Last Wednesday I went to the club Semifinal, which is a part of the famous rock venue Tavastia, to catch Black Bile live for the first time.  Black Bile is a metal project by Henri Kuittinen, who writes all the music and plays all the instruments in the studio.  Live, however, he is joined by a live band, so it’s pretty much like what Trent Reznor has been doing with his Nine Inch Nails.  Last December Black Bile was signed for Sakara Records as the label’s first band singing in English. Sakara Records is a record label run by the wildly successful trash metal band Mokoma, and in the last couple of years Sakara Records has been quickly gaining popularity and a wealth of new artists.  At the moment they house Finnish success stories like Stam1na and Diablo and the veterans of progressive rock and punk YUP.

Black Bile’s music is metal combined with a great number of other influences like a little bit of industrial, post-punk, new wave, pop and all kinds of other stuff.  All of this is painted pitch-black by a thick layer of Nordic melancholy and desperation.  Black Bile’s debut album Great Ape Language (released 16th April this year) received mixed reviews in the Finnish music media mainly due to the huge amount of different styles Kuittinen has mixed together, others praising Kuittinen’s flexibility and the overall quality of the music, others criticizing the album for being a way too much of a jumble of elements. As for me, well, I think it’s a really interesting and complex album.  I wasn’t hooked the first time I listened to it, actually I was almost kind of angry that I had bought the album, but I just wasn’t able to resist popping it back into the stereos soon.  There was something there which made me want to listen to it again and again…

Now I can say that Great Ape Language is an very good debut album, however I do have to admit that it’s a real difficult one at first.  Even though there evidently are a ton of influences, Kuittinen has managed to create a very unique sound for his project by making all of the different elements fit each other in a blastedly interesting way.   The sound is characterized by transitions between crunching riffs and somber, sentimental acoustic guitars, minimal electronic touches, careful use of celloes and most prominently, such a level of depression that you could say it’s running rampant.  Really, it seems melancholy is the key element in Black Bile: it more or less penetrates and dominates just about every single song on Great Ape Language.  Hell, even the band’s name itself is a reference to melancholy, the word deriving from the ancient Greek words for “black bile”. This definitely isn’t music for your sunny afternoon in a car, folks.

Interestingly, while Black Bile is decidedly a metal band, it’s the quieter tracks and the numerous ballads that appeal the most to me.  Although the opener Earth Will Rise and the bleak Mute are great metal crushers, songs like the surprisingly Weezerian Light That Failed, the ballads Valerian and Emily and the dark, electronic soundscapes of Monochrome steal the spotlight.  Here the melancholy works for great effect with the mellower atmosphere, and Kuittinen’s voice is also better suited for these kinds of quieter tracks.  For example the one true in-your-face death metal track Divorced with the World is only average at the very best.  In conclusion, I’d say Great Ape Language is an honest, uncompromising album, a misunderstood and underappreciated gem.  It might be difficult to listen to at first, but grows on you rather quickly.  It’s got its fair share of flaws, but I’m sure that if Kuittinen wants to continue with his project, by the second album we’ll have a true masterpiece in our hands.

You can check out Black Bile’s music on their MySpace or the official site where the player seems to have the whole album for preview.  You can buy Great Ape Language at Record Shop X for 15,90 €, and they even ship worldwide.

Tracklisting for Great Ape Language by Black Bile

1. Earth Will Rise
2. Valeriam
3. Light That Failed
4. Infection
5. Divorced With The World
6. Emily
7. Half
8. Mute
9. Monochrome
10. Worst Case Scenario
11. Slumber

Apocalyptica came to the US this spring in support of their sixth studio album, Worlds Collide, released Sept 17, 2007 in Europe and April 15, 2008 in North America. They’re back in Europe for the summer festival season, but they have announced additional N.A. tour dates including some “more intimate” shows at smaller venues along with some larger shows and at least one festival appearance. Tickets for most of the shows go on sale this weekend.

For those not familiar with the album, Worlds Collide augmented their signature cello-metal sound with guest artists Adam Gontier, Tomoyasu Hotei, Till Lindemann, Dave Lombardo, Cristina Scabbia and Corey Taylor on six of the eleven tracks. They really do put on a great live show and I’m looking forward to their return to NYC. I’ll be there, as close to front and center as I can get.

Hello all! My name is Paul, and I will be a semi-regular contributor to this blog. My Nordic music interest lies primarily in Finland, but I hope to be able to provide a fairly balanced look at the music of the rest of this northern rim as well! In that vein, my inaugural post is about the Icelandic one-man-band Örn Elías Guðmundsson, better known as Mugison. I figure the best way to do this is with a review of his most recent album.

Mugison - Mugiboogie
I first heard this guy live as the opening act for Queens of the Stone Age, so my initial expectations and impressions were naturally going to be a little different than the album would be. Most bands sound much louder and heavier live, but based on the set that he played I was expecting a hard rock sound that verged a little on metal (on one of the live tracks he used the death growl) The first four tracks held up my initial expectations pretty well, as they were all tracks he played live, but then things started to change. While listening to these songs, since I was enjoying them so much, I went and did a little research, and discovered that apparently Mugison is actually an artist usually in the vien of fellow Icelanders Sigur Ros, which as anyone familiar with their sound is practcially the antithesis of hard rock. The rest of the album conforms to his earlier work fairly well, and it doesn’t really veer back into hard rock (although one later track was the one with the death growl, it was very different than the live version, as this was odd experimental soundscape with muffled growled vocals)

Naturally I was disappointed that it wasn’t all like the absolutely killer opening tracks, and I do suspect a lot of the people hat bought the album at the show feel similarly, but after I got past that I did start to appreciate the album as it is. There are some bluesy and country elements in Mugison’s experimental tracks, and if you were to take out the hard rock tracks it would be a very well done post rock album. I’ve bought his earlier two albums, though I haven’t really listened to them yet, and I can hear a distinct evolution in his sound. Unfortunately I’m not really a huge fan of the softer post rock movement (I am however quite familiar with the so called post metal movement) so I can’t really compare Mugison to anyone other than Sigur Ros on these tracks, but from what I can tell he does them very well. They’re quite pretty and appealing to listen to, and his voice has a much deeper tone (this is relative, mind) than Sigur Ros, which is much more suited to my taste. There are also more in the way of conventional rock structuring in Mugison’s music than some post rock artists, which makes it a little easier to listen to in my opinion. I highly recommend the last three quarters of the album to post rock fans.

The problem to me is that the first couple tracks feel like they should be a totally different disc, maybe an EP, since they have so little in common with the rest of the album when played in order. There’s this blast of bluesy hard rock, replete with somewhat sexed up lyrics a la Danko Jones, and because they’re so put together it doesn’t flow well. I find myself often stopping the playback now after the first four tracks unless I skip them altogether, which of course detracts from the overall experience. That said, the first tracks are very, very good in the style they’re in, and I think Mugison clearly has it in him to release an absolutely killer hard rock album if he wants to.

So what’s my final verdict? Taken as a whole, it feels a bit schizophrenic, like Mugison started to make a hard rock album and chickened out at the last minute, or decided to try something new on a regular album. I don’t know the story behind the new sound, but I’d urge him to try maing a whole album. The set he performed was very, very good and he made a fan of me, even though he’s primarily the shoegazer post rock stuff, but were he to release a whole album of songs as quality as the first ones he’d win legions more I suspect. I can’t say I would recommend anything but the beginning to hard rock fans, but the latter half is very well done for what it is.