SuidAkrA – Echoes Of Yore (Album Review)

SuidAkrA - Echoes Of Yore

When a band has been around for long enough, there often emerges an unofficial “Best of” of their back catalogue.
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While these lists may vary, there is inevitably some overlap and these have been officialising in SuidAkrA‘s new album Echoes of Yore. As the name suggests, this album is composed of fan favourite songs which were voted on in a Kickstarter to celebrate their 25 year anniversary. While each of the songs has been remastered for the modern era, there is a very real risk that the songs may be lost among other contemporary releases. Whether or not this has happened to SuidAkrA‘s signature blend of Folk and Melodeath remains to be seen.

The newer mixing takes their older extreme metal production and gives it a modern flavour with a larger soundstage, better separation and improved clarity. Another factor in the difference in sound is due to their recent focus on the folk aspect of their music, seen in recent offerings like 2016’s Realms of Odoric. Leaning away from their Black/Death roots, the newer production does improve their heavy sound, such as by elevating the distortion of the guitars from sounding like a result of bad recording equipment to an expression of tempered aggression, but the real winners of Echoes of Yore are the tracks with more symphonic and acoustic touches. The boost in soundstage really compliments acoustic heavy songs like Warpipes Call Me and busier songs like Morrigian, in which the space offered to the jam-packed instrumentation allow for a fuller listening experience that wouldn’t have been afforded to the older style of production.

The one caveat to the remastering is that the cleaner production takes the edge on some of the songs, and this is felt most in Rise of Taliesin. While the new version offers a much more symphonic experience; the pipes and strings entering the song much earlier and are much more active, the production just nudges the song from a clean sound to a clinical sound, removing the rustic spirit of the song in the process. The original is something you can imagine sung by the fireside while the newer one, albeit more musically interesting, is a bit too polished and sounds a bit like commercial cinematic music. Another victim to this is Pendragon’s Fall. The Emprise to Avalon version has a much more dated sound, but it is much better suited to the aggression of the song and functions as a nice patina for the older version. The newer version, while arguably sounding better, loses the aggression that the crusty production offers and this isn’t helped by the fact that the aggressive in-your-face intro of the old version has been replaced with a folkier, slower chant. That isn’t to say the songs are ruined though, as the new version offers much more for the discerning ear to discover through its larger instrumentation and the subtleties of Antonik’s vocals are easier heard when not buried under crunchy guitars.

This review can really be boiled down into a simple statement.
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The songs are objectively better sounding but some abstract qualities are lost in the process. For some, these qualities are what made the songs special to them, and the songs will feel a bit lacking to them. But the majority of the songs are improved by the remastering, their energy elevated and focused by the cleaner production, as opposed to the general savagery of their more primal origins. Echoes of Yore is good for both longtime listeners and new ones; offering a different perspective of their favourites (for better or worse) to older fans and functioning as a solid starting point to SuidAkrA‘s imposing back catalogue.

Release Year: 2019
Label: MDD Records
Category: Album
Country: Germany

Reviewed by Kevin Jin