Eluveitie - Helvetios

I have a very love/hate relationship with the Eluveitie.  First of all, I find the name annoying to type because I always forget if it's e-i or i-e in the middle, but I double checked it this time (just for you).  Definitely e-i.  Secondly, because they're completely, utterly awesome, but sometimes they're not.

The complete truth is I generally don't like female singers in metal.

1) Bands that are fronted by a female are often lost in her stardom, everything ends up being about her instead of the band as a whole.
2) Female fronted bands tend to fall into two categories: whiny or too operatic.  
3) clean vocals, and they're almost always clean vocals when it's a girl, really aren't what I'm usually looking for when I'm listened to metal.

That said, sometimes they're exactly what I'm looking for and I'll listen to the same song over and over.  If you like them I won't hate on you for it!

I'm sure you can sympathize with the feeling.

ANYWAY...

On February 10th Eluveitie is releasing a new album entitled, Helvetios.  Already, through the magic of youtube I've been able to hear two of the songs, A Rose For Epona and Meet the Enemy.  Here's the music video for A Rose for Epona so you can form your own opinion:

 Eluveitie uses a mix of both male and female vocals which keeps their albums unique and interesting.  Some of their songs are sung in there entirety by the female vocalists and some by the male.  In keeping with my general preferences...I usually like the songs with the male singer, songs like Inis Mona and Thousandfold.  In A Rose for Epona they succeed in using both vocalists and create an enticing collage of male and female vocals that escalates the end.

What I really love about Eluveitie and what keeps me coming back for every album they produce is the use of historical instruments.  I'm a total sucker for strange and interesting instrumentation.  How many bands do you know that have a permanent hurdy-gurdy playing member?  Some folk metal bands get lost in the folk part, but Eluveitie really seems to provide a consistent mix of metal and folk.

I'm really looking forward to hearing the rest of the album!

What am I Trying to Say?

Why music?

I worried about writing too much here.  And then I worried about writing too little.  It's hard to talk about music and feel any sense of completion because music is music and it's something more than mere words.  At my most basic level I'd like to explain simply that live music pleases me.  Even when it is the saddest, most painful song I'd rather be standing in that audience than be anywhere else.  But this is too simple and then I have to attempt to explain WHY I feel that way. 

Music is a somewhat magical art form in that it can last forever (we're still listening to music written four hundred years ago) and is also exists only in the single moment of it's performance.  At a concert there is a connection between you and the performer and through the performer a connection to every other audience member. 

Music is one of the best ways to enjoy the present.  It's not much fun to look forward to hearing music or to remember what a song sounded like last week, but music right now absorbs you and places you in the moment.  ~Terri Guillemets

Live music reminds me of the transcendentalist literature movement.  Everyone 'plugging into the All.'  Unlike paintings, sculpture, or movies, music's completed form exists only inside your head.  Hearing it live is like having ESP.  Suddenly your connected to something so much bigger than simply yourself. 

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.  ~H.A. Overstreet

Beethoven once described music as "the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."  It connects our souls to our bodies and our bodies to our souls.  More than words or pictures, music communicates beyond time and place, it transcends language and culture, and it can come bearing the heaviest messages.  But it is also something that becomes background.  We listen to it while getting ready, we sing in the shower, we listen to it in the car and I'm listening to it while I type this article.  We use it in our crazy human mating rituals (dancing music, music to 'get horizontal' too, etc). 

So, anyway:  I like music.  And if you're reading this, you probably do too. 

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.  The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg:  I have it in my pocket.  ~Henri Rabaud

Why travel?

Perhaps I'm just testing that all too common saying that music is the universal language (in case you were wondering it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who stated this in his work, Outre-Mer).  By the way, I'd like to mention here: I took music lessons from a teacher who didn't speak my language on an instrument that wasn't native to my culture.  And it was weird.  And it was awkward.  And music might be universal, but the language to teach music is NOT.  But I can claim to know a little bit about playing Erhu now.  Or perhaps, I was simply bitten by the travel bug (if it looks anything like a mosquito I may or may not have killed it this morning).

One of my main points about music is that it unites people, what better way to test than to see it in action around the world ?

Let you in on a not-so-secret

 I have already started.  I grew up in rural America, studied abroad in London, lived in Taiwan, volunteered in Mexico, and currently am living in small town Japan.  I've gotten to know a lot of seedy venues in a lot of towns and met my fair share of fellow rockers.  My first few posts will be catching you up with what I've already done, but for me to do more I need your input.  I will need your help and your advice.  Tell me about your favorite bands, cheapest travel tips, share YOUR world of music with me.   

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world." ~ carved into a church in Sussex England ca. 1730

And so...

With that, let's let it roll.