With eleven beautiful tracks, being them Infront of Destiny We Shall Face Our Death,
We Travel South, Winds Blow Over Seas, Our Spirits Pass Through the Underworld, Around the Bonfire Our Souls Will Unite, While The Cliffs Stand Tall in the Horizon,
The Return Back Home, For as Long as Enemies Lay in Defeat, Golden Coasts Filled with Amber Stones, Let Thy Gods Sing Your Glory Hymn and Outro, Infront of Destiny is a remarkable album, filled with local colors, that redeems and redefines the folk metal genre, creating bonds and solidifying boundaries that breaks and links the outstanding fractures of a greatly envisioned shining ascendant wisdom, with ancestral solstice melodies, that reunites a timeless period of impulsive and formidable clarity, supported by a common mental constitution, where all souls were aligned together. With quite a simple proposal, that seems to elevate – and evaluate – the true essence of powerful cultural roots, to collectively glorify the wisdom of nature, to celebrate the infinity and the higher appeals of life, while singing in the mountain spheres of a permanent peace, in times where simplicity and energy where perfectly converging together, for the redemptive vastness working incessantly for the common good, Infront of Destiny is a remarkable milestone in the folk metal genre, exceedingly pure in the veracity of its timeless roots.
With tempestuous inherently folk instruments, grasping melodies cutting winds by the power of a wisdom never caught, barbaric vocals of elusive unrestrictive domain, the magical guidance of philosophically guided descended thin layered guitars, occasional folkloric-minded rhythmic challenging marches, the cold rain of ancestral elemental days filled with warrior purposes and battles for survival of the fittest, Romuvos purely embodies the true spirit of the Baltic area, in an amazingly vivid, lucid, beautiful and at the same time ethereal, timeless and dream-like epic opera of metal voracious truth, where all souls who shares the same principles of ancestral pagan brotherhood, desire to preserve traditions and to revive the inner spirit of strength, power and gifted ascension, will inherently converge to a path of excellence, standing between a shining perpetual family dream, and an infinite mysterious day inside themselves, that could never be lost anytime.
Anyway, Infront of Destiny, although having a sound that seems a little uniform throughout the record, is a great example of folk metal, true to the fundamental principles of its epic essence. Exceedingly shining, amazingly lucid, and superbly convoluting the atmosphere of a battle terrain, while reverberating in the essence of our spirits visions of a distant past, through a magical voracious upheaval of death and defiance, this work certainly can be considered a great and amazing record. Although it does not essentially present anything new to an audience already deeply familiar to the genre, Infront of Destiny does shine over a new path of folk metal, being righteously melodic and originally fearlessly regional, keeping faithful to its roots all the elements that precisely keeps this album an intriguing exemplar of the genre. With soft and calm melodies, where philosophical constraints, pagan culture and communal spiritual chants prevails over aggressiveness and fury, Infront of Destiny is a work that you shouldn’t miss, if you really are into the folk metal genre. A masterpiece on its own rights – although, like I’ve said above, doesn’t show to its audience anything new – it really manages to be an album quite unique, full of beauty, poetry and ancestral considerations. While folk metal it is not one of my primary genres in any way, I found Infront of Destiny, by Romuvos, a remarkable work, to say the least. The music of Velnias will also probably awake your curiosity about Lithuanian culture, and the country’s current music scene, awakening your senses to the rich cultural inheritance of this small beautiful nation, upon which you probably doesn’t know anything at all. Regardless of what you know, or doesn’t know, Romuvos’ Infront of Destiny is quite a way to start!
Wagner