It’s certainly been a whirlwind few years for one of the world’s biggest metal bands, Lamb of God. Charged with manslaughter following the death of a teenage fan at a 2011 concert in Prague, frontman Randy Blythe was finally acquitted in 2013, but the legal fees and enforced hiatus caused by the nine-month trial crippled the Southern metal merchants. The tragic events of 2011obviously weigh heavily on Lamb of God’s new album, which follows close on the heels of Blythe’s
Dark Days memoir, detailing his time spent in prison. The doomy
512, the number of Blythe’s jail cell, is about “the radical mental and emotional shift you undergo when you go into prison”. Over the past two decades Blythe has screamed and hollered with the best of them but on
Overlord he actually tries his hand at proper singing, though his clean vocals stray dangerously close to lumbering 1990s grunge pop.
It would be rude, if not disrespectful, to say that 34-year-old English producer Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, creates music that is outside the box. From jazzy noodlings, folk-tronica and drum’n’bass, to his collaborative work with producer Burial, in the mind of the inventive laptop maestro I believe there is no box to begin with.
Morning/Evening is Hebden’s self-released eighth full-length album and the follow-up to 2013’s
Beautiful Rewind, built from just two lengthy tracks (that’s one track per side for all you old-school vinyl people) and created “on a laptop computer using the Ableton Live software to control and mix VST synthesisers and manipulations of found audio recordings” (for all you geeky electronic nerds). The Eastern-sounding audio recordings are voice samples of Lata Mangeshkar’s
Main Teri Chhoti Behana Hoon, taken from the Hindi movie Souten, and along with a propulsive beat and lush strings create a warm orchestral dawn.
Evening takes a more dreamy meditative groove, a slow-burning soundtrack to a long dusky summer evening, and a perfect end to the 40-minute journey.
