Nebelung - Vigil

There they're rooting out the forests,
With the ruiners I want to fight,
This God in my left,
This ore in my right.

Blessings drip the golden flowers,
And they sanctify my weapons,
For I bring prayers to all
Which I myself have not created.

See, the gnat of a small life,
And how light is it to kill.
Yet they cannot knead from clay,
Yet they can't whistle from the pastures.

Only sometimes shakes the hunger;
Tender meat is good for eating,
And just as I murder the boar,
So will the wolves eat me.

Yet stays a Friend and willing
What ducks in shrubs and corners.
The wise snake calls me Herbs,
A Toad, the metal veins.

Brothers house in far-off cities,
Where they butcher, play and smoke.
Since there's much what they have,
And little of it is what they need.

For to me, these things are lavish:
Spears and arrows, when I hunt
And a woman for my nights,
And a child for my days.

To the roots I may fall
From the battle with the ruiners,
In the same earth will
Someday their bones rot.

-original from Die Roder

Band: Nebelung

Album: Vigil

Genre: Neofolk

Country: Germany

Year: 2008

More info Here and Here.

I discovered Nebelung in the summer of 2009, and this was my favorite song of theirs from the beginning. Recently I found a load of CDs I burnt at the time and put them in my car's track player, meaning that for the past few weeks I've heard this song every morning. When translating songs I try to make them fit the original pace of singing so they can be sung, the fact of which English is similar to German is to be thanked for.

On their album Vigil, this is definitely the "best" song. The other ones are toned down, mellower, and what you would expect from Neofolk. But they are good nonetheless, the lyrics are provocative and meaningful, and the music is soothing if not uplifting at times and dramatic. Again I gave the album a chance because of the cover art, which is superbly ambient and nicely done.

Rated 7.5/10 for Neofolk Organic neofolk with a few memorable songs and thoughtful lyrics


About the rating system: 5 is average, 0 is atrocious, 10 is the best thing you ever heard.

Failure - Perfect Isolation

Band: Failure

Album: Perfect Isolation [EP]

Genre: Post-Metal (listed as Depressive Black Metal)

Country: Honduras

Year: January 2013

Link: http://www.suicidepath.com/2013/02/failure-perfect-isolation.html

I started off listening to this album yesterday and finished it a few minutes ago, not really noticing the transition in songs. It's composed of a single sound-scape, sometimes rasping into heavy riffs and melodic... screaming as typical DBM vocals go. But there's a melancholy current drifting beneath all of it and it returns to prominence during the rest of the songs, which are calm. Most songs flow into one another or have abrupt endings, but the flow isn't broken for long.

I chose this album because of the attractive cover art, which is strange and simple as far as the genre goes. The "pure" quality and thoughts of Honduras unveiled a strange artistic essence that I wanted to pry deeper into. But what happened as I listened was a question that's passed my mind many times now: How can this be called Metal? Granted the long tradition of DSBM and how the typical metal-riffs get toned down into a melancholy sound-scape, but there are entire sections of the album with just calm, electronic and drum pieces. It was just calming, atmospheric music. Maybe someday a scientific committee of metal heads will get together and label this kind of music as non-metal, just like Pluto was labelled as a "dwarf" planet rather than a planet proper. But for now we'll continue to attach the label "metal" to it. But despite it being metal or not metal, the album was a calming piece without anything to really gripe of complain about. I couldn't find anything especially special about it, other than providing a good 40 minutes of relaxing background music. 

Rated 5/10 for Ambient Neutral, calming background music with Post-Metal gaze

***

As I've started to go back on the internet, especially to blogspots posting music (like the Dumah of so long ago), I've realize once again that there is simply a mess of too many bands and albums to focus on. Never having got a chance to hear most of them, I'm going to start picking albums from recent releases (since I don't really know anything about them) and listen to them one at a time in order to rate them in a sort of list. The number of albums being uploaded is far past casual browsing these days! So I'm going to have to start a system of going through them to see which ones are worth downloading.

Next up: Shadows of Tragedy Compilation
               Draugadrottin - Where the Sea Gives Up Its Dead