Finsterforst - Zerfall (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Aug 2019
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Finsterforst are one of those bands that you either love or you leave alone and this fifth studio album isn't going to change that. The band's name is a reference to the Black Forest of their home state of Baden-Württemberg and their music is almost as impenetrable as the same Black Forest was to many of the characters of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales. It's not remotely as densely packed as the Fleshgod Apocalypse album I reviewed back in June, but it's a formidable album nonetheless.

Part of that is the fact that this album runs almost eighty minutes long and yet features only five tracks. Never mind Wut and Fluch des Seins, which are both over ten minutes long, and Weltenbrand, which comes really close, Ecce Homo is amazingly longer than all three of those put together. I've reviewed many entire albums this year that run notably shorter than that Ecce Homo on its own! And this is folk metal, not a genre known for its long tracks.

Much of it is the structure of the songs, though. These are immersive slabs of music that aren't remotely constructed out of verse, chorus, verse. That isn't to say that there isn't melody, because there's melody everywhere; it just doesn't lend itself to visualisation of a big picture. There's variety too, plenty of it, but it's spread out over all the tracks so that it fails to help distinguish Weltenbrand from Fluch des Seins and Wut from Zerfall.

In fact, I've listened to this for much of the day and I continually fail to notice when a song ends and another begins, rendering this into one eighty minute track in five relatively similar movements. If that's not your thing, especially on a folk metal album that isn't all accordions and bagpipes and fiddles, then you're likely to hate this with a passion. If you listen to a sample, enjoy the sound and like the idea of immersing yourself in it for an hour, then this is done very well indeed. They're the Opeth of folk metal.

Me? I kind of dig it, even though it'll be a brave radio show that tries to play any of it. If they do, it ought to be Weltenbrand, which starts to make itself known after half a dozen listens, both for many heavy sections and a neatly quiet and intricate section six and a half minutes in. The production is excellent, the drums perfectly placed in the mix. The bass sets the tone and the heavy guitars aid it. The vocals are a highlight, Oliver Berlin ably mixing harsh, clean and choral styles to good effect, though he has help on the latter. Those choral parts sound like monks, sometimes being devout and sometimes clearly testing their mead.

I have a feeling that another half a dozen times through will reap rewards. There's a lot here waiting to be found and I'm already finding some of it. I doubt, however, that any but the diehard fans are going to expend the energy to explore this over weeks. And, you know what, I think Finsterforst are OK with that.

Blindead - Niewiosna (2019)

Country: Poland
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

The more I listen to bands from Poland, the more I realise just how varied and deep the rock scene must be over there. Case in point: Blindead, whose sixth album came out in April without me noticing. It's unlike any of those other Polish bands I've been enjoying. Frankly, it's unlike much of anything I've heard. While a few comparisons do come to mind at points, I'm not used to hearing all of them on the same album.

Niewiosna, the eleven and a half minute title track, for instance, spends five minutes building textures before vocals show up to surprise us. The music continues to build anyway, melodic jangling guitars gradually fading into the wall of darkness that grows up around them. Drums are punctuation not accompaniment. The vocals are spoken rather than sung and spoken in a recitation as if this is performance art or sardonic ritual. Sans vocals, this could be a new wave song played at a third normal speed. With vocals, I'm really not sure what it is but it had my attention.

The Bandcamp tag that makes most sense is "experimental", but it's musical experimentation not noise, even when the album gets extreme. They also use tags as varied as alternative, electronic, post-metal and sludge. There's a lot of truth to each. What makes the band special is how they can combine it onto a single album and have it make some sort of demented sense.

It was Niepowodzenie where I started to grasp the point. It's the shortest track here by far, at just under five minutes, but the music is both perky and hypnotic. It's also extremely rhythmic, not unlike some of the work of Philip Glass. More importantly it's cinematic, even without the performance art vocals. It felt like something Wong Kar Wai might use if he ever made a giallo. There's suspense but there's dynamism and hints of story, like some young lady is being chased, but by what?

By this point, I'd looked them up. If Google Translate isn't misleading me, the band's gigs are often soundtracks to the films of Roman Przylipiak. I'm finding a bunch of short films on IMDb by him but I haven't seen any. I have to say that I'm interested in doing so now.

And what film would Potwór się rodzi accompany? It feels experimental from the outset, reminiscent of Andrew Eldritch jamming with Coil in slow motion. But then, it gets all doomladen in the midsection, more like Swans, but with some ritual drumming from Konrad Ciesielski and snippets of conversation. If that wasn't enough of a change, it soon adds in the electronica and goes off the deep end. Are we in a serial killer's basement watching him warm up his power tools? This is heavy stuff but not in any usual way. At least the end has a pulse.

I was completely hooked at this point, because the rollercoaster was moving faster and the seatbelts had evaporated and what is Ani lekkomyślnie, ani bezboleśnie? It's pure punk, with snarled vocals. There's Iggy Pop in there and Lou Reed and some sort of demonic creature. It's like someone was forced to transform into his inner beast during an Einstürzende Neubauten concert, while Celtic Frost watched.

Maybe that's what happens. When I put the song titles into Google Translate, I saw a progression. It didn't know what Niewiosna means, but the others are Failure, The Monster is Born, Not Reckless, Not Painless and Spring. Maybe it's a concept piece with science going wrong, creating a monster, trying to deal with what it is and eventually finding a dark solution.

I'm less fond of that last track, Wiosna, which is too subtle until, well, it isn't subtle enough. It gets even more out there, but this is magnetic and engrossing stuff across the board. Most people will hate it, of course.

Killswitch Engage - Atonement (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Aug 2019
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Beyond having one of the coolest frickin' band names ever conjured up, Killswitch Engage are also one of the few radio-friendly modern American rock bands I'm still able to enjoy. No, I'm not likely to be reviewing the new Slipknot or Korn albums and I'm not too likely to be listening to them either. This is a different matter. This bunch are a real metal band underneath the hardcore elements.

Regular readers know that I'm hardly the world's biggest metalcore fan, but this outfit do it right. They have all the energy and attitude required but they mix it up a lot too and don't see melody as a four letter word. Sure, there's a lot of that shouty metalcore vocal that tends to leave me dry, but it's not everything here. To accompany a variety of styles in the backing, there are clean alternative vocals as well, plus fast thrashy vocals, slow churning vocals and even what almost sound like death growls as The Signal Fire kicks off.

That latter may be because there's a notable guest on it. He's Howard Jones, who was the vocalist for Killswitch Engage during the decade between Jesse Leach leaving the band and returning to it; fans ought to thrill to hearing both of them on a single track. The other notable guest is Chuck Billy, of Testament fame, who appears on The Crownless King. He's only one reason why it stands out to me though. It stalks. It churns. The pit will find serious motion to this one!

This is Killswitch Engage's eighth studio album, their first since Incarnate in 2016, but they're almost as regular as clockwork. They've never gone less than two years between albums and never more than four. It seems to work for them and nobody's complaining so far. Well, not about that. I have a really odd complaint about this album. There's a 'Yeah!' that gets thrown out like punctuation in a James Hetfield manner; it's all over the album and it's an annoyance to me, albeit because Leach doesn't sound like Hetfield elsewhere. The 'Yeah' is a real distraction.

Otherwise, this is solid stuff for metalcore fans, with an agreeable amount of variety. The Signal Fire starts out thrashy, then gets all puffed up in the chest like metalcore so often does, then finds its groove in time to set up a melodic chorus. Know Your Enemy is a bouncy piece, just what metalcore is supposed to be. Bite the Hand That Feeds has some real energy to it with an attitude strong enough to spit through the speakers. Take Control is one of the more straight forward metal tracks and it's just as effective, with a decent solo to boot. I wouldn't change the radio station if this was on.

It's been really interesting to see just how nu metal split the wider genre onto two completely separate paths: there's modern American radio metal and there's everything else. With this album, Killswitch Engage continue to be a rare band to be able to walk, with head held high, on both those paths. I'm not seeing a need to atone for that.

Anfel - Echoes of Buried Hope (2019)

Country: Russia
Style: Symphonic Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 12 Aug 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | VK

It seems odd to suggest that this is polarising music and then come down in the middle, but I'm going to do just that.

Anfel are an unusual band, not least because they're often the solo project of Denis Lobotorov, who goes by Dionis. He's Russian, from Tver on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and he mostly plays symphonic gothic metal.

I say mostly because the steady release of new albums—eight of them in the seven years from 2009—stopped in 2015 so that he could concentrate on re-releasing each of them as solo piano performances. That's pretty gothic, I have to admit, but it's neither symphonic nor metal. I should add that some were instrumental to begin with, but this still marks a return from reworks to new work.

It also marks the debut as lead vocalist of Elvira Lobotorova, the guitarist of Blackthorn, who goes by Alchemida. She'd also previously played guitar on the prior Anfel album, Icy World, and I believe she does so here too. Dionis play bass. I presume that the rhythm comes courtesy of a drum machine, but I can't confirm that.

I liked this immediately and a good portion of that is Alchemida's voice, a soaring creature that seems to sing even slower than she does. The music is clearly symphonic, each song finding a swirling groove that I'd be surprised to find isn't the product of synths rather than an actual orchestra. I don't think Anfel has that much budget. Alchemida soars over it but she's part of it too, as if the music is clouds and she's floating on them.

What surprises me is that, as overblown and emotional as the music is, the vocals make it sound somehow patient and restrained, not something we tend to hear in this genre. It's lush material, music to be enfolded by. There's real melancholy poured into it, but it refuses to be too weighty. And that's a good thing.

What may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective, is that it's crazy long. Sure, there are only ten songs here, but six are over ten minutes and the average is only just shy of that length!

Sometimes that's certainly good. The opening song, And Our Proximity Create Only Chaos, doesn't feel remotely long at eleven minutes. It just continues to get increasingly exquisite, the soaring vocals of Alchemida at the fore and the harsh ones of Dionis rumbling underneath her to provide texture. It has to be said that, while there are plenty of instrumental sections, this is all about that contrast of voices.

Sometimes, however, it's bad. Dawn on the Ashes of Our Senses may get where it needs to go, but it takes its sweet time about doing it and it really has no business being nearly a quarter of an hour long. The whole album can be actively listened to or set off in the background for a pleasant environment but songs like this one do test our attention.

And this is where it's going to get polarising...

To fans, of whose number I'm now one (while acknowledging that the album is too long), this is often hypnotic stuff, the vocals lulling us as the drum machine speeds up and the synth strings swirl around. I've had it on in the background for a couple of days now and I seriously feel better for that.

However, to non-fans, this is going to seem interminable. They'll complain about how songs never end and don't vary much either, the groove found two minutes in to any song being the same groove found ten minutes later as it wraps up and, arguably in the next song too and the one after that. It does sometimes seem like a fourteen minute song is actually a four minute song with the key parts looped, but that may be overly cynical.

So which are you? Well, if you're interested, I'd suggest that you sample the track, And Our Proximity Create Only Chaos. If it knocks your socks off, this will be a must purchase. If it doesn't, then this really isn't going to be for you.

The New Roses - Nothing But Wild (2019)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Aug 2019
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The New Roses, who hail from Wiesbaden, Germany even though they don't sound like it, have been building a serious name for themselves over three albums and a lot of touring. This is number four and it's so full of energy that it might just explode in your hand. My only disappointment was that I heard the best track on it first, on Chris Franklin's Raised on Rock radio show, so it was all downhill from there.

Fortunately, it doesn't go very far downhill. If nothing's up to the quality of Down by the River, that doesn't mean that the other dozen tracks aren't a seriously good batch of songs. From the opener, Soundtrack of My Life, which is a six pack of Monster packed into three minutes of rock 'n' roll, Nothing But Wild does its level best to thrill us with music that's clearly new but just as clearly rooted in the classics.

One major compliment I can throw out is that, while I caught bits of a wide variety of rock artists in here, this band really don't sound like anyone else. I might, if you twisted my arm, raise Airbourne as a fair comparison, but that reflects on their shared approach more than anything else. The New Roses may have a little less AC/DC in their sound but it's still there, especially in some of their more relentless songs that don't want to stop for breath.

Down by the River is a great example of how they mix things up. It's a sort of Rick Springfield story song, but heavier and there's a lot of Scorpions in the melody of the chorus. There's glam rock riddled throughout the title track and there's a punk pop urgency to Unknown Territory. There's southern rock in The Bullet and more both country and AOR in The Only Thing; I spent a while wondering if it was more likely to be covered by Bryan Adams or one of those generic hunks in hats with twangy accents. To be fair, though, the crunch on the guitar elevates it past that sort of half insult.

Put it all together and it's very New Wave of Classic Rock, with songs like As the Crow Flies hard to describe in any other way. The band are certainly looking backwards, not just to a single style but to an entire era of music history. However, like some of the other bands wearing that banner, they're bringing those sounds into the modern era in a consistent manner to make the blistering hard rock fit alongside singalong clap-a-long songs like Meet Me Half Way, with clever lyrics like, "Don't be my partner, just be my partner in crime."

I haven't listed the band members, but that's because this is so much of a team effort and it's the songwriting that stands out first. Let's just say that nobody lets the side down and they all clearly had a lot of fun putting this together. If it doesn't feel too long at thirteen tracks, it's got to be fun, right?

Tomb Mold - Planetary Clairvoyance (2019)

Country: Canada
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 19 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I hear a lot of good about Tomb Mold. Their second album, Manor of Infinite Forms, featured in a lot of lists of the best of 2018. I was eager to check out album number three. And... I just don't get why they're so adored.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate this, even though I haven't really been a fan of old school death metal since I was diving off Autopsy and Obituary stages in my Morgoth sweatshirt back in September 1990. It was a new genre back then, extreme and brutal and enticing. However, I didn't stay with it for too long, because there were local bands like Anathema and Paradise Lost inventing doom/death that sounded much more versatile and interesting.

Even now, I prefer melodic death to brutal death and doom/death to both. I appreciate that Tomb Mold are trying to do something different with it and I liked some of what they did here. Just on the opener, Beg for Life, I like how it ramps up the pace a couple of minutes in. I like how it drops into an acoustic section a couple of minutes later. I like how it stays there, even when the vocals and drums kick back in, for a little while.

But, I don't like the muddy production. I don't like the way a late section involves the tempo changing frequently because it loses the groove. Most of all, I don't like the vocals of drummer Max Klebanoff, which seem unvarying not just through this track but through the whole album. I'm not averse to a good death growl, as regular readers will know, but this isn't what I'd call a good death growl. And so, even on the strong song to kick off the album, I like a lot of it and dislike a lot of it.

The same goes for the rest of the seven tracks on offer. I appreciate how a number of them feature samples or created effects to vary the sound. There's a three minute interlude called Phosphorene Ultimate, quiet noodling with a staticky communication of some description over it, that's neatly cinematic, but I don't know why it's there. The same goes for the two minute outro to Heat Death and the album, which I presume is supposed to be the universe in a downward spiral through some celestial drain. It's all interesting on the first time through but it gets old really quickly.

Given that I tend to look for different sounds even in my death metal, it's odd to say that my favourite parts of this album are the fast ones. While I can't say the production helps them, the band really know how to kick it up on songs like Infinite Resurrection and Cerulean Salvation. I found myself engrossed in the music on these tracks, because it has ambition and energy and, as far as the production allows us to tell, it's tight. I found myself wishing that the album was instrumental so I could hear more of that.

It's only because there are so many instrumental sections that I considered a 7/10 but the vocals bounce it right back down to 6/10. I've listened four or five times through and I'm just not grokking it. Maybe I need to catch a gig sometime and see how they sound live.

Sabaton - The Great War (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Is it a compliment or an insult to suggest that The Great War, which is the ninth studio album from one of Sweden's most recognisable power metal bands (and HammerFall's album comes out next week) is just like the first eight? I think it's a combination of both, because Sabaton score low on ambition but high on consistency. They're one of the most recognisable bands in the metal genre today because you know exactly what you're going to get every time.

For those new to the band, that means that the ten tracks proper here each last three or four minutes, contain a collection of strong hooks and catchy choruses and recount some sort of historical story about war. There's also a further theme to link them, which is particularly obvious this time because it's in the title of the album. For those not paying attention to all those anniversaries over the last few years, The Great War was World War I or the First World War, which ravaged Europe and changed everything.

It seems appropriate to call it here The War to End All Wars and add that it took place from 1914 to 1918 and I'll explain that. While some Sabaton fans rave about the band's knowledge of the history of warfare, this is legend as much as it's history and it's dotted with numbers to make it sound more detailed than it is. It's just the sort of simplified history you might read about in grade school books. Take these stories as rabbit holes and give them worth.

For instance, Alvin York was a real soldier and his deeds certainly deserve to be recounted (he attacked a German machine gun nest, capturing a hundred plus enemy soldiers and killing a couple of dozen). That story isn't 82nd All the Way, which is as shallow as the spooky tales a new parent might read their baby to send them to sleep. But hey, it's chock full of details like 8th October, 1917, the 338th, Hill 223 and the 82nd all the way to make it feel like more than, say, the Gary Cooper biopic.

It's fluff, folks. But it's insanely catchy fluff that attaches its hooks to your brain and refuses to release it until the next song has taken over. The band are so good at these hooks that others bands might kill for the secret. They're so good that every one of the songs here has a real shot at being a single. Four have made it so far: Fields of Verdun, The Red Baron, Great War and 82nd All the Way, and I can't argue with any of those, even if I'd call out The Attack of the Dead Men as the catchiest thing here.

But hey, there's so much that's catchy that we could each compile a top five and still not come up with any of the same choices. Most of it is the vocals, where the verses are catchy, the bridges are catchier and every chorus is a deadly earworm. Some of it is choral, nesting multiple voices together, The Future of Warfare seemingly just as easy for Van Canto to cover as Primo Victoria from their first album in 2005. There's plenty of it in the guitars too and the keyboards bolster those, occasionally going solo, with a lovely Hammond sound at points. The drums do a great job of both accompanying and sounding like rifle shots in the background.

The line up is mostly the same as it was last time on 2016's The Last Stand. Vocalist Joakim Brodén and bass player Pär Sundström have been there all the way from the band's beginning in 1999. The rest of the band changed at once in 2013, with drummer Hannes van Dahl and guitarist Chris Rörland joining at that point. New fish Tommy Johansson replaced Thobbe Englund (who just put out a solo Judas Priest tribute album last week) on second guitar just after that last album and this is his recording debut with the band.

I highlight that because a new guitarist is at least a change. I think it's fair to say that everything else here is exactly as you remember it from any previous Sabaton album. And, as I said at the beginning of this review, it's both an insult and a compliment to point that out. No, there isn't anything remotely new here. Yes, it's just as good as you remember.

Madmess - Madmess (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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