The Gathering - The May Song

It's 1995 and I'm walking into a record shop that no longer exists and I get the one-two punch of both Anneke and Liv Kristine's voices, as they played 'Mandylion' followed by Theatre of Tragedy's first. Both amazing and unique voices that I've been following for a quarter of a century now.
I don't think I'd ever listened to The Gathering before then, and honestly - I don't really like their older stuff. I played 'Mandylion' a lot back then, and 'In Motion #1' is probably my favourite song of theirs.
Flash forward a couple of years and I'm getting the new Rotting Christ CD, and it came bundled with a Century Media sampler that included a bunch of bands I loved, a bunch of others I'd never even heard of, and a few surprises.

One such surprise was The Gathering's new song 'Nighttime Birds', from the forthcoming similarly titled new album. And this was such a massive leap forward from what they'd done, that it truly felt like they'd reinvented themselves, and started to fulfill their enormous potential.
(Future releases would see the band evolving ever further, though.)

'The May Song' was actually the first single out of that album, and I snapped it up eagerly. I will confess to loving collecting singles, always have, though these days I have very few of them.
Last year, Alone Records released a special limited edition box-set containing all of the singles from the Century Media era, issued on vinyl for the first time. It was a pricey acquisition, to be sure, but the production values make it completely worth every single cent. It's one of the jewels in my collection, for sure.

For the past 15 years or so I've had this tradition of heralding the month of May with this song.
I don't think that'll be ending any time soon.