Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: folk rock

Showing posts with label folk rock. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Thursday, 30 January 2025

Sotomonte - Decadence & Renaissance (2025)

Country: Spain
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

When I found Sotomonte, I was actually looking for Spanish language music, because I've found a few gems in end of year lists. However, while Sotomonte are indeed Spanish, hailing from Bilbao, the largest city in Basque country, they sing in English and their overt influences seem English or American. This is their second album of psychedelic rock and a Spanish language website I should read more from (in translation) lists it as the Best National Record of 2024. That website is called La Habitación 235. This list tells me that Spain might produce as much psych as Portugal, but I've only reviewed one of the top twenty bands before, Moura and then not for this album.

I liked this on a first listen, though the opener didn't particularly grab me, feeling over-repetitive. Ironically, it's titled The Nothing. It grew on a second listen, as did the whole album, and I can see myself spending a lot of time with this one, not just here in the office but elsewhere too. This may well play incredibly well on headphones in a dark room, where I can truly lose myself in it. Much of it seems to swirl to me, as if it's written in circles like a musical rotoscope. Gambit, the second song and the one that absolutely captured me, does that often, especially during the heavy jam within its second half. Much of What a Game to Play feels precisely that way too.

One of the joys of Gambit and, to a lesser degree, The Nothing, is that I can't place the pieces that Sotomonte used to construct it. There are moments that feel familiar and the result is obviously a folky psychedelia with heaviness added at points in a way that American proto-metal bands did in the early seventies, but only when the song needs it. It was The Beauty of Tomorrow where I heard clearer influences, as it unfolds like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull singing for the Grateful Dead. That combination of English and American influences may be why it's so elusive.

The fourth song may be called Blind Faith, but it doesn't feel like them. I heard some Bob Dylan in the vocals and chaotic west coast psych behind them. I love how chaotic these songs seem to get, because they aren't. The musicians, all six of them, are doing very deliberate things to interact in very deliberate ways. It's not chaos, but it can feel that way because it's so busy and what they're doing is unusual. It's harder to subconsciously deconstruct these songs and much easier to just let them wash over us.

If Blind Faith feels American, Montecristo/The Riddle feels English. It's almost John Lennon doing a guest slot on a Tyrannosaurus Rex song. Marc Bolan is all over this album, but ironically the song that most fits his early psychedelic style doesn't sound remotely like him singing. There are four musicians credited for vocals, all of which also play at least one other instrument, so I don't know who sings lead, but the names are all Spanish so I have no idea where at least one of them picked up a tinge of Liverpudlian accent. Maybe they listen to a lot of the Beatles.

I had no intention of running through these songs in order, but it's worked out like that. My Cross to Bear showcases some glorious seventies organ and the heavier aspect that manifests here and there coalesces into a Mountain vibe. Little Vilma gets all jiggy with it, literally, incorporating an obvious folk dance section that doesn't sound like it's played on a regular acoustic guitar, more of a mandolin. I can't resist the musical circles of What a Game to Play, almost mathematical in the Philip Glass fashion but drenched in folky psychedelia and with Wishbone Ash transitions. An outro, The Everything, as a bookend to The Nothing that kicked the album off, is over too quickly.

I liked this on a first listen but I liked it more on a second and loved it by the third. I have a feeling it's only going to get better and better with each further listen. That makes it accessible but deep and I'm still trying to figure out some of what they're doing after five or six listens. It's already an old friend and I'm pretty sure it's going to remain one for a long time. I only gave out a handful of 9/10s in 2024, albeit partly because I lost a good chunk of the year, but this deserves another one. It's going to be hard to move onto another album but, if I ever manage it, there's one preceding it, which is From Prayer to the Battlefield, released in 2021.

Monday, 23 September 2024

Tusmørke - Dawn of Oberon (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Prog Archives

It might sound like a Christmas album for a few moments, but this is a neat melding of a number of seventies rock styles. Initially, the most obvious influence on the eighteen minute opening title track is Jethro Tull, not only because of the prominent flute; it's there in the structure and the vocals too. That evolves though, because it's not just folk prog. As it shifts into a long instrumental section, it also shifts into more neoprog territory, especially through the keyboards, and when it truly comes alive about eleven minutes in with a palpable middle eastern flavour, it's revelling in psych.

Contrary to the reputation of prog, Dawn of Oberon is a song that suddenly becomes difficult not to dance to. It's a decent song before this point, but it's absolutely glorious after it. It still feels lofi, as if it was recorded on a four track, but it's jaunty and beyond engaging. It practically reaches out to drag us out of our seats and feel the music instead of just hearing it. It continues to evolve from there too, venturing into space rock. Not for the last time on this album there's some Hawkwind in the sound too. If you ever wanted to hear Tull and Hawkwind jamming together, this may be as close as you'll ever get, even if the Tull half of that partnership gets the final word.

It's always an ambitious statement to kick off any album with a side long epic, but it works here. It means that we're under no false impressions about what we're getting into with Tusmørke (which is the Norwegian for twilight). Nothing else here is remotely that long and some of it takes a very different tack indeed, but it grounds us in what the band do: primarily folk prog but with journeys into psych and space rock. If we dig that long opener, we're going to like the rest of this album and, I presume, we'll enjoy much of their back catalogue. They were founded back in 1994 as Les Fleurs du Mal, became Tusmørke in 2009 and have knocked out a steady stream of albums since then. This is their eleventh overall and their fourth in four years.

Nothing else here touches the opener, but all six tracks feature something worthy of note. Born to Be Mild, as you might expect, dips into Steppenwolf at points, and remains firmly in that combo of folk prog and space rock, atmosphere swirling around everything like we're listening to light that reflects off a revolving disco mirrorball. Dwarven Lord is notably laid back, kicking off with lounge elements in the folk prog. When it escalates, it does so with the subtle warp they used on Born to Be Mild and further space rock touches. What ties dwarven lords and fairy queens to the chirping of synths, I have no idea, but it's a heady mix nonetheless.

Tusmørke sing in English on most of this album, Midsommernattsdrøm excepted, but it looks like that's a relatively recent thing and earlier albums are more likely to be in Norwegian. The singer goes by Benediktator and, like many singers who perform in multiple languages, he's just a little more effective in what I presume is his first. However, had I not known that the band hailed from Norway, I'd have assumed from his diction and intonation that he was a native English speaker. I'd call out the post production on the vocals here too, as they're manipulated midway through to be reminiscent of what bands like Gong were doing back in the day.

Oddly, Midsommernattsdrøm feels a little long at eight minutes while Dawn of Oberon doesn't at eighteen. Maybe that's due to its lazy feel, aided by ambient sounds like chirping birds or buzzing flies and the way the notes draw out more and more as the song runs on, as against something in an ostensibly similar vein like Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows. Even though there are obvious comparisons, the two sound totally different. People View does something similar, but with much more of a happy tone. It's not that Midsommernattsdrøm is sad, but People View is a celebration song, even when it's slow.

And that leaves Troll Male, which has a dreamy sound to it and uses a similar vocal punctuation in its later sections to, of all things, I Only Have Eyes for You. Now, we can talk about bands like Tull and Hawkwind and a whole bunch of Canterbury groups, but who had money on the Flamingos as a Tusmørke influence? It's at once the most jarring thing on this album, oddly so given all the space rock synths and some of the more experimental moments on this track and others, yet something that completely fits with the rest of the album.

I think it fundamentally plays to the sense of weirdness that Tusmørke are happy to adopt to make their particular hybrid of folk, prog and psych work. Folk is tradition and psych is subversion, so it's easy to see a clash, even though they fit together much easier than that. Prog just makes it all the more interesting musically whichever way that happens and the more imagination that goes into that, the better. Tusmørke are full of imagination, one reason why the Canterbury sound seems to be a fair comparison. I've often struggled with Canterbury bands because they dive too far off the deep end without any idea where they're going to end up, but that's not the case here.

In fact, I think what I like about this the most is that Tusmørke know exactly where they plan to go and use that imagination to get there. I haven't heard their previous ten albums so can't comment on how well this fits alongside them, but it's strong stuff that makes we want to explore further.

Thursday, 11 January 2024

Hexvessel - Polar Veil (2023)

Well, here's something that I totally didn't expect. My last experience with Hexvessel was with an album called Kindred in 2020, which became my Album of the Year, just nudging out Solstice. Both of those albums were folk music, though former took that into psychedelic rock but the latter into progressive rock. It's a haunting album and I've gone back to it often since, as well as checking out a few odd earlier tracks on YouTube. I haven't listened to earlier albums yet, perhaps with a little fear that they might not be up to Kindred's incredibly high standard.

Well, this follow-up, their sixth studio album, is hard to compare because it adopts their style into a completely different genre, namely black metal, and it's a fascinating shift that I'm still coming to terms with. The black metal is in guitars, now exclusively Mathew McNerney's domain because I don't see Jesse Heikkinen in the line-up, which are no longer acoustic psychedelic folk but a full on wall of sound bleakness. The change is from pastoral meadow or maybe sparse desert to nighttime blizzard, literally day to night. However, neither the vocals nor the drums follow suit, except for an anomalous couple of moments.

That means no blastbeats, except for Eternal Meadow and Homeward Polar Spirit, which are both as frantic as we expect from black metal drumming. Otherwise, Jukka Rämänen keeps a slow beat, which fits the bleakness but carries a little more inherent warmth. It fits reasonably well, because it means we pay attention to mood more than we might usually for black metal and there is some variation there. It also forces us to slow down while we listen, which helps us pay closer attention to the voice, which delivers lyrics rather than serving as another musical instrument.

And yes, that means no harsh vocals, except for the very end of Older Than the Gods, where there are hints at something harsh. This is less successful to my thinking, because these approaches are almost mutually exclusive. What made McNerney's vocals special on Kindred was how much sheer nuance he was able to infuse into songs. Even when other instruments did something interesting, I was always listening to the words he was singing and feeling them in the way he felt them. It was a highly immersive storytelling technique and individual words carried powerful meaning. Here, he seems to do the same thing, but I just couldn't hear that nuance. I mostly couldn't hear words. The lyrics may be as meaningful but I couldn't back that up or give examples.

So the overall effect is very different. What preserves from the psychedelic folk sound is a strong sense of ritual. It was easy to fall into rhythms and flows and those remain powerful, if not of the same level of impact. McNerney's voice stands out best on Crepuscular Creatures, where all that nuance is still evident, but A Cabin in Montana is the track that easily carries the most impactful groove because the beat works perfectly with the voice. It's mostly on these two songs that I was able to catch lyrics. "Who speaks to the world?" "Freedom!"

Elsewhere, I like that overall effect as a sound but not how it plays out over the whole album. It's fascinating to hear what I still think of as psychedelic folk music drenched in feedback and with an entirely clean voice almost battling it out for dominance with an abrasive guitar. However, over a full album, this is generally too opaque, too distant and too dense, except in rare moments, like a snatch of something special at the very end of Listen to the River, as the wall of sound fades away and we hear what was behind that curtain.

Of course, I have to wonder if this is a one-off experiment or an indication of where Hexvessel are going. As the former, it's certainly interesting and, on occasion, it works rather well. Some tracks continue to grow on me, even if I have to pay serious attention to figure out why. Ring is one, with some excellent guitarwork underneath the wall of sound. As the latter, though, it seems unlikely to me that this approach will work long term. It's inherently limited and, as such it's missing a lot of what I find special in this band. By a lot, I mean far too much. I guess only time will tell.

Thursday, 22 June 2023

Schandmaul - Knüppel aus dem Sack (2023)

Here's another medieval folk metal album, which means that you're already fairly presuming that this band are from Germany. They're based in Munich and the four male musicians also play in the rock band Weto, with the keyboard player from Regicide. There are two female musicians too, who add notable textures, especially given that Birgit Muggenthaler-Schmack is responsible for all the shawms and bagpipes. They both have their own side projects too.

Between them, they cover a heck of a lot of musical ground on what is their eleventh album. I have no background in their work and failed to tackle Artus, their previous album in 2019. I'm absolutely sure that they've changed their sound over time because there's far too much on offer here to see anything else. Just check out the first four songs to see how they vary their formula massively.

Knüppel aus dem Sack is initially driven by metal riffs from Martin Duckstein and a solid beat from Stefan Brunner, but then Muggenthaler-Schmack sets the tone with bagpipes and Thomas Lindner spits bars in a raspy Teutonic voice. Köningsgarde gets majestic, as the title of King's Guard might suggest, but it bounces too with a bagpipe melody very reminiscent of ELP's Touch and Go and the anthemic chorus feels like Rammstein, as if we're somehow bringing prog rock and NDH together at a Renaissance Festival, especially once she shifts to shawm.

Das Gerücht is extra-playful, as if its depiction of The Court often focuses on a jester whom Lindner is more than happy to bring to life, down to fingersnaps and theatrical tease. We can just tell that there's a gleam in his eye when he's singing this one. When it's quiet, it plays with us entirely like Gogol Bordello do. When it ramps up, Saskia Forkert makes her violin prominent and it barrels on with folk energy. Der Pfeifer, or The Piper, continues in that vein but with a focus on melodies from a recorder alongside audience participation, whether hand clapping or dancing.

The rest of the songs here tend to play in one of those approaches, most frequently folk metal that often drops into rock. As that might suggest, it's relatively light, always focused on melodies from Lindner's clean voice and Muggenthaler-Schmack's bagpipes without any intention of bringing in a harsh voice or a crunchy back end. The traditional instruments, not just the bagpipes, but also the accordion Lindner plays when not strumming an acoustic guitar and the violin and hurdy-gurdy of Forkert, aren't there to sneak in a spotlight moment but to shape the songs throughout.

That's clearest when they drop out of metal entirely, such as on Der Quacksalber, which is all lively drums, fingerpicked guitar as a backdrop and a tender fiddle as a solo instrument. It's easy to see Lindner sat on a tall stool in a pub singing this one while we all either twirl our partners about the room or stand there and tap our feet. The same goes for Luft und Liebe after it, which kicks off as a calliope song only to liven up and then quiet down with Matthias Richter's bass replacing those guitars and a flute replacing the violin. This one shifts back up into the folk metal approach when it wants though, because that's never far away.

It's hard not to like this immediately and emphatically. There's technical wizardry going on and all these musicians are very capable indeed, but at heart it's just music to dance to, as medieval music tended to be, and that's the only criterion it knows it wants to nail. That lighter mindset is where it may divide people, because most folk metal, as if I might dare to generalise that most versatile of genrese, has far more crunch than this. There's a personal nature to this sound, as if the studio is unnatural territory to them and they would much rather just play this music to half a dozen of us as we walk down a grassy road. And that's fine. I appreciate that mindset, but I still feel like I want a little more crunch.

Monday, 12 June 2023

Blood Ceremony - The Old Ways Remain (2023)

Country: Canada
Style: Occult Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 5 May 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia

I dug into Blood Ceremony a little bit a few years back when I realised that occult rock was not only alive but very well indeed. They were formed in Toronto as far back as 2006 and they released their self-titled debut only two years later, but this is only their fifth album and their first in seven years after 2016's Lord of Misrule. The core of the band is the two remaining founder members, guitarist Sean Kennedy, who's also the songwriter, and lead vocalist Alia O'Brien, who started out as flautist but quickly moved into microphone duties and organ as well.

This fits with what I've heard from them before, albeit a tad lighter, and it's clearly good stuff, but it's also better than it initially seems, something I only gradually realised in a few ways. Part of it's that a majority of the songs build massively from their subdued openings to blistering conclusions, beginning with the opening couple of tracks, The Hellfire Club and Ipsissimus. The former is a little seductive and a little teasing as it builds but it holds back a little too, until it truly comes alive with a ripping guitar solo from Kennedy. The latter was always catchier, the sibilant title rolling well off O'Brien's tongue during the chorus, but again it comes alive with Kennedy's guitar solo, which this time is reminiscent of Blue Öyster Cult.

Part of it is that the album as a whole builds too. I don't dislike these early songs at all, but I found myself paying more and more attention as it ran on. It starts to get away from me too, in the sense that I forget to take notes and become lost in the music. Powers of Darkness is a tasty song as I'm listening to it, very much a vocal piece with some catchy themes, but I didn't realise how tasty until I wandered off to grab some lunch and realised that it was still playing in my head from memory, a mere couple of times through. It's an earworm of a track and a real highlight here.

So are the next couple of songs, as we roll into the stronger second half. There's a far folkier Black Sabbath in The Bonfires of Belloc Coombe, probably the best song from the standpoint of building as it goes. Widdershins is the heaviest song on the album, more akin to the weight of prior albums, and it remains heavy even when O'Brien's playful flute joins in during the finalé. Surprisingly, this heaviest song is followed by surely the lightest in Hecate, which is folky in comparison, revelling in its happiness in a sixties psychedelic pop style.

This album covers a heck of a lot of ground, from the delightful saxophone solo in Eugenie to more traditional fiddle work on Mossy Wood. The more I listen, the more the flute stands out, though it frequently takes a back seat when compared to this year's Jethro Tull album, RökFlöte. Lolly Williams finds a lively vibe that's all about making us move, whether we get up and dance or just bounce within our office chairs. Song of the Morrow, on the other hand, is progressive and epic, almost Led Zeppelin-esque in its structure, if not any particular component. There's even a dash of psychedelic Beatles in there too.

Given that I've already mentioned Jethro Tull, I should mention how similar they aren't, because a rock band with a clear folk influence that features a lead singer who also plays the flute suggests a close comparison and it's just not there. Sure, they were apparently Alia O'Brien's initial favourite band and their most obvious influence is in her flute, but that's about it. The folk here is different in origin, much more reminiscent of Pentangle or Fairport Convention when it isn't Black Sabbath or the various other pioneering occult rock bands. Check out Mossy Wood for that folk side, with a delightful fiddle and a catchy na na na vocal conclusion. It's Pentangle but heavier with a darkness hovering over it.

And so, while I liked this immediately, I like it a lot more after a few repeat listens and some time away from it to discover how much it had stuck in my brain. It's been a while since I dug into Blood Ceremony's previous albums but this feels a little lighter and a little more varied, especially with the psychedelic pop influence in Powers of Darkness and Hecate and the classic rock angle in some of Kennedy's solos and Song of the Morrow. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I think I've started off June with an 8/10.

Friday, 19 May 2023

Jethro Tull - RökFlöte (2023)

Excepting the select few who study historical agriculture, the first response most people are going to have to the words "Jethro Tull" is likely to be "a rock band with a flute". Given that, it may be an excellent time to remind that this rock band with a flute have gone through a number of styles in a career that's now closer to sixty years than fifty. They started out playing jazz and blues, moved to rock, turned progressive, shifted back to folk, went commercial, heavied up and eventually turned back to folk but with more of a world perspective. All with a flute, sure, but also with the guitar of Martin Barre, who was a mainstay from their formation in 1967 to their split in 2012.

I mention that, because the newly reformed Jethro Tull, which featured an entirely new line-up in addition to main man Ian Anderson, does feature a guitarist but we often forget that, listening to the music. Last time out, on The Zealot Gene, released only one year ago, that was Florian Opahle, while here it's Joe Parrish, but both of them, as capable as they are, stay firmly in the background. As such, it's easy to think of this band less as Jethro Tull and more as Ian Anderson's current band. With that in mind, I'm happy to hear this album, especially so close on its predecessor's heels. The last time that Tull released two albums in consecutive years was 1979 and 1980.

RökFlöte is a nonsense word, of course, but it's there for a few reasons. For one, they remain rock with a flute, but there's also a pair of heavy metal umlauts to remind us of that Grammy they won instead of Metallica and there's a strong focus on Norse mythology, so this isn't so much RökFlöte, it's really RagnarökFlöte, which doesn't look as cool. The more I relisten, the more I hear Parrish's guitar, providing heavy but subdued backing to the songs, but Anderson's flute soars over them as if we're listening to a bird on the wing and everyone else in the band is the blurry landscape we're not seeing in the distance because of our narrow focus.

It's there solo as the female narration in a Norse tongue ends on the opening Voluspo. It's there in Ginnungagap, so much that it feels like the piece is going to be entirely a flute instrumental, with a little assistance from the guitar. When Anderson starts singing a minute a change in, it seems to be a little out of place. The same happens on Cornucopia, because it feels like a solo flute piece for a minute and a half until suddenly there are vocals. And the same applies on Guardian's Watch, an even more obvious instrumental, because it's a dance piece right out of folk music, but one that is channelled into vocal song sooner, only forty seconds or so in.

In short, it's there on a majority of these songs, as if it's keen to enforce that Jethro Tull are not a rock band with a flute,they're a rock band with a lead flute and that's a crucial distinction. Now, it sounds like I'm being negative here and I don't man to be. I'm not putting these songs down. I'm a number of repeat listens into this album and I'm still having a blast with it. It's just to point out the order of Anderson's focuses nowadays. It's flute first and foremost. Then it's on what used to be his primary role, as lead vocalist. Then it's on songwriting. A little further down the line, it's everyone else. And that's fine, as long as you know what you're getting.

However, it may be telling that my favourite songs here are the most playful ones, that hearken in aim back to the folk rock era of the band. On these, the flute is a Pied Piper of an instrument with a wink and a cheeky grin, eager for us to follow it who knows where. I'd probably pick The Feathered Consort as my favourite here, with Cornucopia behind it then Guardian's Watch and Trickster (And the Mistletoe). But some of the songs have touches that are playful, like Ithavoll, the outro with a fresh instance of our female narrator in Norse. Anderson duets with himself, one voice coming out of the left speaker and another the right. The song itself isn't up to the others I've mentioned but it's still alive.

And so I'm happy to hear this album, even so close to its predecessor, which is at once a better and worse album, depending on what you want to focus on. Ian Anderson was always one of the pivotal characters in rock music and he's continued to be unique for well over a half a century now. It's fair to say that this new Jethro Tull is pretty much entirely him, with no insult intended for the various other talented musicians involved, but he has the talent and the charm to swing it.

Wednesday, 19 April 2023

E-an-na - Alveolar (2023)

Yeah, I've reviewed one folk metal album already this week and I try to keep things mixed up but, while that's an entirely apt descriptor for Adavänt, it's only a starting point for E-an-na, who don't sound like anybody else in any genre of music. I had a blast with their debut album, Nesfârşite, in 2019 and was eager to jump onto this follow-up. I'm reviewing after Lordi entirely by accident, with the band actually from Transylvania and another Eurovision hopeful—they were a finalist in 2022 in the Romanian selection contest, Selecția Națională. They sound as much like Lordi as Adavänt, which is not much at all. They don't even sound like Bucovina, who are what you might be thinking of if I say Romanian folk metal band.

While they don't sound like any other folk metal band, it's clear that they sound like an amalgam of folk and metal. The folk music is everywhere, all sorts of ethnic sounds whirling around in a mix that's all them. It's primarily folk music from the Carpathian mountains, but that doesn't mean a single sound. The harmonising vocals towards the end of O, Romaniţa may come closest to what a non-Romanian like me might think traditional music in the Carpathians might sound like, but that is merely one string to their Romanian bow.

There's wild and wacky carnival jazz on the intro, Mioretic Metal, that could accompany a Looney Toons cartoon. Doi kicks off with flutes and hand drums and it finds a neat combination of jagged rhythms and accordion groove. Călăuză matches prowling bass with gypsy dance music. There's a humming duet to kick off O, Romaniţa and it soon trawls in middle eastern rhythms and melodies, on both violin and drums. The intertwining vocals of male vocalist Andrei Oltean and female vocalist Roxana Amarandi late in the song is fascinating. And that's just the first four songs. E-an-na have no interest of skimping on this diversity as the album runs on.

While there's more folk than metal, there's a lot of metal here. It's there on Mioretic Metal, as it ought to be. The end of Călăuză is furious. Ies is heavy from the outset, like the roof has fallen onto us and the band carry on playing while we collectively hold that weight above them. 'colo 'mbia is crunchy guitars and hardcore shouts, surprising given that all the vocals have been clean thus far. It's arguaby alternative metal, even though it drifts into an extended accordion solo later on. Parts of the second halves of Fântânile de la Capătul Lumii and Floare de Fier are utterly crushing, even if they're accompanied by acoustic guitars or flutes. Suit în Nor could often be called nu metal.

All this is par for the course for this band, I should add. When you think you know what's going on, they turn on a dime and that's emphatically what I like most about E-an-na. I didn't hear anything here that fascinated me as much as the double whammy of Pielea and Pânda on Nesfârşite, but I'd only be disappointed if they didn't include new things that I haven't heard before and they happily delivered there. Biba sounds like someone playing the wires inside a piano, accompanied by some ruthlessly mechanical vocal rhythms. The final forty seconds are absolutely glorious but the entire song is fascinating.

Oddly, my favourite songs are in between the extremes. Mioritic Metal and Cenuşiu are gleefully lively, leaping around like a hummingbird on acid. At points, it's electronica. At points, it's metal. At points, it's a whole slew of things. Ironically, Cenuşiu translates to Grey, which this song utterly isn't. Floare de Fier is another bouncy one and a heavy one too, with chunky guitar and earworms of melodies. I also dug a couple of songs that are almost routine for this band, as surprising as it got for me. Fagure Negru has a gorgeous post-punk groove to it and Dulce is smooth as well, as it ought to be with a title that translates to Sweet.

So this may not have the peaks of Nesfârşite, but it's another fascinating album from a fascinating band. There are precious few bands on the planet who can keep their listeners guessing this much without losing the plot and E-an-na know exactly what they're doing. Roll on the next album!

Friday, 31 March 2023

Altın Gün - Aşk (2023)

I fell in love with this as soon as it started. If I'm understanding correctly, the core of Altın Gün is a pair of musicians who are Turkish by heritage but born in the Netherlands. That's Merve Daşdemir and Erdinç Ecevit Yıldız. Both sing lead but divvy up the songs between them, so that some are led by Merve's enticing female voice but others by Erdinç's deeper male voice. Both play keyboards as well, with Erdinç adding the saz or bağlama, which is an Anatolian lute. Between all this, Altin Gün sound exquisitely Turkish, to the point where this is world music at heart.

However, behind them are four Dutch musicians playing traditional rock instruments—guitar, bass and drums—and between them, they channel this world music through a psychedelic filter so that it comes out as an exquisite merger of east and west. The opener, Badi Sabah Olmadan, is a strong track, clearly psychedelic rock with a Hawkwind drive to it. It's not alone here in rocking it up, but the album often aims lighter with songs that could be seen as psychedelic pop or even a keyboard driven prog.

One of the key components to define which is the bass of Jasper Verhulst. On Badi Sabah Olmadan, he's a rock musician and he adds fuzz on Rakıya Su Katamam to shift from psychedelic rock over an easy border into stoner rock. However, starting on Su Sızıyor, he reminds me of a reggae bassist in that he relies on the guitar and drums to work a groove so that he can provide a riff to underpin a song. However, we can't just label songs based on what Verhulst is doing, because he goes with the reggae approach on Canım Oy, which is clearly psychedelic rock, even if it adds in plenty of Turkish disco at points.

The keyboards help shape genre too. Çıt Çıt Çedene throws Mike Oldfield style keyboards over the reggae bass, as if he'd set up a salon at his house and some Turkish musicians joined him to jam. It comes back on the closer, Doktor Civanım, which is the most western piece here with an electronic beat and the least overt Turkish vocals. I felt like I wanted to pull Crises off the shelf after this one, which is progressive pop through and through. However, other songs use the keyboards to take us on a wild cosmic trip, especially during instrumental stretches in the second half of songs like Dere Geliyor, and Çıt Çıt Çedene. Güzelliğin On Para Etmez feels like a Turkish folk song set against Pink Floyd keyboards.

For the most part, my favourite songs are the rockier ones like Badi Sabah Olmadan and Rakıya Su Katamam, but that's not always the case. When Dere Geliyor isn't taking us on a cosmic journey, it plays very minimalist indeed. We get Daşdemir's haunting voice but accompanied only by a sparse echoing guitar and keyboard swirls. It only leaps into action a couple of minutes in as hand drums provide the engines beneath an organic vessel of keyboards. And then there's Kalk Gidelim, which arrives out of the blue eight tracks in with a thoroughly different approach.

This is an exquisitely sassy song that sashays up to us with a serious purpose, bells shimmering in a sultry haze of sensuality. The melody is a delight and the beat even better. It never quits teasing us and we find ourselves effortlessly lost inside it, as if we dived in but never surfaced. Daşdemir has the lead again but, while she's as sweet as ever, she layers on seduction as if it's going out of style. It's hard not to read sexual metaphor into the point almost three minutes in when everything gets instrumentally frantic.

Generally speaking, there's a light heart at work here. There's sadness to be found in some songs, like Güzelliğin On Para Etmez, but precious little darkness. The most obvious is probably a theme that shows up after each instance of the title being sung on Leylim Ley, like it's call and response. Even there, it's a delicious darkness that teases us rather than threatens. Every time I listened to this album, which I did under different moods over a few days, it seemed clear that I left it happier than I found it. And with that thought, I threw the band's name into Google Translate to find that it means Golden Day. That makes sense, as does Aşk meaning Love.

They've been around for seven years, though I was surprised to find that Verhulst was the founder, seeking Turkish musicians rather than the other way around. This is their fifth album, suggesting a prolific work ethic. However, two of those albums came together, Yol and Âlem in 2021. At this rate, we ought to expect another one from them in 2025 and I'm already looking forward to it.

Monday, 6 March 2023

Burgundy Grapes - Quadrella (2023)

Country: Greece
Style: Folk Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

This must be the quietest album I've reviewed yet at Apocalypse Later but it's a damn good one, a core of soft folky acoustic guitars surrounded by fascinating sounds from a variety of instruments played by guests. Burgundy Grapes ares at heart a duo, George Kolyvas and Alexandros Miaoulis, who don't list what they play, beyond those guitars and presumably the drums, as nobody else has a credit for that. They may well play more between them, but guests add wilder instrumentation to the mix too maintain a progressive edge: a double bass here, an organ there, even theremin or stylophone when needed.

The base sound is folk rock, often with a psychedelic angle, as if they recorded this in a park in San Francisco while under the influence of acid rather than at home in Athens, Greece. It's very quiet, as if every musician is deliberately playing their respective instruments very softly and trying not to breathe to put off the extra-sensitive microphones, but that doesn't mean that it's without an intricacy. It must be the easiest album in the world to put on and automatically like as background music, but it's well worth a deep focus from the listener to catch everything they're doing. All of it is engaging and fascinating.

Tickle Road is a soft opener, but Possibility Song is a darker counterpoint, quietly threatening and making us aware of our surroundings. Wander to Stride is more overtly folk, but it's not pastoral, even if I could absolutely imagine a flute soaring over it. Instead of adding that element, it drifts into Pink Floyd territory, if you remember the Meddle album. There are hints of organ and double bass that remain tantalising. While a gentle riff repeats over and over like waves, I was listening to the chimes or xylophone or whatever's tinkling in the foreground, almost as a solo.

Sometimes there seems to be an organic flow to the guitars, as if this was aimed at anyone who's into the first couple of Leonard Cohen albums but doesn't want to hear his poetry, focused instead on his rippling guitarwork. It reminded me of Philip Glass's Glassworks album, merely slowed and transcribed for acoustic guitar. Initially, the tone felt like acoustic Wishbone Ash, but that goes as quickly as it arrives, replaced by the subtly psychedelic folk angle. Dream Echo has African guitar melodies, again slowed down, but overlaid with a lap steel straight out of country music. I heard a lot of Norman Blake here too, but, yes indeed, slowed down and softened. Burgundy Grapes don't want us to get up and dance. They want us to sit around and listen, maybe join in.

What surprised me the most was how few of these eleven pieces of music feel like they could have been the backing tracks to singer/songwriter songs. Crystal Friend certainly does and I kept trying to imagine what sort of unique voice would surely join in any moment now. However, this remains entirely instrumental. The title track is another example, though I felt Crystal Friend would work with a tender female voice but Quadrella a more raucous male one, maybe not a full on Tom Waits but on the way towards it. He would certainly respond to the carnival beat and the theremin that kicks in too for an enticing touch.

But then we're back to pieces of music that feel like they were always instrumentals and couldn't be anything but. Sure, the baritone sax of Thodoris Rellos on Curtains does kinda sorta take the place of what a vocal might do, but it's meant to be instrumental. Most of them are driven by the guitars but a piano takes over on Green Door, almost duetting for a while and eventually taking over the piece. It's yet another reminder that this would work effortlessly as background music, just something a little breezy and natural to lighten your day, but it also rewards the listener who pays attention to see what's going on.

And that's where I'll leave this, because I have to move on to another album, as easy as it would be to just let this play out the week on repeat. I'd say that you need to be in the mood for this, but I'd correct that to say that, if you're not in the mood for this when you press play, you will be soon into it. It's a refresher of an album. Take one after lunch and it'll better your day.

Tuesday, 21 February 2023

Grandma's Ashes - This Too Shall Pass (2023)

Country: France
Style: Stoner/Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's something interesting from France that taught me a new acronym. The genre here is up for grabs but I've seen FFOBR applied to it and I had no idea what that meant. It appears that Female Fronted Occult Blues Rock is a thing now and has been since at least 2015, when Doomed & Stoned journalist "Papa" Paul Rote put together a triple compilation of doom-stoner bands led by female voices, The Enchanter's Ball. I guess Coven have finally become leaders as well as pioneers, with a crop of bands in Rote's summation of the genre ones who have blown me away more recently, like Jess and the Ancient Ones, Wucan and Avatarium.

I'm not going to add Grandma's Ashes to that hallowed list quite yet, but I enjoyed this greatly and I can see it growing on me even more. They're folkier than any of the other bands I just mentioned but they range a long way, from the intro, À mon Seul Désir, which is mediaeval vocal harmonies, to something close to doom metal. Mostly, they sit in a middle ground that's sometimes psychedelic rock and sometimes prog rock but more often stoner rock. The shifts from calm folky harmonies to a raw stoner punk sound in a song like Aside, or, in the other direction, from heavy doom chords to a calm and even sassy pop sound on Caffeine are fascinating.

Frankly, everything here is fascinating. This is a debut album, though they released an EP a couple of years ago, and it's a startlingly mature mixture of different approaches. The vocals are mostly somewhere between folk and alternative pop/rock, whether they're aiming for traditional, jaunty or introspective. The guitars are the heaviest angle, with riffs right out of stoner rock and heavier bands. Borderlands ends by slowing down until it's almost recognisably Black Sabbath. The drums and, to a lesser degree, the bass represent prog or math rock, sometimes all the way into jazz, like on the saxophone assisted Interlude - Melt.

Reading interviews with the band, mostly for that EP, The Fates, highlights their influences, which are not remotely surprising. Guitarist Myriam El Moumni grew up in Morocco and so was exposed to copious amounts of African music but also grew up on classic rock before stumbling upon desert rock in Paris. Bassist Eva Hagen came up from British punk through stoner rock into a wider range of genres, like metal and prog. Drummer Edith Seguier favours math rock and prog metal. Myriam and Edith both studied jazz. All three sing here, but Eva is the lead, so I'm assuming the folky bits of the band's sound come from the dreamier aspects of desert rock.

I can't say that everything here worked for me, but that's almost inevitable with a release that's as broad in its reach. After all, this ranges from almost glitch electronica in Cruel Nature and that jazz saxophone on Interlude - Melt all the way up to doom metal in Caffeine. That's a serious range for a band on their debut album, but somehow they're able to collect all of those sounds into a single defining sound. If you played me carefully selected sections of half a dozen songs here, I'd say that they were by half a dozen different bands, but if you played me the entire songs, I'd see them as a single coherent band. That's impressive.

The catch is that it makes it tough to call out anything for special mention. What are my favourite tracks here? My cop out answer would be that you should ask me again after another few listens. I would, however, be surprised if Borderlands and Cruel Nature weren't in the shortlist, maybe with the closer, Lost at Sea, ahead of them. This adds experimental sounds into the mix and Eva's vocal is particularly emotional. Even though she sings mostly in English, I found it hard to focus on lyrics because I was too caught up in the emotional weight of the vocals which, like everything else here, have a considerable range, from fluffy soft to heartrendingly personal.

I know I like this a lot but I don't know how much yet. I need to come back to it a few more times as I get ahead of myself and free up enough moments to let it soak back in. So it's an 8/10 for now but it's not outside possibility that I'll shift that upwards at a later date.

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Solstice - Light Up (2022)

It's the last day of January and so I'm drawing a line between 2022 and 2023 after this review. From here until the rest of the year, I'll be focused only on new 2023 releases and, whatever else I might have missed from the past year will stay missed. And that's why I'm listening to Solstice, because I was blown away by Sia at the tail end of 2020, so much that it was my Album of the Month and one of only ten 9/10s that year. This continues their fourth phase with Andy Glass accompanied by Jess Holland on vocals and Jenny Newman on violin, who shape the band's sound, and the same line-up as last time out.

That sound is a little different here, but rooted in the same prog and folk worlds. The keyboards of Steven McDaniel are more prominent than Glass's guitar and Newman's violin, though he's rarely soloing. He's creating ambience to be enriched by Robin Phillips's bass and Pete Hemlsey's drums, but especially by Holland's vocals. That's the mindset here: set the scene and let Holland define it, with Newman and especially Glass sitting aside waiting for a moment to step in and elevate.

For a band who are so drenched in folk music—and it doesn't need the violin on Mount Ephraim or the harp and sitar that kick off Bulbul Tarang to underline that—there's a lot of jazz in play here. The title track kicks off the album as much jazz fusion as prog rock, though Holland's voice remains prominent, blocking us from seeing this as an instrumental workout. Wongle No. 9 follows suit and finds some glorious balances: it's very loose but careful; it's funky but smooth. Bulbul Tarang tries jazz too but isn't ready to give up the folk or indeed the prog, so it's a less obvious example.

I liked every track here and, after a few times through, they're soaking into my skin so I can carry them around with me. Mount Ephraim is the one that stuck first, courtesy of that folky violin, but Run is the immediate standout. It's such a delicate piece that I was afraid of breaking it simply by moving in my chair while it was playing. The drums are soft and electronic, a beautiful sample of glitch. The vocals are tender and layered beautifully, occasionally weaving amidst themselves. It's as effortlessly calm as the unbroken sheen of a still lake.

It grows though. It ramps up at the five minute mark, albeit only to gentle violin. It ramps up again thirty seconds later, with Glass's guitar searing out of the peace. I can't recall any driving force of a band taking such a back seat as he does here but, when he feels the urge, he steps in with a solo that speaks directly to our souls. It doesn't even have to be a long solo, like the brief one early in the second half of Bulbul Tarang to temporarily spear the calm.

He returns soon enough with more but it's obvious that he has impact even when he's not playing. I love those guitarists—and it does tend to be guitarists—who speak volumes with the notes they don't play just as much as the ones they do. That's only one reason I hear a lot of Dave Gilmour in Glass's work here and on Sia. The almost liquid tone they share is another.

Run leads us into Home, which is a memorable track too, because it's the one most reminiscent of others. Solstice have found their own way in music so emphatically that, even when I catch a mere glimpse of this band or that artist, it's gone again. They're so clearly them. However, Home does remind us of other musicians, generally those who cross the border between pop and rock for fun, but do so with imagination and very deliberate craft. I'm thinking people like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, along with Dave Gilmour, though there's also some Suzanne Vega in Holland's voice here and the bass/drum combo that kicks it off is a calm take on Police's Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.

All in all, this didn't floor me the way Sia did but, having heard that, I was kind of prepared for this follow-up, the band's seventh album. It still drew me in though, quickly and effectively, and yet I'm still finding new depths on a fourth or fifth listen. It's another peach from Solstice.

Thursday, 10 November 2022

Andaja - Pavidalai (2022)

Country: Lithuania
Style: Folk Rock/Pagan Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Aug 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I'm not sure what I expected from this album, which came to me labelled as folk rock, but it isn't at all what I heard and I wonder if what I read is simply out of date. Andaja hail from Lithuania and it seems that they used to play pagan metal in the noughties, active from 2009 to 2009 with an album to their name in 2006, Iš atminties. When they got back together in 2013, they shifted to Baltic folk rock, as evidenced by a second album, Atvaras, in 2017. And that's where the notes end, but this is a lot closer to pagan metal than folk rock to my way of thinking. Maybe they've shifted back to their original style.

It's obviously metal as much as it is rock, because of how it sounds, some songs dropping down to a calmer vibe but many powering ahead with emphasis. I found it just as obviously pagan, perhaps a little because Daiva Pelėdaitė reminds me of Candia Ridley of Inkubus Sukkubus, merely with a far heavier, crunchier backdrop behind her and a real drumkit, a backdrop more reminiscent of bands like Romania's Bucovina, especially on the heavier songs. The melodies are certainly similar and it doesn't surprise that they're both rooted in the folk music of eastern Europe, but I caught a more ritual element to Andaja, especially on tracks like Pieno upės.

I like that crunchy backdrop, especially given how much ground it explores, but Pelėdaitė is easily the highlight of the album for me. Their Bandcamp page says that "a brave female vocal flutters like a flag" and I get all that except for one word. There's a stubbornness to her voice that seems very much like victory in the face of adversity, so the flag and bravery aspects work really well. It's a strong voice that both commands and perseveres, and I easily imagined her leading her troops into battle on songs like Medžiojma and winning the day, as underlined by the galloping beats late on. What I don't hear is the fluttering, because this there's no fragility or hesitation in this voice, even on quieter songs. There's power even in her speaking voice, which opens Giesmė iš vandens.

That Bandcamp page also suggests that there are very few female vocalists in Lithuanian metal, a state of affairs I can't speak to. However, if that's true, I hope that others will listen to her clarion call and join the fray, because she's blazing a powerful trail here and I'm eager to see what voices make themselves heard in response. There are two other musicians in the band proper, Ričardas Matyženok on bass and Mantas Galinis on drums. Pelėdaitė also contributes piano and keyboards, which leaves the guitarwork to a guest, Karolis Lapėnis, of Lithuanian death metal band Gilzeh.

My favourite songs come early, after the album's warmed up. Perkūno sutuoktinė is pagan folk but Šilko siūlai heavies proceedings up with style. Then it's Medžiojma and Pieno upės, which are both highlights for me, the former more of a stormer and the latter more versatile but equally strong. After those, and the fantastic opening to Dangaus kalvis, all whispers and chimes and one note on the bass repeated with increasing emphasis, the album slid away from me a little, grabbing me on every listen with Giesmė iš vandens and its prowling bass and commanding vocal.

It ends strong too, with interesting sounds echoing through Slogi, which also builds magnificently, and another dominant performance from Pelėdaitė on Velnio vestuvės, where she teases us early before reasserting total control. The instruments behind her tease too and the song interrupts a strong build to tease us all the more. While Pelėdaitė owns this one, not so much singing lyrics as hurling out commands to us, Matyženok's bass is notable early and Lapėnis's riffs are excellent. It may well be the third highlight for me, above Giesmė iš vandens.

Now, I need to figure out where Andaja are going, because it doesn't seem to be where the notes I'm reading state or indeed where the cover art suggests. That's a post-rock cover if ever I've seen one, promising ethereal soundscapes built from electronics, precisely none of which happen to be in the music. This is folk metal to me, likely the pagan metal Andija started out playing, though I'm trusting my instincts there rather than any understanding of Lithuanian lyrics. And they certainly feel like they mean it. Even if they're relying on a guest guitarist right now, this feels like a band I expect to knock out albums every couple of years because they have a mission.

Thursday, 22 September 2022

The Hu - Rumble of Thunder (2022)

This album is aptly named because Mongolia's best known musical export are rather like a rumble of thunder, initially heard somewhere over the horizon but who keep coming ominously closer till they're right in your face. What they do tends to be called folk metal, but it's mostly world music, heavier than the norm but not massively so. It's just that the aggression in their sound fits so well with the metal genre, because everything feels like a challenge, even if it isn't.

I loved their first album, The Gereg, and I loved them on YouTube before that, through the videos that went so effectively viral, songs like Wolf Totem and Yuve Yuve Yu. I hoped to catch them live in Phoenix last year and then this year, because they keep coming through town, but I had to enjoy a little vicariously through my son, who saw them while I was in England. He reported back that they were excellent and bought me a Hu shirt, which was much appreciated.

This is at once a better and a worse album than The Gereg, mostly because it's more consistent in approach. If you want an hour of the Hu bellowing at you, then you're not going to complain at all, because they start out doing that with This is Mongol, continue doing that in Yut Hovende and, for all intents and purposes, rarely stop doing that throughout the album, even when they cool their jets on more peaceful songs like Mother Nature. They're just naturally aggressive, even when the thinking is welcoming and open, and they play that up.

In fact, when they calm down a little and write pieces of music that could be considered songs, not just chants and challenges, they feel more mature than ever. Triangle is the first of these, because it has a serious bounce to it. It's almost alternative rock, but with jaw harp and throat singing. I'm very fond of it, once I got used to its friendly approach after the opening pair of musical threats. I like Teach Me too, which has a similar bounce but also adds a Celtic flavour behind its aggression. There's more of that Celtic feel on Bii Biyelgee, especially when it speeds up at the end into what could be considered a jig.

My favourite songs come late on, because the album is beat heavy. Everything drives forward and much of that is due to the drums, which are high in the mix, but every instrument plays along in an overtly rhythmic fashion, including the vocals. I wanted a lot more of the fiddles, especially given that two of the primary four musicians, Gala and Enkush, play them. However, with a few notable exceptions, like Black Thunder, they almost hide in the background. They're there and they sound great, but they're a background texture rather than a lead instrument.

Black Thunder does allow these horsehead fiddles to run loose and dominate for a little while like soloing electric guitars. I enjoyed everything here, especially the throat singing on Sell the World, but the album came alive for me in the second half, with the nine minute Black Thunder kicking off in style with patient morin khuur against a vocal drone and continuing to build, its sound getting progressively heavier as the song evolves. It feels like a complete song, as if the band deliberately chose to develop it further than the more simple, albeit highly effective, chant songs.

And that goes double for the closing couple of gems, Shihi Hutu and Tatar Warrior, which are the most complete songs here, to my thinking. There's plenty of that aggressive chant in the former, but the song develops with riffs, power chords and interesting transitions, as if it's a wild cover of a Led Zeppelin song we've never heard before. Black Thunder is more immediate but I think this is my favourite song here. It even has plenty of that wailing morin khuur that I crave so much. Tatar Warrior is more like a Metallica song and they've covered a couple of them in their time. This is a tribute in different form, but just as enjoyable.

The catch to ending so well is that it's easy to see that not everything stands up to the closing pair, so I think I have to go with a 7/10 this time. It's still a really good album and I wonder which angles they show here are going to be the ones that they follow most diligently in the future. Triangle is toe-tapping commercial fun but I hope they get more progressive the way that Black Thunder and Shihi Hutu do. Only time will tell. And when are they coming to town again? I can't miss them every time through.

Thursday, 9 June 2022

Bucium - Zimbrul Alb/White Wisent (2022)

Country: Romania
Style: Folk Rock/Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Apr 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's a submission from Bucharest, Romania that surprised me, as submissions so often do. It's a folk rock/metal album at heart, though that description may mislead a little because this isn't yet another collection of drinking songs and the band don't play unusual instruments beyond violins, though there are two of those. I would add "progressive" to the genre, especially once we get past the title track, which is atypical in its simplicity. It feels like a French chanson sung in Romanian by a Tom Waits fan until chunking up with some heavy guitar. It's unusual, sure, but it's also straightforward. It does one thing.

Fata din gradina de aur is where this album really grabbed me because that certainly doesn't just do one thing. It's an eight minute epic that does very little by the book and it's a gem. The vocalist is the same and the crunch not too far different but everything else changes. If it initially feels like it might have also started out as a vocal folk song and it moves into a dance a couple of minutes in, it evolves beyond both soon afterwards, with original riffs driving a section, before a neat drop to a midsection that starts Genesis but adds in Hawkwind and a hummed melody builds into a choral vocal swell. If it starts out as a folk song, it ends up as a football chant, and folk/prog is the glue.

If the goal was to gradually add complexity and depth as the album went, that goes by the wayside after Greuceanu, which is more epic than its predecessor, which translates to the poetic The Girl in the Golden Garden, and more progressive too. Greuceanu is a name, presumably referencing the folk hero who takes on a quest to recover the sun and the moon after they were stolen by an ogre. The twin violins of Alexa Nicolae and Mihai Balabaș take a broader role here, as lead instruments, and they help make for an emotional journey. Every time I listen to this one, I get caught up in it, a ten minute song feeling at once like merely three but also a lifetime. It's glorious stuff.

And there was no way to keep going along this path without following up with a side-long suite in a collection of parts, so Bucium wisely step back and deliver a set of shorter songs instead. The Song of the Sun, Cantecul Soarelui, introduces a guest, Ligia Hojda, who provides a delightful melodious vocal to duet with Andi Dumitrescu, Bucium's regular vocalist and guitarist. This feels less rooted in folk music and more in pop music, though it wraps up very much in both at once. More obviously a folk piece, Harap Alb, or White Moor, brings in Bogdan Luparu instead, Dumitrescu's equivalent in Bucovina, who has a very different voice to Hojda's but one that works well on such a lively song that's driven by violins as much as guitar again.

Vanator is even more lively, with Dumitrescu back at the mike, but again it's the violins that steal the day. Bucium have an unusual line-up in having a pair of violins alongside a traditional rock trio of guitar, bass and drums, but nothing else: no accordion and no hurdy gurdy, just the guest string quartet on the bookends. They have to give prominence to those violins for this to remotely work and they do so, never more effectively than in the midsection to Vanator, which is a frantic hunt by the title character.

The guitars seem to gain prominence in the final two tracks, Road of Serfdom and Nirwana, almost bringing Bucovina vibes to the fore. Bucium never attempt black metal, but there's a strong sense of urgency in both these songs that I'd enjoyed in Bucovina's excellent Ceasul aducerii-aminte album and the tones in play aren't too far away either. It's an interesting approach for an album to really pump our blood as it's ramping down and I'm not entirely convinced that it's a wise one, even with a drop to narration and slow keyboard fade, but it does seem to serve the purpose of having us roll from the last track right back to the first one for a repeat listen.

Thanks to Andi for sending me a copy of this one. I now have another favourite Romanian band and they have two prior albums to discover, Voievozii way back in 2008 and Miorița more recently, only five years ago.

Friday, 28 January 2022

Jethro Tull - The Zealot Gene (2022)

Back in 1988, I listened to the 20 Years on One Leg with a Flute special on the Friday Rock Show and taped it for posterity. Two decades was a big deal for Jethro Tull and the majority of songs played were from their five album box set, 20 Years of Jethro Tull: The Definitive Collection. Fast forward to 2018 and I tuned in to Chris Franklin's Raised on Rock for a three hour runthrough of all the best Tull tracks of their first fifty years, as voted for by listeners. Now it's 2022 and Tull have a new album out that doesn't remotely sound like the band is almost fifty-five. Of course, it isn't, as it features a new line-up across the board, except for main man Ian Anderson, but still.

Well, OK, maybe it doesn't feel like they're bounding around the stage any more, but it's vibrant and engaging, even if it's a thoughtful album with typically strong songwriting. It certainly lives up to its status as a decent comeback album, albeit with one notable exception, given that it has now been no fewer than twenty-three years since J-Tull Dot Com, their previous studio album of all original material. I have to add that caveat because they did release a Christmas album in 2003, which we'd normally ignore for no better reason than it's a Christmas album, except that it's one of the rare examples of such a creature being interesting.

That one notable exception is the absence of guitarist Martin Barre, for the first time since their debut, This Was, in 1968. Why Ian Anderson didn't ask him back after reforming the band, I haven't a clue and, as good as this album is, his absence isn't hard to miss. His replacement here is Florian Opahle, a German guitarist who's best known for playing on Anderson's solo albums, including the most recent, 2014's Homo Erraticus. However, he left Tull in 2019, in between recording this and its eventual release.

Opahle does a good job, but this isn't a big guitar album and the mix clearly sees Anderson's flute as the lead instrument, after his voice, with others like mandolin, harmonica and tin whistle peers to the guitar, even if they don't show up as often. On a few occasions, Opahle steps up to make his presence known, on songs like Barren Beth, Wild Desert John, and it's always welcome, but also a rather fleeting thing. Never mind cowbell, this needed more guitar. In fact, by the end, we wonder where the drums went too, because there aren't any on most of the late songs because recording, begun in 2017, ran into COVID-19 and drummer Scott Hammond couldn't record at home.

My first impressions were that this was a capable and enjoyable Tull album but not a particularly immediate one. The exception is Mine is the Mountain, which feels like an epic, even though it's a rather short one at well under six minutes. This is an absolute gem of a song, calm and thoughtful but innovative and striking in its way. It stands out from everything else here, both in quality and in style, given that the rest of the album is playful and lively and full of folky, pastoral elements.

On repeat listens, I found the songs becoming old friends. They're not necessarily the best Jethro Tull have ever recorded but they're certainly worthy of being played alongside them on stage. The Zealot Gene is a memorable one and so is Shoshana Sleeping, where Anderson's voice drifts into a spoken word mindset at points. Most are story songs, as is Anderson's bent, and we find ourselves listening to the lyrics the way rap fans do when they start paying attention to rock music. However, the storyteller in Anderson that captures us, doesn't necessarily plant seeds and, when it's over, I only had Mine is the Mountain stuck in my brain. It's head and shoulders above the rest of the album.

Monday, 10 January 2022

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof (2021)

It's been quite a while since Robert Plant teamed up with Alison Krauss for a surprising but highly successful collaboration. That was Raising Sand in 2007, released on roots label Rounder, and it did very well indeed for itself, debuting at #2 on the Billboard charts and taking home five Grammys, including Album of the Year. Now I don't usually pay any heed to the Grammys, but that's quite an achievement for a roots album. I doubt this will make a ripple because it's hardly surprising to see this collaboration in 2021, but it's still a really interesting release.

Of course, the focal point is always going to be the voices, two very different voices from different backgrounds that combine as if they were always meant to be together. This follow-up album kicks off with a wise duet, Quattro (World Drifts In), and the harmonies are heavenly. Other songs work differently, giving one voice the focus and bringing the other in to back it up and harmonise when it's needed. One reason that the collaboration works so well is that so few listeners were aware of both voices when they came in, so there was usually an element of discovery.

Rock audiences, of course, knew Robert Plant well. His influence is stamped on pretty much every rock song released in the last half century. So much of what the genre does is because he did it in Led Zeppelin and his voice only gets richer. He was 73 years old when this album came out and he's not only still at the top of his game but he keeps elevating the top of his game. I have no idea how many people expected him over Jimmy Page to be the most inventive member of Zep over coming decades, but I don't think there's even a debate as to that any more. Plant is always interesting. I think his peak here is the wavery bridges on Go Your Way but he's amazing throughout.

Americana audiences may know Plant peripherally but they know Alison Krauss well, because she's a legend in roots music, not only for her voice but for her fiddle work, which is majestic. Check out a song like You Led Me to the Wrong, which features Plant's voice but Krauss's fiddle in dark duet and see just how much she brings to the table. Other songs feature her as the lead voice and it's a thing of beauty. Her first solo jaunt here is The Price of Love, an old Everly Brothers song, and she soars and soothes and commands. She's amazing throughout too.

What surprised me most, even though it really shouldn't, is how solid this is apart from the voices. It's so easy to see country music especially as being all about the singer, and overtly country songs here like Going Where the Lonely Go are beautiful from a vocal standpoint, but the musicians you so rarely see on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry are among the best in the world and the line-up behind Plant and Krauss here is impeccable, whatever their backgrounds.

I know a few of them. T Bone Burnett is older than Plant and has been there, done that forever. It used to be that he was best known for playing guitar behind Bob Dylan but film soundtracks like O Brother, Where Art Thou? surpassed that. He makes things happen and he has the musical chops to back up whatever that might be. Bill Frisell is one of the best unknown guitarists in the world (if you think about the general public). I've adored his work since hearing the amazing cover of Going Going Gone on Rubáiyát, the Elektra Records 40th anniversary covers album. He can play anything and he can likely play it better than anyone else. Mark Ribot is always fascinating too, even when not backing Tom Waits or John Zorn. Nobody finds grooves like Ribot.

And there are plenty of grooves here. Plant does that in his sleep too, but these grooves tend not to be the rhythmic grooves he loves so much. They're certainly here, on songs like Somebody Was Watching Over Me, but mostly they're Ribot/Frisell sort of grooves, where the musicians manage to pull a tone out of their instruments that we haven't quite heard before, that conjures up mood from the very first note and sets the stage in no uncertain way for the singers to shine. They're using different guitars, different drum sticks, different techniques.

In fact, the grooves are so important here that which ones connect with you the most may shape a list of your favourite songs. For me, that's coalesced over multiple listens to pieces as different as Can't Let Go and Last Kind Words Blues. The former combines surf guitar with an Elvis swing and a sassy backing. It's a lively but deliciously subdued piece with joyous drums from Jay Bellerose. The latter is plaintive, stripped down acoustic blues that sears the soul. The guitar alone is enough to make you weep, even before the harmonies show up to destroy you utterly.

I'm sure Burnett had plenty to do with the song choices and arrangements. Not everything here is a deep cut, given that The Price of Love topped the British charts in 1965, not that it sounded like this then, but most are. Last Kind Words Blues, for instance, is a Geeshie Wiley song, a mysterious female country blues singer who put out three singles in 1930. I know some of the songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint and Bert Jansch, but I need to look up others, like Ola Belle Reed, Randy Weeks and Bobby Moore and the Rhythm Aces. This is discovery for me and entertainment both, just like anything else with Burnett's name on it.

Tuesday, 16 November 2021

Omie Wise - Wind and Blue (2021)

Country: Portugal
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Oct 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I've been listening to this album a lot over the past week and it's become a real gem in my mind, a mostly calm and peaceful work that ought to sit wonderfully in the background but somehow isn't ever content to do so and keeps me listening actively. It's a prog rock album from Omie Wise, from Braga in Portugal, their second after 2019's To Know Thyself.

It's enjoyable but deceptively light from moment one. It's folky, it's pastoral and it's free. And if a description like that makes you think of English folk prog, then you're not entirely wrong but the opening song, Arroyo, ends up middle Eastern. It's difficult to place the band's influences because they're as much countries and genres as bands and they're woven together. There's definitely lots of English folk here, which is probably most evident at the beginning of Crown Flash, an odd track because it's not heavy in the slightest but often feels reminiscent of a Black Sabbath interlude.

However, Omie Wise's looks around the globe go much further than the English countryside. The middle eastern sound is probably most obvious on The Boy and the Wind, through the use of vocal wavers but made even more obvious by the djembe. And there's some real energy in this one, so if folky, pastoral and free makes you think quiet and inoffensive, this will cure you of that idea, if an escalation in Arroyo didn't already. This one escalates much earlier and keeps on going for longer. I should mention that the first three songs are all reasonably long because they're patient.

The Celtic influence is most overt on Shoals, a neat instrumental interlude performed mostly by a synthesiser that sounds like flutes. It has a soft, lilting melody that's very Celtic but there's more here that I don't recognise from my travels through world music. I'd already wondered early on if the stringed instrument in Crown Flash that sounds like a harpsichord is the braguesa, an acoustic guitar with ten steel strings that's from Omie Wise's home town. Here I wonder what else they're trawling into their sound.

And sometimes, especially as the album runs on, the sounds move away from prog rock. If we keep the folk sound as a common component of prog, then it's Sow the Wind that starts the departures as it's really an alternative rock track as much as anything else, a genre that's hinted at earlier in The Boy and the Wind. The characteristic way the chorus is delivered is very familiar to me, but I'm unable to place it. I'm thinking more experimental music, maybe Captain Beefheart. Pyre is the smoothest piece here, with a lot of loungein the music and exotica in the vocals and a soft saxophone. And the album wraps up in singer/songwriter style with Aurora, meaning that the second half is all over the map musically but without ever losing coherency and consistency. That's a neat trick to pull off.

I liked this album on a first listen. It's a very hard album not to like, I think, because it's so smooth and so easy on the ears even when it's doing some surprisingly deep and complex things. However, I didn't expect that it would grow on me the way that it has. I thought it would be a pleasant listen that would pass me by, as I moved on to the next album to review and the next.

However, this isn't planning on leaving me alone any time soon. It's seeping into my soul, even though it's hard to call out any track for special mention or any musician above his peers. Everyone and everything does exactly what's needed at every point. Now I need to listen to that earlier album!

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

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