Blind Guardian Twilight Orchestra - Legacy of the Dark Lands (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Symphonic Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2019
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I've had a blast catching up with the glut of releases from major names over the last couple of months and I hope you've enjoyed Name November as well. I wrap that up today with something completely different. This isn't the next Blind Guardian album, hence the slightly different name credit, and it's not really symphonic power metal either. So why I am reviewing it?

Well, it's a piece of classical music (a cantata? an oratorio?) composed by Hansi Kürsch and André Olbrich of Blind Guardian and performed not with the regular band but the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. There are no drums here, no guitars and no bass. All the music is orchestral, though Kürsch does sing on the various songs which punctuate the album, as do others, who I presume are part of the orchestra's choir.

And, while there are 24 tracks on offer, only eleven are actually songs. The structure here is a stricter version of what Blind Guardian did on Nightfall in Middle Earth, alternating songs with narrative dramatisations, featuring a host of different characters. There's an instrumental introduction too to round out those numbers. On occasion, the lines are blurred by bringing the narrative actors into a song like In the Red Dwarf's Tower.

While this should be best approached as an experience, I'm not sure whether Kürsch even plans to mount a full stage production like an opera. I have no doubt that such an undertaking would be insanely expensive. A film version would be cheaper. I would guess that most will be coming for the songs that do, after all, constitute over an hour of the running time.

They're a whole heck of a lot of fun and, even if we weren't feeling it, it wouldn't be difficult to contract fun from Kürsch's performance. His voice soars the way you'll expect, but it also soothes and stalks. What I enjoyed most was the way that the music interacted with his voice. The woodwinds on In the Underworld are playful and engaging but they also tease Kürsch. It's easy to see the interplay in dance within a stage production.

I've listened through a couple of times but haven't delved into the lyrics at any depth, so I'm not really grasping the story. I believe it runs much wider than this album, including a novel by Markus Heitz called Die dunklen Lande. From what I see, I believe this is based on Heitz's characters as a companion piece to the novel. However the ties, it sounds suitably epic for such grandiose orchestration.

As something so unique, it's hard to find anything with which to compare it. Sure, there are connections to Nightfall in Middle Earth and some of this is reminiscent of Blind Guardian's more traditional songs. However, it's a full blown orchestral composition shorn of metal in every way other than Kürsch's vocals, so it's fairer to compare it to a cantata like Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which is a lot more varied than the O Fortuna bit you know.

Maybe it falls somewhere in between those two. It's certainly more classical than the Nightfall album and it's more metal than Carmina Burana. However, I heard a lot of film soundtrack music here too, especially in 1618 Ouverture, the introduction, though the deeper sounds of James Horner and Howard Shore rather than the quirkier ones of Danny Elfman.

I hear that it took Kürsch a couple of decades to make this happen, so I'm happy that he's realised the dream that he conjured up so long ago. I'm even happier that it works, though it isn't going to be for everyone, even among Blind Guardian's fans. They may well dig songs like Dark Cloud's Rising but only a subset will put up with the narrative sections on repeat listens.

Michael Sweet - Ten (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock/Heavy Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 11 Oct 2019
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OK, this one was a real surprise for me and it seems to have been for a lot of other people too. I remember Michael Sweet from way back in the eighties, when he sang for pioneering Christian rock/metal band Stryper, who I recall being cheesy, melodic and overblown. They didn't sound remotely like this.

I can't recall if I've heard any of his solo material until now, but I know what I expect it to sound like. It doesn't sound remotely like the work of someone who gets hired by Boston as vocalist/guitarist or someone who makes a couple of albums with George Lynch of Dokken. It doesn't sound like this.

The sound varies from song to song, but it's generally heavy metal not hard rock and it's lively heavy metal at that, as befits the guests who bring an unlikely variety of background to this material. That's Jeff Loomis of Arch Enemy on the opener, Better Part of Me, and Marzi Montazeri from Superjoint Ritual and currently Exhorder on Lay It Down. Now or Never features Gus G of Firewind. These aren't the AOR keyboard players I was expecting.

With people like Loomis and Montazeri involved, it's heavy stuff. The drums that kick off Lay It Down are more like something I'd expect on a Motörhead album than one by the dude from Stryper. What fits is the powerful voice of Sweet, because even when he was singing cheesy Stryper numbers like To Hell with the Devil, he had an operatic metal range.

To be fair, the heaviest stuff is at the beginning, though the album never wimps out. I see that Sweet has been accepted into Metal Archives entirely based on this album. To provide context there, there are two tracks here on which the guest guitarist is Joel Hoekstra of Whitesnake, who aren't deemed metal enough to be included. Matthew Sweet and Stryper both are apparently seen as more qualifying.

The majority of the album is more straightforward heavy metal, many tracks sounding like demos recorded so guitarists could try out for Ozzy's band in the eighties. The variety here is really interesting. Sweet carries on much in the same way throughout, but Jeff Loomis isn't Gus G and neither of them are Tracii Guns from LA Guns or Rich Ward of Fozzy.

Sometimes the guitarists elevate the music. I wasn't feeling Forget, Forgive at all until it livened up because of the guitarwork of Howie Simon, perhaps best known for his stint with Alcatrazz. I'm not a huge Fozzy fan but Rich Ward creates a memorable vibe on the title track. Sweet complements what he does well, belting out that he's giving us ten, appropriate for the song but also because it's the title of both the song and the album and because it's Sweet's tenth solo album, if you include that pair with George Lynch.

Sometimes Sweet leads the show, like on Shine, which he continues to build a little more and a little more until it's epic stuff by the end. Ethan Brosh of Angels of Babylon does a solid job but it's Sweet's show. So is Let It Be Love, which is the softest song on the album, surely the closest to Stryper as I remember them.

The songs that feel best in sync between vocals and guitar are the two with Hoekstra, Never Alone and When Love is Hated. What I found most interesting here is that the two songs are very different. Never Alone has a heavy feel, like Black era Metallica, at least until the chorus which points the way to When Love is Hated, which isn't too far away from Graham Bonnet era Rainbow.

The biggest mistake the album makes is perhaps to put songs after those two, which are next to each other. After hearing Sweet with Hoekstra, everything that went before is instantly lessened and everything that comes after fails in comparison. Don't get me wrong; Tracii Guns does deliver a strong solo on Ricochet, but it feels like a guest appearance. I haven't heard the Sweet & Lynch albums, but Sweet & Hoekstra sound like a band.

Pretty Maids - Undress Your Madness (2019)

Country: Denmark
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2019
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Frontiers Records are putting out a heck of a lot of good stuff nowadays and I really should be reviewing more of it. They're based in Italy but they're releasing new material from a lot of classic names and finding some quality new bands too. Sure, I wasn't too impressed with the latest Quiet Riot album but this new Pretty Maids is pure class, I have another Frontiers album down for review tomorrow and I can't wait for the new Blue Öyster Cult album, due in January.

I knew that Pretty Maids were still around because Ronnie Atkins has been a guest vocalist on the last few Avantasia albums, including Moonglow, but I was surprised to find that they've never really gone away since I first heard them back in 1985 on The Friday Rock Show. There was a brief moment in 1991 when they technically seem to have split up but it only lasted long enough for a rethink and they were back up and running. Given how good this album is, I really should take a look back at the last few because this is their fourth in seven years.

If you haven't heard them, they're a melodic heavy metal band from Denmark, which is unsurprising nowadays but was far from the norm in 1985. They're a pristine example of how a band can be heavy without ever losing an inherent focus on melody. I wrote it that way deliberately because, however much of an influence they've been on European power metal, that's not what they are. Power metal starts with the power and brings in the melody. It feels like a Pretty Maids song starts with the melody and brings in the power.

In fact, the majority of songs here could be covered by a soft rock band and still sound amazing. Sure, there are heavied up ballads that could easily be de-heavied like Shadowlands and Strength of a Rose, but someone like Richard Marx could take on Will You Still Kiss Me (If I See You in Heaven), which is a heavy song with a heavy build, and it would still sound great without any of that heaviness.

The heaviest song here is surely If You Want Peace (Prepare for War), which chugs along as well as any death metal song I've heard this year, albeit a little less extreme. Pretty Maids aren't an extreme band, but it's not hard to see why more extreme bands see them as an influence. If a band closer to the soft end of the spectrum could cover other songs, I could see a heavier band covering this one.

The best song may well be the one in between the two I just mentioned at the heart of the album. It's Runaway World and it's class throughout. It starts out softly with Chris Laney's keyboards swirling to set the mood. It builds with vocal harmonies as the instruments kick in. The verse is a textbook of how to build to a chorus and the hooks when it arrives are fantastic. I have to say that I'm surprised that it isn't apparently seen as single material, the two released thus far being the openers, Serpentine and Firesoul Fly.

If the best material is in the middle of the album, they're a strong way to begin it. They're a little subtler than Runaway World but they're both great songs. With a really strong first half and a glorious middle, it's somewhat inevitable that the second half fades a little but it's still decent. It's a quieter affair, after If You Want Peace, because the last four songs include the two ballads, which fortunately aren't remotely soporific.

This is the band's sixteenth studio album and it sounds like they're as good now as they've ever been. I enjoyed them back in the late eighties but they weren't anywhere near this good then. This is much slicker than Red, Hot and Heavy but heavier and more consistent than Future World. Ronnie's voice has matured well over the years too and he has a really tight band behind him at the moment. Obviously there's a lot of material in between those early days and now and I'm going to be very interested in seeing how long they've been up to this standard.

Entombed A.D. - Bowels of Earth (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Death 'n' Roll
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2019
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While I drifted away from the rock scene in the early nineties, I did notice Entombed, whose 1990 Left Hand Path album was a pivotal death metal release and who demonstrated a will to evolve musically on their third studio album, Wolverine Blues, in 1993. Of the current Entombed A.D. line-up, only vocalist Lars-Göran Petrov was with Entombed at that point, but this band formed out of that one, after they split up in 2014. Founder member Alex Hellid had the rights to the name, so everyone else formed Entombed A.D. to continue their work in the death 'n' roll style.

I don't believe I've reviewed a death 'n' roll album yet at Apocalypse Later and I do know that Entombed A.D. don't particularly care for the genre name. I get that because they're just playing death metal in a different way, like their home town scene in Stockholm had a different sound to Gothenburg, over on the other side of Sweden.

To me, this just feels more rooted in hardcore punk than other Swedish death metal, even though it all was. It's more obvious in the sound, which amps up the bass and aims more for bounce than riffs, not only through the very punk drum sound. It makes sense for the cover on the limited edition to be of an unusual Motörhead song, because they were always as punk as they were metal too.

This is the third album for Entombed A.D., the fourth if you count the final Entombed album, Serpent Saints: The Ten Amendments, on which three quarters of this band performed, and I haven't heard the others, but it took a while for me to get on board with it. It sounded good from the very beginning but it didn't sound memorable until the title track kicked off like a piano with a lifelong dream to really be a music box, something it does at other points throughout the song.

Regardless of whether Petrov's guttural but intelligible vocal delivery has you grinning or not, Bowels of Earth chugs along on wonderfully. The guitar interplay is excellent, as is the solo, and the drums feel a lot more alive. The dynamics when the loud metal and quiet piano alternate are a lot of fun. There's a lot in this song and it's all good. Going back for a fresh listen, Hell is My Home has some strong sections too, but this album really begins for me with the title track.

It doesn't hurt that the next song is even more fun. It's Bourbon Nightmare and it kicks off with a mariachi intro. This is where Petrov's vocals work best, because they're enthusiastic but relatively monotone and this song is full of punk urgency. It's like a fifties rock 'n' roll number performed by a band of highly dextrous cavemen with nothing on their mind except rocking out with every instrument downtuned, including vocals. It's the opposite of subtle and that's absolutely fine.

From then on, this felt good to me, kind of like DOA as a death metal band. Listening to Petrov with punk in mind rather than metal, suddenly his vocals make sense. Perhaps that's why these songs work at three minutes and change but don't work as well at a longer length. To Eternal Night isn't bad, for instance, but it's almost six minutes long and that's too long for a style like this. It doesn't allow for a lot of imagination.

Entombed A.D. are a metal band, so they're more than happy to go with guitar solos, but their effect is punk and so they can only get away with so many of them before they turn back into a death metal band. For now, I'm happy a pair of Entombeds are stalking around Stockholm, but I wonder if either of them is going to grow much from here.

Die Krupps - Vision 2020 Vision (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Industrial Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Nov 2019
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I'm pretty sure I heard Die Krupps back in the day when they didn't sound at all like they do now, but I can't remember quite what. Going back to listen to their early music, I find that they've always been changing. Their first album, Stahlwerksynfonie, is avant garde industrial noise like Einstürzende Neubauten. Volle Kraft Voraus! sounds like post punk chiptune, while Entering the Arena is electronic pop music with alternative flavours.

It was in the early nineties when they began to merge synths with metal and they've continued to grow ever since. 1995's III: Odyssey of the Mind is an album that sounds like what I think of as industrial. By Paradise Now, they were as clearly industrial Metallica as it gets. Only here do they suddenly sound more like NDH. I'd say that this is a better Rammstein album than the one Rammstein put out back in May.

Just check out the title track that opens the album. It has all the driving guitars and dark electronic melodies that we expect from Rammstein, with an impressive hook for the chorus. The odd title is because it's a pun. It's a look at what's coming in 2020 with a pessimism drawn from looking backwards with 20/20 vision. That pessimism continues throughout, with revolution and apocalypse a common factor in the lyrics. Welcome to the Blackout, indeed.

What surprised me most was how simple everything seemed. The guitar tone is the same throughout, as is the primary keyboard tone, and there's only one vocalist, Jürgen Engler, who never varies his delivery much, so it's not an outrageous assumption that the songs are all similar. Sure, there's flavour infused through different riffs, different hooks and different samples, but the overall impression is similar.

Over time, with repeat listens, that impression starts to fall apart. There are different grooves here. Extinction Time works a Sisters of Mercy vibe. F.U., which stands for exactly what you think it does, is the most overtly political song, snarling at an unnamed but very clear Donald Trump with the backing of White Zombie-esque electronica. Welcome to the Blackout kicks off with cheeky electronic interplay before crushing riffs join in, and there's other synth work to throw melodies over everything. Destination Doomsday is faster stuff, almost groove metal.

Perhaps most memorable is Trigger Warning, which has a particularly playful riff, making for what's almost a Yello song but done as industrial metal. I liked that a lot, just as I enjoyed the contrast between the catchy riff and the abrasive siren over the top of the intro and chorus. This isn't an album that fades into background ambience, but Trigger Warning continued to grab me on every relisten.

Most uncharacteristic is The Carpet Crawlers, which is very much electronic pop with milder vocals over oddly hypnotising keyboard runs. It's the only track that doesn't have the guitar crunch and emphatic drive that makes this a metal album. It's more like David Bowie in a post-disco world showing the way forward. It's a good song that gets under the skin, but it's like a Die Krupps song from a couple of decades ago that doesn't fit any more.

As I mentioned, this is a better Rammstein album than the most recent album from Rammstein and it stands up to repeat listens, but it's not as catchy or as inventive as the best of Rammstein, say their Mutter album. The question, of course, is whether Die Krupps will sound like this on their next album or if they've moved on again to something new.

Shark Island - Bloodline (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 11 Nov 2019
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Latest in the seemingly unending list of wannabe comeback artists, here's a second eighties band that many remember for their contribution to the Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure soundtrack. I reviewed the new Tora Tora album in February, so now it's time for the first Shark Island album in the thirteen years since Gathering of the Faithful, which resulted from vocalist Richard Black's prior attempt to resurrect the band. The album before that was Law of the Order in 1989.

It's certainly not a bad effort either, though it aims more at the sound of the eighties than Tora Tora went for and hits less often. Make a Move opens up proceedings in a way that makes us question if Shark Island ever went away. It's a strong, if unsurprising, rocker that would have been an easy single choice back in the day. It's followed by Fire in the House, which is a stalker of a song in the Kiss style, even if it doesn't remotely like Firehouse.

It's track three where we arrive much more up to date. Policy of Truth is a Depeche Mode cover, done with some real weight. The guitars are very low in the mix and the bass (and the bass drums) very high. It's an engaging cover, albeit one that took me a while to get used to. It feels rather out of place until I remembered that it's not 1987 and my mind opened back up again.

My favourite song may be the next one, Aktion Is, though again it took me a while to get used to it. It kicks off with drums that sound very electronic and so provide the song with an odd feel for a while. Is this Robert Palmer? Is it the Bangles? Is it some modern remix of an unreleased T Rex song? It does find high gear eventually and rocks out in true LA hair metal style.

From there, things turn into a mixed bag. Some songs leap out immediately, like Rocks on the Rocks, which benefits from an AC/DC feel at the back end, that tight and incessant drive forward. Maybe it's more the Cult, as that's apparent elsewhere in more than the rhythm section. Some are enjoyable but never seem to quite shine the way they're supposed to, such as Crazy Eights. There are songs I could have done without, like the ballad, On and On, that really does go on and on as it closes out the album until a guitar solo does a little to save it.

There are songs that grow with each listen, like Butterfly, which felt like it was out of control until it came into focus on a second or third try. And there are songs that haven't found that focus yet. I'm not sure why I don't like When She Cries, because I like a lot of what happens within it and I'm not unappreciative of the rest. I think it's over-ambitious with details to the detriment of the song as a whole.

The result is that there's good stuff here but it's in small pictures rather than the big one. I'm unsure that I can recommend this new Shark Island to you because this album doesn't tell me who they are or what they're trying to accomplish. I can certainly recommend some of the songs here but that's a different thing entirely. It seems to me that the band have a hundred ideas and they've tried to cram them into eleven songs. Some of them work but some of them don't and going with eleven of those hundred ideas may have been a better choice.

Assuming that they stick around for a while, and past history suggests that they may not, I'd be interested in hearing their next album. Maybe they just need some time to gig around, realise what works and what doesn't, and focus in on a follow up. It could well be the album that this isn't.

Andy McCoy - 21st Century Rocks (2019)

Country: Finland
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
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I reviewed Michael Monroe's latest solo album, One Man Gang, at the tail end of last month and I mentioned that his Hanoi Rocks sidekick, Andy McCoy, the other half of the Suicide Twins, had a solo album due a week later. This is that album and, while it might seem completely obvious to compare these two albums, they really have little in common. In fact, they highlight just how different these two musicians are and therefore just how much variety they brought to the Hanoi Rocks sound.

Monroe is a rock 'n' roll showman who brings strut and swagger and a sexual charisma to his music. McCoy is a musician who collates sounds from diverse sources and channels them into something new, coherent and vibrant. McCoy is Keith Richards to Monroe's Jagger, or maybe Joe Perry to his Steven Tyler. I think there's more though, because the variety here is more apparent than I expected and it continued to impress me in a way that only Heaven is a Free State did on Monroe's recent album.

Sure, the general sound here, like on Monroe's album, is clearly rooted in the Rolling Stones. The opening title track is built on a riff not dissimilar to Bitch and Bible and a Gun is an overt Stones homage that's agreeably rough enough to have been included on Sticky Fingers. However, just as the Stones drew from more music than the blues, so does McCoy. There are a host of ethnic sounds on this album and they elevate it considerably.

That opener has what sounds like an Indian radio station as its intro and Indian music adds to a new version of Soul Satisfaction from his 2018 EP of the same name. There's flamenco to kick off Seven Seas, old school rock 'n' roll on Batteram, which has lyrics that surely deliberately namecheck song titles. More out there, there's mariachi brass infusing a Latin flavour to Maria Maria, lap steel on Give a Minute, Steal a Year and saxophone on more than just The Hunger and Undertow, but it's particularly effective on those two. Most out there of all is Love It Loud, which is psychedelic reggae.

All that makes this suddenly sound like a world music album, but this still rocks, whatever sounds McCoy is adding into the mix. So there's a seventies style organ/guitar interplay on This is Rock 'n' Roll, with soulful backing vocals to boot, but it's full of outrageous guitar solos and the title is a fundamental truth.

One other angle that makes this feel more exotic is the fact that McCoy is more than just the guitarist; he provides the vocals too and his voice is, shall we say, an acquired taste. It's proudly unpolished and it provides a link between sleaze rock and gypsy punk. He's not Mick Jagger but he might well be Keith Richards after two bottles of Jack. The overall impression is an odd mix of Eugene Hütz from Gogol Bordello, Alice Cooper and Neil Young, of all people. It's not deliberate; it's there in inflections and moments, but it all adds up to a bizarre amalgam of voices into one.

On a first listen, this album doesn't feel particularly coherent. It's like an acid trip through Europe with the radio on but shifting from one station to another with each border crossing. On further listens, these songs start to feel a lot more consistent. They don't all get there, Maria Maria always staying apart from everything else, but the country, punk, soul, reggae and psychedelia start to feel like different accents of the same language.

I liked Monroe's album and I'm giving this the same rating, but they're two completely different sets of music and I'm more likely to come back to this one than the other. If you're less experimental in your music choices, then you may prefer Monroe though. It's more recognisably rock 'n' roll.

Exmortus - Legions of the Undead (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Technical Death/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Oct 2019
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Legions of the Undead is a neatly old school EP in that it allows a band to release a couple of new songs and add a bunch of odd stuff that wouldn't fit on a regular album as a bonus. That's what I remember EPs as being for but I don't believe any that EPs I've reviewed this year have done that until now. Thanks, Exmortus!

The new songs are Legions of the Undead and Swallow Your Soul, both of which sound good to me. I see Exmortus usually listed as technical thrash or death metal and this is kind of both together. Jadran Gonzalez uses a harsh voice that's not particularly extreme; it's a death growl but I've heard far more harsh from pure thrash metal singers in the past. While Swallow Your Soul is reasonably fast, it's not crazily so, and the title track is slower. This is far from frantic stuff.

The one word that rings truest from those genres is "technical", especially on the title track. This is a four piece band and they solo as much as they riff, so that there are melodies hurled out from all over. The bass of Cody Nunez is audible and welcome and Adrian Aguilar mixes up the rhythms a lot from behind the drumkit. While these songs aren't as fast as I tend to like my thrash or as evil as I tend to like my death, I thoroughly enjoyed both as heavy metal songs with extreme influences and I should look backwards.

Exmortus have been around since 2002 but didn't release an album until 2008. Last year's The Sound of Steel was their fifth studio full length and I see that they've generally been received well, sometimes very well indeed. They tend to focus more on war than traditional extreme subject matter, with war being from a more fantasy perspective: battles and heroism and glory, rather than the more historical bent of, say a Sabaton. If these two new songs are representative of their past material, I'm on board.

I'm actually even more on board because of the odd stuff that follows. I see that the band have featured at least one instrumental on each album and some of them have names that hint at a classical influence. Moonlight Sonata (Act 3)? Yeah, I think I know what that is. Appassionata? Yeah, I have an idea on that too. Here, Exmortus wrap up proceedings with three more notably varied instrumentals, finishing up with a very metal classical piece.

The first two are skimpy because they always have been, in the form of short movie soundtrack pieces. First up is Beetlejuice, the Danny Elfman theme you expect but rocked up massively with cool soloing over the refrains. Next up is Bernard Herrmann's memorable theme from Psycho, with shrieking guitars a highly appropriate replacement for shrieking strings. What's notable is that these two themes, written by other people for other purposes, fit well both with the original Exmortus songs here and the one classical track to follow.

That's Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, one of the most metal classical pieces of music ever written, both in its sound and its imagery, as it's an attempt to visualise a witches' sabbath. Exmortus aren't the first band to record it as metal but this version feels a lot closer to the original than the Accept version on Symphonic Terror. That's because the guitars of Conan Gonzalez and Chase Backer sound so much like a string section. They really do sound like witches in gleeful and frantic flight. Shenanigans are surely afoot. It's glorious stuff and it's a great way to wrap up a memorable EP.