Feb 032022
 

 

Even if you didn’t already know, the fact that today’s installment of this list includes seven songs would be a clear sign that I’m about to bring it to an end (really, I am).

Unlike some of the more recent segments, this one focuses on a single but fairly broad sub-genre, which for want of a better term could be called “melodic black metal”. But that still doesn’t mean these songs sound alike, and in fact they’re quite different from each other. The appearance of many of them shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who hung around our site last year, but this group does include one big surprise; it surprised the hell out of me, that’s for sure.

NECRONAUTICAL (UK)

My compatriot DGR wrote of Necronautical‘s latest album that it’s one “you’ll be buckling up for as wave after wave of black metal buttressed by a healthy dose of keyboard synth washes over you in an attempt to drag you under the tide”. He also wrote that “it’s also easy to understand how they band would make the title track one of the keystone songs of the disc”: Continue reading »

May 242021
 

 

(This is DGR’s review of the debut album by the French band Sol Draconi Septem, which was released in March of this year.)

The genesis of this review happened some time ago and it is one that has been long simmering.

Believe it or not, it was actually our featuring of the prog band Wheel – of whom I’m a fan – in one of our round-ups a while back that was the ‘something different’ which caused the re-activation of dormant neurons that led to where we sit right now. In our round-up we covered their song “Fugue”, which is a peaceful interstitial number in between two much larger tracks on their latest album Resident Human, and our editor mentioned that the song had been inspired by the Hyperion Cantos series of books by Dan Simmons.

There are actually a few songs throughout Resident Human that take cues from those books, but it was that mention which reminded me that in one of the many metal rabbit holes I have a tendency to tumble down I had come across another group who also pulled inspiration from that series: the French space-prog/black-metal hybrid of Sol Draconi Septem and their early-March release of the aptly titled Hyperion.

If anything, I figured that if the admittedly excellent Wheel release wasn’t our usual reader fare, then the plumbing of the depths of space and all things synth that happens during the forty-five-or-so minutes of Hyperion probably would be. Continue reading »