Band:	Mystic Circle
Album:	Drachenblut
Style:	Melodic black metal
Release date:	1998

01. Ancient Words
02. Notrum- The Sword Of Might
03. The Dragonslayer
04. King Of The Nibelungenlord
05. Isenstein
06. Shadows Over Worms
07. Hagen Von Tronje
08. Blood From The Xanters King
09. Rheingold

Drachenblut is the second album of the german blackmetallers, at times symphonic, always very rhytmic and agressive with a very dark atmosphere.

About the album: I got me this promotion cd, because I liked the cover, but I had no idea what to expect. The band, whose pictures are on the backside of the cover look somehow evil and demonic, in a strange masquerade of swords, axes, chains, skulls and stuff like that�
The cd itself got a nice artwork with 3 painted dragons on it. The music is somewhat strange, I haven�t heard anything similar before, maybe Ensiferum, but that�s still far away. The genre this band plays must be some kind of melodic black metal. As far as I can tell there are three persons in charge for growls or speech, two male growlers, but I could never understand anything besides, dragonslayer, king, blood, death and similar easier words, and there is one female speaking a few sentences, but that all does not make it very easy. Another problem for me is the tracklist, for it is way shorter than there are tracks on the cd. The reason for this disproportion might be that the other not-mentioned tracks are intros. In fact there are 15 songs on the cd, but only 9 have a name, might also be because of a continuing story which is set among the Ring of the Nibelungen. So this is clearly identifiable as a concept album.
The music itself is ruled by the great work on the keyboard, which is really special and gives the whole album a winterlike-cold atmosphere. The drums are good, but more in the slower parts, the fast parts sound quite mechanic. The guitars are nice, but especially good on the intros and very hard to detect sometimes in the normal songs where the sound is blurred and overloaded in several parts. A solid work on the bass makes the album a round thing, but to me the intros are somehow better than the songs though I was kind of impressed by the first listen. By the way: a short melody use in one track, I don�t remember which one now, can be found in a slightly different form on one of Ensiferum's songs.

All in all I would give this one a 6.5 because still this is not my type of music but I'm sure other people will like it. As I said: the cover artwork is great, the band looks evil and somehow disgusting (and they posess names such as: Baalsulgorr, Aaarrrgon, Ezpharess, Isternos and of course Graf von Beelzebub), this overly evil look makes them a bit ridiculous. The cd artwork is also nice and the keyboard work is fantastic. This mix of attributes does not make it bad nor good, in my humble opinion. If you ever meet this this album, judge for yourselves.