Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: Sweden

Showing posts with label Sweden. Show all posts

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

The Hellacopters - Overdriver (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Wikipedia | YouTube

This ninth album from the Hellacopters runs forty minutes, hardly the longest album I've put on this week but certainly not skimpy with its music. However, every time it finishes, it feels like I've only been listening for about ten minutes. Its eleven tracks zoom on by, only two of them lasting longer than four minutes. When they actually pick up a serious pace, like with Wrong Face On, it seems like the track is done in about thirty seconds. I'd listened to it five times before noon and that's just ridiculous for me.

Initially it's good but not great, because the first three songs are just solid and reliable garage rock songs that do exactly what they must without grabbing me by the feels. Maybe that's due to a reliance on sixties pop melodies. Wrong Face On has that uptick in tempo and then Soldier On caught my attention. It's a strong song but that's not why it stood out. It stood out because the influences that I caught weren't the ones that I would have expected from a Hellacopters album. And I don't mean the core riff that's borrowed from Golden Earring's Radar Love.

I expected them to sound like a garage rock band, as indeed they do on much of this album. Check out Faraway Looks, for instance, and you'll find that it's utterly textbook garage rock, built from power chords, flurried beats, a simple but effective riff, punchy vocals and catchy melodies. Sure, there's a little back and forth harmonising that reminds of Blue Öyster Cult and that adds to the effect, but it's mostly what I expect, done really well by a band who have been doing this for over thirty years.

Soldier On, however, has a real southern rock mindset to it and it's far from the only such song on the album. That feel returns on Coming Down, shows up in the melodies on The Stench and then in the epic guitar solo on Leave a Mark that eventually finds that patented southern rock chicken scratch style. It's in moments like that where Lynyrd Skynyrd spring to mind, but the comparison I kept coming back to was The Outlaws, because it's not just the guitarwork, it's the melodies.

Now, Soldier On has odd vocal manipulations in the verses, but that Outlaws sound is unmissable once they get to the bridges and choruses. And, once it's out there, this genie can't be put back into the bottle. It's there on Doomsday Daydreams, it's all over Coming Down like a rash and it's there on later songs, whether it's in the vocal melodies, the builds or the guitars or all of these things together. It frankly changed this album for me and, while I dug punkier garage rock songs like Wrong Face On and Faraway Looks, I liked these dips into southern rock even more.

I'd probably rank Coming Down at the top of the heap, but with Leave a Mark nipping at its heels, especially with its epic guitar solo at the end to stretch it out to five minutes and change. That's a long song for the Hellacopters, even kicking off with a bass intro that's not far off what Lemmy used to do back in his Hawkwind days. I'm not finding a line-up online, so I don't know if this is the work of Dolf DeBorst, who Wikipedia tells me joined in 2018 but doesn't appear on any albums, a contradictory statement given that this is their second album since reforming in 2016.

Doomsday Daydreams keeps growing on me, so I'd throw that in there as another highlight, and, back in more traditional territory, Faraway Looks and Wrong Face On are right up there as well. I'd usually call an album with five highlights out of eleven a gimme for an recommended 8/10 rating, but Soldier On, with its southern rock flavour, and The Stench with a bluesier version of the same, are the only others that I like a lot. That means four songs that are just there, including the first three, which is an odd state of affairs, and that's telling too.

Then I realised that I've listened through this album maybe eight or nine times now and, even if some songs still refuse to pop for me, I haven't felt the need to skip any of them even once. That firmed this back up as an 8/10. I haven't heard its predecessor, 2022's Eyes of Oblivion, but I'd say on the basis of this one that the band are really enjoying their reunion and maybe feeling some flexibility in their sound. DeBorst aside, if indeed that's him on bass, everyone else is long term.

Nicke Andersson, Robert Eriksson and Dregen were founder members, even if the latter left for quite a while. Anders Lindström only missed the first few years but has been there ever since. I'd say they're having a blast and, while I like them doing what they've always done, I can only hope that they keep exploring this southern rock direction. Coming Down and Leave a Mark especially show that they do it really well.

Thursday, 20 February 2025

Crazy Lixx - Thrill of the Bite (2025)

"We like it hard and we like it fast", sings Danny Rexon on the opener, Highway Hurricane, but this isn't extreme at all. This is old school hard rock/heavy metal with a strong focus on riffs and hooks, a lot heavier than when much the same band backs Chez Kane on her melodic rock albums. Oddly, I've reviewed two of those now but nothing by Crazy Lixx themselves, who have been around since 2002, so let's try to remediate that, or least start to do so.

The goal of Rexon and his fellow founding band members was to revisit the eighties and the glory days of glam metal. The band has evolved over time, with Rexon the only musician left from 2002, but they're still doing much the same thing, even if I wonder if they've moved away over time from the cheesier aspects of the genre. Highway Hurricane certainly has a glam metal flavour but it's a song structured like Saxon might structure a song, or even Vow Wow, who sang about a different Hurricane. Who Said Rock n' Roll Roll is Dead right after it has a Kiss vibe, with a great hook that extends beyond the chorus.

Where things could go horribly wrong is Little Miss Dangerous, because, while it follows up with a fresh great hook that extends beyond the chorus, it plays into the cheesier end of glam metal. It's more rooted in Hanoi Rocks or Poison and we cab easily imagine it, with a poppier outlook, played by a band of men dressed up to look like women, rather than the more masculine approach taken by this band on the cover of the album. I can even see the official video unfolding, with the band clumping together to stalk the camera during the midsection.

However, it doesn't go horribly wrong at all. It's an excellent song, with a catchy core hook firmly in the eighties style that refuses to leave your brain. However, on top of all the sassy moments, it has real meat to it with more Saxon-esque riffs, and it extends wonderfully to six minutes, leaving the last few for an emphatic build. Back in the day, there would, of course, be a three minute version intended for airplay, with a picture disc edition, and it would be a hit. Every song here is catchy but this one is earworm level of catchy. It's the best song here, with one exception.

What follows over this ten track album often mixes those two angles in very different ways.

There is a heavy side to everything, with strong and chunky eighties riffs, often in that Saxon style but sometimes in others, like Call of the Wild, which features AC/DC power chords and fretboard work, or Hunt for Danger, which sounds like solo Ozzy, from the Jake E. Lee era rather than earlier. Final Warning is so eighties that I could swear it's a cover. Sure, I can't place those vocal melodies right now or that opening guitar, which is probably the heaviest thing on this album, but they're acutely familiar.

However, there's also a light side to everything, every track pumped up with big glam hooks and a focus on melody that highlights why Crazy Lixx spend so much time playing with Chez Kane. Not all the melodies feel like pop melodies, as Midnight Rebels sometimes sounds like Skid Row covering Accept, but the other end of that spectrum is Run Run Wild, right before it, which could easily be a pop song with very different filters thrown on it. As it stands, it's more like Skid Row covering the Backstreet Boys. Or is it NSync? I can't tell the difference.

It's where those two sides collide best that Crazy Lixx shine brightest. I really ought to gravitate to the more traditionally hard rock songs like Highway Hurricane over the glam metal ones like Little Miss Dangerous. I do like the former but the latter becomes real highlight for me. It's simply done so well that it can't be ignored. My favourite track, though, is easily the closer, Stick It Out, which is Highway Hurricane done even better. Everything works in this song. The pace is up, the guitarwork is alive and the hooks are huge. It's a great six minute Y&T song in under four.

Crucially, everything here stands up to multiple listens. I may have my highlights and you may have different ones, because there's a clear love for an entire era here not just for certain bands, but I can't pick out a weak song for any reason. I guess that means that this is another 8/10 album.

Friday, 31 January 2025

The Night Flight Orchestra - Give Us the Moon (2025)

Here's another Night Flight Orchestra album, my first that isn't an Aeromantic release. Is there a new concept here? There are certainly plenty of moments that play into the band taking a journey but, while they're obvious in the intro and in between tracks, I could never focus on lyrics enough to discover if it went deeper than that. Those linking pieces are very obvious, enough that I spent far longer on the thirty second intro, Final Call, than I should.

It's a stewardess asking the eight members of the band to attend their flight. That explains to me that David Andersson and Anna-Mia Bonde are gone from the previous release, Rasmus Ehrborn and Åsa Lundman joining in their stead on guitar and backing vocals respectively. It also reminds me that, even though I'm learning more and more about different languages by dealing with the increasingly international rock and metal genres, I still have more to pick up. I'm not shocked that lead vocalist Björn Strid's surname is pronounced Streed, but apparently that of drummer Jonas Källsbäck is pronounced Shellspeck. I therefore immediately apologise to all Swedes whose names I've inadvertently butchered in the past.

Anyway, the thirty seconds are up and off the band go to Tashkent, which is in Uzbekistan, but via a strange route. By the end of Stratus, they're in orbit. What sort of night flight is this?

Stratus leaps in hard as a bombastic melodic rock opener, with big keyboard power chords and the sort of hooks that Toto would employ. It's a strong song, which doesn't surprise because that's the sort of song that the Night Flight Orchestra churn out on a regular basis. However, it's also rather memorable, which is important because a lot of this material blends together for me. Tracks such as Shooting Velvet are enjoyable while I'm listening to them but, as soon as the next one kicks in, I struggle to remember what they sounded like.

That's only emphasised when the next song is as strong as Like the Beating of a Heart, the most obvious single on this album. Sure, it's almost five minutes long and it's a stadium rock belter that ought out to be done in three, but they're five good minutes. It has a wonderful intro that serves to grab anyone's attention and it stays wonderful throughout. What I find myself doing with Night Flight Orchestra songs is figuring out which ones stand out to that degree and continue to do so a few listens in. The album's inherently likeable and accessible and easy to enjoy. The question has to focus on what will stay in the mind afterwards.

On this album, that's mostly Like the Beating of a Heart and Miraculous. They feel like the purest melodic rock standards, the sort of songs that will be playing not merely in heavy rotation on rock radio stations today but also in heavy rotation on classic rock stations thirty years into the future. Maybe the title track fits with these too. It certainly has a powerful chorus. Maybe it doesn't quite match them.

I'd also add Cosmic Tide to the standout list for a different reason.

This is throwback melodic rock that combines eighties stadium rock with tinges of pop and seventies disco, so keyboards are king. Many of my favourite intros, hooks and other parts of songs revolve around the keyboards, which come courtesy of John Lönnmyr, whose other day job is in Croatian melodeath/groove metal band Act of Denial. He's on top form across this entire album, the intros to Like the Beating of a Heart and A Paris Point of View particularly impressive.

However, he takes a different approach on Cosmic Tide, which is to bolster a jangly guitar line with piano in a way that reminds of something Stevie Wonder might do. This one kicks in with drums, as if every rule in place on this album needs to be tweaked, then the guitar, then the piano, and then a particularly urgent pace. It all combines to tell me that, while this doesn't fit with the textbook melodic rock standouts, it's just as good and perhaps even better. It's easily my favourite song on the album.

I don't have a least favourite, but there are plenty of tracks that sit alongside Shooting Velvet as songs I enjoyed while they were playing but which I forgot again immediately. I've listened to this album a few times and every time through, it's like I'm hearing those tracks for the first time with exactly the same end result. The other songs that stand out are for other reasons, some as stupid as the chorus of Melbourne, May I? unfortunately sounding so much like Mother Mayi, that I found myself remembering Leslie Nielsen in Repossessed. A Paris Point of View finds a fast disco bounce, arguably for the first time on the album and Way to Spend the Night is extra bouncy too.

So take that how you will. The Night Flight Orchestra are very very good at what they do. They aim to fill an odd niche, a sort of New Wave of Stadium Rock with Disco that nobody was asking for but which is somehow inherently uplifting and enjoyable. This is a little more stadium rock than disco but it's more of the same and, if this is your thing, it'll take you to the moon. Even if it's scheduled for Tashkent.

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Avatarium - Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead (2025)

I found Avatarium last time out, with their fifth album, Death, Where is Your Sting, which was my Album of the Month for December 2022 and one of only nine 9/10s for that year. The curse of the critic (or the DJ) is that we're so tied to the flow of the new that we can't go back to simply enjoy things the way we used to when we were just fans. However, I've absolutely gone back to this one. It's become an old friend now, that I've hauled out in all sorts of places. I've played a lot of pool to it at my son's house. A couple of the songs have lessened a bit over time but A Love Like Ours and Death, Where is Your Sting are as impactful to me now as they were on a stunned first listen. They live rent free in my head. They awe me.

And that's the other reason why I haven't sought out their first four albums yet. Sure, there's the fact that I simply don't have the luxury of time but I'm a little scared to find either that they don't have the same punch or, even worse, that they do. What if I found them at their peak and it's only down from here in either direction? What have I been doing with my life if they've been creating music this special since 2013 and I simply haven't noticed? What does that say about me? Well, it's time to knuckle down and tackle their new one. Did they strike gold twice running?

Well, no, they didn't, but this was still an excellent album on a first listen and, four or five times in, it's continuing to grow on me. Oddly, the killer track isn't right there at the beginning to kick it off. Long Black Waves and I See You Better in the Dark are really good doom rock songs, just not good enough to knock me out the way that the openers on the prior album did. Not that I could give you another one off the top of my head that matched it, but still. It was the third track here, My Hair is on Fire (But I'll Take Your Hand), that blew me away.

It starts out with simplistic piano from Marcus Jidell and the soft voice of Jennie-Ann Smith but in quintessential Avatarium fashion. You could have blindfolded me and asked me who it was and I'd have told you within ten seconds. Then it's an serious ramp up and I'm in absolute heaven. It's not quite A Love Like Ours, perhaps because it doesn't have its quirkiness, but it's the first song here to come close. Jidell and Smith take it home perfectly too. In between, there are some moments where I heard Supertramp and, if you're now imagining some of their classics translated into the doom rock genre, then you're welcome. I'm doing the same thing.

It was my first highlight and it remains my top pick, but there are a few serious growers here that are coming very close indeed. They didn't grab me on a first time through, maybe not on a second either, but the more I listen the better they get and the more I fall into them and lose myself.

"The heart wants what the heart wants", says Lovers Give a Kingdom to Each Other. What I think my heart wants is to stay in that song. It's only five minutes long but, every time I hear it, it takes my life over for what feels like half an hour. It's not that it drags, it's that it captivates me almost like a hypnotic spell and time slows down so I can attempt to grab it in return. I still haven't quite managed it but I'm willing to keep trying for as long as it takes. Somehow, it's a comfort zone of a song, while also being willing to torment. The tail of the song has a similar groove to a Fleetwood Mac song like The Chain, when they keep layering on emphasis but refuse to escalate.

Until Forever and Again has a similar effect, though it's easier to focus on it. The riff is golden and the guitar laid over it is even better. Smith hits some tasty escalations too and there's a gorgeous drop five minutes in. I adore Avatarium the most when they're doing something minimal like this but then crash back into doom with the sort of effortless transition that other bands would kill for. There's plenty of minimal in the title track, which closes things out this time, enough that we can hear a tiny recurrent squeak that could be something as minor as a microphone stand that needs oiling. This one teases its escalations and takes longer to deliver them, but they arrive. It isn't up there with my highlights yet, but it tells me that it may get there next.

Then again, anything might. Long Black Waves is the closest they get to Candlemass, their parent band of sorts, and there's some tasty guitar and textbook escalations. I See You Better in the Dark has a bluesy feel to it with plenty of hard rock. It could be a Pat Benatar song, of all things. Being with the Dead ramps up the guitar fuzz and stays in the doom rock style. Notes from Underground is the odd man out here because it's a relatively short instrumental, but the handheld percussion that kicks it off carries on audibly under the guitar and regular drums, even once it finds its way to a guitar solo and a heavier riff. Any one of them could grow.

So this is an 8/10 from me for now. It was a 7/10 on a first listen but it keeps growing and it's done that solidly enough and consistently enough to warrant an added point. It hasn't reached the 9/10 that its predecessor earned yet, but I'm interested to see if it'll get there. It doesn't seem like it's got the same peaks but it does feel like it's a little more consistent across the whole album. Let's revisit down the road.

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Opeth - The Last Will and Testament (2024)

It ought to be clear to one and all that Opeth have been one of the most consistently imaginative and genre-flouting bands in the rock/metal scene over the past few decades. For those not paying attention, they started out as a progressive metal band back in 1990 and gradually veered into the much calmer but still imaginative prog rock genre. Mikael Åkerfeldt gave up his death growls back in 2008 after their Watershed album and there have been precious few metal elements within the past couple of albums. Nonetheless, their previous release, In Cauda Venenum, was a highlight of my year in 2019. Well, now the heaviness is back and so are the death growls.

Well, it's not quite that simple. Sure, it's heavier, even before we hear that first death growl, but it remains varied. There are subtleties everywhere here and various vocalists play roles in a story. After all, this is a concept album and Åkerfeldt is playing a dead man, a bitter one, making a harsh voice entirely appropriate. He's the patriarch of a family and he's dead but his children, three of them, have assembled to hear his last will and testament, which unfolds in seven tracks given the names of paragraphs rather than anything friendlier. The living characters, whether the children or the executor, have different clean voices.

First the vocals are sung clean with emphasis. Then they're growled, in alternation with a spoken approach. The music around them changes accordingly, much of it versatile prog metal but some of it still clearly prog rock. Overall, it's much heavier than the past few albums, but there are long sections that don't touch metal at all. For instance, among the guests, who prominently include a large string section, the London Session Orchestra Strings, there are a few contributions by one of Åkerfeldt's idols, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. He delivers spoken word on four tracks and flute on two, §4 and §7.

The first long pastoral section isn't his, but it is on §4, the father explaining to his twins that they aren't his. They're the product of his wife, who predeceased him, sleeping with another man after they couldn't get pregnant together. It's the harp of Mia Westlund that takes the forefront when these twins are floored by the news, then Anderson's flute takes over as they question everything they knew about their lives. The shocks will continue to unfold and Åkerfeldt almost feels gloating as he gets this off his chest in a far heavier section. Much of this song returns to instrumentality, though, as two worlds fall apart.

It's fair to say that we don't know a heck of a lot about these children. We don't know how old they are or what their characters are. I got far more of an impression of the father, who's already dead when this story begins in legal flashback, than I did of the kids. §1 doesn't even mention how many children, just children plural. We learn in §2 that there's one that was born to a maid and brought up as one of his own children. She's a daughter. §4 suggests that his wife felt that, if he could have a child with the maid, then she could have a child with another servant. And that child turned out to be twins. So there are three, all raised by the parents as their own.

It's in §5 that the daughter inherits everything. She's his blood and the others aren't, even though none of them apparently knew this coming in. That's the sort of person he is. This speaks to who he is lyrically, not to who they are. Instrumentally, much of it speaks to him too, the heaviest sections generally representing the sheer force of his will manifesting from beyond the grave. However, an abundance of variety intersperses these sections and only some of that is the father. Much of that represents represents the emotions of the children reacting to the news these paragraphs brings them. I found that I felt for all three of them, even in theoretically happier sections like the end of §6 when the daughter comes into her inheritance and the father tries to be generous and caring.

Thus far I've talked a lot about the lyrics, because they're kind of the point. All the music exists to bolster the words with mood in ways that go far beyond the typical song. It's hard to establish the instrument as a force when it's effectively restricted by the emotion of moments. Of course, these musicians are excellent, as we know from earlier albums. However, it's new fish Waltteri Väyrynen who shone for me. There are wonderful rhythms here and teasing percussion. I know him from his work for Paradise Lost and this is very different indeed, but he does a pristine job.

He doesn't have a lot to do on the closer, A Story Never Told, the only track given a name instead of a paragraph number, because the reading is complete and this comes afterward. It's a ballad, with no heavy moments at all and delicacy dancing in the aftermath of that. There's a twist to the tale. It's appropriate that this dead patriarch, clearly a force of nature, doesn't get the final word. That goes to the guitar soaring in presumed happiness after it's all over. His final words were, in Latin, God, Father, King, Blood, which shows how much he was full of himself. Now, the king is dead. Long live the queen, who may not be at all full of herself if that guitar is anything to go by.

I liked this album on a first listen, but it took a few more, along with a reading of the lyrics, to fully grasp what it was doing. That's pretty routine for an Opeth album, of course. Now it's pretty clear, I can appreciate what it does and why. I like the return to both metal and death growl, though I'm also very happy that both aren't toggles, rather tools to be used when appropriate. The best growl is on §1, delivered with commanding intonation, and that's surely the best track here. I dug §4 and §7 too though, because of how much they do and how well they do it.

This rocked the end of year charts and that's probably fair, but I don't think I liked it quite as much as its prominent flagbearers. There are some who didn't get it but I'm not among those. I think it warrants a safe 8/10, not quite up to its hallowed predecessor but with textures beyond it. Maybe I might reconsider that later, if I come back to it at all.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

The Halo Effect - March of the Unheard (2025)

This is only the Halo Effect's second album, but they have a solid lineage, having been founded by guitarist Niclas Engelin after leaving In Flames. He'd been a touring guitarist for them as early as 1997 and he'd filled in for founder member Jesper Strömblad on multiple occasions before joining in an official capacity in 2010, initially as a temporary stopgap but soon confirmed as the full time guitarist. Ironically, Strömblad is the second guitarist in the Halo Effect. Peter Iwers, who spent a decade in In Flames, plays bass. Drummer Daniel Svensson had seven years in In Flames. The only member who doesn't have a history with In Flames is vocalist Mikael Stanne, who's the vocalist in Dark Tranquillity instead. That's quite the melodic death metal background for a "new band".

This is very smooth melodic death and it washed over me a few times before I started to focus on what they were actually doing. Conspire to Deceive is a textbook melodeath song but it's so clean that we can be half a dozen tracks on before that truly registers. Detonate has a particular catchy guitar hook that I could imagine in a melodic rock song and that's something that happens often, especially on What We Become and March of the Unheard. Change the tone and the voice and the former could easily be a melodic rock song. Alternatively, a melodic rock band could cover it in the style for which they're known and the structure wouldn't remotely need to change.

There are a few notable things to call out, once we listen enough times to catch everything.

For one, there are some lovely intros. Some, like on Conspire to Deceive and Forever Astray, come through the work of a guest musician, Örjan Örnkloo of Misery Loves Co. on synths. I don't believe he's an official member of the Halo Effect, but he flavours their sound substantially. Others, as we might expect, are delivered on guitar. On Our Channel to the Darkness, that's an acoustic guitar and it's both delicate and tasteful. What We Become and The Burning Point do the same thing but with more typical electric guitar. A Death That Becomes Us combines approaches, utilising electric guitar and synths.

For another, much of this unfolds at midpace, but the moments when the band speed up are very tasty indeed. That primarily means parts of Our Channel to the Darkness, whose transition from the slower pace to the fast is particularly effective. I'd call this out as a highlight for a number of reasons, starting with the delicate intro and continuing with the faster pace, but those synths do fascinating work in the second half and the riff/hook is very effective.

Those hooks are a third note, because hooks tend to be vocal and these are played on guitar. They ought to count as riffs but they do exactly what vocal hooks do so I'm thinking of them that way. Of course, Mikael Stanne doesn't go there for the most part, because he's singing in a harsh voice, a well intonated growl that gives him plenty of opportunity for nuance but not quite so much for an array of melodic rock hooks.

However, there is a clean voice here, increasingly during the second half of the album, and I have to assume that it's mostly him, varying his delivery. I may be mistaken, but I don't think it appears until Forever Astray eight tracks in, returning on Between Directions. The only guest voice that I see listed belongs to Julia Norman, who's very apparent on a predominantly instrumental piece, Coda, which closes out the album with vocalisations rather than words, and not very apparent at all on March of the Unheard. Back to Stanne, though, if it is indeed him duetting with himself, he has a rich clean voice that could easily sing lead in another band.

The final note is that another addition on the second half is a string section, albeit a small section as they come, just a cello played by Johannes Bergion and a violin played by Erika Almström. They are also on March of the Unheard, which somehow escapes me every time I listen to it, but are not ignorable on Between Directions. They provide the intro, for a start, but the also sit behind the vocals during the verses, with the guitar absent. The violin dances with Stanne's clean voice often. Finally, both cello and violin reappear on Coda, which is Stanne-free.

Overall, this is a very easy album to like. It starts well with highlights like Conspire to Deceive and Our Channel to the Darkness and remains highly consistent throughout, even as it diversifies what it does in the second half. The question is always going to come down to how well it sticks. That I'm not sure about yet. It feels like it ought to stick well but I somehow tune out on some of the songs every single time. They're not bad songs. They just lose me as if they're coated in some impeccable non-stick surface and I just slide away. With both those aspects in mind, I'll stick (ha!) with a solid 7/10.

Wednesday, 25 September 2024

Eyes - Auto-Magic (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

This came to me labelled as melodic rock but Soldier of Love opens up the album as clear hard rock with thoughts about crossing that border into heavy metal. Its has a confident barrelling pace and it continues to shift wonderfully throughout its five minutes. Mysterious Ways is slower, moving to melodic rock, but the drums still have quite the punch to them; they're not fast but they're high in the mix. Until the End of Time has some glam to its opening, before it moves back to melodic rock and that's most of the variety we're going to find on this album. Or so I thought after one listen.

I should add that five minutes seems to be an important threshold for Eyes. Almost everything on this album runs between five and five and a half minutes, except Innocent Dreamer that runs ten seconds longer and Don't Stop the Night that's done in only four minutes and change. That's long for melodic rock, where songs tend to be those three golden minutes that radio stations would be happy to play before moving onto something else. These songs are all driven by melody and beat, most obviously through Peter Andersson's voice, but they stretch notably past that sweet spot for radio.

Soldier of Love is my highlight, but it's also the only overt hard rock song here in a sea of melodic rock with a prominent beat. The only other song that shifts like this one is What Money Can't Buy, with a nice slide riff. It's not as heavy, but it's growing on me fast. The guitars, courtesy of Joakim Sandberg, remind of a Deep Purple tone, possibly in part because the keyboards back it so closely. There's some Tank here at points too, though never quite that heavy. Like the opener, this would have played very well on the Friday Rock Show back in the mid-eighties.

I'm not sure who else is in the band, nowadays, because I can't find that information, but on their debut album in 2021, Perfect Vision 20/20, Andersson was the only member who wasn't formerly in Aces High. At least I think so. I'm seeing so many different details that often shuffle names around that I'm not sure who's who any more. Maybe this is Aces High, merely renamed to Eyes for some reason, like maybe they got mistaken for an Iron Maiden tribute band too often. If so, then Aces High released three albums that I'm aware of, going back to the nineties. Eyes have added two to that count.

Whoever's in the band and whatever its history, this album is capable stuff. Soldier of Love caught my attention immediately but nothing else followed suit, so I wondered if I should move on to find a different album to review. I stuck with it, though, and What Money Can't Buy enforced itself on a second listen. Then other songs started to make their presence known too and, the longer I listen, the more I like this album. Sure, I'd have liked it more if more songs had matched those two in use of power, but they're all growers and that's not a bad thing. The title track built next with its sassy riff and then the laid back Sailing Ships Across the Ocean with its tasty guitar solo. And so on.

Maybe one reason why it wasn't more immediate for me is because so much of it is fundamentally simple. Innocent Dreamer has a simple but effective riff. Any Way You Dream has an even simpler riff that's arguably even more effective. On a first listen, there was nothing I hadn't heard before. On a second or a third, they got under my skin because they're just performed so well. There's not a flash moment in their bones. Nobody's showing off. Nobody's stealing the spotlight, even in the guitar solos. That tends to mean that few moments leap out for special attention. I didn't end up with a lot of written notes after a first time through.

What gradually manifests is the realisation that these guys know precisely what they're doing and what they're doing is exactly what they need to be doing at any particular moment in time. All this eventually reminded me of comic book artists, like Will Eisner, who started out as cartoonists. They don't draw a lot of lines, which tends to makes their work seem simplistic, but they're experienced enough and skilled enough to draw exactly the right line in exactly the right place, so the resulting effect is huge. In music, Bad Company would be the epitome of that. All Bad Company have on this band is the fact that I know a lot of their stuff by heart. Eyes are still new on me.

And so I found myself listening again and again and again, each time playing better than the last. After a first listen, I was thinking about a 6/10. After a second, I realised that I should up that to a 7/10. After a third, there was no doubt. After half a dozen times through, I'm singing along with a song like Through the Night that hadn't grabbed me before and so I'm wondering about whether an 8/10 would be warranted. It's not all melodic rock now. It's neat tone in Auto-Magic. It's bounce in Through the Night. It's laid back elegance in Sailing Ships Across the Ocean. It's apparently the gift that keeps on giving. So, yeah, an 8/10 and a magnetic one because I don't want to move on.

Friday, 13 September 2024

Nighthawk - Vampire Blues (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Hard/Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

While I may well have heard something from this album on Chris Franklin's stellar Raised on Rock radio show, I came into it blind labelled as melodic rock and found it quite the hard rock discovery. In fact, the opener is called Hard Rock Fever and it rolls along like Kickstart Your Heart but with a sleazier tone that reminds of earlier Crüe albums and a powerful lead vocal. Given the overt ties to glam metal, I took that vocal to be male but it's quite clearly female on Generation Now, just a raucous voice in the tradition of Stevie Lange or Joanna Dean. It turns out to be Linnea Vikström from Thundermother and Nighthawk is a sort of supergroup.

The original idea belonged to Robert Majd (the bassist in Captain Black Beard, who I've definitely heard on Raised on Rock; he's also on the first Fans of the Dark album), during the COVID-19 pandemic, so that he could play guitar for a change and work with a variety of different musicians. It clearly proved to be such a valuable experience that he's continued it. This is their third album and a fourth is apparently already recorded. Their description of their sound is that these are "fast paced, spontaneous, action rock n roll songs", a far better take on this music than melodic rock. Sure, it's highly melodic, but I'd call this hard rock first and foremost, with melodic rock, glam rock, heavy metal and even punk aspects.

For a start, this is much faster paced than melodic rock tends to be, blistering along with attitude, not only coming from Vikström. They simply aren't hanging around on any of these songs, even on a Sam and Dave cover like Hold It Baby, which is bluesy and soulful. Everything is urgent, as if they have a gun to their collective heads to knock out all ten studio tracks in under half an hour or pay a serious price, like losing their souls or some such. I'm sure the use of "spontaneous" doesn't mean that they just walked into the studio, plugged in and plucked ten songs out of thin air, down to the lyrics, but the urgency of them suggests that we could believe it. And only two are covers.

I've mentioned the Sam and Dave cover, which wraps up the ten, with Danny Hynes from Weapon joining Vikström to perform it as a duet, and it's hinted at by the blues on The Pledge, which slows things down just a little a couple of songs earlier, at least for a while, without losing any urgency. The keyboardist is Richard Hamilton from the band Houston and he delivers plenty of wonderful seventies style organ, not for the first time on this album, though it's not as obvious on the other songs as it could easily have been, perhaps one reason this finds its place in time a little later.

The other cover is S.O.S. (Too Bad), a deep cut from Aerosmith's Get Your Wings album, now fifty years old. It's the most seventies song here, but it fits the Nighthawk style well, and just like Hold It Baby, it's set up by an original song situated before it, which is Living It Up. Introduced by Doc Brown from Back to the Future this time, it's full of Aerosmith style sass, but it seems to me that, their choice of cover aside, Nighthawk are more influenced by the Aerosmith of the eighties than their earlier form in the seventies.

That's echoed by other influences. Save the Love is another stormer, with a Rainbow vibe to it that comes from Graham Bonnet's era rather than Ronnie James Dio's. There's some Lost in Hollywood in this one, though it's in the riffs and flow rather than the vocals, because, of course, Vikström is a long way from both of them in style. She's closer to Kelly Johnson of Girlschool on a few of these songs and the band back her up. There's Girlschool on Turn the Night and The Pledge and even my standout favourite, Burning Ground, which almost feels like a Girlschool cover of a Fleetwood Mac song, given how every aspect just harmonises seamlessly together like something off Rumours.

I had a blast with this album, though I can't see the point of the hidden track at the end of the live version of Just Let Go that wraps it up, even if its manipulations loop nicely back into the opener. What shocks me is how quickly it's over, given that there are ten fully formed tracks before we get to that live bonus, but that's due to the urgency. These are all lean and mean songs that blister in and blister out again and, a bunch of sampled intros from movies aside, they have no intention of outstaying their welcome. Everything is urgent and that's why only Hold It Baby makes it to even the three market mark. The opener is done in under two and a half.

With two previous albums available, Midnight Hunter and Prowler, and that promised fourth just around the corner, I have a feeling it would be very easy indeed to just dive into their music as an energy shot on a regular basis. Sure, the line-up changes because it's less of a band and more of a project, but I have a feeling that won't matter. Or maybe it will. Does the sound vary across these albums? I think I need to find out.

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Rydholm/Säfsund - Kaleidoscope (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | YouTube

For all the wild guitar that opens up Now and Forever and thus the album itself, presumably from Kristian Larsen, who's credited here for guitar solos, this is not heavy music. In fact, this may well be the poppiest album I've reviewed thus far at Apocalypse Later. I've gone with melodic rock as a label, which is fair and is where Rydholm and Säfsund tend to play in bands like Grand Illusion and Work of Art respectively, hence the name of their previous collaboration, Art of Illusion. However, this is a little different from that, I believe, hence the new band name.

I haven't heard Art of Illusion so I can't really speak to why this is different but I believe it's due to it being very firmly at the softer end of melodic rock, veering occasionally into prog rock and jazz but with just as much pop music here as there is rock, much of it funky in nature. Many songs, like the two openers, Now and Forever and Hey You, are often reminiscent of soft rock bands like Toto and the commercial extreme of prog rock like the Alan Parsons Project. I caught moments where commercial era Yes came to mind too, especially in the changes, but Hey You honestly owes just as much to Michael Jackson as any of the names you were more likely expecting to hear.

What that means is that I get to bring up Into the Music for the first time. I've talked in occasional reviews about the Friday Rock Show, a BBC radio radio show which was mandatory listening for any UK fans of rock and metal during the eighties. Well, Tommy Vance, the presenter of that show, did a year of presenting a second show, Into the Music, that focused on the lighter end of rock music. If that was running now, I'd be utterly sure that producer Tony Wilson would dialling Stockholm to see if Rydholm/Säfsund would be in London at any point and, if so, if they'd want to pop over to the Maida Vale studios to record a session.

That's because their core sound is in between those two openers, as highlighted by the next bunch of tracks, if not all of them over the fifty minutes taken up by the remaining ten songs.

What's Not to Love and Seven Signs of Love are bouncy and rooted in melodic rock, but they drift into pop frequently. There are guitar solos here, courtesy of Kristian Larsen on this pair, but with others guesting here and there on later tracks. Some are very tasty and I'm particularly fond of the ones on Seven Signs of Love and 4th of July, the latter performed by Tim Pierce, but crucially they never seem out of place, even with what I'm going to add in the next paragraph.

And that's the horn sections, which are even more obvious on Don't Make Me Do It and 4th of July. There are two here, one introducing this aspect to the band's sound on Now and Forever while the other takes over for the rest of the album. That means that Tom Walsh is a huge part of Rydholm/Säfsund's sound, maybe not as much as Rydholm or Säfsund but easily up there with Larsen. What matters is that he isn't soloing on an electric guitar but delivering lead trumpet and fluegelhorn. I've heard saxophones on extreme metal albums lately, so I won't suggest that the mere presence of fluegelhorn makes this pop music but it kinda helps.

Certainly, songs like The Bet, that sounds like a cross between Toto and Queen, and Sara's Dream and Bucket List, which are more like the former without the latter, would sound even more so, if there was less trumpet and more guitar. At points on the latter two, I started to imagine that this was a Toto covers album performed by Postmodern Jukebox, merely with only one singer in Lars Säfsund rather than a string of different guests. Just to highlight how these halves of the sound work together, Bucket List features both an excellent saxophone solo from Wojtek Goral and an excellent guitar solo from Larsen.

What this all ends up as is something very easy to listen to. It's often the sound of summer, which isn't necessarily a good thing because it makes me want to go outside and I live in Phoenix rather than Stockholm, where the sun is a fiery ball of death in the sky that wants to kill me. I'll settle for sitting in my office feeling happier because of the sheer perkiness of this material. My favourite track is surely Now and Forever, which is also probably the most rock song here, but I'm very fond of The Plains of Marathon, another Toto-esque song in the grand sweep after the openers. All of these do the perky thing, though, and it's a generous album at almost an hour, enough to make anyone happy.

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Reach - Prophecy (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Tiktok | YouTube

Reach have been around since 2012 but I'm not finding a heck of a lot of information about them. They hail from Stockholm and this is their fourth album, following The Promise of a Life in 2021. It came to me labelled as melodic hard rock and their Bandcamp page tags them alternative rock, but, only four songs in, I realised that labels and tags aren't really going to be particular helpful. They're all over the musical map and they're clearly happy about that.

Let me explain. The title track opens up the album as hard rock with a strong nineties alternative edge. It's entirely understandable why they supported H.E.A.T. on a couple of tours, but it's also a little heavy for that gig. However, as if hearing that note, Little Dreams is softer, more of a heavy pop approach that we could stretch to call melodic rock. It has a real bounce to it and the bass is a thing of joy. A Beautiful Life kicks off like a TV theme tune, only to launch into rock with the guitar pretending to be the drums for a while but then adding a grungy edge when it all bulks up.

But wait, as they say, there's more. In the second half of A Beautiful Life, there's a western vibe I might expect from an outlaw country rockabilly band that doesn't quite overwhelm the pop rock elements that could compare to a Cheap Trick. The end is almost steampunk in its look backwards into what could be taken for a harpsichord sound. Save the World kicks off with a playful guitar as if it's aiming to be a dance number and suddenly I'm thinking Stray Cats as a comparison.

It's a huge shift from those verses to the chorus that leaps right back into heavy arena pop, which isn't the end of it either, because then they go symphonic in the second half in a way that's mostly reminiscent of Queen. What does this band not do? Well, Queen could be seen as a key influence, though more for their musical chameleon act as for any particular moments, like that one, as it's a rarity. Perhaps the better general comparison would be The Darkness, acknowledging their own Queen connection, because Reach are clearly more modern than Queen and whoever handles the lead vocals likes dipping up into a falsetto just like Justin Hawkins.

Eventually I changed my tag to alternative for want of something to call this, but that's notably limited and shouldn't be seen as a be all end all to their sound. When I've reviewed the Darkness, I've gone with hard rock and that's just as fair. I could switch those and not mislead. And that's not to forget the funk in a song as hard rock as Psycho Violence, which is different to the Red Hot Chili Peppers funk that kicks off Who Knows. Just don't expect any song to sound like any other and you may really dig this. It'll certainly keep you on your toes. I haven't even got to Grand Finale yet, not the final song but another sonic leap into symphonic rock/metal. It's also another theatrical level above what's already been highly theatrical.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned any band members yet and that's because I'm not sure who is actually in the band. Bandcamp states the music is credited to Ludvig Turner, Marcus Johansson and Soufian Anane, while Turner also wrote the lyrics, so I'm guessing he's the singer. Discogs has him as guitarist and vocalist, with Johansson on drums and Soufian Ma'Aoui on bass. I presume he is the same Soufiane as Anane. Others have been involved but I couldn't tell you if they're still in the band or if they ever were, so I'll stick to these three for now. More information would be very welcome.

I like this album because it's hard not to like this album. It's entirely schizophrenic, sure, but I'm a particular fan of albums that venture all over the musical map without ever sounding like a band has betrayed their roots or gone a step too far into something that just doesn't fit. Queen's Sheer Heart Attack and Saigon Kick's Water are firmly in my list of most frequently replayed albums and this feels a little more consistent than either. Just tread carefully if you try to label it.

As to highlights, that's a how long is a piece of string question, because it's what I'm listening to at the time you ask. Mama Mama is a stormer of an opening single, so that's potentially the best of many good places to start. I do like A Beautiful Life, Psycho Violence and Grand Finale too, so they should get a special mention too. But, ask me tomorrow, and I might go with three different ones instead.

Thursday, 4 April 2024

Necrophobic - In the Twilight Grey (2024)

Necrophobic have been around for a long time, having formed as far back as 1989, and this is their tenth album. They're widely regarded as having a discography unusually consistent in quality and this isn't a huge distance in style from their debut, The Nocturnal Silence, that's now thirty years old. They're usually categorised as black/death metal and both those elements remain in obvious quantity from the outset, but I've always heard good old fashioned heavy metal in their sound as well and that may be a little more obvious here than last time I heard them, whenever that was. I don't recall.

Mostly, I see that in how clean everything feels and how that affects slower sections. For instance, the openers, Grace of the Past and Clavis Inferni, are generally fast songs. Anders Strokirk sings in a harsh voice, one that takes from both the black metal shriek and the death metal growl, to end up somewhere in between the two. Joakim Sterner plays the drums at black metal speed and the guitars of Sebastian Ramstedt and Johan Bergebäck mostly match it with the black metal wall of sound approach. However, there are points where both drop into a slower section and suddenly it all feels like heavy metal rather than anything extreme.

As Stars Collide is a great example of a song that never really speeds up, so remains slower than the two openers throughout. There's also a nice churn to it, so there's an obvious opportunity to manifest the death metal aspects of the band, but they don't really seize it. It's there to a point, but Tobias Cristiansson's bass never deepens it far enough for the death to really take hold, slick production keeps it very clean and so it feels like an up tempo Iron Maiden section, merely with a harsh vocal over the top. When Strokirk steps back for an instrumental section, it's easy to forget we're listening to an extreme metal band.

At the other end of the album, Maiden return on the title track, because the melodies as it wraps up feel reminiscent of synth era Maiden, merely with faster drums and that harsh voice. The song after it, the bonus track on some editions, is a cover of W.A.S.P.'s The Torture Never Stops, and it's completely at home with the original material before it. In fact, while it's heavied up through the harsh vocals, it's also deepened but slightly softened by added keyboard textures. It's actually an excellent cover but it helps to underline the roots of the album in eighties heavy metal. Tellingly, Stormcrow isn't much different, even if it's more frenetic. Even the chorus sounds familiar.

Perhaps the most death metal song here is Shadows of the Brightest Night, but it still feels more black than death and adds some progressive metal in there too to make the result rather perky. It's an impressive song and it continues to be for seven and a half minutes, the longest song here outside the eight minute title track. I'd call both of them highlights, suggesting that Necrophobic are at their best when they let their songs breathe. Both of these find wonderful grooves and are able to milk them so that the longer running times don't seem longer at all.

As I wrap up this review, I keep wondering if readers will interpret what I've said as suggesting an overt softening of the Necrophobic sound and I want to underline that that's not what I'm saying. This is heavy, often extreme stuff and the band haven't remotely forgotten their origins. It's just that, if we let it flow over us, we can leave with the impression that it isn't as extreme as it really is. Compare this to Belphegor, Vulcano or Behemoth and it's not going to seem quite as vicious or quite as as raw. It's going to feel slick and even commercial. However, it's just as frenetic and just as powerful. And it's going to feel more accomplished, because the slickness is in the songwriting too. The more I listen to this, the more extreme I really it is and the more I like it.

Monday, 1 April 2024

The Quill - Wheel of Illusion (2024)

I've never even heard of the Quill before but I'm happy to have finally remediated that, even if I'm very late to this party indeed. They were formed as far back as 1986, they put out a debut album in 1989 and another ten since then, making this their eleventh. I saw them listed as stoner/hard rock, but they're heavier than that, at least on this album, making them heavy/stoner metal to me. I'm not sure if they've got heavier over time to become this or if they were there all along. I ought to check out their back catalogue to find out.

As you might imagine from heavy/stoner metal, there's a huge amount of Black Sabbath here and it's firmly from the seventies era with Ozzy Osbourne. Magnus Ekwall, who is prominent enough in the European scene to have been invited to sing on an Ayreon album, The Human Equation, has an Ozzy vibe on a lot of these songs, starting with the opener, Wheel of Illusion, which could easily be an outtake from an actual seventies Sabbath album. That holds true even when the band dip into stoner rock on Elephant Head. It's still Sabbath with Ozzy, but Christian Carlsson's riffs move away from Tony Iommi in the bridge to be more Josh Homme.

While Sabbath are never far away on any song, the Quill are far from just clones and the variety is manifested as early as the second song, We Burn, where Ekwall sounds more like Bruce Dickinson than Ozzy. That's enough to take that song in a very different direction, but the riffing isn't as old school either. L.I.B.E.R. is perhaps the wildest track here, starting out with the repeated bass note intro from Runnin' with the Devil and then Jolle Atlagic kicks in with a drum rhythm worthy of an Adam and the Ants number. Atlagic has played for bands as varied as Hanoi Rocks and the Electric Boys, so it's not surprising to hear him bring something different here.

Are those southern rock stylings in Sweet Mass Confusion (All Rise Now)? I do believe they are and the slide guitar sounds great against the heavy riffing. There's also some southern rock within the closer, Wild Mustang, though less overtly. That one features a wonderful mellow section too with a glockenspiel, if my ears aren't deceiving me, in the final stretch. There's some space rock to start out The Last Thing You Remember and my favourite song trawls in some Hawkwind too.

That's Hawks & Hounds, in which Ekwall sounds as close to classic Ozzy as you can get without ever adding an "All right now!" However, the instrumentation behind him is very different. There's the Hawkwind sound, but also an ethnic middle eastern flavour that reminds less of Hassan i Sabah, a song I've mentioned recently in my Karkara review too, and more of Led Zeppelin, something that is only hammered home by the delightful drop in the vocal melody. It just keeps on going further than we ever expect and it sounds glorious. It's almost a hypnotic song and I adore it.

There's not a lot here at that level, perhaps only the pristine sudden pause that ends the intro to L.I.B.E.R. joining Hawks & Hounds, but there's a lot that I really like, from the core sound to little touches like those drums in L.I.B.E.R., the slide guitar in Sweet Mass Confusion and the sustained epic nature of Wild Mustang. It's not just that mellow section and Carlsson's wonderfully patient guitar solo; it's the entire progression that keeps on giving. It never feels long at just under eight minutes, but it also feels as if it has a ten minute instrumental stretch in the second half that we want to immerse ourselves in.

I'm happy to have finally clued myself in to who the Quill are and I'll absolutely be keeping an eye out for their next album. Had I found them sooner, I could have reviewed Earthrise back in 2021, a typical gap between albums for them, but that should be the last new one that I'll miss. They also seem to be highly stable, Atlagic and Carlsson founder members and Ekwall and Roger Nilsson on bass having around a quarter of a century in the band each, even if they've both taken breaks. It all bodes well for a twelfth album in three or four years time. Maybe I'll have caught up with their back catalogue by then. I hope so.

Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Lipz - Changing the Melody (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Lipz have been around since 2011 but it took them a while to get an album out, Scaryman not arriving until 2018. I haven't heard that one, but I've heard tracks from this, their follow-up, on Chris Franklin's joyous Raised on Rock radio show. They're on Frontiers now and, for some reason, that label is calling this heavy metal. It isn't close to heavy metal, even if there are hints of Shout at the Devil-era Mötley Crüe on the opener, I'm Going Under, as that buzzsaw riff is straight out of Looks That Kill. This is far closer to the smooth glam rock that Tigertailz played on songs like Livin' without You, shorn of the early punk influence but before they got a little edgier on later albums.

While I'm Going Under is probably my favourite song, it's not a particularly representative one. I would suggest that the title track is far more typical of the rest of the material here, featuring a more subdued guitar and a more obvious melodic rock outlook. Its bombastic chorus seems right out of melodic rock, merely put through a sleaze filter, and that seems to be what Lipz are aiming for with these songs. They want to play melodic rock with strong melodies and huge choruses but to sleaze it up with a glam rock look and feel, so that there's an edge to it all.

There are a few songs that take a slightly different approach. While the focus is always on vocals and huge choruses, for instance, the guitarists do get work to do. There's that underpinning Crüe riff on I'm Going Under and more eighties glam metal guitar throughout I'm Alive, the closest on this album that Lipz get to that heavy metal tag Frontiers is using. Freak could have been a glam metal ballad back in the day, kicking off with a tasty slow blues guitar solo, but it's a heavier song here. The real ballad is I Would Die for You, which dips all the way into tinkling ivories, and it's the song where Alexander Klintberg sounds the most female.

He isn't, because he's one of the twin brothers at the heart of this band, and he sounds like a male glam rock singer across most of the album, but he gets very delicate here. It's worth mentioning to anyone new to the band that, while he was a founding member of Lipz, he never intended to be its lead singer. He's one of those two guitarists, the other being Conny Svärd, and he only took up mike duties when they couldn't find a singer who could do the job they wanted. Fortunately, he did step up and the rest is history, because it's hard to imagine this band with a different singer now.

The rest of the band are capable too, with mention here for Chris Young on bass as the remaining musician I haven't credited yet, but this isn't really about musicianship. Sure, they do the job but the job doesn't call for virtuoso theatrics. It calls for capable, albeit tight playing that underpins the lead vocals and the melodies, and that's what these musicians deliver. And, in turn, what that means is that the best songs here are the ones that stick in our head the most. The good news is that there are earworms all over the album.

The chorus in I'm Going Under is catchy, but the chorus in Changing the Melody is a real earworm and it's far from the last. Bye Bye Beautiful and Monsterz have notable earworm chorus as well, while Stop Talking About Nothing and Secret Lover are earworms right out of the gate. The latter is surely the most Tigertailz influenced song here, enough so that I had to remind myself that the chorus is "(Na Na) Secret Lover" rather than "(Na Na) Nukklear Rokket", with a heck of a lot more than two nas for audiences to get behind. This is a gift for audience participation.

So is this glam rock cleaned up to play in the realm of melodic rock or is it melodic rock with sleazy glam rock elements? Given the look, I'd lean towards the former, but it doesn't really matter. The expected audience might be a little different, but there's a huge overlap and Lipz will meet what fans of either approach would expect in the music, which is where it matters the most, regardless of what melodic rock aficionados are likely to think of their make-up and stage attire. No wonder Chris is playing them.

Friday, 19 January 2024

Autumn's Child - Tellus Timeline (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jan 2024
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

I liked Autumn's Child's 2022 album, Starflower, finding it a little heavier than Mikael Erlandsson's previous band, Last Autumn's Dream, so melodic rock that wants to grow up to be hard rock. I was eager to listen to their next album to see how much into the latter they would move, but, in quite the ironic twist, given that I pointed out in that review that they were likely to be rather prolific, I completely missed the fact that they'd knocked out three before it. This is the next in line, a mere three months later, so it's their fifth in five years, an even greater accomplishment because that period of time spans both sides of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's sometimes a little heavier than Last Autumn's Dream, but it's not venturing any further into that direction than Starflower, and it just as often veers into pop music. Like that album, though, it's rather varied in which influences the band are happy to display. A Strike of Lightning is a hard rock song rooted in melodic rock, with excellent guitarwork to open it up. Gates of Paradise opens with choral flourishes and ends in even more of a symphonic rock crescendo. And Here Comes the Night is almost pure AOR with a Graham Bonnet era Rainbow riff to kick things off.

These are all good songs. The catch is that they're increasingly familiar, Here Comes the Night so familiar that I can't not have heard this before even though it appears to be completely original. In fact, it's so quintessential that, in that parallel universe where I have indeed heard this before, it was probably called something generic like, say, Here Comes the Night. It's Cheap Trick over all else, but there's Rainbow there too and some seventies glam rock and even hints of Meat Loaf in the phrasing. It's infuriatingly catchy and it's an early highlight, even if it's devoid of originality in every way.

What I like about this album is that, while it's rarely particularly original, it doesn't remotely stay in one place. Those first three tracks are different and most of the rest follow suit, enough so that Autumn's Child keep us guessing at how varied they're going to get here. The influences I cited in the last paragraph mean that the Journey touches on We are Young shouldn't surprise at all and neither should the guitar solo, but the acoustic Latin-inspired guitarwork that's right before it in the midsection might.

The real surprises arrive with Around the World in a Day, because it's Journey via the Beatles, an interesting touch that would be a worthy Eurovision entry, now that they've adopted rock music, if only it wasn't six minutes long. That Beatles touch doubles on Come and Get It! late in the album. This is the Beatles playing a seventies glam rock song with harmonies by the Beach Boys. Closer I Belong to You is everything seventies all wrapped up into one: pop, disco, rock, funk, sappy ballad, all of it put together. None of these are quite as catchy as Here Comes the Night, but some of the better ones come close.

It's odd to listen to something so varied that's somehow always familiar, but maybe that's just an indicator of how many earworms there are here, regardless of how far into pop or rock this gets. There are points where Erlandsson and lead guitarist Pontus Åkesson seem to be rocking out like their lives depend on it, but others where they veer so deeply into pop music that we wonder how we didn't notice them moving out of rock entirely, occasionally into something truly wild like the unaccompanied harmonising section in Come and Get It! that I kept thinking might dip into barbershop quartet territory. I guess we're too busy singing along with these choruses, even on a first time through.

And that's where this ends up. At this point, I'm not sure what Autumn's Child are actually trying to do. They come from melodic rock roots, but sometimes they want to heavy up and go hard rock and other times they want to ditch rock music altogether and play perky pop music. What's telling is that they're consistently good whichever way they go, meaning that this is a very strong bevy of hook-laden songs. I'm just not sure who to recommend it to most. Cheap Trick fans, perhaps?

Tuesday, 9 January 2024

Spidergawd - Spidergawd VII (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 10 Nov 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter

While they may have the least inventive album titles since Chicago, Spidergawd instead choose to pour invention into their music and this is another immense album from them. I gave Spidergawd VI a 9/10, so they were up against it to match that this time out. I've been away from writing music reviews for a couple of weeks as I nailed down a film zine with a particularly urgent deadline but I listened to this a lot over that time and it keeps getting better. It was always going to be at least an 8/10 but I'm enthused by it enough to warrant another 9/10.

I think it was the instrumental section late in the second track, The Tower, that's what started me onto the path to a 9/10. The opener, Sands of Time, is a strong song to kick things off, but it's not a particularly unusual one, with a sort of Magnum-esque effortlessness. It's very commercial with a clear arena rock influence, often with a Sammy Hagar era Van Halen vibe to it as well, but it's very tasty too. It's impeccably written and impeccably performed. It just doesn't carry much in the way of invention.

The invention I expect from Spidergawd arrives with a delightful carnival-style intro to The Tower, almost in a way that Dire Straits might do, though their opportunity for this one would have been Tunnel of Love and they went a different way. A minute in, it finds a proggier vibe but with riffing like Tank. This is an impeccable groove and it only gets better when it shifts into that instrumental section late in the song, which is gorgeous, starting a trend that continues unabated over the next few songs.

Dinosaur is better again and it's a great example of a song that grows on repeat listens. It may be my favourite of the first seven tracks, though Bored to Death comes close. That has another neat galloping groove and another great instrumental section, this one longer too, though there are backing vocals floating over the top at points. These are sublime songs and the saxophone I tend to expect from Spidergawd nowadays shows up early on too. I had missed that, because it's not as prominent on this album until we reach the closer. I kept catching glimpses of it but it vanished in most instances as if it was never there to begin with and I was merely dreaming.

As we shift into the second half, Your Heritage and Afterburner continue in much the same vein, especially the latter. Every one of these is a good song while it's being sung, Per Borten I believe handling that perhaps exclusively here, as I only see Hallvard Gaardløs credited on bass. He does an excellent job and I don't want to cast any shade on his mike work, but every one of these songs also elevates when it evolves into an instrumental section. This band, with Borten again leading the way on lead guitar, find magnificent grooves as easily as falling off a log and grow them well enough that I found myself wondering what an instrumental Spidergawd album might sound like.

I believe Your Heritage is the first single this time out and that may make sense. It's close to being the shortest song here at just over four minutes—only Afterburner is shorter—and it's the one I'd call closest to their Thin Lizzy style, in the riffs and also in the solo. It's another good one, because there are no songs here that aren't good ones, at the very least, but it's a long way from the ones I'd call out as favourites.

Before I get to the closer, because that's absolutely my favourite, above the various gems I called out on the first half, I should mention Anchor Song, because it's the only other song here. There's a real weight to its intro, which is the heaviest moment on the album. The song proper calms and emulates the tone of much of the rest of the album, but there's also a slight alternative vibe to it as well. It also features another fantastic riff. But to that closer.

It's called ...And Nothing But the Truth and it's the epic of the album, even though it's only a little longer than five minutes and not close to the six minutes of The Tower, itself hardly long when we start talking prog. This one ratchets everything up to eleven and unfolds as an absolute peach of a closer. It starts out with the saxophone of Rolf Martin Snustad and builds through acoustic chords reminiscent of Pink Floyd to a more emphatic version of everything we've heard thus far. Borten's more emphatic with his vocals and even more emphatic with his guitar, delivering my favourite of many favourite guitar solos. There are maybe six songs here, out of eight, that absolutely blister through their last minute or two, but this one has to end an album rather than just a song and it's easily up to the task.

So, yeah, this is a second 9/10 in a row from me for a Spidergawd album. They're less proggy than even I'm used to and I only came in with Spidergawd V. However, they're still absolutely on top of their game and this is highly recommended Norwegian hard rock indeed.

Friday, 5 January 2024

Soen - Memorial (2023)

I found Soen on their fourth album, Lotus, and I liked them a lot. They've changed since then, with a steady move away from the Tool influence that was overt on that album to something much less progressive and much more mainstream, but still unmistakably Soen. These ten songs are simpler, especially in the bass and drums, but they're still powerful and the hooks are just as strong as ever, which is what this band does better than so many other bands: to maintain a serious level of power whatever they're doing, even at their most melodic. They don't just write hooks for their choruses, they put them in verses too and the riffs support that wonderfully throughout.

The increasing simplicity of the music, which suggests that progressive metal isn't going to cut it as a label for long, if this far, was one of the first things I noticed with this album. Another was its impressive production, which is crisp and clear and makes it feel like metal even when it's shifted down into mere rock music, which it does often, in the way that Metallica really played rock music for a while but it felt like metal anyway because of the tone and production. On occasion, the tone even seems similar. There's a ballad to wrap things up too, Vitals, and that maintains its power as well, even in its quietest moments.

I liked this immediately but not emphatically. It took a while to grow on me, partly because of the general approach that was obvious from the first track, Sincere, but also partly because the song after it, Unbreakable, was so obviously the standout. Everything else seemed to sit in its shadow for a few listens through. However, I gradually realised that, even if those songs aren't as obvious or as immediate as Unbreakable, they're all still damn good songs. And so, from liking it from the outset, this turned into a grower. I was going with a 7/10 until my fourth or fifth time through but it became clear that it's an 8/10. Maybe I'll keep going up if I listen long enough.

It's also a very accessible album. Soen fans are likely to dig it, even though they're clearly getting more commercial. It's telling that the most progressive sections are probably the guitar solos, as they sometimes remind of Dave Gilmour, especially on Hollowed, Sincere and Icon. However, Pink Floyd did the same thing that Soen are doing, gradually moving away from progressive to mainstream, so "most progressive" here isn't really particularly progressive. However, it's wide open as to the rest of the potential audience. I can see alt rock fans and nu metal fans liking this, for a start. The path to this sound seems obvious from Floyd, Opeth or Metallica, but also from Disturbed or Pearl Jam, perhaps even Creed.

Much of that is because they calm down a lot for verses. Songs will kick in hard with big metal riffs from Cody Lee Ford and often surprisingly slow drumming from Martín López, but whenever Joel Ekelöf is ready to sing, those riffs strip away or calm down so the vocal melodies stay paramount. Violence is a great example but it's far from the only one here. It makes it easy for us to dig light moments as well as heavy ones, especially as the power is always there regardless.

I say Ekelöf because he's the lead vocalist here, as he's been since the band was founded in 2010, and he's becoming the strongest aspect, if mostly because the complicated passages of songs on previous albums that kept us paying attention to bass, drums and even keyboards generally aren't here this time out. That gives Ekelöf even more focus than he already had as a stellar singer, but he shares that spotlight on Hollowed with a female voice, delivered by Elisa Toffoli, who's Italian but carries a subtle Celtic lilt at the end of phrases. It's not really a duet, because they alternate their vocals for the most part, but both shine on this one, surely the most emotional song here.

It's Hollowed that has the most overtly Pink Floyd inspired guitar solo and it's Memorial after it that has the most overtly Metallica inspired riffing, but it's not a heck of a lot of songs that send me leaping at comparisons. Does Incendiary shift into Alan Parsons Project territory? Sure, I could throw that out, but there's not a lot here that sounds like other people.

Put simply, this sounds like Soen to me, even if they're still evolving their sound with each album, and that's an especially refreshing thought because, while I thoroughly enjoyed Lotus, I heard it as a Swedish take on Tool. I heard that obvious early influence much less on 2021's Imperial, as it sounded like Soen but with Tool often coming to mind. Here I had to stretch to find Tool moments. This is the first Soen album I've heard that sounds almost entirely like themselves.

And now I need to stop listening to Memorial, because I must be on my tenth time through now. It keeps getting better and it's only the fact that Unbreakable remains unchallenged in my mind by anything else here that I'm not thinking about a 9/10. All these songs are excellent, so an 8/10 has to be fair. The question is whether that's enough or not. At this rate, the next album, perhaps due in 2025, may well be right from the outset.

Friday, 24 November 2023

Heavy Load - Riders of the Ancient Storm (2023)

Well, here's a real blast from the past. I've seen it written that Heavy Load were the first Swedish heavy metal band, setting the stage for everything that followed within a country that has firmly punched above its weight for the last few decades. However, this is very much a comeback, as their previous album, their third, came out the year before I discovered rock music. I'm a grandfather of ten who's listened to rock and metal for most of my life and yet this is the Heavy Load's first album since I've known what that was. That's how long they've been gone!

To put some actual dates on that, the Wahlquist brothers founded Heavy Load back in 1976, so the same year as U2, Foreigner and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or, to pick a far more comparable band, Diamond Head. They put out albums in 1978, 1982 and 1983 before splitting up, so this album arrives no fewer than forty years after its predecessor. Given all that, it really ought to be good to be worth such a wait and to highlight that Heavy Load are relevant in a completely different era. I am very happy to state that it is. I like this a lot. Welcome back, folks!

I remember the name of Heavy Load but don't remember what they sounded like back in the day, a combination of heavy/power metal about all I can bring to mind. They're still there today, with this sounding very much like old school heavy metal with progressive and epic layers. Think bands such as Manilla Road or Brocas Helm rather than more modern power metal bands like Dragonforce or Blind Guardian. Then add some early Rush, mostly in the changes, and stir to taste.

Ride the Night opens up in that style and sounds good without really generating much else worthy of comment. We Rock the World continues it, though in a slightly more slimmed down version. The lyrics are precisely as clichéd as you might expect, with whichever Wahlquist brother sings lead on this one telling us that they're going to rock the world, shock the world, shake the world, you name it. However, the music sounds great, this one being a real stalker of a song that follows you down a street with serious intent.

So far so good, but it elevates from there for me. Those two openers are the shortest songs on the album, We Rock the World at four minutes and Ride the Night at five and a half, but they let these songs breathe from then on. Walhalla Warriors doesn't quite reach six but it features a section in which the band step back for Torbjörn Ragnesjö's bass to take the spotlight and, while he doesn't do anything particularly flash, he sounds absolutely wonderful and the band gradually join back in to equally strong effect.

Angel Dark is better still, a heavy song with some of those early Rush changes, harmonies and bass that brings Budgie to mind, maybe even some Demon. Ragnesjö contributes more joyous bass, but a guitar steals the spotlight midway in memorable fashion. The song almost stops dead, so they're able to shift into a completely different gear but the accompanying guitarwork is delightful. I have to assume that this is the work of new fish Nic Savage, cementing his place in the band. He joined in 2018, when they reformed, taking the role previously played most frequently by Eddy Malm. The rest of the musicians all date back to the seventies, even if Ragnesjö wasn't there for the start or the end of the original run of the band.

Slave No More seriously takes its time, mixing some slow old school epic power metal with middle eastern flavours as Rainbow used to do. Then it gets slower still. It's almost doom metal when the verses kick in, but it never loses its epic flavour and it stays heavy throughout. Raven is Calling is a more up tempo track and it's a good one but a less noteworthy one. Sail Away kicks off with a Blue Öyster Cult vibe and finds a magnificent groove. That's four great songs out of seven, with a fifth not far behind them. That's a damn good hit rate for a band who haven't recorded in forty years.

What's left is Butterfly Whispering, which isn't at all what I expected. There's a long intro done on acoustic guitar that's folky but powerful and, well, it isn't an intro. It keeps going in that vein for seven minutes and three seconds. There are no vocals, drums or bass. It's just two guitars weaving back and forth for the entire track, so it's less of a song and more of a piece of music. I liked it a lot but I don't know yet whether it'll stay as strong after many repeat listens. It's doing OK so far.

And, while that's a pretty traditional track by track runthrough, which I generally hate doing, it's how it seems to play to me. It starts decently but improves quickly. The best songs are right there at the heart of the album, from Walhalla Warriors to Raven is Calling, followed by another good one and then that long outro, if that's what we should call it. It's hard to think of it in a different order, but fortunately we don't have to. It's a strong return for a pioneering Swedish band and I'm happy that they're back. Here's to the next one!

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

Thursday, 20 February 2025

Friday, 31 January 2025

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Wednesday, 25 September 2024

Friday, 13 September 2024

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Thursday, 4 April 2024

Monday, 1 April 2024

Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Friday, 19 January 2024

Tuesday, 9 January 2024

Friday, 5 January 2024

Friday, 24 November 2023

Search This Blog

Index Pages

Reviews Archive

Labels

About Me

My Other Web Sites

Blogs Worth Visiting

Total Pageviews

Translate