After listening to the first tunes of this cd, the genre is clear: “HoHoHo Metal”, “Robin Hood Metal”, “True Metal”, or even “Power Metal”. With this genre it’s often very easy: you like it, or you hate it. This cd doesn’t make any difference, if you hate it: leave it, if you like it: buy it. The eleven tracks are easy to listen to and have sing-along chorusses. All ingredients are there: the speed, the double bass drum, violins, flutes, choirs and a male “storyteller” vocalist that sounds like Luca Turilli.

Track number one is arguably the strongest song on the album and one could doubt if opening with your best move is a wise choice. In fact the entire album sounds a lot like earlier mentioned Luca Turilli`s “King of Nordic Twilight” but with the latter being slightly better. A lot of bands make this kind of music and there is a lot of music coming out that has an average quality compared to the leading bands of the genre like Rapsody, Helloween and Blind Guardian.

One has to do something extra to get noticed, so what has Elvenking to offer that hasn’t been done several times before? This will be the, as the band calls it, “growling incantations” which are nothing more than death-metal grunts on critical moments in several of the eleven tracks. Furthermore, the lyrics are based on (of course; look at the bands name!) magical forests with Tolkien-like creatures in it. And to top it of, the musicians have names like Damnagoras (Black Metal?), Jarpen, Aydan, Gorlan and Zender.

All in all, German and Italian Metal lovers will probably like it, they`ll probably judge it to be above average and worth buying, but listening to it first is recommended.