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Around the world in four cds
After going a month or more without ordering any new music, I broke down and went a little wild this month. Consequently I've had a lot of new stuff to listen to -- including another cd by Within Temptation (The Silent Force), another 1 1/2 cds from Leaves' Eyes (Lovelorn, their first cd, and Legend Land, a brand new EP), another cd from Nightwish (Wishmaster), and a few other odds and ends, including the greatest hits of Chicago and Sand In The Vaseline, which is the 2-disc best of the Talking Heads.
My quest for odd music reached a sort of apex today. I had ordered a cd by the band Rudra a while back -- a Hindu Folk/Death Metal band from Indonesia, whose label is DemonZend Records in Malaysia (that's who I ordered from). I recieved one of those mail notices a couple of weeks ago about a package that needed a signature, but then another package arrived the next day and I thought that was it. But then I got my second and final notice. Hmmm, who could be sending me a package requiring a signature? I only had to ponder this a moment to realize it must be my Rudra cd. I'd been wondering when it would finally arrive. So I dropped by the post office today and picked it up, and listened to it at work.
Rudra: Brahmavidya: Primordial 1 On the one hand, I'd listened to one of the tracks from this cd over the internet already, and I kind of knew that this was probably as far as I was going to go in my quest for obscure folk-metal from far corners of the globe. That's because there's a lot of death metal in this disc, and all that gutteral screaming and super-speed thrashing just doesn't do all that much for me. Also, after you've special ordered a Hindu death metal cd from a Malaysian metal label, how much more obscure can you get?
Not that Rudra is considered obscure by most standards -- they're the most popular metal band in Indonesia and probably in all of Southeast Asia, and trust me, there are a lot of other more obscure metal bands lined up behind them. DemonZend even sent me a sampler of some of the others. But the point is, I now have metal bands from various parts of Europe and North America, plus Isreal, Turkey, Latvia, and Indonesia. (I have a lot of Japanese metal too -- Feel So Bad is one of my favorite bands after all. Oh, speaking of which, their new cd should be out within the next month!)
So anyway -- Rudra does involve a lot of super-fast drumming and gutteral screaming. What they're screaming is ten songs of ancient learning from the ten principal Upanishads (metaphysical texts of the Vedic tradition). Like any good screamy death metal band that actually has a message, they explain all in the accompanying insert. My favorite song so far is "The Pathless Path to the Knowable Unknown" which starts out with a galloping beat (more mainstream than most of their songs) and then adds a nifty Hindu chant, "Hara Hara Shankara Shiva Shiva Shankara". The text explaining this song says, "The Kena Upanishad negates all attributes of the world that we percieve through our five sense organs and mind. In fact the world we know is indeed made up of the knowledge gained through the sense organs and the mind. When this sensory world is negated for its impermanence, the Immortal alone stands as the witness to this negation. It is untouched by the shackes of Time, Space, and Causation This Immortal One can be known by approaching a Guru who knows himself to be Immortal."
Some of the lyrics:
"It it known to him to whom it is unknown; he to whom it is known does not know it ~ It is unknown to those who know, and known to thoe who know not.
"Not knowing this I die ~ Not knowing this I am born ~ Not knowing this I strive ~ Knowing this I become Immortal."
Let's just say this is a band that is writing lyrics on a different level from, say, Manowar. ^_^
Anyway as I said, a lot of the cd is a little bit too harsh for me, but there are tabla drums and chanting and other folkish touches and it's all very interesting, and now I can say I own a Hindu death metal cd, in the sense that they sound like a death metal band, not in the sense that they actually write about death. They refer to themselves as a Vedic Metal band, of which they were the first but there are now a lot of others following their lead.
Mezarkabul - Unspoken In some ways what I got from Rudra is what I was expecting to get from Mezarkabul. This is the top metal band in Turkey, known as Pentagram there (but they couldn't use that name in Europe or North America). As with Rudra, I got Mezarkabul's most recent cd on the theory that it was probably the most polished and accessible, and I'm fairly certain this proved to be the case. But I'd come across Mezarkabul's name while researching folk metal, which is mostly in the vein of Rudra, Skyforger (the Latvian band), Orphaned Land (the Isreali band) and various Finnish/Swedish/Norwegian bands like Moonsorrow, Korpiklaani and Ensiferum. All of these bands are more or less related to death metal in some way -- folk metal, viking metal, vedic metal, all of these genres come out of death metal and most include vocals similar to what you find in death metal -- screaming or growling gutteral vocals. Cookie monster with a cold. That sort of thing.
So I was expecting two things from Mezarkabul: death metal vocals, and some native/folk instrumentation or embellishments. I really got neither -- they do have just a little bit of native rhythm on a song or two, I think, but that's it. The music is pretty straight-ahead heavy metal, not too fast, not too fancy, but very heavy. And the vocals are not pretty-boy vocals, but aren't really Cookie-monster vocals either. In fact, they sound a great deal like Black-albumn era Metallica. Which is not at all bad -- in fact, Mezarkarbul is clearly a very good metal band, I can see why they're the most popular band in Turkey, and I liked their cd quite a bit. But I was also disappointed because they were so ordinairy. They could have been a band from anywhere. The vocals are all in English too, and frankly they write in English better than a lot of native English-speaking bands do. (That's true of a lot of these bands from other parts of the world.)
Heavenly: Dust to Dust Another recent pickup is a metal band from France (yes, metal does exist in France after all!) And this is not a death metal band at all -- in fact they very much have a pretty-boy vocalist. Heavenly is a speed metal band similar to Blind Guardian or Wuthering Heights -- fond of both blazingly fast riffing and beautiful vocal choruses. And to top it off, what we have here is a full cd on the theme of vampires. Yep, a big dark vs. light speed metal epic. What more could you ask for?
I really like this one a lot, so far. ^_^
The Brave: Searching For The Sun This American goth-metal band was described as "Rush meets Enya", which is 100% true, in the sense that they're a progressive metal band and their lead singer is female. As far as sounding anything like Rush or Enya? Not even. But they're a nice enough band, in a sort of Evanescense/Lacuna Coil goth metal way. They're probably a bit more metal than those bands, but I dunno, I still haven't picked up any Evanescense or Lacuna Coil, which I probably should. (Hey, Lacuna Coil is from Italy too, I don't have any metal from Italy yet!).
I've been listening to a lot of Nightwish, Epica, Elis, Within Temptation lately. I probably need to buy another Epica cd. ^_^ They aren't as good as Nightwish but they're one of the few bands that really comes close to that combination of symphonic-operatic-goth metal.
My quest for odd music reached a sort of apex today. I had ordered a cd by the band Rudra a while back -- a Hindu Folk/Death Metal band from Indonesia, whose label is DemonZend Records in Malaysia (that's who I ordered from). I recieved one of those mail notices a couple of weeks ago about a package that needed a signature, but then another package arrived the next day and I thought that was it. But then I got my second and final notice. Hmmm, who could be sending me a package requiring a signature? I only had to ponder this a moment to realize it must be my Rudra cd. I'd been wondering when it would finally arrive. So I dropped by the post office today and picked it up, and listened to it at work.
Rudra: Brahmavidya: Primordial 1 On the one hand, I'd listened to one of the tracks from this cd over the internet already, and I kind of knew that this was probably as far as I was going to go in my quest for obscure folk-metal from far corners of the globe. That's because there's a lot of death metal in this disc, and all that gutteral screaming and super-speed thrashing just doesn't do all that much for me. Also, after you've special ordered a Hindu death metal cd from a Malaysian metal label, how much more obscure can you get?
Not that Rudra is considered obscure by most standards -- they're the most popular metal band in Indonesia and probably in all of Southeast Asia, and trust me, there are a lot of other more obscure metal bands lined up behind them. DemonZend even sent me a sampler of some of the others. But the point is, I now have metal bands from various parts of Europe and North America, plus Isreal, Turkey, Latvia, and Indonesia. (I have a lot of Japanese metal too -- Feel So Bad is one of my favorite bands after all. Oh, speaking of which, their new cd should be out within the next month!)
So anyway -- Rudra does involve a lot of super-fast drumming and gutteral screaming. What they're screaming is ten songs of ancient learning from the ten principal Upanishads (metaphysical texts of the Vedic tradition). Like any good screamy death metal band that actually has a message, they explain all in the accompanying insert. My favorite song so far is "The Pathless Path to the Knowable Unknown" which starts out with a galloping beat (more mainstream than most of their songs) and then adds a nifty Hindu chant, "Hara Hara Shankara Shiva Shiva Shankara". The text explaining this song says, "The Kena Upanishad negates all attributes of the world that we percieve through our five sense organs and mind. In fact the world we know is indeed made up of the knowledge gained through the sense organs and the mind. When this sensory world is negated for its impermanence, the Immortal alone stands as the witness to this negation. It is untouched by the shackes of Time, Space, and Causation This Immortal One can be known by approaching a Guru who knows himself to be Immortal."
Some of the lyrics:
"It it known to him to whom it is unknown; he to whom it is known does not know it ~ It is unknown to those who know, and known to thoe who know not.
"Not knowing this I die ~ Not knowing this I am born ~ Not knowing this I strive ~ Knowing this I become Immortal."
Let's just say this is a band that is writing lyrics on a different level from, say, Manowar. ^_^
Anyway as I said, a lot of the cd is a little bit too harsh for me, but there are tabla drums and chanting and other folkish touches and it's all very interesting, and now I can say I own a Hindu death metal cd, in the sense that they sound like a death metal band, not in the sense that they actually write about death. They refer to themselves as a Vedic Metal band, of which they were the first but there are now a lot of others following their lead.
Mezarkabul - Unspoken In some ways what I got from Rudra is what I was expecting to get from Mezarkabul. This is the top metal band in Turkey, known as Pentagram there (but they couldn't use that name in Europe or North America). As with Rudra, I got Mezarkabul's most recent cd on the theory that it was probably the most polished and accessible, and I'm fairly certain this proved to be the case. But I'd come across Mezarkabul's name while researching folk metal, which is mostly in the vein of Rudra, Skyforger (the Latvian band), Orphaned Land (the Isreali band) and various Finnish/Swedish/Norwegian bands like Moonsorrow, Korpiklaani and Ensiferum. All of these bands are more or less related to death metal in some way -- folk metal, viking metal, vedic metal, all of these genres come out of death metal and most include vocals similar to what you find in death metal -- screaming or growling gutteral vocals. Cookie monster with a cold. That sort of thing.
So I was expecting two things from Mezarkabul: death metal vocals, and some native/folk instrumentation or embellishments. I really got neither -- they do have just a little bit of native rhythm on a song or two, I think, but that's it. The music is pretty straight-ahead heavy metal, not too fast, not too fancy, but very heavy. And the vocals are not pretty-boy vocals, but aren't really Cookie-monster vocals either. In fact, they sound a great deal like Black-albumn era Metallica. Which is not at all bad -- in fact, Mezarkarbul is clearly a very good metal band, I can see why they're the most popular band in Turkey, and I liked their cd quite a bit. But I was also disappointed because they were so ordinairy. They could have been a band from anywhere. The vocals are all in English too, and frankly they write in English better than a lot of native English-speaking bands do. (That's true of a lot of these bands from other parts of the world.)
Heavenly: Dust to Dust Another recent pickup is a metal band from France (yes, metal does exist in France after all!) And this is not a death metal band at all -- in fact they very much have a pretty-boy vocalist. Heavenly is a speed metal band similar to Blind Guardian or Wuthering Heights -- fond of both blazingly fast riffing and beautiful vocal choruses. And to top it off, what we have here is a full cd on the theme of vampires. Yep, a big dark vs. light speed metal epic. What more could you ask for?
I really like this one a lot, so far. ^_^
The Brave: Searching For The Sun This American goth-metal band was described as "Rush meets Enya", which is 100% true, in the sense that they're a progressive metal band and their lead singer is female. As far as sounding anything like Rush or Enya? Not even. But they're a nice enough band, in a sort of Evanescense/Lacuna Coil goth metal way. They're probably a bit more metal than those bands, but I dunno, I still haven't picked up any Evanescense or Lacuna Coil, which I probably should. (Hey, Lacuna Coil is from Italy too, I don't have any metal from Italy yet!).
I've been listening to a lot of Nightwish, Epica, Elis, Within Temptation lately. I probably need to buy another Epica cd. ^_^ They aren't as good as Nightwish but they're one of the few bands that really comes close to that combination of symphonic-operatic-goth metal.