hell bent for metal

The only thing more epic than tales of old bat­tles are power metal songs about tales of old bat­tles. We all know I have a huge skele­ton in my closet in the shape of a huge dragon slain by Ron­nie James Dio that rep­re­sents my love for power metal. Not too long ago I com­pared some of the strangely named bands to my MP3 col­lec­tion. I was delighted to find I had a few songs from com­pi­la­tion cds from

• Ensiferum
• Kamelot

Fun­nily enough I found Ensiferum in a folk-metal com­pi­la­tion and again in a viking metal list. and had a few Kamelot songs from a while back. I also decided to check out:

• Sturm Und Drang
• Saba­ton

On the Wacken page, Ensiferum are described as bat­tle metal. The two songs I have on my playlist are Token Of Time and Guardians Of Fate off the self titled album released in 2001. They play a speedy brand of power metal and the vocals jump between the clear chant­ing often asso­ci­ated with say, irish bal­lads and what­not, to some really nice metal growl­ing vocals. The gui­tars play a great style of folk-sounding tunes and I really enjoy it. If it sounds inter­est­ing to you, give them a look.

Kamelot are a band that have done their time in ye olde metal cir­cuit since the early 90s and play a bit of pro­gres­sive metal and use a whole array of instru­ments to make a huge melodic sound. Although the band had suc­cess their real break­through was with ‘The Black Halo’. I actu­ally quite like what I have heard because it’s a lot of fairly sim­ple melodies, but done well to get such an epic sound. Speak­ing of epic, check out their video for March of Mephisto. Invis­i­ble sand­wich at 2:10.

Sturm Und Drang aren’t really power metal as such, I just picked them from a Harry Potter-esque sound­ing name. I was look­ing for another folk sound­ing band, but I was pretty happy to find another band that would be more akin to Air­bourne than the other folky metal I picked out. The myspace page only has a cou­ple of sam­ples, and the boys do look very young, and I hate to say it, a touch emo, but geez, they rock and rock hard. They only released their debut last year and they are very old school rock/metal. I can’t say too much about them because, well there isn’t much around about them. These guys could very well be find­ing their way into my usual lis­ten­ing very soon. Fuck­ing rawk!

Saba­ton was a band I pretty much chose to look at because saba­tons are parts of armour and well, you can’t slay drag­ons with­our armour, so you can see where I went from there. First thing I thought of was, holy camo­ley, this band is fronted by Tim Sil­via. Once I realised how stu­pid that was, I was treated to some more awe­some epic bat­tle metal. These guys will be yet another one to add to the awe­some power metal list. Although they don’t “seem” to take in as many instru­ments as other bands of the power genre, they still use prim­i­tive drum beats and ‘yelling’ vocals that will no doubt give the crowd a per­fect oppor­tu­nity for some syn­chro­nised headbanging.

One of the bands I’m most look­ing for­ward to see­ing is Obit­u­ary.

I got my first real intro­duc­tion to the band shortly before see­ing them live last year. I was tasked with writ­ing a review for Faster­Louder and fig­ured I’d bet­ter get up to speed quick. After a bit of research and then a kick-arse live set, I was sold: old-school Florida death metal for the win!

Faster­Louder Live Review: Obit­u­ary rips up Club Capi­tol, Perth

Luck­ily for me, all the Obit­u­ary albums have been re-released recently so I was able to stock up quite eas­ily. And I was pretty excited to hear about their newest effort, Xecutioner’s Return, which is meant to be more in line with the older Obit­u­ary stuff. Met­alUn­der­ground just posted my review of that album (and here’s a hint: I really really liked it):

Met­alUn­der­ground CD Review: Obit­u­ary — Xecutioner’s Return

So I sus­pect that Obit­u­ary might be one of my Wacken high­lights. I’m a par­tic­u­larly huge fan of both Don­ald Tardy’s drum­ming and John Tardy’s hair.

Their MySpace page says they’re the heav­i­est band in the world, and I think I actu­ally believe that.