DT is cool. My favorite albums are Awake, Images and Words, and Octavarium. Talking about progressive, have you tried Tesseract? The Altered State album is cool. A little poppy I guess but still very nice. I do love the more alternative sound ala Porcupine Tree though so YMMV

One of the cool things about writing for a metal based blog is being able to talk with bands during the production process and maybe try to influence them into thinking more about sound quality than they might otherwise would have. I can't name any names, but Metal-Fi is helping a certain funeral doom band master their next release. The last one was DR6 if I remember correctly, and we've made it clear that we want to see dynamic range in double digits this time. VERY few bands have the guts to master their CDs that way, and we've made it our mission to convince them to treat CDs the same as vinyl masters, which for the most part haven't changed since the end of the pre-Loudness War levels of the early '90s.

As for specific albums, my #1 album of 2012 was Bilocate's Summoning The Bygones. Jordanian progressive death with some Gothic and eastern influences. Freaking stellar. All production work was by Jens Bogren, who's one of the best engineers currently working in metal. It's dynamically smashed as most metal CDs are, but Jens is very good at making the most of a very limited amount of range and you can tell that when listening, the sound really isn't too bad at all. That said, it's a crime that it's not available on vinyl because musically it's such a great album, and when a Bogren mix is allowed full dynamics the results are usually fantastic.

Listen to the track "Hypia" which has Dan Swano providing guest vocals. It could've been a B-side from Crimson or Crimson II. Sooooo good.

Although not a fan of black metal, I gave Bilocate a quick listen and I'm pretty impressed.

I have got the Tesseract album but haven't had time yet to give it a proper listen. Yeah it's got rock and pop elements in it.


Now for something completely different .. a mix of Jazz, Progressive Metal and Funk:

Panzerballett - Tank Goodness



I really love those guys for their crazy ideas. Really smooth tempo changes on the one hand but completely unexpected stylistic changes on the other. Soft plucking followed by hard metal riffs. Just out of this world.

Anyone into the other DT? Dark Tranquillity? They have a new one out. I haven't heard the whole thing yet but saw the trailer on youtube and it seemed interesting enough.

dark tranquillity - construct