This is so awesome. Impaler's Wolves is an EP Darken put out in '99 between the amazing Immortal Pride and the equally cool Creed Of Iron. I wasn't too excited by this at first, since I'm not a big fan of EPs, and in addition the two tracks on here are reworked versions of songs originally on Carpathian Wolves. I thought to myself "How good can this possibly be? I bet it's lame." WRONG!
This is Graveland at their most awesome. Both the tracks on here are over 10 minutes long and boom forth in classic Graveland march-to-battle style. Darken has said Graveland's music will always call the White Beasts of Wotan to the battlefield, and this is the truth. "Impaler Of Wallachia" rumbles across the landscape like a thunderstorm in the Borgo Pass, crying out the legend of the Impaler Prince. And "In The Northern Carpathians" follows it up with crunching riffs and aeolian-scale keys that make the song simultaneously triumphant and eerie.
Far from being a castoff EP just to fill the space between albums, Impaler's Wolves is an essential piece of Graveland's rise from a prototypical raw Black metal band to the epic pagan monster they are today. By redoing two of the strongest cuts from the debut album in his new style, Darken pointed the way Graveland was going into the future. Not to be missed.
