Switzerland has a new and very valuable export article: ELUVEITIE. By now evolved from a project to a full band with nine fix members, they just released their new album Spirit. And like the successful firstling Vên, Spirit is musically more than convincing.
Again they created an exceptionally varying mélange of folkloristic tunes and both death and black metal. What differs from other bands playing in similar genres: the ratio of death metal parts is higher than the black metal. That becomes especially evident when listening to the male vocals, which are more typical for death metal bands. Additionally, the band has a heavier approach as one might usually expect from folk metal.
Besides a classic metal instrumentation, not less than 12 folkloristic and partially typical Swiss instruments are being used by the musicians. That’s another point that lifts ELUVEITIE off the masses of mostly Irish/Celtic-rooted competitors.
On 11 tracks with an average time of about five minutes, Spirit offers a variety of an up and down of heaviness, melody-driven songs and cheerful and melancholic tunes. Exemplarily for that, the following tracks may stand: Of Fire And Wisdom, a mid-tempo paced song with doomy and death-metallic leanings that lead over to speedy blastbeats at the end. It gets followed by Aidu, a contemplative track carried by female vocals and accompanied by acoustic backing. Subsequently, The Song Of Life is an clearly black metal based song, but with a jolly note brought in by the flutes and leads over to Tegernakô, a track at first dominated by strings and then by flutes. And such variety is representative for the whole album.

Spirit is a very impressive release and can be fun again, despite the sometimes sucked off genre.