Myrath - Karma (2024)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
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Back in May 2019, when I reviewed three 9/10 albums in a month, my album of that month was the fifth album by Tunisian progressive folk metal band Myrath, Shehili. It was my first by them but it utterly blew me away, its merger of technical progressive metal with north African folk melodies and rhythms unique and enticing. It wasn't just me who thought so either, because I saw videos of songs on that album shared out on social media more than once by friends who aren't even metal fans. I was naturally keen to hear their next album, which was due last year but delayed for some reason until March of this year.

The good news is that it's a good album. The bad news is that it's nothing like Shehili, and not just in quality but in style. The former is understandable, because few bands can knock out classics of that album's stature every time out, and as long as they're still doing good work, then it's trivial to forgive. The latter is less understandable, because, while bands often indulge in musical shifts, both good and bad, this one seems to be about stripping away the elements that make them who they are and why they're special but keeping the ones that don't.

I'd call that a terrible idea, but it depends on what their goals are. Given that the ones that don't make them special are highly commercial in nature, this is perhaps a financial decision to aid the conquest of the musical map by Myrath, if not as a progressive folk metal band then as a melodic rock band. After all, there are surely more fans of melodic rock across the globe than there are of progressive folk metal. If that's what they want, then they achieved it here, ending up sounding a lot like a Swedish melodic rock band, while retaining some of the crunch that many would see as a hallmark of metal. Of course, this is their band, so they can do what they want.

Unfortately, it isn't what I want from them and it doesn't seem to be what their existing fans want either. Sure, I like their huge hooks, which are almost as good here as on Shehili, the standout on that front being Candles Cry. However, I can get huge hooks from a lot of other bands. I don't need Myrath for that. What I go to Myrath for is all that ethnic north African flavour, something I can't hear anywhere else on account of there not being many Tunisian metal bands out there and only this one that I'm aware has been doing this sort of thing.

And that flavour just isn't here. There's a little bit of ethnic rhythm in the bookends of the opener, To the Stars, but it mostly vanishes in between, with a little more to be found in the keyboard solo in the midsection. There are some cool violins halfway through Into the Light that are more world than the orchestration around them. There's a north African melody on Words are Failing. There are the tasty bookends to Temple Walls. But that's about it. There's literally more ethnic flavour in Asl, the sixty-nine second intro on Shehili, than there is on this entire album.

To me, that's a real disappointment. To those die hard fans who have followed Myrath from their debut album, Hope, back in 2007, it's a bigger disappointment because they apparently began on this journey shortly after and merely took their final leap away from that world flavour here. Now, I'm relatively new to them, but I've read the suggestion that this may be due to the change from Elyes Bouchoucha, their keyboard player until 2022, to their producer Kévin Codfert, the keyboard player in French symphonic power metal band Adagio. I can't say that Bouchoucha was the origin of their unique sound or the loss of it, but it seems to fly.

All of that goes to explain that Karma is not Shehili and never intended to be. That said, what it is isn't bad at all. These are highly capable musicians, whatever instrument they're playing, and that goes for Codfert as much as anyone else. He and vocalist Zaher Zorgati are most prominent here, with tasty guitar parts from Malek Ben Arbia too. Everyone involved adds neat little touches to songs and gets their own moments to shine and that includes bassist Anis Jouini and drummer Morgan Berthet as well as everyone I've already mentioned. However, few of them get much opportunity to show what they can do. This isn't as intricate music as on Shehili and presumably a lot less than earlier albums. That progressive edge may not have vanished but it's vanishing.

In its place, there's a lot of AOR in the melodic sweeps of songs like Let It Go, some funk on Words are Failing and some Iron Maiden-esque woah woah on To the Stars. Even where there are hints, like the very opening of Words are Failing or at various points on Child of Prophecy, they simplify very quickly into something far less complex. I should see what melodic rock guru Chris Franklin of the Raised on Rock radio show thinks about this. As much as he enjoys originality, he may dig this much more than I do, being more into the progressive, folk and metal elements of what this band used to play, which are most evident here on Child of Prophecy and not much else.

Omination - NGR (2021)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Funeral Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 5 Feb 2021
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Regular readers will know well that I live to discover things that I haven't heard before. That's why I'd easily call Nepal Death's debut my favourite album of the month, even if I've rated three others above it. This is the first to even stand up as a contender and that's because this is a one man funeral doom/death metal album from Tunisia on the aptly named label Hypnotic Dirge Records.

That one man is Fedor Kovalevsky, who doesn't sound like he's from Tunisia, unlike his bandmates in progressive death metal outfit Vielikan, Zied Kochbati and Nessim Toumi, both of whom seem to have at least some sort of connection to Omination even if they don't play on this, the project's third full length release. Wherever he hails from originally, he's based in Tunis and that makes this a Tunisian extreme metal release, one that's long, fascinating and uncompromising.

And I say funeral doom/death metal for the sake of listing a genre. This may not be what you imagine from that description, though it's certainly as fair as anything else. This may sound really weird but I ended up thinking of NGR as the dark side of early Enigma. No, this isn't built out of samples and I'm not suggesting that it's Gregorian monks shifted into a minor key. However, the instrumentation here is as much church organ, bells and choral chanting as it is guitars, bass and drums. The whole thing is about setting a mood and that mood is cultists in black robes performing unholy rites in the ruins of an unsanctified church.

It's also experimental enough that it's hard to sit this truly alongside bands like Ahab, who are heavy and achingly slow but traditional enough in their song structures that you could play them at 45rpm instead of 33rpm and get a different experience. This often appears to be as much a sound collage as a piece of music. There are points where our ears catch riffs and melodies and rhythms and all the other things that we critics call out so often for attention, but mostly this sounds like a train colliding with a packed church in slow motion and in such a way that the result sounds appealing.

I'd love to hear someone better versed in experimental music than I explain why this works. I can see a particularly canny combination of subgenres, bringing in walls of sound from black metal, the growls from death metal and the slow pace and atmospheres of doom metal, but there are other things here. This is music I could imagine reading about in The Wire as much as Terrorizer and I'm convinced that a number of the instruments here are found objects in a Einstürzende Neubauten sense, bringing some proto-industrial textures into play.

It also feels as if it falls into a genre that could simply be called loud music. I don't know the technical wonders that the production is utilising but I've stood in a tiny venue with a band performing louder than was appropriate for the space and my ears rebelled at the sheer volume. I felt the same here and I have a volume control that I can tweak however I like. That discomfort factor is built into the music and it's fascinating to me. I don't want to leave, but my ears are constantly struggling to understand what's happening in such a challenging environment. This is what intensity sounds like and I say that before we get to the industrial black metal section sixteen minutes into The New Golgotha Repvbliq.

The vocals help a picture like that because they're varied. Kovalevsky sings with both clean and harsh voices but he also shouts, not in a hardcore style but like he's fighting to be heard in a hurricane, and he also chants in ritual fashion. I presume it's all him, because he's credited for everything, but he's a cast of characters rather than a single performer. Given that some of this feels ritualistic, I wonder if it was written with visuals in mind. If I put the words "dark opera" together, I'd expect something in a gothic metal vein, which this totally isn't, but they seem to fit here.

The stage would need to be huge though, because the grandeur here is Wagnerian in scale. This needs an organ the size of a building and entire walls of choirs. The characters have to be giants, fallen gods moving achingly slowly, especially during the hypnotic ritual chanting sections in songs like Unto the Ages of Ages and Death(s), Love and Life. The sets and costume must be black and white because colour has been bled out of this album. And it must have an ethnic angle, even if African flavours don't show up until Post-Apocalypticism almost an hour in, because wherever this unfolds, it isn't here and that's going to stand wherever you're reading this from.

Did I mention that this album is long? When Post-Apocalypticism ends, eight songs in, we've reached 57m, making this long already. But then it's time for the title track, because NGR presumably stands for The New Golgotha Repvbliq, and this wildly ambitious piece is over twenty minutes long. And, if that's not enough, my edition has a tenth song, titled Nothing, which adds another ten. An hour and a half of this ought to be unbearable but it's magnetic. I listened to this in entirety three times yesterday and a fourth time today as I translated my notes into an actual review.

To suggest that there's a lot here is a major understatement. It's not remotely going to be something that everyone's going to appreciate. This is very niche material, but if you're someone who likes how genres can be merged and subverted into something new and if you're someone who reads The Wire as often as your favourite metal magazine, this may be the best album you've heard in forever.

Avdey - Gates of Horn and Ivory (2021)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2021
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Here's something completely different, given that I couldn't resist the gorgeous cover art painted by Sponte Sequor and found the album behind it fascinating. It's progressive and it's psychedelic but in a very different way to anything I've reviewed at Apocalypse Later before.

The core of Avdey is in Tunisia, which means Mustapha Denguezly on guitars, synths, drums and other percussion and Adel Boujemaâ on bass. They play music that's easy to listen to but hard to categorise. There's world music here, but there's too much from outside the country to truly call it Tunisian. And I don't just mean western sounds, but other world sounds like the Mongolian throat singing early in Jaganmata.

The most obvious addition is new age music and this, the project's first album, seems to have many of the same goals, being spiritual and often ritualistic and/or trancelike. I'm sure people could meditate to this, though I couldn't, being too interested in what the instruments are doing. The reason I think it's so downright listenable is because it's also filtered through a soft jazz mindset into prog rock, so it's both familiar and utterly different at the same time. While it's always instrumental, it does bring in some samples and they're all in English, which helps keep it accessible to a western audience.

There's a third musician who's all over the album like a rash: Leonardo Ramos, who's a Salvadorean by birth and a Brazilian by upbringing, though it appears that he's another Irish music fan in southern Brazil, not far down the road in São Paulo from Tuatha de Danann in Varginha. He takes care of all the wind instruments here and there are plenty of those, from the expected flutes, whistles and ocarinas to more exotic fare like the xun and the xaphoon, the former an ancient Chinese instrument and the latter a recent creation known as the pocket saxophone.

In fact, while all three of these musicians are clearly identifiable at any point of the album, depending what you want to focus on, I'd suggest that Ramos is the lead. Denguezly's percussion and Boujemaâ's bass laying down textures for him to flutter around, like we'd normally expect a guitarist to do, such as on the solo album of travel-oriented mood music that I reviewed from Ed Wynne of Ozric Tentacles a couple of years ago. There are no overt guitar solos here, but there are plenty of solos on plenty of wind instruments.

Like that album, this one seems to travel, though I'm not sure of all the destinations, however much Google helped. An icaro is an indigenous South American healing song, so An Icaro clearly aims for a shamanistic healing sound. I'm assuming Yapa is South American too, most of the results I'm getting tying to Peruvian/Japanese restaurants. Jaganmata is the Hindu mother of the universe, so we're into Asia, though I'm not sure how far a Hindu mindset goes into Mongolia.

Zenith is a sort of destination, I guess, even if it's a movable one and I have no idea how we might get to it. Maybe we just "come along", which is the English translation of the Icelandic Komdu Með. This is the one piece of music featuring a fourth musician, who goes by Skuggasveinn. It's partially a vocal song and he provides the lyrics and the voice. And that leaves Hamartia, which isn't a place but a flaw, from the Greek for "to miss the mark". It's usually applied to tragic heroes like Hamlet and Oedipus. I hope we don't go there too often, but I guess at least we'd have to be heroes to do so.

One of my goals at Apocalypse Later is to find music that I haven't heard before, not merely bands or countries but styles and this one certainly fits that bill. I think I might just listen to it again before I move onto something more expected.

Myrath - Shehili (2019)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 3 May 2019
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Myrath are the latest beneficiary of an odd phenomena that's done well for The Hu and Bloodywood. This is where people who aren't remotely metal fans are confronted with YouTube music videos shared on their Facebook walls of styles of music that they had no idea even existed. Mongolian folk metal? Indian rap metal? Tunisian superhero metal? The response is often to laugh at how wacky these genres seem but then to realise that these wacky genres sound a lot better than the mainstream crap that they're used to. Hey, that really isn't bad, they say, and so the world changes.

Myrath are the last of those three examples, a Tunisian progressive metal band with folk elements. They make music videos that tell ongoing stories with the band cast as what seem to be interdimensional superheroes. They're very cool indeed but the music on this, their fifth studio album, stands on its own. I've been playing this a lot over the last couple of weeks and it just keeps on getting better. It's got to the point that I have to apologise for not posting reviews for a couple of days because I just wanted to listen to this again.

The first couple of seconds of the album may sound eerily like the start to Money for Nothing, but the intro quickly establishes itself as something we haven't heard before. It seems reminiscent of an Islamic call to prayer and it ably highlights that we aren't in Kansas any more, Toto.

It seems odd to suggest that this intro sounds notably eastern, given that, if the band look east from their home town of Ez Zahra, they'll see Sicily and Malta, but it's certainly not 'western'. What follows is a magnificent demonstration of balance because Myrath are both eastern and western, both crunchy and folky, both progressive and catchy. More than anything, their balance between melody and power is so good that I can't think of a better example.

And, what's more, all this is in evidence on every single track, with the sole exception of Stardust, whose classical piano and playful bass leads it emphatically into western prog ballad territory. The oriental textures are everywhere else, whether in fluttering vocals, handheld drums or what really shouldn't be called Egyptian strings when the band are from Tunisia. North African strings maybe; do they have those in Libya in between? The majority of the album is sung in English but sections here and there are in what I presume is a dialect of Arabic.

Initially, my favourite songs were all in the middle of the album. Lili Twil is gorgeous; it's prog metal rather than folk metal but the flute and the lilting voice both add folk flavour. Dance is a fantastic commercial single and Monster in My Closet doesn't run far behind, with a glorious bounce, a great violin riff and a fantastic chorus. Both deserve to be massive hits in the west. Wicked Dice often approaches arena rock without feeling out of place.

The more I listened to the album, though, the more the first half grew to match the middle in quailty. Born to Survive is a worthy single and You've Lost Yourself feels anthemic with its memorable early siren giving way to a handheld drum fiesta and very catchy vocals. And then the last few tracks grew too, especially the deep title track which closes out the album. How do I pick favourites? I guess I don't.

Initially, I just thought there wasn't a bad track here, but much repeated listening tells me that there isn't an average one either. Last month saw only two 8/10s from me but this has to be a third 9/10 for me in May alone. It's outstanding stuff and there are four prior albums for me to discover. Life is good!