Completely forgot to write at least a bit about the Second to Sun concert which I attended a couple of months ago. It's been a long time since I've been to a metal concert (although I've been to some punk, post-punk and folk ones during the last couple of years):
Track List:
Another interesting discovery from the north of Komi Republic, this time it's mostly dark ambient with a healthy dose of atmospheric black metal influence (well, that's exactly what I expected of a project inspired by the nature of that region anyway). Surely recommended if you like the aesthetics of "Russian doomer music" but wan't something based less in post-punk and more in BM/dark ambient.
Named after one of suburbs of Vorkuta, Vorgashor actually comes from Pechora (which isn't as far to the north as Vorkuta), and have released 4 albums to this day. This album contains "6 songs of unrequited love for the motherland", as described by the project, and it's the first one with all track names (except for the last one) in Komi language. All tracks are instrumental but contain samples of a Komi folk song, an old Soviet song by Mark Bernes, and a lecture by an occult writer and philosopher Evgeny Golovin. Along with the rest of Vorgashor discography, it was released on cassettes by a St. Peterburg-based post-industrial label Aphotic Gaze.
P.S. There apparently was a problem with the contact form on my blog, due to which I haven't received any messages during the time I wasn't posting on here. It's fixed now.
Track List:
The long-awaited full length album titled "Miyan Tui" ("Our Way") from the Komi folk-rock band Severiada is finally out a month ago! They're the only folk rock band with lyrics in Komi that I know of, and they have a pretty long history of performing live, but haven't released any recordings until recently. Don't know if it was released physically or on any major digital platforms apart from VK, but anyway it's a very good album that definitely make it into my personal top of Finno-Ugric folk-rock albums (or maybe even folk metal? I think it's heavy enough for the most part):
Track List:
I've started this year with Ingush post-punk, and let's continue with a band from a neighbouring region of North Ossetia. Turned out there's a pretty big rock scene compared to other places in the North Caucasus, which is not particularly surprising - when I visited Vladikavkaz in 2023, it left an impression of a much less conservative and more hipster-ish city than anything I've seen in surrounding Muslim regions, and while I've seen a lot Christian iconography, the actual beliefs of people were more pagan than anything else (say, like in the neighbouring Georgia, there's a cult of St. George, but rather as a pagan god of war than a Christian saint). And if there was death metal in Dagestan in 1996 and Armenia in 1994, it could be in North Ossetia in 1991 too.
This particular band suprised me by being one of the first to play deathgrind in the USSR, when it was very rare even in the much bigger and cosmopolitan cities like Moscow and Leningrad. They started in 1988 as a project of the members of a hard'n'heavy band Исповеди and thrash metal band Orgy, and released their only tape album in 1991. While I expected a really poor quality of production before listening to it, it turned out to be a lot better than I thought, and the music itself is a lot more interested and varied than what you'd hear on a typical grindcore demo from the 90s. Unfortunately, it was released right before "Nevermind" by Nirvana came out, so next year they had to switch their style to grunge because no one was interested in their metal stuff anymore. Not much is known about their futher history except that they've finally split up in 1996 (yes, that was a tough time for everyone and for metal bands in particular), and their vocalist died in September 2001. If I'm not mistaken, no one in the band was ethnic Ossetian, everyone in the lineup had Russian and Armenian names.
Today's my next birthday, and also the last day I update this blog. This surely will be disappointing news for my few loyal readers, but a great relief for me, since running this blog takes too much time and effort without giving much in return. The era of music blogs is clearly over, since you can find almost everything on Youtube and/or Bandcamp nowadays. Moreover, the subcultures from the time I started this blog (2009) are mostly dead by now (and the modern "doomers", whom I can somewhat relate to, still aren't a worthy replacement), so there's not much audience for the stuff I post. Not to mention I'm listening to much less music nowadays than I did a decade ago...
That said, I've found a few great people (including musicians) due to my blog, and I hope my posts will be useful to at least someone in the future, while I move on to new things in life. I had rather serious issues with depression (F32.1) and social anxiety through nearly all my life, which shouldn't surprise my readers, considering what kind of music I mostly post on here. When it got especially bad in late 2016, I finally made a lot of effort to get rid of it, and while I still have a lot of stuff to fix, I feel significantly better about my life by now, and still hoping for doing something really great in my lifetime. These days I'm mostly active on Instagram where I post travel-related stuff, and I'm thinking about starting a popular science blog in the future (not sure in which language and on which platform, though). Anyway, if you don't want to lose contact with me, you can always write me using the contact form. Birthday greetings are welcome, as well as wishes for luck with my homework on the AI/neural networks design, which I'm doing right now.
P.S. For those who are celebrating Christmas, here's a "heavy" cover of a classic Elvis Presley song by the beautiful and talented Daria Zaritskaya (in collaboration with Halocene). While I'm not a big fan of such "bluesy" stuff, Daria surely can sing well, and she knows that today is my birthday too :) Isn't it a great feeling when you open your social media feed on your birthday, and see everyone celebrating and greeting each other? And as far as my tastes go, a music video with Daria wearing a short red dress and high heels is an excellent birthday gift for me:
Track List:
Regular readers of my blog already are familiar with Senmuth, the "Indiana Jones from the world of music". He can boast one of the biggest discographies among metal artists (almost 270 full-length albums up to this day), mostly inspired by the history and culture of Ancient Egypt and Middle East in general. He went on a 1.5 years long hiatus in 2019 due to poor health, but now he's back with 6 new full-lengths released through 2020. However, today I'll post not his newest ethno/tribal ambient stuff, but one of his classic industrial metal albums.
While "Neocortex" indeed well represents the sound of his albums released in late 2000s, it's very different from his other classics like "Kemet High Tech". Most Senmuth's albums are instrumental, while this one (except for the instrumental intro and outro tracks) features a lot of rather weird sounding vocals (and a lot of unconventional vocal effects. The lyrics, as expected, deal with the topics of ancient history, space, introspection, and at times, anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian themes. The music is industrial metal with less gothic/doom metal influences than on other Senmuth's albums from that time, and of course, there's a lot of oriental motives. How about a lezginka in the 9th track (the best one on the whole album)? An industrial metal track based on the Northwest Caucasian (most likely Ossetian) folklore... well, now I truly have heard everything.
Track List:
"Just as the damp, rusty air permeating through an abandoned structure inexplicably causes one to yearn for a time/place slightly out of reach from the physical world, Void churns to life the sleeping machines of our introspection, once again reattaching the chains of humanity to the spiritual. Void is the autumn chill that scatters the dried leaves across the pavement of our mentality..."
A quite obscure release from a one-man project, that shares name with another industrial back metal band based in the UK. However, this Void comes from New Jersey, and it's run by a guy that has no apparent history of interest in industrial/cyberpunk stuff, but a history of playing in several folk metal bands. Now he has a "retro" psychedelic rock band, and he's unlikely to release anything in the vein of this album anytime soon (this one was recorded 10 years ago, in the fall of 2010). However, i must admit that he got the essense of industrial black metal quite well on this release. The quality of recording is quite raw, but it shouldn't scare you off, because this sort of noisy sound fits the atmosphere of this album quite well. There's a lot of rather unusual guitar parts on this album, and a lengthy ambient piece at the end:
Track List:
An absolutely classic album that was recommended to me roughly 10 years ago, along with "Burn Process" by Tactical Sekt: "From what I know about your musical tastes, these two albums will blow your mind!". Indeed, this one has instantly became one of my all-time favourites (I wasn't very impressed by Tactical Sekt, though). I love all Rudy Ratzinger's works from the second half of 1990s, but this one is certainly best of the best, with such killer tracks as "Die in Winter", "Mortal Highway", and of course, the title track, "Bunkertor 7". These tracks exactly represent my idea of harsh electro-industrial sound, and it's probably the heaviest album by :W: (maybe even one of the most aggressive electro-industrial albums of all times), with many tracks sounding almost like metal despite being electro.
Rudy
Ratzinger retired from making music in 2017, although he unexpectedly released a teaser for an upcoming new album about a month ago. Anyway, he still keeps re-releasing his old stuff, and here's the version of "Bunkertor 7" called "Concentrated Camp Edition" (nice wordplay!), with a lot of remixes as bonus tracks:
Disc 1
Disc 2
I always loved Hungarian rock for its unique cosmic sound, already prent in early classic rock bands like Omega, Lord, or Edda, and developed by later progressive rock collectives like Kolinda, VHK, and of course Solaris. Sadly they have released not too many albums beyond their "Martian Chronicles I & II" (the 1st part is certainly my favourite progressive rock album of all times), "Nostradamus: Book of Prophecies", and this self-titled album, re-released in 1996 as a 2xCD edition with a couple of bonus tracks and a lengthy live recording.
The first part of this album features instrumental progressive rock (with some spoken word parts in "Egészséges Optimizmus") played in the way we expect it from Solaris. A very decent follow-up to ""Martian Chronicles I" (especially the opening track, "A Viking Visszatér"). The second part is more experimental, significantly influenced by classical music (especially the best composition on the whole album, "Éjféli Valcer") and, at times, Hungarian folk music. The track "A Kígyó Szive" is apparently inspired by the short story "Cor Serpentis" by Ivan Efremov (nice to see another rock band taking influence from the works of my favourite sci-fi writer, the first one being Erg Noor). Overall, all albums by Solaris are fantastic and definitely deserve to be checked out by anyone who loves quality melodic progressive rock with sci-fi themes. And thanks to this great blog for posting this one!
I'd post much more, but let's stop here. And if you're interested what she's doing now - well, this year she, like many other musicians, has lost a lot of her income from live performances due to the coronavirus lockdowns, but things got better by now. There were plans to release an acoustic album under the name "quarantine", but it isn't out yet. Earlier this year, she released a collaborative single "Adai-Adai" with some Malaysian musician, which is quite different from the rest of her works, with its sound based in oriental folk music (interestingly, it reminds me of "Hizbollah" by Ministry, and some tracks off "Erotic Terrorism" by Fun-Da-Mental).
Track List:
This album is easily one of my most interesting metal discoveries of this year (even if it was released in 2018). I saw Vermilia being recommended as "a better version of Myrkur without all the drama" and decided to give it a try, especially after seeing that the lyrics are in Finnish, and wasn't disappointed at all. There's not much info about Vermilia except it's an one-female metal project from Finland: "Her music is a mix of Epic Scandinavian Pagan Metal and sweet, raw and melancholic vocal harmonies with lyrics in her native language", and that's pretty much all. However, the music is really great atmospheric black/folk metal straight from the woods of Finland, with very hypnotic vocals (especially on more folk-influenced tracks like "Maisema"):
And as a bonus, here's an awesome cover version of a famous song "Täällä Pohjantähden Alla" ("Here under the Northstar"). Compared to the rest of Vermilia's stuff, it's more influenced by gothic metal and symphonic black metal, and if you're new to her music, I'd strongly advise to start from this song:
Track List:
Here's one of the best albums in the whole genre of gothic metal with female vocals, which unfortunately didn't get the recognition it deserves. The band was formed in 1994 under the name Flowing Tears & Withered Flowers, and initially played typical mid-90s death/doom metal in the vein of Tiamat (I still have their cassette "Swansongs" bought long time ago). After shortening their name in 1999, they've released two albums with the sound increasingly being influenced by the 2000s gothic metal, and with Helen Vogt as their new vocalist, they released two more ones which can be considered the classics of that genre.
"Thy Kingdom Gone" is their last and the best album, released in late 2008. I'd describe it as gothic metal that doesn't follow the same formula as most female-fronted metal bands with operatic vocals (Helen's vocals are great but definitely not operatic) and "symphonic" sound (there's a lot of keyboards on this album but it's far from "symphonic"), and still being significantly influenced by 90s doom metal (I have similar feelings about my another female-fronted metal favourite, "Mandylion" by The Gathering, although it isn't particularly similar to anything released by Flowing Tears either). Nearly every track on "Thy Kingdom Gone" is great, but my personal favourites are "Orchidfire", "Rain of the Thousand Years", "Miss Fortune" (a track quite different from the rest), and "Souls of the Neon Reign". It's also worth mentioning that the title track features guest vocals by Vorph fom Samael. Too bad that they haven't released anything more, although Helen has expressed some wishes to record a new album in 2013...
Track List:
Bosnia isn't known for having a big metal scene, but this band from Sarajevo has pleasantly surprised me. It's fairly typical female-fronted symphonic metal that'd definitely appeal to the fans of the genre. The quiality of production could be a bit better, but overall, the music is well composed and played. Here's the full album and one more music video:
By the way, their vocalist Taida Nazraić has one of the most beautiful Instagram accounts I've ever came across. She now lives in Munuch and posts a lot of excellent photography featuring the cityscapes and nature in Bavaria. Her dresses (and style in general) are awesome too, and if you love girls wearing hats, her page would be a goldmine for you:
