Tool - Fear Inoculum (2019)

Yay! Finally a review of a current album! Something I wasn't sure if it would ever happen, and featuring an album by Tool. Something I wasn't sure if that would ever happen either - but here we are!

I always had a rather distant relationship to Tool. Most of their songs are a bit too 'cerebral' for my taste, with their machine-like precision, polished sounds and complex rhythms. I usually prefer dirt and spontaneity instead of too much perfection.

Well good news, if you are like me then: Fear Inoculum feels definitely more dirty than its predecessors, which I find helps a lot getting access to their music. At times they did remind me actually quite a bit of Baroness or Mastodon. This said. Tool of course stays Tool, and sounds like Tool. The band also hasn't dropped any of their complexity or darkness. The production just feels a bit less cold and more dynamic this time around.

The songs are, with the exception of a handful 'breather'-tracks, all above ten minutes. Quite naturally this means the album doesn't unfolds easily. To the contrary: it is full of buildups, mood- and tempo changes and a lot of dynamic - definitely an album that wants to be discovered. I had it running almost constantly over the weekend and I can't honestly say that it hasn't revealed everything yet. It probably takes a longer time-span of repeated careful listening to get behind it - and that's great!

For somebody like me, who isn't their greatest fan, I am quite surprised that Fear Inoculum has actually quite a lot to offer. It isn't the typical stuff I'm listening to, but I find the album very appealing and quite - hypnotic. It shows great skill without being lost in virtuosity while at the same time has this atmosphere of an H.R. Giger painting: A surreal biomechanical landscape you cannot help but explore.

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper (2015)

If you ever wondered, how it would have sounded, if Black Sabbath and the Beatles got merged together in some weird teleportation or cloning accident, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats' The Night Creeper might give you the answer: Imagine Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds played with heavy riffing guitars, eery, distorted vocals and repetitive, hypnotic grooves. A gloomy psychedelic nightmare you may find, you can't get enough from.

Thematically, the album revolves around the eponymous Night Creeper, a Jack-the-Ripper-style serial killer. And it does it brilliantly. The way it transports its distinctive 60s-psychedelica-atmosphere, like an expressionist horror film inside your head. The haunting vocals, the Sabbath-like chord progressions and the very retro production - everything just plays together just brilliantly, creating a truly unique experience.

This said, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats is certainly not everyone's taste and if you are into more conventional, or simply more modern metal, you might not enjoy them too much - for all the reasons mentioned above!

To me, Uncle Acid are one of the most significant discoveries in the recent years. Retro-doom at its finest, with a lot of emotional impact and their own, unique character. Not an easy thing to achieve, but they delivered brilliantly.

Devil Electric (2017)

Devil Electric are a recent discovery of mine. As the name and the cover picture of their debut album suggest, they are another example of the ever-growing Black-Sabbath-inspired, female-fronted proto-doom-occult rock genre. Phew, what a word! And while they certainly don't reinvent the wheel (or their genre), the quartet from Australia knows how to make some excellent, gloomy music.

On the instrumental side, Devil Electric are indeed closely resembling early Black Sabbath. With a lot of heavy,  fuzzy guitar, riffing on doomy intervals and accompanied by a rhythm section that stomps along like an iron behemoth with an impeccable sense of groove in its hulking limbs. So far, so good! Nothing revolutionary, but a very compelling performance. The really outstanding part however, that adds so much character to the band, is its vocalist.

With her bright, light-footed voice she often appears to dance above all the growling, heaviness the band unleashes. The result is - by all the contrast she adds to the sound - a nevertheless quite symbiotic feel, with interesting changes in rhythm and dynamics. It is this dance of contrasts that keeps Devil Electric, contrary to all the familiarity of their songs, varied and engaging - and a little bit unpredictable too. Very effective.

All in all, a strong debut with a lot of 60s- and 70s vibe. It could be the ideal soundtrack to a Hammer film. With misty graveyards, scantly clad witches and generous amounts of blood. Given the number of similar acts I sometimes wish they would stray away from the established, clichéd Black Sabbath-sound a bit more and experiment a bit more with their own style. The potential is certainly there.

Deep Purple - Infinite (2017)

Not many bands can still surprise, or even excite you after they have been around for almost 50 years. When listening to Infinite, Deep Purple's most recent album, I knew for sure: they can.

The album kicks off with Time For Bedlam. Such a dark and irresistibly pressing song, that's on a level with some of their best and most intense material, like Perfect Strangers, Child in Time, or Rapture of the Deep. A vision of brutal suppression and resistance, perfectly crafted, like a Hieronnymus Bosch painting of hell. Ian Gillan's clerical chanting in the beginning, declaring that he is "descending the cold steps of the institution for the political insane - never to be seen again", building up tension, then the rest of the band kicks in and sending the song off with claustrophobic intensity - a textbook example of how to throw its listener right into the action.

May the rest of Infinite be not quite as gloomy and dramatic, it stays quite heavy, with the relaxed and confident playfulness of a band that feels free and fully in its equilibrium. The result are songs which are fresh, witty and flow so naturally and groovy that its simply a pure joy to listen to.

From the light-hearted, and slightly self-deprecating hymn Johnny's Band about the rise and fall and eventual muddling on of a rockband (with a hilarious promo video), to the tender and melancholic The Surprising and stomper like Hip Boots or Get Me Outta Here - Infinite is overboarding with strong performances. There isn't really a song you could call a filler... except the last one: The Doors cover Roadhouse Blues, which is just unnecessary and misses the feel of the original, without adding anything new and relevant to it.

Even with that little lapse, Infinite is one of the band's strongest albums. Like the last couple of releases, it shows that even a band that has been around for so long, still can be inventive and wild and write songs where you keep on discovering something new. Brilliant stuff!

Who knows for how much longer Deep Purple will still be around, but at least, If Infinite is really going to be their last record, then they end their long and spectacular career on a high note.

Jess and the Ancient Ones - The Horse and Other Weird Tales (2017)

Regular readers might have noticed that, besides metal and hard/heavy rock, I also have a soft spot for music from the 70s, psychedelic in particular. And it seems like Jess and the Ancient Ones did their best to push my buttons in that regard.

The album is quite a remarkable experience. Stylisticly somewhere between The Doors and retro-occult-rock like Blood Ceremony, The Horse and Other Weird Tales is colourful, organic and beautifully arranged, with some truly captivating songwriting.

 On top of it all vocalist Jess, who is transporting so much pure energy with her dynamic and engaging singing without sacrificing melody. Was her performance on their first record often quite shouty, on The Horse and Other Weird Tales she sounds so much more refined and in command and in the best sense of the word haunting. Dramatic changes in mood, tempo and rhythms - her performance is really outstanding.

If there is one thing to complain about, and I am happy to say there is only one thing actually, then that it just feels too short. The overall runtime is only 34 minutes and most of the songs are just between two and three and a half minutes long, leaving you craving for more. I certainly would not blame a lack of ideas here. To the contrary. The songs are so rich that most of them could easily be twice as long and still entertain me splendidly.
But maybe its better this way. Maybe they want their listeners to stay hungry for more than having a profound lack of ideas dragged out over 20 tracks and 70 minutes, as it happens too often.

All in all a brilliant piece of psychedelic rock with an outstanding singer. A bit too short, but then again - that doesn't takes anything away from all the goodness that's there!

Lacrimosa - Revolution (2012)

At the end of the 90s, when my music-horizon expanded into the dark side (because of the cookies), Lacrimosa was one of my favourite "newish" bands I was listening to. I loved their particular blend of slow, doom-influenced gothic metal with complex arrangements and the bits of classical music thrown into here and there.

Sadly, around the year 2000, with their album Elodia, the classical bits took over and pushed the metal aspect into the background. It was for me all just too polished and - tame. So began to lose interest into the band until a couple years ago, when I started to rediscover some of the old stuff, I used to listening to. I guess for some people such rediscoveries can be quite a shock ("I was listening to THAT???"), but for me it was quite a pleasant experience so I began to delve into their more recent material.

Which brings me to their 2012 album Revolution. Its a much rougher record than what they did when I left them, and I am quite happy about this. Sound wise it is closer to albums like Satura and Inferno, but with a level of angst and aggression in its lyrics I did not expect to hear from this band. It is a bitter reckoning with our modern society. A society that is heading to self-destruction by vain ignorance and pure greed.

And it is brilliantly written. Take the song Feuerzug (Part 2), for example: The singer describes a burning train (a Feuerzug) that is jumping out of its tracks. First he appears to be a distant observer. Full of disbelieve about what he is witnessing, until he realizes the train is unstoppable; destroying everything on its path - and is heading towards him and everyone he loves.
Eventually he understands that he himself - and actually every single one of us - is sitting in the train and steers it into its doom.
Today, six years after the album's release, with all the recent political developments, his words ring more true than ever.

Revolution is probably Lacrimosa's bleakest album. It sounds so pressing and dark. Vicious at times. A more than welcome change in direction, if you ask me. It might not debate the nicest things in life and certainly is far away from any dark romantic sentimentalities of their past - but that's exactly what makes it so interesting and compelling.

Iron Maiden - The Book of Souls (2015)

While many great bands of the 80s, if they are still around, are well past their creative zenith, live off their reputation from their "glorious old times" and haven't really released anything relevant in years, some bands just keep getting better and better.

I am glad to say that Iron Maiden falls into the latter category. Especially after seeing them live in the mid 2000s, where they delivered a smooth and polished, but essentially unexciting best-of-show. You know, the sort of show you do before you retire.

In this context, The Book of Souls was quite a surprise. Not only that the band is still able to write exciting new material, they also made serious moves into progressive-metal territory. I think this mix is the magic ingredient of this album really: songs that work as well on an emotional level as on a technical, songwriting one as well.

Despite the majority of the songs being well over six minutes long (and three of them over ten), they are all varied, engaging, keeping the listener interested - and deliver quite some punch.

The most outstanding song of the album is without a doubt Empire of the Clouds. An 18-minute long epic on the tragic maiden voyage of the Airship R101, that perfectly builds up from a dreamy piano-melody into the thunderstorm that eventually crashed it down - all carried by Bruce Dickinson's brilliant vocals and lyrics.

And the best of all of this? They achieve all this without abandoning the character of the band. This is still Iron Maiden; the band that wrote The Number of the Beast, Fear of the Dark, The Trooper - you name it. The new songs fit stylistically perfectly to their old material. They are simply enhanced, have grown and matured into - I won't say perfection, but they are pretty damn close.

Listen closely, guys from Metallica: That's how it's done.

(The) Octopus - Supernatural Alliance (2018)

A lot of modern metal, or rock music in general, is pretty formulaic and to be blunt: pretty dull. Its really astonishing that so much talent gets wasted on so uninspired and unexciting material.
Well, The Octopus (or just Octopus, pick your favourite) are different from that. Sure, you could argue that female-fronted retro-psychedelic-metal is not the most inventive of all stylistic choices, but who cares: The Octopus does it so damn well!

As far as I could gather (they are not really well known, you see), they have been around for a while, with their earliest published videos dating back some eight years ago. That's probably part of the reason why their debut album, which just came out this year, sounds so - accomplished.

Catchy riffs, in combination with a superbly groovy rhythm section and on top of it all a very charismatic voice: great ingredients that blend seamlessly together into engaging and diverse songs you just want to listen again and again. Their songwriting and dynamic reminds me quite a lot of Purson or Blood Ceremony, with the heaviness and rock'n'roll drive of Led Zeppelin. Not a bad combination for sure!