Welcome to the meandering musical insights of Aaron Joy (me!), formerly known as the Roman Midnight Music Blog. Here you'll find nearly 750 reviews of CDs & DVDs of rock & metal in all its variations, mainstream & indie, good & bad, U.S. & foreign. A new review every Monday.

Please share these reviews & feel free to copy them to your website or link to them. No downloads to be found here.

Are you a musician with an album?? Please e-mail me (aronmatyas @ hotmail.com) your album, EPK, etc. Or, hit me up for a physical address (I'm in Portland, Maine). If you don't have an EPK, I have a soft spot for personal handwritten letters from the local musician who just plays around town. I'm a bassist & do this blog partly to share music I love & partly to help the little guy, like myself, just looking for some attention. Promo companies are always welcomed to reach out.

You can support this blog by buying my books via amazon, or your local bookseller, or seeing my website www.aaronjoyauthor.weebly.com.

March 6, 2010

Nutrition ~ Hyperdimensional Awakening (EP) (album review) ... Vitamin overload!


Style: black metal, experimental
Label: Death To Music Productions
Year: 2009
Home: California/Japan

Members: Jeremy Mauney ~ vocals
Roland La Goy ~ guitars/bass/keyboards/drums

 
I often have trouble enjoying black metal. It's not because I don't want to but because I don't know what to listen for. I fight against what I perceive as a lack of creativity in the double bass drum & repetitious guitar figures with indecipherable growling. Then, I hear a band where the growling has dimensions (i.e. Arch Enemy & Cradle Of Filth most immediately come to mind) & where there is some musical variety in the arrangement. In that moment I realize the enjoyment in black metal ... I just have to weed through the mass amount of junk metal out there to get to the really tarnished stuff worth collecting. A good stage show doesn't hurt either, which was my introduction to Satyricon who I like. But, on record this asset is missing & I'm stuck struggling trying to find things about a recording that makes it attractive to me. When I find it it's a goldmine. This 4 song EP did shimmers with a gold hue. On one hand it's straight-forward black metal, but the hyper-dimensional in the title should be taken literally. It's full of little nuances. These range from radio transmissions as voice-overs to haunting gothic keyboards, which particularly bring out a new level to the music with quasi-polyphonic melody lines, solos in different keys & a third track that goes for a more ethereal approach. I've found myself listen to this EP over & over & over in the last few days unable to find the words to review it because I know I'll fail & I kept hearing new things in the mix. Whenever I think I'm missing something I know it's good music. This album can be downloaded free, so there's no reason not to check it out!

No comments:

Post a Comment