During years Emil Fitger was a singer, songwriter and guitarist in the alternative metal band Melaina, a band I’ve written about before. The band split up a couple of years ago and Emil decided to continue as a solo artist.

This has now resulted in his debut album “A Long Wait Beneath the Snow” where he’s heading in a quite different direction than before. First of all it’s about electro pop with nice, somewhat melancholic melodies, but his acoustic guitars and different influences makes this a quite varied album.

From the harder industry vibing start with “Forgotten Streets”, to the dance pop beat in “Numb”, to the beautiful, ambient “Levanah” to the finishing, almost hymnlike “Rays of Light” to name some examples. Emil has a good, smooth voice for this and experiments a lot with effects and overlays on the vocals, which works really well in most cases, even if I think it gets over the top in some song where it makes me feel too distanced to the song.

You can listen more on Emil’s Facebook page and on Spotify. Here’s the first song on the album, “Forgotten Streets” plus the videon to “Numb”.

Forgotten Streets

Melaina plays an alternative rock that sounds really interesting. Last fall they released their debut album, and you can listen to a track from the record, here below.

It’s an ambient and emotional rock that builds up a nice sound space. A little in the direction of bands like A Perfect Circle, but at the same time with a lot of variation. I can sometimes feel a metal heavyness and also a progressive, experimental feeling that challenges boundaries.

This is music I can listen to for a long time and float along in the almost meditative rock they play. If you’d like to listen some more, you should visit their Myspace page.

Lily