Harpyie
Minnewar

The megalopolis is the venue for the traditional Minnewar, the singing competition. Here, renowned classics are reinterpreted in the old tradition and pimped and modified in the sharpest way. Medieval sounds meet electronic beats, powerful bagpipes meet sawing metal guitars and clanking chain mail meets wacky cyberware. How about that? That is apparently the truth about the latest effort by Harpyie, a band that has gotten positive mentions by us at Hallowed before. This is an album where they have covered some of their heroes in a cover album, a cover album with a pretty decent cover art.

Folk metal with some electronic touches but mostly rooted in the more classical style of times long since passed to the ages, and their music has a sense of freshness to it. As it is a cover album with songs originally composed by many bands it is a fairly varied album, with some good depth as well. The songs are of the Harpyie style, they have made the songs kind of their own, even though some are quite obviously not quite their style. They should perhaps also be somewhat applauded for selecting songs close to them and not more well-known songs, about half of the songs feels familiar to me and that gave the album a sense of hearing a new studio album despite all songs being published before.

Someone claimed that the ending song was raping the original version of that song, I don’t agree. First of all, you cannot really rape music, it is free to interpret, and a composition can be given new life by other artists or just being kept alive by being performed. It can be better or worse than the original songs, both these outcomes are fine – the worst thing is cover that are more or less the same as the original, I thought that about maybe one song here. Secondly, I like the ending song, the ending pair along with the opening pair of songs are my highlights on this album. I did give all originals a spin and I think Harpyie succeeds better than the original in some instances and less good in others, they do their thing and the songs are usually pretty fresh for being covers and that is a good thing.

You can of course argue about the validity and the creative aspects about cover albums, and that is certainly a valid argument that goes against Minnewar. But Minnewar is a great collection of songs and just because the band is creatively quite bad here you shouldn’t dismiss it, because if you do you will miss a really good album.

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