Lights of Skadi (Sweden) – Nephelia (single/track from EP)
Making a welcome return to NMC are Sweden’s Lights of Skadi, whom we featured a couple of times last year with tracks from their EP ‘A Cinematic Experience (Orchestral versions)’ and their unique brand of ultra fast-paced prog rock.
Whatever your understanding is of ‘cinematic’ music it will be reshaped by this band whether you like it or not.
There is more power and majesty in most of their work than you would find at Davos, if you were ever invited there.
Fortunately you don’t need a CO2 vomiting private jet to get to a Lights of Skadi gig; I just wish there were some over here.
This latest single, which also features on the EP, is ‘Nephelia’, which Mr AI tells me (Mr Google is now redundant and looking for work) means “cloud” or “misty”. It’s a feminine name that evokes imagery of soft, ethereal qualities associated with clouds, suggesting tranquility and beauty. In Greek mythology, Nephele was a cloud nymph or spirit.
So that’s your Greek Myth lesson over for the day but if you’re expecting something wooly and nebulous you are in for a shock. Well, after the first 60 seconds anyway, during which their ship is slowly leaving port.
Thereafter it has a bass line like a sub-machine gun and a non-stop metronomic drum beat that might be played by an orchestra of Duracell Bunnies.
That’s not to mention a guitar riff/solo that Jimmy Page might have left out of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ because it outshone the rest of the song.
(The song features a guest appearance by Argentinean guitarist Cesar Ambrosini).
But it’s the sheer pace of the thing that is most impressive. The soundtrack to an Isle of Man TT motorcycle race.
Stop the World I want to get off!
Where Prog meets Metal and Hard Rock that’s where you’ll find Lights of Skadi.
And they won’t be hanging around on a street corner.
There is a video with this one, which concerns the struggle between two personalities, good and evil, and it is highly professional and effective. When you write instrumentals you have plenty of room to experiment with your videos. A little in the mould of the early ones from Of Monsters and Men I suggest. Nothing wrong with that.
Lights of Skadi are the multi-instrumentalists Jorgen André, Jesper Jansson and Martin Ragnarsson.
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightsOfSkadi/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightsofskadi/
Vince Chinaski (Denmark) – They send the drones (single)
Vince Chinaski, as we’ve remarked before now, is a clever chap who writes songs that test your intellect as much as your musical appreciation.
When I saw the title of his latest single, ‘They send the drones’ my mind wandered (as it often does) this time to Judy Collins’ ‘Send in the clowns’ in which clowns are a metaphor for the moment in a play when things are falling apart and, to keep the audience diverted from the chaos, somebody tells a few jokes.
Whether or not I’m on the right track here I also read ‘They send the drones’ as a metaphor, and not only as a rallying cry against all wars (the title alone evokes the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts in which these machines have often replaced human soldiers while the accompanying graphic is suggestive of wartime Britain in 1944 and Adolf’s last throw of the dice with his V1s and V2s – so in fact it’s nothing new really, just on a bigger scale) – but also for political events.
For example the way in which (I’m talking about the UK here) you daren’t say a word out of place online lest the government’s Starmtroopers (see what I did there?) come for you in the dead of night to bang you up for three years for writing a couple of rude words on Twitter.
Those are the government’s drones but it can also be, as Vince points out, the hatred that is engendered in each other so we see others automatically as ‘the enemy’. The weaponisation of fear, from which some will always seek to gain the most they can.
I recall ‘Project Fear’ in 2015/16 when the elite establishment tried to fool the British public that leaving the EU would mean you wouldn’t be able to fly into or out of Europe, and that there would be critical shortages of medicines and food.
Good friends of mine, intelligent Civil Servants, bought a huge new freezer and stocked it to the brim with provisions. It still lies there unused today and it took them a year to munch their way through the frozen food.
Those were the drones of that period.
And of course if you have a penchant for ‘climate change’ then the drones will be manifest in the form of jet engines and coal fired power stations, and anyone who is a non-believer.
Vince again brings together all his disparate influences from a multitude of different musical genres. Like a patient artisan he crafts his own musical mould and weaves his own timeless fabric of sounds and words.
The opening vocal note alone sounds like a cry for help as he surveys the crash site of humanity down in the valley from his mountaintop perch and later he is joined by a melancholic chorus which might be that humanity itself lamenting its own annihilation.
And he uses the analogy of a black crow circling above, just as Sol Heilo did in a recent song we reviewed. The birds are back in fashion.
There is a marvelous pair of lines that cleverly conflate several issues of recent years into one:
“When the fear breaks out, easy like the flu
They buy a weapon of choice and learn to shoot”
Musically there is always something special to listen out for in a Vince song. On this occasion there is so much going on it is a veritable maelstrom of activity but I did pick out a guitar sound that is so outlandish it could be a Theremin.
Find him on:
Website: https://vincechinaski.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vince.chinaski
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vince_chinaski/
Bandcamp (track): https://vincechinaski.bandcamp.com/track/they-send-the-drones
(As a little bonus here is a live performance)
