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[miko2]

Today's Song: Enthroned by The Seventh Power

One thing I've noticed about iTunes is that they go to the effort to carry a lot of very obscure music... take Christian hard rock and metal, for example. During my years at Salem Academy Christian High School and for many years after, most of what I listened to was Christian rock and Christian metal. Most of this stuff was quite obscure when it was produced, and is even harder to come by these days... and I own a lot of vinyl albums that have never been released in a cd format. But you can find quite a bit of it on iTunes: Daniel Band, X-Sinner, Servant, Resurrection Band, Deliverance, Jerusalem, etc.

The Seventh Power is a new band (their first cd was released last year) but I discovered them while checking out the newest Deliverance cd (which is available for download on iTunes). This is a band featuring guitarist Bill Menchen, who is also the guitarist for bands Titanic, Final Axe, and Rev Seven. I don't know any of those bands either, even though Final Axe has been around since the late 1980's. It's pretty rare that you get a Christian metal band from that era and I don't know who they are. I mean, I ordered dozens of demo tapes from bands during that time, who never actually produced anything on vinyl or cd.

In any case, this Bill Menchen seems to be the kind of guy who hangs around his studio in Las Vegas and works on dozens of side projects, kind of like the guys from King's X, or the guy from Porcupine Tree, or... well, it's a popular thing for musicians to do these days. He also seems to self-produce everything he's involved in. For The Seventh Power he handles everything except the drums, which are handled by none other than Robert Sweet of Stryper. So, the good news is that we've got excellent musicianship here -- great drums, great guitarwork, a top-notch sound. The bad news is that Menchen's vocals are weak, and his songwriting skills are subpar (according to one review, at least two songs consist of only the song title sung over and over). What that all adds up to for me, is that this is the perfect kind of band to do the iTunes one-track thing with. One song isn't going to break me, and if I pick the right tune I won't necessarily notice the vocal and lyrical deficiencies like I would over the course of a full album.

And I really do like this song "Enthroned", with it's heavy, doomy riffing. The lyrics that are there are actually well written and don't get repetetive.

It probably goes without saying that this band is too obscure to have a video on iTunes. There's no myspace page for the band (although there are myspace pages for Menchen, Sweet, and for the band's music label Retroactive Records -- none of which allow you to listen to a full song by this band). However they are available at CD Baby, which allows you to listen to an extended sample of each song:

Seventh Power at CD Baby