Somehow, in the middle of the nineties, this crack addicted lizard-gigolo appeared out of nothing and terrorized the Portuguese hit parade for a ridiculous 10 weeks in a row. The choreography made it to Unesco’s World Heritage! Booyah!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0lAKW9HmgM]
El Gore competition, the big number two
Yesterday the El Gore team has spent the entire day at the 10th Anniversary of the EMF. Reviews and a video will of course follow soon, but meanwhile we want to give you, our readers, something back for your continued support.
Therefor we bothered all of the bands at the show for their autographs and got a huge poster signed. Of course you can now win this amazing thing and it’s very easy: simply write us an e-mail to elgore1 (at) hotmail.com and we’ll draw a winner on the the day of our one year anniversary, October 4th!
You are a fan of Dead Eyes Memorial, Dirty Crows, Perish With Pride, Faraday’s Cage, Abstract Rapture, Girlschool or Gama Bomb? Then what are you waiting for?! Write us!
-El Gore team-
Interview with Sektemtum
We recently conducted an interview with Reverend Prick of the band Sektemtum. It was done in French but I tried my best to capture the same tone during the translation of the transcript. Enjoy!
El Gore: How did the band come together?
Reverend Prick: Our goal is to destroy what is left of mediocrity, the coalition happened naturally, we united the crème de la crème. Destroy …
EG: What was the first lineup and were there ever any lineup changes?
RP: There is no real line-up. Everything is possible, nothing is set in stone, SKTMTM is the coming together of those that have a common vision. The New World establishes solid foundations. Inconvertible by nature, we would betray ourselves from weariness. In a cat-and-mouse game no one wins, everybody dies.
EG: Was this a one-off thing or are there plans for more music to be recorded?
RP: We are currently working on new stuff for Sektemtum and Doctor Livingstone.
EG: Are there plans to play live?
RP: If the circumstances are right it is imaginable. Our criteria are quite precise, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll find a quality booking agency who would make us want to hit the road, but you never know… And then again, if we tour we would have to mingle with other bands, meet a crowd; all that seems rather boring to me.
EG: What are the main influences of the band?
RP: There are thousands of bands that play this musical genre, the influences come from rock and metal in general. We decided to record a metal album, a style that has been in existence for several decades; just to tell you that our influences are very diverse, yet imprecise.
EG: The band is a bit shrouded in mystery, no band pictures and no information on who played what on the album. Could you clear up which member played what instrument on the album? As I understand, two drummers are in the band.
RP: We are four, we worked together as four, Meyhnac’h, Six, PLCD and myself have worked as a union and if some play drums it doesn’t prevent them from playing other stuff. Six is a talented drummer but also a very good bassist, guitarist. PLCD also plays guitar and bass, he’s a responsive and efficient songwriter, he also sings on the record, as do all the members. This collaboration disregarded the heavy burden that an instrument imposes.
EG: The members of Sektemtum have been active in a lot of different bands. Could you clarify who is still active in what other band and if Sektemtum is considered the main band?
RP: Sektemtum is the only band to have potential in the future, because it’s the best amongst all of them.
EG: Who is responsible for the concept of the band?
RP: All four of us are part of the origins of the band. Guilty but not responsible.
EG: How did the music come to be? How was the songwriting divided?
RP: PLCD does the songwriting, we arrange it, we change it around in the process.
EG: Whose idea was the video?
RP: All four of us are part of the origins of the video. Guilty …
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=karDU2TpDT0]
-Interview by Dave, translation by Yannick-
Motorpsycho – Heavy Metal Fruit
Shame on the author once again, because it was only in 2010 when he came along the prog masters and songwriters from Motorpsycho. Heavy Metal Fruit is sometimes titled as a longer EP, a huge understatement considering the deepness and the length of over 60 minutes playtime.
Their latest release The Death Defying Unicorn from 2012 (featuring Ståle Storløkken) is still too epic for the author to review, although the main reason why he writes this review is the proggy, jazzy and spacy groove that the Norwegians display in this great work. The journey ironically starts with silence, slowly filled with silent guitar sounds before starting with a huge and warm melody joined by psychedelic vocals and a funk that won’t stop until the end of this space odyssey.
By the time Starhammer comes to an end after nearly 13 minutes, X-3 (Knuckelheads In Space) / The Getaway Special kicks off without a warning, taking you with light speed to the next rock’n’roll galaxy. There used to be a comment on last.fm which said something like this would be the perfect soundtrack when cruising with a cosmic chopper through the Milky Way. It is indeed. “Won’t you fly us?” – Of course! And after the landing, the jazzy outro gives the passenger a welcome repose in some space lounge.
“Round round round we go, always slightly faster…” The spacecraft floats calmly on its way to nowhere. But don’t feel too safe, because there are massive turmoils to come, sucking you into a black hole, always faster, always faster, The Bomb-Proof Roll And Beyond (for Arnie Hassle) has knocked you off course.
Close Your Eyes – maybe this is all just a dream, the listener is lost in melancholic piano sounds, space is such an empty and loveless place. W.B.A.T. wakes you up again, a jam session from infinity, the travel must go on! Meteors, burning planets, exploding suns, riff rock! Never ending grooves bring you back on track. The journey is its own reward. Irreality and reality have never been so close to each other; you once again have to close your eyes to see what’s between bass, guitars, drums and funky vocals. Just keep the pace, the end is near.
Not a bit of it! Gullible’s Travails (pt I – IV) shows you the way. It could be an album in itself. The last trip of this odyssey is nearly 21 minutes long and reminds you of the challenges you have to face. “Call it fear, call it hope disguised as anger.” Never have human eyes perceived so many strange galaxies – Zeppelin planets, Sabbath moons, Rings of Floyd. This trip has everything what jazz, prog and acoustic rock have to offer. Even at risk of overusing adjectives: this is an epic and dignified end for the expedition of the spacecraft baptised Heavy Metal Fruit. And it all just has started.
No recommendations. Nothing’s real. Enjoy it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJXttnGCPDk]
The Empire Shall Fall – Volume 1: Solar Plexus
Killswitch Engage: a name that pretty much every metalhead has at least heard before. Their first album Alive Or Just Breathing featured Jesse Leach as a singer and is to this day still a milestone in metalcore, at least in my opinion. After its success however, he decided to leave the band and did a couple of side-projects, one of them was The Empire Shall Fall. Their 2009 release Awaken went completely unnoticed by me and I was quite delighted when I stumbled over them in 2011 when I heard that they’d release a new album called Volume 1: Solar Plexus.
The record, which as the name might suggest is the first part of a trilogy, was released in December solely in a digital format in order to save unnecessary expenses and took me by complete surprise since I had no real clue what I’d get for my money. But since I absolutely loved Leach’s other project Times Of Grace I decided to give it a shot. To put it mildly: I was not disappointed, at all. I should add that the record was released on vinyl a bit later, for those of you that are into that.
The seven song album starts off quite fast and then almost immediately settles into a mid-paced groovy tempo without losing a bit of its heaviness. The rest of the songs always keeps a similar approach which never puts you out of the atmosphere of the whole thing. More non-traditional instruments, at least to the genre, are thrown in as well on the journey. Things like pianos and saxophones just give it a slight jazz feeling which simply fits perfectly.
Every single instrument has a rich sound and hits home non-stop; especially the guitars sound like your finest djent band at some points and make you wish there was more than twenty-five minutes of music. On top of that are the magnificent vocals which alternate between melodic singing and raw screaming.
That is all I’m going to write since I believe you should check it out for yourself, especially since it’s a rather short pleasure. I for one am looking forward to the sequels to Volume 1; even though their release is sat in the stars, since Jesse rejoined Killswitch Engage and might not have time in the near future. I’m sure that the wait will be worth it though. Be sure to check out their Facebook page and listen to the song below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KZtDwWvGlQ]
Trash Monday XXXIV
Ashland High, aka Trace Cyrus, aka Miley Cyrus’ brother, aka “if Travis Barker and Justin Bieber had a child”…
Video is no longer on Youtube, so find it here.
The Majestic Unicorns From Hell
Last weekend I went to a small one day festival with my friends from Dirty Crows as I promised them to do their merch booth. I was really looking forward to this gig because I finally had the opportunity to see one special band and to run across a close friend of mine to whom I haven’t spoken to for a long time and in fact is playing in this combo. I am talking about The Majestic Unicorns From Hell. In fact I am not going to write anything about the other bands as this review’s only purpose is doing some publicity for these guys’ amazing music.
Talking about their music I think that the most positive part is its unpredictability, something which has became really rare in music nowadays. The riffs change from fast punkish and metal shreddings to a sludgy, doomy stoner steamroller. As the guys are clearly inspired by metal and different sub-genres, I was positively surprised that there wasn’t any double-bass hammering throughout all the songs which makes the band really sympatico and not less heavier. The drums’ richness live sound perfectly suits the rest of the music. It also would be cool to hear the different songs with a vocalist but I imagine that this is really hard, it is like searching for the Holy Grail. On the one side the vocals have to embrace the weird and hypnotizing sound on the other side they have to stand alone and be unique in order to do justice to the rest. So, take your time and focus on the music!
To conclude I really hope that The Majestic Unicorns From Hell will perform more often in the future and if you ever get the chance to experience them live just check them out, you won’t regret it, promised. I posted their Soundcloud thing in here but I have to say that the music is much more powerful and varied when you experience them live! Looking forward to hearing more from you guys! Also check ‘em out on Facebook.
Street Fighter: The Movie
Street Fighter, another movie from my youth. The nineties were those times where we, as children, couldn’t care less about movie mistakes, badly cut scenes, shitty acting, miserable, far-fetched plots and other cinematic faux pas. In the end we all had fun and that’s what this movie is about. As I rarely write something about the plot I also won’t do it this time, if you want to know something check out Wikipedia. In any case, there are other things to write about.
Street Fighter II (the Super Nintendo game) is one of my all-time favorite fighting games and I have to say that I never really tried to compare the movie to the game, I simply accepted that the former is an amazing pearl of trash with really interesting scenes and insinuations most of which I only understood years later. Amongst others, there is this great hommage to the Godzilla movies. While a Chinese member of the multinational military force tapped into Bison’s security system, there all of a sudden are appearing Honda and Zangief fighting on a miniature of Bisonopolis. This scene is overlayed by the typical Godzilla cries.
Another really clever and damn perfect scene is when Gen. M. Bison tries to kill Col. Guile in his stealth boat. Bison’s killing machine looks exactely like the oldschool arcade game machines. This nearly made me cry when I first saw it!
As already pointed out that I never really compared the movie to the game but still there are some aspects which I kind of missed. In the old times I was really pissed that there were a few characters appearing in the flick which weren’t part of the “first” game. As my English was quite bad at that time I made up my own idea of who is a good and who is a bad guy, which was pretty close to the movie but I couldn’t stand these “new” characters (Dee Jay, T-Hawk, Cammy) from other Street Fighter games, which I all hated.
Furthermore I was a bit disappointed that the director decided against the characters’ special moves. No Hadouken, no Sonic Boom, no Yoga Fire and most of all no pausing during Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick (especially the latter one makes me really sad). A few days ago I read an interview with Steven E. de Souza claiming that this was done on purpose because he didn’t want to connect the movie that much to the game. I’m Ok with that now.
In the end, I really do love Street Fighter and it always makes me smile. I feel like being a child again. It is like a time machine and that’s something I really adore because I had a great childhood and love(d) the nineties. You have to check it out.
Balegard – Tbst
This week I’m going to review a very fresh demo by a still rather unknown band from Finland. On September 4th Balegard released their second demo called Tbst completely for free via social networks and I decided to check them out. Let me begin by giving you a general idea about the genre: it’s black metal. They themselves call it “Tavastian Black Metal”, since lyrically it deals with the history of Finland…fair enough. I should say at this point that I’m not a huge fan of overly specific names for different sub-genres, but since it has no influence on the music itself I don’t really mind. Now, let’s begin, shall we?
Since I knew about the band prior to this release, I was pleasantly surprised by the improved sound quality in comparison to their first split-demo Routakuu. Both demos are, as far as I know, entirely self-produced and self-mixed with little to no budget so it’s quite nice to see that the band has refined their skills in that department over time…something that makes this release quite enjoyable for a “clean sound” fetishist like myself.
The riffs are well-recorded and quite catchy in most parts, something that is quite important to me in black metal since usually they are repeated quite often throughout a song. In the final part of the last song, Kalmanvesi, there’s actually a pretty cool solo that you should definitely keep your ears open for.
The drums are overall well done except one minor gripe: the bass drum is almost inaudible on two out of the three songs. A fact that one can excuse since it’s a demo and probably recorded with a single mic or two at best…but it’s something I would love to see fixed on future releases. I also noticed the drum being off-rhythm in some longer passages, something I don’t mind much since the beats themselves are interesting enough for me to ignore such minor mistakes.
Last but not least, the vocal department. This duty is shared between the two guitarists; with one doing the regular screams and the other one doing the more high-pitched ones. Both variants are sung with a sense of desperation and passion, so perfectly fitting to the theme. Speaking of which: the lyrics are entirely in Finish and mainly about the life and history in Tavastia, so heads up to those that are into that part of world history.
That pretty much sums it up on my behalf. I say you should give this demo a chance if you are even vaguely into black metal or if you want to discover a new genre through a young band with quite a lot of potential…plus it’s for free. Be sure to check out Balegard‘s Facebook page where you can find a download link to their demo and more information about the band itself. Below you can find my favorite song Hardaler. Read you next time!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Dnax07mp4]
WhoCares – The Compilation
There isn’t much to say when two legends of hard rock/heavy metal collaborate, it either is a blessing or a catastrophe. When Tony Iommi and Ian Gillan announced their plans to record together again, people probably didn’t know what to expect since their only prior collaboration (Black Sabbath’s Born Again album) has been something of a mixed bag.
Personally, I love Born Again and after the Heaven & Hell album, Tony Iommi was on top again, so I certainly was looking forward to hearing new music from both men, although I did not know what to expect musically.
The band came together to do some charity work in Armenia and recorded a single in 2011 which contained two new songs and numerous guest musicians. Now the band has released a two disc compilation and the release has its positive and negative sides.
I got to admit that I am not really a fan of compilations, most just tend to be some sort of cash-in with some inaudible demo recordings and noisy live tracks being sold as rare. This is obviously not the case here as 90% of the songs were never released on CD before. The majority of this compilation is made up of rare B-sides from both artists. There is some Deep Purple, some Black Sabbath, some Gillan solo, some Iommi solo and the two songs from the 2011 single.
The majority of the songs feature Ian Gillan, which is fine by me as I pretty much own everything by Tony Iommi anyways. I am new to Ian Gillan, only owning the classic 70s Deep Purple outputs, thus this compilation served as an introduction to Ian’s body of work and as such succeeded without a doubt in making my mouth water for more.
So I would recommend this to people interested in discovering both artists outside of their main bands (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple), as well as Fans who need to complete their collections. Many of the songs are available here on CD for the very first time. Mentioning songs would be a stupid thing to do as the material ranges from heavy metal to hard rock to blues and even Pop/AOR rock music. You get a bit of everything, a nice thick booklet and the compilation is available at a fair price.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQYjEa3FdUo]