Other people's music

I've bought a lot of cds recently, but not had time to listen to them all. The last ones I really commented on were Swallow The Sun, Insomnium, Katatonia, and Paradise Lost. For what it's worth I still have much the same opinion on those: StS is great, Paradise Lost is average, Insomnium's was not significantly better than the previous one (which was great), and Katatonia's was a disappointment albeit an enjoyable one.

Since then, I've acquired and listened to these:

Dark Tranquillity - We Are The Void
Eluveitie - Everything Remains (As It Never Was)
Ghost Brigade - Isolation Songs
In Mourning - Monolith
Monumentum - In Absentia Christi
Novembers Doom - Into Night's Requiem Infernal
Winterfylleth - The Ghost Of Heritage

All of those are good but the Ghost Brigade album really stands out. When I first heard some of their stuff online last year I wasn't quite sure if I liked it, because a couple of songs have that slight metalcore tinge to them, but I heard another song recently that I thought was quite good and so decided to get the album to see what it was like. Needless to say I wasn't disappointed and they fit in my mental music classification somewhere around the Katatonia / Dawn of Solace area, melancholic metal with occasional clean vocals. I was even more pleasantly surprised to learn their keyboardist is Aleksi from Swallow the Sun and Insomnium. That guy gets around, in a good way.

I have also acquired the following but have yet to listen to them:

Burzum - Belus
De Profundis - A Bleak Reflection
Lustre - Nightspirit
Mortemia - Misere Mortem
Serotonal - Monumental (thanks Dan!)
Stone Circle - Myth
Thurisaz - Scent Of A Dream
Vreid - I Krig


It's the Katatonia and Swallow the Sun gig tomorrow. After being relatively spoiled in the mid 90s with gigs like Paradise Lost + Anathema or Iron Maiden + My Dying Bride, there seemed to be years and years of great bands with boring supports or vice versa. But for me this has all changed in the last year, with bands I love playing together becoming the rule rather than the exception. Last year we had Paradise Lost with Katatonia, Swallow The Sun with Insomnium, My Dying Bride + Katatonia + Anathema at Hellfire, Katatonia and Swallow the Sun tomorrow, and Dark Tranquillity with Insomnium later in the year. Good stuff.

PS. It should be interesting to see Katatonia's new line-up.