Black Ish

2022 release from Denmark's premier roots-rockers Thorbjørn Risager & The Black Tornado. The septet has blazed a trail across Scandinavia, Europe, Canada, the US and Asia for the past twenty years. They've been captivating crowds with their dynamic stage presence and a sound that fuses soul, Chicago blues, boogie and rock 'n' roll with a voice where Ray Charles, Van Morrison and Billy Gibbons meet in the middle. They've brought dancing shoes to Europe's largest festival stages and low-light noir-ish blues to Jazz clubs around the globe.

BLACK PAGE were formed in the mid 1980s as a Japanese rock quartet by Bunmei OGAWA (keyboards), Itsufumi OGAWA (guitars), Kozo SUGANUMA (drums), and Tsuneo KOMINE (bass) - already all of them had been musically professional. Regardless of their sense of humour cultivated in Osaka, they had played lots of gigs with their astonishing technique - featuring Itsufumi's complex guitar play much influenced by Alan Holdsworth, Bunmei's Emerson-ish thrilling keyboard explosion, aggressive drumming by Kozo called 'Tekazu-Oh' (in English, The King Of Full Speed … sorry no appropriate expression here), and Tsuneo's strictly precise bass-quake. In 1986 BLACK PAGE released their one and only album 'Open The Next Page', in that their terrific technical approaches could be remarkably approved by progressive freaks all around the world, but sad to say, they were disbanded soon after that.

The fifth full-length album from Portland, OR-based black-ish metal band Agalloch, The Serpent & The Sphere, opens with a 10-and-a-half-minute track called “Birth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creation,” and it is a mindfuck. The song spends some three and a half minutes laboriously building from near-total silence, and upon finally hitting its groove, it proceeds for the next seven goddamn minutes at like 56BPM — a rhythm you might describe as “adagio” or “deliberate” or “glacial.” Frontman John Haughm’s lead vocals are mostly whispered, his rhythm guitar track is entirely acoustic; there’s some portentous plainsong chanting, and at numerous points, components of the already spare instrumentation peel away, leaving only one or two pieces in play, as if the song is buckling under its own enormous weight. It reminds me a lot of the elegant and deeply depressive funeral doom made by Australia’s Mournful Congregation (or Agalloch’s Profound Lore labelmates Loss, from Nashville), although it doesn’t attempt to wring quite the same powerful drama from those sonic elements. It’s not a difficult song, exactly — it’s rather refined and beautiful-sounding, in fact — but on first blush, as an opening track and inaugural statement, it makes no fucking sense.