Here I am, almost a week late with this update, but I’ll try and have another AotW entry up real soon to make up for this one being so far behind. Anyway, dust off the air guitar and if you’re of the long-haired persuasion, get ready to whip those locks around like a windmill in honor of this week’s Album of the Week…

Wolf - “self-titled”
It’s a daunting task to attempt breathing life into the corpse of a genre gone stone-cold nearly two decades ago, but Swedish revivalists Wolf have done just that. Taking the NWOBHM template perfected most prominently by bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, Wolf treads very similar ground without sounding like an also-ran. The driving melodies, dual guitar attacks and falsetto vocals certainly don’t give any indication that this record came out in 2000 (released in the US by Prosthetic Records in 2004).

The vocals retain a lot of the qualities of legendary Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson without being a direct ripoff and the music stays just a bit to the left of the classic Iron Maiden sound so as to distinguish it as more homage than plagiarism. The album starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up until “243,” the next-to-last track and the only instrumental on the album. While it works well enough for what it is, instrumentals on metal albums are generally a letdown anyway, so it’s hard to pick on it too much. Every one of the tracks before this point is absolutely stellar and is sure to have any old-school metal fan dusting off the air guitar for a wicked good time. The final track is a bit of a letdown after such a brilliant start and juicy middle, but when you manage to produce an album with 7 stellar tracks and only 2 that are, at worst, merely “okay,” you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.

Standout Tracks:

- In the Shadow of Steel
- Moonlight
- The Parasite
- Electric Raga
- The Voyage
- Desert Caravan

Links:
Official Site
Prosthetic Records