Sheygun - Burn the Fuse (2024)

Country: Armenia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Sheygun don't quite represent a new country for me here at Apocalypse Later, but so far I've only reviewed one album from Armenia before, which was very different, given that Narrow Gate play progressive metal and Sheygun hard rock. Both hail from Yerevan, the nation's capital, but that's about it. I'm reviewing it as a 2024 album because it is one, but one that only just crept in right at the end of the year, on New Year's Eve Eve after the critics had finished summing up 2024. That's a dead zone for bands and this one deserves to be noticed.

Initially, I got an agreeably sleazy feel from this album. The openers, 69 Beauty and Get Up, seem to be influenced by bands like Hanoi Rocks and very early Mötley Crüe, with the latter betraying some AC/DC moments too. That continues into Chevy, though the vocals of Mos oddly remind of a rock-era Suicidal Tendencies. And then No Regrets opens up with a riff and beat clearly borrowed from the Scorpions' The Zoo. I was singing along with the guitar part that isn't there. I guess that means that these guys are old school, focused primarily on the eighties.

I'm not entirely sure who does what, but they're a five piece band that grew out of four friends in Yeghegnadzor, south of Yerevan, who got serious and added Arman on drums. Mos is both vocalist and bassist, while Varo plays rhythm guitar, which leaves Arthur and David contributing in ways I'm unable to explain. Surely one of them's the lead guitarist, but I'm not sure about the other. There aren't obvious keyboards here. A third guitar? Or is he the real bassist and Mos helps out on that front? Inquiring minds want to know.

I especially want to know because the bass player gets a couple of notable runs early in the album, one midway through Get Up and the other as the intro to Chevy. Neither of them require technical genius, which extends to everything the band does, but a bad player can screw up the simplest riff or run and whoever plays bass here doesn't. It's all good stuff and it highlights that every member of the band is playing their part and doing it well.

That leads me to point out that most of these songs come across with a live feel, even though the album was clearly recorded in a studio. I don't know how much they rehearsed beforehand or how long it took them to record, but it feels like they merely plugged in one day and let rip, blistering their way through seven tracks in the skimpy thirty-five minutes that the album runs and that was that. Of course, given that, they sound like a magnetic club band. I don't know how it would play in a stadium but I'd be paying a lot of attention in a tiny club.

Now, I say mostly because there are a couple of tracks that stand out from the norm. Everything I said above covers the first three, along with Hoyden and WTF is Going On, so five out of seven.

The first exception is No Regrets, which changes up the vocals completely. Suddenly we're almost in psychobilly territory, which I wasn't expecting. It's a much longer song too, running seven and a half minutes when only one other track nudges past five, and it lost me on a first time through. It kept me on the second because, rather than inadvertently tuning out, my ears caught on to what really counts as an epic jam. It's stadium material after all and they're jamming out the song to a moment still to be determined like signature songs tend to do. I'm thinking Freebird, Green Grass and High Tides, Whipping Post, that sort of thing. This isn't quite that epic and it's more subdued, but it has the same approach and could easily extend for another five, ten, fifteen minutes.

Whether I was focused on No Regrets or not, Hoyden grabbed me by the throat, because it's one of those songs that simply aches to get down to business and blisters from the outset. You can get lost in No Regrets or get detached from it but you can't ignore Hoyden. It's a good old fashioned eighties rock song, not so sleazy this time, more back to basics, with an excellent guitar solo in the second half from whoever's handling the lead guitar that I wish I could credit. WTF is Going On is a fresh dose of energy at the tail end of the album, but it's too repetitive to rank with Hoyden.

The other exception is Let's Go to the Room, which I feel I should underline isn't a bad song. There isn't anything wrong with the songwriting at all, but it feels much sparser and thus much weaker than everything else on the album. I don't know if it was recorded at a different time by someone who thinned out the production or if that was a deliberate decision made during the sessions the rest of these tracks were recorded during, but it doesn't work for me. What exacerbates that is a particularly odd decision. Given that it sounds weaker, why place it right after Hoyden, the most balls to the wall song on the album? All the decisions around this one seem wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to adjust eventually and listen to it on its own merits, but that sparseness took me aback on every listen. And, of course, the rest of the album kicks ass. I'd love to sit down in a bar in Yerevan with a pint of Armenian beer and watch the crowd's reaction as this wild bunch hit the stage. I'm sure that they'd all go home suitably drained and reenergised.

Narrow Gate - Message from the Land of Noah (2019)

Country: Armenia
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | YouTube

Here's something even more off the wall than usual, because it's not just a product of a far flung nation (in this instance, the band are from Yerevan in Armenia), it's also an instrumental concept album about Noah's Ark that's brought to life through progressive metal by experienced musicians in other bands. While the story dates back to Mesopotamian flood stories and is part of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this appears to be a Christian take.

That's because the core band members are Garik Amyan and Sergey Areskin, a pair who are far from just musicians. Sure, both play guitar here and Amyan also plays bass and drums and composed all this, but they founded the label, Art4God Records, which released it, and are core members of Blood Covenant, a symphonic unblack metal band that's almost two decades old. Amyan is also part of the worship team for the Word of Life Church in Armenia, which is evangelical Christian.

All of which means relatively little because the album is instrumental and so hardly counts as preaching. It merely underlines how seriously the band take the material. And hey, I've reviewed a lot of black metal here of late, so maybe it's about time I added a white metal album too.

There are seven tracks, which combine to loosely tell the old story that we probably all know. For those who don't, God decides to destroy everyone and everything on the planet but Noah is righteous so he gets saved, along with his family and mating pairs of animals and birds, all of which survive forty days and nights of flooding in their gopherwood boat. Eventually the waters recede and the Ark ends up on Mount Ararat, where Noah sends out a raven and a dove. When the dove comes back with an olive branch, he knows the land is drying and ready for repopulation. The end. Or the beginning.

Message, suitably, is the only track with a voice on it but it's God talking in Armenian so I can only assume what it says. It's really just an intro to set us up for Wages of Sin, an attempt to describe in musical terms just how wicked the world is. What fascinated me here was how it's constructed out of a whole plethora of instruments, many of which seem to be Hispanic. That's a Latin guitar and a brass section. How old is Tijuana?

I have to wonder too how many instruments they actually used, because there are all sorts of sounds here, but I presume most are the product of someone on keyboards. Surprisingly the band don't bring Christianity into a summary of what they do, going instead for "ethno-progressive metal band". I assume that adds a folk element to their prog metal which accounts for the diverse instrumentation.

After the decadence of Wages of Sin, we get 382 Seconds Before Noah's Flood, perhaps the most descriptive title I've ever seen. Given that the track is 388 seconds long, we can be sure that the flooding is going to begin right at the end of it and, sure enough, there's thunder crashing right there. It feels underwhelming because that's not an epochal raging torrent.

I was much more sold by the next track, The Ark, which begins with a flurry of guitarwork that highlights how violent the scene must have seemed at the time, with everyone else and their dog drowning. A number of lulls highlight how quiet things get once the water level is high enough but they escalate quickly. The intensity of the song rises and falls like huge frickin' waves.

Eventually we get to KaqaviX, a word I don't recognise, which is about the raven and the dove. It's a playful piece, featuring a lot of lively music, often in the form of fiddle, piano and flute. Holy Mountain is more active still, surprisingly so given that I was expecting peaceful music to reflect the land that Noah found, but I guess it's merely a celebratory song about finding it after so long afloat.

It's New Beginning that finds peace, presumably after the olive branch has been found. The synths take over to swell with emotion, then guitars emerge from the synths to heighten it. It's described as an outro but it's longer than the track before it and is just as worthy. It wraps things up in happy style, at least for Noah and his family. Everyone else has drowned but they were all wicked so it's OK.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, but the instrumental approach provides a lot of leeway in interpretation and it seems like this album tells a very simple, sanitised version of the whole affair. That seems odd to me, because while I'd be more than happy for kids in Sunday School to be exposed to the joys of progressive metal, I don't quite expect that to happen and so this is far more likely to reach the ears of adults who are, in turn, more likely to ask awkward questions. There are no answers here.

Theology aside, I enjoyed this as a piece of music. It's fun stuff and it's easy to listen to, even if you don't want to use it as a teaching aid. It's just over half an hour of music, with an appropriate progression between the tracks, which seem well delineated. We get the story from beginning to end without it ever seeming to grate on our patience or surprising with content that doesn't fit. The musicianship is excellent and consistent, even with no less than four band members credited on guitar.

It's decent stuff and it would be a trip to see it performed at the Word of Life Church in Armenia, but it is what it is. You probably figured out your likelihood of buying it from the first paragraph of this review.