Entry 594 - Tervahäät - Kalmonsäie

Style: Dark folk, vocal chants, ambient with moments of great harshness, acoustic

Primary Emotions/Themes: Ominous foreboding, darkness where there should be light, peace after great turmoil

Thoughts: Dark folk is a genre that I enjoy greatly but I have very little of in my collection. I don't get in the mood to listen to it often, but when I do there is nothing else that will fill that need. Tervahäät is the latest addition to the collection to try and satiate that need.

Kalmonsäie is a curious album. It's basis is slowly chanted vocals and riffs that compliment those vocals. The music is exceedingly repetitive, almost ritualistic. Most commonly the instruments accompanying the music are guitars. 

These guitars strum full chords over and over with minimal progression. While this sounds like a recipe for disaster the band makes it work better than I would have first thought. Instead of tedium the band evokes a tribal atmosphere as if chanting around a fire. These riffs and chants build and build until they are hardly contained by the end of the songs. 

The band changes things up towards the middle few songs of the album though. The guitars get a bit of distortion on them and the vocals become quite harsh. The atmosphere is similar to the chanted/acoustic portion of the music but chills me to the bone. The vocals cut like a knife and the guitars feel like they are barely contained and may explode into full on black metal at any moment... but they never do.

Eventually the chanted/acoustic music comes back to finish up the album and with it comes a great sense of relief. The tension that was created by the harshness in the middle portion of the album is highly effective at evoking a sense of unease from the listener. 

When I first got this album I wasn't sure I liked it or not, but now after spending some time with it and digesting it over the course of a few listens I think it's growing on me. I like the idea of the whole album being used as a tension/release phase. This normally is contained to a single song or two, but here it is the scope of the entire album. That is what has made this album stand out for me, and it's why it will be on my short list of albums to visit when I need dark folk.

Written November 13th 2023