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Let's see here…corpsepaint? Check. Skulls? Check. Leather n' spikes? Check. Imagery, lyrics and song titles indicating a raging black metal bloodfeast? Check.

But wait, where's the metal?

I was of course expecting some standard, good ol' fashioned Transilvanian Hunger worship, but rather a peculiar gothic orchestration of neo-classical leanings with absolutely no guitar, drums, nothing discernibly metal in the slightest. That isn't a bad thing of course, but I found it funny that I sat through the entire opening song of over six minutes long thinking "hey, this is kind of a silly length for your run of the mill lead in to the fury track." No, I had no idea until the second track Thamen Oteth wound up that this wasn't going to be the listening intake I was expecting.

This dark work manifested itself into this plane from the mind of Gabriel Wolf, who I would expect to be either one of the scariest people I would ever meet, or maybe just a big nerd. Ywolf is his brainchild, in which he has enlisted a couple of guest ghouls in Nagy Andras and Tomi Kalliola to add to this perturbing affair.

All tracks are of a literary basis, mainly the works of John Caldwell and also Gabriel Wolf and Adam Chambers' Varaniju, the songs usually borrowing their titles from these pieces. This is a tough one to make a call on because for me at least, I really have to be in the right mood to appreciate an album like Night of the Werewolf. I would say more often than not I can think of countless other albums I'd rather be listening to at the time, but after digging in deep to this slab of ambitious musical vision, I have come out satisfied in my fairly average enjoyment. It for sure won't send you out on a Victorian jugular hunting spree, but this album most certainly enforces that handy yet cliché phrasing "you can't judge a book by its cover."