Bodom After Midnight - Paint The Sky With Blood EP (Napalm Records) [Richard Oliver]
On 29th December 2020, the metal world was shook with the tragic news that Alexi Laiho had died. Alexi was renowned as one of the finest guitarists in metal and with the formation of Children Of Bodom in 1997 he created pioneering pieces of work in heavy metal music which combined the ferocity of extreme metal with power metal melodies and neoclassical guitar playing. A strew of copycat bands soon appeared and the defining sound that Alexi and Children Of Bodom created still resonates with bands today. Unfortunately in 2019 Children Of Bodom ceased to be but Alexi wasn’t done and along with fellow Children Of Bodom guitarist Daniel Freyberg he formed Bodom After Midnight (named after a song on the classic Follow The Reaper album). Completing the line up was bassist Mitja Toivonen, drummer Waltteri Väyrynen and keyboardist Vili Itäpelto. A few successful shows were played and word amongst the metal community and the Children Of Bodom fanbase was that Alexi and the band were in absolutely ferocious form. And then the tragedy of Alexi’s death hit like a truck. Unbeknownst to many the band had managed to record a small amount of material before Alexi’s tragic death which is presented here as the Paint The Sky With Blood EP.
What is very clear from the Bodom After Midnight material is that Alexi was very much the beating heart of Children Of Bodom as this EP feels very much like a continuation rather than a brand new band. The three songs that make up the EP are two original songs and a cover. The two new songs Paint The Sky With Blood and Payback’s A Bitch very much sounds like prime Bodom sounding like a cross between the material on Hate Crew Deathroll, Are You Dead Yet? and Hexed. The songs have a typical melody and song structure of a Bodom song with plenty of punchiness and catchiness as well as fantastic guitar playing. The third song is a great cover of the Dissection classic Where Dead Angels Lie. Whilst this is a very short EP it is nice to be able to hear Alexi’s final work. It sounds like Alexi was building up something very promising with plenty of potential and continuing the legacy of Children Of Bodom. This EP serves as a fitting farewell and epitaph to Alexi Laiho and the potential heard on his final material makes his death doubly tragic. RIP Wildchild. 7/10
Reach – The Promise Of A Life (Icons Creating Evil Art) [Alex Swift]
Listening through the collected early works of Reach yields mixed reactions. There’s no denying the sense of grandiloquent extroversion on display. Make no mistake, these musicians feel the need to put on a show – a feat they achieve through their ambitious combinations or quirky alternative and pompous yet praiseworthy prog. After having a few years to refine their sound and live up to the lofty expectations set by their first recordings, they’ve come through with The Promise Of A Life– a record which grabs me from its opening notes and refuses to relinquish its grip as it struts from style to style, an oddity to experiment, always keeping the listeners' attention in doing so. Those who have read my reviews know of my taste for the dramatic, even when an album exudes melodrama. However, whether you like your rock more pop-tinged, or abstract and investigational, you will likely find enjoyment in this piece for the way Reach daringly balance the different sensibilities in ways that feel purposeful, unique, and exciting.
New Frontier feels adventure or science fiction inspired, the lashing rhythms and awesome synthesiser and lead melodies lending to a sense of cosmic otherworldliness. Seriously, from the second the mysterious whistling opens the track you’re captivated – this album does not squander a second in that mission. By the time the crooning vocals set in you get a sense of why these musicians appeal to a cross section of pop and avant-garde fans. With a slightly retro flair in the production and the decidedly commanding nature of these compositions, there’s a willingness to pay homage to classic rock in their sound as well. Far from coming across as cliché or contrived though, the constant genre fusions are impressive and thoroughly thought through. Case in point: The Law– with a dance-inspired beat and a sense of strut pervading from start to finish despite the roaring guitars and relentless drumming, the anthem feels different yet completely whole, and worth revisiting from a standpoint of pure songwriting alone!
Young Again has a light-hearted and innocent vibe with jubilant keyboards that brilliantly complement the mood even as the chorus proclaims “this is like a rollercoaster ride. We’ll ride until we’re dead inside”. That’s another aspect I find beguiling – there’s a sense of raucous cheekiness present throughout, yet moments like the sanguine centrepiece of Satellite possess an earnestness that enables you to feel as if the vast harmonies and mercurial melodies are climbing and subsiding in time with your own emotions. That’s what the greatest music tries to do: play with your emotions, while convincing you that it’s the music that’s changing for you.
Continuing the mission to make every song different, Motherland gives the impression of being a swing number from the underworld. A glorious cavalcade of humongous horns, jaunty rhythms, spiralling guitars, and possibly a chorus of kazoos if I heard correctly, drag us into the sinister if incredibly amusing mystique. There’s a speakeasy-style rebelliousness and a willingness to defy expectations here that I love, making this perhaps my favourite moment of the entire experience! Following this, The Seventh Seal adds to the capriciousness, with a piece which despite its short length feels similar to baroque pop with the sombre keys and spacey, echoed touches that further the enigmatic qualities on display. Appropriately though, Higher Ground stands tall as a standout moment, rejoicing in its inspiring chorus and impassioned crescendoing.
On many an album, this would be the brilliant final send-off but it's testament to the determination and cleverness of these musicians that this is only track number seven on a debut imbued with absorbing concepts and intriguing ideas. Cover My Traces is one of the most musically interesting moments precisely because of its minimalistic nature and fascinating use of electronics and recurring phrases to inspire a mood. Subtleties matter to Reach, as they should do to any act that changes genres as frequently as they do! The Streets is another one of my personal favourite anthems and one of those that’s boisterously unashamed to showcase their chops in pure, noisy rock n’roll.
Lastly, Promise Of A Life charms with a sense of lavish grandiosity and piercing emotion that I’d expect from an act that #makes their trademark one of changeability fused with sentimentality, and an optimism that whatever they do next will be extraordinary. On that hope of truly exciting days to come for Reach, we can rely. 9/10
Capra - In Transmission (Metal Blade Records/Blacklight Media Records) [Matt Bladen]
There has been probably too long to wait for this record. Tracked at the end of 2019, recorded by Jai Benoit (Golgothan, Father Rust) and then mixed by Taylor Young (Nails, Twitching Tongues), a little later the pandemic reared its ugly head the beast had to be kept in it's cage as the year progressed. However now in April 2021 Capra are ready to unleash In Transmission on an unsuspecting public. This debut album is a full on assault to the senses from the first stab of a guitar chord, the band come from a State that know a thing or two about hardcore. Capra come from Lafayette, Louisiana and they explode out of the South, arms swinging and teeth gnashing. Their debut record is bursting with hardcore punk and crossover thrash, the instrumental trio of Tyler Harper (guitar), Jeremy Randazzo (drums) and Ben Paramore (bass) ravage every song with biting riffs, pumping grooves and sheer aggression.
Formed by Harper and Randazzo in 2016, Capra was started as a form of catharsis for Harper, something to put his focus and determination into post-rehab. Inspired by bands such as Every Time I Die, Converge and Eyehategod, they finally settled into their current line up adding Paramore on bass and vocalist Crow Lotus. It's Lotus' experiences that very much influence the bands upfront, confrontational lyrics drawn from her experiences of sleep paralysis on the violent Paper Tongues as well as here experiences as both a woman and as the child of an immigrant. Her rage is at the forefront imbibing just the right amount of melody into her anguished screams and acidic sneers. Musically Capra shape a nasty fusion of hardcore beatdowns, blistering punk with elements of death/black metal adding to the maelstrom of noise on these 11 songs that have a D.I.Y ethos but never suffer from a lack of musicianship. In Transmission paints a vivid picture that it's far from A Wonderful Life in the world of this Capra. 8/10
Bloody Hell - The Bloodening (Rockshots Records) [Simon Black]
I’m going to put this out front, because quite frankly, there is no getting away from it. Every year the likes Metal Hammer or Kerrang! online will dust down an repost a top twenty type feature reminding everybody about some of the worst excesses of Heavy Metal album artwork (usually from the 1980’s) to which our beloved genre of music has been a most notable contributor, with the top five always falling to the bands that have had the most subsequent success even if they didn’t feel the love from their labels when these atrocities got first published. It’s a good laugh, most particularly for those of us who lived through that period, as we shrug our shoulders and confess to the fact that we probably own copies of at least half of them.
These features rarely contain anything from this century though, because as a genre we’ve all grown up beyond all this sort of thing now, right? Enter Bloody Hell, with a cover that not only reopens these features for a new century and decade, but may just have managed to premier in the top five, which puts them on a par with Pantera, Alcatraz, Alice Cooper, Anthrax and Black Sabbath. Imagine the troubled kid from Stranger Things drawing his interpretation of the Mind Flayer crossed with Edvard Munch’s The Scream… In crayon…
More importantly though, as with so many of the luminaries above, the musical content is in a completely different league to the cover. I’m guessing that since this Finnish four piece have been around the block a while, that the joke is a shared one, because musically this is blisteringly tightly delivered NWOBHM influenced Traditional Metal although despite an on/off twenty year history this is actually only their second full length album. It’s clearly Classic Metal influenced, but has a lovely fat, crunchy and modern production and mix – when my desk vibrates from the rhythm section’s output on a record, I know that this is an album that’s going to sound heavy as fuck live. Lyrically it’s more Twentieth than Twenty-First Century in subject matter, but that really does not matter, as this is about attitude and a deep love for the music.
At nearly an hour of running time for the dozen tracks, this is not about brevity either, but the album does not drag in the slightest and apart from the odd nonchalant eyebrow raise towards some of the lyrics I cannot fault the songs on here. OK, single Burn Witch Burn, is more than a little cheesy and the keyboard/piano chords sounds a bit out loud and out of place in the mix, but its speedy delivery allows you to move beyond the oddity and just enjoy the ride.
The majority of the rest of the material demonstrates the kind of maturity of writing you would expect of a band that have been around for twenty years (albeit with lengthy breaks) so you get songs that have a great structure, supported by some nifty guitar work and a vocal delivery that although hits some great high clean notes, also delivers gutsy rock’n’roll attitude. It’s got naïve charm and a lot of promise … despite the cover. 6/10