Whyzdom – Of Wonders and Wars Review

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I do understand you my dear child of night and Metal fan. Symphonic Metal sometimes seems to have had enough, to be really worn out with all the pomp and grandness and soprano and keyboardings, but when you listen to kick off track “Wanderers and Dreamers” youll agree with me. The song is beautiful! Beautiful! Very beautiful!

The thing that attracted me soon after the first seconds of “Of Wonders and Wars” was vocalist Marie Mac Leod’s voice. My dear fan can say ‘But this is a Symphonic Metal band. All vocalists have that voice.’ and I’ll reply ‘Yeah, you’re right, my dear fan. But she uses her skills almost all the time. And that’s the difference’. True. The difference here is that Marie Mac Leod uses her shining voice most of the time. She uses it much more than her clean voice which is wondrous too. That makes a hell of difference because in practical terms it makes the band stand out from the crowd. And she a wondrous voice which makes every track something else.

Intrumentwise Whyzdom don’t try to reinvent the wheel. It means that the band uses the tools she has to but in a creative way. I always that it doesn’t matter what technique one uses but how one uses the technique. That’s it. That explains a lot what happens here in “Of Wonders and Wars” terms of musical composition. First track, for instance, uses a piece of Frans Schubert. In other tracks as in “The Final Collapse” the band tries to invert the orders mixing estartegies as using an acoustic guitar as intro to then make the track hard and heavy with a broken riffing. The outcome is very nice. As the motto is don’t mess with success, of course, Whyzdom use some clichès. However, instead of making the music more predictable, they make them less predictable because the fan doesn’t know what is to come in each track. That’s very healthy especially in a subgenre that is falling into the predicablity.

Whyzdom “Of Wonders and Wars” may not save the Metal music world or make a revolution in it but it does make it more fun. It sure does.

By the way, interesting CD cover. It gives the album an aura of mystery that fits perfectly the band and its music.

Whyzdom “Of Wonders and Wars” was released on September 19th via Scarlet Records.

Track Listing:

  1. Wanderers and Dreamers
  2. Child of Damnation
  3. Stonehenge
  4. Ariadne
  5. Touch the Sky
  6. War
  7. Metropolis Lights
  8. Pyramids
  9. The Final Collapse
  10. Notre Dame

Watch “Notre Dame” official video here: