For those of you who have heard Ancient Wisdom's debut, "For Snow Covered the Northland", you'll most likely remember it as a successful and at the same time depressing mixture of black and doom metal. Is this as good?...well let's take a look :) The band have changed quite a bit actually, but on more of a physical level. Ancient Wisdom is now a one man band, led by none other than Marcus E. Norman. The departure of the other five members has not completely ruined the band though, just added to a minor change in sound. The main change is the addition of *mass* amounts of pianos. Rather than relying on interesting keyboard riffs as we saw in "For Snow Covered the...", pianos and smaller amounts of keyboards take up the greater part of the music. Not to say there's anything wrong with this, it just doesn't add to the "sorrow-filled" attempts being made here, nor is it as successful as the occasional excellent keyboard parts on the first album. The other major change is the much darker sound. I found this to be quite well done though, the entire album has this drab sickening feel to it, unlike the first albums more depressive feel. This is most likely because of the "fuzzy", almost thick sound created by the guitars at times (which reminds of Katatonia), it creates quite the evil atmosphere. Other than that, fans of the first album will most likely enjoy this particular disc. Perhaps a tad more evil, yet still successful if your looking for something past the hyper-speed bands, or perhaps something somewhat sadder sounding.

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