The Wolves Of Avalon "Carrion Crows over Camlan" CD

Dedicated to Quorthon. Special guest on vocals Rob Darken from Graveland!!!

The Wolves of Avalon is an interesting concept on paper: essentially Metatron and Allan Davey from The Meads of Asphodel (the latter, of course, also formerly of Hawkwind) regressing to material similar to the Meads’ first couple of albums but including folk elements, the majority of which seem to come from quite a variety of session/guest musicians. The intro and eponymous first track are mid-paced epics in the style of Falkenbach’s last two albums, containing a soaring emotional violin accompaniment bolstered by the occasional strumming of an acoustic guitar. This sets the precedent with ‘Lost Gods We Call on You’ as the second real song following in a same vein, albeit with the addition of various supplementary instrumentations including some female vocals, a Hurdy Gurdy, whistles, bagpipe, guitar solo and male choirs.
However, despite such a promising beginning, the quality declines into something that’s predominantly fairly dull with glimpses of what could’ve been. Quite simply, the middle songs are comprised of verses and choruses featuring boring black metal, with the extremely well composed folk instruments and sung vocals often being segregated to breaks or solos. This compartmentalisation eases off by the album’s conclusion, but by that time the character has changed from mid-paced epics to melancholy - i.e. two trudging ballads and a dolorous concluder - and is thus nowhere near as compelling.
Yet it’s dull not just in terms of the riffs, but also the lyrics too. Metatron’s normally captivating lyrics are this time generic in sentiment and feature quite a lot of simple lists or repetitions of song titles. Furthermore, another niggling factor for me was the mispronunciation of Welsh names; some simply sound like Metatron guessed and eventually ended way off the mark. It’s lazy, particularly from someone who has formerly accompanied an album with a 60,000 word explanatory essay. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to discover how to pronounce them correctly (I don’t know about the pronunciation of the English tribes mentioned and therefore can’t comment specifically on them, yet the Welsh issue doesn’t inspire confidence).
Ultimately, The Wolves of Avalon show the beginnings of a good band, just basically not when Metatron’s singing. Aside from the first two proper songs he, and Darken for that matter (who guests significantly on one track), simply don’t posses voices capable of recuperating boring songs. Sounds harsh, but the organic and intricately flowing (largely) instrumental interludes are vastly superior than the conventional verses and choruses. In fact, they’re good enough for me to consider calling these sections a folk version of Nachtreich when listening, which is saying something.

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