Pelican - Forever Becoming

From Southern Lord comes one of the best releases so far this year, Pelican's "Forever Becoming".

This is Pelican's fifth album and it might be their strongest to date. They're an instrumental progressive metal band which might sound a bit boring but this is far from it! Why add a vocal if it doesn't enhance the music? Every instrument and every note is there for a reason.

The single from the album "Deny The Absloute" was the first song I heard and so far it stands out as the strongest point of the record, maybe together with the brilliantly beautiful closing track "Perpetual Dawn".

Southern Lord always put out a quality product, not only music wise, but the vinyl product. Heavy weight vinyl and beautiful gatefold sleeve. They deliver the goods as always! My copy is on orange and blue vinyl, it was the first version available and sold out the 500 copies fast on pre-order.

Instagram.

I suck at this blogging thing. I'm just terrible at updating it. There are so much stuff to write about that I don't know where to start....

I'll hopefully get to it soon... in the meantime, please follow me on instagram where I'm better at updating stuff:

http://instagram.com/vionylrichie

Queens Of The Stone Age - I Appear Missing.

Finally Queens Of The Stone Age release a song from their upcoming album "Like Clockwork". This song is called "I Appear Missing" and it's a really cool song. Makes me really wanting more. I can't wait for the album!

RIP Jeff Hanneman

At the moment I'm playing Slayer's thrash masterpiece "Seasons In The Abyss". This I do in honour of the tragic news of Jeff Hanneman's passing today.

Slayer was, probably together with Entombed, the first "real" metal band I started to listen to, nearly 15 years ago. I've seen them three times since then. Twice with Jeff and once without. Seeing the intimidating trio of Hanneman, Araya and King shredding their riffs and with mister Lombardo behind them beating the hell out of his drum set are some of my greatest concert experiences.

Rest In Peace Jeff Hanneman!

A busy summer!

This summer will be pretty awesome! I have quite a few great shows to look forward to.

In June I'll see Neurosis for the first time, two weeks after that Iron Maiden plays in Stockholm on their "Maiden England" tour, one week after that there is the Slottsfjell festival here in Tonsberg and late in July Smashing Pumpkins are coming to Oslo!

The biggest act for me at Slottsfjell is without a doubt, Converge. I consider all four of these bands to be among my, maybe, top ten favourite bands so it'll be an incredible month!

And as if this isn't enough we also have tickets for the Black Sabbath show in November. Quite the year 2013...

Skogen Brinner - 1st

This might be the best record of 2013! I've been a fan of Skogen Brinner for quite some time now and I have the two releases prior to this debut album, a cassette EP and a 7" single. On these two releases there are five songs (six if you include the cover of Black Sabbath's "Electric Funeral") and four of these are also on the album, this means five new songs.

"1st", which is the name of the album, is packed with cool fuzzy riffs. Most of the songs would stsnd strong as single tracks and they tiw together really well to get that album feel.

I wrote about the cassette that it was the perfect combination of Black Sabbath and Pugh Rogefeldt (I've seen this beeing mentioned a lot in other reviews as well) and it's still a fitting description. One of the greatest bands of all time and one of my favourite Swedish musicians, "1st" couldn't be better!

I must also mention that this album is released on Subliminal Sounds, a label that always delivers incredible stuff!

Record Store Day

Yesterday was the annual Record Store Day all over the world. The Garden was of course participating in the celebrations and we had an incredible day in both of our stores. It exceeded all of our expectations.

This year there were an insane amount of releases. I only got one for myself... I got the new single from David Bowie. It's a double A-sided with the songs "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" and "Where Are We Now", both taken from his brilliant last album "The Next Day".

There were a few releases more that I wanted, the re-issue of At The Drive-In's "Relationship In Command" and GZA's "Liquid Swords" in a really cool new version with a chess game and other stuff. We weren't able to get these in our store though. Hopefully they can arrive at a later point.