Sheygun - Burn the Fuse (2024)

Country: Armenia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Dec 2024
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Sheygun don't quite represent a new country for me here at Apocalypse Later, but so far I've only reviewed one album from Armenia before, which was very different, given that Narrow Gate play progressive metal and Sheygun hard rock. Both hail from Yerevan, the nation's capital, but that's about it. I'm reviewing it as a 2024 album because it is one, but one that only just crept in right at the end of the year, on New Year's Eve Eve after the critics had finished summing up 2024. That's a dead zone for bands and this one deserves to be noticed.

Initially, I got an agreeably sleazy feel from this album. The openers, 69 Beauty and Get Up, seem to be influenced by bands like Hanoi Rocks and very early Mötley Crüe, with the latter betraying some AC/DC moments too. That continues into Chevy, though the vocals of Mos oddly remind of a rock-era Suicidal Tendencies. And then No Regrets opens up with a riff and beat clearly borrowed from the Scorpions' The Zoo. I was singing along with the guitar part that isn't there. I guess that means that these guys are old school, focused primarily on the eighties.

I'm not entirely sure who does what, but they're a five piece band that grew out of four friends in Yeghegnadzor, south of Yerevan, who got serious and added Arman on drums. Mos is both vocalist and bassist, while Varo plays rhythm guitar, which leaves Arthur and David contributing in ways I'm unable to explain. Surely one of them's the lead guitarist, but I'm not sure about the other. There aren't obvious keyboards here. A third guitar? Or is he the real bassist and Mos helps out on that front? Inquiring minds want to know.

I especially want to know because the bass player gets a couple of notable runs early in the album, one midway through Get Up and the other as the intro to Chevy. Neither of them require technical genius, which extends to everything the band does, but a bad player can screw up the simplest riff or run and whoever plays bass here doesn't. It's all good stuff and it highlights that every member of the band is playing their part and doing it well.

That leads me to point out that most of these songs come across with a live feel, even though the album was clearly recorded in a studio. I don't know how much they rehearsed beforehand or how long it took them to record, but it feels like they merely plugged in one day and let rip, blistering their way through seven tracks in the skimpy thirty-five minutes that the album runs and that was that. Of course, given that, they sound like a magnetic club band. I don't know how it would play in a stadium but I'd be paying a lot of attention in a tiny club.

Now, I say mostly because there are a couple of tracks that stand out from the norm. Everything I said above covers the first three, along with Hoyden and WTF is Going On, so five out of seven.

The first exception is No Regrets, which changes up the vocals completely. Suddenly we're almost in psychobilly territory, which I wasn't expecting. It's a much longer song too, running seven and a half minutes when only one other track nudges past five, and it lost me on a first time through. It kept me on the second because, rather than inadvertently tuning out, my ears caught on to what really counts as an epic jam. It's stadium material after all and they're jamming out the song to a moment still to be determined like signature songs tend to do. I'm thinking Freebird, Green Grass and High Tides, Whipping Post, that sort of thing. This isn't quite that epic and it's more subdued, but it has the same approach and could easily extend for another five, ten, fifteen minutes.

Whether I was focused on No Regrets or not, Hoyden grabbed me by the throat, because it's one of those songs that simply aches to get down to business and blisters from the outset. You can get lost in No Regrets or get detached from it but you can't ignore Hoyden. It's a good old fashioned eighties rock song, not so sleazy this time, more back to basics, with an excellent guitar solo in the second half from whoever's handling the lead guitar that I wish I could credit. WTF is Going On is a fresh dose of energy at the tail end of the album, but it's too repetitive to rank with Hoyden.

The other exception is Let's Go to the Room, which I feel I should underline isn't a bad song. There isn't anything wrong with the songwriting at all, but it feels much sparser and thus much weaker than everything else on the album. I don't know if it was recorded at a different time by someone who thinned out the production or if that was a deliberate decision made during the sessions the rest of these tracks were recorded during, but it doesn't work for me. What exacerbates that is a particularly odd decision. Given that it sounds weaker, why place it right after Hoyden, the most balls to the wall song on the album? All the decisions around this one seem wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to adjust eventually and listen to it on its own merits, but that sparseness took me aback on every listen. And, of course, the rest of the album kicks ass. I'd love to sit down in a bar in Yerevan with a pint of Armenian beer and watch the crowd's reaction as this wild bunch hit the stage. I'm sure that they'd all go home suitably drained and reenergised.

The Halo Effect - March of the Unheard (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

This is only the Halo Effect's second album, but they have a solid lineage, having been founded by guitarist Niclas Engelin after leaving In Flames. He'd been a touring guitarist for them as early as 1997 and he'd filled in for founder member Jesper Strömblad on multiple occasions before joining in an official capacity in 2010, initially as a temporary stopgap but soon confirmed as the full time guitarist. Ironically, Strömblad is the second guitarist in the Halo Effect. Peter Iwers, who spent a decade in In Flames, plays bass. Drummer Daniel Svensson had seven years in In Flames. The only member who doesn't have a history with In Flames is vocalist Mikael Stanne, who's the vocalist in Dark Tranquillity instead. That's quite the melodic death metal background for a "new band".

This is very smooth melodic death and it washed over me a few times before I started to focus on what they were actually doing. Conspire to Deceive is a textbook melodeath song but it's so clean that we can be half a dozen tracks on before that truly registers. Detonate has a particular catchy guitar hook that I could imagine in a melodic rock song and that's something that happens often, especially on What We Become and March of the Unheard. Change the tone and the voice and the former could easily be a melodic rock song. Alternatively, a melodic rock band could cover it in the style for which they're known and the structure wouldn't remotely need to change.

There are a few notable things to call out, once we listen enough times to catch everything.

For one, there are some lovely intros. Some, like on Conspire to Deceive and Forever Astray, come through the work of a guest musician, Örjan Örnkloo of Misery Loves Co. on synths. I don't believe he's an official member of the Halo Effect, but he flavours their sound substantially. Others, as we might expect, are delivered on guitar. On Our Channel to the Darkness, that's an acoustic guitar and it's both delicate and tasteful. What We Become and The Burning Point do the same thing but with more typical electric guitar. A Death That Becomes Us combines approaches, utilising electric guitar and synths.

For another, much of this unfolds at midpace, but the moments when the band speed up are very tasty indeed. That primarily means parts of Our Channel to the Darkness, whose transition from the slower pace to the fast is particularly effective. I'd call this out as a highlight for a number of reasons, starting with the delicate intro and continuing with the faster pace, but those synths do fascinating work in the second half and the riff/hook is very effective.

Those hooks are a third note, because hooks tend to be vocal and these are played on guitar. They ought to count as riffs but they do exactly what vocal hooks do so I'm thinking of them that way. Of course, Mikael Stanne doesn't go there for the most part, because he's singing in a harsh voice, a well intonated growl that gives him plenty of opportunity for nuance but not quite so much for an array of melodic rock hooks.

However, there is a clean voice here, increasingly during the second half of the album, and I have to assume that it's mostly him, varying his delivery. I may be mistaken, but I don't think it appears until Forever Astray eight tracks in, returning on Between Directions. The only guest voice that I see listed belongs to Julia Norman, who's very apparent on a predominantly instrumental piece, Coda, which closes out the album with vocalisations rather than words, and not very apparent at all on March of the Unheard. Back to Stanne, though, if it is indeed him duetting with himself, he has a rich clean voice that could easily sing lead in another band.

The final note is that another addition on the second half is a string section, albeit a small section as they come, just a cello played by Johannes Bergion and a violin played by Erika Almström. They are also on March of the Unheard, which somehow escapes me every time I listen to it, but are not ignorable on Between Directions. They provide the intro, for a start, but the also sit behind the vocals during the verses, with the guitar absent. The violin dances with Stanne's clean voice often. Finally, both cello and violin reappear on Coda, which is Stanne-free.

Overall, this is a very easy album to like. It starts well with highlights like Conspire to Deceive and Our Channel to the Darkness and remains highly consistent throughout, even as it diversifies what it does in the second half. The question is always going to come down to how well it sticks. That I'm not sure about yet. It feels like it ought to stick well but I somehow tune out on some of the songs every single time. They're not bad songs. They just lose me as if they're coated in some impeccable non-stick surface and I just slide away. With both those aspects in mind, I'll stick (ha!) with a solid 7/10.

Ian Hunter - Defiance Part 2: Fiction (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Apr 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

You'd never know from this album that Ian Hunter is eighty-five frickin' years old, especially with a song as absolutely killer as People to open up. Damn, that's a catchy "na na" chant to kick off a new album, as if we're back in 1974 and Mott the Hoople is still in business. Hunter certainly is, spitting out cynical lyrics with glorious intonation that land tellingly. I found myself singing along with this song on my very first time through and all the more on further listens. It's about everyone being a consumer of marketing. "We know what people want," claim the marketroids. "No you don't!" we chant in response. This is a fantastic song to start but it's also easily the standout track.

Much of the rest of the album follows the precedent of the title track, which is a singer-songwriter song in the old style. It feels notably weaker than People initially, but it grows as it goes, getting under the skin before it's done. Arguably the quality of the songs will depend on this factor. Those that get under our skin are the strong ones that will grow with repeats until we wonder why we'd doubted them to begin with. Those that don't will feel weaker and lessen the album overall. What seems particularly important is that that's going to be a personal thing. I can absolutely imagine that the songs that don't get under my skin may well get under yours.

Hunter's voice is as recognisable as ever and, while his voice may be a little rougher now than the rough it's always been, it's still glorious and his delivery is just as fantastic as it's ever been. He's feeling these lyrics and passing that feeling on to us without any trouble at all. What's more, few songs are worthy of comparisons because they generally feel like Ian Hunter songs. He sounds like Bob Dylan on a lot of What Would I Do without You, a song on which Lucinda Williams joins in and her voice has changed considerably since I last heard it. Otherwise, the delivery on This Ain't Rock and Roll sounds like a Steve Earle story song, but that's about it. Everything else is Hunter.

I can't get much further in this review without pointing out that this is the sequel to Defiance Part 1, which came out in 2023 and which I haven't heard. Like that album, this one features a core set of musicians but also a heck of a lot of guests. I wasn't remotely surprised to find that Joe Elliott is there on backing vocals, as he's worshipped Hunter for decades, but he's not particularly obvious. He's on People, along with both Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. Brian May heavies up Precious, Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp both contribute guitars to The 3rd Rail and the late Taylor Hawkins plays drums on four tracks, including Hope, with Williams and Billy Bob Thornton helping out with the vocals.

I appreciated many of these contributions, but none are blatant, Williams's voice on What Would I Do without You being easily the most obvious. Whatever these luminaries contribute, Hunter's voice and lyrics remain in the spotlight. Of course we're supposed to listen to the lyrics on singer-songwriter songs but that doesn't mean that we always do. We do here, even if we don't know what Hunter's singing about. The 3rd Rail, for instance, is a notably sad song that I have to assume refers to a news story back home that I must have missed, having hopped the pond a couple of decades ago.

The most obviously Ian Hunter songs are People, with its Mott the Hoople glam rock drive, along with This Ain't Rock and Roll and Everybody's Crazy But Me, with its simple but very effective riff in the time honoured Keith Richards style. The former seems pretty straight forward, dissing on modern music, but I wonder if it actually is. After all, disses on modern music aren't remotely new and I wonder if Hunter is cleverly nodding to the fact that, a century ago, someone was probably complaining about how the work songs mentioned in the first verse simply aren't like they were back in the old country. The latter is neatly sardonic, as we expect from Hunter.

Amidst all the singer-songwriter material, Precious and Kettle of Fish are heavier songs, courtesy of Brian May on the former and Rick Nielson returning on the latter. I like the variety of intensity and it feels like Hunter does too. He relishes telling stories in songs like The 3rd Rail and Hope but he really gets his teeth into hooks on songs like People and Precious. When he starts Everybody's Crazy But Me with a characterful "'allo, 'allo, 'allo", we struggle to believe it's over half a century since Mott the Hoople split. Talking of openings, People begins with "It's the gospel according to whichever channel you're listening to", which is almost as great a beginning as the "na na" chant before it.

What that means is that some of this is immediate, most obviously People, but none of it is tough to get through. With repeat listens, everything grows and some of it considerably. There's a lot in play here and it's well worth trying to figure out what Hunter's singing about, even on songs that outwardly seem straightforward like This Ain't Rock and Roll. And that in turn means that I really need to take a listen to Defiance Part 1. I grabbed a copy in 2013 but never got to it. Obviously that was a mistake.

Katoaja - What We Witness (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Jan 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram

Here's another progressive metal album that covers a lot of musical ground, but it does it with a lot more coherence than the Blood Incantation album that I reviewed yesterday. It isn't extreme, so the breadth of palette isn't as substantial or the shifts as jarring, but it still covers a heck of a lot of ground. That begins with the opener, Nothing and Nothing More, which is definitely a lot of something, especially when the keyboards get seriously interesting at the end of the first half.

This song runs a breath over ten minutes and is entirely instrumental for the first couple. It starts out elegant, then turns jaunty with a core vocal that gradually gets less annoying. Are there two singers here or just one? There seem to be two singing core, even before someone starts singing clean. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a fan of shouty vocals. They certainly have their place, adding aggression to any song, but I've always found them fundamentally limiting, because that's pretty much all they can do. Unless a band is planning to only be a blitzkrieg of aggression, it stifles creativity.

Katoaja solve that problem by varying the vocals considerably. This song starts out shouty but it goes clean. Other songs do both too, in different quantities. The Sinking Cathedral adds whispers, which gradually grow in emphasis. Stoic features milder vocals, which oddly stay at the same level throughout the song. They embrace folk melodies in Nangijala. There's even a harsh voice in The Source that approaches a death growl, as well as a breathy clean voice. What this means is that the album and the songs on it can't be defined by one vocal style and that's especially important with someone who typically shouts. The second vocalist is bass player Matias Ärrälä, but most of this has to be the work of Juho Kiviniemi, who's admirably versatile.

Of course, the musical style varies with the vocal style, as we'd expect for a prog band and that's a good thing and a bad thing. The beginning of The Sinking Cathedral is absolutely my thing, with its slow build on organ, intricate guitar and those whispered vocals. Unfortunately, the middle of the same song isn't my thing at all, with limiting core vocals and modern guitars that masquerade as percussion. It grows substantially over its five minutes though, with some gorgeous keyboards, an impressive bass and a tasty guitar solo still to come.

Every song here has at least one thing worthy of note and often that becomes a plural. Nangijala wends its way into folk melodies a minute and a half in. What We Witness opens up teasingly with slow keyboard swirls and tasteful piano, then it erupts into life with a jagged rhythm. The ending of The Source is utterly delightful, with the keyboards dancing around airly over a heavy backdrop. They're the work of Unto Luoto and, while he's far from the only talent in this band, he's the one who caught my attention the most.

The Great Under is particularly fascinating because of him. The music is heavy and driving and the vocals, when they arrive, are aggressive core vocals again. Yet the keyboard melodies are straight out of the new wave, the sort of thing we'd expect on Ultravox songs. It's like Luoto is playing on a completely different song to the other four musicians in the band, but it works. The keyboards are a way to temper the aggression without caging it and, rather bizarrely, it all works together with wonderful effect. In fact, this may be my favourite song on the entire album.

If there's a competitor for that title, it's What We Witness, not only because it's the instrumental and they always tend to stand out for me on albums with core vocals. However, this particular one does a lot. I didn't expect it to stay instrumental, for a start, its eruption into jagged rhythm when I expected the vocals to kick in, appropriately core at this point, but they never do. The song waxes and wanes, with a heavy section in the middle and an an introspective one during the second half. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

My other highlight, much of The Sinking Cathedral aside, is The Source, which leaps into metalcore from the outset but with the vocals varied, this being where that near death growl shows up. The keyboards are what shift the tone, as they do so often on this album, leading it into a traditional prog section, a soft midsection and that delightfully airy ending. There's a lot in this song, which runs almost eight and a half minutes. It's prog metal, metalcore, prog rock and prog metal again in turn, with each section moving seamlessly into the next.

All in all, I like Katoaja, who were ambitious with their debut album but pretty consistently nailed it. By now, the average Finn must be in three bands, because Finland is punching so far above its musical weight that it boggles the mind. I don't know whether these five musicians arrived from other bands or play in multiples, but it doesn't sound like this is their first rodeo. I'd definitely like to hear more.

Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's an album that's made a lot of top ten lists for 2024, unsurprisingly given how much buzz has surrounded Blood Incantation lately. I reviewed their previous album, 2019's Hidden History of the Human Race, in January 2020 because it had similarly made so many end of year lists. The general consensus of the critics is the same for each: they're both masterpieces that move death metal in new directions. What's odd is that I found myself happy to agree with them last time but not this. There are the roots for a masterpiece here, but it just doesn't hold together for me.

There are two tracks, The Stargate and The Message, presumably broken up over the two sides of the vinyl release, and each of them is broken up into three parts named Tablets. That's hardly an unusual approach, but I can't figure out why any of them are separated the way they are. Tablet I of The Stargate, for instance, features three utterly distinct parts that aren't separated at all yet the ambience that ends Tablet I flows right into Tablet II as if there shouldn't be a gap. I can't see what Blood Incantation are trying to do.

By utterly distinct, by the way, I mean utterly distinct. Tablet I starts out with bubbly synths but a jagged guitar quickly joins in as if this is a Voivod album. Thirty seconds in, it's clearly technical or progressive death metal and that settles down within the next minute and we're off and running at pace. It's all good stuff and it's building. However, it all falls away at the two minute mark, so it can veer into something completely different.

Suddenly it's funk. Or reggae. Or soft rock. Or jazzy space rock. Maybe it's all those things at once, rather like a lively krautrock piece with a touch of Journey, especially once a keyboard solo shifts the feel firmly into space rock. Eventually, it evolves into Pink Floyd, a Dave Gilmour clone rocking out in a guitar solo. This is a wild and very interesting three and half minutes. Again, it's all good stuff, entirely instrumental, but if I have no idea why it's there at this point in this song.

What's more, it doesn't end with Tablet I. It just erupts back into prog death at the five and a half minute mark, rather abruptly too, as if someone realised that the radio station had changed from the metal station to the krautrock station and tweaked the dial back again. This closing section is, you guessed it, all good stuff. Everything here is well played and clearly placed very deliberately. I merely have no idea what it's supposed to achieve. I get the feeling that it's supposed to take me to a particular place but it doesn't. I'm stranded in the airport terminal wondering which of these planes to catch.

If the end of the part prompts the decision, then it's that krautrock plane to Berlin, as Tablet II is almost entirely told in that instrumental vein, merely with added samples for flavour. In fact, it's so krautrock that there's a guest musician here and it's Thorsten Quaeschning, the current leader of electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream. That isn't particularly shocking, because it sounds like a track of theirs all the way until it turns into pastoral folk rock three minutes in and eventually gets to a heavy prog metal section, sans the usual death components, at the end. That's a genre even a musical chameleon like Tangerine Dream hasn't tried out yet.

I could keep going at this level of detail throughout all three tablets of both songs, but there's no point. The same wild shifts happen and, while every section sounds great on its own, none of it has any reason I can figure out. What's that ethnic instrumentation on Tablet III, in front of the tribal drums? I have no idea but it sounds good and makes no sense. Why does Tablet II of The Message veer into jazz out of nowhere? Why does Tablet III open up in a clear thrash metal section, a nicely powerful one at that until the death growls show up and minimise it? Why does that shift into the same pastoral flute and soothing folk prog as the middle of Tablet II of The Stargate? I don't know.

It feels like I should like this. I tend to appreciate bands subverting genres by merging them in odd ways. I tend to love extreme metal bands dipping into unusual rock territory, especially with ethnic instruments to mix it up even more. I tend to like being bludgeoned here but soothed there. That's joyous to me. But it has to make sense. There has to be a reason for it to happen, lyrical or musical or whatever. Set a scene and paint it with music so I can see what it is. It seems like this is trying to do that but it doesn't know how.

And that's why, as beautifully played as this is and as fascinating as its musical shifts are, it simply doesn't work for me as an album. Hidden History of the Human Race was an easy 9/10 for me, even though I don't dish those ratings out like candy. This has to be a 6/10 because it makes no sense to me at all and I've listened through enough times for a sudden realisation to feel long overdue.

What About Tomorrow - Rage of Mythology Volume I (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

I've started off each day this year with a metal release from 2025 because I'm struggling to find a new rock album. Finally this one crossed my path, even though I know almost nothing about What About Tomorrow except that they're Italian, the band comprises of four musicians and they play hard rock in an odd variety of styles. Maybe they're versatile and maybe they haven't figured out what they want to sound like yet, but they're capable throughout this album, whatever influences they're manifesting at a particular moment.

For instance, after an acoustic guitar intro, Werewolves opens up, with elegant Iron Maiden-style guitar. The song doesn't stay there though. That's a bouncy riff and the hooks are far more in the Saigon Kick realm, a name that kept leaping to mind as I listened through. Big Brother has vocal phrasing that reminds of Danzig and especially Metallica. I'd say Diamond Head instead, but it's Metallica's Black-era guitar crunch that shows up on Moment of Glory and Kangarat, along with more James Hetfield-esque vocals. Namazu, on the other hand, sounds more like Extreme, with the lead guitarist channelling Nuno Bettencourt.

I should emphasise that all these influences are there in moments, often many of them, but never really full songs. Even Namazu, arguably the most consistently influenced song, starts out with a experimental section that's as jagged as the rest of the song isn't. There are a bunch of intros on these songs and they do a wonderful job of keeping us on the hop. Big Brother starts a bit jagged too, albeit not as much as Namazu, but Moment of Glory starts out with an agreeably funky bass and Kangarat opens with some sort of ethnic stringed instrument that I can't place. It feels more Indian than Japanese but it has the strong plucked sound of a koto.

The name I kept coming back to was Saigon Kick, partly because this is so diverse but also because anything Jason Bieler puts his mind to has a particular melodic flow, whatever else it's doing. It's what I heard so often here, perhaps most consistently on Desert Me but also in hooks all over the album, not only Werewolves and Kangarat. A lot of what goes down on Moment of Glory, its funky bass joined by a funky guitar and then sassy drums, could easily have been on a Saigon Kick album. And hey, I'm never going to complain about anything I can justifiably cite Saigon Kick on.

Given how these touches are often blatant, I'll hazard a guess that the songs I haven't mentioned yet are just as obviously influenced, just by names I don't know or don't recognise. Phoenix is the most tantalising of them, because I'm hearing seventies singer/songwriters, musical theatre and, almost inevitably, Saigon Kick again. However, the song itself doesn't sound like any of those and I wonder what the influence was. You Make Me Feel Down has a sleazy glam metal kick to it, albeit filtered down to rock rather than metal. I just can't place any particular band.

And that's fine, because the aspect I like most about this album is that it goes all over the map in fascinating ways. Whoever's listening is likely to catch this band here and that band there but the bands are going to vary based on our own tastes and backgrounds. Maybe these guys have no idea who Saigon Kick are and got their sound through another band. Maybe you'll hear those moments and know exactly who that would be, even if I don't. Such is the guessing game of influences.

Given that I know next to nothing about What About Tomorrow, I can't praise anyone in particular for their contributions. They do have an Instagram page, so I can see that they're all young, but it seems to have been set up in the last couple of months and they haven't got round to naming the band members yet. There is a mention that they used to be called Infills Chain and googling gives me a lot more information on them. But hey, are these two bands comprised of exactly the same four musicians? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whoever the lead guitarist is clearly knows what he's doing, whether it's Davide from Infills Chain or not. There are a bunch of strong solos here, with the one on Namazu perhaps the best, but not far ahead of the one on Kangarat. The vocals are strong too, but they do have the most derivative moments, especially the James Hetfield ones. There are a couple of moments on Big Brother and Kangarat where I started to wonder if I was listening to a cover of a song I'd never heard before. Both bass and drums are less flash but don't particularly seek moments in the spotlight, but they find them anyway, most obviously during the intro of Moment of Glory.

Their first Instagram post has "We know what we want know, so what about tomorrow?" as a sort of mantra. Ironically, I'm not sure they do know what they want know, because the only thing they need, I think, is a defining sound. The talent's there. The songwriting's there. The performance is there. I'm just not convinced they're themselves yet. I look forward to finding out who they'll turn into. Bring on volume two!

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Wild God (2024)

Country: Australia
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

My first experience of Nick Cave was oddly not musical, because I first encountered him as an actor giving an uncompromising performance in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, an obscure Australian prison feature that he also co-wrote. Once I realised he was a musician, I had to check out his music and I was quickly hooked. Murder Ballads is probably my favourite album of his with the Bad Seeds, but on another day I might plump for Let Love In or Your Funeral... My Trial instead. I was firmly paying attention when he put out the very different The Boatman's Call, but I seem to have drifted away since then. I've heard some of his later albums but nothing's grabbed me the way his old stuff did.

So let's check out his new one, Wild God, which is his first album since 2019's Ghosteen, and which apparently features much more input from the Bad Seeds. Cave has continually reinvented what he does throughout his career, so I'm not shocked to find this different to anything that I've heard from him before. However, it's easy to see the evolution. There are plenty of moments here that owe a debt to The Boatman's Call, but the sparseness is gone, if not all the personal ache. What replaces it is a buoyancy that's always there but sometimes makes itself incredibly obvious.

It's there from the outset on Song of the Lake, the busiest song I've heard from Cave in decades. While Wild God is a more personal song, it erupts halfway through and suddenly it's every bit as buoyant as Song of the Lake. Frogs builds into buoyancy. Joy builds into buoyancy. Conversion may build into buoyancy more than anything else here, touching early but exploding into something of such import that it's impossible to not be affected by it. Eventually we realise that the swell is on every song, even when we think it's all calmed down to something more personal. It's like there's an angelic throng hovering above the album accompanying everything with joy.

The key line may be one from Joy, when Cave sings, "We've had too much sorrow. Now is the time for joy." He's always been a tortured poet, tearing apart his soul for the right word on album after album, and this album is no exception. However, every moment of pain is tempered by the vibrant joy in the chorus around him. This is gospel music really, even if it's not worshipping any particular god. It's finding revelation in the act of worship through music. It's weird to realise that this isn't an album of words, not really, even if a few stand out here and there. Cave may be a poet with his own singular voice, but this album is all about mood.

Above everything else, it lives or dies on mood. How did you feel coming into this album? How did you feel leaving it? Crucially, what's the difference between those two states and why? Are there any particular moments that prompted that or was it just the combined effect of three quarters of an hour of grand affirmation? There are moments here of traditional Bad Seeds groove, like in the second half of Cinnamon Horses, but mostly it's just pure emotion transformed into a musical form.

I'm not sure I can even call out highlights because I think I'll need to get to know this album over a much longer period than a day to decide on that. Wild God certainly grabbed me, and Conversion and Joy too, but I wonder if Final Rescue Attempt will end up being the song that actually speaks to me the way Cave songs traditionally tend to do. I have a feeling it might be but I don't know yet. I do know that the song that most people have raved about, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is) didn't wow me. Maybe it'll manifest its power to me after more listens, but I don't think so. It's an interesting song musically with unusual percussive effects, whistles and a tasty backing vocal, but it's not one that has connected with me yet, especially with the narrative section.

It isn't alone. I like every song here but I don't love every song the way that many people seem to do. I've seen it in a lot of top ten lists for 2024 and it's topped at least one. Even as a Cave fan, I'm just not hearing that level of accomplishment here. It's a good album, certainly, and maybe it's a great one. It does things that I'm not used to hearing from Cave, like focusing on mood over lyrics, and that's interesting. I felt the buoyancy too, which I think is the point, but I'm not going to find a struggle to move on to another album, which is something I've done before with Cave albums. Let me see how it settles.

Noirum - Nature (2025)

Country: Czechia
Style: Avant-Garde Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's an interesting album that's hard to categorise. I'm going with avant-garde black metal, as that's what the Metal Archives list and it's certainly grounded in black metal. Forests, Darkness and Sorcery opens up the album with a wall of sound guitar and a shriek in the vocals. The question is whether what else they do counts as avant-garde or just inventive. It seems entirely accessible to me, for extreme metal, and that's no bad thing. Does avant-garde have to mean challenging?

Some of it departs more obviously from black metal than the rest, but even there it's not always a wild shift. Sure, Jotunheimen goes to some interesting places that we wouldn't typically associate with black metal. It starts out with soothing Slavic folk chants, with a slow bass and slow keyboard melodies, not to forget a wonderful percussion sound. The vocals and percussion are manipulated later in the song so that it almost feels like a Kraftwerk compsition for a while. That's not a usual sound for black metal, even though it works well.

But Arctic Swamps often sounds like Celtic Frost, slow doom metal with prominent note bends on the guitars. It's still really heavy stuff, even if it feels like a sound that predates black metal in its current form. There's a proto-extreme thump on Eternal Snow that hints at thrash and industrial but it morphs into more recognisable black metal often enough. Deep Lake under the Moon kicks off like S.O.D. and it and Sólardauði both have mosh parts that I'd expect from someone like them. Wanderers has an epic swell over the black metal flurry. There are plenty of side trips into other subgenres here but they're all pretty compatible with black metal.

So avant-garde may be a stretch, but it's definitely black metal with an open mind and that's been my favourite type of black metal since it found a name. It never ceases to amaze me how it's gone from a fundamentally restrictive single bleak sound to arguably the most versatile genre in all of metal, venturing into all sorts of musical territory that I'd never have imagined would welcome it back in the late eighties.

Jotunheimen aside, this tends to do it subtly, like a neat psychedelic section late in Sólardauði it's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. The harmonising vocals in Wanderers aren't missable, but there are nuances there that are. It's cleverly done. There's a complete drop midway through A Lone Tree that serves as wonderful emphasis, and, of course, the accompanying ramp back up to full gear. All these are worthy touches that highlight the strength of the songwriting.

The most overt example of something different, Jotunheimen aside, has to be Eternal Snow, which continually reinvents itself. It starts out proto-extreme and never quite ditches its industrial vibe but somehow finds its way into a jagged jazz section and back out again in a spacey swirl that feels almost new age. It's a constantly inventive song that keeps us well and truly on the hop. Somehow it doesn't end up on my favourites list, because that's the sort of thing that usually grabs me, but I prefer Jotunheimen for diversity and Wanderers for sheer groove.

Oddly, there seems to be less to say about this than I expected from a band labelled "avant-garde". It's a strong album, certainly. I've listened through this a bunch of times over a couple of days and nothing's got old yet. The musician responsible for most of it goes by VlastYs, whose usual credit is for "everything". However, I see a second guitarist, Martin Vymětal, who joined a couple of years in and is apparently still involved. I couldn't tell you which guitars belong to which musician, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to assume that everything else is VlastYs, including the songwriting.

I like this a lot, albeit a little less than I did on a first listen when it felt more groundbreaking. It is imaginative, for sure, but I have to wonder if this is more accessible than the previous two albums, which weren't generally labelled in English. Nedráždi Moniku harmonikou and Pusťte netvora do otvora are pretty much entirely in Czech, I believe, with perhaps an odd shift into other languages for tracks like Auris artifex or Vindaloo. Oh, and Bikini Hardcore, which doesn't sound close to the sound this band has. Certainly there were female vocals on the first album but not here.