A Meme Best Enjoyed Once per Year - A Review of Wind Rose's Trollslayer

I have had the pleasure of attending concerts involving Wind Rose twice: as an opening band for Rhapsody of Fire last year and as a headliner earlier this year. Wind Rose transmits a joyful atmosphere, connects strongly with its audience and singer Francesco Cavalieri has classically trained vocals that sound absolutely impressive. However, these remarkable strengths don't come across as convincingly on the band's studio releases. The quintet's sixth studio album Trollslayer is a very good example to support this thesis.

On paper, several of the band's strengths can also be found on the nine songs clocking in at forty-two minutes on this output. The vocals still sound captivating, epic and majestic. The keyboards provide cinematic tones fitting the band's imagery and lyrics connected to a fantastic world involving dwarves and trolls. The guitar play is catchy, melodic and simple. Bass guitar and drums provide rhythms that are easy to digest. The production is professional and focuses on melody over energy. The group's identity remains faithful to its origins and hasn't changed one iota since its foundation.

Highlights on this particular output are epic album closer "No More Sorrow" that takes you upon a cinematic voyage through seven and a half mostly entertaining minutes, then we have catchy, joyful and playful "Rock and Stone" inspired by a multiplayer space dwarf first-person shooter video game and last but not least, one should mention uplifting party anthem "The Great Feast Underground" that should please power metal fans, live-action role-playing enthusiasts and folk rock aficionados alike.

The only but significant problem of this record is that Wind Rose has essentially become a meme over time. One tends to associate the quintet with melodic party anthems about dwarves and that's precisely what we get here. While this identity sounded refreshing in the early years, this imagery has become so stereotypical that very few listeners manage to feel neutral about this quintet. They will either fully embrace this group with much enthusiasm or reject it entirely with annoyed disgust. Wind Rose isn't the only band that has become its own meme as German power metal group Powerwolf or Swedish power metal band Sabaton have been going through similar fates before. European power metal has never been as predictable as it is in the present day.

At the end of the day, I'm willing to listen to Wind Rose's Trollslayer once or twice per year when I'm in the mood for joyful but superficial party anthems that are so melodic that they barely qualify as metal music. Once I have been listening to said album however, I most certainly don't mind taking a break from it for another year. Wind Rose's Trollslayer offers exactly what you would expect from it. It is good for what it is, no more, no less. For the quintet's future however, the band should try to break out of its self-congratulating cycle of endless repetition and take the risk to try out something new to remain artistically relevant.

Final Rating: 70%