Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Neofolk
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

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

There are at least three sounds here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars (2023)

Country: Sweden
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I liked Katatonia's eleventh album, City Burials, and I like this twelfth that's so similar in approach that I could almost replace this entire review with one word: ditto. Wherever they've been in their musical journey over the years, they're a very comfortable prog band nowadays, sitting happily on the border between rock and metal, heavy for the former but light for the latter. And they have an uncannily consistent tone that means that, while the songs are all clearly different, they end up as a blend in our brains, which automatically aggregate them all together.

Maybe it's a little more immediate than City Burials, but it's still such elegant stuff that every one of these ten songs (eleven if you count the bonus track, Absconder) needs to to be fed and watered frequently for it to bloom in our hearts. Jonas Renkse maintains such a consistent vocal tone that it sometimes seems like he's being sponsored by a couple of specific pitches and he can only move away from them maybe three times per song. The guitars are more versatile but only if we focus a lot more than feels natural. And how you take that last sentence may be the key to whether this is truly for you or not.

The entire album sounds so comfortable that the easiest course of action is to to leave it as it is, to let it simply wash over us like a sweet smelling cleansing action. We feel embraced by its presence and so comfortable that we have to set it on repeat or lose an acute belonging. It's feelgood music that's almost addictive. Life seems better when it's playing and we don't want to return to the big bad world with its demands and expectations. Can't we just curl up in the arms of our beloved and close our eyes and let this album roll through our headphones for the next year?

It's so comfortable that it almost feels wrong to listen deeper. This is carefully crafted music, and it benefits from us actually paying attention to see what the musicians are actually doing, because a lot is going on here, regardless of which track is playing, and it's fascinating to focus in and follow the bass or the keyboards or the guitars. However, unlike what must be every other band, it seems like we're cheating when we do that and we have to look over our shoulders to make sure nobody's watching. In fact, it almost feels dangerous, like this was supposedly placed here by God and we're suddenly heretics to stone if we acknowledge that it was created by mere human beings.

If you're happy with the positive feeling, this is a peach of an album. It's seamless and immersive. It's kind of like Paradise Lost at their most commercial, on albums like One Second when they were a new wave band, all Depeche Mode with emphatic almost gothic hooks, only smoothed out with a serious algorithm so that the hooks are constant but exquisitely subtle. Everything's melody in an ever-extending set of layers. It'll be your favourite album of the year. It'll be home.

However, if you feel that sinister underbelly, like it's conning you into believing that everything's a paradise and you've put on the prohibited glasses that let you see past its facade, it's going to be uncomfortable. You're still going to feel that constant insistence of welcome, but you're going to know better and it becomes a beautiful nightmare. It's not home. It's the Matrix and you want to wake up.

With all that said, can I call out anything for special mention or is it just a consistent fifty minutes of being surrounded by amniotic fluid? Maybe. There's some sassiness to Colossal Shade's central riff. The intros to Opaline and Atrium are beautifully intricate, the former being a real grower. In the end, though, perhaps only No Beacon to Illuminate Our Fall steps out of the conformity to be a creature of its own. It finds some nice grooves and works through some complex prog changes, but it also loosens up to drop into something more exploratory.

Bottom line: it's impeccable stuff but it makes me increasingly uncomfortable.

Raeziel - Resilience (2022)

Country: France
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Oct 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

On a first listen, it didn't sound like Raeziel are bringing anything new to post-rock with what looks like their debut album, but they perform it very capably indeed. On a second listen, I didn't change that opinion, but doubled down on it. I wasn't surprised by what they do here, except to say that it sometimes seems a little heavier than equivalent bands, crossing the line into post-metal, just not exploring particularly far beyond it. However, it feels effortlessly good, staying evocative, perhaps even deepening our experience as we journey through these soundscapes.

I don't know who's in the band, so I can't call anyone out for a special mention, but I don't think it's needed anyway. This is very much a team performance, however many musicians happen to belong to Raeziel. Bandcamp tells me that it's a home recording, so that number may even be one, with a multi-instrumentalist taking his time in his studio to get every instrument right before layering it all together. Certainly, I don't see more than one musician in any of the images on their Instagram account.

That means that what I like here is what I like about post-rock in general. I like the way that pieces of music—and, just in case you're wondering, everything is instrumental—play as journeys and it's up to us to figure out where we're going and what we're seeing on the way. They're all mid-length, the shortest track just under four minutes and the longest almost six and a half, and they all move between quiet, gentle sections and louder, more urgent sections, just in different ways, different orders and to different degrees. Everything feels consistent but every piece is different, just like every train ride through random countryside is consistent but different.

It's so consistent that I would have been hard pressed on a first listen to call out a favourite track. This is one of those albums where your favourite track is always going to be the one that you're on at any particular moment; they all do the job but one is happening right now and that's what you care about the most at that point in time. With repeat listens, I'd call out the opener, Vesper, that six minute track; Vendabrume, kicking off side two; and Renaissance, at the tail end of the album, right before the closer. Why? No better reason than me connecting to them a little stronger than anything else.

Maybe Vendabrume stands out for me because it discovers some sounds unlike any other piece on the album. In particular, there are two percussion based sounds—the drummer hitting something different—and they grab my attention every time, however often I listen to them. The first is early on and subtle, so it's making sure we're aware. The other comes later and is much more overt, the drums taking the lead for a glorious section. Renaissance is a smoother piece but it benefits from an excellent escalation out of a quiet rain adorned midsection that ramps up to the end. Vesper? I have no idea. It's not just because, as the opening track, it was my first impression of Raeziel. There's a deeper connection, but I couldn't really call out why.

And that's about all I can say here. If you like your post-rock on the heavier side, this is good stuff, however many musicians there are making it. Maybe we'll find out when the second album comes out. Maybe not. I'll be checking Bandcamp anyway.

Kirk Hammett - Portals (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 23 Apr 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

Here's something completely unexpected: a solo album from a member of Metallica. They've been around for over four decades now and not one member of the band has released anything solo. In fact, I seem to recall James Hetfield stating something about how it would never happen because it would only serve as distraction from Metallica. I guess times have changed. Metallica famously have, after all. And, almost as if to show just how far, Kirk Hammett, who's been their guitarist so long that only Dave Mustaine really remembers them without him, clearly chose to release music utterly unlike the music he's known for in his day job.

While there are moments that remind very much of Metallica, because Hammett's soloing is very recognisable, this is emphatically not a Metallica album. It's entirely shorn of vocals, for a start, a completely instrumental release; there are precious few riffs, so little of that ever-reliable James Hetfield rhythm work; and the drums aren't really there to keep time, at least not throughout. As heavy as it gets, and it's not unfair to label it metal, it never truly steps into any of the genres that Metallica have been known for. Maybe there's a section in The Jinn that would qualify, if it wasn't for the cello.

For the most part, I'd call this progressive metal or post-metal, but it dips more than its toes into the genre of soundtracks, music composed to accompany something visual, like a movie. We know that Metallica are aware of Ennio Morricone, as they open each gig with The Ecstasy of Gold, after it was suggested to them by the late Jon Zazula, their first manager. There's a lot of Morricone on this album, especially in High Plains Drifter, even though that western was not scored by him, and at a number of key points in The Incantation.

What else I heard in The Incantation was classical music, not that that's a long way away from the sort of thing soundtrack composers conjure up. The staccato riffing is reminiscent of Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War. The lively midsection is quintessential Mendelssohn. The lonesome beginning and frantic ending mix the unusual instrumentation of Morricone with the swells of John Williams who, of course, was massively influenced by Holst. Listen to The Planets and then watch Star Wars if you don't believe me. There's orchestration throughout The Incantation, even a sitar section.

And it's easily my favourite piece here, as well as being the most visual. None of this was created to score a movie, but some of it appears to have been composed as background to an exhibition of Hammett's horror and sci-fi memorabilia called It's Alive. I have no idea which bits and what they accompanied, but there's serious menace in The Incantation and I could easily see it put to use in the soundtrack of a horror movie or thriller. That doesn't hold true for everything here, but it all goes a couple of steps beyond what we might expect from an instrumental guitar album.

That's my biggest takeaway here and it's the biggest reason I like this EP so much. It's not there to showcase Hammett's technical virtuosity, though he does exhibit plenty of that, because it's not a shred album. It's not about taking the guitar into new places, either, like you might expect from a Joe Satriani or a Steve Vai. It's fundamentally about composition and feel. It's telling that while a guitar may be the central instrument, others often take over. There's cello on every track, plenty of other strings, horns and even a harp. There's plenty of percussion that isn't on a drumkit. All of this is there to add texture and feel and evoke some impression or other. And it succeeds.

I believe this is being marketed as an EP, but its four tracks add up to twenty-seven minutes, only a couple shy of Reign in Blood, so it's not a skimpy release, even if it's hardly an sprawling epic. It's a decision on your part as to whether you want to dive in, because it's not Metallica. The question is going to come down to whether that's a good thing or not. Right now, to me, it is. I've been a huge fan of Metallica since Ride the Lightning came out and I enjoyed this more than anything they've done since ...and Justice for All. Their choices as to which musical adventure to take next can be of greatly different validity, but this is emphatically a good one.

I want more of this and may well up my rating. The Incantation is a 9/10 for me. High Plains Drifter is an 8/10 and The Jinn is really close. And Maiden and the Monster, easily my least favourite track, is a 7/10. So this is closer to an 8/10 than anything. So be it. Now, let's have another EP, Kirk, with a similar lack of creative control from a certain overreaching drummer.

Modder - Modder (2021)

Country: Belgium
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Dec 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Here's a submission from Belgium that satisfies a wish of mine that's often manifested this year. I really like the heaviness generated by sludge metal bands but I tend to dislike the raucous shouty vocal style that such bands often employ. The obvious solution is Modder, an instrumental sludge metal outfit who play long, heavy songs without a single attempt to vocalise anything. Everything revolves around the riffs, which have always been my favourite aspect of sludge.

I was hooked by a the opener, the nine and a half minute Mount Frequency, and the band kept me paying attention throughout. This one is built off a riff that's simple in nature and told simply, but it's a good one and it's the bedrock under what I would call atmosphere if that word didn't have a different meaning in genre names. Modder have a knack of setting a scene with their songs and it doesn't come from the riff at all, though that's slow and heavy and hypnotic. It comes in part from a melodic line that's doomy but often ethnic, almost middle eastern, and in part from electronic overlays that are like ambient industrial.

The latter is there even more on Wax Rituals, which is slowed and downtuned further anyway but benefits immensely from these overlays. Both these songs could fairly be read as improvisations on themes by latter day Celtic Frost, whether it's dark rhythmic chords or upbeats on the drums. However, this one adds even more of a gothic industrial ambience that's drenched in horror. I can easily imagine people using Wax Rituals as haunt music, even taking the slowing and downtuning even further to include subsonics to affect mood.

That industrial edge is omnipresent, adding those layers of texture, but industrial is inherently an artificial sound, whether it's the heartbeat of pulsing machinery or their by products like hails of sparks or escaping steam. Spasm has that industrial edge too, but there's something fundamentally organic in it too, as if its earliest overlays are the tortured catgut strings of cellos rather than steelcutters in a factory, and its punctuating sounds like giant ocean bubbles.

Spasm also differs from the others by dropping the riffs away completely just before the halfway mark. Sure, it allows a shift in mood for the second half of the song but it's like an entire complex shut down for the night and we suddenly see animal life emerging from the quietened shadows. I love this, even though it's brief, because it really helps to make this visual. You're probably going to see something else entirely to what I saw, but you're going to see something. There's post-rock here, or post-metal. Is post-sludge metal a thing? Maybe it is now.

My least favourite song here is the last one, When Your Bones Weren't Meant to Be, for no better reason than everything before it feels unusual and this one merely feels like a jam around a set of riffs that the band happen to like. Sure, those are decent riffs and I didn't dislike the piece at all, but it feels somehow less substantial and more unoriginal after three more evocative tracks.

It's great to hear something this unusual and especially when it's submitted for review. It's been a very interesting week, listening to subgenre that I hadn't heard before, like Mothflesh's technical groove and now Modder's ambient industrial and post-sludge. Now, what's slated for tomorrow's playlist? Thanks, folks!

There Was a Yeti - Gravitational Waves (2021)

Country: Canada
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 19 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | YouTube

I can't find much online about There Was a Yeti, but I'd certainly like to know more. The band may not even be a band, just one guy from Alberta, Canada; the location is a given, but that's about it. The only other absolute is that this is instrumental music. I'd call most of it post-rock, because it's aiming at creating soundscapes with what appears to be traditional rock instrumentation: guitar, bass and drums, though I'm pretty sure there are keyboards here too, even if they're not obvious all the time. Occasionally, it ventures into post-metal too, but that's far from consistent across an array of nine tracks that amount to a generous seventy minutes of music.

On the opener, Massif, that's done by heavying up the piece considerably, literally moving from its initial post-rock approach into a post-metal one. Sometimes, though, such as on the title track, it's a texture. This one's a post-rock song, but the post-metal crunch is added somewhat for effect into the background, as if whoever's playing the heavy stuff is in the next studio over with all the doors left open so that the sound clearly bleeds through. I like the contrast, with a softer echoey guitar noodling away as our foreground and the slightly subdued crunch behind it. I'm not convinced that I like it more than the softer songs on their own though.

Gravitational Waves is a long piece, exceeding ten minutes, but it still fades out if it still had more to tell if only there wasn't a time limit pressing. There's some intricate drumming right at the end of the song that particularly caught my attention and I wanted a lot more of that, but I wanted in vain. I should add that this isn't the only piece in double digits, Leviathan an epic closer indeed at fourteen minutes. The shortest piece here is Simulation, at four and a half, but it feels more like a calm interlude before things liven up considerably on Caligula's Favourite Pastime.

This is one of the heaviest songs on the album and it features a lot of intricate changes, so it could be categorised as instrumental progressive metal as much as post-metal. Boundaries do blur, but this one crosses it pretty emphatically. And that just makes me wonder who's actually playing the instruments because they deserve praise. Sure, the guitar is always at the forefront of everything that There Was a Yeti does, but there are some great moments not on the guitar, like the drums late in Gravitational Waves or the keyboard bookends to Simulation.

Talking of Simulation, it may be the shortest track here but it's easily my favourite. That keyboard intro is neat but, when the guitar takes over, it does so with the west African highlife tone that's a constant source of happiness to me. It's impossible for anybody's spirits not to be bucked up when listening to highlife and that works just as here too. This one's a jazzy piece as well, especially as it gets going, so it keeps us on the hop even as it's cheering us up.

And, even though I have a metal heart, I much prefer the softer pieces here mixing highlife guitar improvisations with jazzy beats. They're not particularly challenging, but Simulation and Renjo La and The Lion's Daughter are delightful. Sure, Renjo La does build for a while in its second half with power chords and drum fills, but it still does what it did, merely with an added layer of emphasis. I don't dislike the heavier pieces, but they don't feel anywhere near as free or natural. After only a single time through the album, I noticed that I was thinking about skipping forward through most of the heavier songs to get to the more introspective pieces. That's telling.

And so I think this is a 6/10. I enjoyed it and the talent on display by whoever's in this band is clear, but I can't past the feeling that I should have enjoyed some of it more than I did.

Adliga - Vobrazy (2021)

Country: Belarus
Style: Post-Doom Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 5 Nov 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | VK | YouTube

I've only reviewed a couple of albums from Belarus before, Belle Morte a mere couple of months ago, but here's another one, thanks to guitarist Ignat Pomazkov who kindly sent me a copy. It's an interesting album, one that, quite frankly, I wasn't ready for. I knew that I was into this on the first listen, but it's a post-metal album with a particular focus on doom, which is a combo that I'm sure I've never heard before. Metal Archives lists Adliga as one of only 85 groups who play doom/post-metal around the globe and they're the first one that I've listened to.

What I expect from doom is a slow pace and a heavy sound. I've heard all sorts of guitar tones and vocal styles within that basic framework, but doom has to be slow and heavy. This album is both in its way, but deceptively so. It never really speeds up, but it doesn't always feel slow. And it's heavy while often seeming to be not particularly heavy. I've had this on repeat for the whole day and it's told me that it's accessible music, even if it isn't remotely mainstream; and that it's not the doom metal that I know and not really the post-metal I know either.

I found myself going through an odd loop. The second song, Naščadkam, begins crushingly heavy, with a harsh male voice and an enticing female shout over slow beats and deep guitar. Of course, this is heavy stuff! How else could we hear this? But if this is heavy stuff, why didn't I feel that way on the opener, Apošni raz? So I went back to that and it's suddenly heavy too, especially late on and if not remotely as heavy as Naščadkam, but only because I'm thinking of it from that perspective. It feels odd.

What I ended up realising is that this cycles through three different genres and these three don't always mix. Sometimes it's doom metal and only doom metal, like that first minute of Naščadkam which verges on death/doom and the sections of that song that revisit that approach. It's brutally heavy stuff, with a recognisable clean doom metal guitar. Katja Sidelova's shouts are extreme but never seem to have come from hardcore. She endows them with real emotion and we can't escape the power. I usually hate shouted vocals but I simply adore these, especially in a conversation with the harsh male vocal of Uladzimir Burylau.

Sometimes it's post-metal and only post-metal, as perhaps best depicted in Paparać Kvietka. Sure, it's still slow and dark but I wouldn't call this doom in the slightest. It's experimental, with a vocal that begins with spoken word and gradually escalates as the song runs on, and with instrumental backing to match. My thoughts here were of bands like the Swans and others that I think of with a label like alternative slapped on them, albeit not the sort of alternative that gets played on radio stations across America.

And, sometimes it's both post-metal and doom metal at the same time, but not too often. What I think caught me out is that I tried to imagine what the two genres would sound like combined and this rarely does that. Instead, the band weave back and forth between post- and doom without us really acknowledging when that happens. That makes the album feel something like a magic trick but a really enjoyable one.

It also makes it hard to choose a favourite song because so much of the album plays not as a set of individual tracks but as a single piece of music, something new and enticing that we haven't heard before. I'm impressed by the band's sound and how heavy it gets while staying so clean. Maybe I'd plump for Naščadkam and Žyvy, because they effortlessly combine all three of those approaches.

The band here are always interesting and I'd happily listen to this in entirely instrumental form. It never falls into the background because, even though there are points where the guitars are just playing riffs, there's always development going on, whichever song I'm on building and becoming and evolving. And that goes for whichever instrument you want to focus your ears onto.

However, I have to call out the vocals as a real highlight. Sidelova's voice is versatile, shifting from a clean and melodic style to those emphatic shouts, without ever losing power. Burylau's voice is a supporting one, not used remotely as much, but he has a warm growl that fits alongside whatever Sidelova is doing at the time. I found myself eventually pressing stop after my ninth or tenth time through the album just so I could wander over to YouTube and see Žyvy being performed.

Now, what else is going on musically in Belarus?

Between the Planets - Parallel World (2021)

Country: Czechia
Style: Post-Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 18 Sep 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Here's another submission from Czechia and it's an easy one to fall into because it's an immersive listen. Between the Planets is a solo project for multi-instrumentalist Martin Spacosh Perina, with a few studio guests here and there and an expanded line-up when playing live. This is Perina's third album under the name and, even though it features guest vocals on three tracks, I keep thinking of it as an instrumental album. Part of that is that only one of those three features lyrics; the others use the voice of Bara Liskova entirely as an instrument.

The majority of it is Perina doing interesting things with his guitar against a variety of backdrops also conjured up by Perina. None of the instruments in play sound unusual to me, though I should emphasise that keyboards are definitely one of them, sometimes the most prominent one, so this isn't a post-rock album in the strictest sense. The Twin Paradox is a fantastic soundscape, one that conjures up comparisons to seventies Krautrock, but I don't think there are any instruments on it except synths, so this is definitely not a band emulating that sound with guitar, bass and drums.

The most obvious way that Krautrock doesn't fit the whole album is that one of the guitar sounds that Perina is fond of is a modern djenty palm muting sound. I've never been much of a djent fan, but that's mostly because I think it's a limited style that works as a form of rhythm but not as the default sound for riffs. It works here, because Perina acknowledges its limitations and uses it as a rhythmic element for the drums to improvise around and a soloing guitar to soar over.

I bring this up specifically because Perina's influences include a lot of djent bands, including the genre's progenitor, Meshuggah. However, while I can hear bands like Meshuggah, Tesseract and Animals as Leaders in Perina's broader palette, this album doesn't really sound like any of them, making any comparison to them a little misleading. It's more post-rock than it is post-metal, I think.

For instance, the djent sound comes into play on the first track, Metamorphosis, but it's not there all the time and there's a lot more going on even when it shows up. It's used on Time Dilation as a sort of punctuation to the flow of musical language. By the time we get to the title track and hear the violoncello of Karel Zdarsky, we've almost forgotten that there was djent here. It's just one of a number of ingredients in this musical stew and it's noticeable in some bites but not in others.

I like the title track a lot, partly because it's so introspective but still enticing and partly because of the sounds that it conjures up. That violoncello is one, plaintive and haunting, but there's what sounds like a muted electronic xylophone too and some interesting drum beats as well. I'd call The Twin Paradox my favourite piece of music here, but it's very short at only a couple of minutes and this is a lot more substantial and has more of a growth arc.

The song with lyrics is Hungry Eyes, at the very heart of the album, and it stands out because we'd got used to instrumental exploration and words just weren't part of that picture. The guest singer here is Martin Schuster from the prog metal band Mindwork, who are also in Prague and who also sent me their new release for review, an EP called Cortex back in January. He's versatile here, in a couple of different clean voices and a harsh one, each matched by Perina's music. He also provides a guitar solo and his bandmate Filip Kittnar contributed to the drums throughout and is also one member of Perina's live version of Between the Planets.

The most obvious other guest is Sam Vallen of the Australian alt prog band Caligula's Horse, who lends his considerable guitar talents to Sleepwalking and Waves of Consciousness, shining on the latter with a searing solo. There's a distant voice behind the music on this one that I presume is a sample, but it's deep enough that I can't understand it; it just adds to the progressive nature of the material. The one downside to the album is the use of static early in this song and also on the closer, Distortion of Reality. I presume this is there to add texture, but I wasn't fond of it at all. Fortunately, it's a rare and minor intrusion.

It's good to hear more music from Prague, especially music that connects to music I've reviewed at Apocalypse Later before but sounds very different. Thanks, Martin!

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.

Pupil Slicer - Mirrors (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

I've seen the memorable name of Pupil Slicer—clearly someone stumbled upon Un Chien Andalou, or at least the one famous clip from it—crop up in a few places so I thought I should check out what looks like their debut full length album, following some EPs. They're definitely an interesting band, though they're hardly going to be everyone's tastes. I usually see them defined as post-metal, but I see telling genres listed on their Bandcamp page like grindcore, mathcore and powerviolence. The one that I'm thinking rings truest is "chaotic hardcore".

That's because this is both wild and tight, often delivered at a breakneck speed but with a solid level of technical ability. There's a lot of stop and start with this band but everyone stops and starts at the same time and they shift tempo just as seamlessly. A blisteringly short song like Stabbing Spiders, all over and done with in a mere forty-seven seconds, comes very close to grindcore, but it's performed with guitars tuned in a very modern American metalcore style and there's too much else going on to be pure grindcore.

By the time L'appel du Vide, a much longer three minute song with a further thirty seconds of what is perhaps a manipulated electronic take on the intro to Metallica's Damage, Inc., was over, I'd figured out the obvious comparison and it's a surprising one. Back in 1992, the BRIT Awards, which featured a performing line-up of pop artists like Seal, Simply Red and Lisa Stansfield, opened with the legendary combination of avant garde techno pranksters, the KLF, and crust punk band Extreme Noise Terror. It was an unusual artistic statement, especially given the audience, but it seems to me that Pupil Slicer might just have stumbled onto that on YouTube and been inspired to start a band.

That's because L'appel du Vide, like the rest of the album to varying degrees, is rhythmic in ways that go far beyond the impressive drums of Josh Andrews. The vocals are spat out in rhythmic bursts like a machine gun, the guitar sometimes resembles a cycling siren, and there's artistic manipulation of the song, whether performed live or added in post. There's a fascinating backing vocal partway that's just as melodic as the song itself isn't. It sounds good to me, but it also sounds as much like an artistic statement as a song.

There's performance art here from the outset. Kate Davies delivers the expected screams and other ultra-harsh gutturals but they're far beyond the more straightforward backing vocals of bassist Luke Fabian and there are points where they feel painful. Martys, for example, which opens up the album with a vengeance, features vocals with the expected harshness until, well, they go much further. The intensity level increases until, by the end of the song, it sounds as if she's in actual, serious pain, like she's just swallowed a vial of acid and her throat's dissolving as she performs.

After a few tracks, I started to wonder what this looks like visually. Husk is fast and furious, but it also gets downright sludgy at points and the longer it runs, the sludgier it gets. The last couple of minutes of Mirrors are More Fun Than Television is even sludgier. And what does it look like? There ought to be a visual component to this. What's going on at the beginning of Worthless, when it's just bass under a drone? Then again, what's going on when it gets moving? It sounds utterly destructive. At least Pupil Slicer put a music video together for the minute and change Interlocutor and it's as dark as it sounds, telling quite the self-destructive story in such a short time, but still leaving room for a very impactful ending.

The closest musical comparison I can conjure up is the debut Dillinger Escape Plan album, Calculating Infinity, but that's a slow motion version of this album. It shares the mathcore insanity of a song like 43% Burnt and even a guitar sound, but this is much heavier, the vocals are much more raucous and the stylistic chameleon play is much more extreme. If that sounds like your sort of thing, then this is going to be so your thing that you'll have found a new favourite band. Otherwise, this will probably scare you.

Gojira - Fortitude (2021)

Country: France
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Apr 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Look up French band Gojira at Metal Archives and you'll see that they play progressive/groove/death metal. Now, each of those genres conjures up a particular sound in my brain and this album isn't close to any of them. To me, their seventh studio album sounds more like post-rock with a strong influence from what I often see listed as "modern metal", which mostly translates to the rhythm guitar being a truly rhythm instrument, more like the drums than the lead guitar, and the vocals having something of a hardcore shout in them.

Born for One Thing defines all this as it opens up the album. It feels as much post-rock as post-metal, mixing influences as diverse as Metallica and Radiohead. The songwriting is deep, best experienced once and then explored on further listens. Joe Duplantier's vocals are fascinating, as they come from a host of different styles, from pop chants to death growls. The bass is an audible, prowling creature. There are overtones here too, somewhat like the high melody in Tuvan throat singing but done with guitars. It's a really interesting sound.

And it only gets more interesting as the album runs on. Amazonia is particularly fascinating. Much of it is played in a monotone, as if the strings on the guitars were all tuned to the same note, but melody creeps in through what sounds like world music. It's bookended by Jew's harp but there's often a sort of group chant going on that veers into full drone at points. This is ritual music, sometimes hypnotic, but that's only one approach that Gojira take here.

Hold On starts like a mediaeval folk song in choral polyphony, perhaps translated into dance music and then into whatever Gojira play. The vocals are usually my least favourite aspect in any genre touching on groove metal, but Duplantier's here are as constantly inventive as anything else that the band is doing, this song featuring perhaps the wildest departure from the expected. Well, it's either that or the title track, which finds an Enigma vibe with bass, an antiqued voice and the sort of instruments I remember from music class in school: tambourine and woodblocks. I was almost surprised to not hear a recorder. It's an intro, really, to The Chant, which continues, well, the chant, with rock instruments.

As if we wondered if we'd drifted a long way away from metal, Sphinx brings us right back in with what is easily the heaviest song on the album, above raucous early tracks like Another World. It has overtly harsh vocals, though they're still easily intelligible and they don't remain harsh throughout. It's also the most obviously riff driven track on the album. My favourite riff may be on Amazonia, but it's only one riff. This one moves constantly from one simple but effective riff to another.

In short, there's a lot here. I can't say I was knocked out by my first listen, though I did like the album immediately. However, with each further run through it, I find myself more and more impressed and I have to go with an 8/10. I tend to dread the words "modern metal" because the shifts taken by albums with that label tend to be ones I don't particularly like, finding them unimaginative and limiting. This, on the other hand, is certainly modern metal but it's thoroughly imaginative and free of limits.

The diversity is joyous, Amazonia being very different from The Chant and both being very different from Into the Storm, but all three being obvious highlights. And the same goes for Hold On. And The Trails. And... This really is a fantastic example of what the modern metal genre can be and so rarely is, unafraid to trawl in its sounds from gothic metal, post-punk, electronica, mediaeval chant, krautrock, whatever seems appropriate at the time. That's a sign of adventurous songwriting and, when paired with the talent these musicians obviously have, it makes for a great album.

La Fin - The Endless Inertia (2020)

Country: Italy
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I was very happy when Federico La Torre, bass player in La Fin, sent me a copy of their debut album for review, because the PR material doesn't seem to be able to define what they do. In an era of subgenres and sub-subgenres, it's great to see a band who don't fit into any of the buckets already out there. It's going to be fun trying to define what they do, with that in mind.

The first genre that came to mind, as Inertia kicked off the album, was post-rock. It's melodious guitar, set against a background texture, with other instruments gradually joining the fray. Even as it gets a lot more vehement, it still feels like a soundscape, just an angrier one, with the music a conversation with the shouted vocals of Marco Balzano. He sings cleanly too, at multiple points in this song, but in the angry moments these are hardcore shouts.

Once Inertia really got moving (ha!), it was clear that this is post-metal rather than post-rock and it's possible that it's the fairest place to end up. Wherever this album takes us, it always has hard edges, even when the band have moved into softer sections. I'm no expert on post-metal but I caught a little Isis or Cult of Luna here, but without as much sludge. The pace is often similar but feels more active. Perhaps that's because there are three guitarists in play, plus an audible bass, and they don't so much weave together as join a conversation separately, alternately agreeing with and then wildly disagreeing with the vocals.

Then there are points flavoured by extreme subgenres, most obviously black metal and avant jazz, but they're only points. There are no black metal songs here, but there are entire sections featuring a wall of sound approach and much faster drumming. There are no avant jazz songs here, but there are parts that feel acutely experimental. La Fin clearly have broad tastes in music and they're happy to borrow ideas from diverse sources to filter into the nine jagged soundscapes to which we're treated.

And jagged is a good word to use here. It's clear that, while the band is conjuring up soundscapes, it's doing so in unusual fashion. Riccardo Marino rarely just keeps the beat here and, even when he does, it isn't always in a traditional time signature. I certainly won't be tapping out Repetita's drum intro with my fingers any time soon. This takes us firmly into progressive metal, but not remotely like Queensrÿche or Dream Theater and their ilk. Maybe there's a little Tool but this is more like King Crimson as a post-metal band.

I think it's fair to say that this is not an easy to grasp album. It's as full of melody and elegance as it is anger and dissonance, but it's hardly going to make for easy radioplay, even on a station that leans to the alternative and happily embraces metalcore. I've listened through a few times now and I can't say that I've figured out the structure of any of these songs yet. I appreciate this part and that one and of course that one over there, but there's so much going on that I know I still have a heck of a lot of dots to connect. I'll take time.

For now, even though I'm rarely a fan of shouted vocals, I like this a lot. It feels vibrant and fresh and fascinating. There's anger but it's textured anger and, unlike every metalcore band on the planet, the voice isn't the only storyteller. The instruments aren't just providing a mood, they're each telling the story from another angle. The PR tells me that this is a concept album, with each of these nine tracks exploring a shared concept from a different perspective. I'll have to take that as read, but I could buy into those different perspectives not being limited to their own track but arguing for it throughout.

Even if I'm not following the concept, this is clearly intricate, dynamic and accomplished music and it counts as La Fin's debut album, following an EP in 2016. It was never going to get less than a 7/10 but I'm already comfortable going with a 8/10 for now. As I listen to it more, it's not outside the bounds of possibility that I up that to a 9/10. Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Federico.

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.

Cult of Luna - A Dawn to Fear (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Post-Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

The point of post-metal, and its quieter cousin, post-rock, is to conjure up imaginative soundscapes using entirely traditional rock instrumentation. The leeway available as to what sort of soundscapes is immense and, while I'm an entry-level post- fan, I've already heard a lot of very different sounds out of this model.

Cult of Luna, on their sixth album (seven if you count a 2016 collaboration with Julie Christmas), sound much darker than the post-rock bands I've been exploring, perhaps as might be expected being post-metal. However, I think a deliberate choice factors into this too. They're not feeding off Shriekback or the Cocteau Twins as much as they are Coil and Nurse with Wound, albeit sans the wild experimentation.

Ten minutes of The Silent Man set the stage well. It starts out rather like a buzzsaw, with almost an industrial sound without any apparent electronica or samples. It quickly finds a groove, which is bleak and abrasive. I can't tell if the melody, when it comes, is the work of guitars with keyboards in assist or vice versa. Whichever, the resulting feel is dystopic, as if we're out there in a dangerous future (or maybe an alternate dystopian past, as it doesn't feel particularly futuristic), starting to realise that the world we thought was safe has been watching us and it's about to come down hard.

The vocals help, being something of a cross between a black metal shriek and a hardcore shout. While I wouldn't usually be a fan, I think they ably help the mood that the band are going for. They're not in our face the way that a hardcore voice would usually be, but they may well be sometime soon. They're harsh but a lot more human than shrieks would usually allow. I'm hearing big bad people out to get us, rather than demons or trolls or other supernatural creatures.

This mood continues on throughout the album, which is very long and features very few tracks. There are only eight on offer, only one of which runs short of seven minutes. Four of them last over ten and two of those do so by a big margin; Lights on the Hill is over fifteen minutes long. Each of them finds its own particular taken on dystopia though, so there is variety.

Lay Your Head to Rest almost pulses with sluggish life. A Dawn to Fear carries a real elegance, as if it's a David Bowie song lowered a few octaves and slowed down to boot. Nightwalkers is an industrial song recorded outside the factory rather than inside it, so we hear the clashes at a remove. There's a Joy Division sort of patience to it for a while, though it speeds up and gets more industrial.

As the longest song, Lights on the Hill should have impact and it does. It shows up well over half an hour into the song, the first in the second half, and it's slow and atmospheric, almost like this particular dystopia is post-apocalyptic and we've reverted to a wild west mentality. The wind is a major player for a while and we still hear it after it's gone. It escalates slowly but very surely. There's a real impact to it and the peaceful ending is odd but satisfying.

After that, I got tired. While Cult of Luna do what they do well, I find it wearing on the system. While thrash can clean me out and perk me up, this is the sort of music that can grind me back down again. If you're into that, I think this is emphatically for you. Otherwise, it starts to feel as long as it is, which is long enough to not fit on a single CD. The eight tracks add up to seventy-nine minutes and the least interesting tracks are at the tail end so, if this isn't your jam, it's going to get old long before it's over. I'd have given it an extra point if it had ended after Lights on the Hill.