Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: 2024

Monday 6 May 2024

Glass Island - Lost Media (2024)

Country: Poland
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Apr 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

If you asked me which country's prog rock I'm most keen to hear more of, I'd have to toss a coin to decide between Norway and Poland. Both are apparently full of excellent prog rock bands and it's always a joy to discover another one. Glass Island were founded in 2019 by Wojciech Pielużek, who occasionally collaborates with other musicians but wrote and performed everything on this album himself. It's the fourth Glass Island album, each arriving a year apart, with a prior EP from 2020. It does rather a lot within its fifty minutes, making it an album to enjoy on a first listen but dive into deeper on multiple further times through to appreciate it fully.

The sound is fascinating because it finds an elusive balance between imaginative and commercial. Almost Human opens with chimes and builds through infectious riffs, on both guitar and bass, but also drops into neat textures here and there. It's entirely instrumental and fundamentally driven by riffs for five minutes before Pielużek briefly solos on guitar and finally adds vocals. Suddenly it becomes a song and it's one with a catchy chorus. Just trust in me, I'm almost human. I'm seeing a lot of bands open albums with ten minute plus songs lately and they keep nailing them.

There are definitely different aspects to what Pielużek is doing here. The most commercial aspect is his somoth and friendly voice, which takes the fore on False Memories but gets oddly laid back on A Different Kind of Tomorrow and Credulous, almost like he's singing Britpop and Four-Letter Words is almost perky. It's an easy voice to listen to, whatever he's doing with it, and he's fluent enugh in English that I rarely caught an accent, but I'd still suggest that he thinks of himself as a multi-instrumentalist before a lead singer, not because he's lacking in the latter department but because he particularly excels at the former.

As a guitarist, he has a knack for generating catchy riffs that would often work in a hard rock band, never mind a progressive one. There are a few of those in the first half of Almost Human, a strong one to wrap up A Different Kind of Tomorrow and others dotted around the album. These riffs are bedrock for the more experimental side of what Pielużek does. They make it all accessible, even if we start to wonder about complexity and time signatures and how straightforward this isn't. He's a good soloist too, but he doesn't spend a lot of time with guitar solos, soaring with one on Almost Human, blistering with one on Past the Truth and adding a few very different ones in Stay Under Cover.

Just as we just absorb those riffs and come back later to think about how complex they are, we see the songs in a similar way. As much as I enjoy the catchy melodies and riffs, not to forget the solos, it's the textures that really pull me in. It's those chimes on Almost Human, the weird keyboards in the middle of False Memories that sound like musical steam horns and the glitchy rhythms on Past the Truth that combine with the guitar to remind of Robert Plant's Big Log at points. The song has a completely different direction, ending up almost Pink Floyd, but that texture abides. More than anything, it's especially the entire second half of Stay Under Cover, which is joyous.

This track is a worthy bookend to Almost Human, not only because it's another ten minute gem but because the first five minutes of the album and the last five unfold instrumentally, as if they were always meant to lead us in and take us home. It's the most obviously progressive song here, with a whole slew of different sounds. It opens up slow and langurous, a liquid guitar flowing through the piece, but, after the tasty guitar solo midway, it drops into a texture section with minimal piano in a fascinating battle with the unusual rhythms behind it. Eventually that builds into a fasacinating synth outro and it left me wanting to immediately play that final track again and again.

I liked this album on a first listen, which always helps with prog rock, but liked it all the more on a few repeats, enough to move it up from a 7/10 to an 8/10. And I think that may be the norm for any listeners finding Pielużek and Glass Island through this album. The immediacy of it means that it's highly accessible, while the depth of it means that it's worth exploring too. Keep these Polish prog rock bands coming and do tell me what they're putting in the water over there, because Poland is punching seriously above its weight right now in the genre, as indeed is Norway.

Friday 3 May 2024

Praying Mantis - Defiance (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 19 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I only review new rock and metal at Apocalypse Later and I've often talked about the main reason why I do that. So many of my fellow fans back in the eighties seem to have fallen prey to the belief that "all new music sucks". They're quite clearly wrong and I'd cite the fifteen hundred albums I've reviewed over the past six years as evidence for that. However, those people are also missing out on the fact that some of the bands who they use as examples of why rock music was so much better back then aren't just still going but are putting out their best material now.

Case in point: Praying Mantis. They formed way back in 1974 when I was toddling around causing a lot of heartache for my parents and they only released a sole album back in the day, Time Tells No Lies in 1981. Sure, it's a good one, but I'd suggest their most recent couple of albums are right up there with it, if not above it. That's Katharsis a couple of years ago and Defiance right now. This is a good one on a first listen, which is always a telling sign, but it grows on a second and cements its stature on a third.

The opening three songs explain why. From the Start is a solid opener, lively if not fast, there to be an attention grabber. Defiance is slower but has a majesty that builds it wonderfully, with an epic feel that makes it surprising to realise that it's over in four minutes and change, making it shorter than the opener. That majesty returns in songs like Forever in My Heart or Never Can Say Goodbye and, after a few listens, seems to pervade pretty much everything. Feelin' Lucky ups the tempo to rock out but with an elegance that reminds of the sort of thing we might expect from Demon.

They make for a strong opening, ably setting the stage for what's to come. Before I tell you that a few later songs are better still, let's dive into the acknowledgement that track four is a cover, the old Joe Lynn Turner-era Rainbow classic, I Surrender. It's an excellent version with another superb vocal performance from John Cuijpers and some sumptuous dual guitar work from Tino Troy and Andy Burgess. However, it initially seems rather redundant because it doesn't add anything to an established classic that we already know.

The point is that there's history here. It was written by Russ Ballard and its first release was on a Head East single in 1980. Praying Mantis recorded a version during the Time Tells No Lies sessions in 1981, but they didn't release it on the grounds that Rainbow had just done that. I presume that led to the selection of a Kinks song instead, All Day and All of the Night, for that album and as the second single from it. And so this is the modern day Praying Mantis re-staking their claim to it as a song that fits their style perfectly, which it does.

What's particularly telling is that other songs here, especially Give It Up, unfold in the same style of emphatic arena rock. This is an original and it's not quite as good as I Surrender, but it deserves to be in the same setlist. Forever in My Heart and One Heart would play wonderfully to arena rock fans too, both starting out like power ballads even if only the former stays there. These just ooze with the majesty I talked about earlier, the second adding an elegant acoustic guitar solo during its second half, power chords maintaining the impact behind it. There's some major sustain on the vocals of John Cuijpers on these, not that he skimps on that elsewhere.

That emphasises how he's a real boon to this band nowadays. He's the most recent arrival, joining in 2013 alongside drummer Hans in't Zandt, their decade plus with Praying Mantis cementing how this is easily the most consistent line-up they've ever had. Both simply fit here, even though both are Dutch and the band is English. The instrumental Nightswim is no less worthy an inclusion here for its lack of vocals, but when Cuijpers rips into the next song, Standing Tall, we see just how much he belongs in this band.

I mentioned that, as strong as the opening three songs are, there are better still to come. While I can't resist Forever in My Heart, even being generally put off by power ballads, but Standing Tall is my easy pick for the best song here and my personal favourite. It starts out like Rush and turns into Demon, with a dash of Survivor in the commerciality of its riffs and, as it builds, one of Golden Earring in its incessant drive. That's a catchy keyboard riff but an excellent guitar solo too and the best thing about it is that it manages to be a faster paced rocker without losing the majesty of the slower songs. But there's also Give It Up and Let's See and Never Can Say Goodbye and... let's just say that this is a damn fine album that ends even better than it begins.

What fascinates me the most is that we appear to be in a heyday of classic bands who predated my discovery of rock and metal in 1984 but who are putting out amazing material right now. It seems bizarre to suggest it, but could I come up with a theoretical tour more enticing to me in 2024 than Praying Mantis, Demon and Diamond Head, this band seeming like the missing link between the two? I don't think so, unless we add Weapon too for good measure. Let's revisit that in a few weeks when I review the new Demon album.

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong - Day in Time (2024)

It seems strange, given such a memorable band name, that I haven't heard of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong before, but they've been around since 2009 and this is their seventh album. Clearly I've been missing out. By the way, that name was taken from the description of a scientific experiment in a textbook, but that doesn't mean this is math rock. The Pigeons play funk rock that's almost always driven by the bass of Ben Carrey. The vocals of Greg Ormont are very clean and the sound is often poppy—the earworm chorus in The Town, the obvious single which opens up the album, reminds of Bruno Mars's Uptown Funk—but they also love to jam and I fell into a lot of these guitar solos.

Let's get The Town out of the way quickly, because it's the sort of song that's so infectious that it's easy to just slap that one on repeat and forget that it's actually opening up an album. There are a further ten songs on Day in Time, plus a thirty second outro that sounds like it was ripped from an old and warped cassette. I can't say that any approach The Town on the infectious front, but a few of these songs come close to being as perky, such as the title track and Fall in Place. I had a concert to attend tonight and I had The Town and Day in Time playing in my head all the way there.

Funk rock is usually driven by the bass and Ben Carrey is a thoroughly impressive bedrock for the band to build on. He's there on The Town and Day in Time, of course, but it's impossible to ignore him on Beneath the Surface and Sorcerer, let alone when he's stealing the spotlight with bass solos on tracks like Alright Tonight and Overtime. There are moments dotted here and there on the album, often in the intros to songs, when he doesn't do anything at all and it feels acutely like something's been lost. Fortunately he soon shows up and all is right with the world again.

Once Carrey has set down a bass line, many of these songs are tasked with a pretty basic question as to whether they want to be pop or rock. The more Greg Ormont's vocals nail a melody, the more pop it becomes, whether it's the funk of The Town, the disco of Let the Boogie Out or the reggae of My Own Way. The more Ormont focuses on his guitar and Jeremy Schon joins him—I don't see a credit to divvy up lead and rhythm duties, so I presume they swap them—, the more it turns into a rock album. Just check out Skinner, which doesn't just have the best guitar solo on the album; it's seriously extended because this is a five minute instrumental.

It's how they put those two approaches together to create one sound that makes this band work so well. The clean lines, whether we're talking vocals or guitar, suggest that this is what we might hear if Lenny Kravitz handed his guitar to Eric Clapton and his microphone to Robert Cray. Late in Feelin' Fine, there's a jam that's absolutely glorious but, prior to that, the song is so clean that we'd perhaps be forgiven for assuming that they're aiming for the blandest audience possible—like people who think the sun shines out of Jimmy Buffett's margarita glass—but just can't resist rocking out anyway.

And they rock out a lot here. The Town ought to be too commercial to do that but there's a tasty guitar solo in the second half; Alright Tonight boasts another one; and Day in Time has one more that comes right after a keyboard solo. That's three in three songs and there are a bunch more to enjoy before we get to that instrumental workout on Feelin' Fine eleven tracks in. Add to that an array of extra little touches, like the keyboard flurry late in Day in Time that reminded me of early Marillion; the reggae jangle of the guitars in My Own Way and Fall in Place; or the funky horns in Let the Boogie Out that elevate the whole thing.

It all made me recall a gig review in Kerrang! way back in the late eighties that sent someone to an Allman Brothers gig who clearly had no idea who they were. They fully expected granddad rock and were prepared to sit through it, but they got a blistering jam show instead that utterly blew their mind. That's how I imagine Pigeons Playing Ping Pong gigs to be, with grandmas showing up because they just sound so nice in the background of Murder She Wrote or some such show and hearing tight rocking jams instead that make them question what they've missed over decades.

And I'll shut up now, except to make a note for my future self to figure out what that phrasing is in Overtime that I absolutely recognise but somehow can't place. I listened to a couple of tracks late one evening to see if this was something I'd be up for reviewing. Obviously I was, but what I got on an eleven track album was so much more than I heard in that pair of openers, even though anyone listening to this would have to include The Town as a highlight. I'm one of those, though Skinner is my top pick and Day in Time and Feelin' Fine aren't far behind.

So I may be a little late, but I've caught up with Pigeons Playing Ping Pong and now have six prior albums to seek out. Have you caught up with them yet? You should. Your day will feel better for it.

Thursday 2 May 2024

Leaves' Eyes - Myths of Fate (2024)

It's becoming increasingly difficult to list a country for Leaves' Eyes, who return here with a ninth studio album to follow 2020's The Last Viking. They were formed by Norwegian vocalist Liv Kristine and the line-up of Germany's Atrocity, but there are no longer any Norwegians in the band and, of six members, only three hail from Germany. The lead vocals are handled this time, as last, by Elina Siirala, a Finn; Joris Nijenhuis is a Dutch drummer; and the two replacements for Thorsten Bauer are an Italian, Andre Nasso on bass, and a German, Luc Gebhardt on guitars.

Wherever they're from, they sound excellent on this album. The songs feel a little heavier than on its predecessor but that's not because of any change in songwriting, more because the back end is beefed up a little in the production. It all sounds like it has a little more oomph to it, but what we hear on top of that is the same heavy symphonic metal. Well, mostly, because I'm hearing a little change in the approach too, not least all the folky touches on The Last Viking being restricted to a single track, Einherjar.

For one, even though the production makes this feel a little heavier than last time out, there are fewer harsh vocals from Alexander Krull, now the sole remaining founding member, after Bauer's departure in 2021. There are some on the opener, Forged by Fire, but he focuses on keyboards for Realm of Dark Waves and Who Wants to Live Forever, which become the baseline for this album. I was almost shocked when he leads out Hammer of the Gods, on which he has a lot more to do with his vocals. The same happens with Sons of Triglav, easily his most dominant vocal performance on this album. He's still there, of course, decorating other songs like Fear the Serpent, just less often.

For another, there's less of a choral sound in play this time. Again it's there and indeed it's there on the opener, which features some of the most memorable choral vocals here. There's more still to come in Fear the Serpent, Einherjar and especially Sail with the Dead, but the latter two close out the album and so it's missing far more often than I expected. In Eternity, which boasts a highly prominent woah woah chorus isn't bolstered by other voices the way it could easily have been. It was clearly a deliberate decision to relegate choral vocals deep below Siirala's clean but powerful lead, as well as Krull's occasional harsh vocal.

Now, that doesn't mean that Leaves' Eyes are moving away from symphonic metal. This is clearly symphonic metal through and through. Siirala may not soar all the time but she soars plenty and I'm very happy about how she breaks down when she wants to set a mood and when she wants to show off a little. She's a wonderful lead singer for this band and it's hardly surprising that she's even more of a focus than she was last time. Goddess of the Night is a showcase for her, covering both nuance and power, but my favourite moment is the very first word in Fear the Serpent which she delivers with impeccable relish.

It's probably not coincidental that Goddess of the Night is also the most orchestrated track, with delicate violins to match Siirala's delicate sections and more powerful ones to match her powerful ones. While I'd call out Hammer of the Gods and Forged by Fire as my favourite songs, along with the Viking metal infused Sons of Triglav, Goddess of the Night can't be ignored as a real highlight of the album. It's the softest, subtlist and quietest song here, however much it builds, but it's also perhaps the one we can least ignore. We can fall into the grooves of many of these songs and let them carry us along, most obviously Sons of Triglav and In Eternity, but Goddess of the Night has real demands on our attention. We are commanded to listen.

All that said, it shouldn't surprise that I like this album rather a lot. It's more immediate than its predecessor and it's more consistent, in addition to having that extra boost from the production. However, it's also not taking any risks. Decreasing those harsh vocals and choral backdrops feels like a backward step. Symphonic metal is a genre that's particularly easy to identify because the bands who forged it are so similar that they can sound interchangeable. Leaves' Eyes have always been a little different, obviously compatible and similar but never the same, perhaps inevitably given their origins in a gothic singer and a grindcore band. However, these changes feel like they may be moving them closer to the norm and that may be a mistake.

Grains - Grains (2024)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Electronic/Space Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from down under. Grains, who hail from Wellington, which marks as far south as you can go and remain in a capital city, apparently started out as a duo playing synth ambience but they bulked up 2021 to a five piece band. They're primarily electronic, but they run quite the gamut within that. How? opens up as almost new wave, like Tangerine Dream with some welcome throat singing. I am loving how that's travelling far from Mongolia nowadays. Then Ever adds a beat and starts to explore the potential of what five guys playing these instruments can do.

I like Ever, which is over in fewer than five minutes but still moves from pop music into space rock and on into something more esoteric. Sometimes this feels acutely poppy, especially early in Unco and Flying Saucer, which appears to be an old piece of music condensed a little for this, their debut album. There's disco on Unco and there's new wave on Flying Saucer, but both evolve elsewhere. In the former, electric guitars float around deep underneath the synths and gradually surface as the piece runs on. That's quite a tasty solo building towards the two minute mark and a neatly delicate section just after four.

The latter is one of the two epics the album has to offer, L.O.T.A.F! being the other one. Any track here could easily have been extended far past its actual running time, but Grains only allow some extended exploration on these two. They do think about it on Unco too, which almost reaches the seven minute mark, but they haul it back in well before it can sprawl out of control. Flying Saucer starts out poppier than usual, a very old school lead synth backed by far more modern synths, but it also gets heavier than usual late in its first half and again during its second.

If it wasn't for the overt guitars midway through L.O.T.A.F!, then Flying Saucer would feature the poppiest and heaviest moments of the album, which ought to give a good idea of how far it shifts over its eight and a half minutes. And that's a good thing. Anything that trawls in space rock even as a component really ought to take the listener on a journey and I got that the most here on this one highly versatile track. L.O.T.A.F! took me on a journey too but a much darker one that isn't to out there but to in here, which gets experimental and claustrophobic.

It's the longer pieces that connect with me the most, the two epics but also Unco and, after them, the closer, Succession II, which is pure electronic rock in the seventies tradition but introduced to space rock and with layers of extra electronic chirps. It's like walking into a maximalist spaceship control room with ADHD. This one's only five and a half minutes long, which isn't sprawling for the fourth longest piece on an instrumental electrona album. I say instrumental, by the way, because not one of these pieces involves the delivery of lyrics but there are vocals here, whether they're recorded or sampled, just occasional vocalisations and that throat singing on How?

That's not to say that the shorter pieces don't work, but they're far less ambitious. How? sets the scene and Ever is an introduction to where we might be going. Pans is more than a pleasant interlude, but for half its running time it seems to be exactly that. It does get more interesting in its second half but I don't think it quite figures out what it wants to be. And Succession I is evocative from its very first moments, as if it's dumped us into a rainforest and we have to figure out which one. However, it's easily the shortest piece here and it never answers the questions it asks. Succession II seems a lot more confident about shifting to answers within a couple of seconds.

I like this a lot and it's easy to get completely subsumed by it, but how substantial it really is may depend on many further listens. Grains have been around for a few years now, with their earliest recordings issued in 2019 on a single called ζ, the Greek letter zeta. Back then, they were the duo of Calum Turner and Peregrin Hyde. Nowadays, there are five of them, with additional cello from a couple of guests. However, I'm expecting that Turner and Hyde still provide the bulk of this on a selection of synthesisers and sequencers. The rest flesh out the sound into something more. Lets see where they go from here, because I have a feeling that they're going to keep evolving.

Wednesday 1 May 2024

Týr - Battle Ballads (2024)

It's been five years since a Týr album and they're touring again. My son got to see them recently in Mesa and he thought they were solid, even though he was personally there to see Trollfest again, who were one of their support bands. Now, five years may not seem like a long time but that's the beforetimes on the other side of COVID, so it's a long time indeed. The only time they've taken as long between albums before was the previous gap, between 2013's Valkyrja and 2019's Hel, which was twice as long as any gap before it, so this may be the new normal.

If so, then material needs to be pretty strong and, while this is certainly a reliable and enjoyable album, it rarely seems to ache to knock my socks off, unlike Hel, which was infused with energy to do precisely that. This feels a little more relaxed to me, but it's slowly building on me. Hammered is a decent opener, but Unwandered Ways is better still, nailing the melody and the bounce, and Dragons Never Die almost matches it. Row has a tasty rhythm, which it really ought to have given that it's a rowing song. Given that, I'm not sure that it should speed up at the end, but maybe this is competitive rowing rather than raiding foreign shores.

And that's the first chunk of the album, because this doesn't break naturally into two sides. These first four songs are all sung in English and they all do much the same thing in different ways with varying degrees of success. Later on, skipping over two tracks for now, the third chunk features a set of three more of these. These seven tracks comprise the core of this album, even if they fall on either side of its heart.

After them is the closer, Causa Latronum Normannorum, which stands pretty much on its own. It's an interesting song, because it's slower than those seven default mode tracks, the fast drumming of Tadeusz Rieckmann aside. It's initially sung in what I presume is Faroese, then shifts to Latin, so it definitely takes a different approach there. And it flaunts itself, building more sedately with an effortless ease, as if it's impressing on us how powerful it is so that we don't try anything. I like it.

However, I like the two tracks in the very middle of the album even more. They're notably different from each other but they sit well together because they're both sung in Faroese (or is it Icelandic, as Google Translate seems to think?) and, maybe in part because of that, they feel more authentic. However, I have a feeling that they'd feel more authentic even if they weren't. The other songs are new, of course, and they feel like they're new songs. I don't know for a fact that these are new too, but I have no reason to believe that they aren't, other than they feel timeless, like they could be a pair of five hundred year old classics given a modern day Týr treatment.

Torkils døtur (Torkil's Daughter) is a ballad, though it does bulk up late on, but there's a real power to it. The guitars are acoustic for the longest time and they're delightfully delicate in comparison to to the rest of the album. However, the vocals quickly take over and everything feels naturally harmonised, like it's not one voice but thirty singing so closely in unison that it becomes a single enhanced one. It's also orchestrated, in ways it certainly wouldn't be in a Faroese inn, but the approach works. I find it an impossible song to resist, even if I have no idea what they're telling me.

Vælkomnir føroyingar isn't a ballad, but it carries the same sort of heritage to it, just translated a lot deeper into modern day folk metal. Maybe Torkils døtur is an actual Faroese folk song whereas Vælkomnir føroyingar is merely the most successful new song here at tapping into that tradition. It's easily my favourite track, that harmonised vocal approach continuing but with a more obvious merger of clean voice over harsh voice, singing the same words. The melodies are more effortless than even Unwandered Ways and the whole thing is always over far too quickly for me. I feel like I could be carried along by this one forever. Given that it translates to Welcome Guests, that seems rather appropriate.

Where this leaves me is that my favourite two songs are the ones not sung in English. Lead singer Heri Joensen is clearly fluent and he delivers very well indeed in English, but there's an element here in the Faroese songs that simply isn't there in the English language ones, one that's typical for folk metal, of course. If there's a subgenre of metal that values native language more, then I don't know what it is. I like everything on this album, but I like some of it a lot more than the rest and the rest means the majority.

Are Týr trying too hard to find a more mainstream sound and losing a little of themselves in the process? Let's see how the next album turns out in what I'm now guessing will be five or six years from now.

About Us - Take a Piece (2024)

Country: India
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram

I reviewed the self-titled debut album from About Us in 2022 and pretty much everything I said in that review holds true here. Most notably, they have a truly bizarre mix of styles that sometimes works really well and sometimes leaves me wondering why. This sort of mix simply isn't done and for good reasons, because the fanbases for some of the different styles on offer here tend to hate the other styles. However, they've doubled down on this sort of thing since that debut, so it must be working for them.

They start us in relatively easy, with an opener in Come to You that's half heavy/power metal and half melodic rock. Their base style remains melodic rock, which is why they're on Frontiers, but it's fair to say that I doubt anyone else on Frontiers sounds like this. There are plenty of bands on that label who play melodic rock and plenty more who play power metal and perhaps a few that sound like both put together. However, I can't name another one who adds nu and alt metal into the mix, as About Us promptly do on Endure.

Come to You is fundamentally a melodic rock song with the sort of melodies we expect built on the sort of structure we expect, but it's bulked up with beefier guitars and notably fast drumming. I'm pretty sure Yanni Ennie is using a double bass approach here, which I don't believe I've ever heard in a melodic rock band before. Sochan Kikon takes on an escalating metal vocal at the very end of the song too. Endure, though, is melodic rock with a Hot Topic filter laid prominently over it like a blanket. Renlamo Lotha and Pona Kikon shift their guitars to rhythmic monotone riffs and djenty chords and both Sochan Kikon and whoever's adding backing vocals go trendy harsh. However, the solos are back to power metal again.

Legion mixes those approaches, building from an elegant power metal intro to djenty verses and back into power metal choruses, the melodic rock not as clear but still there in the structure, and the majority of these tracks continue to mix these approaches in different amounts. Fire with Fire is more melodic rock but with grungier guitars and Sochan Kikon singing clean but with more grit and, at the very end, another metal scream. EVH is bouncy hard rock with much more prominent keyboards from Renbomo Yanthan, so it's AOR with a little crunch. This one could easily be heavy Journey. Beautiful Misery is melodic rock that ramps up to power metal but with those alt metal touches when that sort of middle finger attitude is warranted.

About Us hail from Wokha, which is so far to the northeast of India that it's far closer to Myanmar than the majority of India, so I wonder what their local music scene sounds like. It's not the usual home for a rock band of any description, so maybe rock fans there are more accepting of this sort of wild mix. If Journey and Blind Guardian and Avenged Sevenfold are all simply rock bands there and a notable change from Bollywood soundtracks and traditional Indian music, then a band like About Us makes total sense. Here in the west, where trad metal and alt metal have two separate fanbases, especially outside the US, About Us make us wonder a lot more.

What I can say is that they're highly capable. Sochan Kikon sounds effective whatever style he's adopting at any particular moment. Check out the guitar solos in Reels for Eternity and Hope to see what a double act like Lotha and Pona Kikon can do. Ennie impresses throughout, even if it sometimes feels as if he'd be more comfortable in an extreme metal band. Yanthan rarely takes the spotlight, which holds true for bassist Soren Kikon, a third Kikon in this band, but they both deliver exactly what they need to do to support these songs.

I'm going with another 7/10 here, as I did with the About Us debut. This feels a little heavier over a forty minute stretch but it hasn't lost its melodic rock roots, especially with a thoroughly melodic song like Fortitude wrapping things up, even if Sochan Kikon gets edgy at points and there's a nice slow and heavy section early in the second half. My least favourite songs are the ones that venture deepest into the nu metal approach, Endure and Legion among them, but they stay varied too, so I'm not desperately upset. Later songs, like Hope and Beautiful Misery, strike a better balance for me, mostly unfolding in traditional melodic fashion but with the occasional edgy texture.

What I don't hear yet is something new coming out of this merger. It still sounds like a merger of two very different sounds coexisting on the same album. Maybe, if About Us keep knocking these albums out, they'll find a way to make the two sounds feel like one, at which point they'll certainly have staked out a very new claim within the genre. Best of luck to them!

Tuesday 30 April 2024

The Obsessed - Gilded Sorrow (2024)

This may be an odd confession to make, but I don't believe that I've ever heard the Obsessed. I've heard their lead singer and lead guitarist, Scott 'Wino' Weinrich, because he fronted Saint Vitus in the late eighties and he appeared on Dave Grohl's overlooked Probot album. However, while he formed this band as far back as 1979, it only released some demos and a single before he joined Saint Vitus. After his time in that band, he reformed the Obsessed but their albums showed up in the early nineties when life was taking over from music for me.

If I ever heard them, it would be the track that was on Metal Massacre VI, but I don't recall it, so I get to finally catch up through their fifth album. The first three came out between 1990 and 1994 and four arrived another split and reformation later in 2017, soon before I started up Apocalypse Later Music. Clearly I need to go back to those earlier albums because I like this, not that it shocks me at all. What surprises me is that it took this long for me to catch up.

Well, there's another surprise in store with the opening couple of tracks, Daughter of an Echo and It's Not OK, because they're perky doom, downtuned but up tempo and I'd somehow got it into my brain that the Obsessed played more traditional doom but with punk influences. Maybe they did. I wasn't there. I like these tracks, though, which do have a punk energy to them but are played with metal precision. That punk energy extends to Wino's vocals, because the perkier a song gets, the more conversational he becomes in his delivery. Not everything adopts that approach here but it returns as an approach in Jailine.

That all changes on Realize a Dream, which starts out aiming to set a mood and shifts into more of a hard rock sound. The tone is the same, but the influence is less Black Sabbath and more the Cult, just slower, as if it's a single played at 33rpm instead of 45. Accordingly, Wino sings this song more than converses with us. Jailine is even more obviously Cult-inspired, with some Danzig in there for good measure and even a hint of Sisters of Mercy in the chorus too. It's all downtuned though and back to perky doom. It's a heady mixture and I like it a lot.

The title track is much slower and more overtly doom, with vocals that start out spoken word and endowing it with an epic wasteland feel. Maybe it and the similarly slow but bouncier Stoned Back to the Bomb Age and Wellspring are what I was expecting from the Obsessed. The former is bleak but the latter slow bounces with Wino returning to conversational vocals, loose but always firmly on point, even throwing in dismissive laughter in Stoned Back to the Bomb Age when the lyrics ask for it. It's not a happy song, raging against politicians.

There's more variety late in the album, with Lucky Free Nice Machine closing out like a hard rock guitar solo. It's only a minute long and it's entirely instrumental, Wino's guitar taking a moment in the spotlight but the rhythm section of doom bolstering him wonderfully. None of them are old time members, though drummer Brian Constantino was on that previous album, Sacred, having joined in 2016. Jason Taylor on rhythm guitar and Chris Angleberger on bass both arrived in 2022. Before it, Yen Sleep goes back to traditional doom, plodding along with just enough bounce to be engaging rather than bleak. It features my favourite guitar solo of any of these songs.

Oddly, though, given how much I like traditional doom and dip happily into funeral doom, most of my favourite songs here are the perky ones, most obviously It's Not OK and Jailine. I'm also fond of Realize a Dream and Yen Sleep, two very different tracks indeed. That means that, while I have finally heard an Obsessed album, I'm not entirely sure which of these sounds is their core one and I really ought to go back and dip into the earlier ones to see where this came from.

The Dame - II (2024)

Into the Wastelands starts out with a fuzzy guitar that made me think this might be stoner rock, even if it came labelled as prog. But then the lead vocal of vocalist Marian van Charante kicks in and prog suddenly appears to be a fair description. She's a charismatic vocalist who sings with relish. I now understand why so many other singers seem to missing out on intonation because she has all of it. Her delivery is theatrical and feels like it comes from jazz and musical theatre, but she has power that's straight out of rock and it makes for a heady combination.

I should add that this is the second album from the Dame, but it's their last with van Charante. It's been years in the making so, even though she's left the band and new singer Elianne Ernst has stepped in to replace her, it's still van Charante on this album, as it was on the Dame's debut, Losing Sight of What You Want, six years ago. I don't know what Ernst sounds like, but it feels like van Charante has stamped her personality onto this band, who are a varied bunch, I'm guessing, given where the music behind her goes.

Into the Wastelands is an ambitious opener, nudging past twelve minutes and it travels through a lot of musical territory in that time: playful pop rock, imaginative prog rock, a trippy psychedelic midsection and even a couple of heavier parts at points where the guitars flirt with metal crunch. There's a patient guitar solo seven and a half minutes in and a far more ambitious one either side of nine. This piece does a heck of a lot in those twelve minutes. And then All in Good Reason does something completely different.

In fact, the constant here is change, because, while some of these songs share sonic components and some actively lead into others, none of the six tracks on offer really sound like each other. It's consistent in tone, so nothing ever seems jarring, except the fact that van Charante often sounds as if she wandered into the studio from a smoky jazz club and wants to take a stab at rock music, especially on All in Good Reason and Momentary Inn. However, that's really a one time problem. Either you don't get it, in which case this isn't for you, or you're on board immediately and firmly open to the potential of what it might do. I'm in the latter camp.

Even though All in Good Reason sounds like dark jazz, I kept catching a Black Sabbath influence in the structure. Ozzy could sing this. Sure, it would sound completely different but it would fit what he does too, at least until it gets overtly musical theatre. Momentary Inn wouldn't. Two thirds of the way in, All in Good Reason turns into prog metal and van Charante, who I presume is Dutch, is suddenly very English. Momentary Inn shifts between delicate jazz piano and overt prog song. All that Rumbles opens with similarly delicate piano but there's also a driving electronic beat pulsing at us and that totally changes the feel.

That leaves Overwhelming Silence and Disentangling, which initially seem to be connected but go to very different places. The former is the quietest song on offer in one sense, being entirely voice and piano, but it's also the most vehement, because van Charante seems to be unburdening and there's a lot to dump. It's a subtly powerful piece. The latter initially continues that but it's nine minutes of growth and it builds substantially over that time. My favourite guitar solo comes during the finalé of this one, though I'm also rather fond of the one midway through Momentary Inn. Disentangling is also the epic of the album, even if it's shorter than Into the Wastelands.

And, given that I've only mentioned van Charante thus far, naturally so as the most unusual element but a single piece in a puzzle nonetheless, I should cover who else made this. Those solos are courtesy of Stephen de Ruijter, who handles the lead guitars here, with van Charante handling rhythm, acoustic and electric. The delicate piano (and indeed other forms of piano, given where else it goes late on Momentary Inn) is the work of Thijs de Ruijter, including a late section of All that Rumbles that moves into New Order territory. And that leaves Michel Krempel on bass, who may be most obvious on heavier sections but is also a key part of All That Rumbles, which relies on him even when everyone else steps back.

I like most of my new music to sound original but that's tripled for prog rock. It's supposed to be a progressive genre that explores new sounds and new combinations of existing ones. What I hear from the Dame is something I haven't heard anywhere else, so they're doing this right. I'd love to hear their next album to see where they're going to take this sound with Elianne Ernst.

Monday 29 April 2024

Rage - Afterlifelines (2024)

Rage are one of the few metal bands from the eighties to survive to the present day without any blips in service, having stayed together as Rage since 1986, plus another three more years before that if we count their time as Avenger. They've always been prolific as well, this counting as their twenty-seventh studio album, but they appear to be bursting at the seams with new material, so much so that I actually missed their 2021 album, Resurrection Day, after enjoying 2020's Wings of Rage enough to give it a highly recommended 8/10. I did cover Spreading the Plague, their 2022 EP, though, and I didn't want to miss this double album, their first such, even if I'm a month late.

After a deceptively soft intro, In the Beginning, they shift instantly to full gear for End of Illusions and Under a Black Crown and we're off and running. I talked about their particular balancing act in my review of Wings of Rage, how they're often "up tempo without being thrash, heavy without being death, powerful without losing melody." That phrase applies to these openers and to many others as the album runs on, such as one of my personal highlights, Dead Man's Eyes, which also adds a little death metal crunch. There are a few hints at extreme metal here that remain hints only, especially through harsh moments in songs like Dead Man's Eyes and Lifelines.

Other songs drop the pace a little, never too much, remaining heavy but maintaining their sense of melody. Afterlife, Mortal and Toxic Waves fit that bill and they're just as tasty as the fast ones. Waterwar shifts between the two modes, mostly staying in the slower mode but punctuating the verses with a neatly fast machine gun riff, almost a call and response with vocalist Peavy Wagner. This is another highlight for me, aided by a strong guitar solo from Jean Bormann. I've liked this new Rage with two guitarists, but Stefan Weber has gone on hiatus for health reasons, so they're temporarily back to being a trio for now, with Bormann handling both lead and rhythm.

The double album is broken up into two albums with different names, Afterlife and Lifelines. The former, from In the Beginning to Life Among the Ruins eleven tracks in, that includes everything I mentioned above except Lifelines, is consistently strong with a few highlights: Dead Man's Eyes, Waterwar and a third called Justice Will Be Mine, which is a clear single with an emphasised melody that's almost Celtic in nature and a neat slow heavy section in the build up to the finalé. Not everything is up to that quality but there are no bad tracks here and I wouldn't call any average either. All are good heavy/power metal songs, with some of them merely a little better than others.

The second album continues in the same vein except that there's an extra element in play that's a tasty addition. That's made obvious in Cold Desire, which kicks it off, beginning with sassy violins and piano that don't disappear when the song launches into the usual mode, those violins happy to hang around in the background to keep playfulness in power. And they continue on throughout the rest of the album, with orchestrations woven into the sound by pianist Marco Grasshoff. That isn't a new approach for Rage, who collaborated with the Prague Symphony Orchestra on Lingua Mortis in 1996 and continued to include orchestration from the Lingua Mortis Orchestra on later albums, like XIII, Ghosts and Speak of the Dead.

I'm all for that approach, for which Rage should be credited as pioneers, and there are a host of neat touches on this second disc that are emphasised or indeed created by the violins and piano. However, I found the songs a little less effective on the whole than on Afterlife. There are obvious exceptions, like Cold Desire and the highly ambitious Lifelines itself which are highlights for me, but there are fewer of them and the lesser material isn't as strong. I should call out Dying to Live too, which is a ballad that turns into a power ballad but, shock horror, sounds good to me.

Much of the reason Dying to Live works is the vocal performance of Peavy Wagner. He's never had the best voice in rock music in the traditional sense and I'm sure a vocal coach could find all sorts of little issues to highlight, but he has a strong balance between power and melody that any band like Rage need to thrive so I've never cared. However, he sells Dying to Live by endowing it with an emotional lead vocal through plenty of nuance. He continues that into The Flood and it's there on the final track, In the End, too, Bormann joining him for good measure.

In the end, I think I have to go with a 7/10 for this and feel a little guilty about it. There's a lot here that's worthy of an 8/10 but I don't think it's quite consistent enough over nearly ninety minutes to warrant that. There's well over an album's worth of really good material here, so I'm tempted but there are enough other songs here to pull it back down. Maybe I'd have gone 8/10 for Afterlife but a 7/10 for Lifelines, the result being the sort of 7.5/10 that I don't give out. Really, though, to keep me debating that after ninety minutes ought to tell you that this is worthy.

Full Earth - Cloud Sculptors (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something special and notably ambitious from Norway. Few bands tend to start out their debut albums with twenty-one minute instrumental jams, even within the psychedelic rock world. Fewer follow it up with a twenty minute title track. That's an album right there, but precious few keep on going, delivering four more tracks, none of them quite as long as those openers but two more making it past ten, with the second part of the opener bookending the album and pushing that track to almost thirty-five minutes alone. There are eighty-five minutes of music here.

Of course, that's exactly what Full Earth do here and they had me completely riveted by the end of that first piece of music, Full Earth Pt I: Emanation. I wasn't immediately sold, as the drums are pretty routine as it kicks off and the guitars are clearly repetitive, but everything builds and I do mean seriously builds. I had to temporarily ignore the rest of the album by starting it over again the moment it ended. The first step up is around the two minute mark, then again at three and a half, once more at four and a half and over and over again until I was totally mesmerised by all its swirling chaos.

There are five musicians in Full Earth and they play the typical rock instruments—Ask Vatn Strøm on guitars, Simen Wie on bass and songwriter Ingvald Vassbø on drums, with both Wie and Eskild Myrvoll adding additional guitars—but two of them are also credited on different keyboards and the fifth member, Øystein Aadland, provides a whole bunch of them. This is like we're watching an entire galaxy form and develop and eventually explode. There's much to take in but it's glorious. I'm not at all surprised to find that Vassbø is playing with Motorpsycho nowadays, as well as being a long-standing member of Kanaan, along with Strøm and Myrvoll.

The section that kicks in at around 13:45 when Wie's bass introduces a heavy riff and Vassbø starts improvising drum fills but the keyboards continue to dance is breathtakingly good and that's not my only favourite section. There's already been a gorgeous step up in pace that shows up around eleven minutes and the finalé is wonderful too. Much of this is built on repetition and slow build, so there are ritual and trancelike elements to it, but there are solos all over the place too, from both guitars and keyboards, and so this never quite falls into drone territory.

However, that influence is definitely there and so are a host of others. Their Bandcamp page has a few names listed on that front, not just stoner rock bands like Sleep, Elder and High on Fire, but a collection of minimalist and avant-garde composers too, both ones I know like Terry Riley and the incomparable Györgi Ligeti and ones I don't like James Ferraro and Onehotrix Point Nevers, who are names I clearly must check out. These are cited as inspirations for the two short organ pieces, Weltgeist and Echo Tears, but there's experimentation in the middle of Cloud Sculptors.

Talking of Cloud Sculptors, the title track feels like whatever deity we're playing here pressed the zoom button and whipped inward to focus on a single planet. It isn't ours, as the fluttering flutes and liquescent guitar paints an alien landscape dominated by frolicking butterflies and keening land whales. The drums vanish entirely at points to reflect a King Crimson influence, but that wild and fascinating midsection is something else again, feeling like the pulsing of a planet that may be bursting at the seams.

I have to admit to feeling that this was my long overdue first 9/10 for the year during the opener, but I started to think during The Collective Unconscious that it's the first contender for my album of the year, because, once this one gets going, it's even better than the opener.

I had wondered a little because Weltgeist is a plodding ambient organ piece, almost a turn based improvisation with notes shifting up and down on a particularly ruthless beat (Echo Tears is more of a Philip Glass rhythmic effort), and The Collective Unconscious starts out in a similar vein, but it grows a few minutes in with some sumptuous seventies organ that brings King Crimson promptly back to mind. That gives way to searing guitar solos and a bludgeoning road home that brings up scale again, one way or another. I can't tell if I'm a galaxy watching a neighbour form or one single cell watching a human body evolve around me, but it seems utterly momentous. There's more of that in the closer, Full Earth Pt II: Disintegration.

And, beyond sounding momentous, this is energy-infusing stuff. I haven't felt particularly down at all this week and I've been getting stuff done, but I feel thoroughly revitalised listening to this. It will be hard to move on from it.

Friday 12 April 2024

Blue Öyster Cult - Ghost Stories (2024)

Nineteen years elapsed between Blue Öyster Cult's thirteenth album, Curse of the Hidden Mirror, and their fourteenth, The Symbol Remains, so we probably shouldn't complain that it took merely four to get to number fifteen. However, this is supposedly their final studio effort, which makes it a little more worrying that it's not made up of new material. Well, it's new to us but it isn't to the band because, with one exception, it's material left off three older albums from the seventies and eighties. That exception is the closer, If I Fell, a Beatles cover, that they recorded in 2016.

The good news is which three albums we're talking about, because they're ones that contain huge songs. The oldest is Spectres from 1977, the home of Godzilla. Then there's 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin, which gave us Burnin' for You. Finally, there's The Revölution by Night, originally released in 1983, which features arguably their most underrated song ever, Shooting Shark. The bad news is that these songs were clearly left off those albums for a reason. They're not bad songs, not really, though some are just there. However, few of them could fairly argue about not being included on those albums, even if BÖC diehards consider them "lost gems", as the press releases suggest.

The best of them to me are almost bookends. Late Night Street Fight is a strong opener that has some real funk to it, not only through the prominent bass of Joe Bouchard, who isn't in the band now but was back then. Don't Come Running to Me almost at the end of the album, with only that Beatles cover still to come. It feels raw but I don't mind that, because there's an edge to it and I'm not certainly averse to BÖC with an edge. It's especially good because the edge isn't just courtesy of the guitars, which deliver some wonderful power chords, but also the drums, presumably from Albert Bouchard. These are the two that live up to the "lost gems" suggestion in my book.

Of course neither Bouchard brother is in the band any more, even if Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma are, and that leads to another odd feeling. We might think that the final album from a legendary band like Blue Öyster Cult ought to showcase their final line-up as a goodbye but this one doesn't, even if Richie Castellano, who's played keyboards and rhythm guitar with them since 2007, stepped in to plug some holes in the partial recordings, just as Joe Bouchard recorded a new lead vocal on So Supernatural, even if he isn't in the band. These weren't all complete songs in the archives. It's likely that most were partial recordings that needed not just remastering but completing.

Three of the songs are covers and they're all decent enough, but none of them does anything new that the originals didn't. Sure, there's a wonderful seventies organ sound on We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the old Animals classic, but Kick Out of the Jams is just there, even if it was a favourite on stage. It's not a patch on the MC5 orignial. The third is that newer take on If I Fell, an odd choice from the Beatles catalogue, from way back in 1964 on their A Hard Day's Night album. It's the shortest song on offer here and it's a studio jam done acoustically that feels a little out of place. It certainly couldn't have been placed anywhere else on the album.

Some of the other songs are worthy of note, even if they don't sit up there with the two highlights. Cherry aches to be commercial from the outset and unfolds in harmonies. It's like the Beach Boys doing old time rock 'n' roll, except there's a jangle to the guitar that they'd never sanction. Shot in the Dark starts out with a minute of intro that's spoken word monologue over piano jazz, as if the band were hanging out in a lounge bar. And talking of lounge, The Only Thing is extra-smooth, like it's a psychedelic disco lounge ballad. I'm not unhappy that I heard these, but I can see why they're not on those old albums.

The rest are just there, not particularly bad but without anything notable to add. They'd all count as filler on a regular album and so didn't make it onto stronger albums. Some of them could have served as B-sides for singles, though Soul Jive seems like an idea that hasn't been developed yet, even with whatever was done in the studio to finish these songs up. The only other song I ought to talk about is So Supernatural, the one with Joe Bouchard's new vocal. It felt weak to me initially, but it builds well and I found myself getting into it more and more as it ran on. Tellingly, listening afresh took me through the same cycle each time. The first minute is just there, but the chorus is decent and it gets better and better until it's almost another highlight.

And so this is Blue Öyster Cult's final studio album. It's not bad. It's interesting. It's no classic. The problem for me comes back to that single word: "final". If the band hadn't mentioned that, then I would bet that fans would welcome this a lot more than they seem to be doing. It's decent and it's a look back at a couple of eras in the band's output that could be seen as heydays. Sure, it's clearly an album for the diehards, but it could have reached further. However, weighing it down with that "final" word means that it's the end of a stellar career that's run over half a century and it's not an emphatic goodbye.

Crossdown - Wind Blows Over the Forsaken Land (2024)

Country: Vietnam
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives

I've only reviewed one album from Vietnam at Apocalypse Later and that was back in 2020, so it's about time I covered another one. Oddly, both turn out to be black metal debuts, but otherwise I wouldn't call out a lot of commonality between the two. Elcrost's Benighted & Unrequited covers a lot of musical ground, always playing with contrasts: harsh and clean, intense and ambient, fast and slow. Crossdown don't have any real interest in clean, ambient or slow, though, of course, the songs do vary in tempo, merely from reasonably fast to frantic, with some mosh parts in there for good measure. What they want to do most is blister and they do that for most of nine songs.

According to Metal Archives, there are two musicians in Crossdown, though they also suggest that this album came out on 13th January, 2023. Everything else I'm seeing suggests 12th April, 2024, so I'm reviewing it now, but I guess I need to trust them on who's in the band. Phat Tien Nguyen takes care of the drums and Trung Loki contributes everything else: vocals, guitar and bass. Loki has to be one of the busiest men in Vietnam, partly because he's also in half a dozen other active bands that play various combos of black, death and thrash metal—Brutore, Butchery, Calochivu, Obsess, Rot and Sleeping Hollow—and because he's been half a dozen others in the past, but because he also runs Bloody Chunks Records, who released this album.

He's primarily in black metal mode this time out, as his guitar has a typically vicious black metal edge to it and his vocals form a typical black metal shriek. He barks out these lyrics without a lot of variety, but they do add that higher pitched tone that's needed on this sort of album. His bass rumbles along underneath deepening everything else but without seeking any sort of turn in the spotlight. In fact, there's very little here that wants the spotlight. Every song is more than happy to be there, to blister through its business and then to let the next have its turn.

The overall feel is shifted to the album as a whole, with each song contributing something similar to bolster it. That's why I won't call out any particular tracks for special mention. Go to YouTube or wherever else you look to sample albums. Pick a track. If you like that one, the you're going to like all nine of them. On the other hand, if you don't like it, then this isn't going to be for you and you don't need to listen any further. Maybe I could cite Bizarre Ritual or Immaculate Liar for having a tiny edge over the others, but I'd probably do the same thing with different ones tomorrow.

If there are surprises, they're in Nguyen's drumming and just how many mosh parts add up as the album rolls along. Nguyen's drumming is furious in fast sections and calculated in slower ones. He seems to deliver both styles effortlessly, but he never seems to reach the sort of speeds that the most intense black metal bands thrive on. Maybe it's partly because the mix isn't the cleanest at the lower end, a not uncommon state of affairs for black metal, so the bass drum blurs together with the bass. If there's a double bass pedal here, it's buried deep enough that I had to stretch to imagine it. It may well be just Nguyen having fast feet.

Partly, though it's because Nguyen just doesn't aim for that sort of hyperspeed. And that's where those mosh parts come in. They're right out of thrash when bands slow down and want their pits to churn and, the more I listen to this album, the more I feel like there's a heck of a lot more thrash here than I initially thought. When Crossdown are slow, they fit right in with thrash metal. When they speed up, they feel black but mostly because of the vocals and that guitar tone. They're not a long way from thrash otherwise.

The result is, perhaps inevitably, something that feels black metal from the outset but also highly accessible to thrash fans. Right from the beginning, when Paganist's Revenge blisters out of the gate, it's clearly black metal but there's a short mosh part within its first minute and more on the way later in the song. That repeats across the other eight tracks and I suddenly realised that I was reacting to it in the way I'd react to a thrash album. This is black metal that aims to clean you out rather than paint any sort of picture or push a bleak mood.

That's why I'm going to go with a 7/10 here, even though that matches the Elcrost album and that seems odd. This doesn't sport any of the elegance or subtleties of Elcrost that I was so impressed with back in 2020, but it doesn't try to. It's no nonsense heads down thrash all wrapped up in black metal trimmings and that's all it cares about. It's simply a different thing, even if the genre is the same on the label, and it wants to do something different. I'll happily throw on Elcrost if I want to listen to something impeccably crafted. And I'll happily throw on Crossdown if I just want to shed a lot of latent aggression. Both of those approaches are valid and both bands do the business.

Thursday 11 April 2024

Thor - Ride of the Iron Horse (2024)

Apparently I'm late to the game again. I do know who Jon-Mikl Thor is and what he's done, so I'm not that far behind the curve, but his particular brand of way over the top hard rock/heavy metal antics were so quintessentially eighties in nature that I thought he'd hung up his metal hammer a long time ago. Instead, I keep bumping into his name in periphery. Last time he came up was when I read an excellent interview at the Rialto Report with his ex-wife, who was part of his band under the name of Queen Pantera. Before that, I rewatched Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, a cheesy '80s movie that starred him and his band. It's pretty awful but not without its merits.

And, realistically, that tends to describe what Thor does. While other bands only lean into clichés while they're in vogue and then shun then afterwards, attempting to distance themselves from a very deliberate set of choices they made at particular times, Thor always leans into them. He does what he does and it's always utterly unashamed. That tends to make his music often cringeworthy but sometimes he hits the motherlode and suddenly there are songs that frickin' rock. You might not feel entirely comfortable saying so, but you'll know it and you'll keep spinning those records.

Why I'm late to the game is that he hasn't remotely hung up his hammer and he's celebrating fifty years in the music business. I'm not sure which band he first recorded with, but he played glam in the early seventies in a number of bands like the Ticks, Centaur and Iron Falcon. His first album as Thor was the Keep the Dogs Away in 1977 and, while he's certainly taken breaks over the decades, he's apparently been going strong in the new millennium, with twenty albums out since 1998, in a few instances two or even three in a single year.

So, how does his fiftieth anniversary album sound? Well, as you might expect from everything I've said thus far, it's a mixed bag. There are fifteen tracks here but they're all done before it reaches the fifty minute mark. While eight seem to be new, the rest are either demos or outtakes, likely a set of songs that either didn't make albums or would have been albums that didn't happen. While some absolutely rock out in the hard and heavy mode we expect, others take a different approach and it's hard to see how Thor expected them all to work together here. Patchwork doesn't cut it.

For a start, there are songs here that take it slow and provide a backdrop for almost spoken word vocal delivery. The opening title track is one and it made me wonder if Thor had lost the ability to sing. Peace by Piece takes this approach too, perhaps more appropriately a story song given that it's all about a book that publishers don't want, only for it to be buried in a time capsule and dug up a thousand years later when it ends war and brings the nations together. It's the destiny of Bill & Ted in literature form explained in a song that's brimming with pride. Never mind the critics, it's saying, do your thing and it might make a difference down the road when the world catches up.

I can't help but like these, but they're cheesy as all get out in a way that the Canadians seem to be so good at, having produced not only Thor but Anvil and Helix. Lightning Rod seems to be a full on embrace of cheese, sounding like a Rocky Horror song with a rap section, set against the backdrop of gothic rock. It's like a Sisters of Mercy cover band tackling Rocky Horror but needing to tap into some sort of trendy mindset to get hip with the cool kids. It works as well or as poorly as you might expect, depending on your point of view.

It's 5-0 Let's Go where Thor finally settles down to the hard rock that we know he can do so well. It isn't Thunder on the Tundra and it isn't Let the Blood Run Red but that's the guitar tone I want to hear on a Thor song and that's the pace too. There's a cheesy chant-along section that's catchy as hell and it all ends up being a hard rock cover of an imaginary Suzi Quatro song that celebrates an incredibly long career with vim and vigour. Thor clearly means this and it's hard not to get behind him. I was celebrating along with him and generating and whatever else the lyrics want me to do.

The biggest problem the album has is that there aren't enough songs like 5-0 Let's Go. Bring It On is an eighties-style stomper with more excellent soloing from Matt McNallie, John Liebel or both, to match what they contributed to 5-0 Let's Go. The best song here is either Flight of the Striker or Thunder on the Mountain, both of which are older songs. The former dates back to 1987 so is likely to have been from a projected fourth album that never happened because the band split up, while the latter is from 1979, so stuck in the eight years between the debut and its follow up. It features an absolutely killer seventies organ solo.

So that's four strong songs and there are other worthies to back them up. However, there are odd decisions here and there that take the album in different directions. Thor channels his inner Elvis on Unlock the Power and shifts alternative on No Time for Games with post production effects to emphasise that. 100% is an acoustic demo that we'd know dates to 1979 even if it wasn't labelled, right down to its handclaps. To the Extreme is a rap metal song from 1999 that's about Thor but I doubt actually includes him performing. I've mentioned Lightning Rod already. These all feel like B-sides for singles rather than coherent album material.

Thus this is a mixed bag. There are multiple songs here that I'd happily return to. However, there are also multiple songs that I don't need to hear again. Some of the cheese works well but some of it really doesn't. Clearly Thor can still sing, in his unmistakably overt fashion, but sometimes he's just not interested in doing that and so tells stories instead. Take from all that what you will. What I think it boils down to is that I'm happy Thor is still with us and making music fifty years on from a debut I can't identify, but he's never made a lot of the right decisions and gets lucky enough with songs here and there to make his mark. Here, he's somewhat lucky but just as often not.

Sweet Ermengarde - Sacrifice (2024)

Any goth worth his or her salt knows that Andrew Eldritch isn't remotely interested in recording a new studio album. That means that, if you want to hear new Sisters of Mercy material, you have to either go see them live—because he's still writing and performing it—or make your own. It's clear that Sweet Ermengarde did the latter and it shouldn't shock you if I point out that they hail from Germany because the Sisters have always been massive there. If you doubt me, check out the best live versions of Ribbons online; most of them were recorded in Germany.

It's impossible not to hear the Sisters as this album begins. Fragments has it and Faith Healer, the standout track for me, screams it from the rafters, even if it may owe almost as much to the Cult. As those influences might suggest, Sweet Ermengarde are at their best when they establish this sort of up tempo groove, which is why my favourite songs here are their up tempo ones like Faith Healer, The 5th Horizon and Viscera. There are points in The 5th Horizon where the guitar takes a break but the groove blissfully carries on regardless, as indeed these grooves do long after these songs are over. Lars Keppeler's bass takes over at one point in Viscera and exactly the same thing happens.

Oddly, given that, Sweet Ermengarde seem to prefer slowing things down a little and taking their songs in a gloomier direction. Most of the thirteen songs here are slower than the three that I've called out as highlights and the album slows down generally until the final two songs follow suit in very different ways indeed. I should emphasise that those grooves don't disappear, instead simply unfolding in slower fashion. The bass's moment in the spotlight in the slower Genesee is not light years away from its moment in the spotlight in the faster Viscera only one song earlier.

Of course, the effect is different. In the faster songs, we plug into the grooves and move along to them, even if we're sitting in an office chair listening at work. Even the most restrained listeners will find themselves tapping their feet to the beat, which, I should add, is delivered by a drummer here, Mischa Kliege, not a drum machine with a fancy name. In the slower ones, we don't do that. Instead we open ourselves up to their moods and let them fall onto us like warm rain, soaking into our essence and shaping our mood. They're slow and gloomy but not depressing, so their effect is affirming and enriching rather than bleak and suicidal.

That holds for everything up to Silent We Mourn eleven tracks in. Every track up to that one fits in one of those two moods and it would end naturally at that point as a decent fifty minute album, a third for Sweet Ermengarde, even if their line-up has changed considerably across each. Only two of five members made it from 2013's Raynham Hall to 2016's Ex Oblivione and only one remains in place for this album eight years on, that being Lars Kappeler on bass. Drew Freeman may be the vocalist now, for instance, but it's his debut with the band, because Kuba Achtelik was the singer in 2013 and Daniel Schweigler in 2016.

However, the album isn't over. There are two tracks left, the longest two on offer, and they skew the impressions of the album that we take away with us, on account of them being last. Embers Fall is slower again than anything else that came before and notably so. It's so slow that it becomes an acutely personal song as if Freeman is singing only to me. And, even though it takes a progression of gradual slowing down and runs with it, it also launches into something very different a couple of minutes in. Until now, the entire album has been gothic rock, but for twenty seconds, it's extreme metal, with frantic drumming from Kliege and harsh backing vocals from guest Nino Sable. Then it launches back into slow gothic rock, returning twice more for twenty second blitzkriegs.

And, if that sounds like a real anomaly, then there's Of Her Heart's Ocean, an eleven minute dirge to wrap things up. This is less a song and more of an ambient installation piece. It's achingly slow, it's full of atmosphere and it's peppered with occasional industrial ambience. It's not without its merits and my avant-garde tastes rather like it, but it's highly anomalous here. It feels like we've just been to a pretty decent goth gig, expended all our energy and now we're walking out of the venue. Except that, even though the door is right there, we never actually reach it because time has stretched and the building is ever so slowly twisting and contorting around us, as if it's ready to collapse and kill us all but, even with the light right there, we're not ready to leave yet.

That's a really weird way to wrap up an album that started out like the Sisters of Mercy, so I'd love to know exactly what the band had in mind. In the meantime, I hope they don't take another eight years to knock out another studio album. If they've found a stable line-up at last, maybe we'll see another one in the next few years. Oh, and kudos for the band name, which is a real H. P. Lovecraft deep cut.

Wednesday 10 April 2024

Korpiklaani - Rankarumpu (2024)

This is album twelve for Finnish folk metal legends Korpiklaani and it couldn't be mistaken for any other band, even those who play in the same style. They've stuck with their core sound of late and, judging from the ratings I've seen on some of the albums I haven't heard, that's a good call. What you get here is bouncy folk metal with a galloping pace and full integration of metal instruments like guitars, bass and drums with folk instruments like violin and accordion. If you've heard Korpi before, then you know that already, of course, but with every album I hear, I'm surer that taking any one of those instruments away would utterly break this sound and it doesn't matter which.

Rankarumpu kicks off just as effectively as last time out, on 2021's Jylhä, but quicker because the opener gets down to business immediately. That's Kotomaa and it's the first standout track. It's a deceptively light song, given that it does everything a Korpi opener is supposed to do and it does it well. The only reason I say that is that Tapa sen kun kerkeet and Aita after it are darker, deeper and with more of a weight hanging over them. I like both, but the perkiness of Kotomaa is tasty.

At this point in their career, it's perhaps fair to point out that most of these songs sound like you might expect them to sound. None let the side down but a few fail to truly distinguish themselves. They're too good in isolation to call them filler, but they're happy to do only what they need to do without adding anything extra to the mix. It shouldn't shock that my favourite tracks here are the ones that do have something different to bring to the table.

Other than Kotomaa, the first of those is probably Mettään, which starts with an old school intro of power chords, then hands over to accordion and launches into a variety of gears. The chorus is as notable for its pauses as for its words and, right after it, is a thoughtful section that isn't quiet but is slower and more flavourful than what went before. It's a great example of a track that isn't content to do just one thing and it's all the better for it. Kalmisto does that too, because it slows down with strong effect, as does Harhainjen höyhen, which is a strong closer. Rankarumpu is even bouncier than Kotomaa and that may be appropriate for a title track, but Oraakkelit does it too.

Other than that, there's a plaintive violin that opens Viikatelintu and immediately stamps it with elegance, hardly the first word that springs to mind when Korpi come up. That's no insult, I should add. I've been a fan since their first couple of albums but I've always seen them as a sort of force of nature. They took the Finnish folk music that they used to play under the name of Shaman and drench it in vodka, strip it naked and chase it through the woods. They never intended to be subtle or elegant, but both can show up at odd points regardless and that fiddle that opens Viikatelintu is one such.

There's not a lot more to say, but I should add a couple of things. One is that this is less generous than Jylhä, whose thirteen tracks took it past an hour, but it doesn't skimp. It delivers a full dozen songs, even if they're done in just under three quarters of an hour. They're merely back to normal sort of length, I guess. The other is that there's been a line-up change, with Olli Vänskä joining on violin in 2022. He has a history with the band, having stepped in to cover for Tuomas Rounakari on a number of live dates in 2016 when that previous violinist fell ill. He previously played for Turisas.

Oh, and I'm going to miss them live this time around, though they're about to head through town on their latest tour with Visions of Atlantis and Illumishade in support. Check them out at the Nile in Mesa on 29th April. Fingers crossed, I should be in a position to see them next time in a few years after they knock out their lucky thirteenth album. I hope that's a killer. Neither this nor Jylhä are the greatest albums in their discography but they're far from the worst and they're consistently solid. Reliable Korpi is always a treat.

Grinded Grin - Charlatan (2024)

Country: Croatia
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Jazz Fusion
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Opening up a prog rock album with horsehead fiddle and throat singing is a plus for me, though it does sound rather like an orchestra warming up. Then again, that may be the point because this is just a quick seventy second intro. Masquerade, the first track proper, leaps headling into a wildly different vibe with a psychedelic guitar solo at the top of the mix and right in our face. A minute in, it steps back and we're in strange territory, appropriately so for prog rock. The drums are pure jazz. The guitar morphs into an exploring synthesiser. And then the throat singing returns as an overlay.

It's an interesting approach that reminds a lot of jazz fusion, because it's generally instrumental, that throat singing apart. However, it's clearly ethnic and I don't believe Mongolia is particularly known for its jazz fusion. The guitar is very prominent too, so loud in the mix and so psychedelic I'd almost call this stoner rock, a tag that is indeed listed on the album's Bandcamp page, along with avant-garde and alternative. Jazz and fusion aren't there, though, and there's no mention of this world music flavour either. Tellingly, progressive rock doesn't show up there either, so I'll think of it as psychedelic jazz fusion instead.

That world music changes as the album progresses, the contributions of Javier Morales left in the openers and the didgiridoo of Michele Fortunato only lasting into Deceptive Delirium, where the Mongolian flavour is replaced by the plaintive trumpet of Josué Garcîa. Ascent into Illusion turns to the saxophone of Vedran Momčilović to be its lead instrument and adds some weird percussion that sounds like woodblocks. The result is a sort of acoustic industrial jazz fusion track that I can't leave alone. After all the exploration of the earlier songs, this one feels repetitive and pounding, but it works wonderfully for me. Even at over six minutes, I didn't want it to end.

I should mention that every name I've mentioned thus far appears to be a guest, because they all show up for one or maybe two tracks and leave again. The band is a duo at heart, with Aleksandar Vrhovec playing guitar, bass and those idiosyncratic synths that tend to sound rather like a swarm of musical bees, and Linda-Philomene Tsoungui contributing drum loops. Of course, that's not the typical make-up of a duo, hence quite the list of guests. Looking back through their Bandcamp at earlier albums, it seems like there have been more traditional line-ups. Vrhovec is at the core of whatever they do.

In whatever form they've held, they seem to be prolific, this being their eleventh album since 2018 with six of those arriving between February and July 2021, one a month like a magazine. Those all seem to have a different mindset, most of them longer than this album but often boasting only a single track and never more than three. This batch of seven shorter pieces isn't typical for them, a twelve minute closure called Epiphany's Exposure notwithstanding. That length pales when faced off against the forty-one and a half of Terra, the only track on the album of the same name.

I haven't heard any of those earlier albums, but each piece of music here has its own character, an overall psychedelic jazz fusion feel throughout but explored in different ways each time, not least through a succession of dominant instruments, the Les Claypool-esque funky bass riff in Pinnacle of Illusion following the respective guitar, trumpet and sax of the first three tracks. The other pieces are less memorable for being ensemble works, though Epiphany's Exposure does find some focus during a squealing saxophone dominated second half when Sebastian Lopez finds the spolight. Until then, it was more of a Frank Zappa orchestral piece.

It took me a moment to understand what Grinded Grin were doing here, but I got on board pretty quickly and I find that I like this album a lot. Jazz fusion is a coin flip for me, as I find that I dislike as many albums as I like. It's a genre that can get very indulgent. However, it's also often led by a virtuoso guitarist and, while I cast no aspersions on Vrhovec's talents there, the spotlight shifts a lot here and rarely to the guitar. It becomes far more of a soundscape album, where Grinded Grin conjure up a new sound for a new track and hopefully take us to a new place. Like the Qilin album earlier in the week, this didn't transport me often but I appreciated those soundscapes anyway.

Now, how have I not heard of Grinded Grin before and which album in a bountiful back catalogue should I dive into next? After I dive back into the delightful Deceptive Delirium, of course. And Ascent into Illusion. And...

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