Cav's Place

If I was saying that the previous post from this series might have been one of the most rushed but nevertheless one that really deserved the title, since it only contained particularly new finds, this one is at least as rushed but definitely far less deserving of the title, the only actual recent find being Shondha, which I stumbled into a month ago, when they posted Queen of the Witches, which seemed interesting enough for a first effort, so that will be my first pick. However, when they released their first album, a week ago, I noticed that the vocals sound “broken”, for lack of a better term, on most of their other songs. Still, I was able to pick a second song, Lone Dreamer, that’s somewhat better, so I could include them here. This one also has some faint male vocals, and while I’m assuming that they’re so faint because they’d definitely be bad if they’d be louder, as they are, they actually help, so maybe they could do this more often, at least until they manage to improve the female vocals.

The next band is Opera Magna, which I initially stumbled into quite some time ago. The fact that they have male vocals already makes them somewhat unusual for me, but what’s far more so is that I decided to add them to the list even though their songs were in Spanish. However, I needed material in English before actually considering including them in such a post, and last year they did release an album in English. It doesn’t include new material, the songs being the English versions of what they released five to ten years ago, in three parts, but I’ll nevertheless select my first pick, Where Once Was Beating My Dark Heart, from it. And, seeing as that can technically count as an older song, my second pick, La Muerte de un Poeta, is from their recent album, even if it’s once again in Spanish. That’s also in order to make it easier for myself, so I won’t have to go through their older releases and select something else, but I checked a couple of those old songs as well and they’re also competent efforts, and they’re all posted officially, so you can listen to them as well and see which you prefer.

As for the last band, Alhena, I wonder whether their recent release, Scarlet, which seems to be their first actual new material in several years, will be enough to reverse Metal Archives’ decision to blacklist them. Either way, I’ll make it easy for myself and go with Like a Doll as the second pick, since that’s the old song that they have a video for. I can see an evolution between the two, so if they are actually going to release more new material soon, it could be even better. But I also listened to parts of some of their older songs and I’d say that those show a fair amount of confidence as well. If you want to check, I can point you to them.