Apodion.net

It’s like a fucking outerspace concerto for saxophone.

—Akie Bermiss, on the recently released recording of the John Coltrane Quartet, One Down, One Up (Live at the Half Note)

The brave daughter of a reindeer herder>will ride by reindeer to Tozhu>The poor cowboy of Khemchik>Will remain on cowback.

That said, it’s understandable that I had my doubts when a first listen of their second record presented a sound that, while not a drastic departure from their first, nevertheless certainly demonstrated itself to be the result of some tinkering.Omnium Gatherum are Finnish, and they play melodic death metal…. This does not pose a huge problem, and indeed a part of me fears that an attempt to ‘punch up’ the vocals might be the first step in the same sort of weakening and watering down that afflicts the band’s geostylistic (and linguistic; Finland’s national love of Latin is just one more little-known reason to adore that icy bastion of agglutinative alcoholism) neighbors, Mors Principium Est, on their own recent second.They say that melodic death metal as a genre is dying, or dead, and that it is full of crap copycat bands who couldn’t write an original riff if you threatened to stomp all over their In Flames CDs, and they’re right, insofar as metal today is fertile and popular enough that the law of averages tells us that there simply have to be a mammoth load of terrible bands; there are the exceptions, however, now as there were in the past, and the bands who have found their own sound and struck their own territory are the ones that will be remembered.