Themed Mixtape Game

I don't believe it has. It's never been able to survive HBB's downrating. Bathory won once in the very first round, only because he neglected to rate.
 
Serjeant Grumbles said:
I don't believe it has. It's never been able to survive HBB's downrating. Bathory won once in the very first round, only because he neglected to rate.
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I gave a Manilla Road song an 8 the previous round, and iirc I've given another one a 5-6 or so. I'm not the only one that thinks they're shit brah
 
I think many of their songs of terrible, almost childish writing. Wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that at least a third of what I've heard sounds like total shit, and another third just scraping mediocrity. An album with my very favorite Manilla Road songs would probably be an 8/10 album though.
 
What do I listen to that you think has typewriter drums?

The problem with Manilla Road is that half of his vocal melodies sound like literal nursery rhymes and that the guitar melodies/riffs often do nothing but follow said nursery rhyme or play out some dull power chord progression. The average Manilla Road verse riff repeats itself dozens and dozens of times with no attempt at any kind of interesting development. If it wasn't for Randy Foxe, those 80s albums would be mechanical as fuck. Every once in a while he'll buck tradition and do something totally awesome and left-field like The Fires of Mars, but generally they're a lazy shit band.
 
It almost sounds like you've heard "Feeling Free Again" and "Necropolis" but not many other songs based on that description. Even those songs aren't really any more simplistic than the commercial songs by most metal bands anyway.
 
Nope. Crystal Logic (the song) repeats that riff and vocal melody so many fucking times before it finally gets to the bridge, for example. Divine Victim from this very round is pretty Necropolis-style. Open the Gates' title track is very repetitious too, and I also have Hour of the Dragon noted in my autistic list for its repetition (although I can't remember that one off the top of my head). Some of their thrash stuff (Whitechapel, Midnight Meat Train, etc) is similarly poorly arranged, even if it's not melodic enough to compare to nursery rhymes (which makes those particular songs even worse).

You'd have to give examples regarding other bands' commercial songs. Breaking the Law's vocal melody, for example, builds for much longer than most Manilla Road songs, and it's also a much shorter song. The verse is built on basically two (very simple of course) riffs, which repeat only twice each before going into the chorus. The main hook repeats a lot more, but that's because it's obviously one of the most instantly identifiable riffs of all time, and even there it's not just a cut-and-paste job, e.g. in the refrain after the solo there's a build-up prior to the repeat-chorus-and-end pop structure of the song. Breaking the Law has more interesting songwriting than any short ~3 minute Manilla Road song I can think of.
 
I'm actually talking about the happy singalong vocal melodies, which are present on four of the songs that you named and definitely not the majority of their music. You make it sound like most of their music has those when the majority of songs on their 1980s albums are longer and don't focus on those types of things.

A good example of a commercial metal song that has vocal melodies that totally stick with the relatively simplistic musical elements is "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath.

I don't think that anyone will argue that Manilla Road is one of many bands that stretch out some of their songs, but people who like their music don't find that to be a problem. They definitely have plenty of riffs and a good rhythm section.

I also don't think that you'll find many Manilla Road fans who like Out of the Abyss very much because it sounds like a weak interpretation of UK Sabbat if you ask me. You can dislike whatever you want, but there's plenty of variety to be had in the 1980s Manilla Road albums.
 
Yeah, early Sabbath had some songs like that, although Paranoid's vocal melody doesn't exactly follow the riff, it's just built on it. Iron Man would be an example where I would agree with you, but I consider that to easily be one of the worst songs of their first five albums, and they had a lot more ideas than Manilla Road on the whole.

EDIT: And it's not just about happy sing-a-long melodies. Even some of their longer songs have really repetitive arrangements, even if they do contain multiple sections. Rome (or whatever it was called) from an earlier round was repetitious while still long and containing a few different riffs. It's the way Manilla Road (fails to) build off of their ideas that makes them suffer
 
"N.I.B." is possibly my favorite Black Sabbath song and it's totally guilty of having the vocals follow the music, as are many of the other songs on their first four albums in degrees varying from total lockstep with the music, such as in this song, to heavy reliance on following the music. I've never really that to be a flaw, even though "Iron Man" is probably their most overplayed song for me.

Personally, I think Crystal Logic is somewhat overrated and Mark Shelton was surprised that it became their most popular album because he said it wasn't a big hit in the 1980s. Roadkill is even totally devoid of songs from the album even though "Far Side of the Sun" is in the setlist.
 
I bet the reason why they don't play anything off of Crystal Logic on Roadkill is because their lineup changed after that album. The inclusion of Randy Foxe on drums adds a much different dynamic to their songs than Rick Fisher's playing.
 
Mark has also said that the album being heralded as the most classic album in their discography is fairly recent, which is why they play more songs from it now than they did before.
 
I can accept all of HBB's criticisms as valid and likely true, but I just don't really care about critiquing bands based on how complex they are or how anti-repetitious their compositions are. I don't listen to Manilla Road for those reasons, that's not why I think they're a great band and I'm glad they don't do what HBB wants them to do.

They sound perfect just the way they are.
 
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