Norwegian top-act Throne Of Katarsis sort of is a constant element within my end year lists. Their Candlelight-efforts Helvete … (2009) or Ved Graven (2011), for example, did end up with a very high personal score (both reviews I did on these full albums are still available within the Archives-tab). So I was very pleased to receive the promotional edition of this band’s fourth studio album.
Metal Inquisitor was founded in 1998 by Blumi and Witchhammer. The idea behind the band was to play classic, traditional heavy metal. After some time the gang assigned Kronos for the bass guitar and El Rojo as the singer.
Vegard Sverre Tveitan, aka Ihsahn, is probably mostly known from legendary act Emperor. He is / was also active in splendid projects like Thou Shalt Suffer (damn, I do miss them in every aspect), God Of Atheists, Zyklon-B (another excellent combo, even though… Never mind…), Hardingrock or Xeresia (almost all of them bands or projects I am just crazy about); with his wife Heidi S.
I EXIST are a sextet from Australian capital Canberra, and on there 3th full length they present us a slab of darkness one would not immediately link to surfers paradise down under. What I Exist offer us is downtuned guitar violence , ranging from doom to stoner sludge with a hint of death metal and some hardcore. The vocals can be filed under “guttural”. Not all tracks on “From Darkness” manage to score high on my “attention span radar” but when they let the sludge & doom approach take priority o
Oranssi Pazuzu were formed in 2007 by Juho ‘Jun-His’ Vanhanen, who wanted to do something in the vein of his band Kuolleet Intiaanit, but much heavier, bleaker, more extreme. The band recorded two full lengths (Muukalainen Puhuu and Kosmonument) and a split (with another weird Finnish band, Candy Cane) before, and this new material goes on in the very same weird vein. So if you’re trusted with any former stuff, you might expect the usual, i.e. the unusual!
I was very pleased with what Italian band Stigma (the one from Piedemonte, of course) did in the past. Albums like When Midnight Strikes! and Concerto For The Undead (both of them released via Pivotal Recordings, in respectively 2008 and 2010; reviews updated on respectively 18/04/10 and 21/12/10 in this site’s Archives-section) were honoured by positive reviewing taken care of by undersigned ;-).
(intro based on my review of last year’s Bereue Nichts-album; for full review: see update within the Archives, posted on October 31st 2012)
Bordeaux… I do appreciate some of the wines coming from that era, even though not every sub-region out there can completely please me (I am a connoisseur-amateur, with a profound passion for wines and distillates, but that’s another story). However, there’s another Bordeaux-based existence I do appreciate enormously: Year Of No Light. This band was formed at the beginning of this century and they did record a handful of highly acceptable releases with a mostly breath-taking atmosphere.
Stonecast are: Franck “Kanon” Ghirardi (vocals), Seb “Cazu” Casula (rhythm guitars), Bob “Flying” Saliba (lead guitars), Lionel “Beev” Antonorsi (bass) and Kenny Earl “Rhino” ex-drummer Manowar.
A French band formed in 2002 in Marseille with some influence from Iron Maiden, Iced Earth, Blind Gardian and Manowar, but the hold their own identity and modern approach.
Running Wild could be called a dinosaur, because they were formed way back in 1976, and besides a hiatus of some three years between 2009, when they split up, and their reformation in 2011, have kept around, with many personnel changes over these years.
Merely a year has passed since the release of their ‘Shadowmaker’ album. This album seems to go back to their nineties releases, and as far as I’m considered, is not a bad album, but also an album that will not remain in your memory for too long. It’s some standard eighties/nineties metal no more no less.
