Skjult - Lucifer Hominum Salvator (2020)

Country: Cuba
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

I may well be out of date with my knowledge, but I seem to remember from the Buena Vista Social Club movie that all musicians in Cuba are employed by the government. If that's still the case, it's wicked that Conspirator, the man behind Skjuld, ought to count because he sings and plays black metal, hardly the sort of music we expect from the land of Fidel. I have no idea what sort of audience he gets but all power to him for doing this to begin with and doing it for long enough to put out three albums.

Conspirator does everything on this album and it's so well produced that we can hear all of it. The wall of sound here comes from the guitars, which are right up there with the vocals in the mix. The drums are a little buried and are sometimes slower, which is intriguing, but they know exactly how to ramp up the pace when needed, such as on Under the Serpent's Banner, which truly blisters. Whatever speed they are, I should add that they're always urgent.

I liked this from the outset, with the Black Sabbath touches that kick off Lawless God, but it gets better and better. The Sight is an impressive demonstration of how black metal doesn't have to blister to carry power and weight. Here, the drums actually outpace the slower guitar for the first half, which is just as evocatively evil and paints just as much of the soundscape Conspirator is conjuring up. That goes triple for The Way Back to the Source, which is a sheer delight of an instrumental. I adore that guitar tone.

The Fall is an interlude that leads us into A Star Down Below, my other easy favourite here. It has a huge sound and it maintains a fantastic old school groove. Midway through, it almost turns into a black metal version of Agent Steel, translating the speed metal blitzkrieg of 144,000 Gone into a wildly different style. It takes its time getting there, though, building up to it magnificently. Sacred Flames follows up with more galloping speed metal with a black metal overlay. It's elevated by a second vocal at points.

That just leaves the title track, which really didn't the suffix of (Ritual) because it's clearly a ritual piece even before the chants begin, taking me back to the seventies and the shenanigans of bands like Atomic Rooster and Black Widow. The music behind them is slow, heavy and hypnotic and, in other hands with a different guitar tone, this song could be doom metal. Again, it plays as a duet, with evil vocals countering the hopeful chant, and that's a glorious way to do this.

What I've been finding lately with a lot of one man bands is that the people behind them are multitalented but often better at one thing. They may be the bees knees on guitar but their vocals are more average, or vice versa. Here, I could see Conspirator being just a vocalist or just a guitarist and being worthy of praise even restricted to one role. Hilariously, it seems that he mostly plays bass, performing in that vein for Dawn of Madness, Heretik, the Chaos Nether Silence, Darkening and presumably others.

If that isn't enough to keep him busy, I should remind that he plays every part here and also does everything for Shrine ov Absurd, who knocked out an album somewhere in between the three he's done as Skjult. Clearly there's a black metal underground scene in Havana and, if it all sounds like this, I'm eager to seek out more.

Svengali - Sayonara (2020)

Country: United Arab Emirates
Style: Melodic Metalcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Once again I'm dipping into a -core genre even though you know by now that I don't dig shouty vocals, but I just had to discover what a melodic metalcore outfit from the United Arab Emirates sound like. Well, they're sort of from the UAE. Svengali are indeed based in Dubai, but the four members are each from different countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and India. I don't know what usually populates the Virgin Megastore chart in th UAE but Svengali's debut album reached the number two spot.

And they sound pretty good, whatever style they're plucking from their ample playbook. Their core sound is roughly what you might expect: fast and heavy guitars with the bass prominent in the mix and deep shouty vocals from what I presume is Adnan Mryhij. The only line-up I can find has five members so I would think that someone has left the band and I have no idea who.

If you're into Killswitch Engage, you should dig this, even though they're a bit slower at full tilt and feature less guitar solos. The closest they get to Killswitch here is certainly Freight Train, which kicks off with a guitar sound right out of Iron Maiden's Back in the Village but then launches into the chuggy metalcore sound that the rest of the song thrives on.

If that's the hardest song here, the softest is surely Better Off, which is half a ballad, with melodies reminiscent of Marlene on the Wall by Suzanne Vega, of all things, and half an alt rock song with a decent solo. Whoever provides the clean voice brings a real warmth to the album and he's either layering his voice or someone else is backing him in a similar vein.

The best song to my mind is the one that mixes these two different styles in the most effective way. That's Labyrinth, which wraps up the album. It kicks off quintessentially for metalcore but the shouty vocalist hands over to the clean one before the halfway mark so that he can introduce strong hooks that take the song in a different direction.

I like this song a lot and would call it the most definitive song here, even if it refuses to be just one thing. There's a proggy section midway through that feels like post-rock but, just as we're getting into the soundscape, it hands over to a powerful chugging riff backed by distant floating synths and then we're back to the hooks. It's heavy and it's soft without either aspect conflicting.

An album of songs with the contrasts of Labyrinth would be fantastic, but it isn't this one. Other songs tend to focus on the traditional metalcore sound without getting too much into embellishments from other genres, or don't bother with them at all. And that's fine. Svengali not presenting themselves as anything but metalcore and, as much as I prefer every other vocal style in the entire rock/metal spectrum, Myrhij is as enjoyable a shouter as I've heard lately.

In fact, if there's a genre they hint at most, it's not prog or post-rock at all, but groove metal because there are moments here that reminded me a lot of latter day Sepultura, albeit coming to that shared sound from an opposite direction. Sepultura are a metal band who like punking it up, while Svengali are clearly a punk band who like metal. I wonder how far they'll go on that scale on future albums. It's not like Sepultura haven't developed massively over their career and it's comparatively early for Svengali.

Oh, and by the way, the typographer in me adores the simple but highly effective logo!

Creative Waste - Condemned (2020)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

If I could be surprised by anything more than the discovery that there's a grindcore band in Saudi Arabia, it's the discovery that they've been doing what they do there for a long time. While the founder members talked about the band at the tail end of the last millennium, they officially formed in 2002 and are based in the gulf coast cities Al Qatif, Dammam and Al Khobar. Whoever's in the latter is actually closer to Smouldering in Forgotten over the bridge in Bahrain as he is to whoever's in Al Qatif. Metal Archives has a note that Creative Waste performed the first metal gig in public in Saudi Arabia, so extra kudos to them. Shake the pillars of the world.

I'm not sure how much material they've issued in the past. Their website, or what passes for one, mentions four albums but Metal Archives only lists two, the first dating back to 2012 and the second being this one. Bandcamp has a short third from 2008 that Metal Archives lists as a demo. I do like the bio the band included on that page: "Creative Waste is a Saudi Arabian grindcore band. That should give you an idea of how horrible we sound." Nice.

Here, they sound pretty damn good. Their sound clearly comes from the early days of grindcore. Condemned is rather like early Napalm Death but not quite as extreme in speed, with riffs that are straight out of the first Discharge album. Other songs aren't quite as reminiscent, but both those bands come up a lot here. The abundant use of samples clearly comes from punk too, given that they're all social in nature, railing against a lot of common bugbears like wealth inequality and racism. I recognised Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky and that idiot at a Virginia public meeting who accused every Muslim of being a terrorist.

The primary reason that Creative Waste are a lot more like the Napalms than Discharge is the use of particularly wild vocals. They are varied, perhaps because vocal duties are divvied up between the two Al-Shawafs in the band (presumably brothers?), Fawaz and Talal, who were founding members and have kept Creative Waste alive ever since. Fawaz is also the band's guitarist and Talal contributes the drums but I believe it's their voices we're hearing.

I have no idea which is which but one of the voices is old school grindcore, straight out of the Lee Dorrian playbook, hurling deep guttural roars into the microphone, while the other is higher, wilder and punkier and is really a challenge to the the mixer's ability to keep him from blowing out the top end of the spectrum.

What surprised me most is how substantial these songs sounded. Back in those early days in the late eighties, I remember songs not only being very short but feeling very short. They were brief bursts of intense energy without too much of a secondary goal in structure. I remember being surprised when From Enslavement to Obliteration came out and rocked that assumption. These songs are short but not for grindcore, running in the territory of a minute and a half to double that. The New Apartheid, the only song here to make it past three minutes, feels like a more extreme sort of crossover that's far beyond anything Agnostic Front or the Crumbsuckers ever put out.

To me Creative Waste sound like a what if scenario. Imagine if the American authorities had managed to put Jello Biafra behind bars and kicked the rest of the Dead Kennedys out of the US. Imagine if they'd settled in England and got caught up in the early days of grindcore, consequently speeding up and getting more raucous. Imagine if they'd hired a new singer who came out of crust punk and wanted to emulate Lee Dorrian. And imagine if they hung out with a DJ who knew exactly how best to use samples. What you're imagining is something very close to Creative Waste.

Bursters - Once and for All (2020)

Country: South Korea
Style: Post-Hardcore
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Wikipedia | YouTube

I'm listing this Bursters album as post-hardcore, even though I continue to struggle to define that genre, but you'll see it as others, partly because they hail from South Korea. You've heard of K-Pop? Well, this is K-Rock, its younger and harder musical cousin. I've seen Bursters listed as a boy band, but that may be because of their carefully manufactured looks rather than a musical reason. These guys really play real instruments and don't remotely sound like a New Kids on the Block or a One Direction. I've seen alternative hardcore, which makes sense. I've even seen heavy rock, though I wouldn't go there.

What surprised me about this is how much I like it, given that a majority of the influences are from places I don't like.

I've talked here before about how shouty hardcore vocals are my very least favourite style from the entire rock/metal spectrum. Well, that's just what Roh Jaegun uses here, and with real emphasis too. He does calm down now and then, to whisper at us vehemently or even just sing cleanly. Smell the Rot, which opens up the album, is primarily a hardcore song.

Barriers, which follows it, gets much more diverse, but by trawling in other American influences, mostly pop punk but a little nu metal too. Now, it's a hard task not to enjoy pop punk, however annoying it can be, but nu metal is my very least favourite style from the entire rock/metal spectrum. Are you catching my surprise now?

The band detailed their influences to Kerrang! magazine. Roh talks up Bullet for My Valentine and My Chemical Romance. Guitarist Lee Gyejin raises Linkin Park. Bass player Jo Hwanhee adds Limp Bizkit and Korn. Only the drummer, Jo Taehee raises bands I actually appreciate, calling out Mike Mangini of Dream Theater and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin as influences. That explains why I'm more a fan of the drums than anything else here but I never expected to like anything influenced by Limp Bizkit or Korn.

Maybe it's partly the energy that's working for me, as hinted at by the name of the band. There's a heck of a lot of energy here and it manifests in many different ways. Barriers is a bouncy song. Hero boasts a fantastic riff and a catchy chorus, as well as some great moments for a bassist, Jo conjuring a Flea comparison with a few runs.

Things also get a lot poppier than I expected from those influences, even if Coldplay did show up on that list too. Colors kicks off with a choral part before becoming a jangly guitar pop anthem, a little reminiscent of U2 back in the good old days. The title track is a similarly anthemic and jangly pop number, but with Korean lyrics as well as English and a proggier sound back behind the hooks. The pair of Dreamer songs add a patient piano and enticing liquid electronica around the pop drive and emo screams.

And that's not to say that everything here is either pop or the sort of rock that comes from terrible influences. Perhaps what I like most is that there isn't a single sound here to define Bursters. There are a generous fourteen songs on offer and the band explore a lot of musical territory. Here I Am is the most traditional metal song, getting its speed on at one point and going back to Iron Maiden riffs at another. The electronica is far from overdone, adding textures here and there. There's even a reggae vibe in Give and Take and a lounge section in Savage, ladies and gentlemen.

So, for a band who seem to like all the music that I don't, I find it rather hard to dislike Bursters. I can't imagine hauling this out often but they do what they do well and I wish them all the best in conquering the west in the same way K-Pop seems to have done.

3000AD - The Void (2020)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

With a population of only 5 million, New Zealand punches above its weight on a lot of fronts, but I see fewer Kiwi metal bands than I might expect, both in quantity and importance. The most notable outfit I can name may be Shihad and the most fun lately has been Alien Weaponry. Perhaps not coincidentally, both of those bands play (or least used to play) thrash metal and so do this band, 3000AD, who hail from Christchurch though their Bandcamp page suggests that they may be based in Berlin nowadays.

Interestingly, they call what they do progressive thrash, and I won't argue with that too much because there are certainly prog elements here, but they also play close to the looser punk side of thrash. They're a power trio, for a start, with drummer Hellmore Bones singing lead and the other two members singing plenty of backup. If the backing features prog stylings, the vocals are all crossover attitude.

One aspect that both the instrumentation and the vocals share is the way in which they interact as a matter of course. Just check out the intro to Who's Watching?, which we would usually expect to be a solo guitar but here is a duet between Sam Pryor's guitar and Scott Austin's bass. The reason that the band sound like they have more than three members is because that bass has a surprisingly high tone so that we often mistake it for a second guitar.

They have a clean sound that ought to fit pretty well when they perform with other German thrash bands. It's those punky vocals, which are as reminiscent of, say, the first Suicidal Tendencies album as someone like Kreator, and a futuristic lyrical bent that sets them aside. And the world's doing its best to catch up with them, as if the band were really 2020AD not 3000AD.

For instance, a song like Cells, which I presume was not written last month, seems eerily contemporary, set as it is against the wildly unlikely theme of a global pandemic. "Those walls have become a tomb, enclose around you like a concrete womb" sounds like it was written in response to social isolation. Its "microscopic annihilation" comes from "germs bred for war" so I hope we don't discover next week that COVID-19 was a CIA weapons test. It's not like the US hasn't done secret medical experiments in foreign countries before. Hey, Guatemala!

I wonder what else the prophets in 3000AD have in store for us. Well, hey, I see environmental disaster, internet addictions, the surveillance state, the world catching fire... all eerily topical. Only Journeys really sounds like a future state, involving interstellar travel as we attempt to locate a new planet to terraform. Maybe Elon Musk is already working on that.

I liked this but not as much as I thought I would. Even at its fastest, it's slower than I tend to like my thrash and it spends a lot of time mid-pace. I would see 3000AD as the sort of band who come on a few bands into a festival and energise the crowd. They're tighter and more sophisticated than the warm up bands but they're not iconic enough yet to be the names at the top of the bill. Then again, this is their debut. I like the riffs, the sound and even the punky vocals. I'd like to see where they go from here.

It's worth mentioning that the album wraps with Born Under a Black Sun, so that's what we have in our heads as we leave The Void. Along with Journeys, it's the joint longest song on the album and it's the only instrumental. It easily counts as the most consistent prog thrash across the eight tracks and it's delightful. I like the punky vocals but I love 3000AD all the more when the musicians concentrate on their instruments.

At Breakpoint - Let Your Demons Run (2020)

Country: Iceland
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook

This album kicks in like a radio rock show that we're not quite tuned into, but turn the dial to hear better once At Breakpoint come on. That's cool and it's a good way to start the album. I'm not sure we needed the same approach on the next song too, but hey.

At Breakpoint are a hard rock band on their debut album (following an EP in 2017) who hail from Hafnarfjörður, just south of Reykjavik. They're about as different from my previous Icelandic review as can be comfortably imagined, given that that was of a funeral doom metal band called Andvaka. That said, this group would play rather well to a metal audience, even though they're clearly rock rather than metal, because of the way they handle the back end.

These songs are rooted in melody with the vocals highest in the mix. Gunnar Björn is a rock singer, even if he has a very memorable vocal fry, as if he can magically transform his chords to sandpaper as and when he wants.

When in sandpaper mode, he could be seen as a alternative rock singer with a host of comparisons to American alt rock vocalists, mostly to modern bands that I don't know and thus would need my kids or grandkids to identify. The band's Facebook page mentions trendy bands like Bring Me the Horizon and Paramore, whose singers, I imagine, might sound like what Björn is doing. When in the smoother mode, he's very radio friendly in more of a pop vein. There's even a hint of autotune on the final track, appropriately titled Not OK.

However, the band behind him have a lot more than their toes dipped into the modern metal scene. They never want to blister or shred, but they are tuned down and drive the songs with patient riffs, the tone moving up and down the heaviness scale quite a long way in either direction. 3 Lines is easily the heaviest song on offer and, the heavier the band get, the more they tend to remind a lot of a slower, more mainstream Clutch.

What's impressive is that the most catchy songs include Not OK and 3 Lines, so the poppiest one with a hint of autotune and the heaviest one. That's the biggest success of the album, that this can feel both utterly commercial but also agreeably heavy at the same time, without ever really moving from rock into metal.

And that's pretty much all I can say about this album. The lighter songs do all the same things as the heavier ones, just with the heaviness knob turned down to some degree. In other hands, Without You would be a ballad, but here it's not really any different from 3 Lines except for the fact that it's not heavy while the other one is. We're used to volume knobs that make something quieter or louder. At Breakpoint have the same thing for weight.

I should mention the band members, as they make this seem rather effortless when it surely isn't. Beyond being the vocalist, Björn also plays guitar but Rúnar Þór is the lead guitarist and he's a highly patient one, deliberately avoiding the urge to just take over. Pavol Ingi plays a reliable bass. Anton Búi is the drummer, who's as patient in his way as Þór. What I'll take away from this the most is how restrained it is, how these musicians stayed with their plan to nail the groove they wanted without anyone really showing off. And that's why it grew on me.

Abäk - El canto de las Lapas (2020)

Country: Costa Rica
Style: Folk Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

If Külmking resisted their folk metal leanings, Abäk embrace them, defining themselves and their goals as "a cultural rock project that seeks to spread different branches of Costa Rican culture through music." Their songs stem from the myths, history and literature of their native country. I'd go with folk rock rather than folk metal because, while there are certainly places where the guitars speed up and rock out, they're always kept low in the mix and the result feels like rock music that gets more energetic when it feels the need. And whatever we call it, I like it a lot.

Clearly Abäk aren't a small band, photos suggesting ten members, and that's before we factor in four guest musicians, including Jose Macheño from the Spanish folk metal band Lándevir. Sadly, I'm unable to find anything to tell me who's in Abäk and what they do in the band. So let's just say that there are a few vocalists, all of whom sing clean, whether rough male or crystal clear female. There are at least two guitars, along with a bass and various drums. There are certainly flutes involved and a fiddle too.

The opener, La Bruja Zárate, starts off as the band mean to go on. There's a minute and a half of pure folk: acoustic guitars, a hand drum and vocals. At that point, it leaps into eighties heavy metal, continuing with clean vocals but now with a drumkit and electric guitars clearly influenced by early Iron Maiden. Even the sound fits because the guitar is much lower in the mix than a metal band would place it nowadays. By the three minute mark, though, the metal calms down a little and a soaring female voice duets with the guitar, not singing words but just sounds à la Yma Sumac. She eventually sings words but with a folk chant behind her and we're back to the beginning.

I was sold on the album just from that one song, but there are six more and they continue to be interesting. Iriria adds flutes and a punk vibe, without losing the metal guitar solo in the middle. This is a wild mix but one that works really well. It's folk, it's rock, it's punk, it's metal. And the rest of the album continues to mix these genres up in different combinations, as if everyone does it and it's the most natural thing in the world. This is probably my favourite song on the album.

Luna Roja is a folk duet between emotional male and female voices. Guerrera features an oddly strident female vocal, given the others we've heard thus far. Santa Rosa is a metal song built on a military beat. Conquistador gives the bass player plenty of time in the spotlight. The title track brings in the fiddle, which adds an elegance to proceedings that's echoed by the lead male voice. It's also the longest of the tracks by far, running almost ten minutes, and it grows perhaps the most, hauling us along quite the journey before wrapping up with flutes and birdsong.

I'd love to know more about Abäk. Is this some sort of musical collective? I can't imagine that all ten band members appear on every track, especially as the vocals seem to vary considerably across the album. I believe this is the second studio release for them, following a concept album, El Tambor de Sibö in 2018, which I'm eager to check out now. Whoever does what and how often, I enjoyed this a great deal, as I have most of the South American folk metal that I've found of late, bands like Curare, Herteitr and Tuatha de Danann.

Külmking - Kõik kaob (2020)

Country: Estonia
Style: Groove Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I'm seeing a lot of different labels for Külmking, who are from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Their Bandcamp page tags them as death metal, folk metal and pagan metal; their Facebook page shrinks down to just the latter; while Metal Archives plumps for death/groove metal. On the basis of this album on its own, I'd lean towards groove metal as a descriptor of the sound myself, though with a strong death influence.

Presumably the pagan and folk angles are tied to the lyrics; the band's name is a "malicious spirit in Estonian folklore". It seems that Google Translate isn't too great with Estonian, as is evident just from attempting to figure out who does what in the band. It makes sense that Madis Velström takes care of "a hellish vocal" but Rain Parkman is apparently the man who handles the "grab drum heating", whatever that is. Searching for individual words, I see that Sven Põder is on "welding guitar" while Raiko Parts handles the "chisel guitar", but I could only get "eminent bass" for Mihkel Orek. Well, eminent is good, I guess.

Given descriptions like those, I'm surprised that this isn't more vicious in nature, but it's very controlled material. The musicians mostly concentrate on riffs and a succession of complex time changes to separate them, which is enough to make this a very djenty experience if not for the death influence and the reasonable pace. It does feel like the band could have taken this a heck of a lot further in many different extreme directions but they chose to avoid them all in favour of keeping the songs as tight as possible.

The band start off on Timuka tütar as they mean to keep going. Only the odd but intriguing intro really separates it from the other nine songs on offer. It's djenty for a while, that jagged guitar tone that makes it sound like a bass, but there's a thrashy guitar later on when the song gets moving. Madis Velström grunts and growls his way through, as if he's not entirely sure if he prefers death growls or hardcore shouts. He moves from one to the other a lot here. The approach works well as a companion to the guitar sound.

The lack of variety is surely the album's biggest problem, just as the tight musicianship is surely its biggest asset. Some songs feature faster sections that play closer to older school metal, but they always return to a staccato riff at some point. Jaaniöö is a great example of all of that, but it's also elevated by what I initially presumed was a backing vocal that's less polished but more characterful than Velström's lead because it's just singing, not playing the role of a singer. Other faster songs, like Libahunt, just play that staccato djent style faster.

I wished I knew who the backing vocalist is. He shows up again on Libahunt and at further points throughout the album and sings in a folkier style. I would never call this folk metal because it clearly wants to be modern and I don't hear any ethnic instrumentation at all, except for maybe a quiet moment late in Surm that is probably a guitar but sounds more like a lute. However, that backing vocal adds an extra element that, over a few listens, became the one and only identity I could take away from the album. When it's in play, the band sound like nobody else, only Külmking. When it isn't, they're just one more djenty metal band, however musically proficient they happen to be. And it turns out that the backing vocalist is the same Madis Velström who sings the lead. I appreciate his versatility.

I'm not a big fan of djent, so the fact that I like this is telling. I can't say I like it a lot but that may just be my personal tastes showing. It's as capable, as well written and performed, as anything with that sort of sound. I just happen to prefer the Külmking that Külmking seem to be trying not to be, the folkier band of songs like Kaarnakiwi with a different vocal style.

Stonus - Aphasia (2020)

Country: Cyprus
Style: Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

As if we needed any more proof that heavy stoner/doom rock is alive and well and continuing to spread across the globe, here are Stonus, who are Cypriots from Nicosia, even though they've apparently been based in London since 2018 and they recorded the album in Greece. This is killer stuff, six tracks that take us on a psychedelic trip that's bookended rather nicely.

Awake starts things out heavy and betrays a lot of influences. There's blues here, especially in the midsection, and it's psychedelic blues with a really good mix. There's space rock here too, the song often sounding like Hawkwind but without all the synths. Just to make it even more interesting, it's also about as sleazy as I've ever heard stoner rock get. The genre is versatile.

And it needs to be on a thematic concept album like this one. Aphasia is the inability to understand words not because they're not known but because the brain has forgotten how to connect them with their meaning. This album is an attempt to "imitate the mental disorder in a more spiritual and personal perception".

The title track is a little clearer because that's an Ozzy vocal through and through, though the music backing it doesn't play in the expected territory of early Black Sabbath. Sure, it's heavy and doomladen but it doesn't feel like an homage at all. It's more like what a different band might have done in 1970 or 1971 if they'd had the same influences as Sabbath but chose to go in a slightly different direction.

And then it gets really interesting because Mania gets all patient. This one absolutely captivated me, kicking off with a liquid guitar that's relatively standard for stoner rock but then pausing suddenly and beautifully as a hint for the rest of the band to crunch in all together. Rather than finding one riff to build the song, it quietens down massively and goes dreamlike first. While it does ramp up late with some excellent soloing, Mania is as notable for what it doesn't do as what it does.

Fortunately, Nadir, the longest track on offer at eight and a half minutes, follows suit. It starts out with a guitar mimicking Pink Floyd electronica, then moves into a stoner chillout zone that somehow remains a little chill even as it escalates into something more powerful. When the vocals show up, we suddenly realise how long we've been without them, this band being just as effective instrumentally as when Kyriacos Frangoulis exercises his voice. There's certainly some Sabbath here this time out, but the trippiest Sabbath you can imagine.

If you think we might be missing the riffs, Stonus add plenty back on Dead End, but the vocals stay in that hallucinatory trip mindset. There's also an effect applied to them that makes them seem closer to the guitar. Depending on how deep we've dived into this, that proximity in tone adds another level to the psychedelic nature of the trip. The frantic harmonics towards the end are cool too.

And that leaves Ghost Town to take us home by combining the Ozzy vocals from Aphasia with the chillout trip of Nadir, over a very Sabbath-esque bass line from Andreas Aristides. Eventually it ends up back in Hawkwind territory, a driving trip but again without any synths to space it out. We're almost back where we started and that's a great moment to just let the album play again.

I believe this is the debut full length for Stonus, though they've put out a couple of EPs, Lunar Eclipse in 2018 and a single called Sweetspot late last year. Given how excellent this is, I'm eager to check those out while I wait for the band's follow up to Aphasia.

Smouldering in Forgotten - Invictus Mortem (2020)

Country: Bahrain
Style: Black/Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

The best way to highlight what Smouldering in Forgotten sound like may be to explain where their name came from. They were happily going about their days under the name of Bleached Bones until deciding in 2005 to rename to a lyric from Upon This Deathbed of Cold Fire from the debut Goatwhore album. It does make my heart glad to realise that Goatwhore, one of my favourite band names of all time and an excellent live act, are known well enough in the Kingdom of Bahrain to prompt a local band to rename in homage.

If you don't know Goatwhore, their style is blackened death metal with some elements of thrash. Smouldering in Forgotten are similar but darker, warmer and with Mardus's vocals far more consistently death than Goatwhore's black, oddly given that they seem to have started out as a black metal outfit. I'd suggest that they have better production as well but then I realised how it blows out the extremes for the sake of volume and so it distorts annoyingly often. Instead I'll just praise the mix, however it got output. Of course, you can never be sure with anything that touches on black metal if the bad production is deliberate to "keep it real".

When it stays within available amplitude, I like the sound here and I prefer the deeper vocal style, which is old school death metal. The instrumentation tends to build a backing wall of sound, over which the guitars embellish and riff and the vocals rumble. There's not much variety here but there are some interesting points, like the middle eastern flavour early in Tartarus that I wish had emerged more often, and the philosophising about the rise and fall of civilisations that closes out the album.

Generally speaking, I prefer the longer songs here. The average Smouldering in Forgotten song runs five minutes and change and features much of the same result. As if to suggest that they need more room to work, the longer songs bring a little more to bear. My favourite here is Lord of Venom, a seven and a half minute epic. After that, I'd probably plump for Of Chains and Crowns, which runs almost seven minutes if we cut out the long sample. It's notable that these songs don't do anything special that the other ones don't except breathe more. The riffs feel stronger for it and the slower moments feel all the more ominous for it.

Excepting Of Chains and Crowns, which closes out the album, it's the trio of tracks at its heart that impress the most. Lord of Venom kicks them off and Tartarus wraps them up. Inside those bookends is My Pyre Awaits, which could well be the fastest and most blistering piece here and the closest we get to a black metal song. Busac is a whirlwind behind the drums and both the bass and guitars get memorable runs for Hussam and Voidhanger respectively.

There are a couple of earlier Smouldering in Forgotten albums, Legions into Black Flames and I, Devourer, though they're surprisingly old, having been released in 2007 and 2010. I don't believe the band ever ceased to be but it seems that this is the band's first new material in a decade.

I like it but I don't like it as much as I should for "first new material in a decade". I ought to feel the hunger of a band who finally find themselves back in the studio and can't wait to lay down ten years worth of writing and honing and finessing. I don't think they sound tired and they're all clearly talented musicians but, sadly, I don't think they sound remotely as hungry as they should.

Pure Wrath - The Forlorn Soldier (2020)

Country: Indonesia
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Pure Wrath is another one man project, this time from Indonesia, and the one man is Januaryo Hardy, who does everything here except the drums, which come courtesy of Yurii Kononov, formerly of White Ward and currently of a host of varied bands, and the piano on the opening track, which is by Dice Midyanti. It's Hardy's fourth release as Pure Wrath, following two albums and a split release with French symphonic black metal band Onirism, and it counts as an EP, even though it generously runs almost half an hour.

It's also very good indeed. I've listened through a few times and every time it shocks me by ending so quickly and I realise all over again just how much it sucked me in. There are only three songs on offer, ranging from seven up to ten minutes, but they're so immersive that they feel like five apiece. If I have a complaint, it's in the mix of the drums, which are excellent but a little buried in the mix. The piano works well down there, because it teases and we pay extra attention to hear it. The vocals are buried to exactly the right level too, but I'd have liked a crisper drum sound.

The piano gets overt at the end of When a Great Man Dies, underpinning what I presume is a voice sample of someone who was involved in or affected by the subject of the album, which is the genocide that began in Indonesia in 1965 as an anti-communist purge after a failed coup and became so much more, leaving a million dead and setting up the New Order of Suharto in power for the next three decades. Maybe it's a late recording of Sukarno, the deposed president, who was placed into house arrest until his death.

I've read that this bloody period is little talked about in Indonesia, due to being suppressed by the government, so it's good for it to see a little light on this album, even if I have no idea what the lyrics happen to be. I did catch odd bits here and there, enough to believe that they're delivered in English but not enough to have a clue about what they cover. I'd like to read those lyrics, just as I'd like to know who's speaking in that sample.

Atmospheric black metal is a fantastic genre to explore this sort of subject matter. hardy and Kononov create a powerful wall of sound that's impossible to ignore, just like the mass murder of one per cent of the population would be. It's hard and mostly fast until, at certain key moments like one midway through With Their Names Engraved, it all suddenly stops and we're calm in the eye of the storm wondering what's still going on out there while it's so peaceful here inside. After that moment of peace, the last couple of minutes are melancholy, with an almost choral dirge, as we come to terms with what's just happened.

What impressed me most, beyond this structuring, is how the guitars retain a melodic line even at ludicrous speed. One of the benefits of being a one man band is that every part you play has to be recorded separately and, once you get into that mindset, it's no great stretch to add further layers. As this album has such a dense sound, I can't say how many guitar layers Hardy added but much of the album obviously features a backing layer to maintain density and a lead layer for surprisingly patient melodic riffing.

I liked this a lot on a first listen and I liked it all the more after a few times through. I look forward to seeing what else Hardy has done, whether as Pure Wrath or one of his many other bands. He also provides everything for a brutal death project called Perverted Dexterity and a post-black one called Lament, among a host of others. He shows a lot of versatility here and that is never a bad thing when you play in multiple genres.

Silent Tiger - Ready for Attack (2020)

Country: Honduras
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2020
Sites: Facebook

Ready for Attack, whether the song or the album, is hardly the most original music ever released. If you're a fan of the genre and tried to come up with ten quintessential song titles, you'd come pretty close to the ones on this album. Fortunately, that's the last negative thing I'm going to say about it because this is a quality release from a band that's based in the Honduras with a session vocalist who's apparently everywhere at the moment.

They start out reasonably heavy with that title track, but Chasing the Wind adds a more prominent keyboard sound and we're grounded in what Silent Tiger are going to bring us for the next forty minutes. This song starts out with a decent eighties metal riff, layers in keyboards and then strong vocals on top of everything. David Cagle's voice is definitely at the top of the mix, even if I'd have liked Jean Funes's guitars to be as far up there with him, especially because the songwriting seem to value both equally.

Most of the information I can find on the band revolves around the line-up, Cagle being a prolific session vocalist perhaps best known in melodic rock circles for Northrup Cagle, LastWorld and Marty and the Bad Punch. Funes and drummer Joel Mejia play in Hearts on Fire, with Funes also cited for Sound of Eternity and Mejia for Codigo Eterno. I haven't heard any of these bands though I'm far more likely to seek each of them out after enjoying this album. I think this also means that this is the debut for Silent Tiger.

Their Facebook page does list influences, which are surprisingly heavier for the most part than we might expect having heard the album. Sure, that's very recognisably a Def Leppard riff in Only Heartbreak but the rest of the song, like the others here, is much more grounded in AOR bands like Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and Journey. Unannounced, Tearing Me Apart could play on my local classic rock station without anyone realising that it wasn't a contemporary of Wheel in the Sky or Feels Like the First Time.

While Tearing Me Apart may well be the best song here, Come to Me sounds just as quintessential, including every component of a successful AOR song: power riff, driving beat and heartfelt vocals, but also a layer of keyboards that keeps us from ever thinking that it's too heavy for daytime radio. Then Edge of Love follows it up with more of the same but with more imaginative drums. The most fun riff is surely on the closer, Eyes of a Blazing Fire. Frankly, had this album been released in the heyday of AOR, it would have featured at least four or five singles and been heavily rotated on mainstream radio.

If, I should add, that the powers that be didn't realise that they were from the Honduras, because I always believed that there was an unwritten rule to require all AOR bands to be perceived as American, even if they were really Canadian and regardless of how many Brits were in their line-ups. If nobody owned up, though, then Silent Tiger would have got away with it because, if David Cagle isn't actually American, he sure sounds like it. The whole album is certainly sung in English and without an accent.

The best album I've heard this month is a melodic rock album, from Canada's Harem Scarem, and, while this isn't as good as that remarkable gem, it's an album worth mentioning in the same breath. There are similarities in style, consistency and quality. Also both albums are worth listening to a few times with different focuses.

Listen to this without a focus, letting the songs introduce themselves. Then listen again with special attention to Cagle's voice and how his hooks drive the melody. Then shift your focus to Funes's guitar to see how he grounds it all with his riffs and elevates it with his solos. Then ditch the focus and see how it washes over you as an old friend. It's a strong album, even if it isn't particularly original.

Chris Poland - Resistance (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Fusion
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

If you only know the name of Chris Poland from old Megadeth albums, this may come as quite the surprise, not least when rapper Rhymefest starts to do his thing on opener, Battle Bots. No, this isn't a rap album, it's a solo guitar album and Poland works through a heck of a lot of styles over a dozen songs, most of them entirely instrumental. And no, it's not remotely like his first solo album, Return to Metalopolis, either, because that was shred. This is a fusion album at heart, even if it gets heavy at points.

If you're an older school rock fan with at least a few Jeff Beck albums in your collection, you'll immediately see a similarity. For all that a couple of songs do have vocals on them, this isn't about writing songs. It's about exploring what the guitar can do within a framework that non-guitarists can appreciate too. And, for the most part it works, because the guitar can do a heck of a lot and Poland has fun underlining that here.

I didn't know until reading up on him that he used to play jazz fusion with drummer Gar Samuelson even before the pair of them joined Megadeth. That he went back to it after Megadeth and a brief stint on bass in the Circle Jerks shouldn't be too surprising. He's recorded a bunch of albums with OHM and a joint project between OHM and Umphrey's McGee called OHMphrey.

After that fascinating opener, Poland gets heavy for a little while with The Kid and I Have No Idea, jazz fusion numbers with a lot of bass and a soaring guitar. He gets older school later with Sunday, the sort of accessible track that Tommy Vance would have spoken over in between blocks on The Friday Rock Show. The album wraps with a couple of jazzier songs, Maiden Voyage and Song for Brad, that are more for the die hards.

My favourite tracks ably serve to highlight the variety and versatility that is on offer here. Moonchild kicks off quiet and melodic, then, as the drums stay slow, Poland's guitar gets all bluesy and wild like a hair metal guitar solo. If it goes with half a dozen notes where one would usually do the job, Django flips that around and aims for a sparse but exquisitely beautiful Roy Buchanan approach. It's delicate and

And, hey, if you haven't heard of Roy Buchanan before, go and check out any version you can find on YouTube of The Messiah Will Come Again. I'm happy to be your introduction! Guitar playing isn't just about notes and how fast you can play them, it's about tone and emotion and dynamics and finding magical sounds that have never been played before that people will still be talking about decades on from your performance. I'm not saying that Poland nabs any of them here but he's certainly looking and Django is the piece in which he looks the most.

I'd also suggest that Django is the song where the backing musicians get the most to do beyond just supporting whatever Poland's doing. Billy Dickens is the bassist on everything else, but it's Kevin Woods Guin on this one, with co-producer Jim Gifford on drums and, I believe, David Taylor on the second guitar. It's easy to get lost in Poland's performance but kudos to the rest of the band on this one too.

As I mentioned earlier, if you like Jeff Beck's solo albums, you should like this too. The opener notwithstanding, it's not either as ambitious or as experimental as what Beck's done lately, but it ought to play well with his older albums. If you've never heard solo Jeff Beck and have no idea what jazz fusion is, I would suggest that this is as good a place as any to start.

Boneweaver - The Long Way Down (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's an interesting debut of what's almost a one man band. Tristan Feilla is the main man here, responsible for the vocals, guitars, bass and most of the keyboard work. Excepting a couple of guest musicians who show up for a song each, the only other person involved is Mark Stewart, who took care of the drums, as well as the mixing and mastering of the album.

It's a carefully constructed album because there's a great deal of dynamic play going on and not just because of the shorter delicate interludes which sit between songs. Even a song as pumped up as the opener, White Knuckles, has a lot going on within it, if not as much as later ones like Bloodlines or Leavings of the Wolf. White Knuckles is an appropriate title because of how much effort Feilla puts into it. He throws everything he can into those vocals and, while he's certainly more polished as a guitarist than he is as a singer, I can't fault him for effort.

It's Bloodlines, the next full song on offer and the longest to be found on the album, that really shows us how much Feilla plans to play with dynamics. It's quiet and introspective one moment, then raucous and driving the next. There are emphatic vocals here too, but quieter, more controlled singing as well. What's more, Feilla layers his contributions so that, not only does he vary his delivery as the song grows, but sometimes there are multiple styles ongoing at once, like a shouty lead backed with an almost soothing backing.

While the music here is intricate metal, Feilla clearly listens to a lot of hardcore or the shouty modern metal that adopted that vocal style, because it's his default mode when not varying for effect. I'm not generally a fan of that shouty style but I think it works here because it's a logical stop on a scale of dynamics that ranges from soft up to very hard indeed. Clean vocals wouldn't work at that extreme without this turning into something it isn't and I get the decision to go with shouts over growls.

All that said, it's fair to say I prefer the music to the vocals. This is a prog metal album rather than metalcore and there's a heck of a lot going on in the instrumentation. I particularly like Leavings of the Wolf, because of the sheer range that it explores and the fact that it does so appropriately, without stretching the song beyond its natural limits. There are solo vocal sections that carry a lot of atmosphere to echo the cover art, intricate and heavy guitar sections and a lot of interesting bass work too. It feels a lot more epic than 4:19 ought to allow it to be.

Really, all these songs are epics that just seem shorter because the intros to them are labelled separately. Bloodlines is a couple of minutes longer if we include L'appel du vide, which sits before it; Leavings of the Wolf would be almost seven minutes if we count in Fourth Birch; and Depths would sneak over that mark with Empty Sky factored into its running time. This might seem like a minor gripe but it fundamentally shifts how we see the album. Right now, it's eleven short songs over less than three quarters of an hour, but a shift in perspective makes it five long songs and White Knuckles as a guide.

The more I listen to it, the more engaging it becomes. It's a good album if we treat it in isolation. It's an even better one if we acknowledge that it was almost entirely created by one man and it marks his debut in the studio. With that in mind, Feilla is clearly someone to watch, even by someone like me who isn't that fond of shouty vocals. Let's see what he conjures up next.

My Dying Bride - The Ghost of Orion (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I can't just walk straight into a My Dying Bride album. I usually find that the most effective way to approach such a creature is to pour the thing over me slowly so that I can acclimatise to their exquisite sound. As usual, the first half hour or so washed off and away from me, but the sheer majesty of The Long Black Land stuck and captured me utterly and I lost the next couple of hours to the band.

This is their lucky thirteenth album, thirty years into their career, and it lush. Only Andrew Craighan and Aaron Stainthorpe are still on board from the beginning and the former provides all the guitarwork here, because new fish Neil Blanchett didn't join until the album was done. It's also the first to feature Jeff Singer, formerly of Paradise Lost, behind the drumkit. Bassist Lena Abé has been with the band for over a decade now, as has Shaun MacGowan on keyboards and violin.

The band's sound has always remained identifiably theirs even with a musical shift or three over the years. This is emphatically doom metal but with some death on the side, Stainthorpe shifting to death growls at points on quite a few songs. The gothic metal aspect mostly manifests through the violin and guest cello from Jo Quail, which provide an elegance that fits the relentless slow pace. Every note is chosen as carefully as the lacquer on a magahony Victorian box or the polish on a brass fitting.

The album breaks into sections for me. The first includes three songs, which include the two singles thus far, but oddly it's the least worthy section to me. Sure, it simply reeks of anguish and can't be ignored but, compared with what comes later, it sounds like an excellent band warming up. The interlude between this and the second half is The Solace, an even more emotional piece that's entirely bereft of bass or drums. It's entirely solo guitar, if never guitar solos, and it's directed by the guest folk vocals of Lindy-Fay Hella.

And then we get serious. After half an hour or so, my breathing had slowed to match the music as if I was entering a meditative state and it's here in The Long Black Land that I fell fully into sync. It starts well with Quail's cello and a slower pace even than before, teases at speed with a neat churn or two and adds emphasis with a death growl from Stainthorpe. But then the midsection truly captured me.

I'm writing this in self-isolation due to COVID-19 but this transported me somewhere where I felt truly alone (but on board with that). The keyboards set the scene and the guitar and cello decorate it. The drums, at the point when they show up, tease exquisitely. Two minutes later, the full band crash the scene with utter majesty and take me slowly home. This is precisely what "power and glory" is meant to describe. The second half of this song made me feel like I was immortal and, only when it suddenly ends, was I shaken back to mortality.

The Long Black Land is a second shy of ten minutes and The Old Earth nudges just over that mark, kicking in with more folk before turning it way up with some exquisite crescendoing. It's preceded by an interesting title track, an elegant set of whispers with acoustic guitar accompaniment that allows us a moment to recover from the previous song and prepare ourselves for the next. It's followed by a choral outro.

And we briefly quantify our state of being before launching right back into the album again to find that Your Broken Shore is a grower. As tends to be the case with My Dying Bride, I look forward to many hours getting to truly know this album. It's a safe 8/10 for now. Let's see if I raise that later.

Voodoo Six - Simulation Game (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

No less a luminary than Steve Harris of Iron Maiden has been "keeping an eye on" Voodoo Six and it seems like he's become something of a godfather to the band over the years. They've already supported Maiden in Europe and they're about to support British Lion on tour in December. Then again, Tony Newton, bassist and co-founder of the band is Maiden's live sound guy.

Now, I reviewed the British Lion album earlier this year, with Harris on bass, but I think I like this more. It's clearly hard rock rather than heavy metal, even if the opening riff to The Traveller is a little reminiscent of an Anthrax mosh part. The band formed in 2003, so they're hardly new, and this is their sixth album so far. Alongside longterm members Newton, drummer Joe Lazarus and Matt Pearce on one of two guitars, they've added Tom Gentry of Gun on the second, and a new lead vocalist, Nik Taylor-Stoakes.

What impresses me here is that, even with so many connections, they aren't a clone of Iron Maiden at all. In fact, they aren't a clone of anyone that I'm able to conjure up. There are obvious influences but they're merged well and none of the songs really sound like anyone else. And here I should highlight that Simulation Game is emphatically an album of two halves that are further apart than we might expect if we only listen to one or the other.

I adored the first half. I caught hints of Maiden in some of the dual guitar breaks, but also hints of Led Zeppelin and even Jethro Tull, among a variety of others. The influences are generally from the seventies and eighties and primarily British, but these songs sound apart from anything else I've heard from the New Wave of Classic Rock thus far. I heard different people in the vocals of Taylor-Stoakes too, most overtly Sean Harris of Diamond Head but also a lot of David Coverdale and even Chris Cornell.

Overall, I think the biggest vibe I got here was Diamond Head, not because a single song sounds like them but because the general approach plays similar. Each song features a progression of different riffs that are often simple in themselves but add up to something complex when plugged together. The vocals play along with that, adding a more soulful layer over the top of the music. The biggest difference is in the density of the sound. Diamond Head like to stay stripped down and let the riffs speak for themselves. Voodoo Six prefer a denser sound that adds more texture, including what sounds like strings.

Only time will tell, of course, as to whether any of these songs gain iconic stature the way that so many of Diamond Head's have. The band sure give it a good shot though. The Traveller, the majestic Gone Forever (my favourite song here) and Inherit My Shadow are each really solid tracks on a first listen that get even better with a second and third. In between them, Liar and a Thief takes a bit more time to grow but I wonder if it's even better. Last to Know finishes off the first side well.

And my biggest problem with the album is that the second half doesn't build on that start but takes a wildly different approach. Instead of being rooted in classic rock and NWOBHM, with contemporary layers added, it's much more alternative in nature, albeit with far more strings. That Cornell influence becomes really overt on Lost and stays throughout the second half. Brake and Control clearly take their influence from the noughties and both feature the strings far too much for my tastes and in more intrusive ways: they add to The Traveller but detract from Control. The latter rocks more than Brake does, but all these songs feel grungier, American and more alternative.

There's also Never Beyond Repair, which is a ballad and the first song here to leave me entirely cold, but only One of Us really grabs me on the second half. And that leaves me in an odd place for a rating. The first half is an easy 9/10 for me, some of the best songs I've heard this month. The second, however, is more like a 6/10 with some of it lower, so I think I'm going to have to even out to a 7/10. That's going to rankle with me, though, so I'll plan to come back to this in a week or so and see if I want to bounce it up a notch.

Waltari - Global Rock (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

The boundaries of rock opened up a lot in the nineties and there may not be a better example of a band who embraced that than Waltari. Their 1992 album Torcha! ran the gamut from rap to speed metal, a former punk band covering Madonna, and they've only expanded on their musical tastes since then. This is very much for the open minded, so much so that some of this goes too far even for me.

Case in point: opening number Postrock, which combines crunchy metal guitar and autotune, the oddest combination of styles I can imagine. Metalheads are not always averse to other genres of music, even chart pop, Billie Eilish a surprising name on a lot of metal lips nowadays. But rock music generally is based in live performance and autotune is anathema to that mentality. I'm a hater of autotune myself because it sounds awful to me on anything but the most abstract electronica. I don't like this song because of it.

That said, it's only used for effect on this one song and not throughout it, while the rest of Postrock sets the stage for a lot of what's to come on the rest of the album. This is pop music but it's metal music and there's enough of each to underline both. The choruses here are pure pop but the backing is metal and the midsection is as far from pop as it gets, with duelling guitar solos and prog phrasing. We're not in Kansas any more, Toto.

The question is whether such a wide variety of styles can co-exist within a single song because Waltari don't merely alternate heavier songs with light ones, they combine those styles within songs. They mostly confine themselves to the pop/rock/metal spectrum, so they're not as wild as, say, Mr. Bungle, but they often bring Faith No More and Babymetal to mind. I'd especially say the latter because of the frequent use of pop vocals, often saccharine ones, over a metal backdrop. The latter is more obvious in the shifts of style not only within songs but sometimes, as with Metal Soul, within lines.

Wikipedia currently tags Waltari as avant-garde metal, alternative metal and progressive metal, but I think they need to reevaluate that given how much a lot of songs depart entirely from metal here. Skyline is the extreme here, a song that kicks off with AOR phrasing, then adds a little heavy guitar for a moment before a fundamental shift to hip hop over electronica, finding a pop chorus within a minute. It's not really my thing but it is done well and I'm not going to rail against it the way I did the autotune on Postrock.

What it does is variety and it does it well, just as do so many other songs here. No Sacrifice starts out like a churning Slayer number with vocals that range from Rage Against the Machine to Ozzy Osbourne; halfway through, it's all symphonic before that Slayer riff kicks back in. Sick 'n' Tired reminds of Oasis with less of an accent until it grows into a Peter Gabriel number. Going Up the Country is a popped up blues song, a sort of Spirit in the Sky type spiritual chant but remixed by a DJ. Orleans kicks off with a driving metal riff in the vein of Accept but adds in some electronic woops and some country blues slide. There's a lot here.

The wildest song may well be Boots, which shifts from an R&B influenced acid intro to an arena metal number rather like the Scorpions, before becoming a sort of cross between a rave and an aerobics routine. And yes, the title is referring to the Nancy Sinatra song, These Boots are Made for Walking, which is re-interpreted for the chorus, even though this isn't a cover of that or the Megadeth take on it. It's remix culture gone wild.

The most varied songs are the most interesting ones here, though it'll take an open mind to appreciate all of them. What gets me most isn't the variety but the lack of acknowledgement of what's cool and what isn't. That may well be what impresses me most here, because Waltari aren't just mixing extremes, they're doing so in any way they want, even if it means incorporating arena rock, AOR or the nu metal that's all over The Way, even though it does get a little more older school as it grows.

The most forgettable songs are the ones that don't care to get remotely that imaginative. There are a lot of them here, thirteen full songs taking up an hour of play, so it shouldn't be too surprising that some of them are rather forgettable, especially towards the end. Sand Witch is easily the best late song with its transition from folk into power metal and post-punk.

All in all, this is a wild journey for anyone with the balls and the disdain for trendy labels that's required to really get it. I admired this more than I enjoyed it but there are still songs I wouldn't mind playing a lot. Kudos to Waltari for making something this interesting.

Feastem - Graveyard Earth (2020)

Country: Finland
Style: Grindcore
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Knowing I'd be reviewing the new Waltari album today, I looked for something as loud and raucous as possible to balance against it. Feastem looked like a great choice, given that they were formed in 2005 "to play the fastest, most pissed off grindcore imaginable". I wouldn't say that they succeeded but the band are certainly fast and pissed off, even if the quality of musicianship is high.

The downside is quickly obvious, if you'll forgive the pun. Feastem's fourth album is their shortest yet, over in under twenty minutes, which is way too short for an album. Just call it an EP instead, folks, or even a mini-album, anything to highlight that it's really short. Then again, their longest thus far, 2011's World Delirium, was still shorter than Reign in Blood, albeit a little closer. I'm docking a point here as a token complaint about length.

While I've seen both thrash metal and death metal associated with Feastem, I don't hear that here. This is old school punk played fast and ferociously to fit firmly in the grindcore category. There are no guitar solos. Every song here kicks off fast, finds a groove and explores it briefly before wrapping up. There are fourteen tracks here, only one of which makes it past the two minute mark. Two of them don't even get to a minute and the powerelectronics outro is longer at 1:14 than half of the actual songs. It's kind of like DOA on speed or early Discharge with more buried vocals.

Fortunately, the music is excellent. The band don't care about gimmickry, so there's no gore or porngrind here. They're more old school punk politicians, railing against the current state of world affairs, the title track being as telling right now as anything else I've heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's certainly pessimistic but, frankly, lyrics like "Mob mentality, a hive mind in frenzy, the corpse of civilization, the wreckage of hope" could have been written about my local Walmart this morning. Then again, that could be Walmart any day, pandemic or not.

Even if this is perfect music for those with attention deficit disorder, the songs don't get old. I enjoyed this as much, if not more, on my fifth listen as on my first. Certainly the riffs, which are all simple but effective, are surprisingly memorable for grindcore. I Will Never Kill manages to cram two such into a minute and both are so simple but so effective that I could well wake up in the morning with them playing in my head.

That's not to say that there aren't more ambitious musical elements here. I rather like Sortovalta, the first of five songs in Finnish, because the riff is rather like a call and response between drums and guitar. It sounds great and it doesn't sound like anything else here, highlighting a variety that I don't often hear in grindcore, where the in your face effect is the one and only point. No, you're not going to hear a sitar or a trombone or something else wildly adventurous for the genre, but you're not going to hear fourteen takes on the same song either.

For a start, while this is generally just as fast as you'd expect, there are songs here that slow down. The title track evolves nicely, benefitting from a whole two minutes and ten seconds of running time, more than anything else on the album. That's not typical, of course, but there are moments in a few other songs that highlight how Feastem don't need to spend all their time at a hundred miles an hour. Terror Balance has a neat section that's far slower than the rest of the song too.

I liked this, even if I wanted a lot more of it than Feastem were willing to give me. I reviewed a few albums last year that are longer than this band's entire back catalogue put together and that includes four albums, a couple of EPs and a couple more split singles. Remembering that Reign in Blood was released on cassette with the entire album on both sides, maybe Feastem can throw out a cassette version of Graveyard Earth with the entire album twice on both sides. I'd still listen through the whole thing.

Crematory - Unbroken (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I haven't listened to enough industrial metal but it's a subgenre that needs to grab me to work and I struggled with this one a lot. Crematory have been around since 1991 and this is their fifteenth studio album so they certainly don't sit around getting bored. "Music is an addiction, my first love and my religion," they sing on the title track, which opens the album. It's clearly autobiographical, as the "29 years and still alive" line vouches.

However, their sound has evolved a great deal since they began. Rather than simply changing, like so many bands do, they've added new genres into their core sound and never really got rid of the old ones. That's both successful and, well, not so successful for me, because there are bits that I like here and bits that ended up just annoying me.

They started out as a death metal band, a genre that's most obvious nowadays in the lead vocals of Gerhard Stass. He's oddly high in the mix, the backing music feeling a little subdued behind him, which is odd for industrial. The reason for that is probably because they've ended up close to the NDH sound of bands like Oomph! and Rammstein, who thrive on their vocal hooks.

From death metal, they grew into gothic metal and that's very obvious in the first few tracks. The title track has very little goth to it, but Awaits Me adds a lot, not least an accompanying clean vocal from Connie Andreszka, and Rise and Fall brings even more of that into play. There's also a melancholy piano that sits behind songs like Rise and Fall and leads its melody. I like these songs the most here and wonder about how the band sounded during their gothic metal years.

The biggest problem for me is that I started to enjoy the accompanying vocal a lot more than the lead. Stass sounds best for me when the music behind him is most aggressive and when he doesn't try to underline his growling. Behind the Wall is surely the best example of both, a hard driving industrial track with a good hook, a memorable chorus and a lot of electronica backing both, even a guitar solo that sounds like Rolf Munkes is standing on a gantry with sparks launching off his guitar in all directions. The Downfall fits that as well, with a Sisters of Mercy type drive to it.

However, when the music gets less emphatic, Stass seems to want to push his growling style further and it doesn't work for me the way he clearly wants it to. My Dreams Have Died is a great example, because it almost seems like Stass is a death metal fan doing karaoke to a generic industrial song. when Andreszka chimes in, I realised how much I missed him. He didn't need to add his voice to Behind the Wall at all but I was happy when he returned on The Kingdom and especially here.

I wondered about whether he could lead an industrial band on his own because his voice is much more subtle than Stass's: warm and rich but not remotely as dominant as we might expect with industrial; he felt more suited to prog goth. By the time we get to songs like Inside My Heart and Voices, though, I became sold on him as the lead with Stass serving as texture. Like the Tides wraps things up with only his voice and it worked for me.

While Stass's vocals were the biggest problem for me, the album also runs a lot longer than it should. It's a very generous release, with fifteen songs totalling over an hour, and that's before we factor in the bonus disc. It's a lot of music, and all credit to the band for being that generous, but the uninitiated like me are likely to find it too much. There's not really much here that isn't covered definitively in the first eight or nine tracks. The album could have jumped from The Downfall almost to the end and miss out six or seven tracks without losing any of its impact.

I often end my reviews by saying that I want to dive into a band's previous albums. Usually that's because I enjoyed myself enough to just want more. On this occasion, it's to find out how Crematory's sound evolved because I have a feeling I'm going to like them more a few albums ago.

Noir Reva - Continuance (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I still don't have a firm grasp on what post-rock is, beyond the fundamental idea of creating soundscapes with traditional rock instruments, but I love a lot of what I'm hearing. Case in point: Noir Reva, a post-rock band who hail from Koblenz in Germany. They sound like they play electronic music but I'm reasonably sure that, if there are any actual keyboards in use here (surely the intro to They Do Exist proves that there are), they really aren't doing anywhere as near as much as we might think.

While Fiowia and Skyward open up proceedings with major emphasis, the quiet parts mostly serving as an underline to the more overt ones, this album does settle down as it goes until it's a sort of upbeat jangly ambience for quite a while, but with depth to it like all the best electronic music. Fiowia is the most overt rock song here with Skyward the most contrasted, its peaceful midsection leading into an agreeably dark conclusion.

My favourite song is easily Goraiko, which starts out much like it could be an instrumental post-rock cover of a wildly famous pop song I've never heard before. It grows and evolves as it goes, out of a vague sense of familiarity and into a voyage of discovery. The cover art fits this song because I could imagine starting it on those steps where I might have chatted with no end of people for years but ending it somewhere on the other side of those trees, where I've never previously been but which I'm better for now having visited.

While much of this album, as with much post-rock, could be the soundtrack to an imaginary film or book or video game, the most perky sections, like the beginning to Goraiko, sound rather like a better version of what we hear on YouTube compilations of fantastic football goals. I usually put those videos on mute because I don't want their generic and unimaginitive scores when I want commentary but I'd certainly leave the sound on if music like this was used instead, because it's far from generic and it's full of imagination.

While parts of this would work on videos like that, much of the album would not because it doesn't stay perky and upbeat. Come Back Apollo has darkness woven throughout, the jangling becoming somewhat melancholy. I don't know if Apollo ever plans to come back but, from the tone of this song, I doubt the band believe he will. I'm not sure what the subject matter of They Do Exist is but it's menacing enough in the midsection to count as the discovery of a suppressed alien invasion.

It's songs like They Do Exist that really highlight what post-rock does, as it could have been created entirely using synths but I'm assuming that that isn't a drum machine and those are guitars and a bass. It's an odd idea, to conjure up electronica-esque soundscapes with traditional rock instruments, but I'm really digging it and Noir Reva sound very good to me, soothing but with an underlying sense of menace.

There seem to be four gentlemen in the band, but I can't find details of the roles they play, beyond being songwriters. The other key information that I can provide is that this appears to be their second album, after a 2016 full length called Nuance, a title that could easily have been applied here too. It was a little shorter and the songs on it were a little shorter too, but I would like to hear it to see how the band have progressed.

Vulcano - Eye in Hell (2020)

Country: Brazil
Style: Death/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

If I mention Brazil in conjunction with extreme metal, most of you are going to think Sepultura, but they weren't the only band doing that sort of thing in the early days because there was a major scene growing there back in the early eighties. Other pioneers included Dorsal Atlântica, Sarcófago and this band, Vulcano, who were formed in São Paulo in 1980 as Astaroth, changing to Vulcano the following year. They found their style in 1984, playing a hybrid of black, death and thrash metal that still feels proto-extreme today three and a half decades on.

While they only split up for five years in the early nineties, this is only their eleventh album, their first since 2016's confusingly titled XIV. It's good old-fashioned extreme metal, reminding often of early Slayer and Celtic Frost, which is no bad mix, especially when you add in some Teutonic thrash. I haven't heard Vulcano in a long while, so I'm out of date in what they've been doing. I'm not seeing great ratings on their last few albums but this certainly seems decent to me.

It's far from the most original album I've ever heard, but there's a hunger in the sound that I really like and an excellent production job that renders an almost live in my office feel. I really like that too and a blisterer of an opener like Bride of Satan to kick things off in old school Slayer style doesn't hurt either. Neither does the Teutonic vocals on Cursed Babylon. It all starts out great, with decent riffs, strong churns and excellent solos.

Its biggest problem is that it isn't particularly varied and, even where it is, the album's structure prevents us from seeing that in any big picture. A pairing of Evil Empire with its slower mantra-like Celtic Frost guitars and the up tempo Struggling Besides Satan with its frantic vocals that struggle to keep up with the music is worthy variety, but that's about it. We get the same sort of pairings throughout the album and not much else. Most of these songs are variations on the same styles.

Its biggest success is that the raw and live sound feels great and none of the songs outstay their welcome. Sure, part of that is because they're all short, with only one of thirteen tracks making it past the four minute mark and five of them lasting less than three. That makes this a real blitzkrieg release, one that ramps up early and sustains at least one of a holy trinity of speed, heaviness and intensity throughout, if not more than one at once.

What all that boils down to is that, if you're into that old school extreme sound but want to hear it recorded in a studio with modern technology, this is a great choice. We can even hear the bass, especially within songs like Dealer of My Curses, where it gets its own moment in the spotlight, or with songs like Inferno, where it rumbles along gloriously underneath everything else.

However, it doesn't deliver anything that you haven't heard before, making this more of a completist purchase for the diehards than a discovery moment for the curious. Now, if the latter do find it and love it, that's fantastic and it'll work well as a starting point for an exploration of the genre. The more discovery that curious listener does, though, the more this will vanish into the background.

This is one of those albums I'll give a 7/10 for being thoroughly enjoyable in a style that I love but should drop a point for people who don't share a passion for this sort of thing.

Aridonia - Aridonia (2020)

Country: Argentina
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Feb 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I love how flexible genres can be nowadays. Case in point: how can we place a band like Aridonia into just one pigeonhole? Quick answer: we can't. Just listening to the first track on this, their debut album, I hear it drifting through half a dozen different genres, though the flow is entirely natural.

It's Abismos and it starts out as a soothing, hypnotic and psychedelic rock song. When the fuzzy guitars join in and the vocals get more raucous, we're firmly in stoner rock territory. Then we get all prog with intricate changes and even an ethnic section. The bass of Tomas Longombardo gets some welcome runs during the middle of the song. And the end slows down considerably and heavies up, with a nod towards doom or sludge metal.

I don't know if there's a particular lyrical vision behind the song because Aridonia are from Argentina and sing in Spanish. Google Translate isn't much of a help on this, perhaps because the lyrics are abstract or colloquial. It looks like they're talking about a journey through time and past lives, but I visualised it as a trip down into the depths of the ocean, Abismos meaning Abysses, with the colour of the song representing the weird and wonderful at serious depths and the heaviness representing the weight of the water.

Fantasmagoria is an odd follow-up because the otherworldly images I conjured up from the opener continue but it kicks off with a riff that's reminiscent of Metallica's Frantic, of all things. While Robert Trujillo would leap into bass runs like Longombardo gets here, the rest of that band have become part of the mainstream and we can only attempt to imagine them doing something as interesting as this.

I won't be much of a surprise for a band who delve into both psych and prog, but Fantasmagoria is the shortest song here and it's still over five minutes in length. Abismos is the longest at over nine and it doesn't feel remotely too long. These songs are as long as they need to be and no longer, even at seven or eight minutes.

With the band tight and constantly interesting, the weak spot for me is the vocals which aren't bad but are rough and would fit better on a dirty blues album. The singer is Fernando Echenique, who is also one of two guitarists, so I'd bet money that he thinks of himself as a guitarist who also sings not a singer who also plays. Oddly, when the band get closest to dirty blues, as they do at points on La serpiente y la manzana, he doesn't sing much, though he fits perfectly when he does.

Echenique's voice brings a down to earth garage rock sound to the band which would otherwise seem trippier and more detached from reality. This is music to accompany you during astral travel or on some sort of heroic psychedelic trip. It's often dark but it's always warm, so it's an interesting companion rather than a dangerous one. Its presence is comforting but it does too many imaginative things for us to relax, so we can't and don't want to ignore it. It's almost like a conversation, though I have no idea what I'm contributing to that.

I don't think anything here approaches the majesty of Abismos, but this is a rather immersive album, enough so that I listened three or four times before putting virtual pen to paper. It's easy to get lost in the second half, with Magia negra particularly magnetic but that feeling continuing on through Oda a la memoria and Leviatán for a twenty minute chunk of solid trip.

I should add that I only have a little Spanish, but I could figure out all these song titles without online help (except for one, "manzana", which is "apple", so meaning that La serpiente y la manzana is presumably Biblical). The only bit I'm stuck on is what Aridonia means, because I'm not seeing a reference or a translation, so maybe they just made it up.