Efnisien - Worn by Sin (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 17 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's another local Phoenix band I haven't caught live yet, but I wouldn't mind at all if they showed up on a local bill whenever this quarantine ends. They play black metal without varying the old Norwegian formula but they're sounding good here, aided by a solid production by Randy Abbott, who's also the lead singer and the creator of the band's logo. And, before you ask, he is not the one man behind this; there are four other musicians in the band, all of whom seem very capable.

It seems odd for this EP to run the sort of length EPs are supposed to run, given that I keep seeing ten minute EPs and forty minute EPs lately, but it really does do what an EP is supposed to do. It kicks in fast, it hurls out five tracks, all of them unfolding at a pretty consistent fast pace, and it ends fast, leaving us with just over twenty minutes to get to know the band. That seems fair, given that this is their debut, and it's a decent intro to what Efnisien do.

Talking of intros, that's the other thing that I noticed right off the bat. Efnisien do like their atmospheric intros, which tend towards horror themes. Gallows starts with a sample that might be from Witchfinder General, but it isn't easy to tell under the screams and roaring flames. Horrors Within has horror sounds to kick it off, surprisingly enough: creaks, roars, heartbeats and the like. Worn by Sin begins with some sort of drug use. Disconnect has layered whispers. Through Agony starts with bells and an atmosphere of dread and adds another sample midway. That's a lot of extras for a five track EP!

Maybe it's to help distinguish the music. There are differences between the tracks but we have to pay attention to find them because the tone is highly consistent across them. I've had this running on loop for a couple of hours and the first four blur together, those intros serving as much as interludes as actual intros. They're almost break points so we know that we've moved on from one song to the next.

It's the final song, Through Agony, that has stood out for me every time. It isn't the only one to vary the speed, but it does it most successfully and I really dug the atmosphere early on as the band play slow behind the rasping vocal of Abbott. Five guys can't play this fast and accurately without being solid musicians but it's Through Agony that highlights that there's more in their collective arsenal than just playing the traditional black metal wall of sound.

For a debut EP, this is decent stuff. I'd have liked more variety but what's here hasn't either pissed me off or bored me to tears after so many repeats. The heat of Phoenix isn't a logical place for black metal to thrive. I grew up in the frozen wastes of the north, even if Yorkshire isn't quite Arctic, and there's an accompanying "grim up north" mindset that fails to translate well to sun-drenched desert twenty degrees south. Perhaps that's why Phoenix is still a thrash city at heart, even if it's gone trendy with -core genres of late.

I hope quarantine lifts soon so that bands can get back on stages and I can catch people like Efnisien live. And I look forward to watching this band as they develop their own identity. This is good bedrock to build on.

Allen/Olzon - Worlds Apart (2020)

Country: Sweden/USA
Style: Symphonic Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Metal Archives
Anette Olzon: Facebook | | Twitter | Wikipedia
Russell Allen: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

After last year's excellent second album from The Dark Element, Anette Olzon appears eager to team up with another foreign musician for a new project. In this instance, it's the American singer Russell Allen, surely best known for his work with Symphony X. As the backing musicians are Swedish, I guess this is more Olzon's project than Allen's, but, if so, she generously gives him a lot of space to shine here.

Of the eleven songs on offer, Allen and Olzon get three each, with the other nowhere to be found. The remaining five are duets, meaning that each singer in the name of the band sings on eight songs but the two musicians who play behind them feature on all eleven. What's more, while Anders Köllerfors sits behind the drumkit throughout, Magnus Karlsson handles everything else. He's been in a whole slew of bands, perhaps most obviously Primal Fear, so he's a highly experienced musician, but he contributes the bass, the keyboards and all the guitars.

He provides an excellent backing track for the singers to strut their stuff over and he does so on every song, so I wouldn't be amiss to rename the band to Karlsson. Primal Fear ventured into thrash, so it's not surprising to see Karlsson get heavy on occasion and I appreciated that. The beginning of I'll Never Leave You is as heavy as this album gets, though Lost Soul has a real crunch too. Even on those two, though, melody remains paramount.

Lost Soul could easily have been an early Dio song, with a different vocal approach. Allen is more than able to taken on that epic Dio style and he's not entirely unwilling to do it here, because he turns that up on My Enemy, but it's not as overt on Lost Soul as it could have been. Another stylistic shift is to folk on I'll Never Leave You but, unlike the latest album from Nightwish, the band Olzon used to sing for, her voice can get fluttery and folky without the song losing its symphonic power metal base.

What surprised me, given that I've long been a fan of Olzon's and I tend to prefer my symphonic metal with female vocals, it was Allen's solo songs that leapt out at me the most. Second single Never Die is like a textbook for any symphonic metal students out there and that's his. Lost Soul is his too, as is Who You Really Are and those are probably my three favourite tracks here.

I think part of it may be that he really gives himself to the material, just as much on his solo songs as the duets. Olzon is more than willing to match him on the latter, and she's easily capable of doing so, but she holds back on her solo songs to focus more on technique than emotion. For instance, she nails One More Chance from the technical side, and manages to reach a truly impressive height in the process, but I'd suggest that, should that one have been a duet, she'd have put more emphasis and emotion into it to follow him.

And all that leaves this an oddity for Olzon. If this is more her band than Allen's, she pretty much handed it over to him. As great as she was on that album last year with The Dark Element's name on it, I'm seeing this one as a Magnus Karlsson album with Allen singing lead and Olzon showing up for some duets. I don't quite think that's how they envisaged it. I'm leaving it with a wish to check out Karlsson's solo album, Free Fall, which features Allen on the opening track.

Nord - The Only Way to Reach the Surface (2020)

Country: France
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Here's another highly varied post-rock album to take you on a voyage to wild and exotic places you've never visited before. It appears to be one song in nine parts, so there's a concept in play here but it's a vague one indeed, a line on the Nord Bandcamp page suggesting at "Love, Frustration, Work, Death and a possible Shining Light in the end."

This journey through life is a real exercise in contrasts, the first half of the album alternating between short quiet pieces in various styles and loud, anarchic ones. The opening track might be seen as an intro, revolving around a heavily effect-laden vocal that's unaccompanied for a third of its running time and only minimally for the other two, but perhaps, if we have some sort of protagonist, it's his or her safe space, a warm moment that could be the last time they remember being truly happy. It's appropriately called Love.

Lulled into a false sense of security, we're then hit by Violent Shapes, as violent a song as its name suggests. A black metal-esque wall of sound leads into a purposeful bass and a progression of noisy indie rock, reminiscent in turns of seventies punk, the post-punks who followed it and even latter day bands like the early Chili Peppers.

Then we're back to peace, with a classy interlude on strings, but then it's right back to the turmoil of life in the form of the noisy, if not quite as anarchic, The Unstoppable, with guest vocalist Désiré Le Goff of Nesseria to add to the tumult. There's a lot here to process in only five minutes, which may well be the point: djenty guitarwork, prog metal, hardcore shouts, even a quiet moment before the song ramps back up to a noisy outro and a pleasant follow-up in the indie rock interlude called Happy Shores.

The album really got interesting for me as it moved towards its second half, when the contrasts stop showing up as numbered interludes but parts of songs with a variety of textures.

Anger Management, somewhat ironically given its title, is less angry than a couple of prior songs. There's an angry section, but the majority runs more to a more mature flow, with synth power chords over tribal drums and a voice half-hidden behind it all. Perhaps, at this point, it's about management not anger, even if it does erupt into a wild solo towards the end.

My favourite song here is We Need to Burn Down This Submarine, with ominous synths leading us into gloriously rolling drums and prog metal fretwork and a surprisingly subdued but characterful vocal. I'm a big fan of the drums on this album, both Thibault's playing and the drum sound that came out of the mix. I also like the playfulness here, with a guitar in each speaker and an exploratory jazzy feel. The growing intensity of Florent's vocals are icing on the cake.

There's one more song, the intriguingly titled 1215225, Part 2, with a neat vocal showcase but little time to fully explore its ideas, before the album wraps up with the epic sixteen minute title track. It's a rollercoaster of a song, bringing more jazz into play and even some surf guitar too, along with a lot more prog of varying heaviness. I didn't grasp the flow of this track, just as I may have only generally found a vague narrative across the album, but I did like these individual pieces for their own sakes.

What's telling is that they're so different in tone and approach that I have to express surprise at not being able to name any more favourites. It's not that We Need to Burn Down This Submarine is the only good song here, because all this is interesting, carefully constructed and well played music. It may be because, as different as these pieces are, I do think of them as parts of a larger piece of music. The title track is, in many ways, the entire album in miniature, a varied and versatile set of musical ideas that somehow feels coherent, even if we can't explain why. And that makes this album a success.

Axxis - Virus of a Modern Time (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Last year, Axxis celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of their debut, 1989's Kingdom of the Night, by releasing a double album of songs from their eight years on EMI re-recorded by the current line-up. Technicaly, they've been a band for longer than that, having started out in the early eighties as Anvil and then Axis, before adding an X to finally attain uniqueness.

I haven't heard them in a long time, but they play their heavy metal with a strong shade of power metal nowadays but, on the basis of this half hour EP alone, I'm not convinced. What's odd is that the reason why changes from one track to another, suggesting that there's good material underneath a variety of problems.

For instance, I kind of liked the opener quite a lot. It's entitled Babylon and it has an Accept-like drive, a decent enough chorus and a good treatment of samples. I say "kind of" because I'd have liked it a lot more if the drum sound hadn't been tinny and the lead vocal hadn't grated. How much of these problems are in the mix and how much the performance? That's a good question because both are less problematic on other tracks.

For instance, on the title track the drums sound beefier and the vocals are commanding and emphatic, even in English (Bernhard Weiß sounds a lot better when he switches back to his native German). There are two versions of Virus of a Modern Time here and they're oddly next to each other. The first runs a little shy of four minutes, while the video edit exceeds five. The latter is the better version, with time to breathe, but both work, if not particularly one right after the other with only a single song following them.

After Weiß, who's been with the band from the beginning, the longest serving member is Harry Öllers on keyboards and I appreciated his contributions. For much of the time we don't notice him, but whenever he does show up he tends to elevate the material. He's the siren on the title track and the pulse on War Games, which ends up sounding a little like heavy Sisters of Mercy. He's surely responsible for all the little gimmickry elsewhere too, like samples or effects. These tend to work pretty much all the time, which is rare.

The other band member I'd call out is Rob Schomaker because his bass is one of the most prominent prominent aspects throughout and he does a lot to make songs like Last Eagle work. Weiß and new fish Matthias Degener are strong on guitar but all the stronger with Schomaker underpinning them. There are nods to a more modern, industrial-tinged guitar style that I don't think help too much but this happily stays heavy metal.

There's good stuff here, but I think I'd prefer Axxis if they showed up on a radio show a track at a time, rather than on a six (sort of seven) track EP, let alone a full studio album. Let's see if that opinion holds when they put out their next full length release. And let's see how much it changes when I hear drums that sound like drums.

Phe - Glooming Dawn (2020)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 11 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

The lines between psychedelic rock, stoner rock and doom metal appear to be more and more blurred with each day that passes. This second album from the Dutch band Phe is all of the above plus a little drone metal too in what is often a hypnotically minimal approach. The clean vocals, adorned only with a periodic echo effect, help make it all feel very accessible too, with hints at Neil Young and Ian Astbury. It's as beautiful in its way as the gorgeous cover art and carries a menace like those incoming clouds.

It starts out heavy on Vortex with both feet firmly in the doom metal genre, but the guitar tone is all stoner rock. The riffs are minimal and there's a strong use of echoing power chords. I'd say repetitive, except that carries a negative connotation and these repetitions are positive, hypnotic riffing to conjure up a trance state. Minimalism and repetition continue throughout the album, until we reach Break a Bottle, which goes so far as to ditch the guitar and drums.

The Lion and the Snake is where the Neil Young influence is most evident. It shows up in the vocals, of course, right down to some clumsy phrasing, but I would suggest that it's in the fuzzy guitar too. When it gets really going, it reminds of one of Young's live feedback jams, like his legendary cover of All Along the Watchtower, but it's a bit too restrained to entirely mirror that. The melody also sounds eerily familiar to me but I'm pretty sure it's from something wildly obscure (a Seer's Tear demo?) that Phe likely haven't heard.

We are Gods and Asylum are as achingly slow and minimal as I've heard stoner rock. Any slower and we'd be at Earth's Hex album but that feels jazzier and less rock-oriented than this. It seems particularly odd to look at the track times and realise that they're only five and six minutes long. They seem to keep us under their spell a lot longer than that. For songs with verses that seem to feature only a single guitar note per line, they're oddly perky and engaging, something that may be due in part to the note frequency increasing with the songs, building at least the former to a crescendo.

And, through all this, the vocals of drummer Ruud remain relentlessly clean. The music would seem to work just as well with death growls, though it would reach a very different result. Keeping the vocals clean may actually be more sustainable for someone who's also drumming, but this approach gives him far more opportunity to vary his inflection, something that elevates songs like The Former Baptist Known as Phe and renders them even more psychedelic.

That's also a fantastic song to showcase Marcel's patient bass, which is all the more beneficial to the album as it runs on. Paul's guitar is generally a lot more obvious, as we'd expect for a guitar on a stoner rock album but the bass shines when underpinning riffs on Break Down and leading the way on The Former Baptist Known as Phe. Closer Break a Bottle is reserved for voice and bass, which is about as minimal as it gets. At least, it sounds like a bass to me, though it could be a downtuned guitar. Either way, it provides a neat repetitive trance-inducing riff for Ruud to sing over with all his attention on the voice, like an accented Ian Astbury wailing out his soul.

I liked this a great deal on a first listen and it got better with a second and a third. There isn't a duff track anywhere on the album and it's hard to pick a favourite track because they all grab equally well. I think I'd have to plump for the builders, We are Gods and Asylum, though Break Down wants a fight to take that title. I have a feeling that, when I come back to this in a month's time, something else might leap out instead because it's that sort of album.

Joe Satriani - Shapeshifting (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Instrumental Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Holy crap, Satch is up to seventeen solo albums now? I clearly haven't been paying enough attention. Then again, the ones I remember most, like Surfing with the Alien and Flying in a Blue Dream, date back to the late eighties. I must be getting old. That makes Joe Satriani even older, of course, but he's not far off sounding young and vibrant here on a baker's dozen of new tracks.

I won't even bother mentioning that his technique is insanely good, because that's been a given for decades now. Suffice it to say that he's still right on point, whatever he's trying to do. What matters now is whether what he's trying to do is going to connect or not. When you're a guitar hero throwing out another instrumental album, we have to do more than admire the technique of a master and get to the point where we just dig the music or the thing's failed completely.

And I have to say that this is a bit of both. For instance, the title track and All for Love are guitar workouts, shock horror, that do roughly what we expect Satch to do and just as well. However, it's the song in between them, Big Distortion, that connected more with me, mostly because it feels like it could be a song, if a vocalist had just wandered into the right studio and decided to jam.

The first really interesting track is Ali Farka, Dick Dale, an Alien and Me, perhaps inevitably given that intriguing title. Ali Farka Touré was a Malian multi-instrumentalist who became not only huge across the African continent but also well-known in certain circles in the US. He made lists of the best guitarists of all time in American magazines. Dick Dale took African sounds too but turned them into quintessentially American surf guitar. Both of them have passed so presumably Satch is paying homage, with the alien just icing on the cake.

It's here that I started to engage with the album, because instead of trying to make a piece of music sound like one thing, Satch seems to be trying for two at once. Teardrops refuses to be only one thing, partnering overproduced blues and handclaps with ominous spaghetti western chords. Perfect Dust is a perky country song but with a central riff right out of action cartoons, as if Chet Atkins was writing for Inspector Gadget. The first single, Nineteen Eighty, starts out like an AC/DC barnstormer and transforms into the sort of thing Eddie van Halen did during solos, experimenting with what the guitar's capable of.

I admire how Joe Satriani went for variety here. A country song like Perfect Dust is a long way from one like Here the Blue River, which is a reggae tune from moment one. Oddly, these two are perhaps the most fun the album has to offer, with All My Friends are Here tapping on their shoulder. I wonder how lively some of the other songs will feel like live, because this is one very produced album, so much so that it feels artificial and somewhat soulless.

I can't fault Satch's talent, which is as obvious here as ever, especially when he hits a groove like on Spirits, Ghosts and Outlaws, but this is so careful and technical that I lost sight of most of it. I prefer his talent to manifest as wild and loose, as if he stepped into a studio and improvised something magical for three quarters of an hour with a solid set of backing musicians trying to keep up. I want his talent to soar free like a creature of the wild. Here it's constrained in a cage with what sound like carefully prepared sonic backdrops and it's a lesser album for that ruthless care.

I'm going with a 6/10 but feel free to add a point to that if you think like a diehard fan.

Fughu - Lost Connection (2020)

Country: Argentina
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Feb 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Prog Archives | Twitter

Here's an interesting album that the band sent me for review. Fughu are from Buenos Aires in Argentina and they play progressive metal, but perhaps not a flavour that you've heard before. They mix older influences with new ones to end up somewhere new and I like it. Interestingly, it starts out without any metal in evidence whatsoever. The first couple of minutes of Peggy are prog rock, pure and simple, but eventually the guitar crunches in and the vocals get even wilder.

Now, I should add that the vocals were already wild. Renzo Favaro sings lead and he does so with theatrical character. I really didn't know what to think when his heavily accented English first kicked in and it got stranger as the opener ran on, continuing down that path as the band move onto Pixel Hero. I got used to it after a few songs, though, and it's easily the most memorable angle to Fughu. There are influences you might expect, like Geoff Tate, but Favaro goes way beyond that. He trawls in David Byrne, Serj Tankian and even Freddie Mercury, whatever style he needs for the moment.

Once we're used to what Favaro gets up to, we start to focus on the rest of the band. Maybe that's by Call Now, where the music almost goes down a folk dance road at one point but takes a wild left turn into a sort of beatboxing segment, which soon evolves into a guitar solo. On the softer side, Stay is driven as much by the enticing bass of Juan Manuel Lopez as anything else, a folk vocal chant notwithstanding. Ay ay ay!

While we notice those versatile vocals first, we eventually realise that the music is just as versatile and the four musicians responsible are tight and apparently up for pretty much anything. The Goat came out of nowhere for me, with a slow but inexorably driving industrial rock aesthetic that actually stops halfway to turn into something oddly ambient, as if the factory being mimicked shut for the night and the band forgot to switch off their sample recorder.

But a lot of these songs come out of nowhere. Told You is a very heavy song, except when it isn't: there are peaceful sections in there, not to mention a quiet introspective one, but the end result is heavy. Right from the Bone is heavy at points too but it's a funky playful track, drifting from krautrock to System of a Down and back again. What If becomes all neo-prog and I dug the instrumental section.

If Stay isn't my favourite, then it's Martian, which is all over the place, like a jazz assassin. Favaro delivers carefully with storytelling melodies, while Alejandro Lopez dominates the instrumentation with an improvisational drum attack. Then it turns into an acid trip, but it emerges vibrant, alive and inquisitive, back at the beginning but with extra layers. Eventually it takes off, soaring around us with keyboards and even operatic vocals, only a carefully plodding bass keeping us remotely grounded.

I'd usually say here that there's a heck of a lot here and the catch is that not everything lives up to the same level of quality. There are certainly a few songs that I don't like as much, but this is one of those albums that's so varied and interesting that the songs I really like might get old after a while but the songs I don't like much might suddenly pop on a fifth listen. I'm only three in at the moment and a few haven't got there yet.

If its weakest aspect is a perceived lack of consistency, its strongest must be that it's engaging enough that I'll easily end up past five listens soon enough. After all, I haven't found the kitchen sink yet and I'm pretty sure it's in here. Everything else is.

Nightwish - Human Nature (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

This ninth album from Nightwish may be one of the more interesting releases of the year but not everyone sees that as a good thing.

Many long term fans, who bought this on day one, apparently hate this with a passion. They're vocally pining for the good old days when Tarja Turunen was the singer for Nightwish and Floor Jansen sang for After Forever. Jansen has been in the band for most of a decade now and has become a legend in YouTube reaction circles, with the live version of Ghost Love Score from Wacken in 2013 quite possibly the most reacted to metal on the planet. "Floorgasm" is a word known by a lot more people than have bought Nightwish albums.

The thing is that this Nightwish aren't that Nightwish from Wacken. The move is away from guitars, drums and, frankly, the whole symphonic metal approach to something as yet not entirely defined but which is clearly more based in the keyboards of Tuomas Holopainen and, I'd say, musical theatre. This album is mostly sold in a two disc edition, the second of which is for a 31 minute symphonic instrumental, in eight parts, called All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World. The third disc in some editions contains the regular album sans vocals.

I'm labelling this symphonic metal because it's Nightwish but it's hardly a fair description for at least half of these songs. Noise, the first single, is surely the closest to traditional Nightwish, even if it experiments with electronica and layering, which makes it odd to me that the diehards hate it as a pointer to where the band are going nowadays. It would have been fairer for them to rail against the second single, Harvest, which is folk music not symphonic metal.

All this said, while this album isn't too close to the Nightwish I remember from the Tarja days, my job is always to review what something is not what it isn't and this is still a fascinating album. For all that it doesn't do a lot of what we expect from symphonic metal, it's musically adventurous with side journeys in a lot of different directions.

One that I wasn't expecting is ambient. For a minute and a half, Music, the opening song, sounds like an orchestra warming up in a building three blocks away that we can only just hear over the wind and the Rainforest Cafe that's in between us. Then it gets folky, hinting at what we'll hear more of later in Tribal. It's three minutes before it finds structure and vocals, and two more before anything recognisably rock arrives. This is apparently a history of music, which makes the whole song highly ambitious and there's an irony in the most overt word being "silence".

One that I was, given that Troy Donockley became a full member of Nightwish in 2013 after six years of collaboration, is folk. Harvest is like something I might expect from a solo folk album from him rather than Nightwish, but a folk element runs through many of these songs. Some are folk, some folk rock and some folk metal. Tribal points out that the band's interest isn't just in British or Celtic folk. Both male and female vocals play along with the drums here. It isn't all Floor behind the mike here.

That leaves one that I kinda sorta expected, which is a strong vein of what we might call musical theatre. I've seen some Floor in that sort of setting before and she's very good indeed at it. Just check out her sing Phantom of the Opera, from the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, with Henk Poort on a Dutch show called Beste Zangers. That mindset of musicals is all over this album, often in the way that the vocals, or the keyboards, tell stories but also in the way that those heavier elements that we're used to are often sidelined.

It used to be that Nightwish songs were heavy because they were a metal band but they're heavy now only when the songs want them to be. Heavy guitars are a particular tone to sit behind the vocals rather than as a default setting. Perhaps my favourite song, Shoemaker, features quiet bits, operatic bits and heavy bits and the guitars only really have a place in the latter. Whey they aren't needed, they're gone, and that's surprisingly often.

I'm not so much a Tarja fanboy that I rail against this. Bands go where they go musically and I'm all for experimentation. I liked this album, and oddly the more theatrical songs more, like Shoemaker and Pan, but it feels rather transitional to me. It continues the band down a road they arguably started on Endless Forms Most Beautiful but it's not the end of that road. They have a lot further to go and, at some point, we really need to stop calling them symphonic metal. That doesn't, however, mean that we have stop liking them.