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It's not very often that I get to review music from Canada. It's true that the scene is perhaps not as big as, let's say Norway or Germany. Besides the bad attitude of some record companies, by simply not responding or even asking to pay to get promos, doesn't help promotion-wise! Anyways, Dark Forest is from Alberta, home of David Parks, sole captain of this ship. Aurora Borealis came out in September 2006 and got re-released just recently to include also four compositions taken from Demo 2005. Two of these songs, Under the Northern Fullmoon and Eternal Forest, which happens to be among the best ones, were also re-vamped and re-done on the full length.

Aurora Borealis contains all the classic elements of epic Viking metal: Nature samplings, ambient/orchestral keyboards, harsh vocals, choirs, varied but mostly fast paces, battle samplings and even some folksy parts with a bit of acoustic guitars and mouth harp. All of this work is done in a very melodic fashion, wrapped in a very good sound production. I found the drums were a bit too prominent. I usually enjoy keyboards pretty much but I felt they were too present throughout the opus. Too frequent as well are the faster/blast beats. On the other hand, the acoustic guitars were too scarce to my liking.

All that said Aurora Borealis remains a very melodic Viking metal release that is easily accessible and bound to please a lot of metal fans who enjoy the not so extreme or dark and dirty aspects of metal.