Cav's Place

Even though I’m still not checking any groups, last night I found myself stumbling into a new band that’s about to release a first album later this month, and looking up its vocalists led me to two others. Since neither seem to have new material released since they joined, what I can post from those two other bands are songs recorded with other vocalists, so you can’t say that there’s a direct connection between the three bands included in this post, but I suddenly found myself with exactly three actual new finds and maybe just enough time on-line to listen to some of the songs and load the others, so if I can add another post to this series, albeit still a rushed one, this is what I’m doing.

That new band is Nocturna, and they’re with that label that doesn’t seem to allow their artists to have their own pages on music or video sites, but with exactly two songs, New Evil and Daughters of the Night, posted by the label so far, it makes things very simple for me when it comes to the picks. And I like this format with two operatic female vocalists that can join their voices and keep pushing the song forward, so they seem promising enough even if I’d say that, at least in these two songs, there’s nothing memorable in the composition as a whole and the instrumental part may even leave something to be desired.

With one of Nocturna’s vocalists also listed as a member of Angelize, this was my second find. Of course, with no new material seeming to have been released since she joined them, what I listened to may not say much about their current sound, assuming they’ll even remain active, especially since many years seem to pass between their albums and there were notable changes in the past as well. First they fortunately got rid of the growls I heard in the couple of older songs they posted but still only had male vocals, such as on City of Innocence, and then they added female vocals, such as on Gone. The overall impression remains that it’s quite an amateurish effort, that they’re trying to do too many things at once with the sound, the instruments tripping over each other and occasionally a section not seeming to fit the rest of the song at all and scratching my ears, plus that the recording quality is clearly not professional, but there are improvements, albeit slow ones, and the vocals also required plenty of them at the time of their last releases, so maybe the next ones, if there will be any, will be more memorable.

As for Nocturna’s other vocalist, she’s also a member of Septum, which was formed in Cuba but then apparently became an international project. They seem to mean to release something new soon, but I couldn’t find anything already released in their current format, so I have no idea how they’re going to sound and can just pick two songs out of the few older ones I listened to, those being The One You Loved and Quiet… Listen!. The recording quality is again a problem, but the songs themselves can be all right for a band at that stage and I actually expect them to be much better in their current format. I may well be proven wrong, of course, and I most probably won’t remember to check for myself, but it remains to be seen.