ELVENKING — Two Tragedy Poets (...and a Caravan of Weird Figures) (review)

ELVENKING — Two Tragedy Poets (...and a Caravan of Weird Figures) album cover

Album · 2008 · Non-Metal

5/5 · 2011-06-09
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Two Tragedy Poets (...and a Caravan of Weird Figures) is the fifth full-length studio album from Italian Folk/Power Metal act Elvenking. The release is a one-off mostly acoustic album created for the band to explore their folk side in greater detail. There are still some electric guitars present on the release which gives a few tracks more of a folk rock feel to them, but for the most part the album is a straight up folk release. It also features some songs from the band’s third album The Winter Wake redone in acoustic.

Elvenking really disappointed the fan in me with their previous offering The Scythe from 2007. That album numbered among the worst I had ever heard, so I was very pleasantly surprised when Two Tragedy Poets came along and quickly established itself as one of the band’s strongest offerings, second only to the band’s debut album Heathenreel. Although there is not a hint of metal on the release the album returns to the same sort of fun and folksy atmosphere Heathenreel and is made great by the very same reasons as that album. The songs are fun, catchy and surprisingly for a non metal album from a metal band the metal elements that they are known for are not missed in any way. Maybe that’s because the last album was so bad, but regardless Two Tragedy Poets feels really fresh and exciting to listen to and contains many of the band’s strongest songs recorded to date, such as Another Awful Hobs Tale, Ask a Silly Question and Not My Final Song.

What is also a nice surprise is that the band’s vocalist Damnagoras (shorted to just Damna by this point) delivers his best vocals to date on the album. To be honest this guy was never really a favourite singer of mine, and I’ve personally got his vocals pigeonholed as a required taste and his performances can be a hit or a miss depending on the level of passion in his vocals. Heathenreel was a hit, but The Winter Wake was something of a miss in comparison, and on The Scythe you don’t even want to go there, but with Two Tragedy Poets it’s a very big hit. The passion of Heathenreel is back, and with the quality of the writing on the album being so high, Two Tragedy Poets is a very formidable album.

Along with many new songs, the two new versions of songs from The Winter Wake album - that album’s title track and The Wanderer - both stand as superior to the original versions. The Winter Wake itself is especially better, as it is not ruined by the out of place thrash metal vocals of Destruction’s Schmier. The Wanderer stands as another album highlight, it’s as if this already great song was made for the acoustic.

The most surprisingly inclusion here is a cover of Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth for two reasons. One, although Two Tragedy Poets isn’t a metal release Elvenking is still a metal band and this is a pop song. Two, isn’t actually one of the heaviest tracks on the album being one of those rare few tracks to feature electric guitars. While it raises my eyebrows it does somehow manage to fit in amongst Elvenking’s original material, though naturally it is the weakest of the bunch.

Overall I find Two Tragedy Poets to be the second of the two masterpiece albums that Elvenking has delivered to date. Given how their metal albums prior to it went downhill each time when I first got my hands on this I wanted them to continue with this style, and in fact I still do, because Elvenking certainly found a niche with this one. Sadly that was never their intention and a couple of years later they released a new metal album, but is my hope that they won’t neglect to do another one like this at some point, as it’s better than most of their metal albums put together.

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven, scoring 9.9/10)