ALBUM REVIEW: Okeanos – Firtan

Germany’s FIRTAN are a band that perform a heady and bleak brand of Pagan black metal. In their eight years as an active outfit, they have made a substantial impression in their homeland, and have slowly been garnering a fan base outside of their homeland. Having signed with AOP Records not too long ago, the band are now ready to unleash their second record, Okeanos, a release that shows a much more mature and musically lean band than the band that gave us their debut Niedergang record four years ago.

The album’s opening effort, Seegang, does an excellent job of setting the tone for the rest of the record. It’s an undoubtedly epic and bleak offering that has a great ambience right off the bat, and creates a level of anticipation of the music that is to come. The bulk of the song is done very well too, with a few acoustic interludes breaking up the ferocity on offer. Blending tight, melody tinged black metal in the vein of WINDIR with some harrowing and tortured howls, it’s a solid track to open this album with, and sets the musical bar nice and high for the rest of the record to surpass. It’s a monolithic track with a vast, expansive sound, and there’s enough ideas on offer to keep the listener captivated throughout.

Tag verweil takes a far more technical and intricate musical approach, with some absolutely incredible lead guitar hooks and dancing drum lines acting as the core of an impressive and memorable song. Even the vocals take a far more ethereal and grandiose tone at points, which helps no end to injecting some variety and power into the proceedings. It’s an intense affair, with plenty of lighter, clean guitar tones in the mix to make this stand out and hold a respectable level of gravitas. The third track, and the musical successor to the preceding track, Nacht verweil, is a far darker and more brooding piece of music. As the song titles suggest, this track and the one prior to it are literally night and day in terms of the tone and style in which it is performed. There’s a lot more minor chords and notes used on this track , which a healthy dose of dissonance and bleakness thrown into the fray for good measure. The acoustic guitar parts, and the morosely grim violin sections, add further depth to the sound, and provide a sharp contrast with the song’s much more visceral and bombastic moments. It has plenty of energetic melodies and dense rhythms to it, and it proves to be a great way to close the album’s first half.

Purpur, a short and sweet track, acts as a great palette cleanser, and a solid interlude for the final two tracks. This is a great track that makes brilliant use of the acoustic guitars and violins that were present earlier. This is essentially a song that has a similar vibe of a WINTERFYLLETH track, coupling melancholic violin passages with exemplary, folk infused guitar hooks. Uferlos is a very subdued number that makes great use of cleaner guitar tones, both acoustic and electric. This contrast in sound from FIRTAN work incredibly well, providing a depth that sets the pace for this track. It descends into a noticeably more intense black metal track, with some awe inspiring, vast guitars backed by a thunderous bass line and some impressive, steady drumming. The vocals are varied, shifting from shrill, black metal shrieks to death metal style gutturals with ease. This proves to be one of the most vocally vibrant songs from FIRTAN on the whole record. A lot of the music is far more restrained than we’ve seen up until this point, and it work well on here. The musicianship is verbose and eclectic, and it’s hard to find fault with even a second of it.

And then we reach the final track, Siebente, letzte Einsamkeit, by far and away the longest track on the record. It’s a suitably dark and misery drenched experience, with eerie guitar hooks and agonised, vicious sounding gutturals providing a solid base for a track imbued with plenty of impressive folk instrumentation and haunting melodies. It shifts from light, sublime sound to far denser, chaotic ones that its hard not to love, and the different sounds, styles and speeds at which this track is delivered gives this song so much variety and depth. This is a brilliant track that closes this album on a perfectly epic and grandiose note, giving the listener one last aural assault before the final notes fade away.

Okeanos is an incredibly diverse and majestic record that brings together a dense and impenetrable black metal sound with some excellent atmospherics and subtle folk influences, giving the listener something to really sink their teeth into. It’s hard to find fault with this album, and it’s clear that FIRTAN have refined their sound down from the first record, leaving only lean, visceral music in the aftermath. This is a record that could really see FIRTAN expand their fan base well beyond the borders of Germany, and with any luck this album will help them cement their legacy within the Pagan black metal scene.

Rating: 8/10

Okeanos is out now via Art of Propaganda Records.

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