The title says it all! Opinions expressed here are those of the authors. Personal tastes may vary, and we are cool with that.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Leaves' Eyes Update

I am so fucking excited! One of my fave bands ever, Leaves' Eyes, just updated their Facebook page with a pile of info on their upcoming album! The CD is called Meredead and is slated for an April 22nd release in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The album cover has been released, and the announcement on the band's FB site includes this quote from vocalist & lyricist Liv Kristine:


"As we began composing the first song ideas for our fourth full-length album,
all of us were very eager to take another step in strengthening both the
individual sound and concept of Leaves' Eyes, like we have done album by album.
Along with the song-writing process, I made up my mind about the songs' themes,
and drowned myself in different sources of literature. Some songs clearly needed
lyrics rooted in northern history and culture, as well as having mystical
themes. Being an Old-English fan, I decided to write some of the lyrics in
Old-English, which of course included further studies of grammatical and
phonetic knowledge, which I really enjoyed doing. Next to modern English and
Old-English, some songs are sung in traditional Norwegian, to keep their strong
individuality and focus on certain themes from special genres in Norwegian
traditional singing. The album is given the title "Meredead", as one of the
songs on the album. It is my own word-creation (at least I haven't found it in a
dictionary yet), and it may mean both "dead by/in the sea", or "the mortal or
killing sea". In my lyrics you will find traditional themes from Viking
literature and Norwegian song tradition, moreover, tales from the Irish isles,
some from already existing sources, some made up myself. Sometimes you will hear
about men going on adventures, some ending up drowing in the sea, their wives,
evil witches, three-headed trolls, or spell-bound princesses, as well as marble
halls and blood-thirsty creatures. I allowed myself more freedom for the concept
of "Meredead", telling a number of different stories, real, mystical or
sometimes maybe even both."
You guys in GAS have all the luck! You seem to get all the good stuff first!

From Liv's description, this sounds like one hell of an album, with some great themes and a lot of thought put into the concepts and lyrics. I'm really impressed that Liv has taken on writing some lyrics in Old English; that's not easy shit at all, especially if English is your second language. The album cover looks pretty cool, too, I have to admit.
So, definitely something to look forward to come spring, but as usual, I do hope I don't have to wait forever to get a copy; sometimes living in North America is so annoying - we always get the later release dates and it's such a pain in the ass!

3 comments:

Almagest said...

Old English is completely different from Modern English - it's more like Modern German, Icelandic or Old Norse. Knowing Modern English doesn't help you one bit with Old English, you need to learn it as an entirely new language basically. It's like Spanish and Latin.

Allyson said...

Ah, you're totally right, Almagest. For some reason I had Middle English in my mind & Chaucer translations from uni...

Almagest said...

BTW, that is quite a strange title for an album. But original, no doubt. And I'm kinda happy that the trend from Njord didn't continue, otherwise the cover art would consist of nothing but Liv's breasts in close-up! XD