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I have been keeping an eye on the career of this band, as Tverd was founded when the awesome Pagan Reign broke up back in 2007, featuring several of the same members. I was a big fan of Pagan Reign, but I found that Tverd's debut album Follow the Sun's Way just did not grab me when it was released in 2008. I was surprised to hear from the band, offering their new album for review, and I was curious to see what they were up to.

Pagan Reign were always a bit disjointed, their compositions held together by glorious guitar melodies and catchy song structures. I find that Tverd have less of what I liked about Pagan Reign, and more of what I don't like about bands like Folkearth. This is very disjointed, with the songs made up of disparate parts rather awkwardly bolted together. The guitar melodies are gone, and in place of that we get a lot of flutes and singsongey clean singing, along with a number of other folk instruments that are, again, not very well integrated into the whole. The vocals are all in Russian, and the tone of them ranges from decent to an over the top, theatrical style that is simply too much. There is also a good bit of narration, which just kind of stops the songs dead. Even if I could understand all this, there is too much singing and too much talking and not enough music. The whole thing comes across as awkward and stagey, and rather pedantic, as if they were cramming existing lyrics into songs that were not written for them.

This album is trying very hard, but I can't figure out at what. The songs haven't got any flow or swing to them, and they are just collections of bits stuck together. The album never gets any kind of groove going, and never builds up any of the atmosphere that is so important for Folk Metal. Sadly, this is a disappointing work.