With the three bonus tracks included in Robustfellow‘s anniversary edition, Eternal Elysium‘s Share tops out at 73 minutes long. What I dig about this second reissue collaboration between the Japanese band and the Ukrainian label is that Robustfellow aren’t just working with the undervalued Nagoya heavy rockers. They’re championing them. Putting them on a (deserved) pedestal. Even the way Share, which originally came out in 2002 — thus 20th anniversary — is noted in the info below as “iconic” speaks to the imprint’s genuine esteem for the work being re-released.

And one can hardly argue. Eternal Elysium, who bridge doom and heavy rock and psychedelia with a fluidity that sounds so much easier from them than it actually is to pull off, have been kicking ass periodically for more than this two decades, and the more people who know about it, the better. Righteous album, killer mission, made with love. If you need an example of what to appreciate about the heavy underground, this is a good one. Passion on every level.

Many bundles available, preoders up, all that, as per the PR wire:

Anniversary edition of the iconic album “Share” from Japanese legends Eternal Elysium -> https://bit.ly/3rEKXQe

“Share” is the third full-length album in the band’s discography and the second release of Eternal Elysium in the Robust Relics series.

(“Searching Low & High” was released in 2017 – https://bit.ly/3HHtKeN)

Release Date set exactly 20 years after the original edition on February 25, 2022

Anniversary Issue Ingredients:

• remaster from Okazaki
• Three bonus tracks
• new cover of the release from Lviv artist Dmytro Dimorphic (posters for Robustfest 2016: 5R6, Weedpecker, Dekonstruktor | Robust Evening: Somali Yacht Club “The Sea” launch party)

CD [Standard Edition]

2-panel digipak, gloss lamination

CD L [Robust Edition]
• 3-panel digipak, matt lamination
• Completely Remastered Audio +3 Bonus Tracks
• Alternate Cover artwork by “Dimorphic” (Robust Artist)
• Collectable cards:

1/3 Tour 2002 T-shirt art

2/3 Signed band photo card

3/3 original “Share” artwork card
• Digital DL Card for MP3/FLAC/WAV
• Exclusive Laminated Sticker
• OBI Strip

Limited to 50 hand-numbered copies

Limited Edition Cassette
•oldschool plastic box
• thick booklet
• shape DLC for MP3/FLAC/WAV
• transparent orange shell cassette

Edition of 50 hand-numbered copies

Eternal Elysium “Share” T-Shirt (Pre-Order)
• finest textile
• high quality print
• RRS logo on the shoulder
• RBF tag

Pre-Order at this location: https://bit.ly/3rEKXQe

Tracklisting:
1. Schizy
2. Feel The Beat
3. Movements And Vibes
4. Waiting Tor The Sun
5. Machine
6. No Answer
7. Love Is All
8. Dogma
9. Fairies Never Sleep
10. Burning A Sinner (Bonus Track)
11. Just Friends (Empty Love) (Bonus Track)
12. Godzilla (Bonus Track)

Produced by ETERNAL ELYSIUM
Engineered and Mixed by Yukito Okazaki
Recorded & Mixed at Studio Zen Nagoya,Japan
Mastered at Soybean Nagoya, Japan

Remastered at Studio Zen by Yukito Okazaki in 2020

Bonus Tracks:
*Burning A Sinner – previously released only at “I Am Vengeance” soundtrack CD by MeteorCity
*Just Friends (Empty Love) – previously unreleased
*Godzilla – previously unreleased

Musicians:
YUKITO OKAZAKI – Vocals, Guitars, Keys, Percussions
TOSHIAKI UMEMURA – Bass, Voices
RIO OKUYA – Drums

Additional:
Tom Huskinson – Drums on “Movements and Vibes’
Senpo Ito – Fairy on “Fairies Never Sleep” and Chorus on “Dogma”
Makoto Iwakura – Chorus on “Dogma” KengoTashiro – Voice on “Fairies Never Sleep” and Chorus on “Dogma”

www.eternalelysium.com/
http://eternalelysiumshop.bigcartel.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Eternal-Elysium-official-160089987381948/
https://www.facebook.com/RobustfellowProds/
http://robustfellow.blogspot.com/
robustfellow.bandcamp.com

Eternal Elysium, Share (2022 edition)

I like to think that usually when I put something up like this, it might catch eyes from a range of people, or if not, at least I don’t have a specific person in mind. This is not one of those posts. This post is made for one person in particular, and whoever you are, you all know that person. They’re the ones who piss and moan about how everything new sucks and there’s nothing good coming out like when they were 12 or whatever and nothing is cool and blah blah blah. Everyone knows that person. Sometimes I think we’ve all been that person, but there’s never been less of an excuse for being that person than there is now. New music is everywhere. Everywhere. Not only is it waiting to be discovered, it’s pretty much throwing itself in your face and screaming “HERE I AM AND ALSO I’M PROBABLY FREE AT LEAST TO STREAM!”

Short of new music showing up at your doorstep carrying a tray of warm blueberry muffins, I find it hard to think of ways in which it could be made easier than it is in this day and age. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the apocalypse in which we reside.

Case in point, here comes Ukrainian imprint Robustfellow Productions with a 42-track/three-plus-hour label sampler bringing together past releases with exclusive songs, upcoming stuff and a whole mess of styles rammed together for your, well, sampling convenience. Frankly, if you — yes, you — make it past Eternal Elysium and Thunderchief and are still complaining there’s nothing good out there, the problem isn’t the rest of the world, but even if they’re not your thing, there’s a ton of stuff here and I won’t even pretend to know it all. It just takes the smallest amount of digging through, that’s all.

So go on. It’s waiting for you:

Robustfellow Prods. is happy to present FREE music sampler featuring finest representatives of the robust scene for the recent times. Listen to the highlights form Robustfellow’s roster., Robust Digital releases that being streaming during this year plus a preview of what’s to grab in Robust Shop for next year.

Cup of robust tea full of psychedelic, sludge, prog, stoned, grunge, death, metalcore, black metal and all the celebrated genres.

https://robustfellow.bandcamp.com/album/robustfellow-sampler-2019

Cover artwork by ????????? ?????
Design by Konstantin Bikmulin
Sounds “AS IT IS”

Robustfellow Prods., 2019

Robustfellow Samper 2019
from A to Z:

Backchat [Kyiv, UA] War and Plague
Cold Shell [Kyiv, UA] You Think Too Much About Death*
Death Pill [Kyiv, UA] Go Your Way*
Dépaysement [Kyiv, UA] Ground Arms*
Doomed City (previously 5R6) [Kharkiv, UA] No Heroes
Eternal Elysium-official [Nagoya, JP] Burning A Sinner*
Ethereal Riffian [Kyiv, UA] Unconquerable
Freeky Cleen [Kyiv, UA] Done Time*
Gamardah Fungus [Dnipro, UA] Fetus Crying*
House Of Flowers [Dnipro, UA] Dawn
??? [Kharkiv, UA] ???
Knifeman [Kharkiv, UA] ?????
??ntur [Kyiv, UA] ??, ???? ??????? ???????
La Horsa Bianca [Kharkiv, UA] Da cao
Love’n’Joy [Kyiv, UA] Come about
Merzotna Potvora [Kyiv, UA] ?erne?*
???? [Kyiv, UA] ?.?.?.?.
NoT [Kharkiv, UA] A Penny (????????)
????? [Uzhgorod, UA] Ad Civitas Solis
One Magic Megawatt [Kyiv, UA] Die Every Night*
OOZE [Vasylkiv, UA] Backend
Pustosh [Vasylkiv, UA] Nespravzhni
Pyraweed [Baku, AZ] Man of the mountain
Red Eyed Hyena [Ivano-Frankivsk, UA] Tale of Marvin Heemeyer
Septa [Odessa, UA] The Tin Man
Shiva the Destructor [Kyiv, UA] Nirvana Beach*
Slice & Dice [Mykolaiv, UA] Filthy Basement
Sons of Alpha Centauri [London, UK] SS Montgomery (James Plotkin Remix)
stonefromthesky [Kyiv, UA] Confined
Straytones [Kyiv, UA] Dark Lord
Swörn [Turin, IT] Electric Saint
The Anchor Stones [Kyiv, UA] Love It
The COW [Kyiv, UA] PLATO
The Glober [Kharkiv, UA] Space Harmony
THUNDERCHIEF [Richmond, Virginia, US] Stone House
Tungu [Chernihiv, UA] ???????? ?????????*
Urgalia [Cherkassy, UA] GhostFloor*
Volver Stone [Zhytomyr, UA] Wasteland
VOVK [Kyiv, UA] The Last Ship Above the Sky
Vykroutas [Kyiv, UA] ??????? ???i? – ????? ?? ?i?*
Warningfog [Kyiv, UA] II. The Cow
We The Censors [Kyiv, UA] Keep It Up

* – ex?lusive tune

Enjoy the Eclectic Flight !

https://www.facebook.com/RobustfellowProds
https://robustfellow.bandcamp.com/

Look. The thing is immense. One can barely hope to give a decent accounting of a compilation in a review in the easiest of scenarios, but to attempt to sum up the scope of Robustfellow Productions‘ Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3, which spans three CDs in its physical incarnation and tops out at an astonishing 48 tracks and four-plus hours of listening material when the digital bonus tracks are included from the Bandcamp version, the idea itself becomes silly. All one can really do is the same thing the listener likely does: make your way through it at your own pace, try to absorb as much as you can, and step back to admire the incredible amount of coordinating effort that must have gone into its making.

The latter is particularly impressive as what’s been touted as the final installment of the Kiev-based Robustfellow‘s Electric Funeral Cafe trilogy — nothing like going out with a bang — is bigger even than its predecessors, which came out in 2016 and 2015 and were “only” two discs apiece. The first two were broken down into component Electric and Funeral halves, arranged along this theme by discs. This edition works much the same way, with the Electric discs more focused on heavy rock and the Funeral disc dug into dirge-style doom and sludge, but adds the Cafe disc, on which one might be hear the Beatles-gone-electro-pop psych of Black Maloka, the Creedence Clearwater Revival-style boogie of Freeky Clean or the pure Doorsian meandering of The Jossers, along with more familiar names like Krobak (a Stoned Jesus side-project) or The Legendary Flower Punk (a The Grand Astoria side-project).

As with the earlier volumes, the bulk of the inclusions here highlight the underground boom in the Ukraine itself. 38 of the total 48 groups involved hail from the Ukraine. Two more are from Russia (The Legendary Flower Punk and A Foggy Realm, also on the Cafe disc), and one each from Japan (Eternal Elysium, on the Electric disc), Finland (Loinen, Funeral disc), the US (Contra, Electric), Sweden (Suffer Yourself, Funeral), Belarus (Nebulae Come Sweet, Funeral), the UK (Sons of Alpha Centauri, Cafe), and Italy (Le Scimmie, Funeral). It’s easy to get lost in the sprawl of a release like this, certainly, but worth noting all the same that this is the first of the Electric Funeral Cafe offerings to branch outside the Ukraine itself, so even as Robustfellow ends the series, it does so by reaching into new territories, making the project all the more impressive. One imagines that if the label kept it going, it would only continue to grow.

Not that it’s lacking in its current form, of course. Pick your poison and it’s likely here somewhere, from the progressive heavy vibes of Stonefromthesky and Ethereal Riffian on the Electric disc to the deathly chug of Chainsaw Jack‘s “Crashing Waves” and post-hardcore-sludge of Nebulae Come Sweet on the Funeral disc to the ’90s-style psych of Vermilion Nocturne and beat-backed drone of Submatukana‘s “Genesis” — which boasts a sampled Bible reading amid creepy whispered vocals — on the Cafe disc. There are, of course, a host of bands here who aren’t so easily fit into one category or another, as Dreadnought foreshadow on the Electric disc some of the screaming that will be a running theme throughout most of the Funeral disc, and the huge Ufomammut-style roll, push and echoes of Soom on Funeral do likewise for Cafe, but each piece of Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3 offers something distinct from the others, and so the themes are not only ably established, but solidified while jumping from band to band, city to city, country to county, atmosphere to atmosphere.

And as ever for a worthy various-artists release, Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3 presents a number of curios warranting further investigation. In particular, Lviv’s 1914, who lead off the Funeral disc with “8×50 mm Repetiergewehr M95” would seem to have a fixation with WWI — remind me to tell you sometime about how it was the fall of Western Civilization; unless you’re European, in which case you already know — and Lucifer Rising on the Electric disc blend modern buzz tone with classic blues rock thrust, but there are a swath of such interest-piquers as the comp plays out, and the real challenge lies in not being overwhelmed by all of it.

Much to the credit of Robustfellow and to the benefit of the acts contributing, everyone is given a genuine chance to ply their sonic wares, whether that’s a sub-three-minute death-doom rumbler like Monmuth‘s “Vail Seven” or the nine-minute heavy post-rock rollout of Stonefromthesky‘s “67,” which makes sense in a if-you’re-going-to-do-it-and-it’s-already-huge-then-don’t-skimp kind of way, and if the tradeoff for that is there’s a lot of music to dig into, it’s the kind of issue a listener should probably be thankful to take on, even if it requires multiple rounds to get through the front-to-back experience — a four-hour listening session is a rare gift in these busy times. Bottom line is Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3 will be there, whether one wants to take it as a whole or in pieces — as a document of Ukrainian heavy, yes, but also the scene’s will to reach outside itself and include others in a creative conversation — and as that movement continues to flourish and progress, such an impulse can only help broaden a scope already shown here to be considerable. And by considerable, I mean staggering.

Various Artists, Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3 (2017)

Robustfellow Productions on Bandcamp

Robustfellow Productions on Thee Facebooks

Robustfellow Productions website

It does not take long into Eternal Elysium‘s Resonance of Shadows for one to realize they stand in the presence of masters. The long-running Japanese outfit, comprised of vocalist Tana Haugo, guitarist/vocalist/founder Yukito Okazaki and drummer Antonio Ishikawa offer the 2016 release as their sixth full-length, and it arrives some 20 years after the band made their debut with 1996’s Faithful. American audiences might recall their 2000 sophomore outing, Spiritualized D, and its 2002 follow-up, Share, were released on MeteorCity. It’s now been over seven years since they offered their last long-player in 2009’s Within the Triad, but they’ve stayed reasonably active with shorter outings, their Highflyer EP and a split with SardoniS both surfacing in 2012. Some of the material on Resonance of Shadows (issued through Cornucopia Records dates back to the era of Within the Triad as well, with “Views on C#” and “Unbound” having appeared on 2008’s Mysterious Views in Stone Garden EP and the aforementioned SardoniS split, respectively.

As such, one might wonder from whence the rest of the eight-track/56-minute collection comes — cuts like the boogieing “Cosmic Frequency,” the more-Pentagram-than-Pentagram opener “Ingah,” the classically rocking “The Breeze Says Go” and the slow-paced crusher “Hiroshima” — but it ultimately matters little for the kind of doom and heavy rock Eternal Elysium proffer, which is about as close to timeless as the style gets in its incorporation of influences modern and old. These songs could’ve been sitting around for years, and who cares? Not like they’re going to age. In their rolling nod, fullness of tone, interplay of Japanese and English-language lyrics and easy shifts between upbeat and downer atmospheres, Resonance of Shadows conveys the years of experience at work behind Eternal Elysium while never sounding staid or overly composed. It’s heavy rock and roll for the converted, and the rest be damned.

Laying out such sonic ultimatums is one thing, and a lot of bands do it, but to actually have the material to stand behind them is rare. As such, the more one digs into Resonance of Shadows, whether it’s the immersive lumber of “Unbound” or the catchy Sabbathism of the penultimate “The Ancient Soul” — to my regret, I speak roughly zero Japanese, and I’ve still had that hook stuck in my head for the last week — the further one is taken by its methods, its subtle fluidity that draws together a full-album flow across standout individual pieces, and the natural clarity in Eternal Elysium‘s sound. Not unreasonable after so many years for them to know what they want from a recording, and with Okazaki working as producer, engineer and mixer at Studio Zen in Nagoya, the command they show is most definitely their own from the tones they capture in “Ingah” onward, but on a pure execution level, the apex that “Ingah” hits in its second half is particularly affecting.

And while it doesn’t set up all the sonic shifts that will play out across Resonance of Shadows, starting immediately with the shuffle of “The Breeze Says Go” and continuing through the memorial bells that launch “Hiroshima,” it does step forth as an excellent lead-in to them. More over, one that a lesser band wouldn’t be able to wield with such grace. To look at Resonance of Shadows as two halves, each with four tracks — though vinyl invariably wouldn’t split that way given extended runtimes in back end — it seems to bring shorter rockers like “Ingah” and “Cosmic Frequency” and “The Breeze Says Go” while letting the seven-minute “Hiroshima” (which breaks into a faster rush in its own second half, churning to an instrumental crescendo that serves as one of the record’s finest) work to foreshadow the doomly plays throughout the instrumental “Views on C#,” the ultra-grooving “Unbound” and the spacious closing pair of “The Ancient Soul” and “Sekibaku.”

The truth of Eternal Elysium‘s scope, however, is more complex, and Resonance of Shadows isn’t nearly so binary. As much as “Unbound”(8:49) and “The Ancient Soul” (9:17) take their time to patiently flesh out ideas, they’re not lazy in doing so, and among the album’s principal achievements is how organically it crosses the sometimes vast divide between doom and heavy rock, so that the languid, rich low end, echoing lead guitar and open spaces of “Sekibaku” feel no less appropriate here than the march of “Unbound” or the mournfulness of “Hiroshima” earlier. Setting up multiple contexts and moving swiftly between them, the three-piece are able to harness a vitality that works as the thread tying everything together, and accordingly, they allow their material to go where it seems it wants to go without having the push of “Cosmic Frequency” are out of place next to the aughts-style stonerism of “Views on C#,” or for that matter, anything lose a step feeding into anything else.

“The Ancient Soul” and “Sekibaku” underscore this triumph, but again, it’s evident from “Ingah” onward, and the argument that Eternal Elysium make in favor of conversion, “never so blatant as “drop out of life with bong in hand,” is no less convincing. To call them underappreciated feels like understatement, and thinking of how one might approach Resonance of Shadows as a fan come to the genre since 2009 who is maybe taking on the band for the first time, the best way I can think of is as a blueprint for how heavy rock and roll and doom should sound when done right. No pretense, fluid boundaries and songwriting at a paramount. Recommended.

Eternal Elysium, “Ingah”

Eternal Elysium on Thee Facebooks

Eternal Elysium on Twitter

Eternal Elysium BigCartel store

Cornucopia Records website

If you’ve had the chance to check out the prior two installments of Robustfellow Productions‘ compilation series Electric Funeral Cafe, you already know they’re massive things. Huge in terms of the sheer amount of music they feature, and with a strong focus solely directed on the Ukrainian heavy scene, they bring to light some acts who those of us outside the region might not necessarily run into on a daily basis. Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 3 is no different, but it’s worth noting that in addition to the good dose of acts from Kiev and Lviv it provides, it for the first time pushes international and boasts bands from the US, the UK, Belarus, Finland, Japan and Sweden included, so this final installment in the series — which comes with seven more tracks if you get the digital version — is by no means limited. Fitting for the mission of the series that it would expand even unto its conclusion.

I feel like the first line below under specifications really says it all: 41 bands, 9 countries, three discs, over three and a half hours of music. Sold.

Release date is Jan. 21. Here’s info from the PR wire:

V/A – ‘Electric Funeral Café vol.3’

Formats: 3xCD in Deluxe digipack & Download
Catalogue # RBF 016 | IHR005
Label: Robustfellow Prods. & Iron Hamster Recs.
Release Date: 21 January 2017

Specifications:
– 41 bands from 9 countries on 3 CDs lasts for more than 3,5 hours
– Including 23 special tracks that you hardly hear anywhere else
– Plus 7 bonus tracks on digital version on bandcamp
– The final chapter of EFC trilogy
– Deluxe ltd.ed. that will consist of EFC vol.1,2,3
– Launch Party 21.I.2017 @ Winter Mass [“Monte Ray Live Stage”, Kyiv, UA]

Artwork design by Zinkovskaya Oksana
Design and DTP by Marsym Gavronsky
Made in Ukraine | 21.I.2017

List of robust bands involved in EFC vol.3 from A to Z:
1914 [Lviv, UA]
5R6 [Kharkiv, UA]
A Foggy Realm [Moscow, RU]
Atomic Simao [Kyiv, UA]
Bichkraft [Kyiv, UA]
Black Maloka [Kyiv, UA]
Borum [Kyiv, UA]
Chainsaw Jack [Kharkiv, UA]
Contra [Cleveland, OH, USA]
Dreadnought [Ternopil`, UA]
Drunk Diver [Lviv, UA]
Eternal Elysium [Nagoya, JP]
Ethereal Riffian [Kyiv, UA]
Filthy Rich Preacher [Cherkassy, UA]
Freeky Cleen [Kyiv, UA]
Krobak [Kyiv/Kharkiv, UA]
Katakomba [Kyiv, UA]
Le Scimmie [Vasto, IT]
Les Gendarmes [Kyiv, UA]
Loinen [Karjaa, FIN]
Love’n’Joy [Kyiv, UA]
Lucifer Rising [Kyiv, UA]
MAUT [Ivano-Frankivsk, UA]
Monmuuth [Dnipro, UA]
Nebulae Come Sweet [Minsk, BY]
Night on Fire [Zhytomyr, UA]
Ningen-girai [Cherkassy, UA]
Nödutgång:Självmord [Poltava, UA]
Obriy [Uzhgorod,UA]
Octopus Kraft [Drohobych/Lviv, UA]
Onsager [Khmelnitsky, UA]
OwlCraft [Cherkassy, UA]
Risin Sabotage [Kyiv, UA]
Small Depo [Kyiv, UA]
Sons Of Alpha Centauri [Kent, UK]
Soom [Kharkiv, UA]
Space-man [Lviv, UA]
stonefromthesky [Kyiv, UA]
Straytones [Kyiv, UA]
Submatukana [Dnipro, UA]
Suffer Yourself [Kyiv, UA/Linköping, SWE]
The Curse Of Wendigo [Kharcyzk/Kyiv, UA]
The Jossers [Kalush, UA]
The Legendary Flower Punk [St.Petersburg, RU]
Trip Inside Me [Kyiv, UA]
Tungu [Chernihiv,UA]
Vermilion Nocturne [Kyiv, UA]
Warningfog [Kyiv, UA]

http://robustfellow.blogspot.com/
https://robustfellow.bandcamp.com
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRobustfellow
https://www.facebook.com/RobustfellowProds/
http://vk.com/robustfellow

Various Artists, Electric Funeral Cafe Vol. 2 (2016)