Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
This will amuse you. At least I hope so.
I got the wrong end of the stick altogether with this one. I thought the band was called Ragnarock (you have to admit it is a pretty fine band name) and the song called ‘The Blitz’as in Sweet’s The Ballroom Blitz. But it’s the other way around. Silly me.
And they are from Italy. I thought the Norse culture connection (see below) suggested they might be Norwegian. But never mind.
Anyway, it’s their debut single, that’s for sure. ‘Ragnarock’ in Norse culture is the “final day,” or the Day of Reckoning, momento mori if you prefer an excursion into a dead language, and there’s no getting away from it, folks.
Hence the lyrics motivate expressing one’s vital energy, as if every day were your last. Carpe Diem. It’s later than you think. Insert your own idiom.
By now I was expecting to be hit with a wall of death metal; after all as I have often observed death is never far away from any metal song.
But it turns out to be a good old fashioned rocker. It opens like Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, the wind whistling across the wily moor, campfire twigs crackling.
Then it receives a message from Moonbase Alpha before demonstrating a neat interpretation of the ‘Spirit in the Sky’ riff, which underpins the remainder of the song apart from a short bridge of various noises off, to use a theatrical term.
It’s crisp and clean and they keep good time. It’s perfect head banging material.
My one concern is that the singer’s voice doesn’t have a hard rock feel to it. It is more suggestive of a rapper and that’s something they might want to work on. Copious amounts of whisky and cigars should do the trick. Or gargling with razor blades.
The band promises “to surprise soon with an EP.”
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThisIsTheBlitz
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisistheblitzofficial
