History Verdun

There are three artists sharing the same name:

1) French punk band Verdun, coming from the gutters of Rouen, upper Normandy, starting in 1981 and calling it quits in 1992. Musically this is mid tempo dark anarcho-punk with crazy female vocals.

2) Dr. Neal Barnard is the head of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an organization that focuses on nutritional education and higher standards on quality-control in medical research. That should keep him busy enough, but he has also found time to be the founder, primary composer, guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist for Verdun. Barnard was also a founding member of the jazz/fusion group Pop Maru, and played on the lone album from the jazz group Quartet.

This band is a difficult-to-classify quartet with Barnard, drummer Mike Stetina, and two female vocalists. One is Martha Roebuck of the neo-blues band Falstaff, and the other is Vietnam-born Ngọc Hoàng, daughter of 60’s film director Hoàng Vinh Loc (“Year of the Tiger”) and veteran of several multilingual and multimedia musical story works developed for handicapped children. The group has a truly unique sound that is based on dissonant rock-based rhythms in odd meters, overlaid with delicate, rich, and lush world sounds using both traditional American and Vietnamese instruments (mostly acoustic), and topped with lilting Vietnamese vocals as well as operatic English. Their recordings range from original works to rock covers to transformed pop classics.

To-date the band has a sole recording, the self-titled debut VERDUN. The odd-numbered tracks can be downloaded whole from their website. The catch is that some of the better tracks on their first album are the even-numbered ones.

A supremely original and creative band that has definite promise should they continue to develop new material.

3) Verdun is a one-man depressive black metal project from Sweden.

4) “Named after the most inhuman battle in the First World War, VERDUN (Montpellier - France) are one of those bands that are hard to label, merging the lines between sludge/doom and slowed-down dark hardcore. Heavy and dry riffing, neck-breaking groove, incantatory vocals, fogs of delay and a strong psychedelic feel, that’s what you can expect from the half-hour of their debut EP “The Cosmic Escape Of Admiral Masuka” out in early 2012 on Head Records and Throatruiner Records. Carrying a strong live reputation, VERDUN is definitely one of those bands to watch for any fan of Burning Witch, Electric Wizard, or Amenra; and by extension anything dark and crushing.” Mathias Jungbluth

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