New Finds – VII
In the previous post from this series I was saying I was planning to write another by the end of the year and wondering whether I’ll actually manage it. And today is the end of the year, so this is cutting it as close as it can be, but let me see if I’ll throw something together by midnight. Don’t worry; don’t have anything better to do and there are definitely a lot of bands to choose from, the problem being how to select them and then which songs to link to.
I’ll start with what truly is a new find, which is a Romanian band called Adastia. They seem to have been founded very recently and only two songs are posted, To the North and Nightforge, but those sure show a lot of promise. Great, powerful vocals, nice songs overall and even more notable for me since there are few metal bands with female vocals here and even fewer that don’t feel a need to ruin everything by adding growls. Or at least they don’t seem to feel that need based on these two songs, but the other members of Adastia, with the exception of the vocalist, are or were in Avatar, which as you can see is listed as death metal, so there is reason for concern even if Avatar’s vocalist isn’t included.
And now I’m just going down the list, skipping plenty for various reasons, and stopping at EnkElination, or EnkeliNation, as they spell it when they mean to point out that it comes from “angel” in Finnish and not only from the vocalist’s name. They’re definitely not a new find, but I guess it’s simply their turn to be mentioned in one of these posts, though I definitely have no idea why it took me so long. They have videos for Tears of Lust and for Last Time Together, but if you want to listen to all of their first and so far only album, also named Tears of Lust and released last year, you can do so on Bandcamp.
Another band whose turn definitely came is Elvellon, though I’m actually not sure how long ago I first bumped into them. Their first video, for Born from Hope, was released after I wrote the previous post in this series, but I’m quite sure that wasn’t the first time I heard them and their EP, Spellbound, was released back in January. Contains only five songs, but you can listen to all of them on Bandcamp and I added bands based on less before, even in this very post, and some were definitely less promising than Elvellon.
Moving on, Gibraltar isn’t exactly a place where I’d expect to find such a band, but that’s where Angelwings are from. There’s not that much to listen to at the moment, but they’re saying their first EP, titled The Edge of Innocence, should be released in early January. Until then, they recently posted Wonderland, while the song that first made me add them to the list was Memories. Definitely like those two, though overall they seem to be a mixed bag from my perspective, as I’m not keen on the other two posted so far, which sound quite different.
And while I’m at wings, let the fifth band I’ll add here be Metalwings. They seem to have been around for a while, but what I’m seeing seems to indicate that they were mainly singing covers, with a first EP mentioned as supposed to be released in 2015 but not actually listed anywhere, so may not have seen the light of day yet after all. Still, they have a video, for Crying of the Sun, and a few other full songs on their various profiles. The most are on SoundCloud at the moment, so I guess that’d be the place to check to get a better idea, but I must say I was stuck on Second Chance for quite a while, and twice, if not actually three times.
I seem to have managed to get to five bands added faster than I initially thought, mostly because my picks made selecting what to link to easy, and for a moment there I was considering to add a couple more, but better play it safe and stop at the usual number. What’s somewhat interesting is that only one of the five, Elvellon, even has an entry on Metal Archives, and while the lack of actual releases means that’s exactly as it should be for Adastia, Angelwings and probably also Metalwings, the lack of such an entry for EnkElination is definitely surprising. Guess I wasn’t the only one who for some unexplainable reason hadn’t gotten around to adding them somewhere yet…
But to get back to this entry and this series of posts, there are definitely many more bands I should add at some point and the list will only get bigger with time, with so many undeservedly ending up forgotten there for years. As such, with only four months between this post and the previous one, I’ll set a clear goal of two more for next year, and a tentative one for three, or for two bigger ones including a total of at least 15 bands. Seems like a tall order, however, though I’m not exactly sure why.
