FOR THE LOVE OF METAL
The first of several Drudkh reissues from Season of Mist, Forgotten Legends captures the band’s early rumblings – a small collection of long songs recorded in the summer of 2002 and released as the band’s official debut.
Album review by Laura Wiebe Taylor
A lost classic no longer, this hidden gem deserves to be heard!
Prior to The Fire is earnest but it’s easy to like, solid and tight. Everything just falls into place for Priestess in a charmed way on Prior to The Fire; it’s the ideal introduction to the band, and a calling card release.
The overall sound gives me an image of Viking Goths parading around in Scandinavia. On most of the songs they manage to sound well balanced between classical and metal without sounding too rock opera cheesy
The biggest surprise in regards to mountain boys The Sign Of The Southern Cross (SOTSC) and latest effort …Of Mountains And Moonshine is probably its absolute absence of surprise.
They might be called Southern Cross, but don’t let the name fool you. This ain’t no southern rock band.
With a roster of talent that is hard to match, Shrinebuilder’s Shrinebuilder is an impressive debut.
Incredibly upbeat and dominant despite the overuse of operatics and keyboards—they still sound stuck somewhere between Diary Of A Madman and The Neverending Story soundtrack—Utopia is an indelibly catchy affair even if it refuses to advance the state of metal.
Rodrigo y Gabriela’s new album 11.11 challenges a lot of preconceptions of metal heads and metal music. While the instrumental, largely acoustic album cannot be traditionally considered as a ‘metal,’ the duo of Rodrigo Sánchez (lead guitar) and Gabriela Quintero, (rhythm) definitely has roots in classic and thrash metal. They started perfoming together after they both left a thrash metal band in Mexico, and while the music they do now is has a foundation of Spanish-influenced traditional folk, their faster and at times, gritter rhythms and rapid time changes serve as an homage to their metal foundation.
Ancestors can’t decide whether to join the noodly prog rock or stoner doom circles, and has left a foot in both camps, coming off like Dream Theater on ditch weed.