Aborted - Vault of Horrors (2024)

Country: Belgium
Style: Technical Death Metal/Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
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I guess Aborted should still be listed as a Belgian band, given that sole founder member and lead vocalist Sven de Caluwé is Belgian, but they're a pretty international bunch nowadays. What blew me away from moment one is the drumming of Ken Bedene, one of two Californians in the line-up, his fourteen year stint with the band making him the longest serving member who wasn't there at the beginning. The others hail from Iceland and Italy, but the latter is bassist Stefano Franceschini who left in 2023 after seven years on board. I don't believe he's been replaced yet but he does play on this album for presumably the last time.

Aborted are usually listed as technical death metal, which is entirely appropriate, but Bedene is a grindcore drummer when Dreadbringer kicks off the album. He doesn't stay there, but damn, he's fast. Of course, everyone else has to be totally on top of their game for this to hold together and I would be failing at my job if I didn't point that out, but it took plenty of effort to tear myself away from what he was doing, whatever anyone else was up to at any particular moment. I remember a gig in Bradford way back in 1988, with Carcass headlining during their demo days, at which I found myself hypnotised by the drummer of Intense Degree. He was so fast that I couldn't see his arms when he was in full flow because they were just a blur. That came quickly to mind here, though the majority of the speed seems to be in his feet.

After Bedene, it was de Caluwé who grabbed my attention with his vocals. He mostly delivers in a guttural death growl that's somehow clear enough for me to be able to tell that he sings entirely in English. However, like Bedene, there are points where he shifts up to grindcore speeds, others where he moves his pitch up to provide more of a black metal shriek and still more where there's some sort of post production done on his voice to give it a weirdly echoing effect. It's almost like he's inside such a small box that he'd have to be crushed into a cube to fit but which somehow lets his voice remain as huge and resonant as ever.

At least, I believe most of that is de Caluwé, but it's hard to actually tell, because there's a guest vocalist singing with him on every single track. Most are North American, with four from the USA and four from Canada, including Oliver Rae Aleron from Archspire on The Shape of Hate and Alex Erian from Despised Icon on Death Cult. However, there's also a Brit, Jason Evans from Ingested, on Insect Politics, the most overtly grindcore song here, and an Italian, Francesco Paoli from the mighty Fleshgod Apocalypse on Condemned to Rot. No wonder that one has a particularly dense sound. Generally speaking, the multiple voices helps this album considerably, adding a diversity that might not otherwise have been there.

The guitarists are Ian Jekelis and Daníel Konráðsson and what I found fascinating about what they do here is that they never seem to solo in genre. During the majority of these songs, they play at a quick pace because that's what everyone else is doing, and they add depth to the music. However, there are points where they play a lot slower, or at least whoever's handling lead at any particular moment does, and that adds a fascinating dimension. There are long sustained notes in The Shape of Hate and Hellbound, even though everything else around them is fast, and the solos, in most of these songs, tend to be almost traditional heavy metal solos, hardly extreme at all.

While those solos can be rather engaging, this is the exact opposite of easy listening. It's not just that it's very loud and very fast, it's that we have to pay a lot of attention to what's happening. It can be easy to get lost in some of these songs, like Condemned to Rot and Brotherhood of Sleep. Hellbound may the most immediately accessible. Death Cult has an almost singalong chorus, merely a simple and brutal one. The Golgothan is an attention grabber, because of electronic pulses as part of the beat, and there are deeper keyboards later in the song which add another element to the sound.

My favourites are the ones that are complex but not impenetrable, ones that I can grasp within a few listens but still have hidden depths that I can explore on further runs through. Dreadbringer has to be the most obvious, but The Golgothan is close and Malevolent Haze has an emotional arc to explore. It seems bigger than anything else here, perhaps appropriately as the closer, only the single that hinted at the album, Infinite Terror, after it as a bonus track. That's a good one too.

It's just hard to call out tracks after only five listens, though. This is material so dense that we just can't judge it properly until we've enjoyed its company for a while, bought it dinner and visited its parents. We have to dive in deep and explore it to find what it's truly offering. The whole album is still growing on me and I'm a little wary about only giving it a 7/10. I have a feeling that, in a week or two, I'd give it more, but I have to let it go right now so I can move onto other albums by other bands. C'est la vie.

Lipz - Changing the Melody (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
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Lipz have been around since 2011 but it took them a while to get an album out, Scaryman not arriving until 2018. I haven't heard that one, but I've heard tracks from this, their follow-up, on Chris Franklin's joyous Raised on Rock radio show. They're on Frontiers now and, for some reason, that label is calling this heavy metal. It isn't close to heavy metal, even if there are hints of Shout at the Devil-era Mötley Crüe on the opener, I'm Going Under, as that buzzsaw riff is straight out of Looks That Kill. This is far closer to the smooth glam rock that Tigertailz played on songs like Livin' without You, shorn of the early punk influence but before they got a little edgier on later albums.

While I'm Going Under is probably my favourite song, it's not a particularly representative one. I would suggest that the title track is far more typical of the rest of the material here, featuring a more subdued guitar and a more obvious melodic rock outlook. Its bombastic chorus seems right out of melodic rock, merely put through a sleaze filter, and that seems to be what Lipz are aiming for with these songs. They want to play melodic rock with strong melodies and huge choruses but to sleaze it up with a glam rock look and feel, so that there's an edge to it all.

There are a few songs that take a slightly different approach. While the focus is always on vocals and huge choruses, for instance, the guitarists do get work to do. There's that underpinning Crüe riff on I'm Going Under and more eighties glam metal guitar throughout I'm Alive, the closest on this album that Lipz get to that heavy metal tag Frontiers is using. Freak could have been a glam metal ballad back in the day, kicking off with a tasty slow blues guitar solo, but it's a heavier song here. The real ballad is I Would Die for You, which dips all the way into tinkling ivories, and it's the song where Alexander Klintberg sounds the most female.

He isn't, because he's one of the twin brothers at the heart of this band, and he sounds like a male glam rock singer across most of the album, but he gets very delicate here. It's worth mentioning to anyone new to the band that, while he was a founding member of Lipz, he never intended to be its lead singer. He's one of those two guitarists, the other being Conny Svärd, and he only took up mike duties when they couldn't find a singer who could do the job they wanted. Fortunately, he did step up and the rest is history, because it's hard to imagine this band with a different singer now.

The rest of the band are capable too, with mention here for Chris Young on bass as the remaining musician I haven't credited yet, but this isn't really about musicianship. Sure, they do the job but the job doesn't call for virtuoso theatrics. It calls for capable, albeit tight playing that underpins the lead vocals and the melodies, and that's what these musicians deliver. And, in turn, what that means is that the best songs here are the ones that stick in our head the most. The good news is that there are earworms all over the album.

The chorus in I'm Going Under is catchy, but the chorus in Changing the Melody is a real earworm and it's far from the last. Bye Bye Beautiful and Monsterz have notable earworm chorus as well, while Stop Talking About Nothing and Secret Lover are earworms right out of the gate. The latter is surely the most Tigertailz influenced song here, enough so that I had to remind myself that the chorus is "(Na Na) Secret Lover" rather than "(Na Na) Nukklear Rokket", with a heck of a lot more than two nas for audiences to get behind. This is a gift for audience participation.

So is this glam rock cleaned up to play in the realm of melodic rock or is it melodic rock with sleazy glam rock elements? Given the look, I'd lean towards the former, but it doesn't really matter. The expected audience might be a little different, but there's a huge overlap and Lipz will meet what fans of either approach would expect in the music, which is where it matters the most, regardless of what melodic rock aficionados are likely to think of their make-up and stage attire. No wonder Chris is playing them.

Atrophy - Asylum (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
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There are two new thrash albums out by American bands releasing their first studio work in what seems like forever. My son was very impressed by the new Morbid Saint and I'll catch up with that soon enough, but I remember Atrophy from back in the day, even though I wasn't living in Arizona then. I was on the other side of the pond in rural Yorkshire while they fired up Tucson in the wake of Phoenix bands like Flotsam and Jetsam, Sacred Reich and Surgical Steel. I'll be seeing Flot live in a couple of weeks time. Maybe I'll get the chance to see Atrophy soon too.

The only constant from the band back then and the band nowadays is Brian Zimmerman, the lead vocalist, because everyone else joined during the latest reformation, which is their second. After a split in 1993, three founder members came back in 2015 but that only lasted until 2020, and no new album emerged during that period to sit alongside the two from their original run. This revamp is only three years old now, but they've already knocked out this album and are apparently writing another one, so Zimmerman has clearly got the bit between his teeth and his new colleagues are happy to work with him and get things done in the studio.

And they are certainly getting things done. This album kicks off well with a string of tracks that do exactly what late eighties thrash did, mostly in the Exodus or Testament vein. They're fast but not obsessed with speed. They're technical without being progressive. They're tight and reliable. They have a carefully defined tone to the guitars that gives it a vicious edge but one that's controlled nonetheless. As all that might suggest, this album is all about balance and the bottom line is that this new Atrophy seem to have nailed that their first time out. All the things any thrash fan could want are here wrapped up in nine decently sized chunks.

There are catches, of course. Most obviously the style is very consistent throughout, so there's not a lot of variety between the nine tracks on offer. The only one that truly tries something different is Distortion, a slower track when it starts but one that drops off hard into much slower material still, initially giving a spotlight to Zimmerman's voice, which ventures more into speak-singing on this one than usual, but then becoming almost doomy in nature.

There's also an unusual intro to The Apostle and both an unusual intro and outro to Close My Eyes, but otherwise both explore the sort of material that we expect. The bottom line is that this isn't a progressive metal album where Atrophy try to forge a new direction for thrash metal; it's about a band who are happy to be back in business doing what they do as well as they can and throwing the results onto an actual studio album, no fewer than thirty-four years since its predecessor, Violent by Nature in 1990.

For the most part they succeed, but the faster songs are better to my way of thinking. Punishment for All is an excellent opener and Seeds of Sorrow matches it. I do like the first half a lot more than the second, but the latter is growing on me. American Dream is a chugger, but it's emerging from its peers after a few listens as a superior example of its type. I tend to drift away from chuggers on thrash albums unless they feature riffs or melodies or other components to elevate them. I didn't drift away much here, because slower songs often speed up and examples like American Dream or Five Minutes 'Til Suicide, a kinda sorta title track, are catchy enough for me.

The end result is that this is a capable return. It may not be the classic Atrophy line-up but it's still Atrophy and I'm happy to hear Zimmerman's voice again. This is a solid album that bodes well for the future but it's neither a glorious resurgence for the band nor a disappointment after so long away. It's a welcome album that does its job and moves on. The more they gig and write, the more likely the next album or the one after—and it seems pretty likely that we'll see more at this point—will be a gem. All the promise is there. Welcome back, folks and I hope to see you on stage soon!

Magma Soul - Sacred Fire (2024)

Country: Mexico
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Mar 2024
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Here's a fascinating band who don't come from Spain, as they were presented to me, but instead from Mexico City, Mexico. They do start out in Spanish, the first three tracks performed that way, but then they switch to English for the rest of the album, including English language versions of a couple of those opening three, only La Puerta Falsa here only in Spanish. That seems odd, but it's not the oddest thing about the album, because they're all over the musical map, enough so that very few songs can be compared to each other.

That starts out feeling a little offputting but settles quickly, until this starts to seem like a covers album featuring all the songs that the band were influenced the most by, only where none of the songs are actually covers, even those three opening songs in Spanish.

La Puerto Falsa is a solid stomper, a punchy piece set up by Alexis Mendoza's able bass. Paraiso is an alternative rock ballad except for when it isn't. There's Beatles-like poppy punctuation behind the verses but it heavies up so that Alejandro Cuadros can deliver a searing guitar solo while the rest of the band stubbornly refuses to up their energy to match his. Talk about a moment for him in the spotlight! El Poder has a jiggy dance feel, but it's a hard rock song, rather like Jet covering Runrig. Vocalist Rob Rodriguez gets some real attitude into his delivery that's not as effective on the English language version.

So that's three completely different rock songs, at which point they shift into English to continue to shake up any expectations we might have left. The Other Side kicks off with southern rock slide guitar and adds seventies organ, but ends up in modern alt rock territory. You Get What You Give stays southern, even without the slide, to sound more like the Black Crowes. Woman is a funkier take on Bad Company, with yet another blistering guitar solo. There's a third on Beyond the Sun, even though it's otherwise a grungy Scorpions-esque song and, beyond the sheer versatility that pervades the album, it's those solos that work best for me.

Again on My Own and Stardust are both alt rock, but the former sounds like it belongs back in the eighties, a bouncy pop rock song with Blondie verses against Police ska guitar and then Jet in the chorus, while the latter is clearly far more nineties, with a grungier outlook. After that, they shift back to the seventies. In Rock We Trust is underpinned with seventies organ in the Jon Lord style but it unfolds more as a glam rock song, almost like the Sweet covering Y&T covering Deep Purple. The Messenger 2.0 is purer glam rock but with a heavier alt rock backdrop and some urgency right out of early Iron Maiden.

I should add that Higher Power is El Poder sung in English—apparently the higher power is love, in case you were wondering, which I'm not going to argue with—and Paradise is the English language version of Paraiso, of course. But that said, I've run through all these songs and you're imagining that Magma Soul sound just like a dozen completely different bands. Which they do but that isn't at all helpful in the grand scheme of things. I'm imagining a festival in Mexico where Magma Soul serve as the entire line-up, playing a dozen sets in a dozen different ways, so meeting everyone's tastes at some point or other.

Of course, that also means that my favourite song would be similarly meaningless and would likely change with every listen. Right now, I'd throw out In Rock We Trust and Beyond the Sun, but that'll change tomorrow, I'm sure, and I'll be right then too. You—yes, you reading this—could pick a pair of completely different songs that fit your tastes and you'd be right as well. And that means that they're going to be one of the most fun bands to stumble into a club and hear in Mexico City, but I think they'll need to carve out an actual sound of their own to shift much further beyond that, one that can draw from all these influences but in parallel rather than in serial. I'm looking forward to hearing them grow.

Myrath - Karma (2024)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
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Back in May 2019, when I reviewed three 9/10 albums in a month, my album of that month was the fifth album by Tunisian progressive folk metal band Myrath, Shehili. It was my first by them but it utterly blew me away, its merger of technical progressive metal with north African folk melodies and rhythms unique and enticing. It wasn't just me who thought so either, because I saw videos of songs on that album shared out on social media more than once by friends who aren't even metal fans. I was naturally keen to hear their next album, which was due last year but delayed for some reason until March of this year.

The good news is that it's a good album. The bad news is that it's nothing like Shehili, and not just in quality but in style. The former is understandable, because few bands can knock out classics of that album's stature every time out, and as long as they're still doing good work, then it's trivial to forgive. The latter is less understandable, because, while bands often indulge in musical shifts, both good and bad, this one seems to be about stripping away the elements that make them who they are and why they're special but keeping the ones that don't.

I'd call that a terrible idea, but it depends on what their goals are. Given that the ones that don't make them special are highly commercial in nature, this is perhaps a financial decision to aid the conquest of the musical map by Myrath, if not as a progressive folk metal band then as a melodic rock band. After all, there are surely more fans of melodic rock across the globe than there are of progressive folk metal. If that's what they want, then they achieved it here, ending up sounding a lot like a Swedish melodic rock band, while retaining some of the crunch that many would see as a hallmark of metal. Of course, this is their band, so they can do what they want.

Unfortately, it isn't what I want from them and it doesn't seem to be what their existing fans want either. Sure, I like their huge hooks, which are almost as good here as on Shehili, the standout on that front being Candles Cry. However, I can get huge hooks from a lot of other bands. I don't need Myrath for that. What I go to Myrath for is all that ethnic north African flavour, something I can't hear anywhere else on account of there not being many Tunisian metal bands out there and only this one that I'm aware has been doing this sort of thing.

And that flavour just isn't here. There's a little bit of ethnic rhythm in the bookends of the opener, To the Stars, but it mostly vanishes in between, with a little more to be found in the keyboard solo in the midsection. There are some cool violins halfway through Into the Light that are more world than the orchestration around them. There's a north African melody on Words are Failing. There are the tasty bookends to Temple Walls. But that's about it. There's literally more ethnic flavour in Asl, the sixty-nine second intro on Shehili, than there is on this entire album.

To me, that's a real disappointment. To those die hard fans who have followed Myrath from their debut album, Hope, back in 2007, it's a bigger disappointment because they apparently began on this journey shortly after and merely took their final leap away from that world flavour here. Now, I'm relatively new to them, but I've read the suggestion that this may be due to the change from Elyes Bouchoucha, their keyboard player until 2022, to their producer Kévin Codfert, the keyboard player in French symphonic power metal band Adagio. I can't say that Bouchoucha was the origin of their unique sound or the loss of it, but it seems to fly.

All of that goes to explain that Karma is not Shehili and never intended to be. That said, what it is isn't bad at all. These are highly capable musicians, whatever instrument they're playing, and that goes for Codfert as much as anyone else. He and vocalist Zaher Zorgati are most prominent here, with tasty guitar parts from Malek Ben Arbia too. Everyone involved adds neat little touches to songs and gets their own moments to shine and that includes bassist Anis Jouini and drummer Morgan Berthet as well as everyone I've already mentioned. However, few of them get much opportunity to show what they can do. This isn't as intricate music as on Shehili and presumably a lot less than earlier albums. That progressive edge may not have vanished but it's vanishing.

In its place, there's a lot of AOR in the melodic sweeps of songs like Let It Go, some funk on Words are Failing and some Iron Maiden-esque woah woah on To the Stars. Even where there are hints, like the very opening of Words are Failing or at various points on Child of Prophecy, they simplify very quickly into something far less complex. I should see what melodic rock guru Chris Franklin of the Raised on Rock radio show thinks about this. As much as he enjoys originality, he may dig this much more than I do, being more into the progressive, folk and metal elements of what this band used to play, which are most evident here on Child of Prophecy and not much else.

Emergency Rule - The King of Ithaca (2024)

Country: Australia
Style: Stoner Rock/Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 9 Feb 2024
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Metal Archives lists Emergency Rule as a southern metal band and I guess we can't go much more southern than Adelaide, South Australia. However I found this, their debut album, listed as stoner rock and that rings truer to me. There's definitely a southern flavour on The Hook, which kicks off the album, and there's as much metal here as rock, the majestic Something to Say as close to the old school Black Sabbath sound instrumentally as I've heard recently. However, I'd see Clutch as a powerful comparison, both in tone and approach, so hard/stoner rock seems to fit best. Of course, the band's own description of "Sabbath with attitude, Skynyrd with power" is pretty accurate too.

The other reason I'd call out stoner rock here is because there's also a powerful psychedelic sound here, starting in Garden and reaching its peak on the intro to Ulysses. The guitars—plural, even if many stoner rock bands are trios—get all mellow during verses on the former, which allows singer Doug Clark to endow his voice with some notable attitude. That only grows further on Bartender, which is a performance for him more than it's merely a song. Everything on this one is nuance for him, which is admirable because he's also the band's bassist, so is always doing far more than sing.

I can see Bartender being a lot of listeners' favourite song, but mine is Something to Say, because it's so impeccably old school that even the opening silence sounds like it was recorded in a studio in 1972. It starts out stoner rock but finds quintessential Sabbath riffs. Clark growls this one, so is nowhere near any of the various vocalists Sabbath had over the years, but I love that guitar tone and there's a glorious instrumental section, as indeed there is on a number of these songs, which benefits from there being two guitarists, Chris G and Callum Wegener. It reminds me that, even if a band has an obvious and strong lead singer, they can still absolutely deliver instrumentally.

It's why I always think of how tight Clutch are instrumentally, even though Ned Fallon often leads songs with his vocal phrasing. The same holds here and Emergency Rule are imaginative on that front. The mellow Sabbath guitars in Garden are part of that and they return on From the Grave, though that song also features perhaps the most overt southern riffs, along with what may be a banjo at points. So is that glorious psychedelic opening to Ulysses. Another is the inclusion of an unlikely instrument for stoner rock on Abuse, namely a string section. That's a cello, I believe, to provide the intro and there's a frequent underpinning of violins throughout the song. The cello especially works with this sort of heavy material.

The album starts strongly with The Hook and continues to be strong through the eight tracks most of which run in the five or six minute range. Something to Say was my favourite from my very first listen and that hasn't changed maybe seven or eight times through. However, which I'd pick as my next choice has changed often, because this benefits from each song being subtly different but of a pretty consistent quality. For a while, I'd have gone with The Hook or Ulysses, but gradually the second track has enforced itself. It's called Garden and it's a real grower, that does all the things I love about The Hook and Something to Say in one four minute song, with a neat psychedelic edge.

Emergency Rule have been around for a while now, having formed way back in 2011 with their line-up still intact from that time, but this is their debut album. It's obviously not their oldest material because their first two singles, Flag and a Medal and The Zealot, aren't included, so I'd dearly like to know why it took them this long to get this far, only to suddenly nail everything right out of the gate. And I'd also dearly like to know that we'll see another album in a couple of years, instead of waiting another decade and change.

The Black Crowes - Happiness Bastards (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Southern Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember the Black Crowes as quite the tour de force back in the day. Shake Your Money Maker was a peach of a debut album and The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion was a deep and mature follow up. Southern rock was undergoing a revival around that time, with Lynyrd Skynyrd resurgent and the Georgia Satellites setting the stage for the Black Crowes. I heard more of their albums in the nineties, but don't remember much about those, except the famous censorship of the cover art for Amorica.

I guess I thought they'd split up and moved on, which it turns out that they had, in 2002, after half a dozen albums. However, they got back together in 2005 for a decade and knocked out two more albums before giving up the ghost again, rather acrimoniously, it seems. However, now they are back for a third time, with this their first studio effort from their 2019 reformation and their first album of new material since Before the Frost... Until the Freeze no fewer than fifteen years ago.

They kick it off hard too, with Bedside Manners a stomp of a song driven by a thumping beat from someone I can't identify because none of the three credited members play drums. Of course, the core of the band remains brothers Chris and Rich Robinson, delivering lead vocals and lead guitar respectively, among other things. However, the third member is Sven Pipien on bass, so I'm having to guess at the rest of the performers here being the touring line-up. If that's the case, then that drummer would be Cully Symington, with Nico Bereciartua a second guitarist and Erik Deutsch on keyboards. If it isn't, then who knows? I don't.

What I do know is that this is very much the expected sort of sound for the Black Crowes. They had a hybrid style back in the day and it's still the same here, mixing up good old fashioned blues and gospel influenced rock 'n' roll with the country elements of southern rock. Bedside Manners isn't the only stomper, Rats and Clowns right after following suit. Wilted Rose is a country rock ballad with guest singer Lainey Wilson playing a strong female harmony to Chris Robinson's delightfully broken voice. Wanting and Waiting is right out of the Rolling Stones songbook. And so it goes.

The truest Black Crowes songs arrive later. While Dirty Cold Sun and a good chunk of Bleed It Dry have very deliberate vocals that are spat out like Bob Dylan might, they work from quintessential Crowes melodies and the vocal lines in the latter take us right back to the big hits from the debut album, just not as cleanly as some of those stripped down classics because the genre traditionally functions on grit rather than purity. Follow the Moon feels familiar too, not because any of it is at all borrowed but because it's so true to the band's core sound, especially when it hits the chorus.

The point, I guess, is that there's not much that's new here, just a fresh look at an existing sound by a freshly reformed band who have the urge to work together once more to see what comes out of it. Then again, I doubt anyone's picking up a Black Crowes album in 2024 and hoping to hear the band veer off in a new direction. They want to hear new songs but done in the old style and that's exactly what they get, except perhaps Flesh Wound, which ends up in an unlikely place, taking its bouncy pop punk-infused rock 'n' roll into what's almost a field recording of a religious assembly at school. I have no idea what the words are at that point.

And so I think how you enjoy this will depend on what you want to hear. To me, it sounds precisely like the Black Crowes released a new album and, if that's all you need to know, then you won't be disappointed. The most important thing is that it feels like they care about the band again which helps make these songs work. It's not so fresh that we might buy into them bursting into a studio with unbridled enthusiasm, but it's far from a cash grab. These are good songs played by folk who are enjoying playing them. However, if you know their back catalogue and want to see them move forward, whether into some sort of new territory or to evolve a little, you might be disappointed, at least a bit. But hey, probably not much, because you're already a fan and it sounds great.

Vespertine - Desolate Soil (2024)

Country: Israel
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2024
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Now that Sonata Arctica have finally returned to playing power metal, there's a lot of symphonic metal in their sound, but here's an actual symphonic metal band. I mention that because I found them listed as pure symphonic metal but it's pretty clear from the outset that we can add folk to that as well. The intro, Genesis, which builds dynamically from piano to flutes to orchestral swell and eventually pipes, grows into that and the instrumental first half of the opening song proper, To All the Wilds, plays likewise. And then it gets really interesting.

There are two people in Vespertine, as far as I can tell, and, while they work together effectively, they appear to bring two completely different approaches to the band. Dawn Kadmiel is all about that symphonic folk. She provides all the orchestration, which shapes how this sounds; she plays a tasty violin; and she delivers her vocals clean with an eye on the folk tradition. Her colleague Ran Hameiri, who plays guitar and bass, is therefore tasked with heavying it up to add the metal side of things. He does that, but he does it through a mostly harsh voice and metal here is dependent on the song. Often it's heavy or power metal. Sometimes it's full on melodic death.

As you might imagine, everything hinges on how well those two approaches play together, with a take on beauty and the beast that goes far beyond the traditional one of contrasting vocalists. It works really well for me, if you want a quick answer. However, there's also a much longer one that depends on how you look at this music. I listen to albums in entirety and more than once, so that I can see how they flow, how they grow on repeat listens and also where to focus in on something if it stands out or warrants special attention. For a while, this works differently for me in that way than if I focus in on individual tracks.

That's because the first two tracks proper play rather oddly and I got it into my head that the way they do that continued on throughout the album. It doesn't, which makes it even odder that they be the first two tracks.

Take To All the Wilds as an example. Within the grand flow of the album, it works very well indeed. I love the instrumental opening that combines the flutes and piano of the intro with metal guitars and a fast metal beat. When it shifts into a song after a couple of minutes, it stays symphonic folk, with Kadmiel the only vocalist, her voice giving way to violin and an elegant guitar solo, but close to four minutes in, Hameiri kind of takes over, his harsh vocal stealing the spotlight and his guitar heavying up, in preparation for the melodic death metal of the second half of Omens (The Trial of Doom).

Every moment in the song works as a transition from Genesis to Omens except the unusual funky section late on. However, if you listen to it in isolation, as you might on a radio broadcast, it feels disconcerting. Without any context from the tracks around it, it sounds like it doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a instrumental piece or a vocal song? Is it rock or metal? Is it soothing folk or hard death? It's pretty much symphonic all the way through, so that's a fallback, but it can't establish a particular mood or style within its boundaries. I still like it, because all those moments are great, but it doesn't feel at all complete, needing those surrounding songs to give it context.

That lack of self-identity applies to Omens (The Trial of Doom) too, then Rain into the Hollow kicks off with an electronic pulse behind the soft piano that sounds good but fails to indicate where the song is going, so I started to see this as far better as one forty minute slab of music than as seven individual songs plus an intro. I started to think about the album as an exercise in where we could move the breaks between the songs to give them more coherence. Maybe To All the Wilds should be two separate songs or one suite with two or three movements, and Omens likewise. I can't see this sort of feeling as a good thing.

However, the more the album runs on, the more coherent the individual songs become and, as I'd pointed out, all the moments sound wonderful anyway, even early on. It means that this may play better to listeners who devour entire albums—and versatile ones at that—than those who tend to prefer individual songs. The more coherent songs come later, like Twilight State (The Vespertine) and Rain into the Hollow, so stick with it. The album's worth it.

Fortunately I fall into the former camp anyway so I ended up good with most of this. I'm good with the contrasting vocal styles in a late duet against escalating orchestration in Omens (The Trial of Doom) and a weirder balance early in Twilight State (The Vespertine). I'm even good with Hameiri suddenly shifting to clean vocals during Skeleton of a Tree, because it's more rock than it is metal, especially after the far heavier Rain into the Hollow, and into spoken word on Twilight State too. It's a versatile album and it takes some getting used to, but I like how it all ends up.