Week 2: SpiRitual

   I still had several good options knocking around in my head when it came time for week 2, and the difficulty of deciding which to post about next was at least part of the reason why I'm doing this so late in the week. Anyway, after some thought I settled on SpiRitual. SpiRitual are a German group, and "they" are officially a solo project of Stefan Hertrich (formerly of Darkseed). A string of guest musicians appeared on the project's recordings, though, so it's not entirely accurate to think of this as a one man band.
   Hertrich formed SpiRitual in 2005 and promptly released the EP "Pulse". Later the full Pulse album was released, featuring the original 6 songs along with 2 new tracks. These 8 songs unfortunately comprise the entirety of SpiRitual's recorded work thus far.

   Before I go any further, I should point out that stylistically SpiRitual are kind of hard to place. They contain folk elements (primarily Middle Eastern and Native American), a good deal of electronic programming, ambient passages, a core of industrial metal, and occasional progressive guitar solos. The vocal styles employed are quite varied as well. For these reasons, I can only truly recommend this band and this album to people with fairly eclectic musical tastes.

The track list for the full album is as follows:
1. This Battle Is Yours
2. Symphony Of Life
3. Nahash
4. Pulse
5. Khundas
6. You Believe
7. Save And Heal
8. Nowhereness

   Many of the album's tracks start out soft with woodwind passages, dreamy female vocals, and/or mellow electronics. Some songs (Khundas and the closer Nowhereness) stay mellow throughout, but most tracks feature more aggressive elements after the initial intro passages. Once the drums drop and distorted guitars appear, the male vocals employed vary greatly, with a range that includes highly aggressive harsh vocals, clean baritone singing, distorted spoken passages, and coarse thrash metal yells. These changes occur many times in each song and are often layered and blended together along with drifting female vocals in the background. The music is constantly changing as well with appearances of by acoustic guitar, flutes, keyboards, sampling, piano, and occasional other instrumentation all scattered throughout nearly every song. As such, this isn't a band that can easily be understood by listening to a few short samples. For anybody curious but unwilling to track down the full album, though, the standout tracks are Symphony of Life and Pulse.

   So, for their extremely diverse and unique sound, SpiRitual are my metal band of the week.