Whether you’re a fan of Moonsorrow or not, there’s one thing that everyone can acknowledge: Heritage - Moonsorrow's career-spanning retrospective box set - is massive. Featuring all of Moonsorrow’s work from 1995 to 2008, Heritage is made up of 14 (!) 200 gram LPs and also includes a t-shirt, a turntable slipmat, a poster, a DVD featuring a 45-minute tour documentary and an autographed thank you list of everyone who ordered the diehard edition of this behemoth. If you are a Moonsorrow fan, this is your vahalla. And you didn’t even have to die to get here.

The recordings here span the group’s entire discography and also feature 21 live, demo, bonus and unreleased tracks, many of these available for the first time on any format. Again, whether you enjoy Moonsorrow or not, the exhaustive scope of this box is to be admired and Blood Music’s devotion to craft, authenticity and archiving is to be commended. That said, the price tag isn’t cheap (it’s your monthly car payment).

Moonsorrow’s music has always been a combination of the two elements in its namesake, as the group’s epic tracks that often span up to 10 minutes reflect the folk metal that has defined Finland’s place in the extreme metal pantheon but also make use of symphonic black elements apparent in mainstays Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth. Beginning with its Suden Uni debut, Moonsorrow announced itself to the world as a band ready to assimilate its surroundings but also introduce metal to its own brand of Finnish tradition and myth, the group already consummately professional in both craft and execution, a tendency that continued through Voimasta Ja Kunniasta (2001) and Kivenkantaja (2003). While Moonsorrow dabbled with more caustic sounding black metal influences on 2005’s Verisakeet, by 2007’s V: Havitetty the group had returned to a more folk-centric approach, though never abandoning its emphasis on Finnish countryscapes and dreamscapes with

mordant qualities.

It took two years for Blood Music to coordinate the creation of Heritage and, for Moonsorrow devotees, those 730 days were but the initial branch-encased path to the greater forest of possibilities that is this box. Much as Metallica’s Live Shit: Binge And Purge boxset represented an overwhelming insight into the band (the business-related faxes the group received regularly still stand out in the mind, almost twenty years later), Heritage is the first and last word on the Moonsorrow legacy.