New Finds – LXII
After including Alterium in a previous post from this series, I’ll start this one with Xeneris, which seems to have been founded by the other former members of what used to be Kalidia, which I included in another one of these posts. The two picks will be A New Beginning and Eternal Rising, and I’ll say right away that I definitely prefer Alterium, the vocalists being the most obvious difference, but not the only one. They can still be worth listening to, but while Alterium seems to be more or less picking up from where they left off, it remains to be seen whether Xeneris will catch up and reach a similar level.
The second band is Oknos, which I just happened to be reminded of these days. They do have one video posted within the past year, but don’t actually have recent releases, that song being from their second album, released two years ago… And at this point I wonder whether they will continue, the last visible activity being back in October, when they announced that they needed a new vocalist. So for my first pick I’ll just go with another song from that album, Coming Home, which I like quite a lot, while the second pick will be Burning Heart. They seemed to be on a good path and, even if they will manage to find a new vocalist and continue, there’s a high risk that the change will be a significant setback. But maybe things will work out… Though the fact that their former vocalist seems to no longer have time for this is sad in itself.
The third band, Slaverty, doesn’t have recent releases either, but they definitely belong in such a post because I actually just stumbled into them while writing this and looking into the vocalists used by the project that I meant to include instead. And they are still active and seem to plan to release a second album next year, but so far they just have one album, released in 2020, from which I’ll pick Dreamcatcher, and one more song, Blue, so that will be my second pick, even if it was released two years ago. So let’s see how they’ll continue, because what I listened to just now was quite nice.
