Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: Italy

Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Friday, 21 February 2025

Lacuna Coil - Sleepless Empire (2025)

I ended my review of Lacuna Coil's 2019 album, Black Anima, by suggesting that I used to be a big fan back in their gothic metal days but their sound had shifted musically over the years to a point where it just wasn't for me any more. Well, I like this tenth album a lot more than that ninth, so maybe I was wrong about that. Most of its limitations are precisely the same as last time out but there are more instances where they break through them to do something more interesting.

As always, my favourite aspect of modern day Lacuna Coil is the clean vocal approach of Cristina Scabbia, which hearkens back to their gothic days more here than on Black Anima. She soars all over this album, perhaps most notably on Sleep Paralysis, the catch being that it's hard to focus on the music behind her. It's there but it's generally just a texture for her to soar over. It's like it unfolds in black and white but she soars in colour. It takes exactly the same role for Andrea Ferro, her male counterpart, but his harsh voice is always far less effective, weaker not through being bad but through being generic. It becomes just another texture for her to play against.

While Scabbia is enjoyable throughout, there are a few points that echo the intro to Venificium on the previous album by doing something much more diverse and interesting. The first arrives with Gravity, where Ferro joins Scabbia in a chant that sounds like it's in Latin and sounds rather like something that might have appeared on an early album. In Nomine Patris opens in a similar manner but with more of a pagan edge. That's only the beginning to why that song is easily my favourite here. Scabbia's melodic choices and a slower pace remind strongly of their early days, even if the instrumentation shifts inevitably away to their modern sound.

My least favourite aspect is the fact that the instrumentation is fundamentally bland across the majority of the songs, but here that serves well to highlight where that's not the case. There's a clear element of electronica on Oxygen and Scabbia's shout at the outset is manipulated. It has noticeable tempo shifts and an actual riff we can focus on. There's another of those, albeit in a more modern staccato style, on the closer, Never Dawn. Oxygen even drops away entirely at the three minute mark to leave Scabbia a capella. It's a good touch.

Gravity gets even more interesting. After that opening chant, there's even more electronica and there are strings in there too, albeit presumably generated by Marco Coti Zelati's synths rather than an actual string section. When the vocals kick in, they're sassy like nu metal taking on tribal music and it's both vocalists in duet. That tribal element is dotted over a few songs, whether in a vocal chant, most obviously on Never Dawn, or through more interesting synths. The same song sounds like it features a didgiridoo early on. I wasn't expecting that on a Lacuna Coil album.

There are two songs featuring guests, which often tends to mean standout songs, but not on this album. Hosting the Shadow features Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, another massively successful modern band that tend to leave me dry live or in the studio andthis song works that way. At least his nuanced harsh vocals demonstrate how limited Ferro is. It's almost mindboggling that he was a founder member of the band who carried all the vocal duties for two years before Scabbia was brought on board. Then again, back then they didn't sound like this. In the Mean Time adds Ash Costello from New Years Day, who I don't know and won't be checking out because of this.

Instead, I'll throw out another compliment I wasn't expecting to trawl out. As I mentioned earlier, it's always the vocals of Scabbia (and, to a lesser degree, Ferro) that drive Lacuna Coil's sound in their modern incarnation. Everything relies on Scabbia's melodies or the contrast that Ferro can bring to bear and the music is just a crunchy texture behind them rather than something that we can enjoy on its own merits. Because of all that, this becomes vocal music and there were plenty of tracks on Black Anima that felt like pop songs fed through a modern metal filter. That's really not the case here, which I'd see as a good thing. The only one that plays that way for me is I Wish You Were Dead, which could have been by any of the modern pop divas with a different filter.

So, as much as I've talked up limitations, I liked this a lot more than I did Black Anima. I gave that album a 6/10 and this easily deserves a 7/10, even from me, not remotely being part of the target audience for this band any more. In fact, I'd go further and say that I enjoyed it, even though I'm still acutely missing the gothic elements, solos and instrumental sections and guitars—this is so bass heavy that I only heard the guitars on a few tracks, Scarecrow best highlighting how Zelati's bass was doing the job of the guitar across most of the album. Now, let's see what my son thinks of it, because he's much more of a fan of Lacuna Coil's modern sound.

Friday, 17 January 2025

Blind Golem - Wunderkammer (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook

"Wunderkammer" is a German term that translates to what we steampunks know and often make ourselves as a "cabinet of curiosities", but it literally means "room of wonder". This second album from one of my favourite new hard rock bands, Italy's Blind Golem, is a little of both but more the latter, I think. That's because this sound is always big, that patented seventies mix of heavy organ and wah wah fuelled guitar, and wouldn't fit at the cabinet size. Also, cabinets of curiosity have an inherent variety to them, each piece being wildly different from the next, whereas this plays in an relatively consistent fashion.

As with their fantastic debut album, A Dream of Fantasy, which was my Album of the Month here at Apocalypse Later in January 2021, the influences are obvious and English. The primary one is a gimme, given that the band grew out of a Uriah Heep tribute band called Forever Heep, and most of the best parts of this album are the ones that sound the most like them. There's a cover here in and amongst the original material, but it's an emphatically deep cut, Green Eye, recorded for the 1972 Demons and Wizards album but not making the final cut. It's generally findable as a demo on expanded deluxe versions of that album, deep in the bonus tracks.

Some Kind of Poet opens up very Heep with a simple riff and that glorious seventies organ sound. It stays slow and simple during the lovely guitar solo in the middle of the song and there's a tasty drop into a mellow section during the second half that turns into a bass run and then a wonderful keyboard solo. Golem! opens up like the purest Heep too, both in the slow intro and then the fast bounce, and, of course, there aren't really any tracks anywhere on this album that don't remind somehow of them at some point. Because Green Eye is such an obscure deep cut, I initially took it as a Heep influenced song rather than a cover. It features some bounce, but not as much as Born Liars before it, and it stubbornly refuses to blister along even though it could easily take off.

Oddly the first influence I heard this time out wasn't Heep but Rainbow, because they're all over the transitions in the opening song, Gorgon. Those are Rainbow transitions from the Dio era, but How Tomorrow Feels brings a later Rainbow to mind, the riff more reminiscent of the Bonnet era. Last time out, I heard plenty of Deep Purple, albeit mostly in Hammond organ solos from Simone Bistaffa, but there's not as much of that here. He focuses more on that Ken Hensley organ sound from early Heep, which was always his primary go to influence. I find it surprising that the Purple touches are all in the keyboards but the Rainbow touches in the guitarwork, given, of course, that Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist in both bands.

If there's a third influence here, then the Rodney Matthews cover art can point the way. That's a notably Magnum-esque cover, ironically with just as much serpent as The Serpent Rings. Magnum came out of the Uriah Heep tradition in the seventies, dating back further than most people are aware, but they forged a new sound from it that was progressively less based in power chords and Hammond organ and more on the melodic hard rock vocals of Bob Catley. There are songs here I'd place at the point where Magnum started to diverge, like How Tomorrow Feels. Sometimes it's an older school Heep song. Sometimes it feels more like where Magnum went with that sound.

I adored A Dream of Fantasy in 2021 but found that it was a little off balance. The first half was an absolutely peach that I called "the best 1975 album I've ever heard that wasn't remotely written or recorded in 1975." The second side was pretty damn good too, but it couldn't match the first, a 7/10 instead of a 9/10. This follow up is far more consistent, more like an 8/10 throughout. The best songs are as great as the best last time out, especially when they nail that bouncy Heep groove in songs like Golem! and Born Liars, but also in many of the builds, keyboard solos and vocal hooks. Is the spaced out approach of Just a Feeling better than the epic nature of Endless Run or the heavy simplicity of Some Kind of Poet? Who knows? They're all great.

Crucially, though, the worst songs are the sort of songs you wouldn't expect to see next to a word like "worst". Every song here is worthwhile, right down to the substantial outro, Coda... Entering the Wunderkammer, which opens with unusual a capella harmonising vocalisations which keep on even after the instrumentation joins in, until it all wraps up with a cool jam. There's a hint toward that when It Happened in the Woods kicks off too, merely with words rather than vocalisations. It all works. Are these the least songs on the album? Perhaps. Are they at all unworthy? Absolutely not. They're well worth your time.

And that's why, even though I'm staying with an 8/10 for this album, I'd call it a better album than its predecessor. Sure, it's a little slower out of the gate, Gorgon unable to match Devil in a Dream, and its peaks aren't either as high or as clumped together, but the least song here is a step up on that 7/10 second half of the debut. The album as a whole is a gift that keeps on giving and it could be the easiest 8/10 I give out this year.

I've often found that tribute bands are often just as able as the original bands that they cover, the only component they lack being songwriting because their songs are inherently written for them. What I'm hoping is that more of these bands start to write their own songs too, because some of them are going to prove, like Blind Golem, that they're damn good at it.

Wednesday, 8 January 2025

What About Tomorrow - Rage of Mythology Volume I (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

I've started off each day this year with a metal release from 2025 because I'm struggling to find a new rock album. Finally this one crossed my path, even though I know almost nothing about What About Tomorrow except that they're Italian, the band comprises of four musicians and they play hard rock in an odd variety of styles. Maybe they're versatile and maybe they haven't figured out what they want to sound like yet, but they're capable throughout this album, whatever influences they're manifesting at a particular moment.

For instance, after an acoustic guitar intro, Werewolves opens up, with elegant Iron Maiden-style guitar. The song doesn't stay there though. That's a bouncy riff and the hooks are far more in the Saigon Kick realm, a name that kept leaping to mind as I listened through. Big Brother has vocal phrasing that reminds of Danzig and especially Metallica. I'd say Diamond Head instead, but it's Metallica's Black-era guitar crunch that shows up on Moment of Glory and Kangarat, along with more James Hetfield-esque vocals. Namazu, on the other hand, sounds more like Extreme, with the lead guitarist channelling Nuno Bettencourt.

I should emphasise that all these influences are there in moments, often many of them, but never really full songs. Even Namazu, arguably the most consistently influenced song, starts out with a experimental section that's as jagged as the rest of the song isn't. There are a bunch of intros on these songs and they do a wonderful job of keeping us on the hop. Big Brother starts a bit jagged too, albeit not as much as Namazu, but Moment of Glory starts out with an agreeably funky bass and Kangarat opens with some sort of ethnic stringed instrument that I can't place. It feels more Indian than Japanese but it has the strong plucked sound of a koto.

The name I kept coming back to was Saigon Kick, partly because this is so diverse but also because anything Jason Bieler puts his mind to has a particular melodic flow, whatever else it's doing. It's what I heard so often here, perhaps most consistently on Desert Me but also in hooks all over the album, not only Werewolves and Kangarat. A lot of what goes down on Moment of Glory, its funky bass joined by a funky guitar and then sassy drums, could easily have been on a Saigon Kick album. And hey, I'm never going to complain about anything I can justifiably cite Saigon Kick on.

Given how these touches are often blatant, I'll hazard a guess that the songs I haven't mentioned yet are just as obviously influenced, just by names I don't know or don't recognise. Phoenix is the most tantalising of them, because I'm hearing seventies singer/songwriters, musical theatre and, almost inevitably, Saigon Kick again. However, the song itself doesn't sound like any of those and I wonder what the influence was. You Make Me Feel Down has a sleazy glam metal kick to it, albeit filtered down to rock rather than metal. I just can't place any particular band.

And that's fine, because the aspect I like most about this album is that it goes all over the map in fascinating ways. Whoever's listening is likely to catch this band here and that band there but the bands are going to vary based on our own tastes and backgrounds. Maybe these guys have no idea who Saigon Kick are and got their sound through another band. Maybe you'll hear those moments and know exactly who that would be, even if I don't. Such is the guessing game of influences.

Given that I know next to nothing about What About Tomorrow, I can't praise anyone in particular for their contributions. They do have an Instagram page, so I can see that they're all young, but it seems to have been set up in the last couple of months and they haven't got round to naming the band members yet. There is a mention that they used to be called Infills Chain and googling gives me a lot more information on them. But hey, are these two bands comprised of exactly the same four musicians? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whoever the lead guitarist is clearly knows what he's doing, whether it's Davide from Infills Chain or not. There are a bunch of strong solos here, with the one on Namazu perhaps the best, but not far ahead of the one on Kangarat. The vocals are strong too, but they do have the most derivative moments, especially the James Hetfield ones. There are a couple of moments on Big Brother and Kangarat where I started to wonder if I was listening to a cover of a song I'd never heard before. Both bass and drums are less flash but don't particularly seek moments in the spotlight, but they find them anyway, most obviously during the intro of Moment of Glory.

Their first Instagram post has "We know what we want know, so what about tomorrow?" as a sort of mantra. Ironically, I'm not sure they do know what they want know, because the only thing they need, I think, is a defining sound. The talent's there. The songwriting's there. The performance is there. I'm just not convinced they're themselves yet. I look forward to finding out who they'll turn into. Bring on volume two!

Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Wind Rose - Trollslayer (2024)

I had a feeling this would be the case, so I very deliberately avoided reading my review of the prior Wind Rose album, 2022's Warfront, before listening to this new one a bunch of times and taking all my notes. Sure enough, though, most of what I jotted down echoes what I said last time, meaning that this review could mostly be reduced to the single word "Ditto".

Now it's not quite that simple. This isn't as good as its predecessor, but I still enjoyed myself on my first time through and I find that I'm still enjoying myself in much the same way half a dozen more listens in. It's notably shorter, mostly because its songs are shorter. Intro aside, Warfront had only two of nine tracks lasting fewer than five minutes. On Trollslayer, that's five of eight with a further two exceeding that mark by no more than five seconds. The exception is the closer and, while it's a departure from everything else, as indeed Tomorrow Has Come was last time out, the two songs are very different otherwise.

So they're not quite the same album for a few reasons but fundamentally they sound very similar. This band know their sound and they stick to it ruthlessly. The line-up remains unchanged, as it has been since 2018 when drummer Federico Gatti, added as a touring member a year earlier after the departure of Daniele Visconti, joined officially, and their approach is exactly the same. As before, the weakest aspect is that every song works in exactly the same way and sounds very similar. Try a song, any song (OK, maybe not No More Sorrow). If you like that song, you're going to like all the other songs too. If you don't like that first one, nothing else is going to change your mind. Extend that suggestion to cover both albums and it would hold true.

That style is consistent power metal with copious folk elements and a fundamental welcome in its sound. The lead vocals of Francesco Cavalieri are deep and resonant and they constantly invite us to join in. Behind him is Tommaso Corvaja who serves as a choir. Much of the time, while there's a single vocal line, it feels like there's more than one voice and that holds even when there really is only one voice. That adds to the sense that Wind Rose are the jukebox in Valhalla and everyone in the vast room sings along. Of course, chests are ample so microphones are replaced by huge mugs of ale.

It primarily works at two tempos, one of which tends to bulk up to the other. That means that it's a tough call to identify standout tracks because what makes a song our favourite is going to fall to a personal connection to a hook or a melody. Mine are probably The Great Feast Underground and To Be a Dwarf. I happen to like the melody in the former and I also dig the softer midsection where most of the instrumentation falls away for the vocals to continue over what sounds very much like a harpsichord. The hooks on the latter are irresistible and there's also a glorious keyboard riff to kick things off.

I could imagine a lot of people plumping for Rock and Stone, which is a real stomper of a song, an audience participation number in an album full of audience participation numbers. It's catchy and it absolutely knows it, which is why it's one of the few songs to stay at the slower tempo for most of the song. It simply doesn't need to speed up to feel powerful and so we don't move as fast, here in our chairs. Every song here makes us move, even if it's just to sway back and forth as if we're on a bench with a thousand of our brothers in arms singing and swaying in unison.

All that said, there's something to be said for all these tracks. Dance of the Axes maybe increases the tempo just a little bit more to add a sense of speed and urgency. Trollslayer features a lovely instrumental section during its intro. Legacy of the Forge plays up the choral approach even more, with whole sections ditching words and relying entirely on vocalisations. Then there's the closer, No More Sorrow, which changes almost everything.

It's a good song, but being the only one of nine to really attempt something different means that it feels a little out of place. Cavalieri does the same job, as do the various other musicians when it picks up power, but the mood is totally different. There's a second voice that seems pleading and sad, two words that don't apply to anything else on this album. That's especially apparent during the softer section that wraps up the song, a nod back to that harpsichord midsection in The Great Feast Underground. There are hints at harsh voices too, albeit mostly behind clean ones. And, of course, it runs on for seven and a half minutes when nothing else gets its claws past five.

All in all, this is a good old friend of an album, as Warfront was, but it's not quite as successful. On that one, I felt safe with an 8/10 and pondered a 9/10. This is a solid and utterly reliable 7/10.

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Fleshgod Apocalypse - Opera (2024)

This sixth album from Italian symphonic death metal mainstays Fleshgod Apocalypse is well titled. Sure, it opens with an aria, Ode to Art (De' Sepolcri) to showcase the soaring soprano of Veronica Bordacchini, who's worked with the band as a session and touring musician since 2011 but became a full time member in 2020, serving not only as their female vocalist but as their clean vocalist, as long term bassist and previous clean vocalist Paolo Rossi left in 2023. However, the best adjective to use to describe Fleshgod is "more" and that works just as well for opera. Each is grandiose and overdone and larger than life and that's kind of the point.

I've always appreciated how Fleshgod can throw so much at the wall and yet have it all stick. They seem chaotic in the extreme to anyone who's never heard them before, but a few listens allows us to realise what's going on. We almost need to train our ears to acknowledge what they're doing. On this album, either my ears are finally fully trained or it's a little bit more accessible than has been the case, especially on certain songs.

For instance, the first song proper is I Can Never Die, which is typically frantic stuff but it's easy to dissect after a couple of listens to see this as an unholy merger of alternative rock, symphonic pop and death metal, with plenty of orchestration. It moves from one of these to another consistently and eventually does it all at once. There's a late section when it whisks through hyperspeed death metal, hard rock guitar solo, soaring opera and symphonic pop in a highly memorable minute and then combining them all together. It's as accessible as I've heard Fleshgod (at least until Till Death Do Us Part arrives at the end of this album, but I'll get to that).

Other songs aren't quite as obvious. We can deconstruct Pendulum to a degree, but it's never as simple as we think we can make it. What's going on a mintue in, for instance? There are points in this song where the intensity drops completely away to leave clean female vocals over an alt rock instrumentation, but then the harsh male vocals offer an almost sarcastic commentary. And then there's piano, that gets truly wild towards the end of the song. Bloodclock opens up with harp and finds its way through intense technical death metal to musical theatre, delivered in a snarling rap, and then powers up with choirs and orchestration. These aren't as easy to work out.

What's telling is that I'm struggling to choose my favourite tracks, not because none of them stand out for special mention but because they all do. At War with My Soul opens heavy and choral like a Therion song, but speeds up the drums and builds male and female vocals and instrumentation in a common direction. That's unusual for Fleshgod but it works. Morphine Waltz is European power metal merged with avant-garde musical theatre, all driven by a possessed pianist and framed as a technical death metal song. The whispered "trust me" on Matricide 8.21 points the way to the alt rock approach that reaches the staccato riffing and the almost rapped vocals. Every song needs a special mention becaues it does something different.

And that holds even more true for Till Death Us Do Part, on the other side of Per Aspera ad Astra. It starts out slow and heavy, not as slow as doom metal but insanely slow for Fleshgod. Drummer Eugene Ryabchenko, who we can believe has eight limbs to maintain these tempos, must feel like he's playing this song in crazy slow motion. It's slow like a slow Black-era Metallica song, but then it drops into symphonic pop with vocal melodies more like Evanescence. They rinse and repeat a few times before escalating in emphasis but never truly in speed, even when it gets a little faster in the second half. I like it a lot but it's surely the least Fleshgod song I've heard Fleshgod do.

Usually it's easy to explain what a band sounds like by comparing them to others. On albums past, we could often compare Fleshgod to Septicflesh because both combine overtly classical music with extreme metal so tightly that they become one thing. However, we can't do that any more and I'd find it even harder than usual here. Sure, there's opera and death metal. Those are givens. What remains includes Emilie Autumn, Avatar, Evanescence, Disturbed, Carl Orff, Therion, Meshuggah... it's a list of names you probably didn't expect to see together, let alone mentioned in a review of what is still technical symphonic death metal, with drums that often reach black metal speeds.

I liked Fleshgod's previous album, 2019's Veleno, but I didn't like it as much as a lot of critics, who rank it among the best symphonic metal albums of all time. This one I like more. It's accessible for Fleshgod, but it's still wildly extreme when compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet. Nobody's going to dismiss this by suggesting that they've sold out, but it's easier to deconstruct than usual and it features a host of more recognisably modern aspects in its sound. And I'm liking it just as much on a seventh time through as I did on a first.

Monday, 2 September 2024

Black Wings - Whispers of Time (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Black Wings are showing on Metal Archives as having split up, after an active spell between 2005 and 2011 resulted in one album, 2008's Sacred Shiver. But hey, here's a 2024 album, of what seems to be entirely new music, performed by two of the same musicians and three new ones. Facebook seems to suggest that it was recorded in 2010 before the band split up and was rescued from the vaults by one of the studios in which it was recorded, Sonika, in the band's home town of Ferrara. Having not heard Black Wings before, I'm very happy to hear them now, though I'm sad they are no longer together.

It seems appropriate to start some catch up at Apocalypse Later after a tough few months dealing with real life issues. They're fourteen years late with this album. I've only been away since June.

The album came to me as melodic heavy metal, which is fair, I guess, but they mostly play a sort of European power metal that veers into melodic rock, hard rock and traditional heavy metal. It also gets epic, with a cinematic intro in Opening the Gates that shifts from demonic spoken word to an enticing, almost bouncy, Danny Elfman-esque theme, and a less successful closer that runs far too long. That's Back to Consciousness and it combines narration, elegant piano and orchestration.

While Strangers to This World (Like You) is emphatically a melodic rock song, driven not by guitars but the keyboards of Alessandro Duò, most of this does give Claudio Pietronik the traditional lead guitar role for heavy metal alongside the powerful vocals of Diego Albini, and not one of the seven other tracks feels comfortable lumped into melodic rock. The opener, Cold is the Wind, is a suitably lively track with good strong vocals and lively riffs, especially after a brief drop to piano midway, those riffs wrapped in effective orchestration. This is a statement of intent and, while that intent is briefly interrupted by Strangers to This World, it holds true for much of the album.

Cold is the Wind is definitely one of my highlights, but there are others. Calling to a Fool ups the power again after Strangers to This World and Albini is especially eager to deliver, but it elevates through a unexpectedly loose and jazzy midsection that kicks the song back into gear through an excellent pair of solos, one on guitar from Pietronik and another on keyboards from Duò. Talking of blistering, the most blistering heavy metal here is the guitarwork during the second half of The Sense of Emotions. It's a powerful song anyway but that guitar is gorgeous. I should also call out The Story Ain't Over, because it finds a particularly strong groove in the second half, both before and after Albini hands over to the instrumentation.

While those are my highlights, the remaining songs don't really let the side down. Another Sun is a capable song with a lot of Iron Maiden to it and even more of the European power metal bands who came into being because of them. It would be a good song on any other album, but I can't say it's as good as the songs around it. Whispers of Time is more generic for a European power metal song, even though it's the title track. It's decent, but it doesn't stand out the way those highlights do. And Waiting in Heaven slows things down considerably, opening like a ballad but powering up in its later stages. It's the least effective of them all for me, if still enjoyable.

The worst song for me is easily the closer, which isn't really a song at all, just a five minute outro that dips back into cinematic territory, as if it's wrapping up a concept album. Maybe it is, but I'd not caught any link between songs otherwise. Its only vocals are narrative and it never manages to find a focus instrumentally for me. Sure, it sets a mood but it's not the mood I wanted from an outro to a power metal album. Even on a third or fourth time through, I never wanted to skip any of these songs, even the partial ballad, but the outro lost me first time around and got more and more annoying with each further listen.

Without an active band behind it, I guess this only has a couple of possibilities to live up to. One is to enhance the reputation of a band who are no longer together, and I'd suggest it succeeds there. I haven't heard Sacred Shiver, so I can't say if this is better or worse or even remotely similar, but it seems like a valid rescue from the archives. The other is to introduce people like me to a band who might, even individually, benefit from fresh attention. Is this good enough to prompt a reunion? It probably isn't, but it's a quality addition to the resumes of everyone involved, whatever they may be doing nowadays.

Tuesday, 16 January 2024

Orchestre Celesti - Cornwall! (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Jan 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives

I have no idea why this album is called Cornwall!, so have to assume from the track titles that it's a concept album, even though it's entirely instrumental. Orchestre Celesti is only one man but he's an orchestra here, either playing all sorts of different instruments or approximating them with a bank of synthesisers. He's Federico Fantacone and he's been releasing music under the banner of Orchestre Celesti since 2007. The name refers to the ancient Chinese art of training doves to fly in specific patterns with flutes attached to their legs, thus creating music together. This is the ninth album to carry that name, plus another collaborative effort with Lisa la Rue, and a bunch in a duo with Enzo Vitagliano as the Round Robins.

The goal of the project appears to have been to combine two very different styles of prog rock: the well known British kind that was so popular in the seventies and the Italian kind that was less well known but massively influential. I don't know if that's changed over the years, but I didn't catch a lot of British prog here. Where there's a British sound, as there clearly is on The Song of Western Men, given that it starts out with bagpipes and progresses into harp, it feels more like soundtrack material than anything Yes, Genesis or King Crimson were doing back in the day. Maybe there's a lot more from the Canterbury scene, but I'm no expert there. It's rather like a travel documentary that takes us round the beautiful sights of the British Isles.

What's more, other pieces of music betray different influences. While most of the soundtrack type material leans towards the orchestral style, as the project's name suggests, with the comparisons being to Hollywood names like James Horner or Hans Zimmer, The Ballad of Elisabeth Raby starts out just like something Vangelis might have conjured up. Sure, that takes us back to Europe but to Greece rather than the UK or Italy, and From Pickaxes to Weapons takes us out again, to Japan, in part because of the early strings, which heavily remind of Japanese folk music, but also a rippling brook of a piano, thoroughly rooted in nature.

While I don't hear a lot of British influence, at least this time out, I do hear a lot of Italian prog, a genre I'm still learning about. The opening track, Cornubia, for example, is a perky and jazzy piano piece until it drops into something clearly prog and very much soundtrack influenced, because it's all about mood. Even when the drums pick up a tempo, there are all sorts of instruments showing up in the background, as if to represent different characters. There are similar hints at a voice but it always remains instrumental, just an odd vocalisation here and there. It might occasionally hint at a more German style, but mostly stays Italian.

Even though that track and much of the album continues to seem like the score to a movie that we haven't seen, it's never far away from prog. There are neat changes and technical sections and all sorts of experimental parts in Cornubia and a whole bunch more in From Pickaxes to Weapons, the longest piece here at almost fifteen minutes. That gives it a huge amount of time to build and it's happy to take advantage. Some sections are very quiet, almost experimentally so, but others are built around quirky rhythms on what I presume is some sort of drum machine.

Ancient Dukes and Mythological Heroes may be the most recognisably prog song here, especially once it reaches the two minute mark and launches into gear. What came before and much of what follows is built off solo piano and veers back to mood soundtrack, an approach that's impossible to ignore. The question really boils down to how successful this is as a soundtrack. Do we ache to see the movie, or movies, that this material imagines that it underpins, meaning that it's incomplete without the visuals, or do we enjoy it on its own merit, as many do with soundtracks that work as a musical achievement as much as accompaniment?

I wish I could come up with an answer to that. I certainly enjoyed this on its own merits, sometimes seeing footage from the nonexistent film a piece conjured up in my mind, most obviously The Song of Western Men, but often not. Mostly, I felt that it sounded like a soundtrack but didn't care what it might accompany; it was fine all on its own. And then there were sections, like that early part in Ancient Dukes and Mythological Heroes and the saxophone section midway through Ritual Dance of Mermaids and Seals, that didn't even feel like soundtrack material at all, just prog rock.

I guess that means that I never ached for the movie, so I'd lean much more towards success here. I certainly enjoyed the music, what it does and how I could fall into it. I also liked that it continued to feel fresh, whether on a first listen or a fifth and across quite a few days. Given that it's a highly generous album, running almost eight minutes over an hour, that's quite the accomplishment. I'd probably benefit from hearing more from Fantacone as Orchestra Celesti, but this was impressive as an introduction to his work.

Friday, 15 December 2023

The Cosmic Gospel - Cosmic Songs for Reptiles in Love (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Dec 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

I could swear blind that I received this album as a submission for review but I can't find any details of that anywhere: no download, no e-mail, no message, no nothing. So maybe I was dreaming, but I took a listen anyway on Bandcamp and found it an interesting album, especially immediately after the weird but wonderful new Gama Bomb album, which is different in almost every way. This is pop music that's far too interesting to be just pop music, with the Beatles's psychedelic years the first point of reference. It's also often psychedelic rock, occasionally progressive rock and sometimes a little garage rock too, though this latter is rarely forceful.

The Cosmic Gospel is primarily one man in Macerata, Italy who writes, records and mixes, as well as singing and playing most of the instruments on this debut album. He's Gabriel Medina and he even painted the cover art, I believe. The only other musician involved is Louie Cericola who contributed some keyboard work on Core Memory Unlocked from his Korg Sigma. The Bandcamp page suggests that these songs were either inspired or grew out of songs by other bands that Medina must have been involved with that were either never finished or not released, so its patchwork nature makes sense.

If there's a common thread, it's that most of these songs create a particular mood that is utterly subverted by their lyrics. Usually, that means perky moods and dark lyrics, but occasionally that's reversed. I often let albums wash over me without actively seeking out their lyric sheets, but this only works that way if we refuse to let odd words and phrases grab our attention because they're not remotely part of the mood we're in. I'd suggest that following the lyrics isn't the best way for a listener to go, because Medina delivers lyrics in an unstructured manner, almost conversationally, finding whatever melody works. Letting it wash over us is better, treating it as an instrument, but it's going to get jarring when you realise what he's singing.

Exhibit A, your honour, is the opening track, It's Forever Midnight. It's a perky opener, with garage rock guitar, synth handclaps and Medina's soft psychedelic voice. It's laid back but catchy, masking dark lyrics about our narrator breaking into his neighbour's house to save his baby from perverted Mr. Goose. It's a happy psychedelic pop song with some subdued garage rock emphasis until we're in on the story, at which point it only gets darker the more we think about it. Is this an actual baby or a term of endearment for a girlfriend? Does that make it better or worse? What precisely does perverted mean here? Maybe we don't want to know.

Exhibit B would be the song after it, The Richest Guy on the Planet is My Best Friend. It opens with sugar sweet synths taking the place of the guitars, which only show up on slightly more emphatic sections. It's less perky but it's still happy until the lyrics start to make us wonder. This one's open to more interpretation but it could easily be read as a cult suicide. Whatever it means, it doesn't mean anything sugar sweet unless there's something seriously wrong with our brain.

Exhibit C works the same way but the other way around. Core Memory Unlocked opens soft like a folky psychedelic pop song from the late sixties, flutes behind a strummed acoustic guitar. It's less Beatles here and more Vashti Bunyan, maybe as covered by Tyrannosaurus Rex. There's a sadness here that wasn't on the opening couple of songs, but its lyrics reflect simple melancholic longing rather than anything actively dark. So, as the music darkens, the lyrics lighten. That's not a usual approach, but I found it fascinating.

What else I found fascinating is how this often feels relatively simple, built on simple melodies in that Beatles-esque way. Their most powerful songs were often the most simple and Medina knows that. However, there are a number of places on this album where he dips into something far more complex. There's some of this on Hot Car Song, which is more emphatic from the outset, its John Kongos beat shifting into almost a Cramps vibe at points, but this mostly kicks in at the end of the blobfish song, Psychrolutes Marcidus Man, when it shifts into what sounds like a kazoo orchestra.

The Demon Whispers opens like avant-garde classical, but its ominous nature is overwhelmed by a folky acoustic guitar, the unusual returning halfway with the advent of a theremin-like melody. It gives way to Wrath and Ghosts, which starts out unusual and only gets more so as it builds. This is an almost entirely electronic track onto which voices are added, though they may be manipulated samples. It becomes an avant-garde choral piece for a while, like Henry Cow taking György Ligeti and shifting his polyphony into something prog.

It's been too long since I've been this surprised by an album in any way other than quality. Sure, it happens that I expect a lot from a band who fail to deliver or not much from one that utterly nails it this time out. Here, I had no expectations of quality because it's a debut album. What I expected was something psychedelic, with influences beyond the Beatles listed on Bandcamp being Damon Albarn, Beck and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I wasn't expecting this experimentation and the thoroughly unusual contrast between music and lyrics. So, thank you if anyone actually did send a copy of this over to me. If not, I must have dreamed my way into an interesting find.

Monday, 11 December 2023

Tol Morwen - Rise of the Fury (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 18 Nov 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's another submission but one that surprised me. Tol Morwen are a five piece from Italy with no full length releases, even though they formed a decade ago in 2014. This is their second EP and everything that I see suggests that they play melodic death metal. So I had expectations and track one, Berserkgang, met them pretty well. It's a good song and it's played well too, with a technical edge. The production is strong and each instrument, including the voice, is strong too but nothing really departs from what the genre does. It's merely melodic death metal done very well. No surprises thus far.

Unchained continues in the same vein but then escalates into something more. If Berserkgang had anything else except melodic death, it was the occasional hint at an older form of heavy metal and that's here too. Phil's drums remain fast throughout but the rest of the song more and more into older forms. I heard a lot of doom/death in the guitar lines, the solos are old school heavy metal in the Randy Rhoads vein and there's a slow doomy wrap up. Suddenly there's a lot more here than a simple tag of melodic death metal suggests.

So Unchained surprised me, but so did how the album continued from there. Ragnar wraps up with more melodic death but there's a lot of old school heavy metal in there too, especially during the slower midsection. Before that, there's a heck of a lot to discover and I'd be fascinated to see how Tol Morwen can spin that versatility over a full length album. And yes, I'd be interested to see how it gets labelled, because I don't buy into the band continuing to be seen as just one genre.

I keep coming back to Unchained, but Fate of Gods is better still. It starts slow and atmospheric in the pouring rain, a prowling bass from Thorval introducing Metallica-esque power chords. This is a neat and elegant way to introduce a song, even if it's not one of the epics of the album at only five and a half minutes. It feels like prog metal, even before whispering vocals and a complex dynamic play lead into a roaring escalation. There's a lot here: interesting changes, plenty of dynamics and vocals from Dökk that grow and develop and play with mood. The solos are wonderful and so is the Iron Maiden riffage, presumably courtesy of rhythm guitarist Erik.

If you're expecting something different again from Terror of Rome by this point, then you won't be disappointed. There's a Viking metal sound on this one, though it doesn't skimp on the fast paced melodic death. There's more of that elegant guitarwork, with a further excellent solo from Bjorn and a tasty outro from guitar and bass. It almost makes it a little surprising that Ragnar wraps up in a purer vein, but it works as a bookend to Berserkgang and prompts us to just start the EP over again.

I'm calling this an EP because that's what it seems to be marketed as and there are only five tracks on offer. However, none of these songs is short, Terror of Rome the shortest at not much shy of five minutes, so there's more music to enjoy here than there has been on some full length albums that I've reviewed lately, even without a separate intro track. And hey, it's notably longer than Reign in Blood, so it's a substantial EP. I definitely want a full length, but I'm very happy with this one in the meantime. Thanks, folks!

Friday, 28 July 2023

Twilight Road - Trapped (2023)

You probably won't know the name of Twilight Road because this is their debut album, if indeed it isn't a one off project, but you may know the names involved, the primary pair being Dario Mollo, an Italian guitarist, and Carl Sentance, a British vocalist. They have worked together before, on an album by Dario Mollo's Crossbones from 2016 called Rock the Cradle, which was apparently strong enough to generate fans wanting another one, but I haven't heard that.

Mollo is best known for his pairings with famous vocalists: four albums in collaboration with Tony Martin, three more in Voodoo Hill with Glenn Hughes and another in EZoo with Graham Bonnet. I heard him last on the fourth of the Tony Martin albums, Thorns, from last year. Sentance first found fame in Persian Risk, Phil Campbell's old band, but also fronted Krokus for a few years, knocking out an album with them, and has been the lead vocalist in Nazareth since 2015, after Dan McCafferty chose to retire. My last experience of his work was Nazareth's Surviving the Law album, also from last year.

If those sound like diverse bands, you'll have figured out in advance how versatile this album is. In fact, it's almost deliberately set up like a trawl through a lot of the history of rock music. Trapped, for instance, is straightforward guitar-driven hard rock with soft keyboards behind it to open up a door to airplay. Dirty Rock 'n' Roll is harder and grungier and has a Guns n' Roses feel to it in both vocal delivery and structure, but a whole bunch of other names leap out at points, some Steve Vai here, some Def Leppard there, some Alice Cooper here, some Warrant there. Dark Angel travels a little further back in time and delivers a delicious back and forth between guitar and organ.

This sort of changing goals between tracks is so overt that I could imagine the song choice chosen by a randomising machine like they use on talk shows or Whose Line is It Anyway. The next one will be in the style of... *spin wheel*... seventies blues rock. Ah yes, Madonna. Then... *spins wheel* an outtake from Rainbow's Down to Earth album. OK, so Turn It Up. That's not quite the core riff from Since You Been Gone but it's close enough to bring it immediately to mind. Next up? *spins wheel* Bruce Dickinson but less sonically dense than Iron Maiden? I like that idea. So here's Empty Mirror and Warning. Take your pick.

Actually that vocal approach shows up before then, because there are parts of Dark Angel where Sentance channels some Dickinson, but that reaches its peak on Empty Mirror, where he hurls out lines like boomerangs to float in the air and maybe come back to him from the audience. It's not a difficult approach for him, more akin to his Persian Risk days, I'd think, than anything he's doing in Nazareth now, but he's a versatile singer. He's one of the key reasons that Perfect Strangers has a pretty high success rate. And yes, I'm talking about the Deep Purple classic.

This is one of those iconic songs that should be covered with extreme caution, because it's just not likely to work. Either you do it so well that it sounds like the original, in which case why bother, or you don't and it sounds like a poor knock-off, hardly the effect you're going for. I had my doubts in advance but this is a rare exception to those two scenarios, because Sentance sings it firmly in the style of Ian Gillan but not exactly how Gillan sang it, so it feels less like a cheap knock-off and more like a live version by Purple that we haven't heard before.

That holds true for how they treat the song too. It's close for a few minutes, enough so that we're singing along and not only with the words, because after all we know the guitar and organ riffs in this one the way we know a lot of lyrics. However, then it veers off into another direction entirely, into an instrumental workout that echoes what Purple might have done in a live environment, all the way down to a brief Rainbow homage at the end, but doesn't copy what they actually did. I'll say it plainly: I wasn't expecting this to work but it did and that may be the biggest success here.

In short, there's a lot here and while not much of it is particularly original, it's all done well, from the blues rock of Madonna to the prog metal elegance of Mafia, Sentance shifting his voice from a Bruce Dickinson sustain a little closer to a Geoff Tate one. Most of it sits in between in these two, exploring the range of what hard rock has done over a few decades and filtering it into a bunch of new songs. Mollo's excellent, my favourite moment from him being the core riff in God is Red, but Sentance makes the album for me.

Tuesday, 20 June 2023

Black Rainbows - Superskull (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Stoner/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Jun 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter

If I'm counting properly, this is the eighth studio album by Italian stoner rock band Black Rainbows, who formed in Rome in 2005, but it's the first time I've heard them. I like what I hear, because they play a very bouncy stoner rock that's very engaging. The two openers bounce like Clutch, surely an important influence, but they pale in front of the bounciness of the next track, Children of Fire and Sacrifices, which sounds older. I'm not sure there's a stoner rock band in existence that doesn't feel like Black Sabbath at some point and that's definitely here but they mix it with Clutch and, as we'll soon find, Hawkwind.

There's fuzz here on Edoardo Mancini's bass but it's relatively clean, so shifting into hard rock, and that's eventually where we find the final track, Fire in the Sky, which kicks off with a riff that could have been lifted from a Paul Di'Anno era Iron Maiden track but quickly shifts into full on Hawkwind territory, with that patented driving bass and clean vocals from Gabriele Fiori that are delivered in unaccented English. This track is so unmistakably Hawkwind that it's clearly an overt homage.

And it isn't the first one, though the others forgo the drive for the space rock acid trip. The Pilgrim Son and King Snake both shift notably into space rock, keyboard generated atmospheres building a swirling maelstrom around Mancini's bass. The former evolves back into the regular sound during the second half, albeit not quite so bouncy as the early tracks and with the keyboard swirls there in the background behind everything else, until it drops back into peaceful space rock noodling to go home. The latter is more subdued, a mellow trip throughout. Desert Sun kicks in emphatically as a deliberate contrast.

The question is which of these approaches work best and I'm not sure I have an answer. They do the bouncy stoner rock thing so well that I'm tempted to go for those songs. I'd surely call out Children of Fire and Sacrifice as my favourite track, but Lone Wolf won't leave me alone. It's extra playful so it's not only the bounce that sells it. I adore the riff on this one and I love how it evolves during the instrumental second half even more. I'd also highlight All the Chaos in Mine, not because it does anything fancy but because it has no interest in doing anything fancy and stands out anyway. It features such a simple riff, in contrast to Lone Wolf, but it's exquisitely effective, turning the song into some sort of unstoppable behemoth.

I like the space rock songs too, but not as much. The Pilgrim Sun runs eight and a half minutes and I don't think it has enough to warrant that sort of cosmic journey. King Snake feels more effective at only five minutes, a laid back Hawkwind vibe with everything drenched in acid echo. It certainly has a more effective approach to taking me somewhere, which space rock always ought to do. If it's not taking me way outside on a colourful journey through the cosmos, it should take me way inside and feel hypnotically insightful. The Pilgrim Sun aims for the former while King Snake does the latter.

And, just when I'm forgetting it's there, every time through I get captured all over again by Fire in the Sky. Sure, it's the most derivative song here but it simply pulsates with energy and ought to be an absolute blast live. In its way, it's a combination of the two approaches above. It has the bounce of the early highlights, like Apocalypse March and Children of Fire and Sacrifices, but it also has an obvious keyboard presence, those cosmic swirls surrounding everything like a dry ice machine that won't switch off. The echoes are fantastic too, especially when applied to the riffs so that they rise above us and float in the ether.

Whichever style works best, the album's pretty solid and there are seven earlier studio albums to track down, starting with 2007's Twilight in the Desert and proceeding irregularly from there. The covers are all glorious too, so I could totally see picking up vinyl copies and sliding them into clear covers on the wall. This may feature their best cover yet, courtesy of a Brazilian artist called Pedro Correa, who's done posters for Phish, Eddie Vedder and Coheed and Cambria. His portfolio is very cool indeed. It's the icing on top of this tasty psychedelic cake.

Wednesday, 26 April 2023

One Horse Band - Useless Propaganda (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

I was planning to review the third album from John Diva and the Rockets of Love today, but I found myself digging too far into why it underwhelmed me to quickly acknowledge that, if I wrote a review, it would be the sort of negative review I try to avoid. Instead, I checked out a few others and came up short until this one, from a band from Milan who play an interesting form of garage rock. I came close to ditching this one too, because the opener, Santa Claus, doesn't start out like that at all, its approach more like an attempt to merge Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan into a cool unique voice. And that's fine, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

However, I didn't turn it off because I was interested to see where the album went, and it went in a very different direction a couple of minutes in and especially once Killing Floor showed up. This is where the garage rock kicks in, with a drummer who sounds like he only has three drums in his kit but he's happy to beat the crap out of each of them for us. The vocals are still deliberately whiskey soaked but far more emphatic and driving melodies rather than singer/songwriter introspections. The guitar rocks and the kazoo... well, let's just say that it sounds very much like someone's playing a kazoo here and I sure ain't judging because it sounds great, like a bunch of interesting musicians jamming in their garage.

As the album goes, it sounds like the band shift further backwards in time. Supersonic ditches the kazoo but keeps everything else and feels primal, like something the Sonics might have recorded a lot more decades ago now than is comfortable to think about. It's a Gimmick emphasises that they like looking back, because it sounds like a fifties pop song rocked up in loud but simplistic fashion, a sort of Dion & The Belmonts type of song. It feels unusual because whoever the lead vocalist is in One Horse Band sings the verses but leaves the chorus to a backing singer. Also it heavies up when we don't expect, which is another tasty touch.

As you might expect for garage rock, there's a punk sound here too and that's clear once we get to Useless Propaganda and Hello Charlie. That rough voice suggests traditional punk influences but a post-punk mindset in the melodies. I hear the Clash here, both original first album sound and later adventures beyond it. Of course, this isn't the only layer, because Useless Propaganda ends with a sort of Supremes refrain and Hello Charlie adds a trumpet to give it a more avant-garde edge. It's a heady mixture and it highlights how much energy there must be in One Horse Band's garage on rehearsal nights.

Now, the energy does drop at points for effect, because One Horse Band aren't a one trick pony. In Ice Cream, the power is stripped away in a flash to leave the singer returning to the Waits whisper on the opener, set against a loud slow blues backdrop, and I Sing opens up with a delicate folk tune that sounds like it's being played in a hip coffee house, before it launches into full on garage punk, just to shock the hipsters sipping their expensive artisan coffees. A Little More is delicate too, but it stays that way, even as it builds. It showcases a different side of the band but it's effective. What I find strange here is that I wasn't sold on the quiet voice on Santa Claus but I love it on Ice Cream and A Little More.

What this all adds up to is that, if I was wandering past the One Horse Band garage during one of their rehearsals, I'd absolutely stop and listen. I wouldn't think they were anything special initially, just good at what they do, but, as time would pass and song would move to song, my estimation of their worth would continue to increase. There's a lot more on this album than the initial approach suggests and it's all tasty stuff.

And, all that said, I've probably misled you, because the key word in One Horse Band isn't Band but One. That's because there's only one musician here, ignoring the trumpet Tom Moffet contributes to Hello Charlie, and he's called One Horse Band because he wears a fake horse head everywhere public, in the same way that Buckethead wears a fried chicken bucket. Oh, and yes, he performs as a one man band in the sense that he plays multiple instruments at the same time on stage. That's why the drum sound is so simple. And this is his third album.

So, what's his name and what's he's hiding? I haven't the faintest idea, but he sounds great. Which famous musicians live in Milan but are never seen at One Horse Band shows? Inquiring minds want to know.

Thursday, 26 January 2023

Ardours - Anatomy of a Moment (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 12 January 2023

Messa - Close (2022)

Country: Italy
Style: Doom Metal/Progressive Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 11 Mar 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Hank Shteamer summed up 2022 with a Best Metal Albums list at Spin and he cheated a little with two albums tying for the number one spot. However, Faetooth didn't make it onto anybody else's list, as far as I can tell, while Messa did, such as those at Brooklyn Vegan and Treble Zine. I'm new to Messa, but they're an Italian band usually defined as doom metal but with aspects of ambient and drone. There's definitely doom here, but it varies in ways that are unusual, and it often spins off into other directions entirely, sometimes at the drop of a hat.

Case in point: the opener, Suspended. It opens with a slow but rich wavering organ, like something Susannah and the Magical Orchestra might use to accompany a minimalist vocal cover. It powers up twice, with Sara demonstrating a serious versatility in her vocals over a backdrop that shifts in its intensity to match her. She can soar and she can croon. She can force her voice on us unwilling and she can soothe us with a teasing invite. It's good stuff, a lot looser than I expect from doom, but it impresses. And then suddenly, five and a half minutes in, this gets so loose that it's jazz.

No wonder Spin suggest that the album is reminiscent of Stevie Nicks, Danzig and Steeleye Span, a trio you wouldn't generally expect to see mentioned in the same sentence. There's an element not covered there too, which is world music. Many of these songs, starting with Orphalese, kick off in a world music vein, with ethnic instrumentation—Spin call out a use of oud and duduk, but that only scratches the surface—that's used in ethnic ways, not in translation to western rock music. It often seems eastern, but it's never quite that predictable.

And there lies much of the joy of this album. Like Mr. Bungle but in a less schizophrenic way, this is never predictable. Whatever a particular song is doing, we can't rest assured that it's going to be doing that three minutes later and we have no expectation that the next song will follow suit. The sheer versatility in play makes me hesitate to even slap doom metal onto this as a label. Sure, it's common to many of these songs and it may mark the roots of the band, but it's misleading, just as any genre would be. Progressive rock works just as well. The common factor here is music, pure and simple.

It's jawdropping to realise that a piece of music like Orphalese, heavy on world music components and without much in the way of drumming, especially during the first half, is sandwiched between a pair of heavier songs in Dark Horse and Rubedo. Dark Horse is a masterful exploration of tempo changes, shifting up and down without ever leaving doom, which is not remotely as simple as that might sound. Simply speed up doom and it's not doom any more. The mood has to be maintained and transformed through that tempo shift and thats why you don't hear much fast doom.

Rubedo may be the highlight of the album, though it's not clear cut with Dark Horse here and the pair of long songs halfway through, Pilgrim and 0=2. It definitely plays in doom too, but as a chance to contrast what almost feels like a deconstruction of a singer/songwriter folk piece, with heavier sounds that are clearly doom. Then there's a serious ramp up in speed halfway that takes us firmly away from doom and back in again. A thirsty guitar sears over a flurry of furious beats and it's all very unexpected and very impressive indeed.

I found myself separating the sound into vocals and instrumentation. There's such a strong focus on dynamic play that the electric guitars blend with bass and drums to form one half of the sound. Alberto does provide some great solos but, even there he's over on one side of a visualised stage with the other rock instruments, Marco on bass and Rocco on drums. Sara is on the other, almost in a standoff, teasing collaboration one moment and then dominating the next with an incredible breath control. With her are the acoustic and ethnic instruments, because they do much the same thing in their individual ways.

This album is like a tug of war between the two sides, an electric rock band rooted in doom but not averse to be versatile and an acoustic world music outfit who like tradition but aren't that averse to fusion. These songs pull one way and the other, a consensus sometimes being found but usually a more complex interplay. Quite where the punk blitzkrieg Leffotrack fits, I have no idea; it's almost a third competitor entering a two side dynamic and it's out of place. However, the jazz competitor joins the battle with abandon, especially late on 0=2 when a manic saxophone joins the wild guitar and steadily galloping beat.

In short, there's a lot to take in here and it's impossible to lump into one bucket but, if you have a taste for multiple genres and you don't restrict yourself simply to the rock spectrum, then this is a potential treat for you. If there's an obvious flaw, it's the album is long, running five minutes past the hour mark, and some of these songs are most notable for being between others, not remotely filler but not able to justify their presence quite so easily as others. That's nothing major though. I haven't yet skipped a song, however many times I listen through. This is majestic stuff.

Wednesday, 4 January 2023

Elephant Groove - Annihilation (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's a second debut album showing up early in 2023 that's well worth your attention. Elephant Groove are a power trio from Milan who play a versatile form of stoner rock, alternating between Black Sabbath at their most Planet Caravan mellow and a variety of alternative rock styles. Their most natural musical home seems to be the former, because they start out that way on Sargassum and keep coming back to it, not only to wrap that opener up with a second bookend but all through One More Ride and for much of Walls. Bear in mind that there are only five songs here.

It's a delicious sound too, guitarist Davide D'Alfonso conjuring rivers of notes out of the air like he's manipulating liquid glass. It sounds even better when drums and bass join him in a minimalist way, because it grounds us while he's still floating around in the sky above us. Andrea Lucchese is their drummer and the bassist is Jody Purita. Frankly, I could let that default Elephant Groove sound flow through me for days, especially through a pair of headphones in the dark, but I'm fascinated by where else they go.

Sargassum grows into a couple of places. Early on, it's reminiscent of Tool, not only because of the Maynard James Keenan style vocals, also by D'Alfonso, but because of the unusual rhythms from Lucchese, which are emphasised by Purita's bass mirroring the drums so closely. Later it turns into an epic finalé of wailing guitar right out of the late sixties San Francisco heavy psychedelia scene. It's a different style from the go to sound for this band, but Davide once again seems to be sculpting music rather than playing it.

Kingdom takes a very different approach. The clean rhythmic opening reminds of Joy Division and the bass doesn't dissuade us of that feeling, even if it's a little funkier than Peter Hook would play for them. This one's instrumental for half its running time, before it turns into an alternative vibe that somehow sounds both American and Australian. This one's definitely a child of the nineties, if a little less reminiscent of the obvious bands and more the genre flouting influences that carved out the road that they followed into an unexpected mainstream.

Annihilation wraps up the album with another take. There's some funk going on in this one too but it's kept in the background, behind raw and heavy guitarwork that gets sludgy at points, with firm nods towards the Swans and the Melvins. There's another mellow section in the middle though. It doesn't seem to matter where Elephant Groove go musically; they'll always find their way back to that mellow vibe, as if they're floating through space peacefully and suddenly receive music from out of the blue that they jam with until the signal goes away and they're back to being mellow.

This approach leads me to think that the album is a little short at under thirty-five minutes. It's an enjoyable ride, even if you fuel up the bus and take the trip again and again, but I found a need to know what sound they'd tune into next to incorporate into tracks six and seven? I can float along in the Planet Caravan vibe for a while until that next sound comes along. What do you mean it's over and we're rolling right back into Sargassum? Then again, this approach also means that I could see an Elephant Groove album doing the Polygondwanaland thing and rolling the final track back into the opener so the album becomes an infinite loop.

Talking of Sargassum, it's the early highlight here but I think I like One More Ride more. D'Alfonso's vocals dive into the background on One More Ride, his guitar bubbling all around, until it starts to feel like Ian Anderson joining in on Planet Caravan from the next door studio. I get lost so much in this one, I keep coming out of it halfway through Walls and have to go back to listen to how one ends and the next begins. I could see my favourites not being yours though. There's a lot more here than is typically the case on an overtly stoner rock album.

Thursday, 6 October 2022

Banco del Mutuo Soccorso - Orlando: Le Forme dell'Amore (2022)

In keeping with the historical music played by Heilung, here's a new prog rock concept album from Italy that's based on a romance of chivalry written in 1516 by Ludovico Ariosto. Sure, that's notably new if we compare it to a hymn to a Sumerian goddess uncovered in a Syrian archaelogical dig but it's not that new, not really. I live in Arizona nowadays. We've only been a state for a century and change. It's hard for anyone here, who isn't Native American, to imagine the year 1516.

But never mind that, this is a new album from Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, a clumsy name for one of the giants of RPI or "rock progressivo Italiano". I adored their 2019 album, Transiberiana, a return to the studio for them for the first time in a quarter of a century. Three years on and they're back again, with another absolute gem. The line-up is the same as last time out, and that means one of the founding members, Vittorio Nocenzi on keyboards, along with a line-up that's mostly younger than the band, only drummer Fabio Moresco, another child of the fifties, predating the seventies. Banco themselves were founded in 1969.

And, with that said, where do I start? This is a sprawling album, running seventy-six minutes. You'd thought the last one was long at fifty-three? This one is too long, which brings it down a little, but it's bursting with imagination for the majority of its running time and kept me utterly on the hop. It's great to hear a prog rock band actually being progressive in the way that prog rock bands used to be way back in the heyday instead of just complex and virtuosic. In fact, it's so progressive that I haven't quite grasped the album as a single entity yet. It's a lot to take in.

Instead, I'm busy grasping some of the individual tracks. La Pianura Rossa is the first highlight for me, a bouncy and playful gem which unfolds in unnamed movements, shifting mood on a dime and doing all sorts of things in between the jazzy opening and the introspective piano at the end. The way multiple voices combine to become quite the party is wonderful and the presence of the brass section that punctuate things is even more fun. With a tango-esque rhythm, it felt like I should be dancing to it rather than just moving in my chair, but that would be hard even if I could dance.

While there's so much going on within the album for me to see it as a single work after a couple of listens, the individual songs often flow nicely into each other. That soft piano that finishes out La Pianura Rossa continues into Serve Orlando Adesso, which works as a fantastic interlude between its predecessor and the next bouncy gem, Non Mi Spaventa Più L'Amore, but also as a ballad in its own right. The vocals are fine, but it's the guitar sections that impressed me, one calm, the other searing. And that searing guitar continues into Non Mi Spaventa Più L'Amore, another prog tango with neat contributions from accordion and frantic piano.

Many of these early songs are delights. Le Anime Deserte del Mondo starts out like a fresh ballad but it builds and builds until it fades out into a gloriously old school keyboard solo from Nocenzi. I particularly liked L'Isola Felice too, even if it includes a brief autotuned section to match a pulsing electronic backing. Beyond the guitars and layers of keyboards, there's glockenspiel here too and even what may like a lap steel to kick us off, alongside waves and whispering. Norway may well be taking over as the new prog rock nation but Italy clearly won't let the title go that easily, even if a sleepy England seems content to watch them duke it out right now.

I preferred the first half to the second, but there are gems to be found there too. In fact, I doubt a few more listens will allow anything to depose La Maldicenza as my favourite piece here. It's a prowling gem that is not willing to be ignored. It's a storm of a track in a completely different way to how that would be normally meant. It doesn't drive incessantly onwards and destroy us, but it does rattle everything in its path. And, talking of rattling, I have no idea what the rattle is late in the first half but of the song but it's a wild sound amidst a whole bundle of wild sounds. What a piece! Oh, and I should add that the storm passes and the second half is a beautiful evocation of petrichor.

Italian prog tends to be less about a tie to folk music and more about a tie to classical music, even opera—hey, check out Nova Malà Strana if that perks up your ears—and there's a lot of classical in Nocenzi's keyboards and some less acrobatic opera in Tony D'Alessio's vocals. Some of these songs, starting with La Pianura Rossa, feel like they should have a visual element to them that I don't get when listening to an album. I don't think they could stage this entire thing as a rock opera, but the first half and some of the second would work with that sort of visual accompaniment.

The epic of the album is Moon Suite, hence why the planet Earth on the last cover has become the Moon on this one. I like it, but it's far from my favourite song here, playing to me like an attempt to write an Italian Yes song. It's more adventurous than Yes are nowadays and I adore some of the old school keyboard work Nocenzi throws into it, but I think I prefer the previous track that serves as a sort of intro to it. That's Non Credere Alla Luna and it features both a wailing saxophone and a Mark Knopfler-esque guitar. It may be my favourite song here after La Maldicenza.

The caveat to everything I've said is that I should underline that I need to listen to this more. It's a busy album and a long one and, as enjoyable as it is, I haven't scratched the surface after a couple of listens. This is easily an 8/10 but I may well up that to a 9/10 after listening to it more. Whatever I do, it's highly recommended, as is its predecessor, Transiberiana. This band are on top form right now and you should check them out.

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