Lista de Bandas Pagan Black Arcane Wisdom Relics of Elder Might

This band was a surprise at the time, and unfortunately they didn't went too far after releasing this album. "Relics of Elder Might" is a mix of folk, black metal and even progressive metal. From Portugal, and with strong relations to other band called Sirius, they took their risks going into such an elaborated work... and it worked!

The opening track "Misanthropic Horror Magnified" is 8 minutes long, and well, it starts the album in full power with it's folk-black-metal, clean vocals mixed with black metal vocals, flutes, powerful moments with calm interludes - this is a song that has it all and opens the album in a very fashioned way. The second track is more oriented to pure black-metal, with some distorted vocals and an electronic interlude and again some clean vocals that add softness to some parts of it. It's not as strong as the first track but it's a good song too. "Symphonia Chaos" is another good song, with a more direct approach to metal, but very well played and balanced, but then on the last minutes has some changes and for moments it's melodic rock mixed with some more wicked song that remembers bands like Solefald. "Fatum" is an acoustic song with folklore influences and it's a chill-out moment before the closing track "Theatre Unfolds (Siglo XVIII Of A Diseased Mind)": another long and epic song. It starts with some classic music instruments and explodes on a powerful black metal but keeping the same classic sound in the background for a while. Then the song evolves again to those clean vocals in a more slow momentum, just before diving into a interlude with a guitar riff and very good keyboards and a nice solo. And another solo ends the song and the album, but this time with piano instead of a guitar. It's a great song to end the album, there's no way that this song won't be trapped in our minds for a quite a while!

"Relics of Elder Might" is in the end a great black metal album (EP), but surprisingly it's even better because it is not black metal in it's vulgar sense: it has clean vocals that are thrown into the song very fashioned way, sounding smooth. It has classical elements, and instruments, it has some folk influences, electronic flashes here and there, and yes, it has some classic black metal.

Update: it seems that the band is not totally inactive but there are no rumors that they are working on another release.