reviews and interviews (summer turns to fall)

Time for a round-up of what interviews and reviews I've managed to get written in the last month or so...

hellbound.ca:

• interview with Russia's Forest Stream: Nature and Society, Misery and Hope
• Forest Stream's Somn on songwriting and storytelling
• review of God Dethroned's Passiondale

exclaim.ca: (it looks like my posting of these reviews has been a little lax...)

• Treachery – Treachery
• Lacuna Coil – Visual Karma
• A Finnish Summer with Turisas (DVD)
• Root – Hell Symphony and The Book
• In Flames – remasters/reissues
• Khors – Mysticism
• Samael – Above
• My Dying Bridge – For Lies I Sire
• Autumn – Altitude
• Ensoph – Rex Mundi X-ILE
• Leprous – Tall Poppy Syndrome
• Amorphis – Skyforger (I'm much more fond of this record now than when I wrote the review)
• Candlemass – Death Magic Doom
• Ruins – Cauldron
• Novembers Doom – Into Night's Requiem Infernal
• Primordial – Imrama (reissue)
• Dream Theater – Black Clouds & Silver Linings
• The M.E.M.O.R.Y. Lab
• When Icarus Falls – Over the Frozen Seas

And these two didn't seem to make it online:

Karl Sanders

Saurian Exorcisms

Saurian Exorcisms is the second Eastern-acoustic album from Nile's Karl Sanders, a complex and unearthly musical tapestry generated almost entirely by Sanders himself. The record is broken up into multiple individual tracks - all with enigmatically descriptive titles - but the songs course from one mood to another, flowing between looping motifs, between geographical and cultural influences, with little conventional logic or shape. The sound is deeply evocative and exotically picturesque, easily suggesting the kind of mythologies the album title invokes. Layered traditional instruments, Middle-Eastern melodies, hypnotic percussion - it's all a long way from Sanders' usual fare. But the accumulation of eerie cries and chants, dark and strange tones, and unresolved harmonic tension makes it easy to forget this isn't a metal record. Saurian Exorcisms is the kind of lullaby that produces exquisite nightmares. (The End Records, www.theendrecords.com)

Laura Wiebe Taylor

These Are They

Who Manifest

At three songs and under 21 minutes, Who Manifest is just a taster, a mouth watering snippet and, hopefully, a sign of more good things to come. Novembers Doom is the closest reference point for These Are They - not so much because of current similarities (beyond Paul Kuhr's easily recognizable growl) but because of history. These Are They bring together two parts early Novembers Doom (Kuhr and Steve Nicholson) with members of Disinter and Earthen in an old school death/doom rumble, channelling some classic harsh and gloomy sounds. Amped up with some gnashing riffs, a little heavy blues, and some stripped down soloing, Who Manifest is solid and raw, abandoning melancholy for sheer ominous mass. (The End Records, www.theendrecords.com)

Laura Wiebe Taylor