Nashville, Tennessee is the home of a Prog Power Metal band named Oblivion Myth. It’s a band formed in 2006 and singing in the spirit of true Power Metal about magic, fantasy and honor and the likes. Apparently they’re doing well locally, as their new single, called War Child, made its debut on Nashville’s The Buzz radio station. Unfortunately their signal doesn’t quite manage to reach myself on the… Go read/watch!

The last time we did some proper Power Metal must’ve been before Jesus was born. Well we’re making up for a long hiatus today, because we’ve got a Norwegian band today with Mell Gibson on vocals. The band is called Pagan’s Mind and they play their game in the fashion of some of the great German Power Metal from the ages: bombastic, dramatic, fast and catchy as EHEC from German bean sprouts. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t Progressive elements to be enjoyed.

The eleven year old band released Heavenly Ecstasy as its sixth album on May 20^th of this year. It went on sales through Steamhammer records in Germany, making it the first of the band’s records to go out through that label. Heavenly Ecstasy contains eleven tracks, thirteen if you get your grubby hands on a bonus edition.

A couple of weeks ago Canada’s Unleash the Archers released Demons of the Astrowaste, their second full-length of hybrid Power/Melodic Death Metal. After forming in 2008 they released their debut, Behold the Devastation, in 2009. Having heard and enjoyed that album several times, I was doubly impressed upon realising it was music from a band in it’s infancy. So when I found that there was new material from these guys, and gal, I had to check it out. I remain impressed.

I haven’t had the chance to listen to the whole new album yet, but let’s not have that stop us from sharing. If you like Power Metal and Melodic Death Metal and also enjoy a solid vocal performance from A Lady of Metal prepare to be entertained.

Finnish Power Metal from Sweden. Yep, it exists. In this case we’re talking about Oz, a Heavy Metal band formed in 1977 in the Finnish town of Nakkila. The band released albums from 1982 to 1991, then put a lid on it and quit.

Years and years passed, until in early 2010 the five-pieced group came back together, by now relocated to Sweden. Their first completely newly written song is a fact for some months now, and has been released in a music video that we’ll share past the jump. The single is just a first little appetizer for the band’s planned new studio album Greatezt Blitz, to be released in the spring of 2011. I guess that pretty much means any time now.

We got a friendship invitation the other day by a Greek band, named Winter Crescent. Strange name for a band coming out of a country where the average temperature in any month seems to stay well above zero degrees Celsius (for all you Fahrenheit fans, that’s when water freezes). Anyway, usually we don’t bother much with friendship requests – we accept them, but don’t do much more than that – as we prefer to wait for explicit review requests. After all, we’ve usually got enough bands on our list to take care of for centuries to come already.

However, with Winter Crescent something in our inner being told us to play a song before clicking the closing cross on their profile page. Well, needless to say, we enjoyed what we heard!

We do some Accepting today. We accept the fact that Accept is a great fuckin’German Heavy Metal band and although it’s not Death Metal – and so not particularly concrete-grindingly loud – we still fuckin’ love it! Rufio seems to agree as well, because he suggested we take a look at the band (thanks for that, mate!). The band may have taken a liking in ACDC in the past, because, as Rufio put it, “all I can think of while listening to this is that ACDC picked up some European influence”.

Well actually, it could’ve been the other way around – though it’s not. What I know for sure is that Accept was actually walking the earth a couple of years before ACDC, two or five years in fact, depending on whether you count them as the same band back in the days between 1968 and 1971 when they were still called Band X. That’s a shitty name, as we know they accepted and acted upon. For all the math wizards among us: ACDC formed in 1973, Accept/Band X in 1968. However, ACDC was the first to release an album, in 1975, while Accept needed until 1979.

In late 2010 German Speed and Power Metal pioneers Helloween released 7 Sinners their fourteenth full-length studio offering. Thirteen catchy anthemic Metal tunes for Metal fans who don’t mind having a little fun through their music. Don’t get me wrong, this is classic type Metal material, but it may leave you feeling a little uplifted. An example of this is the leading single Are You Metal? which is a song about Metal. How fuckin’ fun and Metal is that?

Two days ago we posted the first issue of a pack of progressive Metal suggestions by our reader Zodiac. His list of suggestions was too long to wrap up into one post. You would have been bored to shit of our writings and moreover you wouldn’t have appreciated the music as much, as it would have numbed you out. So, today part 2 of Zodiac’s pack is up! That means: Gwynbleidd (US), Ephel Duath (Italy) and Silent Memorial (Switzerland).

A short while ago visitor Zodiac dumped me a message stuffed with links to bands that hadn’t yet made a spot here on The Baboon. Common denominator of these bands seems to be their more or less, depending on the band in question, progressive approach to Metal-making. His dump included eight different bands, so that’s too much to include at once, but I’ll break the pack into pieces and throw it to you in bite-sized chunks. Pt. 1 is up today, with three bands: Dagon (US), Auvernia (Argentina) and Ghost Brigade (Finland).

This morning I woke up and noticed Kyle, after a while of absence, returned to us with a considerable list of band suggestions. A list from which we’ll gladly put up stuff for various reasons. Today for example we’ll put up one band because they make beautiful, emotion inducing emotion, even though part of that emotion might want to make you kill yourself.

Another band we’ve put up because it’s a classic 1980’s piece of Power Thrash that might make you feel a little better after the first experience. Who knows it’ll work. And even if it doesn’t, we hope the more solid, World War Two-inspired stuff from another “countryband” of mine will do the trick!