Within Temptaton: Enter

The appropriately named Enter is the first album, reare shared between leased in 1999, from the Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation (who just finished a tour of the US opening for Iron Maiden). They had also released an EP, Restless, in 1997.

It's really quite varied, ranging from almost purely orchestral pieces to some pretty heavy metal. Sharon den Adel, the vocalist, has the usual amazing voice that seems to characterize these bands. It's not just that she sounds pretty, but she really knows how to use those pipes, as well. Like many symphonic metal bands, though, the vocals mix the 'clean' sound of den Adel's voice with growled vocals from Robert Westerholt. This is the so-called 'beauty and the beast' effect.

For a first album, this is really very impressive. Their sound is well established. And although their music is not as complex as that of Epica or Nightwish or Ayreon, it's still got more than enough to keep me interested, and that's not always easy to do.

The real highlight for me is "Gatekeeper", which is one of the heavier numbers on the album. It opens with a lovely orchestral passage which flows smoothly into heavily distorted guitars, which eases back into a more orchestral section, though that's overlayed with drums. The introduction complete, the song moves into a second section, featuring power chords and then a simple but effective guitar riff. The vocals begin in the growled style, with choral voices behind, until Den Adel at the chorus. It's really a powerful song.

Epica: The Phantom Agony

The first of the symphonic metal bands I discovered was Epica, which was founded by Mark Jansen, who has previously been in one the first symphonic metal bands, After Forever. As it happened, he was dating Simone Simons at the time, who could sing, so he invited her to front the band. And damn can she sing! (Check out her performance, with Floor Jansen, of "Stabat Mater" on Retrospect.)

I'm working my way through their catalog. Having started my own listening with some more recent stuff, I've gone back to the beginning.

The first album, released in 2002, was The Phantom Agony. It opens with a statement of intent, the choral piece "Adyta", sliding smoothly into a pretty typical sort of Epica piece in "Sensorium". But things really get going with the third song, "Cry For the Moon", which seems to remain a favorite with a lot of Epicans (as fans are known). It's very much symphonic metal, with symphonic elements but a driving metal beat, Simons's gorgeous vocals backed by a choir (though her voice may be overdubbed as part of that, too). 

That song is a continuation of a song cycle, "The Embrace That Smothers" that Jansen had begun with After Forever. Wikipedia describes it as being about 'the dangers of organized religion', which would be putting it kindly. Two more parts appear hear, the rest being on The Divine Conspiracy. I mean at some point to listen to all nine parts of it together.

Much of the rest of the album has a similar theme. Indeed, the whole thing feels like a concept album, organized around a person's search for meaning and struggle with religion.

It's not a mature effort. Jansen and Simons and the others are clearly still learning to harness their compositional talents. But the highlights here are fantastic, such as title track, especially.

Configuring Raspbian OS for the Pi2AES Hats

 The card is said to use the same drivers as the HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro. So following this page, we need to:

1. Remove the line
   dtparam=audio=on
   from /boot/config.txt if it exists (which it probably does).
   
2. If your system uses the vc4-fkms-v3d overlay, make sure, audio is also disabled on this:
   dtoverlay=vc4fkms-v3d,audio=off
   I had something similar, so set that to off.
3. Assign the right card to squeezelite. Use squeezelite -l to get a listing. You probably want hw:CARD=sndrpihifiberry,DEV=0. So open /etc/defaults/squeezelite, and add that as the card.

That's it!

After Forever

This afternoon, while doing various sorts of work, I listened to the first three albums by the Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever. One of the founding members of this band was Mark Jansen, who would later found Epica, and the vocalist was Floor Jansen (no relation), who is now the vocalist for Nightwish. Mark Jansen left after the second album; there were three more after that.

The first two albums are Prison of Desire and Decipher. I don't think these are quite up to what Mark Jansen would shortly do with Epica, but you can see the seeds of that music here. They do a great job integrating the orchestral elements with the rock elements, and Floor is, as always, just brilliant on vocals. (There are also growled, metal-style vocals, which Mark Jansen would continue with Epica. The contrast between these is sometimes called 'beauty and the beast', a term that seems to have originated with the Finnish band Battle Beast.)

The third album, Invisible Circle, is a really ambitious concept album, telling the story of an extremely dysfunctional family and how the cycle of abuse perpetuates itself. It's depressing and sad, as you'd expect, but insightful and powerful. It's not uniformly successful, but there is some pretty good stuff here. It's a bit more on the progressive metal end, with some obvious elements of bands like Yes and ELP. 

Indeed, it sometimes feels to me like Yes is a major influence (perhaps at a remove) on this stuff. A lot of the 'clean' female vocals remind me of Jon Anderson's vocal style. (Yeah, I'm very into Yes.)

Symphonic Metal

A couple months ago, I saw John Petrucci, from Dream Theater, touring in support of his solo album Terminal Velocity. It was a great show. Opening was Meanstreak, whom I'd not heard of before. As it turns out, they were one of the first all-woman metal bands, though they've been inactive for many years. (And, as it also happens, three of the women in the band would eventually marry members of Dream Theater.)

After the show, I did a lot of reading about women in metal, my curiosity piqued. I'm not, generally speaking, a big metal-head, but I have enjoyed some music of that kind. I really like Mastodon's albums Blood Mountain and, especially, Crack the Skye, and of course King Crimson, one of my all-time favorite bands, inspired a lot of metal, especially on the more progressive end.

Eventually, I stumbled upon 'symphonic' metal: These bands are often fronted by women. If you haven't heard this stuff, it may sound almost impossible. And it's easy to imagine how mixing metal with symphonic elements could go horribly wrong (as, indeed, it sometimes does). But the best bands in this tradition are just amazing, and I've been blown away by Epica and Nightwish, especially, and frantically started collecting their albums on vinyl. As it happened, Epica was playing up in Boston (opening for Sabaton) just a couple weeks after I saw Petrucci, so my partner and I were able to see them.

There are a lot of other bands in this tradition, and I'm going to use the blog to record some thoughts about some of them.