Mandatory Metallica Saturday

A slight change in the presentation of Mandatory Metallica today.



This is to celebrate the release of Guitar Hero Metallica.

Text book stuff from Sweden!

Now Morifade are another one of those many underground power metal bands that you’ll usually only come across completely by accident or in mentioned in a list on Youtube or something. Funnily enough, I came across this band in another way, that is; I typed ‘Sci-fi’ and ‘power metal’ into the Metal Archives search engine and picked a band name at random and then My-spaced them. How lucky I was because I really liked what I heard.

Morifade of Sweden are nothing special, but I have to say, they’re bloody good for what they are, which is: light-hearted, sci-fi sounding power metal with elements reminiscent of bands like Stratovarius and Labyrinth.

They have plenty of speed, but not an overdose. They have interesting riffery with a lot nice rhythmic work as well as a lot of great modern power metal leads and melodies. The drumming is great too, a lot of alternating patterns and ‘speed up and downs’ (think Wuthering Heights (but not that much lol)). The overall arrangement has some good variation, you won’t get bored with this after the first few tracks and you’ll easily loose you self in a two or three back-to-back listens of the album. Vocals are what you would expect from Stefan Peterson, mid-ranged, full, melodic and straight forward. Keyboards are well placed, subtle and get very quick in the pre-chorus areas, as in most great power metal.

This is just another of the great, hard working power metal bands out there that just know what they’re doing and do it well. There’s’ a lot of catchy soul-raising tunes on this release the will have you coming back again for more. My only criticism is of the lyrics which are very bland and is nothing you haven’t heard before but other than that, the music is top notch power metal.

7/10

Highlights: Escape, In Martyria and Revive for a while.

Megadeth

To prove that we're not 100% biased against Megadeth only 95% here at DoD, here's a clip of Burnt Ice being played in 2008 in San Diego:



Enjoy!

Mandatory Metallica Saturday (again)

Sorry I couldn't resist posting this one:

Entombed

I didn't realise this but 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the birth of Entombed and that legendary Swedish Death Metal sound. So everyone play your favourite Entombed album and open a bottle of beer and celebrate.
This is what I will be playing:

Mandatory Metallica Saturday

Holy shit, its been a week already and I haven't posted once, sorry about that people. Its a bit hard to post when your internet speed is down to 56k for a few days.

Mandatory Metallica Saturday

I'll step in once more and deliver your weekly dosage of Metallica:

Avantasia

I read this curious article this morning which made me think a bit more of Tobias Sammett but I also kind of question his way of thinking a bit. Here is what he had to say regarding the release date of the next Avantasia album:

"This is not a rock-&-Roll-homestudio-project, we'll work with a choir, with a symphony orchestra and - no matter if the music-industry goes down the toilet - I'll spend a fortune on creating the whole thing. So I'll take all the time I need, and it won't see the light of day until I am completely satisfied. Some who know my plans said, that it's unreasonable to spend one's savings on creating a piece of music these days, as the music industry is going through hard times. Absolutely right! But do you consider it extremely reasonable to shoot a man into space? It's unreasonable to spend money for whatever, life itself is unreasonable, because - believe it or not - in the end it's quite often pretty lethal. I am rather unreasonable and therefore unsad."

Interesting.




Priest

Project Strato

Not sure how many of you are fans of Stratovarius but as one of the early power metal bands they have been around for a very long time and gone through numerous changes. I was reading on metal-rules.com earlier today that Timo Tolkki (who recently departed the band) is forming his own project called Project Strato which is utilising the Dreamscape line-up and tentatively called their album Return to Dreamscape. The hope is this will revisit the type of music they played on this album 15 years ago and give Timo Tolkki the opportunity (in his mind) to close the book on Stratovarius. The remaining band members still continue to play with the band's name and the issues they have had to deal with Tolkki and his mental illness came to culminate in late 2007 with his departure. This year they have a new album, new guitarist and hopefully a new fresh outlook.

I will get a chance to see this on Monday when I go to see them play along with Firewind.

Priest

Walknut

Since I accidentally discovered these guys from Russia, they have been on constant play. Here is the second song off the album Graveforests and Their Shadows, Motherland Ostenvegr.


Enjoy



by the way its not a video its just the full length song