Listen “Blackjazz” on a cold and dark morning in 2010 was love at first listen and it was one of the best albums of 2010 while Shining became one of my favorite bands. Although 2011 bring “Live Blackjazz”, a killer and consistent live recording, the awaiting seems longer than it actually was.
“One One One” pick up where “Blackjazz” left off, eventually Jørgen Munkeby and his bandmates get further darker, harder and more intense than ever before. The sixth album by the Norwegian Shining it’s a contorted mixture of black metal, industrial rock and jazz reminiscences, it’s blackjazz. Read more Shining – One One One (2013)
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Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine – White People And The Damage Done (2013)
Released on April 2, 2013 on Alternative Tentacles, the second studio album by Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine it’s a very strong, classy punk rock album filled with wicked guitar riffs, good sense of humor and social and political criticism. So, this is 101% Jello Biafra and “White People And The Damage Done” might be considered the orotund follow up of the Dead Kennedy’s 1987’s “Give Me Convenience OR Give Me Death”. No fillings, no fake s*it, no pop-punk (?!), no wasted or forgettable moments, but only true, honest, neat, punk rock. 54 year old Biafra shows that it’s still possible, and goddam it! it’s more alive and kicking then most of the self-proclaimed rebel and furious so-called musical products that the industry serve us nowadays.
So, shut up and shopping!! ( 😆 )This is something you definitively need to have it in your record collection! Read more Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine – White People And The Damage Done (2013)
Alexandr Vatagin – Serza (2013)
Cinematic and minimal electronic smoothly flavoured with dissonances and glitches, unexpected noise contortions and turns, but mainly staying in the smartly wide open spaces, Alexandr Vatagin’s third album it’s a chill, peaceful and enjoyable ride into minimal-modern-experimental electronic music.
Alexandr it’s also the head of Valeot Records, home of several other artists such as Tupolev, Port-Royal, Slon, Werner Kitzmüller Trio, Milhaven, Protestant Work Ethic, Dirac, The Pattern Theory, Werner Kitzmüller, Kutin and Attilio Novellino – some of them making guest appearances on this new album as well. Based in Vienna, Austria, Valeot Records supporting post-modern music that does not fit genre-classifications.
This is not an album of tumultuous, nowadays fancy bangings, drops and wobblings, but of emotions and gentle use of sounds. It’s a refreshing mixture of classic approach and modern texture, a style blending of post-modern shoegaze-like minimalism with the chill and gentle, jazz flavoured moments, all nice and smoothly dressed up in sparkling, electronic lace dresses. Read more Alexandr Vatagin – Serza (2013)
Device – Device (2013)
If not a super-group, a super-project build-up by Geno Lenardo (ex-Filter guitarist) and modern hard rock icon, singer David Draiman of Disturbed.
It all started when Lenardo reached out to Draiman to collaborate on a song for the “Underworld: Awakening” soundtrack in late 2011. Even though the song they recorded in Chicago and entitled “Hunted” didn’t ultimately make the final soundtrack, they decide to continue write and record tracks and soon they had an entire album ready to served to the audience through Warner Bros. Records.
“It started to develop very naturally and organically,” recalls the frontman. “Geno is a brilliant songwriter in his own right and a tremendously talented sound designer as far as the electronic palette is concerned. Together, we made this monster. It’s not metal. It’s got a dark electronic vibe. At the same time, these are big, anthemic, and intensely melodic songs. It’s futuristic rock.”
Although they tag it “dark, heavy, melodic, industrial” and mentioning mainly industrial influences such as Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Marilyn Manson, Pigface, KMFDM, Front 242 and Skinny Puppy, Device sounds like a dense and powerful mixture of Godsmack with Disturbed, Fight and Filter. Read more Device – Device (2013)
Rorcal – Vilagvege (2013)
It’s something wrong with me, or it’s something wrong with the world. I’m on the edge and this seems to be a hard decision, because I can’t make up my mind if I am crazy, or the rest of the world it’s crazy. This new type of post-everything – including the yet unborn/undone – kind of depressive and noisy whatever metal/rock/hardcore it’s murderous. Literally. If you feel good about yourself – accidentally – you will commit suicide anyway after listen into it. It’s kind of conquest who can make you kill yourself first I guess. Who can deliver the most gloomiest and chaotic hurricane of noises. This world it’s full of shit, I know, people are full of shit, I know that too, but you don’t have to remind me this constantly. I know!
Apocalypse? Perhaps. Definitively it’s something very wrong with this species and it deserves to parish. But man, I’m a sentimental old fool, I love a good cup of vine, I love to watch a beautiful sunrise, well, I love to f*ck, and I love to listen music. Among a few other things. I’m 43 years old, listening music for all my life and do some music by my own and with several bands for more then two decades now. I’m kind of alarmed that one of the best albums I had listen lately was “People, Hell & Angels”, a posthumous album of Jimi Hendrix with recordings from sessions in 1968 and ’69.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hippie or something!! I love down-tuned guitars as well as extreme metal. If it makes any sense. Read more Rorcal – Vilagvege (2013)
(ghost) – Departure (2013)
This is a quite emotional journey on the wings of soulful, cinematic – and ghostly – electronic music. Sensitive grooves and mysterious layers of obscure melodies are the ingredients of this moods and feelings oriented exploration. It’s like a movie without words, it gives you the wings to fly through an endless space made up of dream and fear fragments.
In a world where half of the humans acting like everything’s just fine and dancing, while the other half are drowning in depression and waiting for Apocalypse every single day, an escape into some wide open spaces like “Departure” it’s like winning a trip to heaven.
“Departure” is the debut album from Connecticut based producer (ghost). Rooted firmly at electronic music’s crossroads where electronic pop, early artificial intelligence era ‘Warpisms’ and experimental electro intersect Departure follows a thinly structured concept in which a protagonist, possibly (ghost) himself(?), escapes a type of confinement in search of freedom or immunity. Read more (ghost) – Departure (2013)
Suicidal Tendencies – 13 (2013)
Mike Muir and his gang of suicidal maniacs are back!! This is the 13th Suicidal Tendencies release (although, the ninth studio album), with 13 new songs, 13 years since the last album (“Free Your Soul and Save My Mind” released in 2000), but the first without guitarist Mike Clark since 1987’s “Join the Army”. And it’s ferocious! Right between the classic Suicidal maniacal grindings and the killer Infectious Grooves flavour. As always. Although, last time was a lifetime ago and probably most of the nowadays headbanger kids don’t have a clue what the heck I’m talking about.
But once again, I have to notice that these “old guys” have a criminal sense of memorable melodies, have the guts to deliver killer and powerful riffs and murderous grooves, while most of the nowadays formed bands only delivering over-produced, but absolutely forgettable mass of noises. By the way, kind of sad, scary and alarming. Read more Suicidal Tendencies – 13 (2013)
Iron Maiden – Maiden England ’88 (2013)
Even my five years old son knows who is Eddie and even further, he have several favorite Iron Maiden songs already. No better proof that Iron Maiden are living classics and definitively one of the most influential heavy metal bands of all times. And probably the only heavy metal band engaging three lead guitarist!! But this is a different story!
In September 2007, Iron Maiden announced the “Somewhere Back in Time World Tour”, which was tied to the DVD release of their “Live After Death” album – originally released in 1985. This tour led to the release of a new compilation album, entitled “Somewhere Back in Time”, which included a selection of tracks from their 1980 eponymous debut to 1988’s “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”, as well as several live versions from “Live After Death”. The final leg of the tour included the band’s first ever appearances in Peru and Ecuador, as well as their return to Venezuela and New Zealand after 17 years. At their concert in São Paulo on 15 March, Dickinson announced on stage that it was the largest non-festival show of their career, with an overall attendance of 63,000 people.
At the 2009 BRIT Awards, the 34 years old Iron Maiden won the award for best British live act. Voted for by the public, the band won by a landslide. Read more Iron Maiden – Maiden England ’88 (2013)
No Sun in San Francisco – Principles & particles (2013)
Very dark, very raw, technical and merciless, No Sun in San Francisco aren’t an American band, but a Swiss one and most of their debut album was recorded far away from the sunlight, down in an anti-nuclear shelter lost somewhere in Switzerland’s countryside. Without hanging tags, their sounds like a sick mixture of Neurosis, Isis, Converge, Cult of Luna and Meshuggah.
This new post-everything, but metal rooter scene it’s growing pretty fast, getting bigger and the Swiss scene seems to be one of the strongest. Impossible to label them, to define a genre, No Sun in San Francisco get inspired from the raw and contorted black metal butcheries up to complex and technical extreme metal, and form psychedelic and progressive flavors to shogazer contemplations. Unpolished, furious grinding to the ground passages are followed by quiet, still dark, but strangely beautiful, calm passages only to explode again with killer riffs and blood spitting deadly vocals. Read more No Sun in San Francisco – Principles & particles (2013)
Queensryche: War in the Ryche of the Queen
Queensrÿche fans might be confused lately and the fan base seems split into two. We’re in the strange situation of “which is which and who is who” having a Queensrÿche A and a Queensrÿche B, both sides accusing each other of the worst.
“Frequency Unknown”, the new Queensryche album it’s due to release on April 23 on Deadline Music/Cleopatra Records. Actually one of the new Queensrÿche albums, the other one have no title yet and it’s recorded by “another” Queensrÿche. Sadly, two quite different bands running with the same name in two different directions.
“Frequency Unknown” featuring original Queensrÿche vocalist Geoff Tate along with an entirely new – all stars kind of – line-up consisting of Read more Queensryche: War in the Ryche of the Queen
