Riverwood - Fairytale (2018)

Country: Egypt
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 31 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

While my review of Galaxy Destruction Inc.'s Sacrifice for Rebirth has sparked the most hits thus far, I'm pretty sure that it'll be overtaken by the time Ahl Sina's Troops of Pain has been online as long. I really wasn't expecting Taiwan and Egypt to generate the most attention, but I'm happy for that. I'm all about bringing great music to new ears, wherever it comes from.

While Ahl Sina are international in nature, their base is in Cairo. Thanks to Riverwood vocalist Mahmoud Nader, here's a band from three hours to Ahl Sina's northwest, from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. A few comparisons are obvious: they're both progressive metal bands from Egypt with debut albums that run over an hour. They both explore a lot of territory in their releases too, meaning that you're going to want to give them your attention.

However, there are obvious differences too. Nader sings in English for a start and there's much less of a folk music influence here but a greater tendency to drop into progressive rock, which is where we start out. The album starts out instrumental, with an atmospheric keyboard-led piece that ends with what may be clashing swords and a pastoral intro to the first full song, Poisoned Love. Is that a clarinet that's echoed by intricate guitar? That sounds like an organ at the point where it shifts from rock to metal.

It's five minutes into the album when vocals show up and they're clean, as they mostly are throughout. However, there's a partially buried harsh growl floating behind the lead during parts of Poisoned Love that's delightful. Kudos to the mixing engineer as well as the band! There's a similarly buried female vocal at points, there for texture. That it gains its moment in the spotlight only at the very end of this eight minute track surely means something. The same happens with Möt Ditt Öde, as if there's a dynamic between characters and the woman gets the last word.

If other tracks walk in Poisoned Love's footprints, it's only in the sense that there's a very general formula. Most of them are long, five of them over seven minutes, partly because they kick off with intriguing instrumental introductions and ramp up as the full band kicks in. They gain focus with clean male vocals, which are textured by others, whether harsh male or clean female. They all grow instrumentally as they run on too, with some elegant soloing and neat touches here and there, like the hint of hurdy gurdy that ends Nightfall Overture and the atmospheric background throughout the longest track, Lost in Nature.

And then there's Marionette. I liked this album quickly though it took me a few listens through to really grasp what it was doing. Riverwood, as perhaps befits their name, are more laid back than Ahl Sina, so their album as a whole tends to be slower and less urgent. Marionette, however, punched me hard and refused to let me up until it was done.

It starts out softly with a delicate vocal melody over a guitar that's somewhat reminiscent of a babbling brook. We can hear the moisture in the air. However, after a minute and change, the world stops so glorious chaos can descend like a curtain of torrential rain, enveloping everything in its path. It's harsh vocal work, of course, but also a wall of sound that echoes and teases. Then it fades and we repeat with layers, eventually shifting into a neat keyboard solo.

The first half of this album is soft, not relaxing but patient and inviting of exploration. There are harder edges but we have to seek them out. Marionette puts the hard side right in our face and it's heartbreaking. The album is life and love and Marionette shows what happens when its stripped away from us, 'when the feeling dies'. It's harder after that, even if the title track is upbeat and affirming.

In between the two halves is the palate cleansing instrumental interlude that is Gates Below, a funky but very Egyptian piece of music, because another full song would have been utterly lost in the echo that Marionette left in its wake. We're still stunned at that point.

Yes, this is another Egyptian progressive metal album and that makes two grand ones out of two for me this year, but Riverwood are very different to Ahl Sina. Both albums are journeys, but they take us to very different places. Once I got what this was doing, I had to remind myself that Riverwood only formed in 2018. If they can turn out an album of this quality right off the bat, what the heck are they going to be doing after a few years? Watch this space.

飯匙槍 - 竄出深土 (2018)

Country: Taiwan
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2018
Sites: Facebook

OK, so I did say yesterday that I was wrapping up my 2018 reviews with the month of January, but a quirk of the calendar means that there's only one day left in the work week and I have requests from a couple of readers to review their band's releases from last year, so hey, why not? One more day!

Everything about Apocalypse Later is fundamentally about discovery and my reviews have focused on that since I started writing about films back in 2007. What I've found in the decade since is that it's often the unusual material that sparks the most enthusiastic response, as perhaps has been made apparent from my two most read music reviews thus far being of bands from Taiwan and Egypt, also the two countries represented today.

First up is 飯匙槍, who are a death metal band from Taiwan. I know little more about them except what their vocalist Endao told me and the fact that there are five people on the stage in the official videos. The band's name translates to NajaAtra, which is a local snake often known as the Taiwan cobra, and the EP I'm reviewing, 竄出深土, would be called Out of the Soil in English. Between them, these names highlight that they're a new band but one with admirable power.

There are four tracks on Out of the Soil, which can be streamed in all the usual places. I know nothing about the tracks except for the titles which are visible in English on YouTube. 赤目 means Bloody Eyes and the punchy nature of the song fits rather well with the footage of machine guns. How the torture fits in I have no idea, but it doesn't feel out of place. 反 means Anti and there's an official video for that one too.

My favourite track is the last one, 餓鬼降, which Google Translate tells me means Hungry Ghost. It has a number of slower sections that ought to generate a decent pit, especially given that hungry ghosts traditionally emerge from Hell during Seventh Month hungry for revenge and justice. They should get people moving! It plays well when it's slow but it plays well when it's fast too and there's a decent solo in the middle. Most of all, there are little touches that make it stand out: there's a great drum roll into a pause three minutes in and I adore the last little vocal nuance at the end. It's good stuff but then all of this is good stuff.

What the EP isn't is groundbreaking. Out of the Soil comprises a decent set of songs, more melodic than brutal but with the melodies deep enough to make them palatable to brutal fans, even if the bass isn't so low that my speakers vibrate. Each of them runs just shy of four minutes and none of them outstay their welcome, especially given that they vary the tempo nicely with some neatly intricate changes, but they do exactly what they do and they're happy not inventing something new.

If this is indeed NajaAtra's debut, as I believe it is, it ought to serve as a solid slab from which they should be able to build in the future. It seems to me like everyone in the band is capable musically and comfortable with each other and within this framework. Every one of these songs plays consistently in style and quality. Now, let's hear a full album!

And, with Galaxy Destruction Inc. and NajaAtra getting a 7/10 from me and Chthonic already on my radar, I wonder what else is happening over there in Taiwan. The Metal Archives tells me that there are plenty of active bands playing in a variety of styles. Let's see which one comes up next!

Eternal Candle - The Carved Karma (2018)

Country: Iran
Style: Progressive Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 27 Apr 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I kicked off Apocalypse Later Music Reviews with my favourite album from last December and I've reviewed an album from each of 2018 and 2019 every weekday since. It seems appropriate that I wrap up 2018 on the last day of January with another personal favourite from last year that doesn't seem to have found a lot of coverage.

The band are Eternal Candle and they play doom/death out of Tehran, Iran, hardly a particularly well known metal capital. They have a progressive edge too, not too surprising given that two key members also play for the prog metal band Heterochrome, who released their debut album in 2017.

This is Eternal Candle's debut album, following a string of singles, one of them a Novembers Doom cover and only one of which is represented here, 2017's A Dismal Inhabitant. Everything else is new but there's plenty of it. This is a lengthy album, almost hitting the hour mark, but it never gets old.

The Ripped Soul is a great way to start the album, after a neat atmospheric intro called In the Absence of Us (there's another one later on called The Void which is even better). The Ripped Soul kicks off with almost tribal drumming, which leads into an intriguing mixture of harsh growls, clean vocals and spoken word sections. I liked the interplay immediately but it gets even better as the album runs on.

Throughout the album, the harsh vocals mostly sit over the denser musical sections, while the clean voice floats over softer backing, suggesting a sort of conversation between different characters. I don't know if there's an overriding story here but this approach suggests that there could well be, even though there are no suggestions that this is a concept album.

Sick Romance plays consistently with The Ripped Soul, merely adding some whispers and more overt melodies, but then Eternal Candle up their game even further with a couple of achingly heavy tracks. A Path to Infinity starts softly with quiet echoing guitar but gets heavier as it runs on. The heaviness is right there at the beginning of A Dismal Inhabitant, though, which is gloriously crushing from the outset.

These two tracks play out like a journey that starts simply with a quiet decision full of hope for success, but soon becomes dangerous, and, as A Dismal Inhabitant kicks in, clearly deadly. Even the contemplative moment four minutes in is endowed with danger courtesy of a darkly playful bass from Armin Afzali.

After I don't know how many times through, I think Afzali is the unsung hero of this album. He's not the most obvious participant, as the vocals lead it, courtesy of Babak Torkzadeh and Mahdi Sorrow. Josef Habibi is a fantastic drummer, not only keeping the beat but muscling in to take the lead at a number of points. The guitars come courtesy of Sorrow and Amir Taghavi and they're a joy, not only in heavier sections or the melancholy ones but in the quiet ones too. However, the more I listen, the more I catch little things that Afzali is doing that elevate a number of tracks.

If A Dismal Inhabitant was the darkest moment in the journey unfolding here, The Void marks the point where that starts to turn. Hear My Cry has a confidence in the guitar line that soars over the threats and My Turn, almost inevitably given its title, returns hope to the equation, even as the lyrics and the title of the next song, Prayer of the Hopeless, suggest otherwise. Maybe it's a fresh start. Eternal Candle sing in English but My Turn is the song in which I caught most words.

Without the lyrics, though, I have to feel this album and it's a notably emotional creation. I found it an easy one to lose myself inside. While not every track is as interesting as the last, there's something in each of them to explore. Prayer of the Hopeless may be the least interesting for four minutes, for instance, but then some of the best melodies and guitarwork of the album show up to elevate its end.

I've found myself coming back to this album a lot and I keep finding new things in it. It's not the greatest album of 2018, but I'd argue that it's one of the most underrated.

Seven More Days - Little Dark Pleasures (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Thus far, what's impressed me most about the New Wave of Classic Rock is that the bands are so varied. Massive Wagons aren't remotely Inglorious and neither of them are Doomsday Outlaw. Well, none of them are Seven More Days either, but there's a quality that runs through all of those bands.

Seven More Days are heavier, more like a New Wave of Classic Power Metal, but they're still melodic and soulful. The most obvious influence I felt was Metal Church, but there's a lot of Accept and Toranaga here as well, plus some Savatage and UFO and Demon. There's plenty of Dio too, whether solo or going back to Rainbow and especially Black Sabbath. At points there's even a folk influence, but I don't mean folk metal as we think of it today; I mean sixties folk like Steeleye Span at the beginning of Castles in the Sky or some of the San Francisco psych bands in the first half of Ode to Innocence.

And I really do mean heavier, by the way. This band have a real punch. Little Dark Pleasures opens up with a seven minute song, which is a little ballsy to begin with, but it follows some delicate guitarwork with soft vocals and then wham! It hits and it hits hard, with an unmistakable modern bass-driven mix but traditional power metal feels.

It's steady stuff, never speeding up even when we think it's surely about to, like it's a band who leapt into that modern studio directly from 1982 so metal hasn't really sped up for them yet. It's built on solid riffs from Chris Porter and patient, astoundingly reliable drumming from Baz Lowe that does precisely what it needs to and not a single note more. It was very reminiscent to me of Accept's Princess of the Dawn on that front.

And wow, that's an outrageously confident vocal from Daz Valentine! He's a lot of Dio and a lot of David Wayne, with some Mark Duffy from Toranaga and maybe a little Lou Gramm as a chaser, and this is precisely why it's important for bands to pick their album openers carefully. Salanders Tale utterly defines who Seven More Days are and it couldn't have done it better. If they can't sway you with those seven minutes, this band aren't going to be for you; on the flipside, if you're going to become a fan, that one song is going to do it for you right then and there.

The rest of the album follows very much in Salanders Tale's footprints. It does slow down further at points, in songs like Not Too Long and One Mind and parts of others too, but the underlying key points are always the same. It's heavy stuff. Lowe and bassist James Kirkby are unrelentingly reliable. There are neat solos from Porter. And Valentine's voice remains clean and powerful and prevents this from ever moving into doom territory.

Back from the Dead is achingly slow, for instance, but it's never doom because of Valentine. It feels more like a glam rock 45 played at 33. If it was sped up, would he start to sound like Vince Neil? This steadfast refusal to speed up does feel a little odd but it also feels good. While I can hear all sorts of influences, I don't know anyone else who sounds quite like this and the tempo is the biggest part of that.

I should also shout out for Not Too Long, which really isn't too long in the slightest. It's a softer song with a Dio feel, some Spanish guitar and strings that actually work as part of the song instead of just as a trendy extra credit. They underline a real sense of menace that builds partway through; that menace is reprised on One Mind and is never better than halfway into Ode to Innocence with a killer riff and bells that can't fail to bring old Black Sabbath or even Pantera to mind.

I liked this on a first listen and I liked it more on a second and third run through. but it's something that deserves more than that. I have a feeling that this is an album that's going to seep into the soul and stake a claim. It's definitely dark. It's definitely a pleasure. The only thing it isn't, at an hour in length, is little. Let's hope it becomes a very big thing indeed.

Bucovina - Septentrion (2018)

Country: Romania
Style: Heavy Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I've been a fan of Bucovina ever since I stumbled upon Ceasul aducerii-aminte, their 2006 debut album, a few years ago. I've lost track of how many times I've listened to that. I happily sing along to songs like Strașnic neamul meu, even though I don't know a single word of Romanian and have absolutely no idea what they're singing about. I often wake up with the intro instrumental that is Valea plângerii playing in my head. It's one of my go to albums from the last couple of decades.

Well, I'm notably out of date. While it did take them seven years to get around to recording a second album, they did get there and to a third and, last year, to this, their fourth full length effort. Clearly I have some catching up to do, but I can start in on that here.

I can't say I like this as much as their debut but then I don't like many albums as much as their debut. I do like it though and I'll be playing it a lot to see if it grows more on me. For right now, it may be telling that my favourite track is a rework of Vinterdøden, their interpretation of the Helheim song that originally showed up on that first album. Maybe I just know it so well by this point that it has an unfair head start because everything else is new.

The good news is that everything I adore about Bucovina is still here, on occasion in the sort of magic moments that I know and love from Ceasul aducerii-aminte. While the only new band member is Jorge Augusto Coan on bass, the balance clearly shifted at some point from clean vocals to harsh and, while they do fit well here, I'm not convinced that they constitute an improvement.

A good part of the joy is the Balkan melodies that are inherent to what they do. They don't simply overlay them with ethnic instruments the way that many folk metal bands do; they incorporate them instead into their riffs and their solos. That means that there's something Romanian under everything they do, whether they're playing fast or slow, loud or soft, death or folk. Does a track like Aşteaptă-mă dincolo (De moarte) kick off with a traditional folk melody? I have no idea, but I could believe it.

Another part of it is the way that I never know whether a song will have vocals until they show up because every single track they record is worthy of being an instrumental. It's just that some merely aren't. Shrug. They work with or without vocals. A third part is the layers; Noapţea nimanui ends with acoustic guitars over a sort of electric drone that's simply gorgeous. I find new joy with each listen because of layering.

The best part of it all, though, is the transitions, because this band is just so tight and effortless. There's a point late on in Din negru (In mai negru) where the escalation to the underlying riff we've become used to under the plodding death/doom turns into a transition and suddenly we're in a slow part with a solo that feels like we just burst out of a forest with some wild creature on our heels and found ourselves wading into a gorgeous hidden lake. This is the sort of thing that I get from Bucovina that I don't get from anybody else, wherever they happen to be from.

My biggest problem here may be that there don't seem to be quite as many of those transitions as there were on Ceasul aducerii-aminte and more of the Balkan melodies are flattened into the standard genre sound. However, there's still plenty here for me to enjoy, even as I ached for more clean vocals alongside the harsh like those on Aşteaptă-mă dincolo (De moarte) or Stele călăuză.

I dug the bombast at the beginning of Stele călăuză and the folk melodies later on. Whatever the song, the instrumental passages are memorable and they're already seeping into my brain, whether they're delicate acoustic pieces, melodic solos or crunchy bedrock. Even if it isn't going to reach the levels of Ceasul aducerii-aminte for me, it's certainly trying to do so and it's getting better with each listen. It's also a lot longer, with almost fifty minutes of music instead of just over half an hour.

For now, I'm blissfully happy that Bucovina are still around and still recording. Now I have two other albums to catch up on.

Doomsday Outlaw - Hard Times (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 11 May 2018
Sites: Facebook | Official Website

I'm enjoying my journey into the New Wave of Classic Rock. Massive Wagons blew my socks off with Full Nelson and the new Inglorious album, Ride to Nowhere, sounded pretty damn fine too. Next up in this quest for me is Doomsday Outlaw, another new British band with an acclaimed vocalist who merely keep the blues a little closer to their rock sound than those two other bands.

I'm a little less sold on these Derby boys, based on this, their third album, mostly because it isn't as consistent. There's a variety of good stuff here but it never seems to gel together quite as well as an album.

For instance, there's an overt ballad called Into the Light that pops up four tracks in for no apparent reason and interrupts the flow. It's not a bad song but it's so driven by its vocals that it feels like a workout for singer Phil Poole or something to impress on a reality show rather than an integral part of an album. At least Inglorious placed their equivalent at the very end of their album, so it's less of an opportunity for the band to wander off and grab a pint. I liked the acoustic version of Days Since I Saw the Sun much more than Into the Light, but you'll only find that on the Japanese release.

That said, Hard Times is still a solid album that I enjoyed on a first listen and enjoyed more once I dived in a little deeper. Inglorious may well tailor their songs to be immediately accessible but they also stay more on the surface. What you hear is what you get. Doomsday Outlaw have more depth to them and songs like Come My Way, Were You Ever Mine and Too Far Left to Fall are subtle pieces that reward the listener who explores their brooding nature.

What's odd is that Hard Times doesn't put its most accessible material at the beginning and I have to admit I wondered a little about their acclaim for a few tracks, especially when the obstacle of Into the Light showed up. I should emphasise that it isn't bad to begin with; it just takes a few listens. The title track has an agreeable Led Zeppelin vibe with a David Coverdale vocal and Over and Over betrays a Bad Company influence. Both these songs do their jobs decently enough but they take time to grow; they don't leap out at us.

I was halfway through the album when Doomsday Outlaw suddenly decided to impress me. Days Since I Saw the Sun has a real emphasis to it with vocals that deliver melodic power and a gorgeous heavy bass driven backing. Will You Wait does the same but ratchets that power up another notch, washing it over us with some glorious guitarwork that I'm happy to say reminded me of prime UFO. An album full of tracks like this would be amazing.

Strangely, for a band rooted in the British style, the most overt winner is Break You, which switches that style up for an overtly American feel. It's a particularly cheeky little radio friendly number that kicks off like Aerosmith, and I mean old school Aerosmith when they were on top of their game the first time around. Then it adds a southern flavour, some Lynyrd Skynyrd and some Blackfoot. The pièce de résistance is a funky organ and horn backing which really elevates it. It's gorgeous stuff.

Right now, I'm thinking that this is the least of the three 2018 albums from acclaimed New Wave of Classic Rock bands, but I'm also thinking that it's the most worthy of exploration. I'm sure I'm going to come back to this a lot more than I will Inglorious. My rating may well rise.

Status Quo - Down Down & Dirty at Wacken (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 17 Aug 2018
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster formed the Scorpions while they were at school in Catford in 1962. When Rick Parfitt joined in 1967, they renamed the band to Status Quo and they've been that for over half a century with a surprisingly consistent lineup. Rossi is still there. Rhino Edwards replaced Lancaster in 1985 and Andy Bown officially joined in 1982. Richie Malone is the new guy in the band, having replaced the late Parfitt on guitar in 2016. Even Leon Cave is only the sixth Quo drummer, having joined in 2013.

I haven't seen Quo live since 1991 but they still sound pretty good to me on this live album recorded at the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany in 2017. Then again, how many bands have racked up over 6,000 shows on the road? Yeah, I'm coming up dry too.

This is one of two live albums released simultaneously that highlight just how versatile the Quo appeal is. Wacken is a metal festival, so Quo would have been one of the quieter bands on a line up that also included Napalm Death, Mayhem and Candlemass, among many others. They came on after Ross the Boss but before Volbeat. Before Softer Ride, Rossi jokes about how he wonders why they're on the roster too, but the audience responds enthusiastically.

That other album though? Well, it's Down Down & Dignified at the Royal Albert Hall, which, as I write, is preparing to present the London Community Gospel Choir. Not too many bands could get away with playing those two venues! Who else could get away with singing, "I never knew there were honky tonk angels" at Wacken? Who else on the Wacken bill is going to be invited to play a command performance for the Queen?

While the no nonsense set does venture forward as far as Beginning of the End, originally released on their In Search of the Fourth Chord album in 2007, most of it is culled from the heavier earlier albums that I go back to reasonably often; I ran through Piledriver, Quo and Hello twice in 2018 and I almost did that again after listening to this.

If I'm not mistaken, the second most recent song represented is 1986's In the Army Now, which is over thirty years old now, even though I still think of that as "new Quo". I'd say I'm really dating myself but a couple of tracks included in the What You're Proposin' medley go way back. I was only eight months old when Railroad came out on Dog of Two Head and I wasn't even a glint in my dad's eye when Down the Dustpipe saw its first release as a single in March 1970.

It's good to hear this old material revisited recently by a new band and they got an agreeably good response from the Wacken audience. They even sing along loudly to In the Army Now, even though it sounds a lot softer than the rest of the set. The highlights are the up tempo tracks like Roll Over Lay Down, Down Down and What You're Proposin'. Those songs were good old fashioned heads down rock 'n' roll boogie back in the seventies and my head's still banging to them in 2018.

My Darkest Time - Dawn (2018)

Country: Macedonia
Style: Gothic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Nov 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

Wow, this caught me by surprise in the very first few seconds. I do like it when an album does that! This track, Two Angels, promptly surprised me again when the vocals hit two minutes in because that sounded like three completely different styles all at once. And I mean all at once, not interacting but battling it out. Hey, add a third surprise. I looked them up and found out that they're a Christian band. Playing gothic doom/death. Well, why not.

Two Angels is an interesting song. The metronome drum got really old for me, but that mix of styles fascinated me. I dug the chiming guitars that almost sound like a sitar and the drums when they got interesting at the end. The female gothic vocals are an enticing siren song and the raucous male vocals shift it even further into originality. The song needed an end though, rather than a fade.

In short, it's not entirely successful but it is fascinating. The worst thing about the album is that the next couple of songs are fascinating in pretty much an identical way, merely with better rhythms. In isolation, they would have garnered the exact same sort of wide eyed response from me. Together, the effect is lessened somewhat until Dawn slows down late on and we realise that My Darkest Time aren't a one trick pony.

The best thing about the album is that it refuses to be one thing, though this might be an offputting approach to many. My Darkest Time have five albums on Bandcamp but haven't described themselves yet. On Facebook, they go for gothic/doom/death metal, but that's less what they are and more an attempt to cover the bases. The only death here is in the male vocals of Martin Atanasov, who may be going for hardcore shouts but whose accent is so extreme that it ends up morphing it into a sort of death growl.

To me, they sounded rather like a heavy Dead Can Dance. Marina Atanasova sings very much in the gothic operatic tradition but with a world edge, meaning that there's as much of Lisa Gerrard here as whichever symphonic metal vocalist comes to mind first. The music, which with the exception of Zoran Petrovski's lead guitar all comes courtesy of Zarko Atanasov, who founded the band back in 2005, and it's all over the map, both musically and ethnically. I'm not too knowledgeable about the folk sounds of Skopje, but I caught a lot of Indian sounds here.

Dawn is certainly an interesting album and one to dive deep into to figure out what Zarko Atanasov is doing at any random point in time. However, it often felt oddly disembodied and Open, O Doors is a great example of that. Each of the component parts is capable and the end result is interesting, but I never bought into this being a band playing together.

It feels like it was constructed rather than grown, with Zarko combining what everyone else was doing in isolation and layering on other sounds until it all got to where he wanted. That's especially weird when two voices are singing harmony to each other but without ever feeling like the singers had met each other. The only time I felt like they were singing together was in the final track, Lord Have Mercy.

I do love bands, seriously, who make it difficult for critics like me to attempt to convey whether you're likely to dig their work or not. I've listened through a few times now and I'm still not quite sure if I do.

The best way to attempt Dawn is to suggest that there's a relatively consistent ethnic groove across the board, with duetting vocals floating over it: pleasant but unsurprising gothic female and uniquely harsh male. Oh, and when you figure out what they're doing, they'll mix it up just enough to make you wonder. Does that help? Probably not!

Speed Kills - Speed Kills (2018)

Country: Italy
Style: Speed Metal
Rating: 5/10
Release Date: 14 Dec 2018
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

There's nothing like a good thrash to clean you out, as Tommy Vance used to say. Speed Kills are from Florence in Italy and they've been around since 2011 but this is their full length debut. At a rough guess, not one of them was alive in 1985 when Music for Nations issued my favourite compilation album of all time, which carried the same name. Puns are rarely new.

It seems to be mostly culled from older songs. The five tracks on the cassette they circulated at gigs in 2017 are all here, as are at least two from the EP they released in 2014, including the title track. If Mater morbi is the same as Land of the Dead, then make that three. One track, Bombs Over Dresda, dates all the way back to their original 2012 demo, Badass Death, but nothing else from that made it this far.

Whether old or new, there's a consistency here that I appreciated, in both tempo and quality, with only a few solos to show off. Mostly this is done at pace and they only slow down long enough to give the pit a moment to breathe every now and then before revving back up again. Angor Animi in particular plays like that a lot. The slowest track is the last one, Gates of Ishtar, but that only shows up after forty minutes of fast paced thrash. If you're still in the pit by that point, you're not going to care.

I couldn't catch too many of the lyrics, which seem to be entirely in English, but I caught enough to see that there's a real sense of humour underpinning this band, as mostly evidenced in the self-deprecating We Suck and also in Beerserker and the charmingly titled LA Fuckers.

The primary influences appear to be Slayer and Motörhead, neither of which is too surprising, especially given the clean vocals that flirt just a little with death growls, but there are hints of other styles here as different as those of Destruction, Venom and Tankard. The point is that Speed Kills do a pretty decent job of cleaning our clock for three quarters of an hour but they don't seem to have found their own recognisable way of doing that.

That may help to explain why, while the standard is pretty high here throughout, there's little that's memorable enough to stand out from the crowd. Oddly, it's the more humour based tracks that come closest, like We Suck, LA Fuckers and We Brake for Nobody.

On the basis of this album, I'd suggest that Speed Kills would make for a solid support band to any big thrash bands touring through Tuscany, but they're not going to be moving up the bill any time soon. They'd certainly warm me up for the big pit.

Captain Caravan - Shun the Sun (2018)

Country: Norway
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Nov 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

One of my biggest surprises when I started paying more detailed attention to the broad spectrum of new music is that stoner rock seems to have spread across the globe like a disease. It's only a couple of decades old but it's everywhere now and here's a stoner rock band from Egersund, Norway to prove it with an LP that grew out of plans for an EP.

I'm still learning about this subgenre but Captain Caravan are a bit more lively than most of what I've heard thus far, if just as fuzzy in tone. There's a lot of energy here, mostly conjured up by BK Sæstad's bouncy guitar riffs. Crown, the album's opener and the single that preceded it, never lets up for a moment and it's an absolute joy.

Monster Magnet and Kyuss and the other stoner pioneers are obvious influences throughout but there's a lot more than one idea in Crown and there's a strong Black Sabbath influence on Illusion of Meaning. Godkiller changes things up entirely, ditching the amplification and going for a brutal acoustic approach with subdued if snarly vocals. Illusion of Meaning does slow down towards the end too but it's for some sort of low chanted vocal that's almost buried under the bass.

It's clear that main man Sæstad, formerly of Pawnshop, has a rhythm section behind him that's almost seamless. The band moves as one motion and they could easily have issued this album without vocals, as many seem to do nowadays, and it would still be magnetic.

The recent addition of vocalist Johnny Olsen does take them to another level though. I'm just trying to figure out his influences. At times he sounds like Jim Morrison trying to sing like Glenn Danzig, which is not something I ever thought I'd hear. On the title track, though, he sounds much more like Angry Anderson of Rose Tattoo and that's an enticing layer to find on top of those hypnotic riffs and that swirling psychedelic guitar.

Olsen's finest moment may be the album's final track, Book of Oblivion, which tones the guitar down a great deal for three minutes so it can duel with his voice which soars like a bird above everything. It's a smooth performance that escalates back to bombastic level when everything cuts loose again at the three minute mark and we're back in psychedelic Danzig territory.

I'm digging a lot of these new stoner bands, whether vocal or instrumental, and I'm eager to learn more about the subgenre. From what little I know, this would seem to be far from a bad place to join me on that trip.

Venom - Storm the Gates (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Black/Thrash Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 14 Dec 2018
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

I often say that when I discovered the Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 1 back in mid-1984, DJ Tommy Vance introduced me to everything from Steely Dan to Venom all at once.

Venom were truly dangerous back then because the mainstream had absolutely no idea how to deal with them. A Welcome to Hell shirt wasn't a fashion statement; it was a way to isolate yourself entirely from the mundane world, whose occupants would carefully watch you walking down the street like you had a severed hand in each hand. The musical landscape we explore today is unrecognisable from 1984 in large part because of Venom's influence on it. If time has rendered them a lot less scary, it hasn't forgotten them. They remain relevant and they still rock.

It's been three years since the last Venom album and the lineup nowadays is the perennial Cronos, along with Rage on guitar and Danté on drums, as it was on Fallen Angels and From the Very Depths. Maybe I need to go back to those two albums for a fresh listen because, to me, this sounds off. Now, Venom are hardly renowned for their state of the art production values, but there are points here where it sounds even worse than usual. Did the entire band cram into a shower stall to record Suffering Dictates? Cronos's unmistakable vocal sneer is more than a little deeper, almost lost, within the mix than I've come to expect. I'm used to that being up front and in my face, where the forces of darkness damn well intended it to be.

That said, the songs here generally don't disappoint. Bring Out Your Dead is a weak opener, but Notorious carries that old school Venom vibe, even as it updates that sound a little for the new millennium. I Dark Lord chugs along agreeably too, even if doesn't sound quite evil enough because of that subdued production, especially at the end, which ought to be far more raw and visceral than it comes across. I'm sure it will be live with Cronos at the front of the stage three feet away from the audience.

Oddly, the album seems to get heavier as it runs on. 100 Miles to Hell is great stuff and enough reason to buy this album on its own and, by the time we get to Dark Night (Of the Soul) five tracks in, the guitars feel more brutal, the bass broader and the drums more relentless. Cronos's sneer is more apparent too and that's a welcome return. So is the upping of the pace for The Mighty Have Fallen, which would have been a better album opener if the title didn't suggest a message that thankfully isn't true.

The mighty may need a real producer and fans of the mighty may quickly forget a few of the lesser tracks, but the mighty have definitely not fallen. I look forward to seeing them live again and hearing some of this material in the set. In the meantime, this is another Venom album that sounds like another Venom album and that's never a bad thing.

Ars Nova - Sombra y Luz (2018)

Country: Spain
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 14 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website

If my Spanish holds up, Sombra y Luz means Shadow and Light, which suggests that this second album from Barcelona prog rockers Ars Nova will be full of contrast, given that it begins with a track called Luz and ends with one called Sombra.

It starts out that way too, following the gentle piano intro track that is Luz with a real belter of a song in Diáspora, which carries on at a frantic pace, racking up notes like confetti and shredding through the lot. Vocals show up a minute in and add another layer, but it's the guitarwork that drives this one, as it does so many other tracks on this album.

From there, it settles into a consistently more comfortable vibe. Blanco slows things down considerably, but it's still bouncy. The melody and orchestration sound like they could have come from a ballad-oriented eighties hair band but it's faster and cleaner. Ars Nova aren't going for sleaze but for catchy prog rock, even when they don't sound like it.

Most of the tracks do have a little of the experimentation that you might expect from prog rock, with Alter Ego perhaps the most obvious example, playing as it does with tempos and rhythms and mixing things up completely, but all involved seems to be relatively content with playing in this style without feeling too much need to innovate around it. There's nothing new to the genre here.

Instrumentally, Ars Nova are clearly top notch, both individually and together as a band, but I'm not hearing much of the contrast that the title promised. Maybe it's a lyrical thing and I'm not getting it because Ars Nova perform in Spanish. There are certainly hints at shading here and there, in early parts of Imágenes and late parts of Aqueronte, as well as in some of the interplay between voice and instrument in Corre libre, but then those hints vanish again as if they were never there to begin with.

Oddly, Diáspora excepted, the better songs show up towards the end. Aqueronte may be the best track on the album and Volar may be the catchiest. Sombra, not too surprisingly given that it's just over fourteen minutes long, has the most substance and it plays with that idea of contrast more than anything else. It's fast, it's slow; it's loud, it's quiet. Some parts are easily more successful than others but it's an agreeable experiment, which is what prog rock is about, as far as I'm concerned.

An album with four experiments on the lines of Sombra would have been a better album. Sadly, that isn't what we get. Fortunately, what we do get is still pretty decent.

Phaeton - Phaeton (2018)

Country: Canada
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

I vividly remember Sid at Groové Records in Halifax giving me a promo copy of Dark Tranquillity's Skydancer with the comment that it contained fantastic instrumental work but was spoiled by vocals. Today, that's still one of my favourite albums, so I have to beg to disagree with the venerable Sid, but he comes back to mind every time I hear a new instrumental metal album.

Phaeton are a progressive metal band from Canada and I kind of have the same problem with prog metal that Sid had with early melodic death metal; while prog metal tends towards clean vocals, they often distract from the musicianship for me. However, that won't be a problem with Phaeton because they're entirely instrumental. Sadly, I'm not finding instrumental prog rock albums of the quality I'm finding instrumental stoner rock albums. Such a tangled web.

I initially wondered if Phaeton was going to be another example of that because the first two tracks, Siege Engine and Voyage Eternal, didn't do it for me, being decent but undistinguished efforts on a first listen, but it kicked in nicely with March of the Synthetics.

It's a longer track, never a problem for prog bands—though longer here does mean six minutes rather than sixty—and it mixes things up far more than twice the previous two. It may not entirely find its groove but it comes pretty close, especially late on, and I dug its layers. It was impressive on a first listen and it grew with further plays too.

Phantasm is even better and I wondered how many instruments were actually being played because it flits back and forth between combinations of slow chugging electric guitar, electric soloing and noodling on both an acoustic guitar and a piano. It's interesting interplay and it leads nicely to the rocking second half which definitely succeeds in finding its groove. Its ending was well constructed too.

And, to me, that's what prog is all about: capable but interesting constructions, the merging of different sounds and instruments (and lyrics, if we're going that way) into something new that often layers up. I found those layers more as the album ran on, all the way to Vortex with its almost industrial vibe at points. It's Vortex that finally demonstrates that Phaeton can indeed create a catchy riff that doesn't prevent them from dancing around with the other instruments. This album definitely needed more of that. Crossing the Divide and Labyrinth come close but Vortex got there.

What it benefits most from, though, is a second visit. Every one of these seven tracks sounds better the second time through and familiarity often improves them from average to good or from good to better. It needs you to invest some time into it. If you do that, it'll reward you for the effort.

Herteitr - Battleblood (2018)

Country: Colombia
Style: Viking/Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I just couldn't resist taking a look at this EP, not only because it's an indie release from a pagan/folk/Viking metal band and I have a particular fondness for folk metal, but Heiteitr are a Viking metal band from that best known of all Scandinavian countries, Colombia. Yeah, that caught my eye too.

Now, I have no interest in being elitist in the slightest but it's difficult to imagine people close to the equator in South America drinking out the endless winter night with their battle compatriots and the Thor's hammer in the Herteitr logo emphasises that this is Viking metal in the Scandinavian vein, even with the presence of folk elements like a charango, an Andean lute traditionally made from the shell of an armadillo. How frickin' metal is that?

The charanguista is Yilmer León, one of two guitarists in Herteitr; the other is German Gomez who also plays mandolin and handles vocal duties. In addition to bass and drums, there's also Diego Gómez on accordion and Leo Zauriel playing a variety of wind instruments, which float enticingly above this material. They've been around for a decade but this is their first recording.

I liked Battleblood a lot, even if I ache for more overtly Colombian elements in their sound. Even if it's odd to see Viking metal from outside of Scandinavia (though this isn't unprecedented, given Ymyrgar's exploration of the Norse eddas from Tunisia), folk metal escaped the north long ago and we now have enticing material incorporating folk instruments from cultures as far adrift as Mongolia, Israel and Japan. Now I want to hear Colombian folk metal without the Viking influence (I'll be reviewing some Ecuadorian folk metal tomorrow, which fits that bill wonderfully).

Leaving aside my global folk metal wishlist entirely, this is good stuff, even though we only have four tracks to enjoy. The Pride of War starts off on the right foot with a rousing effort that should have our mugs of mead swaying in appreciation. Battle Cry and By Death Comes Glory ably keep that spirit alive because there isn't a poor track on this album, let alone a bad one. Everyone and everything does its job well.

The real highlight, though, is the seven minute closer, Flames of Fury / Steel Burning. It starts slower, giving us the calm before the storm with traditional instruments, then launches into motion with the guitar down low and the wind up high. Gomez adds his growl and the melody weaves around him. Guitars swirl and chug, then bounce halfway through when things quieten down, presumably as one half of this track makes way for the other. There's a lot going on in this song and I dig all of it.

Now, given that it took Herteitr ten years to get round to an EP, can we have a full length album a little sooner than 2028?

Massive Wagons - Full Nelson (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 10 Aug 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

While metal has been revitalised by bands blurring the subgenres or bringing in other sounds entirely and folk metal wandering around the globe enlisting different cultures to the cause as it goes, rock has been revitalised too, especially in the UK, by what is increasingly becoming known as the New Wave of Classic Rock. I believe the idea is that, rather than looking forward, these bands look backwards to take heavy influence from the old school. Think Greta van Fleet and Led Zeppelin.

Well, one hot name on the NWoCR front in 2018 is Lancaster's Massive Wagons, who have found their moment in the spotlight after eight busy years on the road and a trio of studio albums, this being the newest. It even cracked the UK charts, making its way in at at number 16, hardly an everyday occurrence for a band on the Earache label, which has been spreading its stylistic net wider of late.

They're definitely looking backwards for their inspiration. There's some Thin Lizzy in here, some AC/DC and some Lynyrd Skynyrd. There's quite a lot of Saxon, some overt old school Status Quo on Back to the Stack (which is clearly a tribute to the late Rick Parfitt) and even a nod to the Scorpions in the lyrics of China Plates. However, they sound a lot more nineties to me than seventies or eighties. They'll be supporting Thunder in Germany in the spring and those London boys who were founded in 1989 and first split up in 2000 are clearly a major influence. On occasion, there are newer influences too, most obviously on Robot (Trust in Me), which has vocals that wouldn't be out of place on a Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

What this all ends up sounding like can be summed up by lyrics from Ballad of Verdun Hayes, which betray another rather unlikely further influence in the D-Day veteran of the title who famously went skydiving at the ripe young age of 101: Is there a better description of this band than, "Does what he wants, he listens to no-one. The man's a machine, he's lean and he's mean; a thousand lives won't see what he's seen." For all the sounds they're borrowing, they're doing their own thing and they wouldn't have it any other way.

While influences can be argued about, what's beyond debate is the energy that storms out of every track here because they're clearly giving it their all and loving what their hard work is resulting in. There's not much flash going on, because this is no nonsense stuff, good old fashioned rock and roll with a strong melodic line and a pounding underlying drive. Baz Mills is a born frontman too.

To put that into perspective, the slowest and quietest song is probably Northern Boy, which is also the only track to nudge over five minutes (two thirds of them are under four), and it's hardly a ballad. It will be a rare listener who doesn't tap their feet along to at least half this album and one of the reasons why it's made so many end of year lists for NWoCR fans has to be because there isn't a duff track here and the band just don't let up. It's catchy on the first listen and singalong by the second, if not before.

I got a real kick out of Billy Balloon Head and Back to the Stack, but my favourite here is Ratio, hands down. It builds a wonderful groove and just keeps on going. The thing is that my next favourite might change every time I listen through. Maybe I'll have figured that out by the time the Wagons release album four and, with a closer like Tokyo that talks down radio but shouts out to the fans, you can be sure that it won't be too far down the road.

Massive Wagons walk that fine line between radio friendly commerciality and the kick ass vibe of a band you'd love to see down the local pub. I do hope you managed that over the last eight years, by the way, because they're moving up fast and selling out bigger and bigger venues on each tour. See 'em now while you can afford it!

Tokyo Blade - Unbroken (2018)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 Jul 2018
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

I've been a Tokyo Blade fan for a very long time now. Night of the Blade, their 1984 album, is never too far from my playlist and their session for the Friday Rock Show is one of my favourites. What I haven't done is kept up with them. Like many NWOBHM era bands, they've broken up and reformed a lot. The era I remember took them through to 1991, but they reformed in 1995, disbanded in 1998 and reformed again in 2007.

Their 2018 album, Unbroken, is the second from this latest incarnation, and it's their ninth studio album overall. Given that I only know three of those albums, I have some catching up to do, starting with this one, and I'm looking forward to it, especially as the current line up includes four of the five Night of the Blade era members. Only vocalist Alan Marsh wasn't on that album, but hey, he was on the one before it, their debut back in 1983, so he could hardly be described as the new guy! That would have to be Andy Wrighton, who didn't join the band until 1984, so a new guy in the sense that Dave Gilmour is the new guy in Pink Floyd.

What hit me right off the bat was the fact that this doesn't just sound like a NWOBHM era band, it sounds like a NWOBHM era album. Every album nowadays has a deep pounding at its bass end, courtesy of modern production, but this one ignores that for the old school sound and, as offputting as that initially was, I kind of appreciated that. It feels like I just discovered an album recorded way back when that nobody knows about.

It was probably the fact that it took me a little while to get used to this that I initially felt that Devil's Gonna Bring You Down was a weak opener (it isn't). I had sinking feelings, but I felt a thrill of nostalgia during Bullet Made of Stone. "Hit me hard, hit me again; it was sweet adrenaline," sings Alan Marsh and that's exactly what my heart was screaming. Burn Down the Night kept that feel growing with cheesy eighties lyrics delivered with melodic power just like I remember, over playful twin guitars and a reliable rhythm section.

If Andy Wrighton's bass is lower in the mix than it would be on any other 2018 album, he is at least given the intro to The Man in Black to make his presence known and it's very welcome. He rumbles along wonderfully underneath the guitarwork throughout this track and on many others too, like Bad Blood and The Last Samurai. It feels odd that the quietest bass of the year is so memorable and I grinned at that realisation.

I found myself grinning a lot during this album, but perhaps never more than during the middle section of Dead Again, with a simple but very effective Thin Lizzy style riff underpinning the delightful soloing of Andy Boulton and John Wiggins, or when they slow the pace towards the end of Bad Blood and become reminiscent of classic era Diamond Head. It's true that I miss some of the speed of Night of the Blade but when slower sounds like this, I'm surely not complaining!

I also grinned at the lack of a glam vibe because Tokyo Blade went there in the late eighties and lost me. They're notorious for being a band who changed their sound as trends changed and, with the exception of the added speed on Night of the Blade, that approach never served them well. This album feels like they're done with trying to anticipate the latest in thing and so settling back to do what they did best at the very beginning, merely with new material. "The winds of change are blowing," sings Marsh on The Last Samurai, and finally they're blowing the right way.

I grinned at the most overt Thin Lizzy influence shown on Stings Like an Open Wound and the most overt Iron Maiden influence on My Kind of Heaven. I grinned at the cheesy Japanese theme on The Last Samurai, which is kind of required for this band. I grinned at the really tasty guitar intro to My Kind of Heaven. I grinned at how radio friendly No Time to Bleed was without losing any of its power. I grinned at how good Alan Marsh still sounds 35 frickin' years after their debut. I grinned just because I'm listening to a damn fine Tokyo Blade album in 2018 and it's new.

I first heard Tokyo Blade in 1984 shortly after finding rock music in general through The Friday Rock Show, so they were there at the beginning for me even though I wasn't quite there at the beginning for them. This sounds like a lost eighties classic to me and, frankly, that's the best Christmas present I could have been given last year.

AfterBurn - Knocking with Your Elbows (2018)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Dec 2018
Sites: Facebook | Official Website

Every single member of AfterBurn is a firefighter, whether professional or volunteer, so they had my respect before I ever pressed play on their second album. Of course, while that's great for promotion, it really has nothing to do with whether they're a band worth listening to (beyond the appropriate lyrics of All Gave Some), so I'll get it out of the way right now and move on.

I'm happy to say that they don't sound bad at all, though there's nothing new here that you haven't heard before from a whole bunch of other rock bands who turn it up but haven't lost track of the fact that rock came from the blues. After they played support for Faster Pussycat at a New York gig in 2014, they were invited onto their tour card, and it doesn't surprise me for a couple of reasons.

One is that their style fits that sort of bill. Look at the title track, which is an up tempo rocker with a glam edge, or Maybe We Should, which is a slower and clearly suggestive bluesy rock song. They're two very different songs but they fit well next to each other on the album and they'd work well on a stage too as warm up for someone like Faster Pussycat. That goes double for the singalong section at the close of the title track, which sounds like something Flogging Molly might record: 'Who's knocking, knocking at my door? Bring beer, bring beer!'

Another is that there's nothing overly flash here at all. Not one member of the band stands out for special notice, not even the vocalist or guitarist as you might expect from other rock bands, where egos tend to require that someone has to be the star. That's not to say that singer Rich Apps or guitarist Joe Martin, Jr. aren't up to scratch, because they both do their jobs perfectly well, as do Chick Slattery on bass and Mat Sebel on drums, but they're all clearly cogs in a bigger wheel and that wheel surely knows how to move much better than the cogs could on their own.

The same thing goes for the songs, because they're so consistent that it's tough to pick out either a favourite (OK, I'll plump for Climbing the Walls if you insist) or even a least favourite from this agreeable variety of fast rockers and slow ballads. I'm under the impression that these guys can play anything on the fly and make it work. They have influences, of course, but they're not overt and nothing sounds like anyone specific, even though there are hints here and there throughout. AfterBurn is rather like a distillation of the last half century of rock 'n' roll with a special focus on the seventies and eighties.

All in all, it's a solid and reliable album made by folk who clearly know each other very well indeed and work together even better. It gets better as well with a second listen as the songs start to become old friends. I enjoyed it a lot here at home but I'm pretty sure that the best place to experience AfterBurn will be in a Long Island club with a couple of beers inside you.

Mikael Erlandsson & Last Autumn's Dream - Secret Treasures (2018)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Dec 2018
Sites: MySpace | Wikipedia

Last Autumn's Dream have been knocking albums out almost every year since 2003 and this fifteenth studio release follows a sort of tradition in releasing soon before Christmas in Japan, hence the length of this one with four bonus tracks. The European release won't drop until 2019.

When it does, it's recommended. I'm new to the band, but apparently the selection of tracks here are generally old and discarded ones revisited to see how they'd work out in the modern day. It turns out that they work out pretty damn well, especially given that they make for a lively album, rocking out on the front of the virtual stage inside our heads. Reading up on them online tells me that their last album was a much softer affair, almost into Eurovision pop territory according to one blog.

Now, Lordi may have shaken up Eurovision and made it a viable target for harder material, but Secret Treasures mostly isn't interested in that sort of thing. I could see a ballad like Have to Let You Go playing there, even if it's crafted beautifully, and even Break Another Heart has an Abba vibe, even if it's rather heavier than their fellow Swedes ever got.

Most of these tracks are up tempo rockers, starting with with the opening double of Eye of the Hurricane and Evil, catchy rockers both that grab our attention from the outset. Why, with a different voice leading it, could have been a Van Halen track from their Sammy Hagar era.

That voice, by the way, is Mikael Erlandsson, the driving force behind Last Autumn's Dream since he co-founded the band with former guitarist Andy Malecek back in 2002. A number of these songs were apparently solo Erlandsson tracks, which is why the cover credits the album to Mikael Erlandsson and Last Autumn's Dream.

I have no idea how the material breaks down but it seems consistent to me, so there was presumably never much of a different sound between Erlandsson solo and Erlandsson in Last Autumn's Dream. Sure, there's a neat guitar groove on the remix of Love is the Answer and another one on When She's Gone, which reminds me of Saigon Kick. So does Alice in the Wonderland, courtesy of their solid Beatles influence.

If anything, the songs seem to be competing with each other to see which will be recognised as the bounciest, the catchiest or the most radio friendly. Only one of those categories has a clear winner, because the catchiest must surely be OK, which burrows into our brains immediately and camps out like it never wants to leave again. When She's Gone deserves to dominate the airwaves so it lands my vote for most radio friendly. The bounciest is really up for grabs, with the album's starter and finisher vying hard for that title in completely different ways and everything in between staking a claim too. That's not a bad situation for a melodic rock band.

The Japanese bonus tracks are all remixes of older tracks originally released on the II album back in 2004. They all sound good to me, perhaps a little heavier and more guitar focused than the rest of the album, but they underline my real takeaway from Secret Treasures, namely to check out what this band have been doing for the last decade and a half. I've clearly been missing out.

Orangotango - Sumatra (2018)

Country: Portugal
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Ever since I discovered Stoned Meadow of Doom on YouTube, I've been completely hooked on instrumental albums from stoner, doom or psychedelic rock bands. This one is the product of a Portuguese trio from Susão. Oddly, given that Susão is at the very northwest of Portugal overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, they seem to be looking far to the east to the jungles of Indonesia for inspiration.

The half hour slab of riffs that is Sumatra is broken up into only five tracks and they're a heady dose of bass-driven power.

Aura starts things out with sensitivity, the gently noodling guitar of Rui Loureiro floating over the other instruments, its plaintive refrain calling for something somewhere. What responds is sheer power, solid bass driven riffs from Carlos Jorge that could be called plodding if they weren't so up tempo. They're also pretty clean, with only a hint of fuzz; they're heavy enough without help from distortion. This distant conversation between distant guitar and bass gets closer as this nine minute opener progresses, all capably underpinned by the drums of Filipe Ferreira. It's gorgeous stuff.

Bolt, as its title might suggest, speeds things up somewhat but it's still no breakneck affair. Dust hits a gallop at points, sounding almost like early death/doom era Paradise Lost on speed, especially given that guitar tone. The middle of Ride explores the same terrain a little slower and I realise that I'm all for gothic psychedelia with a bass as heavy as this!

The variance between tracks comes mostly from Loureiro's guitar work because he conjures a variety of different sounds out of his instrument depending on the needs of the track at hand. Much of this comes in the bookends, two nine minute epics that sound notably different, Aura being conversational and Outblast more spiritual. The three shorter tracks in between are much more similar in outlook and, if it wasn't for the breaks between them, they'd blur into a twelve minute third track.

I hadn't heard of Orangotango until this release and they seem to have come out of nowhere, but I'm hooked. They're a notably heavy band for having only three members but they mix it up well. I wasn't bored for a moment and Sumatra never wandered off into the background while my concentration moved elsewhere. I was with the band throughout. Who needs vocals anyway?

Sechem - Disputes with My Ba (2018)

Country: Spain
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Dec 2018
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Oh, this looked enticing! Sechem, who hail from Madrid in Spain, play 'Middle Eastern folk metal with an overt Egyptian theme'. That's right up my alley! I imagined a cross between Nile and Orphaned Land and that's hardly a bad place to start this musical journey, because there's some of the crunch of the former and some of the invention of the latter.

However, add to that clean female vocals of the lovely Ikena, who sings in the English language, and the flute of Marta Sacri that dances over everything else much of the time and occasionally leads the way, and you end up with a band who sound refreshingly different, even on this, their debut album. They previously released an EP in 2016, Renaissance of the Ancient Ka, and their line up is almost unchanged, having only swapped out bassist Carlos Sobrino for Santiago Urruela.

I listened through this in entirety a couple of times in the wee hours and then came back it again today to take notes, still no closer to figuring out which of the ten tracks are standouts or favourites. Another few times through and I'm starting to get there. There's a consistency in approach throughout but each song has its own identity and its own little nuances to keep it apart from its peers.

That's most obvious is in the vocal work of Ikena. She's willing to soar high and free like a symphonic metal singer on tracks like Bird in a Cage, then ditch that for more sedate refrains surely intended to sound like ritual chanting on tracks like An Epic Journey to Yam, even laugh heartily and raucously at the end of Mummify Me! I'm coming to the realisation that my least favourite song is probably Horus & Seth, whose relatively straightforward story-based lyric gives her less opportunity than most of the rest of the album, especially coming as it does right after a similar approach in Sanehat.

Just because Ikena is an asset to the band, that doesn't mean that the musicians backing her up don't get their time in the spotlight too. For a start, she's not the only vocalist because one of her colleagues provides some deathly growls or muttered chants at points, albeit not too many of them. I've already mentioned Marta Sacri's flute too, which is the most overt element to set Sechem apart from other bands as well as the most overt folk instrument.

However, the most interesting sound is probably the interplay between guitars, which isn't like what you'd get in a Wishbone Ash or an Iron Maiden at all. If I'm reading this correctly, Pepo Raulli is responsible for all the electric guitar work and, when he's not soloing, he's adding depth to the bass and drums. However, Guille Ramos adds an acoustic guitar to the mix and he refuses to be relegated to just the intros as most bands would require. He's there during the songs too and the excellent production allows for it to be heard. For fascinating interplay between the more traditionally metal electric guitar and the ethnic stylings of its acoustic brother, check out An Epic Journey to Yam or The Shipwrecked Sailor.

There's a fantastic interlude in Waltz of the Three Fates too, which serves as a quiet but evocative intro to the final track, The Doomed Prince. And when that ends, I just want to listen to the album over again. It's not the best album I've heard this month but it may be the most likely to become a personal favourite.