Review: Riverwood – Shadows And Flames

Style: Middle-Eastern Folk Metal, Progressive Metal, Symphonic Metal (mixed vocals)
Review by: Francesco
Country: Egypt
Release date: 7 January, 2022

The Alexandrian quintet Riverwood released their sophomore album Shadows And Flames in January 2022, and it opens with an unexpected and anachronistic cover of “The Dragonborn Comes” from the 2011 RPG Skyrim — which, admittedly, after almost eleven years of heavy metal interpretations of this song from all over the world, I found to be a really puzzling inclusion. The arrangement and the production quality is great, but this reimagining brings nothing new to the table save for some Oriental vocal stylings, and with some exceptions sets the tone for the rest of the album to follow. 

Riverwood‘s style on this album is a bombastic progressive metal sound that heavily invokes the symphonic metal genre with an Arabic flair placing emphasis on longer songs and heavy orchestration. The vocals alternate between a growl and a clean vocal, and vocalist Mahmoud Nader is definitely stand-out in this release. I found the clean vocals to be a real delight; at once emotional, engaging, and unique. In contrast, the harsh vocals were a little characterless, or even uninteresting, with the singer’s emphasis being lost in the screaming and these moments in the songs lacking the emotional weight of the cleanly sung sections. Intense, to be sure, but sorely lacking dynamics. The lyrical themes meanwhile refer to fantasy concepts often found in power metal: crowns, thrones, and glory, are handled with no more and no less grace than the average European power metal outfit. Although they can be kind of trite, I find Mahmoud makes a concerted effort to affect his delivery with intent and very deftly avoids coming off as, well, cheesy.

The instrumental work might be the strongest part of Shadows And Flames, and even if the riffing might be less-than-memorable the musicianship is not lacking. The songs contain some traditional folk instrumentation which help the arrangements mostly remain interesting even despite their lengths (with the longest track clocking in at over 12 mins) and the track listing is also peppered with shorter transitional tracks containing either light emotive narration or that have no vocals but both of which serve to segue into the next track. 

One of the album’s weak points comes as the band begins to lean into pieces like “Lustful Temptation” that develop part-way into ballads, abruptly changing the mood. In fact, the album contains quite a bit of emotional atmosphere building with instrumental sections that tend toward more tender melodic emotional passages with an overabundance of melodrama. Another drawback is that none of the songs ever waver from a constant midtempo pace. If you seek speedy 16th-note double-kick verses à la Symphony X or Angra, you would be remiss to look for that here. 

Overall, despite how refreshing the regional touches to the music are, from the flute and darbuka drum interspersed throughout the album to the ululating vocal melodies themselves, I have found that Riverwood seldom dares to experiment on this release. I think the band does little to push the envelope of progressive metal and I wonder what Shadows And Flames does for Egyptian metal as a whole, despite being a largely underground scene. It’s cleverly written but awfully derivative. I think they could stand to incorporate more of the Arabic folk music elements in their style of progressive metal and do away with some of the heavy orchestrations that lean towards Hollywood film-score pieces. And maybe ditch the ballads and speed up the tempo once in a while.

Recommended tracks: Sands of Time, Queen of the Dark, Dying Light
Recommended for fans of: Orphaned Land, Myrath
You may also like: Kawn, Pentagram (Turkey)
Final verdict: 6

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Riverwood is:

– Mahmoud Nader (vocals, guitars)
– Seif Elsokkary (guitars)
– Mohannad Ahmed (bass)
– Abdallah Hesham (drums)
– Omar Salem (keyboard)