"The March Of The Varangian Guard" ist he perfect opening song with heroic choirs, kettle drums and trumpets. Broad orchestra parts add to the clear vocals. After an instrumental middle-part, wide-screen epic starts and the varangian guards begin a chorus that everyone can sing along.
"Take The Day!" starts with trumpets, out of which a stamping rhythm developes.A broad midtempo is used, the warriers around Nygard set to move whilst he offers the embracing storyline with a narrative voice. All of a sudden he stresses his vocal chords, a massive stamping joins, a bassbreak and cascade-like angels´ voices. Latest here you can see that Turisas have been working hard on the orchestrations. The piece ends with an instrumental part.
"Hunting Pirates" ist he pirates-song oft he album, but in the beginningscene on the market with choirs, violins, singing and joy it´s not yet really clear if the pirates are the hunter or the ones being hunted. After two minutes a slow intrumental part begins and ends into a solo.
"βένετοι! - πράσινοι!" begins with fanfares and a fast rhythm. The song reminds, due to it´s instrumental layers during the first two minutes, on filmmusic. The two rivaling parties, the blue and the green ones, appear on the screen. Again and again battle calls come up and then the enumeration of both teams.
Der titlesong "Stand Up And Fight" starts with a heavy midtempo till Warlord inserts a narrative part after half a minute. The piece of music offers a lot of bombast in the refrain but after the very first listening-experience the song does not have the expected potential for being a hit. That might come later.
"The Great Escape" varies the known ingredients very nicely: first a guitar-riff, a stamping rhythm and poisonous vocals. To this, crunchy guitars and musical-like singing is added. After a straight middle-part, fanfares and choires start and last till a break with drum roll occurs. The song ends with violins
In contrast to that, "Fear The Fear" begins with a straight uptempo-rhythm with a stress on the trumpets. All of a sudden there is a guitarbreak that reminds a little on the song from the well-known stallone-boxing film. The song is living from a slow but constantly rising tension, which ends after five minutes and a break in a Cinemascope-bombast.
"End Of An Empire" is, with its length of over 7 minutes, the longest song of the album. First you can hear soft vocals and acoustic guitars, always interrupted by a piano. After something around 1.5 minutes the speed rises and a broad orchestration and choirs start. After 4.5 minutes the arrangement changes to wind instruments and dreamy piano-sounds whilst Warlord whispers. The empire is about to end, with much uptempo, choirs and a monumental end.
"The Bosphorus Freezes Over" is the reverberation with stringed instruments and harp. Warlord narrates and then choirs, guitar and soft drums start. After 3:20, for a last time, broadwall bombast (WTF?) beings and doesnt leave the song anymore.
No question: STAND UP AND FIGHT is influenced a lot by film-music and in this case quite a bit influenced by epic stuff like Ben Hur or Spartacus.
Nevertheless and there I had to swallow a bit you always have the returning thought of a musical, even though Turisas know how to avoid the bombast ending up in cheesiness.
For this, STAND UP AND FIGHT is way to complex and you can always see a certain winking with those Finns.
There is just the question left, where the accordion ended up, because the band hired with Netta Skog fort he album a throughout young and talented accordionist.
This is what singer Mathias says about it: I do like the sound of the accordion but it pushest he music into a too folky direction. On the album though we wanted to create soundscapes like with filmmusic and that´s why we disclaimed the accordion during the recordings. Live it´s gonna look completely different, again.