Bedowyn - Blood of the Fall

By Karen A. Mann. Like their namesake, Raleigh, N.C.’s Bedowyn takes a nomadic approach to metal, journeying through doom, stoner, death and even a little Southern rock, but never settling down with any particular genre.

By Karen A. Mann.

Cover art by Donovan Valdez.

Like their namesake, Raleigh, N.C.’s Bedowyn takes a nomadic approach to metal, journeying through doom, stoner, death and even a little Southern rock, but never settling down with any particular genre. Following their promising 2013 debut, Wolves & Trees, the quartet has delivered a masterful and extraordinarily well thought-out follow up with Blood of the Fall, a raging battle call reveling in death and despair.

The album opens with (and later reprises) "The Horde". This short instrumental is mostly Sabbath-like wah-drenched guitar, (think Electric Funeral), which then segues into "Rite to Kill". With its rolling, chugging drums, intricate guitar, and strong, angry vocals, "Rite to Kill" gives a serious nod to High on Fire, and sets the pace for the remainder of the album. The mood is one of foreboding and excitement, and you almost feel like you’re galloping into a great and terrible war, from which you almost certainly won’t return.

"Blood of the Fall" features some good clean singing from singer/guitarist Alex Traboulsi, who deftly switches from snarling and angry to melodic and clear. "Cotard’s Blade" begins with an acoustic melody, and for the remainder of the album the acoustic touches are more prominent, culminating in the classically-inspired acoustic interlude "For a Fleeting Moment".

Bedowyn is at its best -- and actually most accessible -- on the melancholic, regretful "Halfhand", with Traboulsi showing his full range and guitarist Mark Peters delivering a soaring solo.

The album comes full circle at the very end with "The Horde (Exodus)", which reprises the opener’s ominous wah-drenched riff, but makes it deeper and more despairing. If the album’s opener was all about riding into battle, this is the song where all is lost and devastation reigns.

Make - The Golden Veil

By Ulla Roschat. Three piece band MAKE from Chapel Hill/NC have released their 2nd full length album The Golden Veil. The album can roughly be labeled as post-rock with sludge, psychedelic, doom and drone influences…

By Ulla Roschat.


Three piece band MAKE from Chapel Hill/NC have released their 2nd full length album The Golden Veil.

The album can roughly be labeled as post-rock with sludge, psychedelic, doom and drone influences…, roughly, because MAKE use even the typical post rock/metal elements in a way that makes them totally their own. The loud-quiet contrasts, the slow build ups and cathartic release, we all know well. MAKE drive them to unusual extremes at times and they manage to surprise within the well known patterns.

Beautiful, unhurried dreamy melodies provide a sense of abundance of time and space, often steeped in compelling psychedelia you can easily lose yourself in, but the next crushing riff will find and destroy you before you realize what just happened. All contrasts are extreme, be it the dense and the spacious, the loud and the quiet, the frail and the crushing.

Into this abundance of time and space MAKE complect different musical styles and layers of textures easily and smoothly. There are bits of spaced out psychedelia, acoustic folk, noisy ambience, drone, doom, and touches of progressive, black and death metal. All this is used in a thoughtful and unobtrusive way that this sense of abundance of space is retained. The vocals are used in the same vein, diverse in themselves, harsh and clean, but modestly dosed.

The album is best listened to in the given order of the songs. Right from its start the first song feels like an intro and there's a flow between the songs that builds an overall coherence of the intricate soundscapes that allows the nearly one hour and seven songs to evolve and expand their dark and cold, but irresistible atmospheres. And it's, most notably, MAKE's sense for creating spellbinding atmospheres that makes The Golden Veil outstanding.

The song "The Immortal" is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 94

Serious Beak - Ankaa

By Justin C. We're not quite done with bird-themed metal this year. Up now is Australian instrumental act Serious Beak with Ankaa, a follow-up coming almost exactly 4 years after their fantastic debut, Huxwhukw.

By Justin C.

Artwork: Caitlin Hackett

We're not quite done with bird-themed metal this year. Up now is Australian instrumental act Serious Beak with Ankaa, a follow-up coming almost exactly 4 years after their fantastic debut, Huxwhukw. If you know their debut, you generally know what to expect, because their brand of proggy instrumental metal has stayed pretty consistent, although this time around, I think their melodic sensibilities have grown sharper.

The album is a concept of sorts, detailing in four songs the life cycle of our sun--including its formation, its "main sequence" at the present, its eventual expansion into a red giant, and ultimate collapse into a white dwarf and ultimately going dark completely as its fuel is exhausted. Paired with each song/stage is a bird, starting with an Australian songbird and ending, appropriately, with an extinct species. It's a fascinating concept, and it's interesting to think about how one might compose a soundtrack for the trillions of years in the life of a star. It wasn't obvious to me how one might do that, and even after the first listen, I still wasn't sure. But as I spent more time with this album, I realized Serious Beak nails the hell out of it.

The music alternates between proggy dissonance and lovely, tranquil melody. The angrier/proggier parts definitely call to mind King Crimson and bits of Meshuggah-isms, but I almost didn't include those references in this review because I didn't want to color anyone's perception of the music. More than any particular influence, what kept coming to mind when listening to this was the word "balance." The jagged, syncopated riffing is interspersed with beautiful minimalism. The first two parts of "Main Sequence (Dacelo novaeguineae)" emphasize this in spades. Granted, I could have happily listened to a whole album of the shimmering spacey parts, but as it is, the harsh and the pretty are offset perfectly. You can get lost in some music, but this demands more attention.

The third track, "Red (Laniocera hypopyrra)," may be the most aggressive, and it even features some legit guitar heroics. As you might expect, though, the technicality serves the song. The whole thing comes to a beautiful end in the fourth and final track, which perfectly encapsulates the idea of a star coming to the end of its life. Its gentle melodies and lilting tremolos perfectly fit the idea of something ending, particularly something much grander than us little human beings. It's a perfect ending to a wonderfully immersive album.