German Rhymes

Some folks are just too mean to die, right? For German heavy metal veterans Accept, the title of their upcoming sixteenth studio album isn’t just a badass statement, it’s a declaration of principles…

Following on from the universal acclaim of their latest LP "Le Ceneri Di Heliodoro", ROME releases one of the most impressive releases in its prolific career of 15 years. "The Lone Furrow" is the logical culmination of all of ROME's previous endeavours, a brilliant and patient demolition of the despiritualised modern age, timeless in its critique of man's greed and the deliberate desecration of beautiful things. ROME is back to fearlessly settle accounts of the spirit, with that grave trademark voice, whose tone can be likened to a wise-man's oracle, deepened by countless cigars and pools of stout, or, at times, a Stuka bomber nose-diving into dry gravel. ROME's art always stays slightly beyond the pale and Reuter certainly is what the mainstream would call a joyous outsider. "The Lone Furrow" is a mordant, clear-eyed critique of the modern world, spun with the delicacy of a spiderweb; a journey through the ravaged landscapes of history; a spiritual quest weaving a unique poetry of withdrawal from the troubling world into distant retreats.

Jethro Tull was a unique phenomenon in popular music history. Their mix of hard rock; folk melodies; blues licks; surreal, impossibly dense lyrics; and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that didn't dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums…

When he wrote the cycle that was to change the musical course of the twentieth century, Arnold Schönberg wanted the 21 melodramas based on Albert Giraud's famous collection of poems to be 'spoken and sung' in the language of the country in which they were set, in keeping with the fledgling Berlin cabaret tradition… In doing so, he may not have appreciated the problems that the exercise would pose. The fate of Albert Giraud's verses is inextricably linked to Otto Erich Hartleben's free translation of them. It was in this version that they were most frequently set to music. Stripped of their rhymes and original metre, they are in fact another poetic work. When Darius Milhaud presented Schönberg with a French version recited by Marya Freund in 1922, the composer was disappointed and went so far as to say that he did not recognise his own work!