Fleshgod Apocalypse - Opera (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Symphonic Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

This sixth album from Italian symphonic death metal mainstays Fleshgod Apocalypse is well titled. Sure, it opens with an aria, Ode to Art (De' Sepolcri) to showcase the soaring soprano of Veronica Bordacchini, who's worked with the band as a session and touring musician since 2011 but became a full time member in 2020, serving not only as their female vocalist but as their clean vocalist, as long term bassist and previous clean vocalist Paolo Rossi left in 2023. However, the best adjective to use to describe Fleshgod is "more" and that works just as well for opera. Each is grandiose and overdone and larger than life and that's kind of the point.

I've always appreciated how Fleshgod can throw so much at the wall and yet have it all stick. They seem chaotic in the extreme to anyone who's never heard them before, but a few listens allows us to realise what's going on. We almost need to train our ears to acknowledge what they're doing. On this album, either my ears are finally fully trained or it's a little bit more accessible than has been the case, especially on certain songs.

For instance, the first song proper is I Can Never Die, which is typically frantic stuff but it's easy to dissect after a couple of listens to see this as an unholy merger of alternative rock, symphonic pop and death metal, with plenty of orchestration. It moves from one of these to another consistently and eventually does it all at once. There's a late section when it whisks through hyperspeed death metal, hard rock guitar solo, soaring opera and symphonic pop in a highly memorable minute and then combining them all together. It's as accessible as I've heard Fleshgod (at least until Till Death Do Us Part arrives at the end of this album, but I'll get to that).

Other songs aren't quite as obvious. We can deconstruct Pendulum to a degree, but it's never as simple as we think we can make it. What's going on a mintue in, for instance? There are points in this song where the intensity drops completely away to leave clean female vocals over an alt rock instrumentation, but then the harsh male vocals offer an almost sarcastic commentary. And then there's piano, that gets truly wild towards the end of the song. Bloodclock opens up with harp and finds its way through intense technical death metal to musical theatre, delivered in a snarling rap, and then powers up with choirs and orchestration. These aren't as easy to work out.

What's telling is that I'm struggling to choose my favourite tracks, not because none of them stand out for special mention but because they all do. At War with My Soul opens heavy and choral like a Therion song, but speeds up the drums and builds male and female vocals and instrumentation in a common direction. That's unusual for Fleshgod but it works. Morphine Waltz is European power metal merged with avant-garde musical theatre, all driven by a possessed pianist and framed as a technical death metal song. The whispered "trust me" on Matricide 8.21 points the way to the alt rock approach that reaches the staccato riffing and the almost rapped vocals. Every song needs a special mention becaues it does something different.

And that holds even more true for Till Death Us Do Part, on the other side of Per Aspera ad Astra. It starts out slow and heavy, not as slow as doom metal but insanely slow for Fleshgod. Drummer Eugene Ryabchenko, who we can believe has eight limbs to maintain these tempos, must feel like he's playing this song in crazy slow motion. It's slow like a slow Black-era Metallica song, but then it drops into symphonic pop with vocal melodies more like Evanescence. They rinse and repeat a few times before escalating in emphasis but never truly in speed, even when it gets a little faster in the second half. I like it a lot but it's surely the least Fleshgod song I've heard Fleshgod do.

Usually it's easy to explain what a band sounds like by comparing them to others. On albums past, we could often compare Fleshgod to Septicflesh because both combine overtly classical music with extreme metal so tightly that they become one thing. However, we can't do that any more and I'd find it even harder than usual here. Sure, there's opera and death metal. Those are givens. What remains includes Emilie Autumn, Avatar, Evanescence, Disturbed, Carl Orff, Therion, Meshuggah... it's a list of names you probably didn't expect to see together, let alone mentioned in a review of what is still technical symphonic death metal, with drums that often reach black metal speeds.

I liked Fleshgod's previous album, 2019's Veleno, but I didn't like it as much as a lot of critics, who rank it among the best symphonic metal albums of all time. This one I like more. It's accessible for Fleshgod, but it's still wildly extreme when compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet. Nobody's going to dismiss this by suggesting that they've sold out, but it's easier to deconstruct than usual and it features a host of more recognisably modern aspects in its sound. And I'm liking it just as much on a seventh time through as I did on a first.

Snarm - Till the End (2024)

Country: India
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jul 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's another submission from India. I'm always happy to see these, given that it's a huge nation with a huge musical heritage, but so little of it ever seems to fit into the rock and metal vein. This particular band are Snarm, from Guwahati in Assam, and they call what they do progressive glam/arena rock. It's especially heartening to see a female drummer, which feels odd to call out in 2024 with so many entirely female bands or female musicians playing every instrument imaginable in a wealth of different genres, but is still pioneering in India. So kudos to Arju Begum; may you break that glass ceiling.

Unfortunately, she's part of the most obvious flaw but it isn't her fault. Every time the first track proper, Someday Somewhere, kicks in, my brain screams at me that the production is too thin. Her drums ought to be much beefier than they are and so should the bass of Anurag Gogoi. However, I do have to acknowledge that I'm listening on YouTube, because I don't have an album download. I have no doubt that there's compression involved so this isn't quite how the album should sound, but I found it relatively easy to adjust anyway. By the time that Sky High arrives at the very heart of the album, I've almost forgotten the thin production and I'm just listening to the music.

Initially, it's the arena rock aspect to their sound that's most obvious. Someday Somewhere plays in radio-friendly territory, even at five minutes in length, with AOR vocals from Tsooraj and a tasty fluid guitar solo from the band's founder, Shihan Bhuyan. Rarest of Pearls follows suit with softer vocals and a seventies rock feel. Till the End is good old fashioned hard rock that doesn't seem to do anything flash but flows really well and seeps into our soul because of that. It's the title track and it's the first obvious highlight the album has to offer. No Rain Can Wash Away is a ballad that shifts from delicate piano and soft orchestration to power ballad midway through. Again, there's some tasty guitarwork when it's time for Bhuyan to solo.

Sure, there's a little of their progressive edge late in Rarest of Pearls and there's definitely some glam rock on Someday Somewhere, but these don't come close to dominating the album, at least until One More Lonely Night shows up as the bonus track. That's pure glam rock with metal edges. It's a slick and commercial single but it doesn't really do anything that any other slick commercial glam rock single does, so it ends up feeling like a single that would surely get airplay but wouldn't be particularly remembered after its moment in the spotlight is up.

Mostly, this plays to me like good old fashioned hard rock, mostly seventies but with touches that are pure eighties, and enough AOR to make it totally viable as arena rock. And, while the first half is pretty solid, the second half ups the ante considerably. While Till the End is excellent and all the more memorable with each further listen, Sky High is easily the album's highlight for me. It starts out like another piano-driven ballad, but kicks in hard after a minute to become a seventies hard rock stomper. Sure, I'd like a beefier sound for the bass and drums on one, but it's a gem anyway, right down to a delightful drop into flamenco guitar with handclaps during the second half. Other than that section, somehow it feels Japanese to me, like Bow Wow covering Iron Maiden.

I didn't identify any particular influence on Till the End or Sky High, though there are elements of a lot of different bands discernible. The overt influences kick in after them. This Rock 'n' Roll Ride opens up with a guitar riff that's surely borrowed from Maiden's Back in the Village, but it has a strong Deep Purple sound otherwise. Rain and Thunder features lots more eighties metal guitar, but then it gets Michael Jackson funky and then shifts into European power metal, just in a hard rock framework. It's like Uli Jon Roth covering Helloween. Then there's Reignite, an interesting ballad that's not only folky because of an overt flute. Its sweep is reminiscent of Rainbow Eyes by Rainbow but with Mark Knopfler guitar and a vocal melody that I know I should recognise.

Oddly, while these three songs are the easiest to locate sources for, they're three of the best that the album has to offer, Sky High and Reignite above Till the End and Rain and Thunder for me and This Rock 'n' Roll Ride and No Rain Can Wash Away behind them. That's a lot of songs to call out on an album that's an intro and eight songs, plus a bonus single, which bodes well for Snarm's future, as they develop their own style and hopefully lead the way for Indian hard rock in the 2020s.

This is an easy album to like and also a comfortable album to listen to a lot. There are albums that sound amazing on a first listen, only to fade away after a few more times through; and albums that don't sound like much at all until we dig into them and realise just how amazing they are. This is an album that sounds good immediately and continues to sound good however many times we listen. I doubt it'll top anyone's lists of the best albums of the year, but it's an album even jaded critics are likely to pull back out every once in a while as a reliable old favourite. Thanks for sending this one over to me, Shihan!

Rosetta Stone - Under the Weather (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

Rosetta Stone are a gothic rock band from the second wave, formed as far back as 1988 but with a surprisingly skimpy output for that long life. Their debut album was An Eye for the Main Chance in 1991 but this is only their fourth regular studio release since then, with two others that may count depending on your personal definitions. Either way, they don't release new albums often but this one follows Cryptology by only four years.

They're very much a pop-oriented goth band who used to feature jingly guitars that have morphed into electronica over the years. I haven't heard them in decades, so my memory may be letting me down, but they sound very electronic now, the three participants (for want of a better term) easily distinguished but all highly prominent. The vocalist is Porl King, who used to play guitar, but likely didn't this time out, and keyboards, which I'm sure he still does. Vocals aside, he's overshadowed a lot of the time by Madame Razor, the drum machine that almost defines the band's sound now.

That leaves Karl North on bass, who reminds of Peter Hook from Joy Division and New Order, both of which would seem to count as obvious influences. Many songs here find Joy Division vibes, not least Words to That Affect, but they're always flavoured by the drum machine, which makes them more electronic and thus more reminiscent of New Order. The bass isn't the first thing that grabs our attention, but it gradually grows until we simply can't ignore it, at which point I found myself actively following it, whatever else was happening.

The best bassline here is surely on Coherence, seven tracks in, but the more we focus on the bass, the more good basslines show up, starting with the opening title track, also the first single. It's a crucial note that my favourite songs are the ones with my favourite basslines. The beats work for me, in the sense that they contribute a needed and worthy aspect to the overall sound, but they don't play better to me on any one song than any other. King's vocals work for me too, but in that same sense. Occasionally, he delivers a line in a catchier fashion, like the choruses to We Turned Away or All the Devils, but he fundamentally does the same thing across all these tracks.

So this became almost entirely about the bass for me, starting most of the way through my first listen, with only the occasional keyboard riff helping to elevate one song over another, as on We Turned Away. That means that Coherence remains my favourite song, because it has my favourite bassline, but then it's probably Host and All the Devils, along with Under the Weather. This feels weird to me, because I can't remember another album where the bass dictates my appreciation this much, so I tried to figure out why.

I think it boils down to Rosetta Stone having such a stripped down sound, which is unusual for the sort of band that's survived for almost forty years intact. With the vocals telling stories and the drums merely keeping beat, it would normally fall to the guitars or keyboards to drive the songs forward, but they don't seem to want to do that. The keyboards are there but they feel more like decoration than rhythm and, if there are guitars at all, I mistook them for keyboards. Thus it falls to Karl North to play his bass like it's a rhythm guitar and a bass put together. It also means that a song is a song, because there's nothing in the instrumentation that can really apply emphasis.

And that's fine, but I tend to prefer my gothic rock denser in sound, whether it's the gothic rock of the Sisters of Mercy or the gothic metal of Tristania. Rosetta Stone aren't interested in density of sound and actively seem to avoided any possibility of crunch. So, while they still sound gothic, they remind me more of Joy Division than the Sisters, but still not as dense, meaning that, while I liked this, I always felt there was something missing.

Ravn - Svartedans (2024)

Country: Norway
Style: Folk/Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Oh, I like this band! They're from Trondheim, Norway and they play relatively straightforward folk metal with clean female vocals in front of a traditional heavy metal line-up: twin guitars, bass and drums. What there aren't are fiddles, bagpipes or hurdy gurdys, though I'm very happy to hear a nyckelharpa to open Syndera and thus the album. However, that's the only song on which it shows up, as it's courtesy of a guest appearance from Mathias Gyllengahm, best known for Utmarken, a folk metal band from neighbouring Sweden.

What that means is that the folk aspect of Ravn isn't a layer of instrumentation, as it sometimes can be; it's who they are, like, say, Bucovina. They're a heavy band, make no mistake, playing heavy metal throughout and dipping into black metal on occasion, but they're a heavy band playing folk music, even if it happens to be new and they wrote it. That nyckelharpa lays down a melody that's promptly echoed by vocalist Hildegunn Eggan and the band behind her happily bolster whatever she's doing, at least until the very end of the album, when they fade away on Hulderlokk, leaving her to finish out in haunting a capella.

I like the band but I really like these vocals. I don't speak Norwegian, so I don't understand any of the lyrics she's singing, but she has a fantastic crisp delivery that suggests to me that she has an impeccable intonation. My sister's most of the way to fluency in Norwegian now so I should send a copy of this over to her and see how she does with it. I recognise the pauses in between syllables from when she speaks Norwegian, but she doesn't do it remotely as well as Eggar and I'd hazard a guess that most Norwegians don't either. She also throws out a couple of what I'd have to describe as squeals on Krig that I absolutely adore.

Musically, the black metal is shifted to the centre of the album, so the opening pair of songs are all folk metal without that flavour being apparent. Syndera is an excellent opener, patient and heavy with folky melodies and those characterful vocals. Krig (or War) is better still, my favourite of the eight tracks on offer. It's slower but even heavier, with rumbling drums behind the verses, a strong bridge that oddly reminds of Iron Maiden, even though this is a very different style indeed, and a wonderful melody in the chorus.

The black metal shows up initially in Svartedans, which appropriately translates to Black Dance. It isn't as overt here, restricted to an intro that isn't fast enough or dense enough to thrill die hard black metal fans but clearly drawn from that genre. Then it drops into a melody and we're clearly back in folk metal again. That hint in Svartedans shows up with a vengeance in a pair of tracks that feature guest harsh vocals from Mikael Aasnes Torseth of Trondheim black metal band Keiser. The band dive firmly into his genre to meet him on Mare, then jump back into folk metal when Eggan takes the lead. It's an interesting dance. The two approaches merge in the chorus for Fimbulvinter, which is even more interesting.

And then Torseth departs and Ravn use Svik to come down from their black metal interlude. There are hints of black metal in this one, but it's mostly folk metal again, with a keyboard intro that's a lot like Enya, incorporating what I presume are synths manipulating a vocal sample. It's a livelier song than most of the folk metal songs here but it's not as fast as the black metal ones. It thrives on momentum but the final two tracks avoid that, going back to power chords and slower, heavier riffing.

They're also not new songs though I assume they've been re-recorded for this album, given that a "(2024)" appears after both their names. They were each released as a single, Evighet in 2020 and Hulderlokk in 2021. I like both of these, but Hulderlokk, arguably the most folky song here, is very good indeed, my second highlight after Krig. I don't know what it means, Google Translate giving me only Hole Lid, but I adore its majestic folk melodies and riffs, full of pauses and attitude, all the way to the da de da vocalised sections and that lovely outro.

So I've just found another favourite band, which makes it all the sadder to add that they went on hiatus on 12th August, only a couple of weeks before releasing this second album on the 30th. I'm not sure of the details why, but it's the old classic of "irresolvable disagreements about the way forward". Of course, there are two very clear directions on show here, one to folk metal and one to black metal, so the obvious guess is that these disagreements tie to that but I have no evidence whatsoever to back that up. It's just the obvious guess. If so, it's especially unfortunate because I like how the two merge here. There's a good balance to this album and a lot of that is through an overt shift from folk to black and back again, starting and ending with the purest folk elements.

The good news is that there's a previous album, I mørke natt from 2018, which is still available on Bandcamp, so I'll be happily checking that out when time allows.

Simone Simons - Vermillion (2024)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Wikipedia

Vermillion is the first solo album from Simone Simons, best known as the lead singer of Epica and the former lead singer of After Forever, of course both symphonic metal bands. If it might initially seem to answer the question of what Epica might sound like without a harsh male co-vocalist, it's a little resistant to answer that because it's really not a Simons solo album; it's a collaboration of Simons and Arjen Lucassen, the mastermind behind Ayreon. She provides all the vocals and he all the instrumentation, except for guest appearances on both fronts, and both shape it.

The most interesting song is the first one, which quickly impressed me and just as quickly flustered me. It's called Aeterna and it feels heavier than Epica with Lucassen providing a real crunch. Part of that heaviness is the tone but much of it is the pace, because it's slow, symphonic doom, with a tasty middle eastern flavour laid over it. The instrumentation is higher in the mix than I'd expect for a solo album from a symphonic metal singer too. Then it adds a choral backdrop that reminds of Therion, some hints at industrial and then a real shift into electronica. It's fascinating stuff.

The album as a whole is varied, so Aeterna doesn't entirely set the stage for what's to come, but it does in one crucial respect. The instrumentation is often fundamentally simple, surprisingly so for something that dips into prog, but the songwriting is just as often not. In other words, there are a lot of complicated songs here that are played simply, which feels odd but helps to focus attention on Simons's clear soprano, whatever else is going on. Now, remember this when I talk about all the cool things Lucassen does behind her!

My favourite song after Aeterna is probably Cradle to the Grave, surprisingly because the guest on this one is Alissa White-Gluz of Arch Enemy. I've never been a particular fan of hers, as capable as she is, preferring her predecessor Angela Gossow and not much liking the Agonist, her metalcore band. However, she does a strong job here, lending her harsh voice to be a counter to Simons in an impressively patient manner. Had she duetted throughout, it wouldn't be as good a song, but she chimes in when and only when her particularly texture is warranted and it works gloriously.

I'm not going to even try to rank the remaining eight songs, but they cover a lot of ground.

Some start softly, like In Love We Rust, Fight or Flight and Dystopia, but they ramp up eventually and in very different style. In Love We Rust combines clean vocals and pulsing electronica, powers up, powers down, powers up again and ends up almost like a commercial gothic metal song. Fight or Flight features some delicious guitarwork from Lucassen that's oddly almost an aside and the elegant violin of guest Ben Mathot. As it finishes, Simons duets with herself in operatic Tristania fashion. Dystopia is soft and patient with occasional prog flurries to stir it up and a tasty guitar solo from Lucassen in the second half.

Others power up quickly. Weight of My World alternates between a heavy guitar/bass combo and light electronica. Most obvoiusly, The Core starts up heavy, with Mark Jansen, Simons's former co-vocalist in After Forever, on shouty growls, making it almost sound like elegant metalcore. That's almost appropriate given the song title, but that's not what it's about. Like White-Gluz on Cradle to the Grave, he's a texture behind her when needed, but he starts the song out and is much more prominent.

And then there are songs so different that they're either not metal at all or only touch on it when they feel like it. Vermillion Dreams, presumably the title track, starts out with avant-garde notes and unfolds as soaring vocals over pulsing electronica. I like the melodies in this one but it finds its metal escalation very late, making it as much new wave as symphonic metal. R.E.D. features some flamboyant synths and its punchy opening gives way to something more gothic, like heavy darkwave. And, talking about gothic, I was expecting the closer, Dark Night of the Soul, to be a gothic metal song, what with the presence of piano and cello, but it's really a chamber ballad because it's entirely piano and cello behind Simons's vocals.

All in all, this is an interesting album, one that suggests that Simons is trying to stretch her music into new directions that aren't likely to be viable in Epica. I often appreciate that sort of thing but don't always enjoy it. I did here. For what could be fairly classified experimental, it's an accessible album that's often commercial. While I'm still looking forward to the next Epica album, given that I gave 2021's Omega a highly recommended 8/10, I both appreciated and enjoyed this side journey.

Delving - All Paths Diverge (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Delving is only a band when playing live. In the studio, it's one man, Nicholas DiSalvo, who's best known for being the guitarist and vocalist in the psychedelic/stoner rockers Elder, who hail from Fairhaven, Massachusetts but are currently based in Berlin, the one in Germany not the many in the States. This is a side project of his to find a home for the many song fragments and ideas that he generates over time, being "an almost obsessive songwriter, working on music every day". The first Delving album was a product of the pandemic, collating material created before it, but this follow-up is work that originated since then.

He wrote everything and performed almost everything, the only other musical contributions that get a credit being Fabien de Meno on some keyboards (Rhodes and upright piano) and his Elder colleague Michael Risberg providing "additional guitar ambience" on one track, Zodiak. If all that suggests that this might be a very Elder-sounding release, that's only true if we consider how that band has changed over the past couple of decades. They used to be a stoner metal band, but they softened up considerably when they recorded The Gold & Silver Sessions in 2019 to sound more like a prog/psych band who veer often into krautrock and they've mostly stayed there since, on Omens and Innate Passage.

Certainly, for all the guitar vehemence in the second half of Chain of Mind or early in Zodiak, this is primarily driven by the keyboards and that's often all there is. Just check out the funky start to New Meridian to see that. This track is almost world music filtered through krautrock, the core of it reminding of Jamaican steel drums, of all things, but with an electronic beat layered over the top and building keyboard layers. It evolves, of course, but the keyboards continue to lead the way, even when bass and drums arrive to take major parts. It's one of my favourite pieces of music here and very possibly the top of the list.

It's also entirely instrumental because DiSalvo never uses his voice and I'm not upset about that. I don't dislike his vocals for Elder, but I get so immersed in their long instrumental sections that I'm never particularly happy when he opens his mouth to remind me that I'm listening to a song rather than floating peacefully in the spaces between the stars enjoying the distant scenery. With vocals completely absent here, I remain blissfully immersed throughout, only brought out of it after an hour and two minutes when silence takes over if I haven't got the album on loop.

And immersion is the chief success here. It's very easy to get lost in this album, to lose track of the rest of the world as the music takes us somewhere else. If that's what DiSalvo is going for, then he nails it here. The catch to that is that it means that the album works best as an album rather than as individual tracks. Either you'll like it or you won't. Picking a favourite track or favourite section of a track is going to be much harder.

For me, New Meridian is the only one that does something different to the rest of the album. It's the lightest piece and the most keyboard-centric, until the bass kicks in halfway. However, it's also the most active. Everything else is about presenting an atmosphere and leaving us be to float on through it. This one feels more like some amorphous alien creature that's playing with us and has every intention of making us join in with its games. That's especially true for the first half but it's there in the second half too.

Other than that, I'd maybe call out The Ascetic, because I like how jagged it feels, even though it's ended in surprisingly abrupt fashion. Others might plump for Zodiak, which is a little heavier with that extra guitar ambience, making it the closest to a latter day Elder song, but it's also easily the longest piece here at thirteen and a half minutes. With that said, it changes around the eight and a half minute mark, letting the guitars fade away into the distance and switching back to keyboard atmospheres.

All in all, this is a solid 7/10 all the way but I'm starting to wonder about whether it deserves more than that because I've been listening to it for about four days solid. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. Let's see how I think about it while listening to something else.

Jon Anderson & The Band Geeks - True (2024)

Country: UK/USA
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website - Jon Anderson | Official Website - Richie Castellano | Wikipedia - Jon Anderson | Wikipedia - Richie Castellano

There's some history here to kick off with. Jon Anderson is the former lead singer of Yes, of course, last heard on 1000 Hands: Chapter One, a thirty years in the making album finally released in 2019. He's backed here by the Band Geeks, which are a project of Richie Castellano, currently working as the rhythm guitarist and keyboard player in Blue Öyster Cult. Band Geek started as a podcast but grew into a band that covered songs on YouTube, with a constantly changing line-up of friends and guests. Anderson appreciated their covers of Yes songs enough to tour with them covering classic Yes tracks. That collaboration has now reached another level with this album of original music.

So, it's not Yes, but it absolutely sounds like Yes and not only because it prominently features Jon Anderson's iconic voice. There are overt Yes moments all over the album like a rash, starting with the phrasing of True Messenger, but especially including the bass work on Shine On, the beat early in Counties and Countries and the acoustic guitar intro to Make It Right. Clearly these musicians love Yes and not just because they're backing Jon Anderson. The era isn't singular but is mostly a combination of late seventies and early eighties Yes, a point when the songs were shorter and far more commercial in the main.

That era is backed up by occasional hints at what Anderson did in Jon and Vangelis, Counties and Countries veering into a Vangelis-esque fanfare and some of Anderson's vocal approach from that project. However, it isn't for long and the song clocks in at a breath under ten minutes, so we've generally forgotten those moments by the time we get to the end, with a prominent jazzy keyboard solo that isn't remotely like anything Vangelis might produce. Anderson merely has a lot of history to draw on and clearly not everything here sounds like his best known material with Yes.

I should mention that not every song is long, with Counties and Countries the shortest of only two worthy of that description, the other being Once Upon a Dream, a sixteen and a half minute epic. In fact, three of the nine tracks are done under four minutes with four others ranging from four to six. Some of them are even relatively straightforward for prog rock, Shine On the most obvious of those, regardless of that elegant basswork from Castellano.

Even though the songs take different approaches, the album is consistently strong, though there are clear highlights. I'd call out Once Upon a Dream as the best of them, and I'll cover that shortly, but I like Make It Right a lot too. It's a slower, more deliberate song but it has a gentle majesty to it. Even when it ramps up somewhat in its second half, it keeps that majesty in the way that a band like Magnum almost patented. It's another simpler song too, without much that's progressive, but it's highly effective nonetheless, all the way to the gospel moments at the end. It's a song that we feel rather than marvel at, even if there are moments of the latter.

The gentleness of Make It Right also continues into Realization Part Two, one of the three minute songs, which also adds a mild African flavour. It's only hinted at in beats and late vocal harmonies, but it could easily be funked up and jazzed up to fit fairly on Paul Simon's Graceland album. If I had to pick another highlight, it would be True Messenger, which opens the album as it means to go on. It's a strong opener, but I'd rank it after these highlights but above everything else.

I should emphasise that none of the lesser songs let the side down. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the closer, Thank God, for instance, even though it opens like a Police song, but that's partly because it can't hope to do much in comparison to the sixteen and a half minute epic before it. And that leads me back into Once Upon a Dream, which is likely to be everyone's standout track, ironically given that much of the album's success is in starting and finishing things in far fewer minutes.

I love the vocal rhythms that open Once Upon a Dream, which hearken back to some of the songs on 1000 Hands originating in Anderson's vocal exercises. He has a great choice of words for their sounds and, while I'm not expecting vocal coaches to react to a song this long, I'd love to hear what they might have to say about this opening. Of course, there's time enough for a lot more than just vocals and it stands up to that expectatoin. There's a Rainbow-esque guitar solo early on and an angelic midsection with copious use of triangle, not to forget a particularly wild transition in the thirteenth minute. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

And that holds true for the album as a whole. I'd say that this is better than 1000 Hands, but not by much, maybe not by enough to get a higher rating from me. Should I round a 7½ up or down? Going up would mean it sitting on my Highly Recommended List for the year. I think I'm OK with that. The most important thing, thinking on a grander scale than just one album, is that this is easily better than the most recent Yes album, The Quest from 2021. And I see that Alan White has left Yes, so it has to be said that Steve Howe is the only long term member left. Maybe those reunion calls could get somewhere. And, on the basis of this, maybe they should.

Black Wings - Whispers of Time (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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Black Wings are showing on Metal Archives as having split up, after an active spell between 2005 and 2011 resulted in one album, 2008's Sacred Shiver. But hey, here's a 2024 album, of what seems to be entirely new music, performed by two of the same musicians and three new ones. Facebook seems to suggest that it was recorded in 2010 before the band split up and was rescued from the vaults by one of the studios in which it was recorded, Sonika, in the band's home town of Ferrara. Having not heard Black Wings before, I'm very happy to hear them now, though I'm sad they are no longer together.

It seems appropriate to start some catch up at Apocalypse Later after a tough few months dealing with real life issues. They're fourteen years late with this album. I've only been away since June.

The album came to me as melodic heavy metal, which is fair, I guess, but they mostly play a sort of European power metal that veers into melodic rock, hard rock and traditional heavy metal. It also gets epic, with a cinematic intro in Opening the Gates that shifts from demonic spoken word to an enticing, almost bouncy, Danny Elfman-esque theme, and a less successful closer that runs far too long. That's Back to Consciousness and it combines narration, elegant piano and orchestration.

While Strangers to This World (Like You) is emphatically a melodic rock song, driven not by guitars but the keyboards of Alessandro Duò, most of this does give Claudio Pietronik the traditional lead guitar role for heavy metal alongside the powerful vocals of Diego Albini, and not one of the seven other tracks feels comfortable lumped into melodic rock. The opener, Cold is the Wind, is a suitably lively track with good strong vocals and lively riffs, especially after a brief drop to piano midway, those riffs wrapped in effective orchestration. This is a statement of intent and, while that intent is briefly interrupted by Strangers to This World, it holds true for much of the album.

Cold is the Wind is definitely one of my highlights, but there are others. Calling to a Fool ups the power again after Strangers to This World and Albini is especially eager to deliver, but it elevates through a unexpectedly loose and jazzy midsection that kicks the song back into gear through an excellent pair of solos, one on guitar from Pietronik and another on keyboards from Duò. Talking of blistering, the most blistering heavy metal here is the guitarwork during the second half of The Sense of Emotions. It's a powerful song anyway but that guitar is gorgeous. I should also call out The Story Ain't Over, because it finds a particularly strong groove in the second half, both before and after Albini hands over to the instrumentation.

While those are my highlights, the remaining songs don't really let the side down. Another Sun is a capable song with a lot of Iron Maiden to it and even more of the European power metal bands who came into being because of them. It would be a good song on any other album, but I can't say it's as good as the songs around it. Whispers of Time is more generic for a European power metal song, even though it's the title track. It's decent, but it doesn't stand out the way those highlights do. And Waiting in Heaven slows things down considerably, opening like a ballad but powering up in its later stages. It's the least effective of them all for me, if still enjoyable.

The worst song for me is easily the closer, which isn't really a song at all, just a five minute outro that dips back into cinematic territory, as if it's wrapping up a concept album. Maybe it is, but I'd not caught any link between songs otherwise. Its only vocals are narrative and it never manages to find a focus instrumentally for me. Sure, it sets a mood but it's not the mood I wanted from an outro to a power metal album. Even on a third or fourth time through, I never wanted to skip any of these songs, even the partial ballad, but the outro lost me first time around and got more and more annoying with each further listen.

Without an active band behind it, I guess this only has a couple of possibilities to live up to. One is to enhance the reputation of a band who are no longer together, and I'd suggest it succeeds there. I haven't heard Sacred Shiver, so I can't say if this is better or worse or even remotely similar, but it seems like a valid rescue from the archives. The other is to introduce people like me to a band who might, even individually, benefit from fresh attention. Is this good enough to prompt a reunion? It probably isn't, but it's a quality addition to the resumes of everyone involved, whatever they may be doing nowadays.