Dark Suns - Amphibian Halo
Progressive rock/metal bands don’t make sense. Especially the foreign ones. What the fuck does Grave Human Genuine mean anyway? German outfit Dark Suns paints, expertly on tracks like “Amphibian Halo” and “Free of You,” quite a vista. Similar in parts to Pain of Salvation’s The Perfect Element, Part I, Ulver’s Perdition City, and Riverside’s Rapid Eye Movement, Dark Suns’ prog-experi smorgasbord is bewitchingly effective.
Ghost Brigade - Guided By Fire 2008 (Season Of Mist)
Ghost Brigade - Horns
Released earlier this year Guided By Fire caught the attention of one, maybe two, people. Raise your hand and we can cuddle. On the surface, the Finns appropriated a few ideas from Katatonia, Burst, and the Deftones, but underneath it Ghost Brigade’s cross-genre darkcore is top-class. Nay world-class! “Hold On Thin Line,” “Away And Here,” and “Deliberately” are the soundtrack to a November browbeating. You know, when it’s cold, rainy, and it looks like the world is gonna end.
Kaamos - Scales Of Leviathan [EP] 2007 (Nuclear Winter)
Kaamos - Scales of Leviathan
Posthumously released after Kaamos kicked the bucket in 2006, Scales of Leviathan is crushing high quality Swede-death. Sonically in-between early releases by Visby brutes Grave and Americans Deicide, Kaamos, for whatever reason, didn’t get the same luciferian love bestowed upon, say, Bloodbath. Scales of Leviathan’s opening title track reminds us why non-fruity death rules. 2002’s self-titled and 2005’s Lucifer Rising are as devilishly good as the EP. Too bad few cared when it mattered.
Alchemist - Tripsis 2007 (Relapse)
Alchemist - God Shaped Hole
Aussie’s Alchemist just aren’t appreciated adored as much as they should be. True, the style they’ve carved out—vestiges of Voivod, Slayer, mid-period Napalm Death, and Pink Floyd effortlessly co-mingle in ways few thought possible—isn’t immediate. But that’s the charm, dammit! Vocally, Adam Agius reminds of Max Cavalera and Jaz Coleman. Tripsis, released by Relapse last year, found Alchemist revisiting the meandering tension of cult classic Spiritech.
Hibria - Defying the Rules 2004 (Remedy)
Hibria - Steel Lord On Wheels
Brazil’s got Picanha, hot chicks (in skimpy bikinis), and Hibria. For all those things, we Deci-metallers should celebrate. Hibria’s a relatively obscure heavy metal gem with only one album to its credit. The riff-tastic, DragonForce-killer Defying the Rules. Even though they’re influenced by the masters, there’s a ballsy grit to Hibria unheard in contemporary European counterparts. Guitarists Diego Kasper, Abel Camargo, and bassist Marco Panichi are st-st-stunning! And vocalist Iuri Sanson puts all pretenders to shame.
DragonForce’s new album Ultra Beatdown came out yesterday. Of course, all you Guitar Zero axeslingers and ADHD guitar nerds know this and probably beat Best Buy’s Geek Squad to work at 6 a.m. to nab a copy. You’ll never be as good as George Lynch, but that’s entirely another Deciblog rant. You also won’t nab a chick like this.
Now that you’re prancing around mom’s livingroom in these with that fake Gibson X-plorer wishing, in your heartest of hearts, that you could be like Herman Li or Sam Totman, let’s rewind a bit. It’s OK. You can pause “Heroes of Our Times.” You’ve only heard it 18.75 times today.
DragonForce may be sweet, awesome, tits, or some leet speak horror of a synonym you found on the Interweb, but they’re no fucking match for Lost Horizon. Who? Yeah, we know you said, ‘Who?’ when fellow Deciblogger Greg M. beautifully detailed Cirith Ungol’s ’84 opus King of the Dead. It’s OK. We all have to start somewhere. Like DragonForce.
Hey now, kids. Let’s refocus. Your head can explode to “Heartbreak Armageddon” after you’ve heard Lost Horizon. We’re pretty serious when we say 2001’s Awakening the World is one of the best power metal albums of the decade. So much so we’re serving up two of the album’s best tracks. Before you LULZ or some other shit, listen. Then listen again. Good isn’t it? Now, go buy it and tell your friends. Rather tell your friends to come here first and then buy it. You’ll never look at hot pink arpeggios the same again.
“Rush meets Celtic Frost in a crack lounge.” Now, if you read those words written about any album, you’d just know you were in for something special, right? I may be quoting myself here, but I’ve yet to come up with a more satisfactory epithet for one of metal’s most unique entities. The mighty Cirith Ungol – named after a tower in Lord of the Rings - issued four albums during their fraught tenure, King of the Dead being the second and by far the best. It’s an album of such shining imagination and determined individualism that it puts the majority of what passes for true heavy metal to abject shame. Arcane and impenetrable, often bizarre and deeply unsettling, it has an almost autistic way of taking the recognizable language of metal and speaking it back in a tongue both unnerving and strangely eloquent. Like some acid-fried parallel universe, everything about Cirith Ungol is slightly insane but after such a fashion that once you’ve begun to immerse yourself in their lopsided world, you’ll begin to wonder if it’s them or you that’s lost the plot. Conforming to so many of metal’s unwritten rules and yet never truly bound by them, its otherworldly contrariness continues to confound and amaze almost a quarter of a century down the line.
From the fantasy artwork adorning the sleeve down to the weighty and portentous song titles, everything about King of the Dead screams “cult” from the word go and the music lives up to this promise in spades. Epic seems too small a word, progressive too intellectual, doom too lightweight and heavy little more than a good place to start. Listening to it today, it’s easy to underestimate the impact it had on the poor saps who’d turned out to see Mötley Crüe or Ratt and were subjected to a bowel-loosening opening set from four guys who turned their frustration at seeing their hopes and dreams die into a total sonic beatdown. As a species, we’re generally extremely intolerant of things which we can’t categorize or understand and this goes a long way towards explaining why Cirith Ungol were largely vilified or ignored by the metal media during their twenty year existence. Time has gifted them legendary status, but the disillusionment, despair and even death which it cost them was a very high price to pay.
I’m probably gonna get shot down in flames on this one, but I reckon Die Healing is Saint Vitus’ best album. Recorded after living legend Scott ‘Wino’ Weinrich had departed to reform The Obsessed, Die Healing saw Vitus reunited with original vocalist Scott Reagers for some of the most shit-scary moments of their entire career. It could hardly have been released at a worse time: trad metal was well and truly on its arse in the mid ’90s and doom metal – always deeply unfashionable – was several years away from attaining the kudos and air of knowing cool it now enjoys. Thus, it was a short-lived reunion, but there’s simply no denying the seismic force of these rumbling odes to pain, suffering and misery. Most punters will point to the Wino-fronted Born Too Late as the band’s finest hour, but if you’ve got the patience and the cash – this scarce album has never been reissued – unearthing a copy of Die Healing might just change your mind.
Many fans adore the lo-fi fuzz of the band’s early releases, but if you’ve ever struggled with what by mainstream standards is just plain bad production, Die Healing is where Vitus finally got their studio shit sorted. With veteran knob-twiddler Harris Johns (Voivod, Kreator, Celtic Frost) at the controls, everything that previously threatened to be heavier than thou on a Vitus record is suddenly reanimated like a T Rex with a serious hangover. Never ones for complex arrangements or fussy embellishments, Die Healing nevertheless strips the band’s stark, minimalist bludgeon even further back to absolute bare bones, its skeletal riffs and volcanic rhythm section the very epitome of impending doom. The returning Reagers, meanwhile, turns in a terrifying tour de force, his haunted, agonizing howls plumbing dark depths of despair which sound all too real. “Let The End Begin,” “Sloth” and the harrowing “In The Asylum” are particular highlights – if you can call them that – but overall it’s a near-faultless epitaph with which to mark the passing of a truly great band who struggled against apathy and indifference from cradle to grave.
In keeping with past efforts, Die Healing deals in death and destruction on more than one level. It’s not enough that the world is totally fucked and we’re all gonna die horribly; in the meantime there’s always addiction, depression and mental illness to tide us over. “Special thanks to God” reads the sleeve credits. Never let it be said that doom bands don’t have a sense of humour. Although – as per fucking usual – Die Healing largely slipped by unnoticed under the mainstream radar, it was a fitting headstone for what many consider to be the best doom metal band this doomed planet has ever produced.
Rush, Caress of Steel 1975 (Mercury)
OK, so Canadian progressive rockers Rush aren’t exactly a bargain bin obscurity, but unless you’re a devotee of the band or of prog in general, their third album may well have passed you by. I’ve even met long-time fans who claim not to have heard it, a situation probably exacerbated by the fact that although the band had high hopes for Caress of Steel, upon its initial release it sold fewer copies than their previous album Fly By Night, also issued in ’75. In case you’re wondering, it finally went gold in 1993…
Caress of Steel is generally considered to be the moment when the trio wholeheartedly embraced progressive rock’s aesthetics and it features their first full-blown epic, the 20-minute “The Fountain of Lamneth,” which took up all of side two on the vinyl version. “By-Tor & the Snow Dog” from Fly By Night had epic hallmarks, but, well, it simply wasn’t long enough. This was the ’70s and epics had to be just that. Kids today look back at something like Metallica’s “Orion” and marvel at its vastness and complexity, but “The Fountain of Lamneth” is the real deal. Split into six sections, it’s an extraordinary musical journey deploying the disparate elements which the band later wove into signature pieces such as “2112” and “Cygnus X-1.” Lyrically, it’s typically highbrow fare, a metaphorical telling of a young man’s emergence into the world and his search for life’s meaning, spun as a quest for a far-flung, mythical fountain of youth. It’s every bit as impressive as their better-known set pieces but simply got buried on this, the band’s great “lost” album.
There are more widescreen shenanigans back over on side one which is dominated by “The Necromancer,” a paraphrasing of The Lord of the Rings which makes it an early example of the sword and sorcery worship which later came to dominate epic and power metal. The aforementioned “By-Tor & The Snow Dog” also falls into this category, as I pointed out in my history of power metal in Terrorizer mag a few years ago. Elsewhere, the thundering “Bastille Day” betrays a lingering Led Zeppelin influence, as does the wistful “Lakeside Park” which sees drummer and lyricist Neil Peart already indulging in personal nostalgia, in this case for the place he grew up. Last but by no means least is the absurd but delicious “I Think I’m Going Bald,” a predicament which I’m sure many of you can relate to. True to form, “I Think I’m Going Bald” isn’t really about hair loss, but rather about follicle atrophy as a metaphor for the loss of idealism and ambition. Sounds daft? It probably is, but only Rush could make the idea seem remotely convincing. “Seems like only yesterday, we would sit and talk of dreams all night/dreams of youth and simple truths/now we’re so involved, so involved with life,” laments frontman Geddy Lee.
Rush may well be going grey, but as Caress of Steel defiantly predicted, they’re going grey their way.
An obscure U.K. outfit active mostly in the second half of the ‘80s, Head of David’s main claim to fame is having ex-Napalm Death man Justin Broadrick in their ranks for a couple of years before he moved on to form the mighty Godflesh and later Jesu. The next most notable piece of trivia in a list totalling two items is the fact that Fear Factory covered “Dog Day Sunrise” from Dustbowl on their 1995 Demanufacture album. Head of David’s sound is almost impossible to categorise. Although it’s a standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals setup, the riffs, structures and overall atmosphere are rather strange. Their thanks list includes a nod to “Big Black Sabbath” which at least provides a couple of pointers – there’s a ragged, sub-industrial feel to some of the music not unlike Big Black, and listening to “Ditchwater,” it’s clear that they’ve heard Black Sabbath’s “Zero the Hero” at least once. And, of course, Dustbowl was produced by none other than Steve Albini, now best known for his knob twiddling for Nirvana, but in times gone by the mastur-mind behind – that’s right – Big Black. Head of David recorded several albums and EPs (including two sessions for BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel) of varying styles and with varying degrees of success, but in 2008, the only catalog entry to really pass muster is Dustbowl, a bizarre, claustrophobic, unsettling, gloomy glimpse into, well, I’m not really sure what.
