Admittedly Ragnarök isn’t fancy album title the band could choose, but this debut album of the Finnish band convinces with it’s music. Before the Finns released this full lenght-album, they’ve already released two demos with their former vocalist Teemu ”Modsognir” Ollikainen, who died after those. But most of the lyrics on Ragnarök are penned by him. They’re all in Finnish, which fits the music quite well and it confers more credibility to the folkish-character of the songs.

Also the sound quality is considerable. The production is adequate and gives a homogenous sound to the album. So the flutes and keyboards merge perfectly with the standart metal instruments. And, not naturally for a folk metal album, the flutes sound quite in tune.

Guitars, bass, drums and vocals are well-performed, too. The drums support the melodies very well with nice accents, for example on the crash cimbal. In general the melodies aren’t too playful, the metal-percentage is comparatively high. Among the guitar lines the listener can spot some nice black metal nuances. And also the acoustic parts and clean vocals are quite tasteful.

The songs can be described as slightly hymnal, but never too dramatic. „Jättiläisen laulu“ and „Mustat linnut“ are probably the most catchy and appealing songs.

Only point of critic is that THE super-hit is missing, but the songs have got a constant high quality and the album never becomes boring, despite of the long playing time.

All in all Ragnarök is a great debut album and hopeful we will hear much more about the band Heorot in the future. It’s the kind of Viking Folk Metal band, we need!

written by Aziza Schwenke

Playing time: 44.47