Carmilla "Deflector" Album : released 19 April 2019

Carmilla had been building up to this point for nigh on 18 months, and it is a well-produced work that has been warmly received by this critic at least. Do yourself a favour and play this as the makers intended: old-school, tracks 1 to 11, in order. It will enhance the experience. 

1.       Avvia e Inizia – metallic instrumental piece arranged as a classical work, as the Italian title suggests. But the title literally translates to starts and starts which, for an opening album track, makes sense. A slightly romantic, slightly dark, slightly pedestrian introduction that could have run into Kings and could have been developed a whole lot more … perhaps it could be reprised on the next album with those ending effects leading into a whole operatic piece entitled E così via, per sempre?

 2.       Kings Of Religion – the more I hear Oksana’s voice the more I love this band. Usually when you sing in another language your accent doesn’t come through, but this is not the case with Oksana, which makes her quite unique but, as we have already seen, this is not all that makes her a wonder!

 3.       Stained Scars – Ahh classic industrial chunk-metal with double/quad kicks and layered, overlapping vocals for depth. 

 4.       Deflector – A study in multiple time-signatures with a staccato introduction experienced elsewhere in pop-metal, with great effect. Oksana’s vocals are mixed back somewhat, but this track is no less brutal for it. A more melodic and adventurous opus than we have experienced from Carmilla thus far and we should be hearing more from this track!

 5.       Blinders – Introduced like an AC/DC track, but only for a brief moment before kicking straight into what we have been dished with so far. Yes dished- like a degustation menu where you’re given small tastes of things to come with single releases, every new course of this record delights even more. From the so-called “pedestrian” introduction through Kings each track enhances the experience even more than the last. And we’re still to be served dishes we’re already tasted with chefs Håkan and Daniel working overtime in the kitchen to serve up more and better guitar-sounds and effects with which we’re now so familiar, but expanding and building through each new course. But which wine with each course? That’s for the discerning headbanger to determine! Maybe a malty ale or a well-aged whiskey?! Best served LOUD!

 6.       Devil’s Feast – The first single, so deep into this record. We know that few will listen to a record as it is presented, and may go for the singles first. Random-play may do this as well.

 7.       The Accuser – Just as I was about to say that this is a more laid-back effort, I am jolted back to reality. Do these guys know what laid-back is? Well, yes- they opened with it! Metal with an Eastern influence and a tilt at the classics.

 8.       Lizzy Borden – 19^th-century American axe-murderer who killed her father and step mother, yet was never incarcerated. And with that same morbid fascination as Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd : The Barber of Fleet Street, this track has a fitting back-story. Håkan says that the lyrics were sent to the band by Elin Andersson, a fan of both the band and Borden, and lyricist on a number of the band’s other releases, including their debut Kiss Of Death. The track itself is in the story-telling style of Kings but more fitting to the story of the remorseless Massachusetts Sunday-school teacher-gone postal, pausing for effect as Lizzy did; each hit on the snare between the pauses echoing each swing of that misguided axe.

 9.       A Hundred Years of Failure – break out the doomsday bells, then kick us all in the face! Where has this been, Carmilla? We want more!! She doesn’t know why there is blood on her hands – maybe she should revisit the last track?!

 10.   What We Deserve – Bringing the mood down from 100 Years? The same Eastern influence as The Accuser and the same phrasing in the chorus as Kings but some melodic riffs woven throughout. It could almost be a medley of the album to date. Almost!

 11.   Lightbringer – The third single rounds out this collection perfectly! Brutal lyric-delivery, double-kick mayhem, and some pop-metal riffs added for colour at the bridge. Brilliant!

Carmilla "Deflector" is deserving of as much attention as possible. There is much to be said about the dark side of music from the Nordic regions, and Carmilla’s voice should be prominent in that conversation. The band has changed significantly since the release of this oeuvre, but this bookmark in their journey is a significant contribution to that discussion!

PG (Jacky) Gleeson
27 May 2020

Carmilla (Swedish female-fronted metal band) - 2017-2019 YouTube releases

When I see the term “female-fronted” metal, I immediately expect Evanescence, or similar, but when the opening chords for Kiss Of Death, the first video listed on Swedish female-fronted metal outfit Carmilla’s YouTube-channel, kicks in, I am reminded of how badly out of touch I am and why I started back in this caper to begin with!

Carmilla comprises Håkan Ålander and Daniel Karlsson on guitars, Felix Björklund on bass, Nathalie Astrada on lead-vocals, and Felix Forgsberg behind the kit. The band has had several line-up changes over their short history but none so startling as losing Oksana (Element) and Dennis Blohm Hedlund during October 2019.

Moving on from Oksana would have been a huge decision, given that she was the focus of the band’s look and sound over the previous 18 months; her raw, empassioned, vocal stylings and death-growls with Blackie/W*A*S*P hair-swirling between the verses/choruses of Kiss Of Death grabbing my attention by the throat! Losing Dennis would not have been easy, either, but artistic direction needs to have everyone on board.

Now wherever I’ve been, I’ve never heard a woman produce the vocal sounds that Oksana produced through the course of the recordings shown on the band’s YouTube channel!! During Nothing To Say, as the best example of their work to that point, she effortlessly transitions between death screams and operatic glissandos while the rest of the band, no less skilful with their chosen instruments in showcase of their own amazing talents, together and separately with each new release. But Oksana was front, centre, and foremost in every clip. 

According to their official bio Am I The Danger is the band's debut opus – they were working on that as their first project between their foundation in 2016 and Oksana joining of the band: pacier, heavier, with more guitar interplay than Kiss and more of those amazing vocals! But only the cover-art accompanies the soundtrack to the video, so as not to distract from the music, whereas Kiss is the first “Official Video” for the band.

Nothing To Say plays a looped PowerPoint presentation of a couple of the band-shots, again highlighting the focus of the band’s front-lady. But a little more colour is splashed about with some different arrangements and phrasing through the middle-eight. My favourite track to date, but there’s much, much more to come!!

Time had now come to put together the next album Deflector; the first single Devil’s Feast brings Oksana’s amazing range to the forefront of the chunky industrial riffs we’ve come to know and love. A couple of times we were promised maybe a calamitous rampage of guitar mayhem we sometimes get from death metal stalwarts like Cannibal Corpse but such was not the case. This time!!

Lightbringer and Kings Of Religion were the other two singles. The band’s YouTube-channel offers a live recording of Lightbringer while Kings is a “lyric video”. How Oksana transitions from gutteral to quasi-operatic is beautifully demonstrated on Lightbringer without overdubs or multi-tracking. Absolutely spellbinding!

But Kings is what we’ve been building up to: slightly faster and presented in the Lamb Of God storytelling style used on New American Gospel, this lyric video pays homage to Tolkien, Shelley, Stoker, and other dark bards whose work has been the basis of so much from Carmilla to date. 

Six months later came the great schism that took Oksana and Dennis on their own separate journey. But the band came back with a vengeance, fronted by Nathalie Astrada. In my exchange with Håkan during my research for this piece, he said the choice of Nathalie was a no-brainer despite the geographical distance. “The decision to take Nathalie on is due to her talent”. 

The new look and sound wouldn’t take much longer now!

And Surrender or Die is the first single to showcase that look and sound ... OH MY F🦆CKING DEITY! Talk about your goosebumps! This track is totally mind blowing. As brutal as anything they’ve done beforehand, Nathalie has a presence that will carry this band forward for years to come! She is not Oksana, which is to take nothing away from either of them, but Nathalie is something yet again!! And the band has a new confidence, a new je ne sais quoi, complete with a doom-laden down-tempo middle(ish)-eight. If this is Carmilla 2.0, give me more!!!

Nothing To Say also received the treatment of the new line-up but it is clearly Oksana's song. The new line-up breathes new life into the song but their future is bright ahead of them, starting with the release early in May of their Blood of Fire single and looking for all the world to be as brutal as ever. Follow them with me as we look forward to their next release!! 

Carmilla’s YouTube-channel track-listing and other online recordings: 

• Kiss of Death
• Am I the Danger
• Nothing to Say
• Devil’s Feast (their SoundCloud profile https://soundcloud.com/carmilla-metalband includes audio-only content of these tracks, as well as the singles from Deflector) 
• Deflector (https://g.co/kgs/hqLxeN): 11-track album released April 2019. Includes Kings Of Religion, Devil’s Feast, Lightbringer, and 8 new tracks. My comments are here. 
• Lightbringer
• Kings of Religion
• Surrender or Die (Nathalie vox)
• Nothing to Say 2020 (Nathalie vox)
• Psycho Man: (as I conscientiously don’t Spotify, I air my views when there are other options). 

The Big Dirty- Whiskey Pistol; single released 22 May 2020

The Big Dirty- the name says it all. Self-described as “smut rock”, these guys know how to party, and how to produce music for your very own seriously-good-time!

On 14 May 2020 the band announced the release in July of their next album: https://twitter.com/bigdirtyrock/status/1260624265767981059?s=20

And to give us a taste of what we can expect, they tweeted a teaser for the new single, due for release 22 May 2020, the following day: https://twitter.com/bigdirtyrock/status/1261247228225732609?s=20

So, what can we expect from the lads? Pfft- if you have to ask this question, you are clearly living off the grid in a hole under a rock!

Three words - In! Your! Face! as only these guys can! And right when you think it’s come to an end … well, no spoilers, but maybe expect the unexpected! While the world is locked down and many musicians are whingeing that they can’t do what they love to do: get out and get on stage; these guys have been busy creating the follow-up to last year’s Sex Rock City.

Big and dirty is not only their name: it’s how they party as well. Chris’ heavily distorted guitar builds gradually to the same treatment of vocals from both vocalist and bassplayer Jameses, but the whole band kicks in with those trademark unison vocals that rival any classically-trained vocalist; matched by layers and layers of guitar tracks that broaden the production beyond a straight-ahead rock track.

Chris “C-Diddy” Datson takes up the story:

We started using a bit of a gimmick at gigs where we’d fill up a big water gun or super soaker with whiskey and spray it into the mouths of people in the crowd (if they wanted it). It’s become quite a cool feature in our live sets and something people always shout out for at gigs now..... anyway.... We called it The Whiskey Pistol, and on one occasion we were promoting a gig on social media and talking about how we’d have the whiskey pistol with us, and someone commented saying that Whiskey Pistol sounds like a cool song name. So it got me thinking and I thought it would be cool to write a song specifically around the whiskey pistol. The extended instrumental section at the end was written specifically so that when we play it live we have a decent amount of time for Jonny to spray the whiskey into the crowd while the music is still going hard. Lyrically we tried to make is sound like it was a bit of an old western/cowboy movie, and of course there’s lots of metaphors and room for innuendos in the lyrics. But yeah, it all stemmed from wanting a song where we could put the actual whiskey pistol to good use on stage.

So while I thought it was related to, and more alliterative than, KISS’s metaphorical Love Gun (or as metaphorical as one could get when openly singing about sex back in 1977), it is literally a water-pistol, or super-soaker, full of whiskey, which aids the audience-participation at gigs! Like Pete Townshend’s smashing of instruments wasn’t meant to become what it is today! Didn’t I say they knew how to party!!?

The Big Dirty – not a band to let a silly thing like a deadly virus hold them back! Come 22 May, wrap your ears around Whiskey Pistol. The worst thing about it is having to wait another month and a half for the full album!!

PG (Jacky) Gleeson
18 May 2020

Carmilla - Blood Of Fire single released 11 May 2020

I was going through the Carmilla YouTube channel to get to know who they are and what they're about, when I'm asked to help promote their upcoming single. 

Blood of Fire is Carmilla at their most brutal to date!

The “gentle” intro is shattered by the shuddering stabs of the combined guitars, drums and bass, and backing/overdubbed screams hint at things to come. 

I get Richard Z. Kruspe/Paul Landers chugga-chunk guitars supporting Nathalie’s vocals in the main body of the song but, those dirty black vocals keep coming back to remind us that these guys really mean business. 

The videos are an excellent sample of where Carmilla have been since the very start of 2017 but all that is overshadowed by this new release. 

Get it into your ears while it’s still fresh!

Carmilla Blood Of Fire - astounding!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

PG (Jacky) Gleeson

4 May 2020