Monthly Metal Mixtape: July 2022

Fellowship – The Saberlight Chronicles (2022, Scarlet Records)

I truly love power metal. The DnD fantasy-filled genre is shredding, neoclassical, hyper-melodic soaring guitars and voices just filled to the brim with absolute cheese. The genre was a gateway to metal for me. The blistering double bass-pedaled pace of Euro power metal greats Sonata Arctica, Rhapsody, and the almighty Dragonforce showed me the path forward by couching metal concepts in vibrant singalongs and wondrous melodic sensibilities. While there have been a few notable exceptions since those times of my high school youth, I have long sought to recapture the hyper-replayability of those old albums and the shining, incredible adrenaline and energy they imbued me with. There is just endless middling power metal, and as much as I love it, power metal just never became a genre where middling was gonna get played by me.

Anyway, the year is 2022 and I am seriously contemplating giving a power metal album a spot on my top ten of the year. Why? Fellowship’s debut album is the hope-filled dose of pure sincerity, optimism, and passion that I needed. It just came at the right time. I have been listening to so, so much raw black metal this year—and granted a lot of that would sound like power metal with better production and different vocals, but like—my point is I’ve been listening to lots and lots of depressing music. It’s been a rough couple of years for me and the world, okay?

So what is different about Fellowship that makes it more than a middling power metal experience? Well, like I sort of started to say back there, a few sentences ago, a universe ago, uh, these guys are just incredibly sincere and optimistic and passionate and most of all: human. You can feel it coming off the music. This is just a ridiculously solid power metal album played by people who genuinely love power metal. You can feel the love. The guitar playing is great—on par with old Rhapsody and even Dragonforce stuff at times. Production isn’t over-compressed. Symphonic elements are just light enough. The vocals are great—this bouncy short-haired bard-cosplaying dork can belt it out in all registers. He even hangs out in the middle range most of the time making the record incredibly sing-a-long-able! And sing-along you will want to because these lyrics are memorable, fun, and genuinely a self-help book put to neoclassical shred. This is as sugary as 90s Disney movie nostalgia with as much shimmering heart-pumping weight as when Mulan’s “Be A Man” first lit up your little kid brain. Never would I think shouting “I’ve always been worthy” or existentially encouraging things like “I’m still enough!” in a power metal chorus could light my brain up and make me feel like a kid again like this album does.

After the extremely playful opener, song after song just hits so hard. This stuff is life metal. It’s just the most wholesome metal album you might ever hear, and it just checks all the boxes song to song with a surprising amount of tempo and song variety to pull you in and give you the biggest bear hug of love and encouragement a metal band could ever give you. Every song is great, but my biggest highlights lay in the ear worm chorus of “Scars and Shrapnel Wounds,” the chorus and refrain of “Glint” (“I’ve always been worthy! I’ve always been worthy!”), the genuinely great Disney balladry of “Silhouette,” and the undeniable true climax of the album in “Still Enough.” The penultimate track melts away any hints of the very human-feeling anxiety, uncertainty, and imposter syndrome expressed in the earlier tracks with a blast of pure, sincere, passionate, and confident self-realization. The hyper-anthemic outro of this track genuinely makes my eyes well up as it pulls on my heartstrings so goddamn hard. After years of death and misery, I’ll meet the challenges of this world. Find hope. Find people to fight alongside. Make the world that I want to see all around me, right in front of me, and in me.

“Build my heart here

Forge this heartache

Anchor my troubles

So I’ll find my way”

If you ever liked power metal or melodic metal or Disney music or neoclassical or just hearing dudes who love to make the music they’re making, you owe it to yourself to listen to this. If you think your cold, black metal-loving heart could ever be warmed by metal, you gotta hear this. – Mike Tri

Gimli, Son of Glóin – Gimli, Son of Glóin (2022, Empty Shells Records)

So it’s 11 PM on the last day of the month, and I have no idea what record I wanna highlight. I’ve been mulling it over for most of the weekend. Honestly, I haven’t listened to a ton of metal this month. Instead I’ve been spinning the new records by A Wilhelm Scream (Lose Your Delusion, which yeah, is kind of metal adjacent in the way they absolutely shred), Soul Glo (Diaspora Problems, again, it would fit, but I know other folks who contribute here would be able to write much more eloquently about it than myself), and the absolutely phenomenal new Hot Water Music record, Feel the Void, which is much more in the punk vein of what we usually talk about on this site – and probably my favorite thing they’ve done in the twenty years since the impeccable Caution came out. Oh, and Heaven and Hell, cause who doesn’t need more Dio-era Sabbath in their lives during a hot July.

So instead of some grand review about some rad record I think you should all check out because of its positive qualities that we usually gush about in this space, I’m instead going use my last remaining hour of the month to bring to your awareness Gimli, Son of Glóin. The Gimli, Son of Glóin tape combines both EPs – 2019’s The Most Noble Adventures of Erebor's Finest Son in His Quest to Butcher Orcs & Save the World and 2020’s At Last; Durin's Mightiest Son Returns to the Field of Battle with Axe in Hand and Glory in His Heart! There’s a lot of great music inspired by Lord of the Rings out there and this kinda fits. Instead of some atmospheric black metal à la Summoning, Gimli, Son of Glóin blast through some death/grind riffs over programmed drums interspersed with soundclips spoken by Gimli from the Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy. It is clearly all done in fun and jest. Songs range from under a minute, like in the hilariously named “The Ever-Changing Attitude of Dwarves to Aerial Combat” or “The Size of Your Beastly Foe Does Not Grant It Plurality!” The second EP gives us songs more in the minute range, but it is the outro from the first one (“A Pledge of Brotherhood and Fellowship in Darkened Times”) that brings the most memorable moments musically as they riff on Howard Shore’s memorable theme.

Look, its nineteen minutes of deathgrind riffs over some cybernetic drum programming and the jokey quotes from Gilmi from the movies in the most opportune places. So for example, in “Death Cannot Come Twice to the Orc Lying Impaled Beneath Mine Blade,” Gimli reminds us that said orc “was twitching because he’s got my axe embedded in his nervous system!” It is all in good fun and nothing world-beating, but it’ll make you laugh. And honestly, when’s the last time you listened to a metal record that actually did that? – SteveO