TRACK LISTING

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1.  Sirens
2.  Dark Horizons
3.  Lost
4.  Slam Down The Hammer
5.  The Crow
6.  Wolfpup
7.  Let Me Die
8.  Reptile´s Kiss
9.  Ride The Bullet
10.  Wolfony

Total playing time:  52:16

Release Date: August 26, 2011
Label: AFM Records

Wolfpakk - Wolfpakk

Reviewer: Chris

October 24, 2011

The debut from Wolfpakk reads like a small who’s who in the metal world with a plethora of guest musicians making the self-titled effort a true collaborated project that really does the power metal genre some slight service. With names like Paul Di’Anno, Tony Martin, Tim Owens, Jeff Scott Soto and Neil Murray to name a sparse few, Wolfpakk is precisely that: a grand collective of ravenous wolves that make this album a pretty decent acquisition.

The brainchild of Mark Sweeney from Crystal Ball and Michael Voss of Mad Max, Wolfpakk sets out to produce some quality metal music that has catchy hooks, resonating vocals and some solid arrangements befitting a project with such fine talent on board. As a guy who’s not the biggest ‘modern’ power metal fan on the books, I’m usually the king of trepidation when it comes to this style, but I can say in all honesty that Wolfpakk won’t set the world on fire, but it should satiate the masses with its traditional sense of power chord malignancy.

“Sirens” opens the album quite nicely, creating the overall vibe of muscle and method, but it’s “Dark Horizons” where the album really picks up steam, to say nothing for “Lost”, which rides the waves of symphonic metal sans the silly symphonic overplay. The female vocals provided are exceptionally well done in that there is no incessant wailing and soaring to compete with our favorite Finnish opera sensation. “Slam Down the Hammer” is the very carbon-copy traditional metal song that gets the masses worked up and the venue’s patrons raising their collective fists in unified supremacy, so in that regard it works for the album’s obligatory anthem, basic or otherwise. The guitar work is nothing fanciful here, but some of the crunchy chords and scales are, while typical, well crafted enough to get a mild groove going throughout, especially in “The Crow”, which showcases a hoarse but still viable Di’Anno bellowing through about tarot cards and king’s crowns ever so sincerely. The small, yet interesting Jeff Scott Soto vocal in “Let Me Die” is the highlight of an otherwise mid-level track, though the narrative within is pretty good. Aside from that, the Tony Martin effort on “Ride the Bullet” is a personal height for me as I consider him the third best Sabbath vocalist (yes, even before Ian Gillan) and he still brings it with the passionate vibrancy he did on Sabbath’s Headless Cross or Tyr. For me it’s one of the best moments in the collective, but truthfully it’s not a bad venture at all. The album ends with the slightly bombastic “Wolfony” and puts a nice exclamation point on an album that is far from a masterpiece, but lends some serious credibility to the current movement of the traditional side of the coin.

Nothing is really all that encompassing as a whole in Wolfpakk, but for a trip into the den of venomous vipers of power metal it’s a fine, albeit safe trip inside. It isn’t an album you’ll find remarkable, but you may just enjoy it for what it is, and that’s solid music for solid folks.