Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Triarii - Pièce Héroique (2006)

Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant. So creep Triarii on ‘Pièce Héroique’, their cindery follow-up to ‘ars militaria’, a triumphal arch of bombast and orchestral swells limned with choir and dark vocals. Encapsulating the Trajan typeface dominating the album’s cover in strong caps – puissant blocks of line, crisp geometrically carved serifs, and curving harmonic arches – so enfolds the music that launches with the opening track, ‘Le Crépuscule Des Dieux’. Accentuating a dark glory of Empire strings lend the air minatory aplomb, marching without percussion usher arteries of choir and strings offering skyward libations to swell in a grandiose climax.

This initial inertia drives the entire album, a military mantle of resolute and unequivocal delivery, crepuscular as it is uplifting. Without detracting from the inexplicable presence of ‘Pièce Héroique’, this album picks up where Puissance reached, if rarely. Tracks like ‘On Wings of Steel’ lash bone, flesh and iron as carapace of an army streaming death on a battlefield, a chilling anthem that give pause to all those that would oppose, growling sinister lyrics of inescapable intention. Triarii plough an epic across earth and sky, churning the defeated with ritual percussion, eddying strings and heralding the end of dawn, the end of day on French horns. Not all tracks feature lyrical content, preferring instead to mix instrumental movements amidst thunderous military argot, breaking the intense aphasiac bolides with valedictory parallax as one’s body bleeds under the booted feet of the passing legionnaires. Guest featuring on the album on ‘Roses 4 Rome’, comes welcome repast with Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, in a folk epic classic meshing Tomas Pettersson’s fomenting vocals and guitar with the aegis of Triarii’s orchestration. ‘Kingdom of the Blind’ peels away journey for destruction, a dark ambient monologue of chaos and ululations from the deep as the very earth quivers, illumination of a stark aftermath where surface the subtle symphony experimenting in desperate dimensions. Incarnation emits from ruins of ‘Heaven and Hell’, like moths from chrysalis the dark symphony scatters at the demagogue commandments.

The entire album falls short of a full sixty minutes, yet by the end of the fusillades the listener is well and truly mollified, subdued, peeled of skin and dreams of anything else but a world crowned in crumbling Corinthian pillars and ashes of civilization. With ‘Pièce Héroique’, Triarii have supplanted the mettle of their previous recordings, showing the potency that they so keenly deliver here.

Review taken from Heathen Harvest.

An absolute masterpiece of
militaristic neoclassical music.


01 - Le Crépuscule des Dieux
02 - On Wings of Steel
03 - Heldentod
04 - Kameraden
05 - Overkill
06 - Roses 4 Rome (featuring Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio)
07 - Victoria
08 - Kingdom of the Blind
09 - Heaven and Hell
10 - The Inevitable Farewell of Democracy
11 - Blood and Toil
12 - Sun and Reign

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