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Jan. 10th, 2007 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI was listening to the Radio 1 rock show on the way back from BFs practice on Monday night. The thing is, a lot of metal has excellent drums and at least some sort of effort to involve rhythm as part of the music rather than just being the background everything happens over, and it's got (or should have) bagloads of energy, which is why I got into all that in the first place, but a lot of recent metal stuff has had something I don't like in it that I can't pin down, that makes me just want to go listen to something else. Having worked off the backlog of musical urge in a nice high-speed practice, though, I wasn't being as impatiently critical as usual and could sit back and take it all in.
I have a suspicion that given the basics of good drums and the like, it all comes down to the vocals. There was a session from Gallows, who have a potentially interesting punk/metal crossover thing going on, but with the vocals as they are it's just another bloody emo band. I can see how emo vocals have been arrived at as a style, this sort of plaintive sound that breaks up into a higher-pitched shout for emphasis, and this makes sense, but it's been going long enough now that it's become automatic and thus stylised, and detached from the actual content or point. Have you ever had a conversation with a toddler that's trying to sulk? They try and make everything they say sound like a complaint and will keep it up regardless of the mismatch even if you get them to say something positive, which turns everything they say into a joke. Um, and then they sulk even more because you're laughing at them but never mind. I suppose it's the usual problem I have with songs that just do the automatic thing to do next rather than creating and running on their own internal sense, and in the case of the vocals the wrongness is all the way through the song, making the whole thing sound trivial. Once I had the sulking toddler analogy in my mind though, a Norma Jean song came on and reminded me what it is that bothers me about screamo vocals - they're toddlers one step further along, mid-tantrum, and I keep expecting every difficult-to-parse line to resolve into something about teddy bears. Oh well.
The contrast was illuminated by a band who sent me a friend-request on myspace last night. They're called Divine Chaos, they're a thrash band, nothing that original in many ways but everything fits together and does something, and the vocals are part of it, not getting in the way. They appealed to me like a lot of metal hasn't done in a long time. There was that agility in some of the changes that always cheers me up, not that there aren't some minor clunking bits too but there's space to get into the thing itself rather than spending the whole song thinking about why it's wrong.
I'm still not entirely sure this last bit's an advantage but the current rock show presenter is a Clutch fan and uses instrumental chunks of a couple of different Clutch tracks as beds for the links. I can entirely see how this works, he uses the intro to American Sleep which has a twenty-second grind-like false start (which only sounds better and harder with the radio compression) before swinging into the usual Clutch sound, but I keep thinking he's going to play American Sleep and then he starts talking. Bastard. He did play one off the new album that's not out til March, though, so you know. I'm pretty certain Child Of The City got played when I saw them in December, the verses go round in seven. I wonder if we're actually going to sort out going to Roadburn, even though we've missed the weekend tickets?
I have a suspicion that given the basics of good drums and the like, it all comes down to the vocals. There was a session from Gallows, who have a potentially interesting punk/metal crossover thing going on, but with the vocals as they are it's just another bloody emo band. I can see how emo vocals have been arrived at as a style, this sort of plaintive sound that breaks up into a higher-pitched shout for emphasis, and this makes sense, but it's been going long enough now that it's become automatic and thus stylised, and detached from the actual content or point. Have you ever had a conversation with a toddler that's trying to sulk? They try and make everything they say sound like a complaint and will keep it up regardless of the mismatch even if you get them to say something positive, which turns everything they say into a joke. Um, and then they sulk even more because you're laughing at them but never mind. I suppose it's the usual problem I have with songs that just do the automatic thing to do next rather than creating and running on their own internal sense, and in the case of the vocals the wrongness is all the way through the song, making the whole thing sound trivial. Once I had the sulking toddler analogy in my mind though, a Norma Jean song came on and reminded me what it is that bothers me about screamo vocals - they're toddlers one step further along, mid-tantrum, and I keep expecting every difficult-to-parse line to resolve into something about teddy bears. Oh well.
The contrast was illuminated by a band who sent me a friend-request on myspace last night. They're called Divine Chaos, they're a thrash band, nothing that original in many ways but everything fits together and does something, and the vocals are part of it, not getting in the way. They appealed to me like a lot of metal hasn't done in a long time. There was that agility in some of the changes that always cheers me up, not that there aren't some minor clunking bits too but there's space to get into the thing itself rather than spending the whole song thinking about why it's wrong.
I'm still not entirely sure this last bit's an advantage but the current rock show presenter is a Clutch fan and uses instrumental chunks of a couple of different Clutch tracks as beds for the links. I can entirely see how this works, he uses the intro to American Sleep which has a twenty-second grind-like false start (which only sounds better and harder with the radio compression) before swinging into the usual Clutch sound, but I keep thinking he's going to play American Sleep and then he starts talking. Bastard. He did play one off the new album that's not out til March, though, so you know. I'm pretty certain Child Of The City got played when I saw them in December, the verses go round in seven. I wonder if we're actually going to sort out going to Roadburn, even though we've missed the weekend tickets?
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Date: 2007-01-10 05:22 pm (UTC)I always enjoy your music posts, even though I never respond - I just figure I don't have anything to add as I know jack shit by comparison. :)
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Date: 2007-01-10 11:34 pm (UTC)(The toddler thing surely can't be original, but it struck me again..)
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Date: 2007-01-15 06:34 pm (UTC)Apparently Britt Walford drummed for Evergreen, but I don't know for how long, or if he drummed on any of their records...
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Date: 2007-01-12 10:42 am (UTC)now i don't know what Moist or Staind (who they were discussing) or emo-metal even sounds like, maybe it's a north american sub-genre, i do know what garth brooks sounds like... but that's not very helpful. could be funny though, if it's true.
i don't listen to R1 myself, i find the playlist and the DJs just way too irritating, but over the last few months at work i got a weekly dose, as we drove to and from site, it's the driver's preferred station. maybe it's because it's the same sort of mid-morning and mid-afternoon slots every week, but the playlist really is repetitive innit? and they play about 4 songs an hour. the odd thing that i noticed was that every week, without fail, they would play Panic! At The Disco while we were driving. maybe they just played it a lot, maybe it was following us... whatever. the first time i heard it i thought it was a spoof (is this serious? it can't be...), then after a few listens, i dunno, it's just one of the funniest things around, and the most toddler-like tantrum/song i can think of. maybe it's cos the lyrics that most stand out are the ones about "why can't you people ...(somethingorother).. closing the GODDAMN door..". i mean it's probably a really serious song and all, but it just sounds hilarious. much spitting and fury and badly-fitted-in-lyrics (something about rationalityyyyyyy). right i should stop rambling now and get back to work...
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Date: 2007-01-12 03:31 pm (UTC)I like listening to the radio because there's always new things coming along and it's handy way of hearing at least a handful of them - I like the feeling of having been there and listening when something new that I like comes on. I spent a lot of time as a teenager listening the Evening Session and the various specialist evening programmes, where they suited my taste, though, and I still like to do that now and then becuase they still throw up good stuff.
Daytime Radio 1 is all the conventional, back when I used to do warehouse and manual jobs the radio would be on all day and it'd be irritating how often the same songs came up, but the thing about Radio 1 for me is that it doesn't have any bloody adverts, which irritate me far, far more. The DJs are mostly okay, apart from one or two I can't stand, too.
Panic! At The Disco was just getting played to death recently, I can confirm, and it kept getting stuck in my head really badly. Though they are jaw-droppingly pretentious I'm kind of pleased by them in some ways; they're a very young band, practically just out of high school, and here they are with these songs that are obsessed with scene etiquette and social status. Songs about how some teenagers really feel and see their lives, rather than songs written by bands in their twenties; I suppose I'm thinking of bands like Wheatus that do songs about all-American-teen things like drive-ins and dating that actually you can only see when looking the outside, looking back, if you know what I mean. They're pretentious brats but I get the impression that they really are like that, so marks for honesty rather than trying to write the same songs as everyone else.
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Date: 2007-01-12 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-12 06:06 pm (UTC)Umm, much the same thing still keeps me away from Radio 2, now I think about it. The music's often quite good, if I could completely blank every DJ and just have the music I could live with it, but the DJs are unfortunately incarnations of the hypocrisy that I always see in the whole station. They play contemporary records, but only the safe, fluffy, inoffensive ones like Keane. They play old records, and they play good old records that I'm happy to hear, Hendrix and Elvis and James Brown, but a lot of the old records were ground-breaking at the time and Radio 2 as it is now would have thoroughly disapproved and not played them. Cream used to be dangerously radical band in the 60s, you know, that Eric Clapton was a bad influence. But once these artists have become established and acceptable and comfortable, that's fine. So as a station it's not really based on the music, it's based on what people find comfortable and acceptable, and the DJs and the phone-ins are the same, and I just end up shouting at the radio and all in all it's not worth it. Ho-hum.
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Date: 2007-01-12 11:13 pm (UTC)(they also have pleasing/unexpected juxtapositions far more often than the "youth" stations)
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Date: 2007-01-12 01:00 pm (UTC)Roadburn is going to be SO cool this year!
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Date: 2007-01-12 03:33 pm (UTC)