The artwork and the band's name misled me when I was about to hear a (Swedish) Death Metal piece of work. But God forbid! Ynis Vitrin (now that's hard to pronounce, right?) delivered more than an hour of power / classic Metal in their demo A Dark Land (that also included other demo recordings from 2004/2005)!
Ynis Vitrin was created in 1999 as a cover band for various Rock acts. In 2000, two new members, Benhur Vieira Lima (bass) and Jocemar Maciel (guitars), joined the team that has remained the same until today. Their first demo included two songs but it was never released. On March, 2003, the band entered the studio to record a new demo-CD called A Dark Land. Because of some budget restrictions, the recordings extended until March 2005 (!!!) when it was finally released.
Helloween, Stratovarius, Iron Maiden... did I forget something (?)... oh yeah and a bit of Rhapsody are the ingredients this band uses to create music. Without being original or innovative, their songs are well crafted, quite fast, melodic with very good vocal lines. In fact if all these songs had a good and compact production, this could have actually been considered as a pretty good debut album (and not a demo with some leftovers included).
Not being the biggest fan of keyboards in the world, I think that at times their role in A Dark Land becomes a bit annoying since symphonic music does not mean putting keyboards just to have them there. At least the band lays some really fast double pedal / shredding riff combos in many songs, raising their Metal elements higher than the symphonic ones.
As a whole Dark Land was indeed interesting. If you are not one of those people demanding top notch production in everything coming out of your speakers and you like European Power Metal then you will definitely like this one.