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posts about leaves.

the first video is of the song leaves by the dutch band the gathering. it’s the first song i ever heard from them, and the song which made me get more. the lyrics can be found here.

this is (slow) gothic metal with clean vocals. you can try it :)

[[for legal reasons, i do not want to include youtube videos here anymore. please click on this link to watch the video at youtube.]]

i like it because… it’s so powerful and yet so beautiful. i found this track on a sampler i bought on ebay called “dark winter nights” (in fact, it was the first thing i ever bought on ebay – the second thing was mandylion, the the gathering album on which leaves first appeared); i stumbled about it since i saw it contained a track by sentenced. essentially, some sentenced songs, a stratovarius live album and this cd got me more interested in metal. this song quickly became my favorite song on that sampler, and eventually made me search for more the gathering stuff.
i also like the tree parts of the video a lot, especially the night parts, as at the beginning :-) but then, i first saw this video maybe ten years after i first heard the track?

yesterday i stumbled about the gathering‘s latest live dvd, a noise severe, recorded in march 2007 in chile. a few months later, their singer, anneke van giersbergen, quit the band. (which, in my opinion, is the end of the band; if they will continue, they will be something very different…)
the dvd contains a lot of songs from their older albums, like the “debut” mandylion (their first album with anneke and, in my opionion, their best one), nighttime birds, how to measure a planet? (which i don’t like too much) and if_then_else. the first two can be more categorized as atmospheric doom with progmetal and gothic influences, while how to measure a planet? drifts off into a very experimental alternative rock/prog direction; the last, if_then_else, is more into a trip rock.
well, so much about the facts.
i’ve already mentioned several times that mandylion is really good. and i’ll do it again. it’s one of the few albums (next to sentenced‘s frozen) where i like every track, to which i can listen for hours, again and again. so filled with energy, groove, raw power, emotions. so beautiful. (my favorite song is probably leaves, whose music video you can watch here.)
well, mandylion is their best album, i’d say, but they also have other good ones. one which i don’t really know—shame on me!—is nighttime birds, mandylion‘s successor, which seems to be very good, too. and there’s if_then_else, which has several really good tracks, like the melancholic saturnine or a beautiful instrumental called beautiful war.
somehow it’s really a pity that i never managed to see them.

“the day you went away
you had to screw me over
i guess you didn’t know
all the stuff you left me with
is way too much to handle
but i guess you don’t care”

from saturnine by the gathering.

right now i’m listening to mandylion by the gathering, their first album with the great dutch vocalist anneke van giersbergen. (if you’re interested, take a look at her new solo project agua de annique. if i recall correctly it’s not metal, so worth listening to for everyone reading here.)
this is one of the first metal albums i bought, after hearing the song leaves too many times on some sampler (called dark winter nights; that one also introduced me to rage and samael). it’s a really great, emotional song, touching me deep inside. probably the first song qualifying to be called gothic rock/metal which i loved listening to. a few lines from the song:

“now that you’re gone i don’t know
how to really feel inside
baring the hope to see you again
i guess i never will”

i’ll stop typing know, in favor of catching some sleep… closing with a tbl quote: thank you & good night!

during updating my music player, i had to think about which albums to put on it and which ones to delete. my previous playlist was really biased towards heavy and dark music, so i decided to lighten it a bit up. well, at least from the musical side. but nonetheless, i decided to add something more heavy, namely something from sentenced, which was my favorite band for a very long time. i was thinking hard about which album(s) to put on the player. maybe something oldskool from the north from here? it contains the beautiful song northern lights. or maybe the love and death ep, containing classics like love and death (go hand in hand once more) and the way i wanna go. then, there’s the down album, my favorite beauties from this one are bleed (to death), sun won’t shine (on me without your love) and the agressive i’ll throw the first rock. well, then there’s the frozen album, my first sentenced album after all, and in my opinion still the best one. it contains one of my all time favorite songs, dead leaves. besides that (and many other great songs), it contains the slow rainy ballad the rain comes falling down, grave sweet grave and the (almost) instrumental burn (the pain away). but then, there are also beautiful songs like fragile, dead moon rising and my slowing heart on the crimson album, in particular the latter being so expressive through its monotony. it’s a really sad song, only being topped by no one there, the last song on the cold white light. no one there is one of the saddest songs i know. (if you have never heard it, consider watching its video.) besides this song, the cold white light features some more songs i want to mention: namely cross my heart and hope to die (may my end come tonight), the self-ironic excuse me while i kill myself and the ballad guilt and regret. and, last but not least, there’s sentenced terminal album, fittingly entitled the funeral album, which ends the misery with the great, even though more aggressive and more hateful, songs may today become the day (as i plunge into the gray), ever-frost, vengeance is mine, drain me and end of the road. so, there’re a lot of albums to chose from. my final decision was to include exactly the songs mentioned here, instead of a whole album. i’m really looking forward to tomorrow, when i have plenty of time to listen to this great collection of misery. it’s really a tragedy that sentenced is no more. rest in peace.