Surely, we don't live in the 80s anymore, and a skeleton on the cover of your favourite metal album won't scare even your grandmother nowadays. However, there still are topics with a decent potential to shock the audience, one of which is Islamic radicalism. This topic was pioneered by Bryn Jones (Muslimgauze) well before 9/11 (not to mention the Islamic State insurgency or Charlie Hebdo shooting), and then continued by numerous projects which are making witch house remixes of nasheeds (it's a very popular trend by now, at least here).
Now we have a 100% digital noise project based out of Ivanovo, which have released dozens of albums and EPs in just one year under different aliases (Noise Jihad, Hargeysa, Virtual Mosque, and so on). Just like Bryn Jones, the anonymous person behind Noise Jihad focuses on Islamic aesthetics and imagery, and just like Bryn Jones (who never actually visited Palestine or Middle East in general, despite recording a shitton of Middle Eastern-themed albums), he doesn't seem to have a really deep knowledge of the affairs he writes music about. That said, I'm not an Arabist or Islamic scholar too, so I'm not sure if I'm in the position to judge his work.
I haven't listened to the whole vast discography of Noise Jihad (and, frankly, I don't want to), but out of what I've heard so far, I'd recommend "Jihad" for starters. If you don't like it, don't bother yourself listening to the rest of Noise Jihad's releases.
Пост Мортем (or Post Mortem, if you wish) are a russophone rap trio from Kazakhstan, consisting of Alibek "Dr. Fulci" Jusip, Maxat "AzRaiL" Bekes and Evgeniy "j0nny" Postebailo. Their lyrical themes have been described as: "infanticide, dismemberment, slavery, hate, genocide, drug abuse,
paranoia, rape, war, torture, terminal illness, child abuse, domestic
violence and religion (or lack thereof)" [and Lucio Fulci's movies, I must add]. To put it in short, it's rap with death metal lyrics & imagery. The subgenre of rap music which typically employs such lyrical themes is known as "horrorcore", but the members of Post Mortem don't like this term, preferring their music to be called "macabre rap" instead.
Another, much more well-known horror rapper who dislikes the term "horrorcore" (and prefers to use "death rap" instead) is Necro, of whom I was a fan for a long time, but I always thought it takes a native (or close-to-native) English speaker to fully enjoy Necro's lyrics. And how we have a hip-hop act which is nearly as good as Necro, and raps in my language. Isn't is great? While I normally prefer metal to rap by a wide margin, it's much easier for me to relate to this kind of rap than to the majority of generic death metal. Of course this album isn't a masterpice, but it's infinitely better than almost all the cRAP produced by the post-USSR hip-hop scene. "Infanticidium" is easily the best track on the whole album, and as someone has rightfully said, "that track should be aired on TV as it's a way superior alternative for all these shitty reality shows".
"Infandum Renovare Dolorem" is Пост Мортем's second and the last (and, in my opinion, the best) album. Their debut album "Macabre" isn't bad too, but it's more straightforward Necro worship, with some experiments with death metal which I personally didn't like that much. Their 2012 EP isn't bad either, but this more experimental than their early works, and the lyrics are less explicit. Sadly they haven't released anything in the last couple of years, although the debut solo album of Dr. Fulci is expected to be out on 31st of March.
As you should have noticed, I finally decided to use my .net domain for this blog. At first I planned to use it for a Wordpress-based mirror of all entries from here, but it turned out that a free blogging platform (Blogger) is more convenient to use than Wordpress on a paid server.
The process of domain change turned out to be a hassle, with unexpected problems appearing at nearly every step, but hopefully everything works OK by now. I'll work a bit on improving the blog design and description in the next few weeks; hope I'll have some free time to write several new reviews as well.
IIRC I've posted an EP by Mystica Girls last year this day, and now it's time to post another EP by an all-female band that isn't particularly well known. This time it won't be metal, though.
Misgive are 4 girls from Kota Kinabalu - the capital of Sabah (the easternmost state of Malaysia). Their music is typical pop-punk which is played by a lot of young bands all around the Western world, but I never heard anything like that from Southeastern Asia yet. They're virtually unknown outside their home region, but recently they got some publicity here, mostly due to our local J-rock / J-punk communities. I personally never was a big fan of pop-punk or J-rock, but all these simplistic yet catchy songs on this EP remind me of the late 70's punk which I used to post here circa 2010-2011.
As for the "short skirts" part - the girls themselves definitely like it a lot, judging from their stage outfits designed for them by Afraid Clothing. It's hard not to notice that their outfits are extremely short, and I like it this way too :)
The official page for this EP is here, and if you want to have a free download of it, it probably won't be hard to find.
Here's another compilation from Cracked Core, consisting mostly of tracks which he did for the EVE Online-themed series of compilations "New Eden Logs", using an alias "...Und Null Sekunden". This is dark ambient/drone, nothing particularly outstanding or innovative on there, but it's still quite good. Actually, it isn't hard to guess what kind of sound you'll hear on this compilation by just looking at its cover image.
Yes, I'm still thinking on what's better to do with this blog. Meantime, my old friend CC has released a compilation of his old demos and unreleased tracks. If you're not familiar with this project, I won't recommend you to start from this release, but diehard fans of Cracked Core (if there are any) would probably find it interesting.
Not so long ago, BreadGod has made some good points on how small music blogs cannot compete anymore with the big portals like metalarea.org or dark-world.ru, especially when the bands themselves are joining Bandcamp in droves, and dealing with the DMCA warnings is becoming harder and harder (especially if they come for the least expected reasons - a DMCA warning for Iszonyat's demo, seriously?). My blog has a mission statement that's quite similar to his one, and I also was downloading a lot of music from DC++ before discovering music blogs, so I can relate to a lot of things he's writing about.
Right now I'm working on setting up a Wordpress-based mirror of this blog on a professional hosting platform, but frankly I don't feel like I'm going to put any significant amount of work into it in the future. There are other options to improve my English skills, and there are better ways to spend my free time that writing reviews of (mostly) very obscure music and visual arts for a blog with hardly any readers. Maybe I'll still continue doing it, but my blog is going to be purely review-based (no download links, unless they're explicitly approved by the band members themselves).
By the way, today's my birthday. Greetings are welcome, of course, even if they're going to be a bit belated.
Sorry for not updating the blog for such a long time. I'm busy with transferring this blog to a paid hosting platform, which will probably take a lot of time (and I'm not sure if I'd still have enough motivation and energy to continue posting after that). In the meanwhile I'm listening to a new track from the upcoming 3rd album of Blackthorn, and I like what I'm hearing:
I think it makes sense to review their debut album on here too. Even if it isn't quite as "mature" and well-produced than "Codex Archaos", it's still very good, and a lot of people consider it to be the best release of Blackthorn. In terms of sound, it's what is usually called "gothic metal", with noticeable influences of symphonic black metal. The vocal style reminds some people of At The Lake, but I personally don't hear much similarities. Honestly, I find Aina's voice (lyrical soprano) a bit too high-pitched at times (the second album doesn't have this problem), but it isn't a major flaw. All the lyrics are written by Aina (if I'm not mistaken), and deal mostly with the usual topics for this kind of music - supernatural stuff, witchcraft, sexuality, etc. Nothing particularly outstanding, but to be honest - it's way better than the lyrics of most metal bands on here.
This album was recorded with the 2008 lineup of the band: Aina - vocals, Verbena - bass, Elvira - guitars, Freya - keyboards, Max Sightless - bass. Back then they were known for having a blind (male) drummer, but now their lineup is all-female, with Aina & Elvira remaining the only original members.
If you live outside the former USSR and want to see Blackthorn live (and I know for sure thay have a lot of fans in countries like Argentina and Mexico), you better have some patience. They have toured Germany, Poland, Hungary and some other Central/Eastern European countries, but I don't think they'll come to Western Europe soon - let alone South America, which is mostly visa-free, yet tremendously expensive to travel to from here...
Halgrath is an one-woman dark ambient project from St.Petersburg, started by Agartha (Ekaterina Alexandrova) circa 2010. Agartha herself prefers not to name the exact date when the project was started, claiming her development as a musician is inseparable from the development of her personality in general. As far as I know, she wanted to became a professional vocalist at some point of her life, but eventually decided that classical music isn't her thing, and quit her studies.
Agartha defines her style of music as "esoteric/cosmic ambient". Her debut album "Liquid Mind" almost instantly became an international success, and in 2012 she released 3 more albums. So far I've listened to only one of these ("Out Of Time"), and despite my initial scepticism, I found it to be really good. "The Whole Path Of War And Acceptance" is her newest full-length album, released by Cryo Chamber. Its 128kbps mp3 rip was posted on dark-world.ru, and I think it'd be OK to re-post it here. If you want it in better quality, buy it.
I found out about this (admittedly, very obscure) band circa 2008-2009, when I got nothing better to do than chatting on Myspace with their singer/keyboardist, Jolie aka "Yuka". (This nickname, according to her, was taken from some shoujo anime/manga - Fruits Basket, if memory serves me right, but I'm not sure... after all, I can't remember the last time I watched anime at all). She gave an impression of being a very nice and interesting person, but I had no idea of what kind of music her band was playing, as they didn't have any recordings back then.
Now I finally have listened to their first and only demo, and I have to say that I'm a bit surprised. I expected to hear standard Italian symphonic/gothic metal with female vocals - but instead of yet another Lacuna Coil clone, I got Scandinavian style folk metal with dual vocals (mostly male). The last track is a bit different, though - it's a folk ballad with only female vocals. Yuka's voice is a bit... "specific" (can't come up with a better word for it), and some listeners probably won't like it, but I have to admit that it matches this kind of music quite well. The production is of course far from prefect, but good enough for a demo. The melodies in all 3 songs (the 4th doesn't count, as it's a cover) are a bit simplistic, yet very catchy. Would like to hear a properly recorded full-length album from them, but sadly it seems like they've split up. 3 of 4 members of Ab Noctem (including Yuka) then formed a band called A Thousand Winters, but I couldn't find any further info about them.
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