Led Zeppelin – Blood and Porridge

May 22, 2025May 22, 2025

Happy World Goth Day 2025

It’s May 22^nd, which a quick check on Google informs me is Sherlock Holmes Day, Harvey Milk Day, International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, and, thirst-quenchingly, both Chardonnay Day and National Craft Distillery Day. But most interestingly for me, in honour of the planet’s spookiest and blackest-clad musical sub-culture, it’s World Goth Day.

With that in mind, here are YouTube links to a dozen Goth tunes that I’ve been listening to recently. Be prepared, though, for a few annoying YouTube ads for fast-food outlets, perfumes and designer footwear before you get to the delights of the music itself.

First off… I knew nothing about Sidewalks and Skeletons before I stumbled across this number, Born to Die, on YouTube a little while ago. According to a Google search, “Sidewalks and Skeletons is the solo project of UK artist of Jake Lee, who grew up in Bradford, England”. Lee was at one time a deathcore guitarist but during the past two decades has been attracted more by ‘dark electronic music.’ Anyway, as well as being an impressive (if rather intense) listening experience, Born to Die comes with a video that’s a memorable amalgamation of epileptic-seizure-inducing lighting effects and quaint-but-creepy clips from some old, black-and-white silent movies.

Here’s a song called Edison’s Medicine by the San Francisco band In Letter Form. A track on their 2016 album Fracture Repair Repeat, it manages the tricky feat of sounding a bit like late 1970s legends Joy Division, whilst having enough personality of its own to also sound like something other than a song by Joy Division. (There’s a whole sub-genre of bands out there who sound like Joy Division and nothing else – I’m looking at you, Editors – a sub-genre I like to call ‘Joy Revision’.) Anyway, it’s great The only thing to sour the experience of hearing its melancholy gorgeousness is knowing that, tragically, the band’s singer Eric Miranda passed away the same year it was released.

© Sacred Bones Records

And there’s a pleasant (but again not too derivative) Joy Division vibe running through my next choice, Cyaho, by the Belarussian band Molchat Doma. It appears on their 2018 album Etazhi. Popular belief has it that Goth music evolved in wintry, out-of-way cities in northern England in the Margaret Thatcher-dominated 1980s. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that a similar sound emerged from Minsk, the wintry (during the coldest months its temperature drops to minus seven degrees) out-of-the-way capital of Alexander Lukashenka-dominated Belarus. Though apparently, they’re now based in Los Angeles.

If all this Joy Division-influenced music is making you feel glum, here’s the cure. I mean it. Here’s the Cure. In 2000 Robert Smith and co. released their eleventh studio album Bloodflowers, which was greeted by some snotty reviews in the music press. “Goth-awful!” exclaimed the now-defunct Melody Maker, hilariously. What a lot of nonsense. Bloodflowers is a great Cure record. Incidentally, it’s currently the album I listen to most on my elderly iPod while I subject my equally elderly bones and joints to a workout in my local gym. And the very best thing on it is the second track, Watching Me Fall, a mighty, majestic thing indeed. It’s like listening to a Gothicised version of a relentless Led Zeppelin stomper such as When the Levee Breaks (1971) or Kashmir (1975).

My next song is Troops by London-based singer Grace Solero and her eponymous band. It originally appeared on their first album, New Moon, in 2009. I don’t know if Ms. Solero would be pleased to be described as a purveyor of Goth music, but there’s an amount of witchy darkness here, though mixed with some radiant, soaring moments too. In fact, it’s the song’s polarities – its rawness and tenderness – that appeal to me.

There was a time when Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, famous for performing with his band the Bad Seeds and for once fronting the raucous punk-Goth outfit the Birthday Party, seemed a Jekyll and Hyde character. Sometimes you’d get Nice Nick, singing gentle, pretty songs like Into My Arms (1997) that you ‘d happily let your granny listen to. Yet you’d also get Nasty Nick, responsible for such sonic assaults as Stagger Lee (1996) where Cave hollered about slobbering on people’s heads and filling them full of lead while Blixa Bargeld shrieked apocalyptically in the background, which you’d only let your granny listen to if you wanted her to die so you could inherit her money.

© Mute Records

Some have lamented the fact that as he’s grown older, Nice Nick has come to dominate Cave’s musical output while Nasty Nick has mostly disappeared. But I just go with the flow… Here’s an example of what I consider Nice Nick at his best, the ballad Sweetheart Come from 2001’s No More Shall We Part. I can’t understand why it hasn’t received more attention, praise and love as I think it’s a marvellous song. Though the lyric “And if he touches you again with his stupid hands / His life won’t be worth living” suggests a smidgeon of Nasty Nick lurking in the mix.

As someone who’s also a fan of heavy metal, I should enjoy the crossover of it and Goth music known as ‘gothic metal’. But with a few exceptions, such as County Suffolk’s awesome Cradle of Filth, the bands don’t appeal to me. HIM, the Rasmus, Nightwish, Charon, Unshine… Their music seems all a bit too tasteful and pretty for my tastes, and the ones with female singers appear to be doing their best to sound like Evanescence, a very successful band who never floated my boat. Plus they all seem to come from Finland – is being a member of a gothic-metal band a prerequisite for getting Finnish citizenship?

However, here’s one Finnish gothic-metal outfit I do like, the melodramatically-named Eternal Tears of Sorrow. This song, Sweet Lilith of My Dreams, the opening track on their 2006 album Before the Bleeding Sun, begins daintily enough, before gathering speed and volume. It’s just a shame that Eternal Tears of Sorrow announced their disbandment three months ago.

And just to show there are gothic-metal bands with female singers whom I like too, here’s Lacuna Coil, from Italy (not Finland). Two years ago, Lacuna Coil played a gig in my current city of residence, Singapore, and I’m still annoyed at myself for missing the opportunity to see them then. This song, Blood, Tears, Dust, from their 2016 album Delirium, nicely combines the operatic vocals of their singer Christina Scabbia with the growlier and more traditionally-metallic tones of their other singer, Andrea Ferro. And musically, it rattles along.

That’s enough about gothic metal. Now it’s time for another hybrid – Goth music blended with twangy surf music. The song in question is from the 2022 EP Surf-Goth by Melbourne artist Desmond Doom and its called Get Me Out. Actually, the dark sounds and dark sensibilities mixed with springy surf guitars put me in mind of some earlier efforts by feedback-loving alternative rockers the Jesus and Mary Chain. (If Jim and William Reid knew I had mentioned the Jesus and Mary Chain in a piece about Goth music, they would probably come around to my house and kill me. So don’t tell them I did that.)

© Desmond Doom Music

Come to think of it, though, back in 1998 I bought a Goth compilation album called Nocturnal, which had two Jesus and Mary Chain tracks on it… And also on that album, near the end, was my next choice, Big Hollow Man by the singer, producer and artist Danielle Dax. I thought the song was charming, even though it seemed lighter and poppier than most other stuff on the record. But should anyone doubt Ms. Dax’s credentials for appearing in a list of Goth tunes, I’ll point them to the fact that in 1984 she played the wolf-girl in Neil Jordan’s masterly film adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves (1979). There’s nothing Gothier than that.

I’ve described the veteran band Killing Joke in the past as a ‘Goth / industrial juggernaut’ with a ‘crunching, thunderous urgency’. The next song, I am the Virus, from Killing Joke’s 2015 album Pylon, does nothing to make me change my opinion of them. With its Beatles-baiting title, it takes retrospective aim at George Bush Jr, Tony Blair, the War on Terror, the second Iraq War et al: “There’s a darkness in the West,” roars singer Jaz Coleman, “oil swilling guzzling corporate central banking mind-f**king omnipotence.” I suppose in 2015 Bush and Blair’s catastrophic intervention in the Middle East seemed the worst thing that could ever happen. Mind you, since then… According to their Wikipedia entry, the band have been ‘inactive’ since the death of guitarist Geordie Walker in 2023. But now, in this dire era of Trump II, I feel we need them more than ever.

Finally, here’s Dead Can Dance, another band who combine Goth music with something else – in their case, ‘world music’, the patronising catch-all term Westerners use to describe traditional music from non-Western countries. Dead Can Dance have been mixing genres enthusiastically since 1996’s Spiritchaser, although on this song, Amnesia, from the band’s 2012 album Anastasis, the world-music elements are less in evidence. Well, apart from the insistent chime of band-member Lisa Gerrard’s yangqin, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘Chinese hammered dulcimer’. Whatever, Amnesia is both a stirring and a wonderfully-mellow composition and it makes a good item with which to end this list.

Happy World Goth Day 2025!

© Procreate

May 7, 2024May 13, 2024

In at the Deep end

I love live music and I live in Singapore, where in recent months there’s been much excitement about major bands and singers coming and staging concerts. But I’ve felt like the title character in Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834) when he laments, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” Yes, there’s been a buzz about Singapore being south-east Asia’s number-one stop for famous musicians on tour. But frankly, as a grumpy old punk / goth / heavy-metal guy, the music made by the acts performing lately in Singapore really isn’t my thing. Indeed, if I had to choose between listening to it and sticking a sharp stick into my ear, I’d probably go for the ‘sharp stick’ option.

Firstly in January 2024, Singapore’s National Stadium hosted half-a-dozen concerts by English group Coldplay, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘pop rock’, ‘post-Britpop’, ‘pop’ and, supposedly, ‘alternative rock’ band. I regard Coldplay as being so wimpy they make Belle and Sebastian sound like Rage Against the Machine. That’s all.

Then in February English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran played the National Stadium too. Regarding Ed Sheeran, I can only say I agree with the late Mark E. Smith, mainstay of the fabulously unhinged post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, who likened him to “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops.”

And then, in March at the National Stadium, Taylor Swift put on six shows of her Eras tour. That meant for a week Singapore’s usually orderly streets were filled with fans from all over Asia – ‘Swifties’ I believe they’re called in modern-day parlance – clad in spangly skirts, pink gowns, cowboy hats and friendship bracelets and with rhinestones arranged in the shape of hearts adorning their faces. Taylor’s lengthy stopover in Singapore – the only shows of the Eras tour in Asia – prompted politicians in Thailand and the Philippines to grumble about the generous subsidies Singapore offered for each concert. According to the Straits Times newspaper, these allegedly “were contingent on Swift not performing in other South-east Asian nations.” To be honest, as someone immune to Taylor’s musical charms, if I was a politician in Thailand or the Philippines, I’d be thanking Singapore for keeping her away from my shores.

Anyway, this is a preamble to the fact that, last week, I felt totally starved of decent live music – I hadn’t been to a gig for half-a-year – and did something I wouldn’t normally do. I bought a ticket for a Deep Purple concert.

Deep Purple are often referred to as one of the ‘holy trinity’ who, in the 1970s, fathered heavy metal. But while I love the other two members of that trinity, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I’ve never been into Deep Purple. To me, they didn’t have Led Zeppelin’s knack for coming up with irresistible guitar riffs nor that band’s ability to experiment, successfully, with other musical genres: blues, folk, reggae, rockabilly, world music. And they didn’t have the splendidly ominous sound of Black Sabbath, which would influence future sub-genres of heavy metal like black and doom metal.

© Phonogram Ltd

I also wasn’t into Deep Purple because, even as a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the band seemed like ancient history to me. This was because when I was at secondary school in Scotland, Deep Purple had split up – temporarily, it turned out – and spawned a bunch of splinter groups with former Purple members as their movers and shakers. Ritchie Blackmore, Purple guitarist from 1968 to 1975, had formed Rainbow, which during the early 1980s included in its line-up Purple bassist Roger Glover. For a while, Rainbow had as their singer the late Ronnie James Dio, a man I greatly admired, and I think their 1976 song Stargazer is a work of stomping, over-the-top brilliance. But their later stuff I found mostly lame.

Meanwhile, David Coverdale, who’d been Deep Purple’s singer from 1973 to 1976, had formed Whitesnake, which during its early years contained such other Deep Purple stalwarts as drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Jon Lord. I liked the 1980 Whitesnake album Ready an’ Willing for its agreeable, aggressively bluesy sound, but later albums like 1981’s Come an’ Get It and 1984’s Slide It In seemed, in their inuendo-heavy way, to be about the size of Coverdale’s todger and his irresistibility to the ladies, and I gave them a body-swerve. Later still, Whitesnake metamorphosised into a then-modish, American-west-coast hair-metal band à la Motley Crue, which in my mind made them yet more unspeakable.

© EMI

I’m writing about this in detail because, at my school, the great Deep Purple break-up had resulted in there being two antagonistic tribes among the kids who were into heavy metal. Those who had the Rainbow logo (with a giant fist bursting out of the sea and grabbing hold of, yes, a rainbow) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who thought David Coverdale was a giant dickhead. And those who had the Whitesnake logo (WHITESNAKE spelt in joined-up letters by an ultra-long and ultra-squiggly white snake) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who entertained a similarly uncomplimentary opinion of Ritchie Blackmore.

Incidentally, there was a third Deep Purple splinter group on the go at the time – Gillan, unsurprisingly fronted by Ian Gillan, who’d served as the Purple vocalist from 1969 to 1973. But nobody I knew at school liked poor old Gillan or his eponymous band. My beef with Ian Gillan, though, is that afterwards, from 1983 to 1984, he sang with the mighty Black Sabbath and the album he recorded with them, Born Again (1983), is dire.

In 1984, Deep Purple reformed with their most popular line-up: Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice. But I had zero interest in this. And while over the decades since, I heard about comings and goings within the band – Blackmore quitting again in 1993 and Steve Morse replacing him a year later, Glover departing in 2002 and being replaced by Don Airey, and Morse leaving in 2022 with Northern Irish guitarist Simon McBride stepping into his shoes – I’d never felt any inclination to listen to their music or see them live. In fact, I could only name three Deep Purple Songs: Smoke on the Water (1972), Black Night (1970) and Hush (1968). Oh, and Woman from Tokyo (1973), which makes it four.

And it didn’t surprise me to learn that Deep Purple was why Mark E. Smith (him again) sacked Marc Riley, bassist, guitarist and keyboard player (and future DJ) from the Fall. Riley got his marching orders in part because Smith saw him dancing to Deep Purple in an Australian nightclub: “Get in the hotel and stay there till I tell you.” Smith raged. “You don’t need to be dancing to Smoke on the Water.”

Anyway… Onto last week’s Deep Purple gig, which took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre. I found it a mixed bag – but the good bits in that bag were enough to make the evening worthwhile. It was noticeable how Simon McBride and Don Airey, the band’s newest members, did a lot of heavy lifting, embarking on lengthy guitar and keyboard instrumentals that allowed Gillan, Glover and Paice, all in their mid-to-late seventies, to take a break. Admittedly, Airey is no spring chicken himself, but presumably being behind a keyboard is less tiring than having to prowl continuously around a stage or belt continuously at a drumkit. My tastes in music developed after the advent of punk rock and I’ve been conditioned to believe that instrumental solos are inherently evil, and believe that those who perpetrate instrumental solos should be locked away for 20 years in Prog Rock Prison. However, tonight, I made an effort to switch off the punk part of my brain and just enjoy the quality musicianship on display as McBride twiddled his guitar-strings and Airey plinked his keyboards.

One of a long line of rock guitarists from Belfast – see also Gary Moore, Vivian Campbell, Gerry McAvoy and Eric Bell – and, at 45, three decades younger than his Deep Purple compadres, McBride must find these moments a dream come true. According to Wikipedia, McBride started to teach himself guitar when he was nine years old and while he was listening to his dad’s hard-rock collection, which included Deep Purple, on the family stereo. Now, 36 years on, there are times when he’s practically carrying Deep Purple on his shoulders.

Airey knows how to play too and, perched over his keyboards and grinning manically like a mad scientist at work over a table laden with smoking vials, he was clearly enjoying himself. Incidentally, in the past, Airey has played with Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Saxon, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, among many others, and thus has a heavy metal CV to die for.

Of the other members… Roger Glover and Ian Paice did what was required of them. Whenever the giant screen above the stage showed a close-up of Paice, he seemed to me to be a dead ringer these days for the actor Timothy Spall. Which is ironic since Spall has played a rock drummer – he was Beano Baggett, the hapless tub-thumper with fictional 1970s rock band Strange Fruit in the underrated 1998 comedy movie Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson and written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

As for Ian Gillan… Well, I don’t want to rag on him because of his age, but his voice has definitely seen better days and there were moments, as he tottered stiffly about the stage, when he looked like he was in pain. Also, during some of the stretches in the songs when he wasn’t required to sing, he’d hirple offstage where, presumably, a chair awaited him. Still, I’m past the days when I used to believe that old rockers should be forced to retire and make way for the Young Turks. Probably that change in attitude is because I’m now an old codger myself. If Gillan still enjoys what he does, and people are still willing to pay money to watch him do it… Good on him.

The songs were well-performed even if, tune-wise, they didn’t leave much of an impression on me afterwards – I can still only identify four Deep Purple songs. And at the end, rather wonderfully, the band signed off with three of those four: Smoke on the Water, Hush and Black Night. As Gillan finally managed to hit the operatic high notes, and Airey channelled the spookily thunderous organ sound that was the speciality of the late Jon Lord, the hairs rose on the back of even my sceptical neck. Finally, I understood why so many people loved this band.

Loved? A lot of people evidently still love them. The concert attracted a good-sized crowd, not all of them old buggers like myself, and everyone seemed extremely happy by the end. It was just a pity that many folk spent the gig staring at their phones whilst dutifully filming everything. Jesus. Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen? Why not immerse yourself in the excitement and drama of what’s actually happening around you? It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage. (Suede’s Brett Anderson made this point forcefully in the same theatre six months ago.) Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.

I’m no bigger a Deep Purple fan now than I was before the gig, but credit where it’s due. Despite the occasional shortcoming, they made an effort and put on a decent show, when they could easily have coasted on past glories and phoned in their performances. I only wish someone had de-phoned the audience.

September 11, 2021September 11, 2021

21st century metal

© Nuclear Blast

Such has been the fanfare recently over the return of Swedish 1970s pop darlings Abba, with a new ten-song album and a supposed ‘virtual concert’ where ‘digital avatars’ will perform in the shoes of the band’s now somewhat long-in-the-tooth members, that I’ve wondered if I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t actually like Abba.

Okay, ‘doesn’t like’ is a bit strong. A more accurate verb-phrase would be ‘is totally indifferent to’.

There are a couple of Abba songs that get me tapping my foot in a vague, mindless way, like Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! or Money, Money, Money (both 1979) or the song with which they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, Waterloo – which, come to think of it, was an appropriation of the breezy, sax-laden sound of Roy Wood’s glam-rock band Wizzard. But unlike, say, the entire population of Australia, a country that’s given us such Abba-obsessed cultural phenomena as the cover band Bjorn Again and the movies Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding (both 1994), I don’t worship the ground that the shiny, 1970s, high-heeled boots of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn have walked on.

However, while the planet’s airwaves turn into the equivalent of the soundtrack of Mamma Mia! (2008), though thankfully without the pained, raspy sound of Pierce Brosnan attempting to sing, I will seek solace in the one type of music that truly matters… heavy metal.

Here’s a quick guide to the heavy metal bands, all of whom have become prominent since the beginning of the new millennium, that I’ve been listening to lately.

Al-Namrood

As this 2015 feature in the magazine Vice noted, “Al-Namrood have never played a live show, because it could result in the entire band being executed.” That’s because the band Al-Namrood (a) play black metal and (b) are Saudi Arabian, two concepts that go together about as harmoniously as serpents and mongooses. According to their guitarist and bassist Mephisto, who, like all the band’s members, has never revealed his real name for his own safety, “Al-Namrood is the Arabic name of the Babylonian king Nimrood, who was a mighty tyrannical king who ruled Babylon with blood and defied the ruler of the universe.” Yes, those sound like pretty black metal things to do. It’s a shame that the band has had to operate so far off the grid because the music by them I’ve heard, its growling vocals and relentlessly thunderous guitars and drums laced with delicious Arabic folk stylings, I’ve found irresistible.

Behemoth

Polish black metal and death metal band Behemoth are similarly unloved by their country’s political and religious establishment. And though the repercussions obviously won’t be as serious as those risked by Al-Namrood in Saudi Arabia, Behemoth’s frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski has recently been convicted of blasphemy and could face imprisonment in the increasingly authoritarian Poland of Andrzej Duda. Actually, politically, Nergal has proved to be a bit of a knobhead in the past and once gained notoriety for wearing a ‘black metal against Antifa’ T-shirt, so it’s ironic he’s become a martyr in the struggle against the forces of extreme, right-wing knobhead-dom.

Behemoth first caught my attention when I listened to their 2018 album I Loved You at Your Darkest, which begins with a choir of creepy children chanting, “I shall not forgive… Jesus Christ… I forgive thee not…” Thereafter, the album is a brilliantly Wagnerian parade of tunes with such titles as God = Dog, Ecclesia Diabolica Catholica and If Crucifixion Was Not Enough. Can’t imagine why those pious Polish politicians don’t like them.

Cult of Luna

Proof that, musically, Sweden has considerably more to offer than just Abba, Swedish doom metal band Cult of Luna serve up tunes where big, booming slabs of guitar lumber ominously along, accompanied by hollering and shrieking vocals, creating a sound that suggests a world teetering on the brink of collapse while simultaneously being strangely exhilarating and even uplifting. The earliest album of theirs I’ve heard is 2003’s The Beyond, the most recent one 2021’s The Raging River. Though there’s evidence of development and exploration between the two, the basic template is reassuringly the same.

Electric Wizard

Hailing from County Dorset, England, the original members of Electric Wizard bonded in the 1990s over a shared love of horror films, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the music of legendary Brummie metal band Black Sabbath. It was from the titles of two Sabbath songs, Electric Funeral and The Wizard (both 1970), that they devised their band’s name. For me, they just seem to get better and better – from early albums like Dopethrone (2000) and Let Us Prey (2002) to their most recent opus, Wizard Bloody Wizard (2017), which contains the deliriously catchy track Necromania.

In fact, someone has stuck a fan video for Necromania on YouTube, its visuals stitched together from such lovable old horror-movie schlock-fests as The Dunwich Horror (1969), Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), All the Colours of the Dark (1972), Baron Blood (1972), Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). It captures the essence of Electric Wizard perfectly.

© Roadrunner

Gojira

Several bands have named themselves after Godzilla, Japan’s favourite, radioactive-breathed, city-destroying kaiju, including Godzilla in the Kitchen and Bongzilla. In my opinion, the best of the bunch is the one using the giant reptile’s original Japanese moniker, Gojira. This French death / progressive metal outfit combines shrieking vocals, wailing guitars and thunderous drums – courtesy of drummer Mario Duplantier, whose sound suggests the footfall of the giant lizard itself – with a surprising degree of melody. Well, the melodiousness is perhaps not so surprising, giving that the bandmembers cite Led Zeppelin as a key influence. The 2012 album L’Enfant Sauvage made me fall in love with Gojira, although their most recent one, Fortitude (2021), is pretty good too.

Melechesh

I first heard of the band Melechesh through the artist John Coulthart, whose blog I read regularly and who’s designed the covers for their albums, including 2015’s album Enki. Soon afterwards, I saw Enki on sale in a record shop and bought it out of curiosity. It’s a great album, its storming metallic sound embroidered with such eastern-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern instruments as the sitar, bouzouki, saz and bendir. Melechesh, it transpires, are the propagators of ‘Mesopotamian metal’ which, according to their Wikipedia entry, aims to “create a type of black metal incorporating extensive Middle Eastern influences mainly based on Assyrian and occult themes.” They formed in Jerusalem in 1993 but later relocated to Europe. In the mid-1990s, the city authorities in Jerusalem accused them of ‘dark cult activities’, which probably didn’t encourage them to hang around in Israel.

Orchid

One afternoon I was in the FOPP record shop on Edinburgh’s Rose Street and the guy behind the counter decided to play a heavy metal album over the store’s PA system. “What’s this?” I demanded, intoxicated by the album’s old-school sound – although as this was Rose Street, I may have been slightly intoxicated already. “It’s The Mouths of Madness,” he replied, “by Orchid!” Then he produced another copy of the album, recorded in 2013, which I bought on the spot. I would have remarked: “ORCHID – obviously stands for OZZY Osbourne / RAINBOW / the CULT / Rob HALFORD / IRON Maiden / Ronnie James DIO!” But I wasn’t able to think that fast.

As I’ve suggested, San Francisco metallers Orchid wear their influences on their sleeves, but especially the influence of Black Sabbath. Now while Black Sabbath, with their doomy sound and the occult preoccupations of their song-titles and lyrics, have been a huge influence on heavy metal generally, later bands have taken that sound and those preoccupations and made them more extreme and exaggerated. But Orchid are reminiscent of Black Sabbath as they were, in a purer, simpler form. I don’t mean that they copy the original band’s songs. Orchid sound like Black Sabbath in their early 1970s prime, if they ‘d existed in a parallel universe where they’d been able to churn out a few extra albums. Similar riffs, but not the same riffs.

Reverend Bizarre

As far as I can tell, quaintly-named doom-metal outfit Reverend Bizarre are the only band on this list who no longer exist. They disbanded in 2007, having produced three albums during the noughties. I own two of those, the excellent In the Rectory of the Reverend Bizarre (2002) and II: Crush the Insects (2005). Sounding like a sludgier, more primordial version of Electric Wizard, this Finnish band was notable for, among other things, its vocalist, the also quaintly-named Albert Witchfinder. He eschewed modish doom-metal growling and shrieking and mainly just crooned forebodingly.

Wolves in the Throne Room

Their name may conjure up images of Game of Thrones, but Wolves in the Throne Room come from the relatively un-sword-and-sorcerous environs of Washington State in the northwestern USA. One of their objectives (to quote Wikipedia again) is “channeling the ‘energies of the Pacific Northwest’s landscape’ into musical form.” Thus, their song titles contain such words as ‘fields’, ‘fog’, ‘lightning’, ‘rain’, ‘rainbow’, ‘stars’, ‘storm’ and ‘woodland’ and their sound has been described as ‘atmospheric black metal’ or ‘ambient black metal’. But there’s still enough ‘black metal’ present in Wolves in the Throne Room’s formula to prevent them sounding serene and bucolic. I have three of their albums – 2006’s Diadem of 12 Stars, 2009’s Black Cascade and 2011’s Celestial Lineage – and think they’re all blisteringly brilliant.

Having finished writing this blog-entry, I now feel an urge to listen to the above nine bands’ albums again, at maximum volume. I’ll probably be deaf afterwards, but at least then there’s no danger of me hearing the new Abba album.