http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idE1lsqG2Vc
This song reflects a certain moment of my - recent - life. I just love Journey.
Well, I heard Agalloch's Marrow of the spirit carefully and I can say what I don't like from it. 1.- Production: it's bland as fuck, period. 2.- The vocal delivery is most of time lifeless. 3.- Some parts lack the feeling to hypnotize the listener and, since there are really long sections repeated over and over, at the end I found myself struggling to finish listening the album, with a bitter taste in my mouth/ears and bored. 4.- There are some good ideas tho, but I really think the songwriting is not fluent at all. Some heavy parts are great, but followed by bad acoustic arrangements and/or viceversa.
Yesterday I heard Borknagar's Universal, just after listening Norron Livskunst and I found it pretty interesting from a different perspective. As a Borknagar album, I think it's ok, but not great compared to Empiricism and Epic, but as an avantgarde black metal album it's excellent. I'm loving For a Thousand Years to Come, Fleshflower and Coalition of the Elements. The only track which sounds 100% Borknagar is My Domain.
About NL... fuck, I love it. It has everything what Solefald is known for and they managed to create something completely new at the same time . It's epic, catchy, heavy, dark at times, funny at moments; the diversity of the album is just incredible. The lyrics are also very good! the vocal delivery of Cornelius is just stunning, I just forgot how good growler he was, it's a weird mix of Nocturno Culto, old Satyr and something else that give a very special character and feel to the voice. Lars sounds epic as fuck, I really hope he could get more leads vocals on the future Borknagar albums. Sometimes he sounds just as epic as on the Asmegin debut, sometimes even more. His sense of harmony is just awesome, the arrangements are just perfect. The production is top notch and well, I'm still blown away.
