MORGUL BLADE comes from the United States, specifically from Philadelphia, and Fell Sorcery Abounds is the first full-length album of the band, following the Harbingers of Power and the World’s End EP a couple of years ago. If someone has listened to the EP and liked it, then the debut of MORGUL BLADE won’t disappoint them, as it is much richer and diverse.
The band’s sound is epic heavy metal with Viking-like metal vocals. The music is clearly classic heavy/epic metal with a fantastic work on the guitar melodies, while the vocals follow the BATHORY-school, which means that most of the times they have a reciting style but with some black metal outbursts. This combination works good for the band since it emphasizes the epic atmosphere of the album.
The more you listen to the album, the more its traditional heavy metal melodies win you over. The band has managed to keep the speed down in most of the album in favor of the epic feeling, but has enriched all the tracks with great guitar solos, perhaps similar to SENTENCED and their Amok LP. Especially the track “Sons of the Night” has many references to that period of the Finnish band. But the core of the album is found in the rest of the songs and mostly in “The Beacons Must Be Lit!”, “In the Grip of the
Dark Lord”, and “The Five Will Ride at Dawn”. Great songs, where the guitars never stop to accompany the vocals, whether these are clean and epic, or with black metal growls.
Overall, Fell Sorcery Abounds is a nice album and the mixture of epic/classic heavy metal with Viking metal influences is successful. The fans of the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal, as well as those of BATHORY, old SENTENCED and modern Viking metal bands, will find MORGUL BLADE’s proposal about epic metal very interesting and decent.
