Rating: 6/10
Release: March 2023
Label: Independent

Telperion are a young formation from France who’s released an album in 2015 and brings us a new work entitled “Of Saviors and Conquerors” with 4 songs. Heavy, power and of course folk are the subgenres they tag their style with, and in this new work you’ll find all three influences indeed.

First song Down the slopes of Gergovia starts with keyboard sounds followed by orchestrations that extend for all the song duration. Fast riffs and a mixture of clean and harsh vocals is what you’ll find here as well as a guitar solo near the last minute of song. Harsh vocals did not really fit their music in my opinion, and in addition the singer sounded like he was struggling a lot with his clean vocals.

Second track Grendel is shorter and the structure is the same as the previous song, with a flute added and a majority of clean vocals. Positive and negative aspects repeat again during this track, while in the 3rd one tempo start slow during an acoustic introduction before getting fast as usual again for other 5 minutes. And if I heard this track without getting information about the band I’d never tell they played folk metal, because this time there’s no folk at all except for some orchestration during the 2nd half of the song.

4th and last track Son of the Ocean is starting with sword sounds accompanied by accordion and luckily this time the band is bringing us more folk than in the previous songs, with a keyboard interlude near the middle of the song as well as an accordion and guitar solo near the end of the song which was the best part of the EP in my opinion. This accordion’s finally found its right place in the song and I wonder why has the band waited for so long before showing us its potential.

Before concluding the review I went hearing this band’s debut album and I’ve found out that recording quality is definitely increased here compared with their previous work. I see a great potential here but there are still some major flaws, especially in  vocals and in the correct balance of folk and power influences. The rest is fine and for this reason I’ll look forward to listening more from this band in the future.

Tracklist

1. Down the Slopes of Gergovia
2. Grendel
3. Here Comes the Wolf
4. Son of the Ocean