Beyond Beyond

The German symphonic metal band Beyond the Black return with their fifth full length record, the self-titled Beyond the Black. German Symphonic Metal shooting stars Beyond the Black look back on a stratospheric success story. Already their 2015 debut album hit like a bomb in their home country. Songs Of Love And Death besieged the German Top 15 for weeks and lead up to the band being awarded the Metal Hammer Award 2015 for "Best Debut". It's successor Lost In Forever (2016) entered the German charts on #4 right away and paved ways for a huge tour from Germany over countries like UK, Russia or Japan. Since the band's live debut in 2014 they have played the world's biggest Metal festival Wacken Open Air several times and toured as a support act for heavyweights such as Aerosmith, Korn, Scorpions, Saxon or Within Temptation.

Captain Beyond's second album must have confused the diehards. Where their self-titled debut had upheld the basic progressive heavy rock blueprint of lengthy instrumental explorations, constant tempo changes, and opaque, yet cinematic lyrics, Sufficiently Breathless downplays them for a subtler, song-oriented production. The predominant mood is snappy and businesslike; no track runs over five and a half minutes. This newfound conciseness certainly benefited such heavy-rocking efforts as "Distant Sun," even as the band stuck to their diverse guns on the moody, acoustic title track and the sleek Latin funk rock of "Bright Blue Eyes" and "Everything's a Circle." The results were intelligent and self-assured, yet the band's never-ending bad luck again intervened when vocalist Rod Evans quit in late 1973, leaving the album adrift. The band would proffer a markedly different style on their return four years later, but anyone dismissing progressive heavy rock as an oxymoron should definitely check out this album first.

On January 31, 2022, Frontiers Music Srl made an announcement welcoming the legendary '80s hard rockers Autograph to the label's roster. The band, at the time, featuring vocalist Simon Daniels, guitarist Jimi Bell, bassist Randy Rand, and drummer Marc Wieland, were close to wrapping up work on their brand new studio album "Beyond," which the label had slated for release later in the year. Just past mid-April 2022, Randy delivered the final masters and artwork for "Beyond" and was sorting out plans for the release with the label when he received some news about his health. And then, shockingly, just a few days later, on April 26, 2022, Randy Rand, a founding member of the band, passed away. Before his untimely passing, he shared with his bandmates that if something was to happen to him before the release plans were finalized, he wanted them to release "Beyond", his last recorded work.

Captain Beyond has a rather legendary status in the ranks of heavy prog '70s rock. Their fame is actually in the "cult status" category. Dawn Explosion, their third album, was a good disc, but really did not live up to the greatness of the first two releases. Still, in showcasing the group's unique blend of hard rock, psychedelia, and progressive-type arrangements, there is definitely some strong material present. The hard-edged and frantic "Icarus" and the nearly ethereal, building mini-epic "Breath of Fire (Part 1 and Part 2)" can arguably stand up to most of the material on the other releases. Where they falter here is on such songs as "If You Please" and "Midnight Memories," which seem to be trying to reach toward accessibility, but come much closer to banality and mediocrity. This disc cannot take away from the tremendous glory of the other albums, though, and several of the tracks certainly still hold up well.

Beyond the Ghost presents his third album in the Europa Series, a futuristic, bleak and moving sound voyage that merges electronics and acoustics.
Rome, the year is 2062. The whole of Europe has been falling apart for 2 years now. No one is quite sure what war even means at this point. In Rome, a few dozen soldiers of The Alliance fight against small groups of citizens who joined the resistance. Those who are too scared just hide away in bombed-out houses, starving to death, losing their mind. A city that was once beautiful has become the stage for an absurd tragedy of power struggles gone awry. As the sun sets over the Colosseum, a few gunshots and screams echo in the dead of night, the final tremors of a derelict world crumbling to nothingness.

The Eight Holocaust Hymns based on the Swedish Melodic Death / Melodic Black Metal sounds genealogy of cold and melodic. A powerful work packed with Beyond the Grave style while imitating the cold melodic sounds of the oldschools! Just a year ago, "Veneration of Corpses" had been unleashed and now Black Metal Maniacs are returning with the new masterpiece- "I am the Holocaust"!!!

After their two acoustic adventures, Finnish power metal veterans Sonsta Arctica will honor us with their 11th studio album Clear Cold Beyond, which will be released in March 2024.
And right from the first track First In Line, we get the keyboard-heavy power metal we learned to love from the band in their early days.
Tony Kakko, Henrik Klingenberg and co. are playing like they haven't for a long time!

Randle Chowning and Larry Michael Lee, both of which were original founding members of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, along with multi-instrumentalist David Wilson are creating music that can best be described as a pop/folk/americana blend…