blues / doom

There are music genres that hardly go together at first glance because of the stereotypes in one’s head. Blues and grunge are a good example – the mental image of angry young men screaming their hearts and lungs out into the Pacific Northwestern air in the early 90s doesn’t overlap with the (mostly) African American blues player from Chicago who already performs for 40 years or more. At second glance there is a deeper connection than expected as both genres share a “love” for the broken characters, the inner struggles, the anger, the despair of trying to “find a way out of” or “an access to” relationships. Schematically, there are some similarities too, because of the structure of regular grunge songs often following blues blueprints. 

One bigger difference is usually the sound-scape, for the distortion, that makes an integral part of a lot of grunge songs, doesn’t really work well with blues songs. This discrepancy is now bridged by Alberto Piccolo who normally serves as the guitarist for Italian doomy post-metallers Messa whose last regular album “Feast of Water” received lots of appraisal. Under the moniker Little Albert, he will release “Swamp King”, his version of blues which still is two feet deep in Piccolo’s regular doom-mud. Although the structures are clearly bluesy, the tuning, the reverb and the sound of Piccolo’s guitar form the connection to grunge, and we often see Tad, Jerry or Stone lurking around the corner trying to see how the Italian does it. All of this makes for a kind of doom that one does not encounter too often: great guitar motifs like the beginning of “Outside Woman Blues” turn into good rockers; slow building blues bits add up to slo-mo blues which, of course, is very similar to the arrangement of doom songs (just listen to the slightly punkish “Mary Claire”); the reverb of blues solos is elongated then turning into doom, noticeable in “Bridge of Sighs”. 

With a little bit experimentation and the incorporation of some unique instruments (like the unusual saxophone which makes Messa so unique) the next record will be an absolute smasher to get parties going; “Swamp King” is more like the record you put on shortly after 3 or 4 am, when the party is over but there are still the music fanatics who don’t want to go home, who still need to talk, who could use a new fix. And a good fix it is!


Thorsten

blues / psychedelic rock

Stoneface is an album released in the end of July, by Australian blues rock group The Ivory Elephant. A very intriguing album, with dispersive and highly diluted guitar lines, that fly over the extensive sensibilities of its vaguely digressive harmonies, the work displays an overtly dense and horizontal placidity, while at the same time the imperiously somber dynamic strength of its cohesive sound gracefully externalizes in the tissue of its imponderable and vast serenity the ostensibly lucid vividness of its circumspect nature. So, while the transparent elements of its astounding energy fluctuates above the abrasive restlessness of its own atmosphere, the general musicality of the group conceives a versatile style, whose sound transpires vitality and authenticity. 

Forty-seven minutes long, the record has ten tracks: 1) Storm; 2) Maybe I'm Evil; 3) Wars; 4) Roll On; 5) Jazzhead pt I; 6) Low Expectation; 7) Stoneface Jamboree; 8) Stoneface; 9) Hard Case; 10) Jazzhead pt II; with solid and amazingly authorial guitar lines, that conceives a sonorous paradise where the soul can rest indefinitely in a sweet cosmogony of surrealist expansive splendor, the music of The Ivory Elephant revitalizes the best elements of modern blues rock, and gives them a more dynamic and introspective outlook, sometimes disrupting the harmonies into an almost minimalist rapturous contrivance.

Despite the lethargy that the melodies can inspire — as a consequence of its stylish features that conceives the superiority of supreme calmness —, the sound displayed in Stoneface is marvelously original, tremendously elegant and exceedingly sensible. The band not only manages to successfully create a discreet, but concomitantly extraordinary work of art, it also becomes necessary to expose the gracefully organic temperance of its dilated and effusive sonorous stability.

While the sound of the band can appear to be a little homogeneous at times, The Ivory Elephant manages to successfully make each track to be a glorious surprise, since each of them has an identity of its own, while at the same time the band is coherent and keeps loyal to its marvelously beautiful and sagaciously unique style. Despite the fact that the entire album is wonderfully good, splendid tracks like the epic Stoneface — almost eight minutes long — and the more retro styled Hard Case deserves to be highlighted. A virtuous and proficient work of art that reveals the formidable potential of a very promising band, Stoneface can certainly be qualified as a majestic album. Undoubtedly, blues rock enthusiasts are gonna celebrate this spectacular achievement, whose expressively genuine musical patterns anticipates further developments for the genre. 


​Wagner

alternative / dreampop / folk / blues

Transitions is an album by American musician Andrew Rothschild, released on June 22. Almost sixty five minutes long, the record has fourteen tracks: Nu, Get Up, Acceptance, Growth, Routine, Suwanee, Roots, Devil Behind Your Smile, Memories, Home, Fall, Crimson, Natural and Encore. Working dedicatedly in the development of a genre he defines as bluestronica – which is the combination of blues music’s graceful intricacies with electronic music devices – Rothschild is a primordially intuitive, sagacious and innovative musician, that has no fear diving deeply on underground and genuine methodical experimentalism. With melodies that works vividly fantastic and exponentially fragmented sonorous intonations within a wider melodic diagram, Transitions can be described initially as a calm, serene and relaxing album, although rapidly becomes much more than that. The horizon of a new musical sensibility that integrates into the apparent simplicity of its content projects the expansion of a rational, sensational and lucid authorial work, that filters on the antagonism of its paradoxical tenacity the beautiful and elevating disposition of a vivacious style of music, that impresses for its formidable level of creativity, flexibility and audacity. Transitions is a majestic masterpiece, and this becomes evident already on the first few songs of the album.   

With an energetic, irreplaceable and synergic punctuating premise that wonders throughout the ambivalence of its own passionate sonorous dissidence, the eloquence, the profoundness, the vitality, the consistence and the originality of Andrew Rothschild’s music is beyond ordinary categorizations. With a polyvalent degree of artistry that combines different elements from several apparently disparate genres, the artist deliberates gracefully over the harmonies of its own musical emancipation, creating a totally different and surprisingly original sensorial treasure of sonorous possibilities.  

Generally departing from the educated elegance of lounge music, the sound of Andrew Rothschild incorporates elements of folk, trip hop, world fusion and electronica – amongst other genres –, in such a personal way, that you can almost say he invented his own peculiar style of music. Fearlessly innovating and bravely intense, the sensibility, the versatility and the authenticity present on this album will make you feel your life as a projected conscious dream.

The sixth track – Suwanee, possibly my favorite – is simply a wonderful journey throughout a different form of sensibility. In fact, each and every song on this album is a monumental flavor for the soul, a sentimental gift of nature exposed over a silent universe that echoes endlessly inside the most fundamental principles of a sincere conscience. But, strictly speaking, no words or written evaluation could do justice to this marvelously aggrandizing and excellent state of the art work. You just have to listen by yourself. You will be thrilled, be sure about that. 


Wagner

psychedelic / blues / rock

On The Waves Of Time is an album released on June 22, by German Psychedelic rock group The Moonshine Brand. Forty four minutes long, the record has eight tracks: Menace To Society, Free Your Mind, Humble Queen, Surfing Through Space, Delusion, Acquainted Blues, Wasted With You (No Time For The Blues) and Daughter Of The Moon. A typical work done within the basic premises of the genre, On The Waves Of Time is a moderately good work. While you can’t expect anything sensational or especially relevant, it’s impossible to deny the astounding and sincere qualities the album amazingly displays, in a genuine atmosphere of positive and deliberately restrained acid rock vibe, and the intelligent, impressive disposition of melodies, adequately positioned at the epicenter of a harmonious layer of direct and immaculate devotion to the genre.

With a sagacious level of originality, that accurately displays a flexible sensibility and a gracious level of creativity, despite its overwhelming simplicity, On The Waves Of Time is a lucid and gracefully designed work of art, that lives by the precious honesty – and the inherent limitations – of the genre. With mostly calm and serene melodies, the songs generally delivers on the ostensibly gracious and unforgettable demise of its rhythmic dissolutions the sagacity and the resignation of its renegade, but wonderfully pure style. 

While you can’t expect anything too authentic or rapturous, undoubtedly, On The Waves Of Time is a very satisfactory record. As a matter of fact, if you maintain your expectations on the right level, you can have quite a good time listening to it. The work do represent with major competence the genre, and The Moonshine Brand vibrantly displays a decent degree of originality, despite some restrictions, and the tremendous – and quite natural – amount of influence they absorbed from their predecessors. 

For avid enthusiasts of the genre, On The Waves Of Time can be quite enjoyable.  If you are passionate for the genre, this certainly helps. The album definitely has strong merits – in fact, more merits than deficiencies –, although the uniformity and the excessive calmness of the melodies do produce a tiresome sense of monotony after a while, that can be quite hard to deal with. Nevertheless, the record is very good, although I think that in the proper place or situation – like a party or if you’re preparing to go to a party, or in a car driving randomly accompanied by friends listening out loud in a Saturday night – the work does a lot better than listening to it all alone by yourself.  


Wagner

post-metal / doom / alternative rock

dark jazz / ambient / experimental / trip hop

hardcore

acoustic blues

dark ambient / noise

doom / occult metal

death metal

black metal / doom / death metal

post punk / synth pop

breakcore / industrial

alternative rock / blues

facebook

style of Tool and quite a bit of grunge - vocals that remind of Cobain included. So go buy this one if you appreciate something that refuses to fit into one box.

ambient / experimental

Pany Rosas Discos

blues / stoner rock

Blues for a Dying Planet is an album by Swedish blues rock/ stoner rock group Spiral Skies, released on May 18. A little more than thirty-eight minutes long, the record has nine tracks: Black Hole Waltz, Awakening, Dark side of the Cross, The Wizard's Ball, Danse Macabre, Labyrinth of the Mind, Shattered Hopes, Left Is Right And Right Is Left Behind and The Prisoner. An extremely powerful and impressive album, with amazingly catchy and sensitive melodies – exceedingly reminiscent of more traditional rock’n’roll –, the style of Spiral Skies is simple and clean, but energetic, creative, dense and highly original. Certainly, a masterful artistry that intelligently combines in a lucid panorama a wide understanding of peculiar sonorous perceptions, Blues for a Dying Planet sounds an instant classic from the very first moments, with its genuine and marvelous style, that feels as excruciatingly explosive as well as moderately restrained at the same time. 

With strident guitar lines that summarizes with perfection the accordance of its melodic rites, the album generally follows a very simple musical line, but with such an artistic grandiosity, that instantly surprises the listener. With constrained, but at the same time expansive harmonies, that obeys the sensible insinuations of its own creative impositions, Blues for a Dying Planet sounds like a universal symphony of innocent amazement, that softly revolves itself directly from the heart of the listener, at the onset of its own gracious illusive paradigms.

With a captivating beauty that invites the listener to comprehend the nature of its placid and provocative, but sincere motivations, the album certainly distinguishes itself by the simple, but profound elegance of its formidably dilapidated sonorous shape, that is abundantly charming, but without displaying any excesses, and gracefully sophisticated, but without renouncing the ventures of a refined simplicity, which makes this work a reasonable candidate for masterpiece of the year.  

Amazingly simple and pure, but creatively inspiring and fulfilling, Blues for a Dying Planet is a sagacious and vivacious work, that is ready to enchant absolutely all enthusiasts of the genre, whenever and wherever this formidably consecrated album is heard. 


Wagner

krautrock / psychedelic 

psychedelic rock / krautrock / neo folk

doom / blues

techno

electronic / darkwave

shoegaze

death metal

ambient / downtempo / post rock

death metal / power metal

americana / alternative rock / indie

bandcamp

stoner metal

thrash metal

stoner metal / sludge

psychedelic rock / stoner / blues

drone / ambient

death metal / symphonic metal

alternative rock

ambient

drone / noise / ambient

dark ambient

techno

symphonic metal / death metal

electronic / experimental / breakcore

Petrol 80

Serge

blues

Uranius Blues, a high energy band!!! It’s the least that can be said of this group, both in this first LP,  as in their "old" self-titled EP and especially in their live performances!!! This is a road band, a stage band, that does not get scared if the P.A. fails, if there is any problem on stage, if the amplifier stop to function... they just go there and destroy!!! Do you have any doubt about it? So just watch the video at the end of this review (taken from their live 2012 DVD) and see that they're explosive!!! (with the forgiveness of this infamous joke).

This blues band began in the southern Brazil, more precisely in a region called "Vale do Rio dos Sinos". Their line-up consists of Uraneo Laureano (vocals and tenor saxophone), Tiago D'Andrea (piano, Hammond and Rhodes), Rafael Salib (electric guitar, acoustic guitar and backing vocals), Samuel Moraes Bolacel (electric and fretless double bass) and Paulo Barros (drums and percussion). The album 'Maus Tempos, Bons Tempos' (Bad Times, Good Times, in english) was recorded and mixed in São Leopoldo City (BR-RS) by Roberto Coutinho & Chico Pereira, and mastered in Chicago (US-IL) by Blaise Barton. It’s worth to mention that this work was financed by the Cultural Fund of São Leopoldo's City Hall and counted with special guests: Gonzalo Araya (harmonica), Dejeane Arruée (trombone) and Bruno Nascimento (trumpet).

This album has several influences: boogie, country, funk, rockabilly, New Orleans jazz, Mississippi blues, Chicago blues, rock and even samba/rumba!!! And the lyrics... They are in portuguese!!! FINALMENTE TIVEMOS NOSSA VINGANÇA!!! Yes, you will have to put this in google translator to understand what i said, just as many brazilians do with songs in english... MUAHAHAHAHA!!! Furthermore, this album still has its own accent, both in its music and in its lyrics. Already in the first track the word "guria" is used, and this is a very regional term from the state of Rio Grande do Sul to denominate a woman. And then you are probably asking yourself: But this is blues, is funk, is rock, its blues rock sung in a strange language??? Ahhhhhhh... this question reminds me of a rather peculiar story!!!

One time, Rafael Salib (the guitarist) told me that when he lived in the United States, he was able to see a lot of blues shows and the bands played things that were not considered blues outside the US, such as Purple Rain - yes, that Prince music - and when he asked why they played it, they simply replied, "Oh, but there's a lot of blues in that song!". At these little seconds, we have some kind of enlightement, and we perceive that blues is like jazz and any other music style... There’s not a “right” accent, there’s not a “correct” way to play, because each musical style isn't just a "kind of language", it's a way of life, it's an Aura! And this guys have the Blues' Aura!!! They REALLY have it!!!


Oh, they are planning to release this album on 12' vinyl, so follow them on Facebook and stay tuned to not miss this first class train...


Glauber

grindcore / crust

psychedelic rock / blues / stoner

post rock

An effervescing idiosyncrasy of starving, but calm and levitating melodies swears to an infinite ocean of time a formidable conflagration of creative harmonious contingencies. The sound is beyond exceptional, and everything that revolves around your ears bears the scope of an infinite storm of peaceful eternity.

​With precise and overly diluted, but poetic guitar lines, ​Three Horizons Away is an imaginative and surreal glorious panorama of exponential beauty. Despite its brevity, the sonorous sincerity expanded through the brave, but serene vastness of splendorous rhythms redirects the soul through a journey of ascendant and pure reality. The continual universe promulgated by its linear and constant propulsion of peripheral sounds exhibits the greatness of it’s fantastic, but discreet style, as a different pattern of sensibility.  

post rock

A full, energizing and pure post rock work, with profoundly melancholic, but genuinely organic sonorous vicissitudes, upon which formidable and lucid guitar lines comprehend the painful vicinities of incisive and latent harmonies, that revolves around a mysteriously ancient, but poetic silence. A monumental transformation of conscience reveals itself at the grandiloquent axis of serene melodies, that not only impress by the brutal honesty and sincerity of its audacious beauty, but also by the infallible ordination of its salutary sonorous manifestation, that opens an omniscient pattern of authentic intuitive creative algorithms over the impatience of its notes. With a striking, but overwhelming simplicity, the sensitive calmness of this work is a delightful experience, that makes this brief, but majestic masterpiece a glorious necessity for all enthusiasts of the genre. Leviathan is definitely a precious and marvelous state of the art work, highly recommended.  

post rock

A brief, but poetic immersion towards a recrudescing world of ethereal conflagration, Lift Off ably leads the listener towards a more introspective and interior version of himself. A calm, serene and minimalistic quasi-operatic work that derives the essence of its intrinsic value through the vastness of its sincere and genuine sonorous evaluation, this EP by Man Against Mankind is a rude, but decisive filtration of translucent harmonies eager to revolve around the undermining capacities of reality, determined to descend over a spirit of pure sensibility. With seriously experimental overtones, the audacity of the musician’s style is an experience that reflects the authentic rapture of his creative spirit. With plausible sonorous features that expand the antagonistic principles of its abundant qualities without renouncing the splendor of a glamorous simplicity, Man Against Mankind deserves to be comprehensively inserted in a more singular musical category, given the fact that its aura of original sensibility is  highlighted by the fantasy of harmonies impossible to forget. 

black metal

An interesting EP, with a full atmospheric layer of enormous grandiosity, the hazardous and afflictive anxiety that comes out from the imperial harmonies of this grotesquely delightful sound replicates with precision the endemic agony and the intense features that characterize the genre, and its sinister overtones. With a somber expectation that announces  an imminent conflagration of unraveling proportions, the melodies that strikes the tissue of infinite possibilities simply reaches a level of splendor that eagerly evolves to a planetary dissension. Perfect as the soundtrack of a really macabre movie, Ice-Cold Souls drives at the core of its majestic opportunities the real lancinating devices exceedingly genuine to the genre. Undoubtedly, it’s a marvelous example of how graceful, dense, subtle and evasive the tempestuous sonorous tissue of atmospheric black metal should be.       

black metal / death metal

A majestic and very powerful metal work, with traditional elements brilliantly inserted at the core of the songs, If it is True What the Prophets Write is an elemental journey through the most sincere qualities of an intriguing style, that seems somewhat crossover.

​Despite some moments of more generic harmonies, the group displays an intelligent and passionate singular style, that interestingly revives at the heart of its vibrant molecules an amalgamated version of metal. The human virulence of death metal intertwines the efficiency of its brutal coalescence with the furious fastness of black metal, in a sidereal conflagration of melodies, that exhibits fatally hostile harmonies, also abundant in sensible thrash metal intensities. Definitely a memorable work, If it is True What the Prophets Write is a curious and refreshing EP, that deserves to be highlighted at the center of the underground scene. 

indie / psychedelic / alternative

electronic / downtempo 

crust / grindcore

Fucking shitfuck, did I just become a crust/grindcore fan or what? I mean, I wanted to add this album to Brieviews because quite usually these albums are rather one-sided and there is just not much to write about them. I also wanted to promote these guys because they're from Antwerp. But when I started to play 'Barbarians', I was in shock. Here was a perfect industrial sounding crust punk tune blasting through my speakers. Fast, delirious, harsh and intense, just what we need. So I continued listening. 'The Violent Way' is another of my favorites. These guys have just turned crust and grindcore in one of the most immersive pieces of extreme music I've ever heard.

I mean. I know some of these guys. I often see them at gigs but I have never talked to anyone of them and now they present me with one of the most impressive albums in Antwerp (and the world, or as we say "the parking lot") today.  Fuck yeah this comes highly recommended. 

grindcore

Whooaaarg

post metal / drone