Metal and Water

I picked up a Rhapsody of Fire e.p. today and in the course of looking them up on teh Interwebs, I came across a favourable review of the new album which is released here Tuesday.  This same reviewer ("Angry Metal Guy") also had a lot of good things to say about the new album "The Lay of Thrym", by the Viking metal band Tyr, who hail from the Faroe Islands.

Well, I've been listening to a whackload of Tyr music via YouTube for much of the afternoon, and will be grabbing that album at the next opportunity.  Well done folk-metal, nice mix of progression and aggression, and clear powerful vocals with occasional harmonies; it's a good fit for me.  I also appreciate the cheekiness of lyrics like these from "Shadow of the Swastika":

You who think the hue of your hide means you are to blame
And your father's misdeeds are his son's to carry in shame
Not mine I'll take no part
You can shove the sins of the your father where no light may pass
And kiss my Scandinavian ass

This in turn got me to whimsically thinking about visiting the Faroe Islands, smack in the middle of a triangle betwixt Scotland, Iceland and Norway. Neat little place that the British occupied during WWII to keep the Hun at bay.  They are technically a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, but also have ties to Britain since WWII, which apparently manifests itself in odd little things, like the presence of Cadbury Dairy Milk bars in the shops, as you don't often find these in Denmark.

The Faroe Islands have a couple of different music festivals in the summer and a diverse spiritual history that includes both pagan and Christian elements.  If I should ever find myself in Ireland or Scotland in the future, I would love to pop over and check this place out, something that never would have ocurred to me prior to stumbling across a band barely known in North America.  Metal-driven tourism, who'd have thunk it, huh?

Well, it turns out some enterprising soul has, because I noted that Tyr was one of the artists involved in something called "70,000 Tons of Metal" , a Caribbean cruise that featured something like 40 heavy metal bands, including a few I quite like, such as Blind Guardian, Sonata Arctica, and now Tyr, as well as some others I have at least heard of, like Epica and Gamma Ray.

They have a second cruise scheduled for next January that I don't see any hope of getting to barring a lotto jackpot, but I can't help but be intrigued by the premise, and tip my helm to the creative and enterprising people who found an intriguing way to make cruise ships a potential vacation for a somewhat unexpected demographic!

Especially when getting that many people with an affinity to Vikings on any sort of boat might seem counter-intuitive...

Feuermusikblitzen: Rammstein Concert Review

(Sorry about the made-up German title, but I figured "Playing With Fire" was probably played out by this point, right?)

Last week was the sixth annual convocation of the Fraternitas Subterra, more commonly known as Gaming & Guinness VI.  This year's gathering coincided not only with my 44th birthday, but the first Rammstein tour to hit North America in over a decade.  To say it felt like kismet is a bit of an understatement, as I am a big fan of the band, and the idea of going to one of the world's most outlandish rock concerts with a bunch of my mates within two days of my birthday felt like a real treat.

Earl, Mike P., me, Rob, and Mike T.

Rammstein is a six-piece band from Germany who have been around since the mid-90s. They play a frankly bizarre combination of pounding metallic guitars with danceable beats and keyboard accompaniment which in many ways defies description, but they are considered part of the Nieue Deutchse Harte (New German Hardness) movement, and their music is sometimes labelled as tanzmetal ("Dance metal") in their native land.  Me, I love getting metal peanut butter on my techno chocolate, so this mix is right up my musical alley.  Be forewarned, however, that this alley can be extremely dark and sticky in places, as their subject matter covers a lot of disturbing themes, including but not limited to lust, murder, incest, cannibalism and, yes, fire.  However, many of their harshest sounding songs are actually fairly innocuous, such as "Du Riecht So Gut" (You Smell So Good), or "B********" (Buckstabu, a made-up word which means whatever you want it to).

The band is renowned for the amount of pyrotechnics they use in their shows; it is not uncommon to see rafters glowing red after a Rammstein concert, due to the number of fireball hits they take in a show.  They also use a lot of imaginative and dramatic staging that doesn't use fire, like in their entrance, when the two guitarists chopped through a black wall with pickaxes in front of a blinding backlight, prior to lead singer Till Lindemann cutting an oval into the same wall with a shower of sparks before kicking it in and striding onstage.  I'm in favour of stagey entrances anyways, but opening up with something so reminiscent of the movie Aliens to the strains of "Rammlied", the opening track of the new album, was spot-on for me.

Make no mistake, this is not a concert anyone was likely to be bored at.  I even saw a young lass with a white cane in the lineup to get into Rexall, and thought, 'Between the energy level and the fire, this might be the best possible concert for you ever."  Our group was at least 150 feet from the stage, and we could feel the heat from almost every fire effect they used; I have no idea what it might have felt like on the floor, but I am almost starting to regret not having been down there.

One of Rammstein's greatest strengths is their realism; by this I mean that they are fully aware that a large part of their audience outside of Germany have absolutely no idea what the band is singing about, even if they are singing along boisterously, as the Edmonton crowd did with "Du Hast". 



Since this is the case, they really go all-out to make the stage show entertaining, with lights, sound, pyro effects and other staging elements less easily described.  How do you sum up the innate creepiness of having two dozen dolls suspended above the stage with green lasers beaming out of some of them, prior to their exploding loudly near the end of "Wiener Blut"?  Is it better or worse to learn that the song was inspired by Austria's infamous Fritzl case?  What do you call it when the lead singer and geeky keyboardist Christopher "Flake" Lorenz stage a fight which ends with his getting beaten and thrown into a grimy bathtub, prior to Till ascending thirty feet in the air on a tiny platform and dumping a LOT of fire into it? 




Whatever you might call it, there was a lot to like, but my personal favourite had to be during "Benzin", the band's lovesong to petroleum distillates.  Throughout the song, jets of fire at least twenty feet tall shot out of the stage, which is always cool, but at one point, Till walks up to the mock gas-station pump sitting on stage, pulls out the handle, sparks up a road flare with his other hand, and after finishing the verse, ignites a huge stream of fire which he then waved about the stage to the delight of all assembled. Yes folks, Rammstein is probably the world's least carbon-neutral band.

*Not* the peak fire moment of Waidmann's Heil

Suddenly, there was some jackass on stage in a black hoodie, dancing and waving to the crowd in the classic "Looka me!" fashion, while the two guitarists shot puzzled looks at each other.

And then Till totally set his ass on fire.



All right, most of us figured out pretty quickly that it was a stunt, but at least one commenter from the floor completely thought someone had slipped past security and was wondering if he should perhaps try as well, right up to the point where the stagecrasher was engulfed in flames less than ten yards away.  Someone else reported seeing a young man get physically ill immediately after this, but this may have been due more to something he was consuming at the time than any effects of shock or heat.  As the saying goes, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns."  Good thing their lead singer is a licensed pyrotechnician, eh?

Both of my daughters enjoy Rammstein a lot, especially the songs "Links 2-3-4" and "Amerika", but given some of the band's past shenanigans and adult-oriented content, it was decided very early on that they would give this one a miss.  To be fair, most of the concert was fine, if you consider watching someone getting immolated onstage to be age-appropriate for a nine-year-old, but hey, he walked off under his own power.  I am glad to hear they are making a concert DVD of the 2010 shows at some point so the girls will get to see most of it from the safety of our living room at some point.  That said, I do intend to skip the pre-encore finale of "Pussy" (no, it doesn't mean something different in German), which reached its, er, I wouldn't want to say climax, but perhaps rather 'high point', um, no, let's call it finale, with Till wheeling out a huge anatomically inspired cannon and blasting a (presumably fire-retardant) foamy substance out over the heads of the crowds. I wouldn't be inclined to say a huge member-gun was gratuitous per se, given that one verse of the tune being played is "blitzkrieg mit dem fleisch gewehr".

The concert was a great 18 song setlist with at least two songs from all six studio albums except for "Rosenrot", with 7 songs coming from the most recent album, "Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da" (Love is for Everyone) and 4 from my current favourite, 2000's "Mutter" (LIFAD may eventually eclipse it; a very solid album).  I can never seem to recall afterwards what songs were played and which weren't, so I ended up writing them down on my arm with my Space Pen during the show.

Not exactly 'Armo virumque canto'...

I thought it looked pretty silly afterwards, but I managed to transcribe all 18 songs eventually.  Despite the illegibility, Pete was somewhat impressed; "You did that with a ballpoint pen, in another language, in almost total darkness?  And you can read any of them?  That's actually pretty suave."

The least impressive element of the entire evening was getting into Rexall place, as everyone was subjected to a physical patdown, and some of the more metallic attendees were required to remove studded gauntlets or chain belts and the like.  The audience itself was extremely impressive and highly engaged, chanting, cheering, pumping their fists and even singing along on a few tracks.  I am not often impressed with Edmonton crowds, but this one was fantastic.  I wonder if the band thought so too, since at the very end of the concert, they all came to centre stage and took a knee in a surprisingly touching salute to the crowd.



Strange as it may seem, Rammstein is somewhat like British prog-rockers Muse, in that you don't have to be a fan to make going to their concerts worthwhile.  If you are a fan of powerful music, mixed genres, dramatic staging and unrivalled degrees (Fahrenheit) of pyrotechnicity, you owe it to yourself to go to a Rammstein concert.  Hopefully we won't have to wait another ten years for their return, because I have every intention of being there; this was a great and unconventional show by a great and unconventional band.

Test your Metal

After having encountered Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" on Rock Band, both my girls had asked on a number of occasions, "why don't we own this song?"  A reasonable question, really, and as I did not have a reasonable answer, I took it upon myself to pick up their 'best of' album, Somewhere Back In Time the next time I was at HMV and found it in the 2 for $20 rack.

Strangely, I never gave much thought to Iron Maiden in high school when their breakout album Number of the Beast came out.  It was years afterwards that someone pointed out the dubious logic of judging a band by the quality of the people in high school who wore their t-shirts, something you thought I would have learned after Led Zeppelin, but there you go.  Island Mike pointed out that not only did lead singer Bruce Dickinson bring some seriously operatic vocal chops to the scene, but not a lot of dummies or sell outs would record a thirteen minute musical adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner".  The album also opens with bits of Churchill's speech about the Battle of Britain as a lead in to "Aces High", which certainly appeals to me as a history buff.

Maiden has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years due largely to their reputation for epic live shows, but is also gaining a new generation of younger fans through their concert DVDs like Rock In Rio or the more recent Flight 666.  With much of their back catalogue unavailable, they put together Somewhere Back in Time as a sort of primer of the band's older material, including both live and studio material, and placing it in the order you could expect to see them in at a concert.  It's pretty savvy, and a great collection with all the lyrics to the songs and some good liner notes to boot; I highly recommend it.

A little later in the week, I had this album in the CD player along with Led Zeppelin and Dragonforce, and mentioned to the girls that these groups were all considered to be heavy metal bands, even though they didn't sound very much alike.  I don't suppose that metal is any different any other form of musical categorization: Louis Armstong, Miles Davis, and Michael Buble are all jazz musicians; Bill Haley, Chuck Berry and Jack White are all regarded to be rock musicians.  At the end of the day, these labels shouldn't be proscriptive, they are just a handy form of shorthand, to help lead you to similar sounds from different players.  With heavy metal now believed to encompass over a dozen different sub-genres (including power metal, speed metal, black metal and death metal), two people can call themselves metal fans and not enjoy the same music.  They aren't too unlike Christians in that regard, I suppose, eh?

I'm too big a fan of old-timey musical concepts like harmony and melody to be a supporter of  the darker end of the metal spectrum.  My tastes lean more toward power metal bands like Rhapsody of Fire, and their symphonic and folky sound, but the technical virtuosity of Herman Li and Sam Totman in Dragonforce has a lot of appeal to me as well.  The fact that they both use talented vocalists as opposed to screamers and populate their lyrics with fantasy themes is just icing on the cake.

At the Dragonforce show I attended two years ago, Pete and I both took note of a number of people wearing t-shirts of a band called Sonata Arctica, and both commented on the coolness of their logo.  I didn't give them much more thought until about a week ago when their album Reckoning Night showed up in the 'check it out' bin at the library.  Since I did indeed want to check them out, I, uh... checked it out.

On the first listen, I have to say nothing really leapt out at me, and I said as much to Fenya.  On the second and third go-around, a couple of tracks began to distinguish themselves on the chorus, and after that there were definitely discernible head motions of a rhythmic nature going on.

Sonata Arctica is five piece band: drums, bass, guitar, vocals and keyboards.  I love the peanut butter counterpoint between crunchy guitars and creamy keyboard, so this is a good fit for me.  Overall, I would describe their sound as the bastard offspring of Dragonforce and Trans Siberian Orchestra as raised by vikings, but if you enjoy Iron Maiden, the Scorpions or even Queen or Rush, I figure the odds of you liking Sonata Arctica are at least 50/50.

Having enjoyed Reckoning Night as much as I did, the next step was to get another couple of albums from the library to see if the first taste was a fluke or an aberration.  One of these, For the Sake of Revenge, is a 2006 live album and DVD recorded in Tokyo, with a good sampling of music from their first four albums.

Make no mistake, these guys are not Muse or Iron Maiden; they are a 'working class' metal band from Finland and do not bring a lot of extreme production values to the table.  Their patter is also a little stilted, but hey, they are a bunch of Finns speaking English in Japan, so kudos just for being understood, I say.  It is certainly evident that they are well-loved in the land of the Rising Sun; hands stay up for most of the concert, and the crowd sings along for a good part of the show.  We've played the concert all the way through twice now, and it is really good stuff.  Sonata Arctica lack the commitment to fantasy of Rhapsody of Fire and are nowhere near as proficient as Dragonforce, but lead singer Tony Kakko has a tremendous range, and his voice is clear and powerful.  He is also casual and friendly between songs, while keyboardist Henrik Klingenberg comes off as little creepy and pretentious, but no less talented.  Some of my favourite tracks are the slower but still powerful ones like "Shamandalie" and "White Pearl, Black Oceans", which feature prominent synthesizer or piano parts.

And yeah, if I am going to sing along with your chorus, it's nice if it has a sentiment I share, even if it isn't too deep, like my current favourite, "Don't Say a Word":

Mother always said "my son, do the noble thing..."
You have to finish what you started, no matter what,
Now, sit, watch and learn...
"It's not how long you live, but what your morals say"
Cannot keep your part of the deal
So don't say a word... don't say a word

Fenya and Glory have already made me promise to take them to see the band if they return to Edmonton at an all ages venue; they were last here in 2009, so I hope they don't wait too long to return.  In the meantime, I'm hoping a few of their tracks turn up for Rock Band; I think they would be a lot of fun to play.