Rolling Metal Thread 2009

When it comes to the more extreme forms of metal, lyrics are pretty much secondary in my opinion, what counts is the overall visceral impact of the music. If an extreme band does have an extremely talented lyricist (Red Chord, Pig Destroyer are two of my faves for instance), then that's just gravy. I don't care as much about metal lyrics as I did 25 years ago (really, really exceptional lyrics are few and far between), but I do appreciate the growlers and screamers who do make an effort to enunciate. Like Blythe in Lamb of God, he has a real knack for it. Or Corpsegrinder.

Yeah, I vastly prefer growls in my metal, but can't say I ever pay any attention to the lyrics. Just an odd line here and there (y'know, "Welcome to... my church!", haha!)
This point is limited to the subgenres that I guess get lumped together as "extreme metal" these days. I'm not sure how I listen to the vocals, to be honest. It's just a sort of binding rhythmic and textural element most of the time, though I do really like the -sound- of some growls, such as the ones on _Clandestine_.
I'd say I listen to metal mainly for rhythm (and implicitly structure), with the limited sort of melody and harmony brutal riffs provide trailing a bit behind. I do not like "melodic" death metal etc where people try to jam Judas Priest or Abba into their guitar leads, whether it's Vital Remains' _Dechristianized_ or In Flames' _The Jester Race_.

There's incidentally very little I find more offensive to listen to than -singing- over properly brutal riffs, which has made it very hard to find listenable recent "technical" metal bands, since they're all doing that unfortunate emo yell now.

Ignoring lyrics might be more common for us who don't speak English natively, I suppose; it's easier for us to not really pay close attention what the lyrics really say, and thus more easily be comfortable with songs where the lyrics are nigh-impossible to make out. It might also explain why "Every breath you take" is sometimes played at weddings here. Hm. Or why I've heard people complain about Anacrusis' cover of "I Love The World", which apparently wasn't a properly metal sentiment. This might be completely off-base, I admit. I've never really asked around.

Hrm, that didn't really lead anywhere, did it? Damn.
I've been listening to Solstafir on myspace lately, and uh, I don't really get it. Competent but kinda dull, eh? Maybe if I hadn't played "The Silent Enigma" to death back in the days.

I think that "Every Breath You Take" is played at weddings everywhere.

Very few modern metal bands have lyrics that matter to me, so I don't really care what bands are singing about. They have to have good riffs and a solid rhythm section (and of course make music I like).

i never pay attention to metal lyrics but the quality of the vocals matters a lot to me--timbre, timing, style, and just generally fitting in well with the music. a lot of solid bands are dragged down by a boring singer, but most of my favorite bands have a singer who is really trying to do something interesting. for example anaal nathrakh is to me a sort of forgettable band without their singer, and one thing that really elevated krallice was that mick barr did a nice job with the vocals.

This year's token metal band at Bonnaroo is Down.

xp I love melodic death metal, but that's probably because I look for melody over rhythm and music. However, I find that the Cobra Commander-style vocals work much better with melodic death metal than the Cookie Monster ones.

Also: RIP Metal Edge =(

word, RIP BIG MAG

Yeah, it's a sad day.

Yup. :-(

waht happen?

Yeah, really bummed out to hear that news.

The magazine stopped sucking just in time for the economy to kill it.

crap! after i just subscribed a couple of days ago. maybe that done it in?

Technically not public knowledge yet, fellas, but yeah, we're outta here.

Oops... epic fail!

No big deal.

Well, anyway, you did a great job with the magazine, Phil.

Yeah, what a turnaround that was. It went from being a Hit Parader-style jumble of badly written press releases to a magazine with real integrity.

Yeah, it was great to be even a very, very small part of that turnaround. Phil did such an amazing job.

Shit, I guess I should actually try and read a copy of this while I can - sorry to hear that

new Tombs video - gossamer
http://pitchfork.tv/videos/tombs-gossamer

metalgaze music from the USA

Are Tombs America's answer to Jesu?

album review
Tombs - Winter Hours
http://www.lordsofmetal.nl/showreview.php?id=13240〈=en

That review is not super useful, considering that it isn't in English. Although I already reviewed this record for Outburn.

ilxor bbcode messed the url up, go to the review and in the top left corner of the webpage see the link to the english language review

As you might surmise from the name, that is a really freaking depressing album.

I've been meaning to check out that Tombs album, but I've been having loads of trouble getting the Relapse promo flash player to work right.

Ah, I'm glad I'm not the only one having Relapse streamer trouble. Man, I hate those things.

They sound virtually nothing like Jesu for anyone taking djmartian notes btw - I mean they both have an evident boner for olde tyme shoegazing but take it in basically the opposite direction to each other

Yeah, I hate the streamer too. I don't see the Jesu thing, either. I heard something a bit more post-post-metal.

"Yeah, it was great to be even a very, very small part of that turnaround. Phil did such an amazing job."

WORD.

Thanks, y'all.

I got a physical copy of that Tombs disc in the mail yesterday, along with a copy of the new Buried Inside, which I'm more excited about, frankly.

The new Buried Inside rules (think I mentioned it a while back), but I'm still iffy re: Tombs. "Gossamer" does sound pretty strong.

new ABSU is out there. i will be listening to it as soon as my illegal download is done.

"I've been listening to Solstafir on myspace lately, and uh, I don't really get it. Competent but kinda dull, eh? Maybe if I hadn't played "The Silent Enigma" to death back in the days."

i gotta agree. if you are gonna rip off anathema and primordial, you REALLY have to do it well to impress me.

and i like plenty of MDB biters and other U.K. rainstorm doom copycats, so it's not like i'm a purist or something.

"Also: RIP Metal Edge =("

yikes! so sorry to hear this, phil. for real. i could tell that you were very much in your element and putting a lot into the mag. i would have written more for you if life hadn't intruded so mundanely for me. i dug reading the mag, for sure. and i will definitely miss the near-perfect placement of matt's haiku craziness.

it might be that the presence of vocals, but their incomprehensibility, bothers me. I feel like I should be able to understand them, and I'm frustrated that I cannot. Is frustrating the listener a part of the intention of metal music? Or is there something about the vocals that if I understood it, I'd be able to appreciate it more?

Ugly, clunky vocals are my biggest stumbling block in current ("extreme", whatever) metal by far. When I like metal vocals, it's usually because I like their sound. Hell, sometimes it's just because I can tolerate their sound. In "real" metal, they almost never communicate anything anymore, or at least anything remotely concrete -- which is a weakness of the music whether metal fans admit it or not. It also explains why, when I made out my "Top 25" metal albums list for last year, the ones near the top usually tended to be the kind of albums (like Rose Tattoo, say) that lots of metal fans would now insist are merely "hard rock." And sorry, lyric sheets are not the answer -- I judge music by what I hear, not what I could hear in theory if the band would only let me. (Also don't think the Lamb of God guy's vocals are particularly comprehensible, for what it's worth.) Anyway, the inability to decipher lyrics doesn't make me dislike metal -- I still like a lot of it and love some of it, regardless. Lyrics are far from the main thing I listen for when I listen to music, any music. (And I also like lots of rock and other music in foreign languages, and obviously I can't decipher those vocals, either.) But I do have to think that a lot of metal would be better if I could make sense out of what the lyrics might be. In other words, not being able to decipher the lyrics never makes the music better. (Well, maybe it does if the lyrics stink -- just like I have a feeling I wouldn't have loved the '90s Mexican rock band Caifanes so much if their apparent new age poetry baloney was in my face all the time, so thank God I didn't speak Spanish too well -- but like I said, I usually don't check lyric sheets to make sure.) But again, that's just me. What the heck do I know.

Sorry about the beer-stained rant. And yeah, Phil, that does indeed suck about Metal Edge. You should be proud for what you pulled off, though....

(xp Also, it's not just a matter of "communicating" stuff -- like, emotions or whatever the fuck -- it's just that, way back when, hearing the lyrics was part of what made listening to metal fun. And I miss that. It still happens sometimes, but just not nearly as much. But then again, right: I'm old.)

That's why I asked if it was intentional, xhuxk. I can't imagine someone would obscure the lyrics that much if they weren't making some sort of musical point by doing so. I mean, why wouldn't you want someone to know what you're singing?

'cause that would make you look like a rock star maybe? heavens. tru metal is all about the music, man!

For the first 20 minutes of the new God Forbid album I was ready to dismiss it, it wasn't clicking with me at all, but yikes, does it ever step things up in the second half. Sort of reminds me of the epic direction Machine Head took a couple years ago. If this was an LP (I suppose it will be sooner than later), side two would be a fucking beast.

Not convinced by Sólstafir at all. It's about half as heavy as I expected: there are some interesting textures, but it all sounds a little too ... slick. And this is one occasion where I'd far, far rather have Cookie Monster vocals than post-FM-rock yelping.

I've come around to thinking almost the opposite (maybe the converse) about lyrics: including voices as elements of your music shouldn't constrain you to making them linguistic and/or primary. I think even in music where the words are perfectly understandable, reading them as a coherent expository text is fairly rarely an important part of what I do as a listener. Not that it isn't intensely cool when it happens (lyrics had a lot to do with my favorite album of last year being Frightened Rabbit's, for a recent personal example), but I don't think it should be taken as a necessary goal or an inherent virtue, any more than you'd say "not putting overdrive on the guitars never makes the music better".

Actually, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure more music would be improved by increased guitar distortion than by increased lyrical clarity. (But maybe this is just another way of saying that I like metal.)

^ Agreed ... and reminded that I've not heard that second FR album yet. The first one was fucking awesome, and all I've heard is that the second is even better.

Re: Sólstafir ... I can actually imagine there'd be times I really, really wanted to listen to something like it. I might have been a bit hard. It's probably just because it wasn't what I expected at all.

Well, what I will say is that there are definitely worse vocal metal sins out there than incomprehensibility. Which is to say that, given the choice, there's a good chance that I'd still rather listen to your average death-metal barfer than your average screamo whiner or constipated post-grunge moaner or nu-metal bellower. Thing is, I've got several hundred loud rock/metal/whatever albums on my shelves that prove that those crappy alternatives are hardly the only ones out there. And my question is always, if lyrics really don't matter, as Glenn suggests -- if you're just going to toe the stupid line and vomit like every other dime-a-dozen ogre out there -- why bother having vocals at all? (Actually, I sort of know the answer to that -- because most instrumental metal is even more boring than metal with shitty vocals. So it's a rhetorical question, sort of, but I thought I'd ask it anyway.)

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

Or barf it.

your average death-metal barfer than your average screamo whiner or constipated post-grunge moaner or nu-metal bellower

Poll.

so the torche vinyl showed up today (HOTT), and since i was ordering from robotic empire anyway i grabbed their $20 "Stoney, Ambient, and Heavy" lot 6 CD deal. Any suggestions on where to dig in first from this list?

Torche - S/T
Red Sparowes/Gregor Samsa - Split
Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anenome With Copper Tongue
Windmills By The Ocean - S/T
Versoma - Life During Wartime
Stop It! - S/T

also sad to hear about the magazine, dude.

First Torche is probably better than Meanderthal. I like the RS/GS split, the kayo dot is good and so are Windmills By The Ocean and Versoma. Dunno who Stop Iy! are but looks like you got a good deal.

why bother having vocals at all?

I always thought the vomit vocals were basically to fortify the clubhouse. It's to keep people out. Or rather to make sure the people inside stay in.