Band:	Gwyllion
Album:	The Edge Of All I Know
Style:	Power metal, Symphonic metal
Release date:	April 2009

01. In Silence Enclosed
02. Entwined
03. Void
04. Rage
05. Beyond Goodbye
06. The Night Awakes
07. Closure
08. A Thousand Words
09. Roots of Reality
10. Angelheart

Symphonic metal with female vocals? Sounds a tad little tiny bit familiar? Indeed it does, this time it's played by the Belgian sextet Gwyllion, focused around keyboarder Joris Debonnet, who does an awesome job by the way, and vocalist Annelore Vantomme, who has been replaced just after the recording of this album.

"The Edge Of All I Know", which is released as of tomorrow, is the second album by the band and the first to be released by a label; Black Bards Entertainment. The album cover is pretty nice and the CD starts with a 2-minute epic intro-melody, as many female-fronted metal discs do. In general this album isn't very original. A shame, as I think this band could do something much more 'special', but they don't.

To get a clear picture of this band you can try to imagine a mix of Lunatica's The Edge Of Infinity and Stream Of Passion's Embrace The Storm but without quite reaching the brilliance of either, throw in a small dose of Nightwish's Wishmaster and viola; Gwyllion - The Edge Of All I Know. Some tracks are a bit faster, others slower, some are more power metal, sometimes the guitars are heavier, sometimes Annelore sings higher and sometimes lower, there's a slow ballad at the end (which is a bit boring in my opinion though), but in the end a variation of the aforementioned mix applies to every song on the CD.

Although there's nothing new, this isn't a bad CD, not at all actually. It has a lot of really epic approaches and has enough variation in it to make all songs distinguishable from each other, something that many bands in this genre aren't capable of at all(?). Vocalist Annelore has a really good and strong voice and a wide range, although personally I'd prefer her staying away from the high vocal parts, and Joris is really great on the keyboarder, definitely one of the better metal keyboarders I've heard so far. That's not all though, the drumming's very nice too (despite his few blastbeat passages that are somewhat off the mark on this album) and the guitar section of the band knows how their job should be done as well.

All in all these Belgians have a lot of potential and I'm sure that they could put out a fantastic album if they'd grab a handful of courage for their next effort and put some more experimenting in it. As it is they already have some slightly folky passages and also some acoustic moments, but a bit more personality, a bit of fresh air, perhaps a small note of something that hasn't been done before, maybe add a bit more of an edge to the guitars and their next album could easily be among my list of totally awesome symphonic albums among its two big influences, "The Edge Of Infinity" and "Embrace The Storm".