Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! Are you ready to get learned on music you've never heard of you? Well you should be! This is about to turn your Friday into Jamsday, because that's how we do it here… and by "we" I mean "I." Anyway, you know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on Bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I've been saying, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
How the hell have you not heard Iron Thrones yet?
The Basic Idea
Iron Thrones was exactly what would have happened if Opeth and Isis got into the studio together and couldn't decide on what genre to play. So they just jammed together their signature sound and voila! Riff-laden, groovier-than-a-packed-vinyl, heavy-as-fuck doom metal with a whole lot of progressive tendencies.
Why I Love It
Before we get on with this, let's have a moment of silence for Iron Thrones now that they've been broken up for almost four years.
They might be broken up, but their legacy is just so damn powerful I couldn't leave them out of this segment. I heard Visions of Light when it came out in 2009 and it's been in a pretty regular rotation for me ever since. If you're looking to be instantly hooked on this record, look no further than "Heart of the Light." That riff has been bouncing around in my head since the day I heard it for the first time… and that's the beauty of this record. Visions of Light got slow, got fast, leaned on some serious black metal chords before launching headlong into a riff that would make Guthrie Govan's head spin and simply impress at every single chance there is.
Visions of Light is perfectly ordered in terms of tracking too. Where there's a slow song that might be a little on the longer side, there's something crushingly heavy and fast to follow it up. Where something calm might be bending to the point of breaking, it never snaps into the realm of boredom. When it comes right down to it Visions of Light was a perfect record for its time that never really blew up like it should have, and I'm here today to let that finally happen (I hope). So jam this front to back- it's not just a collection of songs, it's a record that conveys a landscape, tells a musical story and takes you on an adventure that you should absolutely, under no circumstances, pass up.
