(Grant Skelton reviews the new album by the UK band Eye of Solitude and brings us the premiere of a full album stream.)

I’ve truly grown to love sad metal. A prevalent stereotype among the folks who do not understand our beloved genre is that all metal fans are depressed. Yeah, even suicidal. But sorrow, despair, depression, and even suicidal ideation are not unique to metal fans.

In a study published in Frontiers In Psychology, Ai Kawakami intended to find out just why people like sad music. While Kawakami and his fellow researchers used classical pieces for their study, the result is what counts. The participants in the study enjoyed listening to sad music. “Musical emotion,” Kawakami said, “encompasses both the felt emotion that the music induces in the listener and the perceived emotion that the listener judges the music to express.” (Find out more here.)

Certain kinds of metal are for partying and abusing your liver. Other kinds probably give many of us a healthy outlet for aggression so that we don’t wind up in a padded cell. But some metal — and I definitely place London’s Eye Of Solitude in this category — give us something else. I was recently given the pleasure of listening to their latest album Cenotaph. And what exactly does this album give the listener? In a single word, I’d say humanity. Continue reading »