Jinjer - Duél (2025)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Groove Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I'm doomed to point this out every time I review anything with a predominant metalcore element but I've never been a fan of shouty hardcore vocals. They have a purpose and, when used properly, can meet that purpose, which is primarily to channel aggression. However, in almost all instances, they're an inherently limited vocal technique. If all you want to do is channel aggression, then you aren't very interesting. If you want to do more than that, then you need flexibility. And that's the reason I'm still reviewing Jinjer albums when I avoid most metalcore. They have plenty of that.

Well, OK, I missed their fourth album for some reason, which was 2021's Wallflowers, but the core point stands. And I'm back for their fifth after reviewing their third, Macro. Much of that flexibility comes from the astounding vocal talent of Tatiana Shmailyuk but I have to highlight Eugene Abdukhanov's five string bass too. It's a prominent instrument here, to the degree that often it seems like it's the lead string instrument rather than Roman Ibramkhalilov's downtuned guitar. It's right there at the front of every angry assault but it's also there in quieter moments, like the drop in the second half of Tantrum.

That's not to say that Ibramkhalilov has little to do. He's there throughout, of course, deepening the texture of this music; he merely doesn't get as many moments in the spotlight as your average metal guitarist might. There's some interesting guitarwork going on in Green Serpent, both early with vibrant accompaniment and late with a faux acoustic drop at the end. He gets a solo on Dark Bile, not a particularly expansive solo as they go but one nonetheless. Late in the album, he gets a thrash drive both late on Fast Draw and early on the title track, but also a moment of sassiness to bolster Shmailyuk's teasing clean voice at the beginning of Someone's Daughter.

And back to Shmailyuk. As so many YouTube reactors are finding, she can switch effortlessly from a clean melodic voice to a shouty metalcore voice that also contains a lot of growl. Now, she's wasn't the first female singer to tackle harsh vocals and she's hardly the only one doing it nowadays, but her harsh voice still stands alone. Most of those singers sound like they're female when they sing harsh and a few are indistinguishable from the male equivalent. Shmailyuk somehow sounds like she's male and female, as if she's singing both sides of a duet, especially on Hedonist. Some of that could be a production thing, but she does it live too.

As always, my favourite songs are the ones that really play with these two contrasting sounds and make them work together. For me, Tantrum and Rogue are decent early songs, the latter showing Jinjer's progressive side by playing with tempos, but Hedonist leaps out from between them to be the first highlight and Tumbleweed shows up next to be the second. It opens up doomy, but with a happier and quirkier mood in Shmailyuk's vocals, which are clean for half the song after staying in harsh mode for the whole of Rogue. Her harsh voice in the second half churns well with the music behind here, a sludgy growl rather than a standard shout.

They're both first half songs, as is Green Serpent, which plays nicely with emphasis, and they may remain my favourites. However, the second half doesn't feel lesser. It merely shines more through variety than a standout track or two. Dark Bile isn't Fast Draw and neither of them are Someone's Daughter or Duél. All of them play with the same components—that downtuned guitar and overt bass, those two utterly different vocal approaches—but they end up in different places that keep this album interesting in ways that most metalcore doesn't even dream of.

So Kafka is peaceful until it isn't and it finds its way home in a flurry of Ulasevich's drums and the angriest shout on the album. Dark Bile has a jauntiness to it and even a swing, just as Someone's Daughter has a sassiness to it. It reminded me early on of the YouTube reactor who compared her to Katy Perry during the opening section of Pisces only to have his expectations shattered as she shifted into harsh mode; she doesn't do that here until the second half. And Duél has a fascinating opening to make it feel deep even before it gets going. There's a lot in this song.

And so, once again I find myself enjoying a Jinjer album, even though I'm not a metalcore fan. I'm still listing them as progressive groove metal, because both those aspects constitute major parts of the Jinjer sound, but they're still metalcore to metalcore fans. To me, they show that the anger and aggression of metalcore can be preserved while diversifying the sound and stringing a series of varied tracks together across an album. That they don't truly sound like anyone except Jinjer is a bonus.

Karfagen - Passage to the Forest of Mysterious (2023)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives | YouTube

Anthony Kalugin is a rather prolific musician. This is my third review of a Karfagen album in a short four year span, though I'm only tackling the new studio half of the release; there's a bonus disc of what they're calling a Director's Cut instrumental version of 2020's Birds of Passage album. Back in January, however, he also put out a Sunchild album with many of the same musicians, called Exotic Creatures and a Stolen Dream. If that wasn't enough, he put out a Sunchild box set in February of four earlier albums but with eighty minutes of bonus material. He's a gift that keeps on giving.

Back to the job at hand, though, and this is another delightful pastoral prog rock album that often hearkens back to the genre's heyday in the UK in the seventies but with a variety of new elements. As always, the track lengths are wildly different and often misleading, because of how Kalugin has his music collated into suites or broken up into parts, especially when those parts continue across a multitude of albums.

Case in point: this album kicks off with Kingfisher & Dragonflies, Pt. 4, only three minutes long but a return to a piece that started in 2007, continued in 2010 and then kicked off the previous album, 2022's Land of Green and Gold. It's very pastoral, bringing to mind the names that you may expect: Genesis and Yes primary among them. It's unsurprising that parts of this piece, if it has a coherent sense of being, begin albums because they're great mood setters, none of them long but all with a presence to bring us into this delightful setting. Once done, we can imagine ourselves sitting on a green field by a sweetly flowing river with nothing but blue sky above us.

And then Kalugin can get his teeth into an album with another piece, here Mysterious Forest in an off balance pairing of parts. The first continues in this pastoral vein, complete with the chirping of creatures, but there's an ominous tone from the outset that leaves often but never stays gone and gradually leads the piece into a more classical and experimental vein. That means plenty of depth if you're a prog fan who wants to dig into a piece of music, even if it often feels slickly commercial in outlook. Sure, we can let it flow over us but we can also immerse ourselves in it and find more.

I say pairing of parts, because Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 follow in quick succession, leaving Pt. 3 to wrap up the album after a few other pieces of music. Pt. 1 is the most progressive of the pieces, the second an amalgam of prog with jazz and the third far more celebratory in nature. The latter two play out in shorter fashion too, only amounting to two thirds of the first if put together. They're all good but the first part is the one with the most fascinating depths.

And that's not unusual for Karfagen. To Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day is a fascinating blend of old school Ummagumma Pink Floyd and more new school commercial. Through the Whispers of the Wind has its moments, even though it's a mere minute and a half long, a conversation between an acoustic guitar, keyboards and flute. However, neither can remotely compare to the piece that sits in between them, the nineteen minute suite called Birds of Passage and the Enchanted Forest, the magnum opus of the album, an expanded version of a previously much shorter piece.

It's a more neoprog piece to my ears, especially early on. There's some Marillion, both old school and new, the vocals far more Hogarth than Fish but the music occasionally looking way back at the early days, some of it drifts further back still, to the golden era of Yes. There are other touches of note, like the percussion that sounds like woodblocks over deeper drums, that make this pleasant on the surface but fascinating beneath it. It shifts into a new movement six and a half minutes in that changes things completely. Part two gets seriously playful. Part three, if I'm even counting on an appropriate scale, gets more experimental again with some angry saxophone and some wilder orchestrations.

There's a heck of a lot to explore in that track and in the album as a whole. I don't feel that there's anything groundbreaking here, so I'm going to give this my third 7/10 in a row for Karfagen, but it remains recommended. This consistency also suggests that Antony Kalugin is a musician to follow wherever he takes his talent. He's prolific as Karfagen and slightly less so as Sunchild and he isn't done there, because he also performs as Hoggwash and Akko. I don't know how these differ, but I feel increasingly driven to find out.

Gogol Bordello - Solidaritine (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Gypsy Punk
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Sep 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's something a little different: a highly international gypsy punk band from Manhattan. They have been a favourite of mine for a long time, with a number of songs on 2007's Super Taranta! on my internal playlist that I sing along to when I walk. Technically, they count as an American band, a product of the wild diversity that is New York City, but their sound is rooted in the Romani culture of eastern Europe and tends to be described as gypsy punk, because of its sheer energy and use of instruments like violin and accordion.

This is their ninth studio album and it's an important one because of its timing. The band's leader is Eugene Hütz, he of the wild lead vocals, acoustic guitar and occasional percussion, and he hails from Ukraine, which wasn't at war when the prior Gogol Bordello album, Seekers and Finders, was released in 2017. However, a couple of other key members—violinist Sergey Ryabtsev, who's been part of Gogol Bordello longer than anyone else except Hütz, and guitarist Boris Pelekh—are both Russian. They're therefore a perfect example of how the two countries can get along fine and put something new and vibrant into their shared culture. Reality isn't following suit.

And so it should surprise to find that this comments on the war. The cover art is white on black but for the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, colours you'll also see as the backdrop if you visit the Gogol Bordello site on Bandcamp. There's also a reworking of Forces of Victory here, a song from Super Taranta! with guest performers, that was released as a single before this album came out. I should note that the singers helping out Hütz are Oleksandra Zaritska from Kazka, an electro-folk band, and Serhiy Zhadan, who isn't a singer at all but a writer, who collaborates with the ska band Zhadan i Sobaky. Both of course are Ukrainian and the lyrics are translated into that language.

I don't believe Solidaritine is a real word in any language. Here it's what Hütz calls an "imaginary substance that unlocks our empathy and our full human potential, which is supposed to unite us in overcoming our common problems." To me, it sounds like Gogol Bordello and it's a great way for a wartime album to kick off, even if I much prefer the next song, Focus Coin, about something as odd as cryptocurrency.

It does something that I adore Gogol Bordello for doing, which is to meld different genres into an impressive new sound. It's got all the energy that their usual gypsy punk has and it's impossible to listen without moving with the rhythm and tapping it out with your toes. It's a mix of ska and punk with an up tempo beat, some teasing ZZ Top guitar in the second half and and even soulful backing vocals reminiscent of Joss Stone. It would be my favourite song here if Fire on Ice Floe didn't show up much later on.

Focus Coin is more immediate, the sort of song that has you partying even on a first listen, but Fire on Ice Floe kept on getting under my skin with every time through until it was impossible to ignore how much it had got to me. It's subtle as it begins, quiet but for Hütz's vocal and wonderful work from new fishes Korey Kingston on drums and Gill Alexandre on bass, both new to the band in the past couple of years. The verses are chill in a way that only this band can be chill but the hook is an absolute peach and it just keeps building as other instruments join the fray. I picture it like a quiet dancefloor that ends up joyously packed.

After those two classics, there's a bit of a gap. My Imaginary Son really nails its grooves, both the hardcore sections and the ones with plucked strings, while I'm Coming Out is agreeably odd, with quirky lyrics referencing Zombie Lifestyle magazine, which I ought to check out, just in case is isn't a product of his imagination. Oleksandra Zariska returns on Take Only What You Can Carry, while H.R. from Bad Brains steps in to help out on The Era of the End of Eras, adding his characterful and personal touch to the song. Blueprint is a Fugazi cover, one that they play live often and righly so, because it has such a Gogol Bordello drive to it, all the way to the brass that dominates the end.

The beauty of what Gogol Bordello do is that their sound is such a vibrant patchwork of styles that my choices for standouts may well not be yours and that's fine. Their potent energy infuses every song but the particular recipes that each song uses for flavour are highly personal and will speak to different people in different ways, depending on what you and I and anyone else bring with us. I'm not going to catch them in Tempe at the end of the month, but seeing them live is certainly on my bucket list and I'll get there at some point. In the meantime, this.

White Ward - False Light (2022)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 Jun 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | VK | YouTube

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the saxophone is a highly versatile metal instrument. It was not all that long ago that that I thought that, to bring it into metal, you had to go batshit insane, like John Zorn on his Painkiller releases, but that's not true. White Ward, a post-black metal band from Ukraine, prove that yet again here because, as with dark jazz outfits like Katharos XIII, their saxophone works as a contrast and as a driving instrument of mood and menace. And, as much as I enjoy the work of the musicians playing more traditional metal instruments here, it's the sax that haunts me. Dima Dudko does a magnificent job but, crucially, the songwriting allows it too.

The sax often conjures up visuals for me, even if they're often the same ones, and that starts early on this album. Leviathan is a ballsy song to open with, given that it's thirteen minutes long, but it isn't even the longest track here and there are eight on offer. It starts out like a film score, water sound effects setting a scene as the keyboards grow a mood. It feels eighties, something that you might hear on a Michael Mann soundtrack. Then it gets heavy. And then the sax shows up, patient but dark. Whatever this story is, it's not going to end well. When the vocals arrive, they're raw and angry, but more like hardcore screams than black metal shrieks. Things develop and grow and the sax plays its part, until soon after six minutes in when everything fades away and we're back in the quiet rain with the sax stepping up in its more traditional film noir role.

Now, that's only half of track one, so you can imagine the dynamics in play throughout this album. It's not fair to suggest that White Ward alternate between black metal and soft jazz, but it's quite the idea and there's some truth in it, so it's a useful place to start. After all, if you haven't heard a group play in this sort of style, that's going to make absolutely no sense to you and you're going to try to conjure it up in your head and probably fail. Hopefully it intrigues you, though, and that will prompt you to check them out. Leviathan is far from a bad place to start.

Probably the worst place to start is the next song here, Salt Paradise, because of the approach the vocals take, which presumably have meaning within the wider story. They come across to me like a monotone Nick Cave, which is awkward because so much of what magic Cave generates comes from his magnificent intonation. There's no intonation here, deliberately so, and I wonder if this is as an effort to draw a character as sociopathic. I have no idea what this story is, but the moods suggest it revolves around violence and maybe redemption and a sociopathic character would be at home in a violent story.

Given the presence of lengthy samples, taken from speeches, TED talks or maybe documentaries, in Phoenix and the closer, Downfall, which suggests their importance, I wonder if there's a deeper level in play too. Maybe it's telling a story about individuals, the ones we hear arguing bitterly in a couple of these songs, like Silence Circles, but it's simultaneously telling a story about something far larger, like the fate of the planet. Maybe I should go read the lyrics, but I'm not sure I care that much. I adore the instrumentation on White Ward albums. This band are incredibly tight and they have a natural sense for dynamic play that very few bands can boast.

And that's my primary focus, especially as I'm not a huge fan of the vocal approach. There are two vocalists here, Yurii Kazarian and Andrii Pechatkin, who also play guitar and bass respectively. The lead—and I don't know which is which—has a shouty voice for black metal, one that wouldn't work too well singing about demons but does in a more visceral story that's grounded in dark reality, as this album surely is. The other, usually in the background, varies. As a clean voice, it's rich and cool and engaging. As a harsh voice, it's less so, because it's a shouty growl that seems half-hearted, as if it used to sing hardcore and wants to move into death but can't quite commit to that premise.

I found myself in an odd place with this album. I gave White Ward's previous relese, Love Exchange Failure an 8/10 and my instinct told me to do the same here. It's an ambitious album, one that runs for sixty-six minutes and never outstays its welcome, and it flows in a fascinating cinematic way. If I hesitate, it's because of odd clashes that most people aren't going to care about, but I find them a fascinating set of clashes because they're counterintuitive. The band seem to moving in a modern direction in some senses, with the hardcore-influenced vocals and some edgy chords at points. Yet they also seem to refuse to follow trends, many of these songs uncompromisingly non-commercial, with wild shifts from black metal to jazz and with such a prominent and varied use of saxophone.

At the end of the day, I find these clashes fascinating and part of the joy of this band. After all, this is a band doing their own thing in their own way and blazing a trail because of it. And that I dig.

Karfagen - Land of Green and Gold (2022)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives | YouTube

Ukrainian prog rockers Karfagen have been around for quite a while and they issue plenty of new music. I reviewed the delightful Birds of Paradise almost two years ago to the day and yet missed a later album that year, Principles and Theory of Spektra. What's telling to me is that the ratings I see at Prog Archives tend to increase with each album, this one currently peak among them. That a band is always getting better is never a bad thing, though "band" is a misnomer here, Karfagen being primarily a solo project for multi-instrumentalist Antony Kalugin, with a few friends.

The hour of music on offer here runs just shy of an hour and is broken up into three suites, Land of Green and Land of Gold, with Land of Jazz the bonus at the end. Each of those suites is broken up too, because this is prog rock and that's how this works, right? It certainly wears all the clothes it needs to get checked off as prog. I only know Karfagen from the one album I've reviewed thus far, but Land of Green looks further back than that, beginning with Kingfisher & Dragonflies (Part 3), presumably a return to a piece whose first two parts were on a pair of earlier albums, 2007's The Space Between Us and Solitary Sandpiper Journey in 2010.

It came alive for me on Land of Green (part 2), through some gorgeous guitarwork from Alexandr Pavlov. Much of what this band does is interplay between guitar and keyboards. It's always what I could describe as "pleasant", an adjective that some might see as positive and some not so much. I could go with "pastoral", "accessible", "delightful" and others, but the point is that it's music it's hard not to like. The question is whether you're going to love it or drift away, because it's rarely a challenge for the prog rock connoisseur.

In fact, during the entirety of Land of Green, the only challenging material would be a brief piece called Solis Festum that travels quite the ground in under two minutes. Land of Green (Part 1) has the substance at eleven minutes, but it's just more of that keyboard and guitar interplay, the two instruments swapping licks in the hope of conjuring up something magic. I'd suggest that they are unable to do so, but I didn't get bored once and I've listened to those eleven minutes a few times. Every one of them is instrumental and mostly played in neoprog rather than true seventies classic fashion, but they're good minutes. They just don't come fully alive yet.

Perhaps it's telling that Land of Green (Part 2) is jazzy from the outset. It's looser, more soulful. It soars later but it teases earlier. Solis Festum after it, is impossible to ignore, a more experimental piece that ends up in fascinating accordion territory. And, somehow, that sets us up for a poppier, perkier piece in Land of Green (Part 3). However "pleasant" this gets, it never turns into what we might call easy listening. It's active stuff to listen to and explore, rather than background music to listen around.

The second suite, Land of Gold, feels rockier, almost Dire Straits at points in Garden of Hope (Part 1), though that doesn't hold when the vocals show up. They seem surprising here, because we're a half hour into the album and it's been entirely instrumental thus far, but they're not out of place, just as the manipulated vocals on Land of Gold seem perfectly natural when they shouldn't. Those vocals, of course, like everything else here, are smooth and light, albeit not too polished. Kalugin is certainly an instrumentalist before he's a singer.

While Garden of Hope (Part 1) is part of Land of Gold, Garden of Hope (Part 2) apparently kicks off Land of Jazz, which seems odd. I don't really see any coherency to the suites. To me, these are just individual tracks that do individual things, to whatever effect. And it's the jazzier numbers that I'd call out as my favourites: Land of Green (Part 2), Solis Festum and Land of Jazz, with its prominent sax and bass. But hey, that's just me. That's not the default sound here and I like the other stuff too. Those were just my standouts this time out. Your mileage may vary.

Karfagen - Birds of Passage (2020)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives | YouTube

Even a mere five months in, this year has already been a stellar one for the genre of prog rock and I've only just discovered Karfagen, a Ukrainian band, who have put out a new album and a box set in 2020 already. Founded in 1997 by Antony Kalugin, they ddn't get round to actually releasing an album until 2006 because he was at school when he put the band together. This counts as their eleventh studio album and its Prog Archives rating ranks second only to its predecessor, last year's Echoes from Within Dragon Island.

Antony Kalugin may actually be the only primary member in the band nowadays, and he wears a lot of hats. He plays the keyboards that dominate the album, provides vocals and percussion, composed and arranged the whole thing, mixed it and co-produced it to boot. Others appear to come in when requested and I believe the guests here are the same as on the prior album, providing vocals and the usual instrumentation, plus flute, bassoon and violin.

I found the result a sheer delight, because it's as instrumentally varied as we hope any prog album will be but much lighter than most of what I've been hearing lately. The mix lets the keyboards lead with the drums and bass back a level or two, clear but not as overt as most producers would make them in 2020. The feel is as bright and weirdly pastoral as the fantastic cover art might suggest, with its fairytale buildings and anthropomorphic birds. It's a trip to a quiet and different fantasy world, through what Kalugin calls a "symphonic art rock suite".

There are five songs on offer here, but the vast majority of the album finds itself taken up by the first two, halves of the larger title track that runs almost forty-four minutes. After that, there are three further short pieces to wrap things up, which last less than fifteen minutes between them. These betray a set of influences a lot more overtly than Birds of Passage, which is more of a journey through a few of them to somewhere new and enticing.

Given my mention of the word "pastoral", you can be sure that there's a lot of Genesis here but I'd suggest that there's more Camel and quite a bit from Jethro Tull. Certainly the vocals on Birds of Passage (Part 1) remind of a lighter Ian Anderson in the way they're delivered. I don't know if it's Tim Sobolev or Kalugin himself, but the soft female voice is Olho Rostovska's. I felt very comfortable in their presence, even though both sing in English. The lyrics appear to be poetry, from Longfellow and Blake.

It's very easy to get caught up in the music here and totally lose track of time. The title track doesn't feel like it runs on for three quarters of an hour and the album as a whole doesn't feel like it takes up an hour. For my part, I was too busy being carried along through this fairyland countryside enjoying the delights on offer through the windows. I felt calm and patient as the carriage ran on, knowing that I was safe and we'd arrive wherever we might be supposed to at some point. The album is me enjoying the ride.

Kalugin isn't credited for guitar, so it's someone else providing the intro to Birds of Passage (Part 2). It's a flowing solo guitar, part Steve Hackett and part classical guitarist, and it's as playful and delightful as anything else here. Eventually, the band join in and find a groove. This second part is easily less experimental than the first, but it still has its moments of more ambitious composition. This time it's flavoured Camel and King Crimson, with maybe some instrumental Boston added in for extra taste.

With so much of the album taken up by the excellent two parts of the title track, it almost seems unnecessary to mention the three short pieces that it eventually hands over to. Spring (Birds Delight) is neoprog, its intricate vocal delivery and clean but powerful guitarwork worthy of comparison to an early Marillion. Sunrise is drenched in world music so comes off more like Dead Can Dance. That leaves Birds Short Introduction to wrap things up in a smooth way. Maybe it's introducing us to the next album.

I don't want to overdo the word "delightful" but a lot of the music crossing my path is dark and even the prog rock I explore is much darker than this. I know what I'm putting on next time the world wants to tread on me and I need a pickup. It will be hard to come into this with a bad mood but not leave in a good one.

Setoml - Reincarnation (2020)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Melodic Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives

Here's another black metal album from Satanath Records, who are putting out a lot of interesting material nowadays, mostly in that genre. This time, the band is Setoml, from Kyiv in the Ukraine, who are just two people: Serge Krivoviaz on vocals and Anton Semenenko, who goes by DeMort and plays all the instruments. The genre is nominally melodic black metal, which seems fair, but Krivoviaz's voice is often as close to a death growl as a black shriek and slower sections are as reminiscent of death/doom as ambient black.

The opening songs, Flames and In the Cold Eyes, set the pace. The drums are fast, as you might expect, though the tempo varies considerably because of double bass fills. The guitars often run as slowly as the drums go fast and have an icy tone to them that helps invoke the frozen wastes of the north, even though Kyiv is as close to the deserts of Iraq as it is to the fjords of Norway. The vocals are an odd mix of styles, as Krivoviaz sings with an expected hoarse shriek but one that's surprisingly deep and growly.

I'm not sure what instruments Semenenko actually plays, beyond the obvious guitar, bass and drums, but it sounds like there's an organ in there too on quite a few tracks. I first heard it on In the Gray Field of Hope but it's particularly strong on Night Dance and Their Wings are Gray Like Spirits. I really like that sound, whether it's keyboard-driven or just a guitar tone. It certainly moves slowly but surely, like the guitars do, providing melody over the wall of sound drums.

While Flames defines the sound that the band follow pretty much throughout, they do add some interesting touches to later songs. The first to grab me in a way that went beyond the core sound was Thousands Shimmering Souls, which stalks gloriously for a while, building slowly with a guitar that sounds as if it shimmers as much as the souls of the title. The drums are inventive at the midpoint too, before the vocals turn into a goblin chorus chattering at the base of the giant trees that the music become.

At over eight minutes, it's the longest song here and maybe it's the longer songs that impress me most. Their Wings are Gray Like Spirits almost reaches eight minutes too and that's in my top three as well, with the organ adding a wonderful extra layer. Best of all, though, is Night Dance, clocking in at just under six minutes. It kicks off with some really unusual rhythms for a black metal album, but quickly settles into a memorable groove. The organ on both those tracks is a delight, adding simple but creepy and very effective melodies over the top of everything else.

While the four or five minute songs are decent too, they feel like they're a level of complexity shy of the longer ones, as if they're missing an element that would elevate them too. That doesn't mean that they're not interesting, as they still have their moments. By the Dark Lake unfolds much slower until it ramps back up to full speed and blisters, and Setoml are more interesting when they slow down than when they shift into high gear.

I didn't catch any of the lyrics, but apparently these songs follow a common theme, as given away by the album title. Each explores the reincarnation of the soul after death, presumably in a different way. The press release talks about the nocturnal butterfly, as some belief systems suggest that departed souls reincarnate as such creatures. It's certainly a neat idea to build an album around but I can't say how successfully it manages that without seeing the lyrics.

This is the first album for Setoml, which was only formed in 2018, but both members play in other bands too. DeMort played guitar in Amily, a doom/death band, and handles everything in Luna, a symphonic funeral doom project. Both have albums out, as does I Miss My Death, a symphonic doom/death outfit with gothic flavour for which Serge Krivoviaz, credited as Sergiy Kryvoyaz, sings and plays guitar. I'm especially interested in the latter but ought to check out the former too.

White Ward - Love Exchange Failure (2019)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | VK | YouTube

I'm always interested in seeing how far genres can stretch and no genre has stretched as far lately as black metal, which has gradually embraced sounds that not one person listening to the first Bathory album back in 1984 would have believed possible. Part of that is because of the advent of post-black metal, which is what Ukrainian band White Ward play.

For three minutes, this is soft piano and teasing saxophone, not the sort of thing you might expect from a traditionally confrontational genre like black metal. Perhaps the cover art influenced me subconsciously, but I felt like I was walking through someone else city where I was at once out of place but somehow still safe and comfortable. Then it veers wonderfully into a vicious section because that's what black metal does best.

As this title track runs on, it continues to alternate between soothing and vicious and the result is something that's very difficult to ignore. As it ends, twelve minutes in, amidst warm and organic pulsing, we know that we've heard something of note and want to go back to the start so as to experience it afresh immediately. I resisted the urge for a change and continued on.

Very few bands have the sheer command of dynamics that White Ward have and I wonder if that's because they came to this style from the opposite direction to usual. Often black metal bands start out raucous and raw and grow into a more diverse, more nuanced, more elegant sound over time. I may be wrong and what I can see on their Facebook page suggests that I am but it sounds to me like White Ward started out as elegant and nuanced and added the black metal vehemence onto that.

Either that or they fit a couple of session musicians into their line-up far more completely than usual. It would beggar belief if Dima Dudko on sax and Stanislav Bobritskiy on keyboards just wandered into the studio one day and laid down the tracks that they were given. They're inherent to this music, a crucial and key part of it, yet I'm not seeing them listed as actual members of the band. Whole sections of these songs simply wouldn't be there without them.

Even for someone like me, who's got used to saxophones in places I wouldn't have expected them, there's a lot here. This is a long album, featuring four songs over ten minutes, interspersed by three shorter ones that still aren't necessarily short. The shortest track here is only just shy of six minutes, meaning a running time of over an hour. It's easy to get caught up with the flow of this album and lose track of time entirely. When it eventually wraps up, it's almost a shock because we're living in the world of White Ward.

I should add here that the world of White Ward isn't quite as soothing as it initially seems. The title track, which opens things up, is warm, welcoming stuff to begin with but it ends on a darker note. Later songs emphasise that even in the quieter sections. Dead Heart Confession opens in a room where a radio is broadcasting about the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer.

I'm not sure what goes down at the end of Uncanny Delusions and so also the album, but someone is clearly really unhappy about something, screaming her discontent. The band describe their music as "intensely deviant music of a noir share" and that's a neatly poetic way to put it. As welcoming as they often sound, there's a darkness below the surface if we pay attention.

I'm still in love with the Katharsis XIII album of dark jazz that I reviewed in October and this sits well alongside it. It's less jazzy but it's just as full of immersive depth and dynamic range. I'll throw this one onto the same device to listen to in the dark and see if it will stay with me as much.

Jinjer - Macro (2019)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Groove Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 25 Oct 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I've mentioned as recently as this week that metalcore doesn't tend to be my thing. Here's Jinjer to prove that every rule has an exception. Hey, there's been enough negative news about the Ukraine this week; let's find a positive side! Jinjer hail from Donetsk and temper all the shouting with some notable variety, hence the "progressive" label. Tatiana Shmailyuk screams very well, thank you very much, but she also sings clean here, often shifting back and forth surprisingly quickly. One of the other band members, though which I'm unable to say, adds death growls. I only assume they're not her too because they often coincide with her doing something else.

They're groove metal at heart but with such a heavy metalcore component that it wouldn't be unfair to call them metalcore too. Fortunately, the nu metal side that often comes with that is less apparent than it used to be, with a progressive edge becoming accordingly more obvious. That's most overt on the closing track, lainnereP, which, frankly, is different enough from the songs around it that it couldn't have been placed anywhere else on the album, but there's prog throughout if you listen. I, for one, feel that this is a major plus point in the band's evolution.

They're also now comfortable enough to play with unlikely genres, finding a way to fit them into regular songs without culture shock kicking in. Easily the most obvious example of this is Judgment (& Punishment), which kicks off like another bass-heavy groove metal song, but then inexplicably leaps into reggae territory before heavying up on the fly and getting all shouty. This shouldn't work but it does. It's highly unexpected but I have to admit that it's also highly effective.

Songs like Pit of Consciousness and The Prophecy and moments in others were most surprising to me by revealing that mixing groove metal with progressive rhythms and vocal lines can end up sounding like Voivod, who came out of the merging of prog with punk and metal. Sometimes different journeys end up at the same destination, I guess. I seriously doubt this was intentional.

The lesser songs for me here are the ones that don't add much prog, as they merge together and fade from interest. A lot of people seem enthused by the song called Retrospection, but it's most interesting for me for starting out in Ukrainian, which sounds really good on this material. It fades later for me, as do Pausing Death, Noah and others in the middle of the album. To me, the interesting songs are early ones and late ones.

In particular, I think the album ends really well. Home Back features a neat mellow section midway through that's rooted in soul and jazz, shifting into and out of it seamlessly. The Prophecy ratchets up the speed and that Voivod sound again for a while during the non-shouting verses. Then lainnereP does something completely different, playing up the prog and removing the heavier side entirely for narrated whispers, synths and a delightful bass.

Much of the success is due to Tatiana Shmailyuk, who's almost a textbook on how to use the human voice. She sings, she shouts, she growls, she whispers, she snarls, she screams, she skanks. She's fascinating to listen to whatever style she's using. While the band behind her are tight and talented, they're just not as interesting on half these songs.

I'm also not a particular fan of the drum sound. It's not drummer Vladislav Ulasevich, who does a fine job; it's that it often sounds like he's hitting a plastic ice cream container rather than what I presume is actually a high tom. Add that to the djeneral groove/metalcore tone and this often fights to do things that leave me dry.

In the end, the variety wins out. I have trouble even listening to a lot of metalcore albums, but I've run through this one three or four times now and, when it's interesting, it keeps my attention and my enthusiasm. Even when it isn't interesting, it doesn't annoy me and push me to turn it off, it merely fades from my attention until something interesting shows up.

Чиста Криниця - Храм Природи (2019)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jun 2019
Sites: Metal Archives | Official Website | VK | YouTube

Folk metal is such a versatile genre that I really shouldn't be surprised at the next album I find any more, but when I slapped on a folk metal album by a band from the Ukraine, I really wasn't expecting to hear a harp dancing in front of the metal backing of the opening track. Храм природи does translate to Temple of Nature, so it fits, but I dug it a lot and it really grabbed my attention. For a while, it's entirely instrumental but, when vocalist Ruslan joins in and runs through three different styles in all of five seconds, he hooked me completely and I knew I had to review this.

I'll mention him now because the lead vocalist is usually the focal point of a band and he kind of isn't, really, even though he's really good at what he does. His first utterance sounds like a death growl but he raises it into an old school heavy metal style and ends up in symphonic territory. He wails in fine form on Непотопаючий корабель, or A Drowning Ship, exhibiting rather an impressive range. He could easily dominate a band if he wanted to but that's not what he does here.

If the focal point isn't the lead vocalist, then it's the lead guitarist, of course, right? Well, wrong. Again, Volodimir Galaida does precisely what he needs to do, but the guitars here appear to be part of the rhythm section, a solid wall in front of which the more unusual instruments strut their stuff and even solo as needed. Some of those seem to be stringed, whether they're harps or lutes or what have you, so I presume that at least some of them are here courtesy of Galaida but I'm only seeing him listed as guitar and there are less guitar solos here than I expected.

Whatever isn't Galaida is surely the work of Tim Hresvelg on keyboards, who stood out to me. The real question here is about which is which and I have little idea. I would expect that the extended keyboard solo in Доки падала краплина, or Until a Drop Fell, is Hresvelg, as is the melodic line that dominates Непотопаючий корабель. However, is that Hresvelg on harpsichord on Сонячне місто (Sunny City) or could it be Galaida on zither? Keyboards are so versatile nowadays and I'm no expert on ethnic eastern European instruments.

The point is that Hresvelg is never entirely satisfied with adding textures or layers like most keyboard players. When he does just that on Мертві дощі, or Dead Rains, it feels like he's holding back. He sees his keyboard as a lead instrument, like he's in a seventies prog rock band. My assumption is that a lot of the textures here come from him introducing other sounds, like the pipes on Велика подорож, or Great Trip, and the woodblocks on Доки падала краплина that sound like they were borrowed from Martin Denny.

The other thing that threw me here is the fact that this doesn't sound like a folk metal album at all, except on Доки падала краплина, where things cut loose into an ethnic dance for a while. For the most part, this is a metal album, pure and simple, that merely brings in folk instrumentation to take the lead rather a lot. In other words, this isn't a metal band playing folk music, like the Finns with their drinking songs, it's a metal band playing metal music with some folk instruments as an integral part of their sound. I like that.

I like this album too. I hadn't heard of Чиста Криниця before and I'm unable to translate it, beyond Chysta Krynycya, which doesn't mean anything to me. However, they've been around for a while, since 2005 under this name and for another six years under others, initially Bad Dreams, then Dead Dreams and, for most of that period, Morose Months of Melancholy. That seems like an odd name because there's not much doom here. Maybe there was early last decade.

I can see myself listening to this a lot, but I also have the opportunity to follow the band backwards, because this is their sixth album, coming three years after Азовець. Their trend seems to be to wait three years to release a new album, then knock out another a year later. If they hold to that, we ought to expect another one in 2020 and I'll be watching out for it.

I'll wrap up by pointing out that it's a deceptive album. I was going with a 7/10 because it's clearly good stuff, but then I realised that I'd flagged almost the entire album as highlight tracks. A couple more listens and this promptly became my first 8/10 for July. And I'm not done exploring it yet!