Although billed as a prog metal band, Greece’s Fragment Soul are a world away from the genre’s typical Dream Theater and Threshold wannabes. On their 2024 EP ‘Galois Paradox’ they share a metal based sound that’s atmospheric and gloomy; a sound that shares parallels with a few of prog metal’s moodier traits, but at the same time, dares to be quite different. Although the release is short at just twenty seven minutes, the material still finds time to focus on various themes that link the tracks together as a whole: hope, love, loss, and “the chaos of thought” – although in this case, the shared concepts do not necessarily make this an obvious “concept” piece with a narrative flow. The songs can be enjoyed individually, and in some ways, are actually better when approached in such a way.
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Listen: Absinthe Green cover The Spice Girls ‘Viva Forever’
In the summer of 2024, Absinthe Green’s ‘Give The Devil His Due’ was given some well deserved re-promotion. Although the track was two years at that point, it hadn’t really connected with a UK crowd. If it happened to be your first exposure to the Greek rock band, it certainly wasn’t a bad place to dive in. The track’s tonal shift from classic sounding doom into a driving hard rock riff showed off the band’s range of rock sounds very naturally, and although the featured vocal could’ve perhaps been a little sharper, the bulk of the track shared a great melodic feel.
THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #61
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting mp3s and individual tunes that’ve landed in our inbox over the previous few weeks. In proper Singles Bar tradition, this week’s column covers a lot of musical ground by taking in country and a couple of singer songwriters alongside some extreme metal. There’s even time to introduce a new rock band. It’s unlikely that everything here will appeal to everyone, but as always, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
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TANGO WITH LIONS – The Light
After a five year recording break, ‘The Light’ marks the return of one of Greece’s most popular English speaking bands, Tango With Lions. With core sounds rooted within the early mid 90s, Tango With Lions are keeping the flame of European dreampop alive…or so it would seem if you were to only listen to the first few tracks of this 2018 comeback disc. ‘The Light’ presents lots of floaty, dreamy alternative sounds – ’tis true – but it ploughs deeper into bits of alt-folk than most dreampop acts would consider, or even dare.
EDxKEMPER – Cut Her Head And Love Her
Back in 1986 when the seeds of grindcore were sown, it seemed to take extreme music to a whole new level. Often with a raw sound and fairly low budget, the fusion of extreme thrash metal and blistering punk sounds in the hands of bands like Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror created something almost beyond music – a form of short and sharp brutality that was utterly visceral. For something that seemed so niche, grindcore flourished with scenes popping up all over the globe. With bands like NAILS keeping it alive in the twenty first century, almost thirty years on from Napalm Death’s genre-defining ‘Scum’, it couldn’t just be written off as a novelty.
Greek grinders EDxKEMPER are absolutely devastating on their 2016 release ‘Cut Her Head and Love Her’, as they mix the brief bursts of noise from those genre pioneers with more of a crust punk aspect and some extreme metal heaviness for good measure. What’s perhaps most impressive here – without anything resembling actual songs – are the production values. Whereas you might expect something of this nature to hang on to some fairly primitive origins – much in the way an early Crass record could be seen as a snapshot of an afternoon – the production/mix on this disc is stunning.