New Year, New Music

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I am not really a fan of Taylor Swift. She just doesn't engage me as a performer. However, I will concede that she's written some pretty good stuff, just don't find her performances of the songs especially scintillating, at least to the degree I would expect of a performer making not millions, but billions. A recent one is "The Fate of Ophelia" and here a hard rock act called Ark Angels puts their spin on it. Much prefer this to Taylor's (sorry, Swifties).

 
Moonlight Haze is an Italian symphonic power metal band fronted and led by a wonderful vocalist named Chiara Tricario. Europeans on other sites have been to their concerts and speak highly of them. Here's their latest single.


And since I mentioned Greek black metal elsewhere, here's a sample from the latest album by Yoth Iria. Yoth is more or less a spinoff band from Rotting Christ, the titans of Greek black metal, started by that band's former bassist and including a few other former members. I quite enjoy the Greek school, finding it more melodic and musical than a lot of Nordic and related black metal.


 
With a doctorate in music and training and experience in both rock and opera, Kristin Starkey packs a great voice and knows how to use it. Here, she gives an interesting reading of the old chestnut "Killing Me Softly With His Song", originally by Lori Lieberman (who co-wrote the lyrics) but best known from versions by Roberta Flack and later The Fugees.

 
Violet Orlandi often chooses interesting material for her covers. This one was a suggestion from a fan and I jumped on it right away. The original is almost 25 years old, a track by Swedish melodic death metal greats In Flames. The core riff remains but is transposed to acoustic guitar and Violet sings it entirely clean, while In Flames vocalist Anders Friden injects growls into his performance (it's death metal, melodic, but still death metal). It ends up as a solid, interesting performance of the song. Very much Violet but not entirely forgetting its heavier origins.


And a 2014 live performance by In Flames in their hometown of Gothenberg, Sweden. The city has been a major hub of melodic death metal since the early nineties when bands like At The Gates and In Flames launched.

 
One of this country's unsung (at least at home) musical greats is Vancouver's Devin Townsend. A brilliant guitarist (who also plays multiple other instruments), terrific vocalist, and wonderful songwriter, who also engineers, mixes, and produces. He really should be better known, though he at least has been recognized at the Junos on occasion.

Devin's new album The Moth comes out May 29 and it is looking like a doozy. He comes from the metal world but has a strong progressive lean that results in his music being very diverse and smashing genre boundaries with regularity. "Prepare for War" is the latest single from The Moth and definitely shows his metal side but also his epic symphonic side. Interestingly, the video references The Big Snit, a classic old NFB short.


And one of Devin's songs that really hits the heart. The original is a soaring anthem with a layered sound. This live acoustic performance takes it to a quieter, more introspective level. I love how Devin holds back his powerful voice and lets the female quartet carry the song.

 
So, the woman who appears singing for a few seconds in "Prepare for War" is Dutch singer Anneke van Giersbergen, who I have posted before in this thread. She has been working with Devin for years, notably in his band The Devin Townsend Project.

 
Quite a haul of music yesterday when I did my exercise. Some examples:

The Rock Orchestra is pretty much what it says on the tin, a small orchestra that covers rock tunes. They come up in my recommendations from time to time but I have not given them a listen until yesterday. What changed? They covered "Thunderstruck", my favourite ACDC song, with Ukrainian singer Daria Zaritskaya (NoApology) on vocals and American violinist Mia Asano as the soloist, basically playing the guitar parts on her electric violin. Both women are favourites of mine so I jumped on it right away. They did not disappoint. Daria has a perfect voice for ACDC (which I knew going in, having heard her cover them with her band before) and Mia's playing is fantastic.


And then an interesting new track from an upcoming album by legendary film director John Carpenter. He has written scores for several of his own movies but a full album from him not related to a film is a new thing. One of the musicians is Cody Carpenter, who is John's son with actress Adrienne Barbeau.


I first came across Amberian Dawn, a Finnish power metal act, when they did an album of ... get ready for it ... ABBA covers. Yeah, seriously. Their new album, the first with new lead singer Nicole Willerton, skews a lot heavier. Nicole even growls a bit in this one.


And then a lady whose screaming and growling are now legendary in metal: Tatiana Shmayluk of Jinger. This is a live performance from a soldout show in Oslo, Norway.

 
ninj said:
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We got into that in relation to PUB Choir and fans being dropped off the bridge ... in GEO Ghia none-the-less ... troll? Maybe a challenging myth on denim and something soft and blue in the afterglow ... blue jeans? Indigo afterglow of the material of the myth ... offspring?

The it was Gone with the Wind ... thos silly Eire things ... some say aeons ... vaporous items of Freudian question ... small part of the integral story; the whole item ... an emptied soul?

Sometimes everything is poured into it ...
 
The opening of Act II of Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) is one of the most famous pieces of Romantic opera. Usually, you only hear the instrumental part as "Ride of the Valkyries" in concerts but here the Trondheim Symphony and Opera does a full concert version of the scene, with 7 singers belting out the Valkyries' lines. Interestingly, the Valkyrie of the title, Brunhilde, doesn't appear here. She comes on stage at the end of the scene. This is all her sisters flying around collecting the dead from a battlefield.

 
And my weekend kickoff: A highlight reel of Floor Jansen's show at Wacken Open Air last summer. Three Floor classics, one from her first band After Forever (lyrics by her), one from Nightwish (written by the band's regular writer Tuomas Holopainen but very much Floor's take on it), one of her solo tracks rearranged into a heavier setting for this show (lyrics by her, music co-written by her).


Behind her we have the wonderful band that backed her throughout her summer tour of the European festivals: Vincent van Vliet and Rowdy Prins (guitar), Jasja Offermans (bass and backing vocals), Gregor Hamilton (keys), Ivo Maarhuis (drums).

Only a week until her first concerts of 2026 as support for Swedish band Sabaton, which features her husband Hanne van Dahl on the drums.
 
One of the best cover bands going is Foxes & Fossils out of Georgia. Founded by Tim Purcell (far left) and also including his daughter Samantha (the woman next to him), the band does a mix of classic rock, country, and even some modern pop and rock (given the female "Foxes" are all around or under 30). Here they do a Crosby, Stills, & Nash classic with guitarist Darwin Conort taking lead vocals and some excellent harmony work from Tim and the three young women. Besides Samantha, the women (l-r) are Maggie Adams (who was a member of the Purcells' church and sang in the choir with Samantha at the time the band was starting) and Chase Truran (who joined at the suggestion of her choral teacher in high school, a friend of Tim's, when Maggie left for a time to go to university).

 
And another, this time a rare case of Tim singing lead. Darwin and the women provide harmonies. And, yes, Samantha sings duet with her dad a couple times, too.

 
Every now and then, something surprising comes up in my YouTube recommendations. Ellen Alaverdyan is one of those. Still a fairly young teen (she turns 14 next week), she is nonetheless an absolutely stunning bassist. And along with turning 14, she's dropping her first album with the band Jaminai that features her and her father, guitarist Hovak Alaverdyan. And listening to Dad when he solos, I can see where the musical genes came from. The family are Armenians currently living in Las Vegas.


 
A track from a little over a year ago, so Ellen was actually 12 when she recorded this. Dang, they even added a brass section for this one. And she sings!! Not much but she does. Really looking forward to the album.


And the young lady even has the good taste to be a bit of a metalhead. This is a bass cover of "Domination" by American symphonic metal band Symphony X.

 
Oh hell, one more. Here we get Ellen and Hovak rocking out in a world I hope to see them in more often: metal. Vocalist is Dino Jelusick, a Croatian singer who current has his own self-titled band Jelusik, but who has appeared with a number of bands over the years including Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Whitesnake.


Once Ellen gets a bit older, I hope some smart band snaps her up. She'd be great in almost any genre of music but I think jazz or prog would be better for her. They tend to highlight bass more and some of rock's top bass soloists (e.g. Chris Squire, Geddy Lee) have come from prog. That said, I sure won't complain if she goes metal.
 
More from Jaminai. This one is a bit less focussed on Ellen, giving Hovak and Murzo (keys) some more time in the spotlight. Wonderful track and Ellen even does some vocals later in it. I've seen her do that elsewhere, too. Maybe she's headed for being a bassist-vocalist down the road. Some of the great bassists in rock have gone that route, like Geddy Lee (Rush) and Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead).

 
Bloodred Hourglass falls into familiar territory for me these days: melodic death metal. But here, they focus more on the melodic part with help from Finnish singer and musician Erja Lyytinen. The song is from the band's new EP After the Burial, which is kind of a followup to their highly regarded (it got me listening to them) 2025 LP We Should Be Buried Like This.

 
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