Wolfheart

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wolfheart
Studio album by Moonspell

Publication
(s)

1995

Label (s) Century Media

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

Extreme Metal , Gothic Metal , Folk

Title (number)

8th

running time

43:53

occupation
  • Drums : Miguel "Mike" Gaspar
  • Giarre, backing vocals: Ricardo
  • Female vocals: Birgit Zacher

production

Moonspell and Waldemar Sorychta

chronology
Under the Moonspell
(EP, 1994) 		Wolfheart Irreligious
(1996)

Wolfheart is the debut album by the Portuguese metal band Moonspell .

Emergence

The EP Under the Moonspell , released in 1994, gave the band enough prominence to sign a deal with Century Media as the “frontrunner in the Portuguese metal scene ” . In addition, it gave the band the opportunity to have Waldemar Sorychta's album produced in the Woodhouse Studios in Hagen. According to Fernando Ribeiro, working in Woodhouse Studios with Sorytchta has been a dream for an album production since the band was founded.

Track list

  1. Wolfshade (A Werewolf Masquerade) - 7:43
  2. Love Crimes - 7:34
  3. … Of Dream and Drama (Midnight Ride) - 3:59
  4. Lua d'Inverno - 1:48
  5. Trebaruna - 3:30
  6. Vampiria - 5:36
  7. An Erotic Alchemy - 8:05
  8. Alma mater - 5:38
Bonus title of the digipack version
  2. Ataegina - 4:01

Music style and lyrics

While Moonspell played Black Metal with folk elements until 1994 , elements from Gothic Rock , Folk Metal and Progressive Metal can also be found on Wolfheart . The band's influences include Bathory , Root , Morbid Angel , Samael , Tiamat , Carcass , Fields of the Nephilim , The Cure and Metallica . The music is also very melodic in the black-metal-heavy passages. There were comparisons with Tiamat, Samael, Danzig and Bathory, the gothic-heavy passages were also compared with Type O Negative and Ribeiro's deep clear vocals with the Type O Negative singer Peter Steele . In addition, he also uses harsh guttural vocals typical of black metal and occasionally growling .

The band showed a strong interest in the pre-Christian history of their country and saw this "as an alternative, as a critical alternative to Satanism for example", with which they moved away from traditional Black Metal; Bassist Pedro João “Ares” Escoval saw Satanism as a mere “instrument […]. to express his displeasure with the institutionalized history and culture of his country ”. Because of Moonspell's interest in their own culture, Ares made it clear not to be nationalistic . Because of the lyrics, Hanno Kress from Rock Hard described the musicians as "evil, proud heroes of the Portuguese Viriathus culture who have a problem with women"; these would be portrayed in the lyrics as "always as awesome as in a SAT1 weekend film, perfect like from the women's magazine ' Joy ', beautiful and mean like Joan Collins in the Denver Clan and always willing to run away with any of these guys", and when quoting des Marquis de Sade, the band sees "only his excessive sex orgies, but not the social background in which the works were created". The quote in An Erotic Alchemy comes from de Sade's last will.

reception

The album was already considered groundbreaking in the metal scene when it was released in 1995; Robert Müller from Metal Hammer described the album as a "big surprise: Gothic Metal of unimagined goodness". There has been "an amazing development" since the EP Under the Moonspell . According to Ribeiro, the band sold 50,000 copies of the album at the time of their breakthrough, but the musicians didn't make any money and still lived with their parents.

According to Hanno Kress from Rock Hard , the musicians have probably “listened to too much Danzig and Bathory. From this they have made up their dream world of Black Metal, which from a purely musical point of view sounds quite appealing ”; She also “unreservedly” praised the producer, but criticized the image of women conveyed by the lyrics and suspected that the musicians “had a lot of fun with them. Nightingale, ick hear you rapping past on the right ... ”However, the band distanced themselves from nationalistic and comparable tendencies. In 2009 the magazine counted Wolfheart among the "250 Black Metal albums you should know". Eduardo Rivadavia of Allmusic praised the experiments with Love Crimes , but described the pieces on the second half of the album as "a mess of well-intentioned but not yet fully developed pieces"; Overall, however , Wolfheart was "a strong starting point". Stefan Gnad counts Wolfheart among those Gothic Metal albums with which "you can still have fun today".

In 2010 Moonspell was honored in Portugal by the CTT Correios de Portugal for Wolfheart with a 1 euro stamp.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Garry Sharpe-Young : AZ of Doom, Goth & Stoner Metal . 1st edition. Cherry Red Bood Ltd., London 2003, ISBN 978-1-901447-14-9 , pp. 274 .
  2. ^ Moonspell. Rockerilla, accessed August 25, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Nhorf: MOONSPELL Wolf Heart music review by Nhorf. Prog Archives, October 31, 2008, accessed on July 17, 2013 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Moonspell: Brotherhood of blood. Live-Metal.Net, February 10, 2007, accessed on August 31, 2010 (English): “Bathory, Root, Morbid Angel, Samael, Tiamat, Carcass, Fields of The Nephilim, Cure, Metallica, and so on, this is a mix of the 4 of us !!! "
  5. ↑ Micha Kite: Carl McCoy interview . In: Pit Magazine . No. 55 , 2006 ( sumerland.devin.com [accessed July 17, 2013]).
  6. ↑ Jackie Smit: Under the Spell of the Antidote. CoC chats with Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell. Chronicles of Chaos, January 25, 2004, accessed July 17, 2013 : “We'd like to be remembered more along the lines of bands like Fields of the Nephilim; as a cult band. "
  7. ↑ Sin: Moonspell: Art is made to discover. Gothtronic, archived from the original on August 8, 2007 ; accessed on August 26, 2014 (English): “A band that really makes my kind of Gothic Metal is Fields of the Nephilim. They have a sound like Slayer but it's very dark. And they are a very big inspiration for what we do now. "
  8. ↑ a b c UMUR: MOONSPELL Wolfheart music review by UMUR. Prog Archives, April 7, 2009, accessed July 17, 2013 .
  9. ↑ a b Robert Müller: Moonspell . Wolfheart. In: Metal Hammer . No. 5 , May 1995, pp. 51 .
  10. ↑ a b c d Hanno Kress: Moonspell . Wolfheart. In: Rock Hard . No. 96 ( rockhard.de [accessed on July 17, 2013]).
  11. ^ Moonspell. Satan Stole My Teddybear, accessed July 17, 2013 .
  12. ^ A b Eduardo Rivadavia: Wolfheart - Moonspell. Allmusic , accessed on July 17, 2013 .
  13. ↑ a b c Robert Müller: Moonspell . Lusitan wolf howl. In: Metal Hammer . No. 6 , June 1995, pp. 112 .
  14. ^ Ilan Stavans , Verónica Albin: Love and Language . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-11805-6 , pp. 194 ( books.google.de [accessed on July 13, 2013]).
  15. ^ Jonathon Green, Nicholas J. Karolides: Encyclopedia of Censorship . New Edition. Facts on File, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8160-4464-3 , pp. 190 ( books.google.de [accessed on July 13, 2013]).
  16. ↑ Markus Endres: Moonspell. Interview with Fernando Ribeiro about “Lusitanian Metal”. (No longer available online.) Metal.de, January 9, 2009, archived from the original on May 7, 2013 ; Retrieved August 26, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.metal.de
  17. ↑ 250 Black Metal Albums That You Should Know . In: Rock Hard . No. 269 , October 2009, p. 75 .
  18. ↑ Stefan Gnad: Shimmering Darkness . History, development and topics of the Gothic scene. Ed .: Alexander Nym. 1st edition. Plöttner Verlag, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-86211-006-3 , Gothic Metal, p. 190-199 .
  19. ↑ http://www.metal.tm/news/moonspell_zieren_portugals_briefmarken_2892.html
  20. ↑ http://biotechpunk.de/2010/07/moonspell-mit-eigener-briefmarke/