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.

Riverwood - Shadows and Flames (2022)

Country: Egypt
Style: Symphonic Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 7 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Oh, I've been looking forward to this one! Very early in my redunking into the world of rock/metal here at Apocalypse Later Music, I discovered a great experimental Egyptian folk metal album by Ahl Sina and that prompted Mahmoud Nader to send me the debut album of his band, Riverwood, a progressive metal band also from Egypt. I loved both those albums, they both made my highly recommended list for 2018 and they helped to underline why the variety I need to explore here is not just in genre but in location. There's great music oozing out of the pores of the globe and it's often showing up in the countries you might least expect.

So here's a second album by Riverwood and it's another good one. It's also a long one, as not only do the band continue to write and play long songs—three here are longer than the longest on the prior album, Fairytale, which ran only a breath under ten minutes—but they're generous with the quantity of them too. There's an hour and a quarter of music here, spread over two discs. Perhaps the length, of both album and songs, helps it to become immersive. I started out planning to listen to the songs and see how they contributed to the album, but I lost that plot halfway through and I never really picked it back up.

The opener is an epic, even at a mere four minutes, with chanting and powerful strings. It's heavy, then it's folky, then it's both. In between that and the album's first long song, Blood and Wine, is one of a number of interludes, this one aptly titled A Haunting Lullaby. It's precisely what it says it is and it's a memorable piece, even at a mere minute, changing the mood before we leap into the twelve and a half minutes of Blood and Wine, which ably highlights how Riverwood are an extreme metal band even if they kind of forget that most of the time. This is folk music as often as it's folk metal or symphonic metal and, while some of that feels olde English, most of it is middle eastern.

Everything in Blood and Wine feels orchestrated and there are neat choral moments. Nader sings clean, though someone—maybe also him—adds a harsh voice here and there for contrast. Guitars are a constant highlight too, courtesy of Seif Elsokkary and Nader again, but the orchestral parts often take over from them. There are sections run through with crunchy guitar, then repeated as sections for bass. There's a lovely section almost midway where the heavy choral sound of Therion is turned on and off and on again over quiet guitar. There's a lot going on here and it's easy to get lost in the song.

And that's exactly what I did with the album. The Shadow is an odd interlude, but its ethnic winds lead well into Sands of Time, which begins like it's the real interlude. The ethnic winds are joined by ethnic drums and a clean and plaintive voice. I love these folk sections that endow everything with a sway and a timelessness. This one grows into a prog rock piece and, in time, prog metal, an occasional harsh voice showing up to add texture. The bass is often a highlight in this one, but so are the strings seven and a half minutes in. And...

Well, I realised at this point that I wasn't really paying attention to songs any more. I was merely immersed in the music and it didn't matter if Sands of Light rolls into Queen of the Dark or Dying Light gave way to Lustful Temptation. By this point, I was listening to Shadows and Flames like it's an pulsing ocean of waves or an undulating desert of dunes and I was content to let it carry me on to wherever it wanted to take me. Did I mention that I got almost Marillion vibes in instrumental sections of Lustful Temptation? Probably not. I don't think I wrote that down until after a third or fourth listen. How about Dying Light starting out very much like Therion, not just in choral vocals but in riffs? Yeah, probably the same.

Eventually I got round to taking notes again. There's some more glorious bass work in The Flame, from new fish Mohannad Ahmed, one of two members to join after the previous album, Abdallah Hesham on drums being the other. There's some lovely flute too, from guest Hüseyin Pulant, who seems to be on Sands of Time and Dying Light too but might not be. The closer, Solitude, is an odd piece, because it's gothic and doomladen and dominated by strings. At least they sound to me like strings but I don't see anyone credited, so maybe it's all done by Omar Salem on keyboards.

Mostly, though, I want to call out Babylon, one of those brief interludes, because it highlights just why I love folk metal so much. It does that quintessential Riverwood folk into folk metal shift, and it's a delight for its seventy or so seconds. This isn't inventing any wheel, it's merely doing what a folk metal song is supposed to do, but the very nature makes it wildly original. Every band in this genre has a different heritage to bring to proceedings and the variety you find when moving from Finland to Japan to Egypt is glorious. Riverwood probably think of themselves as symphonic metal nowadays and progressive metal after that, but the folk, with or without the metal suffix, is what truly drives its unique nature.

Now, how long do I need to wait for a third album?

Scarab - Martyrs of the Storm (2020)

Country: Egypt
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

For a band who are clearly elevated by their musicianship, especially by an impressive drummer and a pair of excellent guitarists, it was the vocals of Sammy Sayed that grabbed me first. It wasn't because of his choice to go in the deep growl direction, as he's decent but frankly little varied across a ten track album. It was the way he delivers that growl that's notable. Right at the outset, with the opening title track, it's almost an echo of a chant, ably setting the scene as an underground temple mid-ritual, given that the band sing about ancient Egyptian culture and spirituality.

If that didn't conjure up a comparison with Nile, I'll raise it anyway, but I should add that Scarab are actually from Egypt, so it's their own culture that they're exploring. Like Nile, the sound is dense and deep. Guitars are kept low in the mix, so that we hear the bludgeoning drums first with vocals and other instruments adding textures.

I usually prefer my death metal old school or melodic over brutal, but this album is immersive. Part of that is our need to pay attention to catch what the guitars are doing behind the drums and the bass, but a lot of it is just how interesting they are once we focus in on them. When they emerge to play, the guitars are impressive. One is vicious, slicing through the air like an evil weapon. The other is intricate, with a penchant for neo-classical that veers into sheer shred on Kingdom of Chaos. I believe the vicious guitar is that of Tarek Amr and the shred comes courtesy of Al-Sharif Marzeban.

Mostly, they stay at least partially buried in the mix because everything is ritualistic here. Bloodmoon Shadows, for instance, thrives on that chanting mentality from earlier and the guitars match those vocals with textures so that we start to wonder about what ritual we're becoming part of. Are we to conjure something up or lay someone to rest? The song titles suggest both.

Sayed has to have one of the rhythmic voices I've heard in death metal. That mindset continues, even getting bouncy on Circles of Verminejya. His work on this song is as catchy as melodic songs with killer hooks, but the hooks in evidence here are all in the rhythms. It's often said that an unintelligible death growl is another musical instrument, but it's usually said with guitar or bass in mind. Sayed is more a like a flesh and blood drumkit.

While this is hypnotic and immersive as death metal, I'm surprised that the band didn't add more ethnic flavour. It's clearly there on Coffin Texts, as the guitar trills and wavers like we might expect from an Egyptian vocalist but without any attempt to sound like folk metal. There's a little early on in Upon the Pagan Lands too. Maybe I'll notice it more on earlier tracks on repeat listens. Certainly, wherever it's there, it's there in the guitar.

The cover art for Martyrs of the Storm is an excellent guide to what can be found within. This is dark music but warm. It has an immediate impact, but a more abiding presence as we look deeper to see the details. It's ritual but not in any immediately recognisable way. It's epochal, fought on a plane far above our own. It's intricate. It's lush. It's order imposed upon chaos. And it always has something new to discover.

Riverwood - Fairytale (2018)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahl Sina - Troops of Pain (2019)

Country: Egypt
Style: Experimental Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

If you've been following my reviews thus far, you'll have noticed that I like my metal interesting. Don't sound like the other guys and I'm going to pay attention. Blur the boundaries between subgenres and you've got my interest. Bring in far flung ethnic sounds and I'm going to be eager to listen. Well, here's a folk/progessive metal band from Egypt who kick off their album with a ten minute song. This is so far up my alley I can feel it tickling my taste buds.

And it does indeed turn out to be an interesting album. After listening through a few times in entirety, what it really sounds like to me is a prog metal opera that at times gets very folky, as classical music often tends to do.

That ten minute opener, The Gift, begins with chanting then shifts to flute and percussion, diverts into electronic territory and then an intricate guitar intro. When the singing shows up, it's clean vocals over flute, then violin. The melodies quaver and the flutes trill. Only when an electric guitar solo suddenly arrives almost four minutes in does this really assert itself as metal but, a minute further in, we suddenly find ourselves in flight with death metal growls that are later replaced by shrieks halfway between black metal and Bobby Blitzer of Overkill. Even then the ethnic instruments keep on accompanying, even leading and, on occasion, running entirely solo. By eight minutes, we find a spoken word section, marking the fifth vocal style used in one song. And, if I'm not mistaken, all of them except the chanting at the beginning are courtesy of a single man, Moustafa Troll, who founded Ahl Sina in 2009.

So that's ten minutes of an album that runs over an hour, with one track, Enlightenment Discarded that's even longer than The Gift.

There's so much more to say but it would be redundant. Frankly, I could end my review there and you're either going to move right along or raise your eyebrows at the potential.

Well, I should add that I'm still exploring this on my fourth or fifth time through because there's that much going on, both musically and with regard to the storyline.

I'd like to pick up a lyric sheet for this to figure out what's unfolding because it's clearly aimed at being a coherent story and I haven't got a clue what that is, other than something contemporary that speaks to the human condition and its tendency towards conflict. The title track wraps up with a sample from a poem by Jane Elliott called Racism Destroyed in One Minute.

Musically, it's exquisite, all the way up to the tortured shriek halfway through Vowed. It's emphatically an Egyptian band at heart and you'd be forgiven for expecting them to all be Egyptians deeply in touch with the musical heritage of the country. Just listen to the intro to Knowledge and Pain and tell me that that isn't an Egyptian playing frame drums behind an Egyptian string section?

Well, what surprises me most is that Ahl Sina are actually international in scope and this album was recorded in three different nations without a single joint rehearsal of all the members. The strings are courtesy of Stefanie Pfaffenzeller from Germany and the tribal drummer, Shaadie Khoury, is in the US. I presume Amr el Zanaty on the traditional percussion and Ahmed el Eskndarany on flutes are in Egypt, as are Troll on vocals and Shung on keyboards and guitar, but bassist Marcel Hauptmann is also German.

They perform together gloriously, whether they actually perform together or not. This doesn't sound piecemeal at all, even if the international members did record their bits separately and someone glued them together later. I'd very much like to hear this band live, especially supporting Orphaned Land. While one band is Egyptian and the other Israeli, the two would seem to be utterly compatible musically and thematically. I could see the same Lebanese bellydancers performing with both bands.

Now, let me listen through again and see if I can choose some highlights. I'm almost scared to post any because I'm pretty sure that my favourites will be changing every time I listen. It's not remotely as catchy as the Egyptian influenced Sechem album I reviewed recently, Disputes with My Ba, though some of the flute and percussion sections will have you bellydancing in your office chair and scaring whoever's in the next cube, but it's much deeper and more worthy of exploration.