Madmess - Madmess (2019)

Country: Portugal
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Oddly, given that I've been highlighting an admirable diversity in the rock and metal coming out of countries like Poland, Greece and Finland, it seems that everything I review from Portugal is instrumental psychedelic rock. I'm sure there's other music being made there, but until I figure out where the good stuff is, here's another instrumental psychedelic rock album.

In fact, it's an instrumental psychedelic rock album from a band who played earlier this month in Porto with one of those other bands whose instrumental psychedelic rock album I reviewed earlier this year, Orangotango. Oddly, the Spanish half of the bill appears to have been grindcore bands, which doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me, but hey.

This band is Madmess, who are surely doomed to have every Google search for them be 'corrected' to the name of a very different band, and they're from Porto, though they're apparently based in London nowadays. They play their psych with a deceptively loose touch and they play it long, the shortest of the four tracks here clocking in at six minutes on the dot. That gives them a lot of room for musical exploration.

Everything about them seems to tie to motion, though the intensity of that motion varies. It's wildest on The Storm, a maelstrom of activity that has more than a foot in the door of space rock. This could be what it's like to surf Jupiter's great red spot. Lunar Giant is much more patient, its bluesy jamming much more relaxed but never calm. It builds too, with some rumbling drums, to be just as dangerous, if not quite as intense. This giant may seem to be gentle but he hits frickin' hard when he wants to.

It's my favourite track here, though every track was my favourite until the next one hit. It does so much with mood, taking us up and down and in every other direction, as it wishes. It also ends beautifully, setting us up well for the more peaceful motion of Waves. Well, peaceful until it isn't, as the ocean can be just as dangerous as that lunar giant when it gets a hankering to wreak some real havoc. Oddly, there are vocals here, albeit not for long and in a way that doesn't really add anything to the song at all.

The obvious praise here goes to Ricardo Sampaio who handles all the guitars on the album, but that's not to diminish the work of his compatriots, Vasco Ricardo Sampaio, whose bass is a reliable constant under Sampaio's soloing and sometimes a neat counterpoint, and Luis Moura, whose drums do everything they need to do. I love his drum sound here, which is not as up front as I expect modern production to make it but still has all the oomph that it was hard to capture back in the day on old equipment.

I liked this a lot, especially The Storm and Lunar Giant in the middle, and I now look forward to the next instrumental psychedelic rock album that will show up from Portugal. But hey, feel free to throw in requests. Who's making good music in Portugal right now that isn't instrumental psychedelic rock? I see that there was a lot of prog rock in the seventies after the Carnation Revolution, then blues rock in the eighties. I know about Moonspell but I'm unable to conjure up another non-psych name. Help me out, folks!

Destruction - Born to Perish (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Aug 2019
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Teutonic thrash legends Destruction are back with their fourteenth original studio album (I'm excluding the two Thrash Anthems re-records) and, while I can't call it one of their best, it's a heck of a long way from their worst (there are reasons why even the band have disowned the ironically named The Least Successful Human Cannonball).

It actually felt a little underwhelming on a first listen, but then I turned the volume up and let it clean me out on a second time through. I couldn't quite figure it out, because Born to Perish is a blistering opener and none of these tracks are bad. Maybe the problem is that the first few tracks feel a little too similar.

As a long term Destruction fan (I played Eternal Devastation to death when it came out and I still pull out the Live Without Sense album pretty often), I'm aware that they're hardly the most progressive thrash band on the planet and they tend to just do what they do, live or recorded, but the first three tracks feel a little close and Rotten doesn't help, given that its chorus of "Rotten to the Core" can't help but bring Overkill's song of that name to mind and pale in comparison.

At least Rotten tries something different. So does Filthy Wealth, though it sounds familiar from the outset. Metallica's Jump in the Fire is part of it but there's something else too that I can't place (maybe a little Electro-Violence in the vocal line). Butchered for Life keeps up the variety with a quieter start that makes me realise just how much Schmier sounds like Alice Cooper in this style. It's actually quite cool.

Destruction are always at their best when playing fast, though. Sure, there are nuances allowed by a mid-pace that work pretty well but, when they're in their groove, they blister like few bands can. In fact, the precise moment when I realised how old and out of shape I am came when I hit the pit for an encore of Bestial Invasion a couple of years ago. How can anyone not go wild to a song as perfect as that?

Anyway, Tyrants of the Netherworld is my choice for the highlight here, with Born to Perish and a few other fast songs close on its heels. Ratcatcher had no effect on me first time through but really starts to stand out on further listens too. I look forward to hearing some of this material live when they come through Arizona again.

The band are half old and half new. Mike Sifringer is still there on guitar as he's been since the very beginning in 1982. Schmier is there too on bass and lead vocals, which makes two thirds of the founder members; he's played on most of the albums that the band will admit to. The new fish are Randy Black on drums, who's only the sixth drummer in almost four decades, and a second guitarist from Switzerland by the name of Damir Eskić. They're good hires, based on this album.

The oddest decision doesn't revolve around the line-up but the chose of the cover to close the album out. I wasn't expecting a Tygers of Pan Tang song, but Hellbound does sound pretty good in Destruction's hands, maybe a little melodic in the chorus, but hey. It's a good song and a good cover and I have a lot of respect for a band shining a spotlight on the Tygers.

tl;dr version: this is good stuff, even if it isn't great stuff, and I hope to see this line-up live soon.

The Matter of A - Amphibious (2019)

Country: Poland
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

The Matter of A is a one man band, with Artur Jankowski responsible for the whole shebang: not just the singing and the playing of every instrument on this second album, but all the songwriting, arrangements and recording. He didn't paint the gorgeous cover (that's the work of wildly talented Russian artist Tanya Shatseva) and he didn't do the mixing and mastering, but that's about it. He probably put the kettle on too.

Jankowski (and thus The Matter of A) comes from the heart of Poland, a town called Mińsk Mazowiecki, which is east of Warsaw, but that can't explain the wild variety of sounds on offer here. I found the album labelled as prog or gothic rock and both sounds are certainly in here. However, I'm hearing far more than that. The band's Bandcamp page also tags this album as electronic, ambient, industrial and jazz, which helps to highlight some of its admirable diversity.

I was hooked from the outset. I played the opener, Gone and Done, three or four times before I let it run on into the next track. It's built softly on a gorgeous bass run with some ethereal saxophone and some goth musing. That sax keeps teasing us with flavour as it jumps into driving darkwave, but it isn't the only flavour. Is Jankowski playing a koto here? It's some sort of eastern lute, whatever it is, or the equivalent setting on a synthesiser.

How do I describe this stuff? Just on that one track, there's Joy Division and Primus and the Cure. There's Dream Theater and King Crimson and maybe even some reasonably accessible John Zorn. There's European darkwave of the sort you expect to find in an East Berlin nightclub before the vampires dig in to the snacks. There's stuff I don't recognise at all, because Jankowski digs deep for his influences and crafting something entirely new. I like it a lot. And overall, the feel is gothic rock because that's inherent in the vocals as well as some of the music.

While a lot of these elements move through the tracks, there's variety there too. Phase Up is less ethereal and more in your face. The Haunting Roar goes another notch up that scale, switching out quiet piano for industrial power chord assault. The Comedian's Dead highlights that this is definitely a drum machine, almost new wave in its sound but gloomier than anything mainstream. Windshield is NDH material, Rammstein with sax appeal and harmonica. Phase Disconnect gets all experimental, like Lacrimas Profundere on the other side of a dozen filters. I'm not fond of the overdone cymbals here but I love the drums.

I find this wildly interesting stuff. It's different to anything else that I can remember hearing and I treasure that. The fact that it's also damn good is a bonus. Weirdly, it's Jankowski's bass that impresses me most here, except for his songwriting of course. There's a lot of bass here and he plays it as a lead instrument. Every now and again it fades into the rest of the music, only to make itself known again soon enough in a different way. The bass on Gone and Done isn't the bass on Inside and Outside, but it's gorgeous on both.

Other aspects do that too. There's a delightful Mike Oldfield style guitar on Phase Disconnect that emerges out of the ether halfway through the track, only to dance with the drums with real style. There are little sounds like that throughout the album and they highlight to me how we need more jazz in rock music, even when it isn't instrumental fusion.

You'll know by what I've said thus far whether this is likely to be for you, but I'm really digging this and I think Inside and Outside is going to take over from Children of the Sün's Her Game as what's playing in my head when I wake up every morning. This is definitely an album I'll be returning to soon to see if I need to up my rating.

Velesar - Dziwadła (2019)

Country: Poland
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

I had trouble finding a second album to review today. I weeded through many lesser albums that I wouldn't review here, only to find a great one that was perfect until I released that it won't be released until the 23rd. So, back to the search went I until I found Velesar, a Polish band formed last year by Marcin Wieczorek, who had previously sung for bands like Goddess of Sin, Radogast and River of Time, covering heavy, thrash and folk ground in the process.

This is folk metal, as the atmospheric intro makes very clear. It features a host of interesting instruments mixing together in the rain, including drum, flute and violin, but also voices as instruments. It's delightful and it's a great way to set the mood. So is the opening track proper, Taniec diaboła, a wild piece of music that demonstrates how lively folk metal can be. I wanted to get up and dance which, besides being ill advised in a kilt, is something I have zero talent at. My feet couldn't stay still though. I was unsurprised to discover that the song's title translates to The Devil's Dance.

While I like the metal instrumentation here, it's the folk instruments that really stood out as dominant. The violin that leads the way on so many songs, like Zew Arkony and Ślad Swarożyca and that's variously the work of Iga Suchara and Jagoda Połednik. Similarly, there are two flautists here. Zuzanna Bornikowska is responsible for the flute on Ostatnia Kupalnocka and the title track, but Katarzyna Babilas handles most of the rest.

The other folk instrument is an unusual one, a kemanche, which can be heard on the title track; I had to look up what it is, finding that it's a bowed string instrument from the eastern Mediterranean. I thought it's what provided that gorgeous tone behind Karczmiany troll, which is much more serious sounding, but I'm told that that's a violin instead, meaning that I'm even more impressed with the violinists. I'm also happy that the flute and violin are lead instruments here and it's the best folk metal that allows that, instead of expecting only some texture here and there. Plony wouldn't be the same without a violin.

Marcin Wieczorek's voice is just a little rough to give him character and a lot firm to be a commanding lead. Dawid Holona gets moments here and there to highlight why this is folk metal rather than just folk, with good solos on Ostatnia Kupalnocka and Plony. I was highly impressed by the drummers, as the drums vary so much on this album but never cease to be interesting. Again, they're the work of two people: Łukasz Obiegły and Marcin Frąckowiak, who also plays the rhythm guitar.

While the majority of the album is lively and uplifting, built on dances and shanties, there's a darkness to it too, albeit a friendly one as highlighted by the album's title, which is Polish for Freaks. The intro is Where the Sun Does Not Reach and there are songs here called Brother's Blood, Wolf Pack and Troll Inn. It's fairy tale darkness, I think, as is hinted on the cover art, and I love that.

I hadn't heard of Velesar before, but I'm paying attention now. They've only released one single before this, which is the opening track, Taniec diaboła, but this debut album is consistently strong for almost an hour. I hope they continue to make music for a long time to come.

And, should I one day win the lottery, I'd love to see Velesar live. I want to see the pit come alive during tracks like Normanica, a Viking shanty. I'm sure the stage would be alive with seven musicians on it playing their socks off. This is folk metal the way that I like it best: lively and frantic and tight, with folk instruments at the fore. Let's see if YouTube will allow me to live vicariously through video.

Roxy Blue - Roxy Blue (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Aug 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Sometimes it just doesn't seem like 2019! Bang Tango are touring with Faster Pussycat. I've reviewed new albums by Jetboy and Tora Tora. And now, here's the first album of new material from Roxy Blue in 27 years.

It has to be said, with hindsight, that 1992 was hardly the best year for a glam rock band to release their debut album. Nirvana had released Nevermind in 1991 and firmly ended an era. Roxy Blue's album was called Want Some? As nobody did in 1992, they vanished pretty quickly from sight. The point, of course, is that timing is far from everything. So their timing sucked. That doesn't mean that they didn't turn out a pretty damn good album. I still have mine on CD and going back to it reminded me just how fantastic songs like Sister Sister were.

Now, almost three decades on, Roxy Blue are back to kick it up a couple of notches. Modern production values are part of it, but this is ten times as in your face as Want Some? from moment one. The cover is so minimalist as to feel like a manifesto: it's just the band's old logo but on battered steel, with the lip imprint and stars intact. It screams down and dirty glam rock and that's exactly what is. These guys may not be young and pretty any more but they still know how to kick ass and it does feel like they have a real hunger for it that 27 years not touring might just prompt.

Silver Lining and Rockstar Junkie are both in your face songs to kick this off. They're downtuned but upbeat. The guitars have a tough tone, like they want blood and they want it now. The melodies have a husky delivery, as if Todd Poole's vocal cords have been doused in a bottle of Jack for every day of that 27 year gap. Everything about the production is dirty where, in the glam rock heyday, it would have been sleazy. As a song, Rockstar Junkie has the chops to have been on Too Fast for Love, but not with this production. This is like Godsmack covering that in 2002 and that's most of this album.

And I really couldn't get very far from comparisons to more modern American music. Scream, with its grungy guitar tone, vocal effects and alternative filters, could have been recorded by any number of crappy nu metal bands if only they had more than that tone to go on. Collide often feels like it's a country song rather than a ballad, but it's so gritty that it would infect the Grand Ole Opry with something distinctly unsavoury. On Outta the Blue, Poole may well have screamed it through a metal pipe from the next warehouse over, but the guitars never lose that bouncy glam mindset even under thirty shades of rust.

And that's what makes this work. Whatever contemporary sound they're trying to emulate, they still rock. They feel like they're going to take any local bar apart and kick the ass of everyone there, while those big names wouldn't be seen dead in places like that. That sort of gig is beneath them. I don't think Roxy Blue care. They just want to rip it up again and they do, with a host of hints at where they came from in the songs. I heard some Kashmir in Blinders and there's plenty of On the Road Again in Til the Well Runs Dry.

Welcome back, folks. Times have changed. Good music hasn't.

Volbeat - Rewind, Replay, Rebound (2019)

Country: Denmark
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 2 Aug 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives |Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Somehow I've managed to miss out on the varied joy that is Volbeat, a group from Denmark who have been around since 2001, feature a former key member of Anthrax in their line up and have little interest in playing only one style. Unlike the Roadside Crows album I reviewed yesterday, however, the shifting from one sound to another somehow doesn't remove coherence from the record.

I'll get to my surprising conclusion on that later. First, I'll introduce a few apparently disparate sounds that Volbeat keep returning to, so you can see how this builds.

For a start, there's safe alternative rock. Last Day Under the Sun could be a Bryan Adams song if it didn't have quite so crunchy a guitar tone. Rewind the Exit is perkier than Creed and less funky than the Chili Peppers but is reminiscent of both. Cloud 9 epitomises this approach, being overtly radio friendly with its harmonies and strong beats.

It also features a little rockabilly, the second sound in play. As you might expect, Pelvis on Fire is kind of like a punk rock Elvis holding court over a very different audience to the ones he thrilled in Las Vegas. Sorry Sack o' Bones does the same thing but it has a gimmicky edge, like the melody is taken from an alternate universe TV theme tune.

And then there's groove metal, when they decide they want to be heavier for a while. Cheapside Sloggers introduces this when it goes all doomy and starts into Metallica-style chugging guitars. The Everlasting is a bold red underline to that, easily the heaviest song on the album, with that chugging guitar sound accompanied by a more James Hetfield style vocal style.

That's not quite everything, because there are also tracks like Parasite, an abidingly polite 37 second punk song which cheekily became the first single, and When We Were Kids, which feels Irish, like a Flogging Molly ballad, but with some oddly classical riffage added in for good measure. However, those three styles cover the majority of what's going on here. This is rockabilly and alternative rock and groove metal. You know, because why not?

But here's the kicker... while each of the first few songs only play in one of those styles, as the album runs on they quickly start to merge them until everything surprisingly starts to sound like a safer version of the Michale Graves era of the Misfits, just without the expected associated focus on the schlocky horror sci-fi movies of the fifties. That begins with Die to Live, which is only experimental in the sense that the band decided they wanted to see if they could get a piano, a saxophone and the lead singer of Clutch on the same song.

And, to me, that averaging sound is really odd, but it's also weirdly blah. Like them or not, those first few songs aren't ones that can be ignored. If you like Last Day Under the Sun, you may not like Pelvis on Fire and that's doubled the other way around, but both are excellent examples of what they try to be and they'll both have a lot of fans. By the time we get to later songs such as Maybe I Believe, Leviathan and The Awakening of Bonnie Parker, it's all starting to sound the same and my main focus unintentionally ended up being to miss Doyle's guitars every time.

I didn't go to see Volbeat when they hit Phoenix last week as a supporting act on the Slipknot tour, but I have friends who went. I'll have to ask what they thought of the line-up, which is surprisingly diverse, even if we see Volbeat as just one style. They're clearly not Slipknot, but they're hardly Gojira or Behemoth either and none of those are remotely like any of the others. I'm all for breadth of styles but I do wonder who showed up to see whom on that tour and who was still playing when they left.

Based on this album, I'm intrigued as to what earlier albums sound like and there are six of them out there in the wild. I want to find out where these sounds came from, but sadly a lot more than I want to listen to this again.

Calvaire - Nodus Tollens (2019)

Country: Singapore
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 21 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

I've reviewed a couple of post-rock albums here at Apocalypse Later in 2019. Sparkle and especially Ogmasun explore the post-rock mindset of not writing songs in a traditional form but creating soundscapes by playing traditional rock instruments. I've also reviewed some post-hardcore, which sadly doesn't share that mindset. Fortunately, post-black metal does and here's a quality example from Singapore's Calvaire, presumably named for the Belgian horror film with Vincent Cassel but maybe for the novel by Octave Mirbeau.

Now, black metal has often leaned towards the verbose, so songs of eight or nine minutes in length is nothing new. It's often mixed with ambient music, so the quieter side of this album isn't surprising either. Even when it's at its loudest and most raucous, black metal enjoys a wall of sound approach, a further step into soundscape territory. And, of course, black metal shrieks have always been an instrument in themselves.

In other words, it's not much of a step to go from black metal to post-black metal. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find that a good deal of what I'm used to calling black metal genre was really post-black metal, merely before the term was ever coined. This album knows that it's post-black metal but it isn't too far adrift from its parent genre with five full tracks that total just shy of forty minutes, a further two minute collection of sounds called Liberosis nudging it over that mark.

To my thinking, the best tracks are the opener and the closer, but what's in between doesn't slack any. Aokigahara is the opener, named for the so-called Suicide Forest on the lava slopes of Mount Fuji. This seems appropriate, as Calvaire are often listed as playing depressive black metal too, and suicide is about as depressive as depressive gets. The album title might prompt that because it refers to the realisation that you don't understand the story of your own life, as if you're a character in the wrong book. Flowers of Fixed Ideas is the closer and I have no idea to what that refers.

I should add here, however, that I didn't find either of these tracks to be depressing (and I've listened to plenty of depressive black metal that is). I found them to have a melancholy to them but the bell-like guitar work has both a ritual aspect and an uplifting nature. Aokigahara is more deliberate, so I wonder if it's about someone (usually a young lady) visiting the forest to take her own life but Flowers of Fixed Ideas is about her returning home having not done so.

By comparison, Lacrimae Rerum is harsher, more brutal and more incessant, a sort of assault that presumably brings on the tears mentioned in its title. It does quieten down at points but it's always more black than post-black. Liberosis, the experimental two minutes that follows it, is more post-black than black, so the album does swing back and forth. The Celestial Dog has a lot of each side, as does Open Grave Dialogue, which combines blastbeats and shrieks with a slow melodic guitar line floating over everything, as if it's a spirit leaving a body.

This is interesting stuff. It's not for those who want their black metal to sound like the product of a cluster of demons celebrating their evil works. It's for those who appreciate the idea of post-rock but also believe in the idea that evocative soundscapes can be harsh and brutal.

Crypto Chaos - Sediments of Wrath (2019)

Country: Iran
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I've been having internet trouble this evening while trying to get work done so I decided to throw on some thrash to cheer me up. It really ought to be a recognised cure for what ails you! Now, I have a stack of interesting thrash to work through but Crypto Chaos hail from Tabriz in northern Iran, which is one of those unlikely metal countries that keeps on turning out interesting material nowadays, so I threw on their debut, Sediments of Wrath.

Initially, it's pretty basic thrash but it's done well, Moshpit Underground being as enjoyable as its title is clichéd. Then again, I can't see moshpits being a particularly government supported activity in Tabriz, so what might seem like a clichéd title to us might be grim reality there. As to sound, I immediately caught an early Testament feel but with a more evil set of pipes on vocalist Damo, more German in style, like Schmier from Destruction mixed with Tom Angelripper from Sodom.

It's a mid tempo song and so is Thousand Natural Shocks but, just as we're convincing ourselves that the band aren't planning to create anything fancy, they add in some eastern strings and my ears perked right up. That's a wild sound right there and I wanted more of it, but it didn't manifest elsewhere. The song is still much more complex and adventurous than the opener, though.

And then Carnivore ups the tempo and I was totally sold. It makes the first two tracks seem like they were played in slow motion and it's just what the doctor ordered today. I'd have preferred more up tempo thrash but Carnivore is not the only such song on offer. Rebellion of Authority also ratchets up the speed and writing a song about a rebellion against authority in Iran is a sort of rebellion against authority in itself, in a neat but sad meta touch.

Just to keep that thought alive, Revolt ramps up the tempo as well and also wraps up gloriously. As you might expect from its title, Bullet is another fast one for three in a row. However, not all those songs stay fast and the other songs don't always get there. It's a mixed album with regard to speed and, as it ran on, I started to hear not just thrash influences but power influences too, like Accept. There are sections in Bullet and in White Cave that feel very Accept in sound, albeit sans the classical additions. As I listened through the album again, I heard more of that sort of thing.

While I'm seeing conflicting information, I gather there are three people in the band, but that's two guitarists, Trigger and Brontide, and a vocalist in Damo who also handles bass duties. I'm assuming that they're using a session drummer. They're all capable and that bass is refreshingly prominent in the mix on occasion. Whoever's handling the drums does a solid job too.

At the end of the day, this is good stuff and I enjoyed it a great deal. It did exactly what I needed from an album tonight and if I wanted more speed and more of those eastern strings from Thousand Natural Shocks, that doesn't mean I didn't like what I got. This is more good stuff from Iran.