Metal in all its forms and colours

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We talked about some old vinyl and ancient Jazz 'n yesterday's philosophy as semblance ... as some stray thoughts were re assembled!

Such gathering is rare in a world growing hostile and unknowing ... lost horizons?

Then there is the wonder of sound as Black Holes are sounded out ... weird Ecco num-bi ...
 
Russell Allen and Anette Olzon have both had stellar careers in symphonic metal. American Russell Allen has served in a number of bands over the years and is best known for Symphony X. Swede Anette Olzon came to fame fronting Nightwish on two memorable albums before a falling out with the band led to her being fired mid-tour (the handling of which remains the one black mark I have against the band). She has bounced back in recent years with the band The Dark Element, a memorable 2021 solo album, and the project I am about to highlight.

Allen/Olzon brings these two marvellous rock singers together with guitarist/arranger/producer Magnus Karlsson. The band debuted in 2020 with Worlds Apart and their second album, Army of Dreamers, is due out in September with several songs already released in the lead up.

This audio just dropped today:


The title track came out in July:


And the only actual video from the album is "All Alone"


And here's the amazing factoid about Anette: When not belting out symphonic metal vocals, she's a nurse in her native Sweden.
 
It is interesting how the worlds of metal and opera interact. Genres like power metal and symphonic metal have long had an operatic quality to them, even using singers with classical training. So it is always interesting when you have singers who actually straddle the two.

Take for instance, this nice recital performance of the Flower Duet from Lakme, by Leo Delibes. A favorite female operatic duet of many, here is performed by Italian Laura Macri and Mexican-Dutch Marcela Bovio.


And here's the same two singers as part of Dutch symphonic metal band MaYaN. Marcela even indulges in some growling.


How can they live in two such different worlds?

Marcela, while classically trained and quite good at that repertoire, has focussed on rock for much of her career and teaches at a metal-focussed academy in The Netherlands.

Laura sings opera regularly in houses in her native Italy, but has been involved romantically with Dutch metal guitarist-songwriter-growler Mark Jansen, who founded MaYaN, since 2011 so got involved in some of his projects.

So one is a rock singer with an operatic background and the other is an opera singer doing metal on the side, basically.
 
As part of the original lineup of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne is one of the founders of heavy metal music. Today, his reality TV career has turned him into a bit of a joke, but pretty much every band I have discussed so far exists because of Sabbath and Ozzy at some point. And he has new album out, Patient Number 9, to boot. The first reviews that I have seen were actually pretty good.

From the new album:


From 1992, one of his classic solo songs.


And one of the classics of metal, a song that helped start the genre.


Say what you will about Ozzy, but he helped start a movement in music that has become an amazingly diverse art form attracting a broad range of creative talents.
 
Meh, why stop there. "War Pigs" is Sabbath's oft covered contribution to the anti-war movement. Still packs a punch, too.


And skip ahead to the eighties, this was one of the first Ozzy solo songs to catch my ear.

 
Tommy Johansson is multi-talented threat. He writes, he produces, he sings, he plays a mean guitar. While his current regular gig is playing lead guitar for Swedish power metal band Sabaton (and I will be getting to them), Tommy has also worked with many other bands and artists as well as doing some fascinating covers for his own channel. Like this power metal cover of a Blondie classic.


And then there's his rather weird series where he sings Sabaton lyrics to Disney tunes.


The original is about, perhaps not surprisingly given the title, Col. T. E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia (it's the title of his memoirs). Sabaton's specialty is setting historical stories, both well-known and obscure, to music and this is fairly typical of them.


And the song that finally got me listening to his cover work after someone posted it on Floorworld. His voice is just perfect for doing Elton John, so he does. With a bit of a metal twist, of course.

 
Queen has never really been regarded as a metal band, but some of their music went there at times and they were certainly influential in some metal circles (listen to "Stone Cold Crazy" and tell me that's not an ancestor of speed metal).


And this song is almost as famous from a cover by Nightwish as from the Gary Moore original. Johansson puts his own spin on it here. And he really shows off his guitar chops.

 
One more, but not by Tommy himself. Tommy did the arrangements and instrumentals for Floor Jansen's Christmas 2020 performance of the Schubert "Ave Maria". Floor's husband Hannes plays drums in Sabaton so she and Tommy know each other and he helped out on a number of the solo covers she put out during the pandemic years.

 
Another Tommy Johansson - Floor Jansen collab, her cover of Lara Fabian's "Adagio"

 
Canada has never been a big player in metal. We've had a few bands and artists that went there, but it's never been as big here as it is in, say, the Nordic countries of Europe. That said, there have been a few successful Canadian acts. "Metal Queen" Lee Aaron (who is still active today but her heyday was the eighties) and Kitchener hair metal band Helix are two that come immediately to mind from my youth. Triumph is general considered hard rock but certainly flirted with metal at times.

One of the Canadian acts that is getting some attention right now is Unleash The Archers. The Victoria-based power metal band is fronted by the powerful vocals of Brittany Hayes (stage name Brittany Slayes). This video is a remix of a song from their 2017 album Apex and is included on the fifth anniversary re-release of that album.


And Brittany got an invite to appear on a Star One album recently. Star One is a project led by Dutch guitarist, composer, and producer Arjen Lucassen. He brings together a variety of vocal and instrumental artists from the metal world to create elaborate concept albums. Star One albums are generally standalone while Ayreon, his other main project, has an ongoing storyline.

 
"Abyss" is the title track from Unleash The Archers most recent album.


From 2015's Time Stands Still


And the performance that got me into the band, a power metal cover of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage". It is quite good, a spirited, energetic cover of one of this country's greatest songs.

 
I mentioned Sabaton already when talking about Tommy Johansson, who is their guitar-player and probably also when talking about Floor Jansen, whose husband Hannes Van Dahl has played drums in Sabaton for several years now. They are an immensely talented power metal band from Sweden who have made songs about history, both global and Swedish, the focus of their music. A lot of it is military, but other subjects do come up as well.

The frontman of the band is Joakim Broden whose gruff, guttural bass is often the perfect sound for their historical subject matter. He also writes a lot of the music along with bassist Par Sundstrom. Joakim and Par are original members, with the band since its founding in 1999-2000.

The band's latest album is The War To End All Wars, a concept album of songs about events and people from WWI, starting with Sarajevo, about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and ending with "Versailles" about the treaty that ended the war.

"Race to the Sea" tells the story of how the Belgians mounted a last ditch defense by flooding part of the country.


"Soldier of Heaven" deals with soldiers lost fighting in the Alps when an avalanche struck an Austro-Hungarian camp.


Another common theme is Swedish history, and their album Carolus Rex, dealing with the famous Swedish king Charles XII, is a bestseller in their native country. The title track is sung in Swedish. Unlike some of the Nordic metal bands who do all their singing in English, Sabaton sings in both English and their native tongue.


And one of the first Sabaton songs that I listened to was "Livgardet", a salute to Sweden's Life Guard, founded in 1521 as the royal guard of King Gustav Vasa. They also did an English version titled "The Royal Guard".

 
Melissa Bonny is a beautiful, talented singer from Switzerland. She's been part of a number of bands over the years, currently fronting Ad Infinitum, her own band, and cover band Dark Side of the Moon. She can growl with the best of them (and did it almost exclusively in Rage of Light, one of her earlier bands) but really shines as a clean singer, which is how she mostly sings in Ad Infinitum.


And joined by Charlotte Wessels (see upthread) in Dark Side of the Moon for a cover of an Enya song from The Lord of the Rings


And, yes, you saw that right. A metal band with a harpist. Cool, eh.

More Ad Infinitum, this time with a bit of her growling


With trance metal band Rage of Light, a metal-ized cover of a pop song by Danish band Aqua


And I can't leave Melissa without a sample of her harsh singing. This is Rage of Light again, covering death metal band Amon Amarth.

 
In 2002, Mark Jansen of the seminal Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever parted ways with the band. Artistic differences was the given reason. He does seem to be on good terms with other After Forever alumni (the band itself broke up in 2007) and they often appear as guests with either Epica or his other band, MaYaN.

Together with 16-year-old singer Simone Simons, Mark started a new symphonic metal band called Epica (they were briefly known as Sahara Dust). And twenty years later, the band is still going strong. There have been a few lineup changes over the years but Mark and Simone are still leading the band.

The band is known for big, dramatic songs powered by Simone's incredible voice and driving instrumentals, including orchestral and choral backing tracks. They are not necessarily the "heaviest" band in the genre, but they have talented musicians and terrific songwriting from Mark, Simone, and others, putting them right up there with Within Temptation and Nightwish in the symphonic metal pantheon.

The Phantom Agony is the title track from the band's 2003 debut album. Simone is 17 here and already showing the fine voice that is still one of the band's hallmarks today.


Feint also dates to that debut.


Sancta Terra is from the band's third album, The Divine Conspiracy. Here they perform it live with some help from Floor Jansen. Simone often brings friends in to sing this as a duet. Laura Macri and Marcela Bovio of Mark Jansen's band MaYaN have done it with her as well. And that's Mark himself doing the introduction.


One of my favorite Epica performances is Omega Alive, a virtual concert they livestreamed and subsequently released on digital and DVD during the pandemic. This performance of their powerful anthem "Unchain Utopia" (originally from their 2014 album The Quantum Enigma) is from that event. It is one of my personal favorite Epica songs. As you can see comparing this to the first video, Simone's voice has grown more polished and powerful over the past twenty years.


And, finally, from their most recent full album, another favorite of mine that brings in Mark's harsh vocals (I talked about him as a vocalist earlier when discussing growling). He doesn't use them much with Epica anymore, but still gets in there occasionally.

 
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And how does a rock band with "Epic" right in their name celebrate 20 years? Epically, of course. So far they've done a one-off concert in Tilburg, NL with their full show plus guests. They even had "Sahara Dust" (their old name) as the "opening act". It was, of course, just them in different outfits. And then there was a massive boxed set including their first three albums, a rare Dutch TV appearance, and a previously unreleased live album and DVD.

Still to come is a new EP, The Alchemy Project, featuring 7 songs with guest artists from other bands. The first single features the lead from Shining, a project about which I know nothing beyond his appearance here.

 
Sadly, I now turn my attention to Swedish metal veterans Soilwork. Sadly because their guitarist David Andersson has passed away at the way too young age of 47. I just discovered the band this summer but they have been around since 1995 and Andersson joined in 2012.

"Valley of Gloam" is from their latest album, Övergivenheten, which just came out in August.


And the title track from the new album. That's the same singer doing harsh vocals and clean vocals, founding member Bjorn "Speed" Strid.

 
Today is something of a special day for fans of symphonic metal. A decade ago, Floor Jansen took the stage with Nightwish for the first time. Floor was already a veteran of the metal scene, having fronted two previous bands. She even knew the band already as her first band, After Forever, had opened for Nightwish on a tour in 2002. Still, it was a moment with some potential for peril. Floor had come in as a last minute replacement (the documentary about that tour is entitled something like "Learn the setlist in 48 hours") after the band parted ways with previous lead singer Anette Olzon. She came through with flying colours, though, and not surprisingly. She's a consummate professional and self-described "technical singer", meaning she is well-trained, knows how to use her wonderful instrument, and focussed on giving her best on stage.

This morning (our time), Nightwish put out this tribute to their lead singer. A performance of Storytime from their concert at the Wacken Open Air festival in 2013 was my introduction to Floor and the song remains a personal favorite. The video traces Floor's performances of Storytime over the decade that she has been singing it.

 
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