Just for remembrance:
Manilla Road - Crystal Logic
failsafeman wrote:
Overrated. - 65%
Written by failsafeman on April 1st, 2009
My opinion on this album has changed quite a bit over the years I've owned it. When I first got it, I was bewildered; what was this strange, archaic riffing? Who the hell was this nasal dude wailing about D&D? I guess it makes sense, since his nickname is "The Shark", but I admit that their prominent nose is not the first thing I think about. Then, I learned a bit about metal and started to get into the weird sound; I was drawn into the strange world of Manila Road. I followed the Manila Brick Road, or whatever. Now that I know pretty much all about 80s metal, the novelty has really worn off. Manila Road would get much better later on, but here they were still essentially stumbling around without having found their muse yet.
For a prime example, instead of the power/thrash riffage of later albums, we have NWOBHM ripoffs (Shelton has admitted to copying Angel Witch in the laborious final track, but unfortunately he was unable to copy their songwriting talent. The thing plods along for fifteen minutes, and it feels like The Shark should be reminding you "Remember well my friend, a metalhead never cries, even during really long and boring songs which rip off better NWOBHM bands") and then of course the 70s psychedelic holdover crap which Shelton rightfully abandoned on the horrible "Mark of the Beast" but which unfortunately still lingers here to some extent and is present in an annoyingly apparent influence, notably on the meandering and weak "Veils of Positive Existence", which tries to suck the listener in with "atmosphere" but fails to deliver with Shelton's painfully weak constantly echoing vocals that cannot live up to the lyrics (and what the hell are the veils of negative existence anyway? why would he be sailling a ship through them?)
Then of course there is the painfully christian title track, metal apologism at it's worst. I mean, who is he trying to kid? Right after Flaming Metal Systems, he tries to claim that he's not burning? Nonsense!
The final nail in the coffin though is the utterly banal opening, which displays an ominous and promising pitch-shifted narration in fine power metal tradition, but then goes on to fuck it all up with a mediocre riff which sounds like a speeding train...a child's toy train set, that is. With bunnies as conductors. Then there's the wailing chorus, which apparently is meant to convey the antagonists dismay at being trapped in the city of the dead, but more accurately reflects my dismay at having to sit through the song of dead ideas.
Luckily "Feeling Free Again" is a stronger track, which doesn't try to bury the listener with pretension and instead stays true to it's light-hearted title. This greatly brings up the score of the album in my eyes, saving it from utter shittiness.
In short, everyone who likes this album should re-roll a new character, as clearly the one they're playing now has shitty taste.
Windir - Arntor
Derigin wrote:
Windir - Arntor - 100%
Written by Derigin on April 1st, 2009
"My God". Those were the exact words that crept out of my mouth the first time I heard this album. They may be what you will be thinking too when you hear this. I found this band a few weeks ago, but it's a band that's hard to place. One moment, they're throwing out melodic viking metal riffs and in the next, they are engaging in an even more melodic power metal riff! One aspect that's apparent is their apparent influence and appreciation of the vikings, which, if appreciated in a bad way, would make them no better than Bathory or Thyrfing.
Now, onto the true review of this album.
"Arntor" starts with one of the most amazing songs I have ever heard. There are no words to describe this glory of glories. It's 3 minutes and 17 seconds of true and utter wonder; it leaves me wondering what else could follow this 'beginning.' This is by far the most catchy of any intro I have ever listened to. The feeling I get from this music is truly epic; I am a viking warrior, on a journey over the seas of Helgoland, pillaging and plundering all in my path! A good way to imagine this all is to imagine the first riffs of the second song as being a defending Christian garrison against the raids of us viking warriors, and the final riffs of the fourth song as being our victory march on the church of Lindisfarne, and then the scrawling vocals and riffs of "Kampen" as our burning of that said church. The ending, of course, is our return back to our homeland. This is by far the one and only conclusion that can be drawn from this music. It's a true epic, which can only compare to that of the movies Beowulf or the 13rd Warrior.
The growling of the vocalist is some of the best I've ever heard, especially for a viking metal band. The instrumentation is ideal; everything is mixed so well, it all goes together so well. If I may say so, it should be said that the exotic instruments they use in this work are used in a manner which is perfect for this album. They're like a nice walk through a forest, or the waves washing against our gold-ladden ships... so pleasant and wonderful. I really wish they would do more of these instrumental breaks, it's what makes it all that more worthwhile... satisfied. It can't go unsaid that their use of real viking instruments should be the keystone to their success. Afterall:
They... are... vikings.
That's what really makes this album so authentic.
This album shows that these guys have a great future ahead of them. I can only hope that they continue to create works like this, especially after six years of waiting. >:( I would recommend this to every fan of metal, especially those who appreciate death metal, extreme black metal and classical music.
Root - Hell Symphony
Abominatrix wrote:
A dead-end direction - 30%
Written by Abominatrix on April 1st, 2009
With the advent of the Internet and easily transportable digital media, it seems as though metal really has become a global phenomenon. It's now no surprise to hear of bands from obscure parts of the world playing all manner of styles, trying to copy their favourite Norse, English or American groups, for the most part. NO doubt, there were some true and trailblazing pioneers, birthing metal in uncharted and possibly dangerous territories way back in the days when P2P and message boards didn't exist, and people traded cassettes and cobbled together zines with cheap paper and glue. So, when I first heard of Root, I thought to myself, "wow, black metal from a communist country! That's neat! I'm surprised they even know what metal is aside from Black Sabbath and Deep Purple!"
Well, the joke's on me, I guess, because while Root is obviously going for something evil and sinister on "hell Symphony", what we hear is actually pretty far from black metal, and makes me think that they've only been labeled such in retrospect. Obviously, the Czech Republic wants to have its own notoriety within the black metal spectrum, and people always point to a certain cadre of bands, including this one, as progenitors of something groundbreaking and interesting. Well, have you ever heard of Master's Hammer? Dai? Amon Goeth? Stimi Plamenu? Crux? I didn't think so! There's a reason this scene didn't last too long, folks, and there's a reason that people always associate black metal with Norway! Root are supposed to be the real fathers of the "Czech black metal scene", and while this isn't their first album, I'm willing to bet the debut is even less black metal than this one, it being released in 1990 and full of old demo material to boot, from way back when the Iron Curtain was still around and those poor guys were likely to have their degraded, swapped around cassettes confiscated by the KGB or some equivalent thereof. So, not wanting to step on too many toes, I guess, and not having the balls that our murdering and church-burning friends in Norway had, Root decided to play it safe and release what basically amounts to a heavy metal album.
You heard right. On this so-called legendary album, you won't hear frenzied tremolo riffs or drifting, moody and snow-covered harmonies. You won't hear piercing shrieks, and you won't hear blastbeats for more than a few seconds at a time. The production is total shit, but not in the cool way that Darkthroen or Burzum might present. It actually sounds like Root wanted their album to be slick and well produced like Iron Maiden or something, but all the equipment in those old commy studios was faulty and since they couldn't afford to record abroad, they just had to make do with something totally sub-par. The drums in particular have an extremely obnoxious sound to them, most notably the snare, which, when percussed, sounds like a wooden box with rattly chains attached to it. Guitars try to be crunchy, which is definitely the wrong approach for black metal anyway, but in the end just come out seeming ugly and recorded on the cheap. The whole presentation is just baffling, actually, and the terribly phrased English lyrics hinder everything even further. Why are they so obsessed with demons? Does singer Big Boss (hah hahh hah!) think he's King Diamond? He looks really fucking ugly, too, and his moniker belongs in a video game. Each song, until the end, when things get really weird, is dedicated to some devil or demon, and it's as if they just looked through a list of hellish names mentioned in the Bible or "Paradise Lost" maybe, though I doubt they're that literary-minded, and Big Boss drunkenly mumbled some lyrics, which they called the framework for a song. "Satan", which you'd think would be the most colossal hymn to the Dark Lord or something along those lines, isn't even a real song, consisting only of lazy and slow drumming (I hate slow double bass!) and Big Boss talking a whole lot of nonsense in an incomprehensible accent.
There are solos on this album, too, and everybody knows that guitar solos are for rock and heavy metal and are anathema to good black metal. It sounds like Root wants to be Children of Bodom and that's terrible, especially as their guitarist isn't talented like Sexy Alexi and just shreds mindlessly most of the time, though there's a hint of pseudo-spooky melody here and there. The composition is truly all over the place, and reminds me of Metallica's "...and Justice for All", which, when you think about it, was probably a pretty recent revelation to the guys in this band. There are thrashy riffs, slow and incredibly tedious trudging riffs, weird guitar harmonies, acoustic parts, and sudden bursts into frantic speed where the guitarists try to out-pick James Hetfield and fail miserably. There's no rhyme or reason to any of this and any song that does make sense is over pretty quickly and never seems to get anywhere or make any kind of statement. It's as if they read a book on how to write songs and purposefully set out to do everything in opposition to that perfectly sound advice. The album opens with a really long instrumental track (well, Big Boss does mumble something and deliver a nasty cackle more likely inspired by awful Eastern European whisky and unfiltered cigarettes than by something truly demonicat the outset), and before you realise it's an instrumental you might think, "aha, an epic opener! Cool!" ... only there are no lyrics, and it's just a big collection of useless and random riffs that are thrash one minute and doom the next. "Leviathan" is mostly slow and incredibly plodding, causing the eyes to become fastened to the player's time clock, but then goes into some chugging and almost-blasting (the drummer really isn't that fast) that just screams "woohoo, bang your heads guys!" I don't know about you, readers, but if I were threatened by a Leviathan I sure wouldn't be headbanging! "Abadon" is sort of cool and has a song structure that makes sense, but it's only three minutes long, and unfortunately Celtic Frost already did this thing with the tooting horns back in 1986, so it's pretty redundant.
I complained about the opening instrumental, "Beelzebub", a few lines back, but I must sort of retract a bit of negativity here, because the fact that Big Boss doesn't puke his vocals all over it is actually a really good thing. If you're easily convinced by a few catchy rock riffs, you might be tricked into nodding your head with approval as these first seven minutes of your listening experience go by. It was really sneaky of the band to refuse to show off their vocalist's um .. talents in the first piece of music on the album, and make it the longest composition, too! However, after the jangly and out-of-tune-sounding acoustic guitar intro of "belial", the guy starts up, and I've suddenly wondering if I can bare to listen to this anymore in order to tell you people to stay well clear of it. What the hell were these guys thinking, letting this old fat fuck into the band? It's obvious that he doesn't have any more of an idea of what black metal is than the guitarists do, because he switches between a sort of lazy cross between a mumble and a death metal growl, and some kind of awful croaking noise that sounds like a goat being strangled. Oh, and he tries some clean vocals too, and comes off sounding a bit like Layne Staley from Alice in Chains, even harmonising with himself as he sings something that's probably supposed to be evil and scary but just, isn't. Big Boss (god, I can't say that name without giggling) is responsible for all of the atrocious lyrics, and he's obviously no brighter than your average grade-schooler or christian fundamentalist, because, as I implied earlier, they're all about biblical stuff. Another cool thing about Norway is that they finally got beyond the whole Satan schtik and started singing about paganism and culture, which really sets black metal apart as a true art form, separate from and superior to all manner of rock and heavy metal music, which is mostly just out to shock grandmothers by talking about the devil. Do people even believe in the devil in the Czech Republic? I thought religion was banned there or something, at least when the country used to be called Czechoslovakia. I guess Root were trying to be rebellious in their own way, but once again, it reiterates the reason for this whole scene's insular nature and explains why I can't find Root albums at my local record store and why King Diamond never took the band on tour. It's childish and transparent nonsense that anybody with a brain could see through. Nobody cares about your demons, Boss. Go back to your collective farm or wherever it was you came from, because you're obviously no musician.
So, to sum up, this album is something I checked out while looking for some nifty, old-school black metal, and I was really disappointed. What I got was some hodgepodge of heavy metal clichés with a few nods to mainstream rock and an old guy pandering to all the evil satanik kiddies. Stick to Marduk or Burzum if you want real black metal, and remember that most of these cult, old-school albums are obscure for a good reason. The early 90s were a time when black metal hadn't yet really come into its own, and bands like Root were a dime a dozen, claiming to be something they weren't and all the while fooling people into thinking that black metal was just the next step up (or down?) from Alice Cooper.
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