05/01/2017 19:40
Опричь
Oprich to release 'All Sails to the Wind' album in May
Casus Belli Musica presents a brand new album of Oprich: 'All Sails to the Wind' (Poveter). Its release date is May 26, 2017. Format: 4-panel digipak with 20-page booklet, pit-art CD.
The band commented:
"We decided to dedicate our third full-length album to a rarely mentioned phenomenon, although it is incredibly interesting and inspiring. Just imagine: not a single metal band of Scandinavia has created an album about Vikings yet. It is difficult to imagine, isn’t it? Meanwhile, in Russian history there was something similar to the Vikings, and the name for this phenomenon was the Ushkuiniks of Novgorod. At the same time, there are no albums about the Ushkuiniks in Russia, but just individual songs. The word sounds unfamiliar, unusual. Maybe even somehow simple or clumsy. However, a battle axe in the hands of a Northern Rusich became a symbolical weapon of the Ushkuiniks, "the carpenters", as some people kept calling Novgorodians.
"Who they were? Young people who had nothing to lose but their violent heads – the brave and daring members of gangs, the boyars of the untrodden spaces, believing that there, behind the turn of the river bed, the martial success awaits them. It was their detachments on the fast ushkuis (ships) that swept by the Volga and the Kama, and the wind filled out the sails of unquenchable thirst for glory. It was they who broke into the walls of Golden Horde cities, when Rus' still tolerated this hateful yoke, namely they broke the merchant caravans, they robbed both their own and other people, it was their brave campaigns that led the daredevils to Scandinavia, then beyond the Urals, or to the hot steppes of the Lower Volga. And we are, Oprich, the inhabitants of the Upper Volga, the residents of the places from which many of these campaigns began, and now we say our word in memory of those deeds, and this word is "Poveter" – "All Sails to the Wind!""
The author of the cover drawing is Andrey Andreyev, an artist, a historic reenactment adherer, the head of military-historical reenactment club "Южное кнÑжеÑтво" ("The Southern Principality").
(source: Oprich)