In Extremo - Kompass zur Sonne (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Medieval/Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 May 2020
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The last "medieval metal" band I reviewed, Cantus Levitas, are from Germany, and so's this band, because it's a big genre there. In Extremo weren't the first such band, as they were preceded by both Corvus Corax and Subway to Sally, but they've been around for a quarter of a century now and I'm a little shocked that I haven't noticed them until now.

While they started out with acoustic albums, this is high energy folk metal kind of like your favourite Renaissance Faire troupe covered by Rammstein. I remember the Mediæval Bæbes doing a great version of Salva Nos but it didn't sound remotely like the one here. I have no idea how many of these songs are originals and how many centuries old compositions, but it's telling that, if it's a wild combination of both, they fit very well together here.

Maybe I need to dive deeper into the languages used, because while it might seem that the songs are all in German, they likely span a slew of languages. According to Wikipedia, In Extremo have sung in at least sixteen others and not just the obvious ones like English, Latin and French, but others that I haven't even heard of like Ladino and Occitan, not to mention Old High and Middle High German. Salva Nos certainly isn't in German, being in Latin.

Similarly, they also play a wild range of exotic instruments in addition to those you might expect from a metal band. I'm not unversed in folk music so I'm well aware of citterns, hurdy-gurdys and shawms. However, lead vocalist Michael Rhein, usually known as the Last Unicorn, also plays darbuka, davul and binioù, amongst others, and I had to explore Wikipedia to find out what they are. The former two are drums and the latter is a bagpipe.

The early songs here are powerful folk metal songs with strong melodies and they're drive by Florian Speckardt's decidely not mediaeval drumkit and the crunchy metal guitars of Rhein and Sebastian Lange, but with bagpipes alive behind them. There are currently seven members of In Extremo, four at least  playing Germany bagpipes and those of other countries. The first two songs are fantastic, Troja and the title track, but Lügenpack and Gogiya upstage them both.

Both up the energy levels even more, especially the latter. There's a lot of gypsy punk in here and I wasn't too shocked to find that Napalm labelmates Russkaja, who guest on Gogiya, are a Viennese band who describe what they do as "Russian turbo polka metal". Salva Nos is energetic too, if not to those degrees, but it's also the only song I knew before listening to this album, so it stood out for me alongside them.

Not everything is this up tempo, because it would be a wild album indeed if it was, and the songs that slow down and allow us to catch our breaths don't catch my heart in the same way. Biersegen comes really close but high energy just isn't everything that In Extremo do and there's a lot more to be found on this album.

Schenk nochmal ein gets neatly plaintive and Saigon und Bagdad gets quirky. Narrenschiff has a catchy backing chant of a vocal and Wer kann segeln ohne Wind features a severe but still beautiful harp, as well as a deep and dark guest vocal from Amon Amarth's Johan Hegg. Reiht euch ein ihr Lumpen has a Celtic groove to it, even though it's in German, and there's throat singing to kick off Biersegen.

In short, there's a lot here to enjoy and there's a lot behind it too, given that this is their twelfth studio album, four with this line-up. Discovery is a wonderful thing.

Karfagen - Birds of Passage (2020)

Country: Ukraine
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives | YouTube

Even a mere five months in, this year has already been a stellar one for the genre of prog rock and I've only just discovered Karfagen, a Ukrainian band, who have put out a new album and a box set in 2020 already. Founded in 1997 by Antony Kalugin, they ddn't get round to actually releasing an album until 2006 because he was at school when he put the band together. This counts as their eleventh studio album and its Prog Archives rating ranks second only to its predecessor, last year's Echoes from Within Dragon Island.

Antony Kalugin may actually be the only primary member in the band nowadays, and he wears a lot of hats. He plays the keyboards that dominate the album, provides vocals and percussion, composed and arranged the whole thing, mixed it and co-produced it to boot. Others appear to come in when requested and I believe the guests here are the same as on the prior album, providing vocals and the usual instrumentation, plus flute, bassoon and violin.

I found the result a sheer delight, because it's as instrumentally varied as we hope any prog album will be but much lighter than most of what I've been hearing lately. The mix lets the keyboards lead with the drums and bass back a level or two, clear but not as overt as most producers would make them in 2020. The feel is as bright and weirdly pastoral as the fantastic cover art might suggest, with its fairytale buildings and anthropomorphic birds. It's a trip to a quiet and different fantasy world, through what Kalugin calls a "symphonic art rock suite".

There are five songs on offer here, but the vast majority of the album finds itself taken up by the first two, halves of the larger title track that runs almost forty-four minutes. After that, there are three further short pieces to wrap things up, which last less than fifteen minutes between them. These betray a set of influences a lot more overtly than Birds of Passage, which is more of a journey through a few of them to somewhere new and enticing.

Given my mention of the word "pastoral", you can be sure that there's a lot of Genesis here but I'd suggest that there's more Camel and quite a bit from Jethro Tull. Certainly the vocals on Birds of Passage (Part 1) remind of a lighter Ian Anderson in the way they're delivered. I don't know if it's Tim Sobolev or Kalugin himself, but the soft female voice is Olho Rostovska's. I felt very comfortable in their presence, even though both sing in English. The lyrics appear to be poetry, from Longfellow and Blake.

It's very easy to get caught up in the music here and totally lose track of time. The title track doesn't feel like it runs on for three quarters of an hour and the album as a whole doesn't feel like it takes up an hour. For my part, I was too busy being carried along through this fairyland countryside enjoying the delights on offer through the windows. I felt calm and patient as the carriage ran on, knowing that I was safe and we'd arrive wherever we might be supposed to at some point. The album is me enjoying the ride.

Kalugin isn't credited for guitar, so it's someone else providing the intro to Birds of Passage (Part 2). It's a flowing solo guitar, part Steve Hackett and part classical guitarist, and it's as playful and delightful as anything else here. Eventually, the band join in and find a groove. This second part is easily less experimental than the first, but it still has its moments of more ambitious composition. This time it's flavoured Camel and King Crimson, with maybe some instrumental Boston added in for extra taste.

With so much of the album taken up by the excellent two parts of the title track, it almost seems unnecessary to mention the three short pieces that it eventually hands over to. Spring (Birds Delight) is neoprog, its intricate vocal delivery and clean but powerful guitarwork worthy of comparison to an early Marillion. Sunrise is drenched in world music so comes off more like Dead Can Dance. That leaves Birds Short Introduction to wrap things up in a smooth way. Maybe it's introducing us to the next album.

I don't want to overdo the word "delightful" but a lot of the music crossing my path is dark and even the prog rock I explore is much darker than this. I know what I'm putting on next time the world wants to tread on me and I need a pickup. It will be hard to come into this with a bad mood but not leave in a good one.

Paradise Lost - Obsidian (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 May 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I've had a lot of favourite bands in my time, from Adam and the Ants to Iron Maiden, Nuclear Assault to Celtic Frost, but Paradise Lost have surely been my favourite band for longer than anyone else. It can't have hurt that I was a seventeen year old metalhead in Halifax in 1988 when they formed, but part of it is surely that I like bands to evolve over time and few have evolved more than Paradise Lost, and in such influential ways too.

Gothic utterly blew my mind when it came out and, quite frankly, it's still doing that today. Draconian Times is utterly fantastic and I've never sung myself so raw as the secret Paradise Lost gig in Bradford as The Painless a heartbeat before that came out. One Second could well be the most ambitious and influential a change in style as I've ever heard. Those are three of my favourite albums of all time and they're all by one band, but they're wildly different musically.

I did lose track a little in the new millennium, but I've been fascinated to see a resurgent Paradise Lost bringing all their sounds together into one, a heady mix of doom/death, gothic metal and new wave that's unmistakably them. This isn't consistently as heavy as Medusa three years ago, not by any leap of the imagination, though it does find those levels at points. However, it finds a more delightfully varied mix.

Oddly, the opener Darker Thoughts didn't grab me, even with such a versatile dynamic play, but Fall from Grace and Ghosts did and they help to define the album to come. The former is old school doom/death done to perfection, while the latter is fundamentally gothic, an Andrew Eldritch style vocal laid over that recognisable Gregor Mackintosh guitar. Two songs later, Forsaken may be the quintessential new Paradise Lost, mixing everything into a coherent song and making it work.

As a Paradise Lost fan going back to the demo days, it's great to hear those different eras manifesting themselves within the same songs. Forsaken makes that easy and so do Serenity and Hope Dies Young, all these songs catchy but heavy, crushing but melodic, synthpop but metal. What's perhaps most telling is that we can imagine these as well as metal songs synthed up or pop songs heavied up. Whichever way they evolved, they work and they work consistently within the framework of the album.

Perhaps the best example is the way Ravenghast builds. It starts out synths all the way, raindrop keyboards against swirling mist, but power chords set up a dark side and a fretboard slide segues into a achingly heavy slow riff. It's one of the heaviest songs here and one of the slowest, but not once is it forgetful of those synthpop years. Even as vocalist Nick Holmes lets out a death roar for emphasis, Mackintosh's keyboards keep delicately tinkling around him.

I like this new Paradise Lost. This doesn't blow my mind the way that Gothic did, or even Draconian Times for that matter, but it's a strong album with a host of highlights, pun not intended. Even lesser songs, like The Devil Embraced and Ending Days, are growing on me. And, who knows, while this band's helped to create at least two genres already, this combination of styles might just make it three. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

Ron Keel Band - South x South Dakota (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Southern Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Most people know the name of Ron Keel from the hard rock band Keel, who sold a couple of million albums during the eighties. Some might remember a little further back when his band Steeler featured a new in the US guitarist called Yngwie Malmsteen. He's actually explored a lot more territory than that. If an album carries the Ron Keel Band moniker, it's likely to be southern rock, and if the band are IronHorse, they're going to be country. He even sang in a Brooks & Dunn tribute band in Las Vegas.

This isn't just a southern rock album, it's a southern rock covers album and not of particularly surprising songs either, though fortunately not the most obvious. You're not going to hear an attempt at Freebird here, not Whipping Post and not Green Grass and High Tides, though frankly the best versions of those songs would be longer than this entire album. You will, however, hear a selection of songs another level down in fame, including five from number 16 to number 22 on Swampland's list of the the Top 25 Songs of the Southern Rock Era.

They're not bad versions, played a little closer to Keel's traditional hard rock than any of the original bands got. The first highlight is probably a late Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Red White & Blue, which they wrote after 9/11, so hardly a gimme from their old days. It runs over six minutes, which gives it time for Dave Cothern to play some wild southern guitar. It's a strong cover and Keel's voice fits it well. He does well on Don't Misunderstand Me, the Rossington Collins Band song, with the welcome aid of singer Jasmine Cain.

It has more trouble with songs that we know by heart. For instance, he's not bad on songs like Rockin' into the Night or Flirtin' with Disaster, songs so iconic that I wouldn't have to tell any southern rock fan that the originals were by 38 Special and Molly Hatchet. However, he doesn't bring anything to them that wasn't there already, so they're inherently lesser versions. Songs this iconic have to be completely reinvented the way that, say, Johnny Cash did to be worth the effort. These don't do that.

And that knowledge makes me wonder why he chose some of these songs. So many bands have covered the Allman Brothers Band's Ramblin' Man that a close take like this is pointless. Once COVID-19 is gone, you'll be able to waltz into any bar in the deepsouth on a Friday night and hear a local band playing it just as well. The same goes for Ghost Riders in the Sky, a 1948 song by Stan Jones that's covered by someone else every year, most obviously for Ron Keel by the Outlaws, and Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, which was originally an Ed Bruce song before Waylon & Willie got hold of it.

And that means that this is a fun album, sung and played well, but an almost entirely disposable one. I'm not remotely going to suggest that you're going to get this quality out of any random cowboy-booted karaoke singer in a dive bar in Jacksonville but the overall effect is pretty much the same. This was clearly fun for Ron Keel but, to us, it's always going to be a set of songs that we've heard for years done almost but not quite like the originals and that's never the best thing to take away from a covers album.

I'm all for Ron Keel becoming the "Metal Cowboy" that he's calling himself nowadays. He does it well and his band are clearly very talented musicians, especially evident on rockers like Flirtin' with Disaster and the Atlanta Rhythm Section's Homesick. However, if he's going to do more than front a tribute band or play all his gigs at Alabama wedding receptions, he needs to write a heck of a lot of new songs and find a way to reinvent the old ones that he's covering.

Tokyo Blade - Dark Revolution (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 May 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I was in bliss to discover a couple of years that Tokyo Blade aren't merely back, but they've been back, everyone in the band has been with them a long time (even if some have taken breaks) and they still sound damn good. I gave their 2018 album, Unbroken, an 8/10 and I think I'm going to have to follow suit with this one, if mostly for a different reason.

While Unbroken was a solid album elevated by a few standout tracks, this one is an completely reliable creature, so consistently good that maybe only the opener, Story of a Nobody, manages to stand out. That's a classic, from its riffs to its hooks and everything in between. It's a real anthem too, a song that feels like it could, under the right circumstances, change a life for the better. Nothing else here matches it, but every song is still worthy and they warm the soul like an old friend we haven't seen in forever.

Like Unbroken, this is so traditional that it feels like it could have been written back in the eighties. The production is modern, amping up the bass end far more than could have been done back then, but songs like The Fastest Gun in Town, Crack in the Glass and The Lights of Soho are so quintessential for that era that my brain segued from them into Friday Rock Show incidental music so Tommy Vance could tell us what they were.

It's rooted, of course, in the NWOBHM sound, with the vocals clean and the guitars heavy but melodic. The band's standard routine is to kick in with a solid riff, then add vocals with the guitars chugging along in support under them. I like the mix, but I'd have preferred it to not be quite so driven by the bass. The guitars and vocals could have been a little higher.

Tokyo Blade flirted with a lot of genres back in the day, not all of them a good call. This is mostly mid paced heavy metal with few attempts to add an extra element into the mix. The only song that feels a little different from the rest is Perfect Enemy, which is a little more recent in style and with a hint of glam in the vocal. It reminded me of Saigon Kick, which is far from a bad thing.

Crack in the Glass marks Tokyo Blade at their fastest, something I remember from their heyday of Night of the Blade, on which four of the five current band members played; the only one missing from that classic album is singer Alan Marsh, though he was in the band before and after it. However, even if it's the fastest song on the album, it also features the most introspective midsection, which is a delight.

What impresses most here is what impressed me most back in the mid eighties, namely the way that Tokyo Blade can be so powerful in delivery but find such reliable hooks. The riff on Story of a Nobody that opens the album is heavy stuff indeed, like a fast oncoming brick wall. Yet there's still melody and Marsh finds a memorable hook for the chorus. The only other band I can think of that can merge power and hooks this well is Metal Church and there are a few points where that comparison does manifest, even if this is very British in outlook.

Outside of Story of a Nobody, which keeps on getting better and better every time through, I'd be hard pressed to pick a favourite as different ones leap out with each listen. The title track was an early favourite of mine, until The Lights of Soho took over. I'm five or six listens in now and The Fastest Gun in Town is really impressing me, as is Voices of the Damned. This is the sort of album where every track might end up my favourite at some point.

Kudos to the band for staying so strong across so many years. Alan Marsh may deliver those solid hooks, but it's the twin guitar assault of Andy Boulton and John Wiggins that really underpins this album. They're focusing more on riffs than solos here, though I enjoyed the latter too. However much great material is behind them, maybe the night of the Blade is still to come.

Trivium - What the Dead Men Say (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Melodic Death Metal/Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I find that I want to avoid most trendy modern American "metal" bands, as I don't buy into them being anything of the sort, but Trivium are surely the exception that proves the rule. Sure, they're trendy, modern and American, but I don't have any problem in calling them metal.

Now, there are plenty of metalcore trappings still in their sound, perhaps most overtly on Amongst the Shadows & the Stones, even if it's also surely the fastest song on the album, with a pace that outstrips most of the songs on the last few American thrash albums I've reviewed. However, plenty of the also instrumental passages here made me forget I wasn't listening to an Iron Maiden album and some vocal ones move firmly into Pantera territory. Either way, that's metal.

It helps that Matt Heafy's vocals are clean as often than they're shouty, if not more so. The album's bookends, the title track at the beginning and The Ones We Leave Behind at the end, are probably my favourite songs here, with Heafy singing clean for most of both of them. Even on songs with more shouty vocals, such as Catastrophist, the majority of those vocals are still clean and the shouty parts are used as contrast.

Those bookends do what all metal songs want to do: they gallop and they rock and they soar, with a twin guitar assault bringing in melodies. It shocks me that people complained when Heafy ditched screams for clean vocals, because the latter sound so much better and, what's more, give him a heck of a lot more opportunity to bring nuance to his songs.

Bleed to Me may not gallop as much but it rocks and soars too, while somehow sounding like it would fit well alongside all those trendy modern bands on a trendy modern ClearChannel radio station. The Defiant follows suit, with the most Maiden-esque backing of anything here but with shouty aggression in the vocals. It also builds rather strongly towards its end, most courtesy of new fish Alex Bent, who's been the band's drummer for four years now.

I rather like the mixture that Trivium are playing with here, a traditional metal sound that I've enjoyed for three and a half decades and change mixed with that nu American sound that I usually prefer to avoid. They've managed to find a palatable balance that I can enjoy and, by my third time through, it wasn't just the bookends that I was digging but the songs in the middle that explore that palatable balance.

Both Bleed into Me and Sickness unto You are catchy and commercial songs I'd have no problem seeing as singles (which the former was), but they're never weak. The Defiant is more brutal. Scattering the Ashes even adds a slight gothic tinge to its vocal line. I won't suggest that this is the most varied release of the year but it's a lot more varied than I was expecting it to be.

I should add that the melodeath part of the trivium, along with thrash metal and metalcore, is still here, flavouring most of these songs. The most overt may be Bending the Arc to Fear but it's there throughout the album. However, Trivium has clearly turned into more of a straightforward heavy metal band with some metalcore influences and that's no bad thing. Frankly, the more I hear them evolve in that direction, the more I like them.

Ryders Creed - Lost Souls (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 May 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Ryders Creed are a relatively new band but they've made quite the impact in just a few years. This is only their second album but their debut was voted the best of the year by the New Wave of Classic Rock community in 2018 and, only a year later, they won the Young Blood award at Hard Rock Hell. What's surprising to me is how mature this all feels for something from such a new band.

Now, young bands can put out insanely good debuts. I heard Diamond Head and Guns n' Roses in the Ryders Creed sound and both their debuts are legendary, but this doesn't sound like early work from those bands; it sounds like more mature work. Think To the Devil His Due instead of Lightning to the Nations. Think Civil War instead of Paradise City. It's no accident that, while there are three minute songs here, there are three more over six.

I listened to this a lot and let it sit with me and soak into my brain. I'm able to conjure up a lot of bands from whom Ryders Creed have clearly taken influence, but they don't sound like any of them. The Diamond Head, to cite one example, is evident often in the songwriting decisions and the riffing of guitarist Myles Cooper, but Ryders Creed don't sound like Diamond Head any more than any of their other influences. Cooper gets a two minute solo interlude in New Beginnings and it's the most unlike NWOBHM that he gets on the album.

Mentioning Diamond Head and Guns n' Roses may have raised an eighties sound in your brain and that's unfair. There's a lot of the seventies here, again in the songwriting but also in a lot of the quieter moments, where they hint at Barclay James Harvest and Wishbone Ash. There's much from later decades too. While vocalist Ryan Antony doesn't sound much like Eddie Vedder, there is a lot of Pearl Jam in his delivery. There's even a hint at stoner rock, though nowhere near as much as Baleful Creed. The result is a contemporary sound. Had this been released in 1975 or 1985, it would have been very out of place.

It's notable that many of the bands I could cite are metal bands, right down to the Metallica section midway through Memories, but Ryders Creed aren't a metal band at all. They're emphatically a hard rock band, but one confident enough to trawl in metal sounds. While this is more hard rock than Metallica ever got, that part in Memories hints at a song as old as Fade to Black and it feels natural in this material.

If there's an overt flaw, it's in how deep this is. While none of the eleven songs leap out as obvious singles because the band are more interested in a deep development of themes than radio friendly hooks, this still sounds good on a first listen. There are points that are clearly fantastic, as different as the guitar solo on Memories, the funky intro for Chasing Dreams and the epic last minute of Believer, but every one of these songs sounds better on a second listen and a third and so on and so on.

The catch is that I had trouble taking them away with me. I enjoyed them and appreciated what they were doing as I was listening to them. This is almost designed for critics who want to dive into the material and explore beneath its surface. It's a great album for me. Put any of these songs next to those of any currently popular band and they're going to stand out as superior.

It even feels catchy, again while I listen, as there's no lack of melodies, hooks and memorable riffs. However, these songs didn't play in my head after I put the album down. They certainly weren't playing there in the mornings when I woke up. And I still wonder why. Unleashed is a great song, featuring a strong vocal melodic line over a strong riff and it builds wonderfully to a strong chorus. Why is it not stuck in my head?

And that's why I dropped my rating from the expected 8/10 to a still worthy 7/10. The talent here is palpable and I want to hear more. If they can nail the earworm thing, they'll be unstoppable.

...and Oceans - Cosmic World Mother (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Symphonic Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 May 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember ...and Oceans from the late nineties when I was exploring EMusic during its unlimited downloads period. They were a symphonic metal band at a time when there were a lot of such creatures but, unlike many of them, they continued to evolve their sound, so far that they ended up changing name to Havoc Unit to reflect just how far that sound had shifted into an industrial vein. In fact, ...and Oceans was a rename too, because they were previously a death metal band called Festerday. They returned to Festerday in 2013 and now are back to being ...and Oceans, at least for this album, their first under that name in eighteen years.

It's very mature material, highlighting that this return to an early phase in their musical development comes with newfound knowledge. I don't remember those earlier albums incredibly well, but I know that they didn't strike me either as quickly or as fully as this one did. Even on a first listen, this is clearly another strong step forward even during a stylistic look back.

A good part of the joy is in the mix, which is exactly right for this sound. It's a fast and heavy album for the most part, the drums galloping and the vocals blistering, but with neither ever too high in the mix. There's menace in the guitars, from the very beginning, but even at their most menacing, a constant attention to melody is evident. Everything is built in layers and a subtle synth layer that first becomes obvious on Vigilance and Atrophy, then builds with the album, emphasises those melodies.

Those layers add up to a wall of sound, as is so often the case in the black metal genre, and the result is sometimes a glorious cacophony, so much going on at the same time that, even though we delight in being bludgeoned by the melodies, we have to take a step back to fully appreciate what the band are doing. It's not as musically dense as, say, Fleshgod Apocalypse, but there are songs here where I found myself following half a dozen different things at once playing together in strange harmony. It's mature on Five of Swords, but most obvious in the beginning of The Flickering Lights, as it rolls into motion like an orchestra tuning up and evolving into a piece of actual music.

In Abhorrence upon Meadows is easily the most atypical track here, being an almost entirely solo piano piece, but there are hints of synth swell and an artificial aging is applied, along with a few sound effects. It's the most overt nod to steampunk, which shows up in quieter moments here and there. I shouldn't be too surprised. Even though this consistently exceeds the speed levels at which Victorians thought women might explode, there's also polite elegance, a quiet confidence and a pride in creation, all routine steampunk attributes. I wasn't expecting that on a Finnish black metal record.

What I was expecting was a lot more overt industrial and electronica touches but they're few and far between, showing up nicely on the title track and in the abrasion that kicks off Helminthiasis. Just because the band know how to use those sounds, it doesn't follow that they're all applicable here, but I thought this would be notably more of a merger of symphonic black metal with industrial than it is.

I'll be listening to this a lot more and doubt I'll figure out which tracks will abide as my favourites, but depths of the title track surely ensure it will be among them. Five of Swords, As the After Becomes the Before and the slightly calmer The Flickering Lights may follow, I believe, but there's so much here that I can imagine songs rising and falling in my esteem with the majesty of icebergs shearing off a host continent to be all the more overtly noticed.

I have no idea what this band will do next, whether they'll follow this up with more ...and Oceans material or whether they'll choose instead to revert back to Havoc Unit for a second time or even Festerday for a third. Whatever they end up doing, it's going to be interesting because they've never failed to move forward musically, whatever genre they happen to drift into.