Woods Of Ypres - Woods 5: Grey Skies And Electric Light

In December last year I found out about a band under the worst possible circumstances. David Gold, frontman to black/doom metallers Woods Of Ypres was killed in a car crash at age 31. The same age I was at the time. A sobering moment indeed. And it is with that sobriety that I cannot help listening to the band's unintentionally final album, Woods 5: Grey Skies And Electric Light. I have tried, for the purpose of impartiality, to separate the music from the tragedy, but given the album's subject matter I have found it impossible.

The core of the album's subject matter deals with death, loss and the impermanence of life. Much of the album deals with the thought that this life is all you get, going so far as, in Death Is Not An Exit, stating that there is nothing after this. It's almost a more depressing album that Sentenced's The Cold White Light, although often dealing with the nature of death rather than the actuality of it.

Given all that, it would be reasonable to assume that the album is musically depressing, too. Packed with morose dirges and downbeat drones. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the riffs are catchy, the rhythm is strong and the verse-chorus-verse structure makes from some memorable songs that it's easy to sing along to, getting the head nodding and the emotions stirring. Some songs feature some light orchestration, and a lilting oboe adds a quiet mournfulness to Travelling Alone. There have been many, many comparisons to Type O Negative, and I'll make another, but only in tone and vocal style, Gold's baritone voice carrying the weight of the lyrics beautifully. The songs on Woods 5 are, in a morbid way, far more upbeat than the comparison would suggest.

This dichotomy of musical versus lyrical mood adds power to the messages behind each song. It's not just some doom/goth band being morose for the sake of it; it's a band singing about the truth of life, and death, warts and hurt and pain and all. Even the ostensibly pro-life songs Death Is Not An Exit, Adora Vivos and Career Suicide (Is Not Real Suicide) manage to carry this world weary knowledge that life is for now because this really is all there is. The best we can manage is getting to the end without making a complete hash of it. There is no god, no fate, no greater truth to bail you out.

Woods 5 has rapidly crept up my list of best albums of 2012, and is both tribute and memorial to David Gold. This album, with its posthumously prophetic songs Kiss My Ashes Goodbye, Finality and Alternate Ending, will leave its mark on the world of metal for a good while to come. A fitting, unfortunate end to Woods Of Ypres musical career.

Interesting Things

There have been a few albums released recently that I consider ... interesting. For various reasons, here are a bunch of albums that could prove intriguing.

Before The Dawn - Rise Of The Phoenix

Before The Dawn in a post about interesting things? Aren't they just doing what they always do? Well, no, actually. Hot on the heals of last year's Deathstar Rising comes Rise Of The Phoenix, complete with absolutely no clean vocals at all. Indeed, gone are the duelling growls and cleans that have defined the band's sound.

After the tumult and anguish the band went through before the release of Deathstar Rising, which saw vocalist Lars Eikind and drummer Atte Palokangas leave the band, it seems that Tuomas Saukkonen wants to take the band in a new direction. Perhaps he felt that the band's previous sound had run its course and it was time for something new and exciting to come out. A phoenix rising, indeed, but this time heavier, blacker and bleaker. I've given it a quick once over and it sounds good to my ear, but we shall have to see if the infectious choruses of earlier albums translate to this new sound.

Moonspell - Alpha Noir / Omega White

Moonspell are not a band that have really been on my radar. Hailing from Portugal, they started out with a folky, gothic black metal sound but have transitioned to a more death/doom style over time. What makes their new album interesting isn't so much the album itself, Alpha Noir, but the special edition that comes with a "twin" album in the form of Omega White. While Alpha Noir seems like a mix of gothic and death metal, Omega White is the polar opposite, a sort of ambient doom. The band's press release labelled Alpha Noir as "an incendiary album", while Omega White is an album of "pure atmosphere and shadow".

This is the band's first release on the Napalm label, and their first double album (although you can get Alpha Noir on its own if you'd prefer). I've yet to find any way to really give it a listen without buying a copy, which somehow feels odd in this world of internet releases, bandcamp and Spotify.

Arjen Anthony Lucassen - Lost In The New Real

If there's one man that always deserves a spot on a list of interesting things, it's Arjen Anthony Lucassen. After some mind-boggling work on his Ayreon project, he has now produced the solo album he has aspired to for a long time. While being similar to Ayreon in many ways, it's a separate story, although the influence of Ayreon is evident.

Set in the far future, our protagonist, Mr L, wakes up and is astonished at the new world before him. Throughout the album, his advisor helps him adjust to the "new real". This advisor is voiced by Rutger Hauer and is named, somewhat amusingly for fans of Blade Runner, Voight Kampff.

If you're a fan of Mr Lucassen's work, you're pretty much guaranteed to like this. The style is instantly recognisable, the narrative and lyrics immediately accessible to any fan of Ayreon or Star One. And I'm sure it'll be just as mind bending.

Here's the title track. It seems that somebody has uploaded the entire album to Youtube if you want to listen to it, but obviously it would be better listened to in a decent quality with a properly acquired copy!

On Hipsters

I was recently told that I don't know anything about metal. I was told this because I said that I prefer melodic death to death, and like music with a melody or a tune or, at the very least, songs that can be distinguished from one another. Apparently this is neither trve, cvlt nor br00tal, and puts my entire being into question. Which is, of course, nonsense. But it made me think.

These days there is a lot of in-fighting. A lot of people trying to prove that what they like is different from what the masses like. You know the masses; those hideous, uneducated sheeple who just don't get it. And I don't just refer to people who like mainstream pop; I mean those awful people who don't agree with every single opinion and choice of whoever is whining about whatever it is they're whining about.

But heaven forbid anyone agree! If they do, they're obviously either false and into it for the wrong reasons, or they're doing it to be cool and ruining it for the rest of us. The world is turning into a bunch of angry little cliques full of people who profess to know the one trve way and that everyone else is wrong.

So what it got me thinking was that the world is very small these days. Everyone is connected, it's very easy to be part of something massive. We have manufactured boy bands debuting at #1 with a million sales because of the hype machines. We have causes and memes and fury that go global in seconds. So maybe the excitement of being part of something huge has lost its shine. Being part of something small is the new opiate for the masses.

Which is ironic, really. Consider Instagram, beloved by the drive-by hipster for providing a way to be retro without having to actual do anything. And now it's worth a billion dollars. It is now something huge, and it now is the mainstream.

What comes around, goes around, or something. It's fashionable to be unfashionable, but all the little unfashionable things keep being turned into fashion. Hell, if I at age 14 knew that in 10 years people would be voluntarily wearing glasses and buying pocket sized computers I wouldn't have believed it. I got too many black eyes for being an outsider for that to go mainstream. I would have loved for what I liked to be popular. But now it is, I can't help feeling a bit sad about it.

So what can people do? How to preserve the uniqueness and prevent what you like being diluted, ground up, and spat out to give somebody else a billion dollars? Get angry. Get territorial. Get belligerent about it and tell people that they can't be part of their club. And it never works.

I don't really have a point to make. It's just sad that what used to bring people together now drives them apart, because people are terrified of the consequences of popularity on the things they love. They are mortally afraid that if what they are becomes popular, it will be ruined for them and for everybody else. And they're right to be, because it happens every day.

A bit of a miserable post, I know. So I'm going to go look at things in the unfashionable end of the record section. Maybe pick up some album by a band only 10% of the population have ever heard of. Might make me feel better about it for ten minutes.