Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: 2024

Tuesday 9 April 2024

Reach - Prophecy (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Tiktok | YouTube

Reach have been around since 2012 but I'm not finding a heck of a lot of information about them. They hail from Stockholm and this is their fourth album, following The Promise of a Life in 2021. It came to me labelled as melodic hard rock and their Bandcamp page tags them alternative rock, but, only four songs in, I realised that labels and tags aren't really going to be particular helpful. They're all over the musical map and they're clearly happy about that.

Let me explain. The title track opens up the album as hard rock with a strong nineties alternative edge. It's entirely understandable why they supported H.E.A.T. on a couple of tours, but it's also a little heavy for that gig. However, as if hearing that note, Little Dreams is softer, more of a heavy pop approach that we could stretch to call melodic rock. It has a real bounce to it and the bass is a thing of joy. A Beautiful Life kicks off like a TV theme tune, only to launch into rock with the guitar pretending to be the drums for a while but then adding a grungy edge when it all bulks up.

But wait, as they say, there's more. In the second half of A Beautiful Life, there's a western vibe I might expect from an outlaw country rockabilly band that doesn't quite overwhelm the pop rock elements that could compare to a Cheap Trick. The end is almost steampunk in its look backwards into what could be taken for a harpsichord sound. Save the World kicks off with a playful guitar as if it's aiming to be a dance number and suddenly I'm thinking Stray Cats as a comparison.

It's a huge shift from those verses to the chorus that leaps right back into heavy arena pop, which isn't the end of it either, because then they go symphonic in the second half in a way that's mostly reminiscent of Queen. What does this band not do? Well, Queen could be seen as a key influence, though more for their musical chameleon act as for any particular moments, like that one, as it's a rarity. Perhaps the better general comparison would be The Darkness, acknowledging their own Queen connection, because Reach are clearly more modern than Queen and whoever handles the lead vocals likes dipping up into a falsetto just like Justin Hawkins.

Eventually I changed my tag to alternative for want of something to call this, but that's notably limited and shouldn't be seen as a be all end all to their sound. When I've reviewed the Darkness, I've gone with hard rock and that's just as fair. I could switch those and not mislead. And that's not to forget the funk in a song as hard rock as Psycho Violence, which is different to the Red Hot Chili Peppers funk that kicks off Who Knows. Just don't expect any song to sound like any other and you may really dig this. It'll certainly keep you on your toes. I haven't even got to Grand Finale yet, not the final song but another sonic leap into symphonic rock/metal. It's also another theatrical level above what's already been highly theatrical.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned any band members yet and that's because I'm not sure who is actually in the band. Bandcamp states the music is credited to Ludvig Turner, Marcus Johansson and Soufian Anane, while Turner also wrote the lyrics, so I'm guessing he's the singer. Discogs has him as guitarist and vocalist, with Johansson on drums and Soufian Ma'Aoui on bass. I presume he is the same Soufiane as Anane. Others have been involved but I couldn't tell you if they're still in the band or if they ever were, so I'll stick to these three for now. More information would be very welcome.

I like this album because it's hard not to like this album. It's entirely schizophrenic, sure, but I'm a particular fan of albums that venture all over the musical map without ever sounding like a band has betrayed their roots or gone a step too far into something that just doesn't fit. Queen's Sheer Heart Attack and Saigon Kick's Water are firmly in my list of most frequently replayed albums and this feels a little more consistent than either. Just tread carefully if you try to label it.

As to highlights, that's a how long is a piece of string question, because it's what I'm listening to at the time you ask. Mama Mama is a stormer of an opening single, so that's potentially the best of many good places to start. I do like A Beautiful Life, Psycho Violence and Grand Finale too, so they should get a special mention too. But, ask me tomorrow, and I might go with three different ones instead.

Monday 8 April 2024

Whitecross - Fear No Evil (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's another band who haven't put out an album in forever and I'm not sure why. The heyday of Whitecross was in the late eighties when the crossover success of Stryper proved that it wasn't an impossible contradiction to play Christian metal. They knocked out four albums between 1987 and 1989 and two more in the early nineties, but the only album since, 2005's Nineteen Eighty Seven, being primarily re-recordings of songs on their debut. So this is their first album in nineteen years but the first with only original material in thirty-two, following 1992's High Gear.

It's worth mentioning that the most recent three albums from their original run ended up with a Dove Award, which is the premier awards dished out by the Gospel Music Association. If that name raises an eyebrow, I should highlight that they've apparently redefined what gospel means in this sense. Whitecross don't remotely sound like Mahalia Jackson or Tennessee Ernie Ford. However, they do create music that meets the GMA's requirements for adherence to faith, which seems to be what counts most nowadays.

That's why there are songs here that are overtly Christian in outlook, Lion of Judah and Fear No Evil the most unmistakable among them. However, that's not everything here, because The Way We Rock is as lyrically generic as its title might suggest and others do their preaching in far more subtle fashion, building stories about people who find their lives lacking something or describing outreach to people who are struggling for some reason. They're still Christian songs but they may not immediately seem so unless you're paying attention. And, of course, you might not care.

Songs like The Way We Rock ought to fall flat as openers nowadays, because we've all heard that sort of lyric a thousand times and it had got old before Whitecross formed back in 1985. However, there's an element to elevate it here, which is the guitarwork of Rex Carroll, who co-founded the band and has remained in place throughout their existence, only missing a couple of years in the mid-nineties when vocalist Scott Wenzel took over and returning in 2000 when the band got back together properly.

His guitarwork carries a serious bite, lending this song the drive of something Dio might have put out in his early solo years. After Lion of Judah softens just a little, he steps into the spotlight for a raucous guitar solo appropriately named Jackhammer that's aware enough to avoid oustaying its welcome and so wraps up in a minute and a change. Carroll continues to be the highlight for me in almost every song, adding an edge even when new fish vocalist Dave Roberts, who joined in 2020, doesn't do so. He's a Dave Meniketti sort of vocalist, able to merge power and melody seamlessly but without as much soul to his delivery, with some Kevin Dubrow for good measure.

For the most part, the best songs are the up tempo ones where Roberts gets to soar and Carroll gets to blister. Jackhammer doesn't really set up Man in the Mirror, for instance, but Roberts has a powerful scream to do exactly that. Songs like 29,000 might have roots in the glam metal of the eighties but it's much heavier than that, pulling from regular heavy metal to drive forward with a serious emphasis, and it nods to the guitar shredders that took over a decade later, without ever getting indulgent. Carroll can shred all day long but he knows that these songs wouldn't be better for that, so he keeps that in check, adding edge when it's needed and going wild only when it's truly time for a solo or to bolster the build of a song to its finalé.

There are exceptions though, not to the quality but to the suggestion that it's only there in those up tempo songs. The most obvious is Blind Man, which sounds fantastic, even though it's built on mandolin rather than electric guitar. Roberts adds huge amounts of grit into his voice for this one and it works really well. Saints of Hollywood adds a southern rock flavour and Roberts shifts into Spanish at points, which works far more effectively than I would have expected.

I could even add Wishing Well to that list, because it's the power ballad of the album but doesn't annoy the crap out of me the way that so many power ballads tend to do. I wouldn't remotely call it a highlight but it's a decent song and I don't feel the urge to skip past it on repeat listens. One extra draw for Christian metal aficionados is that it apparently features three members of Petra, but that doesn't elevate it for me. The same goes for Carroll's acoustic two minute closer, Further On, which is just there.

All in all, this is a strong return for a band who have been absent from the studio for far too long. Much of it is the product a band full of energy firing on all cylinders, but they're not afraid to mix it up and, when they do, the results are varied. Of course, the Christian metal fanbase is devoted enough to not particularly care that much. It's a Whitecross album. They're on board already.

Qilin - Parasomnia (2024)

Country: France
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Jan 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

This album is a few months old now, so counts as less recent than I tend to prefer to review here at Apocalypse Later, but I enjoyed Qilin's debut album, Petrichor, so much in 2020, that I didn't want to miss out on its follow-up when it crossed my path recently. I also didn't want to wait until next January when I do catch up on what I missed from 2024, because I'd probably forget and then feel bad when I stumble onto it again, having missed my window.

Qilin are French and they play heavy instrumental rock that straddles the border with metal. You could fairly describe what they do as psychedelic rock but it's just as often doom metal and all the best pieces move between the two. That's one way in which this album echoes the debut. Most of the tracks are long and the band, which I believe remains unchanged from last time, allow them to breathe, which leaves room for a couple of modes. There's the heavy mode, with the bass turned up high and the guitars switching between cavernous riffs and wailing solos. And then there's the mellow mode, which is much softer and drenched in atmosphere.

The result is as immersive as last time out but oddly still mostly fails to work as a travel agent for me. What I mean there is that instrumental psychedelic rock often takes me places. Sure, I listen to it as music but it also sends me on a journey too. I have aphantasia so can't frame images in my head, but I still get impressions in the form of feelings. These albums often make me feel like I'm on another planet or drifting between the stars, to cite just two common examples. This doesn't, though it hints at it in those mellow sections.

Instead, it remains stubbornly music, but it's music that I really enjoy. It's heavy but melodic and it's immersive, as if it's so big that it surrounds me. It starts out achingly slow with three minutes of funeral doom called Ouro, that's emphatically an intro to set up the sound palette and lead us into the best track, Lethean Dreams. This isn't three minutes long, needless to say—it runs eight and half—and it builds carefully.

It begins mellow in the closest section anywhere on the album to take me somewhere. It feels like I'm in a huge echoing cavern, perhaps like the cover art, but I'm not the character walking towards it. I'm inside waiting. There's a real sense of patience to it, as if there's no reason to move at all, a feeling of centering where I settle down and wait for everything to come to me. And it does, but I sit, safe and still, in the middle of that cavern while the music changes around me. Even when the song ramps up into heavy mode, playing out like a force of nature, I'm not part of it. I'm calm and unaffected, but not unappreciative, as it rages around me. I listen and enjoy.

And I remain there for forty calm minutes, listening and enjoying, while the remaining four pieces of music play out, along with an interlude in the middle of them. It's odd to see an interlude, as it's not uncommon for the shift between heavy and mellow to effectively incorporate interludes as an inherent songwriting component, but Innervision is very mellow and introduces the heaviest piece on offer, which is the bludgeoning Hundred-Handed Wards.

I like Qilin when they're being mellow, though Innervision may be the weakest such section on the album. However, I like them most when they're raging and the swirl of tasty feedback that wraps up Hundred-Handed Wards is raging indeed. It's probably beaten only by the finale to On Migoi's Trail and the core of Lethean Dreams. I love how they generate maelstroums of energy and whip them around like ancient wizards, destroying everything in their wake yet never losing control of their tools of destruction.

These two aspects constitute the majority of the album, but there's one further touch I should let you know about, because it surprises me every time those waves of feedback in Hundred-Handed Wards feedback subside and Qilin launch into the final track. This is Boros and it opens up entirely like AC/DC. Sure, the bass is drenched in fuzz, but that's an AC/DC build if I've ever heard one. It's happy to not continue down that path as the piece grows and no vocalist shows up, whether Brian Johnson or anyone else, but it does still stay perkier than anything else on the album, even as the longest track here. It doesn't really slow down until about halfway through its nine minutes and it doesn't calm until six and a half minutes in.

And so that's Parasomnia, which refers to sleep disorders that crop in when you're not asleep but not truly awake either. Your brain is still only partially awake and that does seem to be the perfect time to let an album like this wash over you. That would be a way to start the day!

Friday 5 April 2024

Amarok - Hope (2024)

It ought to be easy to say that Amarok are my favourite Polish prog rock band but, like Norway, it's fair to say that Poland are punching seriously above their weight in that genre right now, so I can only say that they're one of my favourites. However, I gave their sixth album, Hero, a rare 9/10 and my Album of the Month in September 2021 and this seventh album is a worthy successor two and a half years on. What's more, it's an album that surprised me, albeit not immediately. For a while, it continues much in the same vein as Hero, which isn't a bad thing at all.

Hope Is kicks off with ominous bass tones and then adds exploring keyboards. There are narrative vocals from Marta Wojtas and sung ones from her husband Michał that work well together, even if it took me a few listens to get fully on board. What didn't take me a few listens is Michał's searing guitar solo that's right out of the Dave Gilmour playbook. It's timeless stuff, the sort of thing that could have been recorded in the sixties and still sounds just as perfect now. I like the countdown at the end too; it doesn't seem like the band can meet the timeframe of Marta's numbers, but they do and it works wonderfully, wrapping up just like that.

If that solo reminds us of Gilmour, and I don't see how it can't, then Stay Human reminds us of Pink Floyd as a whole. You wouldn't mistake it for a Floyd song, but it has exactly the same sort of build that's apparently effortless but still gets under our skin so that we find ourselves grooving along with it even a couple of minutes into our first listen. That's the sort of songwriting magic that most of the musical world wishes they could buy in a bottle and, in the absence of such a quick solution, spends years trying to figure out. Amarok have that down just like Floyd do.

There's more Gilmour-style soloing to kick off Insomnia, with some hints of Mark Knopfler too, and it's so far so expected. However, Trail adds two different directions to the sound. The first is to kick off with a dance beat, upping the electronicics in the way that someone like Steven Wilson might, but never leaving prog. Then it heavies up early in the second half, firmly remaining prog instead of metal but introducing a serious punch that's almost a prog rock take on the rhythmic aspect of djent guitars that sounds much better to my ears. It reminds me that, even with a few songs that sound rather like we expect, Amarok can't be taken for granted. They always bring surprises.

And those escalate with Welcome and Queen, not least because they're not sung by either Marta or Michał Wojtas. Drummer Konrad Zieliński takes over for the former, feeling like he'd find a true calling in one of the huge British alt prog bands like Radiohead or Muse. The song follows suit, the sort of prog song that seems designed to reach out to every corner of a huge stadium without any deliberate pandering to commercialism. He may not be a natural singer but he sounds good. And so does Kornel Popławski, Amarok's bassist who takes them in a completely different direction on the latter.

This is nothing like the songs that went before it on this album, though it flavours what follows it. Part of me thinks it's the least successful track here, because it utterly refuses to play along with the rest of the album, but part of me also thinks it's the most successful for the same reason. It's not one to ignore, that's for sure. It has a dark prog drive underneath it, but it feels more like an eighties post-punk song that finds some unusual grooves and some even more unusual sounds. It has some neat guitar feedback, some glorious percussion and vocals that veer from whispers all the way into punk. In addition to those vocals, Popławski also contributes a tasty violin solo.

And so the album changes, the remaining songs, with Michał Wojtas back at the mike, dipping into the various different textures outlined thus far. Perfect Run seems more subdued but grows more than anything else here on repeat listens. Don't Surrender is more commercial, hearkening back to the arena mindset of Welcome but with cleaner and catchier melodies, even adding a moment or two that reminds of the Beatles.

The last two tracks do much the same but in an even more stripped down form. Simple Pleasures, which is appropriately named, strips that mindset down to its basics, featuring a delightful, very delicate guitar solo during its second half. It's the longest song on the album at seven and a half minutes and it's like a fine wine to savour. Dolina follows suit to wrap up the album, even stripping away the instrumentation to make it a solo Michał Wojtas piece, told entirely with a harmonium and Wojtas's voice, eschewing English for once and delivering its story in plaintive Polish.

Those two are both delicate songs and, while they end Hope appropriately, they also leave us very aware that the album is over. I certainly found myself sitting in silence letting what it did soak in, before starting it over again and running through that emotional cycle. I don't think I like it quite as much as I liked Hero, but it's a close call and, while I've listened to Hero enough for it to not be still in that growing phase, this one's still growing on me. So I'm going with an 8/10 for now, with a strong possibility that I'll up it to a 9/10 soon.

The Dread Crew of Oddwood - Rust & Glory (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Pirate Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Wow, it's been nine years since I saw the Dread Crew of Oddwood supporting Alestorm at the late lamented Joe's Grotto. They were great that night, playing their distinctive brand of pirate metal that's entirely acoustic, and it's good to hear them again on their fifth album. The line-up is most of the same people, with only the drummer changing since that time, the current occupant of the stool being named simply Pete, an uncharacteristically banal name for a member of this band. I'm not going to see them on the current tour, supporting Týr, but my son is and I'm eager to hear how they played.

Opener Lawful Evil is exactly the sort of song they ought to play at a folk metal gig. It's up tempo, vibrant, energetic, furious even, that makes it entirely sound like metal even though it's acoustic. There's a hard edge to the instrumental midsection and just enough harsh on the vocals to do the same there without stopping the lyrics being entirely understandable. And, of course, pirates are not remotely lawful evil, unless they're privateers. That's acknowledged at the end, when a Dread Crew member points out that they're clearly chaotic evil. That's the feel this album delivers.

The good news is that most of the rest of it plays into that chaotic evil acoustic metal mindset and the result is a lot of fun. The bad news is that not all songs are created equal and there are some here that simply don't carry the punch of others, so that, while I wouldn't skip any of these on my tenth time through, a few are going to slide into the background by that point while others won't. Leather Ship is one of those. It's not a bad song and it gets a little furious as it goes, but it's not a second Lawful Evil. And it's not remotely Lost Comrades.

The Dread Crew are a fascinating band because they're not out of place rocking out at a metal gig but they also fairly perform at renaissance festivals and Lost Comrades is a shanty that is overtly designed for the latter, not because it has an inherent sing-a-long melody but because it bulks up the backing vocals so much that they're often almost duet partners, even though it's really a call and response number. Let's run through the crew. How did he die? Better him than I! On the other hand, Squall of Death features some lovely frantic drums, that make it galloping stuff perfect to stir up some serious pit action.

Oh, and if its narrative section, introduced with a heartfelt "Holy shit!" isn't enough for you to see the humour inherent in almost everything the Dread Crew do, then next up is a song called Giant Fucking Demon Crab, which is about, well, a giant fucking demon crab. Because, why not? Hey, I'm a Guy N. Smith fan. I'm inherently on board with giant fucking demon crabs, even if Cliff Davenport isn't there in the lyrics to take them down at the end until the inevitable sequel. We could adopt it as a theme tune anyway.

And that's this album in a nutshell, even though I've only talked about the first five tracks. There are a bunch of up tempo rockers. The Glass of Firewine ups the energy again, even though it's an instrumental piece, while Give Me Your Beer doubles that, with delicate picking and an earworm bridge. The chorus isn't elegant but it's as catchy as you might expect given the song's title. There are a lot of fun songs here. Is it pirate party time in Tavern Brawl? That's an overt nod to the band I first saw them supporting. Give Me Your Beer easily counts as fun and the accordion of Wolfbeard O'Brady comes to the fore in Corpse Juice Medley.

The only catch is that there are more of those less obvious numbers, none of them bad but none worthy of being listed among the songs listed within the previous paragraph. Evil Tide is pleasant enough on its own but it's inevitably subdued, even tame, after Squall of Death and Giant Fucking Demon Crab. I can see people leaping into the pit for the former and following whatever madness O'Brady raises in the latter, then heading back to the bar for this one. And there are songs that I'd say are sadly most notable for their titles, like Revenge Prawn, which is a gem of a name for a ship and a song about it, and Locomotive Death for that matter. These songs are merely there. They're not bad, because there are no bad songs here, but they're unable to live up to their titles.

And so that's the fifth album from the Dread Crew of Oddwood, no fewer than eight years after a fourth, Lawful Evil, which, I should add, did not feature a song called Lawful Evil, which opens this one instead. That may seem weird, but if Led Zeppelin and AC/DC can do it, so can the Dread Crew. After all, they're pirates, right?

Thursday 4 April 2024

Necrophobic - In the Twilight Grey (2024)

Necrophobic have been around for a long time, having formed as far back as 1989, and this is their tenth album. They're widely regarded as having a discography unusually consistent in quality and this isn't a huge distance in style from their debut, The Nocturnal Silence, that's now thirty years old. They're usually categorised as black/death metal and both those elements remain in obvious quantity from the outset, but I've always heard good old fashioned heavy metal in their sound as well and that may be a little more obvious here than last time I heard them, whenever that was. I don't recall.

Mostly, I see that in how clean everything feels and how that affects slower sections. For instance, the openers, Grace of the Past and Clavis Inferni, are generally fast songs. Anders Strokirk sings in a harsh voice, one that takes from both the black metal shriek and the death metal growl, to end up somewhere in between the two. Joakim Sterner plays the drums at black metal speed and the guitars of Sebastian Ramstedt and Johan Bergebäck mostly match it with the black metal wall of sound approach. However, there are points where both drop into a slower section and suddenly it all feels like heavy metal rather than anything extreme.

As Stars Collide is a great example of a song that never really speeds up, so remains slower than the two openers throughout. There's also a nice churn to it, so there's an obvious opportunity to manifest the death metal aspects of the band, but they don't really seize it. It's there to a point, but Tobias Cristiansson's bass never deepens it far enough for the death to really take hold, slick production keeps it very clean and so it feels like an up tempo Iron Maiden section, merely with a harsh vocal over the top. When Strokirk steps back for an instrumental section, it's easy to forget we're listening to an extreme metal band.

At the other end of the album, Maiden return on the title track, because the melodies as it wraps up feel reminiscent of synth era Maiden, merely with faster drums and that harsh voice. The song after it, the bonus track on some editions, is a cover of W.A.S.P.'s The Torture Never Stops, and it's completely at home with the original material before it. In fact, while it's heavied up through the harsh vocals, it's also deepened but slightly softened by added keyboard textures. It's actually an excellent cover but it helps to underline the roots of the album in eighties heavy metal. Tellingly, Stormcrow isn't much different, even if it's more frenetic. Even the chorus sounds familiar.

Perhaps the most death metal song here is Shadows of the Brightest Night, but it still feels more black than death and adds some progressive metal in there too to make the result rather perky. It's an impressive song and it continues to be for seven and a half minutes, the longest song here outside the eight minute title track. I'd call both of them highlights, suggesting that Necrophobic are at their best when they let their songs breathe. Both of these find wonderful grooves and are able to milk them so that the longer running times don't seem longer at all.

As I wrap up this review, I keep wondering if readers will interpret what I've said as suggesting an overt softening of the Necrophobic sound and I want to underline that that's not what I'm saying. This is heavy, often extreme stuff and the band haven't remotely forgotten their origins. It's just that, if we let it flow over us, we can leave with the impression that it isn't as extreme as it really is. Compare this to Belphegor, Vulcano or Behemoth and it's not going to seem quite as vicious or quite as as raw. It's going to feel slick and even commercial. However, it's just as frenetic and just as powerful. And it's going to feel more accomplished, because the slickness is in the songwriting too. The more I listen to this, the more extreme I really it is and the more I like it.

Neon Rider - Destination Unknown (2024)

Country: Argentina
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook

Neon Rider was founded by a couple of guitarists and that's apparent from the title track, which is the intro that opens up the album, a sub-minute long piece told entirely on guitar. We can feel the eagerness in that intro and also as the first track proper, named for the band, kicks in. Sure, Bruno Sangari delivers a strong clean vocal and guitarists Hernan Cattaneo and Marcos Nieva Green add precisely the riffs the song requires, but it's the eagerness that drives it all and I couldn't wait for the solos, because it feels like the performers can't wait for them too. It's a moment of release, as if the musicians have been restrained for a while and can finally just let rip.

Much of the joy here is in that release, because the constant battle in the majority of these songs is between the urge to go wild and jam for an hour and the need to exercise restraint to flesh out this music with verses and choruses and hooks and all that nitty gritty stuff that makes songs. On every song there's restraint but we can feel the energy gradually building until the moment they can simply let loose, mostly through another guitar solo. I can't remember the last studio album I've heard that feels as joyously alive as this one does, especially during its first half. That sort of energy is usually reserved for live albums.

The style is hard rock but with strong roots in melodic rock. Neon Rider and Feel the Magic adopt the latter a bit more than Unleash Your Fire and I Lay My Life in Rock and Roll, because the album builds throughout its first half. Those are the first four tracks and each of them is a touch heavier than the one before it, albeit never losing focus on the melodic rock at the core of them all, even though Cattaneo and Green like to bulk it up with the guitars.

While this is hard rock that will play very well to melodic rock fans, I'm not shocked in the slightest to discover that both Cattaneo and Green also play in a power metal band called Amma, while the former is also in a second power metal band, Edenlord. There's a distinctively metal approach to what they do and, at their heaviest, the result sometimes feels like a hard rock take on Japanese heavy metal bands like Loudness or Bow Wow/Vow Wow. Of course, Neon Rider are nowhere near Tokyo, instead hailing from a different capital, Buenos Aires in Argentina, and it's an interesting approach to music that otherwise owes a lot to the heavier end of Journey.

Those heavier songs are mostly on the first half, with Unleash Your Fire being my favourite in that vein, but there's a return to power at the end of the album because Riders of the Night wraps the show up with some major emphasis. The bulk of the second half, after the edgy guitars of Compass Rose but before that emphatic closer, holds things back more, hearkening back to the openers but taking it a step further. Surreal and Standing by the Edge are a little softer and One and Only is an outright ballad. What's important is that, while the the urgency drops a little, it's still there and I particularly like the guitar solos in Standing by the Edge with their lovely liquid tone.

I'm not a huge fan of ballads, but I have to underline that those liquid guitars elevate this one and a ramp up a minute and a half in doesn't hurt either. It moves from ballad to power ballad, but it's a good one. Other touches that I liked here include the riffs in I Lay My Life in Rock and Roll, which reminded me of Randy Rhoads on early Ozzy albums, and on Riders of the Night, which are vicious by comparison, reminding more of Iron Maiden's Back to the Village. This closer ends up as one of my standout tracks, not merely because of the guitarwork but because of the interesting use of a children's choir, which includes some of the band member's children.

I don't see a lot online about Neon Rider, who only seem to have a Facebook page that's still new enough to not have a friendly url, but I'm guessing that'll change as they establish themselves. It was good to hear them on Chris Franklin's essential melodic rock radio show Raised on Rock and I expect that they'll travel a lot further than that too, with a sound that's rock but nods to metal, a sound that's also polished but also retains an edge, a sound that's clearly well produced but still bursts out of the speakers with sheer energy. I'm presuming this is their debut album and it does a solid job of pointing the way to the next one. Their destination may be unknown but they seem to know where they're going.

Wednesday 3 April 2024

Bruce Dickinson - The Mandrake Project (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2024
Sites: Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

This is a strong album from Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, his first in nineteen years, his previous solo release being Tyranny of Souls in 2005 and his first album since Maiden's Senjutsu in 2021. It's clearly heavy metal but with an emphasis on heavy rather than speed; it flirts with doom and doesn't remotely sound like Maiden except in certain moments when his immediately recognisable voice falls into the sort of patterns that we know from so many Maiden albums. It's patient stuff and while the hooks seem good on the first time through, it requires multiple listens to truly appreciate them.

It's clear that Bruce and his colleagues are on form in the opener, Afterglow of Ragnarok, which is patient heavy metal. Many Doors to Hell follows suit and then Rain on the Graves escalates things as the most immediate song on the album. This becomes an obvious highlight the moment Bruce starts to tell its story and it's very much a storytelling number, the instrumentation falling back to allow him to effectively tell us to pay attention while he recounts what's going on with utter relish. It gets better as it goes too, so I'm not shocked that it was the second single except to note that I don't know why it wasn't the first. That was Afterglow of Ragnarok.

He doesn't stay in storytelling mode throughout, in the sense of inviting us to his campfire so that he can have us hang on every word, but he's back there for Eternity Has Failed later in the album. This one opens up with flutes and ambience, as if we're on a battlefield after all the fighting has been done. Something epic happened here and we're eager to find out what. Story is important to this album though, because this isn't just a record; there are comic books within the package too, but I haven't read them so can't speak to where they take proceedings and how they all tie to the lyrical content of these songs.

Mostly, what I caught from the music is a epic approach, which shouldn't surprise for the singer in Iron Maiden but this is a very different sort of epic. Even Sonata (Immortal Beloved), the nigh on ten minute closer, a Maiden trademark, doesn't feel remotely like Maiden. This is more old school heavy/power metal, built on hooks and themes rather than stories, and it's a haunting example of that style, with Dickinson repeatedly pleading, "Save me now!" with some huge emotional impact.

There are also sounds here that wouldn't normally sit in heavy metal but play into that epic feel. Those plaintive flutes that kick off Eternity Has Failed have a Native American flavour to them as well as a Japanese one. Resurrection Men opens up like a spaghetti western soundtrack. Fingers in the Wounds adds some middle eastern textures that work wonderfully, even though everybody and their dog is throwing those into metal songs nowadays.

There's another touch that I wasn't expecting. Face in the Mirror starts out softer and stays there but Shadow of the Gods, which starts out softer too, doesn't. When it eventually ramps up during its second half, it gets angry in a very modern way, almost channelling some nu metal for a while that I wasn't expecting from the air raid siren, a nickname he lives up to often here, soaring above the music in a way that only he can. He doesn't need to get trendy and he generally doesn't, but a moment in Shadow of the Gods does go there and somehow it works.

In fact, everything works here. This is a deep album and we know that from moment one, because it feels inherently deep and epic and meaningful, but we also have a feeling that it's a lot deeper than we might initially think. I liked it on a first listen, but I liked it more on a second and I have to move on after maybe five or six times through with me liking it progressively more each time but with a strong feeling that it hasn't reached its peak for me yet. I'm going with an 8/10 but it could well warrant a 9/10.

Maybe I'll get a chance to come back in a few months and see. For now, I'm staying at 8/10 because some of these songs still feel like a step above the others. I'm thinking the two bard songs, Rain of the Graves and Eternity Has Failed, then the closer, Sonata (Immortal Beloved), which may well be the best of them all. Nothing else lets the side down, but nothing else touches those three either. Maybe in time they will. Mistress of Mercy is already thinking about it.

The Great Alone - Perception (2024)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Jan 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's a fascinating debut album from Switzerland, which is most of what I know about The Great Alone. I don't know where in the country they're from and I don't really know who's in the band, a couple of names being all I can find: Murielle and Vincent. Clearly that's Murielle singing, so does that mean that Vincent handles all the instrumentation or do they split that up between them? I don't know and I'd love to, but for now, they're Swiss, this is their debut album and it has a unique sound that I rather like.

As they've stated in interviews, they take the sheer power of metal but present it through a rock structure. The result probably counts as alternative, but that's not alternative like, say, Nirvana or REM; it's alternative like Evanescence or a less theatrical In This Moment. Murielle sings clean and she has some serious power to bring to bear but there's a weight to the music behind her too, even when it's held back, as on songs like Cell, Quiet Place or Horizon, the latter of which has the most effective softer section here, I think.

All this, and occasional piano, brings a gothic feel to this material too, but not so far as to label it gothic rock or metal. There's merely a gothic flavour to their particular brand of alternative rock, just as there's an operatic grandeur at points without it ever becoming symphonic metal. Illusion may be the most overtly gothic track here, but the opener, The Call—which may be intended as an intro and may be the first track proper but which really works as both—has a Sisters of Mercy vibe to it. Whatever else it is, it's a statement of intent, but with a ruthless bass, tasty rhythms and an ethnic vocalisation in the background.

I wish I knew who plays the bass here, because it kept on impressing me throughout the album. It's right there on The Call forging the groove but it's there to open up Beyond Dreams too, with some tasty rhythms too. What this one does that points the way to everything to come is escalation, the one thing that the Great Alone do better than anything else. There are a host of tracks, beginning with this one, that have softer sections that build back to something heavier. Stars and Storms has a magnificent build. Cell has a strong second half, including two builds, one to the three and a half minute mark, then another after a complete drop to piano and texture. Quiet Place builds strongly too. These escalations are everywhere and they're always impeccable.

The problem some of these songs have is that their first halves, inherently softer, subtler and with more nuance than the builds that take them into something more, don't always survive the builds. They become the something before the magnificence rather than the first half of a song. That may be a little unfair, but I got so caught up in the second halves of so many of these tracks that I lost a grip on how they got there.

The most notable exception to that is the standout track for me, which surprisingly isn't the well crafted Beyond Dreams or indeed Mania, the next on the album, which continues in the same vein but with a neat drop down to something more ethereal three minutes in. Both are highlights for me, but it's Icons that steals the show, because it has a build but also has a unique sound from the outset and it totally nails its first half.

It's an angry and progressive song, compared to everything else here. Murielle has serious power and she can vary the intensity of a piece with panache, but, like the music behind her, she's always crafting material so that it's the best it can be. And that's great, but on Icons she goes far beyond that to send a message. She's angry here and whatever it is that she wants us to know, she sells it absolutely. There's even a subtle Dolores O'Riordan lilt at a couple of points and, frankly, if you're aiming to sell anger, a hint at Irish is never going to hurt. The music behind her, which starts out as a commercial take on industrial, backs her up absolutely and once again there's a joyous bassline during a neatly progressive section early on. It's a peach of a song.

While I liked this album a lot, in its details and in its sweep, Icons perhaps underlines how it could be a little more than it is. What I liked about the rest of the album was the craftsmanship of the songwriting and the technique of the musicians. It's impeccably done and when it adds an unusual touch or texture, it's even better, like the drops in Horizon and Cell, the gothic piano that opens up Illusion and the opening of Reverie, with a solid riff emerging from the darkness, where it sounds like monks are chanting low. However, it's so slick that it can lose some of its emotion, even during those magnificent builds. Icons nails the emotion.

And that's why this is a really easy 7/10 for me that made me consider an 8/10, but I can also easily see that with a little more rawness and a little less gloss, their next album could easily land a 9/10. I'm eager to see what they come up with next.

Tuesday 2 April 2024

WONDERboom - Hard Mode (2024)

It's oddly hard to find an online discography of WONDERboom, given that they formed as far back as 1996 and have been active ever since, winning awards but releasing EPs and singles rather than full length studio albums. They celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2021 with WONDERboom 25, a set of re-recordings of favourite songs from their earlier releases, but this is a new studio album, potentially their fifth to follow on from 2017's Rising Sun, and it's a wildly versatile affair.

I saw them listed as funk rock, which is as good a description as any, I guess, but they refuse to be constrained by any one genre label, even if it's as high level as pop or rock, because they're happy to play both. There's a lot of rock here, much of it falling somewhere within alternative or arena rock, but there's lots of pop here too, from across the spectrum, trawling in ska, goth, punk, even R&B. As such, it's impossible to even attempt to identify high level influences. The band obviously listen to a broad range of music and let everything they hear filter into their own sound.

The heaviest song is probably the opener, My Name is Freedom, which is an earworm of a stomp, built as much on handclaps and audience participation as guitars and drums. It seems cheap for me to throw out John Kongos as an immediate comparison, given that he was also South African, but it's there and it's overt. However, one of the softest songs is Deadly, the pop song that has an unenviable task in following My Name is Freedom and approaches that by not doing anything at all similar. Apparently, when WONDERboom started out, so far back that they were still called the Electric Petal Groove Machine, they supported Simple Minds on a South African tour. That seems entirely appropriate listening to this song.

From one rock song and one pop song, the next four mix pop and rock in fascinating ways and that ends up being a far more common approach here. Most of my favourite songs here are both pop and rock without ever really being pop rock. Alive is a tasty mix of U2 and Nick Cave and the Cure. Overground (Subway Queen) ups the U2 proportion of that but adds a Japanese melodic theme. Avalon adds some Madness in its perky ska beat, funky piano and quietly cool attitude, though it goes elsewhere for its chorus. Similarly, Miss Demeanour is commercial punk in its verses, like an Iggy Pop song but with the incessant drive of Hawkwind, the lyrics spat in bars rather than sung, but then it all goes big and clean for its chorus.

Avalon counts as the midpoint, there being eleven songs on offer and all of them being of similar length, a radio friendly three minutes and change. I like the first half a lot, wherever it goes. I'm less fond of the second half, partly because it's more pop than rock, partly because its songs have less character to them and partly because one of them, very deliberately, sparks cringeworthy memories. However, the second half wraps up with Voodoo Doll, which is both pop and rock, has character to spare and is as catchy as anything else here, the earworm opener notwithstanding.

The cringy song is Hip, which is eighties hip, sometimes painfully so, even if the words talk about an earlier time. It's firmly pop but it goes all over the place, perhaps mostly to Michael Jackson but to plenty of others, including trends that I've tried to forget. It feels like the sonic equivalent of the sort of fashion catalogue that parents bought Christmas presents from that embarrassed everyone because the trends had moved on by the time the wrapping paper came off. There's an early white rapper feel to it and I'm not talking about Blondie's Rapture or Adam Ant's Ant Rap, but the folk who dressed in pastels and pretended to be black, the predecessors of Vanilla Ice.

The songs after it but before Voodoo Doll are mostly inconsequential compared to the rest of the material here. Prodigal Son is a logical follow-up to Hip but shifting in time from Michael Jackson to Prince. Pretty Things is quieter; it's pleasant enough and it sounds OK in isolation but its Cure-esque pop doesn't enforce itself. Rabbit Hole manages a little better, but it's another subtle pop song and I was having sinking feelings by this point in the album when Voodoo Doll shows up to be the saviour of the side, a Hallowe'en flavoured Adam Ant alt rock song that's all hook.

This is about as different as can be imagined to Toxic Carnage, but I do try to cover the spectrum here at Apocalypse Later and there are wonderful songs to be found on each of these albums. It's joyous to me to move from Thrashing Over Thirty to Alive. They're both rock songs, even if they're not alike in almost any other way, except maybe in how they nod back to the eighties. It's a great time to be alive, with so much varied music easily available to a global audience online. Enjoy it.

Toxic Carnage - Praying for Demise (2024)

I do like my thrash metal and I especially like finding new bands from pivotal nations to the genre who play it and play it well. Toxic Carnage hail from the Mairinque and São Roque on the outskirts of São Paolo in the southeast of the country and, while they've been around since 2008, have only recently got round to actually releasing full length albums. Their debut was the ironically named Doomed from the Beginning in 2019 and this is their follow-up on the other side of COVID. Before these and between them, they put out a lot of singles, EPs and split releases, so it's not that they just sat around doing nothing.

The play a vicious brand of thrash metal that's right out of the old school Slayer playbook, obvious both in the vocals of Robson Dionisio and the lead guitar of Roberlei Cristiano and a few guests providing a lead guitar on individual tracks, the most known of whom is Jhon França of Cerberus Attack, who guests on guitar on Trapped in a Vortex, on vocals on Nuclear Addiction and also found the time to both produce and mix the album.

The band's general approach is to remain speedy, but songs like The Unholy Book and Trapped in a Vortex slow down a little and chug as much as they blister. However, slower is a relative term, with these slower songs still pretty fast compared to other thrash bands. It just means that they tend to reach three and a half minutes or so. The epic of the album is Pyramid of Death that's a breath under four, partly because of a longer guitar solo from guest Diogo Felix.

The faster songs rarely pass three minutes because they simply don't have any interest in hanging around in any sense. They blister through what they do and then they're done, ready to give way for the next song and the one after that. Nuclear Addiction gets right down to business and wraps up in under two minutes, a space that somehow even provides space for both a guitar solo and a bass solo. That's pretty impressive. It doesn't cut anything out that's inherently needed. It simply gets down to business immediately and gets out of the way when it's done.

The shortest song is accordingly the one that goes the fastest, because CxAxTx is a thrash number that flirts pretty outrageously with grindcore. It works nicely as a blitzkrieg of a song that's done in forty seconds or so, with a few more dedicated to purring, a sheer burst of energy in between a couple of those three and a half minute songs that chug along nicely. There's a guest here too but on vocals; he goes by Clark and he does a pretty solid grindcore job given that he's known instead for a melodic death metal band a gothic doom/death metal band. That's versatility for you.

As always with new discoveries in thrash metal, I'll pass a copy of this over to my youngest son who has become quite the connoisseur of the genre and has the good taste to take me to see Flotsam and Jetsam this week for my birthday. He doesn't always agree with me and he sometimes finds things that I don't notice too, but it's rare when either of us recommend a thrash album that the other doesn't appreciate. I'm pretty sure he'll enjoy the walk home from work with this blaring in his ears.

For my part, I prefer the fast songs like Thrashing Over Thirty and Obedience, which doesn't shock me at all. However, I really like Toxic Carnage chugging too, which is less expected. Often, if a band shift a lot between fast thrash and mid pace chug, I'm far more polarised about which songs I like the most. Here, there's not much of a gap in my estimation between those fast songs and slower ones like Pyramid of Death and Trapped in a Vortex. While Toxic Carnage don't do much that's new here, that glimpse of grindcore aside, they play at both tempos very well indeed.

Sure, they would benefit from some more originality, but they generate some serious energy, an essential for thrash, and I dig the guitar solos, especially the one by Paulo Almeida on Echoes of the Future, as well as the prominent bass, which is placed with perfection in the mix by França. I don't know who's responsible for that, because I'm seeing Dionisio variously listed as responsible for bass, rhythm guitar and vocals on this album or vocals and lead guitar, because he was only a bass player in the band in its earliest years from 2008 to 2010. I'm not sure which to trust. I like it, whoever's responsible.

Perhaps my highest recommendation is the suggestion that I left this album thinking that it's an obvious choice to pull out every now and again as a palate cleanser after listening to other albums by other bands that didn't do the business for me. I'll always know that this one does.

Monday 1 April 2024

The Quill - Wheel of Illusion (2024)

I've never even heard of the Quill before but I'm happy to have finally remediated that, even if I'm very late to this party indeed. They were formed as far back as 1986, they put out a debut album in 1989 and another ten since then, making this their eleventh. I saw them listed as stoner/hard rock, but they're heavier than that, at least on this album, making them heavy/stoner metal to me. I'm not sure if they've got heavier over time to become this or if they were there all along. I ought to check out their back catalogue to find out.

As you might imagine from heavy/stoner metal, there's a huge amount of Black Sabbath here and it's firmly from the seventies era with Ozzy Osbourne. Magnus Ekwall, who is prominent enough in the European scene to have been invited to sing on an Ayreon album, The Human Equation, has an Ozzy vibe on a lot of these songs, starting with the opener, Wheel of Illusion, which could easily be an outtake from an actual seventies Sabbath album. That holds true even when the band dip into stoner rock on Elephant Head. It's still Sabbath with Ozzy, but Christian Carlsson's riffs move away from Tony Iommi in the bridge to be more Josh Homme.

While Sabbath are never far away on any song, the Quill are far from just clones and the variety is manifested as early as the second song, We Burn, where Ekwall sounds more like Bruce Dickinson than Ozzy. That's enough to take that song in a very different direction, but the riffing isn't as old school either. L.I.B.E.R. is perhaps the wildest track here, starting out with the repeated bass note intro from Runnin' with the Devil and then Jolle Atlagic kicks in with a drum rhythm worthy of an Adam and the Ants number. Atlagic has played for bands as varied as Hanoi Rocks and the Electric Boys, so it's not surprising to hear him bring something different here.

Are those southern rock stylings in Sweet Mass Confusion (All Rise Now)? I do believe they are and the slide guitar sounds great against the heavy riffing. There's also some southern rock within the closer, Wild Mustang, though less overtly. That one features a wonderful mellow section too with a glockenspiel, if my ears aren't deceiving me, in the final stretch. There's some space rock to start out The Last Thing You Remember and my favourite song trawls in some Hawkwind too.

That's Hawks & Hounds, in which Ekwall sounds as close to classic Ozzy as you can get without ever adding an "All right now!" However, the instrumentation behind him is very different. There's the Hawkwind sound, but also an ethnic middle eastern flavour that reminds less of Hassan i Sabah, a song I've mentioned recently in my Karkara review too, and more of Led Zeppelin, something that is only hammered home by the delightful drop in the vocal melody. It just keeps on going further than we ever expect and it sounds glorious. It's almost a hypnotic song and I adore it.

There's not a lot here at that level, perhaps only the pristine sudden pause that ends the intro to L.I.B.E.R. joining Hawks & Hounds, but there's a lot that I really like, from the core sound to little touches like those drums in L.I.B.E.R., the slide guitar in Sweet Mass Confusion and the sustained epic nature of Wild Mustang. It's not just that mellow section and Carlsson's wonderfully patient guitar solo; it's the entire progression that keeps on giving. It never feels long at just under eight minutes, but it also feels as if it has a ten minute instrumental stretch in the second half that we want to immerse ourselves in.

I'm happy to have finally clued myself in to who the Quill are and I'll absolutely be keeping an eye out for their next album. Had I found them sooner, I could have reviewed Earthrise back in 2021, a typical gap between albums for them, but that should be the last new one that I'll miss. They also seem to be highly stable, Atlagic and Carlsson founder members and Ekwall and Roger Nilsson on bass having around a quarter of a century in the band each, even if they've both taken breaks. It all bodes well for a twelfth album in three or four years time. Maybe I'll have caught up with their back catalogue by then. I hope so.

Moonpark - Good Spirit (2024)

Country: Czechia
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

This is a debut album and, while it sounds like a debut album, the problems I had with it started to go away when I realised some things. Moonpark hail from Czechia instead of an amusement park on the moon, which isn't quite as cool but does give them a good shot at being influenced by bands from both western and eastern Europe, as well as America and whatever travelled. They're relatively new, having formed in 2020 but this mostly sounds like it could have been released on a small record label in the eighties.

Initially, the obvious influences are American AOR bands. Dancing in a Lie opens up like a Survivor classic, with carefully placed power chords against a repetitive keyboard rhythm. Then it launches into the quintessential components of the genre: a simple but strong riff, a good melodic line and a decent guitar solo. Blinding Fire continues in much the same vein, with the addition of effective piano touches to underpin it. It's all mildly aggressive but rooted so carefully in melody that what I mean by aggression is Separate Ways rather than Don't Stop Believin'.

The weak spot for me was immediately the vocals of Michal Kolacek, but I still had a realisation to make and I didn't make that until Together nine tracks in. Because everything is so obviously AOR, I was comparing him to Steve Perry and he was coming off third best. What I eventually realised in Together is that he isn't aiming to be quite that clean. There's some nineties in his voice, whether it's a slight edge in Good Spirit that reminds of Matt Kramer of Saigon Kick, someone starting out the nineties with something a little darker before grunge took over, or a half snarl on Together like Axl Rose once he leaned into his unique voice.

Now, whether that's the right goal for Kolacek, given what everyone else is doing behind him, is up for grabs, but it has to be acknowledged to realise what he's doing. Once I did so, I heard him in a new light, one with less caveats attached to it. He certainly hits some impressive notes on Good Spirit and Blinding Fire. Of course, he's also presumably Czech but singing in English, so kudos for making it sound like he's just as fluent as I am as a native speaker. I couldn't remotely sing songs in Czech, even if I had any sort of vocal talent. He makes a second language seem easy.

After a few times through, I honestly believe that choice has a much larger negative effect on the songwriting than it does on his singing. None of the lyrics here manage to break past the generic and they get rather clichéd on the second side, especially once the ballads show up. There were a few points where I started to mentally keep track of how many eighties song titles I could identify within the lyrics. Did whoever wrote this material learn English from listening to David Coverdale numbers? Inquiring minds want to know.

If I had some issues with the vocals, even if I was able to resolve most of them eventually, I found the instrumentation solid and, lyrics aside, the songwriting does some impressive things. There's a particularly sassy riff in Kiss Me, which may well be my favourite song here. Good Spirit flows as smoothly as a Journey classic, especially once it gets to the bridge. I could even cite Abba here, as there are some effortless pop melodies too, just with that subtle edge to Kolacek's voice. Rock 'n' Roll Train had to get moving quickly with a title like that and it does. It has the fastest pace of any song here, even though it remains firmly within the melodic rock genre.

The songs in between all these are decent too, if a level below the ones I've mentioned. It's when we get to Together that it starts to go wrong for a while. If someone has written a textbook on the way to write a piano driven power ballad, they might just have copy/pasted Together onto a page. I tend to hate piano driver power ballads and I'm not a fan of this one, though I have to admit that it's unexpectedly growing on me a little on further listens. When We Were Young starts out like a piano driven power ballad too, though it does grow beyond that at least a little.

The only song in between those two is a particularly odd one. At points, Summer Night sounds like a fifties pop song. At times it sounds like a fifties pop song as covered by classic era Kiss. Mostly it sounds like a fifties pop song covered by classic era Kiss but then covered in turn by Bryan Adams, which is an odd mixture. There are clichés again, but it's decent enough and I do like its bass line, courtesy of Petr Kolar. And the only song left after them is Dawn, which returns to hard rock Journey and does it pretty well, but it feels a little out of place after the ballads.

And so this is a mixed bag for me. There are some strong melodic rock songs here, most obviously on the first side. I know plenty of people who would love Dancing in a Lie and Blinding Fire and many who would dig Kiss Me and Good Spirit. Jirka Dolezel doesn't bring anything new to melodic rock with his guitarwork, but he was consistently the standout for me; I enjoyed all of his solos to some degree and loved a bunch of them. So there's good here. The bad is mostly constrained to a stylistic choice by Kolacek that may play better for others than it does for me and the clichés that leap out from the lyrics. I wonder if they'd write more substantial lyrics if they did so in Czech, but that wouldn't be as internationally commercial, of course.

Where it ended up for me was a decent debut that sounds like a big break for a small band but an important one. The question now is how they can build on that. They've got their sound out there into the world and now they get to market it. It may be hard to get this sort of quintessentially old style material onto the airwaves but it can be done and there are stages all over Europe. I hope to see a second album in a few years time that's more mature and brings Moonpark into their own. Only time will tell.

Friday 22 March 2024

Midnight - Hellish Expectations (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

I'm not sure we can truly say that Midnight formed in 2003, given that it's a one man solo project put into motion back when Athenar was merely Jamie Walters, the bassist and vocalist in an Ohio based heavy metal band called Boulder. I guess it's when he came up with the name and recorded an initial demo. A couple of decades on, Boulder are long gone but Midnight are well established, this being his sixth studio album. In fact, he's ramping up output, Rebirth by Blasphemy, Let There Be Witchery and this arriving only two years after each other.

It's a real step up on its predecessor, which was decent but slower and more sedate than a typical Midnight live performance, where they blitz through song after song at so frantic pace that each could be a bullet and they have to empty the bandolier before closing time. This really doesn't do anything that's new to anyone who's heard Midnight before, but it feels far more representative of their stage show and that's a good thing. They blister on stage and it's felt awkward to me that they don't blister on album. Well, they do here.

Sure, Escape Total Hell kicks off the album with what could have been an S.O.D. mosh part, but it's ready to speed up quickly and it doesn't even think about slowing down again, except as one tease midway before launching right back into full gear again. The previous album feels like it was stuck in third gear compared to this, which is pedal to the metal all the way. This is a quintessential song for Midnight too, hearkening right back to the early days of extreme metal. There's Bathory here and Venom and even someone like Bulldozer. The riffs are simple but they're relentless.

The most unusual aspect to Expect Total Hell is that it lasts almost three and a half minutes, which makes it almost an epic for Midnight. There are ten tracks on offer here but this is the only one to reach three minutes. The entire album has stripped off, washed up and gone to bed in not far over twenty-five minutes. When an album is over three minutes shorter than Reign in Blood, even with the same number of tracks, then you know it's inherently stripped down to its vicious essence.

All ten of these tracks get down to business immediately and don't waste time wrapping up when they're done, even something like Slave of the Blade, which is a tad slower than the tracks before it, playing out with even more of a Tank vibe to the guitarwork than others, both the riffs and the solos, and an Exciter transition into the chorus. As you might imagine from the names I've thrown out there as comparisons, everything's old school here. In many ways, Midnight's sound is close to everything I loved about heavy metal in the mid eighties. There's NWOBHM riffing, the tempo of early speed metal and the edge of proto-extreme metal, all at the same time.

In many ways, Athenar has found the balance point between early Saxon and early Bathory, but I can't figure out which way that goes. Maybe it's both in turn. Dungeon Lust isn't light years away from Saxon covering Return of the Darkness and Evil, while Nuclear Savior has moments where it could be Bathory covering Motorcycle Man. There's Motörhead all over Expect Total Hell and in a whole bunch of the other songs too. There's Tank everywhere. Mercyless Slaughtor (sic) goes back to that S.O.D. moshing mindset. F.O.A.L. kicks off like Girlschool but is presumably another Venom homage, a nod to their F.O.A.D.

Of course, extreme metal has moved on a long way in the half a century since all those tracks saw original release, but you wouldn't be able to tell listening to Midnight. The most modern sounds to be found here are the black metal tinges to Athenar's Cronos-inspired vocals and the 21st century production values. Bathory never sounded this clear. He's still back in the early eighties and I have no complaints. I'm just fascinated in how he varies his influences depending on which instrument he's playing. When he's behind the kit, he's Philthy Animal Taylor. On bass, he's Cronos. When he's playing a guitar, he's Mick Tucker and Peter Brabbs of Tank.

And, at the end of the day, he's Athenar, because, as much as we can hear all those influences as if there were closed captions pointing them out to us, the result sounds like Midnight. While I only gave Let There Be Witchery a 6/10, because it sounded like a slower, watered down version of the Midnight I saw on stage, I'm happy to give this one an easy 7/10 because it has all the energy and pace of the Midnight I saw on stage. I'd go higher, because it's so much fun, but the constant lack of originality brings it back down again. So a safe 7/10 it is this time out for a more authentic take on Midnight.

Karkara - All is Dust (2024)

Country: France
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 22 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

This is Karkara's third album but it's my first experience of their work and I'm impressed. They're a psychedelic rock trio from Toulouse who play lively songs with space rock synths. Given where the music goes, I'd be happy for this to be entirely instrumental, but I'm not going to complain about the vocals, courtesy of both guitarist Karim R. and drummer Maxime M., because they're deep in the mix, so they work more like another instrument than as a delivery mechanism for lyrics. They do end up going instrumental much of the time and I never felt like I was missing anything by not truly acknowledging a single word.

They lean towards longer songs, all six on offer running between six and nine and a half minutes. My favourites are a couple of the shorter ones, Anthropia over The Chase, both of them squeaking over the line at a whisper under seven minutes each, but I was just as transported by longer songs, the elements that nudged those two to the top of the heap being specific instruments. Anthropia has an even more gorgeous bass groove from Hugo O. than the other songs, while The Chase gets wild in its second half, courtesy of a slower tempo and a truly wild saxophone from guest musician Jérome Bievelot, moving it from space rock to stalker jazz.

Time was that the saxophone was a soft rock instrument, but, courtesy perhaps of John Zorn, it's become quite the versatile addition to pretty much any genre on the rock and metal spectrum, a sentence that my teenage self back in the eighties wouldn't have believed. From prog rock to dark jazz to black metal, it's showing up everywhere nowadays and it elevates a post-black metal outfit like White Ward just as much as a prog rock project like Shamblemaths or a gothic rock band like The Matter of A, doing something different every single time. Even within psychedelic rock, how Solar Corona or The Fërtility Cült use sax is completely different to how Karkara do.

There are obvious influences here, but this is mostly a relatively unique sound to me. There's lots of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on Monoliths and across the album as a whole, but it has to be underlined that it's hard to borrow the sound of a band so versatile that they don't even sound like themselves most of the time. Karkara takes their King Gizzard nod from the Nonagon Infinity album, which is still my favourite by them, and especially in the vocal delivery, but there's more of a middle eastern flavour here and more Hawkwind too. There's lots of Hawkwind on The Chase and elsewhere too, both their patented drive and in the space rock keyboards. There's even some Pink Floyd here, from their Ummagumma era, in the intro to Moonshiner and not just because of those tweeting birds.

Perhaps Karkara took Nonagon Infinity and Ummagumma and Quark, Strangeness and Charm and threw them into a blender, but there's more of that middle eastern sound than could have started out on Hassan i Sabah. Maybe they've been listening to Nepal Death too. Maybe they've just seen a vision of how this connects to that and what should be layered over the top to make Karkara. The intricate cover art with its almost but not quite symmetry certainly suggests that. Maybe I'm just missing a sonic ingredient. I'd love to know what that might be!

This new sound has a lot of consistency, so you can throw any song on at random and still find what Karkara do. I haven't listened through on shuffle yet, but I don't think it would matter too much, a slower vibe that flows from The Chase to On Edge and the glorious transition from Moonshiner to Anthropia notwithstanding. However, even on a first listen, they distinguish themselves and each time through only enhances that. It's not just The Chase going slow and wild with that saxophone, the tweeting birds on Moonshiner and how All is Dust gets seriously angry a couple of minutes in, like a punk band wandered into the studio and joined in for a while, pausing politely so Bievelot's sax can take us somewhere else entirely and in a very different way to The Chase.

The bottom line is that I liked this from the outset but it gets better as it goes and it's all growing on me still after six or seven times through. Psychedelic rock is the gift that keeps on giving right now for me and it's fast becoming my favourite genre to lose myself in. Whatever a particular day brings, it's a welcoming barrier to dive through, let me explore for a while and eventually retreat back to the real world. This may well become another 8/10 that moves up to a 9/10 in time.

Thursday 21 March 2024

Steve Hackett - The Circus and the Nightwhale (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Feb 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

All aboard! All aboard! Legendary guitarist Steve Hackett, fresh from his live album looking back at Genesis's Foxtrot album half a century on, is back with a new album. It's built around a concept but that doesn't really take hold until the second half when the whale shows up. There's certainly some circus material early on but I got so caught up in the music that I never grasped the reasons why and what they have to do with a whale. Every time the album reached Breakout nine tracks in, I was freshly reminded that there's a concept and every time it ended, I wondered what it was.

It seems like there ought to be a story to People of the Smoke, which opens up the album, but it's never a focus for me. There are all sorts of ambient accoutrements to take my mind away from the story and by the time I'm ready to pay attention to it, it goes entirely instrumental, as if the story is left hanging in the clouds. And talking of them, These Passing Clouds is up next as an interlude, completely instrumental. There are a few of those here and they're often delicious, so why would we focus on a story, especially as even Hackett himself would freely admit that he's far more of a guitarist than a vocalist.

There are songs too. Taking You Down is a more groove oriented vocal song with a prominent sax from Rob Townsend, as straightforward as People of the Smoke was wildly playful. Enter the Ring is quite the delicate prog song. When the flute of Hackett's brother John shows up, you know who is immediately going to spring out as a comparison and it's a fair one, given where the song goes from there, even if Hackett's guitar solo isn't particularly like anything that Martin Barre might play. Get Me Out is a real stalker of a song while Ghost Moon and Living Love is softer, technically counting as a ballad, I suppose, but one with choral voices and orchestration in addition to a more laid back Hackett.

There's a voice in Found and Lost too, even though it initially seems to be another interlude. It's a sub-two minute mood piece, drenched in film noir cigarette smoke, and it features some effective smooth singing from Hackett, even if it's far more honest than it is accomplished. It leads into the rain of Enter the Ring, which marks the first point at which I felt like I was on an old school Genesis album, though it veers over to Jethro Tull territory after the flute shows up and everything drifts into perky folk rock.

There are other instruments worthy of note here, beyond the expected Hackett guitarwork, both electric and acoustic and also on mandolin. Townsend on sax and John Hackett on flute are easily the most obvious across the album, as they both show up multiple times, but the most notable on one appearance is surely Malik Mansurov's tar, which is a lute mostly known from classical music in Azerbaijan. It introduces Circo Inferno, which is as unlike Ghost Moon and Living Love before it as can be comfortably imagined. It's a thoroughly alive song, driving through those ethnic sounds to some cool weird stuff early in the second half and a seriously angry sax emerging from it. This is a wicked song and it's an utter delight.

It's here that the concept leaps out to grab our attention, because, while Circo Inferno clearly has to do with a circus and Breakout is a lively ninety second intermission between that and All at Sea, it then starts to have to do with the whale. The guitar churn from Breakout is there too, but it's a lot less immediate, dwarfed instead by the creature's presence. I still have no idea why this album is all about a circus and a nightwhale, but it's clear when it moves from one to the other because Hackett's guitar sounds like an orca in All at Sea and the percussion starts to sound like waves. We would know that Into the Nightwhale is all about the whale, even if it didn't hawk it in its title.

Most of these later pieces are instrumental, but they're more like soundtrack material than what served so well as interludes earlier in the album. However, Into the Nightwhale is vocal, in an Alan Parsons Project vein, and Wherever You Are stays vocal in a more upbeat dynamic vein, which the guitar of Steve Hackett is more than happy for. He's entirely electric here and he goes for searing rather than introspective. The vibrant drumming at the end of this track backs up just how much life there is in it. And yet, White Dove calms us right back down again to wrap up the album in the most peaceful way possible, a soft acoustic instrumental piece with a Mediterranean vibe. What's a nightwhale doing there?

And so I have no idea what this concept album is doing, at least outside the cinematic section late on, from Circo Inferno to Into the Nightwhale. However, as individual songs and pieces of music, with any idea of concept ruthlessly ignored, there's some tasty stuff here. Found and Lost is a hugely evocative piece, with its delicate harp, keyboard swells and sultry saxophone. Circo Inferno is wild abandon, life as immediate as only a carny can pitch it. All at Sea is immersive, a piece of music as easy for us to see as hear. And Ghost Moon and Living Love, as soft as it is, is exquisite, surely the best song here, even if others are far more eager to have us vote for them.

Now, am I going to wake up three weeks from now with a cartoon light bulb glowing over my head because I've suddenly realised what it's about? I doubt it but I like it anyway.

Persefone - Lingua Ignota Part I (2024)

I've never heard Persefone before, but they've been around long enough to still have a MySpace page, having been formed back in 2001 with seven albums to their credit thus far. They hail from Andorra, a new country to Apocalypse Later Music because it only contains about 80,000 people, few of whom are likely to be in metal bands. In fact, only two of the six musicians here are locals, with three more from neighbouring Spain and one from Portugal, but, just on their own, they're enough to drop the ratio of rock musicians to people to 1:40,000, which is pretty decent. I'm sure I'm also only just scratching the surface of what's going on in Andorra too.

They're a progressive metal band who sound very modern, especially in early tracks, which means that the aspects of modern metal that I like the least are here in djenty rhythms and shouty core vocals, but there's a lot more here than that, especially as the EP grows. There are five tracks on offer, though Sounds and Vessels is clearly an intro to One Word, so it should really count as four. Those two are probably the most modern and also my least favourite, but they display a majestic build in an almost ritual way, the band especially focusing on one line as a mantra and growing it from whispers to screams.

The vocalist, Daniel Rodriguez Flys, is also the new singer in Eternal Storm, a fascinating Spanish melodic death metal band who have a new album out that I'm looking forward to hearing. He was not on their previous one, Come the Tide, which was my album of the month in September 2019, in my book, a level above the latest Tool album that Loudwire is touting the album of the year. He's a bit shouty here for my tastes but there's also a versatility to his voice that takes him into plenty of other styles too.

It's presumably his whispers that kick off Sounds and Vessels, building to shouts and then back, as the music behind him follows suit, initially piano and bouncy electronica until they bouncy turns ominous and the song launches into major crunch. Everything's jagged, as you might expect from a modern prog metal band, but it's also very controlled. That all expands further in One Word, as technical and jagged but with a lot more atmosphere behind it. It's all bigger and more, with fast sections and a deeper choral take on the chorus courtesy of what may be multiple voices and may be post production effects, probably both, emphasising how elegantly it all swells.

Most of what I like about One Word and not so much of what I don't like continues on into the trio of remaining songs. The Equable keeps the jagged rhythms but alternates its vocals between that shouty core style and a bulky clean chorus. There's lovely delicate guitarwork and an atmospheric keyboard to wrap it up. Lingua Ignota opens with that choral approach, a folky tune turning angry, and it works the fundamental contrast that so often drives Persefone between calm and confident and hurt and aggressive better than anything else here. Again, the ending is surely the best part, but here the ending stretches to a few minutes of the seven and a half that it runs.

And that leaves Abyssal Communications, which continues the flow of gradually weeding out the shouty aspects to their natural extreme, which is to cut out the metal almost entirely. This opens mellow, the vocals clean and pleading. It grows too, of course, as everything here does, but in the way we might expect from a new wave song rather than a modern metal song, but a suitably prog new wave song at that. Flys continues his shift from my least favourite aspect of the band's sound to my favourite. He finds some deliciously smooth notes here, all the more so because for them he ditches the hint of grit and edge that he employs on the rest of the song. It's fascinating stuff.

Regular readers know that, while I'm open to every aspect of rock and metal and actively seek out the newer and more unusual places that the genres visit, I'm not generally a fan of that particular modern metal sound that's epitomised in djent and core vocals, when that's all a band does. It's a limitation thing for me. Djent turns riffs into rhythms so removes the other cool things that riffs do and shouty core vocals usually aim for aggression above all but almost always feel artificial. As an entire sound, that's limiting, but as a particular colour paint on an artist's palette, it can be an opportunity for contrast when used appropriately against other colours.

And that's what I hear in Persefone's sound. The sheer movement from Sounds and Vessels, easily the most limited piece here, to Abyssal Communication, easily the smoothest, makes for quite the fascinating journey. Inevitably, my favourite songs are the ones partway, because it's never about the destination. I might go with Lingua Ignota over The Equable today but I might reverse that on another day. Both are diverse and immersive, two things that I ache to find in progressive metal, and Abyssal Communication serves as a comedown from both. I presume Persefone will release a Lingua Ignota Part II sometime soon and I'm looking forward to it.

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