Mordy's Metal Listening Club - New Albums Every Monday

but i agree, dude's vocals are a+

You've got some great points in there glenn. Not sure I've got my thoughts in a nice orderly place to respond, but in general I pretty much agree with your general gist.

Just wrapped up the HIM. I would say there might be a handful of tracks I'd be willing to hear again, but I can't say I'll find myself aching to go back to any of it. There was a time in my life where this would have been right up my alley, but I feel like I've heard enough variations on this type of music that I don't have a place for it. I can see the merit and understand why he's got a pretty dedicated following, but I just don't feel like this is offering me something I can't find in other bands.

I'm surprised Chuck isn't taking part in this.

Sure, all recorded music is obviously distanced by definition. But being Jewish and listening to NSBM is "personal" on a different axis than what I meant. I didn't mean that Valo's style "makes" you feel close to him; that part of your reaction is entirely up to you. But he sounds open, in a way that most metal singing feels to me much more closed. Or at least that's my subjective attempt to distill the objective difference, which is obviously a dubious proposition (but then, so is typing about music at all).

goddammit i accidentally listened to three songs from the nymphetamine bonus disc instead of the album itself

I guess I hear his "openness" as stylized in a totally different way, which may be a product of listening to so much "emo" over the last decade. Artists who I generally associate with openness (Chris Carrabba, earlier Conor Oberst, Geoff Rickley) feel open to me because it sounds like there's so much risk for them in singing what they sing -- so much seems almost affectless (particularly stuff like "This Bitter Pill," "Understanding in a Car Crash") which is an affect itself, but there's something raw here. I can't get by here how stylized the vocals still are, which doesn't code for me as openness. (Death metal growls, which I still can't wait to discuss, and I've got a paper on them that I'll be ready to show you guys in a few weeks, are open to me in a totally different way.) The vocals are too clean, and even when they break-falter-crack they do so in a way that's so immediately recognizable as a trope of the genre that I'm not impressed by the "openness."

(Which is to say: This definitely has something to do with when I'm hearing this, and I might've felt a little intimate connection to the singer if I had heard it just a few years ago. Maybe.)

I've got a paper on them that I'll be ready to show you guys in a few weeks

psyched for this!

HIM def young person's music in general

^^^^^

If HIM were around in 1991-92 I'd have been in heaven.

Re "young person's music", I note for the record that a) I'm 43, but b) I often still respond very positively to art that I "would have" liked when I was younger.

Also, I definitely agree that HIM is stylized, and I didn't mean that Valo is impressive or unusual in his "openness". Maybe reverse the question: is there anybody you do think of as clearly metal whose singer sings like that? Could Entombed be metal if they had Conor Oberst singing?

I like early bright eyes , but keep conor away from metal!

throwing in a vote for eluveitie's Slaina album.

Eluveitie is remarkable. I can't wait for folk metal week(s) (there's so many of it!).

Btw, I just wanted to give kudos to kerr + glenn. Both weeks are really productive in terms of how the albums speak to one another, especially in unpredictable ways. These three albums clearly share something (some kind of gothic sublimity), though how they go about it is so different from each other. More to say on this after I've listened to the albums a bit more, but esp Fates Warning w/r/t HIM, where one expression is elongated, bombastic, stylized in a really familiar metal way and the other is more softened, pop, mall-style (whatever that may or may not be), but both seem to be drawing from similar impulses. The theatrically occult, the dramatically morbid. Cradle of Filth too, tho there the voice is doing such weird things (it's almost insane, the more I listen to it -- it's like a voice of total lunacy in such a really interesting way) that it's hard to really compare it with the other two. Ie: It's hard for me to get past the voice. But clearly they're all covering similar aesthetic terrain, but in such different (chronological, stylistic) ways.

One thing I'm interested in w/r/t metal is how often it's coded super masculine (Deena Weinstein writes about this a bit in her book), but stuff like this week's albums seem to undermine that. It's so theatrical and esp re: HIM very soft almost, without the hard masculine edges you expect from metal. (I used to see this a lot when I hung around metal/punk forums and something like HIM would often be called "gay," or something like that which indicates the listener's discomfort at hearing something that doesn't conform to the expectations of metal music.)

Another reason I hate Him is because they forced the Doug Scharin HIM to change their name despite doug having it first.

What Mordy says about COF/Him being "mallrock" they do get Kerrang covers and lots of teenage girls like them.

Actually, I think Scharin forced the Finnish HIM to release their US material as HER until they eventually paid him for right to share the name.

For the curious, and especially those among the curious who think of Conor Oberst as the antithesis of metal, the second disc in the two-disc version of Screamworks is Valo doing hushed mostly-acoustic versions of the whole album. Really.

Haven't listened to this Cradle of Filth in a loooong time, think it still might be my favorite of theirs. They may be pretty much a cartoon version of an extreme metal band at times, but I still feel like this album is full of some pretty great riffs and solos. Love pretty much all of the guitar playing in "Nemesis".

Like the theatrical piano bit in "Gabrielle" would annoy me in pretty much any other band, but its all part of the CoF charm.

Hahaha this bit in "Absinthe with Faust" reminds me sooo much of the Tenacious D inward-singing skit. Never caught that before.

haven't listened to any of this week's picks yet but I'd just like to say that this thread has been top-notch.

I'll say a little about Fates Warning to start my day. My own personal creation-myth for theatrical progressive metal holds that Queensrÿche defined it with Rage for Order, but that it was Fates Warning's Perfect Symmetry and especially Parallels that made it into a genre, as opposed to just one band's particular style. (And later Dream Theater took it over and led it astray, but that hadn't happened yet.) Fates Warning always worked with a more muted and more limited palette than the other two, and although I think that eventually wore on me (A Pleasant Shade of Gray, in particular, seemed helplessly aware of its own drabness), in some ways it makes these earlier albums more intriguing. I.e., anybody can make complex-seeming music by layering enough stuff onto it, but to make complex music with fewer layers you actually have to compose it.

I know for some FW fans the Arch era is the only one that matters, but I admit I never learned to love his singing. Alder, conversely, I adore. The Journey comparison is both cheaply dismissive (Alder and Perry belong to a long tradition of singing that neither of them remotely invented, and Perry is the notorious poster-child for its wimpiest manifestation) and technically accurate (they do both belong to it, clearly). For me the key thing about Alder's style on Parallels is that he provides the legato ties that hold together the twitch-shifting turns of the music behind him. In a lot of metal, everybody goes full-speed, or full-force, or whatever full-thing the band happens to be going for. Contrast isn't unheard-of, but metal's defining quality it ain't.

listening to "abinsthe with faust" from nymphetamine right now (a++ title if nothing else). this album has some catchy riffs for sure but i can't really get w/the camp/goth elements and terrible keyb/string sounds.

somewhere near the end now and i'm pretty bored. i was surprised by "guilded c***" because it was pretty aggressive and i thought this band wasn't really like that. so the rest of it has been disappointing me by fulfilling my expectations. also: TOO LONG!

soooo many piano/ambient/fake-choir intros and outros

Am a week behind but I'm gonna try this Emtombed thing once the football ends.

It's ended

Thus the week behind. Let a fella catch up, gonna still get in all of this weeks listening.

"All ILXors and Lurkers welcome!*"

*except ones that saw this thread a week late.

I think he meant that the match is over. You're welcome to keep talking about last week's albums.

ah glenn, you and yr logic.

currently listening, and enjoying. being roughly the 14th metal record i've ever listened to though, i have nothing to say about it as I don't yet know anything else about the genre that falls into 'i like this' or 'i don't like this'.

yeah, the silly sod posted after the game already finished

winston feel free to give albums ratings based on arsenal players ;)

cradle of filth is definitely a Lolmunia to my eyes

Kyuss - Armand Traore (Talented sure, but needs to grow a fucking pair before worthy of actually playing.)

Entombed - Thomas Vermaelan (Hard headed motherfucker, like a lot against my better judgement.)

If Entombed is actually some weak shizz then my bad, 14th metal record and all that.

i thought you were checking out the EOY metal polls?

I meant to and forgot. Still have the spotify playlist, so I may still sometime.

you said that about the 2008 poll!

I actually downloaded and listened to a bunch of them! The few metal records I have actually listened to are basically 10 random 2008 things and a couple Sabbath things.

you need to get to it

So the Fates Warning 30-second clips on iTunes are not giving me hope. I never "got" Dream Theater either.

The Fate's Warning is way better than Dream Theater.

Absolutely, Dream Theater doesn't compare to early Fates. Awaken the Guardian is actually the album of theirs I prefer.

Well, that gives me a little more motivation to give it a spin, but still not entirely sold.

Yeah, I think my biggest problem will be the earnest, smooth vocals. I like harsh, growling vocals in my metal. I don't like being soothed. Have a feeling I'd like an instrumental version much better. But away we go...

^^ Agreed x100

The musicianship on display is fantastic, so I totally get that part of the appeal.

Seven songs in now and I would definitely have to say I'm enjoying this quite a bit more than any of the Dream Theater I've heard, but the vocals are still not doing a thing for me. The guitar work (is most of this Matheos? don't know the history of this band) is fantastic, easily my favorite part.