Leprous - Pitfalls

From the moment I put on this album, two questions immediately came to mind. First, is this even metal? And second, does it matter?

Leprous are no strangers to experimentation, with a unique blend of operatic prog metal that's softened over the years but hasn't diminished in its infectious zany intensity. So while Pitfalls continues in the same direction as 2017's Malina but more so, it's as unquestionably Leprous as any of their other albums. This is the band at their most symphonic, most electronic and most vocal-centric. And it mostly works.

Lacuna Coil - Black Anima

Lacuna Coil is a band that helped shape my tastes back when I was just starting to explore a new world of heavier music. I became a fan around the time Karmacode dropped and quickly dug deep into their back-log. Comalies still stands out as an album I can return to any time, and the benchmark that I judge every Lacuna Coil album against.

Since then. Shallow life saw saw them trying out a poppier sound with mostly tragic results. Dark Adrenline recaptured much of what made their earlier sound great while modernizing it. Then Broken Crown Halo and Delirium just kind of came and went, not bad but far from memorable. That left me with lukewarm expectations for their latest offering.

Review: Blue Lightning by Yngwie Malmsteen

Yngwie Malmsteen plays the Blues… sort of

I’d like to first start off by saying Yngwie Malmsteen is and will always be a guitar god. As the father of neoclassical metal, I have immense respect for Malmsteen’s technical prowess, compositional skills, and ability to shred with such ferocity that your eyeballs could melt. That being said, if Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads so he could be a blues master, then Yngwie sold his soul off Craigslist to a classic rock station in Tampa. 

   

The album is weird. I read an interview where Malmsteen talked about Blue Lightning and he said: 

“I've been asked to do a blues album for the last 30 years. And this time I finally said, 'Sure, why not? Let's try it!' I just didn't want to be stuck in the standard, pentatonic, play a 12-bar thing. I didn't want to do that.”. 

While the quote sounds good on paper, the combination of neoclassical arpeggios and shreds on top of legendary blues rock songs is odd. At best. The entire album is made up of a few originals, but it is mostly a cover album. He covers two Jimi Hendrix songs (Foxey Lady and Purple Haze), Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones, Demon’s Eye and Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, and even a ZZ Top song (Blue Jean Blues). The cover I am most disappointed by is While My Guitar Gently Weeps, one of my favorite Beatles’ songs and favorite solos by Eric Clapton (who collaborated with the Beatles on this song). 

   

Gently Weeps is considered one of the greatest guitar songs of all time, in large part thanks to the magnificent soloing and riffing done by George Harrison and Eric Clapton. The song not only sounds melancholic, it feels sad. So much so that the guitar truly does sound like it is wailing in agony. The emotion reflected in the masterpiece is why I am so disappointed in Blue Lightning. Malmsteen simply doesn’t sound sad. 

The Blues gets its most signature sound and feeling from the emotions put out by the player. If you listen and watch the great masters of blues and rock guitar such as Robert Johnson, B.B. King, and Jimi Hendrix, you can see how big an impact their emotions have on their playing. Listening to Malmsteen play feels like he is just jamming and playing along to the tune, but not actually feeling it. It feels soulless and falls flat. All the arpeggios and sweeps in the world can’t save the album from what it is, a very talented musician showing off how talented he is. 

    Malmsteen’s album gets 1.5 blue lightning bolts 

https://www.loudersound.com/features/yngwie-malmsteens-track-by-track-guide-to-new-album-blue-lightning

What Ever Happened To Turisas?

This is the first post in our What Ever Happened To... series, where we take a look back at bands we loved that just don't have it anymore, or maybe don't even exist anymore, and how they intersected with our lives. This week, Danny talks about his history with Turisas.

I still remember how I first heard of Turisas. It was junior year of high school, roughly early 2006. My friends Nicky and Patrick were over at my place working on a school project and devouring a whole tray of lasagna (thanks Mom!). The project, a completely ridiculous LEGO stop-motion take on Beowulf, took most of the day and was a lot of fun. When considering the backing music, Patrick pulled up this band I'd never heard of that had this epic intro track (Victoriae & Triumphi Dominus). This was, of course, my first experience with folk metal, and I was intrigued. 

Soon after we wrapped up and Nicky and Pat left, leaving the fridge significantly emptier than it had been, I got (illegally downloaded) the rest of Battle Metal. A metal band with an accordion and a violin? What the hell was this? And videos of Turisas performances I found online showed them dressed like bad LARPers with face paint and fake blood smeared everywhere. And I loved every second of it.

Battle Metal is one of those albums that came around at just the right time in my life. I had just started moving off of the classics like Metallica, Megadeth, Maiden, et al. and expanding into what I can only describe as heavier territory like Nevermore. Prior to Battle Metal, I'd never really been big on harsh vocals, but Turisas scaffolded me through it with the overall bombastic, attention-grabbing music that caught my attention more than the vocals interfered with it. (Yes, you may absolutely make fun of me for this.) Considering my tastes in metal now, that is incredibly weird to write, but hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

Further, Battle Metal initiated my love for cheesy folk metal, and blew the doors wide open for bands like Ensiferum, Alestorm, Eluveitie, and Wintersun to enter my music library. And these of course paved the way for the melodeath I'm obsessed with now, but I'm getting sidetracked.

Battle Metal is still a solid album, though it definitely drags at points ("Midnight Sunrise" does not need to be 8 minutes, and "One More" could definitely go for a trim) and as such suffers from an overall pacing issue. There's more than enough there to make one interested in folk metal broadly and in Turisas in particular. The title track, essentially the anthem for war-focused folk metal for a good few years, starts with epic synth horns and keeps that energy throughout; Sahti Waari uses the band's weird folky instrumentation to great effect; and Rex Regi Rebellis, despite its incredibly cheesy prologue track, remains the highlight of the album for me, even though singing in Finnish sounds kinda goofy to my English-hearing ears. It's a good debut album that promises much more to come.

And oh boy did it ever.

Turisas' mid-2007 release, The Varangian Way ranks as one of my all-time favorite albums and is one of the few albums I actually own in physical form. The Varangian Way takes everything that was great about Battle Metal and brings it to a laser focus. You don't get a slow epic intro here though; the listener is thrown right into the action from the first riffs of "Holmgard and Beyond" and you're hooked. The pacing is perfect. The songwriting is easily Turisas's best. And the whole thing is a concept album (I'll let my history geek flag fly in a future post about this album). Also as a bonus track it has the fan-favorite unlikely cover of Boney M's "Rasputin." Seriously, who listens to this and thinks "this would be a great metal song?" Anyway, The Varangian Way is almost perfect. I wish it had a bit more to it (total length is a slim 43 minutes without bonus tracks), but I suppose it's better to trim the fat than to have a bloated pile with some good parts inside.

By the time I got my hands on The Varangian Way, I'm in college. I've met Greg. We bond over heavy metal and having the same obscure MP3 player (this was before everyone just used their phones, kids). Thanks in large part to my interactions with Greg, my tastes expanded very rapidly! Greg and I talked at length about bands, albums, songs we loved basically any time we weren't talking about Star Wars. We eagerly anticipated new releases, like Turisas' early 2011 release, Stand Up and Fight, expecting more of what we got from The Varangian Way. And we were both quite let down.

Where The Varangian Way was bold, Stand Up and Fight was bland. Where The Varangian Way was interesting and innovative, Stand Up and Fight was restrained and formulaic. Where The Varangian Way was great songs tightly woven together all the way through, Stand Up and Fight was the aforementioned bloated pile with some good parts inside. The title track is a concert staple of theirs, but is really a worse "Battle Metal" as far as viking metal anthems go and I think "The March of the Varangian Guard" is the only other track that gets any regular concert time. Following The Varangian Way was always going to be a tough ask, especially by me, but holy crap was this a disappointment. I think Greg summarized it best as "Viking Metal: The Broadway Musical." Except now I'd argue that's an insult to many Broadway musicals. Also for some reason, the band abandoned the LARPy Viking Ren Faire aesthetic for Mad Max: The Road Warrior.

WITNESS... our decline into mediocrity. Also the accordionist is so not into this Mad Max shit.

Of course, I kept my hopes alive that yeah, it was natural to have a bit of a slump after such a great release, but my hopes died pretty much on contact with the name of their next album, Turisas2013. Seriously. I don't know what they were thinking. This remains one of the stupidest album names I've encountered in a genre full of stupid album names (see any overly pretentious black metal band for examples). Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever listened to this album all the way through, and I can't name a track on it without Wikipedia pulled up. It made that little of an impression on me. And given that I recognized all but maybe one of the songs they played when I saw them live in 2014, I wasn't missing a whole lot.

The biggest problem with Turisas' evolution over time, in my mind, was that after the bombastic epicness that I adored about their first two albums, they trimmed things down. Hell, they completely dropped the accordion soon after recording Stand Up and Fight, and generally moved away from their folky roots. At one point I think I recall seeing a quote from the frontman, Mathias Nygård, that this stylistic change was because they wanted to focus on the live performance. Which I can respect; I've always thought backing tracks at a live show are kinda corny. But in doing so, I think they stripped away the piece of their identity that made Turisas stand out to begin with. They went from being a genre pioneer to a poor man's Ensiferum (and like, contemporary Ensiferum at that). Their live show was still a blast, but they lean mostly on older material, as well they should, in my mind.

Turisas hasn't released an album since 2013. The band is still active, participating in the great summer metal festivals across Europe as recently as this past summer, and touring Europe a bit before that in the spring, but one has to wonder if the show is getting a bit stale. Maybe there's another album somewhere in the works. Maybe life has caught up with Nygård and company as it has for many other artists and people's priorities changed. But whatever the reason, it seems like the Turisas I really once loved is done. I'd still see them in concert, because I know that will be more of the glory days, and I'll still keep my fingers crossed for another masterpiece of folk metal, but I can mostly recognize now that Turisas just isn't that band anymore.

That wouldn't stop me from being at least a bit intrigued by a new album though.

Review: Berserker by Amon Amarth

“We stare at death with crimson grins, with Odin's help we cannot fail”

Amon Amarth, the Viking Death Metal legends hailing from Sweden, will have fans and critics smiling after they listen to their latest album, Berserker. Songs filled with blistering guitars lead us into the fray of an epic battle, accompanied by the usual chugs and brutality that we have come to expect and love from Amon Amarth. Johan Hegg's growls are as crisp and strong as ever before- not something that can be said for most death metal vocalists after almost 30 years.

Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

Opeth is a Band I discovered fairly late in their career, starting with a quality performance at 2008's Progressive Nation Tour. Danny and I were both big fans of what Dream Theater were doing at the time, and we mostly saw Opeth as just another band on the ticket. But for me, like for countless others, they went on to become my bridge to a world of heavier music than most of what I listened to at the time. Like most fans, I prefer their prog death years, but their newer material has still been consistently solid. Even when they ditch the death vocals and dial back the distortion, it's still quintessentially the same band.

So how does their latest stack up against a 25+ year career without any outright duds?

Greg and Danny's Top 10 Star Wars Everything Episode V: Return of the Revenge Strikes Back

This is part 2 of our countdown of all things Star Wars. If you haven't read part 1 yet, we recommend starting here: http://butmostlymetal.blogspot.com/2016/12/greg-and-dannys-top-10-star-wars.html

Danny's 5: Plagueis
Plagueis may be a bit of a misnomer for the title, as the book is largely about the rise of a young Palpatine under the tutelage of his master, Darth Plagueis. Aside from the obvious interest in Palpatine as a character, the book is also noteworthy because it manages to make the events of the prequel trilogy MAKE COMPLETE SENSE! I’m serious. Luceno brilliantly discusses Palpatine’s hand in all the events that led to the blockade of Naboo and, ultimately, the Clone Wars. Having asked Luceno in person about this, he wrote all of this with no guidance from anyone. The poor man had to come up with a way to make The Phantom Menace not seem completely ridiculous, and he succeeded. The saddest part is that Luceno published Plagueis right before Disney mashed the reset button on Star Wars canon. Though he managed to sneak a bit of it into Tarkin, so he’s clearly trying to keep some of that around. If you’re interested in the backstory to one of the most important characters in the original and prequel trilogies, this is a great place to get it.

Greg's 5: Star Wars (A.K.A. Episode IV: A New Hope)
No list would be complete without the one that started it all. It’s the rare movie that changes how movies are made yet still holds up after decades of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and imitations. The original Star Wars is still the gripping adventure it was in 1977, dropping us into a world that feels real with an endlessly quotable, instantly likable cast. It’s the archetypical story of good vs. evil shot with a style and conviction that separated it from the pulp sci-fi that inspired it.If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading and go watch it. Just be warned that this rabbit hole is vast.