Never Enough (http://www.myspace.com/never3nough)
As the Band Describes themselves and their 'Vision':
“People just can't seem to f*****g get enough. Can't kill enough. Can't steal enough. Can't get thin enough. Can't get rich enough. You name it and people want more of it.
This is an outlet for all the love, rage and sadness in our lives. We know there are people out there that are just like us... Passionate and lonely... People who still truly care about what's going on in the world around them and not just what's right in front of them.”
Never 3nough are ex-members of Eighteen Visions and Lylah.
This Band is intense and angst-filled, but I wouldn't call them “Emo”. The have an Industrial “Ground” Metal Edge, but aren't precisely Metal, but they most certainly Rock, and most certainly have things to say about life on this ball of dirt.
They are an “Acquired Taste” worth acquiring, and as their growing following shows, you can never get enough.
Videos:
“The Devil I Am”: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=38016822
“No One Cares”-Live: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=36079396
“The Craving”-Live: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=34156139
Midnattsol (http://www.midnattsol.com/en/history.html, http://www.myspace.com/midnattsolfolk )
The Northlight (Norwegian: Nordlys) has always been a part of Myths, Stories, Sagas and Legends. Do warriors fight a bloody battle on the sky, or are these spirits of the dead playing games? Are those bands of light created by God’s fury or a sign of his protection? Maybe it’s the souls of yet-unborn children – heralds of the ancestors or the remains of fallen Warriors?
The Northlight stands for diversity, just as the new album of the German-Norwegian formation: it’s more “metal,” more diverse, and also way more folk-orientated than the debut “Where Twilight Dwells.” Journalists have already compared it to the likes of Amorphis, Devin Townsend, Nightwish or even Iron Maiden, but one thing is for sure: a simple comparison doesn’t justify itself in the case of MIDNATTSOL – since their debut, the six-piece has created and enhanced its very own style…
Singer Carmen Elise Espenaes and guitarist Chris Hector founded MIDNATTSOL in 2002, their common ground being their mutual affection for Nordic mythology and composition. Other like-minded individuals were found in short order –drummer Chris Murzinsky, keyboardist Daniel Fischer, guitarist Daniel Droste and bassist Birgit Öllbruner – recording their first self-titled demo. The band quickly gathered a growing following from the underground and the Internet, gaining the accolades of printed magazines, soon resulting in the band’s signing with Napalm Records.
The debut album “Where Twilight Dwells” is the astounding result of months of hard work, taking the listener on a journey through the dark, mysterious and ultimately thought-provoking Scandinavian landscape. One might be reminded of the magic of BATHORY or perhaps classic ANATHEMA, all accompanied by Carmen’s tender voice harmonizing with the epic melodies or providing well-done counterpoint to the powerful guitar riffs.
With “Where Twilight Dwells,” MIDNATTSOL immediately earned legions of followers amongst metalheads and Goths alike, all enchanted by the unique stylistic mix. Tours with In Extremo as well as festival appearances at Wave Gotik, Summer Breeze, and The Metal Female Voices Festival followed, making MIDNATTSOL a strong force in the female-fronted metal genre, right from the start.
In 2008, MIDNATTSOL finally return with their long-anticipated second album, “Nordlys.” A recording marathon in the process, Carmen Elise Espenaes recorded her vocals at Mastersound Studios, (LEAVES´EYES, ELIS ) while the instruments were done with THE VISION BLEAK, under the direction of Markus Stock at Klangschmiede E Studios. Tue Madsen (SIRENIA), one of Europe’s leading sound engineers, took responsibility for the mix, and the infamous Finnvox Studios guaranteed a great mastering.
The sympathetic sextet, revolving around the two blond beauties, has pursues the emphasis of emotion and melody more than ever before, but without forgetting to add a good dose of Metal Power and Clarity in their latest songs, alternating between fast attacks and gentle ballads. Nordic myths and tales told by the gentle and charming voice of Carmen Elise Espenaes give the album the perfect finishing touch. Allow the Northern Lights to sweep you away and charm you to your heart's content.
The Bonus track on the Limited Edition was written for the charismatic clean voice of AHAB singer Daniel Droste. Fans of classic Borknagar or new Moonsorrow surely will enjoy this.
Videos:
Tapt Av Hapt: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=103092472
Unpayable Silence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rveD7T4VyU
Northern Light: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=104892245
Lament: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=104891994
Punch Brothers ( http://www.myspace.com/punchbrothers)
I simply listened to the Punch Brothers music and liked it. While it certainly has roots in Bluegrass, the Band is MUCH more enigmatic than that. Like much of the new music coming out of the “Indie Revolution” it defies quantification. Whatever your primary tastes are, they are a worthy listen. I could add a lot of details, but Mike Hill, who wrote the following for their MySpace page's introduction for their new album, pretty well covers it. I could make it different, but not necessarily better. In the end, it's about the Music-and their's-IS another extreme.
Punch Brothers
Antifogmatic
“Antifogmatic” is a bit of bygone slang that mandolinist Chris Thile and his band-mates stumbled across, “an old term,” explains the Punch Brothers founder, “for a bracing beverage, rum or whiskey, that one would have in the morning before going out to work in rough weather, to stave off any ill effects.” It’s an apt title for the Punch Brothers’ second Nonesuch disc. This ten-song set of collectively written material takes a clear-eyed view of those things less tangible than booze that can make us woozy: the pleasures and pitfalls of romance, the seemingly limitless possibilities and multifarious temptations of life in the big city.
“When we heard that term,” says Thile, “it was so easily applied to the bulk of the record. We want our music to be something that people can sink their teeth into, if not help make sense of all the various things happening to them. We want to pat them on the head and slap them in the face and tell them everything will be okay.”
The arrangements on Antifogmatic range from intimate to boisterous and back; genre-wise, the band once again ventures where no string band has ever gone before. The spare opening track “You Are” contrasts percussive guitar riffs with lyrical string parts that dance around Thile’s sweet upper register as he spins a tale of romantic emancipation; occasionally, the other instruments give way to reveal the throb of the bass. The band also engages in some unexpectedly beautiful harmony singing, smoothing out the compelling melodic twists and turns of “Welcome Home.” “Me and Us” and “Woman and the Bell” both have a dream-like quality; the former, in fact, was inspired by those jumbled, thought-filled moments before sleep sets in, and the instrumentation keeps pace with the ever-shifting imagery. In contrast, “Don’t Need No” and “Rye Whiskey” are foot-stomping barroom boasts and “Next to the Trash” is the closest the band gets to traditional bluegrass, even as the lyrics tug the piece in a more surreal direction.
Thile has earned the right to impart a bit of his own hard-earned wisdom in the lyrics he’s contributed to Antifogmatic, which the quintet cut live at Ocean Way in Los Angeles with producer Jon Brion and engineer Gregg Koller. At the heart of the Punch Brothers’ 2008 debut, Punch, Thile’s four-movement “The Blind Leaving the Blind” chronicled in cathartic detail the events and faith-shaking emotions surrounding the dissolution of his youthful marriage. The musically rigorous, personally revealing composition—carefully notated but allowing room for improvisational passages—came to vivid life in the hands of the former Nickel Creek singer’s old friends and newly recruited band-mates: guitarist Chris Eldridge, banjo player Noam Pikelny, violinist Gabe Witcher and bassist Greg Garrison, each of whom were already envelope-pushing figures in the forefront of modern bluegrass, folk and country. (After the departure of Garrison, Paul Kowert, a member of mandolinist Mike Marshall’s Big Trio, stepped in.) “The Blind Leading the Blind” was bracketed by four collaboratively conceived instrumental pieces from this freshly minted group, a foretaste of what was to come two years later on Antifogmatic. Upon the release of Punch, the Washington Post described this then-new band as “some of the best string-band pickers of the new generation, and Thile has given them rich, challenging music to wrestle with.”
“Our new record is a very pure collaboration,” Thile emphasizes. “I would often come to the boys with a start, a little nugget, and we would collectively fashion it into something. None of these songs would have been like themselves if I had been left to my own devices. Several of them were starts that other guys had, and we would build from there. It’s fun how liquid the writing process was on this.”
Says guitarist Eldridge, “We got to find out what the band sounded like when we tried to collectively make music from scratch. A song might start with something as simple as a phrase that everybody thought was cool and worthy of development, maybe a set of chord changes, maybe more than that. Everyone was bringing things to the table and putting them in front of the band’s collective consciousness to try to build them into something together. It was a pretty neat experience to see how things took shape that way. It really happened completely before our eyes.”
The process of creating the work that would ultimately comprise Antifogmatic also happened before the eyes—and ears—of many Punch Brothers fans in New York City, where the members of this former “commuter band,” as Pikelny characterized it, had all decided to relocate. In early 2009, the quintet began a monthly residency at The Living Room, a small club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for what they dubbed P-Bingo Nights, a laboratory for developing new material and trying out songs of any genre that struck their fancy—and, as countless YouTube fan videos attest, for having a good time.
As violinist Witcher, who moved to the city from his lifelong home of Los Angeles, recalls, “We were finally able to hang out and play music for fun, when we weren’t trying to frantically warm up for a show or frantically go into the studio to record. We started doing these shows in New York—informal performances where the goal was to try out a bunch of stuff that we never had the time to do before or that wouldn’t necessarily be right for our live show. In doing so, we started saying, like, ‘Hey, do you think we could work up this Strokes song? Sure. Oh man, I really love the fourth movement of this Mozart Quartet. What if we tried to do that? Absolutely!’ Anything we felt excited about, any piece of music, we tried to see if we could arrange for our ensemble. It was challenging, fun, and kind of successful. When it came time to write this new material, everyone was feeling confident that whatever kind of influence you’re feeling for a song, we would be able to pull it off. All these different styles and different approaches we had been doing in the six to seven months preceding that, it all just kind of seeped into the writing. No one was ever forcing anything on the record; everything that we had learned started coming out naturally in the parts they were offering, the direction they heard a song going in, or in an approach to take for a section.”
The banjo-playing Pikelny says, “It was endless what we could investigate on a particular song or concept. We never stopped pursuing something in the interest of time or because we had to move on. We were able to get deeper inside some of the music than we’ve ever been able to before, to the point that we were spending so much time on this stuff and making so much progress, we were compromising the other aspects of life in New York. I remember one day calling the band and saying we had to cancel this writing session or I wouldn’t have clean laundry for the next tour.”
Thile, also a California native, had befriended Jon Brion during the producer-composer-musician’s own residency at L.A.’s Largo, off-the-cuff evenings that were more salon than concert, attracting some of the best, and often well-known, musicians who happened to be in town that night. Brion, who has worked most famously with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Kanye West, was reluctant to take on a new project, but when Thile asked him for advice on finding a producer, Brion admitted that he might be the best guy for the job. However, the role Brion would assume turned out to be anything but traditional, more about pedagogy than straight-up production. He and engineer Gregg Koller spent a couple of days setting up the studio with remarkable precision—moving the players and instruments like chess pieces until they were in the exactly right positions, testing out microphones until they decided everyone should have a Telefunken 251—then they let the band simply play. Each evening, Brion would return with a great bottle of Port and some equally good cheese to listen back to what the band had done, assess the results and talk—deeply, philosophically—about what they were trying to achieve.
“He knows the room really well,” the young bassist Kowert enthuses. “He knows the point on the floor where the bass should be—whether it was where he liked the sound of it the most or where it would be the loudest. Just knowing how the room reacts to sound. I really like his spirit; he has a really joyful approach to music and he was a positive presence in the studio. He kind of guided us towards choices that made for the best record, like picking earlier takes that surely had more mistakes but had a vivacity and energy to them that later takes lacked.”
The stories the Punch Brothers tell in Antifogmatic—partly autobiographical, partly imagine—were shaped by after-hours camaraderie as much as musical collaboration; they’re ultimately about drinking everything in as well as drinking what’s in front of them up, though there was plenty of that too. Concludes Thile, “The boys and I would work all day in one of our apartments and then we’d want to go out and have a drink. That’s what you do in New York City, because everyone’s apartment is too small to hang out comfortably in. We’re a group of five guys. If friends start attaching themselves to the fray after that, you forsake the one-bedroom apartment and you go into the incredibly vibrant bar scene that isn’t merely an encouragement for intoxication and spending obscene amounts of money per drink. It’s really a wonderful way to get to know your fellow man, with your top button unbuttoned and your tie loosened a little bit.”
—Michael Hill
Videos:
Reptilia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qayc6yJXG-8
This Is The Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfbzkp3dVB4
Alex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQJL2aC-emc
Song For A Young Queen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krf5qQq9bNY
Blind Leaving The Blind, 1st Movement Pt 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9AkIhx-Dsg
Morning Bell (Radiohead Cover): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRUkv0O7WZE
...and how could we talk about “extreme” without
Rammstein ( http://www.myspace.com/rammstein, rammstein.com )
About Rammstein, from one of their many Fan Pages:
The band consists of members Till Lindemann (lead vocals), Richard Z. Kruspe (lead guitar and backing vocals), Paul H. Landers (rhythm guitar, backing vocals), Oliver "Ollie" Riedel (bass guitar), Christoph "Doom" Schneider (drums and electronic percussion) and Christian "Flake" Lorenz (keyboards). They are widely accepted as part of the Neue Deutsche Härte scene, alongside bands such as Oomph!, Eisbrecher, and Die Krupps. Their sound has been dubbed as Tanz-Metal (lit. "Dance Metal").[2][3] Their songs are usually in German, but they have also performed songs entirely or partially in other languages such as English ("Pussy", "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)", "Amerika", cover of Depeche Mode's "Stripped"), Spanish ("Te quiero puta!"), French ("Amour" and "Frühling in Paris"), and Russian ("Moskau"). As of 2005, they have sold over 10 million records worldwide.[4] Rammstein's entire catalogue is published by Universal Music Group. Since their formation in 1994, Rammstein has had no changes in their band line-up nor have any members left the band. Rammstein takes their name indirectly from the German town of Ramstein-Miesenbach, the site of the flight show disaster on 28 August 1988. The band's signature song, "Rammstein", is a commemoration of the Ramstein airshow disaster. In a short period before the band became well known, they performed using the name "Rammstein-Flugschau" (literally meaning "Rammstein-Airshow"). Although the majority of their songs are written in German, Rammstein has had success across the world. It was confirmed in 2007 that the band had re-united from their vacation and had begun working on their sixth studio album, “Liebe ist für alle da”, which was released on 16 October 2009 in Europe.
Videos:
Haifisch: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=104482055
Rammstein: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6GnfN64N78
Reise! Reise! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wBH6HXidO4
Engel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qRdUJDKRcc
Don't Die Before I DO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB8gVc4xij0
Main Herz Brennt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcQ5VE1vWI
So, there's a lot of extremes, but considering the source, what else would you expect. Midnattsol is a Band of special note for RobertLynSchultze and Friends, as it explores the History and “Mythology” of Norse Legend. It's all good, one way or the other, and while it continues to demonstrate the power of staying small businesses as a methodology for the Indie Music and Arts, it also shows the beginning of the kind of Renaissance, a blending and evolving of styles, we haven't seen since the late 60's...and it's happening everywhere, with every style, and without compromise. How Coll is that? More of this And more Poetry to come. 'DeX'