As I’ve mentioned before, demos can either provide a window into a band’s development, being rough and unpolished on their own, or they can serve as skillful, talented works in their own right. The demos collected in Wyrd’s Wrath and Revenge somehow manage to act as an example of both, showcasing the band’s early evolution while providing a thoroughly enjoyable listen.

Admittedly, this is far from a new release. The disc first became widely available in 2005, and it consists solely of the band’s demos from 2000-2001. However, the album has largely avoided any kind of critical engagement on the Internet, which is a shame since it’s unusual in the way it catalogues Wyrd’s history.

The disc contains three demos in total, and, despite their proximity in release dates, they display a marked evolution on the Wyrd’s. The first demo, which comprises the first seven tracks, demonstrates Wyrd at its roughest and most low-fi. The production is crackly and the guitar raw, the music a mixture of Wyrd’s standard early era folk black metal and a more vicious, relentless, almost thrashy style reminiscent of Ildjarn’s work. The final demo, tracks ten and eleven, features dramatically longer songs with an epic flair that, while they still retain their blackness, allow some hints of doom to creep in, along with a heavy dose of keyboards that augments the songs’ pagan nature. Narqath, the man behind the group, lets his songwriting talent flourish fully in these works, which feature several different melodies and riffs. The second demo serves as a bridge between the two, which provides songs which fit both the thrashy and the epic, both of which nonetheless play around with song structure more than in the first demo. In particular, the stirring “Song of the Northern Gale” stands as one of the best tracks on the album, with a carefully crafted song structure cemented in an inspiring, driven keyboard melody. The final track on the album was actually recorded specifically for this release, and provides a melancholy, subdued contrast to the earlier songs.

All of this prior analysis, however, ignores one of the more obvious ways in which this album reflects the band’s development: Narqath reused many of the riffs and lyrics in the songs in his later works, most notably the superlative Heathen and Huldrafolk. This actually weakened the album for me initially; I first saw it as an inferior prelude to his masterpieces, not really deserving of my attention. This impression was thoroughly unfair. While the riffs are employed for longer durations than they are in the studio albums, this allows Narqath to explore them more fully. One of Wyrd’s main draws is the songwriting, and, despite the earliness of these releases, this ability is in full force. The latter two demos are stronger than the first, certainly, but this is hardly a detriment given that the disc plays for a good hour and a quarter.

I can’t recommend this album to a Wyrd neophyte; if you’ve never heard Wyrd before, grab either Heathen or Huldrafolk. This admonition is based less on this album’s weakness, though, and more on the strength of those albums. If you’re already familiar with Wyrd, though, and don’t mind the reappearance of musical motifs from the full-lengths (which, ultimately, doesn’t hurt it anyway), this is a great release. Certainly, you get a huge amount of music for your money, and a unique window onto a group’s musical evolution, not to mention a number of genuinely good songs.