Sometimes folk metal bands can be such a great discovery. Other times they can literally make you want to lose the contents within your stomach depending on how bad of folk metal you may be listening to. I love folk metal bands, but I find myself conflicted with the genre. Some bands can really paint the folk metal image well in their music, but others have fallen short to a genre with so much potential and creativity. Wolfchant’s Embraced by Fire was a hopeful new addition to my metal collection. Where I stood after listening to this album is a completely different story.

The album is released as a two disc limited edition. Embraced by Fire takes up the first disc and the second disc is their well-received Bloody Tales of Disgraced Lands that was released in 2005. I have to admit that this is a strikingly great addition to the album but I will keep my review of “Bloody Tales” separate from this one. In short, if you’re a big fan of this band you receive a great deal overall. There’s plenty of music to go around but most of my interest went towards their 2005 release after finishing the entire hour and forty minutes of music.

The album begins with a pretty dominant feature of most folk or symphonic metal bands. It begins with a completely instrumental piece depicting a strong sense that this may be along the lines of “battle-metal”. I wasn’t too impressed with the intro as it failed to excite me for my further listening. Once Embraced by Fire kicked into full gear it gave me a shimmer of hope of where this album would lead. Guitar work can be heavy, but also some of the soloing can be quite good. Clean acoustic leads sometimes make a stand, but these are too far and few and could have been implemented more. Winter’s Triumph began with a beautiful instance of acoustic guitars which added a great folk metal feel to things, and also set up the song quite nicely before it went into full swing.

My first experience to the vocals had me feeling a little uneasy. The first track, as many of the others, has moments of clean singing with a combo of black metal style shrieks. The vocals were probably my biggest concern for the album. The screaming wasn’t my biggest concern, but the clean vocals were such a disappointment. During choruses, the songs are layered over by a moment of blast beating and a rather silly sounding display of vocals that really hurt my experience with the album. Some may disagree with me about how it is structured, but it was an obvious dissatisfaction for me. Some moments such as this were done quite well, but unfortunately the bad outweighed the good for me in the end.

Drumming and guitar work is pretty solid. It wasn’t my favorite of the year, but there are some parts that shine with some really great ideas. There are moments of guitars chugging along with heavy beats, and then unleashing a solo that either sounds very folk, or even sounds along the lines of some power metal style soloing. This is mainly where I kept my focus. Of course the symphonic element was also an important aspect of this album for me, but I didn’t find myself getting too overjoyed about much of it. Like I said before, there are a lot of great ideas thrown into this album, but a lot of them lacked the luster I was so desperately looking for in this style of music.

Embraced by Fire brings a lot to the table but ends up delivering a pretty average experience for the year. I didn’t hate or love it, but it’s still a worthy mention to any folk metal fans out there. My experience may not have been what I was looking for with Embraced by Fire, but Bloody Tales of Disgraced Lands gave me a more memorable experience and excites me to look into the early portions of the band’s discography.