a MODERN METAL blog

It’s probably been relatively obvious from the last two or three posts that I never really intended to put this on hiatus for over half a year. And yet, here we are, with a harrowing “7 months ago” hovering under that blogpost about Car Bomb... and me, not quite knowing how to move forward with this.

But one thing I’ve definitely come around to thinking is: I don’t really know how many people read this, originally and still but no matter if it’s a thousand, a hundred or just one, I surely owe an explanation of what is going on with this blog and what I want to do with it. And you know what? This time around, let’s make it a bit more detailed. At the least, it might be more interesting that way.

Because here’s the thing: even apart from the usual ‘a lot of stuff going on in my life’-thing that every single one of us has, and which is, thus, not very informative at all, just looking at my relationship with music and the writing about it, there’s more than just a single reason for why this blog is in the state that it is in. So let’s look at them, one by one.

1. I listened to barely any Metal for probably half a year.

Somewhere around summer of 2016, maybe a bit later, I’m not entirely sure, I discovered a specific genre of electronic music: Synthwave. Now, some of you might think “’Discovered’? What’s the big discovery? Everyone’s been raving about it for ages now.” Which is true. Ever since Perturbator became well known and it was discovered that a lot of the darker, more pumping strain of that style of music is actually pretty riff-based a lot of Metal-centric blogs have been writing about it quite regularly. So it’s not like I got aware of its existence in 2016. It was rather that I got struck by it in 2016, in a way. If you’ve read this blog for a while, it probably won’t sound like news to you that I’ve always had an open heart for Pop and especially Synthpop. And not only revealed my initial digging into Synthwave quite a lot of 80s retro-Pop artitsts that made seriously fucking amazing Pop music; this reveal coincided with a phase in my life that probably had me longing for a bit of calm and harmony, be it a cheesy, plus a slight feeling of oversaturation from listening to Modern Metal primarily for quite a long time. So I dug into it deeper and ended up barely listening to anything else for probably more than half a year.

What probably gave that drive more momentum was a simple thrill that this gave me that I hadn’t felt in quite a long time: a genuine feeling of discovery. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Modern Metal and I don’t really feel that I’m jaded but when you’ve had it as your main go-to type of music for 10+ years, it is hard to listen to a new song and not immediately recognize all the common patterns. It makes it hard to get genuinely excited about anything, as, even when what you’re hearing is good, there’s just no surprise to be had anymore. But, at least for a certain while, Synthwave could give me those surprises. It was deeply refreshing, and to some extent still is. A bit like a little throwback to when I first plunged my head into Metal, back in my teens. Not just listening to it as a diversion, but truly exploring it. Commiting to it.

And that probably awoke a certain longing in me, that leads to point two...

2. I am currently trying to get back to a more intimate connection to music.

And this had been coming, for... hard to tell honestly... probably a decade. Over the course of all of those years of listening to music and writing about it I always had a weird on-and-off relationship with writing about music. I loved it for some time and then I got incredibly fed up with it, and then I got back into it. And for a very long time I thought that it might be an effect of analytical listening interfering with my purer listening pleasures; or me getting fed up with myself for falling into certain patterns in my writing; or me thinking about formulations for texts while listening interfering with the direct music listening experience. And while all of those things are factors, I’ve come to think that they are rather symptoms of a problem a bit more fundamental. Years of keeping up with releases, lsitening to them all, writing about them, analysing music for things that I can competently write about while listening to it, completely removed my intimacy with it. Really, the very simple ability to just carve out an hour of the day, start and album, lean back, close my eyes and just listen to it, note for note, detail for detail, accidental noise foe accidental noise. Letting it sink deeply into my mind, wandering the sonic space in my headphones, slowly and carefully watching what it evokes in me. A truly commited, meditative experience of music that I knew I once had but that I had distanced myself from for years and years.

Finally realizing this, what arose in me was, obviously, the wish to reexplore music in that way. Get back to albums that I’d listened to far too litle, far to little intensely and really commit to it, for at least an hour a day.

And I’ve been at this for months now and it has been a pretty amazing experience. Getting slowly back into a mindset of full concentration on a piece of music is refreshing in its own way. But it has its further effects, obviously. One of them being the question how I can organize my writing about music in a way that it doesn’t decrease my ability to concentrate fully on a pice of music when I listen to it in the long run. And I don’t think I have an answer to that yet. 

And the second major one being me getting back into a genre of Metal that I had lost sight of for quite a long time.

3. Which has led me to get back into Extreme Metal.

I always listened to Death Metal and Black Metal and all that neat extreme stuff. But over the years, I lost a bit of sight of it and just listened to what was hot at the time on the side, far removed from my deep adoration of the Extreme sphere in my later teens. Interestingly, listening to music on my big pile of ‘I still have to give this a decent spin’-candidates in a more meditation-minded way revealed to me something like an entire world I had just forgotten about. The gnarly, the skewed, the weird, the excessively harsh, the purposefully dissonant quickly turned out to be a space I so love to wander through that I struggle to remember what made me leave it in the preiphery of my vision for so long a time.

Anecdotaly, it is strangely similar to my feelings about the landscapes found in the swiss mountains. I regularly spent my summer holidays there with my grandmother when I was younger. But, getting into my earlier teenage years, I, of course, got fed up with it. Only now, almost two decades later, do I see those mountainscapes on televeision and think: “god, I want to go there again”, deep familarity and fascination with those forests and rock formations emerging again with a puzzling intensity. This odd combination of comfort, excitement and willingness to just lose yourself in something that you just want to wrap around yourself like a blanket.

Taking the time to walk back into the soundscapes of Extreme Metal felt a lot like that and ignited an intuitive love for the sphere that I had barely been able to remember. At least in this form.   

4. Which means that I’ve basicallly barely been listening to Modern Metal for almost a year. 

The likely effect of which is obvious. It made me get back into Extreme Metal hard. Which meant, after my long Synthwave exploration phase, another phase of barely listening to Modern Metal. Which is still ongoing, to be honest. Which leaves me in the uncomfortable and peculiar situation of having this long list of releases and bands that I truly, honestly, want to write about but that I have hardly any intuitive, immediate interest in listening to at the moment. Not ideal.

5. Combine that with a lingering wish to polish this blog up a bit.

But that is not all, as there’s also the matter of the blog itself, coinciding with my own music-listening journey of recent time. For, again, quite some time now I’ve looked at this blog, occasionally checking back on older posts, thinking: “Good god, I really need to proofread this”. Putting it simple without going into all the small problems: If I go on with this, I want to have this blog in a state where I can be just plainly excited when it is linked by an artist, and not worried.

Which would include going through all of its posts and proofread, spellcheck, grammar-check, wording-check, link-check, overhaul, slightly expand and just polish up everything. And I feel this would be a worthy endeavour. But there’s this lingering question of a suitable way of writing this without losing my intimate connection to the music I’m writing about. And also something else that has been bugging me for a while.

6. Also, further combine that with thoughts about moving the blog to a more suited hosting service.

And that is: I don’t really feel that tumblr is such a good platform for this style of blogging. Someone will probably read this and go: “Well, duh”. But still being kind of a novice at blogging and also a complete autodidact in all matters digital, things like comments integration, statistics and view tracking, ease of use for long-text writing, etc. have slowly but more pressingly come into my view over time.

But this presents a new problem. If I want to overhaul and polish up this blog, it would be idiotic to do this now on tumblr, if I’d want to migrate this blogs content to somewhere else anyway. But currently not quite knowing how deeply I am commited to the continuation of this blog, I also don’t quite know if paying 5-10 bucks for a proper hoster for a blog on a wordpress-basis is actually feasible.

K. And you have a shitload of uncertainty. 

Which leaves me... hanging, to be honest. What to do with this? I simply don’t know. I want to continue but I don’t know when and I don’t know where. For the time being, I’ll keep this blog hanging in hiatus alongside my own uncertainties and try to figure something out. 

Ok, this is totally not how I planned to do this, as always but it’s not like I have a time machine that allows me to go almost three months back and keep the schedule I set up for myself in glorious overambition. A lot of what sent this blog back on hiatus was, as you would expect, private, so no comments on that, But some of the reason was also a certain inability to get myself to write about a certain release. 

And now we are in a new year and I there’s still just some releases from last year that I really have to write about to get some closure, as far as partly arbitrary calendar distinctions are concerned. And so, I carry that certain release over with me and...

... well, I really have to write about it now or this will never go on. The release I’m talking about is Car Bombs third album, “Meta”. Which, spoilers, I was absolutely mesmerized by. Which makes it quite hard for me to write about it because I just know that I will probably be overselling it, when you look at it soberly and with a bit of distance. As it is one of those albums where it is hard for me to really distance myself. But the alternative would be to not write about it and that would just be wrong, in my eyes, both because of its quality and because of its significance in the context of the topic of this blog.

So, let’s start this. “Meta”. What you will not read me going wild about is how unbelievably mind-bending its rhythms are. As is probably visible from a lot of my comments on Meshuggah, for me personally that is kind of besides the point of this type of music. Part of that may owe to the fact that I am neither a guitarist nor a bassist nor a drummer, so i can’t really see and fully appreciate all the devils in the details. I just don’t really know how hard it would be to write this, memorize this, play this. But I’ve always thought that, while it is a missing piece in my view that I’d like to fill in some day, that kind of perspective has a certain merrit. It ‘allows’, or rather affords, me to focus less on the intricacies of composition and instrument-mastery and more on the overall sound and on different kinds of details like connections to other works of music from other bands. And in this case, what I see is an album that doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t spin your head around. It instead is a very measured, a very clear album. Much more in the tradition of the more goove-oriented work by Meshuggah than in the tradition of Dillinger Escape Plan.

Or, to carry it into a pleasently pretentious analogy, if you were to compare those different approaches to styles of ancing... “Meta” is not the dancer flailing and spasming artfully, exeggarating his every move to the most extreme, making you wonder which one of his limbs is currently attached to his shoulder. It’s more a dancer that just walks across the stage calmly, in a straight line. And that is all he does, though something is strange about it. And you begin to look closer and you realize that every single movement from the tips of his toes up to the strains of his hair is ever so slightly odd. He truly is walking slowly in a straight line but doing it in a way that draws attention to every single muscle movement on his body, captivating by virtue of sheer clarity.

“Meta” is an album with clear song structures, clear hooks, clear grooves, and head-bangable rhythms all the way through. But in every structure, every hook, every groove there is that special touch, that detail, that idea that just leaves you captivated, smiling, waiting to see the next move.

And a big part of that experience, for me, was seing how many influences this album channels. Beginning with the raw dirty clanging of Pantera

across the infectious dry off-beat rumble of Meshuggah, across the machine-like clanging of Fear Factory 

right to the dancing gargantuan stomping of early Gojira

The guitar tone flavors, rhythms, different approaches of reduction to and emphasis on rhythm all seem to bleed into the music on “Meta”, subtly but always kind of visibly.

Meta by Car Bomb

This even includes certain allusions to the more mathy and industrial strain of recent Death Metal with the song “Sets”, that very fittingly includes guest vocals by Suffocations Frank Mullen.

Meta by Car Bomb

While the vocal style gravitates between the high rasp of Meshuggahs Kidman, and certain reminiscences to Pattons work with Dillinger Escape Plan,

Morenos style of singing with Deftones and Burtons bark and Pop-infused Industrial Rock hooklines with Fear Factory.  

Meta by Car Bomb

But that is by far not all to be found, as some of the ways that guitar tones are modified, as for example in “Secret Within”

Meta by Car Bomb

remind strongly of certain ways of messing with the bass tone in electronic music, especially Drum and Bass.

Which gives some sections of the album a strangely electronica feel, even though elctronic elements are otherwise not really present. Which gives it some subtle stylistic ties to Modern Metal bands like Mnemic or early Textures.

As this all flows together, “Meta” becomes a sum-up of two and a half decades of rhythm-centric, rhythm focused Metal. But it doesn’t do it as a gallery of hommages or quirky citations. All of it is channeled into something that sounds incredibly fresh, incredibly its own. This is not just taking from the masters, it is learning from the masters and then using what you learned to create something that only you could create. In this way, “Meta” is not only a sum-up of two decades of rhythm-focuses Metal, it is also a concise and clear as day show where and how you can progress from those two decades going forward. It is a melding of technicality, intricacy, approachability and catchiness completely grounded in this tradition but completely unafraid to start a new step. Standing on the shoulder of giants, not in their shadows.

I’ll just leave you with this wordy token of my midly tempered euphoria and the complete work to digest, of course:

So I’ve been brooding about this for basically a week now. Do I write something on Meshuggahs recently released new album “The Violent Sleep Of Reason” or don’t I? It would almost have to be a review. But what angle to possibly take. I shoved this left to right and back to front in my head. Thought about focusing on how they seem to move back to a droning drum-driven sound not unlike “Catch 33″ but without its off-kilter structure; or on how the live-recording and some of the guitar leads seem to put the album much closer to a sound akin to Death Metal than ever before. But no matter what I ran through my head, I just couldn’t find any secure ground in any of those angles, second-guessing my take every step of the way.

Which is not unusual and absolutely healthy when writing up any kind of judgement on any kind of work of art. But I felt I did it more here than I’m used to. Which was when another thought crossed my mind: This has to do with more than just my regular insecurities about reviewing an album like this. Stuff like “do I understand enough about technique and composition to judge this?”. And what this more is might be more interesting to write about, and read, than anything I would currently be able to say about “The Violent Sleep Of Reason” itself.

So let’s talk about talking about Meshuggah for a sec. What is my problem? I’ll start by boiling it down to whyt appears to be the core of it for me: They have a solid legend-status now. But havn’t they had for a long time? And how is that problematic? Let’s take those questions on one after the other.

So, first one: Havn’t Meshuggah had a certain legend-status for some time now? Not quite and not like they have now. Let me flesh this out. As I’ve written in the past, in my experience and observation Meshuggahs influence on a lot of the current Metal landscape was indirect, and thus their popularity and reknown was tied to the popularity and reknown of bands that they majorly influenced. In the early 2000s it was perfectly possible for a person who already was into Metal for some time to know, say, Mnemic but not Meshuggah, sometimes resulting in the discovery of Meshuggah when asking for music that sounded similar to Mnemic. I don’t think that this would be a probable scenario today. Back then, Meshuggah were incredibly niche and it were bands like Mnemic, Textures, Sybreed and similar, who incorporated their riffing style into an easier to listen to overall style, that slowly but steadily helped spread the word about this major inspiration of theirs: Meshuggah. At that point Meshuggah already had the predicates “original” and “unique” attributed to them from all sides but they hadn’t had any huge explosion in reknown or influence yet. 

Their name slowly began to be mentioned more and more in the course of the later 2000s, when their style of riffing became more and more frequently adapted by other bands. The big but still niche Math Metal wave with bands like Coprofago and Four Question Marks happened. Modern Metal began to become bigger. In the wake of Textures and similar, that which is commonly called Modern Progressive Metal began to take off with bands like Tesseract and Fellsilent, but also a lot of smaller bedroom projecs like Clodukicker and early Periphery. Soon after, in the early 2010s, that whole disparate and scattered movement of artists who adapted Meshuggahs style was attributed a new collective name, “djent”, in effect making it recognizable and memorizable as more than just some singular artists but as a larger movement. At this point, the one major shared influence of all of those artists, still Meshuggah, became not only explosively more well known, their name now almost omnipresent in discussions about this new thing in Metal, Meshuggah also became distinctly visible as the originator of a specific set of stylistic elements. Often even cited as the originators of the whole movement (though I’d point out that artists like Fear Factory, SYL, Dream Theater, Sikth, some earlier Modern Metal bands and a lot of others were just as important for the current younger Metal landscape). And like that, Meshuggah gained another predicate “major influence”.

But that, I would argue, was not yet the point where their legend-status was solidified. At this point, their status was still slightly hanging in limbo as their last album “obZen” had been released in 2008, before the big djent-wave, It was now clear that they were original and unique and a major influence but how would their story go from there on out, how would they react? It was probably their 2012 album, released pretty much at the early peak of the djent-movement, “Koloss”, that cemented their role. They still did Meshuggah. Slightly more groove-focused and straight forward than before but still undeniably and unmistakeably them, standing there as a calm monolith in the storm of heated discussion about djent, its role, its qualities and their role in it. And this didn’t just cement their significance for that moment. Meshuggah did Meshuggah and stood there calmly as a musical monolith as djent slowly lost its peak traction. Now, that a lot of the movements artists have faded from view, dissolved, refocused or reoriented, that is still the case. Which means that Meshuggah now have yet another predicate that can be attributed to them: “time tested”. And it is this predicate that really completes the collection of predicates that ultimately cumulate in a status that can, without too much overreaching, be called “legend”-status. 

But, assuming that my reconstruction of this all is about correct, how is that problematic when passing a value judgement on one of their albums? Well, with this kind of legend-status comes a lot of need for recursive thinking. As that kind of status, or role, as it is acknowledged by a great sum of people, comes with a plethora of expectations, preconceptions and prejudices (neutral, not only the negative kind). When you judge and album by a band that is solidly known to be original, unique, a major influence and time-tested, for one, the pressure of passing an adequate judgement is much higher. If you screw up, more eyes than usual will rest on it. But, more fundamentally, it is exponentially harder to estimate what judgement is actually adequate. If I have a very positive impression of that album, is that just because the status of that artist, their role in the discourse, primed me to be positive? If I have a rather negative impression of that album, is that warranted or am I overcompensating because I don’t want to be primed by the status of the artist? Leading me from “had another band released this, I would have judged more negatively” into “had another band released this, I would have judged more positively”-territory which is just as much of an easy trap to fall into. Or, formulated a bit more broadly: Is my judgement as it is because a sensible assessment of the properties of the work, or because this kind of judgement fits the narrative in which I see that work embedded best?

Trying to pass a value judgement on an album by a band that has reached a status like Meshuggah have at this point in time almost unescapably becomes entangled in a sheer mess of background assumptions and reflection on them. And as you’re exposed to discussion and thought about this artist countinually because of their status, falling back on things like intuition or gut-feeling isn’t really much of an answer, as those things have already been shaped and adjusted by what you have become used to think and assume about that artist. In such a situation I find it hard, unpleasent even, to do a critique on and album like this, the follow-up to “Koloss”, the album that a lot of people probably just firmly expect to nothing but further cement the legend-status, the time-testedness of Meshuggah.

Putting it radically, I wonder if an adequate value judgement of such a work is even realistically possible. But, of course, considering that question with any consequence would need some serious thought about the more fundamental questions of what “adequate” means precisely (beyond “reasonably defendable in argument in light of the properties of the work and the normative assumptions they are judged by”) and if any work (of art) would ever be adequately judgeable by that udnerstanding of “adequate”. And I lack time and expertise to really do that.

I’m still holding back a longer form post about Tryant Of Death for another occasion but that doesn’t mean I can’t write about related projects, right? So let’s just search ourselves a seat, strap in and really push in that gas pedal until it grinds on ash-glazed and fallout-washed tarmac. It’s time to listen to some Kunstzone.

Kunstzone is a collaborative project between Alex Rise (whom you may know from aforementioned Tyrant Of Death and Psychotic Pulse) and Candy (the man behind President Streetwalker and Khaozone). What the collision of these two minds, melting Rises Black Metal- and Math Metal-infused, and Candys noisy Punk, Grindcore and a drop of Fear Factory -infused takes on Industrial Metal into one blazing ball, brings forth, sounds a bit like SYL and Anaal Nathrakh had a really mean ‘stepped-into-life-by-strangling-the-doctor-with-its-umbilical-cord’ kind of baby.  

Since the start of the project, they have released two albums, the latest of whitch, “THE ART OF MAKING THE EARTH UNINHABITABLE” actually dropped last Friday, quite uncelebratory but a long time coming. Both are rather short form but considering the type of music, the length is actually rather appropriate. The 6 regular songs on this one really don’t need more than about 30 minutes to make their mark and leave their impression on whatever happened to stand in their way. 

While both albums are top notch and heartily recommended, I do feel this latest one has a slightly better pacing and some more memorable moments. It refines rather than revolutionizes. But, honestly, revolutionizing wouldn’t really be necessary, as this projects sound already sits in a rather unique niche. Bridging multiple gaps between several, more older and more newer school, strains of Industrial Metal, offshoots like Industrial Black Metal and even showing some hints of Modern Metal here and there, wraps all the grit, noise, hammering, raging, exaggaration and elation found in the sounds of artists from Godflesh to Sybreed into one package without getting lost in hommages or references.

Have a listen:

I originally wanted to make this a bigger post and do it last Friday, but... well, my plan dissolved a bit when I listened to the new album by Meshuggah that I originally planned to include and just didn’t manage to figure out if I want to write something about it or not. As it often is with albums by that band it’s, at the same time, Meshuggah just doing their thing again and a lot of nuances that are kind of different from what they did before. And as always it is incredibly hard to judge how significant those nuances are. I certainly don’t just want to write something that simply has been said already, especially as a lot has been said already. But I also don’t want to exaggarate some of those nuances to make myself a topic.

But while I’m still pondering that and maybe giving “The Violent Sleep Of Reason” a few more runs to gather my thoughts, there are those other things I wanted to cover last Friday that probably shouldn’t be forgotten just because I can’t make up my mind. So here we go:

1. I already covered the Swedish project Rave The Reqviem shortly when their debut album dropped and seeing the way they are going it is probably highly appropriate to cover their just released second album again. I’m not entirely sure I remember their debut well enough to properly judge this but from my memory I feel like this one actually features more riffing that leans closer towards the staccato-heavy style typical for Modern Metal. Some passages of “Gospel Of Nil”, with that light hammering over floaty electronic backgrounds and short bursts of slightly Black Metal-ish coloring actually remind me quite a bit of Sybreed. Apart from that, though, not a lot has changed. Rave The Reqviem still play an od but highly entertaining mixture of Pop Metal, Industrial Metal, Modern Metal, Industrial Rock and Eurodance (or something along those lines). It is an album filled with hit material but also one that barely ever strays from a very narrow song structure mostly focused on the choruses. Which lets it become repetitive relatively fast and work better on a song by song basis than it does as a whole album, I think.

But even with that caveat, it’s still up on the list of top straight forward Pop Metal (where the Metal isn’t just there as an alibi) releases this year, I think. And if that sounds something for you, be sure to give it a listen:

The Gospel Of Nil by RAVE THE REQVIEM

2. Well, this didn’t really come out last Friday but I kind of feel that I owe this band some actual coverage after I mainly ranted about how hard their internet presence is to find. Ever since they released their debut album mid-year, City have gotten their presence into working shape, putting said album “On The Egde Of Forever” up on bandcamp in its entirety and adding a link to their Facebook-page. So now you can easily find them and their work and have a little peek into their album. Having listened to it now, it is pretty much what I expected after the three songs they released prior to this. It is a slow-paced Progressive Death Metal albnum with a lot of Devin Townsend worship going on on it, in riffing style, melody-writing and direct citation here and there. Interestingly though, I never felt that it became overbearing or painfully obvious. They have a certain way of taking the style of a lot of the harsher Progressive Metal moments of Townsend and integrating it into a more Death Metal centric context that makes it sound fresher than you might initially think. The fact that their songwriting overall is really good and all riffs and melodies definitely hit the spot, hommage, citation or entirely own creation, definitely helps to make this debut one to have an eye on. They are not yet able to really step out of the long shadow of their main inspiration but they have a formula goind that makes me eager to see what happens when they do.

Definitely don’t miss this one:

As I already alluded to in one of my recent posts, I have not been listening to a lot of Metal in the past months. So, getting back into this isn’t as easy as I would wish it was. Which will hopefully eased by some posts about what I actually have been listening to in the following weeks. Before I do that, though, there’s some Metal releases I definitely want to write about. One will be coming this Friday, the other one is one of the few that managed to fully capture my interest while I was off diving into electronic music.  

And that is the debut album “Decline” by the Spanish band Melanism. This is one of those rare situations where you just stumble upon some relatively plain bandcamp page with just one album up from a band that you never heard of and then you click play and suddenly it somehow pulls you in deeper than basically 90% of all those releases you had eagerly anticipated that year. It’s this combination of surprise and just the intriguing-ness of the things itself that allows it to just hit you without having to get through several layers of expectations and preconceptions first.

Now, I can obviously not promise you that you will have the same experience and by reading this and the following, it’s basically guaranteed you won’t (which is always the thing with talking about something that pleasently surprised you), but I still want to turn some ears towards this, because “Decline” is a damn good and also pretty interesting album that I don’t want to end up overlooked. 

On the surface, listening to the first time to about the first two songs, Melanisms debut may see to fit pretty clearly into the niche of the mostly French wave of harshened-up Death-y, Math-y  Progressive Metal in the wake of Gojira with artists like Hacride, Klone, Mistaken Element or (partly) Hypno5e. It has this heavy, weighty riffing, that deep melancholy current carrying everything, that semi-harsh melodic singing style, that clearly-a-song-but-not-unexplorative style of songwriting with clearly identifiable hooks but still a good amount of variation and different parts. 

But listening to it a bit longer and letting it sink in reveals a slightly different beast, that is similar to those artists in atmosphere and vocal style but goes some pretty unique ways from there. The riffing, for one is focused far less on humping and punching mathy grooves and far more on a type of weightiness achieved through a flowing, melodious approach. It is its dissonance that makes it feel Math-y. But that dissonance, too, is always part of a melody. In a way, this very melody-centric approach to mathy riffing that leans on its fuzziness and dissonance for melodic purposes reminds me a lot of some of Watch My Dyings work:

But, as said, with less focus on thumping groove. Another thing that reminded me of them but maybe more of earlier Hacride is the use of electronic elements that are very subtly woven into the other instruments and amplify their melodies, creating a very dense, sometimes slightly cacophonic sound-picture. Wich in turn, reminded me a fair bit of “Luminiferous”-era Sarve together with the flow-oriented mathy riffing and also taking the very straight-to-the-point, matter of fact (in lack of a better term) delivery of vocal melodies in the more hooky sections into account. But, of course, far less Industrial, less Death-y and far more melancholy.

Which was the point at which I actually realized that “Decline” is actually kind of a Modern Metal album in my understanding of that term. Its Industrial and slightly futuristic features and stylistic connections to the good ol’ Fear Factory/SYL/Meshuggah triangle may not jump right into your face. But the reason for that is their combination with this French new wave of Progressive Metal -stylistic repertoire and a strong focus on melody over exaggarated groove, which creates this dense, dissonant, deeply melodic hybrid that reveals new nuances and connections and a lot of hidden catchiness with every new listen. 

So, really, if you like any of the mentioned artists or just the above broad description, give this one a listen:

... if you didn’t check in all of those niches spread out in the big theatre of music.

1. Let’s start with a returning occurrence on this blog. Brandon Mohlis, that solo artist with a strong focus on Progressive Metal concept albums that I’ve mentioned twice before, has released his newest album yesterday. He stays well within his usual framework when it comes to theme and format, as it is again a concept album about a topic in the general area of retro Fantastic Literature. With Superhero comic-books lending the stylistic and lyrical outline to this one. It continues his move away from a more Industrial heaviness towards an overall more Rock-oriented style and away from the obvious Townsend-isms of his first release to a fairly recognizeable musical fingerprint, that already showed on “The City Of Lost Monsters”. Combined with a very straight-to-the-point song-oriented approach that makes it uncharacteristically catchy and easily approachable for a concept album. 

With its overall more Rock-y sound it may fall a bit out of the narrower focus of this blog but I’m pretty sure that if you’ve liked what he did up to this point or generally have an open heart for more light-hearted upbeat and less meandering Progressive Metal you’ll definitely like thsi one. Give it a bash:

Superheroes! The Musical by Brandon Mohlis

2. You probably won’t remember it, let’s be honest. Ages ago I pointed you to a German band called “Prometheus” that strived to do a cinematic blend of Progressive and Industrial Metal. Since then, they have renamed to “Dhark” and progressed further into doomy, dark Progressive Metal territory. The first result of this delve is their new album “Darkness Amplified” (really trying to drive the point home, are we?). Since their Prometheus-times, their sound has definitely developed into a far more coherent combination of slow rolling but not tedious bassy grooves, concise part Industrial, part symphonic highlights in the background to amp up the proportions a bit and a vocal style staying in a shift between harsh and clean. And despite all the slow rolling soundwalls and amplified darkness, they also have a lot of well constructed build-ups, hooks and tempo changes this time around.

Be sure to check it out if dark, harsh Progressive Metal that breathes Extreme and Industrial sounds like something for you:

3. Khonsu have released the first single for their approaching new opus “The Xun Protectorate”. They are a Norwegian project that has been dancing on the lines between the grand cold landscapes of Symphonic Black Metal, the avant-garde-ish noisy Industrial/Black/Progressive Metal experiments of Cyber Metal and straight forward Industrial Metal with their past releases (which I wholeheartedly recommend) and this single probably drives the point home more than ever. If some majestic futuristic music between Mechina and the more Black Metal-minded tracks of Sybreed sounds like something you might want to listen to, put this one on your list:

4. You might remember my mention of the soundtrack for the 2016 Videogame “Doom”, done by Mick Gordon, a couple of posts ago. It is now officially released with a new mix, composition of all the shorter fragments and sequencing adjusted for regular music listening on various platforms. If you liked what you heard last time or are just itching for some Tyrant Of Death-esque 8-9 string Industrial hammering intertwined with electronic ambiance to punch some of your brain cells into fighting shape for two hours, here’s an official stream:

Here I am wiriting, back from hiatus... again. Hopefully a bit longer than before, as I’ve got some of the more tedious stuff of recent months off my back. But, to be perfectly honest, this post doesn’t exactly flow out of my fingers. A lot of that has to do with me taking almost a little break from Metal music recently. I’ll probably get to that in the coming posts (because, after all, who’s saying I can only write about Metal here, right? Apart from some implications of the title, of course.).

But good flow or no good flow, there’s still releases rolling out that I just have to gather some words on. And one of them is definitely Subscales new album “Devolution”. Subscale are a Coratian band first visibly active with their 2012 EP “Fictional Constructs”. I personally fully realised their existence with their 2013 full length record “The Last Submission”. Stepping onto the stage in that year with some Meshuggah-influences under the hood, their reception, as it is for many bands during that time, got entangled with the still pretty roaring djent movement at the time. Something that, looking at the tags beneath their albums, they don’t exactly resent. And why should they. But percieving them in that context may lead you to expect a much more Meshuggah-styled riffing approach than they actually have.

In contrast to that expectation “The Last Submission” was actually less sterile, more oriented towards a flowing, more rumbly groove. Add to that a tendency towards harsh vocals and short, pointed clean vocal highlights and a somewhat reduced role of the electronic component, in comparison to other projects like Neosis or Nakaruga, and you have a sound more akin to early Hacride, The Interbeing and a whiff of Fear Factory here and there. Which, at the time, and still currently, is actually quite a bit refreshing among a lot of bands with a very futuristic, clean and more Electronica-oriented sound.

The Last Submission by Subscale

Their recently released second album, finally after three years and a failed crowdfunding campaign, “Devolution”, continues this approach but with slightly more coherent and balanced songwriting and sequencing that has hookier and more overtly harsh moments distributed more evenly across the songs and the album as a whole, creating a nicer flow, even though an immediate earcatcher like “Inception” might not be around this time.

So, be sure to give this one a liste, too:

As it sometimes happens, bascially a day or so after that last post an album came out that reminded me of the fact that I had forgotten to mention a certain band that is actually quite interesting to take note of when it comes to interweaving Modern Metal elements with elements of traditional or folk music. 

You may remember that some time ago I wrote about a Russian Industrial Metal/Modern Metal band by the name of Bog[~]Morok. And how they left their early Death-y/Doom-y kind of sound for a more avant-garde and Industrial sound with their second album around 2005. Interesting thing is, they didn’t really just leave this part of their sound by the wayside. Not only will you still find a lot of traces of it in their later work, as I already mentioned back then, but they also formed another band in which those elements are still very present, called “Shexna”. Concentrating on slow crawling melancholy and kind of sad grooves and melodies, mixed with traditional instrumentation and traditional clean vocal styles.

But having still most of Bog[~]Moroks line up, you also find traces of the more modern, Industrial side of their sound in Shexna; with some compositions sounding quite Modern Metalsy in the way that traditional instruments are layered into the songs, how the songs are structured and, of course, also those deep rumbling guitars with their leaden mid-tempo Meshuggah-y grooves. It’s a really interesting calm but very heavy in mood and guitar work hybrid of Doom-y Metal with traditional elements and a mathy Industrial undercurrent. 

The release that put me on this is actually their new recently released new album "Вы завийте, витерочики​.​.​.", which I absolutely recommend you check out if anything of the above or some of the stuff in the last post sounds appealing to you.

There’s this thought I had in mind for quite some time that quite some music that crosses folk and traditonal music elements with harsher Metal elements ends up sounding a bit like the stuff that I’m calling “Modern Metal” here, even though it doesn’t really use synths or sound futuristic. But some of the composition methods don’t seem to be far off. I originally planned to make this a little series of posts in the context of crossover Metal, leading in with some thoughts on Tengger Cavalry. But I’m not quite sure that would be feasible right now. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little delve into that usical sphere anyway. As there actually are some bands around that don’t just play Metal with traditional music influences that sounds somewhat like Modern Metal but pretty much straight up Modern Metal with traditional music influences. Allow me to turn your ears towards two of those.

Let’s start with the one that actually made me want to write this exact post. Which is Ukranian project Sva Da Ra, that released their debut EP “Istok” just two days ago. It’s one of those releases I just stumble upon in a random browse and get the immediate urge to shout into the world about. It’s niche, it has a pretty low profile and it is seriously killer stuff. It may lean a bit more on the Progressive Metal and Ambient side than what I normally recommend here; but the combination of heavy downtuned guitar stabs, various traditional instruments, electronic elements and all clean female vocals in a likely eastern european singing style that I can not tell you the name of all come together to form a sound that does some really intriguing splits between traditional music and modern Metal styles without really ever sounding entirely like either one of those even a second. Be sure to check it out:

Исток / Istok by Sva Da Ra

The second band that I think I should really mention given the occasion are Niburta. These Hungarian guys, and girl, of course, have been around for a while. Their first album “Scream From The East” was released in 2012 and could garner some critical acclaim, if I remember right. It’s a pretty weird but also pretty amazing combination of Death Metal with strong groove-orientation, traditional instrumentation and a strong Progressive and Avant-Garde undercurrent with slightly off-kilter sections and clean female vocals (again, in a likely traditional eastern european singing style that I don’t know the name of).

Their recent new EP leans a bit more on the modern side of things with a very percussive feel to it and some more modern Industrial-style riffing.

ReSet by Niburta

... on that band called “City”. A bit of digging in places that shall not be named finally put my nose on their Facebook page. Here it is: https://www.facebook.com/NDCITY/

At least now I know why I couldn’t find it. “ndcity”? Guys, how on earth do you think people will find your page with something as nondescript as that?

And it seems that EP is not actually an EP but will become a complete album sometime soon. By the way, it might be a good idea to point that out on the bandcamp page on more than just the individual description of one song. 

Now, calm down. I know introducing a band like this always seems a bit unfair to their individual profile and personal creativity. But I actually don’t think that it does in this particular case. Which has a lot to do with my experience with their new album. Which I will obviously get to.

In a sec. Let’s get some setup out of the way first. As can be seen from the title, the band I’m talking about here are Subliminal Fear, an Italian outfit that has been around since as early as 2001, but became visibly active only in 2005. Their just released third album “Escape From Leviathan” hit me as a bit of a surprise. Because, even though I did know of their existence prior to that, they never really sprung out to me as a band that makes music that interests me too much. I’m by no means saying that their first two albums were bad but what they played by then was a pretty typical strain of Newschool Melodic Death Metal along the somewhat harsher lines of mid-career In Flames. So, if you’re into that, you might want to check those records out, actually. Here’s their debut (also for comparison purposes):

Uncoloured World Dying by Subliminal Fear

My personal interest for that exact style of music had already declined significantly at that point, after the mid-2000s had seen a huge wave of artists that played it. So I checked out their first offering, didn’t get too much out of it and probably finally saved them under “good, but not interested” when their second album hit in 2012, not really doing much different.   

All the greater the surprise when I saw their new album labelled under tags like “modern metal” and “industrial” and wondered what happened there. And definitely didn’t expect what I heard there. They had some larger lineup changes between their albums, but guitar and bass are, as far as I could find out, actually in the hands of their original personnel from their debut album. The biggest change would be their new dual-vocalist setup. Considering their comparably huge stylistic change, I would think that that is probably really due to a change in their personal stylistic leanings. 

What they went to from Newschool Melodic Death Metal with “Escape From Leviathan”, is basically prototypical Modern Metal in the vein of Sybreed. And I’m not just saying articulate groovy riffs with a technical air, huge presence of synth backdrops and harsh/clean vocal dynamics. No, I’m saying similar song structures with the later-career Sybreed pattern of a standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus -organisation, broken up by an adventurous middle part. I’m saying similar sequencing and song types with a catchy-as-hell opener, a slow pattern-repeating buildup to a huge harsh, semi-symphonic beast of a banger of a song and a second half riding that momentum out with a bit of heightened variation. Seriously, “Evilution” is basically a combination of “Lucifer Effect” and “Dynamic”. And to be honest, I actually think that some tracks on this are actually on the edge of uncomfortably close to single specific Sybreed songs. I’m not entirely sure, but “Escape From Leviathan”s (the song) main riff and chorus sound a lot like “No Wisdom Brings Solace” and I hear bit more combined DNA of “Neurodrive” and “Challenger” in “Dark Star Renaissance” than I would like to. But I’m not saying they are plagiarising or copying, they are just really REALLY close to Sybreed at times.

So much so that it astonishes me that I saw those similarities go mostly unmentioned in a lot of reviews. So, you might aski, am I saying that Subliminal Fear, as far as this album is concerned, are derivative of Sybreed? Yes. Somewhat. But if you’ve read some of this blog, you might remember that is not necessarily a value judgement when it comes from me. Yes, they are extremely close to Sybreed in a lot of aspect. Basically every element of their rifing style, structuring, vocal dynamics, directly remind of them. But that does not mean that they are bad for it. 

Actually, quite the opposite. For multiple reasons:

1. Seriously, when it comes to exactly Sybreeds style of doing the Modern Metal, there’s not exactly a lot of bands playing that. Still active, we have Clawerfield, Nakaruga, Decode The Design and then some more that I can’t remember off the top of my hat. But, really, not a lot. To have Subliminal Fear as a new entry in that small circle of bands that play pretty much exactly the style of music I’ve been in love with for years is really something I welcome.

2. I get the feeling they know it. I mean, even besides the Sybreed similarities, this album is just overall Modern Metal as fuck. The sound, the production, the lyrical themes, the artwork. They even have vocal contributions by Gillaume Bideau (Mnemic, One Way Mirror, ex-Scarve), John Howard (Threat Signal and quite some others) and even Lawrence Mackrory (ex-Darkane and Scarve), for gods sake. I found this album charming for the very outward and open commitment to this style of music alone.   

3. They are really good at it. Plain and simple. Their riffs are cool and very very catchy, most of their choruses hit the mark, their synth backdrops are expansive but not overbearing and well-interwoven with the rest of the music, A lot of the tracks are actually quite memorable and extremely catchy without being so simple that they’d burn out any fast.These guys don’t just very openly like this style of Metal, they also very clearly know what they’re doing.

So, yes, descriptively I’d qalify this album as somewhat derivative but when it comes to a  value judgement about it, I can only ask “so what, really?”. It is a great album for fans of bands like Sybreed, Breach The Void, Nakaruga or Clawerfield and you should definitely check it out. Here’s three sample songs:

Time to get one or two wheels mildly spinning again, so the rising tide of releases doesn’t utterly obsolete this exercise. I’ll start with some offerings of music you might have overlooked before I’ll try to get to some more band-centric posts again somewhere in the following weeks.

1. First off, I suppose not everyone into the music I point to on this blog is necessarily into Videogames, so you might not have come across the latest iteration of the First Person Shooter classic Doom. How would that interest you if you’re not into Videogames or into that kind of Videogames. Well, because this latest iteration of Doom has a seriously badass soundtrack to go along with melting faces off Demon heads and walking through Hellscapes that seem to have jumped out of the lyrics of a good ol’ Heavy Metal song. Like the game itself, the soundtrack is a reimagination and modernization of the mix of eletronic sounds and Heavy Metal motives of the original Doom I+II; mixing Industrial ambiance, synth and Dubstep stabs and just-go-for-it roaring downtuned riff attacks with some bright as day influence from Meshuggah and the more recent interpretations of their sound. The soundtrack isn’t officially released but you can find it on youtube. Have a listen:

2. It has been quite some time since I mentioned Cypecore, when they were in the lead-up stage to their new album “Identity”. That album was actually released in January and has turned out pretty damn amazing. They stay mostly true to their signature deeply Industrial-influenced style of Newschool Melodic Death Metal. Just this time around leaning a bit harder in the direction of Industrial (of the Fear Factory-influenced direction) with more prominent electronic elements, a bit more prominent more mechanical riffing styles and some hymnic not-quite-clean melodic choruses. Their latest singles are a good showcase of what to expect:

It’s probably their most dense, varied and catchy album yet, so definitely give it a bash even if their music didn’t quite reach you until now.

3. Well, if you’ve followed some of this blog you probably saw this one coming a mile away: Neurotech recently released a new album. Goind by the name of “Remission”. And I will probably never not mention anything he puts out. Because it’s right up my alley but also because there’s just always something to write about with Wulfs output. He has this really interesting habit of staying true to his style and iterating on it but in a wy that you never quite exactly know what’s coming next. “Remission” is just another case like that. I guess you could say that it combines the darker, more Industrial edge of “Stigma” with the lighter ambiance and flow and slight synthwave-y sounds of “Evasive” and the sparse, udnerstated guitar work of “Infra Versus Ultra”. 

I’ve especially fallen in love with the song “Divided Bliss” that is basically a Pet Shop Boys-y Pop song riding on an overall retrowave feel but driven by a straight forward damn catchy guitar groove. It’s like an 80s Pop hymn on shark steroids.

Be sure to give it a listen:

[UPDATE] Just a little Update. I just noticed that sinhle song is now a three song EP. Still a very good listen, so be sure to check back. Still no luck finding this bands web presence, though. 

Hey there! It’s me again. Still very busy with a lot of things, still including my master thesis, so delivering content on any regular basis is still a bit of a stretch. Even though there are some releases I really want to cover... but time and stuff.

But I thought I should make a little exception for this.

For one, if you are actually reading this because you like how I write or what I write about, it might interest you that I took part in some writing duties (and pleasures, of course) over on got-djent.com. I participated in a list for bands similar to Sybreed, two rounds of editor’s picks for 2015 (1, 2) and a roundtable review for The Algorithms “Brute Force”. Under the latter another user pointed out some similarities between the guitar leads and recent work of Dan Terminus and the like, which really makes me want to follow that idea and write something about the distinct Synthwave-ness of that album. But I can’t promise anything, obviously, as that would require some research.

Now on the topic for today, which is rather spontaneous, really. I just stumbled over this nice song by a band called “City” on bandcamp:

On The Edge of Forever by City

And, well, you might remember that some tima ago, when writing about the bands Diablo and Save, I commented on how you should definitely consider google when you chose how you name things that you want to be known. And this case brought that thought back into my mind with a vengeance when I tried to find any presence of this band somewhere else on the Internet via Google. So much so that I’m actually wondering if this is intentional.

They are called “City”, first of all. Not very convenient to search on a search engine when it’s a not so well known band you want to find. Even more so, when there’s another well known band with that name. Ok. Let’s try combinations, right? “Citymetal”? Quite some companies that produce mmetal work for use in cities, it turns out. “City Facebook”? Too common. “City band Facebook”? Too common. Ok let’s try adding the album name. “On The Edge Of Forever”? Not a very uncommon phrase. “City + On The Edge Of Forever”? There’s a well known Star Trek Episode with the name “The City on the Edge of Forever”...

Feels like an ARG with no objective and no solution.

“These guys again?”, you might ask. “I sense collusion!”, you might think, coming fresh out of some post-GamerGate twitter shitstorm. But no, I’m actually mentioning them again purely out of personal motivation, both because they are capturing my interest more and more and because I think I should mention them again.

Now, that last bit might sound a bit strange. “Should”? Well, let me give an explanation that might help characterise also why they are capturing my interest the way they do. I’ll do it with one basic point and two concerns.

So, basic point first: If you’ve followed this blog for a while or given it some cursory reading, you’ve probably noticed that I really like to tell stories about connections and developments. Which has multiple reasons, the most dominant probably being that I like figuring out patterns and that I find it aesthetically pleasing (which might sound strange at first sight but consider that the dramatic form of a novel is a big part of the aesthetic pleasure you’ll get from reading it.).

Now the concerns in light of that basic point:

1) I find the development of Isolated Antagonist to become seriously interesting in the way that it is beginning to make for a pretty engaging story about connections and developments.

2) I still fear that the story I told the first time around definitely didn’t do them justice and I don’t want to just let that stand.

Let’s start out with explaining 2). I introduced Isolated Antagonist basically as a band for old school Fear Factory fans in their totality last year. And with everything I see them doing going further, first their fully fleshed out story concept, now their just released second album “Affirmation of Entropy”, I get the very strong feeling that I got distracted when establishing my view on them. By what? From what? Hard to really describe without a musicological background. But my first take at framing it would be: Some aspect of form present in their music distracted me from its actual content (in a very broad and probably inaccurate sense of “form” and “content”). The similarities the song structures, the production and the rhythm patterns had with some of Fear Factories older material distracted me from the fact that the rest, the atmosphere, the composition, weighing of different elements, is much more different from that than might be obvious at first sight. Abbreviated you might say that I was superficial in my judgement. Though maybe not entirely unjustified in it.

But while that slight justification might have been there with their frist album, their second one, from start to finish, makes very clear that that judgement was a huge underestimation of what this band is actually doing. It might still not be entirely wrong to say that at its basic, “Affirmation Of Entropy” is kind of an album in the style of “Soul Of A  New Machine” with its fuzzy riifing between Industrial and Death Metal, its tribalistic drumming, its dark tone and the use of heavily distorted vocals. But if you look beyond those immediate things you’ll notice pretty fast that even in style, this is far beyond being an album that is caught up in those patterns. Far from it, and with this we shwitch over to concern 1), it takes those basic stylistic sensibilities and combines them with an approach that is informed by a lot of later influences. Ranging from Fear Factories later work with its involved story concept and grand soaring clean choruses, the omnipresent melody-weaving synthwork of Modern Metal, experimentation with ambient clearings to some deeply dark Pop-appeal and wall of sound-density reminiscent of Raunchys “Velvet Noise”.

On “Affirmation Of Entropy”, Isolated Antagonist are basically doing the splits between pre-’95 and post-’00 Industrial Metal. And magnificently so. Not only is this a combination that manages to have a nostalgic and modern appeal at the same time, it is also really unique and refreshing, in spite of being very reminiscent of other artists from time to time.

And keep the following in mind: this is only their second album. This will highly probably become even better and more distinctive going further. At this point, I’m more than looking forward to see and hear what these guys can do with their repertoire.

Well, that’s some hopefully ok story about me telling a story. If I got it right this time... maybe. I just hope this one does these guys more justice. And that it’s a story to be continued.

The fullfilment of the first hope you might be able to judge for yourselves:

Hey there. See? Not on hiatus. Well, it probably was. But as little as I have time to write something currently, I definitely want to keep this going, so expect at least something from time to time.

I thought I should take the occasion of the release of Marionettes new album “Propaganda” as an opportunity to introduce my keys to their backplate again for a couple of words.

Marionette are a Swedish band that has actually been around for quite a while having released their first demo 2005 and their first album, “Spite”, in 2008. When it comes to the height of their profile, they are the kind of band you probably heard about some time ago but never really followed to closely afterwards and also probably lost sight of. Which may be the case because they entered the fray with their slightly cheesy, pathos-laiden variant of Modern-ish Melodic Death Metal right when the market was seriously oversaturated with bands that play that style and also Metalcore bands that played music with a similar style.

Which is a bit of a shame as, from the very start, Marionette always had a way with lead melodies. Yes, cheesy, but just really really good. And while they didn’t really change their core formula going on, they began to lay it on a bit thicker with keys and electronics and some clean vocals, moving away a bit from the more typical Newschool Melodeath sound into a more Modern mixture.

And, well, remember how at least some of the albums by Devin Townsend taught us that when you lay on a lot of cheese and pathos, it can actually work out well; and when you lay on more it may become kind of awkward; and when you then go on, fasten your balls and lay it on even thicker, it actually becomes charming again? The latter zone of cheese and pathos is where Marionette are at right now. Their take on Modern Melodic Death Metal is a massive, saturated as fuck wall of Melodic Death Metal leads and grooves, Symphonic Black Metal backdrops with some well placed, very Townsend-ish, Pop-infused clearings, melodies and huge orchestral buildups.

So if those references sound good to you, be sure to give their album a listen on their official page: http://propagandaalbum.com/

And... uhm... also download it for free! That’s a hell of a cool move.   

Here’s a video showcasing the opener of “Propaganda” for immediate impressions: 

Ok, it’s probably time for a bit of unapologetic explanation for why this has been going like it has been going the last months. There’s multiple angles I could take but I think it really all comes down to this simple but significant point: I don’t want this blog to feel like work.

Meaning: I want to do it because I have fun doing it, not because I feel I have a duty to do it. Because that usually has a habit of making my writing a bit stale and clinical. I relate to this style of music with passion and I want that to show. The thing is: My time is somewhat limited right now. For two reasons: First, I’m head deep in preparations for my master thesis, which proves to be more reading intensive than I had anticipated. Second, a shitload of music got released in the last couple of months and a lot of it is music I really want to listen to. But by far not all of it is Modern Metal-related. And as my day has only 24 hours, like it is for everyone, and I also need sleep, I have to prioritize. And prioritzing that which you feel you have to do over that which you feel you want to do in your leisure time is a direct route to frustration. And if I get frustrated listening to Modern Metal, that’s of no use to anyone.    

So I don’t really see another way than to take it really slow with this blog right now. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it is on hiatus. I’ll pop in content every once in a while when something major gets released or I find time for a longer post. Maybe I can find a more regular place for it in my current week-organisation but, as said, forcing it would be bad for me and for the reader.

Now that you have an impression of what is going on, let me point you to some interesting stuff you might have missed:

First, you may remember Digimortal. They are one of the very first bands I covered on this blog. They have released two new albums since then and the second one, their latest by the name of “Дети галактики”, has basically just been released. As far as I can judge right now, it is a bit harsher than their last releases, so it should have a bit more appeal even for those who don’t really dig the Alternative Metal-aspect of some of their stuff.

You can find a preview teaser going through all tracks here and Amazon samples here.

Second, Isolated Antagonist have been very active recently. And their project is taking some shapes I didn’t quite expect. I have to admit I probably underestimated their ambition. Currently, they are in the process of fleshing out the concept running through their albums in book form, which you can follow on their tumblr page. I havn’t had the time to look into it myself but it sure is always interesting to observe when artists take the story and themes behing their lyrics serious. And that doesn happen all too often in Modern Metal. The most prominent example, and the only I can currently think of, would be Mechina.

Furthermore, they have released a new single that showcases where they want to go with their music and a heightened attention to the production side of things (though still retaining a lot of that raw oldschool flavor). Give it a listen:

Void by Isolated Antagonist

Third, you might be interested in “Extropy”, the debut album by Indias Yonsample. It strikes a very nice balance between some of the stuff you usually find on this blog and an early-to-mid Textures approach to Modern(ized) Progressive Metal.