Havukruunu - Tavastland (2025)^{Release ID: 58013}

My first impressions of Tavastland were not very good and as the album progressed, my impressions only proceeded to get worse. The album started off with an odd sound and I couldn't figure out why. I thought for sure it was the mixing; I thought that maybe it was the bass and that Havukruunu completely forgot to plug the amp in. But then "Yonsynty" began and it quickly occurred to me that the bass was there...it's just impossible to hear it! I have not heard an album in a very long time that sounded this thin from top to bottom. Guitar is tinny, bass is...whatever this is and percussion sounds flimsy. The only decent piece of the record is the vocals which are tolerable and the folk/Viking style chant are the most impactful. The mixing on Tavastland is unbalanced; their will be points where the guitars will play chugging and they come out of nowhere with grit and bass, while the vocals have this really awful sounding stereo effect where the left ear sounds out of sync with the right and it becomes overly distracting every time it happened. This is a record that has aspirations of something really cool, but fails in remarkable fashion by trying to be too traditional in its black metal roots.

Best Song: Tavastland

Somehow flying under my radar to date, Finland’s Havukruunu have been causing waves in metal for a few years. It has taken me about ten listens to Tavastland before I could order my thoughts into some semblance of coherence, such was my surprise at just how much I enjoyed their unique brand of imperious blackened heavy metal. I mean, I have heard pagan black metal before, Moonsorrow and Kampfar immediately spring to mind, but nothing quite feels as invested as Tavastland does and certainly nothing sounds as passionate as it does. Telling the story of the Tavastian people’s rebellion against the Catholic church in 1237, the album carries the angst and unrest of the story well on its broad shoulders. The storytelling as a result carries an authenticity a sincerity even, to it. Far from relying on furious blastbeats and raging tremolos, Havukruunu construct the narrative with well-thought through structures. Unafraid to lean on melody and catchy, chant-driven chorus lines to captivate the listener, the Finns show a versatile and pleasing array of variety across the eight songs here.

I am captivated by the time the chants start on opening track ‘Kuolematon laulunhenki’, only to be further hauled into the baying mob by the mining riffs of ‘Havukruunu ja talvenvarjo’. The choral elements of the latter track disperse into the song unexpectedly, without dispelling the more aggressive and driving rhythm that constitutes the main part of the track. I think this is one of the key areas of success for Tavastland. Despite showing a clear penchant for the more extreme parts of metal, the band always keep that apron string back to that very traditional metal sound that their art is built on, very much in reach still. The pagan influence does not get lost either, the title track being heavy with that content across both instrumentation and vocal context also.

There is a cello, and numerous sections of keys deployed on Tavastland, meaning the interest levels are easy to maintain throughout for me. I cannot pretend to be pagan metals biggest fan but when an album is put together this well, it is hard not to be onboard. The lead work is sublime. Richly melodic and still completely unintrusive, in fact it is most welcome when it does make an appearance on tracks. The notes all sound crisp and clear against the more urgent backdrops of the music they are so often layered over. With such a heady sounding review thus far, it is perhaps unsurprising that I have not hinted at any negatives. The truth is, I don’t have any criticisms, no duff tracks and no moments where I reach for the skip button. This may be down to it being an excellent album that moves at such a relentless pace that you cannot help but be taken along by it. Is the last track a stretch too far at nearly eleven minutes? Well, maybe for some. However, to me it sounds like a final glorification of the great content that precedes it and so I love it just as much as I do the rest of the record.