Cellar Darling - Avalanche

 #Cellar Darling #progressive metal #folk metal #folk rock #doom metal #Swiss

We are storytellers. We want to carry you away into our world of music. ​We want to unleash feelings and experiences by telling stories and drawing symbols, in the way mankind has done since its existence: through legends, folk tales, theatre, drama, spirituality - and through songs. We reinvent folk tales for our age as the very essence of what they once were: stories of everyday life. We may sing about the future, we may sing about the past - for essentially, they are the same. If you come to experience our show, you will not know what to expect. If days are bright, our performance shall be bright. If they are dark, it will be dark. In any case, we will tell you stories: those you’ve missed in a world where no bed time stories are told anymore, or those which have never been told before.
Cellar Darling was formed by Anna Murphy (vocals, hurdy-gurdy), Merlin Sutter (drums) and Ivo Henzi (guitars & bass) in the summer of 2016. The trio has previously been part of the core of Switzerland's most successful metal band to date, Eluveitie, touring the world in 45+ countries on 6 continents for over a decade, and forming a bond that could overcome any adversity.
Anna, Ivo & Merlin have turned the departure from their old band into a new beginning, and have moved on to make their own music, while continuing the spirit of musical innovation they have become known for. Cellar Darling’s music is an epic, theatric combination of Ivo’s grand, heavy riffs, Merlin’s energetic drumming, and Anna’s unique, both powerful and fragile voice. Their sound is shaped by the hurdy-gurdy, with its signature folky, earthy tones, and their lyrics tell stories and tales both old and new, true to the band's stated mission: the reinvention of folk tales for our modern age as the very essence of what they once were.
With their very first release, the single ‘Challenge’, along with the bonus track ‘Fire, Wind & Earth’, released in September 2016 after an intense creative retreat, Cellar Darling is already breaking the boundaries between musical genres, blending rock, metal, and folky melodies into a powerful mix. ‘Challenge’ is about an inner struggle, a battle you are fighting against yourself and the world. It is you, screaming at yourself in the mirror and getting high on new found strength. It is failing, overcoming and achieving. The bipolar dance that is life. The song is inspired by a visual image that crept into Anna’s head during what felt like a period tainted with recurring downfall and getting back up again. The music accompanying this image is a symbiosis of dance and combat, sweet and angry. ‘Fire, Wind & Earth’ was written and recorded in the same sweaty summer sessions. The idea for the intro riff was stuck in Ivo’s head for a long time. As soon as all of Cellar Darling started working together on it, the whole song just evolved naturally. The result is a very straightforward and furious song, both musically and lyrically!"
From: https://www.heavymetal.ch/artists/3676/cellar-darling

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

 #Black Sabbath #Ozzy Osbourne #heavy metal #hard rock #classic rock #heavy blues rock #British blues rock #doom metal #1970s #Fantasia #Night on Bald Mountain #animated music video

Listening to Black Sabbath’s self-titled 1970 album is a lesson in heavy metal history. Though bands such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple influenced the formation of the genre, Black Sabbath is often considered the first true heavy metal band, perhaps because they were the first to devote their focus to the darker themes that became an often controversial element of metal. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin also has been quoted as saying he thought Black Sabbath was the first true heavy metal band. Living in an impoverished English town where career choices for most were limited to factory worker or criminal, the boys of Black Sabbath could not relate to the idealistic hippie music that was popular when the band formed in 1968, considering themselves a blues band. Guitarist Tony Iommi, observed the lines that formed at the local movie theater whenever it showed horror films and remarked that if people were so willing to pay to be scared, perhaps they should try playing evil-sounding music. With that in mind, they took their name from a Boris Karloff film.
The title track exemplified Sabbath’s goal of capturing horror in music. It began with atmospheric sounds of heavy rain, thunder, and a single, tolling bell. Then Iomi played a slow, ominous riff based on the “devil’s tritone,” an interval notoriously avoided in medieval music because its dissonance evoked a sense of evil - perfect for Sabbath’s purposes. Though speedy, seemingly effortless shredding has become nearly synonymous with heavy metal, the slogging pace of this formative song was truly heavy, creating a feeling of immense weight and pressure intensified by the dread-soaked vocals of Ozzy Osbourne in his prime. The story of being dragged to hell by a figure in black was not conveyed so much by the lyrics as by the despair in Osbourne’s voice when he moaned, “Oh no, no, please God help me.” The song was haunting in a way that most listeners in 1970 had no idea how to process. This dire sound eventually became the primary influence of the doom metal subgenre in the early 1980s.  From: https://www.classicrockhistory.com/black-sabbath-album-review/

Chelsea Wolfe - Carrion Flowers

 #Chelsea Wolfe #dark folk #gothic rock #experimental rock #noise rock #ethereal wave #industrial #doom metal #black metal #electronic #singer-songwriter #music video

“What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.”
– Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years - the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance - bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.  From: https://chelseawolfe.net/bio/

Black Sabbath - Hole in the Sky

#Black Sabbath #Ozzy Osbourne #heavy metal #hard rock #classic rock #heavy blues rock #British blues rock #doom metal #heavy metal pioneers #1970s

Sabotage is the final release of Black Sabbath's legendary First Six, and it's also the least celebrated of the bunch, though most die-hard fans would consider it criminally underrated. Sabotage came at a time when Sabbath was turning in one platinum record after the next, and critics were finally starting to appreciate the band as much as their fans. It also came during a lengthy and bitter legal battle between the band and their former management, which no doubt informed lyrical themes of betrayal and paranoia as well as the pervasive overall feeling of life itself unraveling. Musically, the band continues further down the proto-prog metal road of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and this time around, the synthesizers feel more organically integrated into the arrangements. What's more, the song structures generally feel less conventional and more challenging. There's one significant exception in the blatant pop tune "Am I Going Insane (Radio)," which rivals "Changes" as the most fan-loathed song of the glory years, thanks to its synth-driven arrangement (there isn't even a guitar riff) and oft-repeated one-line chorus. But other than that song and the terrific album-opener "Hole in the Sky," the band largely eschews the standard verse-chorus format, sticking to one or two melody lines per riffed section and changing up the feel before things get too repetitive. The prevalence of this writing approach means that Sabotage rivals Vol. 4 as the least accessible record of Sabbath's early material. However, given time, the compositional logic reveals itself, and most of the record will burn itself into the listener's brain just fine. The faster than usual "Symptom of the Universe" is a stone-cold classic, its sinister main riff sounding like the first seed from which the New Wave of British Heavy Metal would sprout. Like several songs on the record, "Symptom" features unexpected acoustic breaks and softer dynamics, yet never loses its drive or focus, and always feels like Sabbath. Less immediate but still rewarding are "Thrill of It All," with its triumphant final section, and the murky, sullen "Megalomania," which never feels as long as its nearly nine-and-a-half minutes. But more than the compositions, the real revelation on Sabotage is Ozzy Osbourne, who turns in his finest vocal performance as a member of Black Sabbath. Really for the first time, this is the Ozzy we all know, displaying enough range, power, and confidence to foreshadow his hugely successful solo career. He saves the best for last with album-closer "The Writ," one of the few Sabbath songs where his vocal lines are more memorable than Tony Iommi's guitar parts; running through several moods over the course of the song's eight minutes, it's one of the best performances of his career bar none. Unfortunately, after Sabotage, the wheels of confusion came off entirely. Technically, there were two more albums released, but for most fans, the story of Osbourne-era Sabbath effectively ends here.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/sabotage-mw0000652467 

Black Sabbath - The Wizard

 #Black Sabbath #Ozzy Osbourne #heavy metal #hard rock #classic rock #heavy blues rock #British blues rock #doom metal #1970s

Every Metal Subgenre Began as a Black Sabbath Song
Nathan Smith
Some people out there argue that heavy metal was not invented by Black Sabbath. These people are wrong. To be sure, the Led Zeps and Deep Purples of the world certainly had their metallic moments, but it wasn't until Tony Iommi sheared off his fingertips in a metal stamper and down-tuned his guitar to compensate for this maiming that a new and sinister strain of rock and roll was truly sired.
Now, it's a fact that Sabbath didn't consider themselves heavy metal - not at first, anyway. They viewed themselves simply as putting a slightly new twist on the thunderously heavy blues-rock pioneered by the likes of Cream. There's a lot of truth in that self-assessment. But not even Clapton and co. can claim quite the broad influence on rock and roll that Black Sabbath has produced.
Need proof? Well, how's this for a premise: Practically all of heavy metal's 18 jillion, multifaceted subgenres can be traced back to a specific Black Sabbath song. In cranking out nearly an album per year back in the '70s, the band did a lot more stretching and exploring than they're sometimes given credit for. The result is that they managed to create an entire heavy-metal universe, one track at a time.
They didn't do it alone, of course, and today's metal is as rooted in hardcore punk as it is in '70s hard rock. But the seeds are there. Behold:
10. DOOM METAL
"Into the Void," 1971
Let's start with an easy one. Nowhere in the wide, wacky world of heavy-metal subgenres is Black Sabbath's influence more keenly felt than in doom metal. The band's slow grooves, down-tuned guitars and murky riffs embody the style to this day. The eerie spirit of impending doom on their early songs remains the template for the majority of doom metal's modern practitioners. "Into the Void" is a particularly good example of the doom metal sound from Master of Reality, but it could easily be replaced on this list by any number of tracks from the band's first few albums.
9. POWER METAL
"War Pigs," 1970
Black Sabbath wouldn't truly lead the charge toward power metal until Ozzy was replaced by Ronnie James Dio, one of the preeminent operatic voices in rock history. But the predilection for power was there almost from the very beginning. "War Pigs," possibly the greatest anti-war screed ever set to a backbeat, ranks as one of the most spine-tingling songs in heavy-metal history thanks largely to the most powerful vocal performances of Ozzy Osbourne's long career. It doesn't get a lot more anthemic than this one. If you needed any additional proof of the profound influence of "War Pigs" on the formation of the power metal subgenre, consider that it was a favorite cover tune of Dio's pre-Rainbow group, Elf.
8. THRASH METAL
"Symptom of the Universe," 1975
Sabbath infinitely preferred a slow, rumbling sound to high-octane speed. Almost nobody had more influence on the powerful guitar riffage that was the hallmark of thrash metal than Tony Iommi, however. The chugging crunch of "Symptom of the Universe" clearly predicts the rise of bands like Metallica and Slayer in the decade to come, not to mention Geezer Butler's lyrical themes dealing with evil, war and, uh, dirty women that were employed throughout the group's run in the '70s.
7. DEATH METAL
"Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," 1973
A gore-obsessed outgrowth of thrash metal, death metal retains almost none of the blues-based rhythms in which Black Sabbath trafficked. Thematically, though, Sabbath's influence still looms large. The song "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," with its lyrical allusions to "living just for dying," strongly hinted at the attraction to oblivion that would be cranked up significantly by early death metal bands in the '80s and early '90s. Not to mention the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover! Seemingly scientifically engineered to freak out your mom, the artwork depicts a terrified man tormented by demons on a bed evidently possessed by Satan himself. It set a benchmark for horrifying imagery that death metal bands are still trying to outdo today.
6. BLACK METAL
"Black Sabbath," 1970
Black Sabbath never sounded anywhere near so ugly and extreme as the earliest practitioners of black metal did, but there's no denying that their influence is present. In particular, there's black metal's fascination with Satanism: While never expressing overt sympathy for the devil, early Sabbath flirted heavily with the Adversary; never more so than on their signature tune, "Black Sabbath." The song was constructed around a tritone, a dissonant musical interval derided as diabolus in musica (the devil in music) since at least the 18th century. The song's moody, cinematic opening, full of heavy rain and droning church bells, would also heavily inform the softer, more atmospheric strains of black metal that would arise in the genre's second wave.
5. CHRISTIAN OR WHITE METAL
"After Forever," 1971
The Satanists weren't the only rockers finding inspiration in Sabbath's music and lyrics. While they typically preferred to explore the dark side of the struggle between good and evil, Geezer and the gang weren't above occasionally inserting Christ and the Church into their musical morality plays. The song "After Forever," in fact, makes the claim that "God is the only way to love," and scolds nonbelievers for their faithlessness. While no one has ever called Black Sabbath "Christian rock" with a straight face, there's no doubt the band throws in solidly with the light side on this tune. Lord knows it rocks a damn sight harder than Stryper, too.
4. HAIR METAL
"Changes," 1972
Birmingham, England, is a hell of a long way away from the Sunset Strip, and while Tony Iommi has rocked a few questionable poodle-dos in his day, nobody has ever confused Black Sabbath with Poison. That doesn't mean their contributions to the now-reviled subgenre known as hair metal can be ignored, however. Though Sabbath's dark, sludgy sound was a far cry from the upbeat, overdriven L.A. style of '80s metal, they did practically invent one of the hair bands' most infamous tropes: the metal power ballad. "Changes" would be ripped off by a slew of teased and permed groups in the '80s, from the plaintive vocals right down to the piano accompaniment. Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home," for instance, could have never existed without it.
3. STONER METAL
"Sweet Leaf," 1971
Black Sab loved the herb as much as they loved any other drug - which is to say, quite a lot. Marijuana smoking was damn near universal at their '70s concerts, with the band's deep, slow grooves matching up with weed's pleasant effects like peanut butter and jelly. An out-and-out love song, "Sweet Leaf" cemented the connection between banging and stoning very early on in metal's development. Its sound has been replicated and expanded upon by the likes of Weedeater, Electric Wizard and other dojah aficionados. The song remains a cherished staple of the band's live show today, and it's possibly the most-covered tune in Black Sabbath's history. Draw your own conclusions.
2. FUNK METAL
"Behind the Wall of Sleep," 1970
Sabbath aren't thought of as a particularly funky bunch, despite their preternatural ability to lock into deep grooves. While they'll never be confused with James Brown, they did have their moments - the funkiest of which can be found on their debut album. In addition to the irresistibly bouncy "N.I.B.," Black Sabbath contains the song "Behind the Wall of Sleep," a riff-sterpiece featuring a sublimely funky drum break by Bill Ward. How funky? Well, funky enough to be sampled by the likes of Outkast, Beck, Too $hort and the Fugees, among others, according to WhoSampled.com. Not a lot of funk metal bands can claim to have influenced a roster of hip-hop artists that talented. Pretty much none, I'd say.
1. PROG METAL
"The Writ," 1975
Much of Black Sabbath's heyday coincided with the rise of progressive rock, and though they were never a part of that scene, they were certainly touched by it. Hell, as a hard rock band in the '70s, it was hard not to be. Particularly as the decade wore on, Sabbath toyed with some proggier elements - even adding a Moog synthesizer to tracks like "Who Are You?" and "Sabra Cadabra." For my money, though, "The Writ" from Sabotage stands alone as the first truly progressive heavy metal song. Coming in at more than eight minutes, the weird, lengthy song is notable for providing the first glimpse of the more dynamic vocal range that Ozzy would later employ to great effect on his '80s solo records.
From: https://www.houstonpress.com/music/every-metal-subgenre-began-as-a-black-sabbath-song-6510141