This is yet one Finnish offering of pseudo-medieval Tolkien black metal from the kind of people who probably play live-role-playing-games and get all excited about shit like Summoning and Bal-Sagoth. Well, in all honesty I know the people behind Valar, know they don't do LARP and then I also like Summoning and Bal-Sagoth, but I made the first statement to convey a message, you see!?

I don't like this kind of cheesy soundtrackness in the metal underground. It's so damn easy to sound 'fantasy' nowadays when it's not totally laughable from the start to have keyboards or MIDI instrumentation and bands like Summoning indeed did develop an art from putting together these majestic horns and strings. But most bands who do it nowadays sound just like copies and to me, Valar sounds just like a copy. Yes, he does play around with techno influences and he is more experimental over-all than Summoning is - but that tends to minimize the amount of depth in each of the individual parts, it becomes just: 'ok this is the evil song, this is the happy song, this is the dwarf song' and it really goes nowhere.

If you just want some fun listening and like the fantasy stuff, you might like this. I don't say it's bad in it's genre but I say it lacks the METAL a bit. It's quite conservative stuff despite the experimentation. It's quite open-minded and not so devoted as I'd like all black metal to be.

© 2001 black hate