Three belated reviews of albums that I’ve been listening to over the past month and change, and then I’ll be taking advantage of the slow summer release schedule (that is, of interest to me rather) and writing more about a lot of the older metal stuff I’ve been revisiting, as well as some random metal related topics I’ve been putting off discussing for a long time now. Stepping off the review treadmill has never felt so liberating! Fear not though, I see some major releases on the way that will definitely get a throughout examination on this blog upon their release.
Suidakra – Realms of Odoric:
I almost jumped the gun with my review of the new Suidakra. The first couple spins when I received the promo a few weeks back had me feeling a bit antsy, a little impatient at moments, with an onset of encroaching dread that this new album by a band I had fallen in love in the interim period since their previous release wasn’t clicking with me for some unknown reason. I was supposed to issue a review of this in early June and given my feelings towards it at the time, it would’ve been vaguely negative (more likely, just a meandering complaint about how it wasn’t impacting me as instantaneously as Eternal Defiance, a 2013 Best Album of the Year). I figured I might be in need of a metal break so I took a few days to not listen to anything aside from podcasts and pop music, and a whole week later, I returned to the Realms of Odoric. It wasn’t instantaneous, but over a series of repeat listens I began to find its melodies lodging themselves in my memory, humming a guitar line or folk instrument melody here and there. Its a long held belief within the metal community and other music aficionados that often times the best albums take the most work to reveal themselves, the difference between a can of coke and a fine whiskey or wine. I do subscribe to that belief as well, but don’t discount the impact of instantaneous love of an album either (nor the idea that you’ll burn out on the latter quicker, not necessarily true).
So following that thought, is Realms of Odoric Suidakra’s best album then? I wouldn’t personally propose it as such, but its not as awful as some of the random reviews I’ve seen for it online. Its a step down from Eternal Defiance, being a relatively good album that sports some unfortunate bumps and bruises throughout its thirteen tracks. Some of those bruises come in the form of meandering, directionless instrumentals such as “Cimbric Requiem” (pretty, pleasant, but I’d rather have that space for another melo-death gem), and quasi-instrumentals such as the battle-readying “Creeping Blood” with spoken word dialogue, a marching percussion and riff sequence that stretches for two minutes without really resolving into anything memorable and whose fade out doesn’t really set up the following track “Undaunted” at all. Then there’s the intro cut “Into the Realm”, which actually does a good job of mixing suspense building atmospherics and riff fueled bombast into a minute long rallying cry, except that it seems like a missed opportunity that it fades out before feeding in properly to the first actual song on the album. I know I’ve been critical of bands overdoing things like intro tracks and small instrumentals, but they can be effective and even exciting when placed with a purpose, and Suidakra of all bands seems like they would know how to wield them. Its baffling that they’re committing these blunders.
There are other songs that don’t quite hit the mark for me, like the outro track “Remembrance”, a clean-sung, acoustic strummed lament over muted percussion and cello. By all rights it should hit me in the heartstrings… yet its a tease, a build up to nothing (dare I suggest it sounds incomplete, like it was the half finished intro to a song that never materialized). On Eternal Defiance, the band tried the same formula to stirring, inspiring effect with “Damnatio Memoriae”, one of my favorites from that album and a cut I’ll randomly revisit when I’m in a wistful mood. They’re quite capable of executing these ideas… I even enjoyed past instrumentals in the middle of album tracklists, such as on Caledonia and Emprise To Avalon. For whatever reason though, they’re all falling flat this time around, and that’s disappointing, though I don’t think they mar the entirety of the album. Lets talk about the good stuff then, because there’s plenty of it, the first song that comes to mind being the album launcher proper “The Serpent Within”, which is one of the band’s all-time finest moments. Its built on a mid-tempo riff and rhythm sequence, with a melancholic melody built on long, patient guitar sustains, a creative way to allow the song to breathe and unfurl naturally. The chorus is really inspired, with guest vocalist Matthias Zimmer of Perzonal War (I think! I was wrong on this before) providing clean vocals with an emotive performance. The lyrics throughout this song are a highlight of the band’s career, sparse yet poetic, with imagery that conjures up the ancient and eternal, “This life is but a spiral path / The serpent lurks inside”. That’s about as awesome a couplet as I’ve ever heard sung in a metal song, full of depth and thought provoking sentiment, and one that works as a visual metaphor as well. Well done, seriously.
There’s a handful of other earwormy cuts as well, “Hunter’s Horde” being the most traditionally Suidakra styled melo-death, with riffing that takes equally from black metal and Gothenburg and a semi-growled and clean sung vocal blend on the chorus for that extra pop. Wonderful longtime guest vocalist Tina Stabel returns on “Undaunted” and lead single “Pictish Pride”, the former boasting a bag-pipe led chorus as Stabel delivers one of the more gritty performances amongst her various Suidakra guest spots. I do enjoy the actual song “Pictish Pride” quite a bit, with its acoustic folk instrumentation intro and ability to work with a bouncy melody without devolving into folk metal cliches. I can’t say the same thing however for the music video the band wasted money on —- it has nothing to do with the album certainly, but my gods is it awful (who chose the lighting on the soundstage?… Suidakra deserves better). Also don’t sleep on “Dark Revelations”, a rather exciting experimental, almost Nightwish-y track built around symphonic guitar riff sequences. I’ll admit that it took me awhile to let the acoustic ballad “Braving the End” sink in, its certainly not one of the band’s best (“Mag Mell” being the standard bearer”) but its a pretty track in its own right and Stabel is always a joy to hear.
The Takeaway: Though not quite being the masterpiece I had hoped for after a nearly three year absence, this is still a good Suidakra album, just not my recommendation to be anyone’s first from the band. There was a time when these guys were releasing albums at a one year or two year interval, and I hope the next comes sooner than three years. A highly underrated and overlooked band that delivers consistently creative music.
Grand Magus – Sword Songs:
Similarly to Suidakra, Sweden’s doom n’ rollers Grand Magus were a band I got into relatively recently through their 2012 album The Hunt, an album that saw them transition slightly away from their earlier heavy doom influence and incorporate more of the traditional metal leanings that singer/songwriter “JB” Janne Christoffersson so clearly loves (your Priest, your Maiden, etc). But it was 2014’s Triumph and Power that really impressed me, landing on that year’s best albums list and remaining in regular rotation for me ever since. I love that album mainly due to the increased shift towards trad metal stylings that informed all of its songs, almost like the band injected their sound with an ample dose of classic era Manowar. Their newest, Sword Songs, seeks to continue where they left off and operate more in this newly unearthed traditional metal space, but it suffers from a few miscalculations. The first of which being the band’s choice of tempo on some of these tunes, take for example “Forged In Iron – Crowned In Steel”, where the verses kick along at a rather speedy pace, only to slow down for the chorus, a downshift in energy that just seems to work against the song. There’s an unusual number of more uptempo songs on this album that while not completely foreign to Grand Magus, certainly aren’t what they do best. On “Master of the Land”, they engage in the same downshifting of tempo during the refrain, and it just comes across as a bucket of water being poured over your head, your interest in the song diminishes almost instantly. A shame because the guitar solo in the middle is worth getting to, but not enough to salvage a rather mediocre song.
Grand Magus works best in the solid, mid-tempo groove n’ roll approach where Christoffersson can sing in a rhythmic strut. On “In For the Kill” he builds the hook from an alliterative dance during the chorus when he lays down a longer stress on the word “IN….” followed by “…forthekill” in quick succession. Its a small thing, but man oh man it makes the song work, gives it a swagger that a lot of metal bands couldn’t achieve even with their best Accept impersonations. The album’s opening duo of “Freja’s Choice” and “Varangian” is a one-two punch of classic Magus, a series of staggered riffs working as the hook for the former, while the latter uses an almost folky, Falconer-ish solo melody to work as its’ post-chorus outro hook. Almost there but not quite is “Last One to Fall”, where a strong chorus is left to drift amidst verse sections that can’t manage enough of a dramatic buildup. Its something that plagues a lot of this album, and I can’t tell sometimes if its just a error in tempo choice or just half-baked songwriting. Hard to believe the latter from a band that delivered such a knock out last time. I think one thing they should consider is shifting back towards some of their doom roots on the next go-round, because there’s precious little of that ingredient here, and I think its what is missing ultimately.
The Takeaway: A decent album from a band whose previous three albums were leaps and bounds better —- and in that regard its a disappointment. If you’re new, start with Triumph and Power, but if you’re just curious to hear a taste check out “In For the Kill”, a rockin’ party metal track if there ever was one.
Katatonia – The Fall of Hearts:
If you’ve been keeping up with Katatonia, I suppose it won’t be that much of a shock to hear just how far removed they sound from anything resembling metal on their newest album, the gorgeously titled The Fall of Hearts (sweet artwork too). Metal fans and media will still cover them due to the Anathema clause, that the contribution of a few early career death/doom metal albums hereby lock you into our collective conscience as a “metal” band even though you have nothing metallic amongst your new music at all. But of course its their songwriting complexity and stylistic choices of tone, subject matter where their metal roots still show, and that’s ultimately all that matters. Full disclosure, the last Katatonia album that I bought (and since have apparently lost) was The Great Cold Distance, which is about as perfect a depressive metal album as you can ever hope to hear and a perfect apex of their metallic, crunchy riffs that lingered from the mid-90s and their ever increasing adoption of progressive rock elements. On its 2009 follow up Night Is the New Day however, the band’s sound really shifted, and they kinda lost me and I fell out of the loop with them as a result. I suspect that if I went back and revisited it now, it wouldn’t be as awkward sounding as I remembered, and the good news is that The Fall of Hearts has persuaded me to do just that.
I’m surprised at the lack of surprise or faux-outrage with people hearing this new album, almost as if everyone just predicted the band’s sound getting this frigging soft, and well… quiet for lack of a better term. There’s some really wonderful stuff here despite the hushed atmosphere throughout, such as “Old Heart Falls”, the album’s first single and one of the best lyric videos by a metal band you’ll see (the lyrics being typed on a vintage typewriter, filmed in sepia). The chorus here is sublimely beautiful, with vocalist Jonas Renkse singing a poetic lyric “For every dream that is left behind me / I take a bow / With every war that will rage inside me / I hear the sound / Of another day in this vanishing life / Returned to dust / And every chance I’ve pushed away / Into the night”. If you’re into excellent lyrics, Katatonia is a band you should consider, and it appears that Renkse has only gotten better over time, because The Fall of Hearts is actually one of the year’s most impressive albums on a lyrical level, full of imaginative word play, imagery, and well considered rhythmic meter. But if its just the laid back jams you care about, check out “Residual”, a slow burning epic that gradually crescendos into an expansive, moody, dream sequence built off oscillating guitar patterns and sharp, jazzy drumming. Towards the end it shifts into a surprisingly aggressive riff-sequence that is a bit of a head nod to Tool and A Perfect Circle (don’t let that sway you negatively if you don’t like those bands). Closer “Passer” is the closest thing you’ll get to mid-period Katatonia heaviness, with its pummeling percussion and Enslaved like riff sequences. Best to regard this album as more of a late night, headphones on chill-out listen, and on that level, it succeeds with aplomb.
The Takeaway: I can’t say whether or not this is better than its predecessor Dead End Kings since I rather lamely ended up skipping that one, but this is actually a good listen judged on its own merits. It isn’t marred by any of the awkward, finding their footing that characterized Night Is the New Day for me, perhaps they’ve finally settled into a comfort zone with their full on progressive rock/metal blending.