Alkonost - Дар Саламандры (2024)

Country: Russia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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Alkonost are another of those bands who have been around for a long time without me noticing. They formed in Nabarezhnye Chelny in the Republic of Tatarstan in 1996 and have knocked out at least twelve albums, most of them in Russian but with a couple seeing additional release in the English language. This isn't one of them, but it comes a year after an Anniversary Edition of their debut, a previously cassette-only English language album, Songs of the Eternal Oak. The core of the band is founding member Andrey Losev, who writes the songs and plays guitar and keyboards.

What I'm hearing is that all those roles are fundamental here, making him the heart and soul of what this band does. The guitar is a heavy crunch that sets the fundamental tone for everything. It's a rhythmic guitar that's more interested in echoing a beat than delivering a riff and there are few guitar solos to be found. The melodies here are primarily the province of the vocals, which are provided by Ksenia Pobuzhanskaya, but the keyboards often emphasise her when she sings and in moments when she doesn't, they often take over from her.

If I'm reading things correctly, Pobuzhanskaya is the only other actual member of Alkonost, with an array of guests fleshing out the line-up for this album, even though some of them have credits on earlier releases. Vadim Grozov plays the bass throughout, but other duties are split up by song. I see three drummers, with Dmitry Bortsov possibly the most frequent presence, appearing on five of the nine tracks. There are two guest guitarists but only on a couple of tracks, both showing up on Северное сияние, or Northern Lights, and Pavel Kosolapov playing on Оберег, or Amulet, too. That leaves Andrey Tepper as the violinist on Оберег.

I liked this album pretty quickly, even though it plays out in a highly consistent manner, so it's hard to pick out favourite songs. If you like one, you're going to like all of them, but if you don't like the one you started with, nothing else is going to change your mind. Maybe Оберег is notably playful for a couple of minutes, that violin joining keyboards and vocals before the crunch joins in. Maybe the second half of Разожги огонь, or Light the Fire, elevates it through a strong hook, some free flying ethnic-sounding vocals from Pobuzhanskaya and some technical guitar changes. And maybe Солнце, or Sun, has an even better hook. Quite frankly, though, I could easily call out some aspect of every song to say something special about it, without it having any more meaning.

What that boils down to is that this plays best not as nine songs, but as a single forty plus minute slab of folk metal. It's a very easy album to listen to and I've listened to it for the past three weeks as I've been distracted away from music reviews by a hundred other urgent tasks until I finally got it down on virtual paper. However, it's felt just as good every time I've come back to it partly due to having a welcoming warmth to it. In fact, that welcome may be one reason why it reminded me of a song from a short film I've screened at events that's both gothic and steampunk, both highly welcoming communities.

Coincidentally, that film is also Russian, titled Corset and written and directed by Olga Twighlight in 2015, but the song, Set Me Free, is from a German electro-industrial band, In Strict Confidence. Listening to that afresh, the guitar crunch seems very similar to what I'm hearing from Alkonost and their use of keyboards isn't wildly different either, so it's hardly surprising to realise that I'd heard this as both gothic and steampunk, even though it's not really either. What's different are the vocals, because Pobuzhanskaya is emphatically rooted in folk music while In Strict Confidence remain stubbornly gothic.

And that means that, while Losev is the bedrock of this band, it's Pobuzhanskaya who becomes the one who gives it its identity. She only ever sings clean and in a folky voice that ranges from playful soprano down to sultry contralto. The latter is her default voice, but Оберег especially highlights both sides of her range, reminding me of a versatile Russian pop singer called Линда, or Linda, a singer who also dipped into both folk music and goth. I'd love to hear Alkonost cover anything off Ворона, especially the title track.

Clearly I should be listening to more Alkonost. On another day, I might have given this a solid 7/10 because it's a consistently enjoyable album. Today, I'm going with an highly recommended 8/10 as it's become quite the companion over a few weeks and it still feels just as good now as it did on my first time through. A lot of otherwise wonderful albums age quickly but this one feels just as fresh as it always did. I wonder if I'll find the same with their earlier material. I may need to find out. The title translates to The Gift of the Salamander, so, hey, thank you, salamander!

Roz Vitalis - Quia Nesciunt Quid Faciunt (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Oct 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives | VK

I like the title of this album, which is Latin for Because They Don't Know What They're Doing. Of course, they do, because Roz Vitalis have been around since 2001 and this is their eleventh studio album. I've seen the name often, because they were founded by my favourite Russian harpsichord player, Ivan Rozmainsky, who was a one man band until expanding in 2005 to a group setting. This is much more modern than his chamber prog band Compassionizer, who were named for an album by Roz Vitalis, not least through the use of a lot of electric instrumentation. However, there are a couple of songs here feturing his Compassionizer bandmates.

Like Compassionizer, this is entirely instrumental progressive rock, but it's guitar led just as much as it's keyboard led, courtesy of guitarist Vladimir Semenov. This is highly varied, from the opener, Bait of Success, which is fundamentally riff-based and the guitar is only one of many instruments working that riff, to Premonition, which rocks out with full on guitar solos. One in particular soars in patient fashion, reminding a little of the Alan Parsons Project. Walking starts out in the Mark Knopfler style, another song that often reaches for a heavier guitar. However, the need isn't just heavy here and often calls for a quieter acoustic guitar instead of an electric one.

While Rozmainsky does play harpischord here, his keyboard work is also varied, from a quiet piano interlude called Fountain (and a quiet piano outro called Nocturne) to wilder space rock sections on Premonition and more traditional electronica on Wides. He plays a metallophone on Walking, which is a xylophone with metal bars, just like a glockenspiel, in a section that comes right out of a harpsichord solo and segues straight into rock guitar. He's a sort of glue here: even when he's not performing on a lead instrument, he still controls where the song is going as a composer and links sections with his keyboards.

Where clarinet is also a lead instrument in Compassionizer, Roz Vitalis is happy to stick to guitars and keyboards. However, there are other instruments here, many of which get moments to shine on Bait of Success, which often feels like a round robin giving each of them a chance to play with the core riff. It's played on guitar and it's played on keyboards, of course, in a variety of different ways. However, it's also played by flute and also on trumpet, which adds something new to the sound. Flute and trumpet lead the way on Daybreaking for quite a while and it's delightful.

I've liked each of the Compassionizer releases I've tackled thus far, but it was clear from the very first track of the very first album that they have no interest in being like anyone else. That was an entirely new experience for me, introducing me to chamber prog, and it's fair to say that they're a prog fan's prog band. I don't want to call Roz Vitalis commercial, because they're still doing their own thing, but they are far more accessible. Most of this music flows, sometimes very organically in a Philip Glass-esque way on Bait of Success. Much of it is up tempo and highly engaging. Sure, a part of the musical audience isn't going to go for instrumental music or for prog in particular, but it's easy to imagine a random fan coming into this blind and skeptical and leaving a clear fan, especially with songs like Daybreaking and Wides.

It gets more challenging eight songs in with The Man Whose Wings Were Cut Off, which is many of the things the album was up until that point but also a lot more. It's happier to be jagged at points, playing with less obvious rhythms and flows. It features heavier drums and some heavier guitar, but also drops into very delicate ethnic instrumentation, like rubab and doira with a harpsichord backdrop, because this is one of those songs with the whole of Compassionizer on it, even though most members of Roz Vitalis are still here too, bass player Ruslan Kirillov excepted.

Premonition is the epic of the album at just over nine minutes and it's a good track, but The Man Whose Wings Were Cut Off does more in under eight. It's far less accessible but it's also teasingly complex after listening to so many smoother, less challenging songs, and we almost pay attention all the more because of that. Beautifulness is a midway point, half challenging and half accessible, with obvious moments for Leonid Perevalov's bass clarinet, but it doesn't seem to have as much of a coherent identity. Moments strike me but I keep returning to The Man Whose Wings Were Cut Off instead.

While I've heard a lot of Rozmainsky's work in Compassionizer, this is my first experience of what I guess is his primary band, Roz Vitalis. I like this a lot, but it's easy music to like. It's a different side to Rozmainsky and he's often dominant, but Semenov is just as often dominant on guitar and I'm drawn to that. I believe Alexey Gorshkov is a guest here, but his trumpet stood out for me too, as a wonderful additional voice in this instrumental mix. It's been five years since the previous album from Roz Vitalis, presumably to give Rozmainsky time to build Compassionizer and they've never gone that long between albums before, so I'd guess we'll see another one sooner than 2029.

Vladimir Mikhaylov - Amor Caecus (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 26 Aug 2023

While many of the musicians involved in this album tend to play in a variety of Russian progressive rock bands, this is more of a prog adjacent album and I'm not sure how to label it. Not that that's a bad thing, of course; I love genre ambiguity. This is prog rock, post-punk, eighties alternative rock, new wave and folk music, which is quite the range, and vocalist Dmitriy Rumyancev has an unusual voice to lead these songs. It took me a while to get used to what he does but I got there and would describe him as a strange cross between Bryan Ferry and Andrew Eldritch. He usually sings for the Latvian prog/new wave group TLM.

The openers are where the most overt pop influences show up. A Twist of Flame is prog rock with a heavy side of post-punk and eighties alternative rock. There's U2 here in the guitars and Marillion in the keyboards. Runaway is even more versatile, as a pop rock song. There's more U2 here, but a heavy touch of AOR too and arena rock in the power chords and lively guitar solo, along with some new wave in the phrasing. It's Toto meeting Duran Duran with involvement from Pat Benatar, not only through the guest female vocalist, Yulia Savelyeva, either because it's in the songwriting.

The title track is an odd one, because it starts out almost like Leonard Cohen, a dark folk song that Rumyancev delivers in Latin so we don't catch the presumably biting lyrics. However, it soon turns into a proggy new wave piece, as the instrumental midsection extends into a lively guitar solo. It's Mikhaylov who provides the guitars here, as well as the bass and many other instruments, not just the drum programming but all the way to a drill and an ebow. There is an actual drummer, Evgeny Trefilov, and a few guests, whose contributions are mostly on keyboards, but much of the music is the work of Mikhailov himself.

After the title track shifts for a while into prog, the album seems more comfortable to do more of that, to varying degrees of success. Interdum is a prog instrumental, with inventive guitar against dreamy keyboards, and it's that interplay that I like the most here. It returns on Fortis Affectus, a piece that's only a minute long, so far less substantial. It's Mikhailov duetting with himself on the latter but our old friend Ivan Rozmainzsky of Roz Vitalis and Compassionizer fame guesting on the former. The two perform as RMP, the Rozmainsky & Mikhaylov Project. What's surprising here is a perky beat laid over Interdum as it's pure electronic pop over an otherwise prog instrumental and it gives a neatly contrasting feel to the piece.

Talking of Fortis Affectus being only a minute long, Megapolis is even shorter, which means that it ends as quickly as it begins. It's more Vangelis than any of the other keyboard work here, which is appreciated, but it's sadly only a glimpse at what this piece could be. It feels like it ought to exist to set a mood but oddly not for the next song, Gemini and Libra, which is quite happy to introduce itself. So maybe it's an interlude, but it doesn't seem to work that way. It works as a brief teaser to persuade us into buying the entire song, which, as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist. I wanted more of these pieces, both in length and in numbers.

While I prefer the proggier instrumentals here, which also include the closer, Exitus, the album is happier to attempt songs in its variety of ways. Gemini and Libra is very much a post-punk/alt rock hybrid in the vein of A Twist of Flame; Shadowplay is a mournful pop song that perks up a little in a folky way; and War with Your Own Shadow is another post-punk song. It's the latter that works the best for me, because it enters very consciously from the wings with ominous intent and feels much more deliberately controlled. Runaway is far more obviously commercial if Mikhaylov was looking for a single, but War with Your Own Shadow is the one with the substance.

All in all, I enjoyed this, but it's a patchwork quilt of an album. It doesn't really want to be only one thing, so it enjoys being multiple. Rumyancev's highly recognisable voice lends it some consistency, but he's not on the various instrumental pieces so he can only do so much. Of course, as the latter ended up being my favourite tracks, I must be firmly on board with the genre-hopping. However, it will fall to any potential listener to ask themselves that question and the more on board they are, the more they're likely to enjoy this. Maybe think of it as a four decade retrospective of a band on their first album.

Erode of Sadness - Enlivened (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Symphonic Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
Sites: Metal Archives | VK

OK, there's a lot here, especially early on, so I had to start afresh to make sure I was working from the right page. Vampire Coven is a forty-nine second intro that obviously plants the album's feet in gothic territory. The first track proper, The Dark Times, backs that up but initially does so using an entirely orchestral approach. The band eventually join in to add metal crunch but the vocals we hear are truly operatic in a way I haven't heard since Nova Malà Strana back in the nineties. They come courtesy of Vladislava Solovyova who doesn't just deliver a clean soprano like so many other female vocalists in symphonic metal bands; she actually sings opera.

This opener is a clear highlight, Solovyova's operatic delivery being wonderfully contrasted by the clean but dark vocals of Sinner Apollo. The worst thing about the song is that it ends and relatively quickly, under three and a half minutes into something I hoped would be an epic. What's important is that Apollo is the actual vocalist in Erode of Sadness and Solovyova is merely a welcome guest, a side opportunity to her own band, a symphonic metal band called Rabies that I'm especially eager to seek out to see how she sounds there. It's an odd choice, to bring in a guest lead vocalist on the first proper track on a debut album, because it gives the wrong impression, but it's a great song.

There's another guest vocalist, also female, but she doesn't show up until Supernova Remnant, so there are three tracks for Apollo to enforce his presence as the actual lead singer.

He sounds excellent and underlines that the core sound of this band is gothic not symphonic, even though orchestration continues to play a major part in the sound, especially the violins which start out Blood and Grace and are pivotal in Lie to Me. The other important note to make is that Apollo shifts to a harsh voice at points, unless there's another member of the band who steps up at those points to add further contrast. Certainly there's a section in Lie to Me where both clean and harsh voices sing together, an easy enough effect to achieve in post-production but not so easily in a live environment.

That other guest is Evgenia Frantseva, the singer for doom/death metal band Odium Throne, who sings clean here with an almost hoarse emphasis, while Apollo varies between clean voice, harsh voice and an electronically manipulated effect. I love these variations from the band's core sound, though, of course, they're most obvious on the two songs with guests, however often the choir has opportunity to vary the tone. There are thirteen tracks on this album, along with a bonus track and two intros, so Apollo gets eleven plus one and guests get two. It may not help that, as excellent as he is, I'm still thinking of this band as best with both male and female vocals.

But I need to review the album I'm listening to not the album that I'm imagining given one track on it. Apollo's voice is deep and rich, very much in the Andrew Eldritch tradition but with melody more like Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM and 69 Eyes. These songs certainly bear that influence but a heavier one too, from bands a little further afield like Lacrimas Profundere. There's an occasional shift into much heavier territory too, like on Blood from the Cross, which increases the tempo and prompts plenty of grit in Apollo's voice even when he's not singing harsh. If Erode of Sadness often drop into gothic rock on some other songs, this is the most gothic metal they get.

Given that this is a debut album, I wonder where they'll move stylistically. It feels like the majority of songs are gothic rock with rich male vocals, orchestration and hints at harshness, so maybe that will be the whole of their next album. Maybe, though, it's where they started and they grew into a more metallic sound that verges on extreme metal in those harsh vocals and the urgency of Blood from the Cross. Maybe The Dark Times has always been an anomaly, with Solovyova invited not for a general expansion of sound but just because she was there and could add something to it.

Who knows? I certainly don't, but I'll be keeping an eye open for that second album to find out.

Compassionizer - A Tribute to George Harrison (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives

I've reviewed a few Compassionizer albums, partly because Ivan Rozmainsky continues to send me copies and partly because I'm thoroughly enjoying their brand of chamber prog, a genre that was completely new to me when I first heard An Ambassador in Bonds. Here's another one, but it's the most unusual of them thus far, because, as the title suggests, it's not of original material, at least not entirely. All five of these songs were written by George Harrison, two of them for the Beatles and three for solo records. They range from 1965 to as late as 1987 and they all featured vocals but Compassionizer reimagine them here instrumentally.

They're an interesting set too, most of which are new to me. The only track I can play in my head is Here Comes the Sun, from the 1969 Beatles album Abbey Road, though of course it's very different here. The opener is an earlier Beatles song, If I Needed Someone, which I'm sure I've heard but I'm unable to recall. That's from their Rubber Soul album and is an important track because it's one of the songs that introduced the sitar to pop/rock music. That's right here in this version too, albeit I presume in synthesised form. The three solo tracks I've probably never heard.

I'm not a particular fan of tribute albums, because most of the tracks on them, indeed most cover versions period, are so close to their originals that there seems to be little point to them. I tend to look for reimagination in cover versions, where songs can be given an entirely new life by bands or artists working in completely different styles, such as the wonderful Rubáiyát double album that was released for Elektra's fortieth anniversary, where many contributors were so successful that I prefer their versions to the originals.

Of course, the versions of these songs are all wildly different from the originals, because as varied as the Beatles got, they aren't known for their chamber prog. Now, had I listened completely blind instead of doing some basic research first, I'd still have recognised Here Comes the Sun, but that's quickly diverted into entirely new musical territory and it's all the better for that.

I did check out the other songs before listening to these versions, but one listen was not enough to connect the original with the reinvention in my mind, so they played as effectively new music, as if I was listening to a new Compassionizer release rather than a tribute. They even flow into each other, so that individual songs play more like movements in a suite. I have a feeling that, for those of you who know these songs backwards, that might still hold true, because, even though this is a tribute album, this material was treated as a starting point rather than a be all end all and so the music starts out as George Harrison songs but gradually becomes Compassionizer tracks.

What surprised me the most from checking out the originals is that, even though George Harrison is known as a guitarist, these songs are often known just as much for their vocals, indeed lyrics, as for their guitarwork. As Compassionizer play them entirely instrumentally, that means that what most people know from these songs simply aren't here, but they're still able to create fascinating music from that bedrock. In particular, The Light That Has Lighted the World, from the 1973 album Living in the Material World, is well loved for its lyrics. Instead, Compassionizer focus more on its use of slide guitar and improvise that into something new.

The track before that is Isn't It a Pity, originally on Harrison's 1970 album, All Things Must Pass. It has a hypnotic drive to it, so that we almost don't pay attention to Harrison singing, and that's the element that Compassionizer run with here, even though the song runs a few minutes shorter. The track after it is Just for Today, from Cloud Nine, and it used to be a quiet and simple song, driven by piano but with some excellent slide guitar. That's the album that gave us Got My Mind Set on You, but this is a better piece to reinvent and Compassionizer build on its piano nicely.

I see that they're calling this a short album, but it's a really short album, even shorter than their previous release, As Smoke is Driven Away, which they labelled an EP. However, before you start to wonder about value for money, I should point out that it's available on Bandcamp for a price that's whatever you want it to be, all the way down to free, so it's excellent value for money, even at only twenty-three minutes. Free means that you have no excuse not to check it out, but I recommend a deeper dive into what Rozmainsky and his colleagues have been doing under the Compassionizer name, because they're probably unlike anything you've ever heard before and that's a good thing. Even if you grew up on George Harrison.

Аркона - Kob' (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Pagan Black/Folk Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 16 Jun 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | VK | YouTube

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Arkona, or Аркона in their native Cyrillic, started out as a folk metal band with black metal elements but gradually swapped those elements around to turn into a black metal band with folk metal elements. That start was a couple of decades ago, in 2002 and, by this point, ten albums in, they've moved a little beyond both, to become something a little less classifiable. This could be easily called post-black metal or simply progressive metal with extreme elements.

As their albums tend to be, it's an hour long, so there's a lot of material to explore, but it's focused into a small number of long tracks. Kob', which I'm unable to translate, lasts for seven minutes and Razryvaya plot' ot bezyskhodnosti bytiya matches it, a name that translates into the almost Celtic Frostian Tearing the Flesh from the Hopelessness of Being. That's pretty black metal right there, I might suggest. Ugasaya, Mor and Na zakate bagrovogo solntsa surpass nine. I'm unsure what Mor means, but the others mean Fading Away, apparently common enough that it only needs one word in Cyrillic, and At the Setting of the Crimson Sun. Ydi, or Go, almost reaches twelve.

The bookends are neither folk nor black metal. They're dark ambient, brimming with atmosphere but half of it's whispered horror and the other half a visitation from Russian cyberpunk gods. It's a long intro, as well, over four minutes of it, to get us into a certain mood. The whispering continues throughout the album as a segue between each track. There's dark ambience within the tracks as well, often as what could e called interludes between parts but shouldn't be because they count as parts all on their own.

Part of this is because the keyboards that drive the more ambient sections are provided by Masha or Scream, the only founder member in the band, though both guitarist Sergei (Lazar) and bassist Ruslan (Kniaz) have played on all ten albums. She's the driving force in the band, because she's the songwriter and lyricist and she handles the lead vocals too, though it's hard to tell which they are, because she does so in a host of different styles, both clean and harsh, soft and strident, chanting and brutal. I'm guessing all the voices are hers except the most obvious male voice, which may be either Sergei or Vlad, who's provided many folk instruments since 2011.

I like the title track, which works through quite the dynamic range, but Ydi surpasses it effortlessly and only gets better with repeat listens. It begins with a soft guitar that's almost a brook babbling over the whispers. It escalates soon enough, with a strident vocal from Masha that's underpinned by neat melodies. It builds into a more epic black metal style, almost martial in its assault, like the band are playing this as they hurtle over a hill towards us, the drums galloping horses. Sergei adds a screaming guitar solo around the three minute mark and then it all turns into a threatening folk chant, like something from the Hu. There's so much here and we're still only four minutes or so in.

Much of what follows is made of black metal components, but it's misleading to suggest that it's a black metal song or indeed a black metal album. The drums are often very fast, but the guitars are rarely interested in simply generating a wall of sound. They're often sharp. Some of the voices are bleak, though others are far cleaner and folkier. It's often black metal, but it's approachable for it without becoming soft and it's approachable because of those folkier elements. I should note that Arkona don't toggle between the two approaches, rather combining them with fascinating effect, which often takes the form of chanting vocals floating over the hurtling drums.

The folk elements show up in other ways too, often without us expecting them. Late in Ugasaya, for example, there's a strong black metal section but it suddenly gets bouncy and, however versatile a subgenre it's proving to be, bouncy is not a typical black metal attribute. Then again, Ugasaya was almost synthwave as it opened. One of my favourite Russian musicians is a pop singer called Linda, who trawls folk elements into a more electronic style that's moved through a lot of genres. Masha isn't unlike Linda as this one starts out, though she moves a long way beyond her as it runs on. She gets there in Razryvaya plot' ot bezyskhodnosti bytiya too.

The dynamic play here is fascinating and the changes and shifts in emphasis are just as fascinating. That's why it's easy to think of this as progressive metal or at least post-black metal rather than a purer form, not that "pure" doesn't come with its own problematic impressions in this genre. The whole thing becomes problematic. Just don't think of this as black metal, even when it is. Think of it as prog metal because then, when it shifts off into synthwave or folk or whatever else, it's going to make a lot more sense. Sometimes, as with bands like Opeth, labels become unhelpful except as indicators of how varied an album truly is.

I like this a lot. It wasn't what I expected but it impressed me on a first listen and, as I delve deeper into these songs on repeat listens, it impresses me even more. For highlights, Ydi stands above all this but Ugasaya is stunning, Mor continues to grow on me, especially from its midsection onward, including some fascinating flutes, and, frankly, everything here is worthy. I feel like I should listen another half a dozen times before posting this, but I have other music to move onto. The curse of being a critic is that I can't spend long enough on any particular release. Here, I really want to. It's not a pool to dip into. It's an ocean to explore.

Compassionizer - As Smoke is Driven Away (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Apr 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives

I've reviewed a couple of Compassionizer albums now and the Russian chamber prog collective are usually pretty concise with their songwriting, even if they split a song up over multiple parts. Each of the albums I've reviewed has featured just one long piece of music, the thirteen minutes of Bear Ye One Another's Burdens on An Ambassador in Bonds and the fourteen of Kramatorsk on Narrow is the Road; nothing else on those albums came close. Well, here's what I guess we should call an EP, because "single" doesn't seem to cut it when the one track on offer is twenty minutes long. As you might imagine, there's a lot going on in this instrumental, which is easily the most expansive I've heard from Compassionizer.

The other surprising note is in which instruments are dominant. Ivan Rozmainsky has always been the driving force behind Compassionizer and he's primarily a keyboard player. Sure, he does add a kalimba and a vibraphone here too, but much of what he plays is on various different synthesisers. As such, he's all over this track but mostly in the background for a change. He seems to be content this time out with providing an atmosphere for the track against which the lead instruments can perform. Sometimes that's minimal and sometimes more expansive but he's rarely the lead. Even when he's dancing around that vibraphone late in the piece like he's the whole twinkling night sky, there's a clarinet or a guitar there to dance with him.

Mostly, the lead falls to the clarinets, which have never been a typical rock instrument the way the flute became because of Ian Anderson, but which felt right on the first Compassionizer album and ongoing. Clarinets are such inquisitive instruments, almost the raccoons of the musical world They are always seeking out new truths or new absurdities and that makes them a flexible way to help us visualise music. The bass clarinet here is played by Leonid Perevalov and the rest come courtesy of AndRey Stefinoff.

And there is a story here, or at least a theme, for us to visualise. The concept here is all about "the Mystery of the Victory of Good over Evil". Certainly there's a general sweep from dark to light and from jagged, avant-garde rhythms and phrases to more beautiful, traditional ones. I would expect that the bass clarinet is playing a dark role here, whether it's meant to be specific or general, and what I presume is a soprano clarinet represents its eternal counterpart. However, if the piece aims at deeper storytelling like we might expect in thematically ambitious pieces in classical music, I'm not hearing it. This feels more abstract, so that we can all conjure up our own interpretations but never be far wrong.

Talking of rhythms, the drums are a player in this game too. Not everything features percussion, a state of affairs that may be in part because Serghei Liubcenco, who plays traditional drums, doira and other forms percussion, is also the guitarist and bassist on this piece, so he's wearing a lot of hats this time out. When the bass clarinet is dominant, the drums often back it up like an army, a show of force to overwhelm delicacy. His guitar is even more fascinating, showing up not to play a rhythm or a riff but perhaps to depict the power of chaos.

I wasn't intending to assign characters to the different instruments, like Peter and the Wolf, but I guess I'm kind of doing that anyway. Unfortunately, I don't have a cast list and there may not be a cast list, so I'm stabbing rather blind. For a start, there's a firm transition halfway through that's done on viola and I have no idea what that represents. Of course, it may not represent anything at all and so I'm never going to find that answer. The piece also drifts away and it feels like there may be a reason for that which I'm blissfully unable to see.

Of course, there's never been a requirement to make sense out of any piece of music, even if it has a conceptual theme. You can just back and enjoy. This is certainly an engaging piece that ought to keep fans of Compassionizer happy until their next album, but the longer the pieces they play, the more I feel like there are meanings to be found. Maybe there are no answers and Rozmainsky just likes prompting us to ask questions. And should that ever be surprising in progressive rock?

Dark Princess - Phoenix (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
Sites: Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | VK

If I'm understanding correctly, Dark Princess was formed in 2004 as a solo project for lead vocalist Olga Trifonova, who may have created the first album on her own. However, there was certainly a band for the second album, which is when Stepan Zuev arrived on keyboards and backing vocals. It looks like they released four albums in total before splitting up in 2017, though Trifonova actually left after three, so the fourth is with a different lead vocalist, Natalia Terekhova. She returned in 2020 when the band reformed with a new line-up to support Trifonova and Zuev, each new member recruited from the latter's other band, Sangvis, who play melodic death metal and metalcore.

This is the first product of the new line-up and it's a far cry from those genres. This is gothic metal, mostly heavier than we'd call gothic rock but with occasional dips back to that side of the fence, at points when electronica joins in and the drum sound shifts. The intro to The Pain I Need adds violin too and could have been taken from a Dead Can Dance album. The song settles into rock and then heavies up to metal, before ramping back down to that intro sound at the end. That's not unusual for this album.

Generally speaking, the album aims at the elegance of gothic music, everything on offer polished mahogany and brass, with a clean symphonic metal lead vocal from Trifonova. Zuev doesn't join in on every song and how he does so depends on the material. He showcases a harsh vocal in support on the opening title track and especially on Falling to Fly, but he's also able to shift to a clean vocal, as he does on The Light and My Chance, to name but two. On a first listen, it was the heavier songs where he stood out most, but gradually I realised he was there a lot more than I'd initially heard.

I can see why this used to be a solo project, because Trifonova is certainly the most obvious aspect of the band's sound and almost everything else seems to be there to support it. That extends to an odd lack of opportunities for the backing musicians to move into the spotlight and shine. There's a decent guitar solo on Taste of Freedom from Denis Burkin that almost surprised me and there's a strange break between it and the rest of the song, as if they had no idea how to connect the two in a seamless manner, so just stopped and started again. The similar solo on The Light doesn't segue well either but it's much more effective, both as a solo and as part of a song.

Of course, then there's another solo on the next song, My Chance, which is shorter but seamlessly integrated, and then another one on Your Flame that's likewise, with a reprise no less, and it feels all of a sudden that this is a guitar band. However, once the solos are over, the guitar is lowered in the mix and we're back to a predominantly vocal outlook. And that's fine, but my biggest concern here is in the lack of hooks. Trifonova sounds wonderful and everything she does is melody but I'm not going to be waking up in the morning with any of these songs playing in my head and that's even more important if the focus is going to be so ruthlessly on the vocals.

What I found most odd here was that my favourite songs are the heaviest and the lightest. Anyone who's read a lot of my reviews won't be surprised to hear the former because, while I like bands to vary what they do and keep their albums interesting, I also dig the heavy stuff. However, the latter is a lot more unusual. I don't dislike soft and subtle music and I don't dislike ballads as a matter of course, but I do tend to be less fond of lighter material on heavier albums, which is Not Enough in a nutshell.

However, I'd place it alongside Falling to Fly, with all those harsh backing vocals, as my highlights here, because Trifonova is a delight and in her element in an aria that allows her to exercise some more subtle elements of her talent, like intonation and playing with emphasis. The orchestration behind her isn't entirely unpredictable but it has some nice subtleties to it too. That it heavies up in the third act is merely a bonus. It would have been a highlight for me even if it hadn't.

I wanted a little more from this album than the band seemed willing to give, but it's a decent and welcome return for a band who have been gone from the studio for over a decade.

Concrete Age - Bardo Thodol (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | VK

This is the eighth album by Concrete Age, founded in the very southwest of Russia, in Mineralnye Vody just north of the Georgian Border, in between the Black and Caspian Seas, but resident since 2014 in London, England. I found it listed as melodic death metal and Metal Archives have thrash and power metal tags as well. There's not much power metal on this album, though True Believer wraps up in that vein, but there's plenty of thrash metal on the faster songs like Hex, Lullaby for a Deadman and Ridges of Suffering, downtuned into an overtly death metal pitch and accompanied by harsher vocals than are the thrash norm.

All of that said, though, I'd call this folk metal as much as any of those and I see on the band's own website that they describe themselves as "ethnic death/thrash metal". That rings quickly true, as does the mission statement, that "our project is based on different ancient cultures from all over the world. During our live performance, we use ethnic instruments and mix them with metal." I'm not seeing what those instruments are on this album, but I'd love to know.

Hex opens up the album with ethnic chanting and that vibe doesn't entirely leave when the intro ends, even if it does for a while. There are folk melodies underpinning everything, which become a little more obvious when the band drop away from the crunch for effect and we're treated to clear ethnic sections. Many of these sections feel middle eastern but even more feel Eastern European and it isn't too much of a shock to discover that this is a truly international band. Ilia Morozov, the only founder member remaining, is Russian, but Boris Zahariev is Bulgarian, while Giovanni Ruiu and Davide Marina, who may or may not still be in the band, are both Italian.

Early on, the focus is on that downtuned thrash sound, with ethnic intros and drops away into that side of the band's sound for effect, but the second half of Purity is pure folk metal, unfolding like a heavy and frantic jig, the sort of thing that Gogol Bordello might jam on amphetamines. It's wild and jaunty and it's thoroughly engaging. It's hard not to move to it, even if sometimes we feel like snakes being charmed. By True Believer, that folk metal vibe becomes inherent, almost impossible to separate from the thrash/death sound. That this is the song that ends up as power metal is wild and one reason why it's my pick for best song, even if it isn't a clearcut choice.

And, as much as this old thrash hound dug the faster, thrashier sections in songs like True Believer, and Morozov does spit out the vocals with a neatly harsh growl, I found the bouncy folk sections so irresistible that they became the focus for me. Is that a call to prayer halfway through? It ought to fit the title. Is that a jig or a Cossack dance in the second half of Threads of Fate, when it gets even more lively than usual? Certainy, Trite Puti is as folk metal as it gets, a two minute interlude that's right up there with the songs proper on this album. Thunderland approaches the Hu in emphasis.

And so it goes, moving more and more into folk metal as it runs on, with the title track another of a bunch of highlights. It's folk metal from the outset, courtesy of a middle eastern riff, as crunchy as it is, and it never really loses the folk metal, even when it gets its head down and enters furious mode for a while. That riff gets, well, riffed on during the midsection, and we're right back in that Gogol Bordello territory, maybe a little further south but still Balkan. It's riotous and a whole heck of a lot of fun, which was something I didn't expect.

I wonder how they came to this sound and how recently. Given that it's most overt in the guitars, I wonder if it's been there all along with Morozov, who's one of the guitarists in addition to singing lead, or whether it arrived with Zahariev on the other guitar. It's there in their mission statement on their website, but hasn't been reflected in third party informational sites, suggesting that it's a newer approach for them.

Clearly I should check out their earlier albums, which have come thick and fast. Their debut, Time to Awake, came out in 2012 and they've never gone more than a couple of years between albums until now with COVID the likely reason. It's been three since Spirituality in 2020. I do like finding new favourite bands right at the beginning of a new year.

Compassionizer - Narrow is the Road (2022)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives

One of the most fascinating albums I've been sent for review was An Ambassador in Bonds, which was last year's release from Russian band Compassionizer. My review followed my futile attempts to figure out quite what Ivan Rozmainsky and the various musicians he enlisted were trying to do, right down to the genre of music they played. For the sake of a label, it's progressive rock, but it's not prog in a typical form. The lead instrument was a clarinet, for a start! I didn't reach the term "chamber prog", which is perfect, in that review but I found the links to classical music clear.

It's probably easier to do that here on their next album, which is their third, and now I've seen the term, I can google it and see that it's quite a movement that goes back to bands like Aksak Maboul and Univers Zero. Hello, new rabbit hole, my friend! This could be considered pure chamber prog, I guess, because it doesn't remotely pretend to sit in the rock genre. What percussion there is here is a long way from traditional drumming, and, while Rozmainsky brings in abrasive textures on his synths, almost with the goal of keeping this experimental, the vast majority of these tracks could been recorded with the instruments in a school music room, albeit maybe not an English one.

And, given that most of it is happier and calmer in nature than the prior album, it's not much of a stretch to picture that. Music was a mandatory class at my grammar school in England and I recall certain moments where the teacher taught us unusual approaches, like creating a score not with traditional notes but with lines of colour or even random squiggles. Our attempts to interpret the results on xylophones and violins, or whatever we had to hand, probably sounded painful, but now I can look back and imagine Andre Stefinoff as a child prodigy picking up a clarinet in that class to play a piece like The Invasion of a Crying Shame, with Rozmainsky and Serghei Liubcenco joining in on the nearest instruments.

While I liked the opener, Only One Road for the Wayward, which probably contains the darkest of the material here, especially in its jazzy midsection, The Invasion of a Crying Shame is where this album grabbed me. It's a wildly experimental piece but it doesn't seem so because its melody is a timeless earworm that it steals our focus. It has a mediaeval troubadour feel to me but a carefree one with hints of darkness, as if the plague had visited town but then moved on again leaving only a couple of people dead instead of everyone. There's certainly solemnity in it but hope as well.

And things certainly get happier and more hopeful from there, in Black Sky White and especially I Need You to Help and onward, to provide an increasingly uplifting tone after this early darkness. I liked this shift in tone, even though I'm usually fonder of the darker material on albums. Last time out, I mentioned that it would have seemed jazzy, if everything didn't seem so deliberately placed. This album is jazzier, because it's less deliberately placed. It's looser and folkier and more organic and textures arrive and depart whenever they feel like it.

I often got the feeling, especially on songs like the title track, that Rozmainsky simply acquired a slew of interesting musical instruments and placed them into a studio to serve as a well equipped petting zoo, then invited only professional musicians with open minds to check them out. They did so, seeing what sounds might manifest from a rubab or a doira or a tbilat, promptly tapping into each other's grooves. The beginning of In Things Too High for Me could have been the theme tune to a BBC children's show on the wireless in the fifties. Naturally that show would have been about creativity and the synths that Rozmainsky adds next would have blown people's minds back then.

The only catch to the looseness and spontaneity is that his electronic overlays sometimes become a distraction, as with the staticky glitch work on Kramatorsk. I loved the beeps and chirps on most of these songs, like The Invasion of a Crying Shame or In Things Too High for Me, but I was notably frustrated by Kramatorsk, which I ended up removing from the playlist as I listened through again and again to see how this grew and shifted on me with repeats. While Kramatorsk is fourteen and a half minutes of music, even taking it out leaves three quarters of an hour to explore over and over.

That track is why I'm only going with 7/10 this time, instead of the 8/10 that I gave An Ambassador in Bonds. This is more fascinating chamber prog, lighter and looser but just as enticing and worthy of a heck of a lot of exploration. Thanks, Hans and Ivan, for sending this one over.

Pristine Kids - Leave No Trace (2022)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 2 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

That's a dark and angry note to kick off this prog rock album from Russia! It utterly stripped away any preconceptions I might have had as to where this was going to go and it took a while for me to find my bearings. There's some Pink Floyd in the guitars, some wicked precision in the drums and a real anger in the bass, but it's the powerhouse vocals of Ri Vinogradova that steal our attention the most. Hers is not a voice to forget!

It's hard to describe what she does here. She doesn't leap in front of the band and take over from the instruments. She's arguably not the dominant force at this point, because that bass is so prominent in the mix that it's impossible to ignore. However, she simply refuses to do what we expect, which ought to start with the fact that we expect a singer to sing and Vinogradova just doesn't do much of that here. That's not to say that this is an instrumental album; she's all over it, just doing other things.

She doesn't sing here so much as she speaks in tongues. She croons and she snarls and she flows in rivulets. She's velvet and she's ice and she's acid. She's restrained danger and she's unrestrained fury. She's an angel and she's a horde of demons. Whatever she does is notable and magnetic and that holds for when it's merely to pause a lot more than we expect early in Hide and Seek. Stop It isn't the only showcase for her voice here, but it's an excellent start.

I have to wonder about her background, because her palette is especially rich. She's not just a rock singer, that's for sure. Surely, she's done musical theatre because she's so dynamic. I would expect jazz in there too, because of the way she does so much without actually using words. Stop It shows that there's blues and gospel too, maybe at the heart of everything, with soul erupting from that. And I have to wonder about the background of her bandmates too, because there's theatrics in all they do as well. The drummer is Baard Kolstad and everything else not a guest texture is played by producer Sasha Smirnov, who also wrote the lyrics.

I mention guest textures, because there are textures everywhere here and many of them are the contribution of guests, the flute on Hide and Seek, the viola and cello on A Pillar of Salt and a bass solo on Lullaby that's delightfully smooth. That's not all of them, because there's a circus texture late in A Pillar of Salt and a musical box texture in Lullaby that are presumably due to Smirnov, an impressively versatile musician, who moves effortlessly from surf to prog to heavy grunge.

There's a musical box feel in Boundless too, which also features plenty of aging static and ends up sounding like new wave, Björk jamming with Shriekback, but there's so much versatility on offer, it would be crazy to suggest that this band sound like anyone else exclusively. Pristine Kids may well sound like all sorts of other people at points, but they're just grabbing colours and textures for an impressive musical palette. On the other side of their auditory blender, we get neatly original in a host of different ways for different songs. Boundless is not Stop It and neither are Silence.

The challenge is to reconcile all of this as one band, which is one I'm relishing. There's a special joy in how a song like Silence evolves. It starts out as jagged alternative rock, drops into experimental classical, adds jazzy rhythms over a sultry Vinogradova, grows into intricacy with a neat viola, and then launches into angry bass-heavy grunge, Vinogradova screaming just as well as she crooned. I loved this song on a first listen but I'm still exploring its depths after half a dozen. And, to a lesser degree, the same goes for the entire album.

Compassionizer - An Ambassador in Bonds (2021)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives

I didn't find progressive rock until 1984, when Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show sprang it on me at the same time as every other form of rock and metal from Steely Dan to Venom, but I was never in any doubt that it was a gamechanger a decade earlier. I imagined people who had grown up knowing exactly what music was (whatever they grew up listening to) hearing it for the first time and being shocked into wondering what was happening. In the eighties, however, it was just prog rock, as we had come to terms with what it was, put boundaries around it and labelled it off.

I mention that because this second album from Compassionizer, a musical project built around the keyboardist Ivan Rozmainsky, feels like it has to be prog rock but maybe isn't, as it ignores just as many traditions as it adheres to. This doesn't sound like Yes or Genesis or King Crimson, if they're what spring to mind when you think of prog rock. Maybe there's some Canterbury here, especially on The Man That Sitteth Not in the Seat of the Scornful. Maybe there's some krautrock in here, on An Ambassador in Bonds (Part 3), with what sound like seagulls flying out of the synths. However, I'd suggest that it doesn't sound like whichever bands you think of in either of those genres either.

So what else could it be? It isn't jazz, either, even though the main instrument is often the clarinet of Andrey Stefinoff. Yeah, I said Compassionizer was built around a keyboard player and it is, with those keyboards primarily being synths and also frequently harpsichord, as at the very outset on the intro to Follow After Meekness, but this isn't remotely Vangelis or Jean-Michel Jarre. Maybe there's some Tomita here, not that you'd ever confuse the sounds, as the main reason it isn't jazz is that every piece feels carefully built and every moment is precisely what Rozmainsky wants it to be. He's not just playing with the air to see what happens when he does interesting things to it.

And that makes me wonder if the closest comparison ought to be to contemporary composers, not that this is classical music, even with so much harpsichord and clarinet, but it is very deliberate in its composition. Rozmainsky doesn't seem particularly interested in songs with hooks, far beyond this being entirely instrumental; he's much more interested in riffs and rhythms, as well as more esoteric things like contrasts and layers, making a lot of this play out to me like a folk prog take on Philip Glass albums like Glassworks. And there are responses. This album often feels as if it's really a conversation between instruments, especially on An Ambassador in Bonds (Part 1).

If musical experimentation for its own sake sounds like an emotionless endeavour, I should point out that this is very emotional music. Different Sides of Ascension, as the title suggests, plays in a lot of different tones that elicit very different emotions. It moves from cheerful celebration into darker, more thoughtful tones but reemerges somewhat into the light before it ends. I am Sitting on the Pier is wistful. Hard-Won Humility is questioning.

Surely the most striking piece here is the title track, which appears in three very different parts. The first is thoughtful and it shifts from gentle to volatile, with the most overt guitarwork on the album. The second is martial and processional, unfolding in bold brass. The third, later on, returns to pensive and adds playful to the mix, before it gets really interesting with the introduction of an array of layers, undulating like an ocean. I should add that everything here is interesting, so when it gets even more interesting, we ought to pay attention.

If there's a problem here, it's that all these pieces of music feel like they ought to run forever, but they end and usually sooner and less clearly than I wanted them to. It's immersive stuff and I just wasn't ready to climb out of any of it. At least, there's an earlier Compassionizer album for me to check out, 2020's Caress of Compassion, and a whole slew of albums by Rozmainsky's main band, a possibly similar chamber prog outfit called Roz Vitalis, who have released ten studio albums and nine live ones since their founding in 2001, including a 2007 album called Compassionizer. I guess it may be the key to this.

April Rain - Mirror of Ether (2021)

Country: Russia
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives

I liked this from the very beginning, Prince Rupert's Drop being a capable owner, but it grew on me as the next few songs underlined just how much mastery April Rain have over their tone. Post-rock needs tone as much as nuance to be able to conjure up the soundscapes it exists to do and this has both. The chime sound midway through Tin Woodsman is evocative and the tone as Chiral Allergy begins is just as exquisite as the echo at the start of Tsuru.

April Rain, presumably named for the song by Delain, began life as a one man band in the Ukraine but the civil war prompted Valera Bykov to move to Russia, where they expanded to a four piece and have released a number of albums. If I'm counting properly, this is their sixth studio album. Certainly, they have a maturity to them that's most overt on songs with major builds like Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. This one starts out with beautiful but exquisitely sharp guitar notes that sound like icicles falling. As it grows, we can imagine the seasons turning, increasingly quickly until they start to blur.

That maturity is obvious on a first listen, but repeat runs through make it all the more impossible to miss. This may be deceptively easy music to listen to, but it's hard to avoid the emotional arc running through Prince Rupert's Drop, achieved by contrasting such delicacy with such intensity. Many of the nine songs still to come do that too and I think the transitions are my favourite part of the album.

If there's anything better here, it would have to be the way April Rain handle echo. It might seem like there's little happening in Remission, for instance, which is just a brief interlude between halves, but if we open our ears, we'll hear that everything's happening. It's so deep that we fall into it, which is a great way to start Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. The echo on the percussion in Tsuru is impeccable, and it makes me wonder which of various meanings of that Japanese word they're aiming at. It may be the noun for crane, but I'm going more for the verb meaning to lure in, tempt or entice.

Information about April Rain seems to be thin on the ground, at least in the English language. What I can find all seems to come from the same source, which may or may not be out of date. I'm presuming that Valera Bykov is still the main guy in the band and that he's playing guitar. If the line-up I found is still accurate, there's also Pasha Kuznecov on guitar, Vasya Juravlev on bass and Denis Arynovich on drums. They're all patient and precise, doing exactly as much or as little as they need to conjure up an atmosphere and let it flow. I'm impressed with all of them, separately and together.

This is a generous album, lasting only seconds shy of an hour, but there are no epics here. With just a single exception in that interlude, that means nine pieces of music of between five and eight minutes each. That seems to be a sweet spot for April Rain, because it allows them to build songs naturally and let them breathe in the process. The moments of silence hovering between notes are just as important as the notes themselves.

I haven't heard the five April Rain albums before this one, but I'm eager to check them out because of the strength of this one. It's so quintessentially what the genre is all about that maybe the definition of post-rock at Wikipedia should be a link to this album's Bandcamp page.

I am Waiting for You Last Summer - Self-Defense (2020)

Country: Russia
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | VK

In the mood for some unusual post-rock before I listened to the new Pig Destroyer, I sampled a bunch of albums before I found anything particularly interesting. Then this one showed up and I knew it was the one. I am Waiting for You Last Summer (talk about a band name designed for post-rock!) hail from Ryazan, three hours outside Moscow, and I don't know a heck of a lot about them. They appear to have three members, one of whom is Sasha Sokolov (not the Canadian-born Russian writer) and this is their third album. Sokolov also keeps himself busy with side projects and work for Hollywood trailers.

That latter makes a lot of sense, because this is highly cinematic but in a schizophrenic way. Certainly the album doesn't tell a coherent story, but I'm not convinced that many of the individual tracks do either. It's like they tell parts of separate much longer stories, broken up into highlights to hint at a bigger picture, while remaining engaging and dynamic. Boiling Point, for instance, sounds rather like the good five minutes of a Michael Bay movie but with the boring two and a half hours stripped away.

There is an overarching concept, the album's Bandcamp page tells us. It's "about what happens inside the mind of a person living in a big city in the era of ubiquitous digitalization." Or, as if to highlight the cinematic nature of the music: "The person is by themselves, surrounded by digital avatars." This suggests to me a world in which we pay little attention to the physical world surrounding us because our connections are virtual instead, making for crowds full of people who never interact in person. By extension, that suggests a barer, more fragmented world in which what we're used to seeing in shared spaces has been gradually shifted to individual digital overlays.

That's pretty damn cyberpunk and the music that follows does a pretty good job of detailing that, not least because it's almost entirely instrumental. The introduction, Brave New World, is calm and warm and empty, as if we're in our safe space. Then In Circles hits us from a dozen directions at once, like the flavours in the air if we stand in the middle of a food court and close our eyes. But in Neo-Tokyo.

Listening to In Circles is like travelling at speed through a thriving metropolis, with ambient sounds around us waxing and waning, erupting and vanishing, according to a whole host of external factors. The pulsing beat suggests we're not walking but riding in a vehicle with the windows open through a city that seems alive but only when we look down on it from above with timelapse photography so we appear as merely one streak of light of many. There's so much to unpack from this song. I heard bits of Tangerine Dream and Gary Numan and a host of others I don't recognise.

In Circles is only one of a few highlights here, and there's more Tangerine Dream to find on the closer, Renascence, but it's a fantastic place to start because it takes us out there, somewhere, anywhere, and we don't really return to ourselves until the album's over. It's a hard task for a band to do that when the listener is on headphones in a dark room, let alone on speakers in an office, but I am Waiting for You Last Summer manage it here with ease. No hallucinogenics needed.

Je Me Demande deserves mention too, not only because it's the only piece of music here to feature a vocal track, presumably courtesy of Gdeto, who's the guest on it. It's dreamy stuff from the outset and her voice adds to that feel. While there's rock all through this album, there's plenty of pop here too and this moves from the latter to the former with panache, dreampop to searing guitar solo.

Everything Ends takes a little while to build, but it's well worth the wait for it to get there because it functions as its own crescendo. It feels not only apocalyptic but inexorable, yet somehow not final, as it's not cut off at its peak. It does end but there are a couple more pieces of music to come, so it's only a temporary end. And the first of those is Boiling Point, my favourite piece here, a heavier one but an ethnic one too. The drumming occasionally reminded me of the Geinoh Yamashirogumi soundtrack to Akira, but it's industrialised up and with other melodies overlaid. It's interweaving layers and they're fascinating.

In short, there's a lot here and I look forward to shifting this one onto earphones in the dark.

Alligator - Direct Heart Massage (2020)

Country: Ukraine or Russia (depending on which country you're reading from)
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Metal Archives | VK

It's been a good year for thrash metal but it hasn't been a great one, with a lot of the big names releasing albums that are worthy but not outstanding. Annihilator still have the edge for me thus far in 2020 and I've never been a particularly big Annihilator fan. So I've been wandering virtually around the globe looking for more good stuff in the hope of finding great stuff. I expect to be looking all year but here's another good album from Sevastopol in the Ukraine (or is it Russia now?), courtesy of Alligator.

Instrumentally, they're excellent, and they stay that way during long intros on many of these tracks. A Chisel, which opens the album, runs on for a full minute and a half before vocals show up and the song only lasts a couple of minutes longer. The intro for Dying For takes a full minute of the three and half that the song runs. And these are far from acoustic intros intended to set a mood, they feature the whole band riffing away at full pelt. Ditch the long intro and you get songs like So Fear is Born, which is a blitzkrieg at under two minutes in the vein of Destruction.

Most of the first half is fast, beginning with A Chisel, which is enough to get the blood pumping without any of the manual intervention depicted on the cover art. It's not breakneck though, because this is technical thrash and it lives or dies on its riffs and changes rather than its sheer speed. It's consistently fast enough to keep me happy as I do like fast thrash bands so much more than those who stay relentlessly at mid-pace. Shake up the tempos, like Alligator do on the title track and indeed much of the second half, but don't ignore the speed completely.

It seems that Alligator have been around for a long time, originally getting together back in 1992 but giving up the ghost only four years later without having recorded anything. Clearly they didn't get serious until reforming in 2015. Since then, they've released two EPs and three studio albums, this one being the most recent. Maybe Believe in Yourself is a musical take on their new work ethic: "Your time will come," they tell themselves and I hope that happens.

Alligator are a power trio and the main man is Vladimir Ternovskoy. The best thing about this album is his guitar and he's the only guitarist in play. I adore his guitar tone and I adore how he puts it to use. There's no messing around here. He just gets right down to business and bludgeons us with riffs for the twenty-six minutes the album lasts. That's the worst thing about the album, by the way: that's shorter than Reign in Blood and that's noticeable in 2020.

Talking of Slayer, they're clearly a primary influence and there are points where this sounds like Schmier singing for Slayer. The voice also belongs to Ternovskoy because he does double duty in this band and, while I enjoyed his vocals, I enjoyed them less than his guitarwork. It's a rough voice, with an accent obvious even in the faster sections, and it makes the tone set by the guitar even grittier.

Backing him in Alligator are Nikolay Chechin on a solid and audible bass and Evgeny Tikhomirov on very reliable drums. They're clearly backing Ternovskoy rather than leading the music anywhere; I didn't catch any solo moments for the bass to shine or points where the drums set the direction forward. That said, they don't mess around either. Even at midpace, this is pure thrash. I could imagine walking into a gig late with Alligator on stage and instantly finding myself in the mood to leap into the pit.

Interestingly, my favourite songs here are a mix of fast and slow. I dug the speed of So Fear is Born and the in your face attitude of Street Guys, but I also appreciated the closer, Father's Tears, which is slower and, at under four minutes, still happy to ditch the vocals before the halfway point and wrap up things instrumentally.

If I wanted more than Alligator were willing to give me, that's entirely a comment about the length of the album and I feel I have to dock a point for that. The music, however, is glorious, and it's a lot more consistent than anything the American bands people are raving about have released this year.

Manifesto - The Pills for Blindness (2020)

Country: Russia
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | VK | YouTube

Manifesto are a prog rock band from Moscow and they do exactly what all the best prog rock bands do: keep me on my toes. This album, which runs half an hour even though it only features two tracks was constantly unexpected and I appreciated that considerably. I like hearing things that I have never heard before and this falls into that

The first of those is The Last Grand Manifesto, a telling title for a group called Manifesto, and it tells us quickly and clearly that they're huge Pink Floyd fans. This is so akin to classic Floyd that I wondered at one point if I'd actually popped on a Roger Waters solo concert instead, where he changed things up on Shine On You Crazy Diamond and then segued into some alternate universe combination of Time, Money and Welcome to the Machine.

But then those sound effects grow. What initially appears to be a set of the sampled embellishments that Alan Parsons pioneered on Dark Side of the Moon just keeps on going for the last half of the song. And given that the song's fourteen minutes long and this starts around the four minute mark, that's a heck of a lot of samples and a lot of non-music to sit on a music album. It becomes a journey and it captivated me like a radio drama.

Where it took me, I'm still not entirely sure, but through a few centuries of history is a good place to start. There's war here and peace, the advent of technology, cultural shifts, you name it. It's wildly ambitious and it's more reminiscent of the sound collage work of artists like Corporal Blossom than any actual band, whether prog or not. Pink Floyd have never been quite this experimental, even on something as unusual as Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave And Grooving with a Pict.

The title track, split into two parts, has the unenviable task of following that opener and it does so by changing completely. Part 1 is wavery strings against piano until a voice shows up to take over from a cello. We're still in Floyd territory, with that voice moving from calm and soft and enticing to angry and vicious and reactionary. The production here is particularly fascinating because what's so obviously traditional, a song with voice and guitar and drums, is deliberately rendered a lot less traditional.

Sometimes it feels like we're listening to a vinyl album someone transferred to cassette and then left in a box in a hot shed for a couple of decades so that the tape's a little warped but still plays. Sometimes it feels like the band are performing underwater. And then things clean up and the band punch through the overlay with an urgent funk metal beat that might have come out of King Crimson. Manifesto never totally lose the Floyd influence here, but they add so much to it that they're something else entirely.

Part 1 only lasts seven minutes but it seems longer. Part 2 runs ten but it feels shorter, more timeless. There's more David Gilmour guitar and swathes of phrasing that's clearly taken from Floyd, but it all plays out more like a jazzy instrumental Steely Dan, even with Hammond organ swells in a funky first half and serious builds halfway through. The dynamics are glorious on this one and we shouldn't be surprised when we seem to finish up at a dinner party. What can they get me? More of that guitar, please. Thank you!

Sadly I have no idea which musicians to praise. The band have a group rather than a page on Facebook, so About doesn't tell me much. Instagram really has no interest in telling anyone anything and I'm still figuring VK out. So all I can say is that Manifesto hail from Moscow and I do mean the one in Russia not Idaho. I don't know how many people there are in the band or how long it has been making music or what else they might have done. However, I would be very happy to find out the answers to any or all of those questions. This is ambitious and original work and I want to hear more.

Deviltears - Верни мне сердце (2019)

Country: Russia
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Dec 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | VK | YouTube

I review a lot of albums recorded in foreign languages, but Deviltears don't usually do that. They're from Rostov-on-Don in Russia, at the northeast end of the Black Sea, but their previous three studio albums have been recorded in English: Night Vendetta, The Keys and What Dreams May Come. It looks like they shifted to Russian in 2018 after thirteen years together because that's when new vocalist Viktor Ivanov arrived. The album title translates to Give Me Back My Heart.

Deviltears play gothic metal, but with a surprising set of influences listed on their About page on Facebook. For one, none of the giants of the genre in the west are there, such as Paradise Lost, Cradle of Filth or Moonspell. For another, the list does include a pair of unexpected bands: W.A.S.P. and U2. Lastly, the gothic metal bands that do make the list all hail from Finland, well over a thousand miles to the northwest and past four countries: To/Die/For, Poisonblack, Entwine, HIM and Sentenced.

Those influences put them well on the commercial side of gothic metal. While it plays on the rock side of the fence often, it's also often much heavier, with a lot of power chords, riffs and guitar solos from the two guitarists, Sergey Sapukhin (one of two remaining founder members) and Anton Yemelyanov (who has since left the band). However, it never dabbles in extremes, there is lots of piano and the vocals are always delivered with melody foremost in mind, even during the verses. I kept turning the volume up because it always felt a little quieter than it should.

I preferred the crunch that came along with the heavier songs, which kick in on the second half, and the added power allows the band to play around with contrasts. One great example is Швы, or Stitches, which starts out quiet and then builds with keyboards but finds an agreeably heavier vibe as it runs on to a close. My favourite solo is on По ту сторону горизонта, or Across the Horizon. My favourite riff is the one that introduces Сталкер, or Stalker, even though that track promptly shifts to an electronica backing. Each of these songs is heavy but not exclusively because each of them is also soft.

I like these contrasts, which work for me even though I don't understand any of the lyrics. I only have the English song titles because of trusty Google Translate. Hopefully it isn't lying to me today. The underlying tone is one that fits commercial gothic metal, most of the songs suggesting dark but not extreme ideas. That seems to fit earlier material, which I haven't heard. I do wonder how they sounded with a different vocalist singing in a different language.

With the darkness not too overt and melody high on the band's priority list, I could see this album playing well to melodic rock fans, and not only on a pair of overt ballads that wrap things up: Открой глаза, or Open Your Eyes, where even the solo has softer edges, and В зареве, or In the Glow, which is even softer yet, built not from guitars but from almost new wave trappings. The commercial rock/metal that pervades the first half ought to play well to that audience too, especially the second single, 100 дорог, or 100 Roads, an especially slick number with fantastic hooks.

This is one of those solid albums that works to different expectations. The melodic rock fans will love the first half and be OK with the second, while the heavy metal fans would reverse that. Everybody wins.

Изморозь - Культ (2019)

Country: Russia
Style: Pagan Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Apr 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | VK

Here's one I missed earlier in the year. I've finally got round to finding a phone so I can sign up for the Russian social media network called VK. In a community dedicated to the Russian folk metal outfit Стожар, whose album, Холодом Битв В Объятья Зимы, I enjoyed back in June, I saw a Best of 2019 poll. Ten bands had albums listed and Стожар made it to second with 13% of the vote. Way out in front, though, with a whopping 62% of the vote were a band named Изморозь with this album.

I don't read Cyrillic, so I'm relying on Google Translate to help me out. I believe the band's name is Hoarfrost, they hail from Moscow where they began life as a side project of folk metal band Ashen Light and this, their ninth album, is called Cult. I just had to track it down and see whether Изморозь have a heck of a lot of friends willing to vote in the social media polls or whether this is really that great an album.

Well, I have to say that I enjoyed Стожар more, but I enjoyed this too and it's continuing to grow on me. In many ways Изморозь could be seen as a dark side to Стожар. Instead of light and lively keyboards and clean and melodic female vocals, they play their folk metal with a black metal influence and a subversive nature.

It's often catchy stuff that's hardly serious in nature, as we discover on the two minute blitz of an opening song. I don't read Cyrillic so Медведь, балалайка, водка! means nothing to me, but the chorus makes it clear that the final two words are "balalaika" and "vodka", which need no translation; the first turns out to be "bear". Listening to this song alone, I knew that I had to share it with my son, who's a Trollfest fan.

Even when the songs aren't that wild, they're short and punchy. The longest falls short of the five minute mark and a couple are under three. What sells the dark side for me are the vocals, which are delivered if by a lascivious bearded dwarf with plenty of mead in him, even though I see from photos that precisely none of those attributes are the case. I'd like Trollfest if they had different vocals; I like Изморозь in large part because of them.

I don't know if these memorable lead vocals are provided by Belf or Kiv, as there are two vocalists here; the former also handles the bass and keyboards while the latter plays the guitars. Behind them on drums is Gumanoid. All three are highly experienced, having played in long lists of bands and on many albums and that experience shows here.

While much of this is a heady mix of fast drums and folk melodies delivered by prominent keyboards presumably masquerading as a variety of instruments, with those lascivious vocals emphasising them, there's actually quite a lot going on here. Злой князь (The Evil Princ) begins like Rammstein as a folk metal band. Берега храбрых (The Shores of the Brave) has a Celtic mediaeval feel to it. Лавка смерти (Death Bench) features a lot of variation in speed and plenty of what sound like flutes and other ethnic instruments. It kicks off like speed metal with bagpipes and I'm all for that!

And there are bizarre moments that I can't imagine are deliberate but, hey, may just be. Most come courtesy of the keyboards. I couldn't help but hear the Inspector Gadget theme on Злой князь, even if it isn't a likely source. I also my favourite game soundtrack on the opener and I'd be truly shocked if this bunch of Muscovite black/ folk metalheads grew up playing Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf too.

I liked this on a first listen and I like it more with each further time through It's Изморозь's ninth album and there are EPs in their discography too. I'll be exploring those for sure.

Anfel - Echoes of Buried Hope (2019)

Country: Russia
Style: Symphonic Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 12 Aug 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | VK

It seems odd to suggest that this is polarising music and then come down in the middle, but I'm going to do just that.

Anfel are an unusual band, not least because they're often the solo project of Denis Lobotorov, who goes by Dionis. He's Russian, from Tver on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and he mostly plays symphonic gothic metal.

I say mostly because the steady release of new albums—eight of them in the seven years from 2009—stopped in 2015 so that he could concentrate on re-releasing each of them as solo piano performances. That's pretty gothic, I have to admit, but it's neither symphonic nor metal. I should add that some were instrumental to begin with, but this still marks a return from reworks to new work.

It also marks the debut as lead vocalist of Elvira Lobotorova, the guitarist of Blackthorn, who goes by Alchemida. She'd also previously played guitar on the prior Anfel album, Icy World, and I believe she does so here too. Dionis play bass. I presume that the rhythm comes courtesy of a drum machine, but I can't confirm that.

I liked this immediately and a good portion of that is Alchemida's voice, a soaring creature that seems to sing even slower than she does. The music is clearly symphonic, each song finding a swirling groove that I'd be surprised to find isn't the product of synths rather than an actual orchestra. I don't think Anfel has that much budget. Alchemida soars over it but she's part of it too, as if the music is clouds and she's floating on them.

What surprises me is that, as overblown and emotional as the music is, the vocals make it sound somehow patient and restrained, not something we tend to hear in this genre. It's lush material, music to be enfolded by. There's real melancholy poured into it, but it refuses to be too weighty. And that's a good thing.

What may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective, is that it's crazy long. Sure, there are only ten songs here, but six are over ten minutes and the average is only just shy of that length!

Sometimes that's certainly good. The opening song, And Our Proximity Create Only Chaos, doesn't feel remotely long at eleven minutes. It just continues to get increasingly exquisite, the soaring vocals of Alchemida at the fore and the harsh ones of Dionis rumbling underneath her to provide texture. It has to be said that, while there are plenty of instrumental sections, this is all about that contrast of voices.

Sometimes, however, it's bad. Dawn on the Ashes of Our Senses may get where it needs to go, but it takes its sweet time about doing it and it really has no business being nearly a quarter of an hour long. The whole album can be actively listened to or set off in the background for a pleasant environment but songs like this one do test our attention.

And this is where it's going to get polarising...

To fans, of whose number I'm now one (while acknowledging that the album is too long), this is often hypnotic stuff, the vocals lulling us as the drum machine speeds up and the synth strings swirl around. I've had it on in the background for a couple of days now and I seriously feel better for that.

However, to non-fans, this is going to seem interminable. They'll complain about how songs never end and don't vary much either, the groove found two minutes in to any song being the same groove found ten minutes later as it wraps up and, arguably in the next song too and the one after that. It does sometimes seem like a fourteen minute song is actually a four minute song with the key parts looped, but that may be overly cynical.

So which are you? Well, if you're interested, I'd suggest that you sample the track, And Our Proximity Create Only Chaos. If it knocks your socks off, this will be a must purchase. If it doesn't, then this really isn't going to be for you.