italy

Here’s a weird one: Dave Lombardo playing Vivaldi. In 1999, the not-in-Slayer-at-the-time drummer collaborated with Italian music critic Lorenzo Arruga and some classical musicians on Vivaldi: The Meeting, a set of improvisations on Vivaldi pieces. (This bio of Arruga amusingly calls the recording “improvisations with a Cuban drummer.”) The CD is fairly unlistenable, though it […]

Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s shtick is combining death metal and classical music. Classical music in metal goes all the way back to Richie Blackmore. However, metal bands usually lack formal training. They often merely tread harmonic minor water, while throwing in some diminished arpeggios. So many bands play classical-sounding licks without “getting” classical’s complexity and colors. In […]

Frostmoon Eclipse Italian black metallers Frostmoon Eclipse, whom I wrote about here, embark on their first US tour this Sunday. (See dates below.) The routing is frankly strange – scattered locales in the South and Midwest. This is probably due to their tourmates, Nashville’s Chaos Moon and Ft. Lauderdale’s Benighted in Sodom, whom I reviewed […]

by Cosmo Lee Claudio Alcara is a talented fellow. In Frostmoon Eclipse, he unleashes black metal with bouts of acoustic picking. Stroszek is his delicate, mostly acoustic project. (I wrote about these here and here.) Aere Aeternus is his collaboration with folks in England and France, and it suppresses his six-string prowess in favor of […]

The Secret I was watching UFC a few nights ago, and it occurred to me that brutal music is like mixed martial arts. One has to vary one’s attack. When bands do blastbeats for entire songs, that’s like going into a fight doing only high kicks. You look for any opening, then shoot in and […]

Saying that One Starving Day is a lesser version of Neurosis is no dis. It’s a fine wellspring from which to draw. If Neurosis move mountains and scar the sky, One Starving Day build a good garden, with a gnarled oak nearby. This Italian group may not play new tones, but it pitches them perfectly, […]

Whenver electronic/pop music writer Simon Reynolds weighs in on metal, it’s always interesting. I’ve been chewing on a recent post of his: “metal has just swallowed whole goth (especially 4AD goth-lite), industrial, post-rock, shoegaze, techno, isolationism, folk….to the point where what defines metal as metal these days is nothing sonic but really just the bombastic […]

Speaking of Hiems, drummer Gionata Potenti also plays in Frostmoon Eclipse. The La Spezia, IT band is prone to bouts of acoustic guitar in its black metal, so it’s perhaps logical that the band released an all-acoustic album, Dead and Forever Gone (ISO 666, 2005). But it’s also brave, given black metal’s penchant for obfuscation. […]

Speaking of Italian black metal, in recent heavy rotation for me has been Hiems, of the northwestern city of Novara. Hiems plays good, strong black metal. With black metal, I don’t often use “strong” to connote “powerful.” I am a fan of black metal, but for all its posturing with weapons and spiky wristbands, much […]

In WTF news, Kylesa will be playing select US west coast dates with Lacuna Coil and Within Temptation. This makes no sense other than for the fact that Kylesa happens to have a woman in its lineup also (and that maybe it qualifies as Southern gothic rock). It’s great that the band will reach new […]