Metal in all its forms and colours

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The band The Dark Side of the Moon started as a cover band but to my delight, their latest is an original. Lead singer Melissa Bonny is a busy woman, with both her bands (this one and Ad Infinitum) dropping albums this Spring (Ad Infinitum at the end of this month, Dark Side in May).

 
And Melissa's main band, Ad Infinitum, dropped their third studio album today. It's a very lively, energetic album, very much fitting the lead singer's style on stage. This video is for the opening track of the album. Melissa lacks the operatic range of Floor Jansen or Simone Simons, but is a solid vocalist and is proving to be quite the songwriter, too. The band started as a crowdfunded Melissa Bonny solo effort but expanded over the period between when she started on it and when Chapter I - Monarchy, their debut, was released.


There's other cool metal stuff happening, too, but I will post more on the weekend when I have more time.
 
Enough raving about Melissa. Besides the new Ad Infinitum, March 31 saw the release of Pirates Over Wacken, a live album from Visions of Atlantis. It's a recording of their set from the Wacken festival in Germany last year and, for the most part, is a live version of their studio album Pirates. One of the best songs from Pirates, and one of my favorite songs period from 2022, is "Melancholy Angel" and it plays very, very well live. Just listen to Clementine Delauney's voice soaring in the chorus.

 
We've talked about them before in this thread, but the 500 lb. gorilla of heavy metal, Metallica, is out with a new album. 72 Seasons is classic thrash metal, the kind of music that made the band's name back in the eighties. I'm listening to it on my drive to work so haven't heard the whole thing, but enjoying what I have heard. Here's the lead off track.


And the first single released a few months back.


Fun footnote: Metallica is in Europe right now. They are doing two concerts in Amsterdam, each with a different setlist and opening act. The opening act for Saturday, the second, was supposed to be Five Finger Death Punch. However, Death Punch pulled out at the last minute and none other than Dutch vocalist Floor Jansen (yes, her) got the nod to replace them. It's a real bump for her solo tour, moving her from club venues with 1000-3000 seats to a festival-scale event with 50,000. She's played crowds like that in Nightwish but never in her solo work. She did meet Metallica vocalist-guitarist James Hetfield while performing with Nightwish at the Pinkpop Festival last summer but not sure if that played a role in this or not.
 
False Memories is new to me, but I like this song so will be checking them out further. I came to this one because it has Swedish singer Anette Olzon, who I am very much a fan of, as a featured guest artist. Rossella Moscatello, the band's own vocalist, is pretty good too and meshes well with Anette.

 
For a brief time in my early teens I listened to Def Leppard. I guess I don’t think of them as heavy metal. More “hard rock” - and some of it is more ballad, less hard. Arena rock lol. Ditto Van Halen. I like some Metallica. Enter Sandman used to play at the nightclubs in the mid 90s where I lived. Along with grunge - which has metal influences. Grunge is metal’s socio-politically disillusioned and dishevelled cousin, or something like that. I like Soundgarden. I like Rage Against the Machine - which has elements of metal, rap, funk…

Lately I’ve been appreciating hip-hop, learning more about it. Like you feel about metal, Mendalla, I feel like hip-hop is under-appreciated. So much more goes into it than people think - the timing, flow of the words, and the rhymes, are a difficult skill. It shares a certain angry anti-establishment vibe with metal and punk. Like any genre there’s some good stuff and some crappy stuff. I have new appreciation for Eminem after watching some old interviews and recent ones. “Slim Shady” is his alter ego - a lot of it is ironic. For years I didn’t know that. He’s actually a nice guy. At least, he is now. He’s funny - he shares a similar sense of humour and irony with Stephen Colbert. They did a hilarious mock interview together. I might start a thread because this is off topic.

Closer to the topic, here’s Soundgarden. Though usually categorized as grunge, or used to sometimes be called “alternative rock”, you can hear the metal! It has a good groove to it, too. It’s been several years since Chris Cornell passed away. Seems like yesterday.


I also like old school Black Sabbath. It was more political, anti war than I realized when I was younger and couldn’t get past the “dark theatre” aspect. It wasn’t worshipping violence it was using irony in the aesthetics to speak out against violence committed by militaries and their leaders.


I really like Ozzy. Epic rock icon aside, his absent minded goofball personality isn’t a persona. It’s genuine and I find something really endearing about it. He seems so awkward and nervous in some live performances, but he manages to get through them, remembering all the lyrics lol. And, after all, he did write or help write a lot of songs. He’s very smart. …I just had the thought, “I wonder if Ozzy and Keith Richards hang out. Seems like a good friend-match.” Lol

As for biting the heads off bats? I don’t know…was that real or just theatre? If real, I’m not into that at all,but I can appreciate some of the songs.
 
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Some recent goodies.

The Dark Side of the Moon drops their first album tomorrow. While the band are all music industry veterans who have appeared on numerous albums with other bands, it's still a milestone. Final pre-release single is called "New Horizons" and features a guest singer. I've posted about Fabienne "Fabi" Erni before. She normally sings lead in two bands, Eluveite and Illumishade. Like Dark Side lead singer Melissa Bonny, Fabi hails from Switzerland.\


And I am unsure of the provenance of that song. Dark Side is primarily a cover band specializing in music from TV, movies, and games but there's no credits given in the description on Youtube.

Meanwhile, German medieval folk metallers Feuerschwanz released a somewhat weird, but funny, video for their latest, the leadup to an album due in July. It's arguably a bit blasphemous, ending with Jesus working out on a (get it?) Crossfit, but no worse than some Monty Python material.

 
The song is metal. The singers both have solid backgrounds in metal. But this cover takes the song in some rather non-metal directions. And I love it. Great version. The singers are Charlotte Wessels (blonde hair) and Zora Cock (redhead). Charlotte blew my mind last year with two amazing albums, Tales from Six Feet Under and Tales from Six Feet Under, Vol. II. Zora is the lead singer of the band Blackbriar who I only recent came across. The two will be appearing live together at a couple dates in The Netherlands with Blackbriar as the supporting act for Charlotte. And, yes, they are promising live performances of "Mary on a Cross". Hoping for some good fan vids.

 
With metal's reputation for being a very "masculine" genre (though I hope you're getting a sense of how much more it has become in the current era with so many great female singers), it may be surprising to know that one of the genre's greats, a stalwart of the genre since he joined Judas Priest in 1974, is an out gay man. Rob Halford came out in 1998 during a break from Priest (they parted company in 1991). He has been quite open about his sexuality and become something of a gay icon in the genre. He also packs a hell of a voice. And, best of all, he did finally rejoin Judas Priest in 2003 and remains their lead singer to this day.

From 1986's Turbo, one of the Judas Priest songs I recall from my youth.


From British Steel (1980)


And a recent live performance of another song from British Steel.

 
So apparently this is the year I start getting into classic metal. After listening to some of the top ranked Judas Priest albums, I am giving Iron Maiden a shot. I probably know Maiden a bit better than Priest since my cousin was into them back in the day. For those who don't remember, Iron Maiden is maybe best known outside metalheads for their mascot Eddie, a skeletal "undead" figure who appears in some form on most of their album covers. Back in the eighties, I think I liked those album covers better than the music. One even had Eddie rising from the grave with a quote from H. P. Lovecraft as the epitaph.

Style-wise, Maiden is considered to belong to the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal", a genre from the eighties of which they seem to be the definitive band. The lineup, while a bit fluid, has been pretty consistent as the genre goes. The core of the band is founder Steve Harris. Harris started the band in 1975. He is the songwriter and plays bass and keyboards. Their best known, and longest running, lead singer is Bruce Dickinson who joined in 1981 and has been singing for them ever since save for a break in the nineties. If you've heard Maiden, it's probably Dickinson you've heard.

Probably their best-known song is "Run to the Hills", a fairly political number inspired by settler oppression of North American indigenous people and the indigenous resistance to it.


Another well-known song is "Two Minutes to Midnight", a rather dark Cold War-era anti-war anthem.

 
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Some new metal from recent weeks.

Multinational band The Dark Side of the Moon (Swiss, German, and Danish member) started on a bet and a dare and now they have a full album out and have even done some touring with the bands from which their members are drawn. "First Light" is their latest video and uses footage from that tour cut by the band's harpist Jenny Diehl. It's one of their original songs and a favorite of mine from the album.


Meanwhile, Swiss band Rage of Light, the former band of Dark Side lead singer Melissa Bonny, continues to put out their brand of "trance metal" with Bonny's successor Martyna Halas


Sirenia consists, officially, of Norwegian multi-instrumentalist and producer Morten Veland and French mezzo Emmanuelle Zoldan, though they add a rhythm section for live performances. Zoldan has actually been working with the band since it started as part of the backing chorus, becoming lead singer in 2016. Their new album 1977 is a stellar piece of symphonic metal.


And Sirenia's cover of the marvelous "Twist in my Sobriety" by Tanita Tikaram, which appears as a bonus track on 1977.

 
Lzzy Hale is somewhat the opposite of the classically voiced European metal singers. She's got a ragged blues shouter voice that tears into a song like a wolf into a deer carcass. And Halestorm, the band she founded with her brother Arejay (drummer) in the late nineties, provides a great venue for showing off that voice. Not for the first time, Lzzy and the boys hit Hellfest last weekend and hit it hard. No individual songs posted, so here is the entire set. I recommend skipping to
for Lzzy's amazing a capella take on the Heart classic "Crazy on You".

 
Watched another Hellfest set last night, this it was The Hu (no relation to The Who or The Guess Who). The Hu are a folk metal band from, of all places, Mongolia. They blend traditional Mongol instruments and throat singing with Western rock to produce some pretty impressive music. Their songs are largely in Mongol but they have done English versions of a few by bringing in Western rockers like Lzzy Hale of Halestorm (see above) and William DuVall of Alice in Chains as featured artists. But it's the Mongol originals that have really capture my imagination.

"Wolf Totem" remains one of their signature songs, first appearing on the 2018 album The Ghereg.


From the same album, another ongoing favorite is "Yuve Yuve Yu"

 
From 2022's Rumble of Thunder, "Black Thunder" comes with a pair of terrific music videos that highlight one major aspect of this band: They celebrate the history and culture of their people with enthusiasm and energy. They even have a song about Genghis Khan.


 
Which brings me to "Bii Biyelgee", perhaps my favorite Hu tune. This piece is an exuberant piece of music that, to my ears, transcends genre. It's folk, it's metal, it's plain old rock, it's highly danceable (in fact, Biyelgee is a traditional Mongol dance). Interestingly, the official video picks up at the rather sombre ending of "Black Thunder".

 
Perhaps my favorite of The Hu's English-language collaborations is "Song of Women" which brings Lzzy Hale, who I raved about a few posts back, in with the band. Her powerhouse, somewhat gravelly, voice fits perfectly with the Mongol throat singing of the band members. And it's quite a powerful song, too.

 
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