Vespertine - Desolate Soil (2024)

Country: Israel
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2024
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Now that Sonata Arctica have finally returned to playing power metal, there's a lot of symphonic metal in their sound, but here's an actual symphonic metal band. I mention that because I found them listed as pure symphonic metal but it's pretty clear from the outset that we can add folk to that as well. The intro, Genesis, which builds dynamically from piano to flutes to orchestral swell and eventually pipes, grows into that and the instrumental first half of the opening song proper, To All the Wilds, plays likewise. And then it gets really interesting.

There are two people in Vespertine, as far as I can tell, and, while they work together effectively, they appear to bring two completely different approaches to the band. Dawn Kadmiel is all about that symphonic folk. She provides all the orchestration, which shapes how this sounds; she plays a tasty violin; and she delivers her vocals clean with an eye on the folk tradition. Her colleague Ran Hameiri, who plays guitar and bass, is therefore tasked with heavying it up to add the metal side of things. He does that, but he does it through a mostly harsh voice and metal here is dependent on the song. Often it's heavy or power metal. Sometimes it's full on melodic death.

As you might imagine, everything hinges on how well those two approaches play together, with a take on beauty and the beast that goes far beyond the traditional one of contrasting vocalists. It works really well for me, if you want a quick answer. However, there's also a much longer one that depends on how you look at this music. I listen to albums in entirety and more than once, so that I can see how they flow, how they grow on repeat listens and also where to focus in on something if it stands out or warrants special attention. For a while, this works differently for me in that way than if I focus in on individual tracks.

That's because the first two tracks proper play rather oddly and I got it into my head that the way they do that continued on throughout the album. It doesn't, which makes it even odder that they be the first two tracks.

Take To All the Wilds as an example. Within the grand flow of the album, it works very well indeed. I love the instrumental opening that combines the flutes and piano of the intro with metal guitars and a fast metal beat. When it shifts into a song after a couple of minutes, it stays symphonic folk, with Kadmiel the only vocalist, her voice giving way to violin and an elegant guitar solo, but close to four minutes in, Hameiri kind of takes over, his harsh vocal stealing the spotlight and his guitar heavying up, in preparation for the melodic death metal of the second half of Omens (The Trial of Doom).

Every moment in the song works as a transition from Genesis to Omens except the unusual funky section late on. However, if you listen to it in isolation, as you might on a radio broadcast, it feels disconcerting. Without any context from the tracks around it, it sounds like it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a instrumental piece or a vocal song? Is it rock or metal? Is it soothing folk or hard death? It's pretty much symphonic all the way through, so that's a fallback, but it can't establish a particular mood or style within its boundaries. I still like it, because all those moments are great, but it doesn't feel at all complete, needing those surrounding songs to give it context.

That lack of self-identity applies to Omens (The Trial of Doom) too, then Rain into the Hollow kicks off with an electronic pulse behind the soft piano that sounds good but fails to indicate where the song is going, so I started to see this as far better as one forty minute slab of music than as seven individual songs plus an intro. I started to think about the album as an exercise in where we could move the breaks between the songs to give them more coherence. Maybe To All the Wilds should be two separate songs or one suite with two or three movements, and Omens likewise. I can't see this sort of feeling as a good thing.

However, the more the album runs on, the more coherent the individual songs become and, as I'd pointed out, all the moments sound wonderful anyway, even early on. It means that this may play better to listeners who devour entire albums—and versatile ones at that—than those who tend to prefer individual songs. The more coherent songs come later, like Twilight State (The Vespertine) and Rain into the Hollow, so stick with it. The album's worth it.

Fortunately I fall into the former camp anyway so I ended up good with most of this. I'm good with the contrasting vocal styles in a late duet against escalating orchestration in Omens (The Trial of Doom) and a weirder balance early in Twilight State (The Vespertine). I'm even good with Hameiri suddenly shifting to clean vocals during Skeleton of a Tree, because it's more rock than it is metal, especially after the far heavier Rain into the Hollow, and into spoken word on Twilight State too. It's a versatile album and it takes some getting used to, but I like how it all ends up.

Yossi Sassi & The Oriental Rock Orchestra - Prediluvian (2023)

Country: Israel
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I hadn't heard of Yossi Sassi before, but I've heard his work because he's one of the founders of the Israeli progressive metal outfit Orphaned Land, who notably combine eastern and western music in their sound. If you don't know them, you should. Check out the double whammy of Mabool (The Flood) and The Storm Still Rages Inside from their 2004 album Mabool: The Story of the Three Sons of Seven. He's released solo albums, whether as Yossi Sassi or Yossi Sassi Band, and at least three albums as this side project, Yossi Sassi & The Oriental Rock Orchestra.

While Orphaned Land are prog metal, the Oriental Rock Orchestra play prog rock, so the sound is less crunchy and completely shorn of harsh vocals, with the world elements even more overt. That starts with the intro, On Shoulders of Nephilim, which is played on a stringed instrument that I bet isn't a guitar. I don't know which, but he plays seventeen different varieties, including one that he invented himself, the bouzoukitara. There are acoustic sections in Orphaned Land songs, and some acoustic songs. If you were blown away by the two tracks I mentioned above, keep listening for the acoustic outro after them, Rainbow (The Resurrection), and it'll work as a good transition to this.

That's not to suggest that this is an acoustic album, because it isn't, outside equivalent sections or songs, but it is very much rock rather than metal, even in its heaviest moments. It's also primarily instrumental, built out of what sound like folk tunes and ethnic instrumentation, but played in an obviously rock fashion, with a full band including a rock drumkit. Uriel Machine is led by guitar, as we might expect, but with plenty of flutes above it and hand drums below. It's almost slow shred, if that makes sense, a virtuoso guitarist on best behaviour, perhaps to emphasise what he's doing to the children staring wide-eyed at him in a classroom. Check out this next bit, kids...

If Sassi shows off here, it's primarily by finding a broad variety of tones. While Uriel Machine is an impactful piece that hints at metal without quite going there and Sirius does much the same later on the album, Oopart is a funkier piece, with Sassi teasing his guitar into generating neat sounds the way that someone like Jeff Beck would. Atlantis kicks off tenderly and, while it bulks up, it's to an introspective guitar piece that brings to mind a few guitarists who see the notes not played as being just as important as the ones that are. One tone that doesn't come from guitar is the intro to Architect of the Stars, which is electronica. Are those trap rhythms? I'm no expert in that side of music, but someone who is would be able to call out a lot on this piece.

The only vocal track here is Armoros Fall, in the sense of a song with a singer delivering lyrics. Both are provided by a guest, Ross Jennings, a British vocalist best known for prog metal bands Haken and Redados. This is softer than prog metal but it's the most obvious rocker on the album, with an arena rock feel when it's not working jagged rhythms. It's a vibrant song that often suggests that Jennings is stalking the stage and the entire band is following him step for step, like a pantomime entourage. And, of course, it also has an eastern section, because it can.

There are vocals on Anelo too, but no lyrics, because they're vocalisations, sustained repetitions of a single word that doesn't seem to be quite the title. While Sassi leads the way on one of those many stringed instruments, an acoustic one this time, it becomes a song for the flute. That's been evident from the opening but, the longer the album runs, the more prominent the flute becomes. It's played by Yossi's daughter, Danielle Sassi, and she's comfortable not only providing texture or taking part in instrumental call and response sections, but also becoming the lead, as she does on Anelo and especially Kumlar.

All in all, this is a tasty album. It's an easy and accessible listen but there's a lot going on if you're wanting to dive in deeper. For instance, while it's primarily guitar or other stringed instrument—Sassi also plays bouzouki, charrango, saz, ukelele and bouzoukitara here and Sarel Ha'cohen adds kanun and Ben Azar contributes further seven and eight stringed guitars—there's that flute and other instruments fleshing out the sound. Emil Guseinov plays viola and Roei Fridman a variety of percussion that goes beyond the traditional rock rhythm section of bass and drums.

It all combines to provide something unique and, while nothing stands out above anything else, it all sounds consistently good. It could serve as an excellent rabbit hole to dive into Sassi's music.

Warp - Bound by Gravity (2023)

Country: Israel
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Here's a lively stoner rock album from Tel Aviv that's clearly driven by the guitar of Itai Alzaradel from the very outset, and even though all three members of the band lend voice to the fray, we're never left in any doubt that its natural state is instrumental jam with that guitar always the focus. The opener is The Present and it does different things, even finding a more furious mentality with some punk chord changes midway, but it's at its best when the bass of Sefi Akrish and the drums of Mor Harpazi are laying down a massive backdrop for Alzaradel to solo over.

My other immediate impression is that this is loud music and I mean really loud. I actually turned my volume way down, to the point where it might not disturb a theoretical someone sleeping in a corner of my office, just as an experiment, and it still felt loud. Back up to normal volume, it feels crazy loud. At crazy loud levels on stage, Warp must be quite the experience. Much of the credit is owed to that backdrop, which is cavernous in size, but the guitar easily fills that space.

The vocals don't, which helps the feel, because it seems like they're always struggling to be heard over that mighty guitar. They're never hidden and they're sung in English, but I quickly took them as a sonic texture rather than a set of delivered lyrics. I've listened through a few times and I have no idea what any of these songs are about because it never seems like it matters. What I got from the album is a feel and it's a gigantic combination of punk confrontation and, rather oddly, quite a lively stoner rock approach, because the only threatening done here is by volume. This is a good trip.

Maybe that's because, while of course there's some Black Sabbath here, it's very loose and bluesy rather than rigid and solemn. During the midsection of The Hunger, the bass is delightfully organic and the guitar is happy to follow suit. I feels like I'm in the ship in Fantastic Voyage being hurtled down the rapids of some giant's bloodstream, with a little break in the middle as we transition to a smoother current. Did we just go through the heart and straight out the other side? The intros often highlight different influences too. The guitar that introduces Bound by Gravity reminds of a less self-important Danzig but on Dirigibles it's more like a smoother Celtic Frost.

And, as good as Akrish and Harpazi are here, it always comes back to that guitar. One reason that I think it's so acceptable is that there's fuzz here, as you might expect for stoner rock, but it's a very palatable level of fuzz. Even when a song goes for a more bludgeoning approach, like Your Fascist Pigs are Back, it doesn't have any of the dirtier edges of sludge metal. It's always stoner rock, even if it's so loud that Warp ought to land a support slot on a Manowar tour, and threatens often to go into doom metal. However, it would be fairer to compare them to Iron Butterfly than Candlemass.

I enjoyed the whole album, though the looser it got the more I liked it. I can appreciate a song like Your Fascist Pigs are Back, but I much prefer The Present and Impeachment Abdication, where the guitar just runs loose and shines in its own special light. I also rather dig the closer, I Don't Want to Be Remembered, because it extends that looseness to the vocals, where three voices harmonise in neatly chaotic fashion. There's variety here, if we pay attention but, once we get past the first trio of tracks, the songs do start to blur together a little. This seven minute closer, on the other hand, is stubborn and refuses to blur into anything else. It goes all over the map and can be a little hard to see in entirety, but I love it for that.

I believe this is a second album for Warp, after a self-titled effort in 2019, so I should check that out at some point when I'm not behind on reviews. I'd also like to know what else is going on in Tel Aviv that doesn't remotely fit any expectations we might let bias our judgement. Their Facebook page highlights a whole bunch of others they're gigging with who I'm intrigued to throw an ear at.

Laufgast - Roots for Spears (2021)

Country: Israel
Style: Progressive Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 16 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's something really interesting. From what I can tell, Laufgast is another one man project, of an Israeli gentleman named Asaf Levy, who plays every instrument on this progressive black metal album. However, there are no fewer than five guest vocalists, exactly none of whom appear to be Israeli or indeed vocalists, at least not primarily. Chris Bone does sing with Forged in Black, who I reviewed in 2019, and a few other British bands, but he doesn't sing lead; he's primarily known as their guitarist. Similarly, I'd call Norwegians Kristian Brynjulfsen and Kine-Lise Madsen Skjeldal respectively the bass player in the thrash band Psykopath and the keyboardist in the symphonic black metal outfit Cretura.

And, to be fair, even though this is definitely prog and, eventually black metal, it wanders all over the musical map and those vocalists aren't all singing. Some of them are merely lending voices in conversational or dramatic speaking fashion, as they do from the very start of the album, though they mostly do so in what I presume is Norwegian, so I haven't any idea what they're saying. That lends this album an unusual feel from the outset, and that only increases as we move through an array of genres, initially prog rock, then black metal and eventually world music, with some neat backing vocals.

This opening track is called Mortality in Solace and it runs for only a breath under eleven minutes, so there's plenty of opportunity for musical shifts. There are so many of these that it's difficult to track and many of my favourites are difficult to fit into a single bucket. That world music section, for instance, which unfolds in the minute from 4:14, unfolds against a backdrop of tribal drumming but moves from deep male Norse chanting that just reaches a low drone to a characterful female wail that sounds a lot like Eastern European choral music. And it's bookended by black metal.

There are only three songs on offer, the title track lasting fifteen minutes and the album over half an hour. I can only assume that there's a complex story being woven through these pieces of music and the voices serve as characters or at least provide background to what's going on. Without the lyric sheet, though, I'm lost. It's music to me, without story, and that makes it fascinating but also elusive. I don't know why the musical shifts are happening, but I can hear that, when they do, they shift the tone of the piece considerably, making it hard to picture a song like Mortality in Solace at a high level. I enjoyed this very much in the moment but find myself remembering sections rather than songs.

What's interesting to me is that most of those memorable sections are slow ones, like that world music section in Mortality in Solace. It returns five minutes into Roots for Spears, underlining how this feels like a single half hour piece of music rather than three different songs, but there are a few others too. There's a mildly similar section in Earthbed that stages a more restrained wail in the background behind a speaking female voice and a lively metal beat, while a guitar explores wherever the characters happen to be.

Often with complex music like this that unfolds in many changes over a few long pieces of music, I find myself subconsciously translating the audio into visuals and that helps ground it all for me. I may not see what the composers or musicians saw, but I do see something and what I see helps to shape my understanding of the music. I rarely saw anything here and, when I did, it was in one of those quieter sections. Those world music bits were inside a cave to me, not entirely covered like the cover art but only mostly so with some light shining in from outside. There's also a mediaeval section a few minutes later in the title track that adds flutes, even if it grows into a very pleasant electric guitar solo. I was outdoors for that section hanging out with peasants with trees around.

This is hardly commercial music. It's black metal, for a start, but it's far from only black metal and any story being told is almost deliberately obscured by the choice of language. So this becomes a pure musical experience and it's a hard one to interpret. Ambitious listeners will definitely find it worthy of exploration, because it's well performed and always ready to surprise, but it's not likely to reach much of an audience beyond that. Which is fine. I just hope it finds enough listeners that Asaf Levy can return to this project for a second album, one that I can visualise better.

Dakat Doomia - A Hail from the End (2021)

Country: Israel
Style: Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Jun 2021
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One of the genre boundaries that I have the most trouble with is the one that lies between doom and sludge metal. It's a thin boundary but it often seems like the two genres approach it from completely different directions. Doom is traditional metal that's been slowed down, often considerably. Sludge is hardcore punk that's been rocked up but ends up in a similar place. It's dirtier, more dissonant and, in many instances, less elegant. Stoner metal also comes into play on the boundary between them, often by adding a psychedelic element, though that's more common with doom than sludge.

I mention all this because Dakat Doomia, who hail from Israel, have pitched their tent exactly on that boundary and it makes their sound fascinating. I get the impression, which may be completely wrong, that the band are more comfortable with doom and their go to texture is atmospheric and doomy, but they have wider tastes and they often trawl in sludge and psych for effect. The sludge mostly shows up in Yahav Zukin's guitarwork when there's a need for emphasis. Maor Movsovich's harsher vocals add a further level of darkness and dirt, but he's closer to a death growl than a hardcore shout.

I believe this is technically listed as an EP but, at half an hour, it's longer than some entire albums that I've reviewed lately and it kicks off with its longest song, a complex piece called Paranoia. At different points, it calms down and heavies up on a sort of wave, but it also shifts from an elegant doom sound, à la Candlemass, to a faster, more edgy one with more of a Trouble feel to it. The harsher vocals make it darker, though I should add that Movsovich doesn't stay harsh throughout. It's an interesting song.

And the album only gets more interesting from there. The approach taken in Paranoia of doom with a little sludge only builds with Meteor, but this one adds in a psychedelic edge too through clean vocals and more mellow guitar. And then, two and a half minutes in, it really starts rocking with a raw riff to grab our attention and a gorgeous pause to cement it in place. Then it finds an example of what is my favourite mode for Dakat Doomia, which is a bouncy riff combined with a wailing solo and that growl over it. It's gorgeous and the similar example halfway through Eternal March is even better.

Eternal March layers on the psych and, almost a minute in, throws in a very sludge guitar just oozing with distortion. This song really grows and may be the best one here. I may well always prefer doom to sludge, but to me this is what sludge was created for. It's elegant and smooth and organic until it has a yen to dirty everything up and wail out the blues. The Voids Call does some of the same thing, a lush psychedelic heavy blues song that's as often dark Hawkwind as it is Black Sabbath.

And that leaves Sight of Death, a seven and a half minute epic with a gloriously creeping atmosphere to kick things off. I wonder if the cover art is meant to illustrate this scene, because it feels cavernous, echoing and dark. It also feels different, because the voice, which I presume is Movsovich's, isn't using English at this point, though he does sing in English throughout. This is more of a spoken word section with a reprise later in the piece and I presume he's conjuring in Hebrew [Note: Maor Movsovich kindly let me know that it's actually in Russian]. Regardless of whoever does it and what language it's in, it's effective.

I like this album and I found that I liked it more the longer it ran. It's good when it's pure doom, or as close as it gets, but the sludge adds to it and the psychedelic stoner edge adds even more. Apart from Eternal March being released as a single, this is their first work since forming in 2018 and I'm keen to hear more.

Acid Moon and the Pregnant Sun - Speakin' of the Devil (2020)

Country: Israel
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Jul 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Here's something agreeably different that only grows over its seven songs. The gorgeous cover art, by Branca Studio, might look like an occult paperback thriller from the seventies, but Acid Moon and the Pregnant Sun are an eight piece psychedelic rock band from Tel Aviv and this debut album sounds like a cross between Jefferson Airplane and John Kongos, with Oasis and the Rolling Stones on the side. If that means we can't even place a logical decade for the sound, so be it.

As you might expect from a hippie-infused summer of love sound, the opener is called I Love You, but it mixes its handclaps with jangly guitar and fuzz, making this a a darker journey worthy of the album title. Speakin' of Speakin' of the Devil, that's up next and it finds that John Kongos sort of groove, an underlining riff that carries everything else along with it. The vocals fit Kongos too, rough and raspy but always driven by melody and building to a singalong chorus big enough for us all to join in on. It isn't as catchy a chorus as Kongos tended to find but it's still in the same vein, as is the wild and funky breakdown six and a half minutes in.

And, if we haven't noticed the psychedelia yet, which we really should have done, we can't miss it on a real acid trip of a song called Creatures of the Abyss. It starts out with handheld tribal drums, adding guitars that chime so fluidly that I wondered if they're deliberately mimicking koras. There are words here, albeit presented in the offbeat way that Frank Zappa might, but most of the vocals aren't at all intelligible because they're manipulated in weird ways, sped up but also chopped up and reassembled just out of phase. The result is rather like Gong jamming with Ballaké Sissoko at a Zappa soirée. With everyone on LSD. It even morphs into Golden Brown at one point, as the backdrop to our sightseeing trip into the abyss. What a strange and wonderful song!

Creatures of the Abyss is such an acid trip that I don't think I acknowledged the next two songs at all, being drawn back out of my stunned reverie when Save Me unfolded like a funky Rolling Stones track. Going back deliberately to them, Wide is a heavy and emphatic Jefferson Airplane while Bright Sky at Night goes back further to the folk musicians who influenced them, but under a voice that's so rough and deep that it's like Lou Reed singing alt country. Even at only three minutes, the latter sounds like it wants to put us into a trance state, foreshadowing the album's closer, Sparrow.

First, though, there's Save Me, which is right out of the Stones songbook, but with even more drugs fuelling the recording session. There are at least four singers on this album, so I don't generally know which broken voice is singing what, but the voice on this one is Yoel Chajes, as he's a guest with just that one credit. I would put money on the fact that he's impersonated Mick Jagger before, because surely that's why he got asked to front a song with such a Stones backing. He's a little over the top but that fits this album.

And, having been livened up by Save Me, we're promptly calmed down again with Sparrow, which is so calm that's almost Hawaiian. Its evocation of lapping waves reminds of Fleetwood Mac's Albatross and that gives us the opportunity to think about where Acid Moon and the Pregnant Sun have taken us in the previous six tracks: counterculture San Francisco, a busy market in Bamoko, the innerspace of an acid trip and swinging London. Now we're in hammocks on a Caribbean beach, sipping rum as the sun sets over the ocean. Someone down the way is playing Dylan on a portable radio but we're not paying attention to anything but the soothing rhythm.

Yeah, it's that sort of album. You dig?

Scardust - Strangers (2020)

Country: Israel
Style: Symphonic Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Wow, did this one take me aback! I only got a few songs in and had to start again just to take stock of what I'd just heard. Scardust are an Israeli band who began life in 2013 as Somnia but changed name a couple of years later. They play symphonic progressive metal, but that doesn't remotely cover all that they do.

For instance, this starts out really operatic, with presumably the entire band providing a choral backing for lead vocalist Noa Gruman. Then the music joins, very technically, with violins and crunchy guitars and who knows what else. Remember the beginning of Yes's Roundabout with all its careful interplay between instruments? Well, Overture for the Estranged is kind of like that. For its entire six minutes. There's a spotlight moment for every member of the band both forwards and backwards and a further one later on at length. It's like a demo reel: everything Scardust can do, all wrapped up in one easy to consume bundle. And that's just track one.

Things settle down a bit from there, but not a lot. This is technical stuff all the way through, with all the band members trading solos often, not just guitarist Yadin Moyal and keyboardist Itai Portugaly. The bass of Yanai Avnet blew me away more than once. It's going to take multiple listens of every song to just to fully grasp what these folk are doing. There are plenty of hints at the versatility of Queen, but each song is like Queen squared. Complexity and technical ability clearly matter here and just as much as melody and groove.

Break the Ice, for instance, shifts quickly through Queen harmonies to purest theatrics. This could be a song from a Broadway musical and Gruman's voice would be up to that on its worst day. She's crystal clear but versatile enough to move from kid-friendly Disney saccharine to soaring Phantom operatic and still wrap up with some serious R&B runs. The musical theatre feel is echoed by the fact that the music seems inherently there to support her on this one, with only the solos excepted. This darts and weaves whenever her voice needs it to, but always at her bidding.

The biggest problem Strangers has is that there's just so much here that it's easy to get overwhelmed. A song like Concrete Cages, for instance, is an obvious highlight with its often dominant hurdy gurdy, it's soaring Robert Plant style vocals and a singalong chorus. But there's so much to unpack from this song that it would be viable to write a review this length about that one song alone.

Focusing only on that one would miss out the way that Scardust can shift from Queen to Therion in a single line. It would miss the fact that not all the vocals here are clean, with Gruman going effectively harsh on Over for a while; given that I think everyone contributes backing vocals, I have no idea who does that in harsh fashion in songs like Tantibus II, but's thoroughly effective. It would only skirt the fact that this whole album is wildly theatrical. While Gruman isn't the most accomplished singer in a harsh style that I've ever heard, it's a rare one that gets so much emotional range out of it and I can't name another one that can shift from harsh growls to soaring opera in a heartbeat.

It would also miss the other genres that are trawled in here. The folk music in Concrete Cages is only one sound there, just as metalcore is only one sound in Over and smooth jazz only one sound in that song's flipside, Under. The backing on the latter sounds like an inner city church choir from a random underdog feelgood movie, which would make the segue into rapped vocals natural, except that these rapped vocals are angry and end up verging on hardcore shouts. Oh yeah, this album is versatile. The choir on Huts sounds like a younger one from a high school but it doesn't turn the song cutesy.

At this point, after a couple of listens, I couldn't even hazard a guess at my favourites here. Overture for the Estranged is a gimme and so's Concrete Cages. I might thow out Addicted as a third, but I can easily imagine every song here waxing or waning in my esteem on further listens. There's just so much to discover within them. One key note would be that I especially adore the interaction of instruments when Noa Gruman takes a well deserved break for a while, but she's arguably the most critical piece in this puzzle and she takes the band in so many directions. It's hard to truly comprehend that the voice on Break the Ice and Mist is the same one on Over and Under.

Quite seriously, the most emphatic negative I can hurl out about is that this album will simply be too much for some potential listeners: too much of everything. They'll get lost and give up. Of course, it's fair to say that the most emphatic positive I can hurl out is exactly the same thing, because this is an album that can be explored for a long, long time without finding all its treasure. I may well up this to a 9/10 but I need more listens. And I need more words.

Nevain - Hidden (2019)

Country: Israel
Style: Atmospheric Gothic Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Aug 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

I've been enjoying a whole collection of one man projects on Bandcamp lately and here's another one, from Uri Jeffrey, who's located somewhere in Israel. He plays atmospheric gothic doom metal, or something like it. The gothic is more prominent than the doom but there's plenty of atmosphere with all eight tracks instrumental except for choral effects.

While some of these one man releases seem to be one track regurgitated over and over under different titles, Nevain is reasonably varied. Each of these tracks distinguished themselves in some way except maybe for a couple late on which blurred together.

The title track provides the first half of doomy bookends. This one is slow but with a lively, albeit rather melancholy, atmosphere. It speeds up midway as a presumably synthesised choir kicks in, but it never stays fast. Nevain has a grandiose sound that comes out of Jeffrey's gothic influences but it works well, perhaps never more than when the violin shows up five minutes in.

Those who came for doom may want to skip forward to the last song, Fields of Grey, which really plays it up for the first time, though there are hints at points here and there. It's the heaviest track on the album but it features a neat piano melody over its dark chugging.

In between are a succession of tracks that mostly vary the style enough to stand out. Shadowfall has a guitar/drum combo that's too bouncy for doom but it underpins proceedings while the keyboards take over the melody, often in a middle eastern style. Desolate Ways often sounds like a carillon, with its abundance of bells. Pale Distant Light adds a flute and that helps the track feel even more cinematic than it would have been otherwise.

The keyboards often dominate here and I wonder if they're Jeffrey's primary instrument, given that he also plays keyboards and bass for the doom/death band Clapsodra, who had an album out last year. I'm sure that many of these odd instruments, the carillons and flutes and whatnot, are the product of a synthesiser rather than a well-stocked music room. If I have a complaint at all here, it's that these other instruments don't sound more real.

Instrumentals don't have to sound like classical pieces played on rock band instrumentation. The most overt band influence here is on Disharmony, which I'm happy to say is not disharmonious. When it gets past its intro, it feels very much like a Paradise Lost song, albeit sans Gregor Mackintosh's highly recognisable guitar tone. There's a lot of Paradise Lost here, from various phases of their career, down to the electronica beats on Desolate Ways. Even the song titles are quintessential Paradise Lost.

I like this album. It's consistently good, though not consistently great, and it made for pleasant company while working, enough so that I ended up leaving it on repeat for a while. I'd give it 7/10 for Paradise Lost fans like me but 6/10 for everyone else.

Tillian - Lotus Graveyard (2019)

Country: Israel
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

With influences from Gentle Giant to Opeth via Kate Bush, Orphaned Land and the Dresden Dolls, I was intrigued to find out what Tillian, an Israeli prog rock band from Tel Aviv, sounded like. Which of these varied influences will dominate? Well, I was surprised to find that they've successfully carved out their own sound for this, their debut album.

It's clearly very much lead vocalist Leah Marcu's show. She wrote every song on the album and she drives their directions, whether the instrumentation is loud guitar-based metal or quiet cello-led rock. It's so much her show that I was surprised that the album came out under the name of a band rather than just hers as a solo artist. It wouldn't surprise me if that changed. Well, I was surprised on a first listen but the band are unsung heroes here.

I should go back to that word "show" too. The closest comparison I found was to Emilie Autumn, an artist who doesn't write music so much as she puts on a show. Everything begins with her lyrics and her recognisable delivery, then translates into performance art. Without knowing what Tillian do on stage, I have a feeling that they match those three steps. Certainly, Marcu is very theatrical in her delivery.

I'm Too Close, the first single from this album, sees Marcu exercise her larynx all over an alternating light industrial and chamber music backdrop. It's a more progressive approach but it's exactly what Emilie Autumn does. Monster is heavier than anything I've heard from her, going way beyond her vaudevillian stylings to full on progressive metal at points but the lyrics go to all the same places. "If I had my innocence back"? Yeah, that sounds rather familiar.

Oddly, given how much Leah Marcu dominates this album, it's her colleagues behind her who give her a unique sound because, unlike Emilie Autumn, whose shows feature very little live music—just vocals and her violin—these prog rock musicians explore the musical map and surely do so live as well as on record. They go all Native American on Moonlight Dancer and veer between classical and industrial on Black Holes, the second single.

A first listen is going to have your ears following Leah Marcu all the way, because she wrote this and her wildly explorative vocals are magnetic, but a second listen will show that the band is just as involved, just as varied and just as interesting. If the flaw is that none of these songs are quite as catchy as anything Emilie Autumn conjured up, the boon is that they're a lot deeper and worthy of repeat visits.

On that front, Tillian are more akin to Kate Bush, another vocal acrobat, to whom Marcu pays particular homage on Touched, because her songs all appear to be entirely about her until you listen a few times and realise that the unknown band members behind her are doing incredible work. I particularly enjoyed the sheer variety of Yadin Moyal, who plays some flamenco guitar on Monster, neo-classical on Caught in Your Slough and a variety of styles on the other tracks.

I'll end by saying that this is a prog rock album that ventures into prog metal territory on occasion. Monster is primarily a prog metal song, as is Love or Heaven, with guest harsh vocals from Shachar Bieber, who handles the bass and harsh vocals for prog death band Obsidian Tide. None of the metal songs stay there though. Don't expect a metal album.

Then again, I wouldn't recommend expecting anything. This is highly original work and it's sure to surprise you.