Alkonost – Songs of the White Lily

The universe/God/Mind/random chance (delete as appropriate to your chosen cosmology) works in funny ways. With absolutely no sense of conscious design I’ve found myself listening to some really good acts from Russia of late, and here’s my third post in a few weeks.

Alkonost do metal. Because I’m British, I call it Euro-metal, because there’s a certain flavour to the way people from mainland Europe do metal. I don’t usually listen to Euro-metal – actually, I don’t listen to much metal, period – so the few reference points I have are based around the few I have listened to, such as The Devil’s Blood and, er, that’s it. They are tagged with folk metal and pagan metal which I think may be more about the subject matter of their songs which are to do with man’s confrontations and relationships with nature. The style is more operatic to my ears but, as I keep repeating to the point of boredom, I am no expert on these things.

But the songs, especially the first three, are infectious as all kinds of fuck which is hella feat given that I don’t know the lingo at all. I had Peka running round my head all afternoon, successfully banishing a load of minecraft ‘parodies’ of popular ear-worms that had otherwise commandeered my brain for their nefarious purposes that my daughter has become obsessed with listening to.

I gather Alknost have had a line-up change with this album; certainly there are very different people if you look around the googletube at some of their older songs. After one such, I let it play the next songs at random whilst I typed this and discovered this song – damn…

Echoes of Yul

As promised yesterday…

Actually, my playlist last night consisted of all the other bands mentioned in yesterdays post except Echoes of Yul. And yet, when I awoke this morning, it was they who were playing on my mental radio. Go figure.

All of their work is worth investigating, it really is. I’ve highlighted Tether because it was my introduction and is still my favourite.

Imagine, if you will, Demdike Stare with Horseback for a backing band and sunn o))) providing extra guitars. Because I’m not an expert in genres, forgive me if I say that Tether is the most post-dubstep of their work, i.e. it has the most trappings of electronic flourishes. Partly this is because there are a lot of remixes across the album (although the same flourishes can be found to a lesser extent on Cold Ground) yet it still flows really well.

And with my genre ignorance thus exposed once again, I’m outta here.