TrollfesT certainly aren’t for everyone, but I sometimes wonder whether a lot of people who criticize them even bother clicking play first. The biggest complaint I tend to see about TrollfesT is that they’re just a Finntroll ripoff. After all, they both have “troll” in their names. And they’re both bands. It must be a ripoff.

Undermålere (I am lead to believe this is a fan creation, not an official music video.)

Right. Well, now that you’re hearing this you’ve probably experienced more of the band than a lot of the people who’ve written negative reviews of them. What I think you get when you hear TrollfesT isn’t so much “another folk metal band” as a bunch of music students who’ve got some decent professional training but decided they enjoyed drinking and playing live more than grad school. TrollfesT is a clusterfuck of klezmer, Balkan and gypsy folk, and whatever else they were introduced to in musicology 101 and decided to incorporate. For better or worse.

One thing you’re not going to hear on En Kvest for Den Hellige Gral, or on any of their other albums, is much of a folk/viking metal ethos. There’s a decent chance they’re more familiar with Taraf de Haïdouks than with Bathory (though they have as much of an awareness of metal as all the other styles they incorporate). Hell, they’re probably the least serious band that can be called folk metal. The lyrics are barely coherent gibberish. En Kvest for Den Hellige Gral isn’t in German or Old Norse or anything of the sort. It’s exactly what it sounds like: “The Quest for The Holy Grail” as written by someone a little bit slow, like say, a troll? I think it’s supposed to be consistently coherent enough to be understandable if you know Norwegian, but it’s not a real language.

Each release is a concept album, and while I can’t speak for this one they’ve come package in the past with a mini-comic telling the tale. It usually involves a bunch of imbecilic trolls going on an epic journey for booze (I’m sure the Holy Grail here is some self-replenishing tankard of ale) and pillaging, plundering, slaughtering Christians and all those other good light-hearted folk metal topics along the way. It’s never going to make a statement or push a particular world view, it’s just meant to be fun.

Die Verdammte Hungersnot

Far from being “Finntroll ripoffs”, the band is so unique that there’s nothing I can really compare this to besides their own past works. So what I have to say about En Kvest for Den Hellige Gral specifically will be, I guess, pretty brief. One thing I noticed was a lot of breaks in the folk side of their sound. You’ll find a lot more 30 second or so segments of straight-up metal on this album than on Villanden. That, to me, is a bad thing, because when they’re not playing folk or doing something weird they’re pretty generic.

On the plus side, the folk is largely a continuation of Villanden. That is, rather than the home-grown sort of sounds they used on their first two albums, they incorporate recognizable styles that you can have some fun trying to identify. The recording quality seems to have improved a bit too, which in their case I found kind of disappointing. Villanden’s raw sound gave it a sort of primitive feel that I thought complimented their style.

In a lot of ways it’s their most mature and diverse work, but it lacks some of their last album’s lasting appeal. The songs aren’t quite as catchy. The way the middle of Die Verdammte Hungersnot instantly sticks in your head was a bit more commonplace in the past. The vocals aren’t nearly as unique, and if it sounds all around more professional, well, that doesn’t necessarily work as well for their image. If Villanden was borderline insane, En Kvest for Den Hellige Gral is merely pretty weird.

Der Sündenbock Gegalte

That all being said, if you’re new to the band entirely and intrigued I recommend Villanden over this one. I have a love/hate relationship with it that extends way beyond my interest in anything else they’ve released. But En Kvest for Den Hellige Gral is still pretty good, and it’s a promising sign of things to come that they’ve continued to expand their sound.