+1. There is a lot of technicality in their music in those earlier albums that are absent from more recent albums. Alexi, if he progressed in the right direction, could of been considered one of the top shredders IMO.
i think if he went in a shred direction his music would turn into garbage. i like technical music, i think its impressive, but i dont enjoy listening to it for enjoyment. well, a better way to say it would that technicality is irrelevant for most of the part, as the majority of good bands have decent skills. i dont mean to say that an absence of playing skill is ok, because its not, no skills = boring, repetitive, uninspired, lacking the ability to play anything harder or different, which is not acceptable. take opeth as an example, mike and fredrik are skilled at guitar, but they are no jason becker or allan holdsworth, but i still like listening to them much more than the latter (especially becker...god he sucked.) But mike and fredrik are skilled enough to be able to complement their writing and compositional skills with playing of a high enough caliber that is able to correctly articulate their ideas, and play all the mean stuff they want to play.
its all fine and good to see hard, fast, complex whatever guitar lines thrown around but alot of the time it turns into tasteless wankery (malmsteen.) Malmsteen may be a "faster" player, but i rate a person like scott henderson as a "better" player. i dont think he is anywhere near as fast or as technical, but his playing has rhythm, feeling, beauty and most importantly, sounds good. ive never listened to any shredders because i like their music, but i could listen to scott henderson play all day. having a unique style with phrasing and groove and articulation rates much higher in my book than the shredder approach
i dunno if you were just stating that he could be a shredder or if you were implying that you think he should have been one of those 'shredder' types, but i said it anyway. undoubtbly he has alot of skill, but personally i dont much care for children of bodom anyway.
PS: i guess it was kinda unfair to put holdsworth in there with jason becker, because holdsworth is truly a great player in both the sense of skill and in making great sounding music. he sure is technical but hes not a wanker and his music is just bliss, probably because alot of it is tasteful, refined and restrained (ie he doesnt try to play the fastest sweeps/taps whatever u want and try to melt faces.) i guess i just put him in there so people would see that i was talking about skill, because i consider holdsworth definetely as one of the top 5 guitarists still alive playing
Don't get me wrong, I tried getting into them, despite my boyfriend going "omg it's really bad" and me denying it will be. It ended up being horrible for me, so I can safely say that Drone Doom is not the type of music I would ever hear.
