Music I Liked, Vacation Edition

The last couple of weeks have been so busy that if there was any music playing in the background, I didn’t really notice it. But now that I’m back at my desk and cleaning out my inbox, I’m finding emails I sent myself while I was on vacation. Some of them are reminders about bands I liked while I was on the road to various camping trips this summer – bands like Carnation and Rebel Wizard. Then last week I went to yoga and discovered Maneesh de Moor.

Carnation

I know what you’re thinking. I thought it, too. But this is not the same thing as Norwegian progsters Green Carnation (also very good). This is the album Chapel of Abhorrence by Belgian just plain Carnation that got a 3.5 score on Angry Metal Guy. Just plain Carnation plays just plain death metal that makes me very happy. I think it’s strange to name a metal band for a flower, and even stranger that two of them picked carnations. I guess the carnation really is the manliest flower. In any case, Chapel of Abhorrence is fun. Plus I love that the album cover looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.

Rebel Wizard

I know what you’re thinking. With a name like Rebel Wizard, you’re in for some stoner doom. I was thinking it too. But I was in the car on my way to a camping trip and that seemed like just thing. Plus, when you see a song called “Drunk on the Wizdom of Unicorn Semen,” you click through. To my surprise, the first thing it brought to mind was late ’80s Steve Vai. Then it turned into black metal. I was hooked. I lost signal before I could listen to the rest of Voluptuous worship of rapture and response, but you can bet I’m going to remedy that now.

Maneesh de Moor

After Rebel Wizard “healed the chakras with heavy negative wizard metal” maybe it was inevitable that the next thing I liked was actually yoga music. My yoga teacher always plays awesome music in class. It’s tempting to keep my phone on me so I can Shazam tracks mid-Warrior pose. This week she played a 20-minute track by Maneesh de Moor and it sounded like the theme song to a James Bond movie set in an ashram. I couldn’t find the Bond raga (it might have been Call of the Mystic), but here’s Medicine Buddha Arkana.