Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: 2022

Showing posts with label 2022. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

DeWolff - Love, Death & In Between (2023)

Only yesterday, I reviewed the new Mono Inc. album, which was a new entry to the German album charts at number one. Today, I'm reviewing the new one from DeWolff, which I see was a new entry to the Dutch album charts at, guess what, number one. Their previous album, Wolffpack, which got an 8/10 from me back in 2021, only reached the second spot, held from the top by the Foo Fighters. There's something very positive going on over there in Europe. Checking other countries tells me that the top two albums in Finland in mid-January were VV and Turmion Kätilöt, both of which I've reviewed, even if I can't find newer data. Suddenly I'm a chart watcher.

I'm going with an 8/10 for this album too, even though it's a sprawling sixty-eight minute dive even further into genres in which I have little background. Wolffpack mixed its psychedelic rock and its southern rock with heavy doses of the sounds of the seventies: especially funk and soul, but even a little disco. This does the same but the ratios are different, keeping a rock base mostly intact but venturing far deeper into soul, funk, gospel and blues. Last time the balance was often between a laid back Lynyrd Skynyrd and Stevie Wonder, but here it's more like John Kongos and Nina Simone. There's a lot of Sinnerman here but with many nods to far less epic music too.

It starts of as it means to go on, as if we're tuning into a seventies soul show. Are you ready for the Night Train? It feels like an MC has given the cameraman approval to pan over to the stage, where DeWolff are about to erupt into motion. And they do exactly that, because this was apparently an entirely live recording, not in the sense of performing on stage but in the sense of recording right into the machines as a band without any overdubs added in post-production. This is precisely what they played in the studio and it feels vibrant for having that approach.

There are only three members of DeWolff, Robin Piso and the van de Poel brothers, but there are a host of others contributing to this one. I count eight of them, whether they're providing bass to the sound, adding vocals or guitar or keyboards, or jumping in with flute, trumpet or trombone as needed, with a special mention here due to Nick Feenstra for a fantastic saxophone solo to finish up Message for My Baby. Sometimes they sound like a trio, plenty of space between the band and the floating Hammond organ cloud behind them. Sometimes they become a full on party.

Because the album is so long, there are a dozen songs on offer, even with Rosita clocking in at the surprising length of sixteen and a half minutes. Only Wontcha Wontcha otherwise reaches the six minute mark, so this isn't bloated, especially given that that one is one of the party songs, finding its way into a full on carnival celebration in song form around the halfway mark. Rosita simply has more to tell and it does that in a set of movements that continually grab us into its mindsets. It's grabbing for us at the five minute mark when it goes quiet and introspective. It's grabbing for us halfway through when it turns into a revival meeting.

Pablo van de Poel, the guitarist in DeWolff and one of its vocalists, has talked about how deep the dives were that they were taking into old soul, gospel and classic R&B, checking out bands like the Impressions, the Clovers and the Soul Stirrers, along with bigger names we might remember such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the Staple Singers. He's also mentioned attending a sermon by Al Green at his own church in Memphis, which he describes as "a life-changing experience, musically." This is Pablo and DeWolff treating music as religion, hurling emotions at the tape recorder to be recorded as waveforms.

There's a lot here, far more than I can do justice to within a sub-thousand word review. I must say that certain songs leapt out at me, but also that none of those that didn't are filler. The weakest song here is strong, merely overshadowed by its company. I gravitated towards the blues songs, a delightful guitar from Pablo van der Poel on Will o' the Wisp and even more delightful Hammond organ from Robin Piso. Mr. Garbage Man is a nice slow blues tune and Gilded (Ruin of Love) is laid back glory in four minutes. I liked the party songs too, when the band went full on church gospel or Caribbean carnival or just John Kongos groove.

There's so much here to enjoy, even if I can't tell you the derivation of much of it, and it's full of an obviously live energy. Congratulations to DeWolff on that number one on the Dutch album charts and I hope you stay there for quite a while yet.

Friday, 3 February 2023

Xandria - The Wonders Still Awaiting (2023)

This is the eighth studio album for German symphonic metal band Xandria, though it's also kind of a second debut, given that the line-up has been almost completely replaced since the prior album, Theater of Dimensions in 2017. Vocalist Dianne van Giersbergen left soon after that release, while bassist Steven Wussow followed suit in 2019. Then long term members Philip Restemeier and Gerit Lamm did likewise in 2022. Now, Marco Heubaum had been the sole founder member almost since he founded the band in 1997 but Lamm joined in 1998 and Restemeier in 2002. I believe both are on everything the band has ever released, making this a fresh start for Heubaum and his brand new set of colleagues.

If that might suggest a paradigm shift in their sound, I should highlight that it isn't that different to the Xandria I've heard before. Now, I'm notably out of date, because I believe I've only heard a couple of early albums by them, nothing more recent than their third, India, which is closing in on two decades old now. This feels similar, plenty of power in the sound but with the symphonic more prominent. From the very opening, it builds as much through choral or orchestral swells as it does through the guitars. If there's anything new, it's a more rhythmic lead guitar, a modern fancy.

So I'd call this symphonic metal over symphonic power metal and that tends to lean heavily on the talents of the female lead vocalist. Ambre Vourvahis is the sixth such in the band's history and she seems capable without carving out a niche. It's a crowded field for sopranos, so that it's an uphill struggle for anyone new to distinguish herself. Vourvahis, who is apparently half French and half Greek, does well with a warm and approachable default voice and as well when she soars upward. That said, even after seventy-four minutes of this album—Xandria don't seem to know how to self-edit—she still sounded good, rather than like Ambre Vourvahis. Maybe in time.

She gets plenty of opportunities on Two Worlds and Reborn, the openers, bolstered by the choral efforts and by a harsh voice, presumably provided by Heubaum, to provide occasional beauty and the beast moments. The biggest opportunity ought to have been on You Will Never Be Our God, a song also featuring Ralf Scheepers of Primal Fear, because they would be an interesting duet, but he's far too low in the mix for that to happen. The opportunity was squandered.

Frankly, the best thing about the album is that it's pretty much what I expected. There's energy in this music and the vocals and choral backing add more. While the tracks did blur a little together a first, second and third time through, none of them seem like they let the side down. Yes, this is too long, notably so, but that's not because it's packed with filler. I enjoyed each song as it was playing and didn't regret any of them. But what would all I call out for special mention? Not a heck of a lot is the quick answer to that. The drum intro to Ghosts? I should be able to find more than that, even if Dimitrio Gatsios shines throughout.

I should certainly be able to find more than that on the guitar side, but the guitarwork, from both Heubaum and Rob Klawoon, fails to impress. It's not bad, I should emphasise. Both are clearly able but they don't seem entirely willing and the mix doesn't help them. It emphasises the vocals over the guitars at every step. The riffs are also too modern and staccato, even if they don't attempt a full on djenty approach, and the solos are too infrequent and too lost. So that's the worst thing to my thinking, along with the lack of will to self-edit.

If you forced me to pick favourites, I'd probably suggest the opener, Two Worlds, which sets a scene well, and some of the songs midway, like Ghosts and the much softer Your Stories I'll Remember. If we're going to focus on the vocals, then let them be ones where Vourvahis is free and clear on the sort of material where her sustains can shine. And that's a tell for me, because I don't usually pick out the softer songs on symphonic metal albums for special mention. This one shines because of a strong lead vocal and orchestrations that aren't just swells; there are plenty of strings here and I liked how they weaved in and amongst the choral voices.

And so, like the Ten album I reviewed yesterday, this is another album that I feel fairly deserves its 7/10 but didn't engage with me the way I hoped it would. I hope we're not setting a trend here for 2023. I want to hear albums doing things I haven't heard before that I want to keep on listening to, even if I have more to move onto. Ten and Xandria may well be your bag, but they're not mine right now.

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

Crowne - Operation Phoenix (2023)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock/Power Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 27 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Crowne are a new Swedish band, formed in 2020, who are already on their second album and it's a strong statement. They feel like they're enjoying this so much that they might just stay inside the studio and turn out albums three, four and five in the next couple of weeks. Given that they play a tasty blend of melodic rock on steroids that's just as much power metal, it's not surprising that I first heard them on Chris Franklin's excellent Raised on Rock radio show. They're almost designed for that show, carefully tailored and custom fitted, with soaring hooks and constant melodies.

Those melodies are at the heart of everything, the riffs supporting them and frankly joining them whenever they can. It's not hard to see where the sound came from. While Super Trooper isn't the Abba song, there's some Abba in these melodies. It always feels cheap to suggest Abba in reviews of melodic rock albums, especially when they're by bands from Sweden, but their influence on an apparently unrelated genre only seems to grow over time. The most overtly Abba song here may be the closer, Northern Lights, which feels like the midpoint between Abba and a Blind Guardian singalong. I could easily hear the audience singing this chorus for five minutes.

The more pertinent comparison though is to a different Swedish band, namely Europe, just with a little bit more power metal in the mix and far more subtlety in the keyboards. Juliette may be the most obvious Europe-influenced song here, and not only because it's named for a woman, but it's far from the only one to demonstrate how much lead guitarist Love Magnusson has listened to John Norum and how much vocalist Alexander Strandell has listened to Joey Tempest.

That shouldn't surprise at all, but I'll confess to a little surprise at moments that remind me firmly of Alex Falk of Fear of the Dark. That's mostly in the verses rather than the choruses, but it's there on the opening title track and Champions and In the Name of the Fallen after it and ongoing. Fear of the Dark, of course, are yet another Swedish band, albeit not as well known as the others that I've mentioned thus far—and yes, I know that Blind Guardian are German. What's in the water up there in Stockholm and Gothenburg?

If there's a problem here, it's in how consistent this album is. It feels like an album that should be huge, because it's about as accessible as it gets. If you're into soft or melodic rock, then it's never more than a breath away from a melody and every song has a hook. It ought to work well for you. If you're into heavier stuff and skip over the softer material as a matter of course, well, this ought to work well for you too, because it's always energetic and powerful, even in its quietest moments. It looks at that sliding scale from Europe's poppiest singles to HammerFall's heaviest deep cuts and says, sure, that works for Crowne. Frankly, we kind of forget how heavy any particular song is or is not, and just fall into the album.

And, yeah, I said that's a problem, because we also kind of forget how good this is. While this is in motion it does the business, on every one of the eleven tracks on offer, but, when it's over, we get on with our lives and only gradually, as we listen to other albums and wonder why they're not quite as good, do we think back and wonder just if we've underrated this one. It also means that it's not an easy job to pull out the highlights. I'm remembering moments: the keyboard intro to Ready to Run, the chorus to Northern Lights, the guitar solo in Juliette. This is one of those choice albums where the best song is always whichever one is playing right now.

Circle of Void - Musings of Unbecoming (2023)

Country: Egypt
Style: Progressive Rock/Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 13 Jan 2023
Sites:

I know almost nothing about Circle of Void. They're an Egyptian outfit, though I don't know where they're from within that country. There are at least two members, but possibly more. Tarek Brery handles guitars and keyboards, while Moanis Salem contributes bass. There are drums here and I don't believe they're electronic, but I have no idea who's playing them. They play in an imaginative form of instrumental rock that's clearly progressive and occasionally experimental and which has a tendency to hop over into metal at points, if never for too long.

What I wonder the most is what their collective influences are, because this seems to be all over the map musically. I've gone with prog rock/metal as a label, for the sake of having one, but it's a tantalisingly varied album that often feels like post-rock, sometimes shifts into jazz, especially in Salem's basswork and has more than one section that feels like a solo instrumental album from a blues rock guitarist who wants to figure out how to conjure up new sounds from an old six string. There's a lot here to digest and almost none of it sounds ethnically Egyptian.

My favourite tracks are the more unusual ones, often in which Brery's keyboards pretend to be an orchestra by choosing instruments in turn to mimic. They see what it's like to be flutes and violins on Under Star 1, just as his pensive electric guitar pretends to be acoustic. They come back to the violins on Destiny and continue to do that all the way to the closer, Unbecoming, but they also find moments that sound like a brass section joining forces to make an emphasis. That happens on An Illusive Haven too, but the strings join in to create a dense Ligeti-like atmosphere that works well as an interlude, especially given that the album's epic is next up. The brass punctuation mark is at the very end of Unbecoming too, to open the way for soft piano to wrap up the album.

That's Circles of Void, which builds magnificently and continues to add diverse points of influence to the list. There's a voicebox in play halfway through this one and the guitar gets liquid after it, a sign that we need to add Peter Frampton to Jeff Beck and Allan Holdsworth as guitarists that it's likely Brery enjoys. As much as I like the easy to follow bass here which is lively and welcoming, it's Brery I keep coming back to. For a while, I was enthused by his keyboards but eventually his guitar won me over too, with songs like The Weirdo Meets the Maiden feeling like extended solos.

There's a lot here to digest, enough that I actually stopped the album halfway through my initial listen to start it over again now. I had certain expectations from the opening track, A Prologue to the End, which is the heaviest piece here and one with a disappointing ending, a fade that comes out of the blue when I thought the piece had a lot more legs. Those expectations were flouted as the songs ran on until I had to start over to reevaluate what I'd heard. And then, getting past the point I restarted, the album continued to flout my expectations. The ramp up in tempo at the end of Destiny II before it fades out with a brief symphonic metal choral section caught me totally unprepared.

To highlight just how much this shifted for me, I wasn't that fond of the opener, especially with an uncertain ending like that, but Under Star 1 won me over and the longer I went, the more I fell in love with this music and every fresh revelation it brought me. Is it just me or am I hearing a Mike Oldfield style guitar on Until There's Nothing? How long did I get into Unbecoming believing that it would stay orchestral throughout? Maybe when the drums kick around the minute mark with a heavy bass. Let's add Ennio Morricone to the melting pot though from that intro.

Not everything works, because I'm not convinced by sections where Brery's guitar appears to be unplugged but he's playing it anyway. They seem more like a rehearsal of a piece of music than an actual finished product. But hey, I'm only on my third listen and this just gets better and better. It isn't often that I'm surprised so well and so consistently by an album. Now, where can I obtain the background I want on this band? Do they have a website? Are they on social media? Is it just these two musicians? Who's playing the drums? And what did they grow up on in Egypt to end up with an unusual sound like this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Solstice - Light Up (2022)

It's the last day of January and so I'm drawing a line between 2022 and 2023 after this review. From here until the rest of the year, I'll be focused only on new 2023 releases and, whatever else I might have missed from the past year will stay missed. And that's why I'm listening to Solstice, because I was blown away by Sia at the tail end of 2020, so much that it was my Album of the Month and one of only ten 9/10s that year. This continues their fourth phase with Andy Glass accompanied by Jess Holland on vocals and Jenny Newman on violin, who shape the band's sound, and the same line-up as last time out.

That sound is a little different here, but rooted in the same prog and folk worlds. The keyboards of Steven McDaniel are more prominent than Glass's guitar and Newman's violin, though he's rarely soloing. He's creating ambience to be enriched by Robin Phillips's bass and Pete Hemlsey's drums, but especially by Holland's vocals. That's the mindset here: set the scene and let Holland define it, with Newman and especially Glass sitting aside waiting for a moment to step in and elevate.

For a band who are so drenched in folk music—and it doesn't need the violin on Mount Ephraim or the harp and sitar that kick off Bulbul Tarang to underline that—there's a lot of jazz in play here. The title track kicks off the album as much jazz fusion as prog rock, though Holland's voice remains prominent, blocking us from seeing this as an instrumental workout. Wongle No. 9 follows suit and finds some glorious balances: it's very loose but careful; it's funky but smooth. Bulbul Tarang tries jazz too but isn't ready to give up the folk or indeed the prog, so it's a less obvious example.

I liked every track here and, after a few times through, they're soaking into my skin so I can carry them around with me. Mount Ephraim is the one that stuck first, courtesy of that folky violin, but Run is the immediate standout. It's such a delicate piece that I was afraid of breaking it simply by moving in my chair while it was playing. The drums are soft and electronic, a beautiful sample of glitch. The vocals are tender and layered beautifully, occasionally weaving amidst themselves. It's as effortlessly calm as the unbroken sheen of a still lake.

It grows though. It ramps up at the five minute mark, albeit only to gentle violin. It ramps up again thirty seconds later, with Glass's guitar searing out of the peace. I can't recall any driving force of a band taking such a back seat as he does here but, when he feels the urge, he steps in with a solo that speaks directly to our souls. It doesn't even have to be a long solo, like the brief one early in the second half of Bulbul Tarang to temporarily spear the calm.

He returns soon enough with more but it's obvious that he has impact even when he's not playing. I love those guitarists—and it does tend to be guitarists—who speak volumes with the notes they don't play just as much as the ones they do. That's only one reason I hear a lot of Dave Gilmour in Glass's work here and on Sia. The almost liquid tone they share is another.

Run leads us into Home, which is a memorable track too, because it's the one most reminiscent of others. Solstice have found their own way in music so emphatically that, even when I catch a mere glimpse of this band or that artist, it's gone again. They're so clearly them. However, Home does remind us of other musicians, generally those who cross the border between pop and rock for fun, but do so with imagination and very deliberate craft. I'm thinking people like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, along with Dave Gilmour, though there's also some Suzanne Vega in Holland's voice here and the bass/drum combo that kicks it off is a calm take on Police's Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.

All in all, this didn't floor me the way Sia did but, having heard that, I was kind of prepared for this follow-up, the band's seventh album. It still drew me in though, quickly and effectively, and yet I'm still finding new depths on a fourth or fifth listen. It's another peach from Solstice.

Monday, 30 January 2023

Evergrey - A Heartless Portrait: The Orphean Testament (2023)

Here's a lucky thirteenth album for Swedish prog metal band Evergrey, who I only discovered two years ago on their twelfth, Escape of the Phoenix. This follows that one pretty closely, so much of what I said there applies here too. There's power metal in here, but the prog metal is more overt. It's elegant too, but of such a consistent quality that it's hard to call out anything as a highlight, as each song gets lost in the company of its peers. The best way to enjoy any song here is to listen to it in isolation, as if it was being played on a radio show in and amongst a bunch of other bands. It's likely that almost any of them will stand out in that context.

What I can add is that there are definitely other genres here. While it's always a metal album first and foremost, there's a lot of straightforward rock here too. I've listened through a few times now and got interrupted twice. Both times, I lowered the volume but left it playing in an instrumental section and came back to it thinking that I was listening to a guitarist's album, the sort of thing I'd expect from a Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. That one of those times was during The Great Unwashed is pretty telling, because the guitarwork on that one is particularly fascinating.

That's understandable, of course, especially for a band who appear to have moved more and more towards prog as they've gone on. However, the other genre that I kept catching here is R&B, which is far more surprising. It's mostly in the vocals of Tom Englund, who's the one founder member left in the band. He appears to feel particularly drawn to vocal runs, those acrobatics you hear singers do on talent shows to wow the judges, who tend to be suckers for singers showing off like that. For the most overt example of this, listen to Heartless, especially the quieter spotlight section that's around the three minute mark, but it's there throughout.

I find it rather interesting because he sings like he's a lead singer, but he's always been a guitarist too and musicians in prog bands of any flavour tend to live for their instruments. I don't recall this being obvious last time out, so maybe he's moving in this particular direction. If so, I wonder what changes it will make to the band's sound, because they don't seem to be softening up otherwise. I wouldn't say that any of these songs are easily translatable to pop music the way that some songs on last year's Battle Beast album absolutely are. Just change the filter on them and they'll sound like a different genre. Change the filters here and you'll have prog metal that's been messed with.

And messed with is a good way to talk about the negative side of the album, something else that I didn't notice last time out. It's not obvious throughout, but more than one track features a vocal that's been digitally manipulated. It's there on Midwinter Calls and especially on Ominous, but it keeps crawling out of other songs too to brush its fingernails over my personal blackboard, as one firm annoyance. I'm talking about autotune or whatever it is that Englund is doing to his voice. He sounds great normally, so I have no idea why he wants to change it into something so frustrating. It's the primary reason why I'm not giving this album another 8/10 and not particularly wanting to keep listening.

The other problem isn't a negative, just a caveat and that's that it's far from immediate. It isn't a bad album on a first listen but it's an underwhelming one. It's better second time through and it's better still on each further listen. Songs are only now starting to come alive for me and I'm on my fifth time through. That means that, while right now I might praise the imaginative guitars on The Great Unwashed and the groove of Call Out the Dark, elevated as it is by some straightforward but highly effective keyboard work from Rikard Zander, I need to listen a lot more to call out real highlights. And that's a tough admission for a critic to make.

For now, this is excellent but highly consistent stuff, in the vein of the last album but with more of a shift in the vocals in directions I'm not fond of. For a change, I want to read your reviews of it.

Friday, 27 January 2023

Faetooth - Remnants of the Vessel (2022)

Intellectually, of course, I know that not everyone in Los Angeles plays hair metal and pretty much everyone stopped doing that decades ago, but it still seems somehow surprising that this band of unusual doom metallers hail from that city. There's something northern about their sound, and it would make more sense if they were from Seattle. They have a dirty take on doom that's not quite sludge, even when they ramp up the distortion, and the vocals on Echolalia, the first full track, are flavoured with grunge, even if they're melodic and drenched in melancholy.

I should mention that I have no idea who's singing there because there are three vocalists in this band, each of which plays another instrument as well: Jenna Garcia the bass and both Ari May and Ashla Chavez-Razzano guitars. They have different voices, because there's a harsh one that shows up late in Echolalia and adds a whole new level. It's a sort of hoarse emission of pain, closer to the shrieks of black metal than the growls of death but a long way from either. The difference in these voices is mirrored in the intensity of the music to make this a highly dynamic album.

There seem to be two primary modes. The most common one is a slow and warm reflection, a sort of look back at darkness. This singer isn't out there somewhere buried in the snow fighting off the wild animals, she's safe inside with a fire blazing in the hearth, but whatever experience she went through damaged her and she's trying to deal with that. The other mode is when she can't do that and the harsh voice takes over, screaming out not in agony but in trauma. With the guitars aiming to mirror that shift, it adds a real bite to the impact of the album. It makes it feel like these songs aren't over when they're over. They're always hanging over our shoulder.

The slower, warmer sections can be beautiful. The opening to She Cast a Shadow is a delight, those two guitars combining to unusual effect and the bass wandering between them. That beauty isn't always on the way out when the crunch hits, though that harsh voice is always ready to leap in at a moment's notice and remind us that that's a serious darkness here. I love She Cast a Shadow, but I recognised the melody in the middle section—it's Yallah by Page and Plant—and it bugged me for a while until I figured it out. Now I know, this one's solid without being distracting.

I'm reviewing it because it Spin magazine decided that it should tie with Messa's Close as their choice for the number one slot on their Best Metal Albums of 2022 list. Given that I was massively impressed by Messa, I clearly should check this album out too and I'm happy I did. However, it's not the songs per se that grabbed me but the mood. The more effectively they calm and soothe us and the longer a song runs in that mode, the greater the impact when they crunch up and crush us.

I'd call out Strange Ways for waiting the longest to do that. It's almost five minutes in when it has enough of being calm and the ritual turns dark with cavernous slow chords. This isn't doom to sing along with. It's a doom that's come for us and we feel the draw in our soul. The deceptive ending is particularly destroying because everything is whisked away to be replaced not by peaceful respite but by a hollow emptiness. It's beautiful but it sears us, just as Saturn Devouring His Son does as it closes out the album with a welcome violin.

This is strikingly mature for a band on their debut who have only been around for four years. None of the musicians involved—the fourth is drummer Rah Kanan—have other bands on their resumes and that's a real shock. It seems that they found some sort of magic when they founded their first band and that means that Faetooth is definitely a name to watch. This is hardly mainstream, but it ought to have quite the impact on the doom metal scene, especially given how well they nail this sound. It's harsher than doom but smoother, for the most part, than sludge and others will follow suit in mining that middle ground for gold.

Thursday, 26 January 2023

Twilight Force - At the Heart of Wintervale (2023)

OK, here's something I need to be careful with my wording on, because there's a trigger word I can't avoid that might put a lot of people off, possibly unfairly. That word is Disney.

Twilight Force are a Swedish power metal band in the grand European tradition, who have making music since 2011 and still have half their founder members in place. It doesn't take much distance into the opener, also called Twilight Force, even though this is their fourth album, to see the nods to Helloween and Gamma Ray. This is grandiose and flamboyant and we can just tell how blissfully happy the band is being grandiose and flamboyant.

So far so good, and Twilight Force is an absolute belter of an opener. It's almost a checklist of what you might want in a power metal song, with every box checked off a minute in. The tempo is quick, albeit not Dragonforce quick, but everything is melody and I mean melodies layered on melodies, grandiose melodies at that. There are also a whole slew of flamboyant solos, keyboards passing a baton to the guitars and back and forth until we forget which is which. It's a serious rush and it's a strong candidate one month in for power metal song of the year.

However, it's impeccably clean power metal and I mean crystal clean without a speck of dirt and a conspicuous lack of shadow. As the album runs on, that started to weigh on me. There are bells on At the Heart of Wintervale, large bells rather than the tinkling Christmas sleigh bells on Twilight Force. The instrumental stretch in the second half is clearly influenced by classical music, though I didn't catch any particular homages. Dragonborn kicks off with a playful string quartet leading an energetic jig and it grows into a slower song that sits on top of a what feels like a metal take on a classical take on a folk tune.

It's all incredibly well done but I wanted to know where the darkness was, especially given the art on the cover with a huge dragon bursting out of a crystal cave. That screams danger, but the blues and whites are where this is at and that comes to a head on Highlands of the Elder Dragon. There are a lot of dragons in Twilight Force's world, but they're cuddly animated pet dragons who would never slice into your flesh even by accident. Everything here is safe, including the danger. You can't even stub your toe here. Try it and see.

Highlands of the Elder Dragon is where it gets too sugary for me. It's saccharine sweet all the way down to the narration by some genial grandfather with a twinkle in his eye. It's like the intro to an animated Disney movie but it does ramp up nicely, going full choral at one point. This is the first of two ten minute epics and it doesn't outstay its welcome, even though it's so quintessentially nice. I caught a line in Skyknights of Aldaria where "the people smile and dance the night away" that has to be telling. I imagined them continuing to do that as the dragon from the cover art soared over their village, because he's only there to breath fire on the huge bonfire they plan to keep them as snug as bugs in a rug on a chill winter night. It's just a grand lighting ceremony.

To be fair, there is a dark voice on Skyknights of Aldaria, even if I have no idea what it's saying, as effects-laden as it is. Maybe it's providing a recipe for the best cocoa. That would fit the tone, not least because it's followed by a mediaeval interlude, A Familiar Memory, a palate cleanser just in case anyone got scared by that wicked voice, all welcoming pipes, flutes and hand drums. There's another dance on Sunlight Knight and more bells and a particular grandiose classical finalé. What I want to call out is the calypso section, complete with steel drums, because it's delightful, but it's also overwhelmed by everything else.

This is far too safe for me and I really ought to despise it but somehow it's too likable, even when it leaps into drama towards the end of The Last Crystal Bearer, the other ten minute epic that closes out the album. Our genial grandfather shows back up, to sing this time, and a strong female voice joins him at points, before it all descends into full on animation with a host of voice actors in the house to make us visualise this like a two dimensional cartoon.

And so this is a peach of a power metal album for your six year old niece who aims to grow up to be a Disney princess with a ballgown the size of a house, make-up that never fades and hair that never moves except to dramatically flow in the breeze, but who also wants to ride her very own dragon, wield a flaming sword in battle and kick the boy three doors down in the nuts because he's stinky. If you have one of those, add two points to my rating, but, if you despise Disney even more than I do, then drop a point off.

Ardours - Anatomy of a Moment (2022)

Country: Italy
Style: Alternative
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jul 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

When I asked the Melodic Rock Merchant himself, Chris Franklin of the Raised on Rock radio show, to pick a blatant omission from my reviews in 2022, he gave me a couple of albums to choose from: Manic Sinners as his rock pick and Ardours as a metal pick and, as always, he chose well, because I thoroughly enjoyed both. However, while Ardours do have some serious metal credentials, given who put it together and who they've played with, I wouldn't call this particular band metal.

They were founded in 2015 by a couple of Italians, Mariangela Demurtas and Laurent Kris. She's a vocalist, most recently for Norwegian gothic metal band Tristania, though she didn't join till 2007 so isn't on my favourite album by them, World of Glass. Of course, they sadly split up last year, but there are a couple of Tristania albums out with her voice leading them. Kris is a guitarist, who put almost a decade into Italian black/gothic metal band Cadaveria as the Lynchian pseudonym, Dick Laurent, with a couple of albums and a whole string of singles to his name. They both have other bands, but this is a fascinating side project for both with this their second album.

I'm calling this alternative, partly because it's genre-fluid, moving from new wave to straight rock and back, but always with at least a tinge of the gothic, and partly because it avoids committing to one side of the ever-flexible rock/metal boundary. This is far more rock than metal and sometimes more pop than rock, but Kris's guitar especially ventures over to the metal side on occasion with a rpiping solo now and again to keep the door open to their collective roots, like on Identified and Chasing Whispers. It's a tasty mix. Would I have liked it to be a little heavier? Sure. Do I care that much? No. This is already good stuff.

I've only mentioned two people thus far, as they're the core of the band, but I believe that Tarald Lie, the drummer in Tristania, is involved here too, presumably playing drums. However, I have to wonder how many songs he's on, because these drums often sound like they've been programmed rather than played. That's most obvious on the title track and early in Dead Weight, as the album shifts into clear electronic mode. Dead Weight begins with programmed drums but then seems to move onto a regular drumkit and there are points where both seem to be happening at once.

Someone's certainly playing keyboards too, because they're the first thing we hear when Epitaph for a Spark opens up the album, but I don't know if that's Demurtas, Kris, Lie or someone else. It's done very well though, enough so that this would work if the guitars and whatever drums are real were removed entirely and this became goth-tinged electronic pop music. It's the keyboards that provide the melodies here to underpin Demurtas's voice and this album is at its best when they're doing that incredibly well. I do like Epitaph for a Spark, but Insomniac is the song that has stuck in my head the most, with Identified not far behind it.

The elegant Secret Worlds, which wraps up a killer opening quartet with patient melody and some lovely vocal runs, is another highlight but then we shift into less immediate material. That's not to say that the rest of the album isn't good, because it is, but it's more subtle and worthy of deeper exploration.

Initially, I wasn't particularly fond of that approach, hitting us with three catchy gems straight off the bat and a more elegent gem, then asking us to dig deeper, but over multiple listens, I think it's a pretty good approach. It merely relies on us not quitting when the hooks calm down after Secret Worlds. If we keep listening, we'll be rewarded, especially once we've cycled through the album a time or three. Unannounced eventually joined my highlight list, though I didn't really notice it on a first time through. And that's why this album keeps getting better for me. Thanks, Chris!

Wednesday, 25 January 2023

Massive Wagons - Triggered! (2022)

Massive Wagons are one of the more prolific New Wave of Classic Rock bands, with this the third of their albums I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. They're knocking out a new one every two years nowadays and they just snuck this one in at the end of 2022. It continues their growth too, in a few ways that I expected and a few that I didn't. It's the most immediate of the three, which to a fan of the band is rather like saying that this water is the most wet, and it's the most to the point, only two songs out of a baker's dozen making it past four minutes. There are no sprawling bluesy numbers this time out. It's just in your face pop/punk/rock that won't quit.

As I said last time out, with House of Noise, they're also one of the more recognisable NWoCR acts with this never mistakable for anyone else. Part of that is because their influences are a bit newer than the norm. Instead of nods back to Led Zeppelin and Bad Company, they're more interested in TerrorVision and Wolfsbane. Sure, there's some obvious AC/DC on A.S.S.H.O.L.E. and some Iron Maiden in the title track's guitars, but most of this comes out of the nineties. The Status Quo influence is a little less obvious here, but it's still there in the catchy three minute template.

I'm hearing a lot of pop punk on this one too. They're still a rock band at heart and they're always going to have a a strong following of ground level fans at rock bars up and down the UK who know everyone, have heard everything and just want to sit down at the bar for a pint, but have to get up when the Wagons hit the stage because they diffuse energy to every corner of a room and that's a rare and precious thing. However, their bouncy rock style crosses over into pop punk often here, to hopefully trawl in another set of fans. Fuck the Haters, the subtle manifesto of an opener, is a rock take on pop punk and it's not the last.

The other crowd I'd love to see at a Massive Wagons gig are pop fans, because I'd love to know how they'd feel about the band. Unlike Battle Beast, whose 2022 album I reviewed yesterday, you can't just swap filters on songs here to turn them from metal to pop, but it would seem like fans of a bouncy sort of pop music, say Taylor Swift, might just be blown away by this bouncy sort of rock music. The fact that they're very culturally aware in their lyrics probably helps. And, quite frankly, while this is rock not rap, Baz Mills is so precise in his delivery of those lyrics that he's goddamn spitting bars in a whole slew of tracks. Check out the closer, No Friends of Mine, to see what I mean.

If everything I've just set gives you the impression that they're selling out with this record, I would like to dissuade you of that notion right now. This is fundamentally a guitar album, from moment one to moment last, even if Please Stay Calm kicks off with such an eighties guitar that sounds like a keyboard that I'm still trying to figure out which Def Leppard song they snatched it from. It's the guitar sound on the title track from Hysteria but heavier and faster. Whichever doesn't matter, it's the poppiest part of the album and it's still guitar. This is guitar music. Don't forget that.

But, at their heaviest, on a song like Generation Prime, which explodes into action and only ramps up from there, they transition seamlessly into some sassy reggae just for fun and then back again. It's priceless and it's done incredibly well. It also plays into the primary driving force that keeps a band like Massive Wagons doing what they do and that's fun. Sure, they need to pay the bills and I have no doubt they have to play music because it's who they are and all that jazz, all the reasons to be in a band, but there are few bands who seem more like every member is simply having the time of their lives when the're playing music. This isn't five musicians. It's five individual limbs who plug into each other to become complete. They're a giant robot that's formed from a superhero squad.

I have a feeling that this is better than the 7/10 I'm going to give it but it's less varied than House of Noise and Full Nelson and it's a little too slick for my tastes. I think, at this point, I want to hear a live Massive Wagons album, because they're not touring in Arizona and that's going to how I get to experience what they sound like live, which I expect to be utterly involving. Even with that 7/10, nobody does this better.

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

Battle Beast - Circus of Doom (2022)

This sixth album from Finland's Battle Beast didn't top any best of 2022 lists, though it did make it onto one of them, Metal Kingdom's Best Metal Albums of 2022, at a not unrespectable 11th, but I missed it a year ago and didn't want to let it slip by me entirely before I draw a line on 2022 and go full on dedicated to 2023. I liked the fifth album they put out in 2019, No More Hollywood Endings, or, more accurately, I liked a lot of it a lot. It started out well and it wrapped up well, with a bunch of outstanding songs at each end, but there was also lots of filler in between them and the vision of the band seemed to be all over the map. I wanted to find out if that was an anomaly or a norm.

And, based on this, I'm happy to suggest that it was an anomaly. This one is far more consistent in approach and I was especially happy to hear Noora Louhimo's voice dropped a little in the mix. It's not that I don't want to hear, because she's an outstanding vocalist. It's that she's so outstanding that she doesn't need to be out there in front as if this is a solo project, as it was last time out. On this album, she has to fight more for dominance and she's more than up to that task. Fortunately, so are the musicians behind her, starting with Pyry Vikki's drums, because the beat on the opener is just as emphatic as Louhimo's voice and it stays there throughout.

And it's not just him, because that opener is a very theatrical title track, appropriately given the subject matter. There are plenty of flourishes in the musical backdrop to keep us paying attention to everyone. Circuses are theatres in their way and this song is just as bombastic as the circus that it brings to life. It's a glorious opener, from its musical box intro through an initial vicious chug to the Flight of the Bumblebee style buzz and onward through the curtain into the ring, where we're treated to quite the show.

Wings of Light begins with a killer scream from Louihimo but also a guitar flourish. It isn't close to the opener in theatricality but it's just as emphatic. Master of Illusion kicks off with another huge vocal moment, so there's a clear trend in play. Those drums are in our face too and the guitars on Where Angels Fear to Fly refuse to leave us alone, even when they drop away during the verses. As the song moves towards its close, guitars and voice almost duet, like a game of tag with one doing its thing and handing to the other and so on.

I like all these little touches, Russian Roulette as full of them as Circus of Doom, with an intricate intro and outrageous late section on top of the flourishes during the song, but I honestly believe that Eye of the Storm is my favourite song here and that one plays it straight. It really doesn't do anything fancy until a brief and subtle outro but it's quintessentially urgent. Whatever defences we have left after the assault of the first four songs, it barrels right through them and bludgeons us into submission. It's content to just do the business for four minutes and twenty-six seconds.

Back to Russian Roulette though, I get the feeling that, as powerful as this song is, this could be a pop or even a dance number, something that might be at home at the Eurovision Song Contest in an utterly different presentation. I'd love to hear a pop cover of this to see how it works. Here, it's a heavy/power metal song and not a wimpy one in the slightest, but I bet it would play really well with completely different filters: keyboards instead of guitars, a soft voice instead of an emphatic one, pulses instead of rock drums. Someone cover this as a disco song, please!

If there's a downside, it's that the album doesn't end as strongly as it started but the second side isn't filler. These are good songs, just not quite as good as the ones before them. If they'd moved one of the killers, say Where Angels Fear to Fly, to the end, maybe I wouldn't have been seen it at all. And that means that either this is a big step up for them, which I doubt given the acclaim they have garnered throughout their career, or that last album was a step down they've addressed.

Monday, 23 January 2023

Visions of Atlantis - Pirates (2022)

Country: Austria
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 May 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

I don't know Visions of Atlantis but it looks like I should, especially as this was FolkNRock's choice for Best Symphonic Album of 2022. It's their eighth album, because they've been around for a long while, even though their line-up has changed considerably across the years since they began back in 2000, the only founder member for well over half their career being Thomas Caser on drums. It's a long album too, running almost an hour but it never outstays its welcome. It remains vibrant and upbeat throughout and it's easy to buy into that energy and keep listening.

The most symphonic track is probably Master the Hurricane, which kicks off with nautical sounding flute and the sort of brass you would hear in an actual symphony, to provide texture rather than to replace a rock instrument. Then it ramps up into metal territory with a choral backdrop and all the elements remain in place throughout the song. It's almost an action movie soundtrack with vocals and we can see the pirate ship hurling through the titular storm until it reaches the eye four and a half minutes and everything drops away for a period of beautiful calm.

If structuring a song around its subject matter like a concrete poem suggests a playfulness in the songwriting, then check out Freedom, which turns down the tempo that was maintained through the first four tracks and leaps into musical theatre. There are two vocalists in Visions of Atlantis, one male and one female, and they both sing clean. The relish that the former, Michele Guaitoli, invests in his opening lines makes it seem like he's auditioning on stage for a Broadway show. The latter, Clémentine Delauney, promptly joins him, with a little less relish but not by much, and this turns into a musical theatre duet.

With the exception of Heal the Scars, which is a straight ballad, the rest play in a more traditional vein, but without ever really losing either of those aspects. Standouts for me include the opener, Pirates Will Return, and Legion of the Seas. Both contain grandiose operatic sections like Master the Hurricane and theatrical musical theatre sections like Freedom, but feel more satisfied with a straightforward approach built on riffs and swells. During these songs, Delauney is more obvious than Guaitoli, but they're both clearly there.

Because Caser is the only founder member, they're both relatively recent additions to the band, a surprising detail because they seem utterly comfortable with each other and the musicians on the stage behind them. Delauney joined in 2013, the fifth in a line of female singers but her decade in the band is twice as long as any of the others. Guaitoli is only the fourth male singer but he joined in 2018, so is the new fish in the band. I think my favourite song for them is Darkness Inside, which sees them singing mostly together, to great effect, but with occasional diversions for both.

Everything's solid, even over almost an hour, and I should call out the band members I know about. Beyond Caser on drums, who does his job throughout whatever the tempo a particular song needs, there's Christian Douscha and Herbert Glos. I was surprised to find that there was only one guitar here, because the sound is rich enough that it feels like two. That's Douscha's work, meaning that Glos provides the bass, which is reliable and often notable, because the mix is excellent so we can follow any instrument we like.

There's certainly someone playing keyboards, though I have no idea who delivered that backdrop of texture. However, the flute and bagpipes that show up on a trio of tracks, including Master the Hurricane, come corutesy of Ben Metzner, better known as Prinz R. Hodenherz III in Feuerschwanz. I dig those folkier elements, which work well on an album themed around piracy, and wish they had been used more often. Pirates Will Return in particular seems to ache for them.

Is this the best symphonic album of the year? It's certainly a good one in a year that boasted a few such, but I'd give the edge to SheWolf, I think.

Friday, 20 January 2023

Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars (2023)

I liked Katatonia's eleventh album, City Burials, and I like this twelfth that's so similar in approach that I could almost replace this entire review with one word: ditto. Wherever they've been in their musical journey over the years, they're a very comfortable prog band nowadays, sitting happily on the border between rock and metal, heavy for the former but light for the latter. And they have an uncannily consistent tone that means that, while the songs are all clearly different, they end up as a blend in our brains, which automatically aggregate them all together.

Maybe it's a little more immediate than City Burials, but it's still such elegant stuff that every one of these ten songs (eleven if you count the bonus track, Absconder) needs to to be fed and watered frequently for it to bloom in our hearts. Jonas Renkse maintains such a consistent vocal tone that it sometimes seems like he's being sponsored by a couple of specific pitches and he can only move away from them maybe three times per song. The guitars are more versatile but only if we focus a lot more than feels natural. And how you take that last sentence may be the key to whether this is truly for you or not.

The entire album sounds so comfortable that the easiest course of action is to to leave it as it is, to let it simply wash over us like a sweet smelling cleansing action. We feel embraced by its presence and so comfortable that we have to set it on repeat or lose an acute belonging. It's feelgood music that's almost addictive. Life seems better when it's playing and we don't want to return to the big bad world with its demands and expectations. Can't we just curl up in the arms of our beloved and close our eyes and let this album roll through our headphones for the next year?

It's so comfortable that it almost feels wrong to listen deeper. This is carefully crafted music, and it benefits from us actually paying attention to see what the musicians are actually doing, because a lot is going on here, regardless of which track is playing, and it's fascinating to focus in and follow the bass or the keyboards or the guitars. However, unlike what must be every other band, it seems like we're cheating when we do that and we have to look over our shoulders to make sure nobody's watching. In fact, it almost feels dangerous, like this was supposedly placed here by God and we're suddenly heretics to stone if we acknowledge that it was created by mere human beings.

If you're happy with the positive feeling, this is a peach of an album. It's seamless and immersive. It's kind of like Paradise Lost at their most commercial, on albums like One Second when they were a new wave band, all Depeche Mode with emphatic almost gothic hooks, only smoothed out with a serious algorithm so that the hooks are constant but exquisitely subtle. Everything's melody in an ever-extending set of layers. It'll be your favourite album of the year. It'll be home.

However, if you feel that sinister underbelly, like it's conning you into believing that everything's a paradise and you've put on the prohibited glasses that let you see past its facade, it's going to be uncomfortable. You're still going to feel that constant insistence of welcome, but you're going to know better and it becomes a beautiful nightmare. It's not home. It's the Matrix and you want to wake up.

With all that said, can I call out anything for special mention or is it just a consistent fifty minutes of being surrounded by amniotic fluid? Maybe. There's some sassiness to Colossal Shade's central riff. The intros to Opaline and Atrium are beautifully intricate, the former being a real grower. In the end, though, perhaps only No Beacon to Illuminate Our Fall steps out of the conformity to be a creature of its own. It finds some nice grooves and works through some complex prog changes, but it also loosens up to drop into something more exploratory.

Bottom line: it's impeccable stuff but it makes me increasingly uncomfortable.

Solar Corona - Pace (2022)

Country: Portugal
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 11 Nov 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives

It's good to be listening to another Solar Corona album. I thoroughly enjoyed Lightning One back in 2019, though it isn't amongst their others on their Bandcamp page, and was eager to listen to a follow-up. Apparently I missed the follow-up because there was a second in 2019 called Saint-Jean-de-Luz. There's so much good stuff coming out nowadays that I can't even see it all. Solar Corona are Portuguese, they've expanded to a four piece this time around, and they play psychedelic rock with a serious side of space rock, enough so that a couple of pieces clearly nod towards Hawkwind.

One is the opener, Heavy Metal Salts, though it's a sassy drum piece when it begins. It's not long before it settles into a Hawkwind vibe, surrounded by an atmosphere of keyboards. It continues to build throughout, which means a heck of a lot of build over six minutes. The other obviously Hawkwind-influenced piece is Alpendurada, at the other end of the album, which is so Hawkwind that it becomes Motörhead. That frantic rumble sounds like the chorus to Emergency to me. However, it evolves later on into a pulsing Pink Floyd sound, shifts seamlessly into Tangerine Dream and pounds us with a finalé. It's quite the closer.

The best pieces of music here to my mind—and yes, everything remains instrumental—come after the opener, with the title track and then Thrust. These highlight what Solar Corona are so good at, which is to immerse us in music that reminds us of places we've never been.

Pace kicks off like Pink Floyd's Time, but these clocks aren't clocks at all. They're some imaginative percussion from Peter Carvalho and they continually build through the eight and half minutes the song runs. It's a much slower build than Heavy Metal Salts could boast but it's consistent and the effect changes as those faux clocks speed up and get more immediate. There's a point where they start to feel sinister, especially after a low guitar joins in, as if they're hissing at us. It's thoroughly effective at taking us to a very specific place.

Thrust is even better at that, because we're at ground zero for a spaceship launch and it's almost impossible to imagine anything else happening. It's urgent from the outset, with jagged guitar an evocative ignition sound but then garage rock drums kick in and they're furious. This spaceship is going up and it's going up in a goddamn hurry. This is wild and glorious space rock that keeps up a frantic pace and takes us way way out there. Imagine if the last minute of Space Truckin' had the urgency of Speed King and double the speed and you'll be on the right lines.

A.U. is so slow in comparison, it's almost a stop and it had to be very deliberate placement to put a slow piece right after a frantic one. We feel like we're still blasting off into the cosmos only for the engines to stop and suddenly we're floating. Parker S.P. is funkier stuff, a fresh drum atmosphere penetrated by a cool bass line. These aren't bad at all but, in comparison to the immediacy of the highlights and the vitality of the bookends, they're kind of just there.

I like the added density that comes with having a fourth member, but I'm not sure exactly what he contributed. The three primary musicians from Lightning One are back, which presumably means that Rodrigo Carvalho is still the guitarist, José Roberto Gomes is still on bass and Peter Carvalho is still sat behind the drumkit. There's no saxophone this time out, but Nuno Loureiro is credited as a fourth member. I'm presuming he's the second guitarist, given there's a Nuno Loureiro with a string of credits playing guitars in other Portuguese bands, but someone's handling keyboards on this album and I have no idea who that is.

Whoever's doing what is immaterial, though, because they combine their energies wonderfully to create a memorable team effort. Few bands are so well integrated that I can't really call out one over the rest for a special mention. They all do the business and they do it apparently effortlessly.

Thursday, 19 January 2023

VV - Neon Noir (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Jan 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

Anything is going to seem light after listening to Wormrot, but this new album from Ville Vajo has a pop sensibility to it that's immediately obvious in the electronic drums and synths. If you don't recognise the name, Vajo, who goes by VV nowadays, is the former frontman for Finnish goth rock/metal band HIM. He and Mikko Paananen co-founded the band and remained there throughout a twenty-two year career, a few more if you count their brief earlier time as His Infernal Majesty. It shouldn't surprise that this sounds like HIM, but it's softer and poppier for the most part, with an occasional power up to the old HIM sound.

Perhaps anticipating his older fans worrying about that, he kicks off with a song that does bounce up to the heavier HIM sound, without ever becoming metal. That's Echolocate Your Love and it's a decent opener, just as Run Away from the Sun is an elegant melodic alt goth rock follow up with an agreeable dark croon from VV. I shouldn't even mention him any more, because everything here is him. He wrote the songs, plays every instrument on them and sings over the top. So whatever I say from here onward reflects on him alone. Nobody's stepping in to save the day or bring the quality down.

To my mind, this album truly arrives with the title track, though, three in. There are other strong songs here, but this one comes across as the most perfectly formed to me. It starts out with folky guitar, adds a succession of layers and then finalises the groove when the vocals arrive. It feels as if he's often duetting with himself, which is another layer, I guess, but the result is textbook stuff. It's almost hard to say anything specific about it, because it works like a black hole and just sucks us into it, however many times we listen. Does that mean it's smooth or just perfect?

Everything else sounded good on a first listen, but nothing felt as essential. On a first repeat, the songs all start elevating themselves, which tends to mean that it's a highly consistent album that has depths to explore. Loveletting is a tasty treat on a second listen, beginning with a heartbeat, a keyboard sound right out of seventies Jefferson Starship and an HIM crunch. It's a lighter track, almost ethereal folk at points, but it's a haunting piece. I could imagine Kate Bush covering it. The Foreverlost won't leave me be either, with a sound a little like All About Eve covering the Sisters of Mercy, soft but driving. Salute the Sanguine has a delightful heavier intro and it never quite loses it.

And so it goes. The majority of these songs play in that intersection of a slew of genres. They're alt rock, they're goth rock, they're folk rock, all drenched in those quintessential HIM melodies, with a dark romantic flavour to Vajo's lyrics. "Let's take the scenic route through Hell if you want to see what I see" he sings on Echolocate Your Love, but it's a romantic sentiment rather than emo rant or Hellraiser-esque perversity. Everything is fundamentally nice but with a dark twist, like a young lady who warms the heart of your grandma after spending four hours putting on her goth persona and scaring the neighbours.

I've only listened through a couple of times thus far, which is enough to confirm this as a light but strong album. It's everything that HIM do so well but with the guitars turned down and the synths turned up. And, while that still sounds like it reads as negative, I should underline that it isn't. It's exactly what it needs to be and it's exquisitely formed. Just as some of these songs stood out on a second listen, I'm pretty sure that others will on a third and a fourth. They're all good songs, even over nearly an hour, but they're so consistent that we have to sit down with them and get to know them to truly appreciate what each one brings to the table. It's an easy 7/10 but it wouldn't shock me if I up it to an 8/10 later.

Wormrot - Hiss (2022)

Singaporean grindcore sounds exactly like the sort of thing I review here at Apocalypse Later but a lot of the mainstream press ignores. However, Wormrot have been press darlings for years and this fourth album has been consistently acclaimed as their masterpiece, as well as a swansong for vocalist Arif, a founder member, who left the band after fifteen years behind the mike. They get a lot of coverage and Hiss made at least five best of lists for 2022, as many as Amorphis, Rammstein and Meshuggah.

And I can see why because this is surely the most versatile grindcore album I've ever heard, much of that due to the sheer range of Arif, making his position in the band a particularly tough one to fill. Sure, there's a ten second blitzkrieg song here that does exactly what you expect and nothing more. This one's called Unrecognizable and it's just there, as the nineteen second Shattered Faith is just there later on the album. These aren't anything new and there are precise equivalents on every other grindcore album. The good news is that that's less than half a minute of time wasted, while they get on with the interesting stuff. And there's a lot of that.

In fact, there's so much variety on offer that it'll be hard to cover all of it. Yes, most of these songs are short. Twenty-one of them take up only thirty-three minutes, though the closer, Glass Shards, is an almost unimaginable four and a half minutes all on its own. That's an intro in prog rock but it seems like a sprawling epic in grindcore and the violin of Myra Choo is a standout element, mixing so well with the guitars of Raysid. Yes, most of these songs are fast, with Hatred Transcending the one that screams along so fast it's like Wormrot are riding a lightning bolt, but Pale Moonlight is slow and tribal and All Will Wither is slower still, Arif's snarling calmly over a slow beat, with zero input from guitars, just shimmering cymbals approximating feedback.

But let's talk about Arif, because he's the first reason for this to be so versatile. He pulls out high shrieks and low growls on the opener, The Darkest Burden. Then he adds a surprisingly rich clean voice to Broken Maze, almost like I'd expect to hear from Bucovina. For Behind Closed Doors, he's off into another genre, with old school chanted hardcore vocals before everything went shouty. In When Talking Fails, It's Time for Violence, he shifts again with an anarcho-punk singalong chorus. And that's jut the first four songs, which rack up about six and a half minutes between them.

Guitarist Raysid, now the only founder member left in the band, covers a lot of ground too. He can play incredibly fast, as you'd expect for grindcore, but often he lets Vijesh, who is an insanely tight drummer, run loose and doesn't even attempt to match him, playing much slower riffs in front and sometimes even just power chords. Regardless of how fast Vijesh is blurring, Raysid plays riffs on Behind Closed Doors that wouldn't feel out of place on the Metallica debut, which was really just Diamond Head a little faster.

My favourite songs come late on the album, when he's playing a highly melodic guitar behind Arif. Desolate Landscapes and Vicious Circle both almost sound like two different songs behind played in the same studio at the same time and they sound wonderful. This harmonic work is also there a little earlier on Voiceless Choir, which even adds some divvying up of lyrics that old school hip hop artists used to do. At the other extreme, there's experimental dissonance on Your Dystopian Hell and Hatred Transcending. Nobody here wants to just do the one thing that's always done and I'm unable to conjure up a better approach to take to any genre.

And, talking of things that just aren't done, there's that violin. Whoever came up with the bright idea to add a violin to a grindcore album deserves a prize. Myra Choo isn't omnipresent, like she'd be in a folk metal band, but, whenever she turns up, the music finds a whole new level that's unlike anything I've heard before. Grieve, in particular, is searing. It's a sub-two minute instrumental and it almost finds its way into industrial, because Choo isn't interested in playing sweet on this one. It starts out sounding like the band are in a factory, cutting sheet metal with a chainsaw. Then Choo speeds up and it's fascinating.

She plays much sweeter on Glass Shards, delivering an excellent solo, letting Raysid follow suit on guitar and then combining with him to even greater effect. I assume she's just here as a guest and that may or may not be a one time thing, but I hope she works with Wormrot more and whoever in the Singaporean extreme metal scene might be open to diversifying their sound. I caught a violin moment here and there, on Sea of Disease and Noxious Cloud and especially Weeping Willow, but sometimes so fleeting that I wondered if I was just adding her in my imagination.

All of which adds up to this not being your typical grindcore album, but still delivering the goods in every way that grindcore fans would expect. It's a groundbreaking album. If there's a catch here, it has to be that the few traditional songs suddenly seem like filler because so much else has moved on to new and vibrant territory. And that's the only reason I'm going with an 8/10 instead of a 9/10.

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Chat Pile - God's Country (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Noise Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jul 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

There were a few clear winners in the 2022 end of year lists. Blind Guardian and Ghost topped two lists each. Messa made it onto nine different lists. Ozzy Osbourne managed seven, three of them top tens, marking a notable return to form. I'd reviewed three of those already and caught up with the fourth last week, but the other two bands who made it onto seven lists are ones I let slip by. In both instances, they also made four top tens and three top fives and topped one list, so there's an impressively broad acclaim for both of them. They're Chat Pile and Undeath, both American but a long way apart in genre.

Undeath play death metal out of Rochester, New York and It's Time... to Rise from the Grave was a second album for them, but Chat Pile, from Oklahoma City, are on their debut with God's Country, and that's just enough edge to prioritise them for me this January. They call what they play noise rock, though enough fans and zines have described them as sludge metal for that to stick too. I'm happy to go with noise rock, because this feels like a heavy form of alt rock to me, rather than any metal genre moving the other way, even at their heaviest on a song like Tropical Beaches, Inc.

Certainly the influences seem to be more from the rock side of the fence, even if some have fairly called out Godflesh. They're also more from the American side of the pond, even though Godflesh are English. The obvious comparison is the Jesus Lizard, especially with such a prominent bass, but all the proto-sludge bands are here, from the Melvins onward. These songs are mostly slow, with a thoroughly dominant bassline and a tortured vocal from a singer who's three slices into his wrists because everything about the world sucks but he's not quite sure if he's really committed to killing himself. "This is the sound of your world collapsing" chants Raygun Busch on Anywhere and that's a fair description of his band.

That's the core sound, but there are exceptions sitting on either side of it. Tropical Beaches, Inc. is the heavy song, with monstrous drums setting a much more frantic pace. I Don't Care If I Burn isn't far off spoken word, with a subtle beat and a weird sound effect driven backdrop that reminded of Tom Waits's What's He Building? It's utterly minimal, though Busch's emotional outpouring remains paramount. "You weren't supposed to see this," he screams at us on grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg, and it's hard not to believe him. He's certainly magnetic, a riven soul bared to the universe.

The song that stands out the most is the one that combines those three elements and that's Why. It's built on a slow and sludgy riff from guitarist Luther Manhole and underpinned by bassist Stin, with Cap'n Ron's cavernous drums matched by the repeated title so well that we keep chanting it even when Busch isn't, so he can veer off onto a spoken word rant. He's not delivering lyrics, he's just struck by the ramifications that spring from the very existence of homeless people and so he rages at the inhumanity of it all for three minutes and thirty one seconds. To be fair, he's probably still going, even after we moved onto the next song and the next.

And whether you're going to like this album or not is going to depend on whether you're eager to dive into an album described as above or whether you know you're not going to touch it even with someone else's ten foot pole. There are some subtleties if you care, like the Joy Division vibe that starts out Pamela, but there aren't a lot of them. This isn't a subtle album and the people who are likely to love it the most aren't likely to be interested in subtleties. I like subtleties so this isn't my sort of thing, but it's done well and I can see why it impressed certain critics. If you're a fan of the Jesus Lizard, add at least a point to my rating and maybe two.

Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Turmion Kätilöt - Omen X (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Industrial Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Jan 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Latest in the list of established bands I haven't heard of are Turmion Kätilöt, understandably so as I've never delved that far into industrial metal. I know what it is and I've heard plenty of the major bands but unlike a couple of friends, I haven't dived in much further. Hey, Jim! Hey, David! I'm sure that both of you have been listening to Turmion Kätilöt for ever. As the title suggests, this is their tenth album, so it's about time I paid attention. They've been around since 2003 and their output's been pretty consistent, always between one and three years between albums.

For all that this is industrial metal, it starts out with a beat more dance oriented than anything on the Shape of Water album I just reviewed, even though that's an electronic alternative band. This sounds like the Prodigy until it ramps up and suddenly we're almost in NDH territory. The Prodigy vs. Rammstein? Why not? However, I'm not sure if you can call it NDH when the band in question is from Finland. USK for Uusi saksalainen kovuus? Answers on the back of a postcard to...

The line-up is telling, not least because everyone has dance music-style pseudonyms. The surviving founder of the band, Petja Turunen, goes by MC Raaka Pee, though his voice is almost harsh, using metal terminology. He provides the lead vocals and Shag-U sings too. Behind them is a traditional metal band, with Bobby Undertaker on crunchy guitar, Master Bates (a Captain Pugwash nod from Finland?) on deep bass and DQ on often fast drums. That leaves Janne Tolsa, who as RunQ, handles the electronic side of the house: keyboards, synths and programming, which are all integral.

I liked this a lot more than I expected to. There's almost a folk metal vibe to songs like Gabriel and Vie Se Pois, but with traditional folk instrumentation replaced with electronics. It's heavy but it's vibrant, designed to make us move, and folk metal is fundamentally just a different form of dance music. I like those and others that incorporate unusual musical elements over the straightforward industrial dance songs that would work wonderfully in a club but don't stand out as much to me at home listening in my office.

With a quick nod to the downright 8 bit chiptune sound in Pyhä Kolminaisuus, the interesting ones come during the second half. Isä Meidän has a fascinating intro, shifting from a furious Slayer vibe into polite folk music. It ramps up into the band's core industrial metal sound, of course, but it ends with a clarinet solo, of all things, which I wasn't remotely expecting. Käy Tanssiin is fascinating too, with one section that shifts into Caribbean chill but with no change to MC Raaka Pee's harsh vocal. It's as if the singer from Trollfest broke some cartoon fourth wall and ended up scatting all over a CD labelled Caribbean Moods.

Not knowing any Finnish, I have no idea what these songs are about, but I did throw their titles at Google Translate and I'm surprised to see an apparent religious theme. Gabriel doesn't need to be translated, but Pyhä Kolminaisuus means Holy Trinity and Isä Meidän means Our Father, and a few others include references to blood and kingdom and truth, so maybe there's something else going on here and maybe there isn't. It doesn't remotely sound like Christian music but unblack metal is just as unlikely. Maybe it's anti-Christian music and that isn't a Crux Decussata in the cover art. It certainly seems like it would play better at wasteland events than churches.

Whatever it is and wherever it'll be played, I like this. It's infectious stuff. I guess that means that I've been infected. That works for me. Now, Jim and/or David, what have I been missing?

Shape of Water - Amor Fati (2022)

Country: Italy/UK
Style: Alternative
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 28 Oct 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I try to keep up with the New Wave of Classic Rock, because there's so much wonderful new music being released under that banner, but I inevitably fail because I'm covering a broader spectrum at Apocalypse Later and there are only so many hours in the day. As such, I'm happy to say that I have already reviewed the top two albums on the NWoCR Facebook page's end of year list for 2022, The New Roses coming out on top with Revival Black right behind them. However, I hadn't even heard of Shape of Water, who landed the third place slot, and now that I've heard this album, I see why.

Long story short, they're not really NWoCR at all. They're fundamentally an alternative rock band, with the obvious comparison on that front being Muse. However, the base of their sound is in their keyboards, making them an electronic band, and that allows them to seamlessly move in and out of new wave, post-punk and straightforward pop territory as frequently as rock. They self-identify as gender-fluid, which sounds pretentious but is actually spot on. At this point, I shouldn't see any surprise in them being two Italians based in Manchester in the north of England. It makes sense.

The opening track, Starchild, highlights how hard it is to pigeonhole them. It only runs five minutes but it's all Capriotti for the first three, vocals over keyboards. Somehow it's both progressive and twee, like Philip Glass joining the Cardigans, but the organic dance beat introduced halfway, shifts into a higher gear with much more intensity, De Falco's guitars kicking in heavy and escalating into almost a Rage Against the Machine vibe. And that's song one of ten, though Falling follows it with an almost shocking conformity as a decent but traditional alt rock song except for the jazzy piano break halfway through.

The Snoot is where the NWoCR kicks in and kicks in hard with a solid seventies riff from De Falco. It grows in a few different directions from there, but it's a guitar song with a tasty guitar solo, even if Capriotti's vocal still sounds pop, even when he's rocking it up. Of course, being genre-fluid, they don't stay in rock for long, shifting straight into new wave for Don't Leave Me in the Dark, and the longer the album runs on the more interesting and versatile it gets.

My favourite songs all come late, starting with A Ghost in Manchester seven songs in. This is a post-punk song, I guess, built on pulsing synths, but the verses sound like a centuries old folk song in an utterly contemporary framework. There are bells and what I presume is a trumpet to punctuate it all and then, halfway through, it explodes into intense action only to drop quickly away into a solo piano break. Just in case Queen never sprang to mind, it makes a very deliberate nod to Bohemian Rhapsody to ensure that they do. It's a magnificent song and it stands apart from everything, not just the other songs on this album but everything. It's almost Ghost Town levels of different.

Everybody's Gone feels like the Beatles during its first half but it ramps up to a much more intense mentality with another tasty guitar solo from De Falco. It even finishes with a flourish right out of classical music. Terraformer is back to a rhythmic Philip Glass synth sound, then alt rock, but with a screaming saxophone and a guitar solo to match it. Suddenly Words in Eternity, which closes out, is notable for being not notable, as a conventional alt rock song in the Muse vein.

This album grabbed my attention from the beginning of the first song and it impressed me with its uncompromising versatility, but for three songs it shook me. Few bands can be that good and that consistently different across three songs. Frankly, the only two bands I can name who excel at that are Queen and Saigon Kick; check out Sheer Heart Attack and Water for two albums that manage that throughout. This doesn't manage it across the entire album but it comes closer than anyone else I can remember and they nail it for those three songs late on.

Because this is rarely NWoCR, ranking highly on a list with that particular focus seems odd, but it should rank highly anywhere. Shape of Water are now firmly on my "must listen" list.

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

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Wednesday, 1 February 2023

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Monday, 30 January 2023

Friday, 27 January 2023

Thursday, 26 January 2023

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Tuesday, 17 January 2023

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