It's a little old, but it's all that Raven Wolf has available for now. The album starts out with "Scarecrow", a fairly simple beat driven song, with the bass providing the solid flow for it. While the bass doesn't lose its presence a guitar takes over as the driving force for the music. Generally the speed of delivery is fairly slow for metal, but the performance is strong. "Questions" offers a distinctive stylistic expression; it's a fairly simple song with a clean guitar and a hint of influence from latin or jazz? "Wizard" picks up after that and offers a progression from atmospheric interludes (and intro) to a harsh, jagged, segment that leads into a melodic refrain. Trying something similar to "Questions", "The Steel Tree" offers some catchy lyrical segments on top of the also catchy music.
While the rhythm holds together the songs with some fairly standard patterns, the lead offers some varied and original riffs throughout, on various segments of the album. It is a fairly diverse album that tries some interesting things for metal, not being afraid to borrown elements from other non-hard musical genres -- something that some will undoubtedly attack for not staying true to their genre. Although the music is great, the emotional level, or energy, present in the recording just isn't high enough. This may be in part to the vocal style, or the mixing of the vocals. This pushes the music very far into the mellow area as opposed to the intense side of metal it often approaches.
Overall it's a very solid recording with a large diversity in styles. The music should be very accessible to a very large audience. It's fairly safe to say that they will be around for at least a few more years to come (this based on a recording they did in 1995) and will offer something worthwhile to the scene.
The Band:
Alex Stearns - Vocals & Rhythm Guitar
Bruce Irvan - Guitar
Abby Stearns - Bass
Mike Koenig - Drums
Michael Karpiak - Backing Vocals
Keyboards - Darrin Morhpis
Vain Records
3136 W. Clarendon Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85021
USA
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