Lyriel's Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

Lyriel's Leverage album is sometimes seen as a transitional work between their earlier 'folk metal' and the heavier more Gothic metal of Skin and Bones. A good track to illustrate this, perhaps, is The Road Not Taken with its journey from acoustic guitar and strings to full-band metal for the final chorus.

Be that as it may, this is an interesting track lyrically, based as it is on the apparently deliberate (and possibly fatal) ambiguity of Robert Frost's 1915 poem.

Both song and poem end on the phrase, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference". 

In our time of celebration of difference and our felt right to make our own choices, this lyric is often seen as telling us to walk our own distinct way and choose our own unique destiny. Yet, according to Frost's biographer, Lawrance Thompson, the poem is based on Frost's indecisive friend Edward Thomas, who "whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other." So the original poem is about the waste of energy in pointless regret, always looking back and worrying about "what if".

Which way does the Lyriel song lean? It is, of course, hard to tell as they retain the ambiguity in their selection of lines from the poem.

But there may be a pointer in the final song on the Leverage album, Repentance. This features the following lyric:

"Repentance is a path that we can not walk for long, my dear. ... Come with me and I will show you how to choose a side."

So maybe their take is that you can only waste energy worrying about the past for so long, before you need to commit to one path or the other.

Of course I may just be projecting my own views onto this - it is easily done.

Because I have undoubtedly wasted time and energy myself second-guessing choices already made. Somewhere there is a balance between flexibility and commitment and I don't always hit it, I know.

From a Christian point of view, our calling is to serve God through Jesus wherever we are, in whatever circumstance. It makes sense to seek God's will for the future perhaps, but not to stress too much about it. He is with us wherever we are and, I think, he most appreciates working with us on the choices that we ourselves make and are fully committed to.

So our calling is to commit to our path with God, here and now. Not to worry overmuch about either past or future, but to be fully present in, well, the present. That's where we can make a difference.

Frost's indecisive friend, Edward Thomas, finally decided to commit to signing up for the First World War shortly after, where he was duly killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras. The story is told in this rather interesting article in the Guardian. After finally enlisting he sat down with a friend and told her that he was glad to have made the decision, he didn't know why but he was glad.

Things will happen which will trample and pierce, but I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity.

Autumn Moon Bands Day 1

Four weeks ago BlackLin and I went to Hamelin in Germany (of Pied Piper fame) to a music festival there: Autumn Moon, which was sharing a site with the Mystic Halloween Market - of which more anon ... if I ever get to part three of this series of posts.

There was one band we really wanted to see, Lyriel, who only seemed to play in Germany, so if we were to see them we would have to travel. As Autumn Moon was the half term weekend shortly after our thirtieth wedding anniversary, we decided to treat ourselves.

Our lack of German language skills was a bit of a challenge, especially as Hameln is quite a small town so there was limited English spoken, but we managed.

The festival ran on three main sites: the Rattenfängerhalle - Ratcatcher Hall - was the main stage, then there was a smaller stage at the Sumpfblume - Swamp flowers - and a tiny stage on a ship - large barge really. The Mystic Halloween Market also had its own open air stage where some of the bands also played.

At 3pm on Friday things kicked off at the Rattenfängerhalle with Austrian band Serenity, a band who had previously supported Dio which seemed a good sign. They played melodic metal fronted by two vocalists - one male and one female - and were absolutely brilliant. Their music had colour, energy and interesting lyrics (in English). If the festival is using a band this good to open at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, what would the rest of it be like?

After buying a Serenity CD from their merch stall ,we wandered over to the Schiff for WaldKauz, a German folk band. The Autumn Moon website had provided links to YouTube previews of most of the bands, including Waldkauz. They looked okay on YouTube but not that exciting. Live they were far better, although folk in a foreign language has its limitations. Later they also played on the outdoor market stage, which actually suited them better, I thought, than the slightly cramped Schiff.

After that we had a choice: stay on the Schiff for Ye Banished Privateers, or pop across to Sumpfblume to see electro-pop-rock band Tüsn. We chose the latter. Tüsn were basically okay but incredibly pretentious. Fortunately we knew Ye Banished Privateers would be on later in the Rattenfängerhalle.

A bite to eat then back to the boat for Tibetrea: pagan folk with medieval instruments and female harmonies. Actually much better live than their YouTube videos had suggested. Good fun but not as exciting as some of the other folk bands we saw.

Then across to the Rattenfängerhalle for Megahertz: rock with a very deep male singer. Slightly weird but a bit too Alice Cooper for my taste.

I'm flagging by then, to say the least, but the boat had seats, if you didn't mind being a bit far back from the action. So back to the Schiff again for Dunkelschön's take on folk rock. As the name implies they mixed dark and light, with some lovely melodic songs interspersed with some much heavier and rockier tracks. Enjoyable.

Back again to the Rattenfängerhalle for Omnia: more pagan folk, this time from Bohemia. Interestingly their style of folk is quite eclectic and there was a good reggae beat going on at times. Enjoyable but, in spite of some interesting touches, in the end they became a bit repetitive.

We stayed put for the Friday night headline act: Deine Lakaien. Male voice over keyboards mostly; the YouTube video had sounded good but live I found them dull. That said, the hall was packed with people who were having a great time, so it has to be a matter of taste.

We popped over instead to the Sumpfblume to listen to Euzen who gave, I felt, the worst performance we saw that day. They play a kind of female-fronted indie pop. They had sound issues at the beginning; but even after they resolved these initial difficulties their sound remained unbalanced, too loud and frankly rather grim.

The Sumpfblume complex includes a cafeteria so we retreated there for a mysterious snack which turned out to be a kind of extra-thick pancake. Good sustenance for midnight after a couple of disappointing bands.

After Deine Lakaien finished Ye Banished Privateers set up in the middle of the audience area to play some really enjoyable pirate rock. I quite fancied seeing Trollfest, whose video shows them as basically playing bonkers rock/metal (click on the link above to see what I mean), but by then it was half-one in the morning and we were shattered, so we decided to quit while we were on a high from the Privateers.

So, day 1. Ten bands: six decent to good, two that we didn't enjoy, and two really excellent, in very different ways. Not bad for day one of a festival where we didn't know any of the bands before we booked. Oh, and some really interesting and very tasty food along the way.

Readipop: Thanks and Praise

I keep forgetting just how good some of Readipop's bands are. Fortunately I got a reminder today at the Caversham Festival, over in Christchurch Meadows.

Less fortunately, there was the usual problem of multiple stages meaning that some of the best-sounding bands overlapped, so I missed a lot. Nevertheless, I heard some excellent music, and discovered some bands to keep an eye out for.

The first band I came across, on the Festival Stage, was Area 52. Sadly I arrived at the end of the set, so I only heard one song, but they were impressively together, full of energy, and exciting. I was able to pick up their CD afterwards, which is a good listen.

Over at the Indian Marquee, I heard part of Military Arcade's set: decent pop-punk, but not really my cup of tea, followed by Unorfadox playing (fairly orthodox, I felt) classic rock.

I'm not really a big fan of reggae - I find the rhythm section tends to be a little monotonous, leaving all the creativity to vocals and lead guitar. However, The Majestic really were (majestic, that is). Excellent music, impressive stage presence (it's no surprise to find that leader singer Faada Ras has been performing live since the eighties), and a positive, uplifting message meant that the sizeable crowd had a good time - especially all the youngsters dancing at the front.

Watching the end of The Majestic's set meant I missed most of Jakabo's :( Zepellinesque rock with excellent guitar and a female vocalist (the best Zeppelin-style singers tend to be female, I find ... except the young Robert Plant, of course), the end of their set was a full of energy and audience interaction. I just wish they'd been on half-an-hour later.

Caversham Festival was heaving by late afternoon, which has to be good for the festival's prospects. If you didn't make it today, the festival continues tomorrow down at Christchurch Meadow. As well as music, there are loads of miscellaneous stalls, comedy, drama, weird boats followed by monsters, and lots of food. Well worth a visit.

One of the odd things I find with good live music in a relaxed setting is that you get a small insight into peoples' stories, through their interactions. Just glimpses of story without beginning or ending - totally unlike books and films - simply brief flashes of lives. A chance to hope and pray for God to touch, bringing his expansiveness: an experience of life lived more fully. What could be better, on this sunny summer afternoon.

Grace and peace to you.

Hot Metal

I was recently thinking about my favourite new rock bands; it struck me that out of six favourites (which one is THE favourite depending on mood and context) three are fronted by women. Of other highly-appreciated new bands a lot are FFM (female-fronted metal). Being me, I inevitably find myself wondering why - am I letting a pretty face override musical quality?

At the moment my favourite-favourite new(-ish) band is Within Temptation - I was given their Let Us Burn DVD for Christmas and I've just been watching the Elements concert. The music is fantastic, but it has to be admitted that Sharon den Adel is seriously hot. At the time of the above photo (try clicking on it) she was 38 years old and had borne three children!

Delain's Charlotte Wessels is also seriously good-looking, although in a rather different style. On the other hand, Danii Monroe from The Dirty Youth is pretty but far too young and cute for me to consider her hot.

Admittedly female-fronted metal's  female fronts do tend to be heavily (although not exclusively) inclined to corsets.

Rock music has always been about sex as well as music, of course, but I do think there is far more to female-fronted bands than that. Plus I find myself making some sort of mental distinction between 'hot' and 'sexual', which is weird when I think about it logically. Sharon den Adel in her initial Elements costume (above - doubtless highly metaphorical) looks incredibly hot, highly attractive, even sexy, but somehow, to me, not sexual. I'm strange, I know.

I enjoy the heavy end of rock, overlapping with the melodic end of metal, and hunger after creativity, expression, and a style which combines musical quality with lyrical interest. The contrast between crunching guitars and a rich soprano voice can be a wonderful experience, especially if seasoned with a light smattering of male 'growls'.

A common feature of many songs from Delain, The Dirty Youth and Within Temptation is that they tell a story, and express ideas in interesting ways. Stories about werewolves, deadly sins, or drunken nights out, told through tunes with varied musical structures, by highly talented musicians. All three also play songs of emotional intensity and rhythmic 'heaviness'. Dendera, Future Of The Left and The Virgin Marys (my other three favourites) share similar characteristics, in their varied and distinctive ways.

Of course there is also a lot of formulaic FFM around - it has become a popular musical style on the continent, and there are always those who are more interested in following a fashion than in creating something distinctive - but it remains a genre which, over the past 15 years or so, has attracted more than its fair share of original, creative and enjoyable artists. In my opinion, of course.

I hope you are having a great Christmas, and wish all who read this a happy, hopeful and adventurous new year. God bless.

Takedown Festival 2014

If you're going to a day-long rock festival, it's a really bad idea to be exhausted before you even start. That's the mistake our daughter and I made before Takedown 2014 yesterday, and it did mean we ended missing quite a lot, just trying to recoup our energies.

Takedown is a one-day festival, hosted by Southampton University's Student Union, featuring mostly up-and-coming rock bands. It showcased an amazing number of young bands over the afternoon and evening (click the graphic above to see the programme), for a very reasonable price.

Two bands we particularly wanted to see were The Dirty Youth - who we had never seen before, although I did help to crowd-fund the DVD of their last tour - and Dendera, who are a local Southampton band - we have seen them before a few times, but they say they are working on new material, which we were keen to see.

If you look at the programme you can see that we had a problem: The Dirty Youth were due to finish at 5:50, whilst Dendera were to start - on a different stage - at 5:45. Then The Dirty Youth hit technical problems during their sound check, so they were at least ten minutes late starting. In spite of sound problems, though, it was a really good set, which we got to see from right in front of the stage.

After the gig, BlackLin and BlackSar got their picture taken with Danni, which they were really chuffed about. We gave up on Dendera and went to the cafe, where we got to talking with some of the Dirty Youth stage-crew, and later got some posters signed by two more members of the band (Phil & Leon). So that side of the festival was really good. We'll just have to look out for the next local Dendera gig and see them there instead.

In the meantime we also got to see some bands we'd either never heard of or never seen live before. Western Sand were one I'd never heard of, although they have some decent YouTube clips so we had a look shortly after we arrived. I was very impressed: they sounded to me like a kind of 21st Century reboot of Bon Jovi; heavier and less pop. One to keep an eye out for, I think.

BlackSar was looking forward to seeing Fearless Vampire Killers, but they turned out to be a disappointment. Skarlett Riot were decent, although as another female-fronted rock band playing just before The Dirty Youth they suffered in comparison. Ghouls were fun - basically heavy Ska - although I'd had enough by the end of their set. Kids In Glass Houses were another band BlackSar had heard on TV ... and another disappointment - although by then, to be honest, we were so tired they'd have had to be really good to keep our attention. We skipped the two headline bands and went home early, shattered.

Food was poor, organisation seemed decent, the range of bands was excellent (within their target genres), and we heard some good music, so overall a very good day. Now we're all wrecked, but it was worth it.

"Rise Up, join the revolution"

Delain At HMV Institute Birmingham

I got back home in the early hours of that Sunday morning utterly exhausted. My neck was tender - and promising to feel much, much worse in the morning - my hands were sore and my feet hurt, my voice was giving up and my ears were ringing: it had been a fantastic evening!

Delain were headlining at the HMV Institute in Birmingham, supported by Trillium and Halcyon Way, back on the 12th May. It was supposed to be three of us going, but my wife had a badly injured knee so it was just my daughter and myself making the long trek up the M40 - it would have been nice to have gone by train, but there was no way of getting back after ten pm so car it had to be.

After a lot of messing about finding a car park that stayed open late enough, and a long queue, we finally got in about half way through Halcyon Way's set. This was very loud thrashy metal. Their singer, Steve Braun, had a really good voice, but I felt the band as a whole simply didn't rock. Maybe they were just having a bad night, but they didn't seem to be together that Saturday. Vocalist and drummer were mostly together most of the time, but the bass and guitar players just seemed to be thrashing away in their own individual time zones. Disappointing.

Trillium were up next. I hadn't heard of them before, and didn't really have great expectations, so they were a very happy surprise. Amanda Somerville is a classic operatic metal soprano with an amazing voice, and the band behind her were very together, and very heavy, but with plenty of colour and dynamics. For a supporting band they also had a tremendous stage presence, and their energy filled the room (although, to be fair, the HMV Institute isn't actually that big). I would imagine that 'back home', in the US, Somerville/Trillium headline their own tours.

Trillium were great, but Delain were utterly unbelievable. Trillium's energy filled the room; Delain radiated presence and energy to fill a far larger venue and it was picked up and reflected back by the crowd, which inspired the band, who generated more energy, and so on. It was like being inside a kind of acoustic laser cavity, overwhelmed with such coherent energy and power.

They played songs from their two released albums, as well as from We Are The Others which is due out in early June. One of the new songs is Get The Devil Out of Me, which is a good illustration of their style that you can hear by clicking the YouTube thingie above.

On their records Delain tend to be quite song-focussed: majoring on words and tune ... still quite heavy and quite rocky, but that side is a little less to the fore. Live, they are solid, high-energy metal.

The songs are still very strong, so there's no tendency to become 'samey', as can happen at heavy rock concerts; also Charlotte Wessels has such a strong voice that the vocals don't get drowned out. The result is that songs on the album where I'd thought, "I bet that would be amazing live" absolutely are amazing live, but so are other songs where I'd just thought, "That's a nice song". Quiet songs were played with quiet power, loud heavy songs with explosive power, all interweaved with the colour and melodic interest which makes symphonic metal such a worthwhile artform.

The UK leg of Delain's 2012 tour is over now, but if you should get an opportunity to see them in the future I highly recommend them. With musical energy, intensity and authenticity they put on an amazing show: brilliant!

Science and Faith cover by Katja Petri

You won’t find faith or hope down a telescope
You won’t find heart and soul in the stars
You can break everything down to chemicals
But you can’t explain a love like ours.

A beautiful cover by Katja Petri of The Script's marvellous song, Science and Faith. I also like the way the video shows her doing all the parts to the song in separate windows.

You can hear The Script's original version at: http://youtu.be/4C0zSDo6nzU. One reason I rate this cover is that it is interestingly different to the original - I never really see the point to a cover which just attempts (poorly) to clone a classic.