someone kill me now because i have just discovered the ultimate in singing delights. if the angels in heaven sing even a fraction of how this girl sings then we're in for a blast. that’s those of us who actually make it and for those that don’t , well at least you’d have experienced a little slice of heaven here on earth.

Every once in awhile they comes along a rock band that changes everything you felt about rock music. That raises the bar a notch or two higher and displaces with ease your current rock idol and leaves you thinking, is that even possible?

I met my best friend when I was in the university of benin and to make ends meet, no that’s not true, our ends met just fine, but to provide the extra income for our nocturnal lifestyle we got into downloading albums for the budding rock community at uniben. We'd both fallen in love with rock music from the early ages of the cranberries, and we’d drive around school, the enchanting lyrics of zombie blaring out of his fathers vw golf speakers anytime we manage to steal it into school. We were the cool weird guys who loved demon music.

At the time Dolores O Riordan the female vocalist for the Cranberries was our rock god. Nothing could compare with her powerful lyrics and a divine voice that could easily send a T1000 to sleep. Come with me if you want to live. There was no way to select the best of, every song on every album was in itself a classic so we just carried the five albums and stars in mp3 format on a datalife cd everywhere we went. In hip swagger language the cranberries were the ish. Period.

Until we were coming home from reading 1am one Friday night, nah must have been Thursday night for we did anything but read Friday nights. Anyways we chatting loudly, strolling down from uniben basement after more hours of chasing jambites than actually reading, discussing loudly our current loves, our hearts intent on d bread, suya and cold coke we'd be getting at the pharmacy exit from school when we heard it. The haunting beginning notes of the song we’d later get to know as 'bring me to life'. It was like a dream, Here we were laughing and talking loudly in the middle of the night and at the same exact moment we both fall quiet as we hit the brick wall of excellently produced gothic sound. It was heaven. Even before the bass guitars kicked in we knew that this was the one group that could displace the cranberries.

We looked around trying to trace the origin of the sounds and we see two guys huddled around the boot of their open car six cd loader blinking active, an empty cd case in one of the guys hands and sonys xplode belting out “wake me up inside”.

We walked up to the guys and stood right beside them peering into their boot, lost in a trance. They looked up at us. Saw the expressions on our faces and knew why we were there.

It was love at first auditory experience. These guys didnt know us from adam, eve or the apple but there we stood ,four guys in the moonlight, 'rock heads brought together, friendships forged from the purity of sound'.

That was how we got introduced to the musical marvel that is evanescence. Turns out the one of guys brother had just gotten in from the US and had brought him a bunch of rocks cds which they were trying out. We didn’t let them out of our sights. We drove out of school at 3am every minute spent in that car making us more and more inextricably addicted to the rich gothic sound of evanescence. We got to our room off campus, booted up my agonizingly slow Pentium 2 clone, burnt the cd at an agonizingly slow 2x and bid these poor unfortunate souls goodnight.

From that point onwards we lived and breathed evanescence. We tracked down origin their previously unknown album, noticed a lot of song repetition from the fallen album or the other way round and loved it all the same. The cranberries datalife cd was lovingly retired to our archive with the rest of the rock cds, it was the time of Amy lee and she wasn’t evanescing anywhere.

For two years we rocked evanescence in all forms of media, songs , videos , printed out lyrics , insignia on all our notebooks, posters, t shirts, the work. For two years we walked and drove around school still in the trance from the first night, high off the opiate that was evanescence. We followed their progress ardently, mourning the loss of Ben Moody, not so much the exit of the other two band members and we were beside ourselves with joy when they announced the release of The Open Door. We had it pre-ordered thanks to a ten percent credit card payment shark and were practically foaming at mouth when we finally got it. Album was great, not as great as fallen but it was Amy lee, she could read out her shopping list and it’d still sound good.

Cut to one year later, I’m working now and he's serving in Warri but I still rely on him to keep me updated on who’s hot and who’s not in the rock music scene. Bands come and go, linkin park, 3 doors down , staind….we love staind…. and they’re all good , but nothing compares to the high we get off the dark haunting and enchanting lyrics and grating guitar riffs of evanescence.

And then he comes to visit me mid term at the school he's teaching and he brings his pack of data cds and dumps a whole shitload of albums on my almost empty 160gig hp dv6536, many he hasn’t even listened to , the magic that is torrent downloads and hi speed wireless internet access. He says to me 'i googled. Some of its hot, most of its not' and then we proceeded to spend the entire weekend of his stay watching the entire four seasons of Boston Legal back to back. Denny Crane!!!!


I go about for almost two months after his visit, a poor ignorant soul unaware of the pearls sitting on my desktop, like those Texas farmers who’ve been toiling hard all their life and a few seconds to their deaths oil is discovered less than a mile under their feet.


And then two weeks ago, I come home after work and decided to put in two hours into editing this novel for my cousin at the University of Newcastle whose studying creative writing. I need mood music right? So I go to my music folder, Enya five albums, Loreena Mckennit 2 albums, Yanni like seven albums, Kitaro ok, Enigma ok, Sarah MacLachlan, Cranberries, Evanescence yes, all great artistes to inspire but God I’m tired of listening to the same old songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over …ok you get it……again. So I close the folder and something jumps out at me. it’s a folder among the clutter on my desktop “rcok albumz dump”. Just like that, “wrong” spellings and all. Two clicks later I’m looking at a lot of album art, there are 40 albums sitting on my desktop, each a promise of something new, forty virgins just waiting to get bleeped. SIA, RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS, DAUGHTRY, GIRLS ALOUD, EYES OPEN, GYM CLASS HEROES, MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE , PANIC AT THE DISCO, RADIOHEAD….the list is endless. And then one name strikes me. “THE HEART OF EVERYTHING”. As in truly I fell in love with the name at first sight. It sounded so original, so creative, four simple words put together to create a phrase with infinite depth. Of all the albums in that folder it alone had a single label. The rest had name of artist-name of album but this folder was just those four words. I had no way of knowing if it was name of the album or name of artist.

Open folder, CTRL A, RIGHT CLICK, PLAY ALL and hello……, where have you guys been all my life? I should just end this article here because there are no words in my vast vocabulary that can do justice to describe the purity of the sounds that came out of the altec lansing speakers of my pavilion. No words to explain the goosebumps on my arm, the tingling of my spine, the swelling of my head and the dots dancing around my eyes.

Oh my!!! God hath sent us an angel. Seriously u need to hear it to believe it. It was nothing short of divine. I was in shock. I’d loved The Cranberries, been crazy about evanescence, but this, this was impossible. Nothing mattered in life anymore. Amongst all the ugliness in the world. The wars the diseases the starvation, if something like this existed then it was all good.

I was enthralled. I couldn’t look away from my screen even though all i could see were the jumping spikes of the windows media player visualization as the riffing guitars tore seamlessly and beautifully through the haunting lyrics of the angels voice. My steaming plate of rice my sister had brought for me just minutes before forgotten by my side, I had been jolted out of my eveanescence induced trance and thrown right back into another. I was in that trance for the next 83 minutes, the full length to the last note of the album and then I started to cry. Metaphorically.

Straight to Google. Typed in The Heart of Everything and there they were. A five man band and the angels name is Sharon Den Adel, and together they were known as Within Temptation and they had three previous albums. Straight to limewire, i needed to find more from this band and i discovered even greater pearls in their past works. Great ballads and awesome epics, this band is simply awesome.

On the Heart of Everything the thumping beats and guitar riffs of the harder tracks like the howling, what have you done now , the cross to the haunting and tear jerking ballads like frozen a song about domestic violence, all i need and forgiven all make for excellent nonstop listening. From their older albums please please look for songs like it’s the fear, deceiver of fools, jillian, bittersweet, see who I am, stand my ground, angels, memories.

Several comparisons have been made to evanescence alluding that WT are an evanescence wannabe but bear in mind that this band has been around way longer than evanescence or rather as one blogger put it “Amy lee and her rotating cast of extras”. I never thot I’d live to see the day that- I’d say this but Sharon Den Adel completely floors Amy Lee.

If u like gothic symphonic rock like evanescence, nightwish, lacuna coil, amaranth, you’ll definitely thank me for this. And if you a skeptic, this is definitely the band that will get you addicted to this genre.

It saddens me to have discovered this group. It was like watching the lord of the rings trilogy. You know that its very possible that you'll never again experience the feeling you felt when you watched it. Possible there would never be a movie as epic and cinematic as it. That u had just maybe witnessed the peak of cinematic perfection. And so i feel saddened that in my natural life i might never come across a band so pure and melodic and in the same vein intensely dark and richly gothic.

So please kill me now for i have discovered the ultimate in singing delights. There’s nothing else to live for.

iice:

Awwww this is beautiful

You mean frightening?

rock can be lovely

hello people in the house i urgently need to burn some rock tracks on a cd,i have been so starved of rock since i finished school,artist like, CREED,3 DOORS DOWN,ETC,plz i am ready to even pay financially to get them.thank u.iyke,07031330156.favourable replies needed.

Rock on brother

I just discovered beauty!

I'm into gothic rock so this is right up my alley. .  .  so far i can't get enough of FROZEN"

I want more   

WWWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!. Ur write up sure has had me diggin 4 this guys.

Dolores O'riordan RULES

Dolores O'riordan RULES

[size=13pt]What kind of rock are you talking about? Igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic rock? [/size]

Creed just blows my mind!

Dis truth, driiiives me, , iiin2 MAAAADNESS.I just love Amy Lee, thanx 4 d writeup on WT though,i'll go searching 4 dem.Talkin bout wannabes,who's hrd dis uche gal,Naija gals who sings just lik evanescence, hook was done in Igbo.anyone?

Where have you(this thread) been all along, Rock Songs z the only thang that keeps mii sane!!
Aerosmith,
Meatloaf,
Lifehouse,
limp bizkit,
3 door down,
Coldplay,
Blink 182,
Linkin Park,
Bowling for Soup,
Boys like Girls,
Buckcherry,
Chris daughtry,
Crazy Town,
Creed,
Daniel Powtrer,
Dave Matthew,
, we'v gat my personal favorite, NickelBack,

oh! theres more, a whole lot more, like
Evanescence,
Fat Out Boy,
Finger Eleven,
Fly Leaf,
Fort Minor,
Gavin DeGraw,
Gym Class Heroes,
HelloGoodbye,
Hoobastank,



, Do i go on,