Complexity heavier than distortion+growls+blastbeats

[dwoakee]

By "complex" i mean a piece of music which contains many changes, in chords, in melody, in volume, in time signature, in mood, in style. the more changes and contrast, the more complex.

Imo, a complex piece of music can get heavier than a plain metal song. Examples: Opeth of course, but also some Jethro Tull stuff (Songs from the Wood), or The Mars Volta.

The heaviest stuff is of course complex metal .

Discuss.

 

[Vuashke]

voted subjective - good topic btw

i think there is very little correlation between complexity of music and heaviness of a music piece. as an example, joe pass had a complex chord-melody style, but i would never call his music heavy, especially in comparison to artists that use heavy thick distortion + blastbeats. alot of artists use insane modulation, key and time changes, contrasting dissonance and consonance, upper, altered chords etc, but i would say the standard breakdown would be much heavier than that. i know opeth have alot of change and deviance but they are far from the heaviest band and have never been one of the heavier bands.

i say that there are certain tones that sound evil to the human ear, along with dissonant tones that have a natural yearning for resolve. volume, pitch, timbre, speed etc...all these come into play when considering the heaviness of something. none of these work very well on their own however, and there are always exceptions. you could play john coltrane as loud as u want and it would never sound heavy, maybe because of the unique timbre of the sax, or pre concieved views on whats heavy and whats not. i think that when you drop the tuning of a guitar down it gets heavier, but if you cross a certain line into bass territory it loses the heaviness and the evil and becomes groovey. timbre speaks for itself, i dont know anyone that thinks an archtop guitar on squeaky clean sounds brutal (although some jazz guys will probably try to argue this, as ive seen before - they are elitist fucks).

complexity is good for conveying other emotions but i dont think heaviness is one. im also adamant that fifths are not the best way to convey heaviness in music. complexity has its benefits elsewhere but i think that the general quality of sound and its intervals etc have a distinct heaviness

nice topic, hopefully it will evoke people's opinions. very hard to have an outright answer

 

[Sisyphus's Struggle]

Voted No (i don't know why it have the ?). I think you must define "heavy" as you defined "complex" before, maybe you could elaborate more those concepts. Of course, they're all subjective, something is heavy or complex or whatever according to someone, so i think if you explain more what you're trying to say maybe i can get into your logic and discuss in those terms. In my opinion i have listen to some pieces of music (classic) which are more complex than "x" metal song, but that doesn't make them necessarily heavier than the last ones. But pretty often i found classic music to be more "psychedelic/disturbing" than death metal.

 

[Don Corleone]

i dont see how heavy and complex can be related. bach can be insanely complex, does that mean he composed heavy music?

 

[dwoakee]

Voted No (i don't know why it have the ?).

It should indicate a tone of voice meaning "What in the world makes you state such non-sense?"

I think you must define "heavy" as you defined "complex" before, maybe you could elaborate more those concepts.

I'll try. Of course, if you define "heavy = brutal" than there's no heavier thing than death or black metal or other extreme styles of metal. My notion of "heavy" was more like "full of energy and tension". Think of some extreme, yet monotone metal. At first, it's heavy in both respects. But after a while it get's boring, it's only distorted noise. The brutality is still there, but it got stale.

Compare The Mars Volta to Slipknot. Slipknot is much more brutal than TMV, but in terms of ferocity I consider them equal.

 

[Godhead59]

I say subjective, but this is a good discussion to have. As for my opinion, there's a lot of music that I find really heavy, but it can be as simple as a simply-structured thrashy song like Metallica's Dyers Eve or something as complex as Opeth songs like The Leper Affinity. Heaviness isn't about structure, it's about sound, to me at least.

 

[Vuashke]

intensity is not the same as brutality

 

[Koi]

wtf are you talking about ....
stop trying to interpretate terms like "heavy" and "fast".

 

[Guttmann]

i didnt get all the pieces together, so i didnt vote just yet.
i find this discussion really interesting, cause i didnt really think about whether "intensity", "brutality", "heaviness" and "complexity" are on the same spectrum, or just different words to describe sometimes the same thing ("complexity" doesnt sit very well with that, i know..).

thats a thing that ill def bare in mind for a while

 

[Nightmare_Heaven]

Heavy and brutal are different things innit, but i think i'll vote for "it depends"

 

[pyr0rrzzz]

I consider slow, grooving, low-tuned riffs heavy, nothing else.

 

[Annihilat0r]

"Heavy" isn't the same as intense

 

[Ozzloaf]

Wow then Death or Meshuggah must certainly be the HEAVIEST thing ever, they're complex metal.

 

[the opeth affinity]

First of all can i say this is one of the most interesting threads in a hell of a long time. I voted 'subjective' because as im sure all of us has as some point, let a friend hear opeth and hope they find the musicality and complex nature of there music engulf them as it does. Ive done this many times and as most of ( if not all) of my friends listen to music in the polar opposite of the 'metal' genre. They all say something like its to heavy, to brutal, how can you listen to those god awful growels etc etc. I guess its inbuilt into a person, an attribute of a personality to like a certain genre, a mode if you will of familularity that probably runs through there general interests, which i suppose adds to the problem of defining what is heavy as some people consider iron maiden and priest heavy lol! Heavyness is something that the more i think about is very difficult to define in a band. Slayer to alot of people is heavybut its not really is it? Even morbid angel who are death metal legends im being serious here, dont even define heavy to me anymore, maybe im desensitised to it as some others maybe after years of listening. I say its quite simply a personal response, a feeling of whatb is heavy and what is not, thats as cmplex as i can define it to myself and its an interesting journey to see what else maybe heavy and not even come from a 'metal' genre.

 

[dwoakee]

^back in the day, priest and maiden were pretty heavy for their time, at least compared to mainstream music at that time. i'm sure there must have been heavier bands in the underground scene. of course, metal bands are always trying to push the envelope and find more extreme ways of making music, so compared to nowadays acts like slipknot, nile, bloodbath, behemoth, death spell omega etc. pp., early priest and maiden are children's music. in 1968 jethro tull was pretty extreme, though they weren't categorized as hard rock or heavy metal even then.

when i did my song structure analysis of some opeth songs, i noticed something that totally fits my "complex vs heavy" thesis here: the mellow songs of opeth aren't just less distorted and free of growls. they are also (on average) much shorter, contain fewer different sections and the structure is much simpler. Eg. "Death wispered a lullaby" is basically only a "verse-chorus" structure. windowpane is probably the most complex mellow song of Opeth.

 

[Braighs]

I quantify heaviness by how high my VBR encoder takes the sample rate.
Heaviest Opeth song: Godhead's Lament: 1102 kbps
Lightest Opeth song: Weakness: 504 kbps
Jethro Tull - Songs from the Wood: 973 kbps
VDGG - A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers: 906 kbps

Metal is heavier eod.

 

[BefriendedUnit]

I wasn't aware that complexity and metal-ness were mutually exclusive,

 

[Koi]

what would you call the masters apprentices opening riff? is it really fast or just very slow? And is it heavy or too non-complex? Like someone said earlier, i think that slow downtuned riffs are heavy, not some complex blastbeat riffs.

 

[Vuashke]

id call it boring

and slow

i dont think its particularly heavy, its just fifths and fifths dont have an especially heavy or dark sound, but i guess its heavy for opeth. but i think blastbeats are pretty heavy

 

[Iki-ilkkuja]

Listening to bands like Area, Il Balletto di Bronzo and similar Italian acts from the 70s and I've came to realize that complex, unorthodox music is heavier than metal (in general).