Harakiri for the Sky - Scorched Earth (2025)

Country: Austria
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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There are two distinct sides to Harakiri for the Sky, appropriately enough given that there are a couple of very different musicians in the band.

Matthias Sollak plays most of the instruments, the one exception being the drums, which fall to Kerim Lechner, Krimh of Act of Denial, Dååth and Septicflesh. I don't know how many there are, beyond the traditional, but there's plenty of keyboard work and not all of it sounds like a piano. Without You I'm Just a Sad Song, for example, starts and ends with a memorable melody played on some sort of chime. Melody is everywhere, because Sollak combines a black metal resilience with the delicate melodic ear of a pop artist.

I use the term resilience there, because the traditional black metal wall of sound doesn't appear particularly often, perhaps coming closest on Keep Me Longing and Without You I'm Just a Sad Song. It's less of a barrier than a sort of last effort countercharge, the cover art seeming highly appropriate. It's as if the melodic side is the dominant norm but, when threatened, it turns dark and attacks as a form of defence.

Michael Kogler provides the vocals, which are certainly memorable but seem limited. He doesn't shriek in black metal style but doesn't really shift to any of the other standards. He's a lot closer to a hardcore shout than a death metal growl but he isn't really there either. It's a hoarse shout that carries a little of the bleakness we expect from black metal. That places it a long way from the stereotypical orc sound into a more traditional metal vein that's been dipped into extreme. However, just as hardcore shouts are inherently limited to the one emotion of anger, these are limited to the one of righteous despair.

As a result, this took me way back to when Sid at Groové Records in Halifax gave me a promo CD of Dark Tranquillity's debut album, 'Skydancer'. He described it as wonderful music spoiled by a rough vocal and, while I'll cut him some slack there because it was the beginning of a genre and that vocal style was relatively new, it's exactly what I felt here. There's nothing wrong with what Kogler does, but it's so limited in emotional palette that it's holding back the music.

In fact, my favourite two songs are the last two, which I believe may be considered bonus tracks, both of which feature clean guest vocalists. There's a little of that on the last track proper, Too Late for Goodbyes, courtesy of Serena Cherry, a British singer who may have her own one woman black metal outfit in Noctule but otherwise sings post-rock for Svalbard. Her contribution, which is for part of that song only, is the signpost to what will come for all of Street Spirit and Elysian Fields, to wrap everything up. Starting the album over from there only highlights the difference between how those clean voices reach so much more range than Kogler's hoarse shout.

Street Spirit is a Radiohead cover and the guest is Patrick Ginglseder, P.G. in German black metal band Groza. However, he sings entirely clean on this one and with a glorious sustain that makes him soar very nicely indeed. Tellingly, the guest on Elysian Fields is a dream pop musician, Daniel Lang of Austrian band Backwards Charm. While dream pop may well be the exact opposite genre to full on raw black metal, that vocal style fits the post-black style that Sollak has moved into. While Ginglseder's delivery on Street Spirit is majestic, I suddenly wanted to hear Lang sing for the rest of the album.

After all, it's all about melody. As I listen through again and again, I find myself surprised at how much of it is heavy, given that the melody remains dominant. It's faster early, dropping down to midpace for much of the second half hour, but delicate instrumental stretches and the broader melodic sweep are what stick in my brain the most. That's all Sollak.

Now, Harakiri for the Sky have been around for quite a while, this being their sixth album since they formed in 2011, and they certainly seem to have reached an impressive audience. This is my first experience of their work, so I don't know if I'm an outlier who simply doesn't appreciate this vocal style, something I'm used to with metalcore, or whether Sollak is gradually moving further from Kogler's range. If you're a long term fan, you're on board with that style and can probably safely add a point to my rating. It's a 7/10 for the music and a 6/10 overall.

L'Âme Immortelle - Ungelebte Leben (2024)

Country: Austria
Style: Darkwave/NDH
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Jan 2024
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Here's another band new to me who may not be to you, given that they've been around since 1996 and this is their fifteenth studio album. L'Âme Immortelle, which translates to Immortal Soul, are an electro-rock band from Vienna whose sound has apparently changed over time and back again. Initially, it seems, they played darkwave, but gradually got heavier and moved into NDH, a genre I still know far too little about, even though I do know Rammstein and have now heard Oomph! and an array of others. However, later on in their career, they apparently started moving back again.

All I know is what I hear on this album, which feels less like what I know as darkwave and more like NDH lite. All the elements I expect from NDH are here, except the crunch doesn't have the impact that I'm used to. They have all the setup that Rammstein have, and some of it has edges, but every time Rammstein would kick in hard with a huge back end, L'Âme Immortelle don't. Part of that has to do with them fundamentally being only two people, Thomas Rainer and Sonja Kraushofer, both of them vocalists with the latter the lead singer and the former also playing keyboards, which I'm presuming are the only backdrop to the voices. The beats are presumably programmed on a drum machine.

Its absence of that crunch means that this often reminds me more of eighties new wave, especially as Kraushofer sings with a pop voice. Rainer provides some darkness when he opens his mouth on the opener, Was Wäre, Wenn, because he has a harsh edge to it. However, he shifts to new wave as well on War of Silence, which is lighter again. It might be NDH without the oomph, if you'll excuse that pun, but it's also darkwave without the dark. It wouldn't have surprised me to discover that I heard this track a few decades ago and simply forgot. The heavier songs here are the ones where Rainer sings more, such as the title track, which he kicks off and which plays out as a duet.

The only song where both Kraushofer and Rainer sound dark is Nie genug, even though it picks up quite a jaunty pop beat. He's certainly darker than she is on this one but she plays along more and the result is irresistible. The fact that it also features plenty of dynamic play too is just a bonus. It probably helps as well that it's bookended by two of the poppier songs in Push and Nur für euch. I should add that I like both of them, even though it's mostly the heavier songs that stood out to me on a first listen and even more so on repeats, with one notable exception in the closer that I'll talk about next.

Kraushofer moves into more of a musical theatre style for Regret, initially a ballad but one that's built a lot further than ballads tend to go. There's musical theatre throughout the album, but it's most overt in the final track, Widerhall, which means Echo and is as creepily atmospheric as what we heard from Till Lindemann in the piano version of Mein Herz Brennt and for many of the same reasons. She simply commands our attention, even though the musical backdrop unfolding behind her is notably subdued except for one brief section two thirds of the way in. It's easily my favourite piece here, all the way to its delightfully underplayed finalé.

If that suggests that there's a heck of a range here, then I'm doing my job right. Initially, I wanted to figure out if this was rock or pop, which seemed like it would depend on which mode the band is going here, heavier NDH or lighter darkwave. What I found was that there are songs that have to be called pop, whether War of Silence, which is old school new wave, or Own Ways, which feels like something off a David Lynch album. However, there are songs that are clearly rock and they're not just the heavier ones. And, of course, there's the musical theatre aspect, which isn't usually what I tend to appreciate but which is right up my alley here. This is dark and expressive musical theatre.

That genre-spanning depth kept me listening to this for a few days to try to figure out its secrets. I know I like it but I think I have to be German or Austrian to grok how appropriate this combination of genres feels and I'm not. However, I'm finding it fascinating so I'll continue to dive into NDH and electro-rock when I can.

Visions of Atlantis - Pirates (2022)

Country: Austria
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 May 2022
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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.

Edenbridge - Shangri-La (2022)

Country: Austria
Style: Symphonic Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Aug 2022
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Edenbridge have been playing a very pleasant form of symphonic metal since the last millennium, their debut album, Sunrise in Eden, seeing the light of day in 2000 with three more albums in only four years. That rate of output has certainly slowed down with this being only their third album in the past decade, but it still counts as an eleventh studio album, with three more live. I've always found them one of the more accessible symphonic metal bands, with a soft take on the genre that trawls in not merely classical and a variety of folk music, but prog rock and musical theatre. It's an easy combination to like.

This album is easy to like too, but it didn't grab me until the flutes came out on Savage Land. What makes that odd is that Savage Land is easily my least favourite song otherwise, very much unfolding like a Disney musical aria where a princess maybe thinks about the dark side but talks herself out of it, its teasing guitar hints refusing to blossom into something more. But then, three minutes in, it dives into a rainforest with fantastic drums and flutes and atmosphere. The song isn't far from being done at that point, but it's glorious and it grabs us right in time to hit us with the Accept-esque riffs that introduce Somewhere Else But Here.

And we're off and running. That song moves from Accept to a sort of Blue Öyster Cult groove and a quintessential symphonic metal chorus with all the grandeur we expect, but it's a good song and I felt the need to just start the album over again, finding new joy in At First Light and especially in The Call of Eden, which grew on me immensely, perhaps becoming my favourite song until the closer. Maybe I just needed to be in the mood for this album and I just wasn't for a little while until Lanvall hauled out his collection of unusual instruments and Gibbs slapped me into paying attention properly.

From there, I dug this album, from a strong riff in Freedom is a Roof Made of Stars to the piano in Arcadia (The Great Escape) and the evocative intro to The Road to Shangri-La. Sabine Edelsbacher has fun on the latter pair not just singing but vocalising in both the foreground and background as well. It's still commercial for symphonic metal and there are still sections that lost me, when they soften things up a little more than usual. I still can't get into the first half of Savage Land, but it's not hard to put it behind me when I'm enjoying the guitar solo in The Road to Shangri-La.

And that's a good point to pause, because this has been a very commercial album thus far with the band's poppy take on the genre paramount and the more overtly folk or world influenced sections the best ones. It's enough to make us wonder what happened to the progressive edge, indeed the edge, of Edenbridge and that's here on an epic closer, a sequel in five movements to the title track of their 2013 album The Bonding, called simply The Bonding (Part 2). And here's what I was missing all along.

It's on Alpha and Omega that Edelsbacher moves out of her Disney princess mode and gives some real metal attitude, deepening her voice and adding emotion. The Eleventh Hour is where we're treated to orchestrations and inventive choral work, along with some searing guitar as promised in Overture. Round and Round has that Abba-esque musical theatre sound, melodic voice over an acoustic guitar, but it doesn't outstay its welcome, moving into an intricate instrumental passage, and, when it returns, it's darker and more emphatic. There's prog riddled throughout all of these movements and it feels great after the much safer earlier songs.

And that's how this ends up for me, an album of uneven halves. The first runs a respectable forty minutes on its own but feels safe to me. There's enjoyment to be had, especially if you can find its mood, and I keep coming back to The Call of Eden because it continues to grow on me. However, it doesn't have the adventure for me that the second has. That's just one track, but The Bonding (Part 2) does more in my book in its sixteen minutes than the rest does in forty-one. This would have got a 6/10 from me without it.

Belphegor - The Devils (2022)

Country: Austria
Style: Black/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Jun 2022
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This makes a dozen studio albums for Austrian black/death metal legends Belphegor and it has an uncharacteristically subdued title for them. After all, this is the band behind memorable titles like Necrodaemon Terrorsathan, Goatreich - Fleshcult and, of course, Bondage Goat Zombie. The Devils just doesn't have the same oomph to it. Fortunately, that oomph is still there when it comes to the music, at least for the most part. There's an abiding patience to the opening title track that feels out of place to me and it returns a number of times throughout the album, but Totentanz nails its groove immediately and the album is off and running.

Belphegor is only two people nowadays, founding member Helmuth on lead vocals and guitar and Serpenth on bass and backing vocals, as he's been for over a decade and a half now. The drums are provided by a guest musician, David Diepold of British deathcore band Cognizance, among others. They bulk up with a second guitarist on tour, but Molokh apparently doesn't appear on this album. That makes them a kinda sorta power trio, I guess, and I've always found it fascinating to hear the depth of sound that only three people can conjure up. That goes double for a band who delve into black metal so deeply, that trio being responsible for the wall of sound we hear.

And there's some deep black metal in Totentanz, which is a glorious blitzkrieg of a track that feels like it simply couldn't be generated by three musicians. Sure, two of them have double duty but it seems like there are a lot more than two voices in play and a lot more than three musicians. Their layering of vocals, or whatever it is they're doing here, is the primary reason it feels deep, but the songwriting helps too. Glorifizierung des Teufels is seriously stripped down in comparison, plenty of it told with acoustic guitar and growled vocals, but it gets notably choral. It feels like a piece of operatic music adapted into an extreme metal framework, all the way to the strange narrative bit at the end for a female voice crying out in English in what may be a sample.

Those may be my favourite two songs here, as utterly different as they are, and they point the way to the other highlights of the album that are either fast and frantic but with a memorable groove, though only Kingdom of Cold Flesh attempts to match Totentanz on that front, or imaginative and bursting with dynamic play, a standard approach here. The songs that don't do much for me, such as that title track, are those that don't do either. The ones that do both and occasionally more are still growing on me after quite a few listens.

The most obvious example is Damnation - Hollensturz, which wraps up the first half. It has a frantic section here and there, especially during its bookends, and I love those. It has dynamic sections as well, where it bounces back and forth between calming and heavy. And it adds a fascinating ethnic vocal in its second half that doesn't sound Austrian at all, more Turkish (it returns on Creatures of Fire, just as tantalising). Yet this has also some of the patient bits that sometimes lose me, so I'm thoroughly enjoying it but I'm stuck in two minds about whether it ranks up there with Totentanz and the fascinating Glorifizierung des Teufels.

I'd have liked more frantic pieces but I'm happy with the dynamic play and the choral mindset that mixes the mild black shriek and rich death growl but layers them for effect with clean vocals which conjure up images of a choir of monks joining in song with a couple of demons. Virtus Asinaria has this and Ritus Incendium Diabolis too, almost reaching a plain chant behind the crunch. And this is enough to make me wonder if The Devils is a metal oratorio. It doesn't feel like full on opera so I'm not visualising the whole performance. It's pure music.

Tristwood - Blackcrowned Majesty (2020)

Country: Austria
Style: Industrial Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 May 2020
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Here's another submission, one for which I should apologise to Jegger from Tristwood about, because he sent this to me in May 2020, when this was new. I downloaded it but failed to get round to actually listening to it until now. Double shame on me because this is a fascinating feast of uncompromising underground extremity. It's absolutely not going to be for everyone but, if it speaks to you, it may be one of your favourite albums from last year.

Tristwood hail from Innsbruck, which is in Austria but has been historically part of Germany, Italy and France, making it a suitable location for a band who play an unholy mixture of black and death metal, industrial and grindcore. Whatever they are right now on this song, they'll be something else in five minutes on the next one. There's even a neat melodic part in one song but I'd better not mention that or it might get cut back out again, given the neat background to the album's musical direction that's detailed on its Bandcamp page.

Most of my favourite songs arrive late on, whether that's the proto-death of Acherontic Deathcult or the death-infused black metal onslaught of Bone Cathedral, but the title track may well be the key to what they do. It doesn't show up until three songs in, but before it pulls back the curtain and shows us the layers to Tristwood's sound, we're treated to the assault of a couple of others.

Re-Enthronement of the Damned is blisteringly fast, so much so that it's hard to actually listen to the guitars behind a wall of sound. What our ears catch instead are electronic noises that I imagined were aliens trying to communicate with me through the same equipment I'm using to listen to this album. It's black metal mixed with grindcore and it's uncompromising.

The vocals stood out too. I'm used to death growls, black shrieks and hardcore shouts, among others, but these are what I'll now think of as Tristwood barks. Luckily I'm not listening to this on my laptop, because those doglike vocals would send my cats to the high country. The ferret in my office is down, of course, as he'll say hi to anything, even if it'll eat him.

As we roll into He Who Traversed a Greater Oblivion, the wall of sound remains but with many bricks removed. I can hear the guitarwork now behind slower drums. Notably the vocals turn into grindcore gutturals, deep and desolate. It's different but still extreme, death rather than black, a new facet to a band about to kick A Blackcrowned Majesty off with techno beats and atmosphere, like we're in one of those European clubs we see in the movies that only cater to vampires about to be slain.

What this one does is echo both the earlier songs at once but in a mix that highlights the industrial aspects that we were merely glimpsing before. I can almost figure out what those aliens are trying to tell me, enough that I think they may be chatting with the barking dogs. It's well named, because it's a majestic song indeed, successful at combining at least four genres into one. Oh, and there's a flute, just in case we thought the surprises were over. They're not, though perhaps we're now expecting the unexpected and that's why we're not surprised by the further surprises.

Tristwood were formed as long ago as 2001 and they've put out four studio albums before this, plus a couple of EPs and singles. I haven't heard any of those, but the line-up seems to have remained pretty stable so this, as ruthlessly uncompromising as it is—their 2019 single, Crypt of Perennial Whispers, featured a single 22 minute song—is clearly working for them in the Tyrol, even if they're never going to be providing the new theme for Ski Sunday. Their Bandcamp page lists influences from black metal era Bathory and Hellhammer to Skinny Puppy and Killing Joke. They all make sense, even Oxiplegatz, a name I haven't seen in twenty years.

I like this. It's not something I'm going to virtually spin every week but it works well both as music on its own merits and as a reminder that the genre-hopping, avant-garde, uncompromising underground doesn't have to be unlistenable. Hyperspeed blastbeats, industrial drone riffs, electronic noises and a barrage of Tristwood barks remind me of that magic moment in 1987 when Sid put Napalm Death's Scum onto the Groové Records deck in Halifax and I realised I wasn't buying the Faster Pussycat debut that day after all. It's a good reminder that a lot of extreme music just isn't that extreme any more, but the edges still exist and they seem to be in Innsbruck.

Hypnotic Floor - Foggy Bog Eyes (2020)

Country: Austria
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

I'm not going to spend too much time trying to figure out what Flötenstrudl is all about. It's the intro to this experimental bluesy psychedelic stoner rock album and it's very strange, full of maracas, bees and violin tuning. I think it may translate to "whirlpool of flutes", because there are a lot of those too, but I think it's really a test. Are you willing to listen to two minutes of weirdness to get to the rest of the album? If you are, you're in for a treat.

It's largely instrumental music, though there are vocals every now and then. I can't find a line-up online, but it didn't surprise me to see pictures on the band's Facebook page that show that their singer also plays guitar. The band's approach tells me that he thinks of himself as a guitarist much more than a singer. His vocals aren't bad but nobody's going to be listening for his voice.

For the sake of throwing them into a box, I'd call them stoner rock and the usual influences are obvious. Static Wheel sounds to me like Black Sabbath at their most bluesy with an almost liquid guitar. Every so often, the band flick the heavy switch but they're bluesy far more often than they're heavy. Even here, though, there's something else going on. Is that a glockenspiel I hear at points?

It's Fall where things get really interesting and, having let this album run on repeat for a few listens, I'm thinking it's their definitive song. While Static Wheel is mostly laid back, Fall is almost dance music emphatic. That simple but forceful drumbeat is reminiscent of a Stone Roses song like I am the Resurrection and it never quits. But when the vocals show up, it becomes folky, which surprised me because it's English folk rather than the American folk that infused the San Francisco scene of the late sixties. I should add that Hypnotic Floor are Austrian, based in Vienna.

Fall is the sort of song that we don't want to end and it almost doesn't, an eleven minute opus that seems eager to keep going for eleven more, wrapping up only so that the band can move onto other material, including the title track which adds a prog feel to the psych folk jam for an even headier mix. That triple whammy of Static Wheel, Fall and Foggy Bog Eyes is an impressive run, especially as it continually ups the game for twenty plus minutes.

This gradual acquisition of genres makes me wonder if why I'm not as fond of the final two tracks is because they don't add much more to the mix. Oakman adds a progression in fits and starts and a neat transition into heavy mode. Woods adds a harmonica to underline that bluesy connection. I was expecting something wild at that point, like reggae or dubstep or African drummers but these songs are more like summaries of what's gone before. In other context, they're strong songs too but Hypnotic Floor set us up to expect more out of each successive number and they can't continue to deliver that forever.

I'm sure I'm not the only critic to categorise Hypnotic Floor as stoner rock and there's enough fuzz on the guitar to cement that. However, they're more of a psychedelic folk rave jam sort of band. Is that a thing? It should be, because it's very easy to get lost in songs like Fall or Foggy Bog Eyes. If you laced the Stone Roses' beer with acid and pushed them onto the Cropredy stage with instruments in their hands, they might just sound like this.

I wish I knew who the musicians are so I could give them appropriate credit. Let's just say they all do their job well, even the guitarist when he steps up to the mike because the vocals do drive some of this, especially Woods. I might suggest that this would be a strong instrumental album but, unlike a lot of stoner rock albums, this one would lose something without that folky voice. I like their music and will happily take it however they dish it out.

Edenbridge - Dynamind (2019)

Country: Austria
Style: Symphonic Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date:
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This is the tenth studio album for Edenbridge, who have been consistent and reliable since they issued their debut, Sunrise in Eden, as the millennium turned. They're still consistent and reliable here, sometimes a little much so because this is so effortlessly good that we sometimes relax too far and realise that we've drifted away from it.

It certainly took a while to grab me. The first few songs seemed completely fine but I needed time to get to know them. It was four tracks in when they made me pay attention, courtesy of the overtly Celtic intro to the overtly Celtic On the Other Side. It's a folky piece with dance in its blood and it would be difficult not to move to it, whether you're a dancer or not. It's also the first overt departure from the traditional sort of symphonic power metal that Edenbridge play.

There are actually quite a few departures here, just as there's quite a lot of variety, but the band are insanely good at making them fit comfortably within their particular sound. It's like they happily open the doors of the Edenbridge castle to welcome whatever other elements want in, only to make them feel so at home that they all become part of the family.

For instance, there are faster songs here, such as Where Oceans Collide, and heavier ones, like What Dreams May Come, but they remain inherently melodic and fit well with everything else. There's also a notably progressive track in The Last of His Kind. It runs a full twelve minutes but never seems long because a five minute song flows right into a progressive section, not only because it has time available for keyboard solos, which segues right into a second regular five minute song. Those songs have a prog feel too, reminding of a calmer Dream Theater, but they never forget that they're still melodic symphonic power metal.

The band I need to bring up here, not because they're a good comparison but because they're doing what Edenbridge only appear to do, and that's Sonata Arctica. This album feels very light to me, but it's deceptively so. Sonata Arctica have really lightened up, while Edenbridge only seem to have done. I think it's partly because it seems so effortless, always smooth whatever the band are doing, and partly because of the vocals of Sabine Edelsbacher, which are so clean, so patient and so well intonated that the elegance takes over and we don't realise that she's doing anything flash.

In other words, I can't see Edenbridge being recommended to voice coaches to react to on YouTube the way that, say, Nightwish's Ghost Love Score is every day of the week. However, if any of them do take on an Edenbridge song, like maybe the title track here, for all that it's a coda rather than a complete song, and they'll shower her with compliments. She sounds fantastic and her control is magnificent. I actually like that she's not showing off, singing along with the orchestration rather than setting up contrasts with it.

This is a very difficult album to dislike. It would take a listener utterly antithetical to the concept of symphonic metal to be left dry. However, it's so smooth and easy on the ears that we have to pay attention to realise just how good these guys are. They've certainly had time to find their groove, as Edelsbacher and main musician Lanvall are founder members with over a couple of decades with the band now. Here, with their tenth album, they deliver once again what their fans expect in a way that may land them some more.

Ultima Radio - Dusk City (2019)

Country: Austria
Style: Alternative/Post-Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Now, this is an interesting sound! Ultima Radio, from Graz in Austria, are clearly a stoner rock band. Just listen to the fuzzy guitar tone; what else could they be? Well, it isn't all they are.

Just check out the opener, Your Skin, as example. There's a lot of fuzz and a lot of feedback, but there's Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the riffs and the vocalist brings both David Byrne and Jello Biafra to mind. Who else would break into laughter quite like that as the song wraps up and then chant right into the next? The drums are tribal, making for hypnotic rhythm. The end result is similar to Rage Against the Machine or perhaps David Bowie from his Tin Machine era.

So I guess this is really alternative? The Ultima Radio Bandcamp page lists that, along with post-rock and crossover rock, whatever that is. Certainly, there's some experimental stuff going on, as the band find an wild groove at the midpoint of Limber which sounds like surf music fed through a blender. I never heard grunge bands doing that and this otherwise sounds like more Rage but in a Mary My Hope meets the Pixies framework.

7 of 8 finds another interesting groove. Lead vocalist Zdravko Konrad has an element of Iggy Pop in his voice anyway but it comes out to dominate here on a song that's raucous enough to remind of the Stooges, but with the bass as prominent as it would be in a funk metal band. There's also another layer on top of all this at points that I'm not sure is a guitar or keyboards.

I see that, in addition to the five band members on expected instruments, a sixth is credited for Sound and I wonder if that means that Kevin Prügger is not simply the sound engineer but the band member responsible for adding the extra sounds needed through sampling or whatnot. Certainly, when we get to a couple of interludes, we're apparently on a train and no, I don't just mean the standard blues rhythm.

Interlude I sounds like a haunted house theme. On a train. Yeah, it's not an expected thing, but it sounds cool, as does everything else here. For all of the influences I can cite, by the fourth track, Siberian, Ultima Radio sound like themselves, which is a trick that many bands still haven't figured out after decades of activity.

When Interlude II comes around and we're back on the train, I felt like Iggy as The Passenger, stuck in an alien metropolis soaking in everything around me. I see things from under glass. I look through my window's eye. And all of it is yours and mine. Iggy got it from Berlin. It's what I got from Dusk City.

On their website, Ultima Radio give us a little background. They started out as a stoner rock band, but "What we wanted to create was powerful, eccentric music, regardless of the genre it might eventually end up in." That's a good way to describe them. Sure, they're alternative, but this isn't what I think of first when I think alternative. There are relics of stoner rock here but it's not really stoner rock any more and, while there's clearly psychedelia added, it really isn't psychedelic rock at heart either.

Frankly, I could sit here running through different genres for the rest of a day and still not nail it because the point is that it's versatile. The best I can manage is heavy new wave, but I'm not thinking of Duran Duran. There's soundscape work at play here. Imagine someone like Shriekback or OMD ramping up the volume but still moulding sound into new and darker places. There's a lot of Voivod in Icarus, but it's what Voivod got from Pink Floyd, so maybe this is Ummagumma era Floyd moved on a few decades in a parallel dimension. So maybe it's a Radiohead album we've never heard before.

I've taken you all over with this review and probably confused the crap out of you, but that's fine. If you got confused and left, this isn't going to be for you. However, if you're confused and still reading, trying to figure out just what Ultima Radio sound like from my wild comparisons, then this is very likely to be for you. It's original. It's interesting. And it's damned good.

It have a feeling that this may become an abiding favourite of mine, never quite sounding like anything else even as the years run by, alongside Mary My Hope's Museum, Joy Division's Closer and Natalie Farr's Swept. Check back in with me in a decade.