Sahg at Myspace

‘Sahg II’ is unsurprisingly the Second album by Norwegian Doom Metal super-group Sahg. Their first album, unsurprisingly titled ‘Sahg I’, was a superb piece of inventive trad doom inspired principally by Black Sabbath and Candlemass. Their second effort expands both the range of influences and range of contrasting style contained with Sahg’s sound immensely. There are two main directions that Sahg are pulling on ‘Sahg II’. The first is 60′s and 70′s psychedelia with the likes of Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Cream and Hawkwind being key references points. The swirling, lush and almost seductive tones of the ‘Echoes Ring Forever’ with its epic, seductive drugged-up outro and the chilled out and inventive instrumental that follows it, “from conscious sleep” being prime examples of this.

The second major influence is that of NWOBHM and pre thrash 80’s heavy metal in general such as Witchfinder General, Angelwitch, Manilla Road, and Witchfynde. These elements are usually more subtly placed within the overall ‘Sahg II’ sound with them only coming to the foreground in the fast paced stomper ‘Pyromancer’ but just like the progression between their heroes Candlemass debut and sophomore, the trad heavy metal influences that are more prominent on ‘Sahg II’ than on ‘Sahg I’ change the chemistry of this slice of doom distinctly and when combined with the more overt and noticeable heady psychedelia create a cocktail of metal that is just about irresistible. From the Nostalgic Hammond Organ on ‘Starcrossed’ to the sinister campfire hymn to the dark side of the Age of Aquarius that is ‘Escape the Crimson Sun’, ending with the spacey epic album ender that is ‘Monomania’ this is one sophomore release that ends up bettering the bands stunning debut rather than paling in comparison to it.

Goretorture at Myspace

I wanted to like this album, I really did. I hoped that it would have the same sense of goofy fun that Arnocorps had and that Austrian Death Machine lacked. I mean, I love brutal death metal, so what could be better than a brutal death metal album where every song has an Arnold Schwarzenegger sample? Plenty, that’s what.

The production is absolutely abysmal, as if I was hearing a performance that went through YouTube levels of compression. Normally, I don’t put much emphasis on production, but this album is just insanely muddy. I could have looked past that if the material was good, but all aspects are mediocre at best. The vocals don’t really stand out much and aren’t especially good, the guitars are fairly generic, and the drum machine is so badly programmed that I had to double-check to make sure that Lars Ulrich hadn’t guested on some tracks. And the humorous samples don’t really add as much as I had hoped; one song has an excruciatingly long three-minute sample that takes up half of the track.

If you’re curious about what Mortician would sound sound like if they were obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger films instead of horror movies, you might want to check this out. Everyone else should stay far away.

Kruger at Myspace

Kruger are one of those special bands who at least at this stage in their career cannot be pigeonholed into any specific genre. Their unique sound contains elements of death metal, progressive metal and sludge metal, but cannot wholly fall within only one of those categories. Their one-of-a-kind brand of metal fuses the catharsis and melodic desolation found in such artists such as Cult of Luna, Isis and Baroness with the Stockholm death’n'roll sound of Entombed and Grave, topped off with a deeply progressive and innovative flavour that evokes the spirit of Mastodon and Gojira.

The songs on this album ebb and flow, with a fine example being the full frontal assault slowly dissipating into a post rock manor with the sombre low key passage in ‘Holy Fire’ before building up slowly and melodically into the bass heavy, Tool-like intro to the next track ‘Army of Lovers’. ‘Army of Lovers’ with its powerfully heavy yet catchy chorus is one of the two best tracks on this album, along with the opener ‘Ammunition Matters’, with its savage and furious and almost physical attack on the listener’s senses. Along with Knut and Nostromo, Kruger are proving that Switzerland is still a breeding ground for inventive yet crushingly heavy metal like it was in the days of Celtic Frost, Coroner, and Samael.

Opeth at Myspace

Okay, I know this is a horrendously boring album to review since everyone loves Opeth and probably already knows if they like their newest release, ‘Watershed’, or not. But I don’t, since I’ve avoided listening to it properly until just now.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Opeth. And I’m not one of those elitist Opeth fans who thinks that everything they released after ‘Still Life’ sucks, either. They sucked way before that (ho ho). It’s jut that ‘Ghost Reveries’ really disappointed me. It was too far removed from the Opeth I love. It was too proggy and it was too mellow and it was too crazy and it wasn’t grim at all. Mellotrons? Tribal drums? Fuck off.

Right, yeah, Watershed. What can I say? It’s more of the same, really. Lame. I can’t say I was really expecting them to drop the prog rock nonsense and kick Per out of the band, although it would’ve been nice.

It’s really hard writing a review like this, even when you’re like me and barely even mention the music. On the one hand, I’m glad that Mikael and co. have found commercial success and it’s good that they’re writing music they like. But on the other hand, what about the music I like? Opeth have built up a massive fanbase over the years, albeit mostly the last five, but there’s still some of us who loved Opeth when they were a blackened doomy progressive death metal band.

So here’s my suggestion. Let’s get the band members from Opeth’s glory years together – Peter Lindgren, Anders Nordin, and Johan DeFarfalla – and make a new band called ‘Oldpeth’, with Corpsegrinder on vocals or something. And they can write some awesome blackened doomy progressive death metal, and then I can be happy again, and life can continue to be worth living.

Until that day, I’m going to continue pretending Opeth split up in 2004. Who’s with me?

Electric Wizard at Myspace

Electric Wizard’s latest album ‘Witchcraft Today’ is a definite return to form after the disappointing ‘We Live’. There were two main problems with ‘We Live’ – It was too technical and the production was too clean. This problem is rectified with ‘Witchcult Today’, with the evidence being clear to hear from the titular first track which has the ambience of a loosely-improvised jam session dating back to the early 70s, a feel mostly due to the experience of capturing the vintage sound of producer Liam Watson, most famous for producing indie stalwarts The White Stripes’ album, Elephant.

The second problem with ‘We Live’ is that it was meandering, but not in a positive sense. The spacey drugged-up Electric Wizard classics such as ‘Come My Fanatics’ and ‘Dopethrone’ meandered in a marvellously dishevelled galactic way that added to the cosmic bong-driven atmosphere that made Electric Wizard’s reputation. ‘We Live’ meandered meaninglessly and tediously. Probably as a reaction to this, the songs on ‘Witchcult Today’, despite being on average around eight minutes long, are cut of all excess fat and baggage, meaning that every second of riffage counts in Electric Wizard’s effort to create a sonic drugstorm of a record. Apart from the pointless and mind-staggeringly needless and dull instrumental tracks, which thankfully don’t take up much of the records content, every moment on this album is vital and it seems that Electric Wizard have finally made a record that is at least the equal to Dopethrone, and maybe even better than that seemingly unbeatable masterpiece.