While Alliance are mostly known as a synthpop band, they have experimented with many different genres, and their folk-rock album "Made in White" was even called the best world music album of 1993 in Europe. At that time, the band had already split up, but this album is certainly notable as one of the first world music releases in modern Russia, way predating bands like Theodor Bastard. They were also one of the first bands that have experimented with traditional Tuvan music and throat singing (tracks 12-14 on this album).
"Made in White" features mostly female vocals, performed by Inna Zhelannaya, who later became much better known as a solo artist (and a frontwoman of her own band Farlanders). It's a rather lengthy release, but certainly worth your time of you like soft rock with an ethno flavour:
So far this year was really terrible when it come to deaths of many important musicians, such as Genesis P-Orridge, Konstantin Ryabinov of GrOb, Gabi Delgado of DAF, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, and now Oleg Parastaev of Alliance.
The band was formed in 1981 and initially played ska and reggae, but later became more and more influenced by new wave, which was quickly gaining popularity in the mid-1980s Soviet Union. In 1984, Alliance among many other bands fell victim to the Chernenko's anti-rock campaign and were banned from any public performances. However, in 1986 they have reformed as a synthpop/new wave outfit, with Oleg Parastaev on keyboards. That was their "golden" lineup, but unfortunately it was short-lived: Parastaev left the band in 1988 and started his own new wave project called NRG, while Alliance became a female-fronted folk-rock band before finally splitting up in 1993.
They have reformed in 2008, but didn't gain much publicity until a decade later, when Oleg Parastaev has uploaded a live video of their most famous song "На заре" on his YouTube channel. By a coincidence, it happened during the Venezuelan crisis, and two of the band members in the video looked like younger Putin and Maduro to some viewers. Due to that, the video first went viral in Latin America, and later it became popular at their home in ex-USSR, since it fitted perfectly in the current wave of 80s synthpop nostalgia. After that, the band has released their first new album after 25 years of silence, and in February 2020 - another one, with mostly space-themed lyrics.
Sadly, both of their most important members are dead by now (their founding member Sergei Volodin died in 2017), and to most listeners they'll remain an one-hit wonder, but at least they finally got the recognition they deserve. R.I.P. Oleg Parastaev. He died at 5AM, right according to the lyrics of his best known song: "At dawn, the voices are calling me..." Well, let's say he hasn't died but called to leave the Earth and return to the cosmos he belongs to:
Metal is rare in Vietnam, let alone progressive metal, yet there was at least one band that have deserved the title of "Vietnamese Dream Theater". Unfortunately Hạc San seem to be defunct by now, yet they have left a very good concept album based on the story of Thạch Sanh. While the language barrier makes it hard to find more info about the band, and certainly is the reason why they're largely unknown outside Vietnam, this album has a couple of really great songs that seem to have received significant publicity at home:
War metal from Vietnam? Yes, it's a thing, even if by "war metal" here I mean bands that sound more like Sabaton rather than Blasphemy. Anyway, Vietman is definitely not a metal country, and most Vietnamese metal projects I've heard so far were playing quite generic lo-fi black metal (not to mention most of them actually were started by Vietnamese immigrants inother countries). This album is quite poorly produced too (which is understandable, though), but features a completely different kind of music - heavy metal with folk and alternative rock elements. Definitely an interesting release, despite all the production flaws.
Apart from obvious fakes, District Unknown were the only metal band in Afghanistan (yes, I know Taarma also claims to be an Afghan band; the man behind the project is indeed Afghan but resides in Pakistan). They even have played live shows in Kabul, although they had to wear masks to conceal their identities. As of now, two of their former members have emigrated to UK and USA, and have started a new international metal project called Afreet.
The members of District Unknown called their music "psychedelic metal". Honestly there aren't that many metal parts on this album, and, unfortunately, there's a lot of ambient-like filler parts. The production is also not great (but much better than I have expected). There's a quite detailed review of "Anatomy of a 24 Hour Lifetime", and I agree with its author in that this LP has numerous flaws; however, the musicianship itself is definitely not unprofessional, and I appreciate the effort of recording a metal album in a such hostile environment.
In comparison to most other Middle Eastern countries, metal (and underground music in general) is relatively popular in Iran, yet the country is by no means friendly to such music - so many Iranian metal musicians eventually emigrate, and this band isn't an exception. Tears of Fire were one of the first black metal bands in Iran (if not the very first), formed in 1998 and played their first concert an year later. While modern Iranian black metal scene is still small yet far from nonexistent, the Iranian society definitely wasn't ready to appreciate such kind of music 20 years ago, and, if the official story is to be believed, the band members were arrested after the aforementioned concert on July 8th, 1999.
They have disbanded shortly thereafter, but in 2016 their founding member decided to reform the band as an international project based in Germany. Now they play a pretty strange kind of funeral doom metal with oriental motives (although I don't have much to compare with, as the only other Iranian doom metal band I've listened to are 1000 Funerals). This release is certainly interesting but hard to get into (just like Iranian culture in general).
Named after the famous novel by Aldous Huxley, Eyeless In Gaza is a new one-man doom metal band from Armenia, a place not known for having a big metal scene. It's a side project of one of the members of Bread and Wine, a female-fronted "aesthetic doom" metal band whose music I found to be hard to get into. The debut album by Eyeless In Gaza, however, caught my attention from the first listen:
"The debut album by Eyeless in Gaza, a band from Armenia, presents a
fusion of different styles and gives a fresh look at the genre. A
harmonic combination of classical acoustic guitar, academic choral
chants, and dark ambient interludes, as well as motifs of the epic
funeral doom metal and black doom metal with variable vocals, gives
birth to a real epic canvas filled with magic that tells about a
personal experience, which can be expressed exclusively by the language
of music.
Act I: The Protagonist is an abstract conceptual album, where each track
is a stage of personal experience, existential thoughts about
destruction as an idea of a new beginning. This is a dreamy and tragic
monologue about deep feelings of regret and humility that are melting
within us"
P.S. There's also a British band under the same name whose description looks interesting: "veer[ing] crazily from filmic ambiance to rock and pop, industrial funk to avant-folk styles." Would check out them soon too.
A very pleasant instrumental doom metal album by an one-man band from Morocco of all places. The project has at least one more LP and several EPs, some of which feature vocals, but I like the instrumental tracks better. Great atmosphere, and fairly decent production for an underground project from North Africa.
