I hope to sweet merciful bananas that I’m proven wrong, but I’ve got a sneaky feeling that Blood of Legends, the absolutely masterful fourth album from Greece’s Battleroar, is going to be a convenient case study for the fickleness of the casual metal listener.
Here’s what I mean: There is absolutely no earthly reason why Blood of Legends shouldn’t be picked up and adored by the exact same media outlets and listeners who so enthusiastically embraced Atlantean Kodex’s brilliant album The White Goddess in 2013. That’s not to say that the two bands move in precisely the same orbit, but both albums are exactly the sort of thing you’d want to play for a sourpuss skeptic of the transformational potential of heavy metal wielded with poise, passion, and righteousness.
For those of us who already vibrate on these frequencies, Blood of Legends is tailor-made for anyone equally infatuated with the muscular stomp of Argus and the fanciful beauty of While Heaven Wept. It is an album for anyone whose heart and soul goes on an immediate Manilla Road-trip anytime someone mentions the word ‘necropolis.’ It’s an album for anyone who takes early Manowar at least half-seriously, and who knows that marrying no-prefixes-necessary heavy metal to the emotive doom of Candlemass or even Viking-era Bathory is a recipe for majestic, soul-stirring paeans to whatever god or lack thereof you might choose to believe in.
A huge part of the success of Blood of Legends is due to Battleroar’s new vocalist, Gerrit Mutz. Mutz isn’t exactly a stranger to those with an ear to the triumphantly trad-ly underground, as his golden pipes are a key ingredient to both the stirring doom of Dawn of Winter and the fiercely stout power metal of Sacred Steel. Mutz takes on a rough edge from time to time, but for the most part his singing is the sort of emotive, from-the-gut, undeniably charismatic belting that this tragedy-and-anxiety-riddled modern world needs so desperately.
Another key ingredient to Battleroar’s magic, however, is an unlikely one: The violin of Alex Papadiamantis seems like it ought to stick out horribly, but although its electrified timbre is a pitch-perfect ringer for Martin Powell’s violin work on My Dying Bride’s twin early-career landmarks Turn Loose the Swans and The Angel and the Dark River, on Blood of Legends it somehow blends seamlessly with the mountain-vaulting swagger of the full band. The violin plays a mournful starring role in “Poisoned Well,” and amplifies the Mediterranean flavor of “The Curse of Medea.”
Battleroar’s songwriting skills have taken a massive step forward, too, as choruses stick harder, guitar leads are slicker, and transitions are impossibly fluid. See, for example, the Lemmy-style bass bridges that the doom stomp of “The Curse of Medea” into its heavily “Powerslave”-reminiscent solo section and outro. The one quibble I can find with the album is that I don’t particularly care for Mutz’s staccato delivery on the verse to “Immortal Chariot,” but the chorus is an earworm you won’t soon shake.
But still, for all its impeccably crafted attributes, I’ve still got that feeling that Blood of Legends will remain a treasure found by relative few. If Battleroar were hellbent on cracking the mainstream, you can imagine plenty of choices they might have made differently. That is, if this was a fresh-faced young band clearly feeling the pressure of making a big splash, they wouldn’t stroll onto the stage with such a lengthy, patient intro track. They wouldn’t spotlight that brazenly reedy violin as much as they do. They wouldn’t make a Gladiator-outtake music video for their lead single. Hell, they wouldn’t make the best song of their album a near-nine-minute power ballad about valkyries, but friend, let me tell you that if you put your ears right to the ground and let the soaring, pounding triumph of “Valkyries Above Us” (with its almost Blind Guardian-esque choral sections) crack your lungs with dust-blown fervor, you will come out the other side stronger, sadder, wiser. Changed.
The entire point being, most of the things you might spotlight as faults should actually be interpreted as indications that this band is perfectly comfortable where they are, doing what they do, and not particularly attuned to the passing fancies and ersatz vagaries of the unwashed hoi polloi. Every time I walk away from the damn-near perfect sixty minutes of Blood of Legends, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just heard the purest distillation of something essential. If a band like Battleroar has to toil in relative obscurity, then we should sing their hymns of iron and wine all the louder, all together.
