Dreams of Lands Unseen by Ignea | Album Review
The Ukrainian storytellers weave a globe-trotting adventure on their third full-length.
- Genre: Symphonic/Progressive Death Metal
- Members: Helle Bohdanova, Yevhenii Zhytniuk, Dmytro Vinnichenko, Oleksandr Kamyshyn, Ivan Kholmohorov
- Length: 45 Minutes
- Label: Napalm Records
- Released: 2023
Putting the “Story” in History
I’ll rarely revisit a band’s discography before I sit down to write a review. I like to try and keep the focus on the current album and my localized experience with it. However, I wanted to fact-check myself before I boldly claimed that “Ignea disappeared for years before returning with a new offering” — and it’s a good thing I did because, as it turns out, they’ve been far busier than this review was initially destined to give them credit for.
Ignea have (unbeknownst to me) been consistently producing their particular brand of burly, Ukrainian-flavored symphonic death-tinged cinematic metal for a decade, with the longest gap between releases sitting at 4 years.
Since 2017's debut LP The Sign of Faith, however, they’ve been dropping music regularly, in total racking up an EP, a split with fellow Ukrainians Ersedu, a single, and three full-length albums (including this one). Quite the shock, considering the first (and last) time I’d heard of them was sometime in 2017 when an employee introduced me to a few songs via YouTube, and while I enjoyed what I heard, my tastes then were parked firmly in the death and core genres, so I never followed up.
Shame on me because as I’m sitting here jumping across their older albums, I find myself lost within their narrative soundscapes. They’ve got a penchant for storytelling, whether it’s within a single song or across an entire album — not unlike some of their contemporaries in Unleash the Archers, Epica, or Kamelot, though with the darkness of Brainstorm injected into the instrumentation.
Dreams of Lands Unseen very much continues in this thread, albeit with a heavier commitment not only to the thematic construction but the sound as well. Amidst the swirling keys, throbbing synths, and bombastic orchestration, the guitars ground the material in a deep-throated chug backed by thick, driving percussion and hammered home through Helle Bohdanova’s fearsome growls.
I struggled with my decision to put “symphonic” in the genre tag above, if only because that genre is not well-known for being truly “heavy.” Yet, many tracks on Dreams… weave the necessary energies required to invoke a mosh pit — and seeing as mosh pits and adventuring lend themselves to anxiety-inducing experiences for me, it’s almost fitting that an album themed around globetrotting should be designed to spark a pit.
Ignea are storytellers at heart; many of their releases are conceptual, inspired by, and framed around Ukrainian myths, folklore, and history. Dreams of Lands Unseen continues that tradition. From the band’s website:
It’s a 10-track concept album reflecting the story of Ukrainian photographer and documentarian Sofia Yablonska known for traveling to very distant corners of the world while documenting the lives of tribes and natives, which was especially dangerous and uncommon for a woman of her time.
(Helle also did an insightful 3-part series breaking down and exploring the tracks, which I’ll link below should anyone fancy checking them out)
Either way, it’s a bit of background that just adds something extra to the mix; I would never have known had I not read the excerpt, yet with it in mind, I can’t help but feel the intention at work within the songs. Each track resonates as a singular piece of a larger journey, a roadmap leading the listener through these particular chapters of Sofia Yablonska’s life. Helle, through her bewitching cleans and threatening growls, recounts harrowing and heart-stirring tales, her voice the perfect accompaniment to the powerful sonic tapestry at her back.
In a genre with a built-in predilection for thematic concepts and storytelling, the vocals and music must be equally attuned to the venture, and Ignea have done that with aplomb. In fact, my speedy dive into their older work revealed itself as an inherent trait of the (relatively) young group.
That observation could theoretically color Dreams of Lands Unseen as a “more of the same” album — and in some ways, it’s not entirely untrue. But, when more of the same equates to the kind of committed musical storytelling and rock-solid performances that Ignea proffers, then it’s rather impossible, not to mention reductive, to wield as a pejorative. They’re writing exciting stuff, material I don’t hesitate to place alongside Symphony X, Brainstorm, Pyramaze, Unleash the Archers, and Ad Infinitum as some of the more compelling and consistent in the symphonic/power-adjacent circles.
The only criticism I feel warrants airing is that Ignea flew under my radar for so long. Whether that’s an indictment of me, their label’s marketing efforts or the oversaturated world of content making it harder for creative and consumer to remain current with each other, I can’t say.
Dreams of Lands Unseen is a well-executed slice of brutish, beautiful metal from a stalwart band that deserves way more recognition.
