It’s Friday, and we’re firing up the way-back machine. Got a lot of ground to cover, so there’s no time to waste… Here we go!
Hello out there! Time once again for a quick excursion outside the music world and into the realm of the written word.
That’s right, we’re doing another book report…
Hey gang — it’s Bandcamp Friday! Let’s talk about death metal! Again!
Sort of like a response to this article from earlier in the week where we covered an album entitled A Way Back, today we’re featuring You Can’t Go Back — the latest from Canadian post-metal group Sarin, named for the chemical compound that has historically been used (and sometimes rumored to have been used) as a nerve gas weapon due to its extreme toxicity.
Good afternoon! Hope everyone out there is doing their best to maintain a positive outlook on this gloomy mid-May Monday.
If not, perhaps it would help if you took a moment to listen to this album from earlier this year: you may remember Raphael Weinroth-Browne as the cello player who comprises one-third of Musk Ox and half of The Visit, both of whom we really enjoyed listening to when we had written about these groups’ previous output.
Well, Worlds Within is Mr. Weinroth-Browne‘s first solo full-length, and it nicely showcases the wide-ranging versatility his instrument (occasionally augmented by effects pedals) is capable of.
Today we’ve got another album review for you — and a worthy follow-up to yesterday’s, as this one also contains long, low-tempoed tracks filled with filthy noise and despair. Although it’s actually their second full-length, Cast of Static and Smoke is the first output I’ve heard from these self-described “two weird queer kids with lofty ambitions.” But from that very first listen, Vile Creature grabbed my attention and never let it go throughout four tracks spanning nearly three-quarters of an hour. Let’s dig right in, eh?
Hey, folks — have you read this review of Canadian neofolk/baroque trio Musk Ox‘s 2014 album Woodfall? If you haven’t, I’d be kind of surprised — after all, in the two years since it was published, that review has become the most popular single item to ever appear on this website (as I alluded to when I named the album as an honorable mention for the Top 14 of 2014 list). In fact, it has had more visitors than the About or Contact pages, and far more than any other article I’ve ever written: twice as many as the second-most popular review ever, and almost three times as many as the most-visited article that I published in 2016.
As incredible as all that is, it’s absolutely true, and I figure it can be ascribed to one of two things: either I’m exceptionally good at writing about non-metal music performed with folk/classical instruments, or Musk Ox is just really, really popular. On the off chance that it would happen to be the first one, I’m going to take some time over the next few days to write about some more neo-folk/neo-classical groups whose orchestrations are decidedly non-metal. But in the event that the second thing also comes into play, I will be hedging my bets a bit today: what I’ll be sharing with you has been released by three different musical entities that each involve one or more of the three people who make up Musk Ox. And away we go …
On the way down the street to the bus stop — this is around 5:00 this morning — I realized something. I was hearing birds chirping and singing, and sometimes as I walked past houses, window air conditioners whirring and humming, but otherwise very little background noise whatsoever. It took a few minutes, but finally I came to the conclusion, all of the cicadas must have been sleeping. All those millions of big, ugly, flying things that have gradually emerged from their seventeen-year arboreal naps over the past few weeks to create a deafening cacaphony all over the surrounding area. Over the weekend, when I was stuck spending much of my days outdoors, cutting grass and pulling weeds and various other activities that put me right in the middle of the flight path for hundreds of the clumsy, red-eyed bugs, this nuisance seemed to have reach a terrible crescendo. Sounding like a cross between a gas motor, an alarm bell, and a UFO, the swarm of insects could easily provide a soundtrack for any horror or suspense movie.
Anyway, completely unrelated to anything, today we’re going to spend some time talking about atmospheric black metal. The two different albums I’d like to share with you were both released earlier this year by Avantgarde Music. These bands — one Lebanese, the other Canadian — take slightly different approaches to the genre, but they both generally have a sort of outer space vibe going on. Enjoy!
Hey there, ladies and gentlemen of the internet! I hope you’re having an okay start to your week. Typically I’d be talking about how Mondays are so terrible or whatever, but truthfully, I realize that things could be much worse. Around the middle of last week, I experienced a little bit of a minor medical emergency — hospital visit, a couple days away from work, that sort of thing. Everything around here got really disrupted and it kind of sucked, and I can honestly say I’m actually glad to be back to the normal daily routine, however awful and soul-crushing it may be.
Okay, with all of that out of the way, let’s get to the music! I’ve had to shuffle things around a bit since my schedule got so thrown off over the past several days, but we’ll do what we can to get back on track and get to sharing the albums and other news you people need to hear about. Today let’s take a look at a pair of releases from earlier this month, each by a one-member band (although each had some assistance on these recordings), and each having a Viking connection. It has been a month since the last time we talked about Viking metal — don’t forget that Amon Amarth are still in the middle of their North American tour, with a few weeks left — and it seemed like it might be fun to do it again. One of these albums actually includes a reference to the same source material as the Jomsviking album, and the other deals with ancient Viking settlements in North America …
Hello, Readers! Here we find ourselves on another Monday, and I’m sure you all are about as excited to be returning to work as I am. You may have noticed — or maybe you didn’t, I don’t know — that I hadn’t managed to write anything throughout most of last week. Such is the unfortunate result of being busy working extra hard, making sure everything is as caught up as possible, before missing an extra day of work due to the holiday weekend. The holiday in this case is America’s Independence Day, which took place this past Saturday but most businesses were also closed on Friday for its observation. However, while I may not have had time for writing during the week, I spent plenty of time listening to music. Always listening to music.
And I noted that during those days there was another holiday celebration taking place — Canada Day, the celebration of the anniversary of the official formation of Canada as a country (technically, as a Dominion under the British Monarchy), was last Wednesday. Therefore, it seemed fitting to spend the day perusing all of the Canadian music I currently have on my MP3 player. I noticed that this included a handful of recent (within the past month or four) independent releases from Canadian thrash bands. And then I decided to attempt a feat that (as far as I remember) has never before been accomplished on this website: a triple review! It’ll help that two of these three releases are actually three-song EPs, but still, this is an unprecedented level of ambition. So with that in mind, let’s get straight to it….
Valley of Steel 