When I began writing this section I had, perhaps foolishly, explained that I wanted to look at bands from both Israel and Palestine, but as the latter has basically been annexed by the former, and is, in the words of Steve Hogarth of Marillion, "the world's largest open-air prison", I find this is impossible to do. I could find no Palestinian metal bands at all, though I did find this, a message of hope as music crosses political, ideological and even geographical borders.
Israeli Metal Band ORPHANED LAND Announces European Tour With Palestinian Rock Band - Metal Injection
But I guess either any bands who are living in Gaza or The West Bank are too busy trying to keep alive to come to anyone's notice, or perhaps they've moved out like so many refugees these troubled days, searching for a better life, or at least, a life.
Which leaves me with our final country in this year's Metal Month to be explored as Israel alone. Mind you, I picked up
Metal Hammer magazine today and what did I see on the cover? An article on "Metal in the Middle East"! Where were you two months ago, guys, when I was struggling to put this article together? Timing, as they say, is everything.
Cool title too; wish I'd thought of it.
I have of course sampled the wonderful Orphaned Land (they spoken of in the link above) from this country, but it would be too easy to include them, and you all know, Trollheart don't do easy! So instead let's look into a subgenre I have hardly even attempted to listen to before.
Metalcore is something I'm very unfamiliar with and have hardly touched on in this section, so let's check out a band who fall into that category; at least, they're described as “Melodic Death Metal/Metalcore”.
Illusion of silence --- Blank Divinity --- 2010 (Independent)
With just the one album, released five years ago, and a single the following year, it doesn't really look as if Blank Divinity are up for world domination any time soon, in fact they may already have split, though at the time of writing they're still described as “active”. This is just an EP, and to track it down on YouTube, though not particularly difficult, meant I had to go with single tracks, the last of which I couldn't find, so out of the six tracks on this EP we can listen to and review five.
The opener is called “Blank lament (intro)” and features a rather lovely acoustic guitar with birdsong, not at all what I had expected though I imagine it will all beef up soon and suddenly. For now though this is really quite pleasant, and I would venture to suggest an instrumental. It runs for just under three minutes, and features some really expressive guitar work, electric joining the acoustic; Blank Divinity have two guitarists, who appear to be brothers: Roma and Dima Pindrick. As expected, at the end there's a snarly intake of breath and we barrel into “Night of the rising death”, where things take a real upsurge and the guitars are set most definitely on kill. Vocalist Max Soulfly has a scratchy voice but it's not too deep to be understood. It's a good pumping, rocking track and it certainly blows away any ideas that these guys were going to be ambient or anything of that nature.
“In another life” starts off momentarily like the opener but soon toughens up as the guitars snarl in and Andrey Skibenko pounds away on the drumkit. Marches along nicely, bassist Itay Niv Milenbach keeping the beat steady, and there's a great punch to the song. The longest track, “Bleeding sky”, just one second shy of six minutes, opens quite atmospherically with a nice sort of muted guitar and what sounds like sound effects maybe on synth, then breaks into a hard, striding rock number with some very dramatic overtones. Quite progressive in its way. “Psychopath” is a big powerful song too, with racing, battling guitars and galloping drums, another long one at just under five and a half minutes. Good, sort of howling delivery from Soulfly, kind of sounds a little Slayer in ways, though probably not as fast.
It turns out I'm wrong: there are six tracks on YouTube after all, as I just caught sight of the closer further on down the list. So, what is “Outro” like? Well, as you mgiht expect, a sort of reprise of the intro, with nice relaxed guitar and those birds singing again, even what sounds like it could be violin. They do play around with the tracks though, warping them a little, as if maybe that's meant to impart some sort of message? All is not as it seems?
TRACKLISTING
1. Blank lament (intro)
2. Night of the rising death
3. In another life
4. Bleeding sky
5. Psychopath
6. Outro
Overall a decent album, or EP, but I guess you can see why the chances of them recording anything else are slim. There's some talent there certainly, but a lot of their music does sound quite similar, bar the intro and outro tracks. Surely not the best Israel has to offer, but it's a good start.