Relentless Reckless Forever (Out March 8th, 2011)

Yeah, how on earth could someone feel a BLUE atmosphere on a YELLOW album?!? :D

Yeah, I have usually always linked the cover art and colors to the music but I lost that on Blooddrunk since I felt it didn't really have any atmosphere at all. Yeah RRF is starting to shape up to be goldish yellow but if we say what the keyboards sound like to our ears we are entitled to do that. Who cares what the overall feel is.
 
Maybe it's just me, but I don't know what you guys are talking about when you say atmosphere on an album or song.

For me the "atmosphere" is always different when I listen to something. It really just depends on the mood I am in at that moment. I can find hints of light in a dark song or vise versa. It's all what you make of it...IMO anyways. Maybe i just listen to different aspects of the song than others. I tend to grasp onto the guitars and drums when I listen to music. The rest is just kind of filler...except keys in the case of Bodom.

I thought Blooddrunk was just full of angry feelings and I get that pissed off kind of atmosphere in my head when i listen to that album. Maybe why it's one of my favorite albums, not just Bodom, but in general. I honestly feel it is a great album and I just love it from front to back.

Anywho....maybe some of you can explain to me what you mean when you refer to atmosphere.
 
Maybe it's just me, but I don't know what you guys are talking about when you say atmosphere on an album or song.

For me the "atmosphere" is always different when I listen to something. It really just depends on the mood I am in at that moment. I can find hints of light in a dark song or vise versa. It's all what you make of it...IMO anyways. Maybe i just listen to different aspects of the song than others. I tend to grasp onto the guitars and drums when I listen to music. The rest is just kind of filler...except keys in the case of Bodom.

I thought Blooddrunk was just full of angry feelings and I get that pissed off kind of atmosphere in my head when i listen to that album. Maybe why it's one of my favorite albums, not just Bodom, but in general. I honestly feel it is a great album and I just love it from front to back.

Anywho....maybe some of you can explain to me what you mean when you refer to atmosphere.

Hmm, it's probably in everyone's own ears, what has atmosphere and what has not. But still, most people think, that FTR is very atmospheric album, and I agree, so there has to be some consensus about it. I think that atmosphere is 90% about the sound, not really the riffs and melodies. Though Hatebreeder is a pretty good album, it doesn't have much atmosphere, the overall sound is just too clean and sterile. FTR on the other hand has a very atmospheric sound world.
 
Though Hatebreeder is a pretty good album, it doesn't have much atmosphere, the overall sound is just too clean and sterile.

Bed of Razors and Downfall take me away pretty fucking well so it has that going for it.


I preordered the book edition today and am now wondering why the fuck did I do that:Spin: The LP is like 2x cheaper.
 
Anywho....maybe some of you can explain to me what you mean when you refer to atmosphere.

Atmosphere in music is about the music making you envision a scenery or a situation. With Bodom I see the lake and the forest on the earlier albums, roadside bridges with graffiti where rebellious teenagers drink beer and beat up people with baseball bats, and even an underground gutter on some AYDY songs. Kissing the Shadows has ridicilously deep atmosphere at parts. That harmony on Bodom Beach Terror which I could listen to forever definitely sends me floating somewhere. The atmospheric parts on One Day You Will Cry make me envision being sealed in a dark place. Not My Funeral when the keyboards kick in make me see a murky swamp with buried corpses...

Feeling is a different thing in the same context. I think an aggressive beat like Hellhounds can make you reflect the anger. Or a panic-tempo beat such as Shovel Knockout (when the vocals come in) can make you feel alarmed. Or a balladic beat can make you feel mentally down and coverless.

I think Bodom Beach Terror is an example when atmosphere and feeling collide. The feeling is aggressive, and when the atmospheric harmony comes in you won't necessarily even notice it pass by because it's from a different world. Once I truly discovered that masterpiece of a little harmony I couldn't stop listening to it.

Just my thoughts. I don't really care about music which either lacks all of this or is an uncontrolled mess of everything.
 
Atmosphere in music is about the music making you envision a scenery or a situation.

A good point, though I associate atmosphere with feeling also. For example, I'd say this song has some serious atmosphere, but I really don't envision any particular scenery (other than obscurity), but this invokes emotions, even fear.

 
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Rob - Atmosphere is very closely tied with production. Generally the dirtier (arguably bad) sound, the darker more eeevvvil sounding it is, hence the standard for much of black metal being garage-band qualtiy production. There is definitely light in dark songs, and dark in light songs, but overwhelmingly the timbre of the instruments (including vocals) along with the way the track was produced (how it was EQ'd, how the mix of the instruments are - are the vocals loud in the mix? distant-sounding?), along with the chord choices chosen (lots of diminished chords vs lots of major chords, lots of melodic/harmonic tritones, minor seconds, classically-approved chord progressions, chromatically-experimental progressions, etc.) tend to make up the atmosphere.

But you're right that atmosphere is also subjective. One may feel a strictly dark and depressing atmosphere from one song, while another might feel a dark-yet-hopeful atmosphere from the same song. It's not always just dark vs light, there are lots of little possibilities, and that is where it gets hard to define, and is something that great film score composers (e.g. Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore) are masterful in their work, creating seemingly perfect atmospheres for scenes that can range so much in the tiniest details and variations of how they differ emotion-wise.

A good point, though I associate atmosphere with feeling also.

That is very much the point though. j0000nas is associating how certain songs make him feel to how those specific memories (forests/bridges/baseball bats) made him feel, or at least how he remembers them making him feel. He may not have seen that particular bridge before that this Bodom song makes him see, but he's seen something similar that somehow translates into this one. It's not always just some set scenery, but has to do with your experiences throughout life.
 
A good point, though I associate atmosphere with feeling also. For example, I'd say this song has some serious atmosphere, but I really don't envision any particular scenery (other than obscurity), but this invokes emotions, even fear.

I like that stuff. Yeah, it's best when they're together in a song, but sometimes having some variation of atmospheres and feelings in a song can create a diverse and interesting outcome. But when done wrong, it's horrible. A friend of mine does computer music which is often a weird mixture of totally opposite atmosphere and feeling. He represents a new song to me and it can be a confusing mix of a happy melody mixed with a chaotic beat. (I've politely labeled it his trademark which sometimes works sometimes not.) I mean even if the song has opposite elements, it needs to have a theme and decide whether it's a happy or a dark song at the end of the day. Of course computer music is a gray area and I don't care to evaluate on it too much, who am I to judge anyway, never really tried creating own music besides some melodies.
 
That is very much the point though. j0000nas is associating how certain songs make him feel to how those specific memories (forests/bridges/baseball bats) made him feel, or at least how he remembers them making him feel. He may not have seen that particular bridge before that this Bodom song makes him see, but he's seen something similar that somehow translates into this one. It's not always just some set scenery, but has to do with your experiences throughout life.

Yeah, I guess we can all agree what music is atmospheric and what is not, but it can be in a different way to each of us depending how it sinks in on the mental level. From what I've heard, someone could imagine Follow the Reaper in red artwork, so not all things we see (atmosphere, color of music) are similar.