My band has a new album. You can check out the propaganda and free downloads through those links – this being a semi-personal blog, I’ll share my feelings about the album here.
Of course, I don’t expect anyone except me and the band to consider it a timeless classic. 
But one thing that nobody can deny is, this album is one of a kind. Or do you happen to know of a metal (or any other genre for that matter) album containing a 21-minute narration of a traditional folk tale over a soundtrack of dark soundscapes, ambient noises and electro jamming? 
Avantgarde baby!
Let’s start from the beginning shall we?
Concept and lyrics
We started work on the album this Spring. As usual, we began writing the lyrics first. This time we decided to have a historical theme through the album, and thought of a nice twist to add folk tale characters to the distant-past part of the album, while adding fictional attributes to the historical characters in the medieval-times part of the album.
We tried writing the lyrics and some music at the same time, but it didn’t really work – I think this method only produced the Praslea chorus. We then returned to the tried and tested mode of bouncing ideas around among the three of us and coming up with lyrics together. It proved to be loads of fun as always, with moments of mad laughter when one of us came up with something funny interspersed with periods of 30 minutes trying to find a matching rhyme. Some parts (of Praslea and Mircea I think) I wrote together with Normalu (vocals, flute), most of them we wrote together – and by April they were all done.
We then had to decide on an album title. We knew we wanted to have Zimbru (Aurochs) in it, the aurochs being a central character in the story of the album and it being mentioned in all the songs. So we spent quite a lot of time brainstorming, until demoNU (drums) came up with Muget de Zimbru (Aurochs Bellow). It has a very nice ring to it, and also resembles the name of a classic folk rock album by the Romanian band Phoenix – Mugur de Fluier. Other album titles we’d come up with were quite good as well (I think demoNU suggested Abcdefgh…Zimbru!), but Muget de Zimbru was just perfect, I’m sure you’ll agree.
In the next entry I’ll tell you about the writing and recording of the music for Aurochs Bellow, so stay tuned!
October 12, 2007 at 2:28 pm
[...] Posted by prowler on October 12th, 2007 I’ve written about the making of the album and some of my feelings about it, on my blog. [...]
October 12, 2007 at 2:30 pm
[...] prowler on October 12th, 2007 Am scris despre crearea noului album si niste pareri despre el, pe blog-ul meu. [...]