It's national Metalrage-Spiritual-Beggars-Review week! First Carn reviewed the new exellent Beggars album "Demons", and now it's my turn to check out the latest Grand Magus effort, with the very un-inviting title "Wolf's Return". As you are supposed to know Grand Magus is one of the bands that features Spiritual Beggars' singer JB. His enchanting "extremely-very-convincingly-unmistakenly METAL" vocals rule, in case you didn't know.

In case you didn't, go and treat yourself with the new Grand Magus album Wolf's Return, where the Swedes have left a significant portion of their doom influences of earlier releases behind them, and decided to persue a full-on metal sound. And boy does it work out. The heavily doom-influences may have vanished for a great portion, but the band sounds strong as ever. Even though some pot-heads may disagree. It's a vibrant and exiting piece of work.

The changes in the Grand Magus sound are impossible to be overheard, especially when blasting the opening track King Slayer through ye'ol speakers. Dio eat your heart out! The doom sounds re-appear in some slight form in the second track Nine, but as we progress to the fourth song Wolf's Return the metal takes over again, and for the first time on this record we can hear the true qualities of JB's voice. His icey wail over the slow riffing works out great (as ever).

And with avoiding reviewing this album song by song, it is a very good effort, with the two-piece song Wolf's Return, King Slayer and Repay In Kind ready to sell this record every time it will be heard at some friend's house. Thees ies metol, ja? The one lesser song I detected turns out to be the Ashes track, that never really takes off as the rest of this album does.

In conclusion, I have to say that Grand Magus have progressed towards an even more mature mixture of metal and doom, although (as said) the doom influences are not waying up to the great big dosage of metal that Wolf's Return brings. The downsides to this album can be summed up in three parts:

-I do not own spike bracelets, swords or pig blood, yet I feel an overpowering urge to wear this kind of gear when listening to this album
-It is summer time in the Netherlands (home of metalrage.com), and this would do better as a 4 degrees outside/pouring hailstones from the sky-album
-The true doomies will miss some of the steps made in the progression towards metal, but then again, did they listen to Grand Magus in the first place?

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