Album Review: Steny Lda – Beloe Bezmolvie

The infinite joys of throwing Russian track titles at Google Translate and watching it explode is tempered somewhat by the bleak, monosyllables that emerge from it. Lumps of wording like “Stern Wind”, “Ice Storm, Ball Above Earth”, “In Black Sun Rays” and “Endless Snowy Expanses, Illuminated Radiance, Eternally Cold Stars” still resonate despite their cumbersome quality.

It’s no surprise then to discover that the PR blurb professes this to be a thematic work exploring “the power of cold, its northern and Antarctic nature, and the grandeur of eternal winter”. That thought is drilled home by the album inlay of snapshots of sailors fighting raging seas and glacial locations. Obviously, it’s something of a disappointment then to discover the music feeling so luke-warm. The seemingly endless, subtly shifting synth backdrops are austere in tone but the string work is rich, plump and vibrant and the drums patter along at an untaxing, gentile pace.

Swimming in the same post-metal waters as bands like Russian Circles, Isis and Red Sparowes, Beloe Bezmolvie (or White Silence) opens up with “Fordevind”, a wave-battering crush that confusingly shares its space with calm waters and soft surf. There’s also something enigmatically graceful about the 11-minute “Ledjanoj Shtrom…”. From an opening, almost balletic, emotive riff to the 3-minute directionless, warbled ending the whole ensemble mimics the piece-by-piece joyful storytelling of Russian Circles when their theme demands that they be venturing into the dark, forbidding spaces of Cult Of Luna.
 
Wonderfully, just as you think the album has run adrift, the wreck breaks on these twin glacial outcrops – the blunt death metal of “Svincovo-Serye Oblaka…” and the doomy “Drejfujushhie V Tumane Ajsbergi…” Here, the beast finally roars and beneath all the clamouring, the crafty score finally reveals its blackened soul.

It’s intriguing that Sterny Lda seem to have no problem with emotion when it comes to dishing out the hard and fast tracks – “Beskrajnie Snezhyne…” and “Soprovtilenie…” are both songs that successfully kick up a storm. However, when they need to apply a more delicate touch to extract a different emotion they do struggle – You’d hope that conveying the psychological torment of the bleak and the endless wastelands of the Artic might be something to get your teeth into, yet “Holod Zemli” is frustratingly a somewhat toneless, sluggish and ultimately hollow attempt when compared alongside that of others.

Some good, some bad and something of a sheep in wolf’s clothing then, but ignore the theme, look deeper and you’ll still discover plenty to get your teeth into.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/09/steny-lda-beloe-bezmolvie-slowburn/

Album Review: Skyharbor – Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos

For a landmass as vast as India, a country with over 1 billion people living in it, the number of times you come across one of their metal bands isn’t all that often but there is now a rapidly-growing scene. The furore surrounding New Delhi’s Skyharbor is indication that the world stage is primed and ready for the floodgates to open. Why Skyharbor have been one of their breakthrough acts isn’t clear, but their global sound and the fact they have sunk their teeth into such a vogue genre must be factors.

Nailing a worldwide release for their double-disc debut album, Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos, can’t have been the smoothest of rides (“four years of epiphanies and disappointments” according to brainchild/guitarist Keshav Dar) but it’s easy to see how they got there in the end when you see which label they are gracing (Basick) or cast your eyes down the number of international guest appearances. Also bear in mind that these contributions are from guys who offered their help, not vice-versa. Guys like ex-TesseracT vocalist Dan Tompkins, whose pin-point tone is so obviously the key to the Skyharbor door-lock and consequently ends up singing on 80% of the album, and guys like ex-Megadeth axeman Marty Friedman who contributes to two tracks.

The majority of the content is made up by the Illusion disc and, honestly, it’s a delight to finally hear a modern progressive metal record that is happy to dip its toes in the waters of djent, but doesn’t feel the need to obstruct the flow of the songs with incessant levels of palm-muted hammering or flood you with wave upon wave of ambient wash. The band has allowed for a very organic writing process. Left unencumbered by heavy-handedness or complex mathematics the natural rhythms are left to flow and create instantly recognisable patterns. The production has followed suit and swapped hard, angular tones for a softened, more emotive backline that has put the vocal upfront and undominated. “Dots” is a straight-up joy, “Catharsis” is a brilliantly-layered puzzle with an undemanding solution, and “Celestial” burns with unambiguous, anthemic ambition (listen out for Friedman’s blistered, falling riff and Amogh Symphony’s Vishal J. Singh’s quixotic solo).

Any pent up anger that comes from holding back their instincts is released within the howling confines of Chaos. The band rip into the music with vigour, winding up the pace of their attack and rolling around in distortion and syncopation like pigs in muck. Sunneith Ravankar (Bhayanak Maut) is let loose to roar almost continuously through “Trayus” and “Aphasia”, but it is the split-personalities of “Insurrection” which invigorate the most as, like a spinning compass, the befuddling rhythm finally settles on a direction, both in its more turbulent and calmer guises. Throughout Chaos you get the sense that the heart of the album is still there, latent in the background, desperately fighting to burst through the surface as and when it can. And yet I am left with mixed-feelings about this segue into crushing heaviness. There are several bands who have mastered this kind of polyrhythmic, invasive bedlam already, so whilst it provides a deathly foil for the life-giving properties of it’s sister disc, to some extent it feels a little like the band are laying out their abilities to merely impress; an over-exaggerated evil, perhaps?

Illusion is far more beguiling and there is one particular work of art that sums up everything that is brilliant about Blinding White Noise. With intertwined rough and smooth layering pouring like colors out of “Maeva”, it’s a composition that, whilst forming just one more mountain top in a rolling range of peaks, is a piece of music that seems to transcend faceless labels. You simply couldn’t get away with calling it a “track” or a “song” without doing it an injustice, so I haven’t. At its core lies a series of spine-tingling change-ups that provide the platform for Tompkins to soak us in gloriously sweet emotion. His magnificent tone and eloquent words seem such a fitting place to end this review, so I’ll hand you over to him… “It’s so damn hard to let go / But take a chance / And survive, come together, embrace life / This is India!”

Also online @ The NewReview

Article: Writer's Picks For 2012

I was recently commissioned to highlight a couple of bands with forthcoming albums that, for the coming year, were getting me a little hot under the collar. I plumped for these two...



When a new musical style begins to form, it’s rare that many take notice until it is well and truly established. This hardly seems to have been the case for the onomatopoeically-termed genre of ‘djent’. It first appeared in the early noughties, inspired by the signature palm-muted string hammering of the Swedish metal band Meshuggah, and has rapidly grown into a goliath with new bands piling on board each and every year. India’s Skyharbor and England’s The Safety Fire are two you may not yet have come across. Both have debut albums popping up in 2012 and both promise to be real game-changers. Having seen and heard the the former’s numerous little burps and squeaks popping up on various media sites of late and having experienced the latter’s storming “Sections EP” and explosive live show, I for one am already experiencing palpatations at the prospect of the pair taking djent to the next level.

Skyharbor will release the debut album ‘Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos’ worldwide via Basick Records in early 2012.
You can listen to a sample of what they do here: http://soundcloud.com/skyharbor7

The Safety Fire will release their debut album ‘Grind The Ocean' via InsideOut Music on February 27th, 2012.

This short piece also appears online @ TLOBF = http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/2012/01/best-fit-2012-preview-writers-picks/