Do you like fusion-metal band Cynic? Are you eagerly counting down the days until they release Kindly Bent to Free Us in February? Is the wait until Valentine's Day just too goddamn long for you? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then today's band might just be the methadone to keep you going until you can mainline some more sweet, sweet Cynic.
Said band, Exist, even have a Cynic-al connection: frontman Max Phelps is a member of Cynic's current live line-up, as well as being the frontman for the current line-up of Death to All, the Chuck Schuldiner-tribute group organized by Death-alums and Cynic prog-nerds Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert.
What all of this six degrees of separation stuff means for you is that Exist displays a lot of the same jazzy-sounding prog-metal goodness that can be found in Cynic's more recent work, making Exist a pretty tasty way to make it through the next couple of months. Have a listen to "Self-Inflicted Disguise" from Exist's debut LP Sunlight and see if it'll scratch that fusion itch for you.
Oh, Canada! If any of you were disappointed or dismayed by the decidedly non-metal nature of yesterday's song, I've got just the remedy for you today, and even better, it comes courtesy of some fellow Canucks.
I'm just discovering Victoria's Fall in Archaea, but apparently they've been honing their sound for a couple of years now and are finally ready to release their debut LP Aura Magenta on Christmas Eve. With feet firmly planted in the realms of both djenty chugga chugga and new-school tech-core, they run the risk of being lost amid the din of similar bands, but Fall in Archaea display just the right flashes of melody to catch my attention.
Your song this evening is "Armistice", the recently released first single off of Aura Magenta, and it's chock full of enough groove to get your head bopping and enough strange, slinky guitar acrobatics to convince you that the end of the world is indeed at hand. Give it a whirl and show Canada you care.
When I started writing this blog, it was with the intention of writing more or less exclusively about metal. Now, I listen to a lot of metal and heavy music, but it quickly became apparent to me that so much of what I'm into falls under some other heading. It has since become my mandate simply to write about interesting music, heavy or not. I'll listen to music from virtually any genre, as long as it's not boring. Or country. Fuck country music.
With the thirst for interesting music in mind, I present you with this little gem I stumbled across a couple of days ago, a song called "What the Waves Brought" by an Armenian jazz pianist named Tigran Hamasyan. Regular readers will know that I like a bit of jazziness now and again, but this song has elements that should appeal to even the stanchest of metalheads: complexity, technical proficiency, a balance between consonance and dissonance, energy, dynamic "riffs" (licks? what do you call them on piano?)
I'm featuring this live version of this song from a performance on KUTX because I dig the vocal touches Tigran puts in, spilling over in beat-box territory towards the end, but even the album version (from Tigran's 2011 album A Fable) is plenty worth of a day in the spotlight. And if you're still not sold on the whole jazz piano thing, consider this: how badass would a metal cover of this song be?
In addition to being aware of my love for physical media, regular readers will likely also have picked up on my penchant for preordering. Whether it's in the form of an Indiegogo campaign or just a straight preorder, I enjoy knowing ahead of time that the album I'm looking forward to has already been paid for and will arrive at my door without any further action required on my part.
The only downside is that stuff can sometimes take a while to arrive in the post, and although lots of bands are now mitigating this problem by issuing digital download codes on release day for fans who've purchased physical version of albums, I'm still a little old school in my desire to wait for my copy to arrive before I really sit down with a release. Sure, I'll stream or download on release day to keep up with the Joneses of music journalism, but it's only when I get my grubby mitts on a disc that I really delve into the material.
For this reason, I was pleasantly surprised to find my copy of Mandroid Echostar's new EP in my mailbox earlier this week. For the unfamiliar, Mandroid is a techy Canadian band from Guelph that I've seen best described as sounding a little like Protest the Hero meets Coheed and Cambria. Their self-titled debut EP was pretty solid, and their new disc Citadels is more of the same: some really cool melodies spread across the soaring vocals and intricate guitar work and backed up by some tight and tasteful drumming.
I almost want to go with "Ancient Arrows" as your song today, simply because the intro-y riff strikes me as the best Avenged Sevenfold lick Avenged never wrote, but I think I'm going to settle on "The Sleeper. For a guitar guy like me, this one's loaded: there's some fat riffage, some very video game-inspired tapping that opens and closes the song, and even a sweet little bluesy-sounding solo too.
One problem/blessing in disguise? All I can find on Youtube is a stream of the whole EP, so you'll just have to ingest the whole thing, paying special attention to track five. Or just skip ahead to "The Sleeper". Either way, check these guys out pronto, and while you're at it check out the e-mail interview I did with Mandroid's singer Michael Ciccia back in the spring.
I mentioned playing some Metallica back in the day in yesterday's big mega-post, and today we're going to go with another song we really used to dig when I was an undergrad.
Your song today is "Confined" from As I Lay Dying's 2005 disc Shadows Are Security, a pretty solid metalcore song if you ask me. I've discovered a lot of new music since this album came out, especially since I started writing this blog, much of which has taken me beyond the rather limiting metalcore formula of As I Lay Dying. But I can't deny them their place in my musical history, and I won't deny that there are a bunch of As I Lay Dying songs that I still enjoy, like "Confined". So hate on, haters, while I and anyone who cares to join me will be rocking out like it's eight to ten years ago.
At the risk of sounding like I'm making excuses (which I suppose I am... shut up...) I'm going to lay a good chunk of the blame for my apparent inability to keep to a schedule lately on my early morning starts at work. My normal day starts at five in the morning, and the combination of that ungodly hour and an average of probably only five or six solid hours of sleep beforehand, on a regular basis, is that, unless I catch up with naps or keep myself well-caffeinated, by the end of the week I often end up falling asleep well before I mean to, and before I've gotten all of the day's shit done.
But, to paraphrase the words of House Lannister, "a bearded man always pays his debts", so once again you're getting a hat-trick post today (that's three goals in a single game, for you non-hockey types out there), covering Saturday, Sunday, and today all in one shot. So let's get started.
For your Saturday song, I'm going to need you to close your eyes and picture the following: old-school prog-influenced death metal (think old Opethy kinda stuff) filtered through the lens of a band like Baroness, if Baroness drew its melodic sensibilities and plaintive passages more from straight forward rock and less from countrified bluegrass. Now open your eyes, and find that you're gazing at the totally badass album art for Cormorant's 2011 disc Dwellings. There's a good chance you don't know these guys, but you should, especially if the word picture I painted you above sounded at all flavourful to you. A caveat, however: only two of the seven tracks on Dwellings clock in at less than five minutes long, so first time listeners are in for some attrition. But if you give Cormorant a chance, songs like "Funambulist" will take you for a ride.
Next up, Sunday, and I'm going to do the unthinkable and take a single track out of the context of its "greater than the sum of its parts" album. You know the kind of album I'm talking about, even if I'm not doing the best job of articulating it right now: those magical records that work perfectly as a single piece of music rather than merely a collection of separate songs. Sure, those songs are good, but put 'em together and you've got a real slice of fried gold on your hands. Such is the case with "Quittance" from the debut LP Februus by Uneven Structure, a cool tune in its own right but also a piece of a much more awesome whole. Listen to "Quittance", but by all means listen to Februus from start to finish if you haven't already. Djent has become kind of a bad word, but Uneven Structure will show you one example of how powerful that kind of a sound can be.
And for today, Monday, we're going to do a bit of a throwback to how I used to run Mondays around here with a Metallica Monday.In particular I'm picking "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", an old favourite of mine from way back when I was in high school and we used to attempt a few Metallica covers when jamming. Between us, we knew all the obvious ones, but we also liked to dust off this lesser-known (or lesser-liked, anyways) cut from 88's Master of Puppets, so I encourage you to dust it off too.
Whew. Caught up. Again. Meet you back here tomorrow? Deal!
I know you must have missed me desperately over the last couple of days, so as usual you're getting a a triple shot today to make up for it, whether you want it or not.
First, something a little mellower. I'm not a huge fan of techno/electronica-type music, but there is some bloopy stuff I enjoy. How convenient for me that one of my favourite bands has at least one cool song in this vein (and virtually every other vein besides). That song is "Digital Sea" from the Water portion of Thrice's 2007 album The Alchemy Index: Vols. 1-2, and it's also your song for yesterday.
Next up, we're going a little more aggro with one of my favourite Deftones songs. Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan were both really good records, but when it comes to the Deftones, White Pony still holds the crown in my book. And if we're talking White Pony, we need to be talking "Knife Party", if only for the spine-tingling vocal cameo by Rodleen Getsic near the end of the song. Her performance gives the song a particularly haunting quality that has stuck with me since I was in high school.
Finally, for your Friday song, we'll sample something heavier still. Specifically, we're going with "We Are the Nightmare" which is both the title track to Arsis' 2008 album as well as the opening one. This is the first song I ever heard by Arsis, and I was instantly intrigued. Tasty tech-death with a pretty keen sense of melody? Yes please. Their stuff since this album has been equally technically brilliant, but for me has failed to rebottle the lightning of We Are the Nightmare. If you're into this kind of thing, you should definitely give this album a spin.
Today was a bit of a milestone for me. I convocated this morning, officially becoming a Master of the Arts. Now, in addition to a big stack of books I've yet to read, I've also got a long back-list of music to get to, including today's band.
I've long wanted to check out Caligula's Horse, and now I've got even more incentive with the band's new album The Tide, The Thief & River's End and the new video for "Dark Hair Down". Heavy enough and proggy enough without being inaccessible or avant garde, Caligula's Horse strike a tasty balance. I shall definitely be sampling some more of these Aussies' wares.
We're going with some solid groove to start off the week in tonight's quickie post.
I'll readily admit that Lamb of God's Wrath isn't my favourite LoG album. That said, it does have some great tracks, like today's song. Album closer "Reclamation" is a solid song all the way through, but what really seals the deal on my selection of it this evening is that snakey intro riff, starting out on just an acoustic guitar seemingly on a beach or a shoreline somewhere before adding the electrics and then the rest of the band. It's a good example of a track that's a little less "by the numbers" Lamb of God.
If you'll allow me to wax poetic for a moment,tonight's post is a sip of champagne poured out onto the ground for a fallen musical homie.
I've been a fan of The Mars Volta for a long time, and even though their work got less and less focused with each album (with the possible exception of Noctourniquet) I was bummed to hear the news that the band has broken up. It marked the end of a weird, proggy era.
Tonight's song, however, is aimed at anyone who isn't aware of just how normal and straight-forward a song The Mars Volta were capable of writing. Have a listen to "The Widow" from 2005's sophomore LP Frances the Mute and see what you think.
I'm once again late with this quickie post for Saturday, this time by a few hours instead of thirty minutes, but something tells me you'll survive.
Your song for Saturday is "Waffle" from Sevendust's 1999 album Home. Sevendust is one of those nostalgia bands for me, harkening back to the formative years of my musical taste (aka high school) so when this track came up in the car the other day I said a prayer of thanks to the Shuffle Gods and made a mental note to remind all of your out there of just how solid some of their material is. Consider yourself reminded.
Technically I'm about a half hour late to the party with today's (or rather Friday's) song, but really who's counting (besides me)? Probably not you, that's who!
Pre-orders for the upcoming LP Pink Lemonade from Australia's proggy post-hardcore band Closure in Moscow have been up for a couple of months now, but beyond some studio updatey-type videos on their Facebook they've been relatively silent about the whole thing. The record doesn't even have a release date yet, although it looks like things are now into the mixing and mastering stages. The band does, however, have a new video for the album's first single, "Church of the Technochrist".
Closure in Moscow were never a metal band by any stretch of the imagination, but judging by this single (and a couple of live tracks that have found their way onto Youtube) the band has shifted its sound away somewhat from the levels of intensity and technicality displayed on previous releases. But that doesn't mean I'm not still interested in hearing Pink Lemonade; the band still seems to have all the energy, melodic sense, and just plain funkiness they always have, meaning that the tasty flavours I like about their old stuff are still in evidence. Plus, at least in the case of this first single, the subject matter -- technology as religion -- is actually pretty metal, amirite?
So, staunch metalheads of the Interwebz, put aside your pretentious metal elitism for at least a few minutes and let "Church of the Technochrist" convert you to the ranks of the Closure in Moscow believers. You might just find that you enjoy some slightly mellower thunder from down under.
It's been a while since I've listened to the whispers of the Shuffle Gods, but today they deigned to remind me of a band I haven't listened to in ages, and the soft spot I have in my heart for this band compels me to share that divine inspiration with you, dear reader.
So tonight we're going with a classic from my youth: "Everything and Nothing" from the 2000 album L.D. 50 by none other than Mudvayne. These guys had the unfortunate timing to be sometimes lumped in with nu-metal, but I maintain that they're so much more than that, and while their catalogue contains a bunch of good songs that span several albums, but I don't know that they ever topped L.D. 50, so that's the album we're revisiting this evening. Crank the bass on this one.
Rather than getting all proggy on you again (can you tell I like prog?) we'll stick with some heavier shit in tonight's quickie post. Yes, as you can tell from the title of this post, I'm going with some Opeth, but I promise it's not 70's prog-folk Opeth.
Your song this evening is the relatively brutal "Wreath" from 2002's Deliverance. I say 'relatively' because while it's not the all-out onslaught of earlier Opeth, it's also not the more acoustic guitar-laden stuff of more recent albums. Deliverance, the heavy counterpart to the gentler Damnation, is therefore the middle road, moderation in all things-ish happy medium of heaviness in the career of one of my favourite bands, and that's why you're getting the title track tonight. Good luck sleeping tight after that little lullaby.
Between the week of instrumental stuff and yesterday's Cynic tune, things have been a little bit proggy around here. So tonight I feel like we need to get back to basics, so to speak, and feature a song that just stomps in and says Fucking Metal. And I've got just the song in mind.
Your song tonight is "On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood" from 2011's Ritual by none other than The Black Dahlia Murder. I could have gone a lot of different directions to arrive at something Fucking Metal, but for my money TBDM is one band that absolutely crushes every time they come up to bat. Even within the band's catalogue, I could have picked any number of tracks that display balls out heaviness, but "On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood" just might be my favourite track off of Ritual, not to mention being pretty high on my list of favourite songs from the band's whole discography. Plus that's a pretty Fucking Metal title too, right?
Prog dorks the world over shared a communal musical boner today with the announcement that Cynic's long-anticipated next LP, entitled Kindly Bent to Free Us, will be released on Valentine's Day 2014. Even though I'm a latecomer to the Cynic fold, I'll still freely admit that I'm one of those dorks.
Such feelings of arousal, however, are alas not universal. The proggier, spacier musical direction of Cynic's last EP, 2011's Carbaon-Based Anatomy, left many old school Cynic fans unimpressed, and this EP continues to be divisive, with some fans lamenting the band's progression away from it's death metal roots and some fans embracing it.
I'm one of the latter, and I can't wait to hear a whole album's worth of newer-school Cynic, but as an olive branch to the former chunk of Cynic fans I've decided to go back a bit in the band's catalogue for a song to commemorate the occasion of the album announcement. To that end, your song this evening is "The Space for This" from 2008's classic Traced in Air, because I think that's a track and record we can all get behind. Cynic fans of the world unite!
I think I've mentioned this before, but just in case I haven't let me make it perfectly clear right now: I'm a sucker for physical media. If a band I'm into has a pre-order (or, as the case today may be, a crowdfunding campaign) you know I'm going to be all over the deluxe double CD version. I'm not quite so far gone as to be one of those vinyl-or-nothing people (although I do have a turntable and a small record collection) but I definitely will pick a CD over a digital download every time, to the point that when a band offers only a digital-download version of their release it makes me a sad, sad panda.
My fixation on physical media is such that, when I do pre-order an album (or contribute to a crowdfunding campaign) I typically don't listen to it a whole lot until my copy arrives. Sure, I'll stream it on release day so I'm on the same page as everybody else for when it comes time to write this blog, but beyond that initial acquaintance-making I usually wait until I get my copy to really dig in.
Thus it was with great delight that I opened my Indiegogo perk package from Misery Signals earlier this week. Yeah, I know the album came out over the summer, but I sprang for the "making-of DVD" package, and I believe the band chose to include some tour footage on said DVD, hence the delay.
In any case, I've finally gotten the chance to really listen to Absent Light (which typically consists of a lot of plays through a record whilst driving back and forth to work) and it's growing on me with every spin. I still think Controller is my favourite, but tracks like "Carrier" from Absent Light are doing their best to change my mind. That's why(after a long-winded lead-up) "Carrier" is your song tonight. Enjoy.
We're going to shift gears ever so slightly for this last evening of Instrumental Week. If I've spent the last six days trying to convince you that music doesn't need vocals to be badass, then tonight you're going to learn that instrumental music doesn't need to be metal to be "metal".
I've espoused the great unifying properties of Trioscapes before, but then I was talking about getting your non-jazz friends into something jazzy. Now I'm talking about getting your non-instrumental friends into something that doesn't have any words to it. Trioscapes is the band for the job, and since I've already featured a couple of their songs before, tonight "Curse of the Ninth" is the song for the job.
In metal influencing terms, jazz is the new classical. Back in the day classical music had a heavy influence on some of the greats of the genre (like Metallica, just to name one example) but now jazz is where it's at (take Between the Buried and Me, to again cite but a single instance). Why not check out the very groovy intersection of the metal, jazz, and instrumental worlds that is Trioscapes? You'll be glad you did.
Like seemingly everything else I put my hand it to it took longer than I'd have liked, but I promised a pit report for Tuesday evening's Protest the Hero show and now I'm here to deliver. So read on, and live vicariously through me!
Tuesday's show was one of a few impromptu additions to the Volition tour announced after the main dates but taking place before the bulk of the tour -- some pre-tour warm-ups, or something along those lines, is what I think I recall reading in one of the band's Facebook posts. I would guess that this had something to do with the venue choice of a bar, The Mansions, rather than the comedy club that often hosts shows like this, but honestly, I don't really care. Anything that lets me see Protest in a tiny venue is A-OK in my book.
The first opening act was a local band called Ponderous Chain, but we elected to go out for dinner before the show and as such only caught the second band on the bill, Salt of the Chief Cornerstone. Regular readers will remember that I featured a song of theirs earlier in the week, "Taken by Storm", and this track was just one of several that captivated the whole room with Salt's energetic performance and it's build-and-release style. I dug it enough that I bought a copy of their EP before the night was out.
Also before the night was out, of course, was Protest the Hero. Or at least three-fifths of the Protest I've seen before. Drummer Moe has been officially replaced by The Kindred's Mike Ieradi (the drum work on Volition being handled by Lamb of God's Chris Adler, in case you...somehow... hadn't heard) and bassist Arif is sitting this tour out to work on a stage production he's involved with, his spot being filled by the band's producer Cameron McLellan.
In any event, the boys came on stage to the strains of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers theme song and proceeded to rip through a varied set that included tracks from all four of the band's LPs (even Kezia, which doesn't always get a lot of live love from the guys). There was enough old stuff to please longtime fans such as myself, and enough new stuff to remind everyone that they're touring on a new record.
Highlights of the evening included our close proximity to the barely-elevated stage at all times (thanks to the tiny room at The Mansion) and the crowd's passing Rody crowd-surfing style from the stage to the bar and back for a mid-set brew. Very metal.
And that's about all she (or me) wrote on this one. Head on over to setlist.fm if you're curious about what tunes the band was rocking on Tuesday. Hopefully Protest will be back to town sooner rather than later, and I for one certainly wouldn't be opposed to more stops in small venues like this one. High energy and intensity + an intimate setting = a good time had by all.
This evening sees another quintessential band in modern instrumental metal. Yup, it's time for another Animals as Leaders song.
"Tempting Time" is the opening track from the band's 2009 debut, and thus in a way is the listener's introduction to all things Animals as Leaders. High energy and chock full of shreddy goodness, it sets the tone for the kind of instrumetal that's to come. To derisively label Animals as djent because of their rhythmic, percussive grooves and baritone-range guitar tunings would be to vastly underestimate what Tosin and company are up to. Don't make this mistake!
You can't very well talk about modern instrumental metal-type music without giving a nod to today's band. If you dig this kind of music, you probably already dig these guys too, but that's no reason to leave them out of this week-long instrumental binge.
You guessed it: we're going to Scale the Summit this evening. Which song, you ask? Why, "The Levitated", one of my favourite tracks from my favourite Scale the Summit album, 2011's The Collective. More than many other instrumental bands, Scale the Summit demonstrate perfectly the idea that words aren't necessary to tell a story or go on a journey.
With Instrumental Week continuing this evening, I figured it's only fitting to feature a band that I mentioned yesterday in my description of Salt of the Chief Cornerstone. They're kinda trendy in instrumental metal circles right now, but there's still probably lots of you out there who don't know them, so tonight we're going with a song by Russian Circles.
Your song tonight is "Youngblood" from the 2008 album Station, which happens to be the song by which I discovered this instrumental three-piece. I think I dig 2009's Geneva better, but Station is still a great example of Russian Circles' style, and "Youngblood" is one of my favourite cuts from the latter record. So enjoy it as another reminder of just how powerful music can be, even without those clumsy word thingies.
Two pigs with one bird in tonight's quickie post: marking the occasion of tonight's Protest the Hero show here in Kingston (pit report coming in the next day or two...) and continuing the impromptu Instrumental theme week.
Yes, I figured it's been too long since we've done a theme week,so why not capitalize on the momentum of the rad instrumental posts of the last two days and just make a whole week of it. Sound good? Good. Now for the Protest the Hero show bit.
One of the opening bands, Salt of the Chief Cornerstone, happens to be an instrumental guitar-and-drums duo from Windsor, Ontario. Vaguely jam-bandy at times, Salt overcome this with an ebbing and flowing style that honestly felt a little Tool-esque to me. The same kind of build and release, except done instrumentally a la Russian Circles or something. Except that there's only two of them, making the interplay of both instruments that much more important.
Have a listen to "Taken by Storm" from Salt of the Chief Cornerstone's first EP of demos, and turn it up loud (maybe even close your eyes?) if you want to come close to simulating the energy of being about ten feet away from a performance of this monster.
Since I received my copy of Plini's new EP Sweet Nothings in the mail today, we're going to stay the instrumental, somewhat jazzy course tonight and feature a track from Australia's most underrated export.
The entirety of Sweet Nothings features oodles of Plini's fretboard-melting guitar work, so picking a song today is kinda hard, but in the end the weird groove of the main riff to "Away" has my vote. Labyrinthine and relentless, it drives the song forward like a intricate, mellow train. It would be right at home in a metal song, but instead Plini gives it a different, laid-back intensity. If that makes any sense.
The only problem for you is that I can't seem to find an upload of just this track, so you'll have to listen to the whole EP stream to hear what I'm talking about. Oh wait, that's not a problem at all.
It seems like a lot of albums on my "watch" list have come out recently, or will be out soon, so it's more or less time to shift from "waiting for records to drop" to "waiting for records to be recorded". A number of bands I'm into are either in the studio or just about to head in, like today's band.
Toronto's Intervals are an up-and-coming young instrumetal band that I've feature a bunch before, but since they're within days of heading into the studio to lay down the last of the material for their debut LP I think it's only fitting that I give them another few minutes in the spotlight.
To that end, here's "Inertia", the closing track from Intervals' debut EP The Space Between from back in 2011. A little bit djenty in groove terms (in the best possible ways) but also proggy and melodic, and all without a single word being sung. If instrumental stuff if your thing, you should know about Intervals, and if it isn't, Intervals is a big reason why it should be.
I wanted to post a song yesterday evening. I really did. But saving the world from the machinations of Nazi Germany (aka playing Axis and Allies for like five or six hours) got in the way. I apologize for defending your freedoms. No need to thank me.
So first up this afternoon we have a song for yesterday, and since WW2 was the order of the evening, we're stepping into the musical history books of my youth and going with System of a Down's "War?" from their self-titled debut.
For today's song we'll pick something a little more current. Well, a lot more current. Protest the Hero's Volition came out officially this past Tuesday (a couple of songs/videos had already been released before it leaked a week or two ago) and now that I've had some time to spend with my copy, I for one can say that it slays.
I'm still undecided as to where I'd rank it in the Protest canon, but I have decided that it is, at the very least, a worth addition to said canon. Soaring vocals? Check. Badass, quick-fingered guitar riffs? Check. Bass that actually does something besides follow the guitar? Check there too. And tight, machine-like drumming from Chris Adler? Double check.
"Yellow Teeth" has all of the above, so check it out as yet another example of just how solid a record the boys in Protest have put together in Volition. Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of rip of this album yet on Youtube, so you'll have to just have to go stream the whole album, paying special attention to track five for that yellow goodness. Have at 'er!
