Album Review: Grand Magus - Sunraven
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
The first thing that you should know is that I am wearing a loincloth. This isn’t by choice exactly; one seems to just materialise on me whenever I play this album. It could be chance I suppose – correlation not being causation and all that – but then what to make of the wolves that are suddenly summoned to my side? And where did this axe come from? How long have I been standing on this snowbound mountaintop hurling racial slurs at frost giants? Does my wife know about any of this?
It’s to be expected on occasion. If the true steel flows like quicksilver through your own veins, you will know as surely as do I that certain albums transport you. It’s a nebulous matter; certain releases have this preternatural ability to invoke unguarded ejaculations of boundless metallic jubilation, it’s difficult to pin down in words, something you really have to feel more than boil down into dry terminology. Grand Magus do have this capability; it’s why “Forged in Iron, Crowned in Steel” from their “Sword Songs” Album is, to this day, one of my favourite songs ever. In keeping with that, bits of “Sunraven” are amazing, the type of thing that made it difficult to reach the replay button over the enormous erection the album was giving me. “Hour of the Wolf” is absolute brilliance. Clad in the illustrious armour of Judas Priest, it’s a brisk, vertebrae-threatening triumph of a track, with a magnificent chorus and the strongest melodies on the entire album. Glory erupts equally profoundly on opener “Skybound” with it’s classic descending riff and rolling thunder percussion, kick drums smashing in like suppressive fire. “Winter Storms” has a tasty bit of AC/DC DNA snaking through it; I can imagine Brian Johnson strutting up to the mic to belt through it with his gravelly Geordie screech. It feels “right”, on this base elemental level that feels integral to me; heavy metal distilled and pure down to the very quintessence of it’s being. When “Sunraven” fires on all guns then, it’s completely killer, a total vindication as trve as it could possibly be.
Which isn’t to say that it’s perfect, because it isn’t. It’s fair enough to say that not everything needs to be some impenetrable act of appallingly pretentious musical autofellatio, but it’s also not like some more adventurous song structures would have gone amiss. Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus...and it’s a wrap. Grand Magus have wrought magic when they’ve opted to step outside of this boilerplate arrangement – the aforementioned “Forged in Iron, Crowned in Steel” for one resplendent example. The sheer simplicity of the music does at times hurt the album – the chorus riffs for “Wheel of Pain” and “The End Belongs to You” are gratingly basic; not necessarily bad, just uninventive even for music that isn’t trying to singe the eyebrows from your face with unintelligible odysseys of fretboard masturbation. The good ol’ fashioned KISS adage (Keep It Simple Stupid) can apply, but even so this band undeniably have the talent to blast this album from “good” to “astonishing” if they’d just stepped a bit beyond the basic structure of their songs as is. “To Heorot” has a neat solo, but beyond this it’s folky swing simply didn’t do anything for it; it felt a bit too much like listening to a jig filtered through a Marshall stack, and came across to me as a little trite in a way that’s always made it difficult for me to connect with folk metal in general.
I don’t want to belabour the point. Beyond anything else, my balls are getting really cold in this loincloth, and at least one of these wolves is a poodle. If you like heavy metal, then you will like “Sunraven”. It pulls from so many of the foundational albums in early metal, from the vintage sabbath groove of “The Black Lake” to “Grendel”, which smacks of something that could’ve comfortably sat on Dio’s immortal “Holy Diver” release, that something in it is bound to hook you. Is it original? No, god no, of course not. The roots of this band germinate in those glory days of the 70’s and 80’s, and while it perhaps wouldn’t be fair to accuse the band of musical philopatry as though they’re a covers band or something, they’re certainly content to stick to tried and true methods and means when it comes to their own sound. Yet it’s this earnestness – the steadfast iron will to just play really good heavy fucking metal – that makes the album so endearing even in it’s weaker moments. At it’s best, “Sunraven” is truly excellent, at it’s worst it’s...well, it’s still pretty good. A band may be excused occasional filler if the record on the whole is otherwise great, and if you count yourself amongst those who fretted somewhere in their heart of hearts that Grand Magus had called time on their tenure about this brief mortal coil of ours, then fear no further; they are back with a bang!
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