Jinjer - Duél (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katoaja - What We Witness (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Jan 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram

Here's another progressive metal album that covers a lot of musical ground, but it does it with a lot more coherence than the Blood Incantation album that I reviewed yesterday. It isn't extreme, so the breadth of palette isn't as substantial or the shifts as jarring, but it still covers a heck of a lot of ground. That begins with the opener, Nothing and Nothing More, which is definitely a lot of something, especially when the keyboards get seriously interesting at the end of the first half.

This song runs a breath over ten minutes and is entirely instrumental for the first couple. It starts out elegant, then turns jaunty with a core vocal that gradually gets less annoying. Are there two singers here or just one? There seem to be two singing core, even before someone starts singing clean. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a fan of shouty vocals. They certainly have their place, adding aggression to any song, but I've always found them fundamentally limiting, because that's pretty much all they can do. Unless a band is planning to only be a blitzkrieg of aggression, it stifles creativity.

Katoaja solve that problem by varying the vocals considerably. This song starts out shouty but it goes clean. Other songs do both too, in different quantities. The Sinking Cathedral adds whispers, which gradually grow in emphasis. Stoic features milder vocals, which oddly stay at the same level throughout the song. They embrace folk melodies in Nangijala. There's even a harsh voice in The Source that approaches a death growl, as well as a breathy clean voice. What this means is that the album and the songs on it can't be defined by one vocal style and that's especially important with someone who typically shouts. The second vocalist is bass player Matias Ärrälä, but most of this has to be the work of Juho Kiviniemi, who's admirably versatile.

Of course, the musical style varies with the vocal style, as we'd expect for a prog band and that's a good thing and a bad thing. The beginning of The Sinking Cathedral is absolutely my thing, with its slow build on organ, intricate guitar and those whispered vocals. Unfortunately, the middle of the same song isn't my thing at all, with limiting core vocals and modern guitars that masquerade as percussion. It grows substantially over its five minutes though, with some gorgeous keyboards, an impressive bass and a tasty guitar solo still to come.

Every song here has at least one thing worthy of note and often that becomes a plural. Nangijala wends its way into folk melodies a minute and a half in. What We Witness opens up teasingly with slow keyboard swirls and tasteful piano, then it erupts into life with a jagged rhythm. The ending of The Source is utterly delightful, with the keyboards dancing around airly over a heavy backdrop. They're the work of Unto Luoto and, while he's far from the only talent in this band, he's the one who caught my attention the most.

The Great Under is particularly fascinating because of him. The music is heavy and driving and the vocals, when they arrive, are aggressive core vocals again. Yet the keyboard melodies are straight out of the new wave, the sort of thing we'd expect on Ultravox songs. It's like Luoto is playing on a completely different song to the other four musicians in the band, but it works. The keyboards are a way to temper the aggression without caging it and, rather bizarrely, it all works together with wonderful effect. In fact, this may be my favourite song on the entire album.

If there's a competitor for that title, it's What We Witness, not only because it's the instrumental and they always tend to stand out for me on albums with core vocals. However, this particular one does a lot. I didn't expect it to stay instrumental, for a start, its eruption into jagged rhythm when I expected the vocals to kick in, appropriately core at this point, but they never do. The song waxes and wanes, with a heavy section in the middle and an an introspective one during the second half. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

My other highlight, much of The Sinking Cathedral aside, is The Source, which leaps into metalcore from the outset but with the vocals varied, this being where that near death growl shows up. The keyboards are what shift the tone, as they do so often on this album, leading it into a traditional prog section, a soft midsection and that delightfully airy ending. There's a lot in this song, which runs almost eight and a half minutes. It's prog metal, metalcore, prog rock and prog metal again in turn, with each section moving seamlessly into the next.

All in all, I like Katoaja, who were ambitious with their debut album but pretty consistently nailed it. By now, the average Finn must be in three bands, because Finland is punching so far above its musical weight that it boggles the mind. I don't know whether these five musicians arrived from other bands or play in multiples, but it doesn't sound like this is their first rodeo. I'd definitely like to hear more.

In Flames - Foregone (2023)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Death Metal/Metalcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

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.

Aarlon - Dafan (2022)

Country: India
Style: Alternative Rock/Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Mar 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

After I reviewed the new Bloodywood album earlier in the year, I received submissions from a few other bands from India and that makes me happy because I haven't heard anywhere near enough rock and metal from that country and I'd love to catch up more. In fact, the more I hear, the more I want to hear more because the bands who I have heard are often interesting and uncategorisable. That holds for bands as varied as Prophets of Yahweh, Cosmic Circle and Friends from Moon and it holds true with this album too, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the music here was composed by Ritwik Shivam, the man behind Friends from Moon.

In fact, I now realise that, while Shivam played almost every instrument on that Astray album, the five guest appearances included two members of Aarlon with a third, Guarav Basnet, a guest here too. When Shivam needed a harsh voice, he asked Pritam Adhikary to provide it, who's the vocalist throughout this album, except for Basnet's guest spot on Rok Lo. Shivam had two guest drummers on Astray, one of whom was Prankreet Borah, Aarlon's drummer. Clearly, this is a solid opportunity to hear what Shivam sounds like as only one musician in a band of five, each of which can also call a few shots. Sure, he composed all the music here, but his fellow guitarist, Piyush Rana, handled the lyrics and I'm sure the other musicians made their creative contributions too.

This may not be as wildly varied as Astray, but it continues to keep us on the hop until the end. The genre is very hard to nail down, because they have two very different styles, some songs playing in one and some in the other, with the most interesting moving between them. The first of the styles that shows up is metalcore, because the opener, Vidroh, kicks off hard and heavy but very modern. In fact, the first part of the song is just like Bloodywood, merely without ethnic instrumentation in the drop spots. Adhikary even sounds like Jayant Bhadula when doing his gruff voice. However, the band don't drop into Raoul Kerr-esque raps to provide contrast, Adhikary softens up instead.

And that's where the other primary style comes in, because that's alternative rock, far softer and with clean, characterful vocals. Even on Vidroh, Adhikary delivers in a number of styles, but on the next song, Panchhi, he sounds like a completely different singer, because we move from an urgent metalcore sound to a pastoral one that makes us wonder in Donovan ever recorded in Hindi. They literally go from clanging metal behind a sonic assault to an acoustic guitar over a bubbling brook and tweeting birds in as short a time as it takes for your jaw to drop.

Now, to be fair, the heaviest part of Vidroh was its ending and Panchhi does build considerably, but it feels difficult to reconcile the two tracks as being by the same band. Even when the second goes into its heavier section, it still can't compete with what Aarlon started out with one track earlier, a breathy groove taking over instead that had me rocking in my office chair. That's impressive and I would suggest that, if you don't like the first track, stick around through the second one. There's a lot going on here and you don't want to miss any of it because one style isn't to your liking.

After a few listens, I think it's fair to say that my favourite songs find a different vibe again, as they come early in the second half with an older take on alternative rock. Saavan and especially Aaina could both have done well during the post-punk era in the UK, as ethereal and haunting dark pop music. Somehow, Aaina has a Japanese flavour to it. Tu is more in line, I'd suggest, with their alt rock mode and, like so many of these songs do, builds really well, finding a point where we think it has to have peaked but continuing to build for a little while longer.

If you want the heavier Aarlon, that does return on Inquilaab, but it features a playful kind of rage that doesn't feel quite so angry to me as Vidroh did. The best merging of the two sides of the band may be found on Rok Lo, with Basnet's smooth, sometimes perhaps autotuned voice a fair counter to Adhikary's harsh approach, just as the catchy, commercial alternative rock counters the urgent, in your face metalcore. I think it probably overwhelms it, as it skews more to the alt rock side as it goes and it may end up a little unbalanced.

I'm still in two minds as to how the album as a whole balances those two main styles. As much as I'd usually go for the faster, heavier material, I prefer the softer styles here, especially the post-punk. That said, the songs that shift from light to heavy, and it tends to be that way round, are surely the most interesting. I may be all about Saavan and Aaina, but Tu and Panchhi won't leave me alone. It bodes well for a band when they leave me arguing with myself about what worked best, because it means they're doing interesting things.

Underoath - Voyeurist (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Post-Hardcore/Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Jan 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Underoath have been around for a while now, this being their ninth studio album and, from what I understand, they've moved gradually away from the metalcore they started out playing at the tail end of the previous millennium towards a very different post-hardcore sound. I'm not a particular fan of metalcore but I'm listening to a lot of post-hardcore and finding the genre as fascinating as it is elusive. I'm still figuring out how to define it and not getting very far.

I'm getting far enough to know that this album opens up as metalcore, with Damn Excuses, gets a lot more catchy with Hallelujah and then shifts completely into post-hardcore with I'm Pretty Sure I'm Out of Luck and Have No Friends. These aren't long songs, only ten minutes having passed with three song over, but the difference between the first and third is massive. Certainly, the variety is what makes the album interesting to me. Forty minutes of Damn Excuses would have bored me. In a two and a half minute chunk, it's one welcome texture of many.

While Damn Excuses is straight metalcore and I'm Pretty Sure is straight post-hardcore, the most interesting songs are ones that mix those approaches. Thorn is a real highlight for me, because it moves back and forth between those two seemingly incompatible approaches. It starts out like it wants to be post-hardcore, quickly erupts into metalcore and then backs off considerably in order to find something far more unique. By halfway, I was caught up in the quirky beat and electronica. Sure, there's some screaming going on at points, but it works as contrast.

Take a Breath is another highlight. It manages to be urgent and driving without turning up those screams, which I appreciated. I like the dynamic play that mixes the quieter moments and heavier ones to create something far more interesting than either. Even a frequently metalcore song like Numb benefits from that to a degree and more ambitious songs like Thorn and Pneumonia thrive on it, even if the latter takes its time, given that it has over seven minutes to develop, or double a majority of the other songs here. It's certainly ambitious and its second half is wild.

While my taste tells me that I don't want to review trendy American bands, my mission statement tells me that I should keep my mind open and try them out. Sometimes that backfires and I cringe my way through part of an album before giving up in horror. Sometimes an album shocks the heck out of me because it really wasn't what I expected at all. And sometimes, like here, I join in at the point where a band has achieved an enviable level of success but refuses to just churn out more of the same. They continue to evolve and in a direction that I appreciate.

So, while it's very possible that I wouldn't enjoy early Underoath much at all, I got a lot more than I expected out of this ninth album and I'm likely to enjoy them more and more with each release. I do see that they're not massively prolific, this being only their second album since 2010, though it seems that they split up for a couple of years during that period. All power to them and I'll happily check out another album in a few years time to see how far their evolution has progressed by that point.

Trivium - In the Court of the Dragon (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Oct 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

It's only been a year and a half since the ninth Trivium studio album, What the Dead Men Say, and yet they're back already with their tenth, In the Court of the Dragon. Given that they've gradually shifted over the years from a metalcore sound to a more traditional heavy metal sound, I'm eager to see how much further down that road they've got this time out, now that they're closing in on a quarter of a century as a band. Yeah, it's been 23 years since they formed! We're getting old.

After a brief intro, simply called X, the title track kicks in just like we're back in 1999, Matt Heafy's vocals shouty and his and Corey Beaulieu's guitars distinctly djenty. However, as the song grows, it finds its way out of that. The tempo increases until we realise that we've got to progressive, even symphonic metal territory and the vocals shift into clean mode. It's not done quite like that, as it's a back and forth thing, but the difference in extremes is notable. There are points where this is an angry song, pure and simple, and points where it gets back to doing interesting things musically.

Like a Sword Over Damocles does something similar, but spends far more of its time on the heavy metal side of that pivot and, even when Heafy's screaming in the verses, the guitars are playing a more complex game than the inherently limited palm muting approach. There's still that nineties alternative metal sound, if you're looking for it, but far more of the song leaves it behind, finding anger more effectively through fast, vicious riffs instead of a simple vocal affectation. The chorus has a pretty decent melodic hook to it, but the instrumental sections just rip.

As the album runs on, it moves more and more towards traditional heavy metal, albeit often at a faster and more furious tempo than would have happened back in the day. When it looks back to a former era, it does so using the toolbox of modern metal, both mainstream or exteme. There are metalcore components, melodic death metal components, thrash metal components, progressive metal components and others.

What I found was that the longer songs are the ones that do it for me the most and that means a trio that exceed seven minutes. I noticed this on repeat listens, because, once we get past the two openers, Feast of Fire and A Crisis of Revelation are just there. There's nothing wrong with them, but I kept getting distracted away from them by the smallest nothings, only for my attention to be grabbed back by the intricate intro to The Shadow of the Abattoir.

The sub-four minute No Way Back Just Through is an excellent song by comparison to the two I can never quite notice, but Fall into Your Hands spirits it into oblivion because it's acutely interesting and agreeably complex. It kicks off with unusual rhythms, proceeds with odd but effective stylistic choices—at one point becoming pure thrash—and ends entirely orchestrally. Similarly, From Dawn to Decadence is strong but it finds itself vanished by the closer, The Phalanx. Maybe if I heard these shorter songs in isolation, I could appreciate them more, but they're all consistently overshadowed by the longer ones, each of which establishes itself effectively.

And all that makes this an interesting album. I'm not going to rate it higher than its predecessor, because I'm not convinced it's a better album, but I certainly enjoyed it more, and all the more as it ran on. I realise that what I'm liking most of all is their progression away from their trendy roots as an early 21st century band doing something interesting with metalcore. I'm liking that they're gradually moving away from the more limiting angles to their sound, without quite ditching them entirely, and adding in more traditional elements without ever going backwards. They're still on a forward road, just with a better tricked out vehicle. I like that.

Seklumpulan Orang Gila - Second Voyage (2021)

Country: Malaysia
Style: Alternative
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

This may be titled Second Voyage but it looks like it's Seklumpulan Orang Gila's third voyage at a full album length, after 2014's Bahtera and 2018's Dermaga. Before all those was a 2013 EP called Civilization is on Trial. And I was fascinated to hear what it sounded like because I haven't heard a Malaysian alternative band before, my experience here at Apocalypse Later limited thus far to a melodic death metal band called Mothflesh.

Their brand of alternative is an interesting one because it's surprisingly varied from the outset, a very contemporary and trendy American approach mixing it up with traditional ethnic music. For instance, the album starts with what we can only see as an intro, even though it must be a song of its own, a solo female voice performing in an overtly south east Asian style that I can only assume is Malaysian. That voice belongs to Shafa’atussara and it's delightful.

But then we leap into the album proper with the title track, which features as western a guest as Tim Lambesis, the much troubled lead singer of San Diego metalcore legends As I Lay Dying. He's appropriate here, because this is an up tempo song, with Lambesis's shouty voice combining with the snarly one of a band member and another that's not just clean but sweetly clean. That makes this quite the synthesis of styles, especially when you factor in whatever ethnic instrumentation is happening in the background. I'm not a big metalcore fan but I really like this.

Sailors of Sorrow follows suit in a strippd down fashion, losing the guest vocals and cutting down on the ethnic material without losing it entirely. The quiet section close to halfway suggests that it's really keyboards but it sounds like wind instruments. Whatever it is, it's a fascinating contrast to the edgy guitars, overt bass and lively drums, just as the clean pop voice contrasts neatly with the snarly hardcore one. There are times when this ventures into post-rock but it's primarily still alternative rock, often metalcore without much metal, if that makes sense. Memories does more of this.

But then the band switch sound entirely. Tugu Ugut feels like a dance song with the electronica on mute, but with that overt bass almost duetting with the vocals. It gets a lot edgier, almost finding its way into experimental punk, but never really speeds up. The fastest it reaches is a woah woah chorus. Like most songs here, it's just shy of four minutes, but it veers from dance to post-rock via pop and hardcore punk. It's a fascinating mix and the band keep varying the balance between the edgy and the traditional as the album progresses.

One of my favourite songs is Pelukan Angkasa, which introduces a clean female voice to that mix. I came back to this one after listening to the whole album the first time to see just how much it gets into its, you guessed it, just short of four minutes. It starts out as ethnopop, the keyboards aiming for a chiming gamelan sound. It erupts almost palpably into a heavier chorus. The female voice, of famous Malaysian singer Shila Amzah, is a welcome addition and the two combine explosively and grow with the song too. There are strings to underpin the emotions. It gets traditional as it finds itself only a minute from the end but then builds back up. It's a heck of a ride.

It's fair to say that not everything in this sound is up my alley, but my ears are always open to new syntheses of sounds and the end result here is fascinating to me. By the time Radicalism towards the end of the album shifted into new genres a few times in a short period of time, I even started to think of Mr. Bungle as a comparison. No, they're not that adventurous, but they are definitely adventurous and I haven't seen Kuala Lumpur as a hotbed of that sort of thing. The closing songs, Senja Yang Tua and We are Stronger Than Before, sound like different bands, but they're not out of place next to each other.

Sometimes, styles that I'm not particularly fond of can work really well as counterpoints and that is how the shouty hardcore voice plays here for me. I don't like celery either and wouldn't eat it as a snack but it can work in the right soup. The shouty voices and boy band vocals work in this wildly diverse soup, as do the strings in Senja Yang Tua, the wind instruments in Second Voyage and the fundamentally traditional vocals on the intro, Warkah Dari Rumah. It's quite the album and I'll be adjusting to it for quite a while. Which I like.

Aegos - The Great Burst of Light (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram

Here's another album whose genre is really hard to pin down. It came to me described as "progressive doom metal" and there are certainly some aspects of that to be found, but it's only one part of a vast picture. I've ended up going with post-metal, even though I reviewed a post-metal album yesterday, as this is about as different to Pupil Slicer as can comfortably be imagined and still count as metal. You'd actually be pretty safe using the cover art as the genre, because the music is as bleakly beautiful.

I know very little about Aegos, beyond that whoever's actually in the band hails from Texas. Who and where, I couldn't tell you. The band's page on Bandcamp does list some guests, but three of them are vocalists in some form or other and the two musicians are credited with saxophone and cello and are therefore not responsible for the bulk of what we hear in the five long tracks on offer. There's guitar and bass and drums, as you'd expect. They may be the work of one musician or fifteen. I have no idea.

What I can tell you is what I hear on this album, which I believe is the debut release for Aegos. While it gets very loud and very quiet, reasonably fast and reasonably slow, the first adjective I'd throw out is "patient". Just like the cover art, there's a lot of space in this music and there are echoing silences to flavour the songs as much as the actual notes. Sometimes there are drones, often short ones created out of power chords and there's a haunting emptiness behind some drawn out passages.

Yet, that's far from Aegos's only approach. Ironically, The Stillbeing is the least still of these songs, an intricate weaving of bass, drums and electronica building into a harsh vocal over slow ominous riffing and frantic beats. There are multiple voices here using multiple vocal styles. This song kicked off with a clean voice, but it grows to a harsh one that doesn't sound like it came from the same throat. Even here, it mixes up because there's a point where it becomes a harsh duet.

Vocal guests include Jei Doublerice, Chelsea Murphy and Annastatsea. Doublerice is Italian and listed in Metal Archives as the singer for a symphonic black/death metal band called Journey into Darkness but on Aegos's Bandcamp page as a member of Despite Exile and Abiogenesis, both of whom show up on their own Bandcamp pages as metal bands but experimental ones. Murphy is American and sings for Dawn of Ouroboros, who are listed as "progressive post-black/death metal". Annastatsea, who is credited for spoken word, is also American and another experimenter, opening her soul to the cosmos and embracing the darkness, as her bio reads. In other words, they're all open to something new.

I liked this album from the outset, even though I'd have preferred more variance between clean and harsh vocals. The consistency of the shouty approach on songs like Chaos and Nebulous means that it overstays its welcome a little, though it also ends well. There are five songs here, which generally get longer, from the opener which runs six minutes all the way up to the thirteen minute closer. As you can imagine, they get progressively more epic and I'd call out the fourth track, Qualia, as my highlight.

I'd enjoyed the three earlier tracks but never entirely. I loved some parts of each of them, while some others left me dry. Qualia feels right throughout and, at almost eleven minutes, there's plenty of it to go wrong. Fortunately it doesn't and it grows magnificently. It also features yet another unexpected use of the saxophone in extreme metal, something I'm starting to treasure. It eases in softly, with an ethereal voice behind an unusual beat and a hovering dissonance that feels science fictional, like an alien race observing us through what appears to be a swarm of of bees.

Then it erupts, a frantic beat accompanying a beauty and the beast duet between clean female and harsh male voices. When the sax shows up, it's a wild and free jazz instrument squealing around a riff so relentless that it just has to be deliberately regimented to counter the saxophone. It works really well. Gravity Bending Light is less epochal, even at a couple of minutes longer again, but it gets there five minutes in when the vehemence of the early section boils away and everything gets peaceful. The cello adds to this, as does the oddly choral chanting later on. It's dark but it's delightful.

I hope I can find something out about whoever's behind Aegos. Something this interesting deserves to have credit appropriately assigned. The guests are certainly worthy but they're not the primary here and I wish I could praise him, her or them properly.

Architects - For Those That Wish to Exist (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Feb 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Over time, Architects, who formed in 2004 in Brighton, have moved through a number of genres. They started out as a metalcore band, shifted notably into post-hardcore, apparently pissing off a chunk of their core fanbase, moved back again and gradually evolved past those genres entirely. There's post-hardcore here and metalcore too, but this is neither a post-hardcore nor a metalcore album. So what is it? There, to quote the Bard, is the rub. I can't really define this outside of simply "alternative" and that would be misleading. Some people seem to be using "arena rock", which is even more misleading. REO Speedwagon they're not.

So let's just say that it's highly varied, whether we're talking about the vocals of Sam Carter and his colleagues or the music that the band brings into play behind them.

I'm not sure exactly which voice belongs to whom, but this is an interplay between three of them: one is clean, calm and introspective and perfect for smooth modern pop music, a more emphatic one that remains clean and is alternative rock through and through and a shouty one that takes the emphasis all the way to -core levels. Without history to bias a new listener, they might think of Architects as pop music that gets really edgy rather than a metalcore band who have become a lot more commercial.

Musically, the same applies. There's a lot that's introspective and the keyboards of Ali Dean are very obvious throughout, not always to provide depth, texture or atmosphere. Sometimes they serve as a primary instrument to lead the way for songs to follow. Dean has been with Architects since 2006, but that's as their bass player, a role he still fills; he's only been responsible for keyboards and a drum pad since 2016. Drummer Dan Searle, the one remaining founder member, also handles programming and that really has become two jobs now rather than one broad one.

All this means that the variety isn't merely between tracks but within them, most of these following multiple paths with a lot of dynamic play. An Ordinary Extinction starts out heavy but promptly turns into synthpop; then it adds a layer of unusual rhythms and evolves into a hardcore song that's driven by its electronica as much as its voice. Other songs feature sections of dreamy pop music with a prog mindset, akin to Radiohead, but also sections that are loud and overt and clearly -core, whether it's hardcore or, in songs like Goliath, clearly a full on metalcore vibe that the band started out playing, even if that one finishes up with the most overt strings to be found anywhere on the album.

Goliath is one of four songs to feature a guest performer, in this case Simon Neil, the lead singer and guitarist for Scottish alternative rockers Biffy Clyro. Other guests include Winston McCall of Parkway Drive, the Aussie metalcore band; Mike Kerr of rock genre-hoppers Royal Blood; and Liam Kearly, of prog rockers Black Peaks. What's odd here is that none of them are obvious. The songs they're on fit absolutely with others around them that are played entirely by Architects, so much so that all these guests seem to be have been completely subsumed into the band.

This isn't my choice of genre, but I liked this a lot. For a number of reasons, I've been playing it for the majority of the past week, while I do other things, and it only gets better. The shouty vocal style never did anything for me, but it works here, alongside similarly emphatic musical choices like an ultraheavy riff late in Black Lungs that doom metal bands would kill for, almost a bass line played on guitar. And then they're back to pop music again with a catchy hook and woah woah backing. As Carter sings, "It's enough to plague a saint."

Black Lungs is a real highlight here, but there are others. This is a generous album, running just shy of an hour with fourteen full songs plus a minute and a half intro that should count too. The consistency is high, even though Architects move from djent to post punk to Euro dance to metalcore and it's not just the heavier parts I appreciated. In fact, given that the heavier songs are more likely to go shouty, I'm actually fonder of softer and subtler pieces like Dead Butterflies. That's a lush texture to open up, mostly because of keyboards, and the unusual rhythms and orchestrations only underline that.

Other critics have talked about the lyrical content, I'm sure, given that it looks at the environment, as Architects often do, but I'll comment about how unusual this look is. It's very personal, looking not at what's happening but at what we can do about it and it's alternately optimistic and pessimistic. We're empowered to do what we can, but it might not be enough. I hear that internal argument throughout the album, because it's bouncy and perky and hopeful until it isn't and suddenly it's dark and broody and angry. And that's entirely fair.

This is a really good album. Please add a point if you're fonder of shouty vocals than I am. And maybe another one too.

Gridiron - The Other Side of Suffering (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Groove/Thrash Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

After being dragged down by Hum, I wanted something fast and heavy to wake me up and kick my ass, so I ran through a bunch of thrash metal albums and EPs, most of which left me dry. The one to break through my ennui was this one, by Texan band Gridiron, even though it's not quite the sort of thing I was looking for.

Metal Archives call what they do thrash/groove metal, which isn't unfair, but Gridiron themselves call it metalcore. What won me over was the sheer ferocity when they're seriously shifting, because they carry some serious power and energy. Become is strong out of the gate, for instance, and then gets truly ferocious. Where's my socially distanced mosh pit?

Now, I'm an old school thrash fan—that's always been my go to genre—but I prefer it without groove on the side and with its vocals some degree of clean. The most overt metalcore elements here can be found in Zack Knight's vocal delivery, a mostly monotone shout that's easily my least favourite aspect to this album, but it sometimes gets closer to a death growl, especially when he's roaring, and he also sings clean, so there is some variety here.

He's also one of two guitarists in Gridiron and, without attempting to shift any credit away from the rhythm section which is admirably reliable, it's the guitars that dominate this band and the longer I listened, the more they stood out. I may not like Knight as a singer, but I'm a big fan of him and Josh Cross as guitarists. While I prefer the faster, more energetic sections in any song here, there are slow parts that I really like too, because of the way they merge a crushing heaviness with a strong sense of melody. In fact, while the fast sections got me on board, it could be fair to say the slower ones made me all the more interested.

Lazarus moves back and forth between faster and slower sections and it all works magnificently. Eyes Wide Shut and Afterlife shine because of the guitars and Blame It on the Fire is all about the guitars, with some uncharacteristic keyboards floating over them that at times hint at being a choir. This one is an instrumental, the only one on the album if we ignore the minute long intro, and I'd call it a fine example of what the rest of it could have been, if it didn't seem like a different genre. It's symphonic power metal, really, on a groove/thrash album, an approach telegraphed in A Sight to Behold.

Things shift back to normal with Wretched Earth and stay there. I kept on hating Knight's vocals but loving his guitars. I don't know how he and Cross divvy up their work, so I have no idea who deserves praise for what, but they both clearly deserve plenty of it. Eventually, I freed myself from their thrall long enough to also appreciate Rhannon Knight's drumming. I should have been caught up by it on A Sight to Behold, but I was certainly there by the last song, Of Blood & Bone, which is just as intricate. The bassist stuck in between these forces of nature is Mike Elsner.

I'd also love to know where Gridiron's influences are. They're clearly Pantera fans and I caught various American thrash bands too, but there are older sounds here as well and I'm not just talking about the inevitable Black Sabbath. I don't buy into them only listening to the obvious bands for their genres, Exhorder and Sepultura. I'm not up enough on the metalcore side to suggest comparisons, but Jesse Zaraska from Misery Signals guests here. It all sounds to me like they're pretty well read musically; in moments where I expected X, I often got Y and I appreciated that, especially on Eyes Wide Shut.

You may not be entirely my cup of tea and you weren't quite what I was looking for today, but thanks for improving my day, Gridiron. Oh, and I'd go 7/10 if it wasn't for the vocals. If you're into that style, add that lost point back on.

Trivium - What the Dead Men Say (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Melodic Death Metal/Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I find that I want to avoid most trendy modern American "metal" bands, as I don't buy into them being anything of the sort, but Trivium are surely the exception that proves the rule. Sure, they're trendy, modern and American, but I don't have any problem in calling them metal.

Now, there are plenty of metalcore trappings still in their sound, perhaps most overtly on Amongst the Shadows & the Stones, even if it's also surely the fastest song on the album, with a pace that outstrips most of the songs on the last few American thrash albums I've reviewed. However, plenty of the also instrumental passages here made me forget I wasn't listening to an Iron Maiden album and some vocal ones move firmly into Pantera territory. Either way, that's metal.

It helps that Matt Heafy's vocals are clean as often than they're shouty, if not more so. The album's bookends, the title track at the beginning and The Ones We Leave Behind at the end, are probably my favourite songs here, with Heafy singing clean for most of both of them. Even on songs with more shouty vocals, such as Catastrophist, the majority of those vocals are still clean and the shouty parts are used as contrast.

Those bookends do what all metal songs want to do: they gallop and they rock and they soar, with a twin guitar assault bringing in melodies. It shocks me that people complained when Heafy ditched screams for clean vocals, because the latter sound so much better and, what's more, give him a heck of a lot more opportunity to bring nuance to his songs.

Bleed to Me may not gallop as much but it rocks and soars too, while somehow sounding like it would fit well alongside all those trendy modern bands on a trendy modern ClearChannel radio station. The Defiant follows suit, with the most Maiden-esque backing of anything here but with shouty aggression in the vocals. It also builds rather strongly towards its end, most courtesy of new fish Alex Bent, who's been the band's drummer for four years now.

I rather like the mixture that Trivium are playing with here, a traditional metal sound that I've enjoyed for three and a half decades and change mixed with that nu American sound that I usually prefer to avoid. They've managed to find a palatable balance that I can enjoy and, by my third time through, it wasn't just the bookends that I was digging but the songs in the middle that explore that palatable balance.

Both Bleed into Me and Sickness unto You are catchy and commercial songs I'd have no problem seeing as singles (which the former was), but they're never weak. The Defiant is more brutal. Scattering the Ashes even adds a slight gothic tinge to its vocal line. I won't suggest that this is the most varied release of the year but it's a lot more varied than I was expecting it to be.

I should add that the melodeath part of the trivium, along with thrash metal and metalcore, is still here, flavouring most of these songs. The most overt may be Bending the Arc to Fear but it's there throughout the album. However, Trivium has clearly turned into more of a straightforward heavy metal band with some metalcore influences and that's no bad thing. Frankly, the more I hear them evolve in that direction, the more I like them.

Mantric - False Negative (2020)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

Mantric have an interesting sound. They're clearly prog, but they're on the boundary between prog rock and prog metal, both of which have an alternative edge too, as if prog could be trendy. They're Norwegian, but outside of some Scandinavian accents evident in quieter sections like early on Itching Soul, they sound more like an American band, one that constantly tours, playing a long line of small venues, sitting too low on bills because they're far too adventurous for the mainstream but continually picking up new die hard fans because they do their own thing and they're very good at it.

The other label that comes out a lot for Mantric is post-metal, which makes a lot of sense to me. When I think prog metal, I think of bands who followed in the wake of others like Queensrÿche, Mekong Delta or Opeth. I don't think of what I'm hearing here. Just check out Queen Fatigue, which is much closer to Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground or Swans than any of those bands. The sound on this one comes out of early punk with a layer of grunge but applies touches of electronica and even black metal in the way the band uses wall of sound.

The question is how the band can reconcile Queen Fatigue with the songs that sit around it. Its bookends have pop sensibilities. Itching Soul explores a lot of the same new wave and synth pop influences that Paradise Lost played with on albums like One Second but dirties them up considerably. Norwegian Dastard is a psychedelic pop song with a stoner bass, rather like you might find if early Nirvana covered the Beatles or, later in the song, Pearl Jam covered Pink Floyd.

It might seem like songs like these are going in different directions. What links them is how dirty the sound is on all of them, as if Mantric serve as a filter, taking all sorts of influences you wouldn't expect to hear from a Seattle band and applying a filter to them to create something new. Whether you fall in love with them will depend on whether you appreciate the idea of that filter or not.

Just thinking about Mantric as filter makes this stranger. Blame the Beggar, for instance, is a perky synth pop song at heart, just dirtied up a bit with that fuzzy bass and a guitar that heavies things up when needed. It reminded me of a song like Safety Dance, just with the Mantric filter applied, and if Men without Hats aren't the last band I ever expected to bring up in a metal review, I have no idea who would be more unlikely.

What this led to me to wonder is how Mantric's sound has changed over time. They aren't new, having formed back in 2007, but they're hardly prolific, as this is only their third album since then. I haven't heard The Descent and Sin, but I'm guessing from what I read that they were heavier albums than this, as they were reviewed by metal magazines who pointed out that the prog core ventured into black and death metal territories on them.

There's little extreme here to be found at all and I'd call this album rock over metal, even if the band do get faster and heavier on songs such as The Towering Mountain and Darling Demon. Even there, the heaviness is less from a death or black metal perspective and more from metalcore, with the shouty vocals you'd expect from that genre. I'm not a big -core fan and the latter song is probably my least favourite here, even with a cool guitar buzz that sounds like a swarm of bees flew through the studio, but it's still a really interesting and sonically diverse track.

Mantric certainly aren't going to be for everyone, but they seem to me to be one of those bands who are appreciated either not at all or absolutely. They might make no impact on you at all or they're going to become your favourite band of all time and you'll follow them on tour. As a regular listener, I'm much more the former. As a critic, though, I find this sound fascinating. I want to hear more and I want to see how they've grown already and where they will grow to over time. Interesting band.

Svengali - Sayonara (2020)

Country: United Arab Emirates
Style: Melodic Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Once again I'm dipping into a -core genre even though you know by now that I don't dig shouty vocals, but I just had to discover what a melodic metalcore outfit from the United Arab Emirates sound like. Well, they're sort of from the UAE. Svengali are indeed based in Dubai, but the four members are each from different countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and India. I don't know what usually populates the Virgin Megastore chart in th UAE but Svengali's debut album reached the number two spot.

And they sound pretty good, whatever style they're plucking from their ample playbook. Their core sound is roughly what you might expect: fast and heavy guitars with the bass prominent in the mix and deep shouty vocals from what I presume is Adnan Mryhij. The only line-up I can find has five members so I would think that someone has left the band and I have no idea who.

If you're into Killswitch Engage, you should dig this, even though they're a bit slower at full tilt and feature less guitar solos. The closest they get to Killswitch here is certainly Freight Train, which kicks off with a guitar sound right out of Iron Maiden's Back in the Village but then launches into the chuggy metalcore sound that the rest of the song thrives on.

If that's the hardest song here, the softest is surely Better Off, which is half a ballad, with melodies reminiscent of Marlene on the Wall by Suzanne Vega, of all things, and half an alt rock song with a decent solo. Whoever provides the clean voice brings a real warmth to the album and he's either layering his voice or someone else is backing him in a similar vein.

The best song to my mind is the one that mixes these two different styles in the most effective way. That's Labyrinth, which wraps up the album. It kicks off quintessentially for metalcore but the shouty vocalist hands over to the clean one before the halfway mark so that he can introduce strong hooks that take the song in a different direction.

I like this song a lot and would call it the most definitive song here, even if it refuses to be just one thing. There's a proggy section midway through that feels like post-rock but, just as we're getting into the soundscape, it hands over to a powerful chugging riff backed by distant floating synths and then we're back to the hooks. It's heavy and it's soft without either aspect conflicting.

An album of songs with the contrasts of Labyrinth would be fantastic, but it isn't this one. Other songs tend to focus on the traditional metalcore sound without getting too much into embellishments from other genres, or don't bother with them at all. And that's fine. Svengali not presenting themselves as anything but metalcore and, as much as I prefer every other vocal style in the entire rock/metal spectrum, Myrhij is as enjoyable a shouter as I've heard lately.

In fact, if there's a genre they hint at most, it's not prog or post-rock at all, but groove metal because there are moments here that reminded me a lot of latter day Sepultura, albeit coming to that shared sound from an opposite direction. Sepultura are a metal band who like punking it up, while Svengali are clearly a punk band who like metal. I wonder how far they'll go on that scale on future albums. It's not like Sepultura haven't developed massively over their career and it's comparatively early for Svengali.

Oh, and by the way, the typographer in me adores the simple but highly effective logo!

Jinjer - Macro (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gentihaa - Reverse Entropy (2019)

Country: Greece
Style: Symphonic Death/Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Sep 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Nine months of deep dive reviews and I'm finding my go to countries. I still feel surprised that Greece is one of them, but it's proving to be the hotbed for a whole slew of interesting bands from across the rock/metal spectrum. I see that Gentihaa, who are based in Athens, describe their sound as "fantasy themed symphonic death/black metal". That's at once fair and overly limiting because I'm hearing a heck of a lot more here than that.

In fact, what leapt out at me first were the doom metal vocals of Andre, who somehow manages to not seem like he's in the wrong band. What he does fits a band style that refuses to be any one thing. On Empathy, for instance, which is the first song proper, half of it plays to his doomladen vocals while the other half wants to be metalcore. The guitars seem to be death metal and the drums play in that black/death combination style. It's probably fair to say that I was confused for a while here.

Vision is more of a doom metal song, even if the drums remain fast. Sneak on over to Candlemass's dressing room and lace a barrel of mead with speed and this is what might result. It's interesting stuff though I have to add that I wasn't sold until Metamorphosis three tracks in, which is wild. Going back to listen through again, the early songs are fine, just not what I expected. After Metamorphosis, anything seemed like fair game.

Again, it starts out like a doom metal song with blastbeats, but it refuses to stay there. It finds some weird time changes. It gets all shouty. Before long it sounds like Candlemass and Voivod jamming in the studio with a guest singer from a band like Shadows Fall. There's even a quieter section that's very much like Voivod channelling Pink Floyd. The keyboards swell while the vocals loop and it's all rather psychedelic, man. I dug it a lot.

There's some of that in Alpha too, accompanied by eastern string work and a very different sound. Its long outro is impeccably constructed and flows on to Beyond wonderfully. If it took a few songs to hook me here, I was hooked hard. Beyond ups the tempo seriously, emphasising the metalcore side of the band's sound, with the doom side present for texture. It even finds a rather theatrical sound late on. The band's Facebook page does add to that earlier description, by including "heavy guitar riffs, multi-dimensional vocals and diverse rhythms". I like "multi-dimensional". It fits.

But wait, there's more. Command slows down for an intriguing quiet section that hints at a Spanish sound, but spends much of its time loud and raucous with squealing guitars. Mastery starts out with a symphonic feel, not just because of the vocals but through the guitar build, but then ramps up to be a thrash song. Gentihaa never shift on a dime the way that, say, Mr. Bungle does, but they move through a host of genres without really acknowledging a boundary at any point. The achingly slow outro is fantastic too.

What surprises me most here is that Gentihaa don't appear to have recorded anything before, at least in this particular form. The band formed in 2015 but this is apparently their debut. Each member came from other bands, but even there the genres are varied. Vocalist Andre, for instance, sang for a melodic death band called Wings in Motion, a thrash/groove band by the name of Memorain and even a parody band called, get this, Sonata Antarctika. The variety here does explain a lot.

I for one am eager to hear more and not only because Gentihaa are one more interesting band from Greece. All of this is good and some of it is really great. It bodes well for a bright future.

Killswitch Engage - Atonement (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Aug 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Beyond having one of the coolest frickin' band names ever conjured up, Killswitch Engage are also one of the few radio-friendly modern American rock bands I'm still able to enjoy. No, I'm not likely to be reviewing the new Slipknot or Korn albums and I'm not too likely to be listening to them either. This is a different matter. This bunch are a real metal band underneath the hardcore elements.

Regular readers know that I'm hardly the world's biggest metalcore fan, but this outfit do it right. They have all the energy and attitude required but they mix it up a lot too and don't see melody as a four letter word. Sure, there's a lot of that shouty metalcore vocal that tends to leave me dry, but it's not everything here. To accompany a variety of styles in the backing, there are clean alternative vocals as well, plus fast thrashy vocals, slow churning vocals and even what almost sound like death growls as The Signal Fire kicks off.

That latter may be because there's a notable guest on it. He's Howard Jones, who was the vocalist for Killswitch Engage during the decade between Jesse Leach leaving the band and returning to it; fans ought to thrill to hearing both of them on a single track. The other notable guest is Chuck Billy, of Testament fame, who appears on The Crownless King. He's only one reason why it stands out to me though. It stalks. It churns. The pit will find serious motion to this one!

This is Killswitch Engage's eighth studio album, their first since Incarnate in 2016, but they're almost as regular as clockwork. They've never gone less than two years between albums and never more than four. It seems to work for them and nobody's complaining so far. Well, not about that. I have a really odd complaint about this album. There's a 'Yeah!' that gets thrown out like punctuation in a James Hetfield manner; it's all over the album and it's an annoyance to me, albeit because Leach doesn't sound like Hetfield elsewhere. The 'Yeah' is a real distraction.

Otherwise, this is solid stuff for metalcore fans, with an agreeable amount of variety. The Signal Fire starts out thrashy, then gets all puffed up in the chest like metalcore so often does, then finds its groove in time to set up a melodic chorus. Know Your Enemy is a bouncy piece, just what metalcore is supposed to be. Bite the Hand That Feeds has some real energy to it with an attitude strong enough to spit through the speakers. Take Control is one of the more straight forward metal tracks and it's just as effective, with a decent solo to boot. I wouldn't change the radio station if this was on.

It's been really interesting to see just how nu metal split the wider genre onto two completely separate paths: there's modern American radio metal and there's everything else. With this album, Killswitch Engage continue to be a rare band to be able to walk, with head held high, on both those paths. I'm not seeing a need to atone for that.

Skybinder - Trauma and Trial (2019)

Country: Greece
Style: Melodic Metalcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Regular readers will know that I was an old school metalhead rather than a punk and I've never been a huge fan of the shouty genres that end in -core. That doesn't, however, mean that I don't like any of it; it just means that I'm a lot more selective about what works inside my head.

And Skybinder, a metalcore band from Athens (Greece not Georgia), definitely work in my head, even though they're almost brand new. They were founded as recently as last year but they've been busy because this full length debut follows three singles and I have to say that it's pretty good. Sure, George Plaskasovitis has the vocal style we expect from metalcore but he does it well and he's able to include melody and intensity.

Metalcore is the most accessible -core genre to me, especially when it has that melodic prefix. It tends to mean that, while the vocals are are shouty and there's plenty of that monotone bass where it's trying to be a drumkit, there's a lot more to the backing music, which combines the energy of punk with the intricacy of metal. Guitarists Simos Xalarhs and Tony Makrogiannis have plenty of metal in their sound and it's agreeably mixed too.

While Fathoms sounds like a punk song with odd guitar runs, those runs are reminiscent of early Paradise Lost, adding a doom/death tone to the song. I really dug My Severance, which has a thrash mentality, a great melody and a set of interesting breakdowns, not to mention George getting even closer to a death growl. It runs only three minutes and change but it's very welcome. And, for something completely different, Leap of Faith starts out like an Iron Maiden song.

All these influences are there in the guitars. Tasos and Dimitris on drums and bass are clearly good at what they do but they do what we expect them to do, which isn't particularly inventive. They just underpin the songs so the guitarists can create textures and George can add energy to proceedings. My favourite songs here were always going to be the ones where the guitars had most to do.

The question is whether that's going to be enough for me to care about the album and, this time out, it is. I've listened through a few times and have yet to get bored or turned off. Even George mixes it up at points, like the whispered section in The Pretender, probably the most all-round imaginative song on the album, even if I do wonder how the end would sound without the guitars fading out with the rest of the band.

This is the sixth album I've reviewed this year from Greece and none of them sound remotely like each other. Skybinder probably have most in common with Voidnaut, also from Athens, not in the style they play but because they both play music clearly influenced more by American music than European. I wonder why Athens has a fondness for modern American music but it clearly does, as my next review will underline. I look forward to figuring out an answer.

Drowning Ares - Nocturna (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

I like Drowning Ares for reasons far beyond the music. For one, they sent me a copy of this EP, which is released next Friday, for review. I'm never not going to like free music unless Justin Bieber reaches out too. The line-up on their Bandcamp page lists their drummer as Magneto (Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, X-Men, Astonishing Avengers), so someone should keep a close eye on John Davidson. Oh, and the Artists We Also Like section on their Facebook page starts and ends with Wyld Stallyns. This band are clearly going to be fun, whatever their music sounds like.

And it sounds pretty good. They're all experienced musicians in the metal scene in northern Virginia, each with a number of other bands behind them, so it's not surprising that the musicianship is top notch. They've clearly rehearsed a lot too, because they're very comfortable with each other. The tempo changes a lot on this EP and, even with only six songs, it's longer than some full albums (hello, Reign in Blood), so there's a lot of it.

They play progressive metalcore, which means that it's loud and aggressive and the vocals are shouty but it's far more musically complex than hardcore ever gets. Easily my favourite track here is Beyond the Reach of Time and Reason, which beyond having a title we might expect from Dream Theater, is happy to attempt being as complex too, albeit within the bounds of four and a half minutes.

It does a particularly great job at contrasting the two vocalists. I don't know which is which, other than the pair are Navid Rashid and Jae Curtis, but one shouts in the usual harsh voice, though not outrageously so unless there's a good reason, while the other is cleaner with just a slight edge. The introspective mid-section allows them both to explore more than merely one style each too, with a neat escalation to ramp back up. There's a lot going on in this song and it's all interesting.

My other favourite is the closer, the six minute Nocturna (there's an odd ending tacked on to make it look like eight), because this rumbles on into being with suitable menace and gradually builds in aggression through clear sections, one of which features a vocal line that goes far beyond the usual shouting to almost reach black metal shrieks. Again, those different vocal styles weave in and out of each other in duet style, which is always more interesting than either of them alone.

I don't want to go on about the vocals, because the music behind them is a highlight on its own. With Jae Curtis restricted to a microphone, there's a mere trio generating this busy noise: Rashid on guitar, Patrick Larson on bass and John Davidson on drums. That's impressive but it also explains why there aren't more solos going on here. This is no nonsense stuff.

It feels a little more no nonsense too because each song runs into the next so it never seems like the band stop for the entire half an hour. That aids the aggressive feel. The catch to that is that it becomes harder for us to differentiate the individual songs, each of which follows the same sort of tone. If there's a downside here, it's the general inability of the tracks to stand out from each other. They all sound good but they mostly sound similar.

Frankly, the worst thing about this EP is its cover, which is minimalistic and generic, two adjectives that don't accurately describe the music to be found within. But hey, when the worst thing to say about music is what art sits on its cover, the band have to be doing a good job.