Motorpsycho - Motorpsycho (2025)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2025
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Usually, when a band releases a self-titled album a considerable way into their career, it tends to serve either as a definition of what they do or as a change of direction. Unusually, this is neither for the most part, though it's closer to the latter than the former, given that there are songs on this one that feel almost conventional. Core Memory Corrupt is practically alternative rock with no sense of progressive anything anywhere to be found. It's so perky that it's almost Britpop. So are Motorpsycho going mainstream? Not at all, given that this covers far more ground than that one song. It's just notable that that one song is present.

It's also worth mentioning here that they're down to a two piece line-up, Bent Sæther and Hans Magnus Ryan divvying up both vocals and instrumentation. They're both founder members and have been the only such remaining since drummer Kjell Ruar Jenssen left in 1991. Most recently, their drummer has been Tomas Järmyr, who joined in 2017, but he left in 2023, after contributing to the two albums I apparently blinked and missed, 2023's Yay! and 2024's Neigh!! Maybe this is a conscious reinvention of the band as a duo, unless of course another regular drummer shows up soon. There are two here: Olaf Olsen on two tracks and Ingvald Vassbø on six.

If there's a primary sound on this one, it may be Nonagon Infinity-era King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The opener, Lucifer, Bringer of Light, feels emphatically like that, with its grounding on a perpetual, almost hypnotic, bouncy bass groove, with everything else layered over the top. It's a long song, almost eleven minutes, much of which is instrumental, but it could have carried on for another eleven and a further eleven after that. That sound returns in songs like Balthazaar and Three Frightened Monkeys, though the former mixes it up with folky and Hawkwind touches.

There's lot of seventies hard rock here too. Laird of Heimly is built on Jimmy Page-esque acoustic riffs and middle eastern string overlays in the Led Zeppelin style. Oddly, they gradually take over from an Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd ambience. There's Zep in Stanley (Tonight's the Night) too, but it's electric and soon subsumed into a hard rock song that feels like it's borrowing from both the seventies and nineties, with an occasional melodic nod to the psychedelia of the late sixties. The Comeback feels seventies through and through, albeit more like Mountain.

I should add that the vocals, whether they're the work of Sæther or Ryan, always remain in that time honoured Motorpsycho vein, never borrowing from earlier styles even on those songs that borrow the most musically. For instance, Dead of Winter, which closes out the album, starts out in a folk rock style that would be reminiscent of Jethro Tull even if it didn't begin with flute, and the guitar solo is right out of the Neil Young electric playbook, but the vocals never try to sound like Young or Ian Anderson.

Of course, being a Motorpsycho album, there's always more to cover. Kip Satie, as the name may suggest, is a piano piece. Balthazaar begins as keyboard prog and surprising lofi keyboard prog at that, eerily close to chiptune, before the bass shifts it into Hawkwind territory. By far the most interesting material, though, starts in Bed of Roses and builds in Neotzar (The Second Coming), which is easily the most progressive song anywhere to be found on this album. It's also easily the longest song, even if the album would still be an hour long even without its twenty-one minutes.

Bed of Roses is much shorter at a skimpy three minutes, but it's sixties/seventies folk pop with a revival build, and it gets interesting at the end to set up Neotzar, which opens with a quiet guest female voice with minimal accompaniment. That guest is Thea Grant, who's a Norwegian singer and songwriter with suitably diverse influences. Of course, Neotzar heavies up soon enough and, by the three minute mark, we're almost at a Black Sabbath level with a very old school Sabbath riff driving the piece forward. The vocals don't follow suit, of course.

Soon after eight minutes, everything drops away into a progressive section that's so quiet that it could be called ambient. Is that a harp? There's certainly very quiet guitar noodling. Occasional whispers add to the effect. This gradually builds in six minutes of neat avant prog weirdness that couldn't be any further away from the conventional approach of Core Memory Corrupt if it tried. Then it's back into guitar based hard rock until the peaceful outro. That's quite the sine wave and I get more out of Neotzar with each listen. Bed of Roses has grown into a favourite too.

And so there's a lot here, which shouldn't remotely surprise anyone who's heard a Motorpsycho album before, but it still goes to places I wouldn't have expected them to go. I never expected an utterly conventional song, for a start, especially right after the most prog piece on the album. It all sounds good in the end, but I have to wonder about the choice to self-title. If there's meaning to that, I'm not seeing it. It's another good album, of course, but it doesn't feel as coherent as a whole as other recent releases. Kingdom of Oblivion remains their recent pinnacle for me.

Airforce - Acts of Madness (2025)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2025
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Given that the drummer in Airforce is Doug Sampson, formerly of Iron Maiden, who provided the beat on The Soundhouse Tapes, it probably shouldn't surprise that there's a heck of a lot of Iron Maiden to be found in Airforce, right from the outset in Among the Shadows. However, it's most obvious in the air raid siren vocals of Portuguese singer Flávio Lino rather than the music behind him, which is just as often reminiscent of Judas Priest. The only time Lino doesn't sing like Bruce Dickinson is in mellower sections, like in Lost Forever, when he shifts more towards a Geoff Tate style. However, the instrumentation alternates, stalking like Priest but galloping like Maiden.

Frankly, the derivative sound is the most obvious drawback, because a lot of people will only hear Maiden (and Priest) and dismiss the band because of that. They may miss the fact that they were around back then, even though they didn't release an album until 2016. Airforce were formed in 1987, at least under that name, but their roots go back to 1979 with the band EL-34, the original home of lead guitarist Chop Pitman and bassist Tony Hatton, who formed Airforce with Sampson and his brother Sam on vocals after the split of EL-34 . When Sampson left in 1999, it was EL-34's Mick Dietz who took over until Airforce split in 2001. So they were forged out of the same steel.

Given how inexorably the album moves towards Iron Maiden, not least through the inclusion of a cover, Strange World, to wrap things up, it actually starts out more akin to Priest. They're easily the most obvious sound in the opener, Among the Shadows, though Lino's vocals are taken right from the Dickinson playbook. Life Turns to Dust is even more Priest, slower but harder with real emphasis. It's a stalker of a song and, even with those Dickinson vocals, the structure feels more like what Rob Halford might sing.

There's Priest in The Fury too, but it's when the Maiden starts to take over, not least through its bouncy riff which seems achingly familiar. I can't quite tell if they lifted it from an actual Maiden song or it's so close to that style that it feels like that. It's close to Transylvania, that's for sure, but it's not quite the same. Perhaps because it tries to merge those Priest and Maiden styles, it comes across like it's not quite fully formed. However, it's the only song I'd say that about, as the longer the album runs the more comfortable it feels in the Maiden sound.

Cursed Moon is more Maiden. Sniper is very much Maiden, built from a slow gallop. And, after a brief interlude with the partly mellow Lost Forever and those notes of Queensrÿche, the second half dives right into Maiden with a vengeance. Heroes and Obliterated especially flow together and, while they may be highly derivative, it's effortlessly derivative enough that it's easy to fall right into it. It's telling that Obliterated feels as much Maiden as Heroes, even though there are no vocals to emphasise the connection. It's a very tasty instrumental.

And with acknowledgement to presumably cinematic fare in Westworld and Hacksaw Ridge, two decent but lesser songs here, I should jump forward to that cover. Sampson never played on a lot of Maiden tracks, at least in the studio, only the originals of Iron Maiden, Invasion and Prowler, on The Soundhouse Tapes, and Burning Ambition, the B-side of Running Free, so it would always be interesting to hear him on another track. Oddly, it's feels like a slower cover, even though it's also done with quicker. The original lasts five and a half minutes, but this is wrapped by the five minute mark.

Unsurprisingly, this is going to be best recommended to fans of early Maiden, but there's value here beyond what sounds somewhat like a cover band performing largely original songs. I got a real kick out of the power in Life Turns to Dust, thoroughly enjoyed the instrumental Obliterated and relished in the galloping stalk of Sniper. Lost Forever is Airforce's attempt to do something a little more original and it's fair to say that it works, alternating between mellow and powerful, a real journey of a song.

What matters is that they're creating new music. Having not released anything during their first fourteen year incarnation from 1987 to 2001, not even getting a demo onto the Friday Rock Show via The Rock War, they got down to business late into their second. They reformed in 2008, Pitman leading the way and Sampson following two years later. Hatton rejoined in 2016 and that's when they finally released their debut album, Judgement Day. Strike Hard followed four years later in the COVID times, with a live album a year later, and this arrives four years after that. I'd be very happy to hear more from Airforce, even if they can't escape Iron Maiden's shadow but especially if they can.

The Hellacopters - Overdriver (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2025
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This ninth album from the Hellacopters runs forty minutes, hardly the longest album I've put on this week but certainly not skimpy with its music. However, every time it finishes, it feels like I've only been listening for about ten minutes. Its eleven tracks zoom on by, only two of them lasting longer than four minutes. When they actually pick up a serious pace, like with Wrong Face On, it seems like the track is done in about thirty seconds. I'd listened to it five times before noon and that's just ridiculous for me.

Initially it's good but not great, because the first three songs are just solid and reliable garage rock songs that do exactly what they must without grabbing me by the feels. Maybe that's due to a reliance on sixties pop melodies. Wrong Face On has that uptick in tempo and then Soldier On caught my attention. It's a strong song but that's not why it stood out. It stood out because the influences that I caught weren't the ones that I would have expected from a Hellacopters album. And I don't mean the core riff that's borrowed from Golden Earring's Radar Love.

I expected them to sound like a garage rock band, as indeed they do on much of this album. Check out Faraway Looks, for instance, and you'll find that it's utterly textbook garage rock, built from power chords, flurried beats, a simple but effective riff, punchy vocals and catchy melodies. Sure, there's a little back and forth harmonising that reminds of Blue Öyster Cult and that adds to the effect, but it's mostly what I expect, done really well by a band who have been doing this for over thirty years.

Soldier On, however, has a real southern rock mindset to it and it's far from the only such song on the album. That feel returns on Coming Down, shows up in the melodies on The Stench and then in the epic guitar solo on Leave a Mark that eventually finds that patented southern rock chicken scratch style. It's in moments like that where Lynyrd Skynyrd spring to mind, but the comparison I kept coming back to was The Outlaws, because it's not just the guitarwork, it's the melodies.

Now, Soldier On has odd vocal manipulations in the verses, but that Outlaws sound is unmissable once they get to the bridges and choruses. And, once it's out there, this genie can't be put back into the bottle. It's there on Doomsday Daydreams, it's all over Coming Down like a rash and it's there on later songs, whether it's in the vocal melodies, the builds or the guitars or all of these things together. It frankly changed this album for me and, while I dug punkier garage rock songs like Wrong Face On and Faraway Looks, I liked these dips into southern rock even more.

I'd probably rank Coming Down at the top of the heap, but with Leave a Mark nipping at its heels, especially with its epic guitar solo at the end to stretch it out to five minutes and change. That's a long song for the Hellacopters, even kicking off with a bass intro that's not far off what Lemmy used to do back in his Hawkwind days. I'm not finding a line-up online, so I don't know if this is the work of Dolf DeBorst, who Wikipedia tells me joined in 2018 but doesn't appear on any albums, a contradictory statement given that this is their second album since reforming in 2016.

Doomsday Daydreams keeps growing on me, so I'd throw that in there as another highlight, and, back in more traditional territory, Faraway Looks and Wrong Face On are right up there as well. I'd usually call an album with five highlights out of eleven a gimme for an recommended 8/10 rating, but Soldier On, with its southern rock flavour, and The Stench with a bluesier version of the same, are the only others that I like a lot. That means four songs that are just there, including the first three, which is an odd state of affairs, and that's telling too.

Then I realised that I've listened through this album maybe eight or nine times now and, even if some songs still refuse to pop for me, I haven't felt the need to skip any of them even once. That firmed this back up as an 8/10. I haven't heard its predecessor, 2022's Eyes of Oblivion, but I'd say on the basis of this one that the band are really enjoying their reunion and maybe feeling some flexibility in their sound. DeBorst aside, if indeed that's him on bass, everyone else is long term.

Nicke Andersson, Robert Eriksson and Dregen were founder members, even if the latter left for quite a while. Anders Lindström only missed the first few years but has been there ever since. I'd say they're having a blast and, while I like them doing what they've always done, I can only hope that they keep exploring this southern rock direction. Coming Down and Leave a Mark especially show that they do it really well.

Harakiri for the Sky - Scorched Earth (2025)

Country: Austria
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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There are two distinct sides to Harakiri for the Sky, appropriately enough given that there are a couple of very different musicians in the band.

Matthias Sollak plays most of the instruments, the one exception being the drums, which fall to Kerim Lechner, Krimh of Act of Denial, Dååth and Septicflesh. I don't know how many there are, beyond the traditional, but there's plenty of keyboard work and not all of it sounds like a piano. Without You I'm Just a Sad Song, for example, starts and ends with a memorable melody played on some sort of chime. Melody is everywhere, because Sollak combines a black metal resilience with the delicate melodic ear of a pop artist.

I use the term resilience there, because the traditional black metal wall of sound doesn't appear particularly often, perhaps coming closest on Keep Me Longing and Without You I'm Just a Sad Song. It's less of a barrier than a sort of last effort countercharge, the cover art seeming highly appropriate. It's as if the melodic side is the dominant norm but, when threatened, it turns dark and attacks as a form of defence.

Michael Kogler provides the vocals, which are certainly memorable but seem limited. He doesn't shriek in black metal style but doesn't really shift to any of the other standards. He's a lot closer to a hardcore shout than a death metal growl but he isn't really there either. It's a hoarse shout that carries a little of the bleakness we expect from black metal. That places it a long way from the stereotypical orc sound into a more traditional metal vein that's been dipped into extreme. However, just as hardcore shouts are inherently limited to the one emotion of anger, these are limited to the one of righteous despair.

As a result, this took me way back to when Sid at Groové Records in Halifax gave me a promo CD of Dark Tranquillity's debut album, 'Skydancer'. He described it as wonderful music spoiled by a rough vocal and, while I'll cut him some slack there because it was the beginning of a genre and that vocal style was relatively new, it's exactly what I felt here. There's nothing wrong with what Kogler does, but it's so limited in emotional palette that it's holding back the music.

In fact, my favourite two songs are the last two, which I believe may be considered bonus tracks, both of which feature clean guest vocalists. There's a little of that on the last track proper, Too Late for Goodbyes, courtesy of Serena Cherry, a British singer who may have her own one woman black metal outfit in Noctule but otherwise sings post-rock for Svalbard. Her contribution, which is for part of that song only, is the signpost to what will come for all of Street Spirit and Elysian Fields, to wrap everything up. Starting the album over from there only highlights the difference between how those clean voices reach so much more range than Kogler's hoarse shout.

Street Spirit is a Radiohead cover and the guest is Patrick Ginglseder, P.G. in German black metal band Groza. However, he sings entirely clean on this one and with a glorious sustain that makes him soar very nicely indeed. Tellingly, the guest on Elysian Fields is a dream pop musician, Daniel Lang of Austrian band Backwards Charm. While dream pop may well be the exact opposite genre to full on raw black metal, that vocal style fits the post-black style that Sollak has moved into. While Ginglseder's delivery on Street Spirit is majestic, I suddenly wanted to hear Lang sing for the rest of the album.

After all, it's all about melody. As I listen through again and again, I find myself surprised at how much of it is heavy, given that the melody remains dominant. It's faster early, dropping down to midpace for much of the second half hour, but delicate instrumental stretches and the broader melodic sweep are what stick in my brain the most. That's all Sollak.

Now, Harakiri for the Sky have been around for quite a while, this being their sixth album since they formed in 2011, and they certainly seem to have reached an impressive audience. This is my first experience of their work, so I don't know if I'm an outlier who simply doesn't appreciate this vocal style, something I'm used to with metalcore, or whether Sollak is gradually moving further from Kogler's range. If you're a long term fan, you're on board with that style and can probably safely add a point to my rating. It's a 7/10 for the music and a 6/10 overall.

Bumblefoot - ...Returns! (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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It's almost impossible to categorise this ninth album from Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal beyond calling it guitar music and, given that he's a guitarist, that's kind of a given. Whether you know his work from Guns n' Roses, Sons of Apollo or from solo releases, there will be something here that you'll never have heard before, because he very deliberately trawls in whatever style of music he feels will work for a particular piece.

The opener, Simon in Space, is probably the closest to what you might expect. There are plenty of heavy note bending sections wrapped around more laid back solos and even those laid back solos are intricate and virtuosic. It's the sort of track that tends to sit on albums like this whether they carry the name of Bumblefoot or another guitar wizard like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani rather than a shredder whose tracks are faster and more deliberately awe-inspiring. He's going for mood and feel not technical genius, but there's plenty of technical genius used to get there. Eight minutes of that leads into five more of Planetary Lockdown, which is a little lighter and sassier but in the same ballpark.

And then things go off the rails, as it were. Moonshine Hootenanny is the lively bluegrass knees up that its name suggests, Bumblefoot's guitar variously playing roles that might otherwise go to banjos or lap steels. Sure, there's some of that heavy notebending a couple of minutes in and it leads into a more traditional rock guitar solo, but the bluegrass returns quickly enough. That's followed by Chopin Waltz Op64 No2, which is a well known classical piece. There's another one of these later on in Funeral March, also written by by Frederic Chopin, but while the former is just a transcription to electric guitar, starting with the frantic bit, the latter is a guitar and violin duet with an ominous backdrop.

That highlights that he doesn't do everything here himself, though I'd guess that he does come close. Ben Karas, best known for Thank You Scientist, is the guest violinist who combines so well with him on Funeral March, but household names like Steve Vai and Brian May also show up for guitar duets. Vai's on Monstruoso and May's on Once in Forever. Guthrie Govan may not be quite as famous as them, but he's played with Asia, ironically after asking May, Steven Wilson and Hans Zimmer, with whose band he's been playing live for almost a decade now. He's on Anveshana.

Of those, it's Anveshana that I like the most. Monstruoso is an experience, with heavy and fuzzy electronica almost dominating, enough that it gets a brief reprise in Monstruoso II (Departure). Once in Forever has a country tone without necessarily becoming a country song in the way that Moonshine Hootenanny absolutely becomes a bluegrass song. Anveshana benefits immediately from a tasty groove and the guitar melody feels like it's singing rather than soloing. That combo makes it a highly accessible piece but it stands up to a deeper dive too.

However, it's far from my favourite piece on the album. Funeral March tops that list for me, even if it's the one song that most prominently features an instrument other than the guitar. Cintaku comes pretty close to it though, with its organic beat and melodic guitar line. Like Anveshana, it seems like the guitar is transcribing lyrics. I could believe that this is a Journey song with lyrics in a parallel universe and Bumblefoot's tapped into that for an instrumental version in ours. Oddly, the solo in the middle feels more spacy without apparently trying than on earlier songs where it was absolutely trying to live up to that delightfully weird cover art.

And, with a brief mention for the delightful Andalusia, on which Bumblefoot appears to only play one note but continues to bend it in different directions forever—at least for forty-nine seconds, because that's how long the piece lasts—then there's The Thread, which seems like it's the epic of the album, even though it's three minutes shorter than the opener.

It's an old school instrumental of the sort we might expect to hear on a Jeff Beck album and, as it evolved, building smoothly to explosive moments, I realised that it's echoing what Roy Buchanan did with The Messiah Will Come Again, sans vocals. Once I caught that, I realised just how much phrasing feels very similar. It surely can't hurt to bear comparison to one of the greatest guitar pieces ever played, even if it inevitably comes off as lesser. It's still very tasty indeed.

And so there's surely something here for every guitar fan, even major use of the most seventies technical gadget, the talkbox, on Griggstown Crossing, but, like so many guitar albums, it's all so varied that it's mostly going to impress actual guitarists.

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Neofolk
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
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Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Jason Bieler and the Baron von Bielski Orchestra - The Escapologist (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

This is the third album from former Saigon Kick main man Jason Bieler and his Baron von Bielski Orchestra, which has coalesced into Andee Blacksugar and Edu Cominato, plus a bunch of guests on bass and all sorts of other contributions. It's very much what you might expect from Bieler, if what you expect is rooted in the Beatles-like melodies and grungy guitars that Saigon Kick often displayed but with songs veering off into what seems like every other genre possible at the drop of a hat. Industrious is precisely this, infectious melodies over grungy riffs but with an unusually repetitive lyric, almost a song built around a single repeated verse.

Now, it's not just that, because it goes instrumental soon into its second half and I found myself falling into this section on repeat listens. It explains why Blacksugar is credited on "extra guitars, noises and solos" because that pretty much covers what we hear. There are strong solos on Stars Collide and Violent Creatures too, to which I'm leaping ahead right now because I need to point out that both of them are worthy songs on their own merits. Even on my second time through, I deliberately skipped Savior to test this. Violent Creatures is better than Stars Collide, because it starts out with a lovely slow riff and later brings in tasty escalations, but both are decent songs. Cue them up on YouTube and you'll enjoy them.

The reason I mention that is that, if we listen to the album in order, as is surely intended, we'll be listening to Savior before them and suddenly they get lost in the mix. Savior only runs three and a half minutes, but its impact lasts for triple that, if not more, and it's literally hard to listen to a different song while it's partying in our skulls. If I hadn't deliberately skipped Savior, there's just no way I'd have even registered Stars Collide and it took a lot of effort from Violent Creatures to grab me back again. Savior is that dominant.

Needless to say, it's my favourite song here and it's a worthy first single. There's plenty else that deserves praise here, from the tasty guitar solo on Hollow to the grungy riff on Zombies & Black Swans, from the jaunty beat on No Real Goodbyes to the weird noises on Space Debris, but there isn't anything to even come close to Savior until the final two songs, Sacred Cow and March of the Vikonauts, which are very different indeed, both from each other and from Savior.

Sacred Cow flows delightfully and effortlessly until it gets jaunty in its second half. Somehow it's able to soar like Extreme singing a power ballad but experiment like Mark Ribot playing jazz and both happen in the same song without ever seeming out of place. To be fair, we never quite know what to expect from Bieler expect incessant melodies that are so effortlessly infectious that we wonder why anybody else even bothers to try to compete with him. This unuusal combination is a relatively straightforward one for him.

March of the Vikonauts gets serious with guitar, Blacksugar taking us into Joe Satriani territory. Even though his guitarwork would be a highlight in any other song, it's the groove of this one I'd call out the most. It's all over the map in the best possibly ways, trawling in lots of Led Zeppelin, the expected Saigon Kick and even some classical mindset, all of which flow so naturally that we have to concentrate to realise just how damn clever it all is. It's also a song that's good during its first half but which finds whole new levels during its second.

All of which means that this is another excellent album from Bieler, which doesn't remotely shock me. I gave the previous two Baron von Bielski albums recommended 8/10s and there aren't many albums I'd rate higher than Saigon Kick's Water. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't warrant a third 8/10 in a row, which is a fair acknowledgement of just how consistently good Bieler is, and, of course, his set of eccentrically named collaborators. I'm happy to live in a world where people named Diatribe Impossibles, Nigel Biggles, Renaldo Eclipse Jr., Pleasant Strife North, Steambath McCrarey, Wilhelmina Waistaway and Bernadette Babbles are credited on the same album.

But back to Savior. There's a mere hint of world music before Cominato launches into a beat that would have been worthy of an Adam Ant song but is even more in your face. The brass punctation and steel drums fit that approach too, as does the guitar solo, whistle and backing vocalisations giving encouragement. The lead vocals are quintessential Bieler, but everything else feels to me like something Ant and Pirroni might conjure up and given that they're the only songwriters I'm able to name who write songs as infectiously catchy as Bieler, bringing these mindsets together is a slice of heaven.

The only catch is that, once you've heard Savior, you won't be able to hear anything else without serious effort for a long, long time. That's my first candidate for song of the year right there. In fact, now I've heard it again as I polish off this review, I'm going to stop listening to all the other worthy songs here and throw on Friend or Foe. It's only taken forty-three years for something to match it.

Dawn of Solace - Affliction Vortex

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
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Tuomas Saukkonen seems to be alternating his bands lately. The previous Dawn of Solace album, Flames of Perdition, came out in 2022, then Before the Dawn released Stormbringers in 2023 and Wolfheart issued Draconian Darkness in 2024. Now he's back to Before the Dawn for their fourth album and the third I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. For anyone new to all of these, he's a Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Wolfheart play melodic death metal, Dawn of Solace play gothic metal and Before the Dawn are in between, playing both.

This album follows closely from its predecessor, many songs starting out in gothic rock territory but building into a metal crunch. The metal is usually relatively slow and doomy, with occasional shifts in tempo like the glorious urgency midway through Invitation. The vocals are mostly clean, courtesy of Mikko Heikkilä, best known for Kaunis Kuolematon, but Saukkonen occasionally adds a harsh voice, starting on Fortress. I like both voices—Heikkilä's an elegant tenor, Saukkonen's a rich growl—but they're also highly compatible. Into the Light and Perennial put them into close proximity, Dream combines them and both work a lot better than the alternation of verses in Fortress.

In fact, Into the Light is the point where this album grabbed me. I'm used to these Dawn of Solace albums taking a while to take firm root in my brain. That happened with both Waves and Flames of Perdition and it happened here too. First time through, it sounded good but ephemeral, with nothing sticking. Second time through, Into the Light stood up for attention. Third time through, it s all started to take hold and I was relishing riffs and melodies like they were old favourites. Why it takes me a few listens with Dawn of Solace, I don't know, because that usually happens with much more complex music than this, but it happens nonetheless.

Whatever the reason, Into the Light is the first gem. Murder opens up capably enough but it also ends rather unsatisfyingly, just wandering out of the door as if it doesn't think we're paying any attention to it. Fortress is decent enough too, but seems to missing something. Into the Night is perfectly formed, with an achingly slow beat in the verses that stays achingly slow even when an entirely different beat leaps into action alongside it. Somehow it's doomy and urgent all at once and that makes it fascinating. Add a strong melodic line and those two voices working very nicely together and it becomes quite the track.

It's followed by another gem in Rival, which is so effortlessly elegant that it seems to be carved out of mahogany. If there's some My Dying Bride to be found in Into the Light, there's plenty of Paradise Lost in Rival, especially in the guitarwork during the first minute. Then it drops away to create a sense of space for Heikkilä's delicious voice to explore the way we expect from someone like Soen. And then everything builds powerfully, all the more so on Invitation, into gothic metal crunch like we'd expect from Lacrimas Profundere but with those hints at doom/death that come especially from Saukkonen's vocals.

Put all that together and the result a heady mix that's right up my alley. Everything that follows is decent at the very least, the first two songs being the weakest for me, but the best of them sit at the heart of the album, especially Into the Light and Rival but with Invitation on their heels. It plays consistently from there, with Perennial perhaps playing up the doom/death even more and the closer, Mother Earth, following suit with a minute and a half of soothing electronica tacked onto the end to fade out the album. Nothing here lasts past five minutes, including Mother Earth, if we discount that outro.

And so this is another strong album from Dawn of Solace that took me a few listens to fully grasp. I'll figure out why one day. For now, I just let it play and feel very little, let it play again and feel a little more, let it play a third time and suddenly it's right up my alley and I wondering why it took me so long to realise it. What are the odds that album number five, probably due after the next from Before the Dawn and Wolfheart releases, works exactly the same way? Pretty good, I think.