Album review: Orphaned Land – The Never Ending Way of Orwarrior

If there’s been one good thing to come out of the internet, it’s that we in the West get exposed to more cultural stuff from outside our cosy anglophone enclaves. In addition to having little appreciation of traditional artforms (in our own countries, let alone anyone else’s), we’re often blithely unaware of the ways in which other nations take Western culture and remix it in their own image. Point in case: Orphaned Land are an Israeli power-metal band with a career nearing a decade in length, and The Never Ending Way of Orwarrior is their fourth full-length album.

Their visual style is interesting; prone to dressing up as preachers or devotees of the assorted major religions of the world in their promo material, they look a little silly to my privileged white atheist’s eyes… but imagine for a moment how provocative it must be in their home country for them to dress up as Muslims, Jews and Christians in a big chummy horns-throwin’ gang. Metal has always been about transgressing and subverting these sorts of dogmas and prejudices, of course, though whether it has played any genuine part in cultural change is another question entirely. But Orphaned Land are all about binary-opposition-narrative concept albums – they’ve done East meets West and God meets Satan, and this one’s all about the conflict between light and dark, the quest of the titular Orwarrior (“warrior of light”).

Oh yes, it’s just as pretentious and D&Dish as you’re thinking; high-theatre metal, full of stately pace and grandiose filigree, featuring Middle Eastern instruments and vibrato-rich vocal styles alongside the traditional metal pantheon of crunchy guitar and pounding drums. The instrument choices work well, because Orphaned Land throw in a lot of keys and chord patterns that also bring the Middle East to mind. Close your eyes, and you could be riding across the desert in some alternate-history Crusades MMORPG, brandishing your laser-sword before the walls of Holy Jerusalem in a beautifully-rendered CGI cut-scene.

It’s utterly, gloriously over-the-top. Drawing heavily on what I tend to think of as the power-metal sound (guitars compressed and blended into an almost keyboardish slab of tone, polished glossy drum tones that drive but don’t dominate, layered vocals high in the mix), no one’s going to raid Orphaned Land for new techniques and ideas; their novel sound is a result of tonal and modal choices alone.

And it’s a refreshing change in that respect, even though it’s easy to see the joins where metal and Middle Eastern influences have been welded together; there’s none of the subtlety of integration that you’d find in, say, System Of A Down’s better works, and the stadium goth/folk-metal clichés are in full effect. “Bereft In The Abyss”, for example, is all schmaltzy acoustic guitars and folky warbling… and those might even be pan pipes in the background, if not something similar, before we move into the cumbersomely-titled two-part epic, “The Path”, which breaks out the medieval narrative feel and slathers it liberally all over the place. I’m occasionally reminded (uncomfortably) of the more risible folk-metal I’ve encountered, and American readers might be well served by me saying that it sounds like something played over the speaker at the Renaissance Fair when the kid in the Dream theatre T-shirt looks after the PA while the engineer’s on his tea break. The temptation to break out the Holy Grail coconut shells and canter toward a drawing of Camelot is almost too much to bear… though it can be a lot of fun to listen to, provided you manage to shake off the urge to take it too seriously.

The problem is that I’m sure Orphaned Land would prefer to be taken seriously, at least to some extent, and I feel kinda guilty for sniggering as I prance around my office riding an invisible horse to their efforts. But hey, making people enjoy themselves is as good a political statement as any in this day and age, I guess… and The Never Ending Way of Orwarrior was mixed by none other than Steven “Porcupine Tree” Wilson, so you can bet your plate-mail boots it’s a lush and detailed job; even if the songs don’t stick with you, the gorgeous tones and atmospheres certainly will.

As for me, I don’t know that I’d find myself buying Orphaned Land’s material, but I’m pretty sure I’d make the time to catch them on a festival bill if I had the chance – if their stage show is even half as magnificent and bombastic as The Never Ending Way of Orwarrior, it’ll be time well spent.