Suidakra
Echoes of Yore

Echoing of the yore for Suidakra is a dozen albums and a quarter century of history as a band, those 25 years are case for celebration and Suidakra wanted to make it something special. Therefore they decided to rerecord some old tracks, but how do you select the best from such a treasure throve of songs? You let the fans decide and so it came to be with the ten most popular tracks amongst the fans, that is Echoes of Yore. It is a fine-looking album with great artwork from Kris Verwimp and they also got Marcel Shoenen to repeat his vocal lines to keep in line with the soul of the songs. The only question is: did they succeed?

The succeeded to make a coherent album despite a selection of songs from a whole career, that is a clear advantage of rerecording rather than just making a compilation. It feels like a fresh album with strong production, Celtic metal like the band is known for of course. It will be familiar to the fans with the extreme metal sporting Celtic influences and folkish things; it is mostly grand epic extreme metal though. You can compare them with the likes of Wolfchant, Eluveitie and other Celtic metal bands; they are similar but still have their own sound.

Really strong, clever that they keep it short with only ten tracks instead of having plenty of songs, less is almost always more. It has a fresh sound and will most likely appeal to anyone who enjoys folkish extreme metal, and the Suidakra fans will probably also be very impressed – and perhaps happy that the band did make a newish album instead of a compilation. I think that it is very enjoyable with good tracks and energy, you have to look long and hard to find any weaknesses and if you find them they are probably not that weak anyway.

Clearly an album worth checking out as it is really good and probably gives an excellent summary of the first twenty five years for Suidakra, for me it might be the finest album they have done but as I am not a big fan of them I haven’t really heard all albums before it so my assessment is based on limited data – it is good nevertheless. Therefore the logical conclusion will have to be that it is an album well worth checking out.

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