Record reviews
Steel Druhm keeps getting the weirdo hippie albums and nobody knows why! Sabbath Assembly is the strangest yet and featured members of Hammers of Misfortune performing eerie, psychedelic church music designed to raise Satan and bring about the apocalypse. And you thought church was boring!
Alex discusses the rise and fall of hardcore heroes Vision of Disorder and also takes a few swipes at Long Island music fans. Let’s hope Steel Druhm doesn’t read that part.
Bombs of Hades delivers an album of punky Swedish retro death loaded with crust and scabs. Our intrepid Steel Druhm is here to pick ’em all and find out what lies beneath. It ain’t pretty.
Behexen are very much creatures of the second wave of European black metal, and their identities are firmly rooted in that aesthetic and culture. Not ones to deviate from their chosen path, and certainly not about to start experimenting now. Rather than opting to make drastic changes in approach, they have instead chosen to pursue subtle refinement. Staying within the rigidly proscribed confines of raw, early black metal, Behexen up the finest interpretation of that sound that they can while still maintaining its integrity.
F.A.G. is as anti-retro as Steel Druhm is anti-tax. That means the Led Zeppliny goodness of Rival Sons is gonna fall on angry, bitter ears. At least he doles out some useful Angry Metal History before flipping the grumpy switch.
When I was an Angry Metal Lad I discovered what was then the burgeoning europower scene in the late 90s early aughts. Deeply influenced by the likes of Rage, Helloween, and Stratovarius I began to be taken in by any band that had a lot of double bass, virtuoso keyboard and guitar solos and a dude who sang moderately operatically but wasn’t too annoying. This held me over for a long time, discovering bands that still stick with me to today as some of my favorites including [Luca Turilli’s] Rhapsody [of Fire], Blind Guardian, Sonata Arctica and myriads of others (as well as their aforementioned influences). But like any scene, this one had its boundaries and excesses and after a while I started to get bored. In that process, I missed Vision Divine – an Italian power metal band that includes Rhapsody’s vocalist Fabio Lione who released their first record in 1999.
Doom metal is a lovely creature. There is so much variation and nuance in the genre and two albums that fit in the same box are very seldom cut from the same cloth. Stoner doom I find particularly interesting because the genre itself is as diverse as the smorgasbord [that’s smörgåsbord, buddy. – AMG] of opiates available to the layman (never mind the primo stuff you need to “know someone” to get). Some stoner doom is so full of weed that you could probably be busted for possession if you had it in your pocket. Some feels like a bad acid trip. Ufomammut feels like an LSD-induced, out of body experience in the far reaches of space.
A band with no past is not necessarily a band without a future. But a band which doesn’t look at the future is surely one which lives in the past. With regards to the present, if you title your album Sepulchral Torment and you play old-school death metal, well, there is apparently not much to be said. Rex Shachath is a band with a good hand playing an old game not many people appreciate anymore, but it does it with style and you can’t help but recognise it.
More Finnish music you never heard of? Yep, and this time it’s vest metal! Seremonia brings you some doom rockin, acid ingesting, 60s influenced rock with creepy female vox and Finnish lyrics. If that patches your denim, then read on, flower child!
Describing music as ‘dreamy’ can put different people on different paths of imagination. One could go on the happy path of smiling young people and major chords while another one would think of the vast and ethereal expanses of post-rock but metal is not something that crosses the head. However, on Euphoria …Of Flesh, Men and the Great Escape, Bauda actually plays some metal and attempts to achieve this dreaminess through a delicate balance. I know it sounds odd but this is definitely the kind of record that you’ll be able to grasp after a couple of listens. It needs some time to grow on you. On some occasions, it sounds spot on but on some others, I was left with a feeling of uneasiness.
