Playlist 7/9/05

What's been OMS for the past week or so.

Leaves Eyes - Vinland Saga
I picked up this album after seeing them supporting Paradise Lost. It's an excellent example of symphonic Euro metal, even if Liv Kristine Espenæs Krull's operatic soprano vocals are possibly an acquired taste. It's a concept album about Vikings, and the lyrics and music certainly evoke images of longships and horned helmets. There's an equal mix of power metal and keyboard-driven ballads, including some atmospheric material sung in Norwegian. I can definitely recommend this album.

Octavia Sperati - Winter Enclosure
Norwegian six-piece Octavia were Paradise Lost's other support band. Unfortunately this album is a bit of a dud. The overall sound is a mix of melodic goth rock and metal, vaguely reminiscent of Poland's Closterkeller, but it suffers from a serious lack of memorable songs. Silge's vocals are too often buried in the mix, and the instrumentation rarely rises above the mediocre. If you like this kind of music, there's a lot of better stuff in this style around.

Paradise Lost - Believe in Nothing
This is not Paradise Lost's best album, marking the point were it seems they couldn't make up their mind whether they wanted to be Depeche Mode or Black Sabbath. Suffers from a lack of good songs as well as a lack of direction, and was weaker than it's predecessors. I'm told their two more recent albums are better, but I have yet to hear them.

Porcupine Tree - In Absentia
This is one of my favourite PT albums, in that it includes just about every element of PT's diverse sound on one disk. There's the Led Zeppelin riffs of "Blackest Eyes", the melodic atmospherics of "Trains" and "The Sound Of Muzak", and the haunting melancholy of "Heatattack In A Layby". This is a good place to start if you want to check the band out.

Blackmore's Night - Shadow of the Moon
A while since I'd spun this disk, and I'd forgotten how good it was; far stronger than later releases. BN's renaissance/new age/soft rock melange can be cheesy and twee in places, 'a high Camembert factor' as HippyDave has said. But on this first album the good material outweighs the bad. Blackmore's guitar work is a reminder of why I liked his music in the first place.

Uriah Heep - Salisbury
The Mighty Heep's second album, recorded all of 35 years ago. Naturally the production and some of the arrangements sound a little dated, but the singles Bird of Prey (with the famous 'Norwegian Fjord vocals') and the acoustic chant 'Lady in Black' still feature in the live set. Highlight has to be the 17 minute neo-classical title track, with Ken Hensley's Hammond organ duelling with brass and woodwind sections.