Two of the albums I’ve been most eagerly anticipating are Lumsk’s Det Vilde Kor, and Vintersorg’s Solens Rötter. Believe it or not, these two bands used to sound somewhat similar within the folk metal genre. Unfortunately now, neither one plays “folk metal”. Though they’d each probably still tell you they do, each has gone off in a completely tangential direction, ending up pretty far away stylistically and thematically.

Lumsk’s Det Vilde Kor comes on the heels of 2005’s Troll, easily one of my favorite albums of all time. When I heard that the new album would be based on the poetry of Knut Hamsun, a wacky Norwegian poet/writer with Nazi sympathies and a really cool monocle, I started to get worried, but still had faith in Lumsk’s ability to turn out another amazing album.

So here it is, and as I feared, it continues on their trend of de-metalization. To be sure there are the grinding electric guitars in places, but hardly enough to qualify it as “metal”. The violin and vocals are still by far Lumsk’s best assets, and the horn making its appearance in a few tracks is a nice addition too, but none of the tracks in particular stand out in my mind, at least as amazing songs. There are some interesting parts – I’m not sure I like the funk that rears itself at a certain point, and I’d definitely keep it in my library – but it’s a rather mediocre album in absolute terms.

As for Vintersorg, I’d written an anticipatory blurb a while back about the evolution of his sound, hoping that the “ethnic feel” he promised for the new album would mean more folk metal and the ditching of the “avant-garde” metal influences. Well so much for that!

Though the cover, a medieval-looking woodcut using the old logo, was promising in that regard, there was pretty much no discernible folk influence in the whole album. It had its good moments – the acoustic guitar section at the beginning was nice, for example – but unlike Lumsk’s, this one sounds much too similar to his previous, The Focusing Blur in its meandering melodies and overall lack of structure, for me to want to keep it around.

Seems like I’ll have to get my Scandinavian folk metal fix elsewhere now. If you can recommend any good bands, I’m all ears.

Following up The Silent Force was going to be a monumental task, as great as that album was. But Within Temptation’s latest album, The Heart Of Everything, though with fewer standout songs, does a great job overall.

The Howling had me worried at first: It’s an alright song, but her vocals are going the way of Amy Lee’s in the new Evanescence album: rougher and more masculine. I didn’t like The Open Door at all, but WT quickly redeemed themselves with their first single from the album, What Have You Done, featuring Keith Caputo. His voice is perhaps a bit poppish for what I would expect from Within Temptation – I was hoping for something deeper, maybe even growling a la Jane Doe, but the song is nevertheless catchy, and their voices combine very nicely.

Frozen comes in more sadly and slowly, but no quieter. Vocally, it’s the most emotionally charged so far, but it’s not too amazing. Our Solemn Hour, though, is by far the best track on the album. Latin chanting, sound bytes from old-sounding documentary recordings, and of course the grinding melodicism make for an archetype of everything amazing about goth rock.

The title track, The Heart of Everything, brings back Sharon’s rougher and more masculine vocals from the first track in double force from before. It stands out to me as probably the weakest track to this point. But next comes the infectious beat and grandiose synths of The Hand of Sorrow, a song you just can’t sit still to. Though different rhythmically from any of their previous work, it’s a strong track and one of the best on the album.

The Cross is another of the strongest tracks on the album. It took a few listens for me to get used to it, but the punctuated voice effect really isn’t irritating at all anymore. It’s thematically similar to Destroyed and is filled with Christian imagery, though the Judas reference seems forced. The melody is powerful, and the vocals, though different from anything yet, fit the mood well throughout. Final Destination then is a pretty good song, but it doesn’t stand out a lot. The chorus seems to linger too long in the high note jumps, diminishing the effect of its climax

All I Need starts out with a nice sounding acoustic section, and turns later into a poignant ballad, something that might appear closer to the mainstream. Not that that’s a bad thing; the melody is emotional and the softer instrumentation rising at the end brings the song to a tear-jerking climax. The Truth Beneath the Rose is the obligatory song-making-a-point, this time about injustices done in the name of religion. Whether that is, as it states, Holy wars, or more personal wrongs as in Destroyed, it’s definitely an interesting listen. It’s by far the longest song on the album clocking in over 7 minutes, but surprisingly for something that long, it at no point gets boring or old.

The album ends on a soft note with Forgiven, a piano-driven song lyrically ambiguous as to whether she’s asking for forgiveness or forgiving someone else (actually, it seems pretty unambiguous in both directions, so I dunno). It’s an appropriate closing for such an energetic album.

The Silent Force from the beginning was going to be a hard album to top – it is, actually, one of my favorites. But The Heart Of Everything is a masterful followup with several excellent songs that more than make up for the filler.

AguaT 1.2.2 is out, this time with iTunes 7.1 compatibility. Though the update itself doesn’t bring much except that, preparing it went quite a bit differently this time.

Prior to this update, I used ResEdit to switch out the resources in the iTunes.rsrc file. I enjoy ResEdit; I’m comfortable with it, and I’ve used it a lot. Unfortunately, the MacBook Pro I recently got doesn’t run Classic at all. To this point, it’s been surprisingly not much of a problem: until now, I had yet to even desire to launch Classic.

So I had to use a different program. ResPlendence is too unstable and apparently unsupported, so I gave ThemePark a spin, which incidentally, has a cool new icon now and is free too.

Now ThemePark is a pretty slick program, but it’s a lot more specialized than ResEdit. It can only edit a few resources – graphical ones in particular, so I can hardly use it as a general-purpose resource editor, but it does manage these resources a lot better than ResEdit did. Specifically, I’m glad to see an icns editor for general reasons, and glad for a PNGf editor for the purposes of iTunes. And of course the PICT editor, which ResEdit had as well.

ThemePark is very consistent in its handling of these resources. Whereas ResEdit had virtually a separate sub-application for each editor, all of TP’s look and act virtually the same. The single-window interface is convenient too, though not without its disadvantages: I can’t browse the PICT resources all at a glance like I could in ResEdit.

It’ll take some getting used to: I can’t copy resources from the resource browser, so I can’t copy and paste multiple resources at once anymore (and even if I could, I can’t even see the resources from the browser), but on the other hand drag and drop from editor to editor is pretty cool, and so are PNGf and icns editors. The fact that it’s OS X native doesn’t hurt either.

ThemePark is certainly not a replacement for ResEdit – it looks like that hole in my heart is here to stay for now – but for the purposes of building AguaT installations, ThemePark works great.

I just got done designing the website for Dragonblade Computers, a computer repair company in Salisbury North Carolina. From their website:

Dragon Blade Computers is a computer company based in Salisbury, North Carolina. We offer a wide range of services, including repairs, upgrades, diagnostics, and building computers from the ground up. We can do work on laptops, notebooks, servers, and networks. Our Specialty is Windows based machines, but have no problem taking a look at Apple and Linux based ones as well.

The whole site is built on a Wordpress installation, and the logo was designed in Flash, which I’m coming to appreciate more and more as an awesome vector design app. From mockup to final product took about 4 days once the logo had been designed.

In related news, R.I.P. Screw Myspace, which has departed from these mortal rackmounts to the great webserver in the sky.