Fearful Monsters: Helloween Catches Monsters, David Byrne Threatens the Heavens

In the first month of autumn, the metal workshop members were particularly pleased — there were so many interesting albums that it was hard not to devote the entire review to them. However, there were notable innovations in jazz, and in traditional rock music there was something to note (at least in the form of reissues). Izvestia — about the most interesting September music albums that you might have missed.

Helloween

Giants & Monsters

The German quintet (which has now grown to a septet), barely out of school age, set the canon of power metal in the 1980s: fast-paced double barrels, shining guitar harmonies and choruses, as if written for stadiums. Over the decades, they have gone through breakups, vocalist changes, and unexpected reunions of the classic line—up - and at the same time managed to preserve the aura of a collective legend. The new Giants & Monsters album feels like a continuation of this myth: the music is extremely large-scale, balancing between seriousness and self-irony, and each guitar duel sounds like a signature.

Nevertheless, fatigue slips under this gloss. But it is at such moments that the album becomes especially interesting: in some tracks, the very drive breaks out, when power metal was not yet a genre ritual, but another form of rock and roll youthful rebellion. However, all the participants are already close to retirement age, and the former "first class handsome" vocalist Michael Kiske, alas, looks more like a well-fed cannibal.

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Compared to today's "metal", where hybrid forms dominate — from blackgaze to industrial post-metal — Giants & Monsters sounds like an anachronism, which, however, did not affect sales in any way (third place in the national charts of Germany, Poland and Switzerland and 49th, quite honorable for older Germans in the American "Billboard"). Apparently, cheerful, melodic and straightforward songs are still closer to exercises with dissonances and odd sizes.

David Byrne

Who Is the Sky?

David Byrne is a figure who is difficult to imagine outside the cultural context of the last five decades: from the radical innovation of Talking Heads and solo experimentation to theatrical projects and political manifestos. His work has always been immersed in exploring the boundaries between avant-garde and pop music, between irony and sincerity, between the personal and the universal. Byrne taught the listener to perceive strangeness as the norm and chaos as a system, and this is what makes his presence so significant today.

On Who Is the Sky? Byrne once again joined forces with the New York Ghost Train Orchestra, and the result was a kind of session of collective musical nostalgia for the great days of Tin Pan Alley, classics of the American song tradition. Jazz brass bands, the "Tokinghead" trademark absurdity that reemerged in the wake of Byrne's memory, swinging rhythms and the general atmosphere of a slightly disturbing holiday. Byrne, as always, balances between a joke and a revelation, and in this suspended atmosphere, music is born that sounds like both a question and an answer. This is certainly not Rei Momo or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but it is certainly a fresh and clever work by an ageless and wise musician.

Paradise Lost

Ascension

British (and where else could the "metallers" take Milton's poem as their title?) Back in the early 1990s, the quintet outlined the framework of the subgenre known as "gothic metal" - and it's not their fault that the "glade" was soon captured by mannered Scandinavians with an abundance of makeup on their faces. Paradise Lost themselves have never gone into excessive theatricality or commercial sound, remaining themselves — cold, melancholic and a little scary thanks to the hopeless lyrics and the grave growl of the permanent band leader Nick Holmes.

"Ascension" was released five years after Paradise Lost's previous major work — this is the longest interval between albums in the band's history. Once again, Holmes and his friends dispensed with experiments: the funereal guitar riffs, the unhurried tread of the rhythm section, the entire palette of vocal experiences — from bestial growling to a clean, ragged baritone. The strings that come into play in the ballad tracks complete the picture of Paradise Lost's return — maybe not triumphant, but at least worthy of an ovation in the original, ancient Roman sense of the word.

Till Brönner

Italia

Til Brenner is a German trumpeter, producer and composer who has made a name for himself by skillfully navigating the boundaries of traditional jazz and pop music. Improvisation never gets out of control, and the form, perhaps, dominates the content — high-quality salon music to please the ears of the regulars of luxury hotels. Someone might grimace at such a recommendation, but you must agree that if Brian Eno composed "Music for Airports" and Jean-Michel Jarre composed "Music for Supermarkets", then someone must also be engaged in music for lounge bars. Besides, Brenner does his job, as they would say before, at the highest cultural and ideological level.

The new album (as can be seen from the name) was clearly intended as a soundtrack to cultural memory: Nino Rota evokes the shadow of Fellini, Bruno Martino's Estate raises a wave of nostalgia, and Paolo Conte's songs are ironic about dolce vita. Brenner "makes us look beautiful," but skillfully avoids kitsch, despite the album's inevitable "postcard-like" quality and careful sound gloss.

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The most interesting music albums of August

"Picnic"

"Smoke" (1982 version)

Edmund Shklyarsky suddenly decided to please his fans with a real rarity — the original recording of the debut album "Picnic", recorded in 1982 at the studio of the legendary Andrei Tropillo. Of course, many people have preserved this artifact of a distant era on film, but streaming users could only get acquainted with the 1993 version, which was re-recorded by the band for CD release. However, the "Smoke" returns from the archive not as a museum exhibit, but as a suddenly revived organism. In this record, for all its forced imperfection (and perhaps because of it) It is clearly audible how the young amateur band outlines its own mythology— both musical and lyrical— on the shoulders of titans: from Pink Floyd to Bauhaus. Everything sounds fragile, as if it was hastily glued together: ragged rhythms, flat but stubborn bass, guitar cutting the air like a sharpener in a pocket. And it is this imperfection that makes the album truly alive.

A shaman named Edmund doesn't have three arms here yet, but all his limbs are busy building a strange sound world where every word is followed by a trail of images: shadows of a circus, the hum of empty streets, sparks of electricity. In some places, the "Smoke" sounds like an audio recording of a dark ritual that took place somewhere in the darkness of Leningrad courtyards. Cold, damp, and the shadows of forgotten ancestors stand along Nevsky Prospekt.