The history of Saor is a bit deceptive. If you’ve heard the name at all, you didn’t until last year, but the man behind it has been around for some time now. Before Scotland’s Andy Marshall chose this name for his solo project, he released Eternity as Askival in 2009. He was also a major factor in Where Distant Spirits Remain by Falloch in 2011. Neither of those albums stuck with me well enough for me to remember how they sound off the top of my head today, but I do have them. That tells me this is a musician with a good bit of experience, who managed to get his name out there well before he changed it to Saor. Aura is apparently his second release as Saor — he released Roots last year, and I’ll have to make a point to go check it out. If it sounds anything like Aura, it will be well worth the trouble.
Saor – Children of the Mist, from Aura
It does not take long for this five song, 57 minute album to convince you that it has something special going on. The opening track, “Children of the Mist”, erupts almost immediately into a graceful, distinctly Gaelic sweep of woodwind, layered atop well-mixed metal that lets the folk melody shine without much intrusion. The piano and string that follow seem to float in the air, painting a vivid landscape that seems to mirror the album’s cover art. The vibe is similar to Waylander of Northern Ireland, and it feels like it could drift on forever without losing any of its opening grandeur. Around 4:20, the metal briefly gives way to a beautiful cloud of strings and traditional drumming, soon to be met by blast beats that, much like on Kentucky by Panopticon, manage imbue the landscape with life rather than darkness. As the song continues on, you hear a wide variety of folk, pagan, and black metal techniques employed towards this same end of adding a feeling of life and spirit to the nature scenes that the traditional instrumentation invokes.
Saor – The Awakening, from Aura
This approach holds true throughout the grand bulk of the album. The melodies always arise from the folk instrumentation, with the metal serving a supplemental role of forcing you to feel directly engaged in the moment–a temporal witness to some eternal tranquility. It is a devout album, alive in reverence for the spirits of the land. From start to finish, it varies relatively little but never disappoints.
I suppose the terms “folk” and “pagan” can get thrown around rather haphazardly at times, without much of a clear distinction. One tends to conjure to mind lighter, “fun” bands like Korpiklaani and Alestorm, the other more serious bands such as Waylander and Drudkh. Sometimes this seriousness generates a sort of militarism or savagery, rendering bands like Arkona and Nokturnal Mortum far more intense than anything traditional black metal has produced on its own (and far too often, in Nokturnal Mortum’s case for instance, this gets vandalized by absurd notions of supremacy). But this does not always have to be the case. On Aura there is never a hint of desperation or brutality. The feeling is purely of peace and reverence boldly denying that the tradition it embraces has been in any way weakened by the modern world. “Folk” and “pagan” both denote music focused on ways of life that are no longer socially acceptable or possible in a modern, technologically advanced, monotheistic world. If folk suggests people, pagan suggests religion, and the religions of old were not based upon some highborn Greek notion of divinity. Their gods took hearth in wood and water and earth. Saor feels like pagan metal in that sort of sense to me. Its folk instrumentation paints the landscape, and the metal imbues it with supernatural life.
Aura is undeniably one of the most beautiful recordings of 2014. Don’t let it pass you by.
When I saw a band described as “crust black metal”, my first thoughts went out to recent Darkthrone and Carpathian Forest’s Fuck You All!!!!. I was hoping for the latter of the two, but I found something far more unique to itself. With a healthy dose of thrash, grindcore, and a dozen other influences in the mix, Fukpig deliver a sound I can appreciate from a lot of different angles. Their discography is showing 18 releases in a span of 14 years, so I imagine a lot of people knew what to expect. I didn’t.
Fukpig – This World is Weakening, from This World is Weakening
If This World is Weakening has the look and feel of a grindcore album, it certainly does not share their typical length. At 36 minutes, there is no lack of content. The album actually feels rather lush, with a lot of experimentation and variation that does not succumb to the repetitive. The title track, for instance, opens with a bit of a doom/stoner drone before bursting into a really old-school black metal grind, harkening to the days when the style was not so distinct from thrash. The vocals are deliciously distorted in a way that reminds me a little of Converge, and I’m already loving it. But Fukpig aren’t content to leave it at a black/thrash throwback. 35 seconds on, a drum roll tosses you into a really desperate and compelling tremolo chorus that turns the song on its head. It wouldn’t feel terribly out of place in a screamo song, and it definitely tosses “This World is Weakening” into a category all of its own. Not too many 2 minute songs can feel this complete.
Fukpig – Fascist Moron, from This World is Weakening
The next track is night and day different. The crusty thrash gets layered over a synth chorus that you normally wouldn’t hear outside of Norway. It quickly goes from a nearly tongue-in-cheek dramatic delight to sick and crunchy in the chorus, and then we move on to a dirty breakdown that makes me want to rock my head into orbit, all to a comical grindcore squawk of “FASCIST MORON!” Nearly every song on this album is a world of its own, totally distinct from the rest. Fukpig manage this while rarely extending a track beyond the two minute mark. The unmistakable vocals and thrash beat might be the most consistent features, along with some faux-dramatic synth, but each track seems to put these to use in novel new ways. This World is Weakening taps just about every trend in extreme music and crams them into explosive shells of crusty, thrashy old school black metal. It can and inevitably will replace bands like Pig Destroyer in my really limited collection of tight brutality–a musical mood that strikes me only occasionally but always seems to lack sufficiently appealing sources. There is an underlining intelligence to This World is Weakening that keeps your mind running when you pause from the direct confrontation long enough to suck it in.
Valknacht is a five-piece paganish metal band from Quebec that have released three albums beginning in 2009–not to be confused with Walknut, the highly acclaimed side-project of Stringsskald from Темнозорь (Temnozor). I suppose I grabbed this album for an obvious reason: it presented a pagan tag from a relatively new act I had never heard of. With the folk and pagan metal scene now fifteen years in the making, a lot of the old stalwarts are simply running low on material. I am always hoping to stumble upon a new collaboration willing to pick up the slack and carry one of my favorite genres onward into a new era. Valknacht could be that band, but it’s going to take some work.
Valknacht – Bataille de Maldon, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
The album begins with a 3 minute intro track that I’ll not bother sampling here. You already know what it sounds like. Oars splash through the sea in time with viking voices oooing and OOOing and sometimes aaahhing. Break and repeat with some overbearing choral and brass synth, throw in a gong for good measure, and you will find yourself in the opening moments of “Bataille de Maldon”. Add a dash of synth woodwind, queue the crunch crunch crunch monotone guitar, and remind your drummer to make it metal in a few more measures. The black metal at 2:05 gives us a well-needed boost, and from there the song transitions to something that ought to be really, really cool. 2:40 made me think of Nokturnal Mortum’s “The New Era of Swords” from Weltanschauung, and for about one minute “Bataille de Maldon” is a song I really want to listen to. But the segment soon gives way to something fairly indistinguishable from what came before.
For the vast, vast majority of this 9:30 song, what you hear is an endless rain of double bass, rhythm guitar that only knows two patterns and three chords, a cheap synth whistle that’s totally unconvincing as the real deal, an admittedly interesting lead guitar, and total synth overkill plugging in every gap, sometimes doubled up with layers of “OOOOOOOOO”.
Yet, this could have all worked out really well. This band surely listened to a lot of Moonsorrow, and the string portion of the synth gets playfully close to Nokturnal Mortum at times. But the rest of the synth is just bad. It feels so fake. They use bold brass like they’re Equilibrium or Turisas, but the music isn’t nearly bombastic enough to merit it. The woodwinds have no depth, no air, no punctuation… Аркона (Arkona) is about the only band I can think of that pulls off fake woodwinds effectively (unless others are doing it so well I take them for studio musicians), and they must have much higher-end equipment than Valknacht at their disposal to do it with. It would have been nothing for one of the band members to pick up a whistle and record it proper. The vocals get really annoying really quickly for lack of dynamics or anything interesting to encase them. And the song goes on and on and on without ever adding much of anything. By 3:10 we’ve pretty much heard everything, and there’s next to nothing in the form of build-up or break until we hit a sudden transition at 8 minutes into an admittedly solid finale.
So, am I going to say anything good about this album? Surprisingly, yes. Quite a lot actually.
Valknacht – Le carmin des anges, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
The tragedy of Le Sacrifice d’Ymir is that just about anyone listening to this album will get the same impression that I did for its first 13 minutes. How many will keep listening? Few, I suspect, and it’s a shame because by the end this album is sounding pretty damn solid. “Le carmin des anges” is the closing track. It should have been the opening. Here is a song that cuts out all of the bullshit and condenses everything I did like about “Bataille de Maldon” into a much more manageable 5 minute package. The term “trying” drops back down my throat, and I hear some really badass Windir licks connected by groovy breaks and synth again reminiscent of Noktrunal Mortum. Thorleïf’s vocals do a total 360, and his previously dull deeper bellows sound epic when juxtaposed and then overlaid with higher-pitched rabid black metal screams.
The collective sound really works here, too. The Moonsorrow vibe they were going for in “Bataille de Maldon” flopped for a far-too-excessive attempt to be epic. That sort of music is meant to sound earthy, and the synth swarm just made it seem cheap and fake. On “Le carmin des anges”, a lot of the frivolous choral and brass sounds are gone, and what remains works far better with the Windir vibe they’re getting at.
Valknacht – Le sacrifice d’Ymir, from Le Sacrifice d’Ymir
You didn’t have to wait until the last track to find this though. The third, “Chants de guerre”, carries an infinitely more successful Moonsorrow vibe than the song before it. The woodwind’s fakeness is barely significant because the loop it plays is more of an unnatural Falkenbach chant than a harmony. Thorleïf’s full vocal range finally comes into play, and there is way more Windir-esque black metal–a sound they do right. Track 4, “Sur les ruines de Rome”, throws in some seemingly female screams and spoken lines that feel kind of reminiscent of Masha from Arkona, and could be a guest musician or further testament to Thorleïf’s range. (Liner notes for this album have been hard to come by.) As if Masha had been on their minds, track 5, “Le sacrifice d’Ymir”, feels pretty “slava!”, with some frantic whistle and guitar tapping. I had good cause to doubt another 10 minute track, but there is so much more going on here than in “Bataille de Maldon”. Thorleïf’s vocal dynamics alone are enough to make the overdrawn passages–and there are certainly a few–way less dull, the lead guitarist keeps up that Windir kick he’s proven pretty good at, that obnoxious rhythm guitar from the opener is all but missing, mixed down from a nuisance to its proper role and a background accessory.
“De murmures et de givre” starts nice but regrettably returns to a lot of the mistakes of “Bataille de Maldon”–a 7 minute track that could have probably made its point in three and a half. “Que le sang constelle mes mains” gives us our first and last taste of some accordion. Though its synthetic generation is painfully obvious, it does kick off with a melody pleasantly reminiscent of Finsterforst. Again though, the song drones on way too long with boring “I’m going to growl, you chugga-chug, and you hit a whole bunch of notes at once on your keyboard” moments.
So what’s the verdict? I think that this band either ran out of material and had to generate a few filler tracks, or else the minds behind it have some differences of opinion on how they ought to sound and they tried to accommodate everyone. Over all, fans of Windir will find plenty of moments to swoon over, and Moonsorrow die-hards will be modestly entertained. I got a Nokturnal Mortum vibe in some of the synth string utilization and rhythm guitar breakdowns, but not nearly enough to satisfy, and it has to take second stage to a lot of derivative crap. These guys have enormous potential, and they’re relatively young by band standards. I think the inclusion of “Bataille de Maldon” in its present state–at all let alone as the not-so-grand opener–is a little suspect. It would be nice to hear some session musicians for the folk instrumentation, or at least a better keyboard. And they really need to do something about song lengths relative to content. I will have long forgotten Le Sacrifice d’Ymir this time next year, but I won’t forget to check out their future releases. Turisas rose from a totally generic sound to release one of the best albums in folk metal. So did Finsterforst. Valknacht are certainly capable of becoming a band I could fall in love with.
I am definitely not a time-honored, faithful fan of Blut Aus Nord. They managed to evade my radar for over 15 years before the 777 trilogy brought them into the broader spotlight. Sect(s) impressed me from the start, but in a twisted, bewildering way that was not necessarily enjoyable. It was a car accident you slowed down to gawk at in spite of your better judgment. It was a disturbing feast of dementia. I did not hop on The Desanctification right away, naively expecting more of the same, and it was only with Cosmosophy that I finally caught on to just how intelligent and creative Blut Aus Nord could be.
I didn’t go back in time and pick up their classics, but I did eagerly await their next album with zero assumptions about where it might go. This seemed like a band that could do anything they set their mind to, and judging by Kristian Wåhlin’s cover art, it would be something fairly distinct from 777.
Blut Aus Nord – Paien, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
What I found was an album that kept a lot of basic elements intact, but, sure enough, sounded nothing like 777‘s cyberpunk journey through a hellspawn-ridden hive mind. Saturnian Poetry feels like much more traditional black metal on the surface, though you will be hard pressed to write it off as such. It takes about five seconds to realize that the blurred tremolo will not be content to loop into any stereotypical black metal monotony. The song jerks upward in a frantic fit, and by the 40 second mark we’re already on to a new rotation. Celestial keyboard “aaahhhs” and a barely sane pattern of motion rip your eyes wide open, and the clean, ethereal vocals at 1:20 tower above as an apathetic higher being uninterested in quelling the chaos beneath it. When the blast beats and constant motion do break, it is never long enough to calm the mood. It is an avant-garde, progressive approach to black metal that I can only compare to Krallice, only where they remain raw and brutal to a fault, Blut Aus Nord mellow out the drumming and keep the eye of a graceful keyboard looming ever above you.
You are being watched as you thrash about into empty space as hard as steel. We don’t know what that eye wants, but we sometimes catch a glimpse of its perspective, as at 5:10, as the beat slows to a plod and the sweeping guitar takes in a vast vision far beyond your natural senses.
Blut Aus Nord – Metaphor of the Moon, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
Blut Aus Nord is a band you can sense beyond the limitations of your ears. That was something that struck me from the first time I ever listened to Epitomes 1 and 2 on Sect(s). Where so many experimental black metal bands aim to invoke a feeling, Blut Aus Nord paint a sensory world. The motion of the guitar is so pronounced that you feel the notes cascading around you. Metaphor of the Moon opens amidst a tornado, everything spiraling downward in a rush of energy that encircles you. Wherever their songs might be headed, I tend to feel trapped within them in body–some twisted wonderland where keyboard and clean vocal spirits gaze upon me and invisible forces and amalgamations of lead guitar swoop all around, discernible only through some super-sense that informs me of their presence without ever forming a solid image.
But if I had to pick a fault in Saturnian Poetry, it would be the overly traditional percussion. Beats carried the day in the 777 trilogy. The band’s experimentation with unconventional drum tones added the final layer needed to complete the unique quasi-physical world of their music. On Saturnian Poetry, the lack of this element serves as an occasional reminder that I am, after all, only listening to a song. “Metaphor of the Moon” is the track that seems to extend beyond my attention span the most, at least to a point. I can latch on to it at just about any moment if I choose to, but it sometimes fails to hold me long without some effort on my part.
Blut Aus Nord – Clarissima Mundi Lumina, from Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
That being said, these guys are a clear cut above the vast majority of their competition in the black metal scene. It is hard to believe that France, once known for the raw and unadorned acts of Les Légions Noires, could give us three of the most significant post-black bands of our time, but Blut Aus Nord, Peste Noire, and Alcest surely stand as a triumvirate of progression and experimentation in 21st century metal. Saturn Poetry will never top the 777 trilogy in my books, and generic drumming is to blame first and foremost. Yet I’ll not soon forget a closing track like this–the listener sacrificing himself to madness, screaming towards that eye above, catching unintelligible glimpses that only make his violence more desperate. It never ends, never finds resolution, just continues to implode in perpetual waves of self-destruction. I don’t know that the song, or the album as a whole, has any clear passage. There is no apparent journey here or grand enlightenment at the end, though perhaps I ought to find the first two Memoria Vetusta albums before I pass judgment. Either way, Saturnian Poetry is another shattered window into that twisted, imaginative world that only these French masters can conjure. Whether I see in it precisely what the band intended or not, I definitely see something words cannot easily describe.
There are two reasonable places to start with Aokigahara. One is to point out that that album cover is going to give me serious nightmares. The other is to state that this is an album of contradictions, its Austrian origins being only the most trivial. It is the most over-the-top emo cheese ball of lyrics you could hope to stumble across, with lines like “I’m losing friends and above all, I’m losing confidence,” and “I feel so fucking lonely.” Yet it succeeds in making me feel really, really sad time and time again. And in spite of track titles like “Nailgarden” and “Gallows (Give ‘Em Rope)”, it is really quite beautiful.
Harakiri for the Sky – My Bones to the Sea, from Aokigahara
As one of my first reviews in ages, you could have easily guessed that it would fall firmly in the post-black metal category. But where my last review, Woods of Desolation, showcased a sort of innocent jubilee with limited care for production value and plenty of homage to Explosions in the Sky and Alcest, Harakiri for the Sky’s Aokigahara offers exquisite attention to detail and a “post” sound rooted more in the Agalloch side of the spectrum. The opening track’s plodding dirge offers a lavish soundscape that wants to encompass you in vibrations without ever upping the tempo to a blast-beat driven daze. Don’t worry; there is plenty of that to come. But this is an album meant to be swallowed from start to finish, and not a second of its 60+ minutes feels unwarranted or out of place.
I don’t know much about mixing or production, but I have to think it doesn’t get much better than this. (Youtube bit rates do not come close to doing it justice.) The most immediate and consistently striking feature of the album to me is how well all of the instrumentation melds together. The bass manages to wrap itself around everything and remain distinct no matter how much activity is layered over top of it. The percussion is pleasantly quiet (a modesty so many black metal bands lack) and offers a faint echo that seems to reverberate back into the bass and make the two whole. V. Wahntraum’s vocals maintain their depth even when he rises to the point of an all-out scream (6:20, for instance), and he picks his words to emphasize with care. You might not know what he’s saying, but he manages to convey a sense of sincerity regardless. The guitar seems to bleed into the middle of it all with no distinct range, fading into the doomy haze at its extremities. The end effect is a warm blanket of a sound that wraps around you gently, letting you experience every aspect of it as a unified force.
Harakiri for the Sky – Jhator, from Aokigahara
I must have listened to twenty new albums passively while I worked over the last two days, and my back-of-the-mind impression of Aokigahara was “that one that made me feel cozy”. It wasn’t until I engaged it with no distractions that the darkness of this album really set in. The album cover should have been my first hint. You see the baby fox–an endearing little thing, bathed in warm, fading color–lying dead on a bed of nails and arrows, a grimace of pain across its face. You want to pull it out of the image and hold it close. You want to comfort it. But even if you could reach it, get ahold of yourself. It’s dead. There is nothing you can do. It evokes your most altruistic instincts and denies their use.
The sound of Aokigahara is that same kind of warmth. It is the kind you feel but cannot share, though every ounce of your body aches to. Matthias Sollak and V. Wahntraum let you know this in subtle ways. My first question about the band was “what’s with all this Japanese nonsense if they’re two white dudes from Vienna?” It begs you to hop on Wikipedia. Maybe “Harakiri” isn’t as well known of a word in Austria as it is in America. If it isn’t, “for the Sky” might have given you a positive vibe until you looked it up. I googled “Aokigahara”. I got “Suicide Forest”, a location at the base of Mount Fuji where hundreds of Japanese go every year to end their lives.
So I took a second look at the track titles to this “warm” album of mine. Track two was “Jhator”. Wikipedia: “Sky burial”. Jhator is a Tibetan practice of giving one’s body up for food to sustain the life of others in death. The closing lyrics to the song are “There is only one decision in our lives we can choose on our own: vultures or worms?” That sick knot in my stomach doubled.
Harakiri for the Sky – Burning from Both Ends, from Aokigahara
And then I thought about the track title that had intrigued me the most before I started this little investigation. “69 Dead Birds For Utøya”. I didn’t know what Utøya was, conveniently. The track title kind of already had that simultaneous warm and disturbing feeling to it. Kind of. I think it was the “69” that threw me off at first though, before I started giving the album a serious listen. I instinctively thought it was one of those “when heavy metal efforts to offend get downright weird” moments like Spear of Longinus’s hit classic “YHWH Penis Abominator”. So I googled Utøya. …It’s the fucking island in Norway where Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 children and camp organizers.
With the present track blaring in the background, I stared into the album cover in a thoughtless haze, an overwhelming sense of sorrow creeping over me. I wanted to puke, or cry, or put my fist through my monitor, and all from a track title and a melody. Truly great art digs into us and unlocks our deepest, most powerful emotions, whether we want to feel them or not. It plants the seed and screams our reaction louder than anything we can muster on our own. This was no attempt to be “heavy” or “brutal”–no boast about abstract violence or atrocities long relegated to the subject of myth–no Elizabeth Bathory or Vlad Tepes to keep us cool and edgy. This was art doing its job, and while the experience might not always be pleasant, it is always something beyond what we can safely allow ourselves to feel on a constant basis. We forget, we ignore, we desensitize, but the feelings are still there within us. An elite few bands like Harakiri for the Sky have mastered the art of bringing them back to the surface.
Harakiri for the Sky – Nailgarden, from Aokigahara
I definitely started throwing around “best of the year” boasts too early in my last post. I should have kept my mouth shut until I’d done a good dozen or so reviews and not based my opinions on a bunch of superficial background noise listens, because Aokigahara has already struck me deeper than the last album I had a go at. The music is excellent from start to finish without a doubt, but it’s the underlining theme and presentation that tips it on the scale of greatness. From the song writing to the production to such typically afterthought factors as track titles and cover art, Aokigahara bleeds a common creative agenda. The warmth you feel and think and see is real, but any time you try to take it beyond yourself, you find only loss that you are helpless to counter. “I feel so fucking lonely, although I am never alone,” might be a cheesy lyric in and of itself, but Aokigahara manages to imbue it with substance. Real, brutal substance, like being totally impotent to stop a gunman from slaughtering helpless kids. Maybe the lyrical conclusions are flawed; there seems to be a hint of indifference in the end of every song–a resolution that life just isn’t that important. But it is not convincing. The overarching focus is the helplessness, not the apathy. It’s a 63 minute ball of compassion that you simply cannot share. And let’s be honest, who listens to black metal with their friends?
Has it really been two years since I’ve reviewed a new album? The fact came as a bit of surprise, but here it is late October and I’m staring at a massive horde of 2014 releases that I’ve barely cracked. I was a bit more diligent about keeping up with these when I actually took the time to write about them!
I hope to jump back into this business in force, but in case I fail, I’ll not put off the cream of the crop. My album collection is starting to get overrun by “Woods of” X artists; it seems to be the most popular black metal prefix after “Dark” these days. But one among them might be destined to distinguish itself with my #1 album of the year pick.
Woods of Desolation – Unfold, from As the Stars
I spent a great deal of my late teens and early 20s basking in the polarizing glories of post-rock and black metal. The likes of Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Emperor, and Nokturnal Mortum pumped the residual poison of rock and roll out of my blood and raised me to higher expectations of musical fulfillment. I listened to them not with a care for technical precision or physical skill, but in search of an experience I did not fully understand. Both genres approached this through similar means, but fell short as social stigmata demanded modesty or brutality carry the day. As I grew into an adult, the ice was broken. Neige’s Le Secret whispered its meaning into my ears just as I was old enough to embrace it. He’d broken the Berlin wall of music, and what awaited beyond was strange and beautiful.
Post-black metal, shoegaze metal, “transcendental”, call it what you will. Ten years ago, this album–what the woefully uninformed all-purpose reviewers will write off as a Deafheaven copycat–was not possible. It emerged as many musicians with the same thoughts and greater talent than myself caught glimpse of that beautiful beyond and embraced it. You can name a dozen artists that might have influenced the Australian solo project known as Woods of Desolation, but this brave new genre demands our presence in the here and now. It calls on us to bask in glorious tremolo sweeps triumphant over entwined barricades of light and darkness. “Proud to be living in the echo–the mist of all things combined,” Krallice once wrote, and though they designed to crush it, we retain the luxury to return. When I hear a song this triumphant, that line always comes to me, and the albums that accomplish it are still few and far between. I still love Explosions in the Sky and their ilk, but they offer a different sort of grandeur. Theirs is an experience of climbing to the peak. Songs like “Unfold” allow us to explore the pinnacle at length, from start to finish.
Woods of Desolation – Like Falling Leaves, from As the Stars
To start at the summit and know where you stand. That might be post-black metal in a nutshell. What we can do there… that is still an on-going exploration. Where Liturgy and Primordial roar like lions into the jaws of death, “Like Falling Leaves” is something of the opposite. It accepts the end awaiting it. In this track we don’t hear any of the overarching optimism of “Unfold”. Instead, we’re accepting that something dear is gone forever, and we are held fast in that moment of realizing the fact’s finality. The bulk of the album seems in keeping with these two vibes, sometimes heightened, sometimes subdued, sometimes entwined. “Withering Fields” and “And If All the Stars Faded Away” seem peculiarly triumphant and longing simultaneously, while “Ad Infinitum” is pretty enough for a new Alcest album. Nearly every track bears a sufficiently memorable hook to sound familiar by the second or third play through, and at a mere 35 minutes, it does not waste much time dragging out build-up in between.
I don’t know that As the Stars will retain my #1 spot through the end of the year, especially if I start to pump out album reviews in force again. It is nothing remotely on par with my picks for the last three years, and it suffers from muddy production that can’t always do the song writing justice, but I stand by it as my favorite so far. This is one I’ll keep near and dear to me long after the bulk of my 2014 collection has been forgotten.
Continuing my series on the best of 2013, here are ten of my favorite songs from 2013. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that these were the best songs of 2013. Some of them aren’t. But these are ten songs that, in the future, will define 2013 for me personally. Again, these are my picks and my picks only. So, if you think my taste in music sucks (and, admittedly, quite a few people do), direct your scorn at me and not at anyone else who writes for the Shattered Lens.
I’ve occasionally been asked what my criteria for a good song us. Honestly, the main things I look for in a song is 1) can I dance to it, 2) can I write to it, and 3) can I get all into singing it while I’m stuck in traffic or in the shower?
Anyway, at the risk of revealing just how much of a dork I truly am, here are ten of my favorite songs of 2013.
10) A Low and Swelling Sound Gradually Swelling (composed by Shane Carruth)
This atmospheric instrumental piece comes from the soundtrack of the best film of 2013, Upstream Color. This is great writing music.
9) Giorgio By Moroder (performed by Daft Punk and Giorgio Moroder)
From Random Access Memories.
8) Saturday (performed by Rebecca Black and Dave Days)
I make no apologies. Much like Friday, this is a fun song to sing when you’re driving to and from work. Plus, I think the video’s clever.
7) Brave (performed by Sara Bareilles)
I have to admit that I loved this song more before it started showing up in Nokia Lumia commercials.
6) Feel This Moment (performed by Pitbull, feat. Christina Aguilera)
5) Haunted (performed by ROB)
This is from the Maniac soundtrack. Much like the Carruth song, this is great writing music.
4) Work Bitch (performed by Britney Spears)
Not a day goes by that I don’t find an excuse to say, “You gotta work, bitch.”
3) A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) (performed by Fergie, feat. Q-Tip and Goon Rock)
From The Great Gatsby soundtrack.
2) Just Give Me A Reason (performed by Pink and Nate Ruess)
1) Lose Yourself to Dance (performed by Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams)
What else needs to be said?
Finally, here are two honorable mentions. These are two songs that helped define 2013 for me but, for various reasons, could not be included in my top ten.
First off, Alison Gold’s Chinese Food is technically a terrible song but it’s so terrible that it becomes oddly fascinating. Thanks to the presence of Patrice Wilson, the video is probably one of the most unintentionally creepy music videos ever made.
(I should admit that I happen to love Chinese food myself and therefore, this song is one that I’ve sung a lot over the past few years.)
The second honorable mention is a far better song than Chinese Food: Icona Pop’s I Love It. I Love It was released in 2012 but it’s the song that I listened to nonstop last year.. So, even if it was released a year earlier, I Love It is still my favorite song of 2013.
Tomorrow, I will continue my look back at 2013 with 10 good things that I saw on television last year.
Continuing my series on the best of 2012, here are ten of my favorite songs from 2012. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that these were the best songs of 2012. Some of them aren’t. But these are ten songs that, in the future, will define 2012 for me personally. Again, these are my picks and my picks only. So, if you think my taste in music sucks (and, admittedly, quite a few people do), direct your scorn at me and not at anyone else who writes for the Shattered Lens.
By the way, I was recently asked what my criteria for a good song was. Honestly, the main thing I look for in a song is 1) can I dance to it and 2) can I get all into singing it while I’m stuck in traffic or in the shower?
Anyway, at the risk of revealing just how much of a dork I truly am, here are ten of my favorite songs of 2012.
10 and 9) Make Bullying Kill Itself and Jacking It In San Diego (Trey Parker and Matt Stone)
These two songs were featured in the classic bullying episode of South Park. They should be required listening for anyone who thinks that a YouTube video can change human nature.
8) Big Machine (Ryan Miller)
Perhaps not surprisingly, I discovered a lot of my favorite music of 2012 in the films of 2012. This song was written for the Safety Not Guaranteed soundtrack.
7) Abraham’s Daughter (Arcade Fire)
This is from The Hunger Games soundtrack.
6) The Poison Tree (Moby, feat. Inyang Bassey)
Technically, this song — which is featured on Destroyed — is from 2011 but it was released, as a single, in 2012.
5) Call Me Maybe (Carly Rae Jepsen)
This is just a fun song.
4) Stronger (Kelly Clarkson)
Kelly Clarkson is always going to have to deal with haters, because she won American Idol and voted for Ron Paul. She’s one of my favorites, however.
3) Skyfall (Adele)
The minute I heard this song, I knew Skyfall was going to be great.
2) Blow Me (One Last Kiss) (P!nk)
It’s not really a year in music unless I have P!nk somewhere on the list.
1)Razor’s Out (Mike Shinoda featuring Chino Moreno)
This is from the soundtrack of The Raid: Redemption. Quite simply put, this is a great soundtrack for writing.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue my look at 2012 with my list of 10 good things that I saw on television last year.
I had pretty mixed expectations for the soundtrack to Mists of Pandaria. One the one hand, Blizzard’s scores embarked on a downward spiral starting in 2010. Cataclysm was a poorly planned expansion, and its lack of a clear focus and theme had a serious impact on the music. Russell Brower, Derek Duke, and Glenn Stafford did an outstanding job on Wrath of the Lich King in 2008, but the Cataclysm sound team faced a weak, haphazard plot and (I would imagine) a great deal of frustration as Blizzard scrapped some of their major plans for the expansion mid-stride. Diablo 3 was equally disappointing, with the inexcusable failure to bring back Matt Uelmen taking its toll. I was beginning to think Blizzard had abandoned any serious commitment to ensuring high quality music in their games.
On the other hand, there was no doubt as to what Mists of Pandaria would be about. Just as Wrath of the Lich King had a clearly Nordic vibe from start to finish, Pandaria was thoroughly immersed in Eastern culture and tradition, with a wealth of pre-existing musical themes upon which to build a score. It also brought video game music legend Jeremy Soule into the mix; but considering Cataclysm fell flat in spite of involving David Arkenstone, I wasn’t going to get too excited about this one until I heard it.
As it turns out, Mists of Pandaria might be Blizzard’s best soundtrack to date. Russell Brower, Neal Acree, Sam Cardon, Edo Guidotti, and Jeremy Soule clearly did their research, and the expansion presents a delicious mix of authentic Chinese folk and big-ticket film/game scoring. I am ill-equipped to compare it to similar contemporary soundtracks–I don’t watch movies, and I really haven’t kept up with game soundtracks for the better part of a decade now–but as an avid World of Warcraft fan who plays with the sound on, I can safely say that the music this go around is a fundamental, essential element of the gameplay. This really hasn’t been the case since Wrath of the Lich King. Hour of Twilight (Dragon Soul) had one of the most unconvincing scores in Blizzard’s catalog, for a patch that felt rushed and entirely uninspired. It was a force-fed collection of dramatic stereotypes, and it’s hard to imagine what else it really could have been in the context of the raid. Mists of Pandaria, in contrast, is packed with lively anthems that bring the action to life on a level to par with the mechanical and visual appeal.
My favorite track so far is the music to the Shado-Pan Monastery dungeon. It’s a dungeon that, I think, would hedge on the side of tedious were it not for the score. The Master Snowdrift boss battle begins with a semi-choreographed fight against Pandarian monks who take turns jumping into a ring to engage you. I don’t know if the music is intentionally timed to cue with the fight or if it has just happened that way the two or three times I’ve played through it, but the heavy drumming that starts about 2 minutes into this clip seems to sync up with the start of combat. Playing the game in silence, you might find yourself impatiently waiting for the new challengers to engage you, yawning and tapping your foot to press through and collect 80 valor points. With the music on, it’s one of the most engaging experiences of the expansion: the sweeping anthem gives the fight a cinematic feel, and it’s easy to forget that you’re actively playing a game, not watching a movie. It was on my first play through Shado-Pan Monastery that what Russell Brower and co accomplished in this expansion really hit home. In Wrath of the Lich King, it was the slower-paced themes like Grizzly Hills and Dalaran that moved me the most, capturing the timeless, snow-covered landscapes and subduing the combat experience. In Mists of Pandaria they certainly still achieve top quality questing zone ambiance, but for the first time in a Blizzard game I am also hearing songs that suitably enhance the action.
That, at least, stands for the casual encounters. I have yet to really pay attention to the music while raiding. In a sense, the raids demand the best tunes Blizzard’s sound team have to offer, but they are also the part of gameplay in which you are most focused on what you’re doing and least inclined to sit back and take in the audiovisual experience. What I can certainly say is that for the first time in a while I feel inspired to at least make an effort to pay attention to that experience. For now, I’d like to call further attention to the more ambient, questing zone tracks. The degree to which they managed to incorporate traditional Chinese instrumentation into the score is admirable, and to the best of my knowledge none of the musicians accredited with the Mists of Pandaria soundtrack specialize in Chinese traditional music. The score is certainly of a western film style at heart, and you would never mistake their Eastern fusion for authentic Chinese folk, but such inclusions as a pipa at the outset of “The River” are delicious indulgences that enhance the gameplay experience far beyond what was necessary for the composers to earn their paychecks. Mists of Pandaria is just packed with little Easter eggs that show how much fun Blizzard must have had making this game. (I love how two early, relatively insignificant NPCs you encounter in Jade Forest are named Ren and Lina Whitepaw, as in Ren and Li–Humaneness and Ritual–two of the principles of Confucianism.) Mist of Pandaria’s music offers the same tip of the hat to those of us casually informed on Chinese tradition, and I get a constant thrill in recognizing moments that resemble my beloved eight-volume Chinese Ancient Music Series collection.
Bravo to Blizzard for doing this one right through and through. It’s no masterpiece independent of the video game for which it was composed–I wouldn’t sit around listening to it while not playing the game as I would for say, a Nobuo Uematsu score–but it is an essential component of Mists of Pandaria in a way that the music of Cataclysm never was. Mists of Pandaria is one of the most visually stunning games Blizzard has yet produced, and it’s got a soundtrack to match. I wouldn’t necessarily say I like it more than Wrath of the Lich King, but it achieves the same level of quality while set to a drastically different theme and landscape.
I read so many negative reviews of Unsung Heroes that I actually avoided listening to it for four months. My acquaintance with Ensiferum goes all the way back to their 2001 full-length debut, and I was in no hurry to hear such an essential and formative band for me fall by the wayside. I finally gave it a spin for the first time last night, and frankly I don’t know what everyone is bitching about.
In My Sword I Trust
I mean, sure, Unsung Heroes isn’t the explosive powerhouse of Victory Songs and From Afar. But was I the only person who got the feeling on From Afar that their standard formula was growing really stale really fast? Ensiferum may have set the standard for folk metal as we know it today, but beneath the fist-pumping and epic folk interludes of even tracks like Twilight Tavern and Stone Cold Metal I got the sneaking suspicion that they were beginning to succumb to the very genre stereotype they established. Victory Songs certainly stands as my favorite Ensiferum album to date, but I kind of felt like From Afar was riding too much on its success. Almost every song followed the formula that made Victory Songs so great, and while this certainly facilitated a fresh batch of great songs, it was less than I’d hoped from a band that had consistently paved their own way over the years.
Is Unsung Heroes a washed out version of Victory Songs and From Afar? Only if you claim that those albums capture exactly what Ensiferum ought forever more to sound like. I for one think it’s a breath of fresh air. It reminds me, if anything, of their 2001 self-titled. It humors the possibility of rocking out without lightspeed double bass. It dares to occasionally divorce overbearing synth and “epic” orchestrated overlays from the folk passages. It drops, I think, the degree of pretentiousness that concerned me on From Afar. I have no interest in listening to the musical equivalent of 300 spin-offs ad nauseam. The total testosterone indulgence of Victory Songs was exciting in its day, but in music and film alike it grows old quickly.
Pohjola
I really feel like Unsung Heroes is Ensiferum’s most mature work to date. That doesn’t make it their best; Victory Songs was just too perfect and the self-titled too nostalgic to be trumped any time soon. But on Unsung Heroes I can again feel like I’m listening to a band who share my nerdy lust for all things fantasy. There’s none of the glam and special effects that dazzled me on Victory Songs but made me begin to feel distanced from the band on From Afar. I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to connect with these guys again in the more personal way I felt on their first album.
And really, what can you possibly complain about on a track like Pohjola save that it doesn’t fall into the formula of their last two albums? I’ve heard people say they’re becoming a Turisas knock-off. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Post-Battle Metal Turisas has served as the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster band–glossy and refined, if Victory Songs was Ensiferum’s 300, Varangian Way was Turisas’s Lord of the Rings. Tracks like Pohjola might have epic operatic vocals and orchestration, but the surrounding atmosphere is completely different from either of those works. The viking metal riffs that really start to pick up at the 3 minute mark ought to be a revealing sign that this song is all about the steady drive. The orchestration ebbs and flows without many hard, dramatic stops. The synth whistle that accompanies the main riff in the earlier stages of the song gives it a light-hearted, positive feel that carries throughout. The acoustic guitar outro is beautiful, but it’s also accessible. It’s something you the listener could pick up your guitar and play.
Unsung Heroes isn’t perfect. Sami Hinkka’s clean vocals leave a bit to be desired, especially on “Last Breath” where they take center stage. That, the ninth track, is really the first moment on the album where I begin to see where any complaints might have a leg to stand on. If the 17 minute-long closer which follows–“Passion Proof Power”–was as good as we’ve come to expect from an Ensiferum grand finale, any petty complaints about “Last Breath” might be easily forgotten. The problem is that “Passion Proof Power” is frankly pretty bad. It starts off a lot slower than the rest of the album’s non-acoustic tracks, more inclined to bore me than build anticipation. When it does pick up there’s no clear direction as to what’s going on. The song gives way into some really, really lame progressive rock, coupled with boring, unconvincing spoken passages and completely misplaced operatic vocals. The song never really builds up into anything. There are moments here and there where you might find yourself drawn back in–at the 13 minute mark for instance–but as the song continues to go nowhere you’ll forget about it again soon enough. I can’t make any excuses here; “Passion Proof Power” is a waste of 17 minutes, and if you skipped ahead to it expecting to hear Ensiferum’s finest effort–a reasonable thing to do considering how they’ve concluded past albums–you may well be left with the impression that Unsung Heroes is terrible. Follow that up with an embarrassing bonus track cover of Gypsy Kings’ Bamboleo and yeah, you definitely have a right to demand the last 20 minutes of your life back.
Burning Leaves
In conclusion, this is perhaps Ensiferum’s most down to earth album to date. It’s all about moderation and maintaining a steady drive while never over-extending or burning out into a bore. It doesn’t crush or dazzle; it rocks along, and does so with some really compelling orchestration that’s uniquely accessible. I think there’s this common misconception that fantasy-themed music has to sound larger than life, but for me that’s a detriment in all but the most perfect, Victory Songs/Varangian Way-level instances. If it sounds fake it’s not doing a very good job of creating fantasy now, is it? Unsung Heroes paces itself and transitions in ways that feel legitimate. I love it, at least for the first 40 minutes. It doesn’t so much progressively decline from there as stall mid-air and nose dive; they should have put “Last Breath” before “Pohjola” and made the latter the finale. “Passion Proof Power” and “Bamboleo” are garbage B-sides better suited for some bonus disc on a collector’s edition. (I suppose Bamboleo technically is a “bonus” track.) To say Unsung Heroes is a great album while chucking out a full 20 minutes of its content is a bit of a stretch, but because the weak points are condensed on the fringe rather than interspersed throughout the album, and because 40 minutes of outstanding new Ensiferum is certainly sufficient, I am content to delete the last two tracks from my playlist and call it a success.
Through the Shattered Lens 