Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: February 2025

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

Harakiri for the Sky - Scorched Earth (2025)

There are two distinct sides to Harakiri for the Sky, appropriately enough given that there are a couple of very different musicians in the band.

Matthias Sollak plays most of the instruments, the one exception being the drums, which fall to Kerim Lechner, Krimh of Act of Denial, Dååth and Septicflesh. I don't know how many there are, beyond the traditional, but there's plenty of keyboard work and not all of it sounds like a piano. Without You I'm Just a Sad Song, for example, starts and ends with a memorable melody played on some sort of chime. Melody is everywhere, because Sollak combines a black metal resilience with the delicate melodic ear of a pop artist.

I use the term resilience there, because the traditional black metal wall of sound doesn't appear particularly often, perhaps coming closest on Keep Me Longing and Without You I'm Just a Sad Song. It's less of a barrier than a sort of last effort countercharge, the cover art seeming highly appropriate. It's as if the melodic side is the dominant norm but, when threatened, it turns dark and attacks as a form of defence.

Michael Kogler provides the vocals, which are certainly memorable but seem limited. He doesn't shriek in black metal style but doesn't really shift to any of the other standards. He's a lot closer to a hardcore shout than a death metal growl but he isn't really there either. It's a hoarse shout that carries a little of the bleakness we expect from black metal. That places it a long way from the stereotypical orc sound into a more traditional metal vein that's been dipped into extreme. However, just as hardcore shouts are inherently limited to the one emotion of anger, these are limited to the one of righteous despair.

As a result, this took me way back to when Sid at Groové Records in Halifax gave me a promo CD of Dark Tranquillity's debut album, 'Skydancer'. He described it as wonderful music spoiled by a rough vocal and, while I'll cut him some slack there because it was the beginning of a genre and that vocal style was relatively new, it's exactly what I felt here. There's nothing wrong with what Kogler does, but it's so limited in emotional palette that it's holding back the music.

In fact, my favourite two songs are the last two, which I believe may be considered bonus tracks, both of which feature clean guest vocalists. There's a little of that on the last track proper, Too Late for Goodbyes, courtesy of Serena Cherry, a British singer who may have her own one woman black metal outfit in Noctule but otherwise sings post-rock for Svalbard. Her contribution, which is for part of that song only, is the signpost to what will come for all of Street Spirit and Elysian Fields, to wrap everything up. Starting the album over from there only highlights the difference between how those clean voices reach so much more range than Kogler's hoarse shout.

Street Spirit is a Radiohead cover and the guest is Patrick Ginglseder, P.G. in German black metal band Groza. However, he sings entirely clean on this one and with a glorious sustain that makes him soar very nicely indeed. Tellingly, the guest on Elysian Fields is a dream pop musician, Daniel Lang of Austrian band Backwards Charm. While dream pop may well be the exact opposite genre to full on raw black metal, that vocal style fits the post-black style that Sollak has moved into. While Ginglseder's delivery on Street Spirit is majestic, I suddenly wanted to hear Lang sing for the rest of the album.

After all, it's all about melody. As I listen through again and again, I find myself surprised at how much of it is heavy, given that the melody remains dominant. It's faster early, dropping down to midpace for much of the second half hour, but delicate instrumental stretches and the broader melodic sweep are what stick in my brain the most. That's all Sollak.

Now, Harakiri for the Sky have been around for quite a while, this being their sixth album since they formed in 2011, and they certainly seem to have reached an impressive audience. This is my first experience of their work, so I don't know if I'm an outlier who simply doesn't appreciate this vocal style, something I'm used to with metalcore, or whether Sollak is gradually moving further from Kogler's range. If you're a long term fan, you're on board with that style and can probably safely add a point to my rating. It's a 7/10 for the music and a 6/10 overall.

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Bumblefoot - ...Returns! (2025)

It's almost impossible to categorise this ninth album from Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal beyond calling it guitar music and, given that he's a guitarist, that's kind of a given. Whether you know his work from Guns n' Roses, Sons of Apollo or from solo releases, there will be something here that you'll never have heard before, because he very deliberately trawls in whatever style of music he feels will work for a particular piece.

The opener, Simon in Space, is probably the closest to what you might expect. There are plenty of heavy note bending sections wrapped around more laid back solos and even those laid back solos are intricate and virtuosic. It's the sort of track that tends to sit on albums like this whether they carry the name of Bumblefoot or another guitar wizard like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani rather than a shredder whose tracks are faster and more deliberately awe-inspiring. He's going for mood and feel not technical genius, but there's plenty of technical genius used to get there. Eight minutes of that leads into five more of Planetary Lockdown, which is a little lighter and sassier but in the same ballpark.

And then things go off the rails, as it were. Moonshine Hootenanny is the lively bluegrass knees up that its name suggests, Bumblefoot's guitar variously playing roles that might otherwise go to banjos or lap steels. Sure, there's some of that heavy notebending a couple of minutes in and it leads into a more traditional rock guitar solo, but the bluegrass returns quickly enough. That's followed by Chopin Waltz Op64 No2, which is a well known classical piece. There's another one of these later on in Funeral March, also written by by Frederic Chopin, but while the former is just a transcription to electric guitar, starting with the frantic bit, the latter is a guitar and violin duet with an ominous backdrop.

That highlights that he doesn't do everything here himself, though I'd guess that he does come close. Ben Karas, best known for Thank You Scientist, is the guest violinist who combines so well with him on Funeral March, but household names like Steve Vai and Brian May also show up for guitar duets. Vai's on Monstruoso and May's on Once in Forever. Guthrie Govan may not be quite as famous as them, but he's played with Asia, ironically after asking May, Steven Wilson and Hans Zimmer, with whose band he's been playing live for almost a decade now. He's on Anveshana.

Of those, it's Anveshana that I like the most. Monstruoso is an experience, with heavy and fuzzy electronica almost dominating, enough that it gets a brief reprise in Monstruoso II (Departure). Once in Forever has a country tone without necessarily becoming a country song in the way that Moonshine Hootenanny absolutely becomes a bluegrass song. Anveshana benefits immediately from a tasty groove and the guitar melody feels like it's singing rather than soloing. That combo makes it a highly accessible piece but it stands up to a deeper dive too.

However, it's far from my favourite piece on the album. Funeral March tops that list for me, even if it's the one song that most prominently features an instrument other than the guitar. Cintaku comes pretty close to it though, with its organic beat and melodic guitar line. Like Anveshana, it seems like the guitar is transcribing lyrics. I could believe that this is a Journey song with lyrics in a parallel universe and Bumblefoot's tapped into that for an instrumental version in ours. Oddly, the solo in the middle feels more spacy without apparently trying than on earlier songs where it was absolutely trying to live up to that delightfully weird cover art.

And, with a brief mention for the delightful Andalusia, on which Bumblefoot appears to only play one note but continues to bend it in different directions forever—at least for forty-nine seconds, because that's how long the piece lasts—then there's The Thread, which seems like it's the epic of the album, even though it's three minutes shorter than the opener.

It's an old school instrumental of the sort we might expect to hear on a Jeff Beck album and, as it evolved, building smoothly to explosive moments, I realised that it's echoing what Roy Buchanan did with The Messiah Will Come Again, sans vocals. Once I caught that, I realised just how much phrasing feels very similar. It surely can't hurt to bear comparison to one of the greatest guitar pieces ever played, even if it inevitably comes off as lesser. It's still very tasty indeed.

And so there's surely something here for every guitar fan, even major use of the most seventies technical gadget, the talkbox, on Griggstown Crossing, but, like so many guitar albums, it's all so varied that it's mostly going to impress actual guitarists.

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Monday, 24 February 2025

Jason Bieler and the Baron von Bielski Orchestra - The Escapologist (2025)

This is the third album from former Saigon Kick main man Jason Bieler and his Baron von Bielski Orchestra, which has coalesced into Andee Blacksugar and Edu Cominato, plus a bunch of guests on bass and all sorts of other contributions. It's very much what you might expect from Bieler, if what you expect is rooted in the Beatles-like melodies and grungy guitars that Saigon Kick often displayed but with songs veering off into what seems like every other genre possible at the drop of a hat. Industrious is precisely this, infectious melodies over grungy riffs but with an unusually repetitive lyric, almost a song built around a single repeated verse.

Now, it's not just that, because it goes instrumental soon into its second half and I found myself falling into this section on repeat listens. It explains why Blacksugar is credited on "extra guitars, noises and solos" because that pretty much covers what we hear. There are strong solos on Stars Collide and Violent Creatures too, to which I'm leaping ahead right now because I need to point out that both of them are worthy songs on their own merits. Even on my second time through, I deliberately skipped Savior to test this. Violent Creatures is better than Stars Collide, because it starts out with a lovely slow riff and later brings in tasty escalations, but both are decent songs. Cue them up on YouTube and you'll enjoy them.

The reason I mention that is that, if we listen to the album in order, as is surely intended, we'll be listening to Savior before them and suddenly they get lost in the mix. Savior only runs three and a half minutes, but its impact lasts for triple that, if not more, and it's literally hard to listen to a different song while it's partying in our skulls. If I hadn't deliberately skipped Savior, there's just no way I'd have even registered Stars Collide and it took a lot of effort from Violent Creatures to grab me back again. Savior is that dominant.

Needless to say, it's my favourite song here and it's a worthy first single. There's plenty else that deserves praise here, from the tasty guitar solo on Hollow to the grungy riff on Zombies & Black Swans, from the jaunty beat on No Real Goodbyes to the weird noises on Space Debris, but there isn't anything to even come close to Savior until the final two songs, Sacred Cow and March of the Vikonauts, which are very different indeed, both from each other and from Savior.

Sacred Cow flows delightfully and effortlessly until it gets jaunty in its second half. Somehow it's able to soar like Extreme singing a power ballad but experiment like Mark Ribot playing jazz and both happen in the same song without ever seeming out of place. To be fair, we never quite know what to expect from Bieler expect incessant melodies that are so effortlessly infectious that we wonder why anybody else even bothers to try to compete with him. This unuusal combination is a relatively straightforward one for him.

March of the Vikonauts gets serious with guitar, Blacksugar taking us into Joe Satriani territory. Even though his guitarwork would be a highlight in any other song, it's the groove of this one I'd call out the most. It's all over the map in the best possibly ways, trawling in lots of Led Zeppelin, the expected Saigon Kick and even some classical mindset, all of which flow so naturally that we have to concentrate to realise just how damn clever it all is. It's also a song that's good during its first half but which finds whole new levels during its second.

All of which means that this is another excellent album from Bieler, which doesn't remotely shock me. I gave the previous two Baron von Bielski albums recommended 8/10s and there aren't many albums I'd rate higher than Saigon Kick's Water. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't warrant a third 8/10 in a row, which is a fair acknowledgement of just how consistently good Bieler is, and, of course, his set of eccentrically named collaborators. I'm happy to live in a world where people named Diatribe Impossibles, Nigel Biggles, Renaldo Eclipse Jr., Pleasant Strife North, Steambath McCrarey, Wilhelmina Waistaway and Bernadette Babbles are credited on the same album.

But back to Savior. There's a mere hint of world music before Cominato launches into a beat that would have been worthy of an Adam Ant song but is even more in your face. The brass punctation and steel drums fit that approach too, as does the guitar solo, whistle and backing vocalisations giving encouragement. The lead vocals are quintessential Bieler, but everything else feels to me like something Ant and Pirroni might conjure up and given that they're the only songwriters I'm able to name who write songs as infectiously catchy as Bieler, bringing these mindsets together is a slice of heaven.

The only catch is that, once you've heard Savior, you won't be able to hear anything else without serious effort for a long, long time. That's my first candidate for song of the year right there. In fact, now I've heard it again as I polish off this review, I'm going to stop listening to all the other worthy songs here and throw on Friend or Foe. It's only taken forty-three years for something to match it.

Dawn of Solace - Affliction Vortex

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter

Tuomas Saukkonen seems to be alternating his bands lately. The previous Dawn of Solace album, Flames of Perdition, came out in 2022, then Before the Dawn released Stormbringers in 2023 and Wolfheart issued Draconian Darkness in 2024. Now he's back to Before the Dawn for their fourth album and the third I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later. For anyone new to all of these, he's a Finnish multi-instrumentalist, Wolfheart play melodic death metal, Dawn of Solace play gothic metal and Before the Dawn are in between, playing both.

This album follows closely from its predecessor, many songs starting out in gothic rock territory but building into a metal crunch. The metal is usually relatively slow and doomy, with occasional shifts in tempo like the glorious urgency midway through Invitation. The vocals are mostly clean, courtesy of Mikko Heikkilä, best known for Kaunis Kuolematon, but Saukkonen occasionally adds a harsh voice, starting on Fortress. I like both voices—Heikkilä's an elegant tenor, Saukkonen's a rich growl—but they're also highly compatible. Into the Light and Perennial put them into close proximity, Dream combines them and both work a lot better than the alternation of verses in Fortress.

In fact, Into the Light is the point where this album grabbed me. I'm used to these Dawn of Solace albums taking a while to take firm root in my brain. That happened with both Waves and Flames of Perdition and it happened here too. First time through, it sounded good but ephemeral, with nothing sticking. Second time through, Into the Light stood up for attention. Third time through, it s all started to take hold and I was relishing riffs and melodies like they were old favourites. Why it takes me a few listens with Dawn of Solace, I don't know, because that usually happens with much more complex music than this, but it happens nonetheless.

Whatever the reason, Into the Light is the first gem. Murder opens up capably enough but it also ends rather unsatisfyingly, just wandering out of the door as if it doesn't think we're paying any attention to it. Fortress is decent enough too, but seems to missing something. Into the Night is perfectly formed, with an achingly slow beat in the verses that stays achingly slow even when an entirely different beat leaps into action alongside it. Somehow it's doomy and urgent all at once and that makes it fascinating. Add a strong melodic line and those two voices working very nicely together and it becomes quite the track.

It's followed by another gem in Rival, which is so effortlessly elegant that it seems to be carved out of mahogany. If there's some My Dying Bride to be found in Into the Light, there's plenty of Paradise Lost in Rival, especially in the guitarwork during the first minute. Then it drops away to create a sense of space for Heikkilä's delicious voice to explore the way we expect from someone like Soen. And then everything builds powerfully, all the more so on Invitation, into gothic metal crunch like we'd expect from Lacrimas Profundere but with those hints at doom/death that come especially from Saukkonen's vocals.

Put all that together and the result a heady mix that's right up my alley. Everything that follows is decent at the very least, the first two songs being the weakest for me, but the best of them sit at the heart of the album, especially Into the Light and Rival but with Invitation on their heels. It plays consistently from there, with Perennial perhaps playing up the doom/death even more and the closer, Mother Earth, following suit with a minute and a half of soothing electronica tacked onto the end to fade out the album. Nothing here lasts past five minutes, including Mother Earth, if we discount that outro.

And so this is another strong album from Dawn of Solace that took me a few listens to fully grasp. I'll figure out why one day. For now, I just let it play and feel very little, let it play again and feel a little more, let it play a third time and suddenly it's right up my alley and I wondering why it took me so long to realise it. What are the odds that album number five, probably due after the next from Before the Dawn and Wolfheart releases, works exactly the same way? Pretty good, I think.

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.

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