Artist: Mörkvind & Tårfödd
Country: Italy & Germany / Sweden
Label: Self-Released
Formats: Digital
Year: 2025
Despite Tårfödd’s impressive output, having released three albums and two EP’s in 2024 alone, the band never crossed my path before. Mörkvind, on the other hand, is a band that has hit these pages before and appealed to me with its well-executed Atmospheric Black Metal. What I did miss though, was that last year the one-man from Italy has expanded to a duo with the joining of the German vocalist Vetr. Vetr also appeared on these pages before as his part of Totholz, a Germany Black Metal band that released a solid Black Metal tape back in 2021 – an interview with Vetr is also to be found elsewhere on this site. This time the international trio, including the Swede of Tårfödd, have put their heads together to come up with ‘Shadow Over The Fallen Lands’.
So, this is not a split release in the traditional fashion, in the sense of each band submitting their own material, instead this is a real collaboration with Simon of Tårfödd taking the role of composer and instrumentalist and Vetr and Vindur both adding their vocal antics, the latter also contributing with some additional synths. Consequently, the music has a bit more in common with the Tårfödd material than that of Mörkvind.
But I would be surprised if someone who liked Mörkvind would turn away from this. After all, the differences are not too significant. What you could argue is that there is a bit more dynamism in Tårfödd’s music, which makes it seem a bit more lively. However, this is at the expense of the somewhat more homogeneous atmosphere of Mörkvind. The dynamics are not only found in the classic tempo changes, but also in the riffs that alternately have a more traditional (Atmospheric) Black Metal connontation and exhibit a more obvious Heavy Metal origin. This musical dynamic is further enhanced by the vocal interplay of Vindur and Vetr, who complement each other well without being too different from each other.
Despite the fact that this collaboration, which incidentally seems to stem from an earlier creative collision that resulted in only one song at the time, lasts less than half an hour, things seem to slump a bit toward the end. It doesn’t seem to be due to the musical qualities of this trio, but it appears (again) to be a case of shortcoming that shows up a little too often these days. In these modern times with many one-man bands able to record everything at home (and possibly have their artwork done by AI), there are few incentives anymore to perfect music to perfection before recording it – everything is easily at hand now. The result is all too often that the whole thing seems a little too fleetingly cobbled together in a few evenings. A waste of potential as far as I’m concerned.
