Rating: 9/10
Release: 21 June 2012
Label: Gateway Music

Huldre released a CD ‘Intet Mennekebarn’ recently. And I have to admit I’d never heard of them. Was this a stupid mistake? I can find out by listening to ‘Intet Mennekesbarn’.
Huldre is a Danish band, and Denmark is know for a sound with very low male voices and flutes. Svartsot set a style and this is something which seems to fit Danish bands fine, but not Huldre…
When the CD starts with ‘Ulevinter’ I almost couldn’t wait for the end, if it wasn’t for the strength of this song I would have jumped to the next track just to hear if this was also this nice.
And yes I can assure you also ‘Trold’ is this nice. How nice? Well, as mentioned on Danish radio in a metal-programme. Where you usually hear folk added to the metal, Huldre is adding metal to the folk. What you get is metal for sure, but it feels like loud folk. It seems there’s Folk-metal and Metal-folk. A bit of what you can hear in the Swedish band Fejd. And this sounds nice, I can tell you that.
A song like ‘Skovpolska’ is soaked with folk, the way of singing and the use of authentic instruments in a real folkstyle, brings us songs with an unique style.
The folk is strengthened with metalinstruments which can clearly be heard in a song like ‘Brandridt’ where the guitars are very present to give the song a lot of power, but the violin and traditional vocals give the song an amazing folk-feel.
‘Gennem Marsken’ gives you the feeling it’s a real folk song, but after a minute or so the metal hits off and again an very nice song is laid down. ‘Spillemand’ is a nice happy song for a folk-dance, but again with strong guitars in it. This should lead to a nice folk-pit, I can image it now. A bunch of metal-heads doing a heavy version of the folk-dance.
And then there’s this beautiful Danish female folk-voice in ‘Beirblakken’, I close my eyes and image I’m in ancient history in the beautiful nature of Denmark. And we have to wait long in this track, but in the end it becomes heavy and it combines the ancient and modern times in a beautiful way.
And the choice to put ‘Beirblakken’ after ‘Spillemand’ is beautiful, but the change from there to ‘Knoglekvad’ is brilliant. The speed in this song goes up quite a bit and we get a very nice song with delicious flutes, catchy guitars and this voice……
And this album ends with ‘ Skærsild’ a song in style with the rest of this album and this means: Beautiful.

Huldre has made an very good album with ‘Intet Mennekebarn’. It’s very original, their approach of folk-metal can’t be heard often. I’m not an expert on Danish Folk, but I can imagine they stay pretty close to this, but manage to give this all a nice metalsound. It’s beautiful, it’s original and ‘Knoglekvad’ is a song which goes in my personal favourite list. So, was is a stupid mistake, not knowing them? Yes, it was.
This is an album which has to be in your collection when you like huge amounts of folk in your metal. Truly unique, and that’s a blessing these days.

Tracklist

1. Ulvevinter 04:01
2. Trold 04:49
3. Skovpolska 03:34
4. Brandridt 06:39
5. Gennem Marsken 03:24
6. Vaageblus 06:21
7. Havgus 03:42
8. Spillemand 03:02
9. Beirblakken 05:22
10. Knoglekvad 03:36
11. Skærsild 06:05