Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: 2025

Monday, 17 February 2025

Pentagram - Lightning in a Bottle (2025)

It's great to hear Pentagram again and with such a strong return. This is their first studio album in ten years and they clearly want to Live Again, given how bouncy the opener of that title is. This is doom metal for sure, but it's also a lot of other things. There's a punk attitude to a lot of it. There are all sorts of nods back to the classic rock era, not only to the seventies and eighties but back to the sixties as well. Bobby Liebling is on vocals, as we expect, having apparently cleaned up his act personally—part of the band's absence was due to his jail sentence for elder abuse—but the rest of the band is brand new, everyone else having joined in 2024.

Live Again is a strong opener, but it's not my favourite track here for a number of reasons. One is a very memorable repeated section that's lifted from UFO's Lights Out, just instead of rolling on as Michael Schenker solos, the riff is given a way to stop and start again. I wasn't expecting that on a Pentagram album, but it shouldn't be that surprising. Their particular brand of doom was always a fluid thing, trawling in influences from all over the musical map. Another is the odd drop right at the end of the song, which doesn't work for me, unlike every other drop on the album.

I should note as an aside, given that it's absolutely not a third reason, that I also mishear one line of lyrics every time. "I'm walking the tightrope," sings Liebling. "Never gonna fall, like a cat with Maine Coon paws." It's a great line, but I could swear blind that he actually sings "like a cat with Maine Coon balls." Now, that subtle alteration really says the same thing, but in a very different way, one that arguably features far more attitude.

The first half is very strong, with guitarist Tony Reed delivering a good solo on Live Again and even better ones on In the Panic Room and Dull Pain. There are more on the second half, in I'll Certainly See You in Hell and Lightning in a Bottle, but they're sparser. Liebling is also on top form here, not least on Lady Heroin, the album's standout track, which feels acutely heartfelt. He isn't singing a set of lyrics here; he's pouring out his soul.

Lady Heroin is an unusual song, because it truly revolves around the vocal performance instead of a killer riff. I've never shot up with heroin, but I wonder if the songwriting mimics what Liebling is feeling when he does. Initially, the music barrels along behind him, led by Henry Vasquez's drums, like a nightmarish rotoscope. Later it drops into a mellow section, as if the fury has abated and an element of welcoming calm replaces it. Eventually, it finds a doomy grind, as if the calm is always a transitory thing and that's the catch to the whole thing. Liebling starts out channelling Ozzy, as he sometimes does, and that returns during the mellow section, but he moves beyond that into some sort of dark soul outpouring far more bleakly and honestly than Glenn Danzig ever managed.

Given that it's as much psychedelic or even progressive rock as it is doom metal, I should point out that there's plenty of psychedelic rock here. The delicious drop in In the Panic Room is right out of psychedelic rock and the one in I Spoke to Death isn't far from it. I adore this drop, though it's only one reason why this is my favourite song. The opening riff is the best one on the album for me and it does have competition. I appreciate Vasquez's patience too, because I expect him to kick in hard much sooner than he does and he catches me out every time. This is the most traditional Sabbath-esque the album gets and that's not a bad thing.

Talking of old school influences, the second half kicks off with I'll Certainly See You in Hell, which is even older. It reminds me just how long this band's been active, Liebling and Geof O'Keefe putting it together in 1971, while this grandfather of ten was busy being born. It's doom with a strong punk attitude and a drive that comes straight out of Love. Remember Seven and Seven Is? Love put that out in 1966 and it's still inspiring new songs almost sixty years later.

I don't find the second half as strong, but that's an exception, as is the title track, which is calm in the verses and jaunty in the chorus. The tempo picks up, of course, but it's another good one. And then there's the other real surprise for me, namely the closer, Walk the Sociopath. It's a very slow song, which might sound redundant for a doom metal album, but remember this is a lot of things as well as doom. It's shockingly slow, in comparison to the ten songs before it. It does pick up late and it's a very good song, but it feels like an odd and surprisingly isolated way to wrap up.

All in all, this is a strong return for Pentagram and I'm going to go with an 8/10 but only just. Some of it is clearly not up to the quality of the rest, not necessarily filler material but songs that aren't ever going to hit as hard as the others around them. The new fish are great, not just Vasquez and Reed but bass player Scooter Haslip too, whose playing is easily delineated in this excellent mix. A more surprising note perhaps is that Liebling sounds fantastic here, given how much he's been his own worst enemy for a long, long time (and one to others too, including former bandmates). Lady Heroin may be his finest single performance ever. So it's more like a 7.5/10 but I'm rounding up not down.

Friday, 31 January 2025

Flint Knife Murder - Pretayug (2024)

Country: India
Style: Folk/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 7 Sep 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I like the idea of the website Metal Has No Borders, because that's one of my guiding principles at Apocalypse Later too, so I paid attention to their Best Folk Metal Album of the Year list. It included a trio of albums, Ryujin's self-titled in the bronze tier, Vorgrum's Summit of Dreams in silver and a third EP from Flint Knife Murder in the gold. That's an album from Japan, another from Argentina and an EP from Shillong in the Meghalaya province of India, so far to the northeast that it's past a majority of Bangladesh but not quite so far as About Us, in Wokha, Nagaland.

I don't know that I'd call this my folk metal release of the year because there are highly apparent limitations, but it's a fascinating EP and I'd love to hear more. For a start, it's both folk metal and death metal at the same time, so much so that I can't decide which way it went. It doesn't seem to be folk metal that's been crunched up into death and it doesn't seem to be death metal that's had a huge amount of folk elements overlaid. It feels like it's inherently both genres and both of them are integral to the sound. My favourite part comes at the very end of the opener, Nartiang, with a death metal crunch and a delightfully sticky beat, but a telling folk wail overlaid.

The beginning of Likai that follows comes close, sounding like a field recording of a folk melody in the jungle opening it up, then shifting into the guitars of death metal but the percussion of folk music. I have no idea what's being hit or what it's being hit with but it sounds glorious, with those riffs underneath it. There's a glorious combination of chant and heavy metal riff in Dharmapala, not for the first time. Angulimala opens with a wonderful riff and that folk percussion joins more traditional metal drums for a fascinating sound, that's like hand drums as a full kit. There's some sort of melodious lute halfway that I can't identify but which sounds glorious. The solo is excellent too, again somewhere between folk and heavy metal.

My problem with it is that the death metal angle, when it's isolated from the folk elements which happens occasionally, feels relatively routine. The riffs are good but they don't vary much and I'm not a big fan of the harsh vocals, whether they're death growl or hardcore shout or somewhere in between, because they fall into the common trap of working as texture but without intonation or much nuance. Fortunately, there are a lot of different styles of vocals here and such sections are never particularly long. There are folk chants, dark whispers, clean rock vocals, shouty vocals and harsh growls, each of which adds an element, as does the narrative element on Dharmapala.

I'm only seeing two names associated with Flint Knife Murder, though there may well be more at this point in their career. They formed in 2014, Siddharth Burea on vocals and guitar and Saptarshi Das on vocals and bass, but those are not the only instruments in play here, even if some of it was created digitally on synths. There are no credits for this EP at Metal Archives and it's not on their Bandcamp page. Angulimala is, presumably in an earlier version, but with nobody else listed. An earlier version of Likai is also on their Bandcamp with a guest vocal credited to Tiara Kharpuri.

I've listened to this rather a lot as I've chipped away at my book reviews for the month and I have to say that it's growing on me. It doesn't seem to work well as background but it rewards an active listener, because there are depths here that float past unnoticed if we're not paying attention. A couple of songs, Likai and Dharmapala I believe, feature some tasty bass runs that deserve kudos, but a lot of the nuance is in the songwriting. Dharmapala in particular has both a ritual element to it and a storytelling element.

Maybe that's why it's my favourite song here. It's slower and less overtly death but it does a huge amount with its seven and a half minutes. For something that fits so well as folk/death, there's a strong prog aspect to this one. I adore when the eighties heavy metal solo kicks in and it matches the deep ritual chanting perfectly. I have no idea what's going on but there's a movie's worth of something in this piece. The more I listen with serious focus, the more I find that each piece here has that to at least some degree.

I wonder when they'll get round to issuing a full album. They've put out EPs in 2020, 2021 and now 2024, so they're not without material. I guess it's just a matter of time. I'm looking forward to it.

The Night Flight Orchestra - Give Us the Moon (2025)

Here's another Night Flight Orchestra album, my first that isn't an Aeromantic release. Is there a new concept here? There are certainly plenty of moments that play into the band taking a journey but, while they're obvious in the intro and in between tracks, I could never focus on lyrics enough to discover if it went deeper than that. Those linking pieces are very obvious, enough that I spent far longer on the thirty second intro, Final Call, than I should.

It's a stewardess asking the eight members of the band to attend their flight. That explains to me that David Andersson and Anna-Mia Bonde are gone from the previous release, Rasmus Ehrborn and Åsa Lundman joining in their stead on guitar and backing vocals respectively. It also reminds me that, even though I'm learning more and more about different languages by dealing with the increasingly international rock and metal genres, I still have more to pick up. I'm not shocked that lead vocalist Björn Strid's surname is pronounced Streed, but apparently that of drummer Jonas Källsbäck is pronounced Shellspeck. I therefore immediately apologise to all Swedes whose names I've inadvertently butchered in the past.

Anyway, the thirty seconds are up and off the band go to Tashkent, which is in Uzbekistan, but via a strange route. By the end of Stratus, they're in orbit. What sort of night flight is this?

Stratus leaps in hard as a bombastic melodic rock opener, with big keyboard power chords and the sort of hooks that Toto would employ. It's a strong song, which doesn't surprise because that's the sort of song that the Night Flight Orchestra churn out on a regular basis. However, it's also rather memorable, which is important because a lot of this material blends together for me. Tracks such as Shooting Velvet are enjoyable while I'm listening to them but, as soon as the next one kicks in, I struggle to remember what they sounded like.

That's only emphasised when the next song is as strong as Like the Beating of a Heart, the most obvious single on this album. Sure, it's almost five minutes long and it's a stadium rock belter that ought out to be done in three, but they're five good minutes. It has a wonderful intro that serves to grab anyone's attention and it stays wonderful throughout. What I find myself doing with Night Flight Orchestra songs is figuring out which ones stand out to that degree and continue to do so a few listens in. The album's inherently likeable and accessible and easy to enjoy. The question has to focus on what will stay in the mind afterwards.

On this album, that's mostly Like the Beating of a Heart and Miraculous. They feel like the purest melodic rock standards, the sort of songs that will be playing not merely in heavy rotation on rock radio stations today but also in heavy rotation on classic rock stations thirty years into the future. Maybe the title track fits with these too. It certainly has a powerful chorus. Maybe it doesn't quite match them.

I'd also add Cosmic Tide to the standout list for a different reason.

This is throwback melodic rock that combines eighties stadium rock with tinges of pop and seventies disco, so keyboards are king. Many of my favourite intros, hooks and other parts of songs revolve around the keyboards, which come courtesy of John Lönnmyr, whose other day job is in Croatian melodeath/groove metal band Act of Denial. He's on top form across this entire album, the intros to Like the Beating of a Heart and A Paris Point of View particularly impressive.

However, he takes a different approach on Cosmic Tide, which is to bolster a jangly guitar line with piano in a way that reminds of something Stevie Wonder might do. This one kicks in with drums, as if every rule in place on this album needs to be tweaked, then the guitar, then the piano, and then a particularly urgent pace. It all combines to tell me that, while this doesn't fit with the textbook melodic rock standouts, it's just as good and perhaps even better. It's easily my favourite song on the album.

I don't have a least favourite, but there are plenty of tracks that sit alongside Shooting Velvet as songs I enjoyed while they were playing but which I forgot again immediately. I've listened to this album a few times and every time through, it's like I'm hearing those tracks for the first time with exactly the same end result. The other songs that stand out are for other reasons, some as stupid as the chorus of Melbourne, May I? unfortunately sounding so much like Mother Mayi, that I found myself remembering Leslie Nielsen in Repossessed. A Paris Point of View finds a fast disco bounce, arguably for the first time on the album and Way to Spend the Night is extra bouncy too.

So take that how you will. The Night Flight Orchestra are very very good at what they do. They aim to fill an odd niche, a sort of New Wave of Stadium Rock with Disco that nobody was asking for but which is somehow inherently uplifting and enjoyable. This is a little more stadium rock than disco but it's more of the same and, if this is your thing, it'll take you to the moon. Even if it's scheduled for Tashkent.

Thursday, 30 January 2025

Sotomonte - Decadence & Renaissance (2025)

Country: Spain
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

When I found Sotomonte, I was actually looking for Spanish language music, because I've found a few gems in end of year lists. However, while Sotomonte are indeed Spanish, hailing from Bilbao, the largest city in Basque country, they sing in English and their overt influences seem English or American. This is their second album of psychedelic rock and a Spanish language website I should read more from (in translation) lists it as the Best National Record of 2024. That website is called La Habitación 235. This list tells me that Spain might produce as much psych as Portugal, but I've only reviewed one of the top twenty bands before, Moura and then not for this album.

I liked this on a first listen, though the opener didn't particularly grab me, feeling over-repetitive. Ironically, it's titled The Nothing. It grew on a second listen, as did the whole album, and I can see myself spending a lot of time with this one, not just here in the office but elsewhere too. This may well play incredibly well on headphones in a dark room, where I can truly lose myself in it. Much of it seems to swirl to me, as if it's written in circles like a musical rotoscope. Gambit, the second song and the one that absolutely captured me, does that often, especially during the heavy jam within its second half. Much of What a Game to Play feels precisely that way too.

One of the joys of Gambit and, to a lesser degree, The Nothing, is that I can't place the pieces that Sotomonte used to construct it. There are moments that feel familiar and the result is obviously a folky psychedelia with heaviness added at points in a way that American proto-metal bands did in the early seventies, but only when the song needs it. It was The Beauty of Tomorrow where I heard clearer influences, as it unfolds like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull singing for the Grateful Dead. That combination of English and American influences may be why it's so elusive.

The fourth song may be called Blind Faith, but it doesn't feel like them. I heard some Bob Dylan in the vocals and chaotic west coast psych behind them. I love how chaotic these songs seem to get, because they aren't. The musicians, all six of them, are doing very deliberate things to interact in very deliberate ways. It's not chaos, but it can feel that way because it's so busy and what they're doing is unusual. It's harder to subconsciously deconstruct these songs and much easier to just let them wash over us.

If Blind Faith feels American, Montecristo/The Riddle feels English. It's almost John Lennon doing a guest slot on a Tyrannosaurus Rex song. Marc Bolan is all over this album, but ironically the song that most fits his early psychedelic style doesn't sound remotely like him singing. There are four musicians credited for vocals, all of which also play at least one other instrument, so I don't know who sings lead, but the names are all Spanish so I have no idea where at least one of them picked up a tinge of Liverpudlian accent. Maybe they listen to a lot of the Beatles.

I had no intention of running through these songs in order, but it's worked out like that. My Cross to Bear showcases some glorious seventies organ and the heavier aspect that manifests here and there coalesces into a Mountain vibe. Little Vilma gets all jiggy with it, literally, incorporating an obvious folk dance section that doesn't sound like it's played on a regular acoustic guitar, more of a mandolin. I can't resist the musical circles of What a Game to Play, almost mathematical in the Philip Glass fashion but drenched in folky psychedelia and with Wishbone Ash transitions. An outro, The Everything, as a bookend to The Nothing that kicked the album off, is over too quickly.

I liked this on a first listen but I liked it more on a second and loved it by the third. I have a feeling it's only going to get better and better with each further listen. That makes it accessible but deep and I'm still trying to figure out some of what they're doing after five or six listens. It's already an old friend and I'm pretty sure it's going to remain one for a long time. I only gave out a handful of 9/10s in 2024, albeit partly because I lost a good chunk of the year, but this deserves another one. It's going to be hard to move onto another album but, if I ever manage it, there's one preceding it, which is From Prayer to the Battlefield, released in 2021.

Grave Digger - Bone Collector (2025)

This is Grave Digger's twenty-second album and, because they continue to knock out albums every couple of years, it's the third I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. In 2020, Fields of Blood was a decent heavy/power metal album that warranted a lot of comparisons to Sabaton. In 2022, Symbol of Eternity was notably less successful, its songs enjoyable but unable to stick in the mind. This is a strong return to form and also to a faster and grittier sound that's often more reminiscent of the days when they were a speed metal band. It's not just the tempo, it's a more jagged edge to these songs.

Certainly, Bone Collector and The Rich, the Poor, the Dying open up fast and heavy. They're sung in English, as we expect, but it wouldn't be remotely difficult to identify the band as German, even if we'd gone in completely blind. I wonder how much of this is because there's a new guitarist on this album, Tobias Kersting, who joined both Grave Digger and vocalist Chris Boltendahl's heavy metal side project, Chris Boltendahl's Steelhammer, in 2023. Not all the edge is in the guitars, but I think it may well have started there. If so, thank you, sir.

Both tracks pass the test that the majority of the songs on Symbol of Eternity failed, namely that they're memorable. The chorus on Bone Collector sticks in the brain and I love the line in The Rich, the Poor the Dying that wraps up its chorus: "Money for nothing and death for free." Kingdom of Skulls opens with a tasty bass run from Jens Becker. When the album slows down with The Devil's Serenade, it escalates the hooks at the same time so it all works out. This is a strong song, but it's also the one that warrants the most obvious Sabaton comparison. I didn't hear them much on the opening trio.

The comparisons here definitely highlight the shift in tone. Sabaton were all over Fields of Blood but they're not here. This is edgier and, even when it slows down to chug, it has the gritty edge of German thrash bands like Destruction. Killing My Pleasure opens with a riff that could have been borrowed from early Iron Maiden but it's played with Destruction grit. There's a Destruction riff on Riders of Doom, which isn't a Deathrow cover, even though it's a slower song that's content to chug along rather than let rip.

Mirror Hate is reminiscent of Accept, a band who rarely stay away for long in the sound of German power metal bands. Some songs have a Motörhead vibe to them, both in tone (Boltendahl's voice has a similar grit to Lemmy) and in structure, like Forever Evil and Buried Alive. Graveyard Kings has a chant aspect to it that reminds of Manowar, though it's laid over that notably German style chug.

Another crucial note here is that, whatever tempo these songs choose, the album keeps shifting inexorably forward and it's over before we expect it to be. It's of relatively typical length at three quarters of an hour, but it feels shorter because the songs tend to get right down to business then give way to the next without hanging around past their due dates. Occasionally there's some sort of extended intro, as on Made of Madness or Whispers of the Damned, but those songs feel even more frantic afterwards as if to compensate.

The only song that doesn't adhere to that mindset is the closer, Whispers of the Damned. It's not just that extended intro, it's the fact that it's trying to be an epic track rather than a quick punch. It's well over a minute longer than anything else here and two longer than anything but Riders of Doom. It feels stretched, not least through a narrative section in the second half. And this isn't a bad thing. It's a good song. It just doesn't follow the same mindset as the ten tracks preceding it and that's noticeable.

So this is a strong album, a return to form after the weaker Symbol to Eternity and up there with Fields of Blood in quality. While I'm going to rate it the same at 7/10, I'll happily say that I'm much fonder of it because of the increased pace and grit, especially on the first half of the album. If I'm forced to throw out a flaw, it's that it's top heavy. My three highlights all sit in the first four songs, so all safely in the first half, which I presume would end with Mirror of Hate six tracks in, with the two longer songs on the second half. That's not much of a flaw though. All in all, this is the best of the most recent three Grave Digger albums.

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja (2024)

Muuntautuja means Transformed and I'm told that's what Oranssi Pazuzu, experimental Finnish musicians, are every time they release a new album. I have to take that as read because I've only heard one thus far, their fifth, 2020's Mestarin kynsi. Well, I've also heard and reviewed the 2019 collaboration with Dark Buddha Rising, which they called Waste of Space Orchestra, which is why I checked out Oranssi Pazuzu to start with. I gave the former a 9/10 and the latter an 8/10. I found it all fascinating stuff.

This sixth album is different again, moving a little further away from black metal and a little more into electronica, but it's still an unholy hybrid of multiple genres. Voitelu (Anointing) epitomises that mindset with such a bizarre merger of different music that, by the time a stomping riff shows up three and a half minutes in, it feels like we're listening to four different songs at the same time. It starts out with a punk vibe but one that's too regimented to be chaotic, more regulated into industrial. The vocals are pure black metal orc shriek. And then there's some delicate Philip Glass piano over the top. It's a heady mix but it's almost the definition of not for everyone.

Most of the rest is a lot easier to approach. The title track, for instance, mixes subtle dark drone with chirpy electronic glitch bleeps and what could easily be a hiphop beat. The vocals are heavily processed, a la Kraftwerk. "We are the weird Finnish Robots" Oranssi Pazuzu seem to be saying. It all grows behind them into a post-punk approach, becoming more chaotic halfway through, while resisting the temptation to veer into noise rock. There are no screams here. It all feels held back, moments sounding rather like the Prodigy.

Ikikäärme (Eternal Serpent) is accessible too, but it requires some patience, unfolding slowly and steadily over ten minutes. It starts out with tinkling piano and loose jazz, but with an overarching pulse looming in the air above it. The initial vocals are rich and ritual, as if they're trying to conjure something up. Later, perhaps they succeed because they become so tortured that they sometimes come close to being unrecognisable as vocals. Is that a voice or a weird distortion effect on a synthesiser? I find this one delightfully weird and would call it out as my favourite piece of music, followed closely by the closer, an instrumental called Vierivä usva (Rolling Mist) that rolls inexorably along like a conveyor belt into Hell.

Some of it could be considered accessible to alt rock fans who have a grounding in certain bands. For instance, the album opens up with Bioalkemisti (Bioalchemist), a tantalising rhythm exploding into a heavy grungy riff. Suddenly we're in Swans territory and, interestingly, we kind of stay there even when the intensity reaches black metal levels. The guitars and vocals clearly go there, but the rhythm maintains an industrial bludgeon. Valotus (Illumination) dives quickly into industrial territory, escalates into an intensity that's more crust punk than black metal and then ends in noise rock, emphatically the most raucous the album gets. It would be sheer chaos if it wasn't so rhythmic.

As you might imagine, each track here takes Oranssi Pazuzu into different territory, without ever losing a consistency of approach. This band are still creating soundscapes with an unusually broad palette. It's easy to draw a line back through musical history to new wave and post-punk, but that line isn't remotely straight. It diverts here, there and everywhere, adding textures from all sorts of different genres, from ambient and modern classical all the way through to black metal. What results is often fascinating.

While I'd personally favour Ikikäärme and Vierivä usva, Hautatuuli (Grave Wind) is the track that fascinates me the most. It's another more restrained piece, with more of that new wave vibe, but the vocals are extreme. They're not shrieked here so much as they're whispered in ominous fashion from under a rock somewhere. It's like the soundtrack to a short play written by goblins, with the lead character a supposedly enticing predator who can't avoid coming across dangerously repellent. Come here, little boy. It's not remotely safe under this rock.

I like this album, but I don't like it remotely as much as Mestarin Kynsi. Just from two albums, it's as if Oranssi Pazuzu are a journey rather than a destination and each album is a stop on the way. I have a feeling I'm going to find every stop fascinating but I'm not always going to want to get out and explore. Here, I'm staying on board, waiting to see where we end up next.

Avatarium - Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead (2025)

I found Avatarium last time out, with their fifth album, Death, Where is Your Sting, which was my Album of the Month for December 2022 and one of only nine 9/10s for that year. The curse of the critic (or the DJ) is that we're so tied to the flow of the new that we can't go back to simply enjoy things the way we used to when we were just fans. However, I've absolutely gone back to this one. It's become an old friend now, that I've hauled out in all sorts of places. I've played a lot of pool to it at my son's house. A couple of the songs have lessened a bit over time but A Love Like Ours and Death, Where is Your Sting are as impactful to me now as they were on a stunned first listen. They live rent free in my head. They awe me.

And that's the other reason why I haven't sought out their first four albums yet. Sure, there's the fact that I simply don't have the luxury of time but I'm a little scared to find either that they don't have the same punch or, even worse, that they do. What if I found them at their peak and it's only down from here in either direction? What have I been doing with my life if they've been creating music this special since 2013 and I simply haven't noticed? What does that say about me? Well, it's time to knuckle down and tackle their new one. Did they strike gold twice running?

Well, no, they didn't, but this was still an excellent album on a first listen and, four or five times in, it's continuing to grow on me. Oddly, the killer track isn't right there at the beginning to kick it off. Long Black Waves and I See You Better in the Dark are really good doom rock songs, just not good enough to knock me out the way that the openers on the prior album did. Not that I could give you another one off the top of my head that matched it, but still. It was the third track here, My Hair is on Fire (But I'll Take Your Hand), that blew me away.

It starts out with simplistic piano from Marcus Jidell and the soft voice of Jennie-Ann Smith but in quintessential Avatarium fashion. You could have blindfolded me and asked me who it was and I'd have told you within ten seconds. Then it's an serious ramp up and I'm in absolute heaven. It's not quite A Love Like Ours, perhaps because it doesn't have its quirkiness, but it's the first song here to come close. Jidell and Smith take it home perfectly too. In between, there are some moments where I heard Supertramp and, if you're now imagining some of their classics translated into the doom rock genre, then you're welcome. I'm doing the same thing.

It was my first highlight and it remains my top pick, but there are a few serious growers here that are coming very close indeed. They didn't grab me on a first time through, maybe not on a second either, but the more I listen the better they get and the more I fall into them and lose myself.

"The heart wants what the heart wants", says Lovers Give a Kingdom to Each Other. What I think my heart wants is to stay in that song. It's only five minutes long but, every time I hear it, it takes my life over for what feels like half an hour. It's not that it drags, it's that it captivates me almost like a hypnotic spell and time slows down so I can attempt to grab it in return. I still haven't quite managed it but I'm willing to keep trying for as long as it takes. Somehow, it's a comfort zone of a song, while also being willing to torment. The tail of the song has a similar groove to a Fleetwood Mac song like The Chain, when they keep layering on emphasis but refuse to escalate.

Until Forever and Again has a similar effect, though it's easier to focus on it. The riff is golden and the guitar laid over it is even better. Smith hits some tasty escalations too and there's a gorgeous drop five minutes in. I adore Avatarium the most when they're doing something minimal like this but then crash back into doom with the sort of effortless transition that other bands would kill for. There's plenty of minimal in the title track, which closes things out this time, enough that we can hear a tiny recurrent squeak that could be something as minor as a microphone stand that needs oiling. This one teases its escalations and takes longer to deliver them, but they arrive. It isn't up there with my highlights yet, but it tells me that it may get there next.

Then again, anything might. Long Black Waves is the closest they get to Candlemass, their parent band of sorts, and there's some tasty guitar and textbook escalations. I See You Better in the Dark has a bluesy feel to it with plenty of hard rock. It could be a Pat Benatar song, of all things. Being with the Dead ramps up the guitar fuzz and stays in the doom rock style. Notes from Underground is the odd man out here because it's a relatively short instrumental, but the handheld percussion that kicks it off carries on audibly under the guitar and regular drums, even once it finds its way to a guitar solo and a heavier riff. Any one of them could grow.

So this is an 8/10 from me for now. It was a 7/10 on a first listen but it keeps growing and it's done that solidly enough and consistently enough to warrant an added point. It hasn't reached the 9/10 that its predecessor earned yet, but I'm interested to see if it'll get there. It doesn't seem like it's got the same peaks but it does feel like it's a little more consistent across the whole album. Let's revisit down the road.

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Innocence Lost - Oblivion (2024)

I couldn't find a Best of 2024 list for South American metal, but what I did find tended to include a lot of mentions of a band from Rio de Janeiro called Innocence Lost, who play a mixture of power, prog and symphonic metal, so I thought I'd take a listen. They're hardly newcomers, dating back to 2007, but this is their debut album. I guess that means they've been working on material for a long time and probably playing live shows. They did release an EP in 2012, but that was it for recorded output until a string of singles in the 2020s. Three out of five of them made it onto this album.

What's immediately obvious, once Of Man's Fall, the movie trailer of an intro, is done, is that this is emphatically metal, in red ink with two underlines, without ever becoming extreme. The closest they get to extreme are the drums of Thiago Alves, because he has a lot of gears and he gives the impression that he could shift up another couple at any moment without any worries at all. When he's playing slow, which is often, it feels like he's playing in slow motion. However, even though he does find higher gears at points, he never goes full on extreme.

Nobody else comes close, but the mindset is always metal, with the bass prominent in the mix and often at the expense of the keyboards. That feels unusual for a few reasons. For one, I frequently have to point out in metal reviews how the bass is lost in the mix, but far fewer where it buries the keyboards. I can't remember the last time I pointed that out when the keyboard player happens to be a founder member. That's Aloysio Ventura, who provides keyboards and occasional vocals. The other founder member is Mari Torres, the lead vocalist. Everyone else, including the bassist, was brought on board more recently, around the time that they started putting out singles.

What they provide is interesting music, definitely progressive but rooted deeper in power metal. The symphonic element is there from the outset too, in the choral swells on Dark Forest, and it's never far away, but it always plays second fiddle, as it were, to the power and the prog. The female vocals are clean but very powerful. Torres has a strong set of lungs on her and, while there's a lot of nuance in what she does, she doesn't hold back much. When the Light Fades Away opens up like a ballad, so I wondered how she would sound with some restraints on. She sounds great, though her accent does show here—she sings in English throughout—but she doesn't keep the restraints on for long.

The thing is that everyone else follows suit. The guitar of Gui DeLucchi doesn't solo as often as we might expect but, when it does, it sears, not least in a prominent section on When the Light Fades Away. This sound feels like there's two guitarists, not in the sense that they're duelling but in the sense that there's so much bite. However, there's just DeLucci, which means that he's really giving it some. The same applies to Ventura's keyboards, so often a tease in the background but once in a while a tasty solo instrument, like during the second halves of City of Woe and Downfall.

And then there's the bass of Ricardo Haquim, so prominent that it would dominate this sound if it wasn't for Torres. In many ways, it serves double duty, both in the traditional role of the bass and as a substitute for a rhythm guitar. Check out the beginning of Downfall to hear it shift between those two modes. It's usually up front and powerful, but there's a completely different texture to it at the beginning of When the Light Fades Away, where it turns liquid and subtle and very tasty indeed. It's liquid during the intro to Fallen too, but not remotely subtle. Overall, it helps to bring a more modern touch to the sound.

It's hard to pick out favourite tracks on this album, though When the Light Fades Away has to be in and amongst them. Regular readers know that I rarely pick ballads as standout tracks and, in fact, I'm far more likely to call them the least worthy on any album, but this one has class and variety without any hint of cheese. Dark Forest is up there too, because it's a real statement of intent, in many ways the album in microcosm. Downfall is a strong contender too, because it has everything this album does best in there somewhere. Then there's The Trial, with a bunch of male narrative sections that come close to duetting with the female lead vocal. It's a very interesting song.

And it's a consistently strong album throughout. The intro did nothing for me at all and I'd like to have heard more extended solos, both on guitar and keyboards, with the bass down a little so we can hear more of both, but what's here is all good stuff. It's all heavy power metal that's happy to get right into our face, but with the added depth that comes from the prog angle and, to a lesser degree, the symphonic one. It's a very good debut. I'd love to hear what they come up with next.

Wardruna - Birna (2025)

I like Wardruna, the dark folk side project of former Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik, in which his stagename was Kvitravn, also the title of the fifth Wardruna album. This is the sixth and it's more of the same but maybe a little more varied. This is neopagan music, hearkening back to the music of animist pre-Christian Norway. It's almost odd to hear it in the form of a studio release instead of field recordings. It's performance music, often ritual in nature with a strong connection to the natural world, which means that we listen and feel it rather than find any need to sing along, the way we might with folk songs.

There's a blinding exception here in Hibjørnen. It's absolutely a folk song in that sense, instead of folk music. It's a voice and a guitar (or equivalent stringed instrument). It tells a story, even if I'm not fluent in Norwegian (except occasional words I've learned from min søster) so have no idea of what's being told. If I was, I could easily imagine myself singing along. That it follows a strikingly similar melodic drive to Steve Earle's Copperhead Road only underlines that, its instrumentation merely provided on talharpa (I presume) rather than mandolin. The effect is similar, merely with sadness rather than rebellion as the tone.

Whatever the norm here is, Hibjørnen isn't it. I suppose the majority of the material here follows a cinematic bent, playing into what Selvik does as a composer of music meant as accompaniment, whether for films, TV shows or videogames. Most notably, he composed the music in the TV show Vikings, or at least what was done in a traditional Norse manner. The title track plays into that, as do pieces of music like Skuggehesten and Lyfjaberg. Birna opens ominously, almost like a threat. Skuggehesten starts with a sample of thunder and a galloping horse, but the horse cleverly rides into the song proper in the form of percussion. It threatens too, but Lyfjaberg is less in our faces, more of a background piece of music in Vikings than one bolstering a battle scene.

As you can imagine from that paragraph, everything here lives or dies on its mood, even when it's not particularly cinematic in nature. Hertan is a particularly strong opener, not just because it's a thoroughly blatant piece of music but because it's gloriously layered. It kicks off with heartbeats, adds a chant then ambience and builds into something primal. While we might easily imagine the scene in which it might appear, it would likely feature a band performing music beacuse this isn't background music. It's foreground music that we can feel but also dissect.

And there's a lot of that sort of music here too, which tends to constitute my favourite pieces. I'd call out Hertan as my first highlight, with Himinndotter and Tretale close behind and, a little bit further back, Jord til Ljos, the warmest piece here, which is comforting from the moving water at the beginning all the way to the tweeting birds at the end. There's a hint of new wave on this one, not just the Dead Can Dance that's often overt but maybe even some atmospheric Shriekback.

I can believe Himinndotter might be easy to adapt into visuals, but different people would likely see it differently. Where something like Lyfjaberg feels like it was composed to back a film scene, Himinndotter is the reverse, a piece of music I could imagine someone staging in operatic fashion. While this album is often dark, sparse or even sad, this gets downright jubilant. It's stirring choral work with instrumentation and the fact that it also gets witchy only makes it more adaptable in my mind.. I heard witch in Lindy-Fay Hella's vocals but maybe you'll hear something else entirely. It's open to interpretation.

Tretale goes back to ominous, but builds in a much more ritual fashion. It's far slower and sparser than, say, Skuggehesten, with the ambience being looped twigs or fire not galloping horses, a cry from a raven standing out all the more because of that. It does build but in a nodding drone that's later joined by melodies on flute and lyre and eventually vocals. I like it a lot, but it's one that you have to feel for it to work. I'd say the same about Dveledraumar, but that didn't work for me, even if it was for entirely arbitrary reasons.

It's the longest piece of music on the album, its fifteen minutes over twice the length of anything except Lyfjaberg, which is still only eight and half. However, the early featured instrument sounds to me like someone's blowing a musical raspberry, while the one behind it could be a road crew on the street outside digging it up again. Maybe you won't hear that, but I couldn't not. There's also an organic sound here which seems out of place, as I heard a whale breathing. Perhaps it's meant to suggest something amniotic, like a return to the womb. I don't know. It just didn't fit. It's worth mentioning that this longest song is also largely minimal when compared to the rest of the album, so less happens in its fifteen minutes than in most of the tracks that are a mere three or five.

So this is another 7/10 for me, but I liked it a lot. If you listen to movie soundtracks as well as dark folk music, then add another point to that.

Monday, 27 January 2025

Hamferð - Men Guðs hond er sterk (2024)

One place I always check at the end of a year is the Angry Metal Guy website, because they cover a lot more metal than I do and don't tend to be swayed by the trends that affect more mainstream reporting. Angry Metal Guy himself chose this as his favourite metal album of 2024, ahead of one album I hadn't heard of, Kanonenfieber's Die Urkatastrophe, and two that I've reviewed already, namely Fleshgod Apocalypse and Opeth. Clearly he likes Hamferð, because he also awarded their second and prior album, Támsins likam, his Album of the Year, in 2018. No, they're hardly prolific.

What he likes the most seems to be the way they merge two distinct sounds, whether he describes them as "dour and sinister, but simultaneously fragile" or "tragedy and hope". I also appreciate a sense of duality, which is most obvious to me in the vocal styles of Jón Aldará. He has two distinct ones. The rich harsh growl that he employs to open up Ábær and the album as a whole, is sourced from the doom/death textbook but with has relatively limited intonation. The soaring tenor that he uses to fill this music with a timeless ache is all nuance and far more typical for gothic metal.

The more I replayed the album, the more I heard that in the music behind him too. When he's in a death growl mode, the music is bludgeoning, often monotonous, and with a subtle echo, as if they play every instrument extra hard and so every individual sound resonates for longer. Sometimes, especially towards the end of songs, it slows even further to hint at funeral doom. However, when Aldará lifts into his clean voice, the music gains nuance too, creating soundscapes of mood. These songs are well worth listening to with a careful ear to see how it's all crafted, but only after a few times through letting it all just wash over you as slabs of emotion.

As you might imagine from all that, I do like this album, but I don't like it as much as Angry Metal Guy does. Ábær and Rikin took a while to grow on me. They got there eventually, Rikin first with a merger of near funeral doom monotony and death metal flurry, the clean vocal sections joined by some surprisingly lively guitarwork as nuance. However, on every listen through, and I'm up to six or seven, it's Marrusorg that grabs me first.

It's the longest song on the album, albeit hardly an epic at six minutes and change. However, this one has an aching grandeur to it that speaks to me, with a calmer folkier clean voice to open it up and a delicacy that doesn't negate size, as if this is a vast mansion of a song that's stood up to the centuries but is likely to collapse any day now. Sections of crushing funeral doom give way to light and tender parts and both feed into each other. That mansion was clearly loved in its day but it's forgotten now and the saddest part is that nobody will know when it's gone. It's the standout for me and I feel its ache deeply. I especially like the moments when the guitar quietly sets the stage for a ramp up in emphasis, like My Dying Bride used to do.

Once Hamferð have gone there, they're happy to revisit the territory on Glæman, with throbbing staccato guitar notes, incredibly sparse piano and that calm clean voice again, which we know will escalate at some point. I may not hear a lot of possibility in his harsh voice, beyond its texture, but his overall range here is stunning. That's most apparent here on Glæman, because it's the song he stays both clean and calm for longest. The chaotic rumble that begins Í hamferð is a firm reminder of what hasn't happened for the past five minutes and change.

Almost appropriately, Í hamferð, a heavier song in every way, is my second highlight, because it's a firm reminder of the power of that heavier approach. Aldará does his best harsh work on this one and the twin guitars of Theodor Kapnas and Eyðun í Geil Hvannastein bolster up almost into a wall of sound, though this always remains death rather than black. It's almost a storm surrounded by a buffer of utter calm, because Fendreygar starts out that way, but with an ominous beat from Remi Johannesen and a hint of fuzzy guitar that tells us that it's not going to stay there. Damn, this one builds. Highlight number three.

I wasn't planning to run through these tracks in order, but it ended up happening that way. What's left is Hvølja, the heaviest, most rumbly, most funeral doom the album gets, with the heaviest the clean Aldará voice gets, tortured into strange shapes but somehow still clean. There's also a title track to wrap up the album, but that's something completely different than anything thus far. It's an unusual piece, resonant guitarwork that's presumably played on an electric guitar but with the aim of mimicking a folky acoustic guitar. The only other music is the timeless wash of the ocean on the Faroese shore and the spoken voice of an old man telling a story. It's quite the achievement, as I find myself listening carefully every time, even though I don't understand a word he says.

Google Translate tells me that the title is "But God's hand is strong", while Hamferð is a peculiarly Faroese word to describe manifestations of dead or missing seamen. The remoteness of the Faroe Islands infuses this music to its core. It's bleak but rich, harsh but beautiful, crushing but folky. The result is the third album from Hamferð, just over a decade after their first. It's an easy 8/10 for me because it soaked into my soul, but, unlike Angry Metal Guy, it's not my Album of the Year.

Bonfire - Higher Ground (2025)

While the five years between 2020's Fistful of Fire and this marks the longest period Bonfire have gone without releasing a new studio album, they've certainly been busy in that time. They hired a new singer in Dyan Mair, best known for Greek power metal band AngelMora, and a new drummer in Fabio Alessandrini, who's played for everyone and we all know how good he is. The last time his drumming showed up at Apocalypse Later was about a year ago in an album by Todd Grubbs. This new line-up also re-recorded the band's first three albums, which came out back in the eighties in a very different era for production. Before the line-up change, they put out an "almost unplugged album" in Roots.

So they've been busy, but they're back to business with another new studio album, which I believe counts as their eighteenth, discounting re-recordings and alternate language editions. It does the job that Bonfire tend to do, which is somehow always heavier than I remember it being. They skirt the boundary between hard rock and heavy metal, often shifting from one to the other within the same song, and they do that very well indeed. I gave Fistful of Fire an 8/10 and, while I'm not going to follow suit this time, this is an easy 7/10 that I enjoyed consistently through multiple times. Not a single song had faded by the fourth listen.

To illustrate how they hover around that border, this album kicks off with I Will Rise, a bombastic hard rock song with an obviously metal pace and mostly metal guitars. That's followed by Higher Ground, with a more overt metal riff in the Accept tradition but still featuring plenty more vocal hooks and melodies. This is a catchy song indeed. Fallin' and Jealousy, both later in the album, are driving hard rock songs that dip over the boundary frequently, while Spinnin' in the Black finishes the album proper with an elegant hard rock vibe and a serious kick.

The lightest the album gets is When Love Comes Down, which is a power ballad, but power ballad in Bonfire's mindset means a song that rocks a lot more and contains much less cheese than your average power ballad. The heaviest is Come Hell or High Water, which features a strong riff right out of the Tony Iommi playbook and prowls along just looking for trouble. New fish Dyan Mair has a good time channelling his inner Tony Martin and he sounds very authoratitive indeed. He works well in this lower register.

He's also very able to hit much higher pitches, something he does in escalation moments all over the album, but I felt that he didn't seem comfortable hanging out up there in the heights on first single I Died Tonight. It's a poppier song that opens up almost like disco and soon finds grounding in a Europe-esque pop rock mindset, albeit with plenty of crunch behind it. It makes sense to take this one higher and Mair has the chops to do it but I much prefer him in the lower register aiming high only when a moment requires it.

Mair is a strong addition to the band who feels like he's been there all along. While this is his first new album, he has those three re-recorded albums in the bag too, so this is kinda sorta album four for him. Alessandrini is always impressive and he has plenty of experience in a whole slew of metal genres. It doesn't surprise that he's ultra-reliable here, though he hardly shows off at all. He just makes this seem easy, whatever the pace.

That leaves the longer term members, but only Hans Ziller dates back all the way to the beginning of Bonfire in 1986, let alone its days as Cacumen in the early seventies. As obvious as the vocals on melodic hard rock and heavy metal albums tend to be, his guitar refuses to give way entirely and I appreciated the guitarwork as much as the vocals across the album. The riffs on Come Hell or High Water and Lost All Control are glorious and I have no complaints about the ones on Higher Ground and Fallin' either. There aren't as many solos as I'd like but what we get are enjoyable. Frank Pané joined Ziller on guitar in 2014, the same year that Ronnie Parkes joined on bass. Both are still here and reliable.

The reason I'm going with a 7/10 here instead of the 8/10 I gave Fistful of Fire is because the songs don't stand out quite so much. I had three easy highlights there and a few hovering behind. Here, I'd only place Come Hell or High Water at that level, though nothing else lets the side down. This is a strong and reliable album that remains enjoyable across multiple listens. The new fish don't feel like new fish in the slightest. It's all good stuff and it bodes really well for the future. However, by comparison, it's just not quite up to the standards of its predecessor.

Friday, 17 January 2025

Blind Golem - Wunderkammer (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook

"Wunderkammer" is a German term that translates to what we steampunks know and often make ourselves as a "cabinet of curiosities", but it literally means "room of wonder". This second album from one of my favourite new hard rock bands, Italy's Blind Golem, is a little of both but more the latter, I think. That's because this sound is always big, that patented seventies mix of heavy organ and wah wah fuelled guitar, and wouldn't fit at the cabinet size. Also, cabinets of curiosity have an inherent variety to them, each piece being wildly different from the next, whereas this plays in an relatively consistent fashion.

As with their fantastic debut album, A Dream of Fantasy, which was my Album of the Month here at Apocalypse Later in January 2021, the influences are obvious and English. The primary one is a gimme, given that the band grew out of a Uriah Heep tribute band called Forever Heep, and most of the best parts of this album are the ones that sound the most like them. There's a cover here in and amongst the original material, but it's an emphatically deep cut, Green Eye, recorded for the 1972 Demons and Wizards album but not making the final cut. It's generally findable as a demo on expanded deluxe versions of that album, deep in the bonus tracks.

Some Kind of Poet opens up very Heep with a simple riff and that glorious seventies organ sound. It stays slow and simple during the lovely guitar solo in the middle of the song and there's a tasty drop into a mellow section during the second half that turns into a bass run and then a wonderful keyboard solo. Golem! opens up like the purest Heep too, both in the slow intro and then the fast bounce, and, of course, there aren't really any tracks anywhere on this album that don't remind somehow of them at some point. Because Green Eye is such an obscure deep cut, I initially took it as a Heep influenced song rather than a cover. It features some bounce, but not as much as Born Liars before it, and it stubbornly refuses to blister along even though it could easily take off.

Oddly the first influence I heard this time out wasn't Heep but Rainbow, because they're all over the transitions in the opening song, Gorgon. Those are Rainbow transitions from the Dio era, but How Tomorrow Feels brings a later Rainbow to mind, the riff more reminiscent of the Bonnet era. Last time out, I heard plenty of Deep Purple, albeit mostly in Hammond organ solos from Simone Bistaffa, but there's not as much of that here. He focuses more on that Ken Hensley organ sound from early Heep, which was always his primary go to influence. I find it surprising that the Purple touches are all in the keyboards but the Rainbow touches in the guitarwork, given, of course, that Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist in both bands.

If there's a third influence here, then the Rodney Matthews cover art can point the way. That's a notably Magnum-esque cover, ironically with just as much serpent as The Serpent Rings. Magnum came out of the Uriah Heep tradition in the seventies, dating back further than most people are aware, but they forged a new sound from it that was progressively less based in power chords and Hammond organ and more on the melodic hard rock vocals of Bob Catley. There are songs here I'd place at the point where Magnum started to diverge, like How Tomorrow Feels. Sometimes it's an older school Heep song. Sometimes it feels more like where Magnum went with that sound.

I adored A Dream of Fantasy in 2021 but found that it was a little off balance. The first half was an absolutely peach that I called "the best 1975 album I've ever heard that wasn't remotely written or recorded in 1975." The second side was pretty damn good too, but it couldn't match the first, a 7/10 instead of a 9/10. This follow up is far more consistent, more like an 8/10 throughout. The best songs are as great as the best last time out, especially when they nail that bouncy Heep groove in songs like Golem! and Born Liars, but also in many of the builds, keyboard solos and vocal hooks. Is the spaced out approach of Just a Feeling better than the epic nature of Endless Run or the heavy simplicity of Some Kind of Poet? Who knows? They're all great.

Crucially, though, the worst songs are the sort of songs you wouldn't expect to see next to a word like "worst". Every song here is worthwhile, right down to the substantial outro, Coda... Entering the Wunderkammer, which opens with unusual a capella harmonising vocalisations which keep on even after the instrumentation joins in, until it all wraps up with a cool jam. There's a hint toward that when It Happened in the Woods kicks off too, merely with words rather than vocalisations. It all works. Are these the least songs on the album? Perhaps. Are they at all unworthy? Absolutely not. They're well worth your time.

And that's why, even though I'm staying with an 8/10 for this album, I'd call it a better album than its predecessor. Sure, it's a little slower out of the gate, Gorgon unable to match Devil in a Dream, and its peaks aren't either as high or as clumped together, but the least song here is a step up on that 7/10 second half of the debut. The album as a whole is a gift that keeps on giving and it could be the easiest 8/10 I give out this year.

I've often found that tribute bands are often just as able as the original bands that they cover, the only component they lack being songwriting because their songs are inherently written for them. What I'm hoping is that more of these bands start to write their own songs too, because some of them are going to prove, like Blind Golem, that they're damn good at it.

Tokyo Blade - Time is the Fire (2025)

Tokyo Blade really aren't hanging about in the 21st century. This is the fourth album of theirs I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later since 2018, which means that they're knocking them out pretty quickly. It's also fair to mention that none of them are short albums, Fury three years ago almost eighty minutes long and this not too far behind it. They're writing a lot of material, which is great, but it's telling that I gave Unbroken and Dark Revolution, two albums that run just shy of an hour each, 8/10s, but Fury and Time is the Fire, 7/10s. Had they been cropped more judiciously, maybe I might have stayed at an 8/10.

Then again, maybe I wouldn't. For an album with fourteen full tracks, there are precious few that I'd call standouts. Feeding the Rat is a decent opener with a good Tank-style chug, but it can't find the hooks I'd expect. Moth to the Fire is decent too, but nothing more. Are You Happy Now is only there, enough that I never seem to acknowledge it. However many times I listen through, Man on the Stair grabs me with its slower pace and more successful groove—it does run long though, just like the album, and it loses me by the end—and then The Enemy Within grabs me afresh, as if Are You Happy Now just isn't there in between them. It's like my brain refuses to let it register, even with tasty guitars in the second half.

The Enemy Within is the first of four highlights for me, but it's a surprising one. It has an epic feel to it, even though it's only four and a half minutes long, doing some of what Man of the Stair did a couple of tracks earlier but more successfully. I adore the delightfully elegant guitarwork, but it's more like a Queensrÿche song, especially in the verses, than a Tokyo Blade song. Is that bad? Well, yes and no, because it sets something of a trend. There's more elegant guitar on The 47, with Alan Marsh going for a Phil Lynott approach during the verses and the band behind him ending up in a sort of Canterbury-era Diamond Head vibe. As an old school Tokyo Blade fan, I've often compared other bands to them. It seems weird doing it the other way round so overtly.

The second highlight for me is The Devil in You, which takes this elegant technical eighties metal approach and bulks it up with a more modern backdrop. It's a heavy NWOBHM song with a strong Randy Rhoads-era Ozzy riff to anchor us in that timeframe, but there are Pantera moments there too. For something so rooted in the early eighties, it's also the most modern song anywhere to be found on this album. In fact, I'd struggle to find another example of a modern touch. There's some glam metal here, in songs like Written in Blood, that feel late eighties, like the Queensrÿche nods, but little newer.

The other two highlights delve into 19th century English poetry, so naturally end up with at least a hint of Iron Maiden in them. However, only one of them really follows a Maiden approach, which is The Six Hundred, a take on The Charge of the Light Brigade. Marsh sings lyrics borrowed from and subtly changed from Tennyson's poem and there's also a narrative section in the second half, just in case we hadn't noticed the Maiden influence. However, it's not the literary source that elevates it; it's the riffs and the hooks, those old fashioned touches that tend to make songs memorable.

Tennyson's poem came out in 1854 but Ramesses, the closer, delves back to 1818 to quote Shelley's Ozymandias during its intro. This may be the best song on the album but it's also one of the most derivative, building just like a Dio-era Rainbow song, right down to the middle eastern tinges, but with a firm eighties metal edge. It's always metal rather than rock, even with a progression taken from George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Again, the riffs work and the hooks work and there's some lovely dual guitarwork. I always want more of that on a Tokyo Blade album and the best examples are on Ramesses, just like it contains the best chugs and the best hooks.

There are other songs here, quite a few of them, but, as enjoyable as they are, few of them find a way of sticking in the brain like those highlights. I do like that Lynott vocal approach on The 47 and Soldier On, both opportunities for Marsh to really emphasise the stories he's telling with serious intonation. There are solid chugs on Feeding the Rat and We Burn. There's a nice heavy section on Going with the Flow, which otherwise plays in the Queensrÿche ballpark, perhaps appropriately as the song following The Enemy Within. It's not good, though, when my brain condenses a seventy-five minute album down to a quartet of standouts, especially when it does it during the album.

Bottom line, this is a good album but it's also much too long. Some of these songs surely should be B-sides of singles or songs that emerge on a bonus disc somewhere. There's too much here for it to not affect the overall rating. In fact, I may be a little generous in going with a 7/10 but I think I will stay happy with that. Nothing's bad. It's just that there isn't as much that's great as I was hoping.

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Opeth - The Last Will and Testament (2024)

It ought to be clear to one and all that Opeth have been one of the most consistently imaginative and genre-flouting bands in the rock/metal scene over the past few decades. For those not paying attention, they started out as a progressive metal band back in 1990 and gradually veered into the much calmer but still imaginative prog rock genre. Mikael Åkerfeldt gave up his death growls back in 2008 after their Watershed album and there have been precious few metal elements within the past couple of albums. Nonetheless, their previous release, In Cauda Venenum, was a highlight of my year in 2019. Well, now the heaviness is back and so are the death growls.

Well, it's not quite that simple. Sure, it's heavier, even before we hear that first death growl, but it remains varied. There are subtleties everywhere here and various vocalists play roles in a story. After all, this is a concept album and Åkerfeldt is playing a dead man, a bitter one, making a harsh voice entirely appropriate. He's the patriarch of a family and he's dead but his children, three of them, have assembled to hear his last will and testament, which unfolds in seven tracks given the names of paragraphs rather than anything friendlier. The living characters, whether the children or the executor, have different clean voices.

First the vocals are sung clean with emphasis. Then they're growled, in alternation with a spoken approach. The music around them changes accordingly, much of it versatile prog metal but some of it still clearly prog rock. Overall, it's much heavier than the past few albums, but there are long sections that don't touch metal at all. For instance, among the guests, who prominently include a large string section, the London Session Orchestra Strings, there are a few contributions by one of Åkerfeldt's idols, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. He delivers spoken word on four tracks and flute on two, §4 and §7.

The first long pastoral section isn't his, but it is on §4, the father explaining to his twins that they aren't his. They're the product of his wife, who predeceased him, sleeping with another man after they couldn't get pregnant together. It's the harp of Mia Westlund that takes the forefront when these twins are floored by the news, then Anderson's flute takes over as they question everything they knew about their lives. The shocks will continue to unfold and Åkerfeldt almost feels gloating as he gets this off his chest in a far heavier section. Much of this song returns to instrumentality, though, as two worlds fall apart.

It's fair to say that we don't know a heck of a lot about these children. We don't know how old they are or what their characters are. I got far more of an impression of the father, who's already dead when this story begins in legal flashback, than I did of the kids. §1 doesn't even mention how many children, just children plural. We learn in §2 that there's one that was born to a maid and brought up as one of his own children. She's a daughter. §4 suggests that his wife felt that, if he could have a child with the maid, then she could have a child with another servant. And that child turned out to be twins. So there are three, all raised by the parents as their own.

It's in §5 that the daughter inherits everything. She's his blood and the others aren't, even though none of them apparently knew this coming in. That's the sort of person he is. This speaks to who he is lyrically, not to who they are. Instrumentally, much of it speaks to him too, the heaviest sections generally representing the sheer force of his will manifesting from beyond the grave. However, an abundance of variety intersperses these sections and only some of that is the father. Much of that represents represents the emotions of the children reacting to the news these paragraphs brings them. I found that I felt for all three of them, even in theoretically happier sections like the end of §6 when the daughter comes into her inheritance and the father tries to be generous and caring.

Thus far I've talked a lot about the lyrics, because they're kind of the point. All the music exists to bolster the words with mood in ways that go far beyond the typical song. It's hard to establish the instrument as a force when it's effectively restricted by the emotion of moments. Of course, these musicians are excellent, as we know from earlier albums. However, it's new fish Waltteri Väyrynen who shone for me. There are wonderful rhythms here and teasing percussion. I know him from his work for Paradise Lost and this is very different indeed, but he does a pristine job.

He doesn't have a lot to do on the closer, A Story Never Told, the only track given a name instead of a paragraph number, because the reading is complete and this comes afterward. It's a ballad, with no heavy moments at all and delicacy dancing in the aftermath of that. There's a twist to the tale. It's appropriate that this dead patriarch, clearly a force of nature, doesn't get the final word. That goes to the guitar soaring in presumed happiness after it's all over. His final words were, in Latin, God, Father, King, Blood, which shows how much he was full of himself. Now, the king is dead. Long live the queen, who may not be at all full of herself if that guitar is anything to go by.

I liked this album on a first listen, but it took a few more, along with a reading of the lyrics, to fully grasp what it was doing. That's pretty routine for an Opeth album, of course. Now it's pretty clear, I can appreciate what it does and why. I like the return to both metal and death growl, though I'm also very happy that both aren't toggles, rather tools to be used when appropriate. The best growl is on §1, delivered with commanding intonation, and that's surely the best track here. I dug §4 and §7 too though, because of how much they do and how well they do it.

This rocked the end of year charts and that's probably fair, but I don't think I liked it quite as much as its prominent flagbearers. There are some who didn't get it but I'm not among those. I think it warrants a safe 8/10, not quite up to its hallowed predecessor but with textures beyond it. Maybe I might reconsider that later, if I come back to it at all.

Red Lloyd - Duke (2025)

Country: Germany
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something interesting. It's enjoyable too, but it's more interesting than enjoyable, which is unfortunate. Apparently Red Lloyd is Frank Altpeter, who sings and plays keyboards in Moore and More, a German tribute band to Gary Moore. I haven't heard them but they won't sound anything like this. This is a prog rock album, a tribute in a sense to the Genesis of 1980, because Altpeter saw them release Duke and envisaged a concept album about a mediaeval nobleman that, needless to say, was not what Duke was.

So, forty years later during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote what he thought it would have been back in 1980 before he actually bought a copy and heard something else. He then recorded it in as authentic a manner as he could, researching the instruments that Genesis used and then locating working examples of the same to play. This is a glorious starting point for a concept album, at once inspired by and yet still not at all based on an existing work by someone else. That provides plenty of leeway too, so this both sounds like Genesis in 1980 and doesn't. Certainly, Altpeter's voice is far deeper than Phil Collins's and sounds especially dissimilar when he gets emphatic on songs such as Ponderings and Duke's Rise. Throughout, the instrumentation is a lot closer.

The concept is relatively clear, of a good and honest duke who's betrayed by his men and vanishes into the desert. While he gets all introspective there over a long period of time, his legend builds back home and a rumour grows that he'll return. However, rather bizarrely, the copy I'm listening to has the tracks presented in a completely different order to what's listed on Bandcamp, one that oddly seems to flow better. It made me happier to see that mine is the stated order on Red Lloyd's official website.

Now, why Bandcamp shuffles these tracks, I have no idea. It would seem to make sense to put Duke Intro at the beginning, for instance, given that it features narration and sound effects to get this album underway, and Duke's Return at the end, as he may or may not show up to make the faithful happy. That's what my order/Red Lloyd's website order does. Bandcamp's doesn't. Either way, the concept flows loosely, so maybe we can shuffle these tracks around without ever losing sight of the general idea.

It's probably fair to point out here that Duke isn't my favourite Genesis album and this isn't up to its standards. However, there's still value here, Altpeter generating some pleasant grooves to fall into, some capable story songs that succeed in keeping our attention and, above all, instrumental sections to get lost in. There's nothing wrong with his voice but I preferred the instrumentation, a majority of it courtesy of Altpeter but with additional guitarwork from an old collaborator, Daniel J. S. Lewis, and Günter Schlünkes, who plays guitar and bass for German prog rockers Riven Earth.

Of course I have no idea whose guitar is whose. I can just call out how lovely it is on Crosses, City of Broken Toys and Ponderings, to give just three prominent examples. The latter two are highlights for me and Tonight is worth calling out too for other reasons. It's the one that gets catchy. There's nothing here on the level of Misunderstanding, let alone Turn It On Again, but occasionally there is a serious attempt to mimic that sort of hook. It's most obvious vocally on Tonight and otherwise on City of Broken Toys and Duke's Rise.

Interestingly, City of Broken Toys starts out with a guitar reminiscent of the Alan Parsons Project, but just before the two minute mark, it shifts to being about as close as this album gets to Genesis in 1980. Duke's Rise reprises that but the other way around, starting out close but veering away as the song runs on, Altpeter delivering his story in a more vehement voice than Collins ever had. My Time Will Come does it too, driven by an excellent beat and authentic keyboards.

And so this is as it was perhaps always doomed to be, a full length concept album born of a musing that trawls in some wonderful stories and not a lot more. After all, I have written a lot more about what this album aims to do than I have about what it actually does. However, that's telling in itself and it's why I started out by saying that it's enjoyable but more interesting.

I could talk about how the concept is never fully wrapped up, left for us to continue in our heads as we wonder if the duke does return or not. I could highlight that some of the tracks are just there, most notably for me Duke Intro, which is a tame intro for the album (or for The Duke's Lament, depending on the version). It doesn't matter. What I've said here covers what it needs to.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Sheygun - Burn the Fuse (2024)

Country: Armenia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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