CD

If you ask me, Heart was at their height in the late 80ies, early nineties, when they got massive radio airplay, not only stateside, but even in Europe.  They scored massive hits at that time,like ‘Alone’, ‘These Dreams’ and other songs.

Days Of Loss were formed about a decade and a half ago. During the first half of the first decade of this millennium (got it?), they self-released Lobotomy (2001) and Sleeping Gods Lie (2004) before fading into silence for a while.

The German band Darkmoon Warrior was formed at the beginning of the second half of the nineties by two (anti) human beings, Grommon and Atom Krieg. During this era, they recorded stuff that sort of mixed the harsh Black Noise sounds of cult-act Abruptum with industrialised Ambient material à la Neptune Towers (you know, that excellent side-project of Fenriz) (cf. the demos After The Final Armageddon and After The Final Holocaust).

Cokegoat are a very young (formation: 2011) Chicago-based six-piece (Jeff Wojtysiak-g, v; Chase Bentley-g; Tim Baldwin-b; Ed Nudd-g, v; Jordan Schultz-d; and Rebekah Brown-k, v), that debut with Vessel, which will be released on vinyl, and which will get available as well via digital download.

Satan’s Rock ‘n’ Roll was originally released on CD in August 2012, and gets now re-released on vinyl, once again via Invictus Productions. Even though Chapel were formed more than five years ago, it isn’t but this Canadian trio’s sole official release (except for a demo in 2008). And the only reason for this re-release is to please the vinyl-freaks.

Arvas hail from Norway and were originally formed during the first half of the nineties as Örth by V-Rex aka Vassago aka Willie (ex-Ancient, ex-Aeternus, ex-Frozen Cries, ex-Dødsfall, ex-Cold Eternity). Örth recorded an album with legendary producer Pytten at the legendary Grieghallen Studio, but it was never released officially.

Apostolum are a band from Lombardy, Italy, formed about a decade ago. After a demo, the band released a first EP / album in 2006, called Anedonia, but it was one of the many releases within a huge grey mass of pulp. Result: Apostolum faded into silence…

This untitled split-EP/MCD starts with three tracks by pretty young Swedish act Usurpress (formed in Uppsala in 2010), which includes former and current members of e.g. Embalmed and Tyrant (the one from Eskilstuna).

In 2006 4 bandmembers met each other on the Mannheimer popacademie and appear on 2006 under the backname of the singer “Hessler”.  After 3 years performing on stage they changed their name in “The Intersphere”.The current members are:

Christoph Hessler (vocals), Thomas Zipner (guitar), Sebastian Wagner (bass) and Moritz Müller (drums).

I put this CD on without reading the accompanying info.  And my first impression was :am I listening to some Ozzy Osbourne tribute band, or a band that’s trying to clone his sound ?  So I started reading the info, and it soon became clear to me as to the why and how of this sound.