Komintern - "Le Bal Du Rat Mort" [1971]

Artist: Komintern

Title: Le Bal Du Rat Mort
Genre: Avant-Prog
Country: France
Release date: 1971

Track List:

1. Bal Pour Un Rat Vivant
2. Hommage Au Marie De Tours
3. Petite Musique Pour Un Blockhaus
4. Pongistes De Tous Les Pays
5. Fou, Roi, Pantin

One more album released in 1971 that was influenced by early hyper-progressive rock and radical politics of May 1968. Komintern, a French band formed in 1970 and disbanded in 1975, are often labeled as "the first Rock In Opposition band". While I can't fully agree with that (as the whole RIO thing started in 1978), Komintern definitely were one of the most important precursors to the whole RIO movement. Can't believe "Le Bal Du Rat Mort" was released in 1971!

P.S. Some members of Komintern were also active in an avant-garde act called Red Noise. While I couldn't find any of their recordings, their name sounds promising, and I wonder if they sounded at least remotely similar to the earliest 70s' industrial acts. The whole thing of mixing avant-garde (anti-music) and radical political imagery strongly reminds me of Throbbing Gristle, early Laibach and the early industrial scene in general. German Oak, Faust and Neu! were called "proto-industrial" on several occasions, but I think it can be applied to a much wider spectrum of 70s' avant-prog.

Download

Knutna Nävar - "Internationalen & Andra Revolutionära Arbetarsånger" [1971]

Artist: Knutna Nävar
Title: Internationalen & Andra Revolutionära Arbetarsånger
Label: Proletärkultur
Genre: Folk / Progg
Country: Sweden
Release date: 1971

Track List:

1. Internationalen
2. Arbetarmarseljäsen
3. Demonstrationssång (Roter Wedding)
4. Röda fanor
5. Visa att sjungas i fängelse
6. Om jag någonsin ska strida
7. Dialektikens lov
8. Arbetare och förtryckta
9. I ena handen hackan
10. Rorsmannen
11. Sång om Kina
12. Kampsång (Warschawjanka)
13. Lappen och rocken
14. Lär av historien
15. Proletären

Another early-70s progressive rock band, this time from Sweden, known for their heavy use of extreme political imagery. "Internationalen & Andra Revolutionära Arbetarsånger" is their debut album, and probably the best in their discography (they also have at least one more LP, "Svarta Listornas Folk", and a couple of singles). Some tracks on it are Knutna Nävar's original material (my favourite is "Visa att sjungas i fängelse"), some - cover versions of well-known revolutionary songs like The Internationale, Marsellaise, Roter Wedding, and Warschawjanka. As you might already know I always liked such songs covered by rock and punk bands (like Banda Bassotti or Leningrad 44), and it's definitely great to hear these songs sung in Swedish - although my favourite version of Roter Wedding is the original German version performed by Ernst Busch, and my favourite version of Warschawjanka is in Hungarian (by Magyar Néphadsereg Művészegyüttese). Don't know for the rest of numerous Swedish political progressive rock bands (known as the "progg" scene), but Knutna Nävar's music is hardly rock at all - in my opinion, it'd better be called "riot folk". Their tunes are relatively simplistic, yet very catchy; + I like the female vocals in some of them.

Download

German Oak – "Nibelungenlied" [1976]

Artist: German Oak

Title: Nibelungenlied
Genre: Krautrock, Avant-Prog
Country: Germany
Release date: 1976

Track List:

1. The Heroic Deeds Of Siegfried
2. Nibelungenlied I: Siegfried & Kriemhild
3. Gunter & Brunhild
4. Hagen Von Tronje
5. Siegfried's Death
6. Dankwart, Ruediger & Hildebrandt
7. Dietrich Von Bern
8. Nibelungenlied II
9. Lament

The second and unfortunately the last album by German Oak, which is even more amazing than the s/t debut. While the debut one was ispired by WWII history, "Nibelungenlied" is based on... guess what? Right, The Song of the Nibelungs (which also was one of the main sources of inspiration for R.Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" cycle of operas).

Download

German Oak - s/t [1972]

Artist: German Oak

Title: German Oak
Genre: Krautrock, Avant-Prog
Country: Germany
Release date: 1972

Track List:

1. Swastika Rising
2. The Third Reich
3. Shadows Of War / Rain Of Destruction
4. Airalert
5. Down In The Bunker
6. Raid Over Dusseldorf
7. 1945 - Out Of The Ashes

"In the strange Olympic summer of 1972, the Düsseldorf instrumental group (community of 5 hippies / open mind artists) German Oak entered the Luftschutzbunker (or Air Raid Shelter), in order to record their eponymous first self-titled LP. The purpose of recording in a bunker was to recreate the feelings experienced by German soldiers during the Allied invasion of 1944. The strange acoustic conditions in the bunker made the music, which was a series of long, spacious guitar jams, sound distant and filled with echo. The cover of album (a militaristic image which is a portrait of the third Reich military force) provides an illustration of anger expressed by the WWII’s young generation against their parents. Julian Cope, in his in-depth review of the album, describes the bands sound in unequivocal terms: “…imagine a brutally recorded, brazen and ultra-skeletal industrial white funk played with all the claw-handed technique of the Red Crayola recording their famous Hurricane Fighting Plane. By consequence German Oak’s music is very tortured, dark and weird, dominated by heavy, “distorted” guitar solos & rhythms. The background creates “painful” & “ambient” sequences thanks to delay echoes, electronic “fuzzy” noises & repetitive bass lines. A funkadelic / jazzy felt punctuates with discretion this grandiose. In a rather discretion they also recorded (1972-76) the moody, cloudy and experimental epic-kraut Nibenlungenieg.""

IMO, German Oak are notable primarily because they were probably the first cryptofa band. While I dislike the whole cryptofa movement (mostly because they were too aggressive when forcing CF as a meme), I also admit that there's a lot of people fascinated by the history and symbolism of totalitarian and genocidal regimes, but not being fascists themselves. The industrial (and especially martial industrial) scene is full of such people, and I like German Oak's hyper progressive rock as much as I like early 80's industrial acts. I won't listen to such kind of music every day, but I think it's a must to know such classics.

Download

Spitfire - "First Attack" [1987]

Artist: Spitfire

Title: First Attack
Genre: Heavy Metal
Country: Greece
Release date: 1987

Track List:

1. Street Fighter
2. Lead Me On
3. Whispers
4. Lady of the Night
5. Explosion
6. Walk Alone
7. Evil Thoughts Around
8. Guilty Dreams

First or not the first attack... but this album is definitely among the first more or less successful metal releases made in Greece. "First Attack" was released on a major label (EMI Music), so it may have a little "commercial" flavour, but nevertheless it's a great album. My favourite tracks are ""Lead Me On", "Lady Of The Night" and "Explosion". Unfortunately, the vocalist of Spitfire was badly injured in a car accident shortly after "First Attack" was recorded, so it remained the only proper release of them (excluding their 1990 live album and 1996 compilation of unreleased tracks) until 2009.

Download

Innerwish - "Inner Strength" [2006]

Artist: Innerwish

Title: Inner Strength
Genre: Heavy/Power Metal
Country: Greece
Release date: 2006

Track List:

1. Trivial
2. Travellers in Time
3. Far Away
4. Lonely Lady (Q5 Cover)
5. Bleeding Soul
6. Feel the Magic
7. Eye of the Storm
8. Final Prophecy
9. Never Let You Down
10. Dreamer of the Night
11. Inner Strength
12. Gates of Fire

Some more power metal from the Balkan peninsula for you. Innerwish are a band from Greece who formed in 1994 under the name "Growing Order", and have undergone a lot of changes in lineup since then. Fun fact: their former vocalist became religious to the point of becoming a cenobite and playing in a christian rock group in the monastery (!). Well... I know a lot of musicians from early Soviet/Russian metal scene who later became religious (from traditional Orthodoxy to Jehova's Witnesses), but I never heard of any other metal musician who's in a monastery now :)

Speaking of music, it's typical "entry-level" melodic metal, nothing really original, but it's well produced and generally sounds nice. Would cernainly prefer this albums over a lot of other generic power metal albums. My personal favourites are tracks #4 (it's a cover, though...), #11, and especially #2:

"Travellers, all we are travellers in time,
Travellers, a trip to nowhere till we die,
Travellers, all we are travellers in time,
Cause life is short no matter how we try..."

random blog with download link

Myrath - "Desert Call" [2010]

Artist: Myrath

Title: Desert Call
Genre: Progressive Metal
Country: Tunisia
Release date: 2010

Track List:

1. Forever and a Day
2. Tempests of Sorrows
3. Desert Call
4. Madness
5. Silent Cries
6. Memories
7. Ironic Destiny
8. No Turning Back
9. Empty World
10. Shockwave

Well, looks like some of my readers are interested in Middle Eastern metal, so I continue this topic. Myrath (meaning "legacy"; formerly known as Xtazy) are a relatively well-known prog metal band from Tunisia, who were the first metal band there to be signed on a label. "Desert Call" is a pretty decent album even by European standards; however, don't know about two other albums ("Hope" and "Tales of the Sands"), as I haven't listened to them yet (but I will).

Thunder Way - "The Order Executors" [1993]

Artist: Thunder Way

Title: The Order Executors
Genre: Heavy/Power Metal
Country: Albania
Release date: 1993

Track List:

1. Nothing Else to Try
2. The Order Executors
3. The Last Warrior
4. Unexpected Sufferings
5. Dancing with Beasts
6. The Devil's Rule
7. Crimes With Prepensation
8. Victims of Confusion
9. Future Punishments

Albania may be not as "non-metal" place as the whole Central Asia - there were more than 20 Albanian metal bands ever in existence, and at least 10 ones active today - but it's still very few even for a relatively small country. Here's the first Albanian metal release ever - "The Order Executors", recorded in 1993 by a band called Thunderway. Unfortunately, it was their only release - they couldn't find a proper audience for such kind of music in post-Hoxhaist Albania (they even had to record this album in the neighbouring Macedonia), and their vocalist himself wanted to do more pop-rock oriented stuff - so the band broke up in 1995. The album is amazing, though - excellent early-1990's heavy/power metal. Check out the track "Crimes With Prepensation", I think it's the best one on the whole album:

As for download links, you can get them here or here (I haven't ripped the album by myself, so I don't want to steal the others' work).

Zindan - "Depth" [2009]

Artist: Zindan

 Title: Depth  

Genre: Melodic Death Metal  

Country: Uzbekistan 

Release date: 2009

Track List:

1. In Haze
2. Truth Becomes A Lie
3. Facing One Another
4. Life Without Aim
5. Before The End
6. Chinvat
7. Mean
8. In The Depth Of Zindan
9. Still Alive

Another metal band from a very non-metal region - namely Central Asia (Tashkent, Uzbekistan). On the photos, only one of them looks like an Uzbek, all the others are probably Russians... but who cares? Their music is surprisingly good, shame that they're so unknown (they even don't have a page in Encyclopaedia Metallum...)

Download

Al-Namrood - "Estorat Taghoot" [2010]

Artist: Al-Namrood

Title: Estorat Taghoot
Genre: Black Metal
Country: Saudi Arabia
Release date: 2010

Track List:

1. Arousal At Nebuchadnezzar Fortress
2. Junood Al Amjaad
3. Estorat Taghoot
4. Ma Kan Mn AlDahr Mundthera
5. Endma Tuqsaf Al Ru'os
6. Ma'dabt Al Audhama
7. Fe Youm Thaqeef
8. Wata'a Bakhtanasar
9. Laylat Ghabra'a
10. Asda' Al Dmar
11. Ajal Babel

Another black metal album recorded in Bahrain (although the band themselves are from Saudi Arabia, they couldn't find a professional studio that records such kind of music in their home country). Al-Namrood are one of the best Middle Eastern BM bands (definitely better than Melechesh ;)), and most importantly, they're a real oriental metal band actively using Arabian motives in their music, not just a clone of some Western band. The quality of production may be not perfect, but the music is quite original. As for the lyrics - well, I know what "taghut" is, but I couldn't understand anything else... At least it looks like their lyrics are heavily influenced by Mesopotamian mythology (just like in case with Melechesh).

I heard they already have released their new album, "Kitab Al-Awthan", but I haven't listened to it yet. As for this one, you can find it here.