WONDERboom - Hard Mode (2024)

Country: South Africa
Style: Funk Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

It's oddly hard to find an online discography of WONDERboom, given that they formed as far back as 1996 and have been active ever since, winning awards but releasing EPs and singles rather than full length studio albums. They celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2021 with WONDERboom 25, a set of re-recordings of favourite songs from their earlier releases, but this is a new studio album, potentially their fifth to follow on from 2017's Rising Sun, and it's a wildly versatile affair.

I saw them listed as funk rock, which is as good a description as any, I guess, but they refuse to be constrained by any one genre label, even if it's as high level as pop or rock, because they're happy to play both. There's a lot of rock here, much of it falling somewhere within alternative or arena rock, but there's lots of pop here too, from across the spectrum, trawling in ska, goth, punk, even R&B. As such, it's impossible to even attempt to identify high level influences. The band obviously listen to a broad range of music and let everything they hear filter into their own sound.

The heaviest song is probably the opener, My Name is Freedom, which is an earworm of a stomp, built as much on handclaps and audience participation as guitars and drums. It seems cheap for me to throw out John Kongos as an immediate comparison, given that he was also South African, but it's there and it's overt. However, one of the softest songs is Deadly, the pop song that has an unenviable task in following My Name is Freedom and approaches that by not doing anything at all similar. Apparently, when WONDERboom started out, so far back that they were still called the Electric Petal Groove Machine, they supported Simple Minds on a South African tour. That seems entirely appropriate listening to this song.

From one rock song and one pop song, the next four mix pop and rock in fascinating ways and that ends up being a far more common approach here. Most of my favourite songs here are both pop and rock without ever really being pop rock. Alive is a tasty mix of U2 and Nick Cave and the Cure. Overground (Subway Queen) ups the U2 proportion of that but adds a Japanese melodic theme. Avalon adds some Madness in its perky ska beat, funky piano and quietly cool attitude, though it goes elsewhere for its chorus. Similarly, Miss Demeanour is commercial punk in its verses, like an Iggy Pop song but with the incessant drive of Hawkwind, the lyrics spat in bars rather than sung, but then it all goes big and clean for its chorus.

Avalon counts as the midpoint, there being eleven songs on offer and all of them being of similar length, a radio friendly three minutes and change. I like the first half a lot, wherever it goes. I'm less fond of the second half, partly because it's more pop than rock, partly because its songs have less character to them and partly because one of them, very deliberately, sparks cringeworthy memories. However, the second half wraps up with Voodoo Doll, which is both pop and rock, has character to spare and is as catchy as anything else here, the earworm opener notwithstanding.

The cringy song is Hip, which is eighties hip, sometimes painfully so, even if the words talk about an earlier time. It's firmly pop but it goes all over the place, perhaps mostly to Michael Jackson but to plenty of others, including trends that I've tried to forget. It feels like the sonic equivalent of the sort of fashion catalogue that parents bought Christmas presents from that embarrassed everyone because the trends had moved on by the time the wrapping paper came off. There's an early white rapper feel to it and I'm not talking about Blondie's Rapture or Adam Ant's Ant Rap, but the folk who dressed in pastels and pretended to be black, the predecessors of Vanilla Ice.

The songs after it but before Voodoo Doll are mostly inconsequential compared to the rest of the material here. Prodigal Son is a logical follow-up to Hip but shifting in time from Michael Jackson to Prince. Pretty Things is quieter; it's pleasant enough and it sounds OK in isolation but its Cure-esque pop doesn't enforce itself. Rabbit Hole manages a little better, but it's another subtle pop song and I was having sinking feelings by this point in the album when Voodoo Doll shows up to be the saviour of the side, a Hallowe'en flavoured Adam Ant alt rock song that's all hook.

This is about as different as can be imagined to Toxic Carnage, but I do try to cover the spectrum here at Apocalypse Later and there are wonderful songs to be found on each of these albums. It's joyous to me to move from Thrashing Over Thirty to Alive. They're both rock songs, even if they're not alike in almost any other way, except maybe in how they nod back to the eighties. It's a great time to be alive, with so much varied music easily available to a global audience online. Enjoy it.

Trevor Rabin - Rio (2023)

Country: South Africa
Style: Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Oct 2023
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

I don't know where Eigenflame are from, beyond the country of Brazil. Maybe they're from Rio but what's clear is that Trevor Rabin isn't. He's from South Africa, though he moved to London and Los Angeles to further his career, which of course he did because he's the same Trevor Rabin who spent a dozen years in Yes and plenty more as the composer of scores for movies of the calibre of Con Air, Armageddon and National Treasure, to name just three blockbusters. His solo albums mostly sit in the previous millennium, but he released the instrumental Jacaranda in 2012 after a twenty-three year gap and this sixth solo album arrives eleven further years on.

I don't know why it's called Rio, but it's bright and bombastic like a Rio carnival from moment one with Big Mistakes featuring layers of vocals, a surprisingly edgy guitar solo and a la la la section to wrap things up. It's definitely commercial but it also has bite, like a very pretty venomous snake. It works wonderfully as an opener, but Push adds intricate prog chops right off the bat and escalates substantially. It's a gem of a piece, a variety of instruments dancing off in what seem like different directions but still sounding fantastic together. It's a masterpiece of arrangement choreography.

For all its instrumental flamboyance, Push is a song with a voice delivering lyrics and Oklahoma is keen to underline that, the instrumentation still a little intricate but mostly serving to build those vocals until the guitar solo can take flight. It's much more subdued than Push but it's still a big and brash number that screams for volume. We fly along with it until we realise just how much is going on beneath it and start to truly pay attention. I don't know how long Rabin has been chipping away at this album, but it feels like it's been gifted with a serious amount of time and attention.

Most of that work was done by Rabin, not just because he's the songwriter but because he plays an impressive majority of the instruments. All the work on guitar and bass is him, and the keyboards. He sings lead vocals throughout and adds backing vocals on all but one track, many of these songs are collaborations between his voices. He provides drums and percussion for four tracks, with Lou Molino stepping in for four more and Vinnie Colaiuta for one more. He adds mandolin on three of these songs and banjo and dobro on two. That just leaves Charlie Bisharat's violin on Push and the backing vocals of Dante Marchi and Liz Constantine on a couple of tracks.

A lot of these tracks evolve like that, because Rabin is working from a very broad canvas here. The core sound is pop/rock with a heavy side of prog, but he moves in a number of musical directions on this one and often against our expectations. Paradise, for instance, starts out as a country stomp but evolves into a vocal harmony, with both those backing vocalists on board. Goodbye is a good ol' hoedown of a country rock song. Tumbleweed starts out almost like the Beach Boys, entirely vocal (albeit with effects) for well over a minute. These Tears goes for a grand Pink Floyd sweep. There's lots of Paul Simon on Egoli, a song that wouldn't be out of place on his Graceland album. And Toxic wraps things up as a jagged blues number that turns into something else again.

You might expect that all this admirable genre-hopping might make the album a little incoherent, but very little of it jars. Mostly it feels like Rabin's exploring a lot of musical territory but trawling it into a consistent core sound, every departure adding a little something before he brings it back in to the core. Only perhaps Goodbye and Egoli really stay somewhere else and I'd call the latter a highlight, along with Push and Paradise, three very different songs to lump together.

And the overall result is strong. This is perky and persistent and it gets under your skin. Every time we think it might settle into something soft and AOR, it does something unexpected and suddenly we're intricate prog territory again and we wonder why we ever thought it might settle. It has no interest in doing that. This is Rabin having fun on his own terms and turning out something that's surprisingly commercial for an album as versatile as it is. I have clear favourites, if not clear least favourites, but I think this is a safe 8/10. Three listens in, it's just as strong as it started out and as colourful as its cover art.

The Fallen Prophets - Perpetual Damnation (2023)

Country: South Africa
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Much of what I review nowadays is from Europe, given that there's far more invention in play over there than in North America at the moment, but I try to keep my eyes focused on the globe. There is a lot of amazing music coming out of South America right now and some from Asia too, even if it seems to be underperforming when compared to population. Oceania is a gift that keeps on giving and that leaves Africa, which I'd love to cover more often, if only the continent produced more in a rock and metal vein. Much of what I do see is from South Africa and the Fallen Prophets are a fresh name to me, hailing from Cape Town.

They seem to like their metalcore in South Africa and there's an element of that here, but mostly I hear death metal, more melodic than brutal and often technical too. There are two vocalists, with Pieter Pieterse the lead. He delivers a deep death growl in relatively traditional fashion, with lots of relish, if not as much intonation and variety as I'd like. Occasionally, Francois van der Merwe has something to do behind him and, if I'm identifying him correctly, his contributions are more in the black metal vein, higher and more of a shriek than a growl. He doesn't get the spotlight often, but there are moments in the closer, Rotten from the Bone.

The music follows their lead, with tone particularly important and melody behind it. If I'm reading correctly, there are three guitarists in play, which explains why the sound is so dense. Daniel Louw covers lead duties and the two vocalists add rhythm. They chug well and they speed up well too, if not particularly far. There's some thrash here, especially on the second half, but they rarely think about going full tilt and the fastest aspect is often Dylan Haupt's drums. Given van der Marwe's vocals and Haupt's drums, a black metal influence is clear, even if it's never particularly overt, just sitting underneath everything else winking at us.

The Fallen Prophets have been around since 2011 and this is their third album, with a couple of EPs in between. As such, it's not surprising that the band are tight, even if two of the musicians joined after COVID and a third not long before it. They feel seasoned and they fall into grooves easily. The catch to that is that I wanted more from them than just falling into grooves. There are moments in which they provide something extra, like the wonderful intro to album opener Let the Weak Suffer and a brief moment for the bass to take the spotlight in Fatal Invocation. These things elevate the music and they do them well, so I wonder why they don't do them more often.

Instead of evolving their sound to provide something different from other death metal bands, I'm hearing far more focus on simply doing what they do very well indeed. It's like they care more that an audience leaves a gig thinking that they're better than anyone else on the bill than different in any way. I'm all for bands trying to being the best they can be, but death metal is a crowded genre and there needs to be something more to distinguish one band from a scene. Maybe this band are more technical than anyone else in Cape Town and damn they're tight, but there's not a lot that's going to make them stand out against other tight technical death metal bands on the internet.

And so, this has to be a recommended album because it's good stuff, but it's going to play best to a strict audience of death metal connoisseurs. Listeners with broader tastes would dig the solos on Asphyxiation Chamber or how well they shift from a slow chug on As the Dead Swarm to what may be the fastest pace on the album, but these are second half songs and they may not get that far if they're not die hard death metal fans. I like the second half more than the first, not just those two songs but also Fatal Invocation after them. This is the Fallen Prophets at their thrashiest and that appeals to me.

They're a good band and this is a good album, but I feel that there's a better one in them yet. This is reliable good rather than inventive good. The hints of invention tell me that they could knock it out of the park with their fourth album, but they'll need to figure out what to add to their sound to take them to the next level.

Slave New World - Slave New World (2022)

Country: South Africa
Style: Hard & Heavy
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Dec 2022
Sites: Facebook

There are a couple of bands out there called Slave New World, it seems. There's one in Emmerich, Germany who play new wave hardcore, and there's this one in Cape Town, South Africa, who play a commercial heavy metal with an American flavour. Maybe neither of them took their name from a Sepultura song. Maybe this Slave New World took it from Trivium's cover. Maybe they just thought it was a cool name because the influences here would seem to be trendier American bands, albeit with the trendiness turned down in favour of good old fashioned riffs and hooks. They're still there but maybe as remnants of an early sound.

Angels Falling and Break the Silence set the mould. Both flirt with nu metal but settle into a more hard rock base, bombastic with a big back end and catchy choruses. It's an interesting mix because it feels a little heavier than it is. This came to me with a heavy metal label but it's really hard rock through and through, just hard rock that needs to be played loud on good speakers. And yeah, I do realise that all hard rock should be played loud but not all hard rock begs for it. This gets down on its knees and begs for volume and it's every aspect of the sound that does that.

It's there in Andy Wood's vocals, which are clean and soar in the vein of a Bruce Dickinson or Geoff Tate, always demanding more space to expand into. He's fond of building not just within this song or that but within individual lines, starting with a particular level of intensity and then ramping up to another one by the end. He does that throughout Never Say Die, a spotlight song for him, but it pervades the album. If often feels like we're listening in a club with the bass pumped up, only for a song to end and we suddenly realise we've been shifted to a festival environment.

It's there in the back end too. Gabo Acosta gives the impression that he'll hit each of drums just a little bit harder with each speaker that gets added to the stack. Michael Naranjo's bass is high in the mix, which flavours the overall sound considerably. It's also there in the guitars, which are the most metal thing here. Darryl Burmeister isn't following Wood into Iron Maiden territory, playing in a slower and heavier vein, but I'd be surprised if he isn't the metalhead in the band. There's at least one point, a couple of minutes into Overdrive, where I felt that I recognised a section and it seems to me that it's from a Maiden song. I can almost sing it in my head but it's being elusive.

And it's in the overall sound, because many of these songs mirror what I said about Wood and his escalations. They don't have intros in the traditional sense; they have a different style of intros in which someone, usually Burmeister, sets up what we're going to hear in the song proper, but with a sort of suppression filter thinning out the sound considerably. Of course, they thin rip that filter away pretty quickly to boost us into the song with the full mix in effect. That happens immediately with Angels Falling and continues all the way to What Have I Become to close out the album.

Now, there is an exception to that gimme volume mindset. If You Bleed has a softer approach with a ballad mindset. It keeps that big back end but it's toned down greatly and, while Wood remains emotional, trying to build it, it's inherently a smaller song than everything else here so it doesn't really work. The song itself isn't bad and might play decently in an acoustic set but it feels as if the band, except maybe Naranjo, have just dialled everything down and that approach doesn't work in this company, especially partway through the album.

For the most part, though, this is hard rock that could easily become heavy metal if the band were in that mood. My impression overall was that it's similar to Queensrÿche but with the progressive metal translated into hard rock and the volume amped up to compensate. Of course, I have no idea if Slave New World were aiming for that or if it's just where they ended up in my ears, but then I'm without much information. In fact, while it seems clear from photos that there are four musicians in the band, I'm going off a two year old Facebook post to identify the actual line-up. Whether I'm up to date or not, it's good to hear some more hard and heavy music from Africa.

Mark Haze - Authentic (2021)

Country: South Africa
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

From right here in Phoenix, let's travel somewhere far away for my second album today. Mark Haze is a singer in Cape Town, South Africa who seems to be well known over there, enough to be a regular on daytime television. Part of that is because he's been around for a while: his band, 12th Avenue put out four albums, got extensive radio airplay and supported Seether on their Homecoming Tour. Part of it is that he was the runner up on Idols, the South African edition of Pop Idol, in 2011. This looks like at least his fifth album since then, though some of those are covers albums.

I believe this one is all originals and it sounds good to me. It's very fresh and upbeat, mixing in funk, pop, blues and other styles into a rock framework. It's easy to see how he did well on Idols singing not only songs by Aerosmith, Queen and Journey but others by Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga and Marvin Gaye. The shortest song, Can't Forgive You, runs just shy of three minutes, while the longest is under five, a clear decision to make them all viable for radio play.

That's Walk on the Water, which is a strong opener. It's a rocker, albeit one that seems written for the female voice, and it steams along nicely with catchy verses and an even catchier chorus. Monkey isn't a lot shorter and it's even catchier, working with a funky Lenny Kravitz sort of vibe. Anjee & Me ups that bar once more, sounding like a Rick Springfield ditty but with a chorus borrowed from the Backstreet Boys, right down to an infectious "do do do do do" refrain. This is such a bouncy song that it's rather hard not bouncing along with it.

What gets me is that I just referenced the Backstreet Boys in that last paragraph with positive intent. Anjee & Me includes what they do well without bringing in any of the things that make me cringe and there are plenty of those. I'm less sure about Starchild, a far more overt pop song that dips much too deeply into modern day R&B for my tastes, even if I quite dig the drums when they get going and the rock guitar too. Haze has a habit of crafting catchy pop songs then rocking them up with a guitar.

I tend to prefer the soft rock songs like the brass-infused Hearts on Fire and the prowling Faking Heaven to the poppier numbers like Starchild and ILYSB (I Love You So Bad), but Haze is just as good at both. Frankly, it may be the songs that do both at once, like Can't Forgive You and Monster, not to forget Monkey, that are the real highlights on this album. I can imagine quite a few of these songs showing up in episodes of TV shows but Monster may be the most overt candidate for that with its dynamics, groove and lyrics.

Whether I like all these songs or not, what impresses me is how seamlessly Haze can shift in intensity. Losing My Mind is a real rocker, fighting with Walk on the Water to be the most intense song (which on this album translates to the heaviest Bryan Adams gets), but it rolls into Star, with its electronica and almost new wave groove. And yet it feels totally natural. Perhaps the linking factor between the catchy pop ditties and the tougher rockers is that all of them feel like they could be sung on a talent show. It doesn't matter if a song is soft or hard, it's accessible to a wide television audience.

Black Pistol - Sins of the Father (2019)

Country: South Africa
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Not to be confused with Canadian rockers Black Pistol Fire, Black Pistol are a South African hard rock band with a stoner edge, because of the slightly fuzzy guitarwork of Roan Mustang. That contribution edges them more towards a Wolfmother comparison than an Airbourne one, those being the couple most obvious modern bands to raise. I've read that they have the usual sort of classic influences too but I'm hearing them a lot less.

They've been around since 2014 and this is their debut album, after a self-titled EP back in 2017. While they sound tight and natural together, there have been line-up changes. Apparently Stiaan Bruwer is a recent addition on vocals, as is a gentleman called Daniel on drums (the band's Facebook page credits him as Nicolas Cage, so I have no idea what his surname really is). The other band member is Jacques le Roux, who with Mustang, has been there for a lot longer, perhaps throughout.

While I'll freely admit that it was the fantastic cover art that grabbed my attention first, the music wasn't far behind. This is a deep album worthy of exploration but it's also an immediate one, with an enticing opening track, Nowhere to Run beginning with a brief drum solo, heavy bass and then bouncy vocals combined with bouncy riffs. The only oddity is that the bridge sounds bizarrely reminiscent of classic Magnum, who would not otherwise be raised in this review. It's very much Bob Catley phrasing.

For all the contemporary comparisons that can be conjured up, Nowhere to Run is an old school track with everything it needs and little more too for good measure. It's lively and very much to the point. The vocals are playful and melodic but with power to them that escalates as the song runs on. The riffs are strong and lead into an appropriately wailing solo given the song title. The rhythm section is solid but manages to find its way into the spotlight at points. And the whole thing is only just over four minutes in length.

What's more, the band take that as a template and promptly knock out another bunch of songs that check off most of the same criteria. Differences do show up though. Call to Arms finds points to quieten down, presumably to allow the audience to join in when they play it live. Devil in Disguise is slower and has a neatly heavy midsection that elevates it. If that hints at Black Sabbath, then Down the Hatch underlines that connection, though Bruwer has little in common with any of Sabbath's many singers.

Hilariously, Heaven & Hell is up next, though it's not that one! It's a top notch song too but it's not the epic that its name and six minute running time might suggest. That job falls to the title track which is probably the best song on the album. It has the best riffs and a fantastic melody too. I preferred the first half to the second but Evil is a late highlight, kind of like a Danzig song during the verses and a Danzig song on speed during the chorus. Preacher wraps things up with extra fuzz and a punky edge.

I dug this album a lot. Beyond simply sounding good, it has an urgency to it that bestows energy onto the listener. Black Pistol really ought to generate some action live. Most of it also gets better on repeat listens, though the opposite holds true for me on a couple of songs on the second half. They're consistent though, so that may well be a personal thing and you might adore them more than anything else here.

Consistency is never a bad thing and I'd very much like to see if that will hold true for a second album.