Faun – Totem (2007)

I can call Faun’s music relaxing neo-folk with acoustic guitar and beautiful vocals. I’ve heard a lot of band’s discography earlier but Totem is my favorite album. The main themes of the album are themes of nature and serenity. Also you can find there several foreign instruments.  The atmosphere of Totem is based on medieval legends. Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Scandinavian styles are used here to create a memorable album. This album is a little bit slower than the previous ones, but I should mention that there is a noticeable progression from album to album.

Medieval folk with a modern twist is very popular in Germany. And the music in this album is rather good, though I cannot say that the this band is better than the most of their colleagues. Stylistically, being closer to Qntal, Faun, however, they try to make their sound more authentic and less dependent on synthetic samples – by the way, they do not use computer bit at all, but at the same time they do not make the listener dive deep in the middle Ages, like Estampie or Wolfenmond, adhering to the right balance. As a result, in the album titled Totem you can find almost pop hit 2 Falken near a carefully styled Sieben, and Tinta, a quite modern arranged medieval melody, is followed by some monotone “old-fashioned” sounding of Unicorne. I cannot say that the songs are somehow contrasted with each other – on the contrary, they fit well into the style of the album, and complement each other. Only the already mentioned the song Falken 2 quite stands out from the general context. On the album you can also find carefully stylized song Sieben and quite modernly arranged medieval melody Tinta that is replaced by a somewhat monotonously song Unicorne with old-fashioned sounding. Two last songs that are most interesting since they illustrate the contrast of genres. Speaking of vocals, one of the female voices and the voice of Tyr can hardly be called strong, but their voices are perfect for this music genre. The second singer has a soprano, which, however, is not too reqiured in the album (perhaps in vain). Anyway this album is pretty good, not excellent but not bad either. In general, Faun have made rather professional work, which is difficult to be attributed to the masterpieces of this genre, but all the fans of the German medieval folk will like it.