Female fronted band ANFEL and their newest release "Icy World" is chillingly haunting vocally and sonically pleasing. ANFEL take on an ELUVEITIE style of Metal with clean female vocals backed with harsh vocals, the real difference is while ELUVEITIE are more focused on the harsh vocals (at least in the albums I know from them), ANFEL aim more for the harsh vocals to be more of a back up set of vocals while the cleans lead the assault on your ears.

Throughout the album I found that the levels on the harsh vocals were incredibly low, everything overpowers them and makes them hard to follow, at the end of the song "My Truth And Its Gist" the clean vocals offered are very operatic and are much louder than the harsh ones making it uninteresting to hear seeing as you can hardly follow the actual words offered. This is persistent throughout the album and takes away from the experience, the instrumentals are great, although the real struggle is identity. Each song seems to blend together and sound rather similar, it becomes hard to distinguish song from song. Some songs like "She's Crying Over The River" have vocals that are bland and lifeless, sounding mechanical and boring and are more likely to push someone away from listening instead of pulling them in. "Why" is a ballad style song, slower than the rest for the most part but don't offer a ballad style of singing, if you're expecting Peter Criss to walk out and sing "Beth" then don't get your hopes up. The vocals seem to be the same idea as the aforementioned "She's Crying Over The River" and while typically contrast between clean and harsh singing is nice, this is a song it really does not seem to work for, the pitch of the two vocals seem to fight each other more than aid each other and takes away from an enjoyable experience.

"Icy World" from ANFEL isn't exactly what I'd call a masterpiece. Hell as a fan of ELUVEITIE and the clear similarities I can find between the bands, I really wanted to like this album. The issue is theres not enough upbeat draw to mix with the slowed down "emotional" songs. Every album needs a yin and a yang to keep it fresh, this album only offered half of one and none of the other. Check it out if you'd like, or don't, really, it's up to you.