AFTERGLOW

Wobbler's second album contains music from their early days at the turn of the millennium. Their debut in 2005 was recent material and they revisited their older works for the sophomore release. Unlike their fabulous third album, "Rites at Dawn", this album only includes one song with lyrics and they are quite short at that. Instead, Wobbler show off two sides of their proficiency with three short tracks in a very medieval flavour and two longer ones that challenge Anglagard for complexity.

The album is quite short but sounds better than their debut, "Hinterland". The production is cleaner which helps the music a lot. "The Haywain", "Interlude" and "Armoury" are short instrumentals that will conjure up images of ladies in long dresses in pointy hats on castle towers and village folk walking behind carts pulled by cattle. Only "Armoury" changes period by morphing into a Moog and church organ piece for the finale.

"Imperial Winter White" (with lyrics) and "In Taberna" are the real guts of Wobbler. For the most part, they are multi- musically-faceted compositions that might be described as a rock band doing a medley of a European movie soundtrack in 12 or 13 minutes. The band continues to pull rabbits out of hats over and over, rarely adhering to a single musical theme for more than 30 seconds or 16 bars. Unlike Anglagard though, Wobbler lean more toward the heavy guitars of the 70's, and it should come as no surprise that I found the band mentioned as avant guard metal on a Russian heavy metal site!

"In Taberna" became my favourite track for this album because of some heavenly 70's rock passages with rock guitar and Moog synthesizer, as well as some heavier parts and an interesting blend of Renaissance music. While preparing this review I found that "Imperial Winter White" also features some excellent parts, and I noted that one section where the beat actually maintains a 4/4 rhythm for a stretch permits the music motif to establish itself and roll along smoothly before a new motif takes over.

I enjoy this album much more than "Hinterland" but not as much as "Rites at Dawn" which is one of my favourite albums. It's not a proper album in that three short instrumentals and two long pieces fill up 35 minutes. But for the adventurous this album has its rewards.