For reasons unknown to me, I've recently developed something of a fascination with these hysterical media types of the past that sought to demonized and destroy music, P&P RPG's, video games, or any other relatively harmless forms of escapist entertainment they perceived as a threat. In the 1980's the godfather of these witch hunts was a man I'm sure many of you have heard of, cursed the name of, or generally despised; Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo has had his fair share of media mishaps (Google Geraldo's Vault) but one of the most detrimental was his involvement in perpetrating Satanic Panic. 

For those of you too young to remember, Satanic Panic was a dark period of the 80's (When wasn't though?) in which there was a literal outpouring of claims involving ritual sacrifice, child murders, rape, self-mutilation -- the list goes on and on, but all of these things were linked in one way or another to devil worshiping cult and to some extent heavy metal.

Slow news day today, so here’s a little something to keep you occupied whilst waiting with bated breath for our next post. 

My Dying Bride is actually one of my top twenty or so favorite bands and perhaps a little bit of a guilty pleasure.  Their latest album, For The Lies I Sire, is no Songs of Darkness, Words of Light but I find myself loving it more and more with each listen.  Vocalist, Aaron Stainthorpe describes the album as “quite possibly the we’ve created to date”, and I’ll have to agree.  In this album the band sought out the accompaniment of a violinist again for the first time since 1996’s Like Gods of the Sun, which adds a layer of despair to the already lugubrious vocals and instrumentation present on the record.  My one qualm is, sadly, this album is almost completely void of Stainthorpe’s legendary death metal grunts leaving a small something to be desired.  We won’t hold it against them though, this album was the next natural chapter in the story of My Dying Bride.

My favorite track on For The Lies I Sire, and the one you can hear above, is My Body, A Funeral -- the first song on the album.  It’s good ‘staring out the window’ (something I find my self doing a lot of lately) music -- slow, poetic and mournful yet ever heavy and never boring.  If you haven’t had the chance to check out My Dying Bride before, here it is.  If you like what you hear, I would highly recommend looking into their album Songs of Darkness, Words of Light, though it should be known; I celebrate their entire catalogue. 

I have put off my Shiny Pennies column for too long. I think it’s been about four weeks since my last one, and for that I apologize. Unless of course you think this column is stupid, in which case you may stop reading now.

Angantyr. Not quite sure how to pronounce this one but that’s not relevant -- you can’t hear me  say it wrong anyway. I was turned on to this guy by a brother in arms who runs the Morbid Tabernacle (Metal Call-Out neither endorses nor encourages illegal downloads). Angantyr the name of the Dutch one-man black metal project of Ynleborgaz whom you may or may not know from his work in a little band called Make a Change... Kill Yourself. If that turns you off (as it did me) hang in there for a moment and left me finish. 

I’ve never actually heard Make A Change... Kill Yourself, and they might actually be really good, I don’t know. Their name... just... it makes it hard for me to want to listen, you know? And don’t even pretend you haven’t judged a book by it’s cover before. I recently talked to a guy who hadn't ever listened to Imperium Dekadenz because he thought there name sounded “stupid”.  I’ll give him that, but he also doesn't know what he’s missing. ID are freaking amazing! But look,  here I am off topic again, I’ve been doing that a lot today. We are not here to talk about Make a Change... Kill Yourself or Imperium Dekadenz. What I am driving at is that Angantyr does not sound like you would think Make A Change... does, assuming you hadn’t heard them before. Make sense?  

Angantyr is, simply put, amazing. I took an almost instant liking to the album Hævn and in each subsequent listen I find myself loving it even more. It’s raw, and grim, and hateful -- everything black metal should be. But it’s also more than that. It’s beautiful, and epic and even sad sometimes -- something most wouldn’t associate with black metal. Don’t bother listening to the track above if it will sit in the back of 10 open windows and a phone call. This is not background music. This is music you have to let soak in, you have to apply yourself to. 

I decided not to stream the one track on the album that really sealed the deal for me in terms of my man-crush on this band. In part because I’m hoping to motivate everyone that reads this to check it out on their own and because it is over seventeen minuets long and might not fit in our media player. Instead, this is the first track on the record, Et Varsel Om Død, which sets the mood nicely and from which I think you will get the general idea. Enjoy!

I could take or leave Dååth. I could also take or leave having to go into my text editor tool to make those special characters in their name. I mean, just who do they think they are having two of them in their name? And why is it that I can name more US bands that use umlauts than European ones? Off topic, sorry. 

However you may feel about the music Dååth makes, there is really no denying the cover to their 2009 record Concealers is something special. I wish I had a bigger scan to show you all so you can see just how intricate this thing is. The band can thank Mr. Jorden Haley for that. Looking through some of this mans art it is clear his specialty is attention to detail. I mean just look at that thing, there are so many elements you could probably look at it for an hour straight and still not see each and every detail. 

The fun doesn't end with just the cover of the album either. All throughout the album’s sleeve, on the band’s merchandise and even in their Day Of Endless Light video you can see touches of Haley’s work. Most recently, Jorden Haley lent his extremely talented hands to designing the cover of An Avalanche Of Worms, a collaboration between Dååth guitarist Eyal Levi and Emil Werstler (of Cynic fame). 

You can take a look at a larger version of this cover an many more at Jorden Haley’s official blog: www.jordenhaley.blogspot.com

I know I have touched on the subject of the art works of one Andreas Marschall more than once in the past but great artists deserve more than an honorable mention so here we go again.

This German-born illustrator got his start in the comic book industry but is now renowned for his realizations of heavy metal alum covers and the occasional film poster. Marschall has contributed to far to many covers for me to go over here but for a complete list you can visit this unofficial fan site. You can see many artists have turned to him as their go-to artist for multiple recordings, notably Grave Digger, Hammerfall, and Immolation among others. 

Marschall is also clearly favored a great deal by Blind Guardian as he has been selected to work on a total of eight of their studio albums not to mention various works for merchandise and promotional materials. The picture above is taken from the cover of BG’s 1993 album Somewhere Far Beyond. This album was largely responsible for slingshotting Blind Guardian into the international spotlight and paved the way to their first tour outside of their home country of Germany and to the far east. As you can see by our recent poll, Somewhere Far Beyond is a fan favorite, landing (for now at least) in second place of “Best Blind Guardian Album” falling just a few votes shy of the top spot behind Nightfall In Middle-Earth. 

On the cover is a band of ragged, traveling bards engaged is some sort of magical act. Given the nature of the cover and the acclaimed track The Bards Song featured within, Blind Guardian have long since used this term to describe themselves, their fans, and even in naming the now defunct fan club, Circle Of Bards. 

There isn’t much that I can say about Candlemass that hasn't been said already. They are pioneers, revolutionaries and regarded and revered the world around. Their first record Epicus Doomicus Metallicus was a bold work of genre defining art but their second album, the subject of this review, 1987’s Nightfall solidified the bands sound and was the first to feature their most well known vocalist, the goofy and charismatic Messiah Marcolin. Nightfall is an aptly titled mournful composition of atmosphere a heavy doomy riffs, the cover art does splendidly what it should in preparing the listener for the melancholy to follow upon opening the gatefold and spinning the disc. 

Responsible for this cover and most defiantly unawares that he would lend his talented hand to the one of the greatest heavy metal records of all time, was mid-19th century American painter Thomas Cole. Cole himself was somewhat of a revolutionary in his own field, responsible for founding the Hudson River School, a collective of artists who, heavily inspired by romanticism, created some of the most enduring pieces of landscape art known to man. The painting you can see above is the last piece of Cole’s The Voyage of Life series which served as an allegory of the four stages of human life titled Old Age.  The painting depicts the subject of his series old and grey, with the waters of life calm around him about to break free of corporeal existence and pass into the realm of immortal life.  A fitting cover indeed, given Candlemass’ seemingly obsessive curiosity with death and the world beyond. 

Nightfall is available through Axis/EMI records.

What is it about power metal, is this the fountain from which amazing album art flows liberally?  

I’m not sure who created the cover art for Dark Moor’s 2000 record The Hall of Olden Dreams.  It looks familiar though, so I bet I will pin it down by the end of the day, well after I post this for all to see.  Regardless of who it was, they did a splendid job of capturing the music inside on visual medium. 

Dark Moor is a Spanish power metal outfit that has been pumping out their criminally underrated brand of power metal since 1994.  Still active, Dark Moor released an album just last year to minimal fanfare and praise.  I am just as guilty as every other metal blogger on this one because I always seem to overlook Dark Moor despite enjoying the hell out of their stuff when I actually get around to spinning it.  If you are interested, Dark Moor has a huge catalogue of material readily available on the internet and plays concerts all through Europe. You can visit their myspace here. 

After the jump you can check out the track Maid of Orleans from The Hall Of Olden Dreams, the lyrics of which are obviously inspired by the tale of Joan of Arc. 

The only words that really come to mind on this one are 'hells yeah!'

A Forest of Stars

Opportunistic Thieves of Spring

Overall Rating: 6.2/10

After hearing both praise and disparagement that seemed to split the black metal community in half over this album, I finally broke down and listened to it with the intention to throw my two cents into the mix. Let it be known that I in no way fall for gimmicks. So having seen the band clad in their Victorian clothing before ever hearing them play, a note was a turn off (take notes here Swashbuckle).  Perhaps the difference between A Forest of Stars and the multitude of others that attempt such feats is the earnestness with which A Forest of Stars performs their theatrics.

A Forest of Stars hit the scene sometime in 2007 and released their debut The Corpse of Rebirth shortly after in 2008.   The Corpse.. introduced black metal fans across the globe to a highly stylized brand of metal that oozed English sophistication and harkened back to some sort of imaginary Victorian era where Sir. Arthur C. Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe married their styles over distorted guitars and violins. In Opportunist Thieves of Spring this story doesn't change much, save for an obvious maturity, a bit more abstract approach and that, despite all this, bored me.  READ ON

This is it friends, the double whammy.  Today is a very special marriage of two of my favorite segments on the site, Metal Can Look Good Too and Shiny Pennies.  Metal Can Look Shiny.  

Thulcandra is the name of the band and as I implied before, they are both sonically and visually stunning.  I'll start with the album cover.  Kristian Wahlin, aka Necrolord, has never disappointed me.  The artistic duties that he preformed for Thulcandra are no exception.  The cover for Fallen Angels Dominion harkens back to some of his early work for the likes of Bathory, Emperor and Dissection.  The cold landscape and grim flautist perfectly complement the melodic and ice cold sonic spheres that await the listener within, bringing me to my next point...

Much like the art on the outside, the art within will almost immediately remind the listener of the late, great Dissection.  Upon further inspection, your initial suspicion of that will be solidified into fact.  I suspect Dissection is after all Thulcandra's main source of inspiration along with some Unanimated for good measure.  Don't go looking into this album for something profoundly original because you will be sold short.  This is Dissection worship. Dissection worship at its finest.  And given the huge void that the band left in melodic black metal with the death of Jon Nödtveidt, it was warmly welcomed into my library.  All that being said, I don't want to give you the idea that this band completely lacks original thought.  There are within this album, musical epiphanies that go beyond Dissection's formula yet still seem to continue their vision.  Whatever your take may be, I think it is easy to agree that Thulcandra breathed life into a genre many feared dead, all the while hacking their own paths through densely wooded sonic forests to divulge upon an old familiar walkway long abandoned.