The Gauntlet :: – Heavy Metal – News – Videos – Ringtones – mp3s -…
The News Review:
- The Gauntlet :: – Heavy Metal – News – Videos – Ringtones – mp3s -…
- Dan Melnick and Erik Laresen
- A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box
The Gauntlet :: – Heavy Metal – News – Videos – Ringtones – mp3s -…
thegauntlet.com – Jan 24, 2007
In the autumn of 2000 he and the drummer Ville Salonen entered a studio to record a demo consisting of 3 songs seething with hatred lunacy panic and despair. It took 3 years of waiting and experimenting in other musical projects until this demo “The Sickening” was released as MCD through Rage f Achilles Records. The short co-operation ended with the label’s faith in being able to sell the music. Something that just might be the world record of commercial flop… A small symbolical death must be performed. And this will come in the shape of the album “Stilltrapped”. Thematically this album is dwelling in depression captivity and death. Musically it’s more diverse extending from actually memorable structures to scary avant-noise experiments and calmer in a way of expressing a prisoner’s suppressed rage in shackles or total living emptiness. All this performed in trademark Apocryphal Voice poly chords and emotional vocals. r if you insist in having the description to be put in another way.
Dan Melnick and Erik Laresen
Loyola Phoenix – Jan 24, 2007
As the ages passed their swords and axes turned into drums and guitars. Their battlegrounds became fiery stages at sold-out concerts. Although their instruments of war changed the blackness of death was still a part of them. The blackness of death metal. But America separated by the vast Atlantic cean remained safe from the hellish tones of Scandinavian metal. Editor in Chief Erik Larsen and Diversions Editor Dan Melnick however were not spared. Larsen a proud Norwegian descendant of the Viking kings succumbed to the influence of Norwegian black metal gods Dimmu Borgir and sold his black soul to the metalocracy… Larsen: No one has a more damned orchestra than Dimmu Borgir. Mustis was classically trained! I bet when he was a kid his teachers would die after hearing him play because they knew nothing else in their life would sound as perfect. Melnick: What would lead a classically-trained pianist to get into black metal?Larsen: His parents maybe? r maybe he realized that classical music and metal are essentially the same thing. Dimmu Borgir crafts six-minute opuses ? opii. What’s the plural for opus?Melnick: I don’t even care the opus belongs solely to Nightwish. A little song I like to call “Ghost Love Score” is a 10-minute long journey through what is probably the greatest movie never made. It starts with sweeping action-packed melodies as the hero duels the main villain and then it builds and builds before crashing back down.
A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box
Pitchforkmedia.com – Jan 24, 2007
They start with familiar classics from the bands who turned out to be goth’s godfathers– Joy Division the Cure Bauhaus Siouxsie & the Banshees– but the heart of the thing remains England’s 1980s goth heyday where the urge to dance comes out in grim grinding relentless music for the fake undead: Look to the Sisters of Mercy’s steamroller “Temple of Love” or Tones on Tail’s “Christian Says”. They sprinkle in darker tracks from the pop bands who filled out goths’ record collections: Echo & the Bunnymen the Cocteau Twins the Jesus & Mary Chain. They follow the aesthetic as it comes to North America (Christian Death) reunites with punk (the Misfits) meets up with electronic dance music (Skinny Puppy) and starts to become “industrial” (Ministry) and then they glance back at the acts who were the godfathers of that (Throbbing Gristle Einstürzende Neubauten). They stop in on the kind of arty spooky goth that was more likely to have women singing (Dead Can Dance Miranda Sex Garden) and close off with a nice past-meets-future moment: Modern-day band AFI covering the Cure’s “The Hanging Garden”. Within all that is a rich vein of terrific pop music from bands whose more over-the-top impulses seem– 20 years down the road– less silly and more brilliantly daring. Between the steady clanging beat and the dark energy they’re working to summon the best of them genuinely shred: See Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s “Walking on Your Hands” which channels Joy Division for people who wish they’d rocked steadier. It’s just as striking to sort through how much these bands contributed to the sound of modern music with their cavernous trebly productions helping pioneer the whole use of hard ugly sound– every time you love a track for how happily brutal it is some small credit is owed in goth’s direction.