Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: Norway

Showing posts with label Norway. Show all posts

Thursday, 27 February 2025

Motorpsycho - Motorpsycho (2025)

Usually, when a band releases a self-titled album a considerable way into their career, it tends to serve either as a definition of what they do or as a change of direction. Unusually, this is neither for the most part, though it's closer to the latter than the former, given that there are songs on this one that feel almost conventional. Core Memory Corrupt is practically alternative rock with no sense of progressive anything anywhere to be found. It's so perky that it's almost Britpop. So are Motorpsycho going mainstream? Not at all, given that this covers far more ground than that one song. It's just notable that that one song is present.

It's also worth mentioning here that they're down to a two piece line-up, Bent Sæther and Hans Magnus Ryan divvying up both vocals and instrumentation. They're both founder members and have been the only such remaining since drummer Kjell Ruar Jenssen left in 1991. Most recently, their drummer has been Tomas Järmyr, who joined in 2017, but he left in 2023, after contributing to the two albums I apparently blinked and missed, 2023's Yay! and 2024's Neigh!! Maybe this is a conscious reinvention of the band as a duo, unless of course another regular drummer shows up soon. There are two here: Olaf Olsen on two tracks and Ingvald Vassbø on six.

If there's a primary sound on this one, it may be Nonagon Infinity-era King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. The opener, Lucifer, Bringer of Light, feels emphatically like that, with its grounding on a perpetual, almost hypnotic, bouncy bass groove, with everything else layered over the top. It's a long song, almost eleven minutes, much of which is instrumental, but it could have carried on for another eleven and a further eleven after that. That sound returns in songs like Balthazaar and Three Frightened Monkeys, though the former mixes it up with folky and Hawkwind touches.

There's lot of seventies hard rock here too. Laird of Heimly is built on Jimmy Page-esque acoustic riffs and middle eastern string overlays in the Led Zeppelin style. Oddly, they gradually take over from an Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd ambience. There's Zep in Stanley (Tonight's the Night) too, but it's electric and soon subsumed into a hard rock song that feels like it's borrowing from both the seventies and nineties, with an occasional melodic nod to the psychedelia of the late sixties. The Comeback feels seventies through and through, albeit more like Mountain.

I should add that the vocals, whether they're the work of Sæther or Ryan, always remain in that time honoured Motorpsycho vein, never borrowing from earlier styles even on those songs that borrow the most musically. For instance, Dead of Winter, which closes out the album, starts out in a folk rock style that would be reminiscent of Jethro Tull even if it didn't begin with flute, and the guitar solo is right out of the Neil Young electric playbook, but the vocals never try to sound like Young or Ian Anderson.

Of course, being a Motorpsycho album, there's always more to cover. Kip Satie, as the name may suggest, is a piano piece. Balthazaar begins as keyboard prog and surprising lofi keyboard prog at that, eerily close to chiptune, before the bass shifts it into Hawkwind territory. By far the most interesting material, though, starts in Bed of Roses and builds in Neotzar (The Second Coming), which is easily the most progressive song anywhere to be found on this album. It's also easily the longest song, even if the album would still be an hour long even without its twenty-one minutes.

Bed of Roses is much shorter at a skimpy three minutes, but it's sixties/seventies folk pop with a revival build, and it gets interesting at the end to set up Neotzar, which opens with a quiet guest female voice with minimal accompaniment. That guest is Thea Grant, who's a Norwegian singer and songwriter with suitably diverse influences. Of course, Neotzar heavies up soon enough and, by the three minute mark, we're almost at a Black Sabbath level with a very old school Sabbath riff driving the piece forward. The vocals don't follow suit, of course.

Soon after eight minutes, everything drops away into a progressive section that's so quiet that it could be called ambient. Is that a harp? There's certainly very quiet guitar noodling. Occasional whispers add to the effect. This gradually builds in six minutes of neat avant prog weirdness that couldn't be any further away from the conventional approach of Core Memory Corrupt if it tried. Then it's back into guitar based hard rock until the peaceful outro. That's quite the sine wave and I get more out of Neotzar with each listen. Bed of Roses has grown into a favourite too.

And so there's a lot here, which shouldn't remotely surprise anyone who's heard a Motorpsycho album before, but it still goes to places I wouldn't have expected them to go. I never expected an utterly conventional song, for a start, especially right after the most prog piece on the album. It all sounds good in the end, but I have to wonder about the choice to self-title. If there's meaning to that, I'm not seeing it. It's another good album, of course, but it doesn't feel as coherent as a whole as other recent releases. Kingdom of Oblivion remains their recent pinnacle for me.

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Wardruna - Birna (2025)

I like Wardruna, the dark folk side project of former Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik, in which his stagename was Kvitravn, also the title of the fifth Wardruna album. This is the sixth and it's more of the same but maybe a little more varied. This is neopagan music, hearkening back to the music of animist pre-Christian Norway. It's almost odd to hear it in the form of a studio release instead of field recordings. It's performance music, often ritual in nature with a strong connection to the natural world, which means that we listen and feel it rather than find any need to sing along, the way we might with folk songs.

There's a blinding exception here in Hibjørnen. It's absolutely a folk song in that sense, instead of folk music. It's a voice and a guitar (or equivalent stringed instrument). It tells a story, even if I'm not fluent in Norwegian (except occasional words I've learned from min søster) so have no idea of what's being told. If I was, I could easily imagine myself singing along. That it follows a strikingly similar melodic drive to Steve Earle's Copperhead Road only underlines that, its instrumentation merely provided on talharpa (I presume) rather than mandolin. The effect is similar, merely with sadness rather than rebellion as the tone.

Whatever the norm here is, Hibjørnen isn't it. I suppose the majority of the material here follows a cinematic bent, playing into what Selvik does as a composer of music meant as accompaniment, whether for films, TV shows or videogames. Most notably, he composed the music in the TV show Vikings, or at least what was done in a traditional Norse manner. The title track plays into that, as do pieces of music like Skuggehesten and Lyfjaberg. Birna opens ominously, almost like a threat. Skuggehesten starts with a sample of thunder and a galloping horse, but the horse cleverly rides into the song proper in the form of percussion. It threatens too, but Lyfjaberg is less in our faces, more of a background piece of music in Vikings than one bolstering a battle scene.

As you can imagine from that paragraph, everything here lives or dies on its mood, even when it's not particularly cinematic in nature. Hertan is a particularly strong opener, not just because it's a thoroughly blatant piece of music but because it's gloriously layered. It kicks off with heartbeats, adds a chant then ambience and builds into something primal. While we might easily imagine the scene in which it might appear, it would likely feature a band performing music beacuse this isn't background music. It's foreground music that we can feel but also dissect.

And there's a lot of that sort of music here too, which tends to constitute my favourite pieces. I'd call out Hertan as my first highlight, with Himinndotter and Tretale close behind and, a little bit further back, Jord til Ljos, the warmest piece here, which is comforting from the moving water at the beginning all the way to the tweeting birds at the end. There's a hint of new wave on this one, not just the Dead Can Dance that's often overt but maybe even some atmospheric Shriekback.

I can believe Himinndotter might be easy to adapt into visuals, but different people would likely see it differently. Where something like Lyfjaberg feels like it was composed to back a film scene, Himinndotter is the reverse, a piece of music I could imagine someone staging in operatic fashion. While this album is often dark, sparse or even sad, this gets downright jubilant. It's stirring choral work with instrumentation and the fact that it also gets witchy only makes it more adaptable in my mind.. I heard witch in Lindy-Fay Hella's vocals but maybe you'll hear something else entirely. It's open to interpretation.

Tretale goes back to ominous, but builds in a much more ritual fashion. It's far slower and sparser than, say, Skuggehesten, with the ambience being looped twigs or fire not galloping horses, a cry from a raven standing out all the more because of that. It does build but in a nodding drone that's later joined by melodies on flute and lyre and eventually vocals. I like it a lot, but it's one that you have to feel for it to work. I'd say the same about Dveledraumar, but that didn't work for me, even if it was for entirely arbitrary reasons.

It's the longest piece of music on the album, its fifteen minutes over twice the length of anything except Lyfjaberg, which is still only eight and half. However, the early featured instrument sounds to me like someone's blowing a musical raspberry, while the one behind it could be a road crew on the street outside digging it up again. Maybe you won't hear that, but I couldn't not. There's also an organic sound here which seems out of place, as I heard a whale breathing. Perhaps it's meant to suggest something amniotic, like a return to the womb. I don't know. It just didn't fit. It's worth mentioning that this longest song is also largely minimal when compared to the rest of the album, so less happens in its fifteen minutes than in most of the tracks that are a mere three or five.

So this is another 7/10 for me, but I liked it a lot. If you listen to movie soundtracks as well as dark folk music, then add another point to that.

Monday, 23 September 2024

Tusmørke - Dawn of Oberon (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives

It might sound like a Christmas album for a few moments, but this is a neat melding of a number of seventies rock styles. Initially, the most obvious influence on the eighteen minute opening title track is Jethro Tull, not only because of the prominent flute; it's there in the structure and the vocals too. That evolves though, because it's not just folk prog. As it shifts into a long instrumental section, it also shifts into more neoprog territory, especially through the keyboards, and when it truly comes alive about eleven minutes in with a palpable middle eastern flavour, it's revelling in psych.

Contrary to the reputation of prog, Dawn of Oberon is a song that suddenly becomes difficult not to dance to. It's a decent song before this point, but it's absolutely glorious after it. It still feels lofi, as if it was recorded on a four track, but it's jaunty and beyond engaging. It practically reaches out to drag us out of our seats and feel the music instead of just hearing it. It continues to evolve from there too, venturing into space rock. Not for the last time on this album there's some Hawkwind in the sound too. If you ever wanted to hear Tull and Hawkwind jamming together, this may be as close as you'll ever get, even if the Tull half of that partnership gets the final word.

It's always an ambitious statement to kick off any album with a side long epic, but it works here. It means that we're under no false impressions about what we're getting into with Tusmørke (which is the Norwegian for twilight). Nothing else here is remotely that long and some of it takes a very different tack indeed, but it grounds us in what the band do: primarily folk prog but with journeys into psych and space rock. If we dig that long opener, we're going to like the rest of this album and, I presume, we'll enjoy much of their back catalogue. They were founded back in 1994 as Les Fleurs du Mal, became Tusmørke in 2009 and have knocked out a steady stream of albums since then. This is their eleventh overall and their fourth in four years.

Nothing else here touches the opener, but all six tracks feature something worthy of note. Born to Be Mild, as you might expect, dips into Steppenwolf at points, and remains firmly in that combo of folk prog and space rock, atmosphere swirling around everything like we're listening to light that reflects off a revolving disco mirrorball. Dwarven Lord is notably laid back, kicking off with lounge elements in the folk prog. When it escalates, it does so with the subtle warp they used on Born to Be Mild and further space rock touches. What ties dwarven lords and fairy queens to the chirping of synths, I have no idea, but it's a heady mix nonetheless.

Tusmørke sing in English on most of this album, Midsommernattsdrøm excepted, but it looks like that's a relatively recent thing and earlier albums are more likely to be in Norwegian. The singer goes by Benediktator and, like many singers who perform in multiple languages, he's just a little more effective in what I presume is his first. However, had I not known that the band hailed from Norway, I'd have assumed from his diction and intonation that he was a native English speaker. I'd call out the post production on the vocals here too, as they're manipulated midway through to be reminiscent of what bands like Gong were doing back in the day.

Oddly, Midsommernattsdrøm feels a little long at eight minutes while Dawn of Oberon doesn't at eighteen. Maybe that's due to its lazy feel, aided by ambient sounds like chirping birds or buzzing flies and the way the notes draw out more and more as the song runs on, as against something in an ostensibly similar vein like Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows. Even though there are obvious comparisons, the two sound totally different. People View does something similar, but with much more of a happy tone. It's not that Midsommernattsdrøm is sad, but People View is a celebration song, even when it's slow.

And that leaves Troll Male, which has a dreamy sound to it and uses a similar vocal punctuation in its later sections to, of all things, I Only Have Eyes for You. Now, we can talk about bands like Tull and Hawkwind and a whole bunch of Canterbury groups, but who had money on the Flamingos as a Tusmørke influence? It's at once the most jarring thing on this album, oddly so given all the space rock synths and some of the more experimental moments on this track and others, yet something that completely fits with the rest of the album.

I think it fundamentally plays to the sense of weirdness that Tusmørke are happy to adopt to make their particular hybrid of folk, prog and psych work. Folk is tradition and psych is subversion, so it's easy to see a clash, even though they fit together much easier than that. Prog just makes it all the more interesting musically whichever way that happens and the more imagination that goes into that, the better. Tusmørke are full of imagination, one reason why the Canterbury sound seems to be a fair comparison. I've often struggled with Canterbury bands because they dive too far off the deep end without any idea where they're going to end up, but that's not the case here.

In fact, I think what I like about this the most is that Tusmørke know exactly where they plan to go and use that imagination to get there. I haven't heard their previous ten albums so can't comment on how well this fits alongside them, but it's strong stuff that makes we want to explore further.

Thursday, 12 September 2024

Leprous - Melodies of Atonement (2024)

Former prog metallers and current prog rockers Leprous are back with their eighth album and it's another interesting mix of styles. As has been the case lately, it's driven mostly by keyboards and vocals, both courtesy of Einar Solberg; as such, there are points on the previous couple of albums where Leprous have almost seemed like a Solberg solo effort, with the rest of the band chiming in on occasion, usually for emphasis. That's occasionally the case here, especially as Silently Walking Along kicks off the album like a gothic new wave song, with warping pulses and a slow beat behind the brooding vocals.

However, as it runs on, it's more apparent that the other four band members, who have remained unchanged across four albums now, simply aren't going to let that happen. There's a playful bass from Simen Børven to kick off Like a Sunken Ship, with interesting percussion from Baard Kolstad. The bass is easily as important as the vocals and keyboards on Limbo, if not more so, because it's the driving force, and Kolstad enforces himself later in the song too, with rhythms that roll just as much as they punctuate. Faceless opens with bass again, this time very much in jazz mode, and yet again Kolstad eventually joins him.

Just in case you're wondering if there are any guitars here, I can happily point out that there are, courtesy of both Tor Oddmund Suhrke and Robin Ognedal, though I have no idea who's responsible at any particular point in time. Most obviously, these songs have an abiding tendency to bulk up at some point, even Silently Walking Alone doing that around the minute mark, when Solberg builds to a new level too. These are initially patient guitars, but then they turn experimental, as they do on a host of songs here, perhaps most notably on Starlight and Unfree My Soul, both with weirdly minimal picking. The more I repeat the album, the more I notice guitars where I didn't think they existed on my first time through.

For a progressive band, which they've remained even after suggestions on 2019's Pitfalls that they were aiming for a poppier sound, these escalations are becoming a little predictable, albeit not so far as to be a problem yet. Every song seems to start softly, with someone doing something quicky on at least one instrument, the vocals play along for a while and then a minute or two or three in, it bulks up quickly to something much heavier, shifting from rock to metal just like that and staying there until it's time to shift back again. It's all for contrast, of course, and it works.

Fortunately, there are enough variations on that theme to keep this feeling fresh. At points on I Hear the Sirens, Solberg's vocals shift into a recognisable Glenn Danzig roar, though, of course, he then escalates in pitch beyond levels Danzig can even dream about. Like a Sunken Ship's escalation feels angry; Solberg's vocals remain clean, for a while, but in front of jagged modern metal, then there are glimpses of harsh vocals too. Self-Satisfied Lullaby is keyboards and vocals for a couple of minutes, before the drums show up, and it returns to that for a while. The bass doesn't arrive until the four minute mark and the guitars wait a minute longer, even though the song is over at six and a half.

What doesn't happen as much are changes that don't involve that bulking up. These songs tend to establish their early sound, bulk up into something heavy, then drop back to the early sound again. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but only Faceless really stands out as doing something different. It starts out soft, like a smooth jazz song, bulks up a little slower with a subdued guitar telegraphing the escalation before it actually happens. It bulks up, then drops back down again to that jazzy mindset, albeit with a nuanced guitar solo, but somehow ends up morphing into what I can only describe as a triumphant chant.

All in all, I liked this album more than Pitfalls but not as much as 2021's Aphelion. What it does, it does well, and it's consistent enough to suggest that there aren't really high or low points, just a fifty minute slab of quality music, but it didn't surprise me much. Aphelion kept me much more on the hop and I appreciated that. So this is a good album that continues to grow after many listens, as a Leprous album should, but I don't think it reaches the heights of its predecessor.

Wednesday, 4 September 2024

Ravn - Svartedans (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Folk/Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Oh, I like this band! They're from Trondheim, Norway and they play relatively straightforward folk metal with clean female vocals in front of a traditional heavy metal line-up: twin guitars, bass and drums. What there aren't are fiddles, bagpipes or hurdy gurdys, though I'm very happy to hear a nyckelharpa to open Syndera and thus the album. However, that's the only song on which it shows up, as it's courtesy of a guest appearance from Mathias Gyllengahm, best known for Utmarken, a folk metal band from neighbouring Sweden.

What that means is that the folk aspect of Ravn isn't a layer of instrumentation, as it sometimes can be; it's who they are, like, say, Bucovina. They're a heavy band, make no mistake, playing heavy metal throughout and dipping into black metal on occasion, but they're a heavy band playing folk music, even if it happens to be new and they wrote it. That nyckelharpa lays down a melody that's promptly echoed by vocalist Hildegunn Eggan and the band behind her happily bolster whatever she's doing, at least until the very end of the album, when they fade away on Hulderlokk, leaving her to finish out in haunting a capella.

I like the band but I really like these vocals. I don't speak Norwegian, so I don't understand any of the lyrics she's singing, but she has a fantastic crisp delivery that suggests to me that she has an impeccable intonation. My sister's most of the way to fluency in Norwegian now so I should send a copy of this over to her and see how she does with it. I recognise the pauses in between syllables from when she speaks Norwegian, but she doesn't do it remotely as well as Eggar and I'd hazard a guess that most Norwegians don't either. She also throws out a couple of what I'd have to describe as squeals on Krig that I absolutely adore.

Musically, the black metal is shifted to the centre of the album, so the opening pair of songs are all folk metal without that flavour being apparent. Syndera is an excellent opener, patient and heavy with folky melodies and those characterful vocals. Krig (or War) is better still, my favourite of the eight tracks on offer. It's slower but even heavier, with rumbling drums behind the verses, a strong bridge that oddly reminds of Iron Maiden, even though this is a very different style indeed, and a wonderful melody in the chorus.

The black metal shows up initially in Svartedans, which appropriately translates to Black Dance. It isn't as overt here, restricted to an intro that isn't fast enough or dense enough to thrill die hard black metal fans but clearly drawn from that genre. Then it drops into a melody and we're clearly back in folk metal again. That hint in Svartedans shows up with a vengeance in a pair of tracks that feature guest harsh vocals from Mikael Aasnes Torseth of Trondheim black metal band Keiser. The band dive firmly into his genre to meet him on Mare, then jump back into folk metal when Eggan takes the lead. It's an interesting dance. The two approaches merge in the chorus for Fimbulvinter, which is even more interesting.

And then Torseth departs and Ravn use Svik to come down from their black metal interlude. There are hints of black metal in this one, but it's mostly folk metal again, with a keyboard intro that's a lot like Enya, incorporating what I presume are synths manipulating a vocal sample. It's a livelier song than most of the folk metal songs here but it's not as fast as the black metal ones. It thrives on momentum but the final two tracks avoid that, going back to power chords and slower, heavier riffing.

They're also not new songs though I assume they've been re-recorded for this album, given that a "(2024)" appears after both their names. They were each released as a single, Evighet in 2020 and Hulderlokk in 2021. I like both of these, but Hulderlokk, arguably the most folky song here, is very good indeed, my second highlight after Krig. I don't know what it means, Google Translate giving me only Hole Lid, but I adore its majestic folk melodies and riffs, full of pauses and attitude, all the way to the da de da vocalised sections and that lovely outro.

So I've just found another favourite band, which makes it all the sadder to add that they went on hiatus on 12th August, only a couple of weeks before releasing this second album on the 30th. I'm not sure of the details why, but it's the old classic of "irresolvable disagreements about the way forward". Of course, there are two very clear directions on show here, one to folk metal and one to black metal, so the obvious guess is that these disagreements tie to that but I have no evidence whatsoever to back that up. It's just the obvious guess. If so, it's especially unfortunate because I like how the two merge here. There's a good balance to this album and a lot of that is through an overt shift from folk to black and back again, starting and ending with the purest folk elements.

The good news is that there's a previous album, I mørke natt from 2018, which is still available on Bandcamp, so I'll be happily checking that out when time allows.

Monday, 3 June 2024

Sykofant - Sykofant (2024)

I don't review every album I'm sent as a submission, but I do review most because they tend to be very strong indeed and this prog rock album from Norway is no exception. Now, I was sold on prog rock album from Norway, because, if there's a country outdoing Poland in that genre right now, it has to be Norway. However, this is very different from any of the other bands I'm being shocked by, like Motorpsycho, Wobbler and Shamblemaths, partly because it combines a couple of eras that I don't usually hear merged.

One isn't too surprising, because it's early Pink Floyd, not the famous stuff but the stuff that came right before it. There's a Floydian patience to the first four minutes of Between Air and Water and both the vocal melodies and the first guitar solo flow like Floyd too. When it returns to this sound in the second half, the bass gets ominous in a simple but highly effective manner that reminds of the Floyd's Empty Spaces. This is very tasty indeed, so I was far from unhappy when a very similar bassline shows up at the very end of the album, to wrap up Forgotten Paths.

However, the other is highly surprising because it's far more recent, namely the nineties, but in a couple of different ways. One is a jagged prog metal approach that reminds very much of Voivod, as is obvious in the third section of Between Air and Water. The other, however, is the commercial sort of American alternative rock that I wasn't expecting to hear on a Norwegian prog album. It's all over the melodies on the opener, Pavement of Colors, and, for a prog album that's as sonically complex as we might expect, that and other songs often find a grungy level of lo-fi simplicity that was fascinating to me. Points in Between the Moments reminded me of Clutch.

It's not merely those two eras, because Strangers in particular ventures all over the musical map, but they're the two that kept coming back for me. Pavement of Colors develops from a funky start with a wonderful bassline, through jangly guitars to almost a Tank guitar tone as it wraps up. That would constitute a highly versatile song except Between Air and Water has three times as long to explore three very different approaches, and Strangers, at just over ten minutes, has everything beaten hands down on that front. This is prog rock, after all, and a prog rock album isn't supposed to stay in the same place.

There are other surprising shifts in style that caught my attention. The first half of Monuments of Old finds a Rush vibe for a while, which makes sense, but it evolves into something far more Black Sabbath, which is far more surprising, and that evolves into almost a jazzy take on Megadeth, not a phrase I ever expected to use in a review. Strangers, always the song to outdo everything else, is happy to follow a section full of middle eastern flavour with one out of a spaghetti western. Then, just to put the icing on the cake, it goes almost ambient in its second half.

In short, there's a lot here because Norwegian prog rock bands never rest on their laurels. While this is a debut album, it's a generous one at only a few minutes shy of an hour, and its six tracks do a huge amount. I've listened through half a dozen times now, which is enough to firm up personal favourites. Between Air and Water was an immediate favourite, but Strangers beats it every time through. It's a fascinating song, my favourite sections sounding like Voivod covering Led Zeppelin with a couple of vocalists. The ambient section that kicks off almost eight minutes in really ought to spoil the song but it works as a sort of interlude to calm us before Forgotten Paths takes things home.

Everyone does their job, as tends to be pretty essential for ambitious prog rock albums, but I keep coming back to Sindre Haugen's bass. It's not always there and it's not always doing things of note but it's there often enough and doing things of note often enough to stand out for me. There are two guitarists, Emil Moen and Per Semb, and I don't know how they divvy up lead and rhythm, but the solos are often excellent. I particularly like the one a few minutes into Forgotten Paths, while it's almost a pop song, and the longer one during the second half, when it's become something far more versatile.

They're also as frequently responsible for the jazzier sections as the drums of Melvin Treider, who is notable for just how much he does without ever seeming to steal any sort of spotlight. They also dip into other genres, from the jagged prog metal of Between Air and Water to a blues slide and jaunty near reggae late midway through Forgotten Paths. And that leaves the vocals, which come courtesy of Moen on lead but Semb and Haugen prominently backing him up. There are points on songs like Pavement of Colors that need two voices to unfold properly.

I haven't heard an average Norwegian prog rock album yet, which is telling. This doesn't reach the heights of Shamblemaths or my favourite Motorpsycho album, Kingdom of Oblivion, but it's above the very high bar the country is setting, up there with strong albums from established bands like Leprous and Mythopoeic Mind. Thanks, Sykofant, I hope Norway keeps those wonderful prog rock albums coming!

Monday, 29 April 2024

Full Earth - Cloud Sculptors (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something special and notably ambitious from Norway. Few bands tend to start out their debut albums with twenty-one minute instrumental jams, even within the psychedelic rock world. Fewer follow it up with a twenty minute title track. That's an album right there, but precious few keep on going, delivering four more tracks, none of them quite as long as those openers but two more making it past ten, with the second part of the opener bookending the album and pushing that track to almost thirty-five minutes alone. There are eighty-five minutes of music here.

Of course, that's exactly what Full Earth do here and they had me completely riveted by the end of that first piece of music, Full Earth Pt I: Emanation. I wasn't immediately sold, as the drums are pretty routine as it kicks off and the guitars are clearly repetitive, but everything builds and I do mean seriously builds. I had to temporarily ignore the rest of the album by starting it over again the moment it ended. The first step up is around the two minute mark, then again at three and a half, once more at four and a half and over and over again until I was totally mesmerised by all its swirling chaos.

There are five musicians in Full Earth and they play the typical rock instruments—Ask Vatn Strøm on guitars, Simen Wie on bass and songwriter Ingvald Vassbø on drums, with both Wie and Eskild Myrvoll adding additional guitars—but two of them are also credited on different keyboards and the fifth member, Øystein Aadland, provides a whole bunch of them. This is like we're watching an entire galaxy form and develop and eventually explode. There's much to take in but it's glorious. I'm not at all surprised to find that Vassbø is playing with Motorpsycho nowadays, as well as being a long-standing member of Kanaan, along with Strøm and Myrvoll.

The section that kicks in at around 13:45 when Wie's bass introduces a heavy riff and Vassbø starts improvising drum fills but the keyboards continue to dance is breathtakingly good and that's not my only favourite section. There's already been a gorgeous step up in pace that shows up around eleven minutes and the finalé is wonderful too. Much of this is built on repetition and slow build, so there are ritual and trancelike elements to it, but there are solos all over the place too, from both guitars and keyboards, and so this never quite falls into drone territory.

However, that influence is definitely there and so are a host of others. Their Bandcamp page has a few names listed on that front, not just stoner rock bands like Sleep, Elder and High on Fire, but a collection of minimalist and avant-garde composers too, both ones I know like Terry Riley and the incomparable Györgi Ligeti and ones I don't like James Ferraro and Onehotrix Point Nevers, who are names I clearly must check out. These are cited as inspirations for the two short organ pieces, Weltgeist and Echo Tears, but there's experimentation in the middle of Cloud Sculptors.

Talking of Cloud Sculptors, the title track feels like whatever deity we're playing here pressed the zoom button and whipped inward to focus on a single planet. It isn't ours, as the fluttering flutes and liquescent guitar paints an alien landscape dominated by frolicking butterflies and keening land whales. The drums vanish entirely at points to reflect a King Crimson influence, but that wild and fascinating midsection is something else again, feeling like the pulsing of a planet that may be bursting at the seams.

I have to admit to feeling that this was my long overdue first 9/10 for the year during the opener, but I started to think during The Collective Unconscious that it's the first contender for my album of the year, because, once this one gets going, it's even better than the opener.

I had wondered a little because Weltgeist is a plodding ambient organ piece, almost a turn based improvisation with notes shifting up and down on a particularly ruthless beat (Echo Tears is more of a Philip Glass rhythmic effort), and The Collective Unconscious starts out in a similar vein, but it grows a few minutes in with some sumptuous seventies organ that brings King Crimson promptly back to mind. That gives way to searing guitar solos and a bludgeoning road home that brings up scale again, one way or another. I can't tell if I'm a galaxy watching a neighbour form or one single cell watching a human body evolve around me, but it seems utterly momentous. There's more of that in the closer, Full Earth Pt II: Disintegration.

And, beyond sounding momentous, this is energy-infusing stuff. I haven't felt particularly down at all this week and I've been getting stuff done, but I feel thoroughly revitalised listening to this. It will be hard to move on from it.

Wednesday, 26 July 2023

Saint Karloff - Paleolithic War Crimes (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Stoner/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Jun 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I haven't heard Saint Karloff before but how can I resist that name? They hail from Oslo and play a brand of stoner rock that starts out right from the Sabbath playbook but varies considerably as it goes until it surprised me. My first impressions are that they're excellent musically, with the main musician Mads Melvold, handling guitars, bass and keyboards, presumably not all at one time. It's redundant to suggest that the band seems to be very tight, when most of it is one man recording a set of overlays in the studio, effectively playing along with himself. The other musician involved is Adam Suleiman, who contributes the drums.

Just in case Melvold holding down triple duty wasn't enough, he also handles the lead vocals and I was less sold on those. Initially, on the opener, Psychedelic Man, he comes across as somewhat like Glenn Danzig with a sore throat, though he has a cleaner, less raucous vocal reserved for the more psychedelic sections, such as when the space rock keyboards show up. I was a little taken aback by how smooth the instrumentation was and how the vocals stood in contrast, but they were never a problem and I warmed up to the contrast in time. The vocals are certainly the weakest aspect but they work nonetheless.

I liked Psychedelic Man on a first listen but I like Blood Meridian still more after it, because it's an acutely playful piece that hearkens back to other seventies bands than just the inevitably Sabbath. While the song seems nineties, the bounce of Queens of the Stone Age with the fuzz of Kyuss, it's a song that looks backwards too. There's Budgie here in how the melody is inherently built into riffs and changes. There's seventies organ that reminds of Uriah Heep. I like this one a lot.

Talking of looking back, Saint Karloff look back further than that. After a mellow interlude, Among Stone Columns, and another frenetic stoner rock song with a punk urgency, Bone Cave Escape, they shift into epic mode and trawl in Led Zeppelin for Nothing to Come, which is a peach of a song. It's acoustic Zep initially, even including a flute, with very Jimmy Page guitarwork but vocals nothing at all like Robert Plant. It builds, of course, heavying up a couple of minutes in, but, even with the more frenetic sound of the midsection, it's tempered by a less frenetic lead guitar. And, just as we get used to that, it shifts back to acoustic but remains frenetic, like utterly in your face folk music.

There's another epic to wrap up the album, Nothing to Come running seven minutes but Supralux Voyager taking up eight and a half. It opens in a similarly epic vein, but it's less hard rock and more psychedelic rock, taking the band in another tasty direction. Both these songs are highlights and I only realised at this point that the songs are generally longer than I'd expect from a commercially minded vocal stoner rock band. The rest aren't epics, but only the interlude and Death Don't Have No Mercy clock in under the five minute mark.

And, frankly, there's the biggest surprise for me, because I know this song well but in versions very unlike this one. It's a slow song for this album, but it's heavy and the vocals suggest that Melvold is shouting through a megaphone like Rudy Vallée used to do in the thirties. The song isn't as old as that, but I first heard it on the debut album by Hot Tuna, Jorma and Jack's roots-focused side band from Jefferson Airplane. That came out in 1970 and it was one of many of their covers of Rev. Gary Davis tunes. He sang blues and gospel, being ably qualified as a blind black preacher man, but he's one of my favourite guitarists. Nobody plays guitar like a blind bluesman and precisely none of the inventive intricacy they have is present on this song, which makes it very weird indeed.

Kudos to Saint Karloff though for covering such a deep cut and transforming it into something new in the process. Now let's see what you can do with Sally, Where'd You Get Your Liquor From? Kudos also for such a varied stoner rock album, shifting from seventies to nineties and from hard rock to psychedelia and touches of space rock. On first impressions, this worked as a frenetic workout but, the more I listen to it, the more it's all about the subtleties that come elsewhere. This is the third album by Saint Karloff and I'm all the more interested in hearing the previous two now.

Tuesday, 18 July 2023

Immortal - War Against All (2023)

There's an irony in the fact that Demonaz, founding guitarist and chief lyricist in Immortal, had to effectively retire from the band in 1997 because of severe tendinitis, given that he now is the band for all intents and purposes. Now, he never truly left, continuing to write their lyrics, set in his dark fantasy world of Blashyrkh, and he often served as their manager, but he didn't return as a playing musician until 2013 after having surgery to address his tendinitis. Fellow founding member Abbath left in 2015 during one legal battle and long term drummer Horgh left in 2022 during another, so it is now Demonaz only, on guitars and vocals, with a couple of session musicians on bass and drums.

It's been a while since I've listened to Immortal, even though this is their tenth album. Initially, it's not far off what I remember from the back in the day. The title track opens up fast and furious, the sound almost replicating the cover. The blastbeats of Kevin Kvåle are the flurry of snow rising up from the ground and no doubt the avalanche that's prompting it. The guitars of Demonaz are the birds, hurtling towards at us at a rate of knots in an attempt to outrun the beat. It's his vocals that take the fore, dominating the scene as much as the horribly betoothed vision in the mountains.

It's such a dominant vocal that we almost imagine him in costume, maybe wearing the mask from the cover, to spit out his lyrics from. They're harsh vocals, of course, and spat out with venom, but they're also well intonated so that we can understand words without even trying and can follow it all if we care enough to focus that hard. I like his voice a great deal and it's far better than a vocal from a guitarist only taking over after a quarter of a century because the band's long term singer had left might suggest. His first lead vocal was on 2018's Northern Chaos Gods, but I haven't heard that so this is my introduction to it. It's mature and it defines this album more than anything else.

Thunders of Darkness follows on from War Against All, so we might be excused for taking this to be a fast and furious black metal album, as we might expect from Immortal. However, Wargod has no intention of following in their footsteps and, while Kvåle's double bass drumming continues to play a part, it's more notable when it shows up from this point on than when it doesn't. Demonaz stays with his tortured black metal voice, but the music shifts more into the heavy metal that we heard hints of earlier in phrasing and riffage. Sure, it speeds up halfway through, but it still feels like it's a lively NWOBHM song, merely with an occasional harsh voice and double bass drumming.

And that mindset continues. I've reviewed hard and heavy albums lately that are faster than some of this. Return to Cold is another track phrased as heavy metal with black metal overlays, but it has the structure and swells of a power metal song. And, as harsh as Demonaz's voice is, clearly aimed to be bleak and resonant to play into his icy fantasy world setting, it shifts in its effect. Much of the time it's a clearer and more enunciated take on the early Quorthon template that pretty much all black metal singers follow, but sometimes, starting on the title track's chorus, he comes across as a rough thrash metal singer in the vein of Mille Petrozza.

And so this is occasionally exactly the black metal we expect from Immortal, given that Demonaz's ultra-fast guitarwork is one of the pillars of the genre, but it's often more proto-extreme metal, a look back at where the genre came from, not merely the pioneers like Venom, Bathory and Celtic Frost, but the bands whose music they were absorbing and spitting out in a more extreme form. It works for me, because I have broad tastes in metal, but it feels cleaner than it should for someone as pivotal to the Norwegian black metal scene, as if all this introspection has forgotten how filthy Venom used to be.

And there sparks more irony, because black metal grew up in Norway, even if it was born elsewhere, and the purists still argue about how bands should retain crappy production as an inherent component of the genre's sound. While the guitar and bass are surprisingly far behind the vocals and drums in the mix, this is absolutely not crappy production. This is very clean production and it makes this an easy album to listen to. It's never going to be cuddly with Demonaz's voice as harsh as it is, but it's fair to say that, along with the tempo shifts, it helps to push this away from black metal and into a far more commercial heavy metal sound, which is all the more obvious when he chooses not to sing on a track like Nordlandihr. I wonder where he's going to take it from here.

Friday, 23 June 2023

Sirenia - 1977 (2023)

Another band whose most recent album came out a couple of years ago, Sirenia's highlighted that their sound had changed considerably since their early years. This follows suit, a firm underline to their current musical approach. What that means for old school fans is that there isn't as much of a gothic aspect to their sound as there used to be, though it isn't gone entirely, and the vocals of founder Morten Veland are mostly gone, showing up on the odd song here and there to serve as a contrast and to pique our memories.

Mostly, this is symphonic metal to showcase the voice of Emmanuelle Zoldan, who sounds excellent but, as with the previous album, doesn't attempt to show off. The songwriting is pretty consistent, these songs generally kicking in with electronica that's characterful and highly versatile but often more in a pop vein than rock, let alone metal. Then the guitars add crunch with a wistful eye firmly on the gothic metal they used to play, as if they're nostalgic but not so much to truly go back there. The beat is up tempo and lively rather than fast, but it speeds up at points for emphasis. And then Zoldan's vocals arrive to take the song where she will.

It's the electronica and the beat that fundamentally drives this album, because Veland trawled in an eighties pop aesthetic to flavour the band's sound that's highlighted by his very unusual choice of cover to close the album. It's Twist in My Sobriety, Tanita Tikaram's biggest hit from 1988, which features a moodiness to her vocal but a perkiness to the beat. That translates well here into a pop metal song, with the moodiness in the gothic crunch and the perkiness still there in the beat. And, really, while this cover closes the album, it could have started it as a mission statement. Instead it wraps up proceedings as a nod to the degree to which everything could have gone.

It's easy to see where this could have gone horribly wrong. Pop metal is a dangerous territory, the two approaches very different and needing to contrast each other well to work in collaboration. It may be the electronic decoration that saves it, because Veland infuses it with enough invention to keep the songs from fading into pop mediocrity. Without it, they might seem enough of a likeness to lose us. With it, the songs are able to delineate themselves and shine on their own.

If you're worried by this pop metal approach, I'd suggest that you listen to Twist in My Sobriety, to see where Veland is coming from this time out, then check out some highlights to see if this works for you. I like the opener Deadlight mostly for its subtle touches, so Wintry Heart may be a better choice as a sample; it has a real bounce to it and a neatly catchy melody. Nomadic is a strong track right after it, kicking off with violin and Jew's harp but then launching into a tastefully aggressive riff. Timeless Desolation features the most elegant melodies, but A Thousand Scars has grandeur to it, with Zoldan getting operatic in its second half, and that returns on Delirium, which is clearly the heaviest song here.

And talking of heavy, while this is still symphonic metal, it's so driven by a pop mindset that it gets easy to forget. Nomadic has an edge but Fading to the Deepest Black is the first song that believes that it's truly metal. Michael Brush generates a much faster beat early on and the guitars go past their standard crunch mode, only to recede for the more elegant verses, even if the keyboards are a constant reminder that this is a darker song. Veland steps up to the mike on this one but keeps it clean for now. He returns and gets harsh for the only time on Delirium, with Zoldan adding serious weight to her voice during her operatic sections.

I like this, even though the proliferation of pop melodies and thinking ought to put me off. There's a song here, The Setting Darkness, that kicks off just like Abba and never really leaves that even as the crunch hits. I don't like it as much as Riddles, Ruins & Revelations, which got an 8/10 from me in 2021, but I do like it. It feels odd to be giving it a 7/10 right after doing the same on Joel Hoekstra's 13, because I like this a heck of a lot more, but that speaks only to how this one connects with me a lot more effectively, not to any difference in quality. I wonder how you'll compare them.

Monday, 19 June 2023

Liv Kristine - River of Diamonds (2023)

Following very much in the vein of her 2021 EP, Have Courage Dear Heart, this is Liv Kristine in her gothic rock mode, approaching and sometimes embracing pop at one end of the spectrum but also thinking a little about crunching up into metal at the other. While we might expect a lot of Theatre of Tragedy here, the gothic metal band she co-fronted for a decade, given that every original song here was written by Tommy Olsson, who spent three of those years as a guitarist in that band, it's only really approached in a couple of tracks, like Our Immortal Day and Maligna, and never with a real intention to go there.

Oddly, the first words we hear aren't Liv's. There's a male voice on the opener, Our Immortal Day, that functions less as a duet partner and more as an introduction. It belongs to Østen Bergøy, the clean voice in Tristania for a decade who's now with Long Night, also Olsson's current band. He's a perfect presence in this opener, setting us up for what Liv has to bring and supporting her with his velvet voice. My favourite duet partner here is Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell, who lends a deeply Andrew Eldritch-esque voice to the title track. Liv's husband and sister also show up, the former a tender partner on Pictured Within and the latter less obvious on Love Me High.

The album starts off well with Our Immortal Day but escalates to No Makeup and Maligna, which I would call out as the two standout tracks on the album. The former plays like a waltz, a wonderful groove that's slower than the songs either side of it but contains so much detail to keep it skipping forward elegantly. The latter is a strong song, with symphonic metal in the vocals but goth rock all over the music, upbeat and driving like the Sisters of Mercy, and with tough lyrics about an abusive relationship. It's almost surprising to hear Liv drop an F bomb but it's perfectly placed here.

I've mentioned the Sisters a couple of times now and that's appropriate but there's another name I should throw out too, because this takes a few journeys into pop music, of the progressive sort we might associate with Kate Bush. When the songs are up tempo, we tend to hear the eternal beat of Doktor Avalanche behind them, even if Liv's isn't far off what we'd get if we inverted Eldritch's, the light to his dark. However, when the songs slow down and get playful or introspective, Kate Bush is the influence we hear. She's there on Maligna but she's unmistakable on Gravity and especially on the closing cover of Cyndi Lauper's True Colours.

Liv has always had a crystal clear quality to her voice, as if it's made of air and ice. Gravity is such a tailored song to that crystal aspect, turning her ethereal, as if she's indeed "flying with gravity", as the lyrics suggest. It does heavy up a little late in the song for emphasis, but True Colours is her voice solo with only piano accompaniment. These are songs painted in shades of white, beautifully rendered, and they're a far cry from the gothic metal I first heard her sing but just as worthy.

If you've been paying attention, you'll realise that the majority of the songs I've mentioned so far arrive early in the album and that's because it is a little top heavy. The first four songs are close to being the best four songs, the only one matching them in my mind being the title track, which still sits on the first side, wrapping it up before the tender ballad Pictured Within kicks off the second. That doesn't mean that the remaining songs are poor but the best of them can't match the worst of the first half, which I guess means In Your Blue Eyes because it's the only other song there.

Pictured Within is very well done but it doesn't grab me. True Colours is a stellar cover but it's just Kate Bush singing Cyndi Lauper without any further depth to it. If you twisted my arm, I might call out Shaolin Me as the best second half song. It sounds like a Shaw Brothers movie as it begins with a synth note building the way Pink Floyd might do it. The song grows and somehow floats, as if Liv has found the zone in a kata and nothing else exists but movement. I could imagine her singing in a blindfold for this one.

And so this is another 7/10, the same rating I gave Have Courage Dear Heart. However, there's far more of it, being a full length album, Liv's sixth solo effort and it certainly flies higher. I could have easily stretched to an 8/10 for the first half but it can't sustain that level in he second so that 8/10 surely drops to a 7/10, but I wouldn't go further. Even the least song here is still enjoyable even on a third or fourth listen, even if I'm tempted every time through to cut Pictured Within short to leap back to the beginning.

Friday, 28 April 2023

Ihsahn - Fascination Street Sessions (2023)

Fascination Street Sessions is only an EP rather than a full length album and its trio of songs count for only thirteen minutes of music, but I've heard a lot of buzz about this release and ought to take a listen. And hey, Ihsahn seems to be releasing all his new music as EPs lately, this being his third in five years since his most recent album, Àmr in 2018. I didn't review Pharos in 2020 but I did take on Telemark earlier that same year, so I guess I've set precedent.

Both those EPs featured three original tracks from Ihsahn, along with a pair of covers, each one of them an interesting choice that we might not expect from a pioneering black metal musician. The choices on Pharos were songs by Portishead and a-ha, while Telemark tackled a Lenny Kravitz song and an early classic by Iron Maiden. Those choices ably highlight how broadly Ihsahn is casting his musical net nowadays. Not only is this not black metal, even though he brings in a harsh voice on a couple of tracks; it's often not even metal, dipping frequently from a prog metal mindset to a prog rock one.

If we took that three/two combo as a template, Ihsahn chose to ditch it here. Instead we only get a pair of original songs, The Observer and Contorted Movements, along with one cover, this time of a song by Kent, an alternative rock band from Sweden, called Dom andra, or The Others. This take is a little heavier, but still clearly a rock song, and it doesn't otherwise bring anything new to it, so it's much more important here as a further guide to what Ihsahn is listening to and is impacted by than as a new piece of music. To me, it's an introduction to Kent.

It also plays more consistently as rock music than the two originals. The Observer especially has an impressive range, starting out prog metal, dropping down to prog rock and then adding emphasis by trawling in that black metal harsh vocal and leaping back to metal. It's all about emphasis. The initial verses are softer, delivered as prog, perhaps even alternative rock, but the ramp up is pure metal and, however many times it goes back and forth, that's where it ends up, in prog metal with a harsh voice.

It's a good song, but I like Contorted Movements even more. It kicks in with a guitar solo from the old school hard and heavy era, when bands had become heavy enough to stretch the boundaries of hard rock but weren't quite at the point heavy metal would become when it found a need to mark a delineation from extreme metal. It softens like Contorted Monuments, but the ramp up is much more subtle, the harsh aspects of Ihsahn's voice creeping in rather than just taking over, and the music behind it follows suit, gradually accelerating into high gear rather than shifting up a gear to snap into it.

And that's about it, because three songs isn't a lot to talk about. This is a good release, but it's not the killer that I'd been led to believe. It also feels skimpy as an EP, even if that's just because we've been spoiled by the previous two. By comparison, it's short and there's enough room to bond this material together. In many ways, it is three individual tracks in the same packaging rather than an EP that says something new. It's a 7/10 for the music, but I've dropped a point for the length.

But, with that, I have to wonder about what we might expect from an Ihsahn full length. He's never gone more than three years without one as a solo artist until now. A blip during COVID lockdowns is understandable, but he's definitely been busy with his music, knocking out more than an album's worth since Àmr. I wonder if he's seeking a new direction and isn't sure if he's found it yet. Frankly, whether he is or isn't, I'm still listening.

Friday, 21 April 2023

Enslaved - Heimdal (2023)

When the Caravans to the Outer Worlds EP arrived only a year after Utgard, Enslaved's fifteenth album, with a set of songs that sounded good but mostly in isolation, I wondered how much of its material would end up on the next full length. The answer to that is not a lot: just its title track, a song also released separately as a single. Enslaved also issued three further tracks from Heimdal as singles ahead of its release, plus a live version of Bounded by Allegiance. That means that die hard listeners heard four out of seven Heimdal tracks before it ever saw release in entirety.

And, given which songs they were, I expect that the die hards were licking their lips in anticipation. I don't dislike Behind the Mirror, for instance, which opens up the album, but Congelia after it is a glorious effort, a song from an entirely different league, and that's the one of that pair that saw single release. It's a weaver of textures that becomes almost hypnotic. It's a quintessential track to transform the black metal for which Enslaved used to be known into a prog rock soundscape, as they've generally moved towards over the decades. It grows too, those textures gaining emphasis and eventually joined by clean vocals and a guitar solo. It's a peach of a song.

Forest Dweller is another of those singles and it's another strong track. It starts out as softer folk prog but erupts a couple of minutes in to a more traditional black metal assault. Even there, it's a progressive piece because it incorporates a jazzy keyboard solo out of nowhere that works rather well to my ears. This is exactly the sort of thing that they've become so good at, almost throwing the early fans a bone with an old school section that reminds us of way back when, only to add this gorgeous and unexpected touch.

The other single is Kingdom, which shows up next. From a thoughtful prog metal intro and a clearly acoustic vibe, it adds layers of electronics and eventually builds to something furious. And, when it does, there's a thrash/death mindset to much of this one that shows up at a few points on this album, such as on The Eternal Sea. At these points, they just barrel along like a juggernaut. I haven't gone back to Utgard in the past couple of year, but I don't remember this. When that was furious, it was clearly black metal. Here, the black combines with other genres, especially thrash, for something very tasty indeed.

That goes double when you factor in another wild keyboard solo from Håkon Vinje. He has a habit on this one of chipping in ideas completely out of left field that can't possibly ever work but always do. The band as a whole is clearly happier with a progressive angle to their sound that their early albums didn't have any room for, but much of that comes from a different form of contrast, taking a song in a particular mood or style and then shifting it into another, with every musician working in unison to make it feel seamless. Only Vinje chooses to layer on something completely different, apparently seeing an opportunity that nobody else in the band did. And every time he's right.

That's not to say that the rest of the band are playing it safe. There are all sorts of textures here worth calling out for special mention. I'd throw out the vocals late in Kingdom. They're kinda sorta clean, so I don't know if they're Vinje or drummer Iver Sandøy. I have a feeling they're just cleaner vocals from lead singer Grutle Kjellson. They're subdued but still menacing and they have a strong effect on the end of the track.

The other is the bass/drum interplay that closes out Caravans to the Outer Worlds. I talked about this one in my review of the EP that bears its name, so I won't get in depth here, beyond pointing out that it fits on this album much better than it did with the other tracks on that EP. Everyone is on top form for this one, including some searing guitarwork from Ivar Bjørnson and/or Arve Isdal, but it's the bass of Grutle Kjellson combined with the glorious rhythms of Iver Sandøy that make it special for me.

And so, this is a slightly inconsistent but generally strong album. I gave Utgard an 8/10 and I think I need to follow suit here. The bookends, Behind the Mirror and Heimdal, don't play as well to me as the rest in between. They're still good, but they're not as good. However, those four singles are all clear highlights, with Congelia chief among them, worth every second of its eight minutes. Think of it as a couple of 7/10s, at least four 9/10s and The Eternal Sea in between. So another 8/10 it is.

Monday, 13 March 2023

Wig Wam - Out of the Dark (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Glam Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Feb 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I mentioned last time out, when I reviewed Wig Wam's reformation album, Never Say Die, that the band had heavied up and that was a change that I firmly appreciated. Well, it seems that they are still heavying up and I'm definitely not complaining. This is still hard rock rather than heavy metal, but the opening title track runs pretty close to the elusive border between the two, closer than I'd say they've ever been. The heaviness is mostly in Teeny's guitars, but the rhythm section backs him up emphatically. That continues, most obviously on Uppercut Shazam and a little less so on High n Dry, but it never really goes away even on the most overt ballad, The Purpose.

The glam roots of Wig Wam show in a number of different ways. Forevermore is a lower key stalker that builds through a singalong glam chorus. Bad Luck Chuck adds in some southern rock and some old school sleaze, before finding a ruthless AC/DC-esque drive. Ghosting You swaggers the way we might expect Wig Wam to swagger and there's plenty of their patented glam stomp. Just to play a bit more with those alliterative movements, the closer, Sailor and the Desert Sun includes a neat middle eastern flavour, so that one sways. The bottom line is that we generally want to move when we're listening to Wig Wam.

There are odd songs that do something completely different and I liked all of those. The Purpose is a ballad, I guess, given that it's notably softer than anything else here and it gives far more of the focus to vocalist Glam. It builds substantially, but never to the point where it could be compared to the heavier material here. It's always the ballad, just not as soft as we might expect. 79 is a guitar instrumental that feels like it waltzed in from an instrumental album. It's a tasty piece, a lot more akin to something Gary Moore might have recorded than, say, a Vai or a Satriani, let alone Yngwie Malmsteen.

Mostly, though, this is just a heavier take on glam rock with chunkier riffs, heavier production and all those glam elements layered over the top. However close to metal it gets, and let's face it, it's over that line on Uppercut Shazam, with razorblades in Teeny's guitar riffs that we might expect from Megadeth, we're never far from a strong hook or a singalong chorus. They're merely laid over chunkier grounding as if this has to be played louder than you're playing it. However old you are or aren't, do you remember that magic first gig when you discovered that soft rock bands aren't so soft on stage as they are on record? It seems to me that this is rather like coming back to the record and not finding it softer at all.

As much I appreciate this everything louder than everything else approach that Wig Wam seem to be firmly moving into, I'd suggest that Out of the Dark, their sixth album, is just as good as Never Say Die, their fifth, which I reviewed a couple of years ago, but no better beyond the crunch. There are still standout songs, like Out of the Dark and Ghosting You, whose lyrics talk about Vanilla Ice for some reason, but most of the album is a notch down from that level, still strong but nothing a certain superhero show would leap at. That material came a little in their career. I wouldn't raise complaints if I heard Uppercut Shazam on the next season of The Boys, but I don't expect it.

And so I wonder how this will fare in the marketplace. Sure, it's heavier, but it's still Wig Wam and I'd expect their fanbase to stay with them, whether they adore the new punchiness or bitch about how they didn't used to need it. Will it bring in anyone new? Maybe. This is all decent stuff, no bad songs among the eleven on offer and the weakest still pretty solid. Maybe it'll be a gateway to the fans of heavier music who might have looked past Wig Wam in the past, even if I don't expect them to acquire a page on Metal Archives quite yet. Time will tell. I'm interested in what they'll do next.

Friday, 10 February 2023

Issa - Lights of Japan (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
Sites: Facebook

When I reviewed Issa's sixth album, Queen of Broken Hearts, a couple of years ago, I pointed out a few things that I wanted to test against her next release. The most pertinent one was that, while I thoroughly enjoyed that album, I felt there was a better one in her, not least because there was a single track that stood head and shoulders over everything else. If she could harness that level on a consistent basis across an entire album, she would be unstoppable. Well, this doesn't turn out to be that better album, but it's another good one. It doesn't live up to the potential but it does live up to its predecessor.

One other note was that that Queen of Broken Hearts felt like a cold fruit salad on a hot day. The sound here is pretty close to the sound there, but it's moved just a little, the shift in cover art an appropriate hint, I think. That album was a little more elegant, while this one has a little bit more grit. Issa appears to have moved out of the ivory tower and onto the streets. There's still elegance here but it's more grounded and more real. She's more approachable. That said, the most overtly fairy tale sounding song, a near-ballad called I Give You My Heart, is one of the highlights here.

Of all people, given that this is a solo project whose musicians are there primarily to back up their strong female lead, the band that kept popping up as a comparison is Bon Jovi, especially early on when they were very much playing along with the hair metal mindset. The keyboards that kick off opening track Live Again remind of Runaway and there are a slew of songs that feature the same sort of power chords and progressions that Bon Jovi used on their first couple of albums, not least the title track. Fight to Survive often sounds like Bonnie Tyler singing for Bon Jovi.

While Issa is still on Frontiers, I should add that the keyboards here are not the work of Alexandro del Vecchio, who's almost omnipresent on every release that label puts out nowadays. They're the work of James Martin, who I believe is Issa's husband and also plays with British melodic rock band Vega, who have been going strong for over a decade now. However, while there seems to be a firm line-up nowadays, it's missing a lead guitarist. Marco Pastorini plays rhythm and Michele Guaitoli, who's here to play bass, also contributes guitarwork, including solos on four songs.

And that means that there are a couple of other guest guitarists who step in to provide the solos. Robby Luckets of Italian hair metal band Sandness gets most songs at five, including It's Over, an impressive song with delicate keyboards behind a thumping beat. The guitars are strong on this one but the solo is even better. The other guest guitarist is John Mitchell of It Bites, who provides the best of the lot, on I Give You My Heart, all the way to its sustained final note that slowly gives way to building keyboards. I liked the respective contributions of Luckets and Guaitoli, but I can't help but wonder how strong this album would have felt had Mitchell stepped in as guitarist across the board.

While I Give You My Heart has to be my standout track, it's not so far above everything else as the title track last time out. It's Over is up there too, as is Seize the Day, which is emphatic, even if it's not particularly heavy. It just seems to be consistently a little more than it was intended to be, as if Marco Andreetto had decided to subtly increase the tempo on the song without telling anyone and they all had to stretch just a little to keep up. It's not a race, though, just a little more spirited exercise than was expected. Luckets delivers the solo on this one and it's good, if restrained.

If you like the softer end of the melodic rock spectrum, with a serious side of hair metal, then this may be right up your alley. Softer is definitely the default mode for Issa, though she's not singing ballads for the most part. These are rock songs, just soft rock songs, and, if we ever think that the album is ramping up in heaviness, then the keyboards are sure tamp it back down again. Moon of Love has a saxophone to bolster its melodies and it's not remotely out of place. If that all sounds like your sort of thing, check it out. It's the seventh album from Issa and it's yet another good one, even if I'm still waiting for that killer release.

Tuesday, 8 November 2022

Darkthrone - Astral Fortress (2022)

Country: Norway
Style: Black/Doom Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Oct 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

I have to admit that I looked at Astral Fortress with a little trepidation, given how underwhelmed I was with Darkthrone's 2019 album, Old Star. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't anywhere near as good as it could have been. Well, it seems like I missed last year's album Eternal Hails..., which everyone is happily proclaiming a solid return to form, along with a deeper exploration of the doom metal I'd noted on Old Star. As the early reviews for this one seem positive too, I was certainly intrigued but a little worried, given that this a milestone as their twentieth album.

What I found was that the doom angle is certainly working out, at least when Fenriz and Nocturno Culto really want to throw their focus in that direction. The best songs here are the doomiest with The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea most notable among them. What surprised me was what the resulting combination of doomy guitar and black metal vocals ended up taking me, which is all the way back to Hellhammer's Apocalyptic Raids EP in 1984, which underlines how that was even more influential than I thought it might be at the time.

This is certainly more controlled than Hellhammer were back then, the musicianship is more solid and the vocals far more focused. However, it's just as bleak and uncompromising, the Candlemass style chugging riffs given an edgier guitar tone reminiscent of Hellhammer and the early years of the band they evolved into, Celtic Frost. Most obviously, the vocals remain black, even if they don't delve into the shriek bag and so remain goblin harsh. Add to that the liquid psychedelic bookends and a solid build that gets under the skin and it's a memorable ten minutes indeed.

The thing is that, while Darkthrone are successfully dipping their toes into the doom pool without ever leaving their black metal heyday sound entirely behind, they don't seem convinced that it's a confirme way forward for them. Caravan of Broken Ghosts is at its best when it ramps up in tempo and Kevorkian Times follows suit. Hellhammer were never as innovative as they became under the name of Celtic Frost and some of these songs drag in the way that some of Hellhammer's did, only without any of the benefit of being outrageously different for 1984.

They do try to be outrageously different at points, such as Kolbotn, West of the Vast Forests, but I have to wonder what the goal of that brief and dissonant instrumental was. It feels like it ought to work as an intro but not to the song that follows, which is Eon 2, a more traditional piece that may well be intended to be a sequel to Eon, the closer from the album at the other end of their career, 1991's Soulside Journey. However, they're very different, as Eon 2 is much slower than Eon, and it's a vocal track without keyboards.

And so this is another mixed bag. I was impressed by The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea and I'm pretty fond of Stalagmite Necklace too, the other overtly doom metal song on offer, because of its strong riff. However, some other songs take a while to get moving and some of them drag. Eon 2 is a decent way to wrap up but it's not the emphatic close that it perhaps intends to be, highlighting a twenty album career with a nod back to the beginning.

It's definitely a better album than Old Star but I think I'm going to stay with a 6/10. What I need to do is listen to Eternal Hails... to see what so many people were raving about.

Thursday, 6 October 2022

Heilung - Drif (2022)

Country: Germany/Denmark/Norway
Style: Experimental Folk
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 19 Aug 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

If you haven't heard Heilung before, you should because a) they're a treat for the ears and b) you probably haven't heard anything like them before. They're variously described as a folk group, an experimental metal band and a ritual collective. They call themselves "amplified history", adding "from early medieval Northern Europe", but they've expanded far beyond that boundary, as one piece here ably highlights. It's called Nikkal and it's the oldest annoted music known to man, over three thousand years old and composed as a hymn to a Sumerian goddess. Nikkal was the wife of the moon god.

Really, they're just Heilung, because their sound is rarely comparable to anyone else. At the heart of what they do are the versatile voices of a couple of vocalists, a German tattoo artist called Kai Uwe Faust and a Norwegian prog rock singer named Maria Franz. Behind them on an orchestra of unusual instrumentation is Danish producer Christopher Juul and, between them, they conjure up a wild array of fascinating sounds. There are guests here too, a bunch of them, but I have no data to suggest what they do, so I'll just acknowledge that and move on.

Drif is their third studio album and its title means "gathering", a term that could be aptly applied to both the variety in the pieces of music on offer and to the cultures from which they're sourced. I believe most are sung in Proto-Norse, language so old that part of it cannot be translated, merely pronounced. Or maybe that's just a problem the internet has in attempting to render Heilung into English, so we can see that the opening song here, for instance, Asja, is a healing song, just as the band's name means healing.

My least favourite piece is in German, which is the eight minute epic right at the heart of Drif. I'll describe Keltentrauer as being performed because it's neither sung nor spoken, at least how you're probably imagining that meaning in a review. There's nothing wrong with it and it's highly evocative, but it also happens to be a poem delivered in German against accompanying music and sound effects of battle. It plays as a memorable experience the first time through but, unless we speak German, it turns into an overblown intro to a Manowar epic ongoing. I soon found myself skipping it. There's still a full fifty minutes of joy here without it.

I doubt many of us understand any of the other lyrics either but, unlike Keltentrauer where words are key to telling a story, it just doesn't matter on everything else. The music speaks volumes and we can tap into the mood and sentiment of each piece without problems, whether it's ethereal or aggressive. The ritual nature of some of them, with its inevitably repetitive chants may turn off a few listeners but anyone who feels music as much as they listen to it will fall into this album and be consumed by it, emerging a different person at the end.

It starts out gloriously with a piece called Asja. Faust delivers ritual throat singing with Rs heavily rolled and a beautifully resonant vibrato. Juul adds a slow beat to match the delivery of words. At first, the backing vocals are harsh and demonic but then Franz joins in with her high and ethereal melodic voice. This is a haka of a song, but one that grows as enticing as it is threatening. Anoana is just as tight and deliberate and it gives a serious effect. Franz has a very different approach on this one, shifting down octaves and moving down in the mix too. Faust is different as well, lighter and much more playful, in a back and forth conversational chant with himself.

These are resonant piees of music. Tenet is too but it gets strange. It starts out like a vocabulary lesson for kids, in palindromic form, then adds deep horns and mad growls and finally shifts into a humming motion to start the song proper. Urbani begins with what sound like crowing cockerels, before turning into a sort of military march or a piece recorded in an African village on a portable tape recorded by a roaming ethnomusicographer.

I found the first half magnetic from the outset but the second half took me a while. Nesso is quite the puzzle, because it features fascinating sounds that we can't ignore. Is that Faust or someone walking on gravel? Is that Franz or a musical bowl used like a bell? Maybe they're all conjurings of Juul using one of his esoteric instruments. Buslas Bann is a hypnotic chant with a deep male vocal that feels more repetitive than earlier ritual pieces and Franz doesn't show up.

And then we get to Nikkal, which I adore. The voices blend wonderfully and I just wish it was longer but it is what it is. We can't complain to the unknown composer, who's been dead for millennia. It's used here as a kind of intro to the closing epic, Marduk, during which Faust recites the fifty names of the Babylonian god of that name, in a ritual whisper against the backdrop of chimes and bowls. All I know here is that it isn't done in the order in the Necronomicon and it features more of those amazing rolling Rs. The side benefits of having a German vocalist!

Everything here is fascinating. Only Keltentrauer feels out of place and then perhaps only if you aren't fluent in German.

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