On Thorns I Lay - On Thorns I Lay (2023)

Country: Greece
Style: Atmospheric Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
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On Thorns I Lay have been around for a long while, even if you haven't heard the name before, but they're not the same band they've been. They were founded in Athens back in 1992, with their first album released three years later, and they've experienced a slew of line-up changes, as tends to be the case. However, until their ninth album, Threnos in 2020, the band remained centered around a pair of founder members, lead vocalist Stefanos Kintzoglou, who also contributed bass until 2017, and guitarist Christos Dragamestianos.

That changed in 2021 when Kintzoglou left to reform the band that became On Thorns I Lay with a few former members. That's Phlebotomy, not to be mistaken with Phlebotomized, the Dutch death metal band. Maybe that's why this album is self-titled. Presumably Dragamestianos sees it as the fresh start the band needs, especially given that the rest of the line-up is very new. Vocalist Peter Miliadis, guitarist Nikolas Paraskevopoulos and bassist Kostas Mexis are each making their studio debuts for On Thorns I Lay here.

If you've followed On Thorns I Lay through those decades, you might be wondering what style they have adopted this week. They started out as brutal death metal, shifted to symphonic doom/death and then gothic metal, before eventually moving back to the doom/death style evident here. The new aspect is folk instrumentation, which I believe shows up here for the first time. There are lots of ethnic instruments on display here and the opener, Fallen from Grace, kicks off with ethnic voice and strings. However, it's still doom/death rather than folk metal, merely with new textures.

I'm a folk metal fan, so I'd be happy with more of the ethnic instrumentation, but it works well as a contrast, replacing the beauty and the beast vocal contrast from some earlier albums. This aspect isn't overused, but it is integral. One of my favourite sections in the album arrives late in Thorns of Fire when the heavy doom/death is accompanied by what I presume is some sort of zither. Many of the songs feature this contrast in some form, especially Crestfallen, both at the beginning and in the midsection, and Among the Wolves, both of which are favourites of mine.

The band's core sound nowadays is an elegant form of atmospheric doom metal, which is slow and crushingly heavy but full of melody, especially through the guitars. It's a rich and immersive sound that, at its best, feels apart from everything as if it's torn a hole in the space/time continuum and dragged us through to somewhere and somewhen entirely new. The death aspect comes mostly in a warm but harsh growled vocal from Miliadis, who I presume is versatile given that he also sings for a crossover thrash band, Double Square, and used to sing for a metalcore band, SlavEATgod.

The instrument that stood out the most for me was the guitar. I don't know how much of that is the work of Dragamestianos and how much his new compatriot, Paraskevopoulos, but the combination worked for me, whether they were soloing, providing melodic lines in a Paradise Lost style or even dropping into an acoustic or ethnic mode, using whatever other stringed instruments were sitting around. I've read that there were many of them, as many as fifteen different instruments, though I have no idea what or where.

The other aspect that deserves mention is that these aren't generally short songs but they're not epics either. Fallen from Grace opens up at just over eight minutes and Crestfallen exceeds it by a single second. The final three songs run seven minutes and varying degrees of change, with only a single track left to serve as the anomaly. That's Newborn Skies, which fails to reach five minutes, a strange and ironic fact given that it's the song with the most symphonic backdrop. We might think that that would be the epic but it isn't here and it's a fair length. The rest of the songs breathe nicely.

I'm new to On Thorns I Lay, as far as I'm aware, and I have to remind myself that this is a new start for them, but I'm interested in what they sounded like previously. The gothic tinges have been far more pivotal to their sound in the past, from what I read, and I've been a particular fan of beauty and the beast vocals since they were invented. Maybe I'll dip into their earlier work once I get back on track with reviews after the events of the past few months. In the meantime, I'm happy with the old school doom/death sound they have here, with heavier death growls and a teasing element of folk added for good measure. I like.

White Canyon & The 5th Dimension - Gardeners of the Earth (2023)

Country: Brazil
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 4 Aug 2023
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I hear a lot of intros on albums nowadays and very few of them have any reason to be there. There are some that serve to grab our attention and some that tease us into what's to come, but it's not particularly often that I hear an intro truly nail both those things but Caminho das Pedras is a fair example of an intro that does both. It sets the mood with a hypnotic swirling sitar that takes us all the way back to the late sixties but adds contemporary touches too, before rolling on into the first track proper, which is the title track. We know what we're getting into, we're placed into the right mood to receive it and we flow on into the rest of the album. It's a great start.

Gardeners of the Earth lives up to the intro too. There's that prominent old school Pink Floyd bass that I remember so well from White Canyon's prior album, Spectral Illusion, and it continues that hypnotic groove. Quite frankly, the more hypnotic this band gets, the better they sound to me. My favourite track here may be Black Holes, which is stripped down to its essence, almost like a garage rock song played at half speed. The guitar is prominent and then the voices, but I end up falling for the drums every time. It's so hypnotic that we could believe the band performed it in a trance. Its closest competitor is Harsh Down, which has been playing in my head when I wake up, and Chapter V - Mental Universe isn't far behind that one.

I mentioned voices plural and should explain that there are two vocalists here, whose names are a mystery to me, but one is male and the other female and both get the opportunity to lead songs. I remember a gothic vibe from the prior album that's here too but to a lesser degree. It's there on the title track for sure, with the male voice taking the lead and the female voice bolstering it like an echo, and it's there in Ancient Secrets of Green Leaf, with the roles reversed. As they move into Howling Pines, though, with the female voice leading the way, and Fireflies Dance, which returns to both singing together, the vibe is firmly folky rather than gothic. Others drift between the two.

Now, whether they're folky or gothic, they're always psychedelic rock with an occasional dip into a more poppy sound. Fireflies Dance maintains the American hippie psychedelia that pervades the album, but it starts out like the Beatles at their most psychedelic and never truly loses that. I love the organ in Howling Pines too, which has that perky sound that tends to belong to the earlier pop songs recorded by bands that evolved into rock music in the seventies. There's more of that within Ancient Secrets of Green Leaf, along with more hypnotic drumming, and this one feels like it could be a fascinating reinterpretation of a Nick Cave song.

In other words, there's a lot here and the songs are neatly immersive. It was clearly going to be an album to recommend from the very beginning but it gets better as it runs on. Those favourites of mine start at the end of side one and roll through side two, all the way to InnerOutside, a fantastic closer that reminds of John Kongos writing and singing for Hawkwind. Then again, I expected a lot from this band because they got a rare 9/10 from me last time out for Spectral Illusion, back in May 2021, even though they lost out for my Album of the Month to a killer Flotsam and Jetsam release.

The challenge for them was always going to be to reach and maybe even exceed the standard that Spectral Illusion set. I wasn't initially sure that it matched it, as the album wasn't as immediate for me, but it was clearly excellent and it grew and continued to grow. It reached the point where it's perhaps only falling behind it because it's not my introduction to the band. Had I heard this first, I might have been blown away just as much as I was when I heard Spectral Illusion. As it is, I'm loving it almost as much. Now I just need to stop listening to it so I can move onto another review. That is not going to be easy.

Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 29 Sep 2023
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I enjoyed Steven Wilson's previous album, The Future Bites, a great deal, but I surely like this more because it feels proggier and spends longer instrumental. As with that release, it's built on an odd combination of influences, namely Pink Floyd and Donna Summer, with the former most evident in the instrumental sections and the latter in vocal parts. However, it's not that simple, as there are other voices here too that do very different things. Ninet Tayab sings on Rock Bottom and Wilson's wife Rotem provides spoken word on the title track, each of them giving this album another angle. However, it only takes a couple of listens for everything to coalesce into a single vision.

I wasn't entirely sold early on. Inclination begins with a long instrumental intro that vanishes into the haze, to be followed by a vocal song that doesn't seem to tie to it to all. What Life Brings is also vocal and it's dreamier, as is Economies of Scale, if we isolate the voices and keyboards from a beat that's glitchy and fascinating. They're not bad songs, but Wilson paints in sounds and those sounds build moods that remind of colours and they're three very different pieces.

Where Wilson truly grabbed me here was Impossible Tightrope, which is the first epic of the album and the longest song on offer at almost eleven minutes. For a few minutes it reminds very much of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, but building quicker and into something more frantic. Everything's a highlight here, the overlapping layers of keyboards reminiscent of mountains behind mountains, but I have to call out the saxophone of Theo Travis. These few minutes are easily my favourite part of the album.

The rest of the song's pretty good too but, a dreamy interlude later, it moves into a territory that's part space rock and part jazz fusion. It's vibrant and perky and reminds of something I might hear from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, not just instrumentally but because there are vocals but no lyrics, just voices as instruments. It's all highly immersive stuff and it doesn't remotely outstay its welcome. I could happily listen to an hour long improvisation on this track.

Much of the reason for that is that, as loose as a piece gets, and Impossible Tightrope feels like it's just a magical nexus of a host of instruments that was spun out of the air, Wilson is a very carefully minded composer. There's a huge amount of energy given to finding precisely the right sounds for every moment on this album. Perhaps the best example of that is Beautiful Scarecrow, which has a glorious and effortless groove to it, but one that grows in complexity the more we examine it, just like a Mandelbrot set.

That rhythm is a highly complex one with a very particular sound; I'm assuming those are electric beats created by Jack Dangers. Behind it, something is soloing, maybe Wilson on guitars or synths or Nick Beggs on Chapman Stick, but I see Theo Travis credited on duduk on this one. Now, is that a Balkan duduk or an Armenian duduk? Reviewing albums does take me down some odd rabbit holes. Whatever it is, it's a delightfully odd sound amidst a whole bunch of other delightfully odd sounds that were clearly placed exactly where they are because of an overarching vision.

This is a highly generous album, running over an hour in its shortest version, with quite the journey for an open-minded listener. It's pop and it's rock and it's electronic. It's catchy and commercial but it's expansive and progressive. It's smooth but it's glitchy. It's crafted but it's improvisational and loose. It's designed for Wilson's voice, both regular and falsetto, but the overall feeling is that his voice and the others he adds are just other instruments. It's a lot of things and the more you let it wash over you, the more you'll catch moments you'll want to explore. Our distance from the music as the title track begins is a clear invitation to come on in and make ourselves at home.

And if you fall into it that deeply, there are other versions available. There's a three album version that includes the regular ten tracks on one disc; a second disc containing remixes of most of them, along with a set of Codex Themes; and a third disc that repeats a couple of those but adds six parts of an audio play. I haven't delved into those other discs yet but it's The Harmony Codex that gets a seventeen minute long take rather than Impossible Tightrope. Whichever version you go for, you'll get plenty of Wilson's solo genius, which I'm appreciating far more than the most recent album by Porcupine Tree.

Kaunis Kuolematon - Mielenvalta (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
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Here's another excellent new melodic doom/death metal album, but it's plenty different from the Wizards of Wiznan album that impressed me so much last week. Kaunis Kuolematon are Finns and they've been around for a decade and change, with this their fourth album. They play their doom/death with a heavy side of black metal, as is perhaps most evident as they start out, with Surussa uinuva. It's sweet and melodic, a sort of subdued epic, until a raucous black metal shriek bursts in and we're suddenly in something very different. It's definitely still melodic but it's heavy, fast and blistering too, more so than I'd expect from doom/death.

Now, this does slow down to find a more traditional doom/death speed, just as Elävältä haudattu does that the other way around, but these tracks enjoy shifting their intensity levels substantially, most playing out in what feel like movements, even though none are identified and only the closer unfolds at epic length, lasting almost nine minutes. Everything else ranges from just under five to just over six and a half, which is a consistent window and not a particularly epic one.

Elävältä haudattu is easily my favourite song here and it has a whole swathe of movements. It's a heavy doom song as it begins, with slow and patient drumming, but that grows into a section with a delicate melody unfolding in front of a building black metal wall of sound. The singer here is Olli Suvanto, the band's lead vocalist, who I presume delivers both the harsh vocals, halfway between a rich death growl and the wicked black metal shriek that ramped up Surussa Uinuva. Then it drops away for a long section with Mikko Heikkilä, the band's rhythm guitarist, at the mike, singing clean with a resonant voice. When it ramps up again, it's very heavy, but it finds another clean moment and ends with a cool harmonisation of voices.

It's a peach of a song and it does a lot. Elävältä haudattu translates to Buried Alive, so maybe this frequent change of movements represents actions in a story. I could see a battle as someone tries not to be buried alive, then to escape, only to fail and experience peace for a while in surrender, a feeling that doesn't last, leading to the heavy and frantic sections later in the song. I don't speak Finnish so maybe I'm projecting considerably here but the musical variation does imply a story and that seems to make sense.

Frankly, the contrasts are what make this special, not just in general but in specific moments. That initial black metal shriek in Surussa uinuva felt like a plane crashing into a hitherto flawless lake. There's a shift from melodic piano to harsh vehemence in Peilikuva that's especially delightful too. This band can shift entirely on a dime and they seem to enjoy the experience. However, it wouldn't be as effective if they couldn't sell both their core styles, the black metal infused doom/death and the peaceful slow and melodic diversions with clean vocals. They absolutely sell both and at points, like in Peilikuva, overlap the two with wonderful effect.

That's three songs and there are half a dozen more to come, starting with the title track, which is Mind Power in translation. However, there's not much more to say once we get past these. This one kicks off with what sounds like an ethnic horn but could be a voice, I suppose. It literally commands our attention and suggests a shift into folk metal that never comes, even with an excellent female voice in the midsection that utterly surprised me. The rumbling behind it and effective developing melody are exquisite atmosphere and then we slam back in hard, as we ought to expect by now.

The rest of the album continues in much the same vein, setting up new contrasts and creating new moments, but it doesn't add anything new. It also doesn't disappoint, though it rarely matches the early sparks of brilliance, and it doesn't get old. In other words, I may not like this as much as I did the Wizards of Wiznan album, but I've happily played it on repeat half a dozen times now and I still find new elements to enjoy even this many times through. It's immersive stuff and it's hard to pull myself away from it so I can focus on another album to review.

The best news is that Kaunis Kuolematon means Beautiful Immortal, which bodes well, and I'm not seeing a line-up change. This was created by the same five people as their self-titled debut EP back in 2012. That sort of thing always suggests a solid compatibility behind band members that allows them to grow their sound without growing apart. Now, I have three earlier albums to seek out and I look forward to the next one.

Dogstar - Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Oct 2023
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Somehow I've never heard Dogstar before. I know the name because I'm a film guy and I'm set for a runthrough of Keanu Reeves's First Thirty films for a forthcoming zine. Of course, I knew that he also moonlights as the bass player in Dogstar. It's merely that I haven't actually heard their music before, even though this is their third album, arriving a heck of a long time after its predecessors, which came out in 1996 and 2000. What I found out immediately in opener Blonde is that they play a very pleasant form of alternative rock, so pleasant that I wondered about where the boundary between rock and alt rock truly is. What side of that arbitrary line are they on?

Now, I don't really care, beyond wanting to slap a vaguely appropriate label into the detail section at the top of my review and to get a grip on where they're coming from. I guess they're alternative enough to count, but only just. Bret Domrose's guitar is just a little bit jangly and his vocal is just a little bit edgy, but only so far as to compare to U2 and Tom Petty and I mean Jeff Lynne produced Tom Petty rather than rockier early stuff. They don't even reach Pearl Jam degrees of alternative early on, let alone the Melvins or the Swans.

The first song that really felt alternative was Overhang, starting with Reeves's bass intro that's an excellent imitation of Peter Hook's. However, while there's definitely plenty of Joy Division in this song, right down to the guitar feedback, it's perkier in the chorus than anything Ian Curtis sang. It still plays unusually dark for this album, though, which is as optimistically cheerful as Reeves tends to be in interviews. The only other edgy moments arrive late in Breach, the closer, which plays with a grungier feel throughout and an unusually harsh backdrop behind certain sections.

Unfortunately, those two songs aswide, the adjectives that come to mind all sound like left handed compliments. This music is nice music, pleasant music, inoffensive music. Yeah, sounds awful, right? Well, the most important thing here is that it isn't. Sure, it's not remotely challenging music but it sounds good and it feels like it has substance and meaning behind it. It's not surface music, even if it's nice, pleasant and inoffensive. It's also well worth repeat listens, which nice music tends not to be because we forget it as soon as it ends. This stays, whether it's due to the melodies, the grooves or the hooks.

And, again unlike most nice music, those do vary across tracks, which find identities of their own to distinguish them. There's a harmonica on Dillon Street that works especially well when Domrose's guitar starts to wail behind it. There's a neat middle eastern flavour to the midsection on Lust, the result I think of a synthesised sitar rather than a real one, but effective nonetheless. Sleep is most overt in its plumbing of early U2 for its vibe. It could be a cover, even though it isn't.

The other song that seems like it ought to be a cover is Lily, because it plays like a pop song in rock clothing. I even found myself thinking about who might have sung the original with its completely different filter and it's broad enough that two of the names I came up with are Leonard Cohen and Cyndi Lauper, maybe the former handling the verses and handing over to the latter for choruses. I can't fail to mention Tom Petty there too, but Domrose channels him on much of the album, which he clearly doesn't Cohen and Lauper. Again, it's an original song.

The result is that I suddenly feel the urge to check out those earlier Dogstar albums, which I never had a yen to do before, even as a fan of Keanu Reeves's films. It wasn't that I don't buy into actors also being musicians, because so many pop musicians whose music I can't stand have become oddly impressive actors. It wasn't that I thought they were some real world attempt to create Bill & Ted's music. I just assumed they played alternative rock in an American style and it wasn't likely to be for me. Now I know that they play alternative rock in an American style but I enjoy it greatly. Even if it counts as nice, pleasant and inoffensive.

Erode of Sadness - Enlivened (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Symphonic Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
Sites: Metal Archives | VK

OK, there's a lot here, especially early on, so I had to start afresh to make sure I was working from the right page. Vampire Coven is a forty-nine second intro that obviously plants the album's feet in gothic territory. The first track proper, The Dark Times, backs that up but initially does so using an entirely orchestral approach. The band eventually join in to add metal crunch but the vocals we hear are truly operatic in a way I haven't heard since Nova Malà Strana back in the nineties. They come courtesy of Vladislava Solovyova who doesn't just deliver a clean soprano like so many other female vocalists in symphonic metal bands; she actually sings opera.

This opener is a clear highlight, Solovyova's operatic delivery being wonderfully contrasted by the clean but dark vocals of Sinner Apollo. The worst thing about the song is that it ends and relatively quickly, under three and a half minutes into something I hoped would be an epic. What's important is that Apollo is the actual vocalist in Erode of Sadness and Solovyova is merely a welcome guest, a side opportunity to her own band, a symphonic metal band called Rabies that I'm especially eager to seek out to see how she sounds there. It's an odd choice, to bring in a guest lead vocalist on the first proper track on a debut album, because it gives the wrong impression, but it's a great song.

There's another guest vocalist, also female, but she doesn't show up until Supernova Remnant, so there are three tracks for Apollo to enforce his presence as the actual lead singer.

He sounds excellent and underlines that the core sound of this band is gothic not symphonic, even though orchestration continues to play a major part in the sound, especially the violins which start out Blood and Grace and are pivotal in Lie to Me. The other important note to make is that Apollo shifts to a harsh voice at points, unless there's another member of the band who steps up at those points to add further contrast. Certainly there's a section in Lie to Me where both clean and harsh voices sing together, an easy enough effect to achieve in post-production but not so easily in a live environment.

That other guest is Evgenia Frantseva, the singer for doom/death metal band Odium Throne, who sings clean here with an almost hoarse emphasis, while Apollo varies between clean voice, harsh voice and an electronically manipulated effect. I love these variations from the band's core sound, though, of course, they're most obvious on the two songs with guests, however often the choir has opportunity to vary the tone. There are thirteen tracks on this album, along with a bonus track and two intros, so Apollo gets eleven plus one and guests get two. It may not help that, as excellent as he is, I'm still thinking of this band as best with both male and female vocals.

But I need to review the album I'm listening to not the album that I'm imagining given one track on it. Apollo's voice is deep and rich, very much in the Andrew Eldritch tradition but with melody more like Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM and 69 Eyes. These songs certainly bear that influence but a heavier one too, from bands a little further afield like Lacrimas Profundere. There's an occasional shift into much heavier territory too, like on Blood from the Cross, which increases the tempo and prompts plenty of grit in Apollo's voice even when he's not singing harsh. If Erode of Sadness often drop into gothic rock on some other songs, this is the most gothic metal they get.

Given that this is a debut album, I wonder where they'll move stylistically. It feels like the majority of songs are gothic rock with rich male vocals, orchestration and hints at harshness, so maybe that will be the whole of their next album. Maybe, though, it's where they started and they grew into a more metallic sound that verges on extreme metal in those harsh vocals and the urgency of Blood from the Cross. Maybe The Dark Times has always been an anomaly, with Solovyova invited not for a general expansion of sound but just because she was there and could add something to it.

Who knows? I certainly don't, but I'll be keeping an eye open for that second album to find out.

Roger Waters - The Dark Side of the Moon Redux (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Oct 2023
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Fifty years ago, few fans of music would disagree that Pink Floyd released one of the pivotal rock albums ever made in The Dark Side of the Moon. It isn't my favourite by them, but it's a gem and it stands up half a century on. Roger Waters was in Floyd back then. In fact, he wrote the lyrics to all these songs, so it seems a little surprising that he would feel the burning need to remember it on its anniversary by re-recording it. Then again, some of my favourite versions of Floyd classics have come through the reimaginings he's given them live, such as Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.

What all that means is that that I came into this with open ears, even though everything I've read about it from those who heard it before me has been negative. It's more different than I expected, almost shockingly laid back; much darker in its reflections on life; and missing not just guitar solos but all of Alan Parsons's groundbreaking samples. It's not so much a solo reimagining of an album as it is a reimagining of Waters's part in it, as lyricist and vocalist, but with everything else cut out. Much of the negativity may tie to that approach, which does seem fishy to me, but there's plenty to praise too.

I wasn't sold early, wondering just what Waters was trying to do with Speak to Me and feeling that he just knocked out Breathe on a first take and approved it without listening back. It's talky and it doesn't seem to say much, more spoken word poetry with subtle accompaniment than an album of rock music. I gradually found myself tapping into his wavelength, though, and got on board. It was Time that did it, because he nails the intonation on this one and the dreamy feel of this version of the song gets under the skin, with its sparse strings and other instrumentation notably below the beat and voice. It lost me a little towards the end when the strings found more prominence, but it was strong for a while, especially during the theremin solo.

Money has its moments too, with the opening word delivered with absolute relish. Again, Waters's intonation is pristine and the words have more meaning here than in the original. However, this is an approach that drags, so the song feels longer than it ever has in this version. Us and Them does little for me vocally, but the guitarwork in the middle from Jonathan Wilson is delightful, as subtle as it is. It can't really be called a guitar solo, but it evokes atmosphere with precious few notes. All the instrumentation follows suit, but if Dave Gilmour is famous for playing one note where others would play a dozen, this seems to deliberately aim at one for each dozen of Gilmour's.

I rather like Brain Damage, though it's as close to a traditional cover as any of these songs get, as driven as it is by the vocals. The backing is subdued, of course, but that ticking cymbal is the same and the subtle theremin and distant organ work very nicely. I'm not as fond of the strings again, a sole instrumental element to disappoint me. Everything else works, as minimal as it is. Eclipse is stronger again, because there's an echo to his deep vocal that's a higher and far more produced voice, presumably Azniv Korkejian's, and the dual voices are highly effective.

So some of this is definitely strong, but it's far from the norm. I can't say that The Great Gig in the Sky is better here, Claire Torry's iconic vocal workout replaced by a wistful reminiscence of a dead friend told in abstract snippets of memory. It works once, because we surely want to know what he has to say, but it gets old quickly on repeat listens. Speak to Me and Any Colour You Like are there and there's not much more to be said. On the Run is missing all its vibrancy and iconic electronica and it's not remotely better for it.

And that leaves this as a curiosity. It's not a bad album. Some of these songs would be praised if we thought they were new. There's some gorgeous production in place to generate the tones behind a few of these songs, like Time and Money, even if the drums remain too prominent. Waters himself improves on his original delivery on a few of these songs, most obviously Money. However, nobody in a parallel universe where The Dark Side of the Moon didn't exist until this version would call out how revolutionary and iconic it is. It's no replacement. Maybe it's a complement. Maybe partially.

Wizards of Wiznan - No Light Has No Shadow (2023)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 29 Sep 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

I wanted to review something doomladen this week but the first few albums I tried out belted right out of the gate or lost me with sub-standard vocals. Four or five in, I found this one, the debut of a doom/death band from the small Swiss town of Nendaz, and it firmly hit the sweet spot for me. It's funeral doom as it opens, taking its sweet time to move but doing so steadily and atmospherically, but it spends much of its time a little faster at the pace you might expect for doom/death, ramping at points, especially late in the album, but never really becoming fast.

Frankly, I was firmly on board by the time that the vocals arrive. There are two voices here, both of them harsh but one easily warmer than the other. I'm not sure which of them is which, but it looks like one belongs to guitarist Marc Dalton and the other to bassist Robin Délèze. If I'm not missing the mark, they're there in that long intro to Seeds of Light adding texture as musical instruments rather than vocals. They certainly do that even when they're singing because texture is a huge deal here, and it's why this album often brought an obscure pioneer to mind as an inspiration.

That's Winds of Sirius, who came from Bourg-en-Bresse on just the other side of the French border from Switzerland, so further away in time than distance, their sole release being back in 1999. It's an album I go back to relatively often, because nobody does texture like them, but it's always good to hear that approach in newer bands, most often ones playing melodic doom/death. They aren't a be all and end all influence though, because I hear Celtic Frost here too and My Dying Bride, along with broader dips into funeral doom and stoner rock, maybe even a hint of Cradle of Filth.

Seeds of Light is a strong opener, patient enough to last just shy of nine minutes, which isn't wildly unusual for this band. There's only one "short" song here, La sorcière du Vegenand, which wraps in under five minutes, the other four stretching from almost eight to over nine. This seems natural to them, because all these songs wander and evolve, dropping often into slow and aching melody and eventually bouncing back up to a firm vehemence. There's a wonderful tease at a fast section late in Absolute Void that's all the better for following a long melancholy midsection.

Absolute Void may well be my favourite song here, but Feed the Fire is close and nothing's far from it, because the quality and imagination are consistently high. Absolute Void starts with emphasis, slow but heavy and bludgeoning, enough so that it moves into textured sludge metal, before that drop into a gorgeous midsection. Even as it grows out of that, it maintains a hypnotic rhythm that suddenly clears, as if the fog has moved aside, and we're in that teasing thrash section and then a set of stoner rock riffs, before it wraps up. It has quite the growth and every moment is blissful.

It would have been hard to match that one, but the Wizards give it their best. Feed the Fire trawls in stoner rock from the outset and stays there for a while, but eventually deepens to doom, adding some more sludge later too. La sorcière du Vegenand ups the tempo, starting out faster than any other song here gets, that one brief moment in Absolute Void aside. It's hardly fast though, just a steady step up from everything else here, especially early on. Reign, the longest song on offer, has its energy too to close out, and it doesn't outstay its welcome in the slightest.

While it's not hard for me to pick a favourite track here, it's harder to pick a favourite aspect. None of the four musicians does anything but build a coherent band sound. Nobody's trying to steal the spotlight or show off what they can do. I like the steady but solid drumming of Ludovic Bornet and how the other instruments often join it in providing rhythm, even the guitars. I like Délèze's bass, which gets one solo moment to shine, and I like his and Dalton's vocals, which walk that fine line of being both harsh and melodic. So few harsh vocalists nail intonation. These guys have it down.

At the end of the day, though, which is when doom/death has most power, it's the guitars that I'd call out for highest praise, because they nail every tone they aim for. They work perfectly in heavy riffing, keeping the weight of this music around us like a cave, and they work even better when in a sort of chime emulation mode, echoing through that cave. So kudos to Dalton and Adrien Bornet, but really kudos to everyone involved here for creating such a glorious texture. I don't know where Wiznan is but I can buy into these guys being wizards and I look forward to whatever they'll conjure up next.