Band:	Elvenking
Album:	Wyrd
Style:	Folk metal, Power metal
Release date:	April 19, 2004
Guest review by:	Marcelo Hissa

01. The Losers' Ball
02. Pathfinders
03. Jigsaw Puzzle
04. The Silk Dilemma
05. Disappearing Sands [Limited Edition bonus]
06. Moonchariot
07. The Perpetual Knot
08. Another Haven
09. A Fiery Stride [Limited Edition bonus]
10. Midnight Circus
11. A Poem For The Firmament

What happens if you put together high vocals and the speedy guitars from power metal with an Elven-based theme and orthodox instrumentation from folk metal? The Elvenking's fabulous Wyrd. As a final touch, they place some catchy tunes embedded in a competent production.

Wyrd is their second album from the distant year of 2004, but it's still considered one of the best albums from the band. Classified as power folk metal, the combination of these two worked so fine that it launched another innovative arm in the heavy metal genre tree.

As it's folk, I'm saying that you may hear a lot of violins, claps in the background and some happy female vocals; take the introductory track "Loser's Ball" as an example. "Moonchariot" is another good specimen to understand Elvenking: semi-acoustic songs with almost-whispered vocals under a gracious atmosphere, alternating distorted guitars and the classic sing-along chorus.

But not everything is nice and slow, stepping on the gas, and less folk more power, "Pathfinder" is another great song. The base sound from those faster tracks takes a step further in the contrast of clean and aggressive vocals. This intertwining is also reflected in the coexistence in the same song of the gentle folk viola with distorted metal guitar. In "Another Haven" you get a piece of awesome work from Kleid's vocals, one of the best songs from the album.

Before closing the album, the last chapter of Wyrd is a journey lasting twelve minutes: "A Poem for the Firmament" is like an epic campaign featuring alternations along the way, a mutability of rhythms and speeds. Divided into five parts, it's the kind of well-crafted music that sounds natural with a beautiful result.

Wyrd stands by that proposed amalgamation between the power and the folk, it delegates to the listener the hard task to answer: how much more can metal evolve? When we think we've heard it all, someone always comes showing a new door to be opened with a plethora of possibilities to be explored.