Last November, everyone’s favourite UK goth metal band Paradise Lost performed via a live stream. Well received by fans, the show can now be enjoyed by a wider audience via an upcoming CD and blu ray release.
‘Live At The Mill’ will be released via Nuclear Blast on 16th July, but you can watch a clip of the band performing ‘Darker Thoughts’ below. Full details of the upcoming release, along with confirmed tour dates – virus allowing – can be found in the following press release.
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Featuring six bands and a selection of retro metal covers, this compilation is an interesting prospect. None of the featured acts will mean very much to most people living outside Canada – or even anyone living too far outside of Ontario – but in a couple of instances, the bands’ choice of material involves songs that will have spent decades gracing millions of stereos since the 1980s. By choosing a couple of very familiar 80s classics, Invicta and Cathartic Demise both stand a fair chance of picking up a new fan or two via this release – and at the end of the day, that’s what every hard working band wants…and needs. By recycling early nineties death metal, both Aepoch and Raider can seem more marginal, but their featured performances capture some more than reasonable extreme metal chops.
A new band for 2021, Herzschlager capture a brilliant hardcore sound where the speed and bowel rattling elements of crustpunk collide with the crunch of classic hardcore, and the aggressive side of bands like Cancer Bats battles against a few early Machine Head-ish breakdowns. It isn’t exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from two members of Allfather – one of the UK’s best extreme metal acts – but, then again, what are side projects for, if not an excuse to branch out and experiment?
In the summer of 2020, thrash/rap metal/crossover legends made their long overdue return with the ‘Violition’ EP. The band’s first new studio release since 1992, at least two of it’s songs were “classic” Mordred, heavy on the riffs, but even bigger on the grooves.
Vocalist Herbie Langhans is one of those people who keeps himself more than busy. He spent most of the 90s and 00’s as frontman with power metal band Seventh Avenue, but after that band’s split, he found work as vocalist with a succession of other acts, eventually landing the job as frontman with melodic metallers Firewind. His performances on their self-titled 2020 release more than showed him to be a good fit for the band. With Sonic Haven – his new project for 2021 – he approaches a selection of power metal tunes, a whole world of trad 80s metal and, in one case, something that sounds like an overspill from his melodic rock band Radiant, to create the kind of debut that often feels like a culmination of all of the music he’s helped create so far. In trad metal terms, the best tunes certainly wouldn’t feel too out of place on one of Saxon’s later albums, but with a much bigger sound and a strong power metal undercurrent, ‘Vagabond’ isn’t just an easy trad metal rehash – there are times it feels larger than life.