Кров у наших криницях (BLOOD IN OUR WELLS)

We arrive at the album that consider Drudkh's masterpiece, "Blood In Our Wells". I have to disagree; it isn't as good as "Autumn Aurora", but it gets pretty close. In fact, this is in my opinion the second best Drudkh album, better than the debut "Forgotten Legends" or the difficult "The Swan Road".

While with their previous album it seemed like they lost much of their progressive style, "Blood In Our Wells" is the most progressive work they have done so far: many keyboards, slow and dreamy instants, many time changes. The songs are almost all long, clocking around ten minutes, all of them with very complex, multi part structures. Indeed, this is a progressive album. Once again the lyrics are full of accentuated patriotism and love for Ukraine. The title itself "Blood In Our Wells" comes from an old, Hungarian poem of the same title.

Dark, intriguing like no other Drudkh album, the band here brings to the songs a little more simplicity in the melodies, making it at times a little predictable, but at the same much more accessible to the public. This is probably why many worship this album. This does not mean that the songs aren't able to give those emotions that every Drudkh fan has knowledge of; The different parts of the songs, other than connecting brilliantly, have all an obscure and cryptic feeling that no other album of the band was able to conceive, probably also thanks to the cleaner sound of the guitars, that make it even more effective. The calm parts though aren't always as good as you would think they would be, in fact these are the parts where the music gets pretty often predictable.

Generally speaking, the atmosphere is muh more alarmed and energetic than the previous Drudkh albums; I think it's because the band in this album, thematically speaking, got a lot more close to the human element, abandoning the evocative, wild nature auras. Just look at the cover of the album; for the first time we see the presence of man, in an extremely grim circumstance. Maybe with "Blood In Our Wells" the band got more sensitive with the generic problems, fears, and hopes of man, even though inserted in a very dark context.

"Furrows Of Gods" has the darkest and most mysterious melody, "When The Flames Turn Into Ashes" the most complex. These two, with the intro, are my favorite pieces. "Solitude" get's boring and it's a little too long, "Eternity" is a little unusual, but it definitely works more than "Solitude". "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" never really worked for me, except for some parts.

"Blood In Our Wells", despite all the things I said against it, is an album I really, really like, and it an excellent addiction to whoever loves this kind of music, or whoever hates humanity.