Sixty-three minutes and forty-eight seconds, fourteen tracks, and hardly a bar anywhere in which every stave of the score is not written full. Read The Last Viking the way a copyist reads a conductor's score, page by page, and you find strings doubling the guitars, a choir doubling the strings, a nyckelharpa and a fiddle threading through whatever gap the choir has left, and a growl sitting at full volume over the lot, until the page in front of you is solid black ink with no white space between the staves. That is the splendour of the record. It is also its one real problem. A score needs its rests, and this one has almost none.
Produced, mixed and mastered by Alexander Krull at Mastersound Studio near Stuttgart, finished in March and April 2020 while the borders outside were closing one by one, and released through AFM Records on 23 October 2020, the five-piece in which Krull growls beside a soprano, Leaves' Eyes, delivered its eighth full-length album, the second to carry the voice of Elina Siirala after Sign of the Dragonhead in 2018 and the last chapter of the Norse story the band had been telling since Vinland Saga in 2005 and King of Kings in 2015. Krull, speaking to Dead Rhetoric in an interview published on 25 October 2020, said the band "had like a studio lockdown for six weeks" as the pandemic arrived, and called the result "a very tight, song-oriented record with a lot of depth." The depth is beyond dispute. The tightness is another matter.
The story belongs to Harald III of Norway, the king the sagas call Hardrada, and the record tells it in flashback. "Death of a King", an instrumental overture of ritual drums and funeral pomp, sets the scene at Stamford Bridge in 1066, the battle in which Harald fell and with him, in Krull's own framing in that same interview, the Viking age as history knows it. From there the album travels back through Kiev, the Varangian Guard of Byzantium, the Saracen lands the sagas name Serkland and the court of the Empress Zoë, before it walks its hero to England once more. As a libretto it is excellent.
The first sung track is where all that ink earns its keep. "Chain of the Golden Horn", named after the boom that sealed the harbour of Constantinople and after the saga scene in which Harald, fleeing the city, sent his crew running from stern to bow so that his galley tipped over a chain across the strait while the second ship broke its back on it, is a galloping folk hymn built on a chorus that hooks itself into the memory on the first pass and refuses to let go. Siirala's line on that chorus sits high and bright, where a soprano either pierces or grates, and this one pierces, though it does so close to the edge. Then "Dark Love Empress", the lead single and Zoë's song, lowers the lights: a piano introduction, cold synthesizers, choirs rising underneath and a short, low guitar solo, a gothic slow burn and the most atmospheric song on the album.
A score needs its rests, and this one has almost none.
"War of Kings" is the song that sets the pace, a mid-paced march with backing vocals chanted in a single unison line, and it stands as the strongest of the shorter songs on any honest reading. It also brings forward the voice on which the record's balance turns, Alexander Krull's growl, and the arrangement decides whether that voice is a countermelody or a din. Where the growl answers Siirala as the low voice of a duet, the counterpoint works; where it is left to carry a passage alone, it shouts the orchestra down. On a record this crowded, the second happens more often than it should.
The folk colour is real and lovingly played, with Thomas Roth on nyckelharpa and Lea-Sophie Fischer on violin among the guests. "Varangians" is a Celtic jig with a sing-along chorus and a darker middle section, while "For Victory" gallops on the fiddle as if the tune had been fished out of a tavern songbook. Clémentine Delauney turns the remade "Black Butterfly" into a duet whose two sopranos sit in different colours, Siirala bright, her guest earthier. The Full Moon Choir is handsomely scored, but a choir that arrives on every chorus stops being an event and turns into a pedal tone held under the whole score. By the middle of the record you know where the next swell of voices will land before it lands.
That predictability is the price of the full score, and the running time multiplies it. "Serkland" and "Night of the Ravens" both first appeared on the Black Butterfly EP in 2019; they belong to the story, but on an album already past the hour they arrive as chapters you have half read before. The craft never slips once. The surprise slips constantly.
And then, thirteenth of fourteen, the title track breaks every habit the record has spent fifty minutes forming. "The Last Viking" runs about ten minutes and is the one place on the album where the score lets its sections breathe and change: a drone and the call of war horns open it, a slow march grows out of them, the tempo breaks loose past the halfway mark, solos flare over the Stamford Bridge section and the time signatures shift underneath, with Joris Nijenhuis steering it from the drums. It is the best song on this record by a distance, and it is sequenced as though the band did not know it. "Break into the Sky of Aeon", a melancholy half-ballad led by piano, follows it and closes the album, a coda placed after the coda, and it sounds like an afterthought after ten minutes of that size.
The record reached number 28 in Germany and entered the UK Rock and Metal Albums Chart at 26 in its first week, which is roughly what the music deserves: a respectable, well-built placing, not a coronation. Inside these sixty-four minutes sits a tremendous album of three quarters of an hour, if you take out the EP tracks and the interlude, framed by "Chain of the Golden Horn" and "The Last Viking", with "War of Kings" and "Dark Love Empress" holding up its middle. If you belong to the faithful of symphonic folk metal, the lavish arrangements, the choirs and the history lesson will be reason enough, and you will forgive the sequencing. If you need a record to surprise you between its best moments, the margins of this score are where you will feel the lack, and there are hardly any margins at all.