the black league is a finnish band founded by the ex-sentenced singer taneli jarva. they started as a doom metal act, and shifted more and more in the direction of a mixture of metal and rock’n'roll.
their first album, ichor, is the the black league album i like most – probably because it’s their doomiest one, and it contains my most favourite song: ozymandias, a song dedicated to the poem ozymandias by percy bysshe shelley (his wife wrote frankenstein):
i met a traveller from an antique land
who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert. near them, on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
and on the pedestal these words appear:
‘my name is ozymandias, king of kings:
look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
nothing beside remains. round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch far away.
the song is slow, dark, most of it being rather calm, while the recitation of the spoken words is heavy, powerful:
another song from that album i like a lot is night on earth (not related to the movie of the same name by jim jarmusch, which i also like a lot).
a third song from the album is winter wind sings, a dark balad encompanied with a strange video… “when you cry winter winds sing straight to my heart…”
finally, here’s a newer piece of the band, featured on their homepage at some point. it’s a somewhat ironic video about a concert which is not the biggest success. see for yourself:
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[...] the black league. [...]