365 rpm (eng)

More than 30 years later, we can now say that when Darkthrone 's debut album Soulside Journey was recorded at the end of 1990, it was primarily the Swedish death metal sound that was the blueprint also for this Norwegian Black Metal band. Perhaps more because of the recording environment ( Sunlight Studio ) than direct inspiration from the Swedish bands  Nihilist and Carnage . But at least in hindsight, we dare to say that even then we could have heard a glimpse of what was to come. Since the debut had followed the template for how death metal would sound and look during the early 1990s, it´s easy to understand Peaceville 's reaction when the follow-up A Blaze in the Northern Sky was presented to the record label. To completely abandon a tried and tested successful pattern in the genre with a heavy, dynamic sound image and comparatively intricate arrangements in favor of treble, monotonous guitars driven by an equally monotonous drum kit, was probably also perceived by man...

Pitchshifter was that perfect band that emerged on the fringes of death and industrial metal in the late eighties and early nineties. Perfect in the sense that it was a perfectly balanced combination of both subgenres. In particular, the debut Industrial  (1991) featured a never-before-heard musical melting pot of drum machines, down-tuned, heavy and simultaneously screaming barren guitars, and a vocalist who completely devoted himself to the guttural voices. A concept that, among others, Fear Factory at least partially picked up on three years later. We can only speculate as to the reasons why the debut album's vocalist Mark Clayden would soon hand over the microphone to his brother JS Clayden . The soundscape on the subsequent EP Submit was not significantly updated, and it must be admitted that I only realized this fact after doing a background check for this review. That the vocalist change had already taken place after the debut album, that is. Ahead of Desensitized , howe...

It's been many years since BT's last album came out and it is their final. That is as certain as all eight of their albums deal with various war themes, Karl Willets announced that they are definitely putting the plectrums on the shelf after drummer Martin Kearns passed away in 2015. Although Bolt Thrower has walked a clear development curve since their debut in 1987, they have (as the "true" death metal band they are) remained faithful to their own vision. In addition to the obligatory war themes, the characteristic Bolt Thrower groovy guitar melodies are integrated into the basic traditional rhythms and the fact that this culminates on their final album makes it, in my ears, their best in the discography. Something that is perhaps accentuated by the fact that a couple of less successful releases squeezed in between ...For Victory and this album. It can also be added that Karl Willets is often voted among the best death metal vocalists of all time and his contrib...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead Choosing and listing your favorite music has more to do with your current mood than with your long-term taste. Once I decided to highlight this album...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead Justin K. Broadrick . Need I say more? Probably. Godflesh , Jesu , Head of David , Fall of Because or Techno Animal ? No? None of those either… Ok, ...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead Those who consume music primarily for entertainment purposes may not appreciate falling asleep to it. I don't think I've managed to stay awak...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead A decade filled with rumors about release dates doesn't leave many people hopeful that a new album will ever actually see the light of day. Those...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead If you write, perform and produce all the music on an album, you might as well include your own name in the artist moniker. If you then intend to per...

If a debut album containing 22 songs that in total are over 40 minutes is followed up a year later with an album containing 10 songs that in total are about 3 minutes longer, then something has changed in terms of composition and arrangement, right? Perhaps not to the ears of the traditional pop music listener. Not at first, at least, but perseverance is one of development´s parents and surely we all want to develop as music consumers? If your answer is yes, then Carcass may not be the one I would first recommend, but if you can plow through the traditional heavy metal path and dare to continue through the waste lands of thrash metal, you are faced with a number of choices, of which the subgenre grindcore is one of the most extreme expressions. And that is where we now stand with the Liverpool band's second album Symphonies of Sickness (1989). Guitarist/vocalist Bill Steer had already participated in 1987 on the B-side of the debut album of Birmingham band Napalm Death with ...

Ok. Perhaps not my favorite album  (1968) by The Floyd either, but in my opinion very underrated. Pink Floyd 's second, Syd Barrett 's last and David Gilmour 's first. The former's involvement is noticeably less here than on the debut  (1967), which almost seemed more like The Syd Barrett Experience than anything else. The album's opening bass sequence has reached more ears than the song itself has. In all sorts of contexts such as samples and commercial music. The band's, in my opinion, most underrated singer, Richard Wright (ordinary the organist in the band), contributes with the album's best vocal track and even Roger Waters ' voice is this time by a good margin approved. At least in the spacey Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun which is the album's absolute highlight. As a conclusion, we get to take part in Syd Barrett's ironic thanks and farewell to Pink Floyd. The band had already had problems with Syd's commitment for some ...

I have absolutely nothing against Eurythmics ' music, but the best thing Dave Stewart did was probably to introduce Dean Garcia and Toni Hallida y to each other when Garcia handled the four-string for Eurythmics for a period in the 1980s. Garcia and Halliday realized what they had in common and formed Curve in 1990. After several EPs, the debut album Doppelgänger was released in 1992 and entered the sales charts, mainly in the UK. The follow-up, Cuckoo   (1993), did not do as well in terms of sales. Perhaps because of its somewhat sharper edges and unpolished surface. Nevertheless, Curve makes a broader and deeper dive into the compositional sea here and the opening track Missing Link at least got some radio airtime. In addition to her contributions in Curve, Toni Halliday has also been involved as a singer in many contexts. Among other things, the British ambient kings The Future Sound of London hired her on the classic album Lifeforms . After Cuckoo, Garcia and Halliday par...

Although we in hindsight can conclude that songs like Light my Fire and Break on Through  clearly are bigger hits than what the Doors had achieved on their follow-up, Strange Days (1967), there's no mistaking the confidence the band gained after their self-titled debut, which was released earlier that same year. After a few months of touring, the group was also more cohesive than ever. Frontman, singer and lyricist Jim Morrison has gone down in history as a troublemaker, alcoholic and explorer of the limits of consciousness, but at this stage these excesses apparently did not lead to any major limitations in the recording process. When we talk about the Doors, we are dealing with 3/4 educated musicians. Both keyboardist Ray Manazrek and drummer John Densmore were jazz musicians, while guitarist Robbie Krieger had provided himself with a somewhat broader education in genres such as flamenco, folk, blues and jazz. Morrison, on the other hand, was self-taught in both singing and ...

I don't know how many Finnish bands have toured the States, but Circle , hailing from Pori is one of them and, as far as I know, the only one that performs both the music and the dialogue in Finnish. Rakennus  (2014) was recorded in Charlottesville , Virginia and is actually as close as you can get to a real live experience on record. You can literally hear the room. The murmur of the audience and sometimes even the musicians' communication on stage is continuously present. Lehtisalo's bass vibrates in Leppänen's snare drum. Westerlund's accents on the electric guitar strings can sometimes also be heard acoustically. Very intimate and authentic. As if they were playing in the living room with us. Circle is a band that started in the early 1990s and quickly made a name for themselves in underground circles around the world. During their almost 30-year career, they have covered most music genres and can generally be described as avant-garde. The song selection during...

About 52 seconds into the album, what would later go down in history as the most influential sound in electronic music was introduced. The sequence-driven notes from the modular Moog were at that time a craft that had to be recreated every time the instrument was woken up after it had been turned off once. If Phaedra  (1974) had been recorded today, 50 years later, that process would of course have looked completely different. Phaedra is Tangerine Dream 's fifth album, the third with the same line-up of musicians and the first on the Virgin record label. In hindsight, the title track and also the opening track seems a bit tentative, perhaps even improvisational. This is not really a negative experience, but it is a bit of a contrast to the compositions on the three subsequent albums, which to my ears represent the same expressive format, soundscape but with a much clearer direction. The album cover, including the painting, was created by the polymath Edgar Froese Since Tangerine ...

2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything 2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird 2002 Circle - Alotus 2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer 2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light 2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal 2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines 2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday 2008 Meshuggah - ObZen 2009 Maserati - Passages 2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent 2011 Kreng - Grimoire 2012 Swans - The Seer 2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands 2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale 2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven 2016 Swans - The Glowing Man 2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana 2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator 2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum 2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian 2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic 2022 Final - It Comes to Us All 2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex 2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead Along with bands such as Anathema and My Dying Bride , Paradise Lost are considered pioneers in the genre of death-doom metal (an offspring of trad...

That Northern Irish band Therapy? was invited to make a remix version of the industrial metal band Pitchshifter 's song Diable the year after Troublegum was released (1994) is perhaps not as far-fetched as one might first think. I have absolutely nothing against Joy Division and covers of classic bands' well-known songs often tend to float out into a tribute to the original version. That is certainly not the case when it comes to Therapy?'s version of Isolation . Here we have a band that, as intensely as they express their own songs, takes on others' songs in order to make them their own. This applies to both Isolation and Diable. Songs from very different sources, too. It is perhaps a little sad. When I listened through Troublegum before this retrospective in order to refresh my memory, in hindsight it was probably nothing more than a few song titles and song orders that needed refreshing. If the album thematically deals with various phenomena surrounding teenage a...

Not only did we have to wait over five years since the last album release, The Last Will and Testament  (2024) was also delayed by a little over a month. This was due to various production delays. In this case, it concerns the production of hardware and not the process of creating the music itself. The music production was already finished in March after the recording sessions at the prestigious Rockfield in Wales. It has been 25 years since Opeth released their last concept album ( Still Life 1999). An expression relatively common in the progressive rock / metal genre. The fact that Opeth was forced to postpone the release date can perhaps be seen as a stroke of luck, as the release now coincides with the 50th anniversary of Genesis ' concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway . Travis Smith has created almost all of Opeth´s album covers Speaking of progressive rock. Jethro Tull were also good advocates of concept albums and sometimes even of parodies of them. The band's...

By this point (1997),  Johan Edlund  had long since shaken off the Swedish death metal ghost he had escaped from in the late 1980s. At the latest after the release of the debut  Sumerian Cry , the gothic-inspired tones were integrated into  Tiamat 's scaly compositional body and gradually gained more space until, around the time of the sequel to  A Deeper Kind of Slumber , they were little more than an embarrassed replica to  The Sisters of Mercy ´s later releases. Now it may seem as if Tiamat is a one-man project, and to a certain extent it is. At least if you look at the band's member turnover and who it is who creates most of it. Lyrically, musically, visually, and conceptually, it is Johan Edlund who almost always stands as the originator. He also always has a finger in the jar when it comes to production. If the opening paragraph in this review is considered pejorative, it is only to try to create some kind of balance in this reflection. A Deeper Kind ...