Key

The Greatest Show on Earth is easily the best album Nightwish have released so far. The track by the same name is also easily the best track they've ever done. The whole album is fantastic the more you listen to it.

The Batlord

Damned by faint praise.

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Trollheart

Um, the album is called Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I might get more into it on other listens, but definitely up the final track I was not sold.
And incorrect too.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Key

I don't know what this means.

The Batlord

Nightwish ****ing sucks, so saying that it's their best album is like saying that it's better than getting shot in the stomach.

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Key

Sorry, got album title wrong. I had just woken up.

Trollheart

Members' Top Ten Lists
Okay, so it's on to Ninetales' list, which begins with this cheery specimen, described by himself as “depressing as all hell”. Nice.

Blood of the Hermit --- Mortualia --- 2010

Well there are only five tracks, but every one of them runs over ten minutes, so we're still looking at nearly an hour here. Still, after only twenty-odd (very odd!) minutes of Zorn I'm ready to listen to, well, just about anything else. Hey, at least the music is great. Vocals are terrible of course, but I'm just kind of shutting them out. He's only screaming anyway and there are only about nine lines of lyric so we shouldn't hear too much from him. Oh of course it's a one-man outfit; some guy called Shautrag does, well, everything, so even if I hate his singing I have to give him kudos for the music.Which I'm really enjoying. Also, why are all the songs labelled “E” for explicit? I read no words on the lyric sheet I would consider such...

I love the way that, although the lyrics are depressing as hell indeed, the music is not doomy really, not slow, not funereal, actually quite uptempo in comparison. Second track's a little repetitive, though I do dig the riff. I suppose in essence though this album suffers from the same flaw I've seen in some of Frownland's, and that is that I really don't remember and can't distinguish tracks. It's kind of almost like one long continual flow of music from beginning to end. At least it's good music though! To be fair, “Sinister shine” has a really nice melody to it, that counteracts the mad screaming of our mate Shagrag. Kind of a finality to the closing track. Overall a very good album, which I didn't find depressing at all. Lyrically, yes of course; all he sings about is death and suicide and the futility of life. Maybe he should try looking on the bright side. And whistling. No, with a voice like that, perhaps not. His lyrics make it hard to raise a smile. But the music certainly did.

So on to his number nine album. Ah goddamn it to hell! A fucking double album! Do you people not realise how much work I'm putting in here?? Curse you all to the bleakest, autotuned pop depths! Gahhh!

Verräter --- Leviathan --- 2002

It's a compilation, and I really should not allow those, you know, but I didn't specify so I guess I have to bend over and take it. Sigh. Okay, well the first thing I can even distinguish among all the noisy generic black metal is when we get to the second track, “Sucking at the teat of revenge”, where it goes kinda bluesy for a few moments, with a more sad, pathetic vocal line than the raving angry one he seems to be specialising in up to then. It's gonna be a long night! Well now, “In this slaveship” starts off nice, very slow and sort of doomy with a nice guitar riff, almost atmospheric at times. Yeah, this one is pretty good. Next one's not bad either. I could get used to this. Maybe. If only there wasn't so much to get through! Oh well, at the time of writing I'm ahead of the game, so I suppose...

Pretty atmospheric and dark for “Shed this skin” and then “King of province: glacial” is a ten-minuter but starts really well. Ah yeah but I'm wrong, it's not good. It's fucking excellent! Really like this one! Almost speed metal at times, then dips into atmospheric, traditional, even progressive. Great stuff. Gets a bit monotonous after that, but then “Sklaverai” gets me interested again. Even get a “clean” vocal! For a while, anyway. Some pretty damn fine guitar too. “Cruelty juggernaut” certainly powers along like one, but also manages to have a really catchy, thrash metal melody, while the opening of “White devil, black metal” is all evil sounding with a dark, nasty voice and the ending is almost Country? “Opaque” is strangely relaxed with a really nice guitar line and even the vocals are tolerable. “The sinking” even has some bloody operatic ones! “Force the hand of evilution” (see what he did there?) is also something of a surprise.

You know, vocals aside (and even they're not the worst I've ever heard) this is really quite listenable music, which is not something I really expect from Black Metal, especially Scandinavian Black Metal. I'm not actually saying I'd spin it again for fun, but it hasn't turned out to be the ordeal I had envisioned for the most part. “Carrion” and “It came in whispers” are particularly impressive, and I can make out some of the words in “Of wolves lineage, we are bond” even if the title is grammatically all over the place. Good closer and a good album, even if it is a double. Quite surprised really.

Number eight caused me some problems, and I had to wait till much later than expected before I could tackle it. Why? Because it’s over two hours long!

Hin-fort --- Trist --- 2007

I’m not joking, by the way! The first track alone is one hour long! I guess we’d call it dark ambient metal, might have been a contender for a spot on “What’s that all about?” this year. Dark and atmospheric start to the opening track, the infamous “Hin”, and I won’t be surprised if it takes ages to get going, as after all how do you extend a single track to an hour? Well unsurprisingly we’re a mere five minutes in and nothing much has happened. Talk about building an atmosphere! In another world this would probably be a great darkwave or whatever album; nothing Metal about it yet, but I’m sure it will kick in at some point, probably with some harsh screamed vocals or battering guitars. Up to twelve minutes now, and though there have been little variations --- keyboard flourishes, little scraps of guitar --- the basic sound has not really changed, apart from becoming perhaps louder and a little fuller. From my very very limited experience of same, this seems like a Drone Metal album.

Oh hold on, something’s happening. Music is fading down, and a voice is speaking --- not singing, speaking, and very intelligibly too --- as if it’s narrating something. This is Tristan, the only member of Trist (ah, I get it now). This was unexpected, I must say. I felt the big droning intro was setting me up for an aural assault, but at the moment I don’t know what to think. We’re now in the fourteenth minute. Who knows what will happen between this and the sixtieth? Ah, here comes the frenetic guitar attack with added drums, yet somehow it seems to fit in with, not blow apart the rising drone, which is still there in the background. The voice has stopped by now, as it happens. The guitar has pretty much taken over with the hammering drums and we’re moving into minute twenty. A third of the way through. There’s definitely though a sense of cohesion about this track; it’s not just noise or angry guitars or one droning line --- well it is, but it all seems to mesh together really well.

Either some snarling now or a bass horn, can’t tell which. Heading into the thirtieth minute now, and I think, though I can’t be sure, that I hear a change in the chords, as in, there’s a very slightly different melody emerging? Might be imagining it. I’m enjoying it so far though. There’s a very definite melody threading all through this piece, it’s just a little hard to pin it down due to the pounding guitar being so front and centre in the mix, but I hear a lot going on behind it. Thirty-six minutes in and the guitar suddenly drops back, the drums stop and synth takes the main melody, elongating it out like a mobius strip stretching out across time itself. Talk about expansive! The voice is back. It’s talking about perceptions of reality and so on. The music is totally fading down now, and Tristan is talking about space and how it evolves.

Now the guitar pounds back in with the percussion, taking us into the fortieth minute and generally speaking, the melody more or less picks up where it began, which is no bad thing as it’s a really nice one, and it’s very odd because you would think that after three quarters of an hour at this stage it would be getting stale and repetitive, but somehow it isn’t. And the time has flown too. Only fifteen minutes to the end of the track. Never thought I’d say that! Mind you, another hour then to go for the rest of the album. An immersive experience to be sure.

We’ve now moved on to the second track (!) and it seems to be generally more of the same long drawn-out hum or drone; this one is a mere four minutes long, though to be honest from what I’m hearing it could be a continuation of the previous hour-long one. Oh wait, he’s talking again. Seems he’s some sort of magician and has invited a woman up on the stage, with the chilling challenge “You are not afraid of death?” She’s counting now, and getting very upset. Not sure what’s going on here. Now she’s screaming in terror or panic (probably both) and the track is over. Next it’s the sound of rolling thunder then that humming synth/guitar is back. This track is over eight minutes long. It seems to be pretty much the one rising tone all the way through. Then “Hilfe” is a short one, with female voices and perhaps film clips, whispering, shouting, crashing. The next three are all long, nine minutes, sixteen and thirteen respectively. If anything of note happens I'll let you know.

Nothing I can write about really. Atmospheric, ambient, droney, but essentially more or less the same (at least to my ears) all the way through. Clips from I guess horror movies with sort of ambient backing. The final track eventually has some nice music I can talk about, with a piano line and some acoustic guitar I think, interspersed with the sounds of people running and screaming, rain lashing down and finally we’re out.

It’s not like this is not a great album, but I found it quite a slog to describe, as for much of the time the same thing is happening just with little variations here and there. I’d describe it as an album that’s great to listen to, not so easy to review, at least relatively succinctly as I try to do here.

Number seven on his list then is this:

Onward to Golgotha --- Incantation --- 1992

Another band I know nothing about. “The soundtrack to Hell”, says Ninetales, no doubt with an evil smile on his lips, but we'll see. At least it's a manageable size, ten tracks coming in at just over forty minutes. Yeah, this is not for me. We're on to track four and it's just a mess of thundering guitars and a vocal so low it's totally impossible to make out anything he's saying, assuming he's not just growling. Yeah, there's nothing here for me. Just downtuned guitars that seem mostly to be playing the same chords, no solos, no breaks, and the voice of a guy who sounds like he wishes he hadn't had that second curry.

Totally bored, and trying to get something from this turd, I checked out the lyrics, but nothing there either. Standard sub-Slayer material, nothing I haven't read before. In fairness, sometimes the guitars wind up and fly rather than plod along, but it's not enough to engage my interest for any more than a few seconds. The soundtrack to Hell? Maybe, if you're forced to listen to it.

I'm done with this, on autopilot now just waiting for it to end. Hope the next one is better, which would not be hard. Interestingly (perhaps the only point of interest on the whole album) there's a bonus track (which I did not listen to; why extend the misery any more than I need to?) which is called “Eternal torture”. Very appropriate.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

I guess "damned by faint praise" would be something like Hitler telling you you're a great Nazi, or a guitarist claiming he's as "good" as the one in Nickelback...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

The real sin of this album.

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Trollheart

Apart from having to listen to it...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018