February 2016 – Page 4 – Wonderbox Metal

Serenity – Codex Atlanticus (Review)

This is the fifth album from Austrian Symphonic Power Metallers Serenity.

This is a bombastic, larger-than-life album that boasts impressive orchestration and bucketfuls of sugary melodies.

Bands like this can so easily lose track of the Metal component of their sound, but Serenity remember this and include plenty of tasty riffs alongside the symphonic feast that they serve up so well.

The songs are enjoyable and well-written, making the most of the European style. Featuring all kinds of catchy and memorable hooks, melodies and harmonies, it’s an easy-to-like album, as long as you’re a fan of the genre, of course.

The singer has a strong voice that carries the tunes well. I like that he has a personable, charismatic side that is almost at odds with the flashy nature of the music in some ways. It has an earthy quality to it, even when he’s belting things out in true Power Metal style.

Production-wise, an album like this can really suffer without a suitably huge and ostentatious sound, but it’s clear that Serenity have spared no expense in this department. Everything sounds bright and shiny, polished and professional.

I really enjoyed this. In a genre that is well past its saturation point, Codex Atlanticus has enough personality and character to hold interest and is performed well enough to keep it.

Highly recommended.

Hemelbestormer – Aether (Review)

Hemelbestormer are a Post-Metal band from Belgium. This is their debut album.

Hemelbestormer are an instrumental band and they have created a sweeping epic of an album with four long, sprawling tracks lasting a total of 60 minutes.

Here we have an interesting and involved merging of different styles that are similar enough to get along well, resulting in the quite monolithic Aether.

Post-Metal, Doom and Sludge Metal are the main ingredients. The swirling Doom/Sludge claustrophobia of some of Neurosis’ more abrasive work is met by the expansive Post-Metal that the likes of Isis did so well. This is alongside elements of the heavier work of Pelican, with even some Post-Rock sensibilities of a band like Russian Circles getting a look in too.

The tracks take the listener on a journey through exploratory soundscapes and the Post-Metal build/release mechanic is artfully used throughout.

Aether is as heavily atmospheric as you can probably imagine, but in contrast to some bands that play this style, (especially, it seems, instrumental ones), Hemelbestormer are not afraid to let the distortion properly kick in and get really huge and heavy with the guitars. This pleases me greatly.

I love music that you can truly get lost and absorbed in and this is definitely one such album. Some instrumental bands can easily lose focus due to the lack of a singer, I find, but Hemelbestormer really don’t suffer from that problem. The music is detailed and nuanced enough to keep you coming back to it, but as mentioned previously, they know when to take things up a notch with the heavy guitars at just the right moments.

Very impressive. Take the time to listen to this.

Interview with Zlang Zlut

Zlang Zlut are an interesting proposition, as they are concurrently a traditional Hard Rock band and also quite unusual due to their use of cello. Either way, Crossbow Kicks is a riotous collection of instantly-likeable Rock tunes that get you moving whether you want to or not. I decided I needed to know more about this intriguing band…

For those who are unfamiliar with your band – introduce yourself!

We are Zlang Zlut, a two-piece rock band with a cello/bass pedal player and a drummer/singer from Basel/Switzerland, we play rock’n’roll. Bite this bullet!!

Give us a bit of background to Zlang Zlut

The cello player (Beat) is in his late fifties, me (Fran), the drummer/singer, I’m in my late forties. We’re both classically trained professional musicians, loving rock’n’roll. We’ve known each other from jobs in classical music and teach at the same music school. We’ve jammed and gigged in other formations before, but this duo has been the most rocking version of our common efforts.

What are your influences?

I’d say it’s a wide range beginning from classical music to jazz and blues to pop, rock, hard rock and heavy metal. We’re really open, but of course the most direct influences are stemming from the great 70’s hard rock bands like Purple, Sabbath and Zeppelin, AC/DC or Judas Priest, to name but a very few. Me personally I’m into loads of ’90s bands too like Helmet or The Melvins, but the list is really endless.

What are you listening to at the moment that you would like to recommend?

I really love the first Wolfmother album and Andrew Stockdale’s solo album, the first two Black Country Communion Albums, Billy Gibbons’ new solo album, all of Mark Lanegan’s albums, and a great duo from Nashville, The Black Diamond Heavies. And, oh yeah, Karma To Burn are phantastic, too.

Your use of cello in a Rock context is definitely outside of the norm. How did this come about?

It’s really not something we planned with any sophistication, it really just happened naturally. Beat truly HATED all existing attempts of using cello in rock music to date, so I guess when he plugged his cello through a distortion pedal into his bass amp, he was ready to make a different statement, or maybe less different, but purer, depending on the angle from which you look at it. We don’t think too much anyway, we just play, and we play what we love to hear.

Give us a bit of background to Crossbow Kicks – any particular concepts or ideas you want to discuss?

Most of the songs ending up on the album had been tested live in concert before, so the songwriting was a natural process of composing and performing. Because of the fact that our experience as a two-piece is growing, we get more security in what we do and what we can do. Still we’re trying to keep challenging us. I think we found a healthy mixture of adventurous and fun songs. I also like the fact that our music gets harder and more intense, but still keeps breathing. We’re pretty proud of this record.

How do you go about writing your songs?

It’s either Beat who comes up with a riff or two, we jam, record, I’m trying to find lyrics to the vocal lines in my head, we arrange, play, arrange, play, and at some point we try to have a version that we start playing live. There and later in the studio we might keep changing the arrangement, but even after recording it it’s not carved in stone and we’ll change it if we feel it ought to be. Beat’s songs are always fun to play. Whereas when I come up with a song I mostly come up with the finished song worked out on my computer, so then starts the whole process of trying to talk Beat into playing what I’d like him to play, which means tough night-long negotiations, haha. After several months of fighting tooth and nail, the song is there and slowly gets welcomed into the repertoire.

How did the recording process go?

We went into pre-production last may, recorded all the basics of the songs in one day, then I recorded all the vocals at home. Then we gave the files to Fredy, our label-boss. He gave us a severe and honest feedback, so then during the summer, we kept re-arranging the songs and I re-wrote half of the lyrics. A week before the studio we rehearsed day and night to get used to the changements and in shape and ready for the recording. The basics were done in three days, the lead vocals in two days, I did the all backings at home over two more weeks, then VO Pulver mixed the whole thing and we had two or three more sessions with him for adjustments.

What’s your favourite song on the album and why?

My personal favourite is “Now”, because it has everything I feel a Zlang Zlut song should have, a cool riff, a dramatic chorus, dynamics, space to improvise, a challenging arrangement and a great cello solo. No wonder it’s 8 minutes long! 😉

What does the future hold for Zlang Zlut?

Who knows? I mean, let’s face it, times are tough for this kind of music, and it’s a daily struggle to get heard in the global cacophony, but as long as we keep growing and loving what we do, there are plenty of rewards on the way.

Skáphe – Skáphe² (Review)

This is the second album from US Black Metal band Skáphe.

This is Black Metal that’s uncompromising, unsettling and uncomfortable. It’s a claustrophobic maelstrom of suffocating blackness that has strange, eerie melodies trying to escape it yet they keep getting sucked back in once more, like light trying to escape the event horizon of a black hole.

Unhinged vocals accompany the wild ride of the music, sometimes seemingly layered upon themselves, sounding like daemonic voices from the darkest void.

Skáphe don’t do things by halves, it seems.

The music on this release has a stronger than normal recording for this type of thing. So much so that you can hear and make out every aspect of the stifling darkness that the band create. It’s like drowning in tar, but an unusual tar; one that you can clearly see the constitution of, so that it makes the asphyxiation all the worse.

This unusual combination of clarity and murk works extremely well and Skáphe² is an extremely powerful album because of it. Something like this would be very easy to mess up in lesser hands due to the propensity for it to occlude or obscure itself, but the songs on this release stay focused, despite the heavy layers of grimness and desolation that the band wrap the album in.

This is 37 minutes of cleverly designed horror. It’s coming for you and you know that there’s a malevolent intelligence lurking behind the crystal clear fog, just waiting for you to get too close.

You have been warned.

Morth – Towards the Endless Path (Review)

Morth is a one-man Black Metal band from Bulgaria. This is his début album.

This album has plenty of occult melodies for the listener to enjoy. Sometimes these melodies can seem quite jaunty or folksy, which is a nice touch among the overall darkened vibes that Morth creates.

The long songs have an epic feel and there’s plenty of atmosphere to soak up here. The music is expansive and seems to revel in a certain primitive sophistication that some of the early Black Metal bands found themselves experimenting with. It’s the kind of music that makes me feel nostalgic and never fails to raise a grim smile.

Synths and keyboards are never too far from the action, wrapping the twisting melodies in their dark embrace.

Vocally we get trademark Black Metal croaking screams that fit the music perfectly. These vocals are absolutely of the classic style and go hand in hand with the classic atmospheric music.

This is well-constructed atmospheric Black Metal with a nice line in melodies and uplifting leads and synths.

Very enjoyable.

Interview with Frozen Ocean

Frozen Ocean’s latest release The Prowess of Dormition is 25 minutes of quality atmospheric Black Metal. Wonderbox Metal caught up with the brains behind the project once more to find out a bit more information…

For those who are unfamiliar with your band – introduce yourself!

Hello. I am Vaarwel, the only person behind this project.

Give us a bit of background to Frozen Ocean

Frozen Ocean was founded in 2005 and had 10th anniversary last year. I always be the only member of this project, and will be. “The Prowess Of Dormition” is nineteenth official release.

What are your influences?

I usually try to avoid influences to create something original, but for “The Prowess Of Dormition” I can mention Vinterland, Thy Catafalque and obscure Russian band Valhalla as entities that inspired me somehow.

What are you listening to at the moment that you would like to recommend?

I generally listen to brutal and technical death metal, so I’d like to recommend to check upcoming Wormed album named “Krighsu”.

Give us a bit of background to The Prowess of Dormition – any particular concepts or ideas you want to discuss?

“The Prowess Of Dormition” has no particular concept or plot, but all the songs are about struggle in philosophical sense, as entity overcoming the hindrances. Struggle is the only thing that can make us better than we are and pushes the evolution forward.

How do you go about writing your songs?

I write the music first, keeping in mind the title and concept, and only then write the lyrics. I record all instruments and vocals by myself, and do all the sound work as well.

How did the recording process go?

Relatively fast.

What’s your favourite song on the album and why?

Title track, I guess, because it is the quintessence of whole EP both in music and in lyrics.

What does the future hold for Frozen Ocean?

Something new and unexpected, as usual.

Horrified – Of Despair (Review)

This is the second album from UK Death Metal band Horrified.

Horrified’s début album Descent into Putridity was a maggot-filled coffin full of raw, underground Swedish-influenced Death Metal. Things have changed since then, it seems.

A Swedish Death Metal influence is still apparent, but the band have expanded their horizons and taken in further influence from the more melodic side of the Swedish scene; think bands like Dissection, Edge of Sanity and Eucharist. It’s an interesting and unexpected change of direction for Horrified that allows them to develop their more expansive, progressive and melodic sides, while still including some nice brutality when they want.

As this development sees the band becoming more sophisticated and melodic, there’s a corresponding increase in length in the songs, with a couple breaching the eight minute mark. This allows the band to add the melodic, emotive side to the core of their old-school style, achieving a blistering combination of the two that works really well.

Although I miss the primitive old-school rumble of their début, I must admit that it’s very nice to see a band develop and spread their wings further afield than their early influences. As these influences do still play a part in their sound though, it’s not a total departure. The end result is that they have progressed into an entity that’s far more interesting and accomplished than what they have demonstrated in the past, and Of Despair is a very enjoyable and compelling piece of work.

Oranssi Pazuzu – Värähtelijä (Review)

This is the fourth album of Black Metal from Finland’s Oranssi Pazuzu.

Oranssi Pazuzu play Black Metal that incorporates elements of psychedelia and Progessive Metal into its dark embrace.

This is the great thing about what Black Metal has become – it has developed way beyond the initial confines of the original genre into all manner of weird, wonderful and splendid things, probably more so than any other genre in many ways. Purists may disagree and say that Black Metal is one specific thing or another, of course. Whether they’re right or not is largely irrelevant, but what is relevant is that Black Metal has been used time and time again as the base inspiration for many a band’s exploration into wider sounds and different pastures.

All of which serves as a slightly long-winded introduction for Värähtelijä; here is an album that does exactly as previously described – it takes the base of Black Metal but does so much more with it than your average Darkthrone clone.

Here we have music that has been expanded upon with psychedelic and progressive properties, as well as the claustrophobic apocolyptica of Neurosis and the extravagant otherworldliness of Sigh. All of this is wrapped up tightly in an emotive, atmospheric blackened cloud and hidden deep in a murky cave somewhere, awaiting discovery by you.

Yes, you.

The atmospheres created on Värähtelijä are surely born of the void, born from some howling, other place that refuses to conform to our physical laws. Surely? The depth, texture and mood displayed on these tracks is more than most bands manage in a lifetime. That’s not so say it’s always 100% effective in everything it does, but again; it’s way more effective than most bands succeed in being when they add a bit of mood to their music. However, Oranssi Pazuzu aren’t “adding a bit of mood to their music”; this is pure mood music and everything here is designed to emote and emote strongly. And it does.

This is certainly not one-dimensional and there’s a lot of different ideas, sounds and styles incorporated into their trippy take on dark music.

Hugely impressive and a great absorbing listen for anyone into music that takes time to appreciate as it seeps into your mind and takes over.

Vargstuhr – Howlings (Review)

Vargstuhr is a one man Black Metal band from Spain. This is his début release.

Unexpectedly, this album starts with an acoustic, folk-influenced track that has semi-clean vocals chanting rough outpourings. It’s a left-field opener that has a lot of rustic charm. After this, a frosted guitar melody blows in, heralding the next track and just when you think you’re in more familiar territories the guitars drop out and clean vocals appear. Then it goes all raw and evil, and at this point you realise you’re not dealing with an average release.

Howlings pays tribute to the fertile experimentation of the early Scandinavian Black Metal scene, effortlessly recreating the feel of the era and the feeling that anything is possible as the early innovators started to diversify out from the original blackened template.

This is both primitive and sophisticated at the same time. The recording is clearly on a low-budget, and at times it becomes quite unbalanced or strange, (what’s up with the horrible blasting snare drum sound on Howling 5: The Hunt, in Search of the Prey?), but honestly I can’t care that much as for the most part it suits the style of the music and represents a certain rawness and authenticity that I can get on board with. Besides, I’ve heard a lot worse.

The playing and songwriting can be similarly described; this is not the high-polish, high-gloss of the mainstream, this is strictly underground Metal fodder and sounds all the better for it.

Howlings combines atmosphere, melody, folk influences and raw Black Metal into 45 minutes of music that I can’t help but really enjoy. It genuinely takes me back a couple of decades and shows a mind with a keen understanding of the early Black Metal scene when it was right on the cusp of birthing itself into the heavily-fragmented, multiplying, mutating sub-genres of the blackened style that we know today, but just prior to this when everything seemed so genuinely exciting.

Even ignoring all of this though, purely on its own merits, Howlings is a very enjoyable slab of primitive Black Metal that has aspirations for so much more and succeeds in breaking out from the well-worn path into its own trail, writing its own story.

Well done that man.

Folteraar – Vertellingen Van Een Donkere Eeuw (Review)

This is the début album from Black Metallers Folteraar who are from the Netherlands.

This is claustrophobic, suffocating Black Metal that features the kind of fuzzed-up, filthy guitar tone that feels like it’s going to swamp you and end your existence.

Primitive and atavistic, it seems that Folteraar draw their strength from the same primordial well-spring of ancient power that first gave birth to Black Metal’s sicking abortion. This is heady stuff that’s definitely not for the casual listener; true acolytes only will appreciate this.

There’s a definite evil, otherworldly vibe to Folteraar. So much so that it’s almost impossible to think of this as music that is being played by a band; it’s more like this has been conjured up direct from Hell. The inhuman screams that accompany these filthy hymns further enhance this impression.

The tracks are relatively short, designed to quickly establish and maintain a dark, grim atmosphere. The unhurried pace is uncaring about the standard structures and practices of mainstream music and is more concerned with mood and feeling. This is one of the many reasons that this album succeeds where it could quite easily have been a sloppy failure in less talented hands.

Ohh, but this is very nice. Of course, it isn’t, but you know what I mean. It’s rare you hear Black Metal this deliciously depraved and esoteric.