→ May 31, 2014
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War Eternal.

Arch Enemy’s upcoming release War Eternal (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band’s first with new lead growler … I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other than their debut album, not brutal tracks with clear melodic elements, technically sound guitar work, and solid vocals that didn’t distract from the underlying material. War Eternal has several tracks with the same musical strengths, but White-Gluz’s vocals and lyrics are a big step back from the band’s previous work, and sometimes it seems as if the vocalist change may have spurred a change in musical direction toward less adventurous material.

War Eternal opens somewhat promisingly, with a brief instrumental (in F minor, as the title tells us) before we get to two of its strongest tracks, the muscular “Never Forgive, Never Forget” and the raging title track. “Never Forgive” is driven by a simple six-note guitar riff repeated throughout the song that breaks apart the high-tempo verses and the staccato-plucked interludes, and the shredding in its two-part solo is probably the album’s strongest for pure technical skill. “War Eternal” opens with a marching pattern at machine-gun speed before downshifting into a pattern that seems drawn from classic ’80s thrash acts like Testament or Exodus, adding sophisticated melodic twists before each chorus to distinguish the song. It’s a shame that it’s brought down by its simple-minded lyrics (“Friend or foe/There’s no way to know” … this is the best they could come up with to open the song?), something that plagues much of the disc.

There’s a lull mid-album, including the cloddish “As the Pages Burn,” where War Eternal loses some steam, but a second instrumental, the glam metal-inspired “Graveyard of Dreams,” serves as a bit of a reset button before the furious strumming that opens “Stolen Life,” the track that should most satisfy fans of Arch Enemy’s previous work. The album needed a song like this: a taut, straightforward three-minutes of speed metal, with riffs to make Dave Mustaine proud (if he could stop patting himself on the back for a few moments). That combination of songs gives the listener a chance to breathe before the last standout on the album, the five-minute opus “Time is Black,” a theatrical and sometimes bombastic song with several tempo shifts and classical elements better integrated here than on “Avalanche,” which has “trying too hard” written all over it. It might have been better to follow “Time is Black” with “Down to Nothing,” which opens with a heavy grindcore pattern that reminded me of vintage Carcass – unsurprising, as Arch Enemy was founded by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott, who worked on their landmark album, Heartwork, the album that did the most to establish melodic death metal as a viable style.

The main drawback in White-Gluz’s vocals is her style of growling, where she’s reaching so far down to get that gutteral sound that she sounds like she’s retching, and she rarely varies this style so the listener never gets a break. Extreme metal already has a sort of built-in bias against female vocalists because of the genre’s preference for these Cookie Monster vocals, rather than the kind of operatic singing associated with British metal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sing-talking of 1980s speed metal, or the death-screeches of Chuck Schuldiner (of Death) or Jeff Walker (of Carcass). White-Gluz’s predecessor, Angela Glossow, found an adequate medium with a higher-pitched growl than male death-metal vocalists employ, but White-Gluz is aiming for a lower register and it doesn’t work for me. She also is far too prone to employ the most cliched move in extreme metal, roaring at maximum volume over the opening riffs. (Note to aspiring death-metal vocalists: Don’t do this.)

War Eternal also suffers from a lack of ambition, outside of “Time is Black” and perhaps “Avalanche,” sticking mostly to straightforward thrash with death-metal vocals and blast beats, when they’re at a point in their career where you’d expect more experimentation. I prefer metal with progressive or technical elements, such as on Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun, but if you’re interested in Arch Enemy I’d suggest starting with 2003’s Anthems of Rebellion.

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→ May 20, 2014
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Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun.

I have two new posts up for ESPN.com Insiders today – my 2004 redraft and my review of 2004 first-rounders who didn’t pan out.

Finnish melodic death metal band Insomnium have one of the broadest wingspans of any artist in that subgenre, incorporating theatrical and symphonic elements without eschewing the heaviness and rapid riffing that keep one foot firmly planted in the death-metal sphere. Their latest release, Shadows of the Dying Sun, continues that tradition and then some, veering from over-the-top extreme/speed metal to operatic tracks that you might even call death-metal ballads.

Melodic death metal generally includes two major elements: technically proficient, hook-laden guitar lines, and screamed or growled vocals. Insomnium adds many other twists to their particular flavor, with strings, pianos, acoustic guitar lines, and vocal harmonies (sung in normal voices) in choruses. It hasn’t been a straight line from the genre’s originators like Celtic Frost and Carcass, but the result is a more accessible brand of “melodeth” that should appeal to fans of everything from contemporary extreme metal to the earliest waves of speed and thrash.

Shadows of the Dying Sun starts innocuously enough with “The Primeval Dark,” a slow-building doom track that clocks in at barely over three minutes, a sign that Insomnium aren’t trying to pummel the listener with unnavigable ten-minute songs, and the song is just the teaser for the tremendous “While We Sleep,” into which it leads without a break. The lead guitar line is joined by a second axe for some parallel riffing before we get an actual sung verse, musical motifs that continue even as the song shifts tempo and direction multiple times. It’s among the most overtly listener-friendly death metal tracks I’ve ever heard: melodic, theatrical, even bombastic, and far more coherent than I’d expect from a six-minute snog of this complexity.

The abrupt tempo shifts of “While We Sleep” are a recurring musical theme for Insomnium, driving other tracks as well. “Revelation” opens with a straightforward European speed metal riff, then drops the pace by more than half for the funereal verses, picking back up in the bridge to the initial tempo, then finding the middle ground for what passes for a chorus here. “Ephemeral” is similarly catchy, an abject lesson to pop acts that try to appropriate punk or metal for commercial airplay, thanks to memorable guitar lines and a growl-along chorus that play well with the heavy rhythm lines and the rapid percussion that marks this clearly as death metal, while also playing around with timing and rhythm. Meanwhile, “Collapsing Words” dispenses with those velocity changes – the song drives in with a rapid-fire pedal-point sixteen-beat riff that evokes 1980s European speed metal and even its predecessors like Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, although it’s probably the one track that would have most benefited from a traditionally-sung vocal.

The album’s centerpiece track is the eight-minute opus “The River,” comprising several movements, including the juxtaposition of slow-changing guitar lines over blast beats, as well as an acoustic intro where lead singer Niilo Sevänen actually sings – although the lines sound more effete than he likely intended because of his accented English. The track builds from the slow intro into multiple swells of machine-gun drumming and fast-picked guitar leads, but the bridges between the choruses are major-chord interludes with clear and compelling melodies. That song and “Lose to Night,” which I’d call a ballad if I didn’t think that would be offensive to Insomnium fans, show both growth in Insommium’s songcraft and breadth in their musical interests – you don’t write this kind of song if you only listen to metal and hard rock.

There are misses here; “Black Heart Rebellion” is just a giant blast-beat, a sop to the portion of the crowd that just wants it faster and louder and more annoying, while “The Promethean Song” would have worked better at about half its 6:40 running time. Even the title track suffers from the same issue of bloat – and as the tenth song on the album, it ran into my own fatigue by the time I’d reach it on straight listens through the disc because of its length and languorous pace. That’s also a function of the overall ambition of Shadows of a Dying Sun, which, at 70 minutes, is almost double the length of some recent indie releases, and has appropriately high musical aspirations without forgoing Insomnium’s sense of melody and even commercial appeal. It’s the best new melodeth album since Carcass’ Surgical Steel, although with Arch Enemy and At the Gates coming out with new albums soon, it’ll be an epic summer for fans of the genre.

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→ December 17, 2013
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Top 13 albums of 2013.

This year was so fertile for new music that, for the first time, I felt like I heard enough records I liked to put together a ranking of my favorite albums of the year. The expansion of Spotify’s catalog didn’t hurt, as now I didn’t have to own every album (or pirate them, which I won’t do) to review them, and I’ve received a few of these via publicists or record labels, including the albums at 4, 5, and 6.

This list represents my personal preferences. The omission of some critically-acclaimed albums, like those from the National, Vampire Tweekend, Daft Punk, and Haim, is deliberate. I don’t like ’em, ergo, they’re not here. The same goes for Mercury Prize winner James Blake, who wasn’t even the best solo male artist nominated for the award this year. If you’re looking for alt-J’s An Awesome Wave, that was my favorite album of 2012, as it was released in the U.S. last September.

I’ll post my top 100 songs of the year on Thursday, and mention in each review how many tracks from that album will appear on that list.

13. Teeth of the Sea – Master. (amazon • iTunes)Part of me isn’t even sure why I’m putting a record I don’t even fully understand on this list; like Field of Reeds from These New Puritans, Master is aiming for something well beyond the scope of what I enjoy and appreciate in modern music. While plenty of electronic acts earned airplay and mainstream plaudits in 2013, I don’t think anyone produced anything as ambitious within that subgenre as Teeth of the Sea did here, creating a dark, immersive record that at times seemed to draw more inspiration from symphonic death metal (like a vocal-free Hollenthon) than it did from the heart of current electronica. The record placed one song on my top 100, but that’s in part of a function of the album working better as a whole than in singles.

12. Frank Turner – Tape Deck Heart. (amazon • iTunes)Turner’s brand of punk-folk, or whatever it is, is incredibly endearing mostly because he seems to cram more lyrics into each minute than Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell spat out in His Girl Friday. It’s the kind of album that should be enjoyed along with two fingers of your favorite distilled spirit, or a pint of a good, not-too-cold Irish or English beer, even though the album’s best song is about the difficulty of drying oneself out. Turner hides nothing, and his writing skills lie in his ability to translate sadness and hurt into darkly humorous lyrics. The album placed one song on my top 100.

11. Wooden Shjips – Back to Land. (amazon • iTunes)Can I just pronounce this “Wooden Shyips?” Because that’s what I want to do every time I see their name. Like Teeth of the Sea, Wooden Shjips are better consumed as a whole disc than as individual singles, here because everything is good and nothing stands out in a huge way from the album’s mean. They get the “psychedelic” tag a lot, although I think some of that is just because they use a Hammond organ, but it’s guitar-driven rock with extended song structures and maybe a little too much reverb in the vocals. It might be more fair to think of them as a jam band that keeps things tight on record. It didn’t place any songs on my top 100, with “Ruins” my favorite track because it sounds like a party’s about to break out in the studio.

10. Carcass – Surgical Steel. (amazon • iTunes) I actually don’t listen to much metal, let alone extreme metal variations, with the exception of melodic death metal – very fast, heavy music with lyrics that are often screamed rather than sung, but with tremendous technical musicianship and actual melodies that require a little work to find but that provide balance for music that can be brutal and intense. Carcass was probably the progenitor of the subgenre but hadn’t released any new material since 1996’s disappointing Swansong, but their comeback album this year, Surgical Steel, is a true return to form but with a newer maturity, including tighter song structures and lots of allusions to their heyday as grindcore pioneers. Other metal albums I liked from 2013: Children of Bodom’s Halo of Blood, Trivium’s Vengeance Falls, Born of Osiris’ Tomorrow We Die Δlive, and Týr’s Valkyrja.

9. Naked and Famous – In Rolling Waves. (amazon • iTunes) The sophomore album from this New Zealand act is more lush than their debut, giving lead signer Alisa Xayalith more room to sing rather than shouting vocals over louder, heavier music as she had to do on their first two hits, “Young Blood” and “Punching in a Dream.” It’s a more serious album, with slower builds and more modest payoffs, weaving textures rather than building off giant hooks – if anything, the catchier tracks are among the album’s weaker ones, except for lead single “Hearts Like Ours” and the duet “The Mess.” I don’t award points for a band making progress per se, but the result here of the band maturing from a shorter singles-oriented sound to a more ambitious overall sound made it among the year’s best discs. The album placed one song on my top 100.

8. Arcade Fire – Reflektor. (iTunes • iTunes) I’ve had multiple readers ask me if I’ve changed my mind on this album since giving it a middling review about a week after its release, which I find strange mostly because … well, is it that important that I like the album? I don’t pretend my opinion means anything beyond giving you guys something to read and talk about, so I don’t think the fact that I found this album disappointing is such a big deal. I loved The Suburbs, but Reflektor went so far in the opposite direction – bloated song times, pretentious lyrics, too few musical ideas – that I couldn’t help but feel let down. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, himself known for songs about twice as long as they needed to be, produced the album, and he was probably the wrong choice for a band that can’t rein itself in. This was a good album relative to other releases this year, but it could have been so much better. The album placed three tracks on my top 100.

7. Jake Bugg – Shangri La. (amazon • iTunes) I whiffed on Bugg’s self-titled debut album for last year’s list; the album came out last October and I didn’t hear anything of it until well into 2013. I’ve caught up now, as Bugg’s second album came out in November and features more of the same Dylanesque sound, but better, including the punkish “What Doesn’t Kill You?,” the rockabilly opener “There’s a Beast and We All Feed It,” and the shuffling ballad “Me and You,” itself a late cut from my top 100. Bugg is just 19 and has only begun to scratch the surface of what could be an enormous career as Dylan’s spiritual heir. The album placed one track on my top 100.

6. Polvo – Siberia. (amazon • iTunes)The second post-breakup (and post-reunion) album from these 1990s noise-rock cult heroes might be their best effort yet, packing plenty of weirdness into its eight tracks but never losing the plot. It’s heavy on twin guitars, even though they often sound like they might not be playing the same song, and the lyrics are trippy if you like them and nonsense if you don’t. I particularly like how the album feels heavy without being loud or extreme, an example of where modern metal often goes wrong; you don’t need to sing like Cookie Monster to create the impression of weight. The album placed two tracks on my top 100.

5. St. Lucia – When the Night. (amazon • iTunes) One of the best debut albums of the year and one of its best pure-pop records, When the Night is the first effort from the South African-born New York native Jean-Philip Grobler, who has remixed many better-known artists and produced the debut album from HAERTS. St. Lucia’s sound is sweet synth-pop with global influences in the rhythm and percussion sections, along with a detour into darker electronic sounds on one of the album’s best tracks, “September.” Grobler occasionally veers too far into twee territory but the album has more than enough moments of balance, placing three tracks on my top 100.

4. Drenge – Drenge. The self-titled debut from these two English brothers actually isn’t out yet in the U.S., which is one of the stupidest policies left in the digital age. Why would any movie, record, or book publisher stagger release dates internationally? Ones and zeroes know nothing of your national borders. If you don’t want to encourage piracy, release everything on the same day across the world. Drenge’s album is on Spotify and I received a promo copy in November, so you can listen to it before its early 2014 release here, and it’s well worth it, with a slew of high-energy guitar/drum songs that show influences from each of the last four decades, going back to early Black Sabbath and running up through the White Stripes. The record placed three tracks on my top 100.

3. Savages – Silence Yourself. (amazon • iTunes) This was my album of the year until September, when the two albums higher on this list both came out, and still wins the prize of the year’s angriest album. The all-female quartet known as Savages have produced a short eleven-track masterpiece of seething and indignation, led by French singer Jehnny Beth’s punctuated style that has her practically spitting the words at the undeserving audience. The music is post-punk in its original sense – Suicide, Television, Gang of Four – not pop, even though songs like “She Will,” “Shut Up,” and “Strife” boast strong hooks. The album placed two tracks on my top 100.

2. CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe. (amazon • iTunes) The debut of the year was a little uneven in spots but so exultant during most of its length that it feels captious to point out its flaws. Singer Lauren Mayberry is an emerging star, one whose future probably goes beyond the electro-pop confines of this record and perhaps the band in general, but for now the Scottish trio has crafted the year’s best pop record, with five tracks on my top 100 and one that was in the set that just missed.

1. Arctic Monkeys – AM. (amazon • iTunes)Their best album since their debut, but with all that several years of maturity and musical meandering incorporated into a disc that brings an enormous range of influences to produce the year’s most compelling and most complete experience. Turner has long been one of rock’s most clever wordsmiths, but took his form of snarky-witty modern beat poetry to new heights on AM. The album placed five songs on my top 100 and could have placed two more, plus one track, “R U Mine?” that appeared on the 2012 list because it was released as a one-off single.

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→ October 2, 2013
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Polvo’s Siberia and a new music update.

Top Chef judge and acclaimed Georgia chef Hugh Acheson joined me on yesterday’s Behind the Dish podcast, talking about the show but also about growing up an Expos fan, the decline of the stolen base, and the rise of coffee culture in America. Acheson’s first cookbook, A New Turn in the South, came out in 2011, with more to come next year.

On to the music… The North Carolina-based band Polvo were part of the underground noise-rock scene in the 1990s, along with Helium, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Superchunk, and other similarly out-there groups that would likely have found wider commercial acceptance if they were recording today. Polvo’s music was intricate and layered, earning the label “math rock” according to the All Music Guide (although I don’t think I ever heard that term when it was current), with lengthy tracks, shifting time signatures, and songs that included different movements as you might find in classical compositions – different enough that you think you’re listening to a different song only to find you’re five and a half minutes into the last one.

After a long hiatus, Polvo reformed for a comeback album in 2008, took another long break, and released their sixth album, Siberia, this Tuesday. It’s more focused than 2008’s In Prism without losing the sprawling sensibility that has always marked their sound, a more mature approach that brings more melodic elements to the album’s best tracks without losing its experimental feel or the densely layered style that has always marked Polvo’s work.

* Full disclosure: I received a review copy of Siberia from Merge Records a few weeks ago.

Although regular readers among you know that I’m a little bit of a short-attention span listener, I found Siberia‘s longest tracks its most memorable, especially the 6:24 opener “Total Immersion” and the centerpiece, “The Water Wheel,” which might as well be two or three songs in one. “Total Immersion” marries a heavy guitar sound with low-register vocals to create an aural experience to match the song’s title, almost drowning the listener in a wall of noise that would make most thrash artists jealous. “The Water Wheel” manages to change direction at least twice within its eight minutes, while also making the best use of the two-pronged guitar attack that Polvo makes anywhere on the album – the two axes work together even when they seem to be the on verge of outright conflict. If Sonic Youth had morphed into a jam band, this is the kind of song they would have churned out.

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Those aren’t the only strong tracks on Siberia, although they’re my favorites. The album’s shortest track “Changed” still manages to pack in several tempos, from a dissonant, Sonic Youth-like (or early Weezer) jangly guitar riff giving way to a chunkier sound behind the song’s sort-of-chorus and an outro that sounds like later Led Zeppelin. “Light, Raking” winks back at the early-90s grunge period (more Mudhoney than Pearl Jam, though) before the surprise addition of a keyboard line behind the chorus, which is followed by a flat-out weird bridge where it sounds like someone is detuning the guitars as they’re being played. Polvo even seems to work in a slight shade of country-rock on the meandering “Blues is Loss,” where their past affection for Middle Eastern and South Asian sounds also makes a brief appearance.

Siberia still isn’t a commercial record, as that’s just not something you’re ever likely to find on a noise-rock record unless the band makes a wilful turn toward the mass market. It’s challenging music because it rewards your attention with its complexity and frequent changes of direction,

* I mentioned Superchunk, who are back with, I Hate Music ($5 there via amazon), just their second album since 2004, featuring what I think is their best single since 1995’s “Hyper Enough,” the musically upbeat “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo,” which opens with a much darker sentiment than the music would lead you to expect: “I hate music – what is it worth?/Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.”

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* I don’t have much to say about Lorde’s hit “Royals” other than that it’s remarkable that a 16-year-old could write better lyrics, with more imagery, than nearly every adult songwriter working in American pop music today. I don’t even love the song for its music, but I love the creativity it shows – and after CHVRCHES this is my daughter’s favorite alternative/pop track right now.

* Wild Cub’s “Thunder Clatter” wins the award for “song I didn’t want to like, but can’t help myself.” It’s too damn catchy.

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* Heavy English’s “21 Flights” is a focus track right now on Sirius XM’s Alt Nation/XMU, which does trigger my inherent skepticism of anything the music industry wants to push on us … but it’s actually a pretty good song, the first single from a band that rose from the ashes of Envy on the Coast. Marrying the staccato guitar style of late-70s punk/art bands like Gang of Four with neo-soul choruses you might associate more with Fitz and the Tantrums, “21 Flights” is a rousing stomper that forges a different kind of indie-rock aesthetic.

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* Speedy Ortiz’s “Tiger Tank” (currently free to download from amazon) reminds me quite a bit of Helium, whom I mentioned earlier – Polvo’s lead guitarist eventually joined Helium while he was dating lead singer Mary Timony. Speedy Ortiz also has a female lead singer and intentionally dissonant guitar lines. I think Pavement comparisons are also inevitable, thanks to Sadie Dupuis’ off-kilter vocals style, where she sings the verses like she’s about to fall down a flight of stairs.

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* Washed Out’s “All I Know” is a major improvement over his first single, “It All Feels Right,” which felt like it went on for fifteen minutes with no purpose. It’s amazing what a faster tempo and a keyboard sample can do.

* Terraplane Sun’s “Get Me Golden” fell out of the 1960s into 2013 with its handclaps, rising vocal harmonies, and Hammond organ. I get a similar vibe from Temples’ music, especially their one minor hit, “Shelter Song,” but Terraplane Sun does that revivalist sound better.

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* The band-of-brothers (three of them, to be precise) Ceremonies releases their debut EP next week, but lead single “Land of Gathering” has been out since the spring. It’s a curious mix of heartfelt, folkish verses with high-flying Beach Boys-style choruses, over a rapid two-step drumbeat that gives way to a slower, tribal percussion pattern that backs up those verses. It’s like a new, new New Wave.

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* Dirty Projectors – “Gun Has No Trigger.” So retro it should be played on an 8-track.

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* Regina Spektor – “You’ve Got Time.” I can’t be the only one who saw her name and assumed she was related to Crazy Phil, right? Anyway, the singer of the theme to the series Orange is the New Black is actually a Russian emigre, no relation to the Wall-of-Sound guy, and she’s been recording music for a decade but is just now breaking out on the strength of this stop-and-go energy rush of a single.

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* The Colourist’s “Little Games” reminds me a lot of another of my favorite alternative-pop tracks of the year, Smallpools’ “Dreaming,” pairing sunny vocals with tightly-produced guitar and keyboard lines. “Little Games” opens up its production behind the chorus with more reverb to the rhythm guitars to add texture to the overly-polished vocals.

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* I hated the Orwells’ “Mallrats,” but their newest song, “Who Needs You” (from the EP of the same title), puts their snotty-rock approach to better use, ditching the most annoying elements and allowing the inherent pop songcraft to make its mark.

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* I received a review copy of Panama’s three-song EP Always, which will be released later this week. The Australian quintet produces electronic-pop music that shows off lead singer Jarrah McCleary’s background in classical piano, with a sound similar to Yeasayer but a slower, more soulful vibe. The title track should show up quickly on alternative radio thanks to the catchy chorus and the little piano flourish that follows it.

* Wikipedia – which is never wrong – describes the Faeroese band Týr as “folk-metal,” although to my ears their sound is more melodic death metal (“melodeth”), sung without the silly screaming or growling that ruins a lot of extreme metal for my ears. I hear way more Iron Maiden, early Metallica, or thrash-era Testament here than any more modern influences, and while I might ordinarily scoff at these Viking-hero lyrics, when you’re from the Faeroe Islands you get a free pass. “Blood of Heroes” is the lead track from their latest album and would likely make Eddie the Head proud of what he’s wrought.

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* Havok’s “Give Me Liberty … Or Give Me Death” is such a close homage to early punk-thrash efforts like Agent Orange, Sacred Reich, or Corrosion of Conformity that when I first heard it I assumed it was some deep track from the mid-1980s I’d never heard before. I enjoy throwbacks like this, although they can get old quickly because the formula is too familiar.

* Stuff I already reviewed: CHVRCHES’ The Bones of What You Believe and Arctic Monkeys’ AM. Still to come: new Arcade Fire.

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