Brendon Small’s Galaktikon II: Become the Storm is out today! Hurrah!
Being one of my most anticipated albums ever, I was almost in tears when it became available at 11PM last night but I had to do the responsible thing and go to bed instead of staying up another hour to listen to it.
I did get a chance to give it a listen on the bus ride to work this morning, and first impressions are very good! I’ve already written about “My Name is Murder” and “Nightmare” to some extent, and I think that so far the frontrunners for favourite tracks are “Become the Storm” and “The Ocean Galaktik.” But I’ll definitely have to give it a few more listens before I make any solid declarations.
As advertised, Galaktikon II is very much a new Dethklok album in spirit, but has enough DNA from the original Galaktikon to keep things exciting. Most of the vocals are in the growly Nathan Explosion-style, which is great, but admittedly does make it harder to figure out the lyrics and the story. There is a lot more “regular” singing peppered in than you’d get from actual Dethklok, though, and there’s a heck of a lot of vocal harmonizing going on, which I obviously adore.
I don’t know if this will replace Galaktikon as one of my go-to albums, but it is a stellar sequel. The metalhead in me is incredibly satisfied. I am greatly looking forward to listening to it at least a dozen more times over the weekend. Hopefully by then someone will have started transcribing the lyrics online somewhere.
I wanted to end this post by embedding a video of the final, instrumental track, “Rebuilding a Planet” but alas, the YouTubers are a little slower at getting these tracks up than expected. The album has already been available for a whole 12 hours at this point. Come on, people!