Spread Hope Like Fire

waxing philosophic on Metal. February 5, 2009

generally speaking, for me, one of the most important aspects of metal (if not the most important) is groove. there’s got to be something there, whether easily accessible on the first layer of the music, or buried underneath, that i can latch onto. this is partially because i often catch myself, when listening to metal, paying particular attention to the rhythm, almost like a drummer would do when hearing a song for the first time. he would, before anything else, want to identify the beat. the pulse. that’s kind of how i am. i have to get oriented. because of that, shit like noisecore, some grindcore, and a lot of tech death is hard for me to get into. like, i’m not someone who can listen to some crazy-ass-hyperspeed-mindfuck band and be like “dude, that’s fucking SIIIIIICK!” and have that be enough to enjoy it. very occasionally, maybe (Origin is a good example), but most of the time, there has to be groove. some technical death metal, for example, is really really good, but for me, that’s usually the result of the band throwing enough other elements in to keep it fresh, so that the “blast-tremolo-double bass-solo-blast-blast” thing doesn’t get stale. even with Origin, i enjoy their most recent album the most, and that’s the one with, in my opinion, the best songwriting, most developed sound, and most effective use of other elements.

Also – random bands I’ve been into lately:

Hail Of Bullets. it’s a bunch of european death metal dudes that have all been around forever, and it shows when listening to the album. it’s so fucking grimy – the production (and, more specifically, the guitar tone) is just fantastic. it sounds like Bolt Thrower mixed with Entombed and maybe a bit of Death.

Decapitated. those guys are AMAZING. makes their accident that much more tragic, but seriously – they’re one of the best examples i know of of a primarily tech death band who knows how to write good songs and just do it right so that it hardly ever gets boring. “Spheres Of Madness”, to my taste, slays so hard. and it shouldn’t, really – it’s pretty much sparse, jagged riffing mixed with near-constant syncopated double bass, so much so that it could almost be an old Fear Factory song. but it’s done so well that it doesn’t even matter.

…And Oceans. they’re not around anymore, but omg. they’re actually pretty hard for me to describe – they’re, like, cyber-death metal or something. but there’s enough room to breathe in the music that it doesn’t feel as suffocating as most death does, and the electronica and ambience is used well enough so that it doesn’t sound cheesy or nu-metal-ish, like Crossbreed or something like that.

Despised Icon. they’re my favorite out of the “deathcore” bands. The Ills Of Modern Man is an incredible album.

Eluveitie. they’re usually called “celtic metal” or “folk metal”, which originally gave me pause about checking them out, because pretty much all of those bands that i have heard end up suffering from one of two problems: they either take themselves way too seriously, to the point that the music and overall image is kind of laughable, or they fuck up the mixture of the different parts of their sound so that it either ends up sounding like gothenburg metal with random other instrumentation thrown in, or celtic instrumental interludes with out-of-place metal riffs, drumming, and solos. one side usually ends up dominating the other. HOWEVER – none of that applies to Eluveitie, in my opinion. they do it PERFECTLY – their version of that style of metal, and the way they make so many different instruments sound natural together, is the best i have heard. Slania is their newest album and the one i like best.

black metal is almost always hit-or-miss for me – it either works or it just doesn’t. i mainly like Norwegian second wave stuff, like Immortal, Mayhem, and Emperor, in that order.

and, speaking of Mayhem, if you’re reading this and haven’t listened to Ordo Ad Chao, you need to. it’s their latest album, and … well, i don’t even know what to say about it. if you judge it from the perspective of actually wanting to hear what most people would call “good music”, then it’s almost inarguably terrible. the production is complete trash – the vocals are mixed almost completely out in some places, the drums are totally unbalanced, the bass is usually the easiest instrument to distinguish, and the guitars sound like buzzsaws with dying batteries. it’s the type of record that’s aimed exclusively at an extremely small niche audience, but if you can accept that, and actually listen to it … i don’t even know if you can call it “good”, but that fucking album is one of a kind. seriously. it’s such a complete mess, so muddy, and so dirty that you almost want to take a shower after listening to it. like, i’ve listened to it through headphones in the dark before, and oh my god – it’s like bugs are crawling on you. it’s like what a virus would sound like, if that makes any sense.

Heaven Shall Burn. in my opinion, they’ve gotten better with each album, and their newest, Iconoclast, is great. they’re German metalcore, although they’ve leaned more and more towards melodic death with each release.

the genre sometimes referred to as “post-metal” is usually hit-or-miss with me in the same way that black metal is. i say “post-metal” because i’m not sure of a better term, but Baroness, Pelican, and Isis are all really good.

and, to go to some of the stereotypical metal bands or albums that always inevitably get thrown out in discussions like this, old Slayer is good. old Pantera is SICK, i don’t give a shit what anyone says, lol – Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display Of Power won’t ever lose their potency, at least for me. and old Metallica is wonderful – those first four albums are just stunning, each in their own ways. they were my favorite band for a long, long time, and i don’t even need to get started on those records – maybe some other time, when I have more time, lol.