adg211288 Sailing the Seas of Fate is the debut full-length album by Canadian one-man band SIG:AR:TYR, which was released in 2005. SIG:AR:TYR’s only prior release is the demo The Stranger, which features a mix of folk and dark ambient music, with no relation to the heavy metal world that SIG:AR:TYR starts to become a part of with Sailing the Seas of Fate.

The music here has, for the most part, actually got much more in common with The Stranger than anything metal related. If you were to put Sailing the Seas of Fate up next to its 2008 follow-up Beyond the North Winds, you’d notice a clear difference. The album sounds like something of a transitional release between it and The Stranger. Metal elements are introduced here, appearing very early on in the opening track, Dreaming of the Dawn, and the riffs are very clearly influenced by the black metal genre, although the end result of the album is best described as a unique brand of folk metal. Metal sections have a very small focus on the album however, and the real star attraction here is the excellent use of acoustic guitars to create an atmospheric record. Use of vocal is few and far between, and like the electric guitars sound fitting to black metal at times, but at others the man behind the project, Daemonskald, uses more of a whisper to deliver the lines. It’s quite effectual, either way.

The most surprising track is the closing Skuld, in that is the most metal dominated track, featuring chugging riffs, black metal vocals, and more typical use of electric guitar. It still retains the excellent use of acoustics though, and there is a great ambient metal feel to the track’s intro in particular, but overall it has a very clear shift from the folk/ambient dominance of the previous tracks.

Although as I said above the album does have the sound of a transitional release between the distinctly non-metal SIG:AR:TYR that made The Stranger and the very metal SIG:AR:TYR that has, at the time of writing this review, released two following studio albums, the most recent being the black metal dominated Godsaga, this is still very solid material from Daemonskald. The atmospheric sections are on par with The Stranger, and the new found metal influence is used to great effect, while retaining the feel of an atmospheric record. This is atmospheric metal, and a very atypical take on the folk metal genre, and I highly recommend it and SIG:AR:TYR’s other releases to anyone who is looking for something that goes beyond the usual standards of metal music. This is, in all fairness, the weakest of the SIG:AR:TYR releases, and I even prefer the demo by a small margin, but this is still a great addition to any metal collection.

The only thing it really suffers for is that it has a lack of individual highlights, which may be in turn because of the lack of vocal lines to hook the listener into singing along. Taken in one hit and just enjoying it for its atmospheric qualities and the album is a great success, but if you don’t find the idea of that appealing, then Sailing the Seas of Fate clearly isn’t an album for you, but I still highly suggest you look into the following releases, which feature a very different focus to this one.

Still I do highly enjoy Sailing the Seas of Fate and will of course rate it for how it is meant to be taken. On that note, I think this a great journey through these so called seas of fate, and happily award SIG:AR:TYR a score worthy of a really great album. I say again though that there are better SIG:AR:TYR releases, which hopefully should give you an idea of just how strong the discography is.

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven, scoring 8.2/10)