Thursday, January 21, 2016

Aella - "Мания величия. 30 лет спустя" [2015]

Artist: Aella
Title: Мания Величия. 30 Лет Спустя
Genre: Heavy Metal
Country: Russia
Release date: 2015

Track List:
  1. Это Рок
  2. Тореро
  3. Волонтёр
  4. Бивни Чёрных Скал
  5. Мания Величия
  6. Жизнь Задаром
  7. Мечты
  8. Весь Мир За 20 Минут
Remember me writing about Alik Granovsky, who was the founding member of Смещение? Yeah, right. Two years after his band has split up, he took part in recording Aria's debut album, which became one of the earliest and most well-known Soviet heavy metal albums. Several years later, the band reached a cult status and a significant commercial success, but Granovsky was no longer their member by then. While their later albums are frequently criticized for sounding too much similar to Iron Maiden and some other classic metal and hard rock bands, their debut album is fairly interesting and deserves its classic status:

30 years later, the members of Aella have decided to make a cover version of the whole album. They started playing together in 2007 initially as a cover band, and even if they've released a lot of their own material since then, they still play a lot of covers. This project was probably the most difficult and ambitious, given the cult status of the original album, but the result turned out to be very decent.

Of course you shoudn't expect anything innovative or original on this album, but it's good for what it is: an attempt of giving the old songs a new live with modern quality of production and female vocals. The idea of an all-female band making covers of classic heavy metal songs is also not new (The Iron Maidens, and probably some other bands that I don't know of, did it before), but then again, Aella do it pretty well. Here's a full video of them playing these covers in Moscow:

These second part of their show features their own songs. While not of them are equally good, some of these songs are real hits (such as the opening song), and generally it'd prefer them to play their own material rather than covers:
As for their visual style, looks like they're successfully managed to maintain a fairly traditional heavy metal style while being a pronouncedly "female" band and not trying too hard to look like men (who have been dominating the heavy metal scene since its inception). Their vocalist, known under her stage name "Tillen Avers", knows well how to make stage movements... and to be honest, she looks very hot in these mini shorts:

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