New Finds – X
I’ll start this by pointing out a new channel on YouTube called Metal for Your Soul, which already has quite a number of full metal albums from lesser known bands even though the first ones were only uploaded on April 1. Then again, I’m somewhat surprised it’s still there even now, though I guess the low number of views and the fact that the bands are lesser known explains it and may help it avoid removal for quite a while yet. Don’t be surprised if sooner or later the link will end up pointing to a channel that no longer exists though.
Since I mentioned that channel, the first band I’ll list here is Feridea, which is an older find which doesn’t even have new material since 2015, but which I was reminded of after spotting their two EPs there. There’s barely enough material for one full album if you put them together and they changed the vocalist between the two, but it’s good stuff, perhaps on Into a Dawn in particular, so I’d recommend at least listening to all four songs on that one, which you can find on their YouTube channel. The songs from Reborn in Time aren’t there, but they are on their SoundCloud page. Still, if I’m to stick to the usual pattern of picking two songs per band, I’ll go with Of Magic and Music and… Let’s say Song of a Longing Heart?
The second band I’ll point out today, Vandroya, is both an old and a new find. How does that work? Well, I’m sure I first stumbled into them years ago and Why Should We Say Goodbye? is actually I song I occasionally looked up to listen to again, usually getting pretty stuck on it once again when I did, but when I wanted to check whether their entry on my list also had the proper links after they started being shared again recently due to the launch of Beyond the Human Mind, I noticed that I didn’t have an entry for them at all, so I must have simply forgotten to add them there the first time around. Either way, I didn’t listen to all the songs on this second album yet, but let’s go with You’ll Know My Name out of what I could find. Rather too much focus on the guitars and those solos still bother me, that song actually being particularly plagued by this, but some enjoy this and she sure has a great, powerful voice.
An actual new find is Last Performance, who just released their first album. That sure is an odd choice for a name, but good voice, good sound, so I sure hope they’re not referring to themselves with it. One problem is that they don’t seem keen on posting or sharing much, be it information or songs, even the fact that at least most of the album is on Bandcamp not meaning much when they severely restrict the number of times you can listen to the songs. That sure is an infuriating feature of Bandcamp, by the way, and I’m not going to pick what to share from there when I’m hit with it. As such, I’m limited to what I can find on YouTube, which at the moment is Under Cover of Darkness and End of Pretense. No complaints, however, since they’re definitely good enough for the two picks.
AfterTime is a band I know I wanted to add before, but can’t remember whether that means I first stumbled into them last year, before writing the previous post in this series, or one of the times when I previously thought about writing this post this year was shortly after discovering them and I clearly had them in mind while trying to decide what to include in it. Either way, you can choose between YouTube and Bandcamp to listen to their songs, and I’ll go with All the Ruins Remain and World We’ve Lost as my two picks. Was more impressed with them at first, now I’m less convinced by her voice and not so keen on the sound of some of their other songs, but it remains a good effort and a good direction, and they seem to be improving, at least in my opinion.
As for Walk in Darkness, it was a rather random pick, but I do believe it is also a new enough find. They released their first album earlier this year and you can listen to all of it on Bandcamp, but I guess I’ll go with Carthage and Alexandria as my picks, the latter featuring the voice of Magdalena Lee, whose Tears of Magdalena I mentioned, albeit grudgingly, way back in the third “New Finds” post. Either way, being a rather random pick, it’s not something that exactly impressed or stuck in my mind, but it can be interesting enough, depending on taste.
And that’s about it for now. First post in this series this year, including the regular five bands, so no chance of getting to that target of 15 in only two posts. Whether 2017 will be the first year during which I’ll manage to post three remains to be seen, but there’s a lot of time left, so there’s reason to hope. And considering the number of bands I know of, a fair part of them at least good, some even outstanding, I really should be trying more.
