Saturday, March 14, 2020

Alstadt - 2 albums (2017)

[Note: As far as I know, Alstadt's music on the following albums are still the property of Vision of God Records, therefore the links provided are to their page. If the material ever becomes my property again in future, I'll make free download links available (provided I'm able).]

"Alstedt" - original band name/logo, but I forgot, and misspelled it... thus we have:



(Alstadt - "Rest these Woods in Solitude")

While this is obviously a Christian Metal project, I had been listening to a lot of Pagan Metal at this time. Additionally, my interpretation of Christianity was closer to Gnostic, and nature-based (or nature-reverent). 
It was around this time that my drinking habit began to develop, following some medical problems that occurred in early 2017. Now that I think about it, this must have been recorded exactly at the time everything started to take a turn for the worse.
"Rest these Woods..." is a pretty straightforward affair, fast, raw, aggressive. Just a speedy purge of emotion, conceptualized within a Christian framework.
The songs themselves were pretty much improvised.
I guess it wasn't so well received, but I'm still rather fond of it, as well as the next album.  


(Alstadt - "Climes of Northern Sorrow" cover photo by Mary Cox O'Ney)

Unlike with its predecessor, the songs on "Climes..." were written. Well, at least more written than improvised. Even though each song was made in one sitting, more work went into constructing the riffs, and overall composition. I actually sat down and wrote lyrics for this one. It's rare, but it does happen.
Cover photo was taken by Mary Cox O'Ney, and used with her permission. I told her I would credit her, but I may have forgotten to include that information when I relayed it to Duane from VoG Records.

The music is different from the previous one too. For one thing, there's a marked influence of Grind and Punk Rock. All in all, a very interesting album.
The crowning achievement, the one track you should listen to if you don't listen to anything else
is "Hope for the Healing," the next to last track on the album:

("Hope for the Healing," courtesy of VoG)

Buy from Vision of God Records:

Alstadt - "Rest these Woods in Solitude"

Alstadt - "Climes of Northern Sorrow"


No comments:

Post a Comment

Response to JTD's Comment

I couldn't reply to your comment, so I decided to just blog it instead: Thanks man, I appreciate your kind words. Rock on:) Yeah, we ...