of course, still get the Glanzmann-style brand of rough-hewn, frenetic Melodic Death Metal mixed with a variety of folk instruments (Taranoías, The Prodigal Ones, Premonition). The ones containing Erni’s valiant efforts to break up this manic rushing about the soundscape some. Albeit that this time, the tune leans more into Folk Metal with some pagan elements thrown in for good measure. The astonishingly well-written pure Pagan Folk interludes awkwardly sit athwart the whole concoction without any real audible connection (Memories of Innocence, for example). It is also a pity that the band chose to include heaps of cheese such as the Anamcara monologue or the endless wailing on Ànv.
So, with all that acrid critique, what tracks should you be looking for? Well, the feisty Taranoías and The Prodigal Ones for sure. The groove-laden Premonition, with them strange keys being its only fault, continued to impress. The pure folk piece Memories of Innocence and its Irish airs stuck out to us, too. So did the somewhat cheesy All is One. And strangely enough, The Prophecy struck a fondue-dripping chord, don’t ask us why. I reckon it is the paganized, almost Heilung-esque flavor this track exudes. As to the rest, well, you be the judge.
In the end though, Ànv sounds like a record at a crossroads. One of the many comments we read on the mighty interweb sounded symptomatic to us. It bluntly stated that since Anna Murphy and her merry men left this gaggle of folk sports, things never were quite the same again. And there’s some truth to that. After Evocation II‘s surprise hit, nary an Eluveitie record – large or small – really got this crew’s juices flowing. Slania, where art thou, like; you get the gist. As to Ànv here, I sincerely hope that this is new beginnings to bigger and better things.
Because, if not, where will this lead Eluveitie?
Record Rating: 6/10 | Label: Nuclear Blast | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 25 April 2024
- We might just produce a short blurb to prove our point. Rack up internal 1-level rankings because we can. -Ed.-↩