Wilderun – Epigone
Release Date: 7th January 2022
Label: Century Media Records
Pre-Order/Pre-Save
Genre: Progressive Folk Metal
FFO: Opeth, Devin Townsend, Turisas, Lör.
Review By: Paul Cairney
I’m going to have to own up to something before I start this review proper. When this album dropped into my inbox, I had never heard of Wilderun, and so I had no preconceptions about their latest album, Epigone. I therefore fired into the all-important first listen, as usual, before I read any of the promotional material – I feel it’s important for your own opinion of an album to manifest itself on a first listen.
About 8 minutes into the album, I fired a message to Bossman Dave asking if he had listened to it. He advised he had listened to a few tracks and thought it’d be ‘right up my street’. I basically stated that, ‘if I wasn’t reviewing it, it’d be in the bin’.
However, this would have been the biggest mistake I could have made. Epigone is a mesmerising slice of progressive folk metal, littered with melodic folk passages juxtaposed with technical death metal, delicate synths sitting side by side with exquisite guitar solos, preceding an onslaught of blast-beats. The Bossman then put the album on himself for a wee listen, and I sent a final message saying, ‘it is an actual mental album, I might not hate it’.
The truth is, whilst I don’t utterly adore the album, I have a great deal of love for Epigone.
As it happens, I rarely read the track names on a first listen either, and so whilst track 1, ‘Exhaler’ is a slow, meandering folky introduction, the following song. ‘Woolgatherer’ is the first of the epic tracks. I genuinely thought it was about 3 different songs on my first listen, with a variety of styles. Upon subsequent listens, it bends, shapes, then suddenly makes sense, a genuine feat of superior song composition. It is a truly stunning track that basically shouldn’t work.
It is then followed up by ‘Passenger’, where the band just let rip with everything they have, and by then you will be totally sold. As a first-time listener to Wilderun, I had to totally throw myself into it. This album demands your time. I wouldn’t, for example, put any of these tracks on a playlist. They wouldn’t make sense.
Epigone is a work of art and needs to be treated as such! No putting it on shuffle, nor skipping tracks, (as boring as I find the opening acoustic number to be). If you respect this album, you will get so much more than you could imagine. You will get hints of ‘Opeth’, a tinge of ‘Devin Townsend’ and a bucketload of atmospheric progressive folk metal.
Wilderun have, in the space of the albums run time, little over an hour, turned me into a fan! A great start to 2022!
(4 / 5)
