Heilung “Drif” Album Review

Drif

Heilung

• • Genre: Folk
  • Date: 19 Aug, 2022
  • Content: Not-explicit
  • Region: USA
  • Track(s): 9

• ℗ 2022 Season of Mist

Heilung’s breathtaking third record, “Drif,” seems to come at just the right time – a time when the world really needs healing more than anything else. With all the tumultuousness that we are collectively experiencing, we are thankful that artists like Heilung are here to help us gain insight into our collective consciousness and give us art that helps nourish the soul. Overall “Drif” works and truly amazes on so many levels and it incorporates so very many varied and distinct pieces of sound.

Album Cover Art

The band name is written using a unique, ethereal design that almost shares a striking semblance with the face of an ant when viewed with an electron microscope, or the face of a leopard at first glance. Then underneath all that, you find scribbled in a different, special way, the album title. Astonishing stuff.

Tracks and Features

The album’s overwhelmingly beautiful and moving opening track, “Asja,” is about driving out evil and bringing in love. The song is about five minutes of pure genius, and every time it ends, you wish it would go on indefinitely with no apparent conclusion. It’s the vibration in the throat signature that Kai Uwe Faust so skillfully narrates. Christopher Juul extracts the percussion, the manufacturing, and the sounds from the prehistoric instruments from our planet’s early history. The mix so expertly highlighted Maria Franz’s breathtakingly angelic voice.

Speaking of Maria Franz, the sixth composition on the record, “Nesso,” has got to be her best vocal performance yet. The range and inflection she displays in “Nesso” demonstrate just how much Franz has dedicated to her craft. She can go from a near whisper to a calming sonant and then so passionately build up to belting out a crowing crest of pulchritudinous crescendo. The sonic part of “Nesso” features Christopher recording the voice parts directly into a resonating copper string tuned to the same note. The song itself, however, is actually one of healing and pulling sickness out of an animal.

The song “Tenet” is a palindrome in and of itself, in addition to being about them. Whether played forward or backwards, all musical instruments, melodies, and portions play the same. By the way, an old code system that dates back more than 2,000 years in Europe is used to construct the tune. Several languages, including Old Norse, Latin, and Proto-Germanic, are used in the song’s lyrics. The song, which is based on an ancient puzzle called “Sator Square” that was discovered under Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, is another example of masterful performance. It has a number of different sub-structures that transport the listener through Northern Europe with Heilung.

The first single to be released, “Anoana,” was backed by what is arguably one of the best music videos ever made. “Anoana,” another carefully passionate and expertly crafted song, transports us to a period of tremendous affluence and ties us to the incantational linguistics of the Northern ancient countries.

The penultimate track, “Nikkal,” exemplifies this where I would have loved to have more time to enjoy the layered choral vocals. The spoken word track “Keltentrauer,” which is a poem about a fictional battle, clocks in at over eight minutes and doesn’t fit in quite as well as the other songs.

The captivating and slightly melancholic “Marduk” serves as the album’s finale. Vocalist Kai whispers the fifty names of Marduk in a very innovative composition that makes use of bronze bowls. Marduk, the ancient Babylonian King of the Gods, was renowned for being complicated and enigmatic, and Heilung captured that about him in this moving, nearly nine-minute epic.

Tracklist

NO	TITLE	TIME
1	Asja	5:16
2	Anoana	4:56
3	Tenet	13:05
4	Urbani	2:54
5	Keltentrauer	8:26
6	Nesso	7:54
7	Buslas Bann	5:03
8	Nikkal	3:04
9	Marduk	8:33

Album Theme

The word “heilung,” translated from German, literally means “healing,” and more than anything, healing is the crux of “Drif.”

Production Credits

Band member, Christopher Juul, handled production and mixing duties.

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