Mar 192022
 


Ufomammut – photo by Francesca De Franceschi Manzoni

I hope your weekend is going well. Mine got off to a very good start this morning as I made my way through songs and videos that surfaced over the past week or so. By sheer good fortune, almost everything I listened to struck a chord, and the ones that rang loudest made its way into this big round-up.

I organized the selections in a way that made sense to me, capped by a shot of pure adrenaline. I’ll briefly tell you what to prepare for.

UFOMAMMUT (Italy)

Prepare for: a slow burn, a dreamy but sinew-triggering trip reminiscent of an old Pink Floyd space odyssey, with an increasingly fiery slug-fest as its destination. Continue reading »

Feb 122016
 

Amorphis-Under the Red Cloud

 

Welcome to the 24th Part of our roll-out of 2015’s Most Infectious Songs, as chosen by me and me alone. I have a constricting feeling around my throat as I bear down on my self-imposed Sunday deadline for finishing this list, when in fact I’m not really close to exhausting all the songs I want to write about. I have some terrible decisions to make this weekend.

The rest of the songs on the list can be inspected via this link.

AMORPHIS

I don’t suppose Amorphis really needed to make a “comeback” album. They haven’t really gone away, and the massive core of their fan base has never left them. But I still think of Under the Red Cloud as a comeback album. Continue reading »

Sep 042011
 

Here we go again — another episode of MISCELLANY, in which I expose myself (figuratively speaking) to music from bands I’ve never heard before and dutifully report the results to you, along with the songs themselves. The rules of the game that I’ve set for myself are to listen to only one or two songs from each selected band and let that be the basis for some judgments about the music.

Recently, I’ve been violating the rules with increasing frequency because I’ve had good luck with the MISCELLANY picks and gotten caught up in the music. For this listening session, I decided I’d really try to stick more closely to the rules because I’m so far behind on other NCS projects. (Here’s a hint: It didn’t work.)

The bands I picked from our MISCELLANY list for this session are Manegarm (Sweden), Exorbitance (US), and Strom (Germany).

MANEGARM

In the last few MISCELLANY sessions, I’ve been intentionally including one pagan/folk metal band on the listening list. It’s a genre about which I’m not terribly well-versed, and I’ve had fun subjecting my eardrums to something different from their usual diet. As usual around here, the comments we’ve gotten on these posts have pointed me to some interesting looking outfits. So, I decided to continue the recent run of pagan/folk music by picking a band called Månegarm, who were recommended by multiple commenters. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »