Whispering Oak - Feast of the Warlords
A new side project from the guy who brought you Rattenkonig, the act is called Whispering Oak and the title of the debut album Feast of the Warworlds. Recorded last X-Mas 2017, and released in January 2018 on the Rottenkonig Bandcamp-site. As astonished I was with the former review I did with his Realms of Rats album, I just had to have a check up on this!.
5 tracks, about 22 minutes. 4 original tracks, and 1 tribute-cover to your favorite Norwegian cave-troll Burzum. The very first track called Omnipresent Cold has a slightly Tangerine Dream/Jarre´ish flange-driven retro synth working in the background, with some beautiful and evocative sounding medieval synth-strings. The track is basically painting a snowy, sunny and glittering frosty landscape before your very eyes, watching it from a hill if you like. The Almighty Warmasters *gulp* continues where Omnipresent Cold ends, where you begin to notice an approaching army in the distance, behind the fog maybe. As it sounds like, they have been in war and gained victory over the enemies... and they are probably gonna "march" by/through your own home village. Carrying the dead and wounded comrades in a battle which claimed too many victims. A beautiful and sad synth piece, with low-key martial drums added to it.
Third track Broken Anvil kind of melts the first two tracks together. The martial drummings of the second track continue here, but the melancholic sadness has been replaced with a scene of hope and warmth which u could feel with the first mesmerizing track. Les Pleurs D Chêne (The Crying of the Oaks) offers a kind of for brooding sense of doom, silence before the storm if you please. It´s a quite pleasant, relaxing and majestic track, but with a sense of ... that something is amiss. Someone is burying the dead, the fallen soldiers are being buried close by your village maybe?. A beautiful 10-minute treat!. Last track coming is the Burzum cover, a not-released track that is and you can hear the original on Youtube. A simple and almost poetical piece ending this great album!
There you have it! Evocative and dark medieval material filled with all the coldness, warmth, dread, doom...with tiny glimpses of hope.
Go and have a listen, it might enlighten your Monday ... certainly enlightened mine!.
Bandcamp: