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The Batlord

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Trollheart

And so to July, the best month of the year because it was the month that the momentous event of my birth was visited upon the world! So who released albums in this month, and is worth checking out? Anyone I know? Not really. So let's try these guys.

Hammer of the Witches --- Cradle of Filth --- 2015 (Nuclear Blast)

Introduction: I know very little about this band, beyond having heard their name, but I am intrigued to see that two of the band members' surnames are Filth (whether that's real or contrived I don't know). This is their eleventh album and features a new female singer with the brilliant name of Lindsay Schoolcraft!

Track-by-track

1. Walpurigs Eve: Which is I believe the night of the witches, when they all dance around and worship whatever. Good medieval style intro, short track, instrumental with violins, cellos, piano and a sort of vocal chorus , very dramatic and builds to
2. Yours immortally: Where the album really gets going with a breakneck guitar and hammering drums, the vocal a sort of shriek with another one growling, and it's all very heavy and extreme, making the likes of Motorhead look dull and plodding by comparison. Not much to recommend here I'm afraid. The guitar work is excellent and there's some nice orchestration; it gets a bit better towards the end, and Lindsay seems to make her first vocal contribution.
3. Enshrined in crematoria: A little bit grindier, then it kicks up in speed again. Basically more of the same I feel. Yeah, didn't get anything from that.
4. Deflowering the maidenhead, displeasuring the goddess: Now there's a long title! Good orchestral/keyboard intro with some nice guitar before it takes off into the stratosphere. Again some very good guitar, some of it quite melodic. I think this earns itself a Green.
5. Blackest magick in practice: Meh, it's okay but not anything that special.
6. The monstrous Sabbat (Summoning the coven): Now this is different. Very low-key, seems to be instrumental, I think that may be harp I'm hearing, plus orchestral backing. Like finding a fifty euro note among all your tenners. Lovely.
7. Hammer of the Witches: Big heavy marching tune, strident, arrogant, fearless, as the title would suggest. Very dramatic with great orchestration. Gets going then on punching guitar. Nice. Good turn by Lindsay Schoolgirl there on the vocals near the end. Lot of power as you would expect.
8. Right wing of the garden triptych: Oh look! She's taking lead vocals on this one. That's a nice change. Great cello work. Did I mention I love cellos? Some pretty good musical arrangements going on here, behind the growling vocals and shredding.
9. The vampyre at my side: This one is just all over the place. The vocals are so shrill it's almost like a screaming rant at times.
10. Onward Christian soldiers: I jsut can't get into this one at all, despite some really effective guitar melodies close to the end. It simply does nothing for me.
11. Blooding the hounds of Hell: Given the hard-as-fuck title, it's oddly got a lovely slow cello and violin intro, with steady, measured drumming and a church organ. Only just over two minutes and I assume an instrumental which closes the album almost as it opened.

Conclusion: It's the old problem. I never thought Cradle of Filth would be something I could get into, but you know, if it wasn't for those distracting mad vocals I could maybe give these guys a shot. There's certainly a lot of talent there, and a lot more melody than I had expected to find. Pretty impressed overall.

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Trollheart

What is it with 1983? Oh yeah: I was twenty. Well, here we are again with another album that, at the time, was pretty damn influential on my music tastes. Now, I know there are the purists among you out there laughing and shaking your head and saying “AOR, man! AOR!” and it's true that this album did chart higher than any of their others and push the band in a more radio-friendly direction, to the point where they really lost touch with their metal roots completely as time went on. But I bet most of you have this in your collection, don't you?

Pyromania --- Def Leppard --- 1983 (Vertigo)

The first album to feature Phil Collen (no, NOT Collins!) on guitar, and the Sheffield band's third album in total, this certainly raised a band who were well known but hardly superstars to the level of world acclaim. The album hit number two, their highest ever, and gave them a number one single. Pyromania does walk a line between harder heavy metal and softer AOR/pop-rock, but it's fair to say there's enough in there to satisfy all but the pickiest of metalheads. It opens on “Rock! Rock! (Till you drop)” with a big heavy guitar riff and then you can hear the more commercial chords slipping in for a moment, but when Joe Elliot growls in with the vocal you are in no doubt that he's in a metal mood. The crystal-clear production of supremo Robert John “Mutt” Lange is evident here from the off, and every track is pristine and perfect in terms of production.

This does not however take away from the raw metal sound of the songs (well, most of them) and Collen does much to stake his claim as the “new guy”, while with Steve Clark and Pete Willis they're now a triple guitar assault, and it shows. The first indication that they may at this point have one eye on America comes with the first single, “Photograph”. I mean, it's heavy enough and one of my favourites on the album, but it's definitely got that made-for-the-charts structure, right down to the “Whoa-oh”s in the leadup to the chorus, the chorus itself, and the slightly toned down guitars. Even Elliott dials it down a notch, making his voice more a screech than a growl. It's no surprise to find that Lange has a hand in the writing of much of the material here, doing what he did for Heart and would later do for The Cars. The man knows how to write a catchy tune, that's for sure.

And it was a success. “Photograph” went to number one (in the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks) although oddly was largely ignored in the UK, not even breaking into the top forty. “Stagefright” returns to the pure rock and metal of their earlier albums like Hysteria, while still throwing in a chorus commercial enough to keep the radio happy. Really nice solo, though who's playing it I could not tell you as we have three candidates to choose from . There's a kind of Bon Jovi/cowboy feel to “Too late for love”, and you can tell it was written to be a single, and so it was. It's pretty formulaic but it's reasonable fun. There are some good performances on it, and as it qualifies (barely) as the ballad on the album, (sort of; see further) at least we don't have to suffer another. But there is good news.

The absolute standout of the album comes next, in the six-minute “Die hard the hunter”. If you bought the album and thought it was crap up to then (and much of it is) then this one track would probably allow you to justify shelling out for the thing. A big, bombastic number, it opens with the sound of helicopters, machine-gun fire, air-raid sirens and bombs going off before a dark guitar, introduces a pretty good sort of phased vocal, with some great harmonies, but just when you think “Oh crap! Another ballad!” it stops for a moment as the title is sung and then percussion pounds in with the three guitars amping everything up, the pace picks up and it begins to swagger. It marches along with purpose and menace, and a great solo in the fourth minute. The song is about a soldier returning from an unnamed war (Vietnam maybe) who has PTSD and sees enemies everywhere. When Elliott sings ”YOu got no enemy, no front line/ The only battle's in the back of your mind” I'd say there are a lot of Iraqi and Afghan vets who understand.

Maybe it's a shade simplistic, but for me it's far and away the best track on the album. It shows what Def Leppard could do when they really tried, and if they had written more songs like this then maybe they wouldn't be as reviled as they are today. The same basic guitar line introduces “Foolin'”, the other ballad, with some good vocal harmonies and a menacing guitar. This is considered a ballad, but for me it doesn't fit the criteria. It gets too fast and powerful for the chorus, which is in itself very lacklustre. Another standout is “Rock of ages”, which returns to the pure rock ethos, grinding out the chorus with fervour and it has to be fair a hook to die for, not surprising to see that it was also released as a single and pretty much followed the success of “Photograph”, if not the other two singles.

The riff, to be entirely fair, is pretty much ripped off from that other single too, and Elliott's attempt to kind of rap actually works, and he manages to slip in the album title as well as many other rock cliches, such as “I love rock and roll”, “Long live rock and roll” “We got the power, got the glory” and “Better to burn out than fade away”. For all that, it's catchy as fuck and as I say one of the best tracks on the album. It just sounds like the guys had a lot of fun recording it, and of course would be a staple of their live set for a long time to come. The striking of a match accompanied by Elliott's nasty little laugh at the end is a good touch. As ever though, there's a tipping point, a moment at which the album starts to slide, and for me this is it.

I never really remember the last three tracks. I can tell you all about any of the other songs prior, but “Comin' under fire” does nothing for me with its AOR-like vocal harmonies and its rather simple melody, to say nothing of harking both back to “Die hard the hunter” and forward to “Billy's got a gun”. Decent solo, but once the song has played I'm sure that again I will forget it. The almost Queen-like harmonies at the end are a joke. “Action! Not words” is worse though. At least a little thought was put into the song before it, but this? It just sounds like they cherry-picked from all their favourite rock songs, jammed them all together, threw a title on it and walked off. I mean, ”I'll be the hero, you be the star/ With your wine and your caviar”? Really? Anyone knows you drink champagne with caviar! Philistine! Seriously though, a lyric like that did not give the song much of a chance, did it?

I always feel it's important for an album to end well, as the final track is the one you end up humming as you put the album away, switch off your media player, go to the next selection, or whichever way you listen to music, and to be fair, “Billy's got a gun” has a stride and an arrogance to it that is somehow endearing. There's a drama and a pathos in it that makes it stand out a little from the last two songs, and yeah, now that I listen to it --- I haven't heard this album in yonks --- it's a pretty decent closer.

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

1. Rock! Rock! (Till you drop)
2. Photograph
3. Stagefright
4. Too late for love
5. Die hard the hunter
6. Foolin'
7. Rock of ages
8. Comin' under fire
9. Action! Not words
10. Billy's got a gun

If you want to hear real Def Leppard, I guess listen to “On through the night” or “High and dry”, but this was my first experience of the band at a time when I was sort of transitioning through heavy metal towards progressive rock and more standard rock, and I was quite impressed with it. Listening to it now, with the benefit both of age and of the knowledge of how the band changed direction, I can see it's very much a flawed album. However there's still enough there to keep me happy, and some of these songs stand as real classics, even if the album could not make such a claim.

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Trollheart

As we move further into Metal Month III, it's time once again to head on down to that dark cavern of possibilities, hit the button and wonder what the dark dice will roll for us. An unsigned band with no demo tape? A band who recorded one album in 1978 and then split up? A well-known band who play music I hate? Or something good? Yes, it's time to return, for the penultimate time, to


And it would seem that right away we have a winner! Okay, it's yet more black metal (are there no progressive or power metal bands to be found here?) but at least they have albums and are signed to a label.

Name: Barshasketh
Nationality:: New Zealand
Subgenre: Black Metal
Born: 2009
Lineup: Krigeist (Guitar, Bass, Vocals) (F)
GM (Guitars)
BB (Bass)
BH (Drums)
Albums: Defying the Bonds of Cosmic Thraldom (2010), Sitra Achra (2013) and Ophidian Henosis (2015)
Live albums: None
Collections/Boxets: None

No information to hand I'm afraid, but it is interesting to note that of the three albums on offer here, both GPM and Spotify have the current one available. So I guess we're going with that, then.

Ophidian Henosis --- Barshasketh --- 2015 (Blut and Eisen Productions)

I've managed to piece together enough information on the title to assume it means either “Oneness or unity with the snake”, “Snake unity” or “Unified snake/serpent” or something along that line. Just as well too, as each of the seven tracks is labelled as part I, II, III etc of the title, so we have “Ophidian henosis part I”, Ophidian henosis part II” and so on. Now that we've got that out of the way, what's the album actually like?

Actually starts off quite nice, with an introspective and ominous guitar, which of course is soon battered away by a harder one and thundering drums, plus the trademark screechy vocal, but all in all there's still some melody retained, and compared to last week's selection this is positively musical! Fast, but not breakneck fast, with a nice guitar riff running through it as we move through part I and it slows down in the fourth minute to a rather nice kind of Egyptian theme, the vocal fading out. It comes back in of course, but the guitars stay slow and melodic, and now we're moving into the final minute. Romping and cantering to the end, and into Part II, where a faster guitar takes the tune, very melodic. Even when the vocal comes in the guitar remains very tuneful, slowing in the second minute, with an almost progressive tilt, really melodic and actually quite beautiful in its way.

I'd just like to take a moment here to applaud whoever wrote the lyrics, at least the lyric for this song, part II. Generally I find black metal lyrics somewhat dour and repetitive, to say nothing of formulaic: praising Satan, cursing humanity, summoning demons, that sort of thing. But here in this song it seems the writer envisages himself (and remember, this is just my interpretation; could be totally wrong) climbing up a hill with his body dragging behind him --- a metaphor for his sins? --- while he watches others rush off into the light and is unable to join them, because that would mean cutting the ties with his body, perhaps seen as an admission of faith? He can't do this, as he says in the final lines ”My dragging body becomes heavy/ As the detritus builds up/ If only I had the will to sever that golden cable/ To float at ease towards the self.”

The really interesting thing here is that in his world, the writer sees his goal above, not below, and identifies it to be “the self”, while below, people weaker than he fall towards the “light of apathy” and allow themselves to be drawn in. His is a harder climb, but with it would seem a greater reward at its end, and here no mention is made either of God or Satan; it's simply a psychological view, climbing towards the self, towards knowledge and fulfillment, instead of letting yourself slide backwards and down into the welcoming arms of warmth and apathy.

These are not, to me, black metal lyrics. Yes, they contain a certain hatred --- well, more a bitter pity really --- for humanity, but so far I've heard no praise of any deity, and it all seems to be very much more a cerebral understanding of things. The music is also not really what I'd call typical of this subgenre, in fact the only thing in my mind that makes this black metal are the vocals. The guitar work is at times almost neoclassical on an Yngwie scale, very impressive, much much better than I had expected. If I had bet my house on how this was going to sound (and if I owned my house, which I don't) I would be living on the streets now. Big surprise, and a pleasant one too. Honestly, so far I haven't heard these guitars be anything but melodic.

Part III slows everything down with a big grinding push, but then it picks up with rattling drums and a really nice riff from the guitar, again very spiritual lyrics, while part IV is faster but has at times an almost swaying quality to the music, and as we move into part V there's that progressive feel again, though that doesn't last as the tempo ups considerably. It's still very melodic though. At times it develops into something approaching a power metal canter, then in the fifth minute it crashes down to a sedate, stately march then speeding up with a lot of drama and excitement for part VI, with a nice chiming sort of instrumental break in the middle.

And that leaves us with part VII, where the circle is completed. In part I the lyric was ”The only true defeat is surrender/The only true death is submission/ There are no martyrs here/ Ours is the path of burning sorrow.” Here at the end that lyric is repeated but the last line is replaced with ”Our is the path of glorious triumph”. With a dark and ominous melody we reach the end of this quite remarkable album.

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

Ophidian Henosis, Pt I
Ophidian Henosis, Pt II
Ophidian Henosis, Pt III
Ophidian Henosis, Pt IV
Ophidian Henosis, Pt V
Ophidian Henosis, Pt VI
Ophidian Henosis, Pt VII

I'm extremely impressed by this album, especially as I had not in the least expected to be. I guess that's a salutatory lesson in judging a book by its cover. I'm still not sure I'd classify this as a black metal album, but what I would call it is a really great album, an excellent surprise and one of my triumphs in the long time I've been doing this section. I had hoped that by choosing random bands I would get to know of ones I would otherwise never have heard of, and maybe even get into some of them. That hasn't really happened. Until now.

It may be (though I'd have to check my records) be the first to receive a rating of

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Trollheart

1996 saw three collaborations with Anders, on Heavy Machinery (also featuring Allan Holdsworth), Red Shift and the second Johansson Brothers album (now shortened to just Johansson) Sonic Winter, and he returned to lend his skills to his old friend Yngwie for the guitar maestro's ninth album, a tribute to his influences and heroes. Inspiration only featured him on two tracks, though even at that I don't know how the guy got the time to play in all these bands and on all these albums, unless he was cloning himself! Oh yeah, and at this point he joined Stratovarius to play on their fifth album, Episode, and he is still with them today.



1997 saw the release of his third solo album, Fission, and the sixth Stratovarius album, Visions, then 1998 was another busy year. He returned to work with Snake Charmer on their Boogaloo, played on Itä-Saksa's second album Let's Kompromise and worked with prog metal band Mastermind on their fifth album, Excelsior. Stratovarius's Destiny also saw the light of day this year. 1999 saw him play on Snake Charmer's Benny Jansson's second album Flume Ride as well as turn out the final Johansson album, The Last Viking.

The new millennium then began for him with the release of Stratovarius's eighth album, Infinite and he also lent his talents again to Mastermind on the album Angels of the Apocalypse


then in 2001 it was Einstein's Einstein Too, a tribute album to Argentinian hard rockers Rata Blanca with La Leyenda Continua and the reunion album from Silver Mountain, Breakin' Chains. No new Stratovarius album till 2003, so he kept himself busy by recording with Rhode Island guitarist Andy West's Rama 1 and helping his good friend Arjen Lucassen on his Star One: Space Metal project, as well as returning with Benny Jansson to Save the World.
[img]hhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/SpaceMetalStarOne.jpg[/img]
But as 2003 dawned, Stratovarius released not one, but two albums, with Elements Pt 1 hitting the shops in January, followed by Elements Pt 2 in November. You'd think that was enough to keep him busy, but no: he also worked on Sonata Arctica's Winterheart's Guild, took part in the Barilari project, an offshoot of Rata Blanca, and was involved in one of the (in my opinion) worst ever metal opera albums ever, Aina's Days of Rising Doom.


2004 then saw him back with Mastermind for their To the World Beyond album, and also helping out Watchtower guitarist Ron Jarzombek's solo project Spastic Ink on their second album, Ink Compatible. In 2005 Stratovarius released their eleventh album, which they saw fit to self-title for some reason, and Jens also worked on the Kamelot album The Black Halo, and somehow also got time to perform live with Russell Allen's Atomic Soul.

Now, after all that work it seems Jens may have taken something of a break, or maybe not, but I can't dig up any activity for the years 2006 – 2008. Hey, maybe he was sleeping! Probably needed it! 2009 brought Stratovarius's twelfth album Polaris and he was also reunited with his brother Anders in Hammerfall's No Sacrifice, No Victory.

2010 saw him called up for action to play keys on Avantasia's fifth album Angel of Babylon, and he also lent his talents to Amberian Dawn's End of Eden. 2011 and 2012 seem to have been relatively quiet for him, with only Stratovarius's Elysium in the former and Amberian Dawn's Circus Black in the latter year. 2013 brought yet another Stratovarius album, their fourteenth, as Nemesis hit the shelves, and he also helped Timmo Tolkki again (Avantasia is his project, in case you weren't aware) with his Avalon project's first album Land of New Hope.

Finally, coming right up to date, this year Stratovarius released their fifteenth album, Eternal, but not happy with just contributing to that, Jens has also played on Finnish power metal supergroup Cain's Offering's second album Stormcrow.


Jens is now the same age as I am (fifty-two) and I make that a total of sixty albums he has played on in his career since 1983. That doesn't take account of any number of live performances he may have taken part on that either were not made into albums or are not recorded in the various discographies I have studied for this article, or that he simply has not been credited for. It also leaves to one side any videos/DVDs he may have contributed to, earlier records he may have played on or bands he may have played in before 1983, or anything else I may have missed in what I hope was a reasonably exhaustive exploration of this man's career in music, most of it metal-related.

I'm sure he has decades more in him and who knows? He may play on another sixty albums before he hangs his keyboard up for good. All I can say is that if there's one musician who doesn't know the meaning of rest, and who has contributed more to the overall prog and power metal scene, then please show me him because I am completely staggered by the workrate of this man. I know one thing for certain: we have not in any way heard the last of Jens Johansson!

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grindy

I'm extremely impressed that you are able to understand BM lyrics so well.

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A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

Trollheart

Don't be: I was reading off a lyric sheet. I usually have to do this, as apart from anything else they're usually pretty hard to make out!

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grindy

*strikes TH from his list of people he looks up to*

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A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

The Batlord

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