Within Temptation - Resist (2019)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Feb 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Pinterest | Wikipedia | YouTube

Within Temptation have never been the most prolific band on the circuit. This is only their seventh album since Enter in 1997 but it's taken five years to get to it, their longest gap between full length releases thus far. Apparently, singer Sharon den Adel suffered from writer's block and what emerged from that was initially very different to Within Temptation and so was released as a solo record.

The influences that she and her bandmates found for this album are an odd mixture and it's one that's both enticing and potentially offputting for some audience members. We'll see how that plays out over time.

There's a lot of darkness here, both lyrically and musically. A majority of the album follows the theme of struggle betrayed by the title, perhaps appropriately given that it was a struggle to get to this point. Many of the tracks feature a pounding style industrial backing that might conjure up visions of the oppressed working class in dystopian movies, marching protestors and even the sort of eastern European vampire clubs that were everywhere for a while.

However, the most overt influence is modern western pop music. I remember when Shania Twain released her Up! album in three different styles (pop, country and world) and wonder how this would sound if the solos were cut out and the heavy pounding was replaced by softer, more dance oriented electronics. I have a feeling that songs like Holy Ground would transform into the sort of thing we might expect from Taylor Swift or Nicky Minaj.

That's a weird feeling to have on an album that I expected to sound like symphonic metal, but it's not an adverse one. Chart material nowadays is very strong on melody but it cares more about synchronised dance routines than substantial musical backing. Taking the good from pop but discarding the bad shouldn't be as outrageous as it sometimes seems. Resist keeps on rocking just like the pop tracks on the new Papa Roach album don't.

Talking of Papa Roach, their vocalist Jacoby Shaddix guests on the opener and it's more extreme than anything on Who Do You Trust? He does a good job here, as do Jasper Steverlinck from Arid and Anders Fridén from Dark Tranquillity and In Flames. Those diverse guests hint at other influences here and they're most obvious in the vocals, even if songs like Firelight as a whole betray particular influences, in this case Pink Floyd.

While Sharon den Adel is taking most of her cues from pop music, there's often an Irish lilt to her voice that I don't remember, as well as middle eastern melodies at points. There are dance style backing vocals here but also heavy shouts, ethnic chants and even some Therion-esque choral work on tracks like Supernova. These inventive songs aren't only borrowing from one source.

All in all, this is initially both enticing and offputting and what you feel about modern pop music may flavour how you respond to this. I think it's a pretty damn good album that's much deeper than easy descriptions might suggest. Taylor Swift singing for Rammstein? I can hear it. Andrea Corr fronting a supergroup featuring Trent Reznor and Dave Gilmour. Sure, why not? But there's much more than cheap elevator pitches here.

This is something new and it's either going to fade quickly into oblivion or it's going to become one of those pivotal albums that will spark a new genre. I have a feeling it'll be the latter and it'll become better with the context of hindsight.

Rosy Vista - Unbelievable (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 8 Feb 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives

The title of this album surely references the fact that Rosy Vista have released it in 2019. I remember this German band from the mid eighties when they released an EP and a couple of singles, but they split up with the decade without a full length release to their name. Well, now they do, over three and a half decades after starting out as a band and seventeen years since reforming in 2002. That's dedication and I applaud it!

It's not a bad album either, though it doesn't quite spark the way I was hoping that it would. Crazy provides a catchy and commercial way to kick things off, for instance, but it took a couple of listens for me to truly appreciate it. By the third or fourth, I wondered why I didn't like it to begin with. How could I not have fallen for this immediately?

I think it's probably not Crazy per se, but the track that follows it, in which everyone, especially vocalist Andrea Schwarz, seems to be trying too hard. It's not bad, but it's probably the weakest song on the album with a heavy focus on Schwarz exercising her pipes over notably accented backing vocals, while the guitars remain annoyingly low in the mix. Its placement this early, just as we're reacquainting ourselves with Rosy Vista's sound, hurts the album.

Every complaint I have about Sadistic Lover is inapplicable to Master of Control, which really should have been the second track, emphasising the depth that Rosy Vista have and the variety. While Crazy is deliberately radio friendly, Master of Control is deeper and has a lot more substance. It starts rather like the Scorpions and moves into MSG or UFO territory (no, Barbara Schenker isn't still with the band and, even when she was, she didn't play guitar).

There are other tracks here that feel very comfortable indeed. Until I'm Satisfied is cool and comfortable. It flows effortlessly, as does Sound of Your Love, even if it's not as memorable. Too Much Feeling, perhaps the best track this album has, is the most comfortable of all. Schwarz shines on vocals here, providing some real soul before handing over the reins to Anca Graterol, whose guitar is the real highlight of the album. Her solo on Too Much Feeling is delightfully emotional.

Generally speaking, this is commercial eighties hard rock throughout, as we might expect, with the benefit of some modern production that ups the bass and gives the drums some more crunch. However, while most of it does feel like it could have been written back in the late eighties, there are points that would have been very different had it been recorded back then.

For instance, Hopatina is just as heavy a track as the Dio-esque Tables are Turned, but it plays out like a pop song with a punk edge. Graterol's work is what stands out, once again, but the earworm chorus is something we might expect from Abba. It's very catchy stuff indeed and it's neatly different to everything else here without ever becoming inconsistent with the rest of the album.

The biggest problem Unbelievable has is that it's too relentlessly rooted in the eighties, so much so that it falls into some of the bad habits we had back then and I don't just mean cheesy eighty lyrics. There's also the inevitable radio-friendly single, the required ballad and the obligatory cover version, here a pointless take on Born to Be Wild that's decently done but completely unnecessary. It adds nothing to the album.

The biggest success (please) is that Unbelievable is a just another new album, rather than a new album by a female band. If there wasn't such an overt link to the eighties here, I wouldn't even have thought of that and that underlines just how far we've come. In 1985, the metal mags would be more interested about throwing Rosy Vista's band photo onto a pull-out poster than actually listening to the music they make and realising that they, especially Anca Graterol, kick ass. Never mind Sound of Your Love, listen to Master of Control and Rockin' Through the Night to see what I mean.

Thank you, Rosy Vista, for sticking it out for all this time and bringing us a full length album in 2019. Let's have another one soon!

Gin Annie - 100% Proof (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Melodic Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Jan 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

On their Facebook page, Gin Annie describe what they do "high-octane hard rock" and I'm not going to argue with that because this is bouncy, catchy stuff that often still holds a kick in its guitar sound and punchy drums, but I have to point out that Dave Foster's voice is much softer and more restrained than I would have expected from that description and the band and album become much softer and more restrained because of that.

Check out Chains, for instance, where we can almost see the musicians on stage getting vicious with their instruments but Foster continues to croon over them. He might be singing, "Take these chains off me," but it sounds like he's very happy with those particular chains, thank you very much. A song later, the band rock out with an up tempo solo in the middle of New Bad Habit, but Foster seems far too polite and positive to have any bad habits, let alone a new one.

Now, before I get punched by rabid fans, I don't mean to suggest that he isn't up to par, because he has a good voice, frankly a very good voice, and he uses it well. However it's a honeyed voice and that's odd to hear in a hard rock band that aims for "high-octane" material. It often feels like the band behind him wants to fight that by adding even more edges as compensation.

And that increases as the album runs on because it seems to get heavier with each song. After Next 2 Me, Phill Burrows's bass starts to get more prominent and the twin guitar attack of Byron Garbett and Brian Green finds a lot more power. Damage kicks in hard and stays there. Fallin' is even harder and it got my head moving nicely. If All I Want ever felt like it wanted to speed up and get raucous, it could become an Anthrax song.

I can't help but wonder how much of this is deliberate.

Early on, Foster's voice is the dominant force here and it's a friendly creature that would play well to the ladies I remember back in the '80s who wouldn't have listened to rock music at all, well except for that one singer and that other one and, oh yeah, that one and... Next 2 Me is the pinnacle of that. It's easily the best story track on the album and it's quite obvious single material, even though it's easily the longest song too. It's radio friendly stuff but just a little bit edgy too.

After that, Foster's voice fades into the background a little as the band step up their game and take over with heavier material. I got into these songs a lot more, but maybe the earlier ones are gateway material to get people this far into the album. If so, I'm all for it!

And then we get to Haunt Me, which is the entire album in a microcosm. It starts out soft like a ballad but adds edges until it's a heavier piece. And hey, Foster proves here that he can do more than be polite. He belts out some of this song and it's glorious to hear. He does the same on the singalong song that ends the album, Born to Rock n' Roll.

I liked this on first listen and I like it still after half a dozen times through to try to figure out why Gin Annie took the approach they did. I still find myself a little confused but I'm still entertained.

Ædelric - Liquidmorphium (2019)

Country: Bulgaria
Style: Gothic/Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2019
Sites: Facebook

This one leapt out at me for a reasons. For one, the band's name contains a diphthong, which automatically makes them cool. Hey, metal umlauts are so last millennium! For two, they seemed to be a gothic metal band from Bulgaria, but a little research tells me that they're not really a band. So, for three, this is a one man gothic metal band from Bulgaria. That's even better!

That man is named Alex and he had previously co-founded and played guitar in Renomane, about whom I know even less. I believe that he's responsible for everything here, except for the vocals on Deka Si, presumably, because Martin Lutzkanov has a guest credit there.

Oddly, Deka Si is the standout track, because it isn't the lead vocal that makes it special. It just contains far more imagination than anything else here, from its very beginning with a tribal drumming sound that evolves into a handclapping routine reminiscent of Nina Simone's Sinnerman. Then, a solo choral voice echoes the pounding bassline and escalates into full choir (and I have a special fondness for Bulgarian female choirs). If it really is Martin Lutzkanov's lead vocal, he provides a relatively subdued folk song underneath the incandescent choir. There's also a flute section and a spoken word section. There's a lot here and it's good stuff.

And that's not to suggest that it's the only imaginative track. However, the other ten put together might not quite match Deka Si alone on that front. Echoes of the Force has flute too, as well as piano. The title track showcases an odd contrast in vicious guitars and frantic cymbals but an almost ambient keyboard backing. Ædelric fleshes out an organic electronica landscape under a driving industrial guitar. Falling Skies does much the same and Sanity does too. Struggle for Life isn't that far away either, with its synthesised strings and choral soundscape.

That's probably the worst aspect of this album. While Alex does vary up what's in his tracks, he doesn't vary much further from one track to the next and many of these start to blur together when the playlist isn't in front of us keeping us aware of where we are in the album. Perhaps those vicious guitars become a little more black metal wall of sound on Ballad of the Death but that's hardly a debate into which anyone's likely to care to leap.

Like morphium itself, this is easy stuff to like but it's also easy stuff to drift away from our attention until it lurks in the background doing whatever it does away from our focus. It's more interesting and certainly more varied than the similarly instrumental Ancient Hawks album I covered recently, but there's little depth here to explore. It feels less like a coherent album and more like a scrapbook of ideas to aid Alex's future work.

Ed Wynne - Shimmer into Nature (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Jan 2019
Sites: Official Website | Wikipedia

For those who don't recognise the name, Ed Wynne is the main man in legendary British psychedelic rockers Ozric Tentacles. He's the only founding member left nowadays, holding strong on guitar, keyboards and programming after thirty-five years. He also writes most of their material. Given that the band today features his wife and son, plus an unrelated Hungarian drummer, it seems a little odd that he'd release a solo album at this point, but hey. Why not?

As you might expect, there's a lot of the Ozric sound here. All five tracks are instrumentals and they run long, only one track clocking in under eight minutes and one just edging over ten. Each constitutes a fluid guitar workout for Wynne, with layers of synths, programmed drums and other sounds arrayed on top. He was responsible for all of it, plus the composition and the mixing and quite likely everything else except the cover art. At heart, this album really is him jamming with himself.

The two tracks that stand out on first listen are Travel Dust and Wherble, which go for rather different vibes, the former carrying a reggae feel to it and the latter awash with world sounds: flutes and xylophones and whatnot. It seems that Wynne's chief inspiration for these tracks were places that he'd visited over a period of a few years, but the places listed don't include Jamaica or Australia, so who knows what he actually visited in the Colorado mountains or the Firth of Forth.

Frankly, it doesn't matter. Wynne's work is always about taking us to wild and wonderful places, whether they're down the road and round the corner, somewhere on the other side of Pluto or inside a rather deep acid trip, but the places we go while listening don't have to be the places that inspired him to write in the first place. And that's good, because I have little interest in actually climbing a glass staircase for eight minutes. I'd much rather listen to Ed Wynne do that on the opening track called, naturally, Glass Staircase, which fortunately does not induce vertigo in the slightest.

If anything, Travel Dust is more likely to do that, given that it feels like an immersion into jungle, with birds singing and rain falling and the works. Where are we in the jungle? I feel sky, so I'm guessing high up. Don't look down! I'm no synasthete but Wynne's compositions are so lush that I tend to hear colours when I listen to them. This one's primarily green with some clear blue floating around above it. The reggae beat that kicks in midway doesn't hurt that imagery at all.

Shim plays with colours too and textures. At points it feels like Wynne's playing a rainbow or a waterfall rather than a synthesiser and images like that help to underline that this is emphatically happy music. As John Hurford's cover art ably depicts, there's no darkness here at all. Everything depicted is lush and vibrant and wildly illuminated. This is positive mood music and that's no accident. Wynne has explained that the idea of the album is "to transport the listener to a place where the everyday ups and downs of the world dissipate, leaving the mind free to wander... landing eventually, hopefully freshly charged, with a smile and a calmer spirit."

If you like the effect of new age albums that transport nature into your home but hate the soporific music that comes along with them, this might just be for you. It does the same job but through a handful of glorious psychedelic trips into the landscapes of your dreams.

Vapor Hiemis - Чараўнiца cмерцi (2019)

Country: Belarus
Style: Black Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 17 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Here's an odd sound that grabbed my ear. Vapor Hiemis play pagan black metal but they're also either industrial or EDM, depending on the source, which translates to the fact that they have a programmed drum machine rather than a live drummer. They also have a band member who plays 'folk instruments', which is why this is often a folk metal album too. How it veers from EDM to folk metal is a wild trip and I'm still not sure how well it works.

It works well on the opener, Ад сонца прэч, with a driving beat, a crunchy bass and a lead bagpipe. The vocals vary from clean to harsh and it's only the slight distortion on the drums that lessens this a little. The title translates to Away from the Sun, which kind of works for an anti-folk song. The death folk approach hits its peak on the final track, Поўнач or North which adds a female folk vocal and I don't know how many folk instruments.

I dig the idea of death folk and Google Translate suggests that Чараўнiца cмерцi means either "death sorceress" or "fairy of the cemetery", depending on how I search. Either way, that's an enticing image to accompany the music and I soon found myself visualising the club scene in Blade with blood pouring from the sprinkler system as everyone feeds on the one unwitting victim.

I think I'd dig death folk more if there was a consistent sound here. The title track ditches the folk sound until late on and frankly ditches the industrial side too. The first half is classic black metal with appropriate shrieks and a sort of happy drinking song in the middle. The drum speed varies but hits some serious bpms at points. Only in the mid section does the wall of sound descend while the pipes of death wail. Then it's back to hyperspeed until a flute joins those pipes for the finalé.

The third track marks the wildest change to the sound, because it's when the EDM is ramped up, with Euro-disco hissing cymbals and a whoop of an electronic motif above and behind the crunch of the band. Maybe if the Prodigy had been born into the Norwegian black metal elite, they'd sound like this. Then again, maybe not. I was mostly intrigued by the idea of who might dance along to this.

Certainly I'm able to see the pit churning happily away but this is a lot more extreme stuff than anything Rammstein came up with. And always those flutes and/or pipes come back to provide the melody, like in the truest dance song, Памірае восень. That translates to Dying Fall so maybe it really is a moshing song.

By five songs in, I started to really wonder about Vapor Hiemis. Are they really a single band or is Vapor Hiemis Russian for "remix album"? While there are some commonalities throughout, these three tracks could easily have been the product of different remix artists messing with the black industrial base of a band who provide everything here but don't actually sound like this.

Maybe they're just that schizophrenic but the end result here feels like a band who play in different styles to different audiences but lumped all of that onto one disc and that decision will affect their potential audience. I dug some of their more folk metal oriented material, especially Поўнач, and didn't dislike their black metal onslaught tracks. I found myself surprisingly intrigued by the EDM stuff too but can't really say that it's my scene.

The point is that I don't know a lot of people who are into folk metal and black metal and EDM all at the same time. But hey, Vapor Hiemis have been releasing material since 2013 and this is their fourth album, so it's clear that there's an audience in Belarus for this. I applaud them for being their own band.

Rival Sons - Feral Roots (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 25 Jan 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I've heard a lot of good things about Rival Sons and I've heard a little of what they've done and appreciated it a great deal. I liked this album too on first listen but it may well be the first I've heard thus far this year that didn't improve on a second.

In fact, I think I actually liked it a little less and I think the reason for that is the little embellishments that are on some of the tracks, like the beginning of Sugar on the Bone, combinations of guitar distortion and keyboards that sound pretty cool on a first time through but start to get annoying on a second. Moments like this keep popping up at odd points, at the beginning or even in the middle of songs like Look Away.

The songs here are all good, often great, and they betray an intriguing set of influences, some of which are not from rock bands. The album's closer, Shooting Stars, is a straight out gospel song, for instance, and it's a real highlight. I wanted it to keep going for ten minutes with an evolution like a Nina Simone song like Sinnerman. It reminded me of the band's stunning version of Amy Winehouse's Back to Black.

Usually I'm hearing bands like Bad Company and Led Zeppelin in New Wave of Classic Rock albums rather than Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone, but hey. I ain't complainin'. There's a soulful edge all the way through, especially in the backing vocals, which start out like Lynyrd Skynyrd harmonies and move even more into Motown territory. I got a Heartless Bastards vibe on Sugar on the Bone too and some Adele on Imperial Joy, so even though it's mostly looking backwards to the seventies, it's still contemporary music.

The influence that stood out most for me is Cold Chisel, not only because lead vocalist Jay Buchanan often sounds uncannily like Jimmy Barnes, but even after Barnestorming verses, the band tend to leap into wildly catchy choruses, often literally hand clapping, foot stomping gospel shouts, like on the album opener, Do Your Worst, or the heavier and grungier Back in the Woods. Only The End of Forever has him sound more like Steve Perry.

Look Away kicks off with an acoustic guitar that sounds rather like Jimmy Page and the title track has a strong Zeppelin vibe that isn't the usual Zeppelin vibe rock bands tend to go for. It's as if they were paying more attention to the folky sounds of Going to California than Good Times Bad Times or Kashmir. It's not remotely Kingdom Come/Greta van Fleet Zeppelin.

All Directions leaps headlong into sixties psych and it's a real tribute to the range of Rival Sons that this feels natural. It ought to feel odd that there's psychedelic folk on an album that features fuzzy guitar that sometimes gets vicious in the way that the Ram Jam Band did. It's fair to suggest that some tracks, especially Back in the Woods, feel urgent as if they were recorded live in the studio. Mike Miley's drum sound especially feels very raw and I loved that.

I'm interested to see how this album will age. It's clearly a great slab of music, much deeper than Inglorious (and that goes for Jay Buchanan's voice too) and much more consistent than the Doomsday Outlaw album, even with such a wild range of influences behind it.

It's the distortion that lessens it a little for me, and not just those interesting little moments but the guitar tone on a few tracks too. While that does become annoying on a second listen, though, I'm finding that it's starting to fade away in my subconscious by the fourth or fifth time through. Yeah, I think Feral Roots is going to age just fine and it'll be talked about for a long time.

A Pale Horse Named Death - When the World Becomes Undone (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Gothic Doom Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 18 Jan 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Sal Abruscato, who leads A Pale Horse Named Death, sees his new band as a gothic doom metal outfit and there's truth there. Just listen to Vultures and you wouldn't slap any other label but doom onto it. The title track begins with what sounds like a harpsichord under chanted poetry, oddly muted as if it's being delivered through a radio, so I'll grant them the gothic too.

However, this isn't remotely what I imagine in my head when I think of gothic doom. It's an interesting mix but it only takes half of the title track to figure it out. Once the initial vocal part is done, it becomes urgent with pounding drums and a driving bass, kicking into the promised heaviness around the three minute mark (five if you count the intro) and it's clearly gothic doom filtered through Nine Inch Nails, an energetic industrial vibe underpinning everything.

In keeping with that nineties influence, there's a Smashing Pumpkins line in catchy emotional lyrics. I could throw out choice selections such as "I've got this funny feeling that God is dead", "Love the ones you love to hate" and "I tried to figure out what's wrong with me" and I've only covered the first three songs that have lyrics. The third is particularly full of them. It kicks off with, "I fell inside my hole again" and progresses to "How do I figure out this mess that's me?", "Emotions crushing everything inside of me" and "I'm never getting out of my black hole."

If we were in any doubt as to Sal's lyrical tone, a few tracks later explains the despair: "It's pretty clear it's the end of days." After all, that fits the names of the band and this, their third album. The apocalypse is coming and that means we ought to be depressed, OK?

The other obvious influence is Type O Negative, the nineties go to goth metal band, and that's no shock given that Abruscato was their original drummer, as he was with Life of Agony. However, this is far from Type O and not only because it has a lot more doom to go with the goth and because it doesn't sound like Danzig in the slightest. Compared to what I remember from Bloody Kisses, this is far more consistent in tone, with fewer pop and punk elements. Personally, I still think of Pete Steele from thrash band Carnivore rather than Type O. I get my goth kicks from other bands.

Frankly, I like this more, but it's still an acquired taste that isn't going to be for everyone. Abruscato knows it's depressing but suggests that the bird that sings in the background of the final track, Closures, "a recording of an actual outdoor funeral with a priest speaking over a casket", is enough of a "sense of enlightenment". I disagree but do hope that anyone looking for music to slit their wrists to listens to him on that. It's "something to look forward to in the end." Hey, We All Break Down felt darkly cheerful to me. Does that work?

From a musical standpoint, there's consistency here but still variety. Love the Ones You Hate is a catchy track that reminds of commercial era Paradise Lost. Vultures is a heck of a lot heavier, with that distorted guitar and vocal sound that pervades much of the album. We All Break Down has something of a grunge feel to it.

And what that all boils down to is that this is primarily an album for alternative children of the nineties. Maybe that explains why they have accounts on more social media platforms than I've ever heard of. Whether it means that they're behind the times or slightly ahead of the eventual nineties nostalgia wave, I'm not sure.