Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: 2025

Friday, 21 February 2025

Lacuna Coil - Sleepless Empire (2025)

I ended my review of Lacuna Coil's 2019 album, Black Anima, by suggesting that I used to be a big fan back in their gothic metal days but their sound had shifted musically over the years to a point where it just wasn't for me any more. Well, I like this tenth album a lot more than that ninth, so maybe I was wrong about that. Most of its limitations are precisely the same as last time out but there are more instances where they break through them to do something more interesting.

As always, my favourite aspect of modern day Lacuna Coil is the clean vocal approach of Cristina Scabbia, which hearkens back to their gothic days more here than on Black Anima. She soars all over this album, perhaps most notably on Sleep Paralysis, the catch being that it's hard to focus on the music behind her. It's there but it's generally just a texture for her to soar over. It's like it unfolds in black and white but she soars in colour. It takes exactly the same role for Andrea Ferro, her male counterpart, but his harsh voice is always far less effective, weaker not through being bad but through being generic. It becomes just another texture for her to play against.

While Scabbia is enjoyable throughout, there are a few points that echo the intro to Venificium on the previous album by doing something much more diverse and interesting. The first arrives with Gravity, where Ferro joins Scabbia in a chant that sounds like it's in Latin and sounds rather like something that might have appeared on an early album. In Nomine Patris opens in a similar manner but with more of a pagan edge. That's only the beginning to why that song is easily my favourite here. Scabbia's melodic choices and a slower pace remind strongly of their early days, even if the instrumentation shifts inevitably away to their modern sound.

My least favourite aspect is the fact that the instrumentation is fundamentally bland across the majority of the songs, but here that serves well to highlight where that's not the case. There's a clear element of electronica on Oxygen and Scabbia's shout at the outset is manipulated. It has noticeable tempo shifts and an actual riff we can focus on. There's another of those, albeit in a more modern staccato style, on the closer, Never Dawn. Oxygen even drops away entirely at the three minute mark to leave Scabbia a capella. It's a good touch.

Gravity gets even more interesting. After that opening chant, there's even more electronica and there are strings in there too, albeit presumably generated by Marco Coti Zelati's synths rather than an actual string section. When the vocals kick in, they're sassy like nu metal taking on tribal music and it's both vocalists in duet. That tribal element is dotted over a few songs, whether in a vocal chant, most obviously on Never Dawn, or through more interesting synths. The same song sounds like it features a didgiridoo early on. I wasn't expecting that on a Lacuna Coil album.

There are two songs featuring guests, which often tends to mean standout songs, but not on this album. Hosting the Shadow features Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, another massively successful modern band that tend to leave me dry live or in the studio andthis song works that way. At least his nuanced harsh vocals demonstrate how limited Ferro is. It's almost mindboggling that he was a founder member of the band who carried all the vocal duties for two years before Scabbia was brought on board. Then again, back then they didn't sound like this. In the Mean Time adds Ash Costello from New Years Day, who I don't know and won't be checking out because of this.

Instead, I'll throw out another compliment I wasn't expecting to trawl out. As I mentioned earlier, it's always the vocals of Scabbia (and, to a lesser degree, Ferro) that drive Lacuna Coil's sound in their modern incarnation. Everything relies on Scabbia's melodies or the contrast that Ferro can bring to bear and the music is just a crunchy texture behind them rather than something that we can enjoy on its own merits. Because of all that, this becomes vocal music and there were plenty of tracks on Black Anima that felt like pop songs fed through a modern metal filter. That's really not the case here, which I'd see as a good thing. The only one that plays that way for me is I Wish You Were Dead, which could have been by any of the modern pop divas with a different filter.

So, as much as I've talked up limitations, I liked this a lot more than I did Black Anima. I gave that album a 6/10 and this easily deserves a 7/10, even from me, not remotely being part of the target audience for this band any more. In fact, I'd go further and say that I enjoyed it, even though I'm still acutely missing the gothic elements, solos and instrumental sections and guitars—this is so bass heavy that I only heard the guitars on a few tracks, Scarecrow best highlighting how Zelati's bass was doing the job of the guitar across most of the album. Now, let's see what my son thinks of it, because he's much more of a fan of Lacuna Coil's modern sound.

Sisters Doll - Scars (2025)

Sisters Doll are new to me, but they've been around since 2010, starting out in Collie, Western Oz and now based in Melbourne. Technically, of course, they've been together since the youngest of the four musicians involved was born, given that they're a quartet of brothers, the Miletos. This is their third album, after Welcome to the Dollhouse in 2012 and All Dolled Up in 2017. Their own website calls them glam rock and there's some of that here but it looks far more overt on earlier releases, where the aesthetic you might expect for that genre is played up to.

Here, it starts out hard and heavy. Purgatory may well be the most elegant intro that I've heard thus far in 2025, acoustic Spanish guitar shifting up to electric rock with a tasty tone and it hints at what the first couple of songs proper deliver, a hard rock vibe with a guitar that clearly wants to get a little heavier than that. This pair, Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner, are highlights right out of the gate, if maybe a little lighter than I expected. There's some Bryan Adams in the vocals of Brennan Mileto and the hooks are just as important as the riffs. The heaviness remains in the guitar, Austin Mileto searing through a strong solo in Climbing Out of Hell, as if he wants to play for Ozzy in the early eighties.

The hints at softness are only fleeting in these two songs, but they're more obvious in Change, a lighter song with a subtle guitar hook and an alternative rock level of fuzz. First Time follows suit but with a country twang to the guitar that leads into even lighter territory. It's as if Sisters Doll want to be categorised as a rock band pure and simple without any further qualifiers to that. It's in scope to drift into softer songs with pop sensibilities but also to escalate into heavier territory, especially when Austin Mileto wants to rock out. First Time is the epitome of this, starting out as more of a pop song but heavying up later on.

What's telling is that, while Climbing Out of Hell and Prisoner remain highlights and serve as my favourite songs here, there are other highlights still to come that don't play in their ballpark. I'd call out Don't Give Up on Us, a lighter but more urgent song with a bouncy rhythm and excellent hooks; United, an old school heavy metal anthem downshifted to a rock framework; and You Can't Bring Me Down, a punchy rock number with plenty of sass. This latter is the sort of rock song that Iron Maiden might heavy up on a B side, but I could easily hear a hair metal band covering it too.

None of these songs are particularly long, everything lasting three or four minutes until we get to the closer, which is six because it really wants to build. It's the title track and it opens with the first acoustic guitar intro since Purgatory, with strings to deepen it. It plays out for a while like a power ballad but escalates four minutes in to emphatic vocals and guitar. It's another string to a very impressive repertoire of sounds, with a blues ending here (You Can't Bring Me Down) and a sassy glam strut there (Take You Away), but a commercial yearning over yonder that goes as far as prominent hand claps (Kiss Me).

While I'm very happy with the range that Sisters Doll exhibit here, what I like the most is how the album runs a respectable three quarters of an hour without a single song lowering the quality. It would be fair to say that I like some of these songs a lot more than others, but I don't dislike any of them and I wouldn't call any of them filler. What I wonder is how they're changing over time, a song like Take You Away fitting the image I get from their bio but the others suggesting quite an impressive divergence from that niche. In other words, I rather want to listen to their earlier two albums to see where they came from but firmly expect that they wouldn't be as varied as Scars.

And that bodes well for the future, even if they're clearly not the most prolific band in the world and may well not be the most prolific band on their street in Melbourne. With the gap between albums increasing from five to eight years, I just hope we don't have to wait another eleven for a fourth album. Next week would be nice, of course, but 2027 to return to a five year average would work and give them a couple of years to promote this one on stage.

Thursday, 20 February 2025

Dream Theater - Parasomnia (2025)

My youngest is ecstatic that drummer Mike Portnoy is back in Dream Theater, because he wasn't in the band when we saw them supporting Iron Maiden in 2010. His return coincides with a return to form and a return to a more emphatic mindset with stronger drums and heavier guitars. How much of that is his work and influence is open for debate, given that he only wrote one of the six songs. Guitarist John Petrucci, however, wrote three of them and vocalist James LaBrie the other two. Add an instrumental intro and a sample driven interlude and this is a generous seventy plus minute album that's surely the best and most authentic release Dream Theater have put out in a long time.

After that instrumental, In the Arms of Morpheus, which is enjoyably patient but inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, even at over five minutes, the opening single Night Terror sets the stage very well indeed. It's patient too, running a breath shy of ten minutes and covering a lot of ground in that time. By this point, we've come to expect long instrumental sections that provide various band members with showcase opportunities and, in between them, a vocal section or two that hopefully find and milk strong hooks. We don't get all those things as often as we'd like but it does happen. And it happens here.

The first two minutes of Night Terror are relatively basic for Dream Theater. There's a churn that reminds of Anthrax. Beware the walking dude, right? But then Portnoy plays a patented Portnoy run and we're firmly in business. The vocal sections are decent and the hooks good, but it's when the band starts to jam that things really comes alive. Petrucci doesn't show off too much on this one but does make his presence known. Portnoy has that early moment. Keyboard wizard Jordan Rudess gets plenty of solo time in the second half, one of which is a virtuoso moment. Petrucci is tasked with following it but it's his more sedate soaring that works best.

In short, it all works and that bodes very well for the rest of the album, which I'd say lives up to the challenge. The worst aspect is probably the half hearted attempt at a concept. This isn't a concept album in the traditional sense because these songs don't progress us through a story. However, it does have a concept, merely a thematic one in which the songs explore the same subject matter in different ways, namely the parasomnia of the title, or in less fancy language, the weird disruptive crap that happens in our sleep, like night terrors and an inability to tell if we're asleep or not.

The worst moments for me were the samples, not only in the interlude that's built on samples but within other songs. We're conditioned to see samples that last more than a moment as narrative material and that can work great on a true concept album. Just look at Operation: Mindcrime, an album that I'll come back to shortly. Here, though, there is no progression so the samples have to serve only as ambience, which they don't do when they take over a song like Midnight Messiah at the beginning, so we wonder if that's all we're going to get.

Fortunately it isn't and Midnight Messiah moves on to become an actual song. I particularly enjoy the chorus, when the pace ratchets up, the guitar is vibrant and the hook absolutely spot on. It's a sort of Deep Purple plays speed metal vibe like Space Truckin' with modern production values, but the verses are more sedate, as if a band with this amount of shared technical ability is choosing to play in slow motion.

And that goes double for Bend the Clock, the most atypical song here, which feels far more like a Queensrÿche concept album song (I told you I'd get back to Operation: Mindcrime) than a Dream Theater one. The whole album has been notably heavier but this piece tones all that down for seven minutes and change. Mostly I'd call that a bad thing but the saving grace is Petrucci's extended solo during the second half, which is the tastiest such anywhere on this album. It gets virtuosic towards the end—really, says, the sarcastic devil on my shoulder; on a Dream Theater album?—but it never loses its feel. Even at its most intricate, it builds on melody first and foremost. It's an utterly delightful solo.

But enough of what isn't typical. There's much here that is. A Broken Man starts that, getting all jazzy and sassy around the six minute mark. It's more complex and progressive, the solos there of course but with much more focus on structure and innovative songwriting. Dead Asleep follows in its wake at greater length and even more success, doing much in its eleven minutes. It starts out like an orchestral take on the Tiger Lillies with acoustic guitar, but grows into modern metal with much decoration by Judess's keyboards. It ends in a peaceful Mediterranean lull.

And, much later, after everything else, there's The Shadow Man Incident, the album's true epic, a nineteen minute workout that makes the nine, ten and eleven minute earlier pieces almost seem insubstantial. It may not be the best song here but it's the one that fans will gravitate towards, as it gives abundant opportunity to every band member to showcase their talents and they all have a lot of fun living up to that. It has a classical opening that reminds of Holst's Mars and escalates in wonderful style at seven minutes and change, but it's the instrumental section in the second half that takes it and this entire album home.

Welcome back, Mike Portnoy. With no disrespect to the highly capable Mike Mangini, who did the business for thirteen years, Dream Theater feels whole again.

Crazy Lixx - Thrill of the Bite (2025)

"We like it hard and we like it fast", sings Danny Rexon on the opener, Highway Hurricane, but this isn't extreme at all. This is old school hard rock/heavy metal with a strong focus on riffs and hooks, a lot heavier than when much the same band backs Chez Kane on her melodic rock albums. Oddly, I've reviewed two of those now but nothing by Crazy Lixx themselves, who have been around since 2002, so let's try to remediate that, or least start to do so.

The goal of Rexon and his fellow founding band members was to revisit the eighties and the glory days of glam metal. The band has evolved over time, with Rexon the only musician left from 2002, but they're still doing much the same thing, even if I wonder if they've moved away over time from the cheesier aspects of the genre. Highway Hurricane certainly has a glam metal flavour but it's a song structured like Saxon might structure a song, or even Vow Wow, who sang about a different Hurricane. Who Said Rock n' Roll Roll is Dead right after it has a Kiss vibe, with a great hook that extends beyond the chorus.

Where things could go horribly wrong is Little Miss Dangerous, because, while it follows up with a fresh great hook that extends beyond the chorus, it plays into the cheesier end of glam metal. It's more rooted in Hanoi Rocks or Poison and we cab easily imagine it, with a poppier outlook, played by a band of men dressed up to look like women, rather than the more masculine approach taken by this band on the cover of the album. I can even see the official video unfolding, with the band clumping together to stalk the camera during the midsection.

However, it doesn't go horribly wrong at all. It's an excellent song, with a catchy core hook firmly in the eighties style that refuses to leave your brain. However, on top of all the sassy moments, it has real meat to it with more Saxon-esque riffs, and it extends wonderfully to six minutes, leaving the last few for an emphatic build. Back in the day, there would, of course, be a three minute version intended for airplay, with a picture disc edition, and it would be a hit. Every song here is catchy but this one is earworm level of catchy. It's the best song here, with one exception.

What follows over this ten track album often mixes those two angles in very different ways.

There is a heavy side to everything, with strong and chunky eighties riffs, often in that Saxon style but sometimes in others, like Call of the Wild, which features AC/DC power chords and fretboard work, or Hunt for Danger, which sounds like solo Ozzy, from the Jake E. Lee era rather than earlier. Final Warning is so eighties that I could swear it's a cover. Sure, I can't place those vocal melodies right now or that opening guitar, which is probably the heaviest thing on this album, but they're acutely familiar.

However, there's also a light side to everything, every track pumped up with big glam hooks and a focus on melody that highlights why Crazy Lixx spend so much time playing with Chez Kane. Not all the melodies feel like pop melodies, as Midnight Rebels sometimes sounds like Skid Row covering Accept, but the other end of that spectrum is Run Run Wild, right before it, which could easily be a pop song with very different filters thrown on it. As it stands, it's more like Skid Row covering the Backstreet Boys. Or is it NSync? I can't tell the difference.

It's where those two sides collide best that Crazy Lixx shine brightest. I really ought to gravitate to the more traditionally hard rock songs like Highway Hurricane over the glam metal ones like Little Miss Dangerous. I do like the former but the latter becomes real highlight for me. It's simply done so well that it can't be ignored. My favourite track, though, is easily the closer, Stick It Out, which is Highway Hurricane done even better. Everything works in this song. The pace is up, the guitarwork is alive and the hooks are huge. It's a great six minute Y&T song in under four.

Crucially, everything here stands up to multiple listens. I may have my highlights and you may have different ones, because there's a clear love for an entire era here not just for certain bands, but I can't pick out a weak song for any reason. I guess that means that this is another 8/10 album.

Wednesday, 19 February 2025

Jinjer - Duél (2025)

I'm doomed to point this out every time I review anything with a predominant metalcore element but I've never been a fan of shouty hardcore vocals. They have a purpose and, when used properly, can meet that purpose, which is primarily to channel aggression. However, in almost all instances, they're an inherently limited vocal technique. If all you want to do is channel aggression, then you aren't very interesting. If you want to do more than that, then you need flexibility. And that's the reason I'm still reviewing Jinjer albums when I avoid most metalcore. They have plenty of that.

Well, OK, I missed their fourth album for some reason, which was 2021's Wallflowers, but the core point stands. And I'm back for their fifth after reviewing their third, Macro. Much of that flexibility comes from the astounding vocal talent of Tatiana Shmailyuk but I have to highlight Eugene Abdukhanov's five string bass too. It's a prominent instrument here, to the degree that often it seems like it's the lead string instrument rather than Roman Ibramkhalilov's downtuned guitar. It's right there at the front of every angry assault but it's also there in quieter moments, like the drop in the second half of Tantrum.

That's not to say that Ibramkhalilov has little to do. He's there throughout, of course, deepening the texture of this music; he merely doesn't get as many moments in the spotlight as your average metal guitarist might. There's some interesting guitarwork going on in Green Serpent, both early with vibrant accompaniment and late with a faux acoustic drop at the end. He gets a solo on Dark Bile, not a particularly expansive solo as they go but one nonetheless. Late in the album, he gets a thrash drive both late on Fast Draw and early on the title track, but also a moment of sassiness to bolster Shmailyuk's teasing clean voice at the beginning of Someone's Daughter.

And back to Shmailyuk. As so many YouTube reactors are finding, she can switch effortlessly from a clean melodic voice to a shouty metalcore voice that also contains a lot of growl. Now, she's wasn't the first female singer to tackle harsh vocals and she's hardly the only one doing it nowadays, but her harsh voice still stands alone. Most of those singers sound like they're female when they sing harsh and a few are indistinguishable from the male equivalent. Shmailyuk somehow sounds like she's male and female, as if she's singing both sides of a duet, especially on Hedonist. Some of that could be a production thing, but she does it live too.

As always, my favourite songs are the ones that really play with these two contrasting sounds and make them work together. For me, Tantrum and Rogue are decent early songs, the latter showing Jinjer's progressive side by playing with tempos, but Hedonist leaps out from between them to be the first highlight and Tumbleweed shows up next to be the second. It opens up doomy, but with a happier and quirkier mood in Shmailyuk's vocals, which are clean for half the song after staying in harsh mode for the whole of Rogue. Her harsh voice in the second half churns well with the music behind here, a sludgy growl rather than a standard shout.

They're both first half songs, as is Green Serpent, which plays nicely with emphasis, and they may remain my favourites. However, the second half doesn't feel lesser. It merely shines more through variety than a standout track or two. Dark Bile isn't Fast Draw and neither of them are Someone's Daughter or Duél. All of them play with the same components—that downtuned guitar and overt bass, those two utterly different vocal approaches—but they end up in different places that keep this album interesting in ways that most metalcore doesn't even dream of.

So Kafka is peaceful until it isn't and it finds its way home in a flurry of Ulasevich's drums and the angriest shout on the album. Dark Bile has a jauntiness to it and even a swing, just as Someone's Daughter has a sassiness to it. It reminded me early on of the YouTube reactor who compared her to Katy Perry during the opening section of Pisces only to have his expectations shattered as she shifted into harsh mode; she doesn't do that here until the second half. And Duél has a fascinating opening to make it feel deep even before it gets going. There's a lot in this song.

And so, once again I find myself enjoying a Jinjer album, even though I'm not a metalcore fan. I'm still listing them as progressive groove metal, because both those aspects constitute major parts of the Jinjer sound, but they're still metalcore to metalcore fans. To me, they show that the anger and aggression of metalcore can be preserved while diversifying the sound and stringing a series of varied tracks together across an album. That they don't truly sound like anyone except Jinjer is a bonus.

10 Slip - Tense Lip (2025)

Country: Canada
Style: Blues/Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

This came to me as blues rock and that's not entirely unfair, being built on blues guitar, but it's not the primary genre I heard. What is depends on which track I'm listening to, because it spans quite a range, not all of it sitting on a straight musical line.

When it starts out with Dead Ain't Gonna Cry, it's heavy blues rock with a fuzzy guitar right out of stoner rock. It's heavy and raucous and surprisingly patient. The vocals in the second half build the live feel that we notice immediately in how hard the drums are being hit. That goes double for the end of the song, which is almost bludgeoning stoner rock. This continues into Cult but with far less intensity. The musicians are playing just as hard and the song is just as patient but it's slower and sparser stoner rock that's stripped down to almost garage rock levels. This counts as the bluesiest rock song on that album but it never cuts loose to jam.

If that gives you a pretty good idea of what 10 Slip sound like, the next few will surely shake that up considerably. 10 Split starts out like Nick Cave singing for a doom pop outfit, but it grows into a Red Hot Chili Peppers direction with plenty of punk attitude in the combatitive vocals during the second half. It's a greased up and dirty song that doesn't want to be clean and, while 10 Slip are a Canadian band, hailing from Sydney, Nova Scotia, there's an Australian feel here that extends far beyond Cave. There's some of Angry Anderson's confrontational attitude here, though the style doesn't come close to Rose Tattoo.

The most fascinating songs on the album come next. The Wall, all nine minutes of it, is rooted in a prog metal feel but filtered firmly away from metal, as if 10 Slip are Tool moonlighting as a stoner rock band covering new wave songs in weird time signatures. There's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard here too, to keep that Aussie feel alive. I've never felt that Canadian and Australian music had much in common until now, but 10 Slip seem happy to be the causeway between them.

Then there's Shallow Waters, which is a story song, a deep vocal accompanied by a batch of power beats, maybe explaining that's why there's more Nick Cave here and even alt country. This one is happy to flaunt an outlaw flavour, refusing to kowtow to any genre's expectations, even alt rock, a sprawling genre that ultimately fits this best, whatever rich resonance the vocals find. The second half ramps up in intensity so that voice can leap into street preacher mode, underlining that Cave influence even more. And given all of that, it still has a real garage rock simplicity to it. It's quite the song.

I despise talking through albums in order, but this one seems to naturally fall that way: the pair of openers to set a particular expectation, 10 Split to shatter it, then The Wall and Shallow Waters to showcase just how diverse 10 Slip are with arguably the best and most memorable couple of songs on the album.

The remaining three don't need to be talked about in order, because they're simply another three songs to deepen that versatility, but I guess I might as well finish how I started, after pointing out that the vocals and guitars come courtesy of Brandon Hoban, while the other couple of musicians are Cameron Walker and Gregor MacDougall, even if I can't tell you who plays the heavy bass and who hits those drums like his life depends on it. Just check out his playing on Spore.

The final three are less notable tracks but they're still enjoyable. Mirrors goes back to stoner rock, but ups the ante into some agreable fast doom. Hallowed Ground, which is the single, is somehow the one song I never seem to write a note about. It's too deep to be truly mellow, but it works that way anyway and plays out slower and more melodically than anything else here, though it doesn't stay mellow all the way, that commanding Cave-esque shout of Hoban returning to lead into a sort of stoner rock knees up to finish. And then Spore, somehow the longest track here, even with The Wall lasting nine minutes, closes out like a stoner rock jam.

I believe this is a debut album, though 10 Slip did put out a five track EP in 2023 called Blackbeer'd that looks like something Alestorm might knock out, all pirates and booze. It's a strong album and I look forward to the next one.

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

Saor - Amidst the Ruins (2025)

This is the third Saor album that I've reviewed at Apocalypse Later, of the six that Andy Marshall has released thus far, and it's another subtle progression forward. It plays in a similar folk/black metal hybrid to Forgotten Paths and Origins, but continues the heavier approach of the latter. It also plays very well over almost an hour, with four tracks over ten minutes each and the short one still over eight, each of them benefitting from all that breathing space. What's new is a solid use of strings, a trio of violin, viola and cello on three tracks and another cello on a fourth.

Amidst the Ruins starts the album out as black metal. It's very melodic, especially once deliberate melodies are laid over the top, often using whistles or pipes, but still with that wall of sound and a vocal that's harsh but not unwelcoming. Gradually, though, folk elements make themselves more and more obvious, until a flute solo midway shifts all the way into cinematic soundtrack territory. That's only emphasised by the strings during the second half, this being the first of the three with violin, viola and cello, and the three fit together stylistically without being identical.

They continue into Echoes of the Ancient Land, which gets to its flute solo a lot sooner but works in much the same way. What it adds to the mix is a clean voice for Marshall which works well indeed, especially backed by that of Ella Zlotos, whose guest presence as both clean female vocalist and a variety of whistles and pipes, is very noticeable and welcome. It does ramp up to the black metal tempo at points, but it's mostly slower and more moody. And, for a while, Rebirth, closing out the album, is more of the same, following a similar approach to Amidst the Ruins.

However, it shifts more and more from black to folk and in a way that's not typical for Saor. These folk elements are all over the band's sound, so closely entwined with the black metal that it isn't removable. It's not a layer, it's a crucial half of their essence. However, I tend to hear it as setting, whether it feels cinematic or not. These folk elements put me into a place, like I'm outside in the bleak wild spaces of Scotland and the music is happening around me, but I'm only imagining that place rather than anything happening within it. It's a belonging feel.

The more Rebirth grows, the more it turns into a different sort of folk music, the sort that makes us want to move and dance. I don't feel alone in the elements any more because there's a piper leading me somewhere. This is hinted at from a couple of minutes in but it escalates at the eight and a half minute mark. My least favourite part to this song is a very prominent drum that grabs my attention away from the rest of the music every time through but maybe that's deliberate, to steal our focus and pass it on to that piper.

That leaves two other songs that sit in between Echoes of the Ancient Land and Rebirth and they are even more interesting in different ways.

Glen of Sorrow is the one that really works for me. The earlier songs are strong but this one stood out for me on a first listen and it's only elevated on repeats. Rather than launch in hard with black metal, it takes its time, starting out with slow, majestically echoing chords then adding an electric guitar. When it ramps up, there's a tasty layering of harsh and clean vocals. Midway, Zlotos starts to chant gloriously and it complements the music behind her. This is a different take on Saor, kind of like Dead Can Dance as folk/black metal, and it renders the sound a sticky one that won't leave my brain. It was still playing in my head during the next track.

And that's The Sylvan Embrace, which works too but I'm not as fond of it. It's a much calmer piece but with some ominous texture behind it. It's slower, largely acoustic and the vocals are generally delivered in whispers, as if recounting an ancient secret. Ironically, the strings are more obvious here where they're the work of Jo Quail's solo cello than on the near forty minutes of tracks that feature the trio of violin, viola and cello. It's an integral component that's impossible to ignore. It's a good track, but it's inherently a step or three down in intensity from everything else.

I almost went with a 7/10 again, even though this is surely my favourite of the three albums, but I eventually bumped it up to an 8/10. Saor are a better band than 7/10 suggests, even though that's still a solid rating in my system, enjoyable albums I have no hesitation in recommending. I merely can't seem to persuade myself to round up instead of down. Here, I think I need to round up. This has been on repeat for a couple of days now and I'm still enjoying it as much as ever, with three of five tracks marked down as highlights. I'm still waiting for that 9/10 album though. It's surely only a matter of time.

TFNRSH - Book of Circles (2025)

Country: Germany
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

This album is so easy to just fall into that it's acutely hard to review it. The basics are that TFNRSH are an entirely instrumental German psychedelic rock band who hail from Tübingen. That name is a short version of "tiefenrausch", which means "deep noise", but they play highly accessible psych on this, their second album. Their first was self-titled and came out in 2023. Across both, they write long pieces of music, two of the four tracks here over eleven minutes and the shortest over seven and a half. I've listened to this maybe a dozen times now and it encompasses me every time until I realise I haven't written any notes and have to start over again, not that that's a hardship.

My favourite track is the opener, Zemestån, which features a simple but effective build. It finds its mood quickly with synths then adds a simple echoing riff. The drums join the fray a minute into the piece but the riff doesn't expand for another thirty seconds and it always catches me out with its patience because I'm waiting for it every time. It's a glorious build, going full crunch two minutes in and milking that groove. There is a drop back at the four minute mark but that's also when the drums start to roll and the guitar gets jaunty. The patience of TFNRSH is palpable because this is all about groove. The solo doesn't show up until seven minutes in and even then takes a while to truly shift.

WRZL is more experimental, with an opening that's hard stoner rock but with space noises in the background and leaping into the foreground too. Then it mellows out for a while with a delightful liquid guitar from Sasan Bahreini. He gets a fantastic solo in the second half. He's the only name I see credited on guitar, but the closer, Ammoglÿd, which is much more mellow throughout, plays in like the intertwining of two melodious guitars. They're initially backed by rain with an occasional contribution from Stefan Wettengl's bass. Drummer Julius Watzl gets a break for almost half the piece.

That leaves the third and longest track, Zorn, which is my least favourite of the four, in part because it's even more patient than everything else, taking a long while to get anywhere. Initially, it's a slow set of peaceful synth drones behind a long spoken word section. It's in German, so I have no idea what's being said for four or five minutes. At least Watzl is there to provide a quirky beat that's a single thread of interest. Maybe if I understood the narration it would be stronger, but it feels like the least substantial piece even without factoring that in.

Now, when it does kick in, almost at the five minute mark, it kicks in with emphasis. That's surely the most vicious guitar yet and it aches to cut through something. After a further ninety seconds, it drops into something more akin to Zemestån but with a more playful and less regimented vibe, so there's definitely plenty in the piece to enjoy but we have to wait for the narrator to finish his spiel before we can get to it. It's the only part of this album that I feel warrants a fast forwarding through, even though I haven't done that yet. The drums are enough to keep me, I guess.

By the way, while the band is based in Germany, song titles like Zemestån and Ammoglÿd appear to be Latgalian, which is a Latvian language. I don't know if any or all of the band members moved from Latvia to Germany or not, but those titles mean Earthquake and Environment respectively. It's ironic, I guess, that they be my favourite two tracks, given that there's no language anywhere in them except the titles. Maybe Zorn means something in Latgalian. Maybe it doesn't.

Any which way, this is a strong and immersive album. I don't know that it does anything unusual or particularly noteworthy. It's just thoroughly enjoyable and I could easily listen to it another dozen times. However, I need to move onto other albums, so I'll have to leave it for now but I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for a third album from TFNRSH in a couple of years time.

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.

Terry Draper - Infinity (2025)

Country: Canada
Style: Psychedelic Pop
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Jan 2025
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

If you don't know the name, Terry Draper was the drummer in the Canadian psychedelic pop band Klaatu, who released five studio albums in the late seventies and early eighties but are probably best remembered today for Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, famously covered by, of all people, the Carpenters. Since they split up, he's put out a lot of solo albums, at least one per year since 2016 until now. I gather that they tend to come out right before Christmas but this one that was aimed for last Christmas is a little late because of illness.

I also gather that while it isn't entirely new material, it isn't a typical set of re-recordings of hits from yesteryear. Some of it is indeed brand new, written and recorded for this album, but some of it's Draper revisiting old demos that have sat around for a while and then updating some of them with a new spark of creativity. Mostly, I don't know which is which, which says something about the consistency of his material, but The Best Blues, my highlight from a first listen, was written in 1976 and the closer, The Sea, goes back to 1973. In other words, not all this is new to Draper but it's new to us.

Klaatu were a psychedelic pop band who crossed the boundary into progressive rock and it's clear from moment one that Draper has continued in the same vein. There's a psychedelic pop flavour to the opening title track, almost a Strawberry Alarm Clock vibe once it gets past its atmospheric prog intro, but with a side of Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles that was also so prevalent with Klaatu. The rest of the album, which fills a generous hour with fifteen tracks, never drifts too far away from it. It Must Be the Weather is right there.

The heaviest song is probably Leavin Day, which starts out with gritty guitar like it always wanted to be a rock song and that's the tone they use. Of course, it's entirely appropriate, because it's no bubblegum pop song about a happy faily move to a dream house; it's a breakup song and that's a gimme topic for rock music. There's rock guitar on Teacher Teacher, which is clearly rock over pop, even though it's light and even trawls in Beethoven's Ode to Joy. It's Your Love is old time rock 'n' roll with adornments. Draper tries a little for an Elvis approach but not too much.

Most of the rest of the album sits in between those two not particularly distant extremes. There are singer songwriter songs here, not least the ballad Brother of Mine, which leads in with piano and voice and is anchored so firmly in the seventies that this is surely another old demo revisited. There's plenty of that on I Close My Eyes too, but with added orchestration. It's halfway between Cat Stevens and the Alan Parsons Project. Talking of influences and the Beatles always being high on that list, Last Chance to Disagree is a story song that sounds like Ringo Starr, unusually because Draper tends to be closer to Paul McCartney's vibe.

Even within a relatively narrow framework, Draper brings in some diverse elements. (How Do You) Make Love Stay almost has an artificial hip hop beat to it, unusual for a drummer. The Best Blues is psychedelic blues pop but it has lovely touches all over it, saxophone here, organ there and plenty of fuzz on the guitar to trawl in some very light stoner rock. The most unusual song here, though, is Ubuntu, which has an interesting ethnic opening. I know this African word because I'm writing this on a computer running Ubuntu Maté rather than Windows. As you might imagine, there are ethnic African moments all over this one, not least in the African chorus, but some of it sounds Jamaican too, which is less expected.

The other song I'll happily call out as a highlight is one that's dug its way into my head, much to my surprise. I fell for the groove in The Best Blues immediately and then appreciated its extra depths, but Dance the Dance got me before I realised it. I liked it, but this is an easy album to like. I didn't initially like it in the way I'd expect for a highlight, but I found myself singing it while I was writing film reviews, which surprised me until I realised that the more I play it, the better it gets. It has an old time feel to it, its lyrics cleverly talking about not just one dance but many of them, the music hinting at them as it goes until it ends up with carnival music. It's a deceptively simple song with a lot of depth.

So that's my first Terry Draper album. I've heard his work before in Klaatu, but never solo before. He's not a one man band, as there are apparently seventeen guest musicians here, many of them fellow alumni of Klaatu, but I have no idea who does what. I figure Draper does the majority of it, writing the songs and bringing different people in where he feels like they'd fit. There are lots of textures here that are easy to gloss over on a first listen but which gradually emerge on repeats, making it a rich album to get to know over time. And hey, if this is your thing, Draper has a notably deep back catalogue to explore.

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.

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