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!!
- 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).
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