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davidnI've made two posts about individual songs so far, and in truth it's rather difficult to stop talking about these once you get started. But to provide a bit of variety, I've found a pretty impressive live performance by Heavenly. This is something rare to find with this band, because curiously, they're all French but their actual record company as well as the focus of their releases and touring is in East Asia, making them the world's only Japanese band from France. I'm unsure of the meaning behind the name, but they were originally had the sublimely ridiculous title of "Satan's Lawyer" and are quite insistent that they're not a white metal band (making it an unusual choice all round). Unlike the last post I made like this, this band is known for levels of bombast that approach ridiculous, which is exactly why I like them.
And when searching for interesting things to say about them, I found out that unlike all the big players in the genre who are well into their 40s by now, Ben Sotto is only four years older than me, and by extension he had a very competent album released featuring both Kai Hansen and Piet Sielck when he was younger than I am now. So I obviously have some catching up to do. Unsurprisingly, like everyone else he lists his musical influences as everyone else.
I suppose part of the reason that I want to mention them in particular is that far from the frightening hair-flinging image that most metal has, every member of this band looks like an actual member of the human race. Ben Sotto's voice, however, is clearly borrowed from another species - this song shows off his absolutely superhuman range, starting high, dropping to extremely low for the verse and then climbing back up. There are higher singers in power metal (Daniel Heiman springs to mind) but the fact that he is seemingly able to do this flawlessly live is just incredible. The note just after 2:30 and subsequent chorus are standout examples, though he still pronounces "edge" as "haige". I don't think I've ever heard anyone sound so comparable to the way they do on the album version, as it seems a lot of power metal vocalists' live voices are rather... disappointing.
In fact you probably won't be able to understand many of the other lyrics either, because there really isn't any way to describe his unique approach to the English language. This song is actually one of the mildest offenders, though I said that about the entire Virus album shortly after listening it to the first time and I was yet to discover just how different the album booklet lyrics were from what I thought were reasonable guesses as to what was being sung. Even Darklyrics' version of them is no help in this case, because it looks like they got theirs from somebody with the original Japanese release trying to sound them out phonetically. So they've been translated from French to English to Japanese and back into English again, and the result is about the same as you'd expect if you tried that with Babelfish.
It all works somehow, though. And on the subject of everyone being influenced by everyone else, watch out at 3:40 when it turns into "Anywhere in the Galaxy" by Gamma Ray.
Artist: Heavenly
Album: Virus
Song: Liberty
Visuals: Heavenly, surprisingly enough
And when searching for interesting things to say about them, I found out that unlike all the big players in the genre who are well into their 40s by now, Ben Sotto is only four years older than me, and by extension he had a very competent album released featuring both Kai Hansen and Piet Sielck when he was younger than I am now. So I obviously have some catching up to do. Unsurprisingly, like everyone else he lists his musical influences as everyone else.
I suppose part of the reason that I want to mention them in particular is that far from the frightening hair-flinging image that most metal has, every member of this band looks like an actual member of the human race. Ben Sotto's voice, however, is clearly borrowed from another species - this song shows off his absolutely superhuman range, starting high, dropping to extremely low for the verse and then climbing back up. There are higher singers in power metal (Daniel Heiman springs to mind) but the fact that he is seemingly able to do this flawlessly live is just incredible. The note just after 2:30 and subsequent chorus are standout examples, though he still pronounces "edge" as "haige". I don't think I've ever heard anyone sound so comparable to the way they do on the album version, as it seems a lot of power metal vocalists' live voices are rather... disappointing.
In fact you probably won't be able to understand many of the other lyrics either, because there really isn't any way to describe his unique approach to the English language. This song is actually one of the mildest offenders, though I said that about the entire Virus album shortly after listening it to the first time and I was yet to discover just how different the album booklet lyrics were from what I thought were reasonable guesses as to what was being sung. Even Darklyrics' version of them is no help in this case, because it looks like they got theirs from somebody with the original Japanese release trying to sound them out phonetically. So they've been translated from French to English to Japanese and back into English again, and the result is about the same as you'd expect if you tried that with Babelfish.
It all works somehow, though. And on the subject of everyone being influenced by everyone else, watch out at 3:40 when it turns into "Anywhere in the Galaxy" by Gamma Ray.
Artist: Heavenly
Album: Virus
Song: Liberty
Visuals: Heavenly, surprisingly enough
I should say
Date: 2008-08-03 01:36 am (UTC)