5 Metal album reviews, 2006-2008

AMASEFFER Exodus: Slaves For Life (Inside Out/SPV)

How about an extreme-metal concept album, recorded in Germany by an Israeli band, inspired by Moses’s Exodus from Egypt? Portentous power-bombast for Passover, in other words, with vocals more-narrated-than-sung, in a Virgin Prunes vibrato or Rammstein gutturals or high wailing whine. Ritual chants, clanking chains, Middle Eastern rhythms, and desert atmospherics provide drama and variety; most metal titles are “Ten Plagues” and “Land of the Dead.”

DORNENREICH In Luft Geritzt (Prophecy)

An Austrian extreme-music duo unplugs guitars and cranks up violin for 44 minutes of gorgeous, romantically over-the-top yet spaciously minimal, chamber metal. For long spans, the album feels like a frost-bitten fiddle-and-flamenco hoedown in the bleak winter forest; “Freitanz” goes further, doing a Central European gypsy strut like Gogol Bordello on the night Hell froze over. The album is said to have been “recorded live and without any technical gimmickry at the Villa Stapf, an ancient edifice in Tyrol”; its title translates as Carved In Air. And despite that “reich” in the band’s name, there is no concrete evidence that the eerie Teutonic whispers in compositions like “Unruhe” flirt with either fascism or Satanism. So try not to think about it.

FARMAKON Robin (Candlelight USA)

All kinds of unexpected stuff arises naturally out of these Finns’ monster-metal ugliness: Rush-like prog signatures, math equations worked out on Mars Volta’s chalkboard, free-jazz sax blurts, wild animal sounds. “Helpless” lets a classic rock riff get airy; “A Temporary Death” climaxes seven stretched-out minutes of increasing beauty with gongs from the church belfry; a concluding “Outro” builds from a placid start into an extended guitar jam. Thrash with a rock sense of dynamics – rarer than you’d think. There’s an unexpected sense of humor, too — In “Our Blues,” a Humvee eats somebody’s family..

JEX THOTH Jex Thoth (I Hate)

Depressively psychedelic doom-metal is no uncommon commodity, but this California quintet sounds unusually exquisite. Elephantine riffs all over the place, sure, but they’re offset by vocal uplift from the witchy woman for whom the band is named. The real star, though, might be keyboard player Zodiac, whose organ, synth, and electric piano in tracks like “The Banishment” and the five-part “Equinox Suite” wouldn’t be shamed on an early Uriah Heep LP. Repeated two-note patterns and brief new agey interludes from bouzouki and flute let the music breathe as well. Freak-folk cover “When The Raven Calls” and “Stone Evil” combine for a climactic finale, and the bassist calls himself Grim Jim.

KLABAUTAMANN Our Journey Through The Woods (Vendius)

Maybe to truly feel the lonely mood this Bonn, Germany folk-death metal duo seem to be aiming for, you need to take the CD cover to heart, and imagine that those two sad little cartoon trolls stuck in the middle of nowhere are the two guys in the band — using a timbered sapling to carry that black pot of gruel across the forest floor, or surrounded in snow by wolves biting their troll tails, you feel their pain. All of which somehow makes the ogre-ific growls feel earned, for once. But what really puts the album over is how the rumbling mulch picks up steam for a woodpile jig in the aptly named “Trolldance” and makes way for placid rustic renaissance gloom in tracks like “Rahenmorgan” and the seven-minute finale “Autumn’s Breath.” More than most extreme art-thrash lately, Klabautamann evince a gravity that keeps their ambient parts from disappearing into thin air: “Grey is the sky, blowing is the wind” indeed.

Harp, 2006-2008