Opeth - Heritage

I have not come across another album that has received more mixed views than Opeth's latest release - Heritage. It seems that people either adore it or completely hate it.

True, that compared to Opeth's previous albums, Heritage is very different. For starters, it has no growls or heavy dark repeating riffs. The entire album sounds like it was made in the 70's and hidden away in a time capsule only to be found 40 years later.

The slow songs, acoustic sections, flute and organ, brush drumming and vintage distortion patches gives a beautiful mixture of folk music and progressive rock. The King Crimson influence is almost palpable.
Mikael Åkerfeldt, the only constant member of the band since it's formation, has always been experimental with his music. But, Heritage is none like any others before it; very un-opeth-like. Much like jazz improvisations, the entire album has many extended interludes and solos.

Lyrically, the entire album is very dark and very often melancholic. Strangely, to me, the album would be the perfect soundtrack to a dark middle ages fantasy story of sorts. The album has many elements that repeat themselves through the songs. With the exception of Slither (which is dedicated to Dio), all other songs have long slow acoustic sections as well as very beautifully pieced solo's. The song Devil's Orchard starts off with a moderately fast tempo and slows down two minutes into the song. The intermediate section like many interludes throughout the album is very psychedelic. The song quickens towards the end finishes off with a solo.
Opeth - Devil's Orchard

The next song on the album is I Feel The Dark which starts off with slow acoustic riff as flutes, strings and soft drums played with brushes add on to give an eerie atmospheric feel.
Opeth - I Feel The Dark

The next song is the fastest song of the album - Slither which also is the least experimental song of the album. The album then moves into slightly more psychedelic and experimental set of songs - Nepenthe, Haxprocess, Famine, The Lines In My Hand and Folklore. All three songs are well over 6 minutes and have very long interludes. Nepenthe is mostly a soft slow songs with abruptly sharp and fast paced interludes and solos. Famine starts off with a very interesting flute and percussion intro. On first listen, these songs can sound quite random especially if you haven't listened to a lot of experimental music. The Line In My Hand has a quicker tempo and some very intricate drumming. Folklore starts off with a beautiful guitar piece and smoothly transitions into an 8 minute piece of pure brilliance.
Opeth - Folklore

The albums ends with one of the best instrumental pieces by Opeth - Marrow Of The Earth. It's a shame they didn't play this live when I saw them. I'd rather let the song speak for itself:
Opeth - Marrow Of The Earth

The album certainly is slower, more melodious and more experimental than Opeth's previous works. Listening to Heritage live is a completely different experience altogether. The atmosphere they create with their music is incredible. To me its perhaps one of the best psychedelic progressive rock album in a few decades. If you have listened to the album and you didn't like it, then you definitely need to listen to it again and this time keep your ears open!

Atreyu - Congregation of the Damned

For a long time, I refused to listen to Atreyu. I didn’t really know why, but since I had full faith in my reasoning abilities (but not so much in my memory), I naturally concluded that I must have had a real good reason for my bias, which had since been washed away by the er.. tides of time.

But one fine day – scratch that – one utterly miserable day, in a fit of pique born of months and months of using a slow Internet connection and Grooveshark streaming worse than a tube of toothpaste, I decided to abandon the hunt for new music and browse instead through some old music I already had but never really listened to. Enter Atreyu.

I listened to their ‘A Death-Grip On Yesterday’ first, and while I really like the album, it had nowhere near the effect on me that ‘Congregation of the Damned’ did, so the latter’s what I’ll talk about.

Congregation of the Damned starts off with a very good, if conventional metalcore song called ‘Stop! Before It’s Too Late And We’ve Destroyed It All’. The lyrics aren’t conventional metalcore though – they’re misanthropic in an eco-warrior sort of way that I thoroughly loved. In fact, the chorus with its gang chants of ‘Kill! Kill! Multiply! Till the skies are black and the rivers dry!’ is one sticky little refrain that I simply can’t get out of my environmentalist head. However, while ‘Stop! Before…’ is a great song, it’s unlikely to become anybody’s favourite from this album.

Lyrics Video: Stop! Before It's...

This album is hard to classify because it tries so hard to be eclectic. Halfway through a song you’re ready to dismiss as meh metalcore, a blazing fast solo appears out of nowhere just to disconcert you. Halfway through a song you’re ready to dismiss as another love song, an ear-splitting scream appears to throw your pigeonholing right out of the window.

‘Gallows’ is a great, great song. Brian Saller, the drummer, is the one singing during the chorus, and once you start to become familiar with his delivery, you realize that most, if not all, the songs on this album have him singing the choruses. Alex Varkatzas, the ‘lead’ vocalist, the chief lyricist and frontman, takes up the verse singing and screaming duties.

This combination works. ‘Gallows’ has an almost power metal feel to its soaring vocals, clean chording and simple, fast beats. Brian Saller’s voice is strongly reminiscent of Edguy and if you go further back, even has shades of Bruce Dickinson with its tremulous high notes. When combined with Varkatzas’s more typical ‘modern’ metalcore voice, it works a tangy treat. Atreyu knows this because pretty much every song on this album uses the dual vocalist formula.

Video: Gallows

‘Storm to Pass’ is almost an identical twin of ‘Gallows’ with a slightly less catchy chorus, and with some additional - spectacular - soloing to fill up the bridge. Which one of the two do I like better? I’m leaning towards ‘Gallows’ at the time of writing this review, but that wasn’t always the case, and I’ll let you decide which one wins.

Video: Storm To Pass

My favourite song on this album is probably ‘So Wrong’ and - interestingly - it’s almost fully Varkatzas. His smooth transitions from whispery verses to rising, pleading shouts to agonized screams and back make for one mesmerizing song. There’s even a quirky little solo in there, and also a bit of Saller in the choruses, but nothing ever feels out of place.

Lyrics Video: So Wrong

‘Black Days Begin’ is almost hard rock with its slow, punchy beats, chugging guitars, and a catchy, catchy chorus. I seem to be repeating myself, eh? Well, Atreyu, even in their otherwise most generic, ‘filler’ songs on this album, have hit on catchy choruses. ‘Black Days Begin’ has a bit of screaming (that spoils my ‘hard rock’ tag a bit, but well, I did call their music ‘eclectic’ earlier), and a solo that’s eerily similar to Megadeth’s ‘Sweating Bullets’ (let’s call it a ‘tribute’, shall we?), but the parts fit together without too much creaking.

‘Ravenous’ is rollicking fast and even more reminiscent of a power metal anthem than the other songs on this album. It’s not a song I would often skip on a full album listen, but it’s not a song that’d make stop what I’m doing just to listen.

‘Coffin Nails’ has some neat riffs and yet another soaring, clean sung Saller chorus. It quickly dropped off my favourites list though, for some reason I haven’t figured out. Having said that, this is a song you’ll definitely enjoy on your first listen.

‘Wait For You’ is the obligatory love song with the keyboards, the soft angsty crooning and the gradual rise to an uplifting crescendo. For something that’s another example of a much abused formula, it’s not a bad song at all.

Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a cliché because there’s something about this album that strikes you as startlingly familiar, even on your first listen. Atreyu, perhaps in their hunt for radio success, have simplified their music. When there’s conflict between catchy but repetitive versus creative but possibly dissonant, Atreyu have always gone for the former. The chording is simple in most of the songs, but you can see that it’s not because the guitarists ain’t got it – there’s enough of soloing on the album to put that doubt to bed. The drumming is occasionally fast, but always simple. The choruses are always catchy, and always simple.

If Atreyu haven’t really experimented with song structures, where does the ‘eclectic’ bit come in? The styles they play – they do a great job mixing the punk vocals with the metalcore vocals with the power metal vocals with the pop vocals; the alternative rock guitaring with the speed metal soloing, with the hard rock riffing - that’s where they’ve really mixed things up.

If you’re an alternative rock fan who likes a bit of screaming, you’ll love this album. If you’re a metalcore fan, so little screaming may be disappointing at first, but you’ll grow to love this album. Lastly, and here’s where I’ll put my neck on the line, if you fancy a bit of Maiden or good ol’ heavy metal, I suspect you’ll enjoy quite a few songs on this album.

Chronix Radio - Radio Review

What's that I see, approaching fast from 12 o' clock? Wait, it's still a speck, but I can make it out now. Look properly, it's right on the edge of my musical horizon. Still no? Oh, it's streaming radio, that's what.

Yes, folks, after many months of frustration with Grooveshark (the darn thing streams as slow as a tube of toothpaste), I've turned to free online streaming radio. There're a LOT of options as it turns out, even if you're like me and listen to a genre within a genre within a genre that only fifteen year old White Australian boys listen to.

A long time ago, I listened for a bit to KNAC. It's not bad - if you search for 'streaming radio rock' I'm pretty sure it'll be up there in the results. (Or maybe you have to throw in a 'free'.) But it doesn't play too much metal, and I wanted metal this time.

Shoutcast, it turned out, was exactly what I was looking for. (Do check it out: you can even filter by genre.) I filtered by 'metalcore' and hit upon Chronix Radio.

Chronix Radio (they have four channels, I'm talking about the one called 'Chronix: Metal') plays a lot of brutal death metal, a lot of metalcore, a fair amount of melodic death, a fair amount of black metal and nothing at all that has clean vocals in it. While I'm not particularly a fan of brutal death metal, it's brilliant for the workplace. A 'Bovine Decapitation' (by 'Humanure') playing in your ear cuts off all sound like a thirty foot thick lead wall. On the other hand, your screen flashing "Now Playing: 'Fetid Eviscerations' by 'Necrophile Castration'" while somebody's over your shoulder may be slightly awkward. Pfaw, we're metalheads and they don't know what they're missing out on, do they?

Melodic death: I've heard a lot of Amon Amarth, In Flames, Children of Bodom. Metalcore, I've heard a little of everything: All That Remains, Killswitch Engage, August Burns Red, As I Lay Dying, Unearth and many, many unknown basement screamers that don't even have Wikipedia entries. I've listened to plenty of screechy black metal - Satirycon, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir and the likes. There's a fair bit of Opeth I've heard too.

So, here's the one line review: pretty good, but I hope there's better out there. There're a lot of great songs, but for every good song, there's a terrible one. I'm not talking about the musical quality of the song, just the recording quality. I think they put in a lot of free, filler bands because they can't afford to play A-listers all the time. The stream quality is OK, the audio does crackle occasionally, but it never breaks to buffer, so I'm fine with that.