Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: melodic death metal

Showing posts with label melodic death metal. Show all posts

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

The Halo Effect - March of the Unheard (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, 14 October 2024

Andy Gillion - Exilium (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Symphonic Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 11 Oct 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Andy Gillion is a former lead guitarist for Finnish melodic death metal band Mors Principium Est, with whom he spent a decade, so it shouldn't surprise that this third solo album from him sounds rather like them. Given that he was also their principal songwriter during that time and handled orchestrations on top of his guitar duties, even playing bass on their 2020 album Seven, a record released three months after he was fired, it would be more surprising to find that it didn't sound like them. The more telling question is whether the next original Mors Principium Est album will sound like Mors Principium Est, with only vocalist Ville Viljanen remaining.

To be fair, after checking out Seven, I'd say that this sounds like that but more so. Sure, it remains melodic death metal with a symphonic edge to the songwriting, but it's more epic, more lively and wildly more energetic. Part of that is the furious pace set by Dave Haley, an Australian drummer known for a whole slew of bands, including Psycroptic, but a lot of that is in the guitars too and the urgency of the vocals. Prophecy, the opening track, barrels along nicely, but so does The Haunting and the second half of As the Kingdom Burns absolutely blisters.

I have to call out As the Kingdom Burns as the highlight of the album, partly because of how that second half blisters but also partly because guest vocalist Brittney Slayes of Unleash the Archers is a welcome addition. I don't dislike Gillion's vocals at all, whether he's singing harsh, as he does on most of the songs, or clean, as he does in duet on this track, but Slayes adds an extra power metal level to this music and it works very nicely, especially when she launches that glorious second half with an escalating scream. The album could have done with more of the pitches she hits here.

However, other than a single moment on A New Path where I could swear I heard her again, she's only on that one track and the album shifts firmly back to Gillion's harsh male vocals. Fortunately, he finds an agreeable balance between intelligibility and growl that's also raucous enough to kick the metalcore crowd into action. I like it, even if that moment of Slayes (if indeed that's who that was almost three and a half minutes in) reminds that it could have been more. There's enough of the epic here to suggest that any female vocalist like Slayes or a male vocalist who sings clean and soars in the range of a Bruce Dickinson would emphasise that element better than anyone singing harsh.

But enough of me reviewing what isn't here. Let's get back to what is. Gillion's vocals are good but his guitarwork is excellent. There's an especially strong solo in The Haunting and another on the closer, Acceptance, and there are furious barrages of melody all over the album, including A New Path, Avenging the Fallen and Call to Arms. Sometimes, like on Avenging the Fallen, they're given a repetitious approach that makes our conditioned ears think of them like riffs. It's fair to say that they are, but they're there to be melodies and they work well in that vein, providing the element that a higher pitched clean vocalist would bring to the band.

Matching the epic nature of the music is the symphonic nature of the music. There are no soaring sopranos here, but the songwriting is clearly done with that sort of structure firmly in mind. Most obvious on Avenging the Fallen, which starts out with a keyboard duelling a guitar, drops entirely into a keyboard swell midway and ends with a surprising prog rock-esque drop, the symphonic side is there throughout the album. Sure, we hear it most in the intros, especially when Gillion delivers them on piano like Acceptance, but that keyboard layer is rarely there just to deepen the sound; it tends to adding another layer that wouldn't be there otherwise. If we could listen to Call to Arms without the keyboards, it would be a very different song indeed.

At the end of the day, I like this album a lot. Whatever Mors Principium Est get up to in the future, it's clear that the songwriting approach that defined their sound over the last decade will be live and well in the hands of their principal songwriter, Andy Gillion. That songwriting may be the best aspect of this album, but his guitarwork, especially in conjunction with Dave Haley's drums, is very happy to fight it for that title. His vocals aren't in the same class, but they're still good and, when this reaches its most symphonic, like in the chorus on Call to Arms, they sound even better. Thanks for sending this one over, Andy, and all the best for the future.

Saturday, 16 March 2024

Vespertine - Desolate Soil (2024)

Now that Sonata Arctica have finally returned to playing power metal, there's a lot of symphonic metal in their sound, but here's an actual symphonic metal band. I mention that because I found them listed as pure symphonic metal but it's pretty clear from the outset that we can add folk to that as well. The intro, Genesis, which builds dynamically from piano to flutes to orchestral swell and eventually pipes, grows into that and the instrumental first half of the opening song proper, To All the Wilds, plays likewise. And then it gets really interesting.

There are two people in Vespertine, as far as I can tell, and, while they work together effectively, they appear to bring two completely different approaches to the band. Dawn Kadmiel is all about that symphonic folk. She provides all the orchestration, which shapes how this sounds; she plays a tasty violin; and she delivers her vocals clean with an eye on the folk tradition. Her colleague Ran Hameiri, who plays guitar and bass, is therefore tasked with heavying it up to add the metal side of things. He does that, but he does it through a mostly harsh voice and metal here is dependent on the song. Often it's heavy or power metal. Sometimes it's full on melodic death.

As you might imagine, everything hinges on how well those two approaches play together, with a take on beauty and the beast that goes far beyond the traditional one of contrasting vocalists. It works really well for me, if you want a quick answer. However, there's also a much longer one that depends on how you look at this music. I listen to albums in entirety and more than once, so that I can see how they flow, how they grow on repeat listens and also where to focus in on something if it stands out or warrants special attention. For a while, this works differently for me in that way than if I focus in on individual tracks.

That's because the first two tracks proper play rather oddly and I got it into my head that the way they do that continued on throughout the album. It doesn't, which makes it even odder that they be the first two tracks.

Take To All the Wilds as an example. Within the grand flow of the album, it works very well indeed. I love the instrumental opening that combines the flutes and piano of the intro with metal guitars and a fast metal beat. When it shifts into a song after a couple of minutes, it stays symphonic folk, with Kadmiel the only vocalist, her voice giving way to violin and an elegant guitar solo, but close to four minutes in, Hameiri kind of takes over, his harsh vocal stealing the spotlight and his guitar heavying up, in preparation for the melodic death metal of the second half of Omens (The Trial of Doom).

Every moment in the song works as a transition from Genesis to Omens except the unusual funky section late on. However, if you listen to it in isolation, as you might on a radio broadcast, it feels disconcerting. Without any context from the tracks around it, it sounds like it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a instrumental piece or a vocal song? Is it rock or metal? Is it soothing folk or hard death? It's pretty much symphonic all the way through, so that's a fallback, but it can't establish a particular mood or style within its boundaries. I still like it, because all those moments are great, but it doesn't feel at all complete, needing those surrounding songs to give it context.

That lack of self-identity applies to Omens (The Trial of Doom) too, then Rain into the Hollow kicks off with an electronic pulse behind the soft piano that sounds good but fails to indicate where the song is going, so I started to see this as far better as one forty minute slab of music than as seven individual songs plus an intro. I started to think about the album as an exercise in where we could move the breaks between the songs to give them more coherence. Maybe To All the Wilds should be two separate songs or one suite with two or three movements, and Omens likewise. I can't see this sort of feeling as a good thing.

However, the more the album runs on, the more coherent the individual songs become and, as I'd pointed out, all the moments sound wonderful anyway, even early on. It means that this may play better to listeners who devour entire albums—and versatile ones at that—than those who tend to prefer individual songs. The more coherent songs come later, like Twilight State (The Vespertine) and Rain into the Hollow, so stick with it. The album's worth it.

Fortunately I fall into the former camp anyway so I ended up good with most of this. I'm good with the contrasting vocal styles in a late duet against escalating orchestration in Omens (The Trial of Doom) and a weirder balance early in Twilight State (The Vespertine). I'm even good with Hameiri suddenly shifting to clean vocals during Skeleton of a Tree, because it's more rock than it is metal, especially after the far heavier Rain into the Hollow, and into spoken word on Twilight State too. It's a versatile album and it takes some getting used to, but I like how it all ends up.

Friday, 19 January 2024

Omnium Gatherum - Slasher (2023)

Slasher is only a four track EP that runs just shy of twenty minutes, but I was intrigued by Omnium Gatherum's 2021 album, Origin, and wanted to see where they took that sound. I liked that album but I didn't love it and a good part of that was that it felt rather transitional. They'd lost a second guitarist and their melodic death metal sound had upped the melodic but lessened the death, a shift that left Jukka Pelkonen's harsh vocals a little adrift. It felt to me that there was a need for clean vocals, either to replace or enhance the harsh, but nobody was delivering them. So I wanted the next album to see where they went. Maybe this EP would suffice.

What it tells me is that I was partially right but partially wrong. Pelkonen continues to sing harsh here but he—I believe, but possibly someone else—also varies his delivery considerably. There are clean vocals here too, most obviously and tellingly in the opener, Slasher, and the harsh vocals are more varied, shifting into a crackling fireplace mindset on Lovelorn that takes the song into goth territory. So far so good for me as some sort of sonic soothsayer, but I hadn't realised quite where the resulting sound was going, a realisation that came when I realised how well the unlikely cover works here.

There are four songs on offer, three of which are originals. All of them betray Omnium Gatherum's roots but fit firmly into their go forward direction, which I'd compared on Origin to Opeth's shift to prog rock. While the shift might be fair, the direction isn't because this isn't remotely prog rock in the slightest, that cover not of a Yes or Genesis track, let alone a deep cut from one of the obscure seventies crate diver discoveries that Mikael Åkerfeldt loves so much. It's of Maniac, the Michael Sembello song from the movie Flashdance. Oh yeah. And it sounds great!

And suddenly I see Omnium Gatherum in a new light. They're still a melodic death metal band but the three songs that aren't covers of disco/synthpop hits could believably be too. They all have an exquisitely perky feel, either entirely or for the most part, built from poppy melodies and hooks, merely heavied up into harsh vocals and crunchy metal guitars. There are bands whose gimmick is to turn pop music into punk or metal as routine, applying heavy filters onto TV theme tunes or pop hits from decades past. Suddenly I'm imagining a disco group whose sole purpose in life is to turn Omnium Gatherum songs into synthpop. I think they'd sound pretty good.

While the cover of Maniac works shockingly well, I'd suggest that Slasher, which isn't a far cry from it lyrically, is the standout track. I wonder if writing that prompted them to cover Maniac or if the act of covering Maniac flavoured everything else, especially Slasher. Sure, it kind of just ends with the mindset that it has nothing left to say, but it rolls and builds well and it has an excellent guitar solo from either band mainstay Markus Vanhala or new fish Nick Cordle, who's been touring with them for a while but officially joined the line-up in 2022.

Maniac follows, with Sacred after that, another song very much in the same vein, with keyboards delivering the melodies so that Aapo Koivisto leads the way just as much as the guitarists or Jukka Pelkonen's voice, perhaps even more. He's the main reason that these songs sound so poppy and perky. And that leaves Lovelorn, which follows in the same sort of vein again but not quite so much. It's the heaviest song here and the most gothic, not only because of how Pelkonen shifts into dark and rumbling mode.

And that's it, because there are only four tracks on offer. I'm still fascinated by the direction that Omnium Gatherum are taking and I'm still eager to check out their next album, but this suggests that we know roughly what it's going to sound like. It sounds good too, even though reading back everything I've written about this EP suggests that it really shouldn't.

Monday, 11 December 2023

Tol Morwen - Rise of the Fury (2023)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 18 Nov 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's another submission but one that surprised me. Tol Morwen are a five piece from Italy with no full length releases, even though they formed a decade ago in 2014. This is their second EP and everything that I see suggests that they play melodic death metal. So I had expectations and track one, Berserkgang, met them pretty well. It's a good song and it's played well too, with a technical edge. The production is strong and each instrument, including the voice, is strong too but nothing really departs from what the genre does. It's merely melodic death metal done very well. No surprises thus far.

Unchained continues in the same vein but then escalates into something more. If Berserkgang had anything else except melodic death, it was the occasional hint at an older form of heavy metal and that's here too. Phil's drums remain fast throughout but the rest of the song more and more into older forms. I heard a lot of doom/death in the guitar lines, the solos are old school heavy metal in the Randy Rhoads vein and there's a slow doomy wrap up. Suddenly there's a lot more here than a simple tag of melodic death metal suggests.

So Unchained surprised me, but so did how the album continued from there. Ragnar wraps up with more melodic death but there's a lot of old school heavy metal in there too, especially during the slower midsection. Before that, there's a heck of a lot to discover and I'd be fascinated to see how Tol Morwen can spin that versatility over a full length album. And yes, I'd be interested to see how it gets labelled, because I don't buy into the band continuing to be seen as just one genre.

I keep coming back to Unchained, but Fate of Gods is better still. It starts slow and atmospheric in the pouring rain, a prowling bass from Thorval introducing Metallica-esque power chords. This is a neat and elegant way to introduce a song, even if it's not one of the epics of the album at only five and a half minutes. It feels like prog metal, even before whispering vocals and a complex dynamic play lead into a roaring escalation. There's a lot here: interesting changes, plenty of dynamics and vocals from Dökk that grow and develop and play with mood. The solos are wonderful and so is the Iron Maiden riffage, presumably courtesy of rhythm guitarist Erik.

If you're expecting something different again from Terror of Rome by this point, then you won't be disappointed. There's a Viking metal sound on this one, though it doesn't skimp on the fast paced melodic death. There's more of that elegant guitarwork, with a further excellent solo from Bjorn and a tasty outro from guitar and bass. It almost makes it a little surprising that Ragnar wraps up in a purer vein, but it works as a bookend to Berserkgang and prompts us to just start the EP over again.

I'm calling this an EP because that's what it seems to be marketed as and there are only five tracks on offer. However, none of these songs is short, Terror of Rome the shortest at not much shy of five minutes, so there's more music to enjoy here than there has been on some full length albums that I've reviewed lately, even without a separate intro track. And hey, it's notably longer than Reign in Blood, so it's a substantial EP. I definitely want a full length, but I'm very happy with this one in the meantime. Thanks, folks!

Thursday, 12 October 2023

Night in Gales - The Black Stream (2023)

I'm not going to be flippant and post a skimpy one paragraph review saying that this eighth album from German melodic death metallers Night in Gales is melodic and deathly, but that is kind of what it boils down to. Throw it on and it's unmistakably melodic death metal. After it ends, eleven songs and three quarters of an hour later, there really isn't much more to say. It's kind of a melodic death equivalent to *insert random Cannibal Corpse album here* in the brutal version of the genre. This is textbook stuff, but it's nothing more than textbook stuff.

So, don't expect anything new to be found here at all, the only variance to the band's core sound a surprisingly long intro to The Black Stream, but, boy, is this elegant stuff. It's a pristine example of a sound that's hard hitting and heavy but also quintessentially melodic, down to its very essence. I couldn't escape the melody for a single second, the guitars running up and down melodies, always moving, but it never gets soft except for that peaceful single intro.

The very opening of the album, as Tears of Blood kicks off, is the precise opposite, a harsh, abrasive noise that reminds of a Merzbow album, but it's gone in ten seconds and, once it gets past that, it continues to be elegant melodic metal throughout with the harsh edge of fast drums and growled death metal vocals to perpetuate the contrast. So, from one perspective, this is a genre perfected with every moment doing exactly what it needs to do. If any of these songs popped up on the radio, I'd enjoy and think to myself that it was exactly why I like melodic death metal.

However, from another, it boasts very little imagination. Once through one song and into another, enjoying everything but forgetting it almost immediately, I thought that this would drift into the background. I was surprised to find that it didn't, but it's the same songs that stand out each time through.

Transition to Doom has a little more perkiness to it and the second half finds a neat groove. Much of the joy is in the guitarwork from Frank and Jens Basten and their stellar delivery continues into Final Place and Laughter of Madness, which may be my favourite song here. The best guitarwork is later though, in the solos on Return to Chaos, which absolutely shine. The other reason that I love Laughter of Madness is that it's also elevated by the vocals of Christian Müller, which hits the spot majestically, aided I think by echoing backing vocals. He's solid but relatively generic otherwise.

Then there's everything else.

The problem is that I'm starting to stretch to say anything, whether positive or negative. I brought up Cannibal Corpse as a comparison, because I enjoy them too but find it very difficult to tell each of the songs on their albums apart. They cease to be collections of songs and become long slabs of a particular genre instead. If we enjoy the genre, whether it's the brutal death of Cannibal Corpse or the melodic death of Night in Gales, we're going to enjoy their albums. We'll sit back or dive in and love the immersion. If we want something different, we're never going to find it with either of these bands and we'd probably be better off skipping past them and looking elsewhere.

So, if you love pure melodic death, add a point to the rating. If you want originality, then drop one instead.

Friday, 17 March 2023

The Fallen Prophets - Perpetual Damnation (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, 6 March 2023

Insomnium - Anno 1696 (2023)

While I didn't intend this in the slightest, this ninth Insomnium album starts out strikingly similar to the Burgundy Grapes album that I happily pointed out was unlike anything I had ever reviewed at Apocalypse Later. Of course, it does darken a little and it has more edges, but it's still calm folk music. A hoarse spoken word voice shows up a couple of minutes in and then it launches into what we expected all along, because Insomnium are a melodic death metal band and Burgundy Grapes are about the exact opposite of that. Those couple of minutes aren't dissimilar but the rest surely is and that long intro worked well as a transition.

Now, even at their fastest and heaviest, Insomnium still have firm roots in folk music, with plenty of folk storytelling on this album too, given that the songs, based on a short story by bassist Niilo Sevänen, explore the witch hunts of the late 17th century, such as the Torsåker witch trials. These events have resonance today and their emotional impact is most felt in Godforsaken, which kicks off with haunting guest vocals from Johanna Kurkela that sometimes feel Celtic and sometimes remind of the lilting voices of the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir.

This is a real gem of a song, by the way. It's fair to say that I enjoyed both opening tracks, a kinda sorta title track called 1696 and then White Christ, but Godforsaken takes their epic feel and ups the ante considerably. It's a cut above from the outset, easily eclipsing the earlier songs, but the second half is especially devastating. Kurkela certainly set the stage for it, but it's the mood that the song finds once it drops to spoken word and inexorably works its way forward from there that truly nails the song as a highlight.

The album can't maintain that level of quality, but it's a tremendously high bar to keep up and it's not far off when all is said and done. The aspects I expected are still here: a strong sense of doom, even when Markus Hirvonen's drums are furious; melodies everywhere, even with an overtly dark sound; and some prog in the how Insomnium handle dynamic play, breaking songs into movements and shifting back and forth between peaceful sections and more aggressive ones. I'm still hearing Paradise Lost in the guitars and early Marillion in the guitars and keyboards.

What leapt out this time was the richness of the sound. There's a weight to it but also a lightness, as if it's a dense and heavy solid but with enough balloons attached to it that we can make it move with little effort. The keyboards are a huge part of this, even though they're not always obvious, a texture behind everything else. If we try to focus on them we won't always be able to, but it's safe to say that Coen Janssen is there anyway building a fog of sound for the regular musicians to play inside. The fact that there are three guitars helps too, because they've found an effective way to divide duties so that there's always bedrock and embellishment. It's a step beyond the traditional lead/rhythm split to ensure that ther'es always something interesting happening.

Whatever they're doing, they're doing it impeccably well and they do it on each of the eight songs on offer this time out. Godforsaken is easily the standout track for me but, the more times I listen through this album, the more The Rapids stands up to be counted alongside it. I don't know if it's just due to its slot as the closer, but it feels more urgent than anything else here, as if Insomnium establish their level of intensity, maintain it for seven tracks and then decide to push past it for the eighth. It's an epic too, albeit a slightly shorter one, and the song I might rank third behind these two happens to be the third epic on the album, Starless Paths. Clearly, the longer the Insomnium song, the more I'm able to immerse myself into it.

And so this is an easy 8/10 for me. The only question I have, as I reach the point where I've listened through enough times for the songs to start to become old friends, is whether I should up that to a 9/10. I don't remember feeling that way on their previous album, Heart Like a Grave, so I guess this is another step up for them. Either way, I see that I wrapped up that review by noting that my son has seen Insomnium live twice now and I have yet to see them. I was aiming to do so in April 2020. I wonder how well that worked out...

Monday, 20 February 2023

Godiva - Hubris (2023)

Country: Portugal
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Ironically, I wrapped up last week with what I expected to be a melodic death metal but turned out to be something else, In Flames having shifted into metalcore and alternative metal, but this is an excellent example of melodic death metal that came to me as gothic metal instead. The vast bulk of Godiva's sound is melodeath, from the heavy, downtuned guitars to the snarling growl of Pedro Faria, though there are plenty of sections that approach a black metal wall of sound. For the most part, I'm not hearing any of the typical elements of gothic metal, but there are the contributions of André Matos that aren't rhythm guitar and we simply cannot ignore those.

It's these that set Godiva aside from every other melodic death metal band I've ever heard—and I've heard a lot of them. His other credit here is for orchestrations and they show up in a few ways. Initially, they're layers of keyboards, which serve as an atmospheric texture behind the usual rock instruments. There are also moments like the breakdown midway through the opener, Media God, which is keyboards mimicking a string section. The most obvious touch is the piano underpinnings that don't remotely take the approach you're thinking from that. They don't mirror the song as it is or add a new melody; they tinkle in runs like a waterfall.

And, quite frankly, how you respond to that piano may be the pivotal factor tipping you between a yay or a nay on this album. I found it delightful and wanted it to happen more. It's certainly not on every track, though it spices up the opener and returns on Hubris and emphatically on Godspell. I can perhaps see people interpreting these as gothic, but they feel more classical to me, adding a minor level of symphonic to the metal, something the guitars also play into at points. The same is true for Black Mirror, which begins in a symphonic fashion and features punctuation points that I presume are keyboards mimicking a brass section, and the pizzicato strings over violins that start off The All Seeing Eye.

However, I could buy into some people being acutely annoyed by the tinkling piano, like when your neighbours put up Christmas lights with built-in sound and you can't not hear them, even after you fall asleep. I hate those but I loved this, so it's entirely subjective. In a way, they serve as a counter to Faria's voice, because it's the only one here, excluding some choral moments on Black Mirror. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a soprano singing on these songs, but there isn't one, nor any backing vocals either. That means that it's all Faria and, while he has a very capable growl, it's a consistent growl throughout, so it takes other elements to play off it, like the tinkling piano or the guitars in Godspell which layer on a separate and vaguely middle eastern melody.

It's fair to say that, just as Faria's voice is the same throughout, the guitar tone follows suit, so all these songs start from the same fundamental place, whether they're bouncy like Godspell or pick a chug to build on like Dawn or Hubris, and it's down to the songwriting to impose variety. The vast majority of that delineation comes through Matos's orchestrations, but Ricardo Ribeiro often has interesting things to do with his guitar, having it almost dance around a song like Dawn pointing a finger at the lack of spontaneity and inviting the rest of the band to join the dance.

If it sounds like I'm being negative here, I should emphasise just how much I enjoyed this. Maybe I came in a little disappointed at not hearing the gothic metal I'd been led to believe would be here, but I quickly found a satisfaction in melodic death metal that sounds right only a day after finding frustration in the latest In Flames album. I have no idea if that affected how long I left this playing on repeat, but it kept on growing on me. I can see a lot of reasons why people might not like this. I don't subscribe to any of them. It's good stuff, especially for a debut—2007's Spiral, released as by The Godiva, appears to be a thirty-four minute EP—even if the band has been around in some form or other since the previous millennium.

Friday, 10 February 2023

In Flames - Foregone (2023)

Sometimes being out of touch for a while is a good thing. I remember In Flames from their earliest years, when they helped to create the melodic death metal genre. My first experience of that was a promo CD of the Dark Tranquillity debut, Skydancer, which blew me away. Naturally, I followed up with albums from At the Gates and In Flames, the other two pioneers of the Gothenburg sound, at the point they got round to releasing their debuts. However, they took their own sweet time and it was too long for me because other genres were calling me by then and real life had asserted itself too. I heard the first few by each, but they didn't have the impact on me that Skydancer did.

Fast forward through the decades and it seems that In Flames in particular had a major impact on the melodic metalcore scene and, over time, while I wasn't paying attention, they appear to have shifted their sound towards it and beyond it. This fourteenth album is a comeback of sorts, with an array of critics acclaiming it for merging the band's two eras, melodeath and a modern alternative sound that owes a great deal to the American bands who took their sound in a new direction. As I only know that old sound—I found (This is Our) House on YouTube and regretted it, so quit there—this is a confusing ear-opener rather than a consolidation of styles.

Initially, it sounds great, not a huge distance from what I remember. State of Slow Decay, which is both the opening track proper and the first single off the album, is fast and heavy with agreeable pace and a really dirty bass underneath it. The vocals are harsh, even though they're very shouty for a death growl. Meet Your Maker has harsh vocals from the outset too, with a deep cleanse of an opening growl. The beat is angry and the bass dirty again. So far, so good.

Well, Meet Your Maker slows down to get jaunty and alternative, with some clean vocals. They're not bad clean vocals but they're drenched in teen angst, which is an odd angle for a band who are well over three decades old. The guitar solo is strong, but it took a while to get used to this style, especially after an impressive opener. And so we go. There's a bounce to Bleeding Out as it starts but a threat too, suggesting a strong song, but then clean vocals that sound like they might have autotune going on. It's definitely hard to get used to the shift.

The best and worst songs are in the middle of the album. Foregone Pt. 1 is the best, a furious song that outstrips State of Slow Decay, with a neat guitar sound that elevates a neat vehemence early on. It's unable to maintain that urgency throughout, but it wraps up with furious drumming from Tanner Wayne. It's a good song. I like how Foregone Pt. 2 starts too, though vehement and furious it isn't. It's not death metal but it sounds good and it feels like it's going to be a nice instrumental interlude. Except then it dives into electronic emo territory, which I'd say is jarring except I'd have to double that when it rolls into Pure Light of Mind, which is a pop song pure and simple with its high clear vocals and pulsing electronic backdrop, however heavy the guitars get at points.

It's like a weird nightmare where I blink and wake up in high school as a sixteen year old kid whose best friend is playing Pure Light of Mind and telling me how heavy it is. I look at him and suggest In Flames instead and he tells me not to be stupid. This is In Flames, he says, and I'm in the Twilight Zone. To be fair, it's not as awful as the old school fans seem to suggest—I had to seek out reviews of the past few albums to see what the general response was and it wasn't remotely good—but it feels acutely out of place here.

I get an inventive band moving through different genres and ending up combining them all—hey, I've been a big Paradise Lost fan since they were failing to not play Nuclear Abomination on stage—but these particularly genres seem to be in opposition. The older school melodeath on State of Slow Decay and The Great Deceiver seems to be about guitars and riffs and musicianship, but the alt rock on Pure Light of Mind and Bleeding Out is about vocals and grooves and raging emotions. I'm not saying that those approaches can't merge, but they're not merging well here.

I'd expect that old school fans, if they're still giving In Flames fresh chances, may well see this as a move in the right direction. There are good songs and heavy songs here. Even when the band are playing in a more modern style, some of it sounds pretty good. I rather like In the Dark. New fans, who have grown up with In Flames being some sort of metalcore band, may be more bewildered. I can see them seeing this as a partial shift in the wrong direction. What I'm fascinated about is if a third audience exists that digs everything here. Who isn't in the band.

Tuesday, 10 January 2023

Concrete Age - Bardo Thodol (2023)

This is the eighth album by Concrete Age, founded in the very southwest of Russia, in Mineralnye Vody just north of the Georgian Border, in between the Black and Caspian Seas, but resident since 2014 in London, England. I found it listed as melodic death metal and Metal Archives have thrash and power metal tags as well. There's not much power metal on this album, though True Believer wraps up in that vein, but there's plenty of thrash metal on the faster songs like Hex, Lullaby for a Deadman and Ridges of Suffering, downtuned into an overtly death metal pitch and accompanied by harsher vocals than are the thrash norm.

All of that said, though, I'd call this folk metal as much as any of those and I see on the band's own website that they describe themselves as "ethnic death/thrash metal". That rings quickly true, as does the mission statement, that "our project is based on different ancient cultures from all over the world. During our live performance, we use ethnic instruments and mix them with metal." I'm not seeing what those instruments are on this album, but I'd love to know.

Hex opens up the album with ethnic chanting and that vibe doesn't entirely leave when the intro ends, even if it does for a while. There are folk melodies underpinning everything, which become a little more obvious when the band drop away from the crunch for effect and we're treated to clear ethnic sections. Many of these sections feel middle eastern but even more feel Eastern European and it isn't too much of a shock to discover that this is a truly international band. Ilia Morozov, the only founder member remaining, is Russian, but Boris Zahariev is Bulgarian, while Giovanni Ruiu and Davide Marina, who may or may not still be in the band, are both Italian.

Early on, the focus is on that downtuned thrash sound, with ethnic intros and drops away into that side of the band's sound for effect, but the second half of Purity is pure folk metal, unfolding like a heavy and frantic jig, the sort of thing that Gogol Bordello might jam on amphetamines. It's wild and jaunty and it's thoroughly engaging. It's hard not to move to it, even if sometimes we feel like snakes being charmed. By True Believer, that folk metal vibe becomes inherent, almost impossible to separate from the thrash/death sound. That this is the song that ends up as power metal is wild and one reason why it's my pick for best song, even if it isn't a clearcut choice.

And, as much as this old thrash hound dug the faster, thrashier sections in songs like True Believer, and Morozov does spit out the vocals with a neatly harsh growl, I found the bouncy folk sections so irresistible that they became the focus for me. Is that a call to prayer halfway through? It ought to fit the title. Is that a jig or a Cossack dance in the second half of Threads of Fate, when it gets even more lively than usual? Certainy, Trite Puti is as folk metal as it gets, a two minute interlude that's right up there with the songs proper on this album. Thunderland approaches the Hu in emphasis.

And so it goes, moving more and more into folk metal as it runs on, with the title track another of a bunch of highlights. It's folk metal from the outset, courtesy of a middle eastern riff, as crunchy as it is, and it never really loses the folk metal, even when it gets its head down and enters furious mode for a while. That riff gets, well, riffed on during the midsection, and we're right back in that Gogol Bordello territory, maybe a little further south but still Balkan. It's riotous and a whole heck of a lot of fun, which was something I didn't expect.

I wonder how they came to this sound and how recently. Given that it's most overt in the guitars, I wonder if it's been there all along with Morozov, who's one of the guitarists in addition to singing lead, or whether it arrived with Zahariev on the other guitar. It's there in their mission statement on their website, but hasn't been reflected in third party informational sites, suggesting that it's a newer approach for them.

Clearly I should check out their earlier albums, which have come thick and fast. Their debut, Time to Awake, came out in 2012 and they've never gone more than a couple of years between albums until now with COVID the likely reason. It's been three since Spirituality in 2020. I do like finding new favourite bands right at the beginning of a new year.

Tuesday, 18 October 2022

Soilwork - Övergivenheten (2022)

This is an important album for Soilwork, not because it's their twelfth or because it's following the highly successful Verkligheten, but because it's the last to feature David Andersson, who passed a few weeks ago. He was an excellent guitarist, as his work for both Soilwork and their moonlighting outfit, the Night Flight Orchestra, shows, but he was also half of the creative process. He wrote or co-wrote the lyrics for nine of the fourteen tracks here and the music for seven. To suggest that he will be seriously missed is a massive understatement. Thank you for the music, sir. RIP.

And, that said, this is another easy to like album from Soilwork, but I had trouble truly getting my heart around it. I liked the title track, which kicks off the album like world music and ends like Pink Floyd, but spends its time in between as the melodic death metal the band are known for. I didn't love it, though, and found the vocal delivery from founder member Björn Strid oddly rhythmic as if he didn't want there to be anything there that could even be considered fancy, an odd decision, given where the music behind him goes.

And, while his delivery absolutely varies as the album progresses, I found myself with a relatively similar reaction to almost everything else. It's immediate stuff, easy to like on a first listen. That's not too surprising, but what surprised me was how little it grew on a second. None of these songs have got their claws into me yet and I'm on my third time through. Does that make it a consistent album? Sure. Does it make it a disappointing one? Maybe. I'm still enjoying it and three times is a lot of music, because this is a generous sixty-five minute release. So I wouldn't use disappointing. Maybe I should use underwhelming instead.

One thing I noticed was how much this often feels like a prog rock album and a commercial one to boot. It heavies up at points but, once past the title track, I didn't really feel like it was a melodic death metal album until perhaps nine songs in, when This Godless Universe kicks in hard after its delicate piano intro. Perhaps part of this is that Strid's harsh voice nowadays isn't much harsher than his clean voice, with just a little rasp added for effect. There are points where he duets with himself, harsh against clean and I kept forgetting. Clean seems to be his default now and he's not too fussed about that.

Maybe it's just that the heavier material was shunted down the track listing. This Godless Universe is second half, where it feels far more at home with Golgata and the excellent closer On the Wings of a Goddess Through Flaming Sheets of Rain than it does the softer, more commercial material in either half but especially the first. There are songs here that feel like heavier versions of what the Night Flight Orchestra might record, especially Death, I Hear You Calling. Dreams of Nowhere fits that bill too, though it also heavies up when Strid goes harsh and the guitars join him.

Talking of On the Wings of a Goddess, it's the epic of the album and my favourite song, perhaps by a distance. As its seven and a half minute running time suggests, it covers a lot of ground, but one of the things that leapt out at me was how furious the drumming was. It's not just that the song is a heavy one, because it isn't throughout, but Bastian Thusgaard seems to want it to be. I would be stretching to suggest that he's run out of album and wants to finally let off some steam, but I'd be lying if the thought of it didn't spring quickly to mind, especially as the guitars don't play along in the first fast section but absolutely join in for the second, as if he'd talked them into it.

After this one, I'd be hard pressed to call out a favourite. This Godless Universe is up there, but I'd probably end up plumping for Morgongåva/Stormfågel, which is telling because it's an interlude, one of a couple here with The Everlasting Flame the other. It's nothing particularly special, but it features some gorgeous liquid rock guitar and it feels refreshing every time through. It's a great piece, but it's an interlude and the fact that it's up there fighting for my next favourite song tells me that I don't like this album as much as the last one.

Tuesday, 11 October 2022

Amon Amarth - The Great Heathen Army (2022)

There's a genre of crime fiction called cozy mysteries, the opposite of hardboiled detective stories because all the awful things that happen—and they're still rooted in murder—are kept away from the fore and the often female, often amateur sleuths quietly figure out whodunit without a lot of fuss. And then they get back to their cats and their chocolate and whatever signature dishes they have in their ovens. The reason I mention this is because it's hard not to like them. They're like an antidote to a down day. Just pick one up and suddenly you're turning the last page and the clouds have receded a little. And Amon Amarth are kind of cozy death metal for much the same reason.

I find it really hard to not like Amon Amarth. Everything they release is immediately accessible, as pleasant on a first listen as on a tenth. Their best songs can take root in our skulls to come out and play at random moments that we don't expect, but the majority sound good going in but promptly leave again to make room for the next one. And that means that, like most Amon Amarth albums, I enjoyed this one from the opener, Get in the Ring, to the closer, The Serpent's Tail three quarters of an hour later, and then promptly forgot whodunit.

Maybe part of this is because their focus on Viking history and mythology lends a brotherly sense of cameraderie to their sound. They've never been Viking metal, per se, but it's not hard to listen to a song like Find a Way or Make One and imagine yourself sitting in a centuries old wooden pub clinking large glasses of mead with whoever's sat around your table. Some of it is in the pleasant melodies wrought by guitarists Oliva Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg. It doesn't matter how fast or slow Jocke Wallgren plays his drums, those melodies weave around the room like magic.

And, quite frankly, a lot of it comes from the vocals of Johan Hegg, one of three founder members still in the band today. He sings in a gruff growl that doesn't carry any of the demonic overtones of the early death metal genre. He's like a giant teddy bear. We appreciate his skill in delivery, especially when he adds a narrative section in The Serpent's Tail, but he never sounds remotely threatening. We sit back and listen and, when he's done, we just ask what he's drinking and get the next round in.

All of which means that this is another Amon Amarth album. If they're your favourite band—and I can imagine that a good percentage of their fans consider them their favourite band—then this is another one. It doesn't do a single thing that you haven't heard already but you're going to love it anyway because they do what they do incredibly well. They're so tight that we don't even notice it any more. It's just a given, just like the subject matter and the riffs and every other aspect, right down to the pristine production by Andy Sneap.

The rest of us, who can't help but enjoy them but don't believe that the sun rises and falls on their say, want something else and there aren't too many moments that stand out. Oden Owns You All starts out as one, because the album suddenly feels urgent, the drums faster, the guitars deeper and, well, a little threat apparent. The beautifully intricate guitar duel during the midsection of Dawn of Norsemen is another. And Saxons and Vikings is the pinnacle of more.

That's not because it feels playful from the outset, though that doesn't hurt. It's because, oh hey, that's not Johan Hegg's voice all of a sudden. And, every old metalhead will immediately know it's Biff Byford of Saxon, his appearance perhaps heralded by the song's title. Saxon have got heavier over the years, but hearing Byford over a comfortable melodic death metal backdrop felt as if he had come home. He's a natural. Maybe Saxon should heavy up a little more!

And that's about it. Nothing I say here will make any difference to whether you pick this up or not or indeed how much you'll enjoy it. It is what it is and that'll be enough if you're an Amon Amarth fan. And yeah, this wasn't the greatest day but I feel a little better for having listened to this. And yet on I go to the next album, feeling no real need to listen to The Great Heathen Army again.

Thursday, 25 August 2022

Arch Enemy - Deceivers (2022)

I've enjoyed Arch Enemy for years, partly because they were one of the few bands who I noticed in my nineties period of not noticing much because life had taken over from music for me for a while. Maybe the fact that they famously hired a woman as a harsh vocalist helped to grab my attention, but that novelty wore off quickly once that unlikely glass door was broken and Angela Gossow was able to become simply the singer, worthy of note for her musical talents not just her gender.

Their current singer, Alissa White-Gluz, is probably a better vocalist, but I still have a fondness for Gossow's voice. She spat out lines well and she's still who I see when I think of commercial melodic death metal. Now, this is a less commercial album than say, Anthems of Rebellion, with faster and more technical shifts, but the melodies are still there and clearly come from the same band. I may not have heard that album in a decade but listening to it alongside this one highlights just how much this is Anthems with crisper production and harder and cleaner edges.

I really like the balance that they've found here between an extreme death metal sound, with its double bass drumming and harsh vocals, and an older school power metal sound, with slower riffs, guitar solos and melodies. There are reasons why Handshake with Hell is the opener, because it's quite a lot of things all at once. It's a melodic death metal song, of course, but White-Gluz sings a line here and there clean, as if it's a straightforward heavy/power metal song too, and she drops into a tasty section in the second half with clean vocals that are almost folky, over a sort of dark ambient backdrop. Then a guitar duel between Michael Amott and Leff Loomis brings us home.

It's the most varied song vocally, because White-Gluz does stay harsh for the vast majority of the album, though she did impress me thorougly with what she did there. However, the music remains varied throughout. In the Eye of the Storm is slow and powerful and it's a firm nod to Judas Priest, even though White-Gluz is a few octaves below Rob Halford. Priest had a few songs with Deceiver in the name, so I was almost expecting that nod, given that there's a kinda sorta title track called Deceiver, Deceiver, but they shifted it elsewhere.

They speed back up on The Watcher, the elegant twin guitarwork of the intro soon giving way to a speed metal blitzkrieg, but it slows down for the choruses and wraps up with keyboards that flow smoothly into the strings that open Poisoned Arrow. And the choruses on both those songs, as on most of the ten songs proper on offer here, are epic in sound. It would only take a change in vocal style for Arch Enemy to become a pure power metal band. They don't even need to lower the bass in the mix, because that's already been done, which I'd suggest is the only flaw to the production.

Some of the songs don't even need the choruses to feel epic. My favourite here after The Watcher may well be Sunset Over the Empire, which has orchestral sweeps in it that may well be keyboards but which endow it with a timeless quality. The lyrics aren't particularly deep but it feels like they ought to be. Certainly it's about a pivotal moment in time, with talk of holy war and an end to one era with the promise of another ascendant. It's the sort of thing an epic metal band tends to sing about and I don't doubt that Arch Enemy would acknowledge that. The orchestral/choral section that closes out Spreading Black Wings is just another example of pure epic, almost a soundtrack.

I wonder whether the naysayers after the hiring of Angela Gossow are still dissing on Arch Enemy. They didn't like how commercial and mainstream the band's sound was getting, especially on the breakthrough Anthems of Rebellion album, and wished for the more technical, more intense days with Johan Liiva at the mike. White-Gluz may be a little more traditional with her vocal but all the complaints about Gossow's era are applicable here. There are catchy melodies everywhere. There are "hey, hey" sections in both Sunset Over the Empire and Spreading Black Wings. Mourning Star is a brief instrumental that wouldn't feel out of place on a Pink Floyd album.

But Arch Enemy seem to be shifting units, so plenty of people aren't upset about their sound. This is often powerful, fast, heavy, emphatic. Is it what the band were doing with Liiva? No, not particularly, but music is fluid and evolving. It seems somehow disrespectful to challenge a band who pioneered one genre for moving into another. It ought to be just as valid to challenge why they haven't changed more in the past couple of decades. Me, I'm just enjoying a quality melodic death metal album that, sure, may often be a quality power metal album instead.

Friday, 11 March 2022

Kimaera - Imperivm (2022)

This is Kimaera's fourth album, but it's the first for me so I haven't followed their sound through a variety of evolutionary steps. It seems that they started out as a heavy metal band called Chimera that featured entirely clean vocals, changed name to play atmospheric doom/death metal and, in time, moved into symphonic death metal. I presume those changes weren't instant and they grew from one genre to another, which might explain why so many of them are still rattling around in a genre-hopping sound.

The symphonic aspect is there first, along with the most prominent ethnic music. The latter isn't a priority for the band, so what little of it shows up is generally confined to the background, but it's discernible at a few points in the opener, De Amare et Bellvm. I wanted more of it. The symphonic side of things is keyboard generated and a clear priority so continues throughout the album as an omnipresent default texture. The death metal joins in next, present in the chugging guitars and a deep harsh lead voice.

I believe that deep voice belongs to the band's founder, J. P. Haddad, who died of asphyxiation in a gas leak only a fortnight after this album was completed. If so, he must be a serious loss to the metal community in Lebanon, where they're from, because the Middle East isn't the most typical place to find metal bands, yet he was able to create one that obtained international acclaim and reached their fourth album. He sounds good too, the primary voice here being deep and rich and warm. Further male voices appear at points, one thinner but harsh and another clean. I presume both are also him. Certainly he also provided the rhythm guitarwork and the concept behind this album, which is centred on the Roman Empire. R.I.P., sir.

That subject matter may well have framed their use of genre here. It starts out bombastic, with a rampant and confident army at war, but it goes to other places too. The decadence of the empire surely manifests through gothic sections. I believe there are violins, or their synth equivalents, on the opener, but they're more obvious on The Die is Cast and VVV, with a melancholy piano joining them on the latter. Most of all, there's a turbulence in this music, which shifts style often in minor ways, as if the various musicians in the band represent constantly shifting different factions in an ever-changing empire. Certainly, there's a song here exploring The Ides of March. It really fits.

That turbulence is arguably the best and worst thing about the band. If you're someone who likes genre-hopping music, you may really dig this, with all its varied performance elements shifting to mirror where the lyrics or mood takes a particular song. The Grammys give out different awards for Best Song and Best Performance and I still don't really understand the difference, but I would call what Kimaera put on this album as a set of performances more than a set of songs. They don't flow like songs but they present like art, where everything has meaning. And, of course, if you're not a fan of anything I just said, you may have problems with this album.

I certainly like it but I'm not sure yet how much. I'm not usually a fan of musical theatre but this is only halfway to that because, sure, it's about the story but it's about the music even more. There are still riffs and hooks, even though the songs are too patchwork in nature to adhere to the usual structures, and they're often good riffs and hooks, albeit a lot more of the former than the latter. It's just that, as you get used to one, they shift onto another. The truest song here isn't theirs; it's Ya Beirut, a memorable version of Majida el Roumi's Beirut Set El Donya with Cheryl Khayrallah on guest operatic vocals.

I don't know what the future holds for Kimaera, given the tragic loss of J. P. Haddad. He's led this band for over two decades and, while nobody else in the line-up appears to be brand new, nobody has been there anywhere near as long as he has. There are no other founder members here and I don't know if any of them are ready or able to carry the torch. Only time will tell, but this does, at least, stand as a testimony to what Haddad and his compatriots achieved. When they're on point, they're really on point and you only have to check out Capvt Mvndi, surely the best song here and the album's epic, to discover that.

Friday, 7 January 2022

Carcass - Torn Arteries (2021)

Carcass have been away a long time. I bought their debut from Groové Records when it came out a truly unfathomable 33 years ago, yet this is only their seventh. It arrived late last year when I was slammed with events, eight years after its immediate predecessor, Surgical Steel, and a quarter of a century on from the album before that, Swansong. No wonder their sound continues to evolve in these massive leaps between releases. They invented goregrind out of new cloth, helped to invent melodic death metal and helped pioneer what's become known as death 'n' roll. So what are they going to sound like on Torn Arteries?

I wondered that out loud when I reviewed Despicable, their highly varied EP from late 2020, with a view to figuring out how well a guide it would serve to this album. Only one of its songs reappears here, which is telling, and that's Under the Scalpel Blade, also released separately as a single. It's a heavy song, but not often a fast one. Daniel Wilding sets a slow groove on the drums, while Jeff Walker growls up a storm on vocals and Bill Steer plays along in Cathedral-esque fashion, a sort of energetic doom. It's certainly melodic death metal but it's also often clearly hard rock, which puts us right under that death 'n' roll label.

Now, death 'n' roll is one of those labels that isn't really a genre. Nobody seems to decide to form a death 'n' roll band so they can play death 'n' roll, even fewer than create djent bands so they can play djent. That's a technique incorporated into a wider sound. This is a direction, I think, taken by death metal bands who still like playing their particular brand of death metal but also wanting to bring more of a classic rock sound into that. I haven't seen anyone moving from hard rock to death as it's always the other way, but that direction is really at the core of this, I think.

Oddly, if this album is going to be remembered for pioneering anything, it's going to be the use of handclaps on the song In God We Trust, which are not remotely dominant and actually sound good but are completely unexpected on a Carcass album. Like many of the songs here, it starts out with a doomy intro, heavy but not fast, then picks up a gallop that's obviously metal but not something we'd call extreme until Walker's voice joins the fray. That's a death growl but an intelligible one, a deliverer of lyrics as much as a vocal instrument. Then, halfway, Steer solos in classic rock style, as those handclaps arrive to show their approval. I didn't join in, but I was there in spirit. Only a good deal later did I realise that they were hiding in plain sight during the intro to Dance of Ixtab too.

Naysayers crawled out of the woodwork after that, but there's no Reinheitsgebot to define what a death metal band can or can't include in their music and that sort of purity law is better left in the world of beer. More open minded listeners won't care. This is a good album and, like other Carcass albums, it's going to continually find itself reevaluated in light of what came next. I remember the general reaction to Reek of Putrefaction and to Heartwork, two now legendary albums that were unlike anything around them at the time, novelty that scares a lot of people.

So Carcass think the pacy death metal of Torn Arteries can coexist on an album with the handclaps of In God We Trust? I have no intention of arguing with them about that. What surprised me most here, especially after Despicable, was how consistent this seems. This isn't a band being torn in an array of directions by musicians who want to do different things. This is a band with common goals that happen to include the heavy riffing and galloping drums of Torn Arteries, the psychedelic '70s guitarwork in Dance of Ixtab, the thrashy intensity of Eleanor Rigor Mortis's bookends, a firm feel of lively doom underpinning Under the Scalpel Blade, the hard rock in the veins of The Devil Rides Out and so on.

I liked this on a first listen, but it felt a little awkward too. The more I listen, the better it gets and the more consistent it feels. These ingredients do go together, even if they initially seem jarring. I developed a taste for this recipe and wonder how well it'll travel. Carcass aren't inventing genres this time out, but they may be rejuvenating one and bringing it to a wider audience. How that will play out is back in the hands of time and we can only hazard a guess. For now, I'm thinking of Torn Arteries as a solid but far from groundbreaking death 'n' roll album. Let's see what I'll think of it a decade from now. I have a feeling I'll still be listening to it. I'm already wondering if I should up my 7/10 to an 8/10.

Tuesday, 4 January 2022

Aephanemer - A Dream of Wilderness (2021)

This is their third studio album, but Aephanemer crossed my path with their second, Prokopticon, which was an easy winner of my Album of the Month in March 2019. I've been eagerly awaiting the next album from them and somehow completely missed it, given that it saw release in November. Fortunately, I have January to catch up on this sort of inadvertent omission! The good news is that it's another really good album and, now I'm past the COVID I had when I was first tackling this, it's easy to see that. COVID clearly messes with the appreciation centres of the brain and it frustrated my appreciation of this one for a while.

Listening now, it's hard to imagine how I didn't fall for Antigone immediately. It's a lively piece for the first track proper, almost a classical dance translated into melodic death metal. There are old rhythms to it, both in the bouncy keyboards and the lyrical delivery in the verses, but the style is a new one, mostly melodeath but with a firm black metal influence in Marion Bascoul's vocals and a few wall of sound sections. This leads to a song that sometimes sounds like Mozart and sometimes Cradle of Filth, which is an unusual but welcome mix.

Of Volition is a lot more traditional, if traditional is a word we can use with Aephanemer. After an Enya-esque opening, it chugs along like melodeath is supposed to, finds a neat melody to layer on the top of it and ends up as much like Iron Maiden as anything more extreme, albeit with a French accent that's there not in the vocals but in the textures of the guitar. Anyone listening to this just has to assume that the band are from somewhere on the continent.

Most of this album is closer to Antigone than Of Volition, but there's another element that spices it up considerably, that's there throughout but obvious on Roots and Leaves and that's prog. This was always my favourite piece from my very first time through, even when COVID wasn't letting a tired brain comprehend what was going on, but it keeps on getting better. There's dynamic play in everything that Aephanemer do but it's at its best on Roots and Leaves, which is a gift that keeps on giving. It's not shocking to find a guitar interlude following it, before the band leap into Strider.

It's easy to call out the songwriting as the best aspect of Aephanemer. Sure, we critics can conjure up comparisons here and there—they've clearly been listening to a lot of Dark Tranquillity—but it wouldn't be fair to suggest that they sound like anyone except themselves. That's an achievement in melodic death metal, where so many bands sound just like *insert favourite Gothenburg sound band here*, and it's sourced as much from of their unique songwriting as Bascoul's dark vocals or the clean symphonic tone of Martin Hamiche's lead guitar. Both those things are in evidence on songs like Panta Rhei or Le Radeau de la Méduse, but they're not the only reasons why they're so obviously Aephanemer.

I don't think this album holds together quite as well as its predecessor, though I really ought to go back to that to listen afresh. It's still a really good album, though, cementing Aephanemer for me as a rare melodeath band with a unique sound of their own, a highly symphonic take that trawls in prog and black and even a little folk, given the presence of Old French Song here, which is a cover of a piece by Tchaikovsky. It can't be coincidence that I prefer my classical music Russian and vibrant, something that I fully expect Hamiche to find too, given that he rarely misses an opportunity to do something in that vein with his guitar.

Now, to not miss the next Aephanemer album in a couple of years time...

Wednesday, 22 December 2021

Hypocrisy - Worship (2021)

I've been reviewing so many albums lately by established bands who broke up every time the wind changed that it seems almost surprising to find one that's never called it quits, though I believe it came close for Hypocrisy in 1997. They were formed back in 1991 and guitarist Peter Tägtgren (and soon vocalis) and bassist Mikael Hedlund have held their spots in the line-up ever since. Drummer Reidar Horghagen, who joined in 2004, is only the band's second and Tomas Elofsson is the fourth guitarist to play alongside Tägtgren. He's been there since 2010, meaning that he's played on two of their thirteen studio albums.

I remember Hypocrisy starting out as brutal death metal, due apparently to Tägtgren's residence in Florida for three years during the eighties. However, I also remembering them shifting towards the Gothenburg style more favoured in their native Sweden, though they're from a long way away in Ludvika, and this feels like a strong mix of the two styles, with the melodic side front and center but some brutality left in Tägtgren's vocals and the somewhat downtuned back end. This is a little lower and a little slower than melodeath tends to be, though there are faster sections too. I much prefer melodic to brutal but I like this mix too.

Worship kicks the album off well, with an intro reminiscent of Cyclone Temple and plenty of faster sections with incessant double bass drumming. It's a good song, but Chemical Whore is better and Greedy Bastards isn't bad at all and Hypocrisy aren't resting on their laurels after all these years, that's for sure, even though it's been eight years since their previous album, End of Disclosure. If they felt like they needed a break, they've benefitted from it, because this feels like they have all the energy and drive that they had back in the nineties.

If there's a downside early on, it's that the lyrics are utterly routine cynicism. They revolve around social issues but are always told from a very simplistic us vs. them mindset, whether they're about religion or drugs or climate change or the economy or whatever. There are occasional moments of lyrical style, such as when Children of the Gray begins with "What a beautiful day to die", but they mostly remind of rebellious teenage poetry and that's unfortunate, given that Tägtgren's vocals are so easy to understand, even though he stays harsh throughout.

There are eleven tracks on offer and they're agreeably varied without ever drifting too far from a central Hypocrisy sound. Dead World is a bit more brutal, complete with a bleak scream to open it up, though it also wanders into groove metal. We're the Walking Dead is a solid slow chugger, not my favourite approach for melodeath but done well here. What's totally up my alley is the thrashy Another Day and the oddly infectious Children of the Gray, my favourite song here after Chemical Whore. In fact, the whole second half is a strong, consistent ride, all the way to a peach of a closer in Gods of the Underground.

I'm impressed by how much this one is growing on me. I've always liked Hypocrisy but they're one of those bands who I can listen to and enjoy, then move right onto something else. They aren't one of those bands who I replay frequently or even seek out. Maybe it's just been too long since I gave one of their albums a listen, though, because this feels stronger than I remember them being. It's not the greatest melodic death metal album ever recorded, but neither is it something to dismiss either. It sounds good on a first listen and then grows each time through, especially the deceptive second half.

Hypocrisy have been away for a while. I'm a little surprised by how happy I am to hear them back.

Monday, 13 December 2021

Fading Aeon - The Voices Within (2021)

Almost three years ago, at the very beginning of 2019, Germany's Fading Aeon introduced me to a new combination of metal subgenres—epic melodic death metal—and I thoroughly enjoyed their debut album, A Warrior's Tale. Now they're back with the follow-up, which continues very much in the same vein: five long songs that combine the riffage of heavy metal and the melodies of power metal with a harsh voice and the crunch of death metal. There's nothing new added this time out, but everything is a little more: the songs are longer still and the riffs are more urgent, but there is also even more of the delicate instrumental work in between the heavier sections.

As with the debut, the first two songs are the shorter ones but, for this band, that means a seven minute song and an eight minute song. They ramp up from there, with the other three all passing the ten minute mark and two heading towards fourteen. None of these feel too long though, even if it's not always easy to grasp the full sweep of any of them in one go. We just dive into them and let their flow take us where they will. These are rivers of songs, sometimes calm and intricate and sometimes whitewater rapids, but they always carry us and we end up happy wherever we end up.

The most immediate song is the first one, Beginning of the End, which means that it's the first of them to become an old friend. One time through and this is just good stuff; a second and we start to identify favourite riffs and favourite sections; a third and we're feeling some of it in our bones. In very different hands, Beginning of the End could be an Iron Maiden song, because of how it's all structured, with solid riffs, memorable melodies and galloping sections where both the voice and instruments gallop together.

The tone is completely different, of course, and the vocals are a light year away from the Air Raid Siren, but this track makes me wonder how Fading Aeon would sound cover something off Piece of Mind. If Maiden are fair to highlight as an influence but completely meaningless as a comparison, I'll go back to the band I compared them to on their debut, because I hear it here as well and that is the French band Winds of Sirius, who were much slower than this but much closer in tone, with a similar vocal style.

Christian Stauch has a warm deep rasp that doesn't allow him much flexibility to intonate but he's very good at stretching his notes for effect. He's a texture here more than he is a delivery method for lyrics, even if his diction is often completely intelligible, and that texture owns the deep end so that David Gareis's far higher guitar can have fun playing counter to it. In many ways, it provides a drone for a higher voice to soar over, just like throat singers, who admittedly do both themselves. Here he's the drone and Gareis's guitar is the higher voice.

Tempting Voices coalesces next before then the longer songs, but my favourite soon became track three, Defying the Path Foregone, which is the shorter of the thirteen minute songs. It kicks off in almost alternative rock fashion, with chords that could start a Red Hot Chili Peppers number, but it unexpectedly adds strings—and was that a flute?—before chunking up and firmly staking out in metal territory. It's the stripped down section early on, where they actually sound like a trio for a change, that grabbed me first, but I enjoyed the build too. It gets faster and heavier with a lot of the melodic line handled by whatever the extra layer is behind the band, and the last third is joyous.

Mostly, I'm just as surprised as last time to realise that Fading Aeon are a trio. Stauch takes care of vocals and bass, David Gareis all the guitarwork and Patrick Gareis the drums. However, there's often another layer in addition to these traditional instruments, including right at the beginning of Beginning of the End, which is the beginning of the album. Sometimes it sounds like it's all the work of keyboards, but sometimes it takes more of a choral form, a merging of voices. Someone's doing something extra and it's obvious when they stop doing it, such as the first minute of ...Dust to Dust, the closer, which opens slow and stark and bluesy.

I like this a lot and I like it more each time I listen through it. It starts out an easy 6/10 but with an expectation that it'll grow on further listens. It becomes a 7/10 the second time through and then keeps getting better, as the songs become old friends. I'm very tempted to go with an 8/10 at this point, especially as I gave the debut a 7/10 and think this is better. Another time through ought to firm up that decision. Now, who else is making epic melodic death metal because I want more and I don't want to wait another three years...

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