Bizarrekult from Oslo, Norway released their new opus with Season of Mist. This opus contains 8 beautiful songs of melodic, visionary progressive black metal with many nods to old school Norwegian black metal like in perfect mix of aggression of raw melodic black metal and clean sung atmospheric melodies, almost out of body ethereal in ‘Du Lovet Meg’. I can’t resist the impression of doom and sludge influences I hear in slow but effective ‘Kongen’. The title song is kind of post black metal, almost cold in space atmospheric masterpiece of work. What sometimes bothers me with bands of this genre that they have too few songs and too long songs on one opus, but fortunately this is not the case here. This one is just the right length and so various to make this a listening pleasure. Eerie and gothic like melancholy turns into blasting almost bombastic black metal hymn in ‘Hvis Jeg Bare Kunne…’, this one being my personal favorite of this opus. Vocals are screamed, but more like anguished sad screams than extreme torture. I recommend for you to listen to this opus in whole total, not partly, because only then you will get the picture of this masterpiece.
I had great expectations from this book when I bought it because it features some of my favorite punk rock bands like Bad Religion and Nofx, plus I love Californian punk so I was interested how some of the albums got so popular, what drove Green Day and Bad Religion to major label, how Epitaph Records rose from nothing to one of the biggest independent labels, rise of Fat Wreck Chords, plus some of the anecdotes behind the scene that I did not know and were interesting to read. The book also nicely describes how Rancid formed and wrote some of the best and most iconic albums in punk rock of the nineties. Pennywise are also featured along with one or two great stories about their legendary guitar player Fletcher Dragge and his exploits. It also shows some of the nastier sides of label business, a nastier side of Brett Gurewitz, Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph Records founder and owner, like also war between Green Day and The Offspring and how it started, so this one is indeed a great read if you like punk rock and history about some of your favorite albums.
A Vulture Wake released this new record three months ago, but no matter, never too late for good music isn’t it? This one is in fact an album which contains two e.p.’s called ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Animal’. So, these are 11 songs of melodic punk rock, I may even call it progressive melodic punk rock, influenced with technical skate punk and some hints of melodic hardcore topped by vocals done by none other than legendary Chad Price (ALL/Drag The River) whose rough and recognizable melodic voice carries the listener to other dimension full of personal emotions, hope, giving other chance and also fear, sadness, blood and anguish. This collection of songs mixes agony melancholy and melody in such a great way that I listened to this one couple of times in a row to be able to hear some of the excellent songwriting and musicianship on this record. My personal favorites are: ‘Blood’, ‘Lost Cause Of The Year’, and ‘We Are Living In A Dream’. Excellent!
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 