symphonic metal

Sometimes I have mixed feelings about so-called "ambitious projects", especially when they throw around with big names and loads of bombast. So when this album came in, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Chances were big that it would eventually end up somewhere in the pile of unreviewed releases. But then I saw the video for one of the tracks, which aroused my curiosity. Fact is, I haven't been listening to symphonic or "gothic" metal in years, except for the ones that end up being reviewed on Merchants Of Air. I have no idea what Cradle Of Filth, Epica, Sonata Arctica, Arch Enemy, Delain or Dragonforce are up to these days. It's just another one of those genre I grew out of, I guess.

So why am I reviewing this album after all? Well, for the money of course. After reading this review, many of our readers will go over to Amazon and buy this album, which yields us a little percentage. There's also another reason, one which is actually true and realistic: this album pleasantly surprised me. As I already wrote, I saw the promotional video for the song 'The Creator And The Destroyer', (with featured Dani Filth and Simone Simons) when I published the news about this album. Because of that song, I somewhat felt like listening to some good old gothic metal, or symphonic metal, whatever you like.

So today, I loaded the album into my media player and pressed play. The Grammy Award winning Metropole Orchestra started playing the intro and I thought "hm, not bad but quite typical". Then, Charlotte Wessels [Delain] started singing over another orchestral piece and I thought "hello nineties metal scene, nice to see you again".  Eventually, 'The Muse And The Conductor', with vocals by Marc Hudson [Dragonforce] & Alissa White-Gluz [Arch Enemy] started pulling me over, and before I realized it, my head was nodding along with the music. I like the flashes of insanity in this song. This whole thing was getting more and more interesting.

Perhaps a bit of background information is welcome at this moment. 'Karmaflow' is a project by Ivo van Dijk (Xystus, Equilibrio), combining a videogame, this soundtrack and theatre. It's the first rock opera videogame which started out as a graduation project in 2013. I'm not sure if there will ever be live performances, but judging from what I'm listening to right now, these performances could be pretty damn awesome. The music is loaded with heavy guitars, elaborate symphonic passages and a healthy dose of electronics. Over these, an array of well-known vocalists do what they do best. Fans of bands like Epica, After Forever, Nightwish and Dragonforce, to name a few, will be enchanted by this thing.

In my opinion, this is simply an excellent album and I'm not even surprised that this whole thing was pulled off by a Dutch person. Why? Well, let's face it, the Dutch have made this genre what it is and are damn good at keeping it interesting. The only things is, for me it sometimes gets a bit over-the-top, a bit too bombastic and too clean. The technical level is tremendous and there are some stunning songs, like 'The Guide' and my favorite 'The Creator And The Destroyer'. But there is also something cabarettesque, so to speak. Then again, it is a soundtrack and it also feels that way. If you're a gamer, I'm sure it must be an awesome experience do dwell in this multidisciplinary fantasy.

So what to remember from this write-up? Well, above all, I guess it's safe to say that this definitely is a remarkable achievement, an ambitious that certainly lives up to its expectations. Fans of symphonic metal will be ecstatic when they listen to this album. I mean, all their favorites are present and the whole thing is done with such precision, such passion and such professionalism that it almost has to become a landmark in its genre. 


​Serge

score / classical

After his beautiful soundtrack for the film The Revenant (read our review), Japanese head-maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto returns with another score. This one however, is for the movie 'Nagasaki: Memories of My Son' (directed by Yôji Yamada). The film is solely made for the Japanese market so chances that people in Europe or America will see it are slim, so perhaps it's best to see this soundtrack as a full-length album.

The film is set in post-World War II Japan, where a mother mourns the death of her son who became a victim of the atomic bomb. The music, or at least most of it, feels somewhat alike. Apart from some flashes of noise, soundscapes and strange musical outbursts, this album beautifully depicts the mother's despair and her loneliness. The piano is the central element, here and there accompagnied by string instruments.

There are 28 songs and flashes of soundscapes on this album, eventually clocking off at an hour or so. It's everything you would expect from a mastermind like Sakamoto, who can show genius in the most minimalistic tunes. If you're a fan of his work, you definitely need to get your hands on this soundtrack. Same counts for fans of classical music and somewhat experimental ambient. This is a fascinating score.


​Serge

score / classical

Ok, one more before I go to sleep, but I've chosen something really special to end this writing session. Former Pop Will Eat Itself frontman Clint Mansell probably is no stranger to both music and movie lovers, having scored the soundtrack for Darren Aronofsky films such as Black Swan, Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain and Pi. This time, Mansell scores Ben Wheatley's 'High Rise', based on the terrifying 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard.

The first time I listened to this album was a few days ago. I was occupied with other tasks and the music merely served as a background noise reduction. However, it didn't take long before the music grabbed my attention. The orchestral opener 'Critical Mass' already did the trick, bringing me back to a time when I was forced to listen to classical music by my music teacher. Back then I hated it, later I started to appreciate it, now it often brings me to tears.

Like many classical pieces, this soundtrack communicates a heap of emotions, from fear and anxiety over depression to relief. The eerie 'The Circle Of Women' is as unsettling as it is beautiful, and so is the brilliant piece 'Built, Not For Man But For Man's Absence'. I've always experienced the sound of strings as reflections of solitude and loneliness and here too it perfectly illustrates that.

But there's more than calm, soothing pieces of music. 'Danger In The Streets Of The Sky' is a bombastic yet melodic piece, driving on pure tension. It's dark, it's fearsome, almost Wagneresque. I know, there is no such word as "Wagneresque" but you get the idea. There are also strange pieces of ambient music, like the moog synth piece 'Cine-Camera Cinema' or the macabre sounding closer 'Blood Garden'.

I'm so happy that I eventually got into classical music and ambient, otherwise I might have never been able to appreciate true musical genius. After listening to this soundtrack a few times, I'm quite sure that Mansell is an outstanding composer, creating inspiring pieces of music that will never bore. So it's no wonder that I recommend this album to every fan of classical music out there. This will be played here a lot from now on...


​Serge

soundtrack / ambient

Sometimes I think my job on this planet is to bring and gratify a touch of friendliness onto this world. I live in a city where people are not being very nice to each other, something which has been bothering me for decades. So, whenever I encounter a friendly email from a modest musician, asking me politely if I would like to check out his newest release, the whole thing gets a certain charm and immediately raises my interest. So, Jakob, this one is for you, for being such a nice person.

Of course, that's not the only reason why I really wanted to check this out. The other reason was the music, obviously. It is the soundtrack for "Skörheten" (Fragility), a documentary movie, described as a "heartfelt and poetic depiction of a woman's struggle with depression and childhood traumas".  With a story like this, I would indeed expect a soundtrack with piano, soundscapes and an emotional atmosphere. And that is exactly what you get.

Although the piano seems to be the central element, this album is loaded with a blend of modern classical music and experimental ambient. Some of these pieces, mainly the ones where the piano is present, are deeply emotional pieces of music. Minimalism seems to be a keyword. There is not a note or touch too many and the whole breathes at atmosphere of solitude, loneliness and perhaps even hopelessness.

The latter certainly is present in some of the gloomy drone pieces on this album, where a gentle but continuous drone functions as the foundation for other instruments to thrive upon.  You can almost feel the emotion the protagonist of this story feels, you can almost place yourself in her place and cry her tears, feel her desire to step out of the destructive vicious circle. I haven't seen the film but I know for a fact that this music has the ability to make it a massive tearjerker.

In short, this started out as an act of friendliness in reply of a nice email and turned out to be such a beautiful and inspiring piece of work.  Music can indeed make or break a movie and this one certainly does the first.  If you are a fan of ambient, modern classical and emotional movie soundtrack, you should check this out. We're dealing with a tremendous talent here. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to cry for a few hours...


Serge

score / electronic 

For many movie maniacs, today is a very special day because Deadpool finally hits the theaters. According to the many posts on social media, this is the most anticipated movie of the year and with good reason too. The trailers and extras are promising. Even I, someone who is not really into movies, want to go see it.  Of course, I know something most people don't yet fully know. I know that the soundtrack is awesome.

But what would you expect from Junkie XL? This project by Dutch born and Los Angeles residing Tom Holkenborg has been around for ages and has always had a flair for improving himself. Personally, I know him from the work he did for Kong and for some Junkie XL gigs I had the pleasure of attending.  He knows music like no other, growing up with Pink Floyd and King Crimson and continuously expanding his influences.

Holkenborg started playing piano when he was four years old, drums when he was eight, guitar at twelve, bass guitar at fourteen. Later he would discover synths and keyboards. He produced albums from metalbands The Gathering, Sepultura and Fear Factory and wrote music for games like Need For Speed.  He worked on the 'Blade' movie and 'Nike' commercials, among others and released several albums under the Junkie XL moniker.

All that experience comes together on this soundtrack. Holkenborg studies the noble art of soundtrack making, added some of his own musical history into it and comes up with a massive Hollywood-worthy piece of work.  From gentle romantic classical pieces like 'Everytime I See Here' over the epic grandeur of 'Maximum Effort' or 'Easy Angel' to breakbeat dancefloor fillers like 'Twelve Bullets', this stuff easily carries this movie.

'Man In A Red Suit' is classical Junkie XL breakbeat stuff, accompanied with the typical Hollywood-bombast, which is pretty damn awesome as a combination.  I actually never expected both to fit so well together.  'The Punch Bowl' delves into the world of dark ambient, drones and soundscapes.  'Watership Down' sounds like Boards Of Canada meets Wagner, and so on.  Yes, it is quite a varied album.

But apart from all these influences, this is a classic Hollywood soundtrack which probably will win some important awards in the near future.  There is more coming up from Junkie XL, other soundtracks are in the making and I feel as if he can go on forever.  I haven't seen the movie yet but this soundtrack gave me some expectations regarding the atmosphere of most of the scenes. If the movie is half as good as its soundtrack, it will still be awesome...


Serge

classical / score / ambient

Several months ago I got acquainted by German post-rock entity We Deserve This when I reviewed his 'Pacific' album (read review).   I really digged his quite heavy style and to be honest, I was expecting something similar.  Needless to say that I was quite surprised by how this new album turned out.  Halfway throughout the album, the first time I listened to this, I said to my wife: "why is he still trying to sell this as post-rock?"

Wow, that might sound like a pretty harsh question, no?  Well, it is not.  This is not a post-rock album, this is a modern classical album where piano and strings are being enhanced by electronic percussion and a beautiful atmosphere.  This stuff is aiming directly for the thrones of people like Olafur Arnalds and Bersarin Quartett and with the right people behind him, We Deserve This could be playing big jazz and ambient festivals soon.

Now, don't get me wrong.  This is definitely something that will please fans of Mono and Godspeed! You Black Emperor but I would never hesitate to recommend this to fans of Nils Frahm or Sebastian Plano or even Boards Of Canada.  With the piano as central element, a trip-hop resembling set of beats and loads of cinematic soundscapes, We Deserve This managed to create something that convincingly crosses the borders between genres.

My personal favorites here are 'Fusion', 'Triangle' and closer 'Welcome Dear Monument', but that's a tough decision to make.  In fact, I much more prefer to play the entire album, often a few times in a row. There is not a lot of difference between the tracks, which are all made out of similar elements, which makes it perfect for concept-listening.  Concept-listening is a technique where the album is becoming a part of everyday activities, blending in perfectly with whatever I do, and this album certainly is good enough to do that. 


Serge

score / classical / ambient

Movies usually are as good as their soundtrack is.  In fact, usually I prefer their score.  I'm not really a movie fan to be honest.  I prefer listening to music and writing down my own stories. So I'm not sure if I will ever watch The Revenant by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman) but judging from this soundtrack, there just might be a possibility.  With a high quality score like this, there's no way that The Revenant will be a bad movie.

But then again, what would you expect from talented and seasoned composers like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto?  In the past decades, these people have come up with loads of albums and soundtracks and very few of them are disappointing.  Aided by Bryce Dessner (The National) they have created a dream of an album, gentle, soothing and loaded with expectation.  This surely is a must-have for any fan of soundscapes and modern classical music.

Coming off his Academy Award Winning film Birdman, Inarritu’s epic new film takes place in the 1800s and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as someone who is abandoned by his hunting team after a brutal bear attack. He must withstand the elements and the wilderness to survive and return to his family. This tragic story is perfectly illustrated in the cold, often eerie and haunting music, which mainly consists of gloomy soundscapes and string-arrangements.

The soundtrack causes images of snowy landscapes, beautiful sunsets and a constant struggle for survival.  I could say that I'm often reminded of works by Olafur Arnalds or some of his collegues but that wouldn't do much honor to this soundtrack.  It goes deeper than most of today's composers do and, although this is slow, soothing music, it's deeply emotional and intense in its atmosphere of desolation and despair.

It's no wonder that this album is nominated for a Golden Globe award.  In my opinion this must be one of the best albums of the year as far as ambient and modern classical music is concerned.  It's too late to add it to my best-of-2015 list but since the psychical editions of the album album will be released in 2016, I'll make up for that next year. 


Serge

post-rock / score

​I received this album a week ago and it has been played a lot since then, along with my traditional evening-albums.  These include 'Pygmalion' by Slowdive, 'Disintegration' by The Cure and 'Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd.  Other artists that often turn up in these 'late-night' sessions are Olafur Arnalds, Biosphere and Godspeed You Black Emperor.  Big names indeed but this album deserve a place among them, that's for sure. With a huge sense of cinematic soundscapes and atmosphere this quartet created a stunning album.

We Stood Like Kings is an instrumental post-rock band from Brussels, Belgium. The quartet was formed in 2011.  The focus was to create new soundtracks for old silent movies, resulting in a debut in 2014 ('Berlin 1927') where they provided 'Die Sinfonie der Großstadt' (Walther Ruttmann, 1927) with a new score.  This new album, 'USSR 1926' is a soundtrack for Dziga Vertov's 1926 movie 'A Sixth Part of the World'.  The movie will be played during live performances and that is something I'm really looking forward to.

You can actually find the movie on YouTube with a soundtrack by Michael Nyman.  My suggestions is this: watch the movie with the soundtrack muted and replaced by this brilliant album.  It really is worth the effort.  It gives the whole a new dimension where modern day music blends in with black and white images.  The film is in fact a call for unification (Wikipedia told me that) and that unification between the images and the music is quite amazing.

If you're not into silent movies, which I can perfectly understand, don't worry.  Without visual stimulation this album can perfectly stand as an excellent post-rock album.  It reminds me of a mix between the piano driven modern classical music Olafur Arnalds and the elaborate soundscape-rock by Godspeed You Black Emperor.  I'm not going into a song-by-song on this one but I have to mention the dramatic classical composition of a track by 'Are You A Master Too'.  Do I hear a few Wagner influences in there?

The song is followed by the beautiful 'Kremlin', where piano and soundscapes show the most gentle side of this four-piece band.  I think I even have to use the word 'lovely' while reviewing it.  Slowly, very slowly, the song turns into a classic post-rock anthem and suddenly there's the distorted guitars and drums.  They disappear just as sudden by the way.  This song is followed by a quite playful song named 'Immense Wealth', equally mesmerizing as Archive's 'Noise' album has been to me when I first discovered it.

There's a lot of competition for my personal top-of-2015 albums but I'm quite sure this one will end up very high in that list.  I'm not just saying that because We Stood Like Kings hail from my country but also because this is a damn good post-rock album.  I wouldn't be surprised if this band appear on this year's Dunk!Festival line-up and I definitely wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be one of the highlights of this edition.  Needless to say that this comes highly recommended for every fan of post-rock music.


Serge

sacred bones records

Do I really need to introduce John Carpenter? If not, please skip the next paragraph. For all the others, here's what you've been missing out on.. Seriously, do I really have to explain it?? *sigh* Oh well here goes.

John Carpenter is an influential director, ever since his 1974 debut film Dark Star, of a wide variety of sci-fi and horror movies (although he has occasionally directed other genres), many of which went on to become cult favorites. The Thing (1982), Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Christine (1983), Escape from New York (1981), the list goes on and on.. And while most haven't exactly been huge box office successes or even critical successes, there is no denying that pretty much all of them bear the very distinct marks of a Carpenter movie. It's pretty safe to say that his biggest successes were in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s and I dare you to find a fan of 80s cinema that isn't in some way smitten with one or more Carpenter movies.

A big fan myself, I count The Thing as one of the greatest moments in cinema history and it's easily my favorite horror movie ever. One of those distinct marks of a Carpenter movie is the soundtrack, for which Carpenter composes and performs the music himself. And while there are a couple of exceptions where he didn't perform the music for the movie he directed (The Thing, for example, featured the amazing score from Ennio Morricone) most of them were and he served as composer for lots of other movies. All of the non-Carpenter directed Halloween sequels have a Carpenter score for instance. And even when the movie itselft was so-so, you could always count on it having an amazing soundtrack. So, everyone more or less up-to-date with the info? Good, let's proceed with this review and focus on the very first Carpenter album that isn't connected to any of his movies.

'Lost Themes', even though it might sound like that, is not a collection of leftover stuff from his movie soundtracks. It features entirely new compositions by Carpenter, with his son Cody and composer Daniel Davies as contributors. The Sacred Bones Records website states the following explanation from John:

"Lost Themes was all about having fun. It can be both great and bad to score over images, which is what I’m used to. Here there were no pressures. No actors asking me what they’re supposed to do. No crew waiting. No cutting room to go to. No release pending. It’s just fun. And I couldn’t have a better set-up at my house, where I depended on Cody and Daniel to bring me ideas as we began improvising. The plan was to make my music more complete and fuller, because we had unlimited tracks. I wasn’t dealing with just analogue anymore. It’s a brand new world. And there was nothing in any of our heads when we started other than to make it moody."

Other than making this lengthy review even lengthier, this does explain why "Lost Themes" sounds so incredibly fresh, while still sounding 100% Carpenter. Seriously, the first couple of seconds I listened to this I was instantly transported back to the heydays of his movies and their compositions. And yes, it does sound more complete and fuller, as he states. The fact that he works digitally on top of just analogue (and there is plenty of it) doesn't distract, and all the tracks retain that typical analogue sound. Let's compare it to CGI enhancing prosthetic effects.. Having been recorded digitally only enhances the enormous depth and clarity. Sure, it's bombastic and over the top at times, but man, it sounds amazing.. It's all there, the arpeggiating synths, the brooding synth swooshes, fantastic hardrock guitar parts, propulsive beats, melancholic synth themes. Notice I mentioned the word 'synth' a couple of times there, because that's what a Carpenter score is all about: HUUUGE synths and bombast. That's not to say he doesn't tone the bombast down occasionally but moments like that are sparse. But let's face it, a Carpenter wouldn't really want that now would he (or she)?

There has been a whole revival of the 80s soundtrack-y synth sounds with artists like Umberto, Nightsatan, Majeure, Zombi; even Portishead's Geoff Barrow made a brilliant unreleased score for the 2012 Judge Dredd movie that was total 80s worship. But how awesome all of these artists and their records are, John Carpenter shows them he is still in the game (even though he turned 67 last month) and shows them how it's done.

Encouraging you to make up your own movie in your head that these tracks could accompany, John Carpenter has created a dark, bombastic, epic masterpiece of synthesizer tracks. The movies don't exist but hearing this you almost wish they would. Even though his last movie, 2010's The Ward was a slight letdown, this album is anything but. Essential.

 

Björn