They seem to be getting more and more prolific, particularly in metal. You know the ones I’m talking about. The “moody, eerie noises/squeaks/creaks/moans etc…” that litter most every metal album put out nowadays. It used to be something that you only heard as the first or last track, but now it seems that they are built directly into songs, keeping me from skipping over them.
For instance, I grabbed the new Mudvayne because I had a couple extra bucks and out of 10 songs there are 4-5 that have nearly minute long noise-intros. These aren’t intros that you can skip either because they are built into the tracks. At least on their older albums you could skip the “mood sounds” as they were their own tracks.
That’s just Mudvayne, who is a pretty mainstream metal act, but the less mainstream you get the more prolific these mandatory noises get. They are annoying and unneccessary. The only exceptions are actual musical intros where the band is playing something and there is no singing, but even those have to be skippable. The worst is when it’s a good song but it has one of those minute-long noise intros so you can’t add it to your gym list or whatever because you don’t want to listen to noise for minutes at a time while on the treadmill.
I don’t have the problem you describe with albums by Architects, Every Time I Die, Destroyer 666, Gama Bomb, Slayer, Municipal Waste, Airbourne, Blood Island Raiders, High On Fire, Lair Of The Minotaur, etc.
You get what you pay for. You wanna pay a bunch of whiny midwestern kids who spend more time on their makeup than on their riffs, yer gonna get some gimmicky craptacular music.
If you really dig the music and want to get rid of those intros you could always just edit them out. Even iTunes can be used to do it. Won’t help you any with listening to the CDs of course.
I don’t listen to much nu-metal, but the phenomenon you’re describing reminds me a lot of the ambient intro from Holy Diver, by Dio. Am I in the ballpark?
One of Suicidal Tendencies’ albums started out that way too. I still remember when they played it on the Phil Donahue Show (shut up, I’m getting old) as an example of the music kids today were listening to. You can picture the perplexed looks of the adults in the crowd listening to the noise emanating over the speaker. Of course they were just listening to the intro. :rolleyes:
It’s not a nu-metal thing. Jesus people, just because it’s metal from the last 5 years doesn’t make it nu-metal. Nu-metal has been dead for several years and regular metal has moved back towards solo’s and shredding again.
Mudvayne has one of the most technically proficient bass players of the last decade BTW, though they definitely have some shitty albums.
I’m sick of that noise shit, too. Today is the Day’s album Temple of the Morning Star has a really good Black Sabbath cover at the end, but it’s hidden after (seriously) 10 minutes of noise and feedback. Using noise or feedback as a brief effect can be cool but we don’t need too much of it. That can really turn me off to a song.
Yes, they are annoying. Ditto with hip hop’s “funny” skits. They are mildly annoying as a separate track, or at the end of a song, but at the beginning of a song as part of the same track, they can be really frustrating.
I doubt they’re going anywhere anytime soon, as there’s no way for the record companies to receive negative feedback. Every time a song with a noise intro does well and sells lots of records, they get a lot of positive reinforcement, but rarely does anybody not buy an album just because of intros, and if they do, how would it get back to the company that that is the reason an album was passed over?