The Riven - The Riven (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

I've been going on and on about how every band I hear from Finland sounds a lot unlike every other band from Finland. Well, the same really goes for Sweden and I've been reviewing a few Swedish bands here lately. Soilwork aren't remotely like Arch Enemy, even though they both play melodic death metal. They're both even more different to Last Autumn's Dream, Candlemass and Soen. What's more, all the above are nothing like The Riven.

The Riven are hard to define because they're really just a rock band with a versatile take on the genre. I could easily see them being called hard rock but that does bring connotations that don't always apply. I'd lean towards blues rock a little more, because the blues is always there right behind whatever sound they're conjuring up on any particular track. They go with heavy blues rock, but they're hardly Cream, even when they really rock out on tracks like The Serpent or Leap of Faith.

So what do they sound like? Well, let's see. Far Beyond starts out in a folksy Led Zeppelin style but soon escalates into a down home Americana crossroads song before adding in a sort of middle eastern edge. Edge of Time is much more lively and has a seventies glam edge to it, sewn over the Thin Lizzy-style backing. Shadow Man kicks off with a ska feel, then launches into straight rock before dropping into a much quieter section. Finnish Woods is initially neatly subdued, but it escalates very well indeed as a soulful atmospheric track that eventually really rocks out.

Does that help? Not really, except to highlight that every one of these sounds feels natural for the band. Remember what Blondie albums sounded like? They had a consistent feel that was quintessentialy them, whether they were playing reggae or rap or punk or pop or whatever came to mind, each track having its own tangent. That's the sort of agreeable diversity I heard here.

Also like Blondie, the Riven are comprised of a very capable collection of musicians who will always be overlooked because there's a beautiful blonde with a powerful voice in front of them. Here, that's Charlotta Ekebergh and she shines very quickly, with some glorious sustain on The Serpent, but she shines brighter as the album runs on and her and its versatility starts to show. Her voice is rooted in the blues rock tradition, with a real power behind it even when it isn't trying. When it does, like on the slower blues song, I Remember, it really soars, highlighting some superb breath control, and, like Joss Stone, most people guessing her race will be wrong.

This is far from a one woman band though and the Riven thankfully don't make the mistake of giving that impression through their name. Everyone has their moments to shine, but surprisingly few because they're too busy working together. Max Ternebring gets the most memorable spotlight with a fantastic bass run on Finnish Woods, which is both the obvious standout here and the track that allows most individual expression.

Arnau Diaz is the only guitarist here and he seems to revel in having a new sound for each track. He doesn't seem to do much that's flash but, if you listen carefully to what he is doing, there's an impressive variance in technique going on. Olof Axegärd is the drummer tasked with keeping up with wherever they're all going next and he does an admirable job, even though that's a pretty tough task.

I like this a lot. I could go on about the positives all day and, given that I've been listening to this album all day, you'd have heard me if I had done a livestream or whatever the trendy kids are doing nowadays.

The negative side is less obvious. Really, the worst aspect here is the fact that everything here is what feels like a strong deep cut. It's a really good album but the best songs, like Finnish Woods, aren't obvious singles and the mainstream public doesn't seem to want that Blondie style of diversity any more. If your current song doesn't sound like the last one, then you must have sold out.

The Riven are absolutely not sellouts. They're a band who sound fabulous on their debut album (they issued an EP a couple of years ago) and ought to sound glorious on the next few. Bring 'em on!

Týr - Hel (2019)

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

We may be taking the high road while Týr take the low road on the opening track, Gates of Hel, but they're no Scottish band. Sadly I missed them in 2018 when they came through Arizona but that also meant that I missed the protestors because Týr are the only other reason, with whale hunting, why anyone here has even heard of the Faroe Islands.

I'm English so I've heard of the Faroe Islands but I haven't heard as much of their premier musical export as I should. I have enjoyed what I have heard and this feels accomplished from moment one. It's Týr's eighth album and the six years since their prior release is twice as long as they've ever taken before. They must have been bursting with material and it shows because a wild energy is obvious here. They want back into our ears.

It's also a long album, running a full seventy minutes, though everyone in the band starts out frantically, as if they want to reach the end tape as soon as is humanly possible. For a while, this is a album in the form of a sprint, though it does that through sheer power, catchy vocals and moments for all the band members rather than any attempt to leap into thrash. It's as fast as I'm aware the band have gone.

Gates of Hel and All Heroes Fall are both full of busy runs for each band member. Gunnar Thomsen gets some very prominent runs on his bass, but the guitars of Heri Joensen and new guitarist Attila Vörös don't miss out on the fun and neither do the drums of new fish Tadeusz Rieckmann. The band definitely start out as they mean to carry on, with an heavier and much more overtly power metal feel but less folk elements.

Ragnars kvæði shows a different style. This is a slower song, progressive musically and with completely different vocals, not only because the song is sung in what I presume in Faroese (all but two tracks are performed in English) but because it's done more as a chant than a song. The style fits absolutely in the folk metal arsenal but it's the only time it's hauled out here in what is otherwise very much a power metal album.

That goes for Joensen's vocals as much as the admirable instrumentation behind them. This is lively stuff, as both folk and power metal often tend to be. I had to pause this my first time through after a dozen tracks and the silence to which I returned seemed much deeper than what preceded the album starting. It's an album that moves into your house and makes itself very comfortable indeed.

The question, of course, is whether it'll move back out again with just as little invitation. I've heard impressive albums that command our attention and impress on every front but which vanish off into the distance as soon as we turn them off, as if we'd never heard them to begin with. On a first listen, the biggest problem here is that the sound is very consistent from one song to another, with only Ragnars kvæði doing anything particularly different.

With eight tracks over forty minutes, a consistent sound really isn't much of a problem, if that sound is good, which it certainly is. With thirteen tracks over seventy minutes, however, a little variety is needed and I was keen to find out if that variety would show up on a second listen.

Well, some individual tracks do start to stand out a little, but it's not an easy process and many of them still sound very similar. Sunset Shore is a heavy ballad and Against the Gods has some patience to it. Far from the Worries of the World has a more singalong chorus and a folky instrumental chase in the midsection; it also ends well with a quiet little coda that leads into the quiet little intro to King of Time. It may be illusion but there seems to be more soloing later on.

Clearly, though, it'll take more than two listens for these songs to start to really distinguish themselves. If the songs are lessened by sounding so similar, the good news is that they're all good songs. There isn't a duff track here and, heard outside the framework of the album, each and every one of them would impress.

I like this new faster and heavier Týr and the future seems bright for them. Now, let's not wait another six years for the next album!

Black Vulpine - Veil Nebula (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Stoner Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Oh, I like this! It's very heavy stuff, somehow seeming slow even when it isn't, like on the opening track, Limbus, which retains a plodding style even at speed. The music is a wall of sound and it really doesn't want to quieten down so we can hear the vocals, which are clean and impressive but don't always feel the need to fight for dominance. When they do, they win, and it's glorious.

And it's that contrast that works so well. This is heavy stoner metal that isn't really interested in being doom, even when it kinda is. The beginning of Hollow is doomy enough for Candlemass and there are inevitable nods to Black Sabbath all over the place. It's much more interested in simply being heavy, which isn't quite the same thing, and it succeeds on that front with aplomb. It's bludgeoning stuff and I've never wanted to be bludgeoned quite so happily before.

The vocals, however, have a sweetness to them that floats airily around the music. They're the Beauty to the music's Beast, reminding that however dark things get, there's always light up there somewhere. What's so impressive is that while they spend quite a lot of time underneath the music, they find power whenever they want to and, when they do, often during the more overt choruses, they have it to spare. They soar as often as they float, even if its with a similar sense of melancholy underpinning it.

I was only able to find the first names of the band members, so I presume that those delightful vocals belong to Sarah, with Daria backing her up at points. Daria also plays lead guitar, with Sarah backing her up in turn, while that powerful rhythm section is Stefan on bass and a rather patient Rudiger on drums.

I've let this play on repeat for a few days and it's become something of an old friend. Just like I think of any particular friend as a person rather than a combination of different attributes, I think of this as an hour long slab of heaviness called Veil Nebula rather than eleven individual tracks. If I force myself to focus in for the sake of this review, it's still more to elements than songs. I'm not sure I could even pick a favourite. Minotaur maybe.

To be fair, some of them could be seen as positive by some listeners but as negative by others. Most obviously, the Jaws theme shows up at the start of The Panting for no reason I could fathom, played on what sounds like a very resonant cello. It sounds good but its familiarity is offputting. Later in the same song, there's a bizarre backing vocal that sounds like crowd noise. Initially I thought it was a cacophony of cymbals, or maybe a demonic choir, but it's just vocals. It adds a wild texture and it's neatly enigmatic but it's abrasive.

I could call out the enticing woodblock in A Lucid Dream or the calamitous feedback ending to Haunted House or the evocative duet between guitar and voice on Minotaur. I could call out an epochal riff but there are epochal riffs almost everywhere here. There's so much to be found if you're willing to explore. I wonder what you'll find and whether it's what I found.

The only traditional song on offer here is Liar, which is bouncy and catchy and its own master. It's still agreeably heavy but the music holds back for Sarah's voice can stand out above a complementary riff. Then again, there's little in the way of lyrics and Sarah alternates with some sort of whisper, so the catchiness may be partly due to the majority of the singing being a chorus.

If you like your stoner metal so heavy that it's carved in granite and raw enough to be right off the bone, but with vocals that are sweetly powerful, then Vein Nebula ought to be right up your alley. It's certainly right up mine.

Alcotopia - It Hits the Spot (2019)

Country: Lithuania
Style: Heavy/Speed Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

In digging deep into the rock/metal world of 2019, I'm already starting to see a number of trends. Genres aren't the be all end all definitions that they used to be, because bands are merging them every which way. Groups who split up in the eighties are coming back and recording new material. And it doesn't seem like anything is unfashionable enough to avoid any more.

I've been digging all these trends and the latter has led me to search for styles that seemed to have died a death as unfashionable long ago. Case in point: speed metal, that faster evolution of NWOBHM led by clean vocals and blistering guitarwork. Thrash adopted it and evolved it further, but I was a fan of early eighties speed metal and I'd love to hear new equivalents to Razor and Exciter and Agent Steel that benefit from modern production.

Alcotopia looked promising, especially given that Armageddon kicks off with suitably tasty vicious guitars, but they're not entirely what I'm looking for. They are up tempo throughout and they leap into high speed at points, such as in Faceless Man and F.Y.E.S., as well as late in Mountain King and early in Alcotopia, but they never stay there. When they do, I felt it like I used to thirty years back, but those moments were far too fleeting for my tastes.

While they're fast at points, the majority of It Hits the Spot is spent at the mid-speed level, so it's more heavy metal with a periodic fondness for speed. Asylum of the Damned is a fantastic example of this; It plays rather like the intro to a speed metal song, after the speed has been promised but hasn't yet arrived, or like the inevitable bridge, when they slow things down temporarily to give us a breather.

All that said, I can only judge this on its own merits, not what I might be looking for in it. It's not a bad album, with the band tight enough to make this work. Laurynas Karka delivers clean vocals with a slight rasp, akin in many ways to Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello. The accent's very similar, if a little less overt, and they have similar tastes in lyrics, as the band name and album title suggest. The title track is a spiritual successor to Gogol Bordello's Alcohol.

Yes, it's often as juvenile as it might seem. It's foul mouthed for no good reason other than to be foul mouthed, as if the band think that will render them cool to a particular audience. The final track, More Beer, could have been recorded by Tankard or Wehrmacht back in the eighties. But hey, as they point out in the title track, maybe that hits the spot. It surprises me but shrug.

There's an odd moment of higher culture late in the album, because the song called Mountain King features music from Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, a very recognisable classical piece. I'm used to Accept doing that but Alcotopia sound more like Testament on this song with lyrics akin to Manowar and that makes it a little odder.

It's very welcome, of course, but it's out of place with the, shall we say, less intellectual material? Holy crap, that sounded classist, but it does feel a little strange to see a Lithuanian band who have built an image on the concept that 'drunken reprobate' should be a life goal suddenly launch into Norwegian classical music.

This is mostly fun and it's done capably with clear musical flair. My neck got a little bit of a workout and the album never bored me, even when I was rolling my eyes. But it's not the workout I was hoping for.

Iron Savior - Kill or Get Killed (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

A couple of readers have asked for more power metal here at Apocalypse Later and I hope this, following The Three Tremors and Avantasia, will do the trick for now. When I think power metal, I think Germany and Iron Savior are one of the more prolific bands over there nowadays.

This makes a dozen albums for them (if we include Megatropolis 2.0) and their heritage goes back to that man Kai Hansen, who was everywhere for a while. A number of the songs they wrote when they were named Second Hell made it into the early Helloween repertoire and saw release on the first EP and Walls of Jericho. They became Iron Savior in 1996 with Hansen on guitar for their first five years and, having lost some of the speed they had at the beginning (but not all of it), they're quintessential power metal.

Piet Sielck, one of the power trio back then, is still working vocal duty and playing guitar. Jan-Sören Eckert joined in 1998 and has contributed to every album except the first. More recent additions are Joachim Küstner on guitar and new fish Patrick Klose on drums. Even though the latter has only been with the band since 2017, they sound like they've been playing together forever.

This is accomplished stuff, but musicianship aside, the question that always comes into play with power metal is whether it's memorable enough to rise and be seen above all the other albums by all the other bands out there, most of which are also populated by very capable musicians.

My answer right now is that I'm not entirely sure. What I'll say is that it's certainly a very good album but I'm enough out of touch with the competition at the moment that I'm not sure how high the bar they need to reach has been raised of late.

There's plenty of good news. The album kicks off in excellent fashion with the title track, which has all the bombast and blister that you might expect from the genre (along with a bit of narration in the middle that's shot with a good deal of humour on the official video). It also finishes just as capably with Legends of Glory, perhaps my favourite song on the album, not only because of that old school chug.

In between are another eight tracks, all but one being of consistent length and style, each of them filling its four to five minutes with driving drums, melodic guitar runs and smooth, emotional vocals with catchy hooks. That one exception is Until We Meet Again, which at almost eight minutes has a couple of minutes on everything else here, but those couple of minutes don't really add much. It starts out softer and there's a progressive section in there but it doesn't work as a longer, epic version of everything else.

If there's a problem with the album, it's that consistency, as these tracks start to blur together somewhat, especially around the middle where the most memorable tracks can be found. To suggest which one of them is the catchiest would warrant some sort of battle royale between From Dust and Rubble, Sinner or Saint and Heroes Ascending. All of them have solid shots at that title!

While they're all highlights, the tracks in and amongst them suffer a little for being similar but lesser versions of the same sort of thing. I've taken a couple of runs through this album and the tracks do distinguish a little on a second listen but, while plenty stand out, a few fade away.

I like Kill or Get Killed and I especially appreciate its quality given that it's the band's fifth album in six years. Kudos to Iron Savior both for doing an impressive job and for doing it so often.

The Hong Kong Sleepover - Butcher & Bolt (2009)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 25 Feb 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Struggling through a poor batch of albums this morning, this one stood out for a terrible reason but I'm happy that it did. The reason? The Hong Kong Sleepover's vocalist clearly has a single goal in life, to sound as much like Lemmy as is humanly possible. Dedication is important and he's pretty damn close. The band don't always sound like Motörhead, but he could still easily land the vacant slot in any tribute band.

Sadly, I don't know who he is because, wherever I look, I can't track down a current band line-up. The last I can find dates back to 2013 and lists Ted Renner. Maybe he's still their vocalist and maybe he isn't. The only name I can find consistently is Miller High Life, which ought to be the honorable fifth band member given how much of it they seem to drink.

It's actually quite appropriate because the Hong Kong Sleepover are a band surely best seen in a bar after a few pints. There's nothing innovative or even particular notable here but they do what they do well and they do it very consistently. The first seven tracks here (of ten) are all heads down, no nonsense, balls to the wall, heavy rock 'n' roll.

Fire & Blood sets the stage with strong but slow, repetitive riffs and the Lemmy-esque vocals very much to the fore, never buried in the mix. It's no classic of the genre, but it rocks and it entertains. What It Means is much of the same, but a little more lively. Grousers and Grip play in the same sandpit and are decent enough songs too.

The double whammy of Ode to Ian Fraser and The Hell of Being Cut to Pieces is where the band really go for the full on Motörhead sound. The latter is surely the closest that I've heard anyone sound to Motörhead since the last Asomvel album. The Hell of Being Cut to Pieces has an interesting lyric and a strong solo. It's easily the best thing here thus far.

Except next up is Roller Derby Girls, which is a real peach of a track with a fantastic mid-section that betrays another overt influence, Brownsville Station. I'd bet that the Hong Kong Sleepover have been listening to their debut album and The Martian Boogie stood out for a contemporary update. I'm totally sold on the idea of Lemmy singing for Brownsville Station, just as a wild concept, but actually hearing it made my day.

To sum up thus far, the album started decently and got better in the middle. Sadly, it starts to fade away again at this point though, weirdly as if the band have forgotten what style in which they've been playing.

Salty About Mike starts out fine, with a decent enough Black Sabbath vibe, but it's too long and it loses us towards the end. It's almost two minutes longer than anything thus far and it has nothing to offer to justify that. It's also a bit of a change in style, something that comes back to mind on the other long song, the album's closer, Black & White. This is a much more interesting track, undeniably the most interesting on the album, but it does feel weird when it veers off into a progressive section 43 minutes into an otherwise very stylistically consistent 47 minute album.

I liked Butcher & Bolt, though I have no idea what the album title means. I see that the Hong Kong Sleepover have been around since 2007 and have two other albums to their name, Mustard and Bolshevik Firecrackers, released in 2008 and 2013 respectively. They're one of the least original bands to show up here at Apocalypse Later (maybe only Razzmattazz have them beat on that front) but most of this is good material and some of it's great.

The sad part is that they're based in Macomb, IL, and aren't likely to find themselves touring too far away from there. That's a shame because I'd like to see what these guys sound like live with a few beers inside me. Real beer, that is. None of this American champagne stuff.

Motorpsycho - The Crucible (2019)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Feb 2019
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

OK, I freely admitted when reviewing the new Mythopoeic Mind album that I'm no expert on Norwegian prog rock but, seeking out more of this stuff, I was hardly expecting to stumble on a band who have been around since 1989 and have released a, well a metric shitload of albums. Check out their page on Wikipedia and look at all those albums and double albums, even a triple!

I have to say that I adored them immediately, because Psychotzar, the nine minute track that kicks things off, does so with a gorgeous gong. This is old school metal, very much in the Black Sabbath vein, but with an enticing psychedelic edge that especially comes into play during the quiet section. Even there, this is heavy stuff and I dug it a lot, even if there seems to be a kazoo riff that kicks in seven minutes into the song? I presume that it's not a kazoo riff but, whatever it is, I love it!

Amazingly, Psychotzar is the shortest track to be found here because it's quite clear that the reason Motorpsycho have made so many double albums is that they write long songs.

Lux Aeterna, which runs just shy of eleven minutes, has folky bookends and it sounds like there's a flute and a saxophone behind the rumbling bass and drums that are just aching to erupt. This one builds very nicely until the fantastic pause five minutes in that allows the band to break into acid jazz territory with the sax getting notably wild. It doesn't reach the levels of sheer insanity that John Zorn favours, but it comes closer than anything I can name. This all reminded me of early King Crimson, and that's never a bad comparison to be able to make.

And that leaves us just one to go, the title track, which runs over twenty minutes because at least five are taken up with a routine (but very nice) prog rock intro that eventually finds a Yes vibe once it gets going, with a prowling bass and a set of questioning themes. The middle section is rather experimental, if not as out there as its equivalent one track earlier, and it's grounded by a hypnotic underlying riff.

One warning I should throw out here is that at points, the title track gets really quiet and I mean REALLY quiet. I had this album turned up loud but I could still hardly hear the quiet sections.

Now, I loved the first two tracks. Motorpsycho may wear their most obvious influences on their sleeves but these tracks are consistent enough to work together on an album like this. The band had already sold me on their name, given that they, like a few others, sourced it from Russ Meyer, but they sold me on their music here too.

I didn't like The Crucible remotely as much, which is a shame because it's over half the album, but I didn't dislike it. It just seemed too long and indulgent and yeah, I know I'm talking about a prog rock band here who have obvious King Crimson, Genesis and Yes influences. It could easily have lost a quarter, even half its running time, without changing its impact. And an approach like that would have left room for another track.

Two 8/10 tracks and one 6/10 that's as long as those two put together means that I need to split the difference, I guess, and go with a 7/10. I'm eager to dip into Motorpsycho's back catalogue and see what wonders can be found. This is just an introduction to me and I'm very thankful for it.

Tuatha de Danann - The Tribes of Witching Souls (2019)

Country: Brazil
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Feb 2019
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Back in January, I reviewed Battleblood, a Viking metal EP from a band who live a heck of a long way from Scandinavia. Heiteitr are from Colombia and it was a weird feeling to listen to a band so apparently authentic but who may well never have set foot in the northern hemisphere. Well, to continue that sort of twisted logic, here's the most Irish EP I've heard in quite a long time. Which county are Celtic folk metal band Tuatha de Danann from? Well, they're not. They hail from Varginha in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Yeah, that threw me too.

What impresses me most is that they aren't just a clone of an actual Irish folk metal band, like say, Cruachan. Certainly there's a lot of that sound here, but this band demonstrate that they know more about Irish music than just folk metal because they dig deep enough to find not only other sounds but the emotional resonance that drives the Celts.

For instance, there's a real joy in the title track that kicks off this EP and it's the joy that comes from the wildness of Ireland and the community that only partly tames it. The whooping and hollering behind the music has meaning, not just as expressions of freedom but as an accompaniment to what is really music for dancing. There are jigs here and pipes but there's also a punk edge that's more akin to the Pogues than Flogging Molly.

Warrior Queen switches to a female lead vocal to sing what is quite clearly a rebel song, born not of wildness and freedom but of oppression and a will to fight back. It's led by a driving beat and what I presume is a mandolin. Tan Pinga Ra Tan, presumably named for a drum rhythm like their debut album Tingaralatingadun, has that female vocal aim for a plaintive tone. It's a yearning song with a neatly contrasting harsh male vocal behind that clean female and it's the only time we really hear an accent that isn't Irish.

Outcry certainly never sounds anything but Irish. It's another rebel song but an acoustic one that's driven by mandolin, pipes and drums. For a while, it's emphatically the Pogues but it drifts into the other obvious influence that I kept hearing here, which is bizarrely Yes. Oh yeah, this Celtic folk metal band from Brazil have a real progressive edge.

That Yes influence can be found most in the thoughtful Turn and the lively Conjura. The former has progressive keyboards dancing behind the rest and the song follows them into prog territory. Conjura often sounds as if the Dubliners wandered into a rock recording session and just joined in with the jam for a while. The Yes side kicks in a couple of minutes from the end with the vocals and keyboards highly reminiscent. It's fascinating stuff.

I've left Your Wall Shall Fall until last, even though it's the EP's middle track, because it's the most metal song here and it also shows that the band don't just listen to Celtic music. The vocals remind of Martin Walkyier of Skyclad fame, for no better reason than they are indeed Martin Walkyier. He wrote the lyrics and sang them and it's appropriate for him to be literally at the heart of this EP.

The original Tuatha dé Danann were the ancient Celtic gods, so that name is a heady one to live up to but this band of Brazilians do a notably fine job of it. Now, I need to track down their four full length albums and see how time has changed them. Three of them were recorded in the early years of the millennium with only 2015's Dawn of a New Sun being recent.

And here's where I should probably point you to Tuatha de Danann's YouTube channel because I'm sure you're having as much trouble trying to figure out what Cruachan, the Pogues and Yes sound like together as I would have been had I not listened to this first. The tl;dr version is that it sounds damn good.