That’s the new project of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, most famous for being the brain behind the American black metal band Liturgy: Kel Valhaal. Borrowing the name from a song on “The Ark Work”, the latest of his other band’s albums (more on that later), it completely lets go of the black metal aesthetics in favour of a completely electronic soundscape, along with clean, monotonous vocals. While most of Liturgy’s work can be labeled as metal, The Ark Work did go into extremely experimental territory, abandoning harsh vocals and bringing in the sound of bells… lots of bells. Kel Valhaal has … Read more
Tag Archives: music
OSR: October 18th 2015
Here’s the second instalment of One-Sentence Reviews!
Let’s begin with The Pneumatic Transit, a progressive jazz band that released Concerto for Double Moon earlier this month: a great and substantial album for lovers of classical- and jazz-inspired progressive rock music. Then comes Mesarthim‘s space-themed Isolate album, an atmospheric black metal wonder that really knows how to take you by the hand and walk you through their songs. Breed the Killers is a sludgey death metal band that released their self-titled debut album earlier this month: it’s pretty good but rather one-facetted and can get boring at times.… Read moreReview: Rise – Resilience
You, mere mortals, subordinate readers, can only listen to one of the songs from Rise‘s Resilience upcoming album, through the video above: About Duality. But trust me, your supreme guide and musical spirit, this album will be on a lot of year’s end lists, ours first! Let’s dig a bit to try and understand why.The manifesto of Rise is all about bringing back romanticism in modern music, specifically a blend of metal, hardcore, metalcore, alternative, and other trace elements. Romance is all about evoking emotions, stimulating the imaginary, and blowing an atmosphere around itself, engulfing the beholder … Read more
Review: Laksamana – Antagonist
Well, that’s something strange as I’ve not seen in a while. Describing itself as a “computer metal” one-man project, Laksamana, from Des Moines, Iowa, sounds like Jute Gyte’s more experimental, barely-even-metal albums, with vocals added on top. And this one truly reflects the spirit of our blog, which you can grasp by reading our name out loud.The aim of the album was to make it abrasive and unpleasant, as a warning of what could happen if all the world lived in computers. The music was made so that it would be impossible to play without the aid of … Read more
PSA: Downtuning is a crutch (to some)
Rob Scallon, musician and Youtube personality, just released this video where he plays the same riff over and over again but everytime down-tuning one step further. The goal here is to see whether or not playing in lower tuning affects the “heaviness” of your song.
Spoiler alert!: it does not.
In the end, those who are down-tuning to sound heavier are only being silly. However, playing in super low tunings, like 8- or 9- string guitar tunings (and even lower!) can get you an interesting sound, which is definitely different than “normal” 6-string guitar tunings.
Don’t tune down … Read more