Ensiferum - Iron [Review]

Ensiferum became a European success with their debut, and their second album didn't fail them as well.
With the release of "Iron", Ensiferum became known throughout the metal world as the "weird Finnish band that writes about weird shit like Nordic nature and the Kalevala."
Well, the weird shit is what all Ensiferum fans love, and frankly after Ensiferum and other bands hit the spotlight in the European Metal scene, Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Loki, and others, they weren't so "ridiculous" anymore.
When once most metalheads go "Hail Satan", the dawn of this era spawned metalheads that could've said "Glory to the Allfather" or things like such. It is no...laughing...matter.
This album received 9 our of 10 stars in many magazines.
This album is also the first to feature their trademark female keyboardist, Meiju Enho!

The details:
1. "Ferrum Aeternum" – 3:28
2. "Iron" (Mäenpää, Toivonen) – 3:53
3. "Sword Chant" (Mäenpää) – 4:44
4. "Mourning Heart (Interlude)" – 1:23
5. "Tale of Revenge" (Mäenpää, Toivonen) – 4:30
6. "Lost in Despair" (Mäenpää, Toivonen) – 5:37
7. "Slayer of Light" (Mäenpää, Toivonen) – 3:10
8. "Into Battle" (Mäenpää, Toivonen) – 5:52
9. "Lai Lai Hei" (Mäenpää) – 7:15
10. "Tears" (Mäenpää, Toivonen, Saari) – 3:20
11. "Battery" (Metallica Cover) – 5:13 (Bonus Track on Limited Edition)

All lyrics by Jari Mäenpää except "Tears" by Jari Mäenpää and Kaisa Saari

The band:
Jari Mäenpää - Harsh vocals, clean vocals, rhythm guitars, all solos (except for track
Markus Toivonen - Lead guitars, solo on track 8
Jukke-Pekka Miettinen - Bass guitars
Oliver Fokin - Drums
Meiju Enho - keyboards

The Review:
1.) A more brilliant intro than the debut's intro! This instrumental is beautiful and epic and uses the advantage of a shaman drum and flutes! This intro, like the debut, leads right into track 2! 9/10

2.) IRON! Beginning again very strong with a rolling attack as if you were rushing into battle yourself! The song goes into blastbeats and great riffs, and we enter the brilliant vocals of Jari Mäenpää yet again! This song is one of the most epic, with Enho's choral keyboard complementing the song fairly excellent! The song's bridge before the solo is a nice gallopipng rhythm amongst an acoustic guitar doing the folkmelodies, rising into a heavy gallop with choral backgrounds, before it leads to a memorable Jari solo once again. The solo is powerful, as are most "Iron" solos, it starts off with a simple, moderate speed melody, immediately going into extremely MINDBLOWING SWEEPS and alternate picking. The song ends with its powerful chorus yet again. 9/10

3.) Sword Chant features a speedy acoustic guitar attack for an intro, before going into a new style of Jarivocals. The exclamation yell, which are delivered extremely will and will feature itself in Jari's later band, Wintersun. It is a heavily vocal oriented song and showcases itself brilliantly, who gets tired of Jari? Not me. 7/10

4.) Mourning Heart Interlude is another instrumental track, though it is mostly unaccompanied and is rather a showcasing of Meiju Enho, it is nonetheless beautiful and adds climax to the next song. 8/10

5.) Tale of Revenge is the album's very melodic story, it is a beautiful, beautiful piece. Albeit it sounds strong and straightforward, it is one of the great masterpieces of metal. Featuring again Jari's vengeful harsh growls, switching quickly to his epic cleans to deliver this song in both the faces of a warrior with a cause and a young child of innocence. The riffs of this song are prime, and are easy to remember by. Towards the end of the song, the folkinstruments bring itself into light again, before ending it in the Ensiferum trademark, the Gallop-of-Victory, featuring speedily played chords and drums! 11/10

6.) One of the album's epic ballads, this song delivers itself as a slow, almost progressive piece, featuring heavy keyboards and more melodic guitars than super buzzsaw riffage. Jari features his clean vocals to start off the song! 7/10

7.) A huge contrast from track 6. Slayer of Light is just extremely fast, and the Gallop-of-Victory is almost there for the entire song! This song uses the keyboards relatively passively and is very reliant on the fast guitars. It is brilliant and for its combination of harsh and clean vocals in the midst of all that speedy power! 9/10

8.) A memorable trademark of Ensiferum is this piece. Into Battle starts off with a very Lord of the Rings-esque keyboard orchestral entry, with a military drum beat and a slow melodic solo. It kicks that off and goes into the gallop-of-victory with powerful twin guitar chord riffage and the Fokin double-bass! This song is incredibly progressive, bringing in changes in tempo very fairly, odd measure endings, and Jari switches from harsh to cleans fairly often. The military snare fill brings its power here, and the recognizable Toivonen solo highlights this piece. Very strange from Jari's sweeps and shreds, the Toivonen trademark solo are rapid hammer ons and pull offs and stringchains of notes to create a "gallop solo". Acoustic guitars, synths, everything almost, even beautifully placed pinch harmonics make its appearance here! 10/10

9.) One can say Lai Lai Hei is Ensiferum's MAGNUM OPUS song in the Jari-era. Words cannot describe simply how beautiful, how epic, how strong, how lovely this piece is. It is fully written by Jari Mäenpää, and there are few if ANY folk metal songs that can top this. It is written so well, too well, it is in one of my top 10 songs list of all time, and that's saying something! I will try my best to describe this piece as best as I can. The song enters with the sound of a burning campfire, followed by an acoustic guitar melody with a shaman drum booming every four measures of such, the melody lasts for quite a while until it is played on an electric guitar joined by Oliver Fokin on drums. It sinks back into the shaman drum and the acoustic for a bit before back into the electric, and then enters something fairly new for Ensiferum. Jari Mäenpää sings this song entirely in cleans, and the first lines are sung entirely in FINNISH, that is right, an immortalization of the metal language. The electric melody plays again, before the tempo changes into a quick gallop attack of the guitar, joined by heavy fills of the drums and bass. Blastbeats begin and the song's mainstay takes hold, Jari sings of a place in the north, far far away, describing of its beauty, of the people throughout the land in a gathering of joy and splendour, of the magic of the forests and the lands, of Gods, spirits, and wolves. Complementing this is a memorable folk rhythm being played on the instruments, after each verse is a fun little electric guitar folkmelody. The chorus is hard to forget, for it is a complete galloping assault with the memorable drone of "LAAAAAAAAAAAi LAI HEI!" The afterchorus is a memorable mini solo that comprises of fast mordents, hammer ons, pull offs, before leading into a keyboard section with the Finnish lyrics, which is considered the pre-bridge before Jari does his final solo for Ensiferum, and goddamn is it awesome. It starts off fairly slow, and gets faster pretty quick, utilizing alternate picking, quick picking through the strings, string skips, and his hard-to-emulate Jari sweeps of destiny, the solo also utilizes simple effects such as palm mutes, pinch harmonics, and many others! Right after the solo, about half a second a silence before the mighty chorus strikes again. "LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI LAI HEI!" The after chorus plays with an additional pinch harmonic thrown in, then this is taken up one octave higher, and the final note is a sad thing to hear, but goddamn it, play that song again! Lai Lai Hei is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, it is just pure brilliance and the man who wrote it is nothing short of a GOD and a GENIUS. Listen to this song my friends, just do it, for me, for Jari, for your sake as a metalhead! LISTEN TO THIS FUCKING SONG! It is nothing short of an epic of perfection, it is beauty incarnated into a song! I tried my best to describe this song, but in the end, you must listen to it yourselves, you absolutely must. Lai Lai Hei! 15/10

10.) Oh, after that, you give me this? FUCKING A, Tears is in no way metal, it is a brooding folk song that is beautiful, beautiful lyrics, beautiful melody, beautiful thematic. Features an uncredited female vocalist for the lead role. 9/10

Bonus Track:
11.) Battery, Ensiferum covered a droll Metallica song and turned it into FUCKING TRUE METAL! The drums are 10 times better, the guitars are 20 times better, the vocals are 50 times better, and the solo is played better than Kirk Hammett. You thought Metallica were thrash kings? Why not kill them now, listen to this Melodic Death/Folk Metal band turn them into dust by playing a genre they don't even perform in, 50 times better than they could ever do.
11/10

Overall album rating: 10/10 (with Lai Lai Hei overdone)
Overall album rating: 9/10 (without Lai Lai Hei overdone rating)

This was the last album to feature singer/guitarist Jari Mäenpää (who would go on to focus on Wintersun), drummer Oliver Fokin, and bassist Jukka-Pekka Miettinen. After this album, Toivonen would hire bassist/lyricist Sami Hinkka (7 string bass guitar god), Norther frontman (now former) Petri Lindroos, and drummer Janne Parvianen.
A sad departure but this in no way faltered the band, the stuff with the new lineup can be described as "equally epic" if not "better"

Fun facts:
On late 2008/early 2009, former bassist Jukka-Pekka Miettinen filled in on guitars for all of the Russian tour dates due to Petri Lindroos becoming ill, bassist Sami Hinkka took over the lead vocals for these dates.
Wintersun opened for Ensiferum on a couple of shows, and Petri Lindroos even came out and performed a Metallica song with Wintersun during one of the shows.

Very good review man! I'm not the biggest death metal guy, but i'll give it a shot!

LAI LAI HEI! Truly IS a masterpiece, and so is this album!

Vggamegod wrote:

Very good review man! I'm not the biggest death metal guy, but i'll give it a shot!

They're not technically death metal.
They're folk metal with melodic death and power metal backgrounds.
I'll give you a link to some of their best shit.
They've only recently been called Viking Metal due to Sami Hinkka's lyrics, being the main subject of norse warriors.

Deathbringer from the Sky


Token of Time


Windrider (My favorite part starts at 2:05)

you had me at the first video - they're fucking epic ;D

definitely gonna check em out

-update: just purchased a digi-copy of 'Victory Songs'.

btw: it would seem it's a good idea to embed videos under reviews - the review was great, but the videos sold me ;p

can't stop listening to Deathbringer From the Sky

I'm gonna look up Lai Lai Hei since you say it's so good.

OMG, that rocked. I heard about Ensiferum before but never heard their music. I'm definetely gonna look up more of their stuff, 'cause that was awesome!

Very, very good review. Tale Of Revenge is an epic piece of song. Lai Lai Hei is also awesome, especially cause he sings in Finnish in it Damn it is hard to write to forums with iPhone

infernoRS wrote:

Very, very good review. Tale Of Revenge is an epic piece of song. Lai Lai Hei is also awesome, especially cause he sings in Finnish in it Damn it is hard to write to forums with iPhone

hahaha, it's bad enough on my laptop, but damn man, props to you!