Ever since their classic “Midnight Solemnly Dance”, Darkseed has been on a constant quest of evolving as a band and has matured musically a great deal into how they sound now, on their latest album “Poison Awaits”. The band’s long time vocalist Stefan Hertrich decided to leave the band in 2006, and from what it looks the band was idle for two years until 2008, when Thomas Herrmann, Tom Gilche, Maurizio Guolo, and Armin Dörfler decided to get the Darkseed ball rolling again.

With ex-drummer Harald Winkler stepping up for singing duties, the band has managed to retain their traditional sound and we think that they actually improved over their previous releases. Harald’s vocals are very diverse and his deep clean sections are reminiscent of Lacrimas Profundere and similar Gothic Rock bands.

Epic Doom Metal is a genre that has been getting little to no attention in the last few years. With only sparse releases by While Heaven Wept, Candlemass, and others, we can count with two hands the albums that have been released in the last 2 years. Doomshine hailing from Sweden adds their contribution to the mix with a crushing release names “The Piper at the Gates of Doom”.

As you can expect from any Epic Doom Metal release, chugging down-tempo riffing, epic singing and tight drumming is exactly what the doctor ordered. Doomshine pretty much excels in every single department and created 73 minutes of crushing music that will please even the pickiest fans of Candlemass and similar bands.

Yaotl Mictlan has always been one of the most interesting bands that we have ever heard to come out of Mexico. With a mixture of indigenous Aztec and Mayan elements, the band crafts their Death/Black Metal with a ‘folk-ish’ aspect, but the end result is something that you wouldn’t expect. The band’s sound is indeed very heavy and just uses these elements to highlight parts of their songs, not to revolve around them.

In these days, every band out there has to have a gimmick in order to be successful (or have ridiculously good musicians), and Yaotl Mictlan’s indigenous gimmick is what actually makes them stand out from countless average Death/Black Metal bands in the world. However, this gimmick is not just for show purposes since the band spends quite a good deal of effort to make their lyrics historically relevant and incorporate part of their heritage into their music.

Hailing from Sweden, Lustre (one man band) brings us his second full-length release with “A Glimpse of Glory”. Mixing Ambient elements with the raw beauty of Atmospheric Black Metal, we get a very solid release that instantly became one of our top 10 releases of 2010 so far. During the 40 minutes of “A Glimpse of Glory”, Lustre reminded us of bands such as Enid, Blut aus Nord, Velvet Cacoon, etc. combined with the ethereal nature of artists like raison d'être and Robert Rich.

Each of the three tracks found in “A Glimpse of Glory” focuses more in creating a very enthralling atmosphere than on the ‘Black Metal’ aspect of things. There are distorted guitars through most of the album (two thirds maybe), but there is only a little section (on track one) that has harsh BM screams. We didn’t even care if anybody was singing since each song crafts a mysterious atmosphere that gave us chills while listening to them at night.

Today we find ourselves listening to yet another band mixing Metalcore influences with something else. While this would usually mean that we start laughing from the beginning till the end of the band’s release, we actually find ourselves quite impressed with the solid effort put by Sicarus on their debut EP “Strength of All”.

Sicarus main strength lies behind the guitar acrobatics that Mad Scotsman and Jon provide the band with. We can make some comparisons with Into Eternity, Echoes of Eternity, Mutiny Within, etc. in this department, but the band does a great job at crafting a sound that does not rely on them too much (unlike the previously mentioned bands).

First of all we have to disclose that we are HUGE fans of Liv Kristine and we have loved almost every thing she has ever released in her career, until now. “Skintight” shows the desperation of an artist trying to break into ‘mainstream’ music. With Leaves’ Eyes and Atrocity being highly popular and very different musical outlets you would image that such a quality singer like Liv would have enough.

Since 1998, Liv has been releasing stuff promoting her solo career. We loved “Deus Ex Machina” since it was a nice break from her main gig back in those days (Theater of Tragedy) and it featured some nice folk-ish songs with some other pop-ish material mixed in between. Not much came of this (except in Norway) and she went back to releasing ToT albums until she got the boot in 2003. And we feel that her best chance at ‘mainstream’ commercial success was with “Musique” and “Assembly”, some electronic/techno oriented albums that shined with her vocals.

Tristania has always been one of our favorite bands since the late 90’s with their impressive “Widows Weeds” and “Beyond The Veil” albums. Fast forward to the mid 00’s and we have that Morten Veland left the band and Tristania was stuck in a creative limbo releasing somewhat dull and uninspired releases. Lastly in 2007 we got Illuminate, and album that was somewhat decent and marked the last release of the band with Vibeke Stene, the band’s iconic Female singer. Many people gave Tristania for dead after Vibeke left and not a lot of people had confidence that the band would ever return with release solid enough to get them back on top of the Gothic Metal world.

With “Rubicon”, Tristania proves us all wrong (yes, including us). The band’s latest release is as great as we could have ever expected, not like Morten Veland would have done (for this check out Mortemia), but like the ever shape-shifting Tristania only knows how to do: it’s complex, powerful and well designed to keep the listener engaged. With the band’s new female singer Mary Demurtas, we get a more than worthy replacement for Vibeke. Mary’s voice is indeed different than Vibeke, but it has enough power and range to helm Tristania’s female singer crown gracefully.

All the way from Poland today we get Jelonek, the ‘side project’ from violinist Michal Jelonek of Hunter fame. The music of this band is another attempt at fusing classical music with metal/rock elements and create an enjoyable mixture of the two genres while not sounding overly ordinary. Comparisons to Apocalyptica, Elend, Agizia and Ulytau come immediately to our heads but Jelonek easily stands out and cannot be called a cheap clone of these bands.

With no vocals, Jelonek’s self-titled debut album manages to immerse the listener into the beauty of classical music paired with (sometimes) powerful drumming and distorted guitar. This band is different to Apocalyptica in the sense that it approaches music more ‘classically’ then them but at sometimes they sound just like them (i.e. “Machinehat”).

Today we have the Metal Blade re-release of legendary Helstar’s albums: “A Distant Thunder”, “Nosferatu” and “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas” is a boxed set that also includes the DVD of “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas”. For those of you that don’t know Helstar is a Power/Speed Metal band from the USA that released some epic albums back in the 80’s before disappearing for a while.

All these three releases featured in the “Rising From The Gave” boxed set feature remastered versions of “A Distant Thunder” and “Nosferatu” and indeed these two great albums sound better than ever. We did not receive the 3rd and live CD for review, so we can’t really say much about this part of the boxed set.