From Estonia, here's LIBLIKAS who blend various styles awesomely with a lot of tightness and a great sense of harmonic melodies.
Basically Stoner rock, the guys are not afraid to mix some Sabbathian riffage with harsher (Thrash) and more progressive (even jazzy) sounds...
I'm not gonna tell you that we've got here the ultimate European answer to Mastodon but you'll be surprised by the mountainous maturity and audacity from such young and (a priori) relatively unexperimented guys !
This certainly helps to its consistency and richness in moods and variations, "Wooden Spaceship" is a concept-album relating the reflective journey of a man suddenly suffering from amnesia, this enhances the coloured creativity of the songs, always heavy with a wide spectrum of emotions... Highly recommended !!!
BAD TRIP is an instrumental band from Greece and this self titled (mini) album consists of 3 songs for about 30 minutes (both first songs clock at 7 mns while last one lasts more than twice as long).
Post HC/Sludge this is what they solidly deliver, tensed and weighty, the music is filled with lots of catchiness and a great dose of dark heaviness.
Logically last song leaves more place for contemplative parts and Post Rock experimentative sounds but the dark and enthralling atmosphere is still prominent !
I'd say that (for me) the relative short length of the album is perfect; I think that just one other song would have been certainly too much, cause this style at one point needs in my opinion vocals and/or a (visual) concept to accompany the instruments like Year Of No Light brilliantly do for example... Bad Trip is seriously recommendable but next album will need this time to reveal a true distinctive center point of their identity !
https://www.facebook.com/BadTrip.Skg
SARIN is a Toronto based Sludgy Post Metal band who released a pretty interesting EP a few months ago. "House of Leaves" contains 4 songs for a total length of about 21 minutes, including the short instrumental that is "Delial".
I really think that Sarin shows an emerging potential in terms of creative soundscapes, just listen for example the first minute and a half of the title track which is stylistically and strucutrally audacious as an introduction to a new band's sound (this is the 1st song)... Where I' m not totally convinced is by the relative linearity of the overall, slow to mid tempos are most often great with chugging agility but I feel some propulsion and/or drama would be welcome at times !
My fave song here is without any possible doubt "Mosque", lumbering and insanely crushing, it could remind an amazing blend of Isis and Yob (Mike Scheidt's influence is to my ears only clearly palpable on this one) !
"Black Halls" is a good song to close this debut with but certainly due to the fact that it's the longest one (8 mn) - I think that this one particularly would have needed more exploration in layers and moods than just the brief and massive acceleration by the very end...
Well, extremely rare are the bands who directly access the highest category at first shot, so no worry for Sarin who has built with this EP some serious foundations but still needs to enrich their sound, something that should be reached with a bit more time...
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