Tripulante - Mensajero del tiempo (2019)

Country: Chile
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Tripulante may only be a trio but they sound like a much bigger band, maybe because they're ably qualified. They're from Calama in northern Chile, but they trained in the neighbouring nation of Bolivia.

Vocalist Aymarita Colque was a concert pianist who studied for a Bachelors in Music in La Paz. Julio Cesar Moya, the band's composer who provides all of the instrumentation, studied at the National Conservatory of Music in La Paz. His recorded output is wildly varied, running the gamut from hardcore punk to heavy metal via folk fusion and he also studied under the Peruvian jazzman Ernesto Loyola.

To keep Moya's resume growing, this is a power metal album with some local flavour added to the mix. Colque sings in Spanish, of course, but there are a few folky touches here and there, most obviously in a brief instrumental called Sobrevigencia, or Survival, that serves as an intro to Cruz y espada (Cross and Sword). That's not remotely enough for Mensajero del tiempo, or Messenger of Time, to count as a folk metal album, but that ethnic flavour isn't absent.

Most of what we get here is Julio Cesar Moya as a one man band. He provides the guitars, bass, keyboards and some of the drums too, performing material that he wrote. It's powerful and intricate stuff, led by his guitarwork but with textured keyboards and rumbling bass backing it up. It's telling that he never seems to be a player of one instrument, even though the guitar is clearly dominant. When he plays the keyboards, for instance, he isn't doing it just to back up his guitars, he's doing it as a keyboard player.

On some tracks, the drums provide the usual accompaniment, like on Paniri, named for a Chilean revolutionary, Tomás Paniri. On others, they keep the beat slowly but add a lot of fills, as if the idea is for the drums to be a lead instrument at this point. He doesn't take that idea too far but it's there and just noticing it is a compliment to Moya.

And then there's Aymarita Colque, who's a powerful singer who fits the power metal style wonderfully. I like her voice when she's not stretching herself at all and I like it even more when she ramps it up and allows her notes to really sustain. She has some serious pipes, as she perhaps shows us best on Ancestralidad (or Ancestrality), on which she demonstrates both a range and a power that's highly impressive. Her voice tends to be lower than we might expect for a female vocalist, but she has range and I adore the high note she keeps hitting on the second repeat of the title!

Oddly, she's not as pervasive as we might expect her to be. This album runs 35 minutes and only the two short intros are instrumental, but each time I listen through it, the more it shifts from a regular vocal led album to an instrumental affair on which she shows up reasonably often to add vocals. I must say that she's a very welcome addition when she does, but the point is that the album would work without her, albeit on a utterly different level, while it couldn't exist without Moya.

In a way, this makes it the best of both worlds. It feels like an excellent instrumental album, but with the vocals of Colque a real highlight. I know that sounds ridiculous because it can't be a vocal album and an instrumental one but that's how it seems to play.

Like the Чиста Криниця album from earlier today, it's very consistent, but in its style as much as its quality. There's not a lot of variety on offer but the band do what they do well and it's hard to choose favourite tracks. I think I should shout out for Ancestralidad because Colque is so good on it, but I don't dislike anything here. Is the title track better than Cruz y espada or Como el cóndor (Like a Condor)? Who cares? They're all worth your time.

While the musicians aren't new, Tripulante are, this being their debut album only a year after coming together as a band. If they're this consistent this quickly, then I really can't wait for the next album! Let's see how they can grow!

Чиста Криниця - Храм Природи (2019)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jun 2019
Sites: Metal Archives | Official Website | VK | YouTube

Folk metal is such a versatile genre that I really shouldn't be surprised at the next album I find any more, but when I slapped on a folk metal album by a band from the Ukraine, I really wasn't expecting to hear a harp dancing in front of the metal backing of the opening track. Храм природи does translate to Temple of Nature, so it fits, but I dug it a lot and it really grabbed my attention. For a while, it's entirely instrumental but, when vocalist Ruslan joins in and runs through three different styles in all of five seconds, he hooked me completely and I knew I had to review this.

I'll mention him now because the lead vocalist is usually the focal point of a band and he kind of isn't, really, even though he's really good at what he does. His first utterance sounds like a death growl but he raises it into an old school heavy metal style and ends up in symphonic territory. He wails in fine form on Непотопаючий корабель, or A Drowning Ship, exhibiting rather an impressive range. He could easily dominate a band if he wanted to but that's not what he does here.

If the focal point isn't the lead vocalist, then it's the lead guitarist, of course, right? Well, wrong. Again, Volodimir Galaida does precisely what he needs to do, but the guitars here appear to be part of the rhythm section, a solid wall in front of which the more unusual instruments strut their stuff and even solo as needed. Some of those seem to be stringed, whether they're harps or lutes or what have you, so I presume that at least some of them are here courtesy of Galaida but I'm only seeing him listed as guitar and there are less guitar solos here than I expected.

Whatever isn't Galaida is surely the work of Tim Hresvelg on keyboards, who stood out to me. The real question here is about which is which and I have little idea. I would expect that the extended keyboard solo in Доки падала краплина, or Until a Drop Fell, is Hresvelg, as is the melodic line that dominates Непотопаючий корабель. However, is that Hresvelg on harpsichord on Сонячне місто (Sunny City) or could it be Galaida on zither? Keyboards are so versatile nowadays and I'm no expert on ethnic eastern European instruments.

The point is that Hresvelg is never entirely satisfied with adding textures or layers like most keyboard players. When he does just that on Мертві дощі, or Dead Rains, it feels like he's holding back. He sees his keyboard as a lead instrument, like he's in a seventies prog rock band. My assumption is that a lot of the textures here come from him introducing other sounds, like the pipes on Велика подорож, or Great Trip, and the woodblocks on Доки падала краплина that sound like they were borrowed from Martin Denny.

The other thing that threw me here is the fact that this doesn't sound like a folk metal album at all, except on Доки падала краплина, where things cut loose into an ethnic dance for a while. For the most part, this is a metal album, pure and simple, that merely brings in folk instrumentation to take the lead rather a lot. In other words, this isn't a metal band playing folk music, like the Finns with their drinking songs, it's a metal band playing metal music with some folk instruments as an integral part of their sound. I like that.

I like this album too. I hadn't heard of Чиста Криниця before and I'm unable to translate it, beyond Chysta Krynycya, which doesn't mean anything to me. However, they've been around for a while, since 2005 under this name and for another six years under others, initially Bad Dreams, then Dead Dreams and, for most of that period, Morose Months of Melancholy. That seems like an odd name because there's not much doom here. Maybe there was early last decade.

I can see myself listening to this a lot, but I also have the opportunity to follow the band backwards, because this is their sixth album, coming three years after Азовець. Their trend seems to be to wait three years to release a new album, then knock out another a year later. If they hold to that, we ought to expect another one in 2020 and I'll be watching out for it.

I'll wrap up by pointing out that it's a deceptive album. I was going with a 7/10 because it's clearly good stuff, but then I realised that I'd flagged almost the entire album as highlight tracks. A couple more listens and this promptly became my first 8/10 for July. And I'm not done exploring it yet!

Gone Rogue - Resolve (2019)

Country: Norway
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Gone Rogue are too contemporary in sound to really count as another New Wave of Classic Rock band, as their influences are clearly more from the nineties and noughties than the seventies or eighties. I'm sure there are a whole lot of comparisons to be made, but my years of listening to KUPD in the car mid-last decade to keep the kids happy blur together. They would catch them all.

The first I recognised was on the opener, Shadows, because there's a lot of Audioslave in it, not only because of the clear but grunge-tinged vocals of Oddgeir Søvik but because of patient backing from a band which feels slower than it is even when it raises the pace. There's some System of a Down on Out of Time, a nod to hardcore on Curtain Call and some Nickelback crooning on Bound. At this point, we're merely four songs in and a cynic would start to wonder if Gone Rogue planned to mimic their way through a list of their favourite bands.

I think that's unfair because none of these songs, except perhaps Shadows, are only reminiscent of one band's style. These boys from Norway take their collection of influences, combine them and transform them into something of their own. This isn't their first album, that being 2013's Home, but I have to wonder what it sounds like because the maturity of the songwriting here is notable. It's thoughtful and patient and careful, but it doesn't forget the emotion needed to make it work.

Just check out a song like Onyx to see why. It's almost the longest song on the album, but it still falls short of five minutes so it's hardly an epic. It is, however, a beautifully constructed piece of music, driven by Anders Henriksen's prominent but minimalist bass and Ole Christian Gridset's drums, which are intricate without ever becoming impossible. They build with Søvik like a Tool song but, just as its getting going, it slows down for pensive guitars and the rest of the band rejoin slowly but emphatically.

Trials and Errors is another example. It has a Tool vibe during the verses too, as it shimmies with minimalist bass and complex rhythms, over which a confident Søvik holds court. It flirts with prog though during sections in which it almost feels like we're being bathed by cymbals. This album isn't ever as heavy as it is at the start of Trials and Errors but the song gets very soft too. The journey there and back is a good one.

I liked the second half more than the first, not because it features better songs but because those songs flow better. The first half often feels like a set of singles, decent ones but ones that come from different times, whereas the second half feels like a coherent side of an album. Grasping Straws sets it into motion and Onyx makes us realise it. In Hindsight and Two Souls play along well, the latter setting things up nicely for Trials and Errors to wrap it all up with style.

I've come to dislike a lot of the big names of the noughties, partly because they were so ruthlessly commercial and partly because I got bludgeoned with their most famous songs and got really tired of them. However, there were a number of less famous bands that never broke into the massively restricted playlists of the ClearChannel stations and so never tweaked our last nerves, instead lying safely in obscurity until we find them again.

Gone Rogue are not one such band because they didn't get together until 2003 and didn't release anything until the Essence of Absence EP in 2010, but it feels like they're kin to those maybe soon-to-be rediscovered bands for more than one reason. They're really good at what they do and, discovering that a decade on makes us wonder about who didn't tell us about them. It feels like someone will, at some point, and we'll get upset with them for not doing so sooner.

Oh, and the history page on their website is absolutely joyous. Go read it and improve your mood.

Bewitcher - Under the Witching Cross (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 May 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Playing after Varkan on Friday at Club Red are Bewitcher, a black/speed band from Portland, OR. They also issued an album this year, their second after a self-titled effort in 2016. I was intrigued as to how they would balance the two genres and that stayed fascinating throughout.

It starts out pretty solidly on the black metal side. There's an ambient but creepy little intro which transforms into a wall of sound and the vocals have a little shriek in them. The songs clearly point the way to lyrical content; what else would Savage Lands of Satan, In the Sign of the Goat or Frost Moon Ritual be about? Yeah, this sounds like black metal. The speed side comes in late in the song with a neat stop/start section during a solo.

But they slow down much more over the remaining tracks to become more of a heavy/power metal band with both the expected genres taking a back seat.

Hexenkrieg, in particular, shows other priorities. There's a lot more speed than black but it's done in a really old school way, as if this was a Raven cover. Never mind 1988, it would be more 1978 if it wasn't for the shrieky vocals. There are points where it sounds like Iron Maiden (the song) and it would take very little work to translate it into early NWOBHM. Just add some Di'Anno, I think.

The title, as black as it sounds, betrays those NWOBHM influences too. If I threw out lyrics like, "Metal heart, metal soul; drink from the chalice of rock 'n' roll", from which year would you think the associated song came? I wouldn't call this track speed metal, even though it's metal that's played at a fast pace. Just listen to early Maiden again and a lot of this will start to seem different to what we know as speed metal. This is more like frenetic NWOBHM, like the middle of Prowler or early Phantom of the Opera, than what someone like Agent Steel or early Helloween would have recorded.

Frankly, as the album runs on, it's only the vocals from the rather subtly named Unholy Weaver of Shadows & Incantations that keep black metal in our minds at all. Not that a name like that would land him a slot in a boy band, but I'm sure that isn't why he sometimes shortens it to Mateo von Bewitcher. The point is that, unless we pay attention to the lyrics, his voice is representing the side of black metal pretty much on his own.

His cohort in crime has just as subtle a moniker: he tends to be known as Infernal Magus of Nocturnal Alchemy, though it's sometimes simplified into just Andreas Magus. Mr. Weaver takes care of the guitarwork as well as the vocals and some of the drums, while Mr. Magus handles bass and whatever's left in drum duties. I presume that Bewitcher will pressgang another body into service for all this to work on stage. I assume that they only have a pair of arms each and want their drums to be live.

I liked this album from my first listen but it's too short. When Rome is on Fire wraps up with fade out chanting, rather than Nero and his fiddle, we're just getting our teeth into proceedings and older listeners will be wondering if it's time to turn the record over yet, only to find that the instrumental Frost Moon Ritual is it for the album. There are seven songs presented here, with only two of them over five minutes and four of them under four.

That means that we have less than half an hour of music, just a hint more than Reign in Blood, which did, at least, have the courtesy of never slowing down or allowing us time to breathe. Under the Witching Cross slows down a lot for a band who play speed metal and we never run out of breath. The good news is that it's good stuff and there are no poor tracks here at all, let alone bad ones. I guess it's no mistake to leave us wanting more.

After Frost Moon Ritual, I searched YouTube for some live Killers era Maiden and, sure enough, it sounded rather familiar after this. The vocals are very different, of course, but the rest isn't too far adrift, and that's hardly a bad sound to emulate. Now, let's see if Bewitcher can make it big without having to hire Bruce Dickinson.

The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - Gypsy Voodoo (2019)

Country: United Kingdom
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 26 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Sometimes it seems like the world contains only two kinds of people in the world: those who have heard of Arthur Brown and those who haven't. Maybe a third makes sense too: those who thought he was a novelty singer who had a big hit with Fire and never did anything else ever again. Well, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, in its original form, only lasted four years, from 1967 to 1970, so had ceased to be before I was even born, but his name just won't go away.

Even today, my son was showing me some Avatar videos, the Swedish band who will be supporting Babymetal on their upcoming American tour, and Johannes Eckerström looks like yet another vocalist who took a page from the Arthur Brown playbook, even if he translated it through Marilyn Manson. Without an Arthur Brown, there wouldn't be an Alice Cooper, something the latter has freely acknowledged, let alone a Marilyn Manson or any of those black metal bands in corpsepaint.

But hey, image isn't everything. Given that the Crazy World of Arthur Brown is apparently back with a new album, something that shocked me until I found out that they've been back since 2000 with a consistent line-up, how do they sound over half a century after Fire? Well, given that some of you only know that one song and the rest of you have never even heard of Arthur Brown, I'd better get imaginative.

If I suggest that Brown was and is a showman, you're probably thinking about a stage show, but it filters into his style. Everything is a production, the way it was with creators such as Screaming Jay Hawkins or Dr. John the Night Tripper and continues to be with Tom Waits today, so that you can't separate their songs from their performances and you're not likely to want to.

Radiance, for example, is less of a song and more of a happening, with Brown playing the spirit guide as we commune on acid. It's a real change for the album, which had been varied but rock-oriented in its first half. The second features songs like Love and Peace in China, a political song that ends in spaced out territory too, both in the sense of acid and aliens. The Kissing Tree is more poetry translated into music, a direction that describes much of the second half. These are much more akin to Spontaneous Apple Creation, the strangest song on that first Arthur Brown album from 1968, than its most famous track.

Talking of which, Brown also reprises the double act of Fire Poem and Fire from that album, in a reinvention of each that expands them and updates them. The former, sans its original fanfare intro, is performance art narration without associated visuals. The latter is both better and worse than the version we know, oddly given that fresh takes of old material tend to either suck or succeed wildly.

This take is less energetic but more mature, less urgent but more textured, less wild but more inventive. Brown himself clearly has far less breath to work with and he doesn't remotely have his old range or power, but he's aged with a knowing twinkle in his eye. The lack of heavy organ work from Vincent Crane, who went on to form Atomic Rooster, turns out to be a huge deal but the new arrangement isn't without a set of new discoveries. I liked it.

The question is how much I liked the rest of the album. Gypsy Voodoo has a rocking Dr. John vibe, while The Mirror sounds like an attempt at a David Bowie style. The King is the most playful of a bunch of playful songs here. These are interesting and set the first half into a particular mindset. And then the second half goes somewhere completely different, back into the sixties and into innerspace, if not outer space.

Coherence really isn't the album's strong point but, frankly, I doubt that Arthur Brown cares about that too much. I'm sure there are reasons why he doesn't front the Completely Straightforward World of Arthur Brown and that is one reason why he's as welcome in 2019 as he was in 1968.

And, as I mentioned, he's actually been back for a while. The band was only around for four years in its original incarnation but Brown reformed it in 2000 and it's remained in place with a consistent line-up ever since. Nobody's left the band in that time, though Nina Gromniak was added as a third guitarist in 2011. I'd be really interested in seeing how this band plays live nowadays!

Varkan - Varkan (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I've talked up a few bands lately like Mystik who unashamedly sound as if a time machine had shown up out of nowhere and transported them forward from the mid- to late-eighties to now. Varkan are another and they're from right here in Phoenix. This, their debut album, came out back in March but I'm on it now because they're opening up for Holy Grail at Club Red on Friday night and I hope to be there. No, I'm not going to Wacken, I'm going to see Varkan.

Like Blackstone Puppets, they sound like the sort of session band I heard a lot on the Friday Rock Show back in the eighties, albeit in a different way. Rather than demonstrating their versatility by playing different styles in their twenty minutes of airtime, Varkan are confident enough in what they do that they can just stick to their style of choice and trust in their talent. The complex constructions of songs like The Revenge of the Black Queen are reminiscent of those from session bands that vanished after maybe one album but who crop up thirty years on in Facebook threads as favourites of fans who wished they'd stayed together and done more.

Let's hope that Varkan stay together and do more because there's enough on this album to warrant it. They're a heavy metal band with a taste for that old NWOBHM style and occasionally what came before, but who also like speed and aren't averse to ramping up the tempo once in a while. Iron Maiden are the most obvious influence, but Nocturnal Pollutions starts out like Judas Priest and there are less well known bands in here too, like Toranaga and Elixir and late eighties Cloven Hoof. They're led as much by the melodic guitars of Dominic Scarano and Alec Damiano as the powerful vocals of the latter, which tend to be buried a bit too far into the mix.

The early songs are decent on all counts, but they don't shine as brightly as later ones. Divided States and Shadow Self feature worthy melodies, nice guitars, whether soloing or supporting, and very lively drums from Michael Rodriguez. Eclipse of My Soul is a weaker song but it sparks up halfway and demonstrates how strong this band is instrumentally with a fast section in the middle. Rats from a Sinking Ship does something similar, but it's also better throughout, with memorable riffs and melodic lines, plus good vocals from Damiano. She's as much Messiah Marcolin as Bruce Dickinson at points.

To my mind, this is where the album kicks into high gear and it stays there for a few tracks. The strongest tracks may well be the four in the middle, even if Nocturnal Pollutions sounds like it was recorded in only one take and could have done with some of the guitars redone. I really like the way that the chorus loops. The Revenge of the Black Queen is the longest song on the album and it may well be the best, with emphatic delivery from Damiano, a gloriously chugging midsection and intriguing drumming from Rodriguez, as he seems to be playing two kits at once. The Wound Never Heals wraps up the quartet of highlights with style, the other contender for best track here and certainly my current favourite.

That doesn't mean that Varkan are done. The patient build of Born on Samhain with a simple but very effective riff, bouncy drums and a keyboard layer, is still to come. So is a new version of Filthy Human Race, which constituted their 2016 demo. There's even a neat little piano outro to nudge up to the three quarters of an hour mark.

I liked this a lot and it got better on a second listen too. The most overt downside is the production. The vocals are far too buried, with the backing vocals bizarrely louder, and the drums are sometimes distorted, such as on The Revenge of the Black Queen. A couple of songs could have been tightened up a little too, like Eclipse of My Soul.

Never mind the perceived lesser stature of the opening slot on Friday, I'm going to see Varkan as much as anyone else on that bill!

Nocturnal Breed - We Only Came for the Violence (2019)

Country: Norway
Style: Black/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Jun 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

Nocturnal Breed have never been the most prolific band. They formed in Oslo in 1996, but this is only their sixth studio album and their fourth in this millennium. Fans must be celebrating, because this only took five years to follow its predecessor, unlike the seven that has become almost traditional. That's far from busy for a band who never split up.

I've heard them before, here and there, but don't recall them standing out. This album, however, blisters and I suddenly wonder what I've been missing. They make an unholy racket, which I think they'd take as a real compliment, given that they merge black metal into their core speed metal sound, overt in the vocals of S. A. Destroyer, some of the lyrics, and in the occasional hyperspeed blast from drummer Tex Terror.

Once I got used to the sound, heard speed metal over everything though. The opener, Choke on Blood, reminds of Sodom, as they often do. The title track has that buzzsaw sound that I remember from bands like Razor and Exciter in the early eighties, but with the benefits of excellent modern production and a real urgency that reminds of punk and brings us back to Sodom again.

What's most interesting is how they don't really move back and forth between the two genres. Occasionally black metal wins out, like on the wall of sound in War-Metal Engine, but mostly they just combine the sounds. That means the fast paced assault of speed metal but with wilder vocals that go beyond even the punkier thrash bands. Destroyer often sounds like a cross between Martin Walkyier's Sabbat days and Schmier from Destruction.

As the album runs on, the clinical speed sound gives way somewhat to a wild thrash sound. Desecrator especially fits that bill, because it's a gorgeous mosh pit song. It's a blistering two and a half minutes of driving rhythms, a neat solo, pauses and escalations, the works. It's fantastic stuff and it has to be my favourite track on the album.

Just to confuse, there's a heavy/power influence here too, as we discover on the delightfully titled Sharks of the Wehrmacht (I'd pay to see that movie). It kicks off with a riff worthy of classic Accept, though Destroyer doesn't sound remotely like Udo Dirkschneider, with his banshee shrieks of vocals. He's really lively though, relishing everything the way Cronos did but with that Walkyier intonation and theatricality.

I'm really digging these modern bands and their modern production taking on the extreme metal of the early eighties. They're making me want to go back and work through a bunch of my vinyl from that era to refresh myself on how much fun it all was back then. There's plenty of early Bathory in War-Metal Engine, some Agent Steel in the groove of A Million Miles of Trench, even a little Mercyful Fate on Can't Hold Back the Night.

The vocals often distract from comparisons but these songs are unashamedly old school and their energy can't be denied. I'm having a blast this year immersing myself in the variety of what's coming onto the market, but every old school release like this suggests that I should go backwards to 1983 or 1984, right before I discovered what rock music was, and explore what I may have missed back then or rediscover what I've forgotten. This is fun!

Solar Corona - Lightning One (2019)

Country: Portugal
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 May 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

It was four minutes into the opening track, Love is Calling, that I fell in love with Solar Corona. It had found an interesting groove anyway, slow but not doomy, patient and spacy. If it wasn't so heavy, it could have been the beginning to a Tangerine Dream epic. Three minutes in, it threatens to get a lot more intense but it holds back a little to build tension. And then, when it hits the halfway mark, it ratchets up to high gear and truly comes alive.

I think the difference between the two halves of that track is that, for the first half I was listening to the music but for the second I was taken on a trip somewhere and I experienced the song. Where it took me, I can't really say but it was a wild journey to somewhere where everything was in motion, a feeling not unlike the cover art as an animated gif.

I know where Speedway took me. As the title suggests, it feels like I joined a whole phalanx of bikers to peel out of somewhere meaningless and explore the open road. And by road, I'm not sure we were on a surface but maybe off on a ray of light into the cosmos. There's certainly a lot of space rock in here but I got an Armageddon vibe too, if you remember the Keith Relf outfit from the early seventies. It does slow down a little after a while but stays involved.

If we weren't already thinking about Lemmy era Hawkwind, we'd surely start when Rebound kicks off. It's a bass led ride into nowhere, appropriate to follow Speedway. Then, a few minutes in, it stops entirely and starts up as a completely different track with a completely different sound. Suddenly, we're listening to a Pink Floyd track we've never heard before, complete with a saxophone, taken from some alternate universe Dark Side of the Moon that we haven't heard before.

If this is the quietest the album gets, Drive-In is surely the most vehement assault on the senses. It's an intense jam that starts intense, calms down for a little while and then gets even more intense. It's a frantic, violent run and we celebrate making it out alive by relaxing a little during Beehive with its suitably swirling groove and some more sax appeal. The song titles are highly appropriate.

At twelve and a half minutes, Gold Ray is emphatically the longest track on the album and it wraps things up with another wild and experimental trip to parts unknown, where all those masked wrestlers come from. For much of its running time, it's one of those jams where we just know that it's all going to fall apart completely any moment now, but somehow it never does because the band know each other inside and out and they keep it together.

This track also fades out slowly, so much so that the last twenty seconds are silence or as close to it as makes no odds. Gold Ray could easily be seen or felt as a glorious explosion. I'm not sure if it's meant to be internal, an attempt to blow our minds, or external, like a star going nova. Either way, it tries to harness the complex strands of reality to be a dance partner as everything boils magnificently away into the ether. One reason I feel that the album works so well is because it does exactly the same thing but on a larger scale.

Solar Corona were formed in Barcelos in Portugal in 2012 and they're a power trio, enhanced by the presence of Julius Gabriel on sax. Rodrigo Carvalho is the ostensible leader and all the guitar work belongs to him. I presume that drummer Peter Carvalho is related. José Roberto Gomes provides the prominent bass. I'd love to call them out for special praise but they're so cohesive that it's difficult to think of any of them individually. Immerse yourself and see what I mean!