In Rotation, May 2007
Andrew Fenner
Robert Ziino – Eclipse Unmasked
Track Listing: Co-Dependance, Eclipse Unmasked, Loon Chamber, Parental Worship, Birth 2, Black Hole in the Abyss, Mushroom Trance 2, Adolescent Confusion.
Well... if I was to review Robert Ziino like a typical rock journalist (the kind for whom “rock” is pop music guys listen to, and “pop” is rock music girls listen to), then I’d probably get out the old paint-by-the-numbers kit and do the “sounds like Megadeth meets Tori Amos with Garth Hudson on piano” routine. Only with Ziino it would be more like “Wassily Kandinsky meets modern society and develops a strange electro-chemical rash”. The parallel has substance, in an inverted way; just as Kandinsky painted music with his abstract canvasses, RZ paints with sound something like visual textures.
In some earlier works, such as Twilight Clones, these abstract ‘paintings’ tended to involve the external world, but in the current release they seem to be directed more toward internal psyche-scapes and wry observations, as in his Music from the Valley of the Flowers. It is amazing what this guy can get away with by just assembling noises. I mean you find humor, mystery, little wafting sadnesses, etc. Just as he adroitly captured the outer space experience in the first mentioned title, he mirrors inner space here.
Caution for the uninitiated; you can’t dance to this stuff... though our Mistress probably could, it would look something like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube... and she is not often moved by experimental electronica.
Aepril Schaile and the Judgement – The Furies’ Prayer
Track Listing: You Murder Me, Disolutio, This Place to Die, Mirror/Spirits, Flight from the Murder Tree, Lay Us Down, Where Does the Devil Go, The Furies’ Prayer, Mary Lucifer, Alive Another Day.
This album could justifiably be titled “Wrath of the Witch”, dealing, as it seems, with the twisted indignation of disenfranchised, murdered, tortured, downtrodden mystics, occultists, shamen, gods and goddesses, etc. refusing to stay dead and coming back from across the centuries with a terrific tumult of dark wings and in-your-face triumph. Many of the songs involve a spare, piano dominated arrangement featuring the leading lady more in the role of a vindictive, exhorting sorceress than a singer... though she definitely sings as well.
Other numbers include bass and drums with organ...even some bowed strings and trumpet. My only qualm, on the musical side, is that most of the songs have the same general format... proceeding from a slow, chantlike opening and rising to an intense, prolonged wail (though there is some variation), and even the melody lines seem very similar. However, this tends to amplify the sense of being at some kind of dark mass or demon-conjuring in the temple or forest of an ancient high priestess; thus I am not so sure it is a detraction, just as a tried-and-true gospel formula might work again and again for the congregation of an on-fire Baptist minister. No Baptist church service could be like this group live though, since Aepril Schaile is also into gothic bellydance. The effect must be stunning.
Deathboy – End of An Error
Track Listing: Amphetamine Zoo, Black Morning, Money and Confidence, Slip, Smile You Fuckers, Lullaby, Cheap Shot, Playing Grownup, Something, Angel On My Shoulder, Caustic.
The second commercial release of hard hitting UK industrial band, Deathboy, does not fail to impress on just about any level. This stuff has staying power! You’ll find pieces of it playing back on brain refrain hours after listening to it. Some of it is almost ethereal. If it wasn’t so relentlessly hard, it might even pass for ambient club/dance music. Can we coin a new term, slambient? Other tracks have punk/metal threads entwined throughout, but sans the “crunch” bottom end common to most metal and a lot of punk.
Well crafted, with solid musicianship and emotionally potent, thought-provoking vocals by frontman, Scott Lamb. My favorite tracks so far; “Amphetamine Zoo”, “Slip”, and “Smile You Fuckers”, which I seem to be playing into the ground daily.
Unto Ashes – Songs for A Widow
Track Listing: One World (Funeral), My Lord is Born, Convivio, Intacta Sum, The Snow Leopard, You Will Never Know, Dream of the Rood, The Life of this World, Intermezzo, Drei Todesarten, Song for a Widow, Occupying Force, I Am Untouched, In Memoriam Robert Luscombe, One World One Sky (Covenant).
Many people think of this band as a sort of medieval troupe. Indeed they might seem so, but on what planet?! Or, more aptly, in what parallel universe? One can definitely arrive somewhere else listening to their music.
There is ample usage of hammer dulcimer-like instrumentation, mixed with everything from Turkic-Bulgarian to oriental to Indian to heavy metal guitars to electronica to hurdy-gurdy along with male/female vocals that sound like Gregorian chant and organum pressed through an envelope of other times and places. Somehow it all seems to be coming from, and arriving at, a dark Middle Ages of gloomy habitats and lugubrious spirits.
The album begins and ends with different covers of Covenant’s “One World One Sky”, if you can call them covers. They are transformed into entirely different songs (well, the first is an instrumental), to interesting effect. Despite the overall moodiness, this work does not come off as angsty or melodramatic; it is more a celebration of a dark state of being.
Adrian James – Das Gift (The Poison)
Track Listing: Mutability, Das Gift, Et Tu?, Beautiful Womyn, Killing Jar, To Die For, Ein Grund zu Leben, Ein Grund zu Bleiben, Real, Ich Frage Mich, Et Tu? (Reprise), Perfect Song, Solitary, Perfect Song (Reprise), I’ll Never Leave, Lull, Denouement (Last Dance).
Das Gift is both the title of the album, and the name of the touring band, though Adrian James himself is the player/singer of virtually everything on the CD. Best known as a violinist with Evanescence, this release marks the launch of his solo career.
Referred to as “gothic”, this material is not, to me anyway, “goth”, by a long stretch. It will probably get a lot of play, for example, on the Melancholia channel of AOL/XM radio, rather than their Gothic channel. (FYI – you can listen free at www.aol.com; the gothic channel is excellent, running the gamut from archaic proto-goth to the latest cutting-edge stuff).
Das Gift features complex instrumentation on mostly medium to slow tempo ballad, or at least balladic, songs and instrumentals. It comes off as more pop/alt-rock with an odd jazz fusion influence. It took the guy 14 years to compile this stuff, I assume by moonlighting while working with other bands. The subject matter seems to encompass that state of love in which one can simply not let go of a torturous, compelling relationship... the kind that spans years and really tears up your heart. To his credit, AJ’s vocal delivery can be very emotionally penetrating. Only a really anthracite soul would fail to be touched, at least a few times, by this heart-wrenching material. Unfortunately for me, I am possessed of such coal black innards that my inclination is to diss this kind of music rather than embrace it, though this is probably because I have lived through such a relationship in the distant past.
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