Circle - Terminal (2017) / 97%

NWOFHM #15
That’s a good Tom Hanks movie too, I guess.


NWOFHM is a term coined by Jussi Lehtisalo, the leader of the psych/experimental rock bands Circle and Pharaoh Overlord. It’s to pay homage to the NWOBHM term while namedropping his country, Finland. 

Lehtisalo created a bunch of projects to create that self sufficient scene. Those include Motorspandex, Krypt Axeripper, Tractor Pulling which all released only one recording but also projects like Steel Mammoth or Arkhamin Kirjasto that have a more extensive discography. All those aforementioned bands were covered by yours truly and the NWOFHM review series is never quite dead.

Circle are one of the best rock bands in the world and Terminal, their latest album in an almost three decades career is just another monumental album dedicated to the gods of riffs. Perhaps not one of their heaviest albums (excluding Incarnation where they basically asked another band to record a doom/death Circle album), it’s definitely one of the most riff focused record of their extensive discography. Their first album released on the American and Sunn O))) owned label Southern Lord Records, Terminal is intense, catchy and totally insane psychedelic prog krautrock. Their three guitarists formation just obliterates and gives ‘em a fully realized and rich sound to go with Jussi Lehtisalo’s seminal bass playing and leadership.

What’s totally crazy about Terminal is the vocals, they’re three dudes handling ‘em and they’re all mad insane. There’s screaming (see the twelve minutes opener “Rakkauta El Dente”) that wouldn’t be out of place in a sort of Motorized heavy/black/thrash band, there’s those totally over the top cleans with what I can only assume is weird stuff in Finnish and, while there’s more, there’s some ominous whispering. That’s just for the first song too...There’s group chanting as the introduction of “Saxo” and it’s like cultists leading you to a strange barn or something. It’s just to watch hockey (damn, Sebastian Aho is great) drink beer and get into the sauna (fully naked, of course), nothing wicked. The cleans become those sort of operatic vocals full of punk folk energy fuel and it’s abrasive but charming.

The focus on focusing on repeating riffs is something common in Krautrock or Neu styled prog and it’s something Circle does extremely well. It’s hypnotic, trance-like and it moves you to the allegedly real country of Finland where collecting different sorts of mustard is seen as a serious hobby and why wouldn’t it be? What I love about the Pori based band is their inability to take themselves too seriously, with that in mind they’re able to be as unhinged as their ideas ask for and while their music could be considered complex or smart, there’s no snootiness or over intellectualism in their compositions and attitude. They’re the type of bands that alternates between more experimental, long formed compositions bordering on drone and rockier ones. Albums like Tulikoira explored a punkier side of the band while Sunrise went all out on proto heavy metal, Terminal borderlines on metal at times but it has a pretty distinctive and varied sound throughout its fairly compact duration.

The extended instrumental moments are also moving and tremendous and not numerous enough to bore you. They take their time to introduce their songs with panache and let the keys and riffs flow. Circle is like what I like about music. It’s loud, it’s bigger than life and it has a lot of striking and memorable riffs. It’s never easy and it’s always intriguing. With some hindsight, Terminal was my favorite album of 2017 as I like how it’s dumb but smart, weird but with a sense of familiarity and heavy and groovy but never without purpose.

Ice Queen - I and II (2018)

Here's my take on the two releases of Ice Queen, the new project of Leeches of Lore's leader Steve Hammond. The debut was released back in March while the second was just unleashed earlier this week. The reviews are part of a new thematic series focused on "ice" related bands!

Ice Queen – Ice Queen (2018)

Ice Bucket Challenge I

I was saddened to hear of Leeches of Lore's recent termination but I was confident that their leader Steve Hammond would continue to produce top notch music and I wasn't wrong. Ice Queen, his new solo project, is basically a continuation of his former band with many twists and spins.

The first really noticeable element is the fact that it's pretty much a voluntarily raw project and it’s much heavier than what Leeches of Lore did on their latest albums. Hammond seems to be fine with just unleashing simple but efficient ideas with almost an approach similar to automatism. Motel of Infinitely, LoL’s swansong showed heavier tendencies but Ice Queen isn’t as eclectic and varied as its former identity. Hammond increased the noise, crust and thrash metal influences and decreased the duration of his songs. That direction made Ice Queen really intense, almost like a grindcore approach. The guitars are thick but sharp and the bass is loud and filling (check out “Burrowing”) and there’s hardly any time to rest except for the country ballad of “Black Water”, a stylistic influence much more prevalent in Leeches of Lore or Hammond’s other non-metal projects.

Ice Queen are hard to classify, really. The structures are quite simple but the coating has all kind of things to make it shiny and exciting. It’s like if you took NWOBHM heavy metal but added a bunch of iconoclastic thrash and Melvins-esque sludge to the formula. It’s just fun riffs with an identity and soaring fun vocals. Hammond can’t do no wrong as far as I’m concerned.

87%

Ice Queen – Ice Queen II (2018)

Ice Bucket Challenge II

The second release of Ice Queen expands where its predecessor left off and brings out some new things to the fold. While the debut showcased a brand new take of Hammond’s peculiar metal sound he spent a decade exploring with Leeches of Lore, II has some fun with the new sound.

Ice Queen is once again built upon a core of fast paced heavy metal with noise, hardcore and thrash elements but wait, there’s more! There’s layers of experimentation here such as the minimalistic dark ambient of “An Abandoned City” or the noise and voice effects of the closer “Quiet”. There’s also a bunch of metal experimentation such as the doom/death riffs of “The Witch King of Urbana” which are intertwined with eerie bits of electronica or the ghostly drone of “Dreams, Dreaming” and it all works. Hammond’s signature special move is that he’s able to assemble a wide array of styles together to form a solid, oozing mass capable of grasping your interest till you’ve heard the same twenty minutes album on repeat.

Regardless of the experimentation, there’s still some pretty metallic bangers like the thrashy/sludgey anthem of “Blizzard of Ants” with its harsh screams or the incisive Mastodon-esque “The Bunt”. All in all, Ice Queen II justifies its existence by exploring other themes than the debut. It would had been easy to release them as a “full length” album of forty minutes but I like that shorter format. It’s easy to focus on the different strengths of those to the point compositions and gather everything you can from them.

84%

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Metallica - Hardwired... To Self-Destruct (2016) / 83%

*Insert witty joke about Dave Mustaine here*

James and Lars are back in full force after the insanely fun train-wreck of Lulu and Hardwired is perhaps the best thing Metallica could had done in 2016. Say what you want about the quartet, they never gave up and they’re always willing to experiment and renew themselves. At this point, they just do what they want and they earned this right.

Considering Kirk lost all his riffs in an iPhone incident (how fucking dumb is he?), the whole album is a collaborative effort by Metallica’s eternal duo. The tall blond rhythm guitar god basically lifts the album to another level and the Danish tennis legend keeps things rooted in an efficient simplicity. Kirk is alright at times but he rarely has the place to shine and I’m not even sure Metallica has or even need a bassist. Use Robert’s skills, dammit.

This is a frustrating record since it's easy to identify what was necessary to make it a great one. The main faults are once again the overindulgence the quartet has and their complete lack of editing. This could be seen as the "old metal legend" syndrome as Priest and Maiden did it as well. Metallica's arch nemesis Megadeth's recent endeavors (except for Dystopia actually) sucked but for other reasons.

I thought Death Magnetic was a fine record plagued with a messy loud production but Hardwired managed to sound renewed without compromising the identity of Tallica. It's just four guys having fun playing a style of music they like and I believe this is the biggest strength of this album. The biggest metal band on Earth sounds confident, powerful and convincing. I have no issues with the production either, it’s heavy without being brick-walled.

One of the consensus that I've been seeing online is that it would had been a strong eight songs record and that most of the second disc is sort of weak. While I agree for the most part, I do think that the 12 songs (13 if we consider the new version of Lords of Summer as part of the record) are all solid and interesting. It’s just too much to take in.

The first disc is catchier and faster while the second has this groovy doom approach but the entire opus is cohesive in its sprawling length. This is a feat in itself since I feel this is a song based effort. A compilation of new material if you will. It's self contained well-written numbers of mostly 6-7-8 minutes alternating between the eras of the Californian icons. Mixing the rock sound of the Loads, the thrashy comebacks of Death Magnetic and a fair share of the groovy heavy metal of the self titled, Hardwired is ultimately a fun album with strong songwriting and diverse footings. Metallica never wrote an uninteresting album and that's one of the reasons they're metal's biggest band. This one is no exception.

Highlights:
-The Lovecraftian Alice in Chains-esque vibe of “Dream No More”.
-The excellent leads at the end of “Halo On Fire”.
-The aggressiveness and riffs of “Spit Out the Bone”
-James’ vocals
-The RJD medley on the bonus disc is awesome, especially "Tarot Woman".


CD1 85%
CD2 79%

TOP 50 of 2000-2009, Part 1, 41 to 50

My buddy BastardHead (or simply known as Mike) gave me this idea of a top 50 of my favorite metal releases from the last decade and since I love lists and love wasting my time with them, here it is. There's only one rule I took in consideration, there's only one album per band for diversity's sake. The top will be divided into five parts and it will end with the top 10, in the meantime here's the bottom albums.

41. Yob – The Illusion of Motion (2004)
The Oregon based trio lead by Mike Scheidt has a pretty good track record during this decade but this is my favourite of theirs, released 2 years before a short hiatus, this album has everything I like from their sound, thundering riffs, long-ass songs full of details and a shitload of psychedelia. It took them 10 years to release an album as good as this one with their most recent “Clearing the Path to Ascend” but the point remains, Yob is one of the best doom band of their generation. The song “Ball of Molten Lead” is still a live staple and for good reasons.

42. Cathedral – Endtyme (2001)
Sure, Cathedral's best albums are their first three with “The Carnival Bizarre” being number one for me but the British legendary doomsters kept unleashing quality material throughout their existence. “Endtyme” was some sort of return to a heavier than thou sound, it's darker and slower than the two previous ones and doesn't have the same amount of experimentation their later days had (see “The Guessing Game”). It's yet another worthy chapter to the now finite career of Cathedral and worth checking out if their faster stuff is not to your looking since it's crushing but it's still hellishly fun (check out the track “Whores of Oblivion”).





43. Darkthrone – The Cult Is Alive (2006)
I'm perhaps a blasphemer but I prefer Darkthrone's later days opposed to their seminal and legendary black metal albums. While I don't like “The Cult Is Alive” as much as “Circle the Wagons” or “The Underground Resistance”, I think it's a very fucking good record full of amusing tracks like the appropriatly Nordic “Too Old, Too Cold” or the dirty “Graveyard Slut”. I think Fenriz and Nocturno are having a good time with this punk influenced album and I had a great moment too.

44. Dark Tranquillity – Fiction (2007)
The best album of the decade for the Swedish melodic death masters showed a larger degree of diversification opposed to “Character” and a less generic and boring approach compared to its two followers. It's ultra melodic and catchy but has many memorable moments like “Misery's Crown” featuring the gorgeous clean vocals of frontman Mikael Stanne. I reckon there's a lot of nostalgia involved here as Dark Tranquillity were one of my gateway bands but I still think this is a super good album, I mean it's not “The Gallery” but they'll never beat this 90s classic.

45. Wormrot – Abuse (2009)
I'm not always down for grindcore but Wormrot from Singapore are masters of pure, unadulterated metallic grind. Abuse is a twenty minutes trip into their political, vitriolic and intense style of music. If you don't like these guys, you should “fix your fucking mind” like one of their songs is suggesting. This comment like the album is kept short, there's not a million things to say about great grind! Wormrot had some issues recently but I'm still hoping for a third album!

46. Dream Theater – Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (2002)
“Train of Thought” was almost my pick for Dream Theater's best album of the decade but this one is a tad better. From “The Glass Prison” to the conceptual title track being the entire second disk. DT is certainly one of my favourite bands but I think their best releases were done in the 1990s but they released many strong stuff after “Metropolis” and Mike Portnoy's departure has revitalized them a little. For their sole double album, John Petrucci and company succeeded at the task of keeping it entertaining and that by itself is an accomplishment.

47. Anata – The Conductor's Departure (2006)
Released almost 10 years, Anata's last album to date (what the hell is happening with them? The last thing I've heard was that they did an instrumental album and Earache rejected it) is one of the best technical death metal record ever. I'm not a fan of the genre usually but these Swedes managed to write compelling and terrific music that isn't only about technicality and showing off (see Necrophagist). Maybe they're aware that they can't top this album and that's stopping them from releasing anything new!

48. High on Fire – Death Is This Communion (2007)Sleep's Dopesmoker is surprinsgly (?) not on my list since I think it's a tad overrated but I do fucking like High On Fire and especially this album. I think they're repeating themselves since “Death...” and I haven't enjoyed myself as much with their music but this one is super damn good and quite diverse. I love the ethnic parts like “Khanrad's Wall”, it adds something special to the album. This is stoner excellence, all hail our shirtless messiah Matt Pike even though he'll always be a sucky vocalist. But the riffs, man, the riffs!

49. Om – Conference of the Birds (2006)
Part II of ex-Sleep bands with Al Cisneros' band, Om. The duo served as the soft companion to High On Fire's high octane weed induced metal but they're as good. “At Giza” is perhaps their best track ever and this album is a pearl of mesmerizing trance doom with unique atmospheres. The band became more intricate with their last album “Advaitic Songs” but I always thought their lo-fi, more simplistic approach was the way to go.

50. Immortal – Sons of Northern Darkness (2002)
“At the Heart of Winter” would probably in my top 5 of the last decade but the 2002 Immortal album isn't as good. It's still a massive piece of heavy metal influenced crushing black metal lead by Abbath's excellent riffs and croaky vocals. The first half of the album rocks but the second is a bit weaker. I's “Between Two Worlds” could had been chosen instead since while it's perhaps not as good, it's a bit more consistent. Nevertheless, it's safe to say Abbath's best work is in the past despite having formed a new band who took his name recently, I doubt he'll be able to recreate the cold magic of his older material.