Alex Beyrodt's Voodoo Circle - Locked & Loaded (2021)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

If you don't know the name, Alex Beyrodt is the current guitarist in German power metal band Primal Fear, as he's been since 2011, but he founded Voodoo Circle three years before that with Primal Fear's bass player, Mat Sinner, who's also still the main man in Sinner, a band that's now forty years young. I should emphasise that, if you're expecting a similar heavy sound to those two, you'll be disappointed, as this is their side band which allows them explore their hard rock influences.

This is their sixth album and it's a reunion of sorts, as it marks a return for David Readman, the band's original vocalist, who left in 2016 but came back to the fold this year, as did Markus Kullmann, after a six year gap as their drummer. All these folks are busy elsewhere, Readman best known for singing for Pink Cream 69 since 1994 and Kullmann the current drummer in Sinner. I'm starting to get the feeling that there's a massive house somewhere in Esslingen shared by twenty musicians who, between them, comprise about thirty different bands in many permutations.

I have to wonder what Voodoo Circle would sound like without Readman, because he puts on his very best David Coverdale impression throughout. Wikipedia tells me that Beyrodt's hard rock influences included Deep Purple, Rainbow and Yngwie Malmsteen, in addition to the one that simply cannot be avoided, which is Whitesnake. Almost everything here is Whitesnake, though it's a neat cross between the old bluesy Whitesnake and the later slick multi-platinum Whitesnake.

The guitars are metallic, far more like Adrian Vandenberg than Bernie Marsden, except on This Song is for You, which is the other way around (with some Carlos Santana for good measure). The vocals are bluesier, though, and the flow is melodic and commercial without feeling like it's always pandering to American radio. I like the balance, especially on songs like Magic Woman Chile, with an quiet and overtly bluesy section and the overlay of gospel-infused backing vocals that wrap it up. Only occasionally do the band ramp up a MTV video vibe and knock out songs like Straight for the Heart or Trouble in the Moonlight.

The band seem like they're having a lot of fun here and they'd be fantastic in a small venue, especially playing funky rockers like the title track that, at points, brings to mind both artists as diverse as Vow Wow and Lenny Kravitz. These are momentary, though, as there's only one song that doesn't end up a candidate for a Whitesnake album and that's Devil's Cross, which sounds like Coverdale guesting on a keyboards heavy nineties Black Sabbath track. Well OK, there's also a Purple-esque intro to Children of the Revolution, but then it goes back to Whitesnake.

There are no poor songs here, though a few of them do play far too happily in the hall of clichés. Eyes Full of Tears is full of clichés and Straight for the Heart is as unoriginal lyrically as the title suggests. It wasn't difficult to visualise Tawny Kitaen in the video for Trouble in the Moonlight when Readman sings, "Bad girls keeping out of trouble in the moonlight." Then again, it's hard to find a Whitesnake song that doesn't feel lyrically clichéd, so I should praise the songwriters for coming up with variants like Magic Woman Chile and Devil with an Angel Smile.

At the end of the day, this is what is. These musicians are consummate professionals and they do their job very well indeed but, if you're not looking for veteran European power metallers channelling the Whitesnake obsession of their youth into a side band, they're not going to convince you. If you're on board with the idea, this is pretty damn good.

Pallbearer - Forgotten Days (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter

Doom metal doesn't tend to be a particularly fashionable subgenre when it comes to critics who write year end lists, but Pallbearer were all over them in 2020 like a rash. They didn't just make six lists that I'm tracking, they made two top fives, including a #4 at Consequence of Sound, just above AC/DC. This is their fourth album and it initially took me aback because it didn't sound like how I expected it to.

I'm used to doom metal being slow, heavy and clean. From the opening title track, Pallbearer clearly have slow and heavy down, but Joseph D. Rowland plays a dirty bass and it all grows out of feedback. This is doom with nods to stoner rock and doom/death, genres that I've never seen mentioned in the vicinity of the Pallbearer name. Maybe that's because there's no attempt whatsoever to venture into the psychedelia that stoner rock so often flirts with and Brett Campbell's vocals remain stubbornly clean and plaintive and never attempt anything harsh.

The dirty sound persists though, so much so that a minute into Riverbed, when it vanishes for effect, Pallbearer sound like a completely different band, only Campbell's unchanged vocals linking us back to what came before. Initially, I thought he was being a little overwhelmed by the music, but the mix favours him more as the album runs on. Overall, he does a fantastic job at making his presence known and, in fact, his sustained notes are a major part of why this sounds epic. Maybe the title track is just that anomalous a Pallbearer song.

It took me a while to get into this album, perhaps because of how abrasive that first song is. I have no issue with abrasive, but being abrasive on an opener that also happens to be a title track sets a sort of expectation that simply isn't met by everything else here. Riverbed was more engaging, but Stasis is perhaps the weakest song here, so I wasn't impressed by the time I got to Silver Wings, the only track here to match an epic style with an epic length—it exceeds twelve minutes but the average otherwise is under half that.

Silver Wings made me pay attention, as it has a lot of time to breathe. The first minute and a half fare well enough but it really kicks in at that point, dropping into a minimalist section but transitioning back to heavy in a simply gorgeous manner. This is as slow as this album gets and the melancholy just drips off the amplifiers. There's doom/death here too, as there's an early Paradise Lost feel to some of the instrumental sections.

It's after that that I really found myself on board the Pallbearer train. The Quicksand of Existing has a real weight to it. It's not just heavy in the traditional sense of downtuned instruments and a crushing taste in riffs. It's heavy in the sense that the song feels like a leaden overcoat; I had to force myself to sit up straight while I was listening to this one! It's a bouncy sort of doom as well, Campbell refusing to be lost under the weight of the fuzzy backdrop. Vengeance & Ruination is bouncy doom too, again without ever losing its brutal weight. Can we call it doom 'n' roll? I'm sure I wouldn't be the first.

Those two songs, accessible but emphatically heavy, would be my favourites here if Pallbearer hadn't finished up with Caledonia, which is a lovely song. It starts out deceptively soft, with a bass shorn of its fuzz and infused with liquid, and some delightfully patient guitarwork from Devon Holt and Brett Campbell. Those guitars continue to delight throughout, highlighting how bluesy the band can get, not just how heavy. I'd say that this one walks a more conscious balancing beam between delicacy and doom. It's the highlight of the album for me.

So, yet again, I'm a little disappointed in an album that made multiple end of year lists, but I'm still happy that I've now heard this and I look forward to Pallbearer's fifth. It promises much.

Juggernaut - La Bestia (2021)

Country: Brazil
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

What should I review after something as deep and immersive as Neptunian Maximalism? How about a thrash album from Brazil, especially one that gets wacky enough to cover something as deeply uncool and safe as Starship's We Built This City to wrap it all up? Yeah, I'll go with Juggernaut's third album, their first in a decade and only their third since they got together in 2005. By the way, We Built This City doesn't work like this, though it does work much better than many of the other thrash covers of pop songs I've been hearing lately. I can't fault them for being ambitious!

Fortunately, the rest of it is much better and there's half an hour or so of original music before we get to the cover. Juggernaut play their thrash fast and vicious with a Teutonic flavour to it that goes well beyond Cicero's raspy voice and heavily accented English. Célio Jr.'s riffs and guitar tone remind very much of Destruction, though there's perhaps inevitably some old Sepultura here too. It seems clear to me that they've been paying a lot more attention to German bands than American ones and I'll never see that as a bad thing. It tends to leave a more evil feel to proceedings and it does that here.

It also means that Célio Jr. plays in a technical style, without ever seeming to show off. Hollow Surface may feature the most dominant guitar I've heard in a long while that isn't soloing. His riffs are always rooted in melody and they're full of those patented Destruction flourishes. Also, just like Schmier, the bass of Fabrício Duwe [edit: Célio tells me that the bass here is by Valda, who kept that role from 2009-2020, but left the band after the album was finished] is audible and easily trackable throughout the album and there are moments to shine for him; he's very obvious on Man of a Thousand Faces, for a start. Alefer Reinert completes the line-up behind a very reliable drum kit. However fast he gets, it always feels comfortable, suggesting a ramp up from crazy fast to crazier fast wouldn't be a problem for him.

While the album title is in Portuguese, Cicero sings in English throughout, though I didn't catch too many of the lyrics. From the titles, it looks like they follow the usual social commentary approach for thrash; nothing stood out for me except the title of the opener, which in Cicero's accented English is more like Terror Isis Squid than Terror Isis Squad, giving it a surreal nature. No doubt it'll turn into a new Alestorm album title! There is an exception, the title track, delivered in the band's native tongue of Portuguese [edit: Célio tells me it's in both Portugese and Spanish]. Apparently, the band have never done that before and have wanted to for a long time. It works well for me and it certainly feels a little more natural for them.

The most obvious downside to this album is that the seven original tracks all unfold in the same style with similar success. I might favour Puppets of Society and Hollow Surface right now, but I might shift my favour to Man of a Thousand Faces and La Bestia on another listen. Consistency is never a negative but it doesn't have to preclude variety and there's not a lot of that here.

Of course, the most obvious upside to this album is that all seven of those tracks are delivered with a passion and energy that's infectious, even through speakers on my desk. I'd love to see these guys live to see how crazy their pit gets. Given that Blumenau apparently celebrates Oktoberfest and features a Beer Museum (now I get the German connection!), even though it's in southern Brazil, halfway up the coast from Porto Alegre to São Paulo, I'd guess that the fans tend to knock a few back and then hit the pit to burn off their energy. I'm sure it's a heck of a show.

I liked this a lot, but it apparently took COVID-19 to force Juggernaut into the studio to record their third album; I haven't heard the previous two—though I'll be searching them out now—but they say that the production and technical quality has improved since then. I just hope that it doesn't require another global catastrophe to get them back into the studio again in a couple of years time. I may be a little premature but I want to hear more from this band.

Neptunian Maximalism - Éons (2020)

Country: Belgium
Style: Jazz Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 26 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

Neptunian Maximalism only made two end of year lists that I'm looking at, at Pop Matters and Treble Zine, but they were high in both of them and they sounded so wild that I had to check them out (and a record label that they record for too—I, Voidhanger, named for a Darkthrone track—who release what they describe as "obscure, unique, and uncompromising visions from the metal underground.") That does fit this release, which is metal, I think, though it's jazz first and foremost.

It's a rather daunting release, a triple album of experimental music from Belgium running two hours and ten minutes and covers Bandcamp tags as wildly diverse as "dark ambient", "drone metal", "free jazz", "heavy psych", "stoner metal" and "tribal", among others. The band include two drummers and one saxophonist, with Guillaume Cazalet covering everything else: bass, guitar, sitar, flute, trumpet... whatever he can find, it seems. Its press claims that it's the "quintessential mystical and psychedelic journey of 2020." Even having already reviewed the Oranssi Pazuzu album, I'm not going to argue.

What I will say is that, as wild as this is, and it does indeed dip deep into free jazz, it felt surprisingly accessible to me. Tribal drumming and pixie-like saxophone render the first two pieces of music lively, engaging and shockingly organic. Sure, Lamasthu slows things down to paint a sonic picture of a trip through Hell itself, dark and eerie from the outset but all the more eerie as the layers peel away with us left in near silence, punctuated only by demonic voices. At least that's what I heard. Its full title is translated from the French to Lamasthu: Seeder of the Primordial Fungal Kingdom and Infanticide of Neogene Monkeys. And yes, there's definitely some Ummagumma weirdness here, but this is heavier and freer and jazzier.

These titles do offer clues as to what's going on, or at least to what we ought to be thinking about as they play. These opening songs comprise a six track cycle called To the Earth. The full title of part one is To the Earth: Daiitoku-Myōō no ōdaiko 大威徳明王 鼓童—L'Impact de Théia durant l’Éon Hadéen, which includes three languages and two scripts: English, Japanese and French. So let's figure out what all that means.

The "odaiko" is the largest drum in a taiko performance of Japanese drumming; this one belongs to Daiitoku Myōō, one of the five Great Light Kings of Esoteric Buddhism. Google Translate tells me the kanji translate from the Japanese to Yamantaka Kodo, but Yamantaka happens to be a Sanskrit name for Daiitoku Myōō. Kodo has a double meaning: both "children of the drum" and "heartbeat", which is the primal source of all rhythm. The French means "The Impact of Théia during the Hadean Aeon", referring to an ancient planet that may have collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, so creating our moon.

So we're delving into Japanese mythology and archeoastronomy. Nganga brings in African culture in primal times, the title belonging to a spiritual healer, and Lamasthu Mesopotamian, as she's the most terrible of all female demons. Ptah Sokar Osiris is an Egyptian composite funerary deity, while Enūma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth. Clearly, there's a lot of birth and death here. We're also running through billions of years: two supereons, at least five eons and mere periods like the Carboniferous. What are Neptunian Maximalism telling us in this grand sweep of history and mythology?

Well, I'm glad you asked! "By exploring the evolution of the human species," the band "question the future of the living on Earth, propitiating a feeling of acceptance for the conclusion of the so called 'anthropocene' era and preparing us for the incoming 'probocene' era, imagining our planet ruled by superior intelligent elephants after the end of humanity." So there you have it. I think I need notes. It's all ritual, but it's heavily researched, multi-cultural, multi-mythological ritual that's explored in fascinating style.

To the Moon encompasses the next six pieces of music, with three of those being about Vajrabhairava, a third name for Daiitoku Myōō/Yamantaka, this time the name used in Tibetan Buddism. The reason why Yamantaka is important is because he destroyed Yama, the God of Death, thus stopping samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, which is the goal of the journey towards enlightenment. I guess if you're going to go with a concept, it's worth making it a deep one. I couldn't name one deeper than this.

Oddly for such a desirable goal, Zâr is doomier in nature with a lot more cymbals in play, aspects that continue throughout this suite. While much of this feels theatrical, the initial part of Vajrabhairava, The Summoning, is especially evocative. It seems like it should be performed live while demons roam the stage, speaking to us in dark voices. The final part, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, is thoroughly theatrical as well, initially an assault of percussion, mostly sticks banging against each other rather than drums. It feels like there's an associated dance that I'm missing. Even when it calms down, it still feels like it's a soundtrack to something visual.

The third part of Vajrabhairava is the one that spoke to me, The Great Wars of Quaternary Era Against Ego. It's chaotic free jazz for a while, until the emergency of a driving trance-inducing riff that sounds like it's played on bass and emphasised by percussion. It persists but so does the chaos, like we're here to witness the age-old battle between chaos and order in microcosm.

That leaves four pieces of music to constitute To the Sun and they're generally longer and much more patient. With the sole exception of the previous track, Oi Sonuf Vaoresaji!, Eôs, the first part of To the Sun, is twice as long as anything thus far, at eighteen and a half minutes. It takes its time, pitting that exploratory saxophone of Jean Jacques Duerinckx against a set of dark textures, sans any percussion, and, when it evolves, it does so into a commanding presence, as if this were an avant-garde opera. The latter part of the song gets all trippy and psychedelic.

I'm not as fond of To the Sun generally. It doesn't seem to have as much purpose to it, Heliozoapolis a fifteen minute jumble of hesitant jazz drumming, sitar noodling and ambient spirituality. It does end well for me, but it's easily my least favourite piece of music here and the rest of To the Sun pales when compared to To the Moon and especially To the Earth.

But hey, given how generous this release is, it's still at least a full album more originality than most albums can boast and I'm comfortable giving it a solid 8/10. The best music here is easily worthy of the highest ratings I give out. Now, I need to come back down to Earth for whatever I can follow this with.

Karma Sutra - Karmasutrized (2021)

Country: France
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 11 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Only just released yesterday, I see that this debut album by French trio Karma Sutra was recorded four years ago in January 2017. Why it took so long for something of this quality to reach the light of day, I really can't say, but I'm happy that it's finally out there.

It hooked me from its very outset, through a song appropriately named Shiva's Chant, given that it's driven initially by a memorable chant, even if it ramps up halfway and lets loose a blistering solo for a very tight and very memorable second half. Its sound can be pinpointed somewhere around the line where heavy blues and stoner rock meet and that's echoed across the rest of this album.

The four tracks of the first half all feature vocals but, with the exception of that chant, they're never a primary concern. All these songs live or die on their riffs and the other things the guitars are doing, a job we can credit to Edouard Reynaert. I didn't really notice until my second time through the album that the vocals vanish after Bastard Children, as they hardly matter, except for that memorable chant, of course, which is as much voice as instrument as an actual vocal, finding a throat singing drone at points. The final five pieces of music are all instrumental.

While Shiva's Chant may be the best of those early songs, I can't skip past the fantastic riff on Mind's Eye, which is quintessential heavy psych. It's relatively simple, but it's instantly catchy and I love how it's explored by the guitar but handed over to the bass to mimic it during the verses. While this band can get balls to the wall heavy, there's a lot of softer material here too and it's just as capable, so the big heavy riffs like this one are moments to cherish.

What's odd thus far is how lo-fi this seems. The band are tight, even when pretending to be loose like on Bastard Children, another heavy psych standout. The recordings haven't been tidied up though, as if they were all recorded live in succession and piped straight onto Bandcamp with the only post work done being to put a gap between each song. Even there, that's rough; it takes a full sixteen seconds to start Karmasutrized #2 to start and there are rough edges before and after a number of tracks. It (and I mean the production here, not the performance) feels honest but very unpolished.

The instrumental pieces are interesting because they feature more dynamic play than the vocal songs. Oddly, though, three of the five are called the same thing. Karmasutrized initially comes in two parts, both really exploring mood, getting particularly mellow towards the end of part. 1 and for a majority of part. 2. I like these slower and softer pieces, which still ramp up at points, but my favourite of these instrumentals is Karmasutrized #2, which is unrelated to Karmasutrized part. 1 and part. 2, in all but a name.

What I realised during Karmasutrized #2 and the second half of Shiva's Chant is that this band remind me just as much of a classic heavy blues outfit like Aeroblus as the usual proto-stoner rock bands like Black Sabbath or Blue Cheer. Karma Sutra could cover Vamos a buscar la luz and it wouldn't feel at all out of place next following Shiva's Chant in a live set. Now, let's hope that whatever back end issues the band had with getting this album out won't affect the next one.

Eternal Champion - Ravening Iron (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Epic Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Nov 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

One of the most surprising entries on year end lists, not to me but the people who chose it, was Texan traditionalists Eternal Champion. "I’ll be honest, wrote Aaron Lariviere, "I wouldn’t have guessed my favorite album of 2020 would come with not one but two topless ladies on the cover." He's talking of a painting by Ken Kelly, famed for his epic cover art for Kiss and Manowar, among others. In addition to those two ladies, whose bust sizes are above impressive, there's a mountain of skulls and a dragon and a giant snake. It's the sort of thing we expected in the mid eighties and what makes this album work is that the music, which is rooted in that era, does not sound like it was written then.

This is the second studio album for Eternal Champion and word is that it's deeper but not as catchy as the first, 2016's The Armor of Ire. I haven't heard that album, but that word rings true anyway. This is a fundamentally melodic album, but it's short on anthemic choruses. It feels like Jason Tarpey is always as interested in telling a story as singing a song, which inevitably lends every word equal importance and choruses distract from that. His voice, which is clean and effective, but not the emphatic operatic one we might expect, also plays up the guitars, which rule this album.

There are two guitarists here, John Powers and Arthur Rizk, the latter of whom is primarily the band's drummer, and they are constantly enjoyable. They're not just about conjuring up a riff and milking it for a while to give Tarpey the spotlight until it's time for a solo, though there are examples of that in songs like Skullseeker. Each of these riffs tends to lead to another one, then another, with a swathe of fills and solos dotted throughout, even if they're notably brief. As much as Tarpey's vocals fit well on top of this music, it feels like it was written instrumentally and would work that way too.

I enjoyed this from the outset, but not to the degree that I expected from an album that made six end of year lists, including a #1 at Stereogum and a #2 at Decibel. While songs like Ravening Iron and War at the Edge of the End were impressive, the album didn't grab me by the throat until it made it to the halfway mark. Coward's Keep is the highlight for me, a full step up on every level from anything that's ahead of it, and Worms of the Earth isn't far behind.

Coward's Keep kicks off with a vaguely exotic intro that leads into the best riffs of the album and the most overtly catchy vocals. If I wake up in the morning with Eternal Champion playing in my head, it's probably going to be this song, albeit more likely its riffs and the deliciously staccato drums from its midsection than its echoed chorus. That's also seeping into my soul though.

It feels just as epic as the album is supposed to, not least because of the those staccato drums return to pummel us all the way to the mediaeval acoustic outro, but, while it's the longest song here, it's a short longest song at under six minutes. To feel epic at under six minutes is impressive, but Worms of the Earth does the same thing at four and a half. The riffs here are faster and more vicious and Rizk is more than up to the task of driving them. His drum sound on this one is glorious.

The least worthy track here is The Godblade, which is just a two minute synth interlude before the final track, but it does remind us that there's a sword and sorcery novel accompanying the album. It's also titled The Godblade and it's by J. Christopher Tarpey, who's better known here as lead vocalist Jason Tarpey. It looks to be as influenced by the fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock as a band named for one of his primary characters, the Eternal Champion.

I certainly liked this album, which bodes well for the vibrant New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal or whatever we're calling it this week. It's solid throughout, deep and intricate without advertising it, a reliable set of songs. However, Coward's Keep and Worms of the Earth demonstrate just what the band can do and they couldn't match those songs on the other three quarters of the album. So, I'll happily recommend this but I won't rave about it. I might just rave about their next one though.

Blind Golem - A Dream of Fantasy (2021)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 4 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook

Here's an album to bring a nostalgic smile to fans of legendary British hard/prog rockers, Uriah Heep, not least because it features their late keyboardist Ken Hensley, on a new song called The Day is Gone, not only playing Hammond organ but apparently slide guitar as well. Blind Golem's sound is overtly seventies and overtly English, as the Rodney Matthews cover art suggests, but it's not confined to the Heep, even though the band appear to have grown out of a tribute outfit called Forever Heep, who are present day and Italian, hailing from the city of Verona.

Heep are obvious on the opener, Devil in a Dream, which barrels along with consummate ease. It starts memorably in the way that all the classic rock songs we know by heart do and then finds its groove. It remains bouncy and upbeat throughout, though I think it'll sound even better when played faster on stage. The other obvious Heep track is Star of the Darkest Night, which brings Gypsy to mind early on, though it does evolve away from that is the song grows.

There are proto-doom songs here that would sound more like Black Sabbath if the vocals had tried to emulate Ozzy. They don't, so it's the music behind them that evokes Sabbath. Screaming to the Stars is the best of them, though The Ghost of Eveline fits in this world too. I wasn't that impressed with the first half, which is decent but growing on me, but the second half is fantastic, as great as anything to be found anywhere on this album, which some deliciously organic bass and guitar.

Scarlet Eyes plays up the heavy seventies organ sound but in a different way. Instead of delivering the Ken Hensley/Uriah Heep approach throughout, Simone Bistaffa channels some Jon Lord too, as this is reminiscent of early Mark II Deep Purple, especially in its heavier moments. Of course, I use heavy in a very seventies hard rock sense here, because this doesn't approach metal at any point. These are songs that could have been released in 1975 but without any Judas Priest pointers to the decade to come.

The first half of the album is excellent. This is such a generous release, running a hair's breadth under seventy minutes, that it would have been a double album in 1975, making that first half the first disc. In addition to Devil in a Dream, Screaming to the Stars and Scarlet Eyes, all of which are highlights, as is the second half of The Ghost of Eveline. Also in the first half are Sunbreaker, which is a classic hard rock belter, almost like a Y&T song recorded five or six years earlier, the solid Bright Light and the big one to look for, The Day is Gone.

It feels like a cheat to suggest that it's the best song here, given that it's the only one to feature Ken Hensley, but it's also true. It feels epic, even though, at just over five minutes, it's actually shorter by a minute than the previous song and by two than the following one. Hensley may not sing, but he's a constant star on this one, front and centre throughout, and he endows the song with a timeless feel. I love the tone he pulls out of his guitar. It's a worthy epitaph to a stellar career. RIP.

The biggest problem the album has is that the second half can't touch the first. The final seven songs are all decent, but the best of them is a step down from the worst in the first half. There's a neat piano on Night of Broken Dreams, which is a power ballad. There's an odd German feel to Pegasus, not only because of the accented vocals. A Spell and a Charm features some strong acoustic guitar work, but it isn't the instrumental outro I thought it would be.

So yeah, what would have been the second slab of vinyl is decent and worth pulling it once in a while, before putting it back in its sleeve and running a few more times through the first. If the first half is a 9/10 but the second is a 7/10, then this ends up as a still highly recommended 8/10.

I don't know how long Forever Heep explored this sort of territory through covers and I do see that a few members of the band have played with others in Italy who write original material, but a running time of seventy minutes suggests that they've been simply burning to get their own ideas down. I for one am very happy that they did so, because the first half of this (which still runs over 36 minutes) is surely the best 1975 album I've ever heard that wasn't remotely written or recorded in 1975.

Boris - NO (2020)

Country: Japan
Style: Stoner Metal/Punk
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 3 Jul 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Tumblr | Twitter | Wikipedia

Boris have been around for a long while and they've released a lot of music across a much wider set of genres than most bands even listen to, but this one garnered more praise in 2020 than anything they have released since Pink in 2005. While much of their work is experimental, including collaborations with Merzbow and Sunn O))), this is much more accessible, though still notably varied. The final track feels like it's on a completely different album to everything else but this is a band who veer between dream pop and drone metal, via pretty much everything in between.

My favourite track may be the first one, Genesis, which is a slow and heavy sludge metal instrumental, as controlled as most of the rest of the album isn't. It could easily have been intensely boring but it's full of feedback that's ridden like a bucking bronco and refuses to let my attention wander. Anti-Gone starts out that way but soon ramps up into a punk onslaught and is over in three minutes. I've seen a lot of descriptions of this album as hardcore and I'm not seeing it, because the vocals aren't shouts. A punk sound doesn't have to mean hardcore.

In fact, with all three members of the band now contributing their voices as well as their instruments, the vocals encompass a number of styles, as is very obvious on Non Blood Lore. Mostly the vocals are clean on this one with a neat echo that I presume is a second simultaneous voice, but there are angry vocals too and some wilder stuff during a slower but impatient section. I like this one too, because of how the guitars threaten to be wall of sound but the bass can still almost solo over them. Everything here works, from the energy to the tone, via the solos.

So far, so good but I don't like everything here. My least favourite song is Zerkalo, which slows down a vast amount from the Misfits-esque blitzkrieg of Temple of Hatred to find sludge metal territory with the drums stubbornly slow and the vocals as raw as anything else here. I'm not very fond of HxCxHxC Parforation Line, which eventually feels like the band are performing on a runway as a convoy of jets land behind them.

It really is an odd combination of songs, but then this is a Boris album and we shouldn't expect them to care about consistency, especially on an album written relatively quickly and recorded in isolation during lockdown for COVID-19. One minute there's a frantic cover of nineties Japanese band Gudon's Fundamental Error, which is a blast, especially when it drops into punk pop melodies but without any pandering to commerciality at all. The next there's Interlude, a strange title for the final song on any album but appropriate here given that it's a shoegazy post-rock song with clean and whispery female vocals.

It's almost a love letter to American punk, ripping its way through the various genres, some extreme but others conventional. For every Temple of Hatred, easily the loosest song here and one that wraps a while before its two minutes are up, there's a Kiki no Ue, a fascinating piece that starts drum heavy but eventually lets the bass take over and define it. I like a lot of this, but I don't like all of it and, as energetic and fun as it gets, it just feels like a good and varied album, and one that's more accessible than the double album they released with Merzbow in December.

However, it doesn't feel like best of year list material, even though it made five of those I'm tracking thus far, including two top tens and a top five, which was a third place in Treble Zine's list right after the Oranssi Pazuzu album that blew me away. I'd just call it a generally enjoyable release that's more appropriate as an entry point to Boris's discography than pretty much anything they've released in a decade and a half. If you want to find out what all the fuss is about, this is as good a choice as any.