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Borknagar - Origin CD (album) cover

ORIGIN

Borknagar

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

3.39 | 38 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Negoba
Prog Reviewer
3 stars A Pleasant Vacation to Neo-Folk Country

I discovered Borknagar's Origin on this site when a review just happened to be on the front page. After some sampling on last.fm, I bought the album and have been listening to it for several months now. As others have commented, this album is Borknagar's acoustic foray, similar in motivation to Green Carnation's Acoustic Verses and to a lesser extent Opeth's Damnation and Ulver's Kveldssanger. Luckily, this album carves it's own niche nicely, incorporating prog and modern metal ideas in an acoustic setting. Certainly, the marriage of black themes and folk has a significant history, which can be seen in the entire neo-folk movement.

This album lies somewhere between Damnation and neo-folk. More energetic and folky than Opeth's work and more intricate and developed than Tenhi, Borknagar has produced an album whose overall sound comes closer to my taste in this type of music than perhaps anything else. The textures are thick, but very organic, plenty of flutes, intertwining guitars, along with real strings. The recording is very good, the guitars are up front and sound great. Vintersorg's voice is dark and cold, harmonizes well, and is vampirically emotive.

Despite all this, there is a sameness to the album that can be a common problem in this genre. I don't get a sense that each song has its own melodic or thematic identity, and it's a little difficult to pick out individual songs in my memory. This song-sense is what places Damnation clearly above this in overall quality, even though the sound of this disc at least matches Opeth's work. The one time a concrete melodic theme is used, it's a bit cheesy (Cynosure).

Again, this album SOUNDS great. I have it on in the background all the time. There's enough musical interest for my ears, enough beauty not to annoy my co-workers. The guitar work is very good. I give this work a 3.5 rating and will round down now that some time has passed and I don't find myself coming back to it as often as I used to.

Negoba | 3/5 |

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