“MelancHoly, Melancholia/ Will you wash my sins away?
Melancholia, Melancholia/ All these days are here to stay
MelancHoly, Melancholia/ Will you chase the sun away?
My melancholia/ I need you to stay”
I think that today, the best music, good music and the music that makes sense is made in the field of extreme metal and progressive metal genres. At least, this is the kind of music that makes sense to me: deep, rich, worthy to think upon, satisfying. I believe that one of the most interesting works in the metal genre came from Teramaze this year.
Metal Oda and the Classical Music Clinic met once again on Clubhouse, exploring the subject of “Death” in heavy metal and in classical music. The subject of death is a popular one in music and literature and as the two best music clubs in their specific genres, we have come up with rich and deep content from different composers and metal bands.
The incomparable progressive metal band Porcupine Tree are back with Closure/Continuation C/C after 13 years of silence, since their 2009 album The Incident. In his countless number of interviews, Steven Wilson at all times said that the PT were not coming back, those PT days were over and that he was happy with his solo projects. But now, after 13 years, here we are with the new PT album: the name of the album is very meaningful and I personally think that even the band has not totally decided whether it is a closure or a continuation.
Turkish power metal band Saints’N’Sinners released their second album entitled ‘Rise of the Alchemist’ in April with their own record label SNS Records. The first singles from the album caused a sensation in the genre when they started to appear on digital platforms. It seems like Deniz Tuncer who wrote the lyrics and the music keeps the secrets to the ancient science of alchemy and has the power to turn “metal” into gold, as Saints’N’Sinners made one of the most outstanding power/melodic metal albums of 2022 so far.
Amorphis, the melodic death metal masters from Finland, released their new album HALO in February 2022. As I was suffering from Covid-19 in February, the issue of this article was postponed to March. Like the previous albums of the band “Tales from the Thousand Lakes”(1994), “Tuonela”(1999) and the “Skyforger” (2009) HALO is about the Kalevala, the Finnish mythological epic. HALO topped the Finnish metal charts as soon as it was released in February. Now it is the right time to take a closer look at this spectacular album.
Shocking, unsettling and obscene are the poems by Till Lindemann, lead vocalist of industrial metal band Rammstein.
When I wrote about the best metal albums of 2021 in December, I didn’t tell you which one I thought was the best among them. There was one hint though about its release date for the attentive reader. As I said in this article, there was that one album in 2021 which left me speechless and this is the “Moonflowers” by the Finnish death-doom masters Swallow The Sun. When I reviewed Iron Maiden’s Senjutsu in September, I remember saying it was too early to label this or that as the best metal album of the year, although I am a great Iron Maiden fan.