Rexorcist's Reviews

Septicflesh has become my new favorite death metal band.  They understand proper application of symphonic and neoclassical theatrics, and it all started with their debut, which was built for expressing.  This is an album that switches from brutal death to gothic to death doom to symphonic black like it's absolutely nothing, and this kind of behavior is a major risk in the metal community as it can lead many to believe there's no focus.  So does this behavior pan out?

The opening title track has heavier guitars rather than drums, which feels appropriate considering the song's sense of despair.  It also showcase extremely sludgy vocals which remind you that you're listening to a genre called "death metal."  Out next song is Pale Beauty of the Past, which switches between melodic gothic synth-oriented sadness and raw extremities with occasional black touches.  It's a more "epic" track with a very different guitar style and a healthy progressive outlook on the constant changes that death metal songs go through.  This one song gives you every area of Septicflesh's love of variety.  It's almost like a Meat Loaf song.  Track 3, Return to Carthage doesn't hesitate with brutality, going close to slam and grind levels while boasting black metal tremelos that may be backed up by a gothic chorus.  There are even power solos that sound fresh out of an F-Zero soundtrack.  Crescent Moon is a much slower ballad, going into death doom territory with the kind of post-metal emotion you'd expect from Solstafir.  There's a simplistic side here that relies on the listener to be drowned in the reverb and melody in order for any theatrics to appear in the mind.  This song might be overlong, but it's a fantastic experience.

Chasing the Chimera starts out with a slower approach as well, but is more reliant on the deeper and more evil aesthetics of death metal.  There's also more room for melody, and this melody feels adventurous and intriguing, like something thrilling is about to happen to you in the real world.  Because of the stylistic and tonal choices, it feels like a spiritual sequel and even epilogue to the previous epic track.  The Underwater Garden continues this as well, leading me to hope for speed and aggression very soon.  It carries much stronger gothic elements this time around, using gothic guitars and heavy synths the like of which may stem from Emperor's sophomore album, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk.  Thankfully, nearly two minutes in, there's a ferocious black metal section, leading me to believe the point of this seven-minute song is to be a magical journey into classical metal's various applications.  In fact, the middle section is just mocking you when it switches from death metal speed to neoclassical pianos and then combines the bass guitars with gothic melody.

Behind the mask is a three-minute symphonic black album which feels like something right out of Emperor's debut, if not for Spiros Antoniou's impressively guttural voice.  I definitely approve of this, having chosen Emperor as my favorite black metal band.  The fact that these guys maintained the Emperor approach while being themselves is impressive, especially since they effortlessly go into a death metal jam for most of the third act without losing the grip, before going back into the symphonic black metal but heavier than before.  Next comes a slow and heavy intro into Morpheus, which brings us some Therion violins to give us an ancient feel, a staple of several later albums.  This gothic / symphonic death song is all about that vibe, and doesn't waste any of the magic from previous gothic touches shown on this debut.  If the last track was Septicflesh's homage to Emperor, this is their homage to Therion, who used to be a death metal act before switching to symphonic metal, also with gothic tones.  We end with Mythos, an epic that first dives right into Prince of Egypt territory and continues into a classical world of war, magic, loss and victory.  Even though it's an entirely different genre, it keeps the best qualities of the album strong and healthy.  Great ending.

It would be unfair to say that Septicflesh were still developing their style, because they made it clear that they were fully aware of what they wanted their image and their music to be.  This album switches around more than a game of musical chairs.  I suppose the band took a massive risk when writing several songs that switched from every point between soft gothica to black death aggression in a whimsical way, but this album's identity keeps this aspect magical, and the album might diversify, but it risks losing the magic in that second act when it was being slow-paced for too long.  This is a bold debut challenging consistency by applying the right emotions and sensations to a plehora of metal genres, finally challenging the listener's dedication to the behavior of the band with a classical piece similarly composed to the most outrageous songs here.  Not quite perfect, but a masterwork in metal.

Although I don't think I'll be joining the Revolution, I have to admit that I love punk.  Right now the only punk genre I represent in a clan is crossover thrash, which is a problematic genre that rarely ever amazes me.  Metalcore, IMO, is the superior genre thanks to the presence of more excellent bands.  Unfortunately, the genre also gets very tiring thanks to the countless emulators of bands like Born of Osiris, so when someone in metalcore mixes it up, like Zao does with their own strong presence, I tend to feel a sigh of relief so powerful that it's almost like a weight is finally off my shoulders, as if finding creative metalcore has become a literal chore.

This is their most popular work: Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest.  At first it starts off pretty typically, even though it's clear that mood and delivery is taken more seriously than punk energy, which is a sigh of relief.  The same seems to be true even as it switches from calm acoustic james to slow punk screams in the beginning of the second song.  Unsurprisingly, there are faint traces of proggieness and djent in the behavior of the riffage, but not enough to even warrant a sub-tag.  This also feels like a smart decision to me because it's very tamed and used specifically for mood.  In otherwords, this is the kind of metalcore album that keeps you on your toes, guessing what's going to happen next even as it rarely breaks its genre.  There are quite a few instances of slow-paced growling and droning, which seems to me is an atmospheric choice that the band likes to take advantage of.  In other words, speed is of little importance, even for a punk album.  Very interesting choice, especially considering that there seems to be some sort of Neurosis influence.

But there's also some time taken for melody whether or not speed is a part of the picture.  Listen to the openings of March and Ember, and then finish the songs to see where things go, even if certain sections may easily be dragged on too long.  Another interesting choice the band made was writing some songs about hypocrisy in the churches, despite being a Christian band.  They're tackling a wide range of themes involving personal struggles, even avoiding the preachy side of Christian lyricism.  In other words, the band tried to make a Christian album that raw metalheads could relate to.  Again, a smart move.  But concerning the lyricism and quirky song structures, practically throwing pop structures in the trash, I'm wondering if each section symbolizes something, which would make this album more conceptual than advertised.

I can see why this is considered a metalcore classic.  It's a SMART album.  So overall, I kinda like this.  Zao have gone far beyond what the Christian rock tag might've indicated for the music browser in terms of both style and quality.  I can say, however, that I'd prefer a LITTLE more punk energy in certain sections, and that some sections whether fast or slow be shortened to maintain a further punk presence and less of a Neurosis one.  Zao did something very artistic here, and they had their bumps but they were still very smart about this.

Kamelot's rocky history has practically come to a close with Karma, the album where they master all of the essentials of power metal and create something iconic.  It becomes clear that Kamelot recognized their mistakes from the previous album yet again, despite the fact that there was only one mistake on the brilliant Fourth Legacy: it wasn't very heavy.  Well after the intro, you're just plain blasted with heaviness.  Kamelot improved their technique in that respct, but the music itself is just as brilliant as The Fourth Legacy, if not more so.  And Kahn feels much more comfortable in the music he's singing for, so the lack of metal in his voice is adjust slightly to fit the melody so that he no longer has to struggle to go hand-in-hand with his softer voice in comparison to the vocal giants of metal.  And the rest of Kamelot didn't even have to adjust their playing for that purpose at all, just the heaviness.  Songs like "Wings of Despair" might feel standard, but the instrumentation makes up for that.  The ONE flaw of the album is that the music still feels standard for power metal, and it's noticeable.  But it's not enough to detract from the quality of the album and the noteworthy improvements the band went through.  Kamelot's Karma is a perfect album for power metal bands to draw inspiration from.

There are a lot of bands I need to go through in order to get my top 100 right, many of which pertain to the slower genres I don't normally explore.  Having said that, I have many fond memories of a long-term sludge binge I had throughout 2019 and 2020, and I've explored some brilliant artists in that time.  One I haven't explored, however, is Hell, not because I'm Christian and I think I'll get possessed, but because it was also a doom and drone album, two genres I haven't ever obsessed over.  So, the Hell debut it is.

But the album was quite good.  Right from the opener, "Lethe," the music was crushing and monstrous, refusing to succumb to the lightning speed of typical metal and allowing the growls of the guitar to do all of the talking.  Sometimes the sludgy music rang truer to Candlemass and sometimes it had the experimental vibes of Nadja  I found myself almost hypnotized by its epic finale, "Maeror," which starts out with the almost industrial sounding "dark ambient" influences and continues on into an ever progressing wail of agony coming from the wild, and yet there's a musicality behind it much like an old record player delivering a requiem mass but drowned out by reverb.  In this instance the album Soundtracks for the Blind by Swans came to mind.

Despite its heaviness and its authentic faithfulness to the many genres it combines, I feel that the album itself doesn't really do anything that unique for the veins of metal it tackles.  Just that it's a good enough performance to recommend.  But for anyone looking to get into the slower genres, the Hell but makes for a very good start.  Chances are it may not amaze you, but it will likely entertain you if you like these genres.  I know this album makes me happy that I decided to explore more drone metal.  I'd say it's better thanthe last drone album I reviewed: Thaumogenesis by Nadja, and that was a pretty good album.

If you had read my previous review of the 105-minute long Esoteric album, The Maniacal Vale, you're probably familiar with my one criticism of the album: the length made it repetitive.  So you'd probably think the five-star rating for Metamorphogenesis comes from the fact that it's only 40 minutes long, and is there shortest album, especially since repetition is a staple of funeral doom.  Um, no.  That honestly has so little to do with it that it's not even worth mentioning.  It's true that Esoteric have a tendency to draw out their albums to an extent that harms the release itself.  This has been true since their second album, The Pernicious Enigma, which was a one-trick pony in every single way.  But the real glory of Metamorphosis comes from the fact that it's so jam-packed with new ideas, twists and musical influences that some have even described the album as "batshit insane."  Considering what we typically get for doom metal, we need an album or two that gets batshit insane.  I'd have loved for the album to be longer, but we still got 40 minutes of brilliance.  It's no longer a repetitive shift from funeral doom to death doom to psychedelic doom.  What we have hear is an eternally progressing 40-minute work that throws in random moments of drone metal, post-metal, straight-up death metal and more.  And each piece of the puzzle delivers a loud blast of rage that's trying hard to fight its own melancholy but always succumbs like a normal human does.  The best combination of musicianship and production that doom can have is the very reason this album exists: a production-oriented 40-minute epic of atmosphere and emotion, giving us something that Esoteric have never replicated.

This is the point of Nevermore's career where they were mostly focused on the art of their new identity.  Now that they had cemented their sound with the previous album, Dreaming Neon Black, it was time to expand on that.  Dead Heart in a Dead World is exactly that.  This might be a continuation of the darker tone they took with their third album, but this is also the album where Nevermore go back on what made them so good in their early days.  They started out as a band with various types of songs, likely trying to discover who they were.  They found that with the less innovative DNB, and it was time to combine that with the variety of their previous two albums.  As such, this album is much less thrash oriented than the last three.  The album basically goes prog, prog thrash, groove, heavy, prog, power ballad, thrash, proggy groove-thrash (this is the Sound of Silence cover), ballad, heavy semi-ballad, prog-speed.

There's a balance between identity and variety here.  They've never been a favorite of mine, but I always admired their willingness to get creative.  I mean, they covered Sound of Silence in an incredible way that I wouldn't have thought of in a million years, one that works perfectly in the groove and thrash departments, with some of that shifting technical behavior of Metallica's fourth album, And Justice for All.  In fact, I gotta say that the cover is now my favorite Nevermore song out of respect for how well they handled one of the best songs by one of music's greatest geniuses.

As for the delivery, once again we have an album full of impressive melodies, powerful tones and moods, clever shifts and a consistent persona.  It's impossible to skip a song for me this time.  In all respects, this is the strongest of their albums up to that point.  Happy to have finally checked this album out.

Voivod is one of those bands that makes a "distinct nature" out of fucking with your preconcieved notions of metal, and they rule at that in various ways.  They're like Melvins and Boris in the sense that they can effectively do whatever they want in their field, and then expand into other territories because you can't stop them.  During their heyday, they released a streing of albums that people keep bickering over their picks for the quintessential Voivod album, a la Beatles.  That's how you know you've got an essential metal band.  There are even defenders of Angel Rat, and when your string stretches five albums, you are essentially a Beatles band for your genre.

The one Voivod album I go back to most often is Dimension Hatross.  As Madonna is the 80's Lady Gaga, these guys are the 80's Vektor.  They pioneered the idea of sci-fi sounds and themes in metal with this highly technical yet highly punkish album, carefully molding the complexities of machinery with the industrial repetition of punk and crossover thrash.  Hell, Snake's got one of THE most punk voices in the world of thrash, and these guys aren't even a crossover band (I kinda wish they were, though, what with another layer being perfect for them).  Now this album doesn't really have the emotional stretches of my favorite metal album, a fellow thrasher album known as Ride the Lightning, but god does this album fuck with your head.  It remains extremely catchy throughout and more intriguing than even the best prog allows for because of it.

There is ONE GRIPE I have with this album.  Like I said, this doesn't have the emotional outstretch of Ride the Lightning.  We've had thrashers, metal bangers and ballads on that album, and when you boil down to it, this album is largely a technical exercise in the same way that Symphony X's Divine Wings of Tragedy and Liu Zhenyang's Paramainomeni is.  Having said that, this is probably the best of the three albums I listed.  The thing is, the thrash, prog, avant-garde and punk are all ingredients for each song, which means the album stays the same.  I think a band that inventive could've taken an extra step forward without screwing with the consistency.

Nevertheless, with how impressive and innovative the technicality is, especially when you have some of the most incredible combinations of timing, melodies and riffs the genre has to offer, I have to consider that this is a more minor gripe than it would typically be on my scale.  If I'm fully honest, the album still doesn't feel as bloated as Master of Puppets does, so I'd say it's in the same league.

Having to complete a book-reading challenge before the end of the year, I've been speedreading roughly a book a day, and listening to albums helps me focus.  So once again I'm going through asstons of music and occasionally checking out some metal.  This time I'm going on a Nevermore marathon.  I've put them off for too long, but I have heard the first two albums before.  So now I begin their heyday with Dreaming Neon Black.  Don't worry.  I can focus on both at the same time, and even absorb both types of vibes when I properly hone my autism.

Looking back on my review for the previous album, The Politics of Ecstasy, I made several comments on their range.  I think there's a bit less of that here, though.  This time, Nevermore's focused on creating a consistent sound for themselves.  Everything is just dark enough to work, except where the singer is concerned.  He's got some serious range and power about him in the melody and metallic energy departments.  The second half of the album has some gothic undertones which match up with his voice even more than before.  There's little variety save a goth rock song at the end and a doom metal song called The Lotus Eaters.  I would prefer more variety, even at the level of The Dreadful Hours or in an extreme case, When the Kite String Pops, so the album risks feeling too long.  There's a deeper groove metal tone in the guitars which manages to put itself in the world of thrash perfectly well, obviously because of the band's previous experience in that world.  But does this make it a unique album?  No, not really.  Thrash and groove have gone hand in hand for a long time, and lots of prog albums of the time were taking a deeper and darker approach.  Add this to the two different songs, it tells me they could've done so much more.

In the end, one factor kind of fails for the genre, despite being new to Nevermore.  So what's left?  Technicality, production, yadda yadda.  And I can't deny that I had fun throughout the whole album.  There wasn't a single melody or riff that I wasn't at least fairly impressed with.  And much of the album's darker tone comes from a more prominent bass, which is extremely easy to hear thanks to the album's production.  Both are going hand in hand perfectly, about as perfectly as I want when you put the two together in any band.  Because you can hear everyone so clearly, this amplifies all the emotional vibes present, in spite of the samey tone of the album.

Basically, every song was great on its own merits, and it's about as proggy as a Rush album, allowing thrash fans an easy yet properly-shifting entry-point to prog.  if you're gonna do an easy-to-digest prog album, this is how to do it.  But its accessibility also gets in the way of maximizing the variety factor, so it's a bit overlong.  They could've done more with this, but it's obvious that they were focusing on their identity, which still succeeds here.  I'm glad I decided to continue on with Nevermore, but contrary to popular opinion, I'd have to say The Politics of Ecstasy is slightly better.

To help with the list and to further prepare myself for the eventual spin of their 2024 album, I'm tackling Evergrey's In Search of Truth next.  This will mark the 20th album I've heard and reviewed for the 2nd Decade prog metal list challenge.  I'm not that big on Evergrey, as I've only heard two of their albums before: Solitude Dominance Tragedy and The Atlantic.  I liked 'em, didn't love em, and just got off the back of listening to all four Disillusion albums.  I started this album hoping it would astound me, but I didn't expect it.

The Masterplan goes right into the prog power metal you'd expect from classic bands like Manticora.  But this has a bit more authentic heaviness to it.  It immediately sets a standard that I want to keep following, but then Rulers of the Mind takes a mystical chime approach with a haunting production sound that's as magical as some dark fantasy story.  I'd know.  I've written one.  The switch from power metal to goth metal is perfectly natural due to the band's love of solos and epic delivery, as they know when to pace these things.  Even when a song has a guitar solo a literal third into it like Rulers of the Mind does, it just adds to the mystique and intrigue that this album set up with The Masterplan.  On top of this, there is NO WAY that I can deny relating to these lyrics.  They perfectly describe what it's like to try and find out who you are in a world where everyone wants to control you, despite the fact that they brag about freedom.  Again, I write about this stuff.  Rulers of the Mind covers a wide range of prog metal vibes and atmospheres in six minutes much like Bohemian Rhapsody did.

So the five-star rating was starting to look likely two tracks in, but I was still careful.  Next is Watching the Skies, which uses dramatic violins in a similar fashion to Disillusions Back to Times of Splendor.  The real clincher of the song's intro, however, is that perfectly-produced breakdown.  It's much more simple and produces a clever drama backed up by the heaviness.  In a way, it takes 180's while staying true to the album's previously established presence.  It DOES get a little more complex by the end, but again, it doesn't lose its grip.  Next is a two-minute piano segue, State of Paralysis.  It's very nice and it fits, but I've heard so many piano segues at this point that it's a bit difficult to build a strong attachment to those.  The Encounter is a more fast-paced power metal track that builds itself on heavy activity.  It was at the point to where the album was merely rearranging elements of past songs for new purposes, so the originality was harmed despite the fact that the song was good.  This told me that the five-star might not happen.  All I had to do was compare like songs to like songs and see if enough of them amazed me.  Considering the half-and-half behavior, likely not.

Mark of the Triangle started slow, but it built itself on neoclassical piano and a perfect presence that relied on being drawn out, like I was being lead through a tunnel where some great treasure everyone wanted was waiting at the end.  This is another kind of song that switches things around every 20-30 seconds and remains consistent.  It showcases the band's love of instrumentation.  Even though none of them are the best metal musicians on Earth, their harmony is incredible.  Next thing you know, low-key pianos bring me to the freakin' House of Usher.  This is Dark Waters, a slightly creepier and slower song that cranks up the gothica.  With this one, the band's more focused on maintaining the song's presence as a song rather than the instrumentation.  The melodies here are some of the best on the whole album.  Different Worlds starts of with serenity, which was needed at this point considering how much of the album was focused on energy.  This didn't stop the pianos from caving into the love of glitter and melody.  The album ends with Misled, which starts off even more quietly... and punks you with heavy guitars stomping all over you at mid-pace. The slower, slightly classical approach is a good one to end such a dramatic album with, and the band is doing everything the can to make this an epic, operatic ending without overdoing it.

This is way beyond what I generally know Evergrey for.  This album might share many similar elements between most of the songs, but it's always trying to do some fancy things with the atmosphere and the instrumentation at the same time.  There's gothic glitter, high-energy power and some deep mystique.  This is enough to make me go back to Solitude Dominance Tragedy and re-evaluate it.  I was hoping it would make at least the bare minimum for five stars, but instead I'm gonna give it almost the bare maximum for four-and-a-half stars.

From what I understand, Disillusion's sophomore album Gloria represents a dramatic change in sound from their debut, which was more straightforward prog but amped up.  Having recently gotten through the first three Shadow Gallery albums, I'm perfectly used to this.  I didn't expect a great album when I came into this, but I theorized I would like it more than many others because IMO the last thing the world needs is more "standard" albums, and we're already gonna get them every week anyway, so I might as well enjoy what I can from their new industrial sound.

I don't know about you, but that super-dark raw and rough atmosphere took me by complete surprise.  It's noisy while still maintaining a sense of melody.  It was also made clear early on that the vocalist Andy Schmidt was taking a few cues from The Sisters of Mercy's own Andrew Eldritch.  He also takes many times to go for spoken word segments rather than singing, which means the band has a clear urban vision for the album.  I'll say this, the urban factor definitely works for the album.  Like I said, I appreciate new sounds, and it's safe to say that this album is pretty unique to the prog metal scene.  There are some very interesting decisions you'd never get on the previous album, such as the choral synths on the title track being combined with spoken word.  Another great example is Avalanche's black metal intro.  That was COMPLETELY unexpected.  The tremelo-picking is tuned down to allow for a funkier rock guitar to take its place, which means there is still some room for evolution in these tracks.

There's a big problem with switching their sound to an industrial one, though.  Their new sound is partially built on the repetition of singular notes heard often in industrial metal, and is contradictory to the melodic prowess that made their first album so good, which means instead of merely switching styles, they also forgot one of their signature skills at times.  The melodies here aren't generally bad, but some are much better than others to the point where another strong comparison to the debut keeps this album from reaching the same heights.  Another little problem is that Schmidt easily had more room for his more melodic vocals, and he largely abandoned them in favor of darker urban vocals that don't have the same effect.

This is one of those cases where a band's ambition creates something good but also alienates the fans.  Not every idea present is a good one, but the band works with what they're doing here pretty well.  I'm not sure why they decided to take such a drastic turn in their sound, but with some more fleshing out, they could've had something brilliant.  Instead, we get something enjoyable and diverse, but uneven and lacking spirit.

I paid very little attention to Disillusion because people only really talk about the one album, their debut Back to Times of Splendor.  That's a bit of a disappointment to me considering I like to explore plenty of an act's catalog before moving onto the next.  But it's necessary for me to check them out considering that debut album's reputation, my desire to be a professional critic and the list challenge here.  I didn't have any prior knowledge of them, and had no idea what to expect, but was hoping it wouldn't just be another standard prog album like a few of the albums on this same list challenge.

I'll admit, I haven't been extremely impressed with many of the choices on Metal Academy's 2nd-era prog metal challenge list.  So when I started the album, and this vaguely Egyptian prog-death opener assaulted me with a complex rhythm that was extremely easy to get to and heavier than a granite boulder, my attention was at full.  I was especially happy with this considering that I'm just coming off the back of Dan Swano's solo piece, Moontower, which was standard prog metal but could've been a little heavier at times without relying on so many 70's German prog synths.  Instead they rely on a perfect melodic / complexity balance as a focal point, as if they knew they were showing off.  But the thing is, this album never once feels like guitar wankery.  The rhythms are always easy to work with, and the band is in perfect harmony.  Due to how focused everything it, it's obvious that Disillusion is trying less to be "musicians" and more to be a "band."  Even when it switches things around a little, like the death metal middle section of Alone I Stand in Fires, nothing really feels out of place.  It's so consistent that sometimes the cool surprises might go over your head.

Due to the fact that the singer and the guitar tone are pretty standard for 2000's prog, I was more impressed than amazed, as if this was just an upgraded version of standard prog albums like Shadow Gallery's Tyranny.  Think of this whole album as a much more clever (and somewhat heavier) collection of many things that give standard prog its own name, from the guitar tones to the softer acoustic moments to being inches away from death metal to an occasional power metal segment to a romantic adventure story.  So while I didn't get the unique album I was hoping for, suffice it to say, I still got a great one that has a lot of clever technicality and never once loses its grip.  I would easily recommend this, although I wouldn't put it in my top 500 metal albums.  Maybe it'll be the in the lower end of my top 100 prog metal albums, but it might get kicked off soon.

It's time for another metal binge!  After another 100 albums (I use a lot of EP's to keep up) during my free time to even out the genres on my albums log, I have room for a day of metal.  On top of that, I'm using it to focus on Metal Academy's prog metal challenge, and the next album is Moontower by Edge of Sanity frontman Dan Swano.  I'm familiar with enough Edge of Sanity, and I know not to expect the same thing from this solo project as it's said to be very different.

The most impressive, and seemingly most lauded, aspect of this album among metal fans is that strangely welldone combination of Swano's excellent growls and the cleaner progressive rock elements, synths, melodies, ELP worship and all.  These same kinds of influences that Dream Theater used on their album Images and Words are shoved in your face on the get-go.  There are plenty of synths on this record, and Swano doesn't waste an opportunity to either growl with them or keep the instrumental flow while simply switching the synths with guitars.  An excellent example is "Uncreation."  I mean, man does he worship the 70's on this album.  Tonally, this is a major far cry from anything Edge of Sanity focused on, although some traces of this wiggled its way into my top EoS pick (and top melodeath pick): Crimson II.

Unfortunately, this album doesn't have the same diversity as the aforementioned Images and Words.  I should think a man with Swano's range and constant activity would be able to do something with a little more variety during a solo project.  But each song had essentially the same goal, tone and instrumentation.  While the progressive structures would take fun turns, the whole album is largely hindered by the album's lack of variety hiding behind its successful unique quality.  On top of this, Dan Swano has a diverse vocal range that he just isn't using to a great extent.  How does a guy who's so varied and creative end up in this state?

These songs are all technically good, if not great.  For real prog fans, this is a very and even easily enjoyable one.  But as somewhat of a perfectionist, I also feel that Swano wasted a big opportunity with this album.  So I'm giving this about an 8/10.

I am still a MAJOR noob to the world of epic doom.  I have a little experience in its parent traditional doom, but I'm not even familiar with the works of Solitude Aeturnus, Doomsword, Solstice or Krux.  Having said this, the reason I decided to listen to this today was because I finally have enough room in my top 2024 albums chart for another metal album to potentially make the top 30.  I'm trying to keep it at a 20% max, so as to ensure I explore other genres heavily.  It's been a terrible time trying to expand on it, but thankfully, my saving grace for the day have been that Twikipedia album and new live albums by Can and Yes.  On top of that, checking the charts, it looks like "epic doom" isn't really known for a grand scale of variety among its more popular groups.

Now I just read that the difference between traditional doom, which is bent in more heavy metal and blues influence. and epic doom is the theatrics, which gives this brand of doom more room for an otherwise opposite genre: US power metal, which is much more energetic.  The Stygian Rose makes a point of letting you know that it plans to make the most of energetic theatrics five seconds in, and the riffage is not only impressive, but the progression of each song is both interesting and easy to follow, even when songs change pace.  I mean, it's totally easy to fall in love with that gothic black guitar tone at the beginning of Down in the Hollow.  The stronger changes seemed to be more apparent with each track, such as the tempo changes with Heavy Is the Crown of Bone.  I was just utterly soaking in the combination of traditional doom, funeral doom, USPM and some doses of gothic and black, as well as the progginess of track four.  But the variety itself wasn't the highlight, but the COMPOSITION.  These guys are utter PLAYERS.  Crypt Sermon manage a lot with the album's average runtime.  There are completely hypnotic elements like that synthy beginning to Scrying Orb, which is one of multiple examples of how crystal clear the album's production is without the overpolished reverb of studio necessities.  This is especially handy considering that the band plays with atmosphere the further along the album goes.  Take the noisy yet heavenly funeralism of the closing title track's intro for example.  I have to be honest: that's one of the finest example of composition, aura, produiction and technique I've ever heard in 2500+ metal albums.

And let's talk about the lyrics.  During The Scrying Orb, I noticed something: these guys are about as good at delivering lyrical imagery of other worlds and realms without sticking fully to tradition as Blind Guardian.  I mean, take Imaginations from the Other Side and Mirror Mirror.  Rhyming anyone?  Crypt Sermon aren't as upfront about the experimentation with melody here, but they know how to keep things engrossing on all levels.  Take the line "Blessed be the green lion, the green lion that eats the sun, to see through Orion where two hearts will beat as onе."  I'm just getting customized flashes of ancient walls with highly detailed hieroglyphs moving to the story.  And thankfully, this guy has a totally appropriate voice for both the energetic bits and the atmospheric bits.  I honestly like his voice much more than Messiah Marcolin's.

I've been pretty excited about 2024 this year, even to the point where I feel like I'm overrating albums because there are so many albums this year that completely fit my standards for perfection.  So in my effort to ensure that my reviews are founded on knowledge, I have to ask myself, "how do I know that this album isn't essentially copying another epic doom metal band that I haven't yet heard?"  I think it's a 100% valid question considering that I made the dumbass decision to listen to a 2024 album for a genre I've only heard like 5 albums for, especially since most of those 5 are early Candlemass.

So I'm just going to go based on my standards across 2500+ albums, assuming that's at least enough by this point: I loved it.  There was not a single millisecond I wasn't completely behind.  It might be a bit too diverse for the general traditional doom metal album to really be seen as an epic doom classic, but if Coagulated Bliss is seen as a modern grind classic no matter how many genres it plays with, that I'm going to go by the standards I set up for myself and ask the four questions.

1. What is the goal of this album?  It seems to be a further exercise in Crypt Sermon's growth as a band by once again differentiating their sound from the previous album.

2.  Does the album meet its goal?  100%.

3. What does the band sacrifice or neglect by meeting this goal?  Honestly, I don't think it really neglected anything except maybe standard epic doom behavior, if I'm to believe the RYM track listings.  I guess if I had to compare it to other doom albums, one technicality that isn't quite a flaw but isn't quite as good as another album in this regard is that its variety, while perfect for the album, isn't as wide-ranging as Idolum or The Dreadful Hours.  But it still works perfectly for the album, which pretty much states that there was no real sacrifice if the goal was to expand.

4. Are the sacrifices and negligences made up for by other aspects of the album?  If the above indeed was a sacrifice, then I have to say that in the end, this album is the kind that can probably attract a variety of metal fans by staying true to the band's spirit.

All in all, I just have to call this one of the greatest doom albums I've ever heard.  On my list I'll be putting this at #244 on my list of perfect albums between Peter Gabriel's So and Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert.  This makes the album my #2 metal album for 2024, my #6 2024 album period as well as the seventh 100 for 2024 that I've given.  Haven't had a year like this is a long time.

Not long after I turned it on, I noticed a huge improvement in production.  A man named Hans Eidskard produced it with the band.  The percussions, the production / guitar tone combo, the vocals and the rhythms were ALL improved right then and there... for the time being.  Although it's not a black metal album, we still get some fairly effective instances of tremolo-picking.  And I only got three minutes in at the time.  I found myself thinking, "Please PLEASE keep this up.  This is an prog and potential avant-garde album after all, so if I don't see Beefheart consistency I'll be upset."  The album was still going for the "switch up the song every few minutes" route with its longer stuff.  Unfortunately, the opener still managed to drag with its fifteen minutes.

I was hardly getting an "avant-garde" approach other than changing the exact sound of each track and maybe having the singer sing to a rhythm that doesn't fully work with the rhythms of the instrumentals.  Of course, Wikipedia said that and not RYM... but still, the progressive elements were more Floydian rather than standard, relying on using repetition and conflicting elements to create odd sensations for atmospheric purposes.  Eventually the album just felt like a cut and paste work because of their behavior from the previous album being applied to other areas that didn't flow quite as well, so I gradually began to lose interest, and once Omnio - Pre started I kinda just used the album for background music, despite the fact that I was still paying attention.

Well, this album certainly didn't satisfy my needs past the first ten minutes.  It's a nice exercise in atmosphere, but this album made me way less interested in even trying out their third album, so I don't think I will this time.  I'll check it out later.  For now, I feel no need to return to this album.

Since one of my assignments for completing the prog metal challenge on Metal Academy is the In the Woods album Omnio, I decided to start with their debut and then finish it off with their third album.  This might be a black metal album, but it's part of another clan challenge for black metal, and even though I'm not part of that clan, I want to get through at least one for each clan anyway.  So here we go.

Now this is ATMO-BLACK, and it starts off with a nice, albeit generic, bit of dungeon synth to kick of the atmospheres.  This is the 12 minute Yearning the Seeds of a New Dimension.  Afterwards, it turns into a standard post / doom metal riff with a deeper voice that seems a little more fit for atmo-viking metal (heh, if such a thing exists... which it probably does) rather than black, but we hadn't even gotten to the black yet, and it finally kicks in at minute seven of twelve.  So while this was a nice, pretty and mutative track, don't expect anything standard.  While the production and atmospheres need A LITTLE tuning for that perfect presence, the composition is perfectly fine  Next comes the title track. The effects are lo-fi and need a real professional, but these effects only last a few seconds before the blackened assault drowns us in the cold.  The same melodic deep vocals of Jan Kenneth "Transit" Transeth have returned, but I think they need a backing reverb for the effects to work their full magic, like Bergtatt or even anything by My Bloody Valentine.  Without the production, his voice is more suited towards the doomier parts of the album.

And now for the band's titular track.  So this is basically how we're doing this: dungeon synth, post / doom riff, atmo-black metal riff, post / doom riff, atmo-black riff, lather, rinse, repeat.  While we get a lot of nice vibes here, not only does the simple production keep every clear sound from maximazing the atmospheres, but we largely know what's happening next.  Little surprises like female vocals in the next track really don't mean as much as they should in the grander scheme of the album.  Thankfully, we get a little mix once the longest song on the album comes.  Wotan's Return is largely based in black's ability to thrash like mad, and these guys aren't afraid to crank it up so high they break the dial.  Of course, this doesn't generally mean the actual rhythmic composition is at a high point.  There are some great moments here with some nice rhythms, but the time they take to simply thrash and scream can easily be drawn out.  It goes into a lot of weird and quiet effects halfway through, like it's suddenly an Autechre album.  This happens for a couple minutes until we're brought back to a less monstrous but still atmospheric breand of the black metal that took up the first half.  Still, the composition itself isn't really anything groundbreaking, especially since we go right back to the thrashing immediately afterwards.  Then there's Pigeon... which is just three minutes of decent piano.

Finally, we have The Divinity of Wisdom.  The synths are used as a violin instrument to back up the slower tempos of the black metal guitars for roughly a minute before the singing begins.  But I can't hear them very well on this track, which is further proof that the album shouldn't have been produced by Trond Breen.  It's probably the best tune on the track for its composition, though.

I was hoping for something a bit more interesting considering that some consider this a unique album, but it feels like HEart of the Ages is one of those albums that delivers an idea without perfect delivery, which leaves all those influenced by the album to expand on plus perfect the idea, much like the Blasphemy debut did with war metal.  This isn't halfbad because it's still a nice and unique idea that rarely drags, and it's quite enjoyable, but it certainly needs a little work in places.

On that note, a viking metal album about winter aesthetics, now I KNOW it's a thing.

Chuck wanted to express new musical ideas through a band that wasn't associated with death metal.  But considering that this album has the EXACT SAME LINEUP AS DEATH DID IN THEIR LAST ALBUM save the singer, can we really just call this a Death album?  All he did was change the band name like New Order did, and The Sound of Perseverance isn't even that much of a death metal album.  I remember a time on RYM where I was group-scolded for a decision to include Funkadelic and Parliament as two separate bands in a funk bands vote.  Since then I try to be more serious about these kinds of things.  On top of this, Control Denied's album has the same kind of prog and thrash influences on that album.  So I'm gonna list this as a Death album with a guest vocalist (who unfortunately died last year).  Hey, Dave Grohl isn't a member of Killing Joke and he performed percussions for their self-titled 2003 album.

Now that I'm done complaining, lemme talk about the album.  First of all, if you have any love for Death's album The Sound of Perseverance, then you're going to love the guitar work on this album.  Instead of being rooted in the death metal compositions of past works, it steers into other areas such as speed, thrash, power and US power.  Songs like Expect the Unexpected have a very similar drum pattern and rhythmic guitar sound.  There's some very definite death-thrash there.  There's a never-ending heaviness that amplifies the progressive power of the album, and thanks to a wider range of sounds the album is also less monotonous than TSoP, which would've been perfect if not for that.  Although, despite the wider range of sounds, I have to point out that many of the songs share all these elements, so the diversity factor caves in on itself much like the most recent Hoplites album, Paramainomeni.  This doesn't stop the songs from being serious headbangers, though.  Among the complexity is an extreme metal power that draws lovers of both heavy and death right in, combining the best of both worlds.  There are very few moments in the album that can really differentiate songs from each other, like the serene midtro of When the Link Becomes Missing turning into that speedy but melodic guitar solo.

There's a lot that this band did right with their first album under the new name, but despite the incredible levels of thrashing and complex compositions, they forgot to truly differentiate certain songs, so it may become a bit much at times.  In fact, the nine-minute outtro didn't even stand out very much because of that.  However, it's a fun album for thrashers with a lot of the band's best tricks at full display.  A worthy follow up to The Sound of Perseverance for the most part.

After two albums of messing around with different musical styles, Shadow Gallery put something together that actually focuses on jam factor.  The two minute intro lets you know what you're getting instantly with a heavily symphonic and energetic guitar solo.  What's also extremely apparent at the get-go (at least if you heard the first two SG albums) is that the problems involving production and beat factor are fixed, allowing the album to feel like a proper metal album.  Unfortunately, the style that they chose is a much more typical prog metal structure that you can get from Dream Theater, Ayreon, DGM and more.  So in their efforts to maintain a more palatable prog metal album, they probably chose not to be a unique band at that point.  That disappoints me.  At least their playing is at their abnsolute best.  The many melodies and solos featured here are always good old-fashion prog fun, but a couple of them are just wonderful.

The album follows a concept that's a little different from the sci-fi fantasy you'd expect from normal prog metal.  This time it's all about the politics.  This is about a weapons designer discovering a government conspiracy that takes him across the world with a woman who's fighting the same conspiracy as him.  The story continues on Room V.  It's a pretty well-told one with some reversals of themes from Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime.  I mean, it's not a perfect story and the ending's not amazing, but it gets you asking for a sequel.  The best thing about the story is easily the lyrics.  There's a lot of real poetry that goes into them.

Maybe Shadow Gallery went with a more generic approach to their sound, but they really did improve on their compositions.  I guess it's easy to see why this is an underground prog favorite / cult classic.  There's a good story here that hits closer to home for its realism, and a lot of rhythm to keep the album's sound going throughout the whole 70 minute runtime.  With this, I've come to the conclusion that SHadow Gallery are certainly not one of the best prog bands in the world, but they're a damn good one.

This is the point where Shadow Gallery decided to be REALLY ambitious.  Taking a dramatic turn from their previos sound, they experiment with new textures here, risking alienating fans of the first.  At first I found myself pretty annoyed with finding the various track listings on RYM and YouTube make it difficult to find the right playlist.  Apparently there seem to be major changes between releases, so I just went with the one involving the hidden segues. 

Right from the start, Cliffhanger fixes the major production problem of the debut, making it more appropriate for tamed metal studio production instead of glittery symphonic prog rock production.  Cliffhanger also bore a new, slower and darker persona.  There's more focus on synths and organs as well as textures.  Whether this was simply a temporary direction on an album with more of the enjoyable symphonics of the previous album or the staple for the rest of the album I didn't know, but I was gonna finish it anyway.  I quite liked the new direction and I was both happy and disappointed that Crystalline Dream carried the sound over due to pros and cons.  The textures become a vital role in the development of the entire side B, which is all one big epic divided into several parts.  The various influences of the album do a bang-up job bringing you into a weird proggy solar system with its own fanciful presence.

Ironically, I really wished there was more strength in the percussions.  The album definitely needs more beat in terms of strength and metallic behavior.  Sometimes this album will drag on and forget to be a metal album.  This is only one example of how the album largely sacrifices the symphonic sound for dramatic epica.  At least these vibes are tamed and never reach melodrama, but I wish it would feel more like a metal album.  Even when guitars go deep it steers to close to ballad territory too consistently to give a metalhead what he needs.  If people are gonna complain about a metal tag for Deep Purple's Child in Time, then I'm gonna complain about a metal tag for Warcry.  It's neo-prog with a little metal in it.

As a prog rock album, this one succeeds hard.  We have a great balance between slow atmospheres and heavy organ symphonics due to the inclusion of ballads.  Although I wish Shadow gallery continued the sound of their first album, I won't deny that I consider the various genres the band implemented to all be well-delivered.  Nicely epic and consistent, this is a step forward for Shadow Gallery.

At the time of writing this, let it be known that I've spent weeks largely focusing on either genres as well as 2024 releases and the bands associated with them.  Since I like to explore at least parts of discographies when I check out as new artist, it takes a while for me to get through metal albums.  In terms of Metal Academy's list challenges, that takes me even longer.  But today I'm allowing myself some metal for all my hard work.  Today I'm getting through three SHadow Gallerey albums to make it to the one I need to help with the challenge: Tyranny.  But of course, I'm starting with their self-titled debut.

The Shadow Gallery debut is basically everything you'd expect from a symphonic prog metal band.  We've got many diversified elements that bring a sharp and poignant persona to the music, made up of the neoclassicalism present in many 70's prog rock bands adjusted for the metal genre, energetic and functional melodies up the wazoo, contemporary neo-prog bringing to mind the words of Marillion and IQ, and enough light but effective metallic energy to attract less experimental fans of prog metal such as Dream Theater fans.  Everything molds pretty well together to cement the Shadow Gallery identity instantly, and makes one curious about future releases.  Right from the getgo the heavy melodies are almost gorgeous, and the album diversifies itself while staying that way.

However, of all its strong points there are a couple of weak points.  First and foremost, while the delivery is exquisite, the compositions are nothing groundbreaking in the prog metal vein.  We've seen it all before, but the persona's strength gave me hope for future releases to remedy the flaw.  The second most important thing is that the production, while glittery, doesn't really fit the metal vibe.  The album's metal enough to go along, but it felt more appropriate for a symphonic prog ROCK album rather than a symphonic prog METAL album.  In fact, it reminded me of the difference between Twilight Force's impressive debut and the glittery behavior of their sophomore.

I'm glad I had the time for Shadow Gallery today, and you know something?  I really like the direction they took.  They seem to have practiced a lot with their sound and despite the major flaws, the strengths outweigh them, and I'd probably even return to this album later despite the flaws.

I'm glad I'm taking this time to go over older albums I've heard for the sake of rearranging some things on my charts.  This was started by a willingness to explore the catalog of Metal Blade, which includes listening to the Metal Blade albums I've already heard for different reasons, such as The Ocean's popular Pelagial, which I've planned on going back to for a while.  Now despite being part of the Infinite clan on Metal Academy, that's mostly for the prog and the avantgarde.  Post-metal isn't generally my thing, but I can spot the good stuff.

The first thing that must be noted is that unlike most post-metal albums, there is certainly not a level of clearcut repetition going on for the sake of exploring overlong ambient textures.  Leave that to Isis and let The Ocean do whatever they want.  I mean let's be honest: Disequillibrated is a death metal song in the same vein as Gojira.  Like past Ocean albums you can sense instances of post-hardcore and metalcore inserted easily, like an off-white patch on a white quilt.  Despite the extremities, The Ocean never forgets that they're making atmo-metal, so there's plenty of time to chill.  As Boundless Vasts starts off heavy and ends its three minute half by quickly getting more and more serene, takes us through a chilling but ambient journey into instrumental deaths while our singer screams like he's trapped at the bottom of the abyss.  Clever work.  Most of these songs are around average length, but there are a couple beautiful segues and two nine-minute tracks near the end.  Let Them Believe may not change things up progressively, but as a post-metal track there's just enough ongoing mutation to keep exploring the oceanic themes.  As well, I completely adore the fact that the eneded the album with a seriously doomy sludge song.

Even though this is definitely a prog album, there is no limit to how accessible this is.  Ironically, this album doesn't border on the questionable nature of the prog tag like some Rush and Dream Theater albums that many metalheads can name.  You can easily take songs like the joining Impasses and The Wish in Dreams and probably play them at work on the same playlist as one with Zep's Ramble On.  This is not only because the band excels with melodicism, but the decisions they make bear a flawless alchemic formula of the post-rock and extreme metal elements even with highly-melodic piano is being played at the same time as death metal screams.

I won't call this a sludge album anymore, but as a post-metal album this is likely my new number one, depending on how I define it and whether or not I'd give the tag to Through Silver in Blood by neurosis.  Pelagial fits every standard of mine for a perfect album.  it sets out to create atmospheres perfectly while balancing out a number of genres in one of the single most consistent deliveries I've ever heard, as well as remaininh 100% accessible in its melodies while testing the borders of extreme metal and prog.  I'm especially happy that I'm currently moving this up to my number 2 prog metal album of all time, as I was afraid that having the top two be the same band (Symphony X) seemed like fanboyism.

Once again we have a fine example of Alcest challenging the very notion of evil in the black metal sound. There will be, however, some debate as to how "black" this album really is, considering that the usage of the genre seems to be limited to certain artistic choices between songs. In the opener, Komorebi, the blackness that helps to open the song is overshadowed by epic choir vocals like something out of a Hans Zimmer score or a Celtic new age album. However, L'envol isn't afraid to follow up the new age vocals that take the final act with a direct assault of atmo-black metal and kickstart another uplifting and catchy piece of pure Alcest. Neige's vocals are just as clear and crystalline as ever. Thanks to its incredibly cheerful approach, you can look back on a song and think to yourself, "this was eight minutes long!?" It still spends more time focusing on the post-metal, though. If you want straight up blackgaze, then Améthyste is the way to go. You can get just as lost in the atmosphere as you do in the rhythms.

Kickstarting the second half is the last of the two singles, the first being L'envol. Flamme Jumelle is a post-rock track that carries all the themes through a lighter, more accessible rock sound but manages to maintain the Alcest appeal perfectly, even when incorporating the mesmerizing tremelo-picking. I can see this being an Alcest stape for future concerts. Next is a piano and violin semi-instrumental (don't worry, it's only three minutes long), Réminiscence, which features Neige vocalizing in ways that just make me wanna effing meditate. The incorporation of new age elements was a spot-on choice. Next is L'Enfant de la Lune, which isn't quite as cutesy as the name would suggest, but makes for a good post-metal track that focuses on anthemic energy. It carries a heavily noisy approach but never really steers into blackgaze. Thankfully, this decision made the song more unique to the album as its approach was used similarly in Améthyste. We end things with L’adieu, which stays soft, ambient and serene throughout the whole five minutes, relying entirely on the sunset calm to recall the imagerey of that album cover in a more realistic fashion. Perfect ending.

It must be mentioned that Alcest is NOT, I repeat, NOT, trying anything that new. Just because there's less blackgaze on this album than before doesn't mean it's new for them. They're essentially repeating the less blackened songs of their past albums. The one time they changed their style, there was a little backlash, even though the album was alright. And if you ever read one of my reviews, you'd likely know that I'm the guy who promotes trying new thing and typically hates copying the hits. The thing is, Alcest's structuring of compositions and rhythms is certainly not conventional, and because of this, five albums of great blackgaze just isn't enough. Pair this with the fact that there are very few in this wonderful gimmick genre that can butt heads with the likes of Alcest and Deafheaven, and you may find yourself running back to this essential French band for more and more. Some say Sadness can, but is three bands really enough? But this album still isn't blackgaze, really. It's a further exercise in pretty atmospheres that's even less distracted by the depression and evil often associated with black metal. 

So time for the four questions:

1. What is the goal of this album? Seems to be an exercize in uplifting summery atmosphere rather than a blackgaze album, so the goal must be a slightly new direction that fans will still get behind.

2. Does it meet its goal? Well as an Alcest fan who just read some ratings after the album finished, I can guarantee that this is a major yes.

3. What did the album sacrifice or neglect to meet its goal? Really, the fact that this new direction is slight means there's some unoriginality involved.

4. Are the sacrifices made up for by other aspects of the album? Considering that the album still meets my standards for variety, atmosphere, rhythmic prowess, etc., I'm gonna say yes.

So this Alcest album is a grand reminder of what Alcest is capable of, but if you look at it closely, you'll see the band wants to go for something a little new. Nevertheless, they still put passion in it and are aware of their skills. I can see this being argued as a contender for best metal album of the year by the masses. I don't think I'd go that far (my current choice is Coagulated Bliss), but I've been waiting for the new Alcest since Spiritual Instinct, and now I'll be even more eagerly awaiting the eight studio album. Les chants de l’aurore cancelled out all my worries that Alcest lost its potency, even if their "new ideas" are technically reorganized rehashes of past ones.

I've been a bitdistracted from the prog metal for a couple days since I've been going through so many projects lately, but now I've got the time to take on this 100-minute Ayreon album in one sitting.  I don't like splitting albums in parts unless it's just THAT long, like the 10-hour Grateful Dead Fillmore West comp I once listened to years ago.  I didn't have super-high hopes for this one as Into the Electric Castle didn't amaze me as much as the fans would want, although I still liked it.

Akin to Into the Electric Castle, this 100-minute album shows Ayreon going for another new sound for the band, but a pretty familiar one for me.  This album's a bit reminiscent of the themes and guitar tones of Metropolis Pt. 2 by Dream Theater.  Don't believe me?  Guess who sings as the main character of this concept: James LaBrie of Dream Theater.  To be fair, I skipped over the Universal Migrator albums for the list challenge, so I'm not fully aware of the transition.  But I know the first part of that two-album series has symphonic prog elements from a little research.  The folksy aspects make occasional returns, and sometimes it's just glorious like in the Disc 1 outro: Love.  It's a pretty incredible track melodically and aurally.  And thankfully, the space rock elements of the debut are here without the cheesy symphonia that didn't really add to the emotional core of the debut.  Thankfully there are a large number of influences here.  Some of the electronic elements faintly ring of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, while some of the more dramatic vocals on Day 8 and the rhythm have a Meat Loaf ring to them.  The song Loser somehow manages to combine Celtic metal with metalcore screams and still maintain the themes and presence of the song.  Pride's repeating metallic riff can also be attributed to some Devin Townsend influence.  This is no surprise as various characters are played by people such as Townsend, LaBrie, Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, Mike Baker of Shadow Gallery and even Eric Clayton of Saviour Machine, along with so many more.

The story is certainly an intriguing one.  This one's like a combination of the mystique of Metropolis Pt. 2 and the scene-by-scene history of The Wall or maybe the 1975 Russian film The Mirror, telling the story of a man who gets into a car accident, is comatose, and goes over his history with his childhood, his wife and even his own emotions.  Listen closely to the lyrics as they get incredibly personal.  However, these themes, while well-delivered, aren't entirely new, as they still ring heavily of the psychological lyrical imagery that's been seen in rock operas ever since the emergence of The Who's Tommy.  On top of that, I'm not really sure the album needs to last 100 minutes.  I mean, some themes feel recycled overtime, not having the originality of similar stories like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Despite these things, the melodies are always beautiful and the number of influences are both consistent and always intriguing and / or catchy.

Now for the four questions:

1. What is the goal of this album?  It seems to be Ayreon's attempt at another "essential" prog metal opera as it fits the tropes.

2. Does it meet this goal?  Considering the melodic quality and variety of each song, I'd say so.

3. What did this album sacrifice to meet its goal?  I'd say uniqueness.  It's tropey and also a little long.

4. Are these sacrifices made up for by other aspects of the album?  Oh, yeah.  The album might be overlong, but its musical prowess is phenomenal.

So overall, I'd say this is EASILY a good 100 minutes of my time that I find myself tempted to go back and revisit.  I didn't think this was gonna be as high on my rating chart as it's gonna be considering that I wasn't wowed by their album The Human Equation which is just as lauded, but this album wowed me a few times.

So apparently the original version of Actual Fantasy is practically impossible to find, so I skipped it.  Real shame since I wanted to critique as many Ayreon albums as I could.  I was only able to find the first two tracks, and was really NOT impressed with what I heard.  It was too long and drawn out, going for bad imitations of classic space rock.  So the next album on my Ayreon marathon is Into the Electric Castle, which some say is their best thus far.

This wacky-ass album cover alone gives you everything you need to know.  Why wouldn't a somewhat psychedelic journey through an undiscovered world to an ancient castle be described with an Infected-Mushroom take on Howls' Moving Castle?  This album features multiple characters all voicing different characters within this strange little story, so it's already proving that it's a unique album, which I didn't really grasp from The Final Experiment.  The vocalists include Lucassen himself, Anneke van Giersbergen of The Gathering, Fish of Marillion, Sharon den Adel and Robert Westerholt from Within Temptation and even Peter Daltrey from the classic pop band Kaleidoscope.   You can tell from the first song, Isis and Osiris, that some 60's influences such as psych rock and Jethro Tull are making their way in.  There's some fine instrumentation from Isis and Osiris alone, but the real strength is how well all the vocalists operate with each other as well as with this unique new sound for Ayreon.

I found that there were some moments where I wished the metal of the first album would make more appearances early on, and I didn't get very much between Amazing Flight and Valley of the Queens (tracks 3-9).  Eventually, once I got past the halfway mark, I kind of gave up on the idea that this is a metal album as was advertised.  However, I really enjoyed the story and the unique sound was there to help.  We had little bits of metal every now and then, like the power ballad The Castle Hall, which mingled the power metal sound with Jethro Tull acoustics.  Weirdly enough, it becomes a metal album again at around track ten.

I didn't think about this at first when I turned on the album, but I wasn't surprised at all when I heard the ten-minute epics and they kept the songs original and consistent throughout each runtime.  This means their skill at delivering epics from their debut hadn't waned at all at that point.  Unfortunately, there aren't very many epics after the first two actual songs, but it was still a lot of fun.

So the four questions:

1. What is the goal of the album?  To be a new kind of rock opera for Ayreon.

2. Did the album meet its goal?  Totally.  This is a much cooler and more thought-provoking story than The Final Experiment.

3. What did the band sacrifice or neglect to meet this goal?  Well, they sacrificed their original sound for a new one, and the instrumentations don't wow me as much as they impress me.

4. Were these negligences made up for by other aspects of the album?  The instrumentation was more great than amazing, so there's a no for that at least.  But there's a HUGE yes for the shift in sound because A: it's not as typical as the stereotypical medieval vibes of The Final Experiment, and B: because this retro Jethro Tull influence paired beautifully with the lyrical content.

So I'd say that this tertiary album of Ayreon's is a big success for them.  It features many cool prog songs with a strong presence, rarely gets samey, carries a bunch of vocalists that work together perfectly and always keeps the story strong.  Really glad I decided to check these guys out.

Time for the next project for my Metal Academy prog metal challenge: Ayreon.  I've been putting these guys off for quite a while due to the nature of my charts and the necessity for more jazz, EDM, folk, etc.  So I'm gonna listen to this band a little slowly overtime, as I shouldn't only listen to ONE Ayreon album for the challenge and am aware that these guys have several essentials in the prog metal community.  I'm honestly a bit impatient to get through them, but won't forsake my jazz and EDM studies for it.

Ayreon is the first band formed by Arjen Anthony Lucassen, who later formed the sci-fi movie concept act Star One.  This is the album that launched his career in prog metal, and focused on a conceptual story from the getgo.  And since the lead character shares the band's name, the story won't end with one album, much like Rhapsody.  I totally admire that a band's willing to stick with a recurring original concept rather than writing about the same metal and pop tops we're all familiar with.

As far as what the album did right: the structures of these songs felt totally fine to me.  Ayreon wasn't afraid to stick an eleven-minute song in this album four tracks in, and that track held itself throughout the entire runtime.  So when it comes to structuring a song, Ayreon already had some skill in it.  Having said that, I felt like sometimes the trumpets and violins came on a little too strongly, and were more there for show rather than for a core, despite the fact that the compositions were still fun and spirited.  I mean, even when the tempos are slower, this album is pretty high energy.  Of course, not everything is all 2112 and Dream Theater.  Nice, softer, shorter and folksy songs like Nature's Dance recall shorter tracks like Mother on Pink Floyd's The Wall.  So one definite pro is that the album isn't beating us over our fragile little noggins over guitar wankery.  They're certainly not one of those sellouts catering to a specific generic group: they're thoughtful.

But what did it sacrifice to get this end result?  Well, first of all, despite all the time travel themes, it starts off with futuristic cyberpunk vibes and then makes a complete 180 to Arthurian mythology.  So thematically, it's a bit challenged.  On top of that, the story certainly didn't amaze me.  It's basically no different than any Bible tale.  Thankfully it's never fully gone.  The prog electronic backdrops of Computer-Reign are a nice recall, but that one song certainly wasn't enough for me.  In fact, the song itself wasn't even long enough for me to really fall in love with.  After the skillfully crafted 11-minute epic, I figured that concept certainly needed more album time.  if I were to be specific, I know these guys could've doubled the time.

So now for the four questions:

1. What is the goal of this album?

To be a diverse, well-written and new concept in fantasy metal, recalling the prog rock albums of the 70's.

2. Does this album meet it's goal?  Yes, it totally does.  There's a lot of spirit here, and you can tell that the band not only wrote the songs fairly well at least, but had fun with it.

3. What did the band neglect or sacrifice to meet this goal?  I'd say a thicker story and more instances of the sci-fi vibe are necessary.

4. Are the sacrifices made up for by other aspects of the album?  Not really.  I still miss the sci-fi and wanted more of a mingling of the two genres.

Well, Ayreon made it perfectly clear that they were willing to maximize on the popular tropes of yesteryears prog concepts and structures.  There are faint hints of Rush, Floyd, Dream Theater, etc. here that you may enjoy.  But even if this fun and spirited album never reaches truly glorious prog heights, it's still a fun and varied debut with the same sense of fun as a good 80's fantasy movie.  If I had to compare the quality and the vibes of this album to a movie, I'd easily choose Clash of the Titans.

Burn the Sun sees the guitar effects taking the astral atmosphere approach, which gives this album a much stronger personality.  The band's obviously capitalizing on the space themes that were fairly popular in prog at the time, much like the two-month-later release of Space Metal by Star One, featuring vocalist Jorn Lande's Symphony X's Russell Allen, who would record duet albums with Jorn later.  So while Ark weren't doing anything new, capitalizing on the fad worked out for them in terms of personality and sound.  Many of the songs steer towards 2000's heavy metal rather than prog, and these jams are quite cool.  Even on only decent songs like Waking Hour you get a nice atmosphere to it.

I also found that the lyrics seem to be a little more fleshed out than before, less reliant on "anthem" tropes present in a lot of rock and metal songwriting.  Take the opener's "Why do we hide behind a masque, suddenly breathless, all is black and blinding me."  A bit on the visual side.  However, sometimes there are also typical lines like "Maybe someday we will know the reason why, only love can bring us forward, holding hands together."  This is a line that Bieber can write.  I don't even know if he writes his own material or not, and I know he can actually write this.  So the actual quality of lyricism fluctuates between cool and visual to typical and needless.

Ironically, on that same song I pulled those crappier lyrics from, the guitar solo is one of the absolute best on the album, which brings me right to my next piece of commentary: the rhythms and riffs are vastly improved on.  I found most of this stuff catchy for being catchy's sake while still keeping up a decent level of progginess and personality, so I always enjoyed what I was hearing, even if I didn't always love it.  I even found a few I would like to play myself if I ever took up guitar.

So this is a slight improvement over the debut.  They're both considered prog classics, but I found that Ark's second album was still guilty of tropes that even Townsend was guilty of in his 1997 debut, Ocean Machine.  Overall, this is a pretty cool album, but nothing in comparison to the giants of prog metal.

I never really hear anyone talk about Ark, probably because the band broke up too quickly to get noticed.  However, both of their albums are considered quite good, so as a prog fan I was looking forward to this for a while.  I finally have some time for metal among all my EDM studies, so why not tackle one of the Metal Academy list challenges?  This time, it's 2nd wave of prog metal.  Unfortunately, when I check out a band, I don't like to look up only one album.  So this list challenge is going to take some extra effort on my part.  Thankfully, the next album on this prog challenge belongs to a band with only two albums, so it's onto this one and off to Burn the Sun.

I noticed that Jorn Lande, also known simply as Jorn, has a similar growl in his vocals to one of my favorite metal vocalists: Russell Allen of Symphony X, who recorded a few albums with him.  Jorn, however, has a bit of traditional hard rock in his voice as well, like just a hint of Robert Plant of another Russell: Jack of Great White.  Along with some traditional vibes, this prog metal album had a nice retro flair to it. The organs in the background are a bit reminiscent of this time as well, recalling moments of Deep Purple and krautrock.  The organ is all-too familiar in prog.  And thankfully, the album mixed it up a little.  pop and prog structures both make their way into this album while we get cute surprises like acoustic Spanish guitar.

Unfortunately, there are two huge problems that got in the way of my enjoyment.  First: the percussion.  The drummer they got was good at what he did, but the distinct sound of the drums was too high and light for a prog metal album.  This hindered the album's ability to maximize the metal energy and constantly got in the way of me fully enjoying any of the songs.  Second: the progressive layouts.  They're are standard as a poppier Rush album.  It's like these prog elements are just prog enough to get the tag.  Eventually, all of its tricks start to feel standard.  On top of that, lyrics like "Roll the dice, pay the price" can be written by Crush 40.

OK, so this debut had some ups that lasted a little while before the downs made it feel less original.  it's a decently cool prog debut, but a standard one with both strong highs and a couple effective lows.  They say the second one is much better, so here's hoping it lives up to the legend when I get to it.  I feel no reason to return to this one, though.

Sin After Sin was an album that only made me so much more confident in the love the world shows Judas Priest.  Unfortunately, this is typically more for the radio singles and whatnot.  Albums like Sin After Sin proved to me that these guys were capable of so much more.  It's obvious that they steered away from blues rock, prog and fantasy because their image was working out for them.  Nevertheless, Screaming for Vengeance was surprisingly diverse for a strictly hard rock and heavy metal album.  So I got pretty excited to finish off the remained of the most classic of the Priest albums with Stained Class, which I started but quit so that I could compare it more easily to Sin After Sin.

This is the album where Priest truly became Priest.  I predicted a lack of the variety displayed and owned on Sin After Sin, which to me is Sad Wings 2.0.  Exciter and White Heat Red Hot begin this album with a good amount of energy for heavy metal, bringing influence to the later speed metal genre the way Dissident Aggressor did.  Great heavy metal tracks right here.  Of course, even though I predicted the third song would steer closer to hard rock, I never would've predicted it's main riff was an earlier, better version of the riff to My Own Worst Enemy by Lit.  Now this album's all funky fresh attitude here, which adds to the album's variety.  But the best thing about this song is the dense and atmospheric guitar bridge.  Strangely enough, this is the first song on the album that came so close to amazing me, as the first two were simply great and new for the time rather than phenomenal to me.  "Better by You Better Than Me" is now another favorite Priest song for me.  Next is the title track, which is speedy but bluesy at the same time.  I found my body going up and down in my chair rather than just performing standard headbanging.  I didn't find Halford's lyrical rhythms to be a proper one to mold with the fantastic instrumentation, though.  Maybe that'll change on another playthrough.

Now Invader and Saints in Hell both had some excellent instrumentation for the hard rock heavy metal bridge.  The lyrical rhythms by Halford were better than the title track's as well.  Unfortunately, I felt that both songs were too similar to each other, giving off a temporary feeling of lack of originality that was a bit to strong.  It might've had less effect if the two weren't next to each other, although I really did enjoy both songs.  Saints in Hell was an instrumental high point.  Thankfully, Savage goes right into the bluesier sounds and feels so much more original and badass as a result.  This is the kind of 70's song a man wants as his theme song when walking into the wrestling ring.  After that is the seven-minute Beyond the Realms of Death, which takes the slower side of metal that Sabbath's known for and applies it the the  newfound Priest personality, delivering something original, exciting and even atmospheric without relying on dense production.  This is probably the best song on the album.  The album ends with Heroes End.  I don't have a lot to say about this one.  It's catchy and fit for the album, but I think it's noticeably inferior to the previous track.  This should've come earlier on the album so that Stained Class could end with a proper bang.

Well, listening to both Sin After Sin and Stained Class has taught me something important: Priest's true greatness lies deeper than the radio's willing to go, because we have so many "bigger" hits by so many "bigger" bands that many of Priest's greatest songs are left to rot in a sack by radio while songs from British Steel are allowed to overtake Stained Class, Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin in popularity.  This album has a little more originality than Screaming for Vengeance and just as much metal fury.  So I think it's right to say that this album is slightly better than Screaming for Vengeance.  Stained Class rightfully showcases Priest's true evolution into Priesthood with a lot of classic metal attitude songs.  No wonder these guys are credited with helping to invent metal.  Sabbath had the slower side for most of their songs, but Priest made speedier songs cool, taking Deep Purple's skills to the next extreme, finally becoming a real metal band.

I'm going through all the most classic Priest albums I can right now to really educate myself in them.  I might be a Guardian but I've covered why I'm not a big Priest fan before.  But the 70's era does intrigue me as the 70's are my favorite decade in music.  Since I'm a guardian here and I've heard over 2500 metal albums, it's time I stopped putting them off.  Sin After Sin is next, followed by Stained Class.

Now this is considered early metal, but maybe not proto-metal.  Stylistically and chronologically, it exists right between the fantasy worlds of Sad Wings of Tragedy and the heavy metal energy of Stained Class, the latter of which I've only heard part of and decided to head to this first.  I found that there's a really good balance of melodies between each song.  The Judas Priest attitude is cemented on this album, so they're able to sing about fantasy topics again but with a whole new personality which would soon evolve into the biker-band we all know.  Songs like Starbreaker are all about that balance between hard rock and heavy metal.  This might even be a favorite Priest song of mine.  I find this balance tested pretty often, being neutral to Sinner and having rejected the tag for Diamonds and Rust.  Because these guys are still early at the time of this album, they're still prone to the softer and even folksier side of 70's rock, which is perfectly fine and even very cool for me.  Did you know my favorite Scorpions song is We'll Burn the Sky?  it's not even a song I grew up with considering the radio never played it and it wasn't on my "best of" copy.  Of course, this rock ballad obviously gets in the way of whether or not I'd call this a metal album, but it's really entertaining and even relaxing me despite the fact that I'm in a metal mood.  And as I hoped and even predicted, the album kicks right back into metal with an artistic 180, and goes into some progressive territory.  And all the while it remains cool, well-written and consistent with both its diversity and persona.

Sin After Sin is that glorious type of album that proudly circles all over the hard rock spectrum of the period.  The various moods of hard rock, heavy metal, blues rock, prog and a little room for ballads shows the band at some of their most diverse and surprising.  I have to really appreciate that the album showcases the band's growing understanding of structures, moods and melodies.  They pull of a lot of great things here whether they're being soft or hard.  There's a little more metal here than on most hard rock albums of the period, but the album clearly has a hard rock focus overtaking the metal vibes.  So the metal tag I'm offering should be more controversial than the internet forgives.  This is the first time that Judas met all of my standards for a five-star rating, even though the songs themselves aren't QUITE as amazing as Painkiller.  But still, there's no way I can't give this a 100.  This is currently my second favorite Judas album, and I'm going to put this in my current top 100.

I am so disappointed in Metal Academy right now.  New reviews are posted everyday, this website is old enough for many Priest fans to flock here, and yet their isn't a single review for Screaming for Vengeance.  Well, if it's up to me to write the first official review for this quintessential metal album, I will.

Of course, it should be noted that I'm not the biggest Priest fan.  My introduction to real metal is all thanks to Ozzy/Sabbath, Metallica and especially Scorpions.  Because of this, I am a Guardian first and foremost here.  But compared to Metallica, Ozzy and Scorpions who all felt a bit different in their own way, Judas felt a little standard for the time.  Maybe this is because they had been emulated so often that they came off as less original to me?  But overtime I've come to accept them much more.  Painkiller was my first Priest outing.  Absolutely incredible metal energy that I was CERTAINLY not prepared for thanks to the radio centering around the 70's and 80's stuff.  Screaming for Vengeance was my second, and as you can see, at first I could NOT favorably compare the two.  And today I still don't.  But I totally get why this is a metal classic.  Like I really do GET it.

Now the first thing I should mention is the varying levels of heaviness between songs.  Sometimes we have songs steering a bit towards the hard rock side like Devil's child, and a few of these songs are just teetering on the thin tightrope separating the air above the rope from the net below, with the air being metal and the net being rock.  Some studio production is noticeable here, so that does as much of a job amplifying the metal as much as it potentially hinders the album with its vague similarities to AOR and other arena rock genres.  of course, this was right before hair metal was cemented, so this album easily avoided the comparison for the time.  You've Got Another Thing Coming and other like songs have a certain metal personality about them, cementing them in the big leagues, but despite this quintessential biker-boy persona, it's still hard rock.  But then you have some serious metal bangers like the title track, which is easily the heaviest song on the album, and Riding on the Wind, which works in tandem with Electric Eye to give you everything you can expect from this album.

Now what I REALLY like about Screaming for Vengeance is that Judas Priest create a variety of attitudes, personalities and tones within their one specific persona: biker rock and metal.  They had greatly evolved from the days of dorky medieval robes and fantasy lyrics that defined their Sad Wings of Destiny days and had gained the nickname "metal gods" with this.  Some songs focus more on the drama, especially where the short intro track is concerned.  Some songs are just about having fun, and others are all about the energy.  Thanks to tonal and tempo changes, no two songs sound exactly the same, which I can't even say for Painkiller as All Guns Blazing feels similar to the title opener there.  But with things changing every song, there are a lot of ways to have fun here.

Now the consistency of the quality is high.  There are absolutely no skips.  I would even go as far as to say every song is great if not close to brilliance.  None of these songs really reach "brilliance" to me, but they're way catchier and more melodically healthy than so many other heavy metal albums I've heard over the years.  I guess this is really what makes Screaming for Vengeance a classic.  You could play this whole album when riding in your convertible and just let the atmosphere take you away as easily as electronic fans like Tangerine Dream's Rubycon.  In fact, those two are only four spaces away on my list of every album I've ever heard ranked from best to worst.  I can't consider this a favorite as none of the songs took me to heaven and back, but it's a lot of fun and perfectly healthy and diverse where the album's main focus is hard rock and heavy metal.

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #8 - Exuvia

This is the one moment I've been waiting for, the beloved 2017 Exuvia.  I'll have heard the last of RoB's rawest classics after this.  It really bit me in the ass yesterday when my internet was conking out and I couldn't listen to either Exuvia or the previous EP.  I really wanna know where this man decided to go after everything that's been going down and all the surreal craziness and evil that built his last three studio albums.

The title track out with a new direction for the tribal behavior of the previous EP, Takitum Tootem, applying the chanting spiritual vocals to a funeral doom sound that evolves into black.  The next couple minutesa are taking small but effective shifts into different black metal sounds to keep things original, drawing the listener into a dark netherworld after the chanting ends.  It seems to me that the black metal here is being used for more like a repeating ambient track rather than a melodic track.  Despite the fact that melody has worked out perfectly for RoB in the past, this decision is a perfectly fine one since it WORKS.  The repetitive hypnotism keeps dragging the listener from one surreal plain of reality to another.  By the end of this track, there's a very faint guitar melody drowned out by the repeating riff.  I'd have liked for it to be a little louder as the ending draws itself out a bit.

Surtur Barbaar Martime begins with one of RoB's signature funeral riffs, taking a direct turn into the black metal pretty quickly, relying on more energy than the opener.  The song typically switches between the two for aural effect, oftentimes being instantaneous but eventually being combined with meximum effect during the middle section.  This song is esentially a reorganization of the behavior of the first track with less of the tribal ambient and more of the funeral backdrops.  But since it shares so many similarities with the first track, I was really hoping for something different with Maere.  Starts out more or less the same way with a blacker energy to it.  Any ambient aspects are attributed to ghostly wails, usued for a mysterious Lovecraftian effect.  They're quite cool, but a little drowned out by the black guitars.  At least, this is true for the first half, which cranks up the volume on the vocals.  It seems that despite the shifts in these songs, the exact tone is much moe consistent.  The line between black and doom is much thinner here.

The Pythia's Pale Wolves starts up the second half with bagpipes faintly added to another typical black doom intro, but the percussion is tamer, less active and more focused on a specific slow rhythm.  The vocals are also more fit for doom as they're clear and harmonic.  This helps bring out another spiritual vibe that's much more relaxing.  I didn't expect this to last forever, though, as it eventually combines the funereal guitar tone with this, somehow making both the ambiance of the blackened guitars and the funereal sound much more energetic together rather than separate.  Even when the crystal clear female vocalizing comes into play, it revs the listener up.  The tempo and percussion eventually replicate the energy, pushing it even further as the power becomes too much to handle, leaving the harmonizing to balance it out.  This is a shift I can really appreciate as it keeps making something better out of a sound that, while still great, we've heard before.  This is the densest segment of the album so far.  This track really likes to challenge the perceptions of relaxation and extremities, as it's really the heaviest track on the album at that point but also has some very serene atmospheric moments created through these extremities.  But at this point, I also really need something different no matter how extreme it gets.

Towards Malaika only has about thirty seconds of weird tribal chanting, and I was pretty disappointment that it didn't continue for even longer.  So the most I could do was wait for something totally new to happen.  Although the beginning had a typical sound, the vibes are much more dramatic than the tracks before, thanks to a higher pitched sound-effect driving the background and amplifying the weird rhythm in the front.  After the dramatic intro, there's a switch into pure, uncensored doom, and this doom keeps us going for a while.  This to me qualifies as a difference because it's slow, stomping guitars are more true to doom's roots than anything that's been present so far, relying more on atmospheres such as tribalism or mysticism before.  The third act, starts with the chanting, and I was once again hoping that it would last a while, but instead it goes right back to the black metal, which kind of pissed me off.  This guy makes a tribal ambient EP, releases another album the next year and barely does anything with it.  It begged the question, why bother featuring it on this track at all???  The song ends with it again, but it doesn't have as strong of an effect as it should for me.  I was thinking to myself, this last track had better be phenomenal.

This final track, Takitum Tootem (Trance), goes right into the noisiest black metal guitars present so far.  This doesn't stop a melody from being made out, largely because the percussion is more rooted in dramatic effect and not speed. In this way, I'm given an effective black ambient track performed with metal instruments, like some black noise albums I can name.  This slower, doomier and noiser take on the Exuvia sound has increased the heaviness while still finding that perfect serenity through it.

This is a different type of album for Ruins of Beverast.  The songs each have their differences and their similarities, and because the songs are so long, the similarities kind of tested my faith in his ability to put out other songs.  Maybe this is the best course of action, as black metal and doom metal fans want many more atmospheres.  This is the perfect RoB album for those who favor atmospheres akin to his debut over the wild ever-shifting behavior of his second through fourth albums.  This album is ALL ABOUT the atmospheres.  Unfortunately, this fixation on metal atmos also wanes down the potential of the tribal aspects shown on the Takitum Tootem EP from the year before, even though it still makes short and effective.  So this is another fantastic release by one of Germany's best black metal artists, but also features a slightly missed opportunity that's not quite enough to knock a half-star down, but is enough for me to confirm that IMO this doesn't hold a candle to Sheltered Elite.

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #7 - Takitum Tootem!

OK, so I'm reading about this album on RYM, and it tags the EP as "tribal ambient" and "black metal."  So here I am thinking, "OK, this is gonna be one of the coolest fucking things ever, or a mess."  The ratings don't look so good on RYM, but that didn't stop me from checking out their demo.  I had a few theories as to what this album would sound like, but I didn't care which one was right.  I just wanted to jump right into it after I had gotten that chronologically far in RoB's discography.

Track one of two: Takitum Tootem! (Wardance).  It starts out with a dark ambient intro with mild tribalism that evolves into a long black metal riff.  The riff itself has a very metal energy about it that isn't so much "evil" as it is "cool" and "dark."  Tribal drumming rides the whole rest of the track.  Unfortunately, it stays that way for 75% of the song with very few meaningful shifts.  I'm surprised at RoB for doing that.

Track two: Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun: This one gets right into the weird tribal atmospheres and instrumentation.  It's practically invoking images of fighting zombies in an ancient temple.  The atmosphere and instrumentation are PERFECT.  Around three minutes in, we start to see occasional ghostly vocals like something out of a Metroid game.  Black metal guitars are also used sparingly at first for build-up.  It speeds up at the four minute mark, turning into pure tribal black metal as guitars overlap each other level upon level like the ending act of Nine Inch Nails' Closer.  It stays that way for a moment before drowning down to a dungeon ambient tune that carries over the Metroid mysticism, going through various Lovecraftian sound effects before returning to the main riff of the beginning, but with more "technological" aspects.  Genius moves on their part.  Now it sounds EXACTLY like something out of a Metroid game.  It ends with two more segments: one final blast of black tribalism, and a weirdass outro with what sounds like some awkward animal noises for a surreal effect.

I certainly wasn't disappointed with this one.  This otherworldly EP carries the surreal vibes of Metroid, Cthulhu and even some Juno Reactor songs.  The first track was decent on its own, but the second track is one of the coolest ambient tracks I've heard.  This is easily a keeper.

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #5 - Blood Vaults

I knew this was going to be a turning point for The Ruins of Beverast.  From what I understand, much of the black metal sound has been degraded to an amplifier for other doomier projects, but I really wanted to see where this was going to go.  Considering RoB's love of the random, I would either love this or hate this.  I currently consider The Ruins of Beverast one of the greatest black metal acts of all time, but I'm not as familiar with his doom music.  Let's see where this goes...

So the spoken word intro wasn't anything special to me.  I mean, I fell like anyone can put together basic synths and a creepy poem together and open an album that way.  The fact that his segues on his debut album were so brilliant only make this worse.  Thankfully, the first song, Daemon, is there to fill in the emptiness.  It starts out as a black doom song but evolves into some oddly appropriate but totally new traditional doom metal for a minute before returning to blackened doom.  Daemon is yet another creepy, paced and cinematic whirlwind of organized chaos, and is a perfect opener to this album.

Maleficia starts out dominated by weird repeating vocal effects set to a slow and sparse gothic doom instrumentation, and even lets some effects take over the lead, almost like he's underwater.  The song gets a little heavier and black to blackness before taking a direct shift into high-pitched synths and post-metal slowness.  This flow is both calming and empowering at the same time, creating something completely new for RoB: a post-metal song, one that I honestly like more than most post-metal albums I've heard.  However, the genre-shifting is much more blatant, which can actually fuck with the flow for some.  I mean, this song REALLY challenges your dedication to Ruins of Beverast.  So the fatal flaw is that the serenity of it all is given very little room to breathe.  We have black doom, death doom and even organs near the end overtaking this, so it's a good song but a wasted opportunity for an incredible post-metal song.

We go back to roots here with Ornaments on Malice, which frankly has been done before: a black-death-doom hybrid song again, and it takes three minutes for it to really change pace.  But this time, it's a simple, monotone ring with more angelic synths and deep chanting.  Eventually the two distinct sounds mold together for something truly epic, if not under-explored.  This combination, however, is also bringing to mind the metal artist Hell, also known as MSW.  After that is Spires, which spends a good deal of time in the same old death doom territory that we already expect of him with very little to say for the melody, which means this fairly rhythmic track is mostly relying on a familiar atmosphere.  There are some weird and quirky moments, but nowhere near enough to drive the song for its 13-minute runtime.

So now I'm hoping A Failed Exorcism gives me something new, even if it ends up being a mess  I mean, 15 minutes wouldn't have been a daunting task back in Sheltered Elite.  The combination of gothic doom and death doom maximizes the effect of both aspects put together, even to the point where it sounds like THE SONG ITSELF IS ACTUALLY GONNA KILL ME.  There's even a touch of prog in the percussions during the breaks.  Three and a half minutes in, it takes a totally different persona as the funereal sounds drive a ritualistic drum pattern through another chanted poetic lyrics with some beautiful singing before returning to the original format again, only with the black doom aspects enhanced.  The next few minutes go back to balancing the two brands of doom with just as strong of an effect as before, allowing it to feel fresh after its many shifts, and ends with a purely death doom outro that ties all the shifts together in a simple, easy to follow way.  Excellent effort.

Next is the three-minute trial, which is all about monotone instrumentation backing up a whole choir.  It gets creepier as it goes along, adding new sounds in the background and slowly changing the drum riff to something more active and heavier overtime.  Following is another three-minute track, Ordeal, which is a pretty cool black metal track on its own but doesn't hold a candle to the best stuff on the album.  Finally we end things with Monumentum, which kicks us off as a with a symphonic funeral piece It switches to a purely doom sound pretty often, which means there are very few surprises left in store by this point.

Well this was a much more mixed bag of ups and downs than I expected.  The quality of songs took big rises and drops constantly, and some are just totally forgettable while others are flat-out amazing.  It says to me that the current incarnation of The Ruins of Beverast is done and shouldn't be pressed any further, so while there are some songs I'd definitely put on a greatest hits comp, I don't really feel like I have any reason to listen to this again.  So I think I'll give it the bare maximum for 3.5 stars: 74/100, as 75 would round to 4 stars.

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #4 - Enchanted By Gravemould

Wasn't really expecting a demos album, but I had to know what the rejects from the first three albums sounded like.  Ruins of Beverast is a project that's shown me a whole new world of black metal, one that I hope is much more thoroughly explored by the masses.  I REALLY do think it's possible.  Did you know that you can get 1000 new black metal studio albums every year?  I checked the RYM charts and multiple year charts for this.  It's fucking true.  On top of that, Darkthrone's updating the doom influence in their modern albums, so I really hope this becomes a thing: blackened doom metal, and not just a small time blanket term for a select few bands like "Philly Club Rap."  So I'm going to keep exploring Beverast and the world he created, and that includes demos and rejects like this.

Desert Lair does show some kind of a difference.  Maybe the occasional slightly higher timbres don't allow it to feel as dark as what was called for on the albums at first?  Maybe the production was wrong because it's a bit more clear?  I have no idea, but otherwise, I don't find anything wrong with in.  The variations in rhythm, tempo and instrumentation are abundant, but they all flow together perfectly.  If anything, this is one of his finest performances.  In fact, I checked some reviews to see what people thought, and apparently I'm not off the mark here: this is basically a highlight of RoB's career.  It kinda pains me that he left this off his official albums.

The Moselle Enigma goes right into the noisier black metal production, and is a bit off.  The noise-factor of the instrumentation is properly messy, but it gets in the way of hearing the vocals properly.  Real shame because the rhythms are fantastic.  Despite how maniacal this song is, it's surprisingly catchy and intriguing.  The second half starts off with rain recordings and more choral vocals, giving us a very bleak imagery that's just PERFECT for the vibe of the song.  Part of me wanted this segment to last the remainder of the song, but when it ended I still had a minute left, and it was used on the format of the first half, which I think is perfectly fine this time considering its short length in comparison to the average length of an RoB song.

Hours of the Aequinox is next, and we go into it with a black noise focus and a slower, doomier violin intro just totally chilling me out.  A serene song was the perfect way to follow up the last one, and the black noise is the perfect way to follow up the rainy effects.  We don't have very many slow-going atmo-black songs that mirror the winter aesthetic, as up to this point, the tones and timbres were a bit deeper.

Those were the originals.  Apparently, the last three songs are all covers, starting with Enigma of the Absolute, originally present on Dead Can Dance's Spleen and Ideal.  Now Spleen and Ideal is one of the best darkwave albums in the world, so covering it is a daunting task.  You'd think a master of black metal would pull it off, and it might've been done had the production been better.  The rhythms of the guitars can barely be made out, the percussion's week, and the effects are almost entirely drowned out.  It's a real shame.  This could've stood with the original.

Next, believe it or not, is a cover of To Have and to Hold off of Music for the Masses, as in DEPECHE MODE.  I guess it can be done, as Depeche Mode have dabbled with darkwave instrumentation before.  It's a pretty creepy track with its own personality, and I guess it's a slight improvement because the atmosphere and production are improved.  But this song doesn't even reach the creative heights of Unlock the Shrine's segues.

The final cover is Symphonaire Infernus et Spera Empyrium by My Dying Bride.  Now I've never heard the original EP with this song, but I'm more than aware of what MDB sounds like.  I've got several of their albums under my belt.  This version uses neoclassical synths to help with the atmospheres, steering into symphonic black metal akin to Summoning.  And it really does capture the epic vibes very well, but the problem is that a 16-minute Ruins of Beverast song needs to keep evolving.  Thankfully this gets around to that at around the five-minute mark, but I think the pitch of the synths is a bit too high for the deeper timbres of the black metal instrumentation, so I can't really say that RoB rocks symphonic black as well as he does atmo-black, despite this being a pretty cover.

OK, the first three tracks work perfectly well on their own, and even in order, whether or not they were intended that way.  The three covers in the second half, however, felt lacking and in need of polishing in order to be great.  So if you're a Beverast fan already, I really do recommend this album if not only for the first half.  But if you're not, you'll probably hate the covers.

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #3: Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite

OK, it felt a little weird typing that title, but whatever.  From what I've heard and read, there's kind of a battle between various Beverest albums for "best one."  Obligatory Beatles comparison.  Now this guy only has six albums, but four of them are contenders: Unlock the Shrine, Rain Upon the Impure, Sheltered Elite and Exuvia.  I'm on the third of these, and I can't wait to see what happens next.  While the first album was great, the sophomore showed a noticeable improvement in quality, being less repetitive and just as weird.  I'm a bit surprised that I'm the first one here to review it, though, considering how big these guys are in the metal community.

This is the album that represents the beginning of RoB's shift from a black metal focus to a doom one.  As a result, the opener, I Raised This Stone as a Ghastly Memorial has a less black production level which is less busy and noisy. This is an excellent example of RoB's ability to produce epic tracks while changing things around.  As far as switching it up with various variations in a single song goes, this is likely his most consistent song in that regard.  Despite the variations in the first act, the backing blackened guitars and the psychedelic / funereal slow-paced solors test the patience slighty.  But a little patience during a vocal segment, and we're back to the sounds of the first act, appropriately so, as that first melody was so epic in its tame approach that it absolutely MUST NOT be forsaken to one act alone.  Our next track slams us with total black metal: God's Ensanguined Bestiaries.  Now this started out as a purely black metal track with very clear production, one that used melody to draw me in again.  So it remains catchy and dark, but doesn't do anything different until the third act, in which the instruments take a step back for clearer vocals to sing for a minute.  And then it goes back to what it was doing. In all respects, the instrumentation's fine.  But when you stand this album next to Ghastly Memorial or anything from the sophomore, it looks and feels kinda like a standard atmo-black track at first.  Thankfully there's at least a change in tempo during the midsection.  This one once again takes advantage of slow compositions during the solos to bring out the epic approach of the album rather than thrashing the fuck out of everything.  And as a guy who generally prefers thrashing the fuck out of everything, it's a very welcome change of pace.  I guess after all the craziness in the sophomore, the fans need something a little more simple.  So this may be the worst track on the album, but it totally works.

This is the point of the album where things were getting weirder.  Mount Sinai Moloch was up next.  I can appreciate the industrial black ambient intro.  Chances were the song wasn't gonna do that for its 12.5 minute runtime.  The intro lasts about a minute and a half before going into some straight up death doom with a slight funereal touch, relying on the sparseness of the instrumentation to deliver the goods until blackened riffs overtake the background, going back to the "blackened doom: that Wikipedia likes to tag this band with, and then back to the funeral doom.  So while the first two songs were a bit more tame than this, I finally get the song I've been waiting for: a multi-faceted and consistent adventure of unpredictability that acts as a testament to RoB's talents.  Right after that is more funereal behavior with Transcending Saturnine Iericho Skies,  Its approach is certainly metallic, but very soothing to the metal soul.  The song evolves into straightforward doom after the intro, just rocking its Sabbathian vibes for a couple verses before taking a 180 into black metal like it's nothing.  And this eventually evolves into the atmospheric side as synths bring out an almost heavenly backdrop for about twenty seconds before we instantly sink right back into the funereal guitars of the intro.  There is obviously nothing this song won't try, which means any suspicions of the album being made of overlong and repetitive songs is practically gone now.  In fact, the changes of pace get more and more frequent the more you dive into this song.

However, despite all these interesting turns, I've heard most of these tricks on the previous album.  I really needed one.  Thankfully, higher timbres of The Restless Mills did just that, going into the highest pitches of tremolo that RoB has picked this far.  This one's far more rooted in the slow atmospheres of metal than anything beforehand.  Unfortunately, the tremolo trick hadn't returned for a long time, but I had a strong atmosphere with some interesting effects in the background to make up for that.  It might not mix it up much until the last third, and I suppose that's fine after the last two tracks, but it doesn't quite have enough melody to go around, either, leaving an empty feeling despite the strengths.  Now Theriak - Baal - Theriak is where we REALLY get something new.  It starts with some maniacal laughing as an unintelligible growl is speaking, leaving me to believe the voice is saying something disgusting and funny while the voices laugh (On a side note, I know all four of Kenny's verses in each version of the South park theme).  Once the laughing is done, the percussions go headfirst into hardcore punk territory!  That's completely new for RoB.  The song switches between focus on atmosphere and melody while switching between growls and singing during this segment, but switches to a more dramatic monotone beat with its own mystic and ritualistic vibe before returning.  Once again, all these changes feel completely natural.  Right before the end of this track, we go into a much cooler and astral Sabbathian vibe, one that would likely make the stoners crazy.  Excellent inclusion before ending before going back into the speedy black guitars.

Alright, now after all the craziness I went through in RoB's catalog to get this far, it's time to talk about the final track of his third album.  Cool deep space synths and an audio sample, nice but been there.  Instances of a 60 BPM blackened rhythm accompanying it.  Improvement.  Evolves into its own focus for the synthesizers to empower, draws itself out while focusing on melody.  Clear vocals and vocal effects taking turns.  In its first two minutes it took several mutations on a very natural level.  This is an extremely psychedelic tune where RoB does a masterful job of just drawing people into its drug-induced black metal world, like the best tracks by Oranssi Pazuzu.  Almost halfway there, a stoner riff cuts out the astral vibes and goes right for pure metal solo for a couple of minutes before returning to some slow but intriguing blackened doom riff before ending in the same psychedelia that began it.  This is a whole new level of wild for RoB.

This album shows RoB at the top of his game, recycling older elements from the past album while increasing the doom influence and improving the production values.  This album is much more than the black doom album RYM has the audacity to tag it with.  This is a journey across the world that the combination of these two genres can explore without losing their identities.  I guess if I had to fault the album for anything, it would be that I heard some of these tricks on the last album, but I think I should forgive that since the primary focus of the album and the production quality are both very different.

Ruins of Beverast marathon #2: Rain Upon the Impure

Our opener is the 13.5 minute epic 50 Forts Alone the Rhine.  This would be his longest song released, so the chances of being totally monotonous were pretty high, unless BoR managed to keep it creative throughout.  I noticed variations in production quality between clear sound effects and slightly fuzzy production for the guitars, while the vocals are right in the middle of the two.  Nothing, however, gets in the way of each other, allowing these multiple elements to work in harmony while the unpredictability of The Mine is combined with the melodic charms of the earlier tracks on Unlock the Shrine, which makes this his best song so far.  I had been curious for a couple years about the combination of fuzzy and clear production and how to properly utilize it.  RoB answered my question, and I'm perfectly satisfied with the answer.  Add the fact that this is probably the creepiest song of his so far, then I would even go as far as to say that this is one of the greatest metal songs I've ever heard.

Next is a SIXTEEN minute track: Soliloquy of the Stigmatized Shepherd.  Damn... The song begins with a dirge of black doom that's more than eager to stomp you flat into the earth.  The doom switches between the death and funeral brands, allowing Frohn to add sparce moments of black growls and guitar effects.  These sparse moments aren't quite enough to make up for the otherwise lack in shifting behavior that the track is guilty of, as it has to compete with the previous song's astounding creativity.  But at the halfway point, our percussion largely ceases for a moment, and the guitar effects become alien and otherworldly, playing at a rapid pace.  The track then evolves into a war metal riff and blast.  The percussions are a little drowned by the riff, but the atmosphere is hypnotic.  We have a couple of minutes of this before the doom takes over again with a couple higher pitches and a more astronomical approach, and then goes back to black again with a slower but still energetic approach, which means our super-slow track is finally utilizing the creativity of the previous track despite its slightly overlong first half.  What a way to save it.  Now we just let the chanting and the psychedelic guitars take us away through the end.  Kick back, enjoy the atmos.

Track 3 is 16 minutes as well, and I've got some pretty high hopes for this one as track two came back with some punches.  Track two evolves into Blood Vaults with more weird sound effects, overtaking the guitars in both volume and focus.  Now things are getting multi-dimensional, like I've been pulled into a Stephen King shadow world.  This intro evolves into a very focused and melodic atmo-black track with the kind of aggression the album's been largely missing.  It even takes a moment to give us the obligatory nerdy Vincent Price sample.  For a while, the drums are hurt by the bad production, but after the sample they seem to be fixed, going at a perfect volume with the riff and some deep masculine choir singing.  Now this change in production wasn't really an "artistic decision" that needed to be there, as the worse production on the first act of this song did more harm than good.  But it's nice to have more balance back, and the melodies keep shifting with perfect consistency.  So Once again we have a flaw in a track's beginning while the song gets better as it goes along.

And now for the THIRD sixteen minute track in a row: Soil of the Incentuous.

...

SOILED IT!  SOILED IT!  SOILED IT!

Ahem, excuse me.  Now for this track.  It starts off with a standard black doom rhythm and riff, not really impressing me at first.  But I had already decided to wait and see what it was going to do next.  Once it upped the blackness, the rapid speed aggression brought more of its general evil out.  it remains standard until another vocal sample leads us to a gothic section with industrial noises to bring us a totally new sound and direction that the album hasn't explored yet, and it feels perfectly fitting.  But once again we're back to the plastic black metal after a couple minutes.  This track shows RoB being much more serious about the black metal aspects than he was on the previous tracks.

After a creepy dark ambient track that does its job but fails to hold a candle to its brothers from Unlock the Shrine.  This track shows RoB doing everything he can to make it an epic ending.  Even anything vaguely related to doom is relying on bombast here, which has largely been missing from the album so far.  Even when the industrial percussions return, everything is epic, loud and cinematic.  A plethora of different vocal styles comes in to aid in every piece of this album from mutant chanting to choirs to demonic growls.  I'd even say this is the second best song that I've heard him record so far.

I'm more than pleased with this sophomore effort.  There are a couple small decisions that shouldn't have been made, and there are a lot of seriously artistic moments that draws me into every angle of the individual worlds each track explores.  Rain Upon the Impure is proper black metal, but also acts as both a slow and fast cinematic exploration of what the darkness of black metal is capable of.  No wonder this is RoB's most popular album, it's a tornado of perfectly evil melodies and vibes.

Ruins of Beverast marathon #1: Unlock the Shrine

Today I'm going on a marathon for a modern black metal artist with an apparent sense of creativity: Alexander Frohn, also known as Meilenwald, and most popularly known as The Ruins of Beverast.  Like other band marathons I've taken on, such as Evoken, I'll be starting from the ground up.  It's been a while since I just had a long metal kick, and I want to get into more doom metal by listening to their more recent doom efforts.  But I don't think I'd be treating them fairly if I didn't go back to their roots first, so a trip to the atmo-black world of Unlock the Shrine it is.

First, lemme mention that atmo-black metal really isn't one of my favorite forms of it.  So many "atmo" genres favor length for the sake of build-up but neglect composition.  I'm not really getting that right here, though.  We start this album off with a good composition and a slow but effective melodic rhythm that manages to last 8.5 minutes, and I'd even give it around 8.5 for how well it was able to keep itself going despite the lack of general activity.  Other songs tend to do this with varying lengths, usually short.  Now Skeleton Coast was a good piece of dark ambient with an almost swamp-like vibe, but I was mostly taken in by Euphoria When the Bombs Fell.  It's a great combination of atmo-black and death doom that once again puts slow melodies first and atmosphere following closely behind.  Afterwards comes God Sent No Sign, which starts off with weird, almost cartoonish alien effects posing as dungeon synthesizers, but ends up backed up by a noisy black metal riff with no percussion.  I addressed the randomness of the decision as feeling somewhat out of place with the first three tracks, but it was still nice while it lasted.

OK, so now there's an 11-minute epic: The Clockhand's Groaning Circles.  I didn't really have any idea what to expect, but ONCE AGAIN, melody came first.  A slightly proggy touch is just enough to separate this song from the others while carrying the same atmospheres, I think at this point, the perfect recreation of past vibes gets in the way of the variety of it all, but the composition still makes it much more create than any Wolves in the Throne Room album.  And once again there's a switch to weird repeating effects.  Procession of Pawns takes an industrial look at dark cabaret, looking at it in that creepy carnival way while keeping it quiet enough for the darker wind effects to take equal focus.  Visually, all I see are dark red skies, winds blowing dark brown dirt in the air and a broken down carousel.

Appropriately, we get a blast of utter black noise on Summer Decapitation Ritual.  You can barely make out any melody, which is perfectly fine for noise fans who want atmosphere, but is also a little disappointing considering that the strongest point for this band so far has been slow and catchy melodies with dark atmospheres backing them up, rather than vise-versa.  I can't really say the decision here was the best course of action.  But they really do nail the menacing vibes, and it also showcases their variety without losing touch of the darkness.  This ends after about three minutes before getting to those same symphonic trumpets the Summoning fans love so much, but there's hardly anything else symphonic about this as a super-noisy melody backs it up, betraying the atmospheric focus for pure melody.  It's a bit hard to gauge how much of a shift this was as a change was necessary, but may have been too bombastic.  The third act of this song goes back to the structure of the first, but the percussions and effects make it louder and more maniacal than before, but also use the room they had for the melody of the trumpets to be recreated by guitars at a faster pace.  So despite the trumpets being a little bombastic for this type of song, I commend the band for their creative and artistic attempts, notably since they mostly succeed.

The next "effects" track, Cellartunes, is by far the creepiest.  Field recordings and slow and deep synths work with dripping water and heavy breathing to create the creepiest atmosphere these guys have done on the album so far, but it only lasts two minutes.  For a dark ambient track on a black metal album, this might be the best track so far.  These effects mold right into the title track without wavering, ready to turn the effects into an actual song. And after about a minute, we get a sluggish industrial melody with matching percussion to slowly but surely carry these effects into black metal territory.  As it should be, it's purely frightening and mesmerizing for the first two acts before using the last three minutes on a perfectly fitting ride into the stormy noise seen in the first and third acts of Summer Decapitation Ritual.  The next effects track is Subterranean Homicide Lamentation, which takes a black ambient industrial noise and puts it to tribal chanting and a faint wind instrument that I think is a clarinet.  This combination is perfectly balanced and gets its effect out of the way well enough, although I would've liked for this concept to emerge into its own song.  The percussions and guitars of the 12-minute epic, The Mine, follow suite.  The changes are largely in the thickness of the guitar atmosphere and the switching between weird vocal effects and darker growls.  Every couple minutes there's a change in either the effects or the rhythm, but it never breaks its heavy emotional core.  The effects and structure become only more and more unpredictable and even progressive, keeping me on my toes and making me eager to hear even more.  The album ends with the shortest track: White Abyss, which is all about high-pitched winds, screams and weird effects whirling about your head.

This was a satisfying debut that proved that early on in his career, Mr. Meilenwald already had a clear idea of what makes art worth exploring.  While this breaks absolutely no new ground, it gives us multiple variations of the standard black metal song and keeps things unpredictable.  This debut definitely gets my seal of approval, and it makes me more eager for the sophomore that everyone seems to love.

Doom metal is practically a genre transitioning the act of digging deeper graves into sound, and the deeper you dig, the heavier you are.  Disembowelment understood this, and it was clear the moment their guitars growled for the first time.  While The Tree of Life and Death, the opener, starts off as a death metal song, its slowly draws you even deeper into dramatic slower pacing and growling guitars until you're not only covered in dirt, but you've sunk into it like an abyss, scared and turning your head as much as you can to avoid the worms you can't see.

My concerns regarding the risk of monotony within hour-long doom albums was at least temporarily countered with the gothic doom sounf of Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory.  It brought a completely new hypnosis to the album, vaguely reminiscing My Dying Bride while using its cleaner production in tandem with black metal riffs during the midsection, and incorporating slow masculine chanting to set a blueprint for what would become funeral doom.  So without these guys, there might've been no Esoteric or Evoken.  While the first track was beautiful, the second was more creative.

Another surprise overtook me as the noisiest shit you'll ever hear capitalizes on the black-death riffs of Prophetic Throne and begins the third track: Excoriate.  There's no rhythm of any kind at first, so while the atmosphere was incredible, I can't say I'm thoroughly impressed with that decision.  But then the instrumentation gets slower, deeper, more artistic and just as horrific as the opener.  It feels to me that this was an early influence for one of my favorite black metal bands: Cabinet.  The cleaner gothic guitars return for a much scarier composition than the hypnotic elements shown in Prophetic Throne.  In fact, the industrial and quirky methods used to bring out the atmosphere are ringing heavily of the album Children of God by Swans. It's a shame this song started out with such a rhythmless beginning, otherwise this would be a perfect song.  It could be said that the beginning was part of the experimental nature, but I feel like it could've still been performed more artistically.  And lo and behold, this is how the song ends as well, which is slightly disappointing despite being extraordinarily heavy.

Nightside of Eden is a relatively short one, and I noticed that when looking at the tracklist.  My first thought was: starts acoustic and probably stays that way.  I was right, but this doesn't mean it wasn't weird.  The beautiful whispers of a female and a strange ghostly instrumentation give it a mythical feel that takes me deep into a golden sunlit forest where a magic well with a statue of Aphrodite awaits.  That is literally what I pictured, dark green leaves, birds and everything.

Our longest song, A Burial at Ornans, starts out how it should, superslow, gruesome in its haunting buildup, slow and tribal in its percussion, etc.  While it's a great sound, it gets to be a bit much for me overtime, which means the band went past their limitations before taking a complete 180 into blackened death territory, which is a fine change but isn't a perfect situation.  In fact, it's a little jarring.  Great sound aside, there are many more creative 10+ minute slow-metal songs out there.

The Spirits of the Tall Hills starts out by using the clean gothic guitars in tandem with blast beats to create a faster and almost blackened sound that stands out from the other songs.  Eventually, the percussions and feedback go right into the black area while the guitars stay the same, creating a strange but soothing post-metal vibe.  There is enough mutation throughout the song to allow it to recycle elements via new combinations of the group's compositions.  Eventually, the percussion takes a big backstep, allowing the gothic guitars to go into surreal but slow psychedelia before diving right back into the speed for one final epic burst.

The final track is Cerulean Transience Of All My Imagined Shores, and it's more deep and mystical throughout its run.  After the harp intro, we once again see familiar elements recycled to create a different kind of experience.  The middle section feels a bit quiet and tame, but it only gets a little louder in the end, which means the album doesn't really end on the big bang it needs.

Glad I finally got through this one.  It certainly did set up several new standards for doom metal, even if it needed to flesh out a couple of things.  Totally worth the hour.

You read the genre-tagging right.  I'm calling this "metal" on top of calling it a grindcore album because for a good portion of the album, it is so diversified and out-there that it's a difficult one to really peg down.  I'm getting switches between some thought-provoking noise rock, drawn out and brutal doom metal with noisy metalcore backdrops, black and death working in tandem and even a little sludgy stuff here and there.  This is Full of Hell going batshit insane, but with catchiness and accessibility covering it all so it never goes too far like Naked City's Torture Garden.  Full of Hell have always been one of the most artistic bands of the modern age.  They helped to justify the existence of the otherwise passable Merzbow with their collabs, Sister Fawn and the self-titled collab, the former of which was my number 1 FoH and the latter of which was my number 3.  The album goes for more straightforward grindcore on a more consistent level after the seven-minute doomy epic Bleeding Horizon ends side A, but the first half is organized chaos, justifying its directionless genre-bending with the bandmates's personas dominating the album's brutal presence.

Of course, it's safe to say that half the tracks are grindcore, warranting the tag, but with that seven minute epic steering closer to that joke of a genre tag RYM calls "downtempo deathcore" than anything, it's safe to say that this album covers the multitude of bases within the realms of extreme metal and metal punk hybrids, with thrash and crossover thrash being absent, and leaving room for some Orchid-style powerviolence.  It's highly accessible despite its plethora of metallic flavors, so I think the best tag for this album would either be "metal" or "extreme metal" as opposed to choosing any one specific genre.  I think to do otherwise might be a little insulting to this testament to FoH's metal cabapilities.  Although next time, I'd like to see them do this and incorporate some of the industrial sounds of Sister Fawn. Otherwise, this album is basically FoH's "When the Kite String Pops."

I'm glad I'm finally on this Avenged Sevenfold kick.  I've put them off for years out of lack of interest for metalcore and alternative metal.  I was extremely eager to see where the band's mutation would take them, putting their crappy debut on exactly the same level (and directly above on my list of all albums I've heard ranked from best to worst) as The Unspoken King by Cryptopsy, and having been fairly satisfied with the increase in melodic and emotional focus on the second.  But now comes the monster of metal: City of Evil, one of the most controversially diverse albums in both genre-bending and online ratings.

The album kicks off with their iconic song, Beast and the Harlot.  I heard this song a couple times years ago out of curiosity, but I wasn't inspired to go into the whole album yet despite liking it.  But I had VERY little recollection of it, so the Judas Priest shift into thrashy power metal territory took me a little by surprise.  One guy on RYM said it sounds like something you'd hear from the Sonic 2 soundtrack.  Now I've played enough Sonic games to know what that means (not Sonic 2, though), but this is NOT Crush 40 here.  I'd rather sing along with "Her plagues will come all at once as her mourners watch her burn" than "I can feel your every rage, step aside I'll turn the page."  The difference here is THIS SONG IS NOT THROWN TOGETHER.  Although, the shift between thrashy metal and Helloween melodies feels a little out of place sometimes, despite being a lot of fun.

That was just for the first song.  Next is Burn It Down, which is more F-Zero-rooted than Sonic-rooted, and the thrash factor is pretty high.  You can tell these guys are Metallica fans, but it feels more like influence than straight out copying.  The melodic factor works beautifully with the singer's melodic vocals despite the high thrash factor.  It looks like they finally found the balance between melody and energy that they struggled with on the debut and improved on with Waking the Fallen.

There's a metalcore drum kick that starts Blinded in Chains.  Like a few songs from WtF (oh), it combines elements of melodic metalcore with power metal, but this was easily the best metalcore effort I had heard.  There's obvious vocal overlapping in the production, but the experience it creates is purely badass and never lets go of the melodic touches.  In fact, this song boasts some of their best melodies.  The song also has an out-of-whack and creepy fade-out segment which lasts about a minute and a half, but does a great job with the dramatic flair without ever overdoing it.  I guess this is another favorite AVS song of mine.  But no matter how hard I tried, I didn't get the Samson reference I was expected because of that obvious title.  Huh.

"He who makes a beast out of himself..."Here it comes, their potential magnum opus.  Melodically their best song so far, does an excellent job shifting from energetic metal to slow ballady alt-rock like it's nothing, and does an excellent job bringing standard hardcore punk into the alt-metal world.  On top of that, it's got an incredibly catchy guitar riff.  Even if it's not a very extreme one, it's an empowering one.  I've gotten aching arms and fingers doing air guitar to this.  Probably the best thing that ever came out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the movie was already good.

Trashed and Scattered blasted me into the "powercore" of the last album, but it wasn't so jarring as the shift between ballads and almost-deathcore like on WtF.  It felt so natural because the previous songs set a standard of diversity and aura that feels difficult to break.  Once again we get some extremely catchy rhythms.  Or maybe it's just me because I'm a power metal sucker, and I've been waiting for a band to really pull of the combination of metalcore and power metal.  This is what I expect.

Next, Seize the Day... OK, maybe I should've expected this, but a piano-rooted alt-rock ballad threw me off.  It didn't fuck with the vibe or anything, but it was a really pleasant surprise.  There's an easy comparison many have made to GNR, which may detract from the originality of the song itself, but at least it's a totally different singer.  Anyway, it's pretty cute and it's a welcome addition.  I think the vocal melodies outshine the instrumentation, though.

Sidewinder is next.  Here we have another energetic ballad that steers into some fairly progressive melodic territory.  It hits all the right notes for a proper alchemical reaction, balancing the rhythms, moods and hard rock / heavy metal vibes. The song goes on with this surprisingly soothing energy for two-thirds of the song before kicking into a Latin rock solo, never breaking the vibes.  That's pretty smart of them.  Not really overlong for seven minutes.

There's a welcome return to racecar metalcore and thrash metal with The Wicked End, featuring a wonkier lead riff with a little bit of djent attached.  But the song slowly mutates overtime, playing with varying levels of energy before somehow naturally working its way into a slow, symphonic chorus during the middle section and helping to overlap the third act until it kicks back into the thrash.  Is this the band's Stairway to Heaven?  Or is it just lacking focus?  No.  No way it's lacking focus.  It felt natural, and that's what makes it work.  The entire first album was loaded with metalcore tropes that didn't work together, so I'm going to approve this song and anyone can fight me on that if they want.  I'm a bit surprised this isn't the closer.  Maybe the album would be fine if it ended here, but I was gonna give the other three tracks a go and finish the album anyway.

The perfect way to start a song after that ambitious monster is with a slow pairing of acoustic guitar and violins recreating the wild west.  This is the beginning of Strength of the World.  Alright, after everything I've heard, I'll give them a spaghetti western beginning.  What does anyone have to lose?  It's not fucking with the flow.  After the minute-and-twenty-second intro, we get back into the electric guitars and build up into a thrash riff and goes into a fairly heavy and meaningful song that doesn't try very hard to go into more drama and relies on high-pitched guitars and the singer's voice to do all the work.  Personally, I think for nine minutes this should've had more focus, but it's not bad.  Besides, the song does mix it up again by bringing back the acoustic guitars and going into western ballad territory, and eventually into energetic riffs again and finally a cinematic violin outro.  It's another ambitious track, but it doesn't really have the same oomph or balance as The Wicked End.

The second-to-last track is Betrayed, and I feel like this one's a little melodically challenged.  The riffs and verses feel a little wonky and don't flow very well.  It's obvious they were trying a little too hard with this song, and that it was basically filler for a seventy-minute album.  Bad move, really.

This monolith ends with M.I.A.  It begins how I expect, with a softer intro before forcing itself back into energetic territory.  Thankfully, the band chose the right genre to go back to: metalcore, their roots.  But this time, the melodies work and the unpredictability is balanced. I mean, the melodies aren't amazing, but they drive this eight minute song from beginning to end and never loses its grip.

Alright, I'm extremely happy to say that I've given their iconic third album a spin.  And now to goad half the metal community into pointing their guns at me: I ate the majority of this album up.  It may be overly ambitious, but it's good to see they were trying a bunch of new things, despite the fact that the overambition leads the album to be frontloaded, especially due to the shorter lengths in the first half.  They seem to have largely forsaken metalcore, but they kept the personality traits and made something pretty fun.  This album might not always have the best songs, but it fits all of my standards for a good album.  The biggest reason I liked this album is that it handles genres and melodies exactly how I would if I were in a metal band (although I'd be heavier, and less reliant on epics).  Overall, great album by a band finding their ground, even if they have some toning down to do.

OK, nobody liked the Avenged Sevenfold debut album, and neither did I.  They say this one's pretty good for the fans, though, so I've got big hopes for this.  Finally getting around to these guys, I'm eagerly awaiting the moment I get to turn on City of Evil for the first time, but I don't want to do that until I get a really good idea of how the band evolved within the first three albums.

Like the first album, this starts out with a decent intro which gets up right into the darker vibes the band is going for.  Unholy Confessions felt dull, under-produced and dreary in its tropes.  It pains me that it became a music video.  But I found that Chapter Four was much more packed, keeping a consistent melodic vibe with its overlapping vocals and slight Gothic touch, and even had a lead riff vaguely reminiscent of the energy of my favorite franchise to compare metal songs to: F-Zero.  There's definitely a poppier thing going on here, but that's an improvement from the chaos of the debut album.  This definitely deserved to be the lead single for this album.  Remenissions starts out with the unspoken combo that I call "powercore," a genre I would totally kickstart if I were in a metal band.  Unfortunately, this is where it becomes clear that the band is steering too close to the "similar tempos" trope that many genres fall victim to.  I wasn't expecting the Latin acoustic segment, though.  Weirdly added, but somehow nice.  Desecration Through Reverence shows a bit more focus on mood-building and justifies the existence of the shifting tropes in a single song in the follow-up to their debut.  It feels so much more natural than everything the debut features.

I didn't expect many differences out of Side B, but I was hoping.  Turns out, my hopes were satisfied even for a little while.  As soon as this slower, alternative metalcore album with a deeper emotional vibe ends, the album steers RIGHT INTO POWER METAL like it was nothing.  This side ends with a basic combination of the temp tricks of the last two songs, and I can't really say this decision does anything for the album.  Despite the progressive nature and melodic prowess, it's a filler song.  Radiant Eclipse is slower, more alternative and rooted in traditional metal ballad behavior while maintaining the signature edge.  This six minute track really was a breath of fresh air that, unlike the pop rock track in the debut, Warmness of the Soul, which felt like a relief of fresh air from the crappy metalcore, is a perfectly fitting alternative song that completely continues the darker vibes of the album while building on previously established influences on this album to become its own thing.  Next was I Won't See You Tonight, Pt. 1.  One look at the length and I thought to myself, "What kind of song on a metalcore album like this lasts nine minutes!?"  My first thought was a fairly proggy ballad which probably builds on the gothic elements suggested by the secondary genre tag on this album's RYM page.  It gained a very slight heaviness from its standard ballad energy at the start, but it lasts that way throughout the whole nine minutes, so I only got about two thirds of it right.  It's really just an overlong ballad.

So now that that was over with, right back into the screechy metalcore like it's not a jarring difference.  This is Part 2.  They could've at least built into the conflict rather than making it instantaneous.  And of course, this song goes right into djenty weirdness to add another trope to the mix... although, this is the first song in this overlong album to do so, so I'm not too bothered by the trope.  Ironically, Clairvoyant Disease goes right back into alternative ballad territory, once again creating a jarring effect on the flow.  And finally, there's And All Things will End, which starts off with a riff similar to many Iced Earth songs, vaguely reminiscing thrash and power, but feeling right for the album here.  It's got much of the same drama as well, but the melodies are only decent and it doesn't hold a candle to any Iced Earth classics.

OK, I'm not gonna call this one of my favorite metalcore albums, but I'd say this album made AVS an easy band to LIKE, as opposed to an easy band to LOVE.  Their songs are poppy enough, maybe too poppy for metalcore and never displaying high points of creativity, but they try as much as they can with the genre they chose for themselves at the time and managed to keep things fairly entertaining with some sense of variety and a much better sense of emotion.