Controversial opinions on metal

[SomeGuyDude]

After someone described Meshuggah to me as rhythm exercises with lyrics I haven't been able to enjoy anything in their entire discography. Literally the best things you can say about the band is that it's difficult to play and the production is excellent.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Whatever, all I know is Meshuggah makes Lamb of God look like clown shoes.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Nah, it's aggressive and has grooving swagger, but despite the technicality and worship from fanboys, it doesn't come off as pretentious to me as much as it feels like something I'm intentionally supposed to feel jerked around by as I completely fail to move to the rhythms. It functions as background music, boogie music, and headbanging music all at the same time and quite well.

EDIT: irt SomeGuyDude

 

[SomeGuyDude]

Whatever, all I know is Meshuggah makes Lamb of God look like clown shoes.

That's setting the bar pretty fucking low, isn't it?

I've never heard anyone talk about Meshuggah without the words "time signature" or "polyrhythm" showing up a lot. That's all the band is. Rhythmic. You wanna know where djent and chugcore came from? Meshuggah. I'm not even kidding, try and remember a Meshuggah riff without it being based on the drums. Every single "riff" is just palm-muted chugging that follows the kick exactly.

Like HB said, they're not pretentious, but to me they still fall into that Animals as Leaders bucket where it's like I'm supposed to be impressed by it more than actually like it. Technical chops doesn't mean they can actually write SONGS. I listened to Koloss a few times and realized that without the thunderous production there was absolutely nothing interesting going on.

 

[The Butt]

Goddamn I fucking hate Meshuggah.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Koloss is their worst album. tbh I was looking for exceptions to the riff/kick mimicking thing and I'm surprised I never noticed how often this seems to be the case. I don't really care because I've never listened to them for sheer ott musical prowess, but yeah, that isn't so good. I know that when I first heard them it annoyed me how the crash cymbal is almost always a steady 4/4 rhythm, but it was something I kind of grew to accept. I'm kinda hearing it as more the opposite though, kick drum following the guitar rhythm more or less. Sure, it's basically all palm-muted chugging, but there's thrashy fast triplet Meshuggah chugging, more mid-tempo kinda groove metal style Meshuggah chugging, there's the quintessential rubbery sounding "djent" chugging that began with Nothing, etc.

 

[Pitiless Wanderer]

Interesting stuff going on in Contradiction's Collapse, but other than that I can't get into Meshuggah either. Talented but boring. And I don't like the vocals.

 

[waif]

Never liked Meshuggah. Yeah, they're good musicians and they have their own sound, but I don't fucking like it. It's really unpleasant.

 

[-CC-]

Their last two albums have been boring, but everything before that is pretty damn good stuff. And please, these guys are the antithesis of pretentious. I mean do I really need to link this?

 

[Einherjar86]

Death metal instrumentation - like tremolo riffing and blast beasts? Dragon Force has both, with clean vocals. Are they death metal? Surely not.

The aesthetic of instrumentation is vastly different. Subtract the vocals from a Dragonforce song and then from a Wormed song. I guarantee that if you perform your little experiment and tell the listeners that "one of these tracks is power metal, and one is death metal," they would be able to tell the difference.

You're trying way too hard to conflate musical styles based purely on names of techniques. A power metal blast-beat is implemented differently, and accompanied by different musical complements, than a death metal blast-beat. Furthermore, the melodic structures of power metal borrow from entirely different chords, scales, and modes than death metal. Vocal style has the least to do with it.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Wormed with powermetal vocals sounds like fun.

 

[CF87]

Chaosphere backwards from Meshuggah is excellent. Newer stuff is repetitive and boring as hell. Sol Niger Within is worth listening to also.

 

[Nephilim96]

Their last two albums have been boring, but everything before that is pretty damn good stuff. And please, these guys are the antithesis of pretentious. I mean do I really need to link this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ

Hockey jerseys.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Hockey jerseys.

Paul Baloff would approve.

 

[Pitiless Wanderer]

The aesthetic of instrumentation is vastly different. Subtract the vocals from a Dragonforce song and then from a Wormed song. I guarantee that if you perform your little experiment and tell the listeners that "one of these tracks is power metal, and one is death metal," they would be able to tell the difference.

You're trying way too hard to conflate musical styles based purely on names of techniques. A power metal blast-beat is implemented differently, and accompanied by different musical complements, than a death metal blast-beat. Furthermore, the melodic structures of power metal borrow from entirely different chords, scales, and modes than death metal. Vocal style has the least to do with it.

You are again missing the point of what I am saying. In your version of this experiment, you're asking participants to identify death metal by what isn't there (I have been talking about the vocal style, so removing it from the equation does not work here). All of those nuances and differentiations you speak of are true and exist, but what I am saying, again, is simply that they are less identifiable than full on gutteral death metal vocals. Get your mother in the room and ask her the primary difference between Slayer and Wormed or Skinless. She will surely tell you the vocal style. Yet again, so we're clear, because I know you are going to reply and say, "yea but death metal vocals alone don't make the genre"...this is correct. Surely not alone, but as the main differentiation between it and other genres of metal.


edit: for the sake of arguing from authority, I have gone back and tried to find the quotes which I cited when I made this argument last year or so. The domains, unfortunately, have expired (the interviews are old). I think I remember exactly though, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but...

Chris Barnes
Glen Benton
George Fisher

.....all three of them have previously stated that the one, main thing that sets death metal apart from other genres of metal is the vocal style. Of course this doesn't make what I say true, and maybe you know more than them, or even disagree (as you have every right to) but I clearly side with them since they've been directly involved in the genre at a professional level for many more years than you or probably anyone else posting here.

 

[Einherjar86]

All of those nuances and differentiations you speak of are true and exist, but what I am saying, again, is simply that they are less identifiable than full on gutteral death metal vocals. Get your mother in the room and ask her the primary difference between Slayer and Wormed or Skinless. She will surely tell you the vocal style.

What does this even matter? Get my mother in the room and ask her the most obvious difference between George Eliot and Honore de Balzac and she'll probably say that one writes in English and one writes in French. That tells us incredibly little about the styles, modes, or aesthetics of the texts themselves.

Chris Barnes
Glen Benton
George Fisher

.....all three of them have previously stated that the one, main thing that sets death metal apart from other genres of metal is the vocal style. Of course this doesn't make what I say true, and maybe you know more than them, or even disagree (as you have every right to) but I clearly side with them since they've been directly involved in the genre at a professional level for many more years than you or probably anyone else posting here.

Stalin had more direct experience with mass killings on a professional level, but I still won't agree with him that the best answer to the state's problems is the execution of dissenters.

Appealing to authority usually results in embarrassing contradictions.

 

[waif]

Of course a bunch of vocalists think vocals are the only thing that matters. They're fucking vocalists.

There's a really identifiable style of "death metal" music. I could show you several entirely instrumental pieces of death metal and you would say "this sounds like New York death metal" or "this sounds Swedish." It's easy to describe what differentiates death metal music from other subgenres of metal without any reference to vocals.

 

[SentinelSlain]

Judas Priest, recently, really aren't very good lyricists. CrossFire being a prime example, it's so stereotypical.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Last I checked, CrossFire was a game that involved shooting marbles and spinning discs that was big in the 90s, not a Judas Priest song.

Oh, you said recently, I'll take my snark back. Sure, their lyrics have been silly at best since the early/mid 80s. Who thinks that newer Priest has good lyrics?

 

[Eligos]

Sol Niger Within is worth listening to

This.

I've never heard anyone talk about Meshuggah without the words "time signature" or "polyrhythm" showing up a lot.

Like HB said, they're not pretentious, but to me they still fall into that Animals as Leaders bucket where it's like I'm supposed to be impressed by it more than actually like it.

Not this.

Animals as Leaders is a completely different class of music than Meshuggah. Sure, you can watch the video for CAFO and just take away, "Oh this guy knows how to play sweep arpeggios really fast." But if you do so you're missing about 95% of that debut album. Seriously, it started off as a dude dicking off in his producer buddy's basement, without the intention of impressing anyone or going anywhere.

Just because the end product is impressive in its own right and has picked up a lot momentum in the last 5 years doesn't mean that its solidarity is at all detracted from or discounted as a result. Tosin Abasi may have honors from a handful of music schools, a signature guitar or two, and multiple tours under his belt, but AAL still jams as hard as it did back in 2010.

Aside from a few bits here and there, Lykathea Aflame's Elvenefris is an incoherent mess that overstays it's welcome.

I revisited Elvenefris the other day and got a similar impression to the ones I get from BtBaM's album Colors. It doesn't lack for good riffcraft, but the songs and album as whole entities are thrown together pretty sloppily. I'll be jamming on a riff an then be totally lost 5 seconds later, which is awesome when the purpose of the music is to disorient the listener (like in Portal's work), but another thing entirely when the intent was to create progressive music, which is evident by the riff content.

It sounds too much like the members were giving each other riff concessions rather than minding how their songs sounded at large.