As I’ve said, I was looking forward to yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday for quite a while. I had a big haul of 9 new (to me) albums and one old.
And since I had also picked up one Heilung album a few weeks ago without waiting and have been obsessing over them a bit, I will bring it up here too.
But first I’ll mention Nine Treasures. This was an album I listened to many times when I was a Google Play Music subscriber, and it’s on Bandcamp as a free/pay-what-you-want option so I wanted to grab it (and throw a few bucks at them for giving me something I’ve already enjoyed so much). Mongolian metal with violin solos, and it’s just fun.
Also on the fun side: music for synthesizers and orchestra, inspired by Archimedes. It was written during the pandemic but a lot of it is very 60s-70s in composition style and in the timbres used, and there’s a charming lightness about the whole thing.
For a much more creepy and somber mood (but you know I love this sort of thing), we have Stuart Liebig’s dark ambient music with synths and percussion samples. I think it speaks well of him that the drums, rattles etc. don’t feel like samples but like it was all performed specifically for this music, it just fits so well. On my first listen, my wife was also listening to a podcast about creepy mysterious encounters with aliens, ghosts etc. and there was a whole mood there.
Also dark and “ambient” but abstract, tense and inscrutable, I found that little mermaid is a bit too intrusive at times for trying to get to sleep — the opposite of Eno’s description of ambient music. But I’m very much enjoying a proper listen this morning — good stuff.
While we’re in the shadow lands, how about some doomgaze? If that’s really the right term; this is really neither as doomy or as shoegazey as many other things. Regardless: good band, music that works for relaxing or in the car or working, I don’t have a deep analysis here.
Speaking of good bands, this Vollte album. Post-rock, a bit prog. Enjoyable. I totally imagined a scene from a heist movie that turned into a chase during “Lightning strikes us.”
Garmarna is a group I’ve enjoyed for quite some time, but I didn’t keep up with them. Swedish folk rock with electronics, it all just fits together so well. think after listening to this one, Vittrad (my first exposure to them and a tie for my favorite hurdy gurdy-focused album) is still my favorite, but this is still extremely good. Produced by Chris from Heilung (you can hear it especially in the ambience of “Två Systrar”) and an understated guest vocal from Maria, which is how I happened to stumble into this.
I almost dismissed this group as copycats of Heilung, and they don’t have the same intense impact. But they are very good in their own right and I will be listening to this album a lot more in the near future. I’ll probably end up getting their others as well.
For my understanding of Heilung songs I can thank lyrics-translate.com and a few interviews and commentaries that I’ve read online. It’s not a necessary step to enjoy the music but for me it deepens the experience.
The overall theme of Heilung’s first studio album, Ofnir, is the story of a peaceful village forced into war, made into bloodthirsty killers seeking vengeance. Then about halfway through, it shifts to mysticism with a poem about a forest and a 30-minute long triptych based on the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. So we have a kind of conversion of the bad into the good, which seems to very much be a theme for Heilung overall.
The band says that while “Ofnir” is a very masculine album, “Futha” is feminine. To me, it’s very much about overcoming dangers and fears, and healing. It starts with the end — Ragnarok — and turns it aside with chanted incantations against every kind of evil spirit. There are songs about protection (including my favorite, “Othan”, executed so well that you can hear the love in it) and healing, but also a poem and chant about ice that leads to a rousing chant about life-sustaining fire. Overall, the theme makes this my favorite album. It’s close though…
Drif is a little more difficult to sum up, with a bit of less easily translated material to start, and ranges from the most ancient song lyrics in the world in an Ugarit dialect to the puzzling two-dimensional palindromic Sator Square, to an actual Roman marching song that’s a scathing satire of Caesar. But it opens with a song of love and well-wishing, and there’s a healing song and a song where a curse is transformed into a blessing. Overall I would say this is the most beautiful of their albums to listen to. (Though the spoken-word piece about a Gaulish tribe defeated by Romans includes the Wilhelm scream, and “Tenet” — which the band knew people would play backward to confirm its palindromic nature — includes some silly phrases in backwards English.)