Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

First a little context - where many English children growing up in the seventies attended C of E schools, mine was apparently NW of BHM which, as all former Sounds readers will recall, stood for New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Unfortunately for myself and maybe six other kids, I wasn't massively keen on the form, meaning I was essentially gay 'n' stuff, preferring the rampantly homosexual music of Joy Division, the Ruts, Devo, and a load of other funny haircut bands, as the genre was known at our school. I didn't even like Queen or Judas Priest, for Ozzy's sake! What a massive bender I was!

My unreservedly heterosexual pal Crispin attempted conversion therapy by forcing me to borrow the first two Iron Maiden albums, and to my surprise I found that I actually sort of liked them. It was like the heavy metal I heard blasting from every bedroom window in town, from every garage and milking shed, and yet it had a punky edge which appealed to me; and thus were my ears jimmied at least a little way open. The Number of the Beast followed and I was grudgingly forced to admit that it too was not without merit, even with the addition of a more traditionally hairy rock vocalist who did that wobbly scream thing with his voice and sounded as though he might be wearing silver trousers.

Years passed and I lost touch with anyone who might expect me to borrow further Iron Maiden albums, and so life became much easier in terms of my musical palate. Then one day, probably late nineties, I happened to pass a junk shop when I noticed a box of records outside perched on a table - actually just seven records, the first seven Iron Maiden albums - excluding the live one - for a quid each and in what looked like good condition. The tidiness of the transaction was hard to resist, and even if the four I'd never heard turned out to be rubbish I'd still be able to look at the covers and follow the story of Eddie as he has a lobotomy, reincarnates as an ancient Egyptian God, becomes a futuristic cyborg, and so on and so forth.

The first three sounded even better than I remembered, Piece of Mind, Powerslave and Somewhere in Time all sounded good, and this one sounded fucking amazing beyond all expectation and accordingly glued itself to my turntable for the duration of the next few months.

I appreciate that we're all way too sophisticated for this sort of thing, and that the otherwise mighty Rollins regards Maiden as the most ridiculous band to ever stick their tongues out on a stage; and I know there's a thin line between Maiden and Spinal Tap, but fuck it.

This one was inspired by an Orson Scott Card novel, and accordingly invokes all of usual horror tropes picked up from Dennis Wheatley and Tomb of Dracula comic books, all delivered as Dickinson pulls an operatically scary face to the soundtrack of a million widdly-widdly guitar solos; but even the notion that so melodramatic and populist a take on the occult might be ridiculous is itself ridiculous, unless you somehow think David Tibet has a direct line to the real stuff; and if that's so, let me know when he's recorded anything half as powerful as Moonchild or even Can I Play with Madness.

I still don't understand how Iron Maiden succeed with the same formula as all those other leather studded wankers who made my school years so fucking depressing, apart from that they get it right and don't sound like a bunch of disgruntled farmhands showing off their 50cc motorbikes to each other in the town square on a windy Tuesday evening. They gurn and wail and scream and go right over the top somehow without trying too hard, and they only ever sound like Iron Maiden even on an album such as this with all of its convoluted song structures and funny time signatures; and whilst there are virtuoso moments, nothing ever distracts from the whole; so all of the pieces fit together in an almost symphonic sense. I'm not even sure Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is metal, or that it matters given that most metal is shite.

All I know is that this is an amazing record.

Howling Larsons & Nikolaos Lymperopoulos - Poemandres (2021)

Occasionally there will be a piece of music of such self-contained power as to inform the suspicion that any comment one might offer will be essentially dog shit; and that's what we have here. I've known Alan Trench for a long time, and on the last occasion of our being together in the same room, he'd remarried and bought a house on a Greek island with the intention of living there in response to some seemingly mysterious calling. I say house, but I had the impression that it was actually a pile of rubble and the newlyweds would need to undertake some renovation work - and by renovation, I mean things like electricity, running water, and basic plumbing. Anyway, they seemed to know what they were doing, and it sounded exciting in a massively reckless sort of way.

Another couple of years down the line and it seems to have worked out well for Alan and Rebecca, now recording as the Howling Larsons - amongst other wilfully tangential names - and they've produced this, a collaboration with one Nikolaos Lymperopoulos who I'm sure Alan described as their next door neighbour, a man who just happened to be fluent in ancient Greek. It sounds unlikely, but this sort of thing seems to become fairly commonplace once you achieve a certain remove from locales with shopping malls; and in any case, this album definitely derives from somewhere outside the familiar, mainstream reality. Poemandres is nearly an hour of Lymperopoulos reading, chanting, and intoning as follows.

The ancient Greek text, a revelation of the creation of the Universe and the fate and nature of Man, is presented here in the original, using the Byzantine intonation method. This has long been considered one of the most important, and certainly the most famous, documents of the Corpus Hermeticum. The music, performed as a ritual piece, draws the listener into one of the most important mind-states of the Ancient World.

...and that really is what it does, underscoring the spoken account with a powerful devotional drone of church organ and other elements hidden further down in the mix to produce something which actually achieves the promises made elsewhere on Current 93's proverbial tin without the emphasis on crap tattoos and pierced todgers. This is because the Howling Larsons took a different route to many of their showier, better publicised contemporaries in moving to Greece and just getting the fuck on with it. Remember all those [name diplomatically withheld because he's probably reading] albums wherein the lad pretends to be a thirteenth century monk by whacking the decay of his digital reverb up to five minutes? Well, this is the real thing.

Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

Stone Breath / Mike Seed with the Language Of Light - The Ætheric Lamp (2011)

Stumbling across a copy of this in the racks at Hogwild, I only really understood what it was through having met some of those involved, namely Language of Light; and I only knew Language of Light through their performing live on some bloke's allotment here in San Antonio. My friend Alan, formerly a big cheese at World Serpent distribution, told me he was coming to Texas to play live, so we met up for a drink and he was accompanied by Rebecca Loftiss - whom he since appears to have married - and Frank Suchomel, collectively Language of Light. So the three of them performed a sort of improvised thing in, I suppose, the general direction of maybe Pink Floyd, and it was atmospheric and very enjoyable; and personally I was just relieved that it shared no discernible heritage with Death in chuffing June or any of that bunch, seeing as how we're all older, wiser, and keen to move on from the days of simply exploring contentious ideas and imagery.

Alan slipped me a stack of CDRs, which I mostly enjoyed, but I've never had an entirely happy relationship with CDRs because each time I play one I'm always aware that it could be about to remix itself into something sounding like Farmer's Manual; so it was probably guilt which made me pick up this album when I saw it, and clearly it needed an appreciative home.

As anticipated, I'm completely out of my depth here. It's folk, although thank fuck it isn't neofolk as I understand it to be. It might be psych folk, I suppose, but maybe it doesn't matter. The Ætheric Lamp is a split album - Stone Breath on one side, Language of Light accompanying one Mike Seed on the other - fairly different artists taking related approaches to music and doing unfamiliar things with tradition. The vocals are of the kind one expects to hear singing about horses, ploughs, gathering in the blackberries and so on, but the art feels very much of the moment - or at least as of 2011 - invoking traditional forms going back to pre-technological times without simply recreating. Stone Breath's blend of celebration and melancholia utilising all manner of plucked instruments suggests rivers of wine, Bacchus all a-prance, olives, and a generally pre-Christian Mediterranean mood. By approximate contrast, the growling synth and delay of Language of Light suggests some sort of peculiarly rustic analog of early Cabaret Voltaire, and doesn't sound quite like anything else in my record collection, which is why I'm scrabbling around with analogies that probably don't work. It all sounds kind of like how I hoped Current 93 would sound but didn't, because the music on The Ætheric Lamp at least seems to know what it's doing.

The thing to take from all this is, I suppose, the powerful atmosphere the disc brings to your listening space and seemingly without doing very much or pulling any funny faces. I guess this is what folk music was always supposed to be about - simple, moving, and performed with honest motives.