Demons & Wizards – Demons & Wizards

By the end of the nineties, there were two main bands playing non- stop in my stereo: Blind Guardian and Iced Earth.
Albums like 'Nightfall In Middle Earth' and 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' had me by the balls at the time.
Therefore, it´s easy to imagine my excitement when it was announced that Blind Guardian´s vocalist, Hansi Kürsch and Iced Earth´s main man and rhythm guitar player, Jon Schaffer, were ing forces in a common project named Demons & Wizards.
After a wait of several months, in February 2000, the self titled debut of Demons & Wizards saw the light.
As Shaffer wrote most of the music, the overall sound of the album gravitated, obviously, towards the thrash- influenced essence of Iced Earth, with Kürsch, on his vocal prime at the time, delivering one of his most aggressive performances ever, fitting perfectly the essence of an album surprisingly dark, that only in songs like 'Blood On My Hands', 'Poor Man´s Crusade' or 'Path Of Glory' allowed itself to get near the more "bombastic" sound of Blind Guardian and the European power metal scene.
The rest of the songs shaped an eerie work, with this overall feeling reaching a peak in the last section of the album, with songs like 'Gallows Pole' or 'My Last Sunrise' reaching shades of dark that none of the ' original bands had managed to reach separately, with just this beautiful 'Fiddler On The Green' as only (and partial!) allowance to a more tamed sound.
Funny enough, could also be the best song out of the album.
Looking with perspective, the album wasn't the game changer that many people (me included) were expecting, but remains an interesting experiment of the mixture between two branches of power metal, separated by the Atlantic Ocean.

This sounds great! just as good as the cd version from the 90's All Blind Guardian/Iced Earth fans should have the 3 D&W albums if you like both bands! Especially as it looks like Iced Earth & D&W are finished as bands now.

As for such a great album, I was dissapionted because of the booklet in that edition. It has just four pages, no additional artwork and no lyrics insert.