Kobal2, what’s your thoughts on Finnish melodic metal?
Symphonic metal, power metal and speed really ain’t my thing, but when it comes to Finnish and some Swedish stuff there’s an undeniable (IMO) quality I can’t resist: Above all else it’s fun! No amount over-elaborate guitar work and wanky synthesizer seems to counteract that when it comes to a lot of Finnish metal.
I’ll also admit to Finntroll (more folk metal than anything else) being one of my favorite bands ever.
NAF: One more thing, I recommended Windir earlier in the thread. Now you might appreciate it more than when you begun this. If you listen to it, have high volume, keep glaziers, snow covered forests and freezing mountains in mind, and you might get it. Both Arntor and 1184 are great albums.
This band swept norway off it’s feet, by the way. Instant hit. After the main guy died they remade Windir into Vreid. I don’t like it, but that band also went off the walls on the charts.
Thanks for the suggestion. It also reminds me that I have been ignoring Black Metal and that I might be able to appreciate Black Metal on the whole more now than the last time I tried. It is probably time to get back to it.
I was reading somewhere that the drums in black metal, which were giving me so much trouble, were supposed to create almost a solid ocean of sound that everything else floated on top of. I’m not sure I was viewing them that way before. They decidedly didn’t come across that way. But maybe that was the change in perspective I needed. Won’t know till I try. I’ll make this coming week a black metal week and see how things go.
Edit: I also gave Finntroll a proper listen a couple of weeks ago and they are fun in a very weird silly way. Again, didn’t hear it at all when you first suggested them, so familiarity with the genre is helping.
Love it ! **Nightwish **are Finns, and yeah **Finntroll **is good fun as far as folk metal goes - it’s not really my jam in the sense that I probably wouldn’t listen to it for a full road trip ; but I always smile when it comes up in my random playlist. Bran Barr is another good (although completely different - celtic- rather than hummpa-based) folk metal band. Speaking of celtic folk metal, **Cruachan **I like less, but they have a lot of fans
Then you’ve got Children of Bodom which is melodic death metal and also really fucking good. I don’t think I know any other band who does what they do - death metal tends to be too metal for me to listen to for very long. Not so with **Children **for some reason, even though nobody would accuse them of softness :). Well, maybe for the wanky synthetizer part :o. But they’re just so *good *!
Yeah, Children of Bodom is what I’m talking about! Hatebreeder is a great album I think.
Finntroll is the only band I’ve heard that managed to tastefully incorporate joik (traditional sami singing) into metal. And jaw harp!
I had a demo of Cruachan, I liked it quite a bit. Haven’t liked anything else I’ve heard of them though. Props for having a pretty cool vocalist.
I wanna add this song to your playlist, NAF: Enslaved - Vetrarnótt
Perfectly illustrates the atmosphere I mentioned earlier.
Megadeth - Peace sells, rust in piece, so far…so good…so what. all masterpieces, cant go wrong.
I listened to this out of curiosity (disclaimer: I’m old). It would have appealed to me more if it had been shorter. There seemed to be a prodigious amount of repetition. I guess there’s a risk of that in any ten minute song, though.It’s definitely not in the “I don’t see how anybody can listen to this” category.
Oh, I liked this. Finally the drums make sense in this. I was listening to Emperor In the Nightside Eclipse today and the drums made sense there too, but they did that mostly, it seemed, by toning down the aggressive drumming. Enslaved don’t do that, they just figure out how to make the aggressive drums work. The vocals don’t but that’s starting to bug me less and less just generally. I’ll post more about Emperor later. I’m going to listen to them some more and a couple other black metal bands over the next couple of days. See if I can’t get things to click. I have Enslaved’s album Isa on my list but wasn’t planning on listening to it this week, but now maybe I will. Also Dark throne Transylvania Hunger (I’m moving on from A Blaze in the Northern Sky) and Khold (don’t remember what album) something else too that escapes me at the moment. I’ll post about all of them this weekend.
Good stuff. Thanks.
One thing that I have seemed to notice about Black metal, it’s WAY better on headphones than in the car. Death Metal and Thrash, not much difference between how I listen… Maybe even a little bit better in the car? But Black Metal decidedly loses something when it’s not in headphones anymore.
Do you have any album suggestions for Brian Barr, Curachan or Children of Bodom? I’ll add them to my (now quite long) playlist. They sound like they are worth checking out. I’m thinking next week maybe I’ll go for the powerful melodic/symphonic stuff you suggested (though I have to warn you, I’m iffy on Nightwish already but it’s all worth a fair shake.)
Glad you like it! The album is hit and miss for me, but I really like the first and the second track. Enslaved is more of a folkish/viking black metal band, but it gets more pronounced in later albums. Isa is very different, but there are good songs in there. The title track is great. Of the albums in between Vikinglir Veldi and Isa, I’ve only owned Eld and Mardraum and I love both.
Your last paragraph reminds me of before I got studio monitors: I would run around testing my mixes on different headphones, car stereo’s and home stereo’s, low end and cheap, to try to find a point where it kinda worked on all systems. What a hassle…
It is definitely on the long side with lots of repetition, and I think that’s deliberate. It plays into the ‘getting lost in a blizzard’ atmosphere many black metal bands were going for. This songs title translates to Winter Night.
Just to clarify: Isa is different, in that it’s a marked divergence in sound and song structure for the band. The songs are shorter and contain many more shifts in dynamics and rhythm. Instead of a solid wall of sound with some breaks in between, they move onto a more progressive approach to their music.
Some black metal that I like:
Abbath - Winterbane - kick-ass song from former Immortal frontman
Nekrodelirium - Grief - I think I remember reading earlier this year that Sandra Stensen joined another band but I can’t remember which one
Nekrodelirium - Distorted Device
Frantic Amber - Ghost - more like blackened death metal but hey; Sandra Stensen’s former band
Frantic Amber - Burning Insight
Absu - Earth Ripper - okay, blackened thrash; sue me :rolleyes:
In all of those songs, I notice a lot more willingness to allow dynamics, rhythmic shift and chord changes than in black metal that I don’t like. Kvlt stuff like Leviathan and Xasthur is just too static (unchanging) and too dense for my tastes.
To some degree I think that artists are now coming along that are incorporating the cool things about black metal with other genres and/or seeing other influences creep into new black metal. For instance, the very palatable arena rock/guitar wizard/black metal concoction:
Rebel Wizard - Drunk on the wizdom of unicorn semen
Rebel Wizard - The poor and ridiculous alchemy of Christ and Lucifer and us all
I think the penny might have dropped for me on Black Metal.
I was listening to Satyricon: Dark Medieval Times and I realized… This is basically an evil sounding version of Brian Eno. I don’t know that this is intentional on their part or not, but it made things kind of make sense I think.
Enjoying Satyricon quite a bit. It feels like something I might only like when I’m in the right mood, but it makes for nice background music in the right circumstances.
I like Opeth. If you want a harder album, go with Deliverance. Damnation and Deliverance were a pair of albums that were written/recorded at the same time. Damnation was a mellower, proggier album, while Deliverance was a heavier album. I like the Damnation side of things (Damnation and Deliverance are my favorites of theirs), but it sounds like Deliverance may be up your alley. (Though the album is still a bunch of 12 minute mini-epics.)
Good times ahead: High on fire is coming to Oslo in a couple of weeks! A week after Melvins will return! Then Godflesh!
Ooh. I found another band I like that hasn’t been mentioned. I started poking around in Black Metal stuff based on what I was digging about the Norwegian scene and came across the “band” (it’s one guy) called Panopticon. The album Road to the North is what Allmusic.com suggested so it’s what I listened to. This is awesome! It’s kinda like the grander slow dark stuff that is going on in some of the doom and black metal bands I have dug, layered on top of just insane aggressive drums and guitars, and then there is kind of a quasi death metal vocal, but buried in the mix like a black metal vocal, and sometimes there is bluegrass music and mandolins. It’s nuts. Really really good. It’s listed as “American Black Metal” but feels sorta like it’s coming from a similar place as a lot of prog death metal. But what do I know.
You guys know them?
Bran Barr is a tiny band that only ever put out two albums, and I haven’t listened to their new one, so that one’s easy : Les Chroniques de Naerg. For** Children of Bodom**, *Hatebreeder *and *Follow the Reaper *are my personal favorites. Can’t help with **Cruachan **much however, as I only know a handful of tracks.
Oh, and for **Nightwish **since you’re coming down from black metal you might like to kick off with *Oceanborn. *While I prefer *Wishmaster *or Century Child, *Oceanborn *is a bit more black metal-y sounding, with blast beats and growls and such on some tracks. Could make the transition easier ? I 'unno :o.
Anyone wanna tackle nü metal next ? 
NAF - especially on first listen you’ll find this shit too herky-jerky and fucked up, but I’ll throw some Dillinger Escape Plan at ya anyway, if you’re looking for a change-up. Some call it math metal, with different parts and time signature changes coming out the yin-yang.
Metal purists like John McEntee (Incantation) have gone on record for absolutely lambasting this band as basically being too flashy, which I’d agree, to an extent, but it’s also for that same reason is what makes it a pleasure to see them actually pull this shit off, live. Jumping and flailing about the stage, they’ll suddenly just stop on a dime, then boom back to more razor-sharp, controlled chaos.
So if it’s a struggle to listen to them, just imagine them actually replicating this shit onstage.
Jeebus hell, no.
Still sorting through the Black Metal scene. Finding Panopticon made me realize there is apperantly a whole wave of American Black Metal that is being made right now.
I think in general I prefer the Atmospheric and folk infused Black Metal. I still can’t quite get into Dark Throne, but Emperor has been awesome and I’m really digging Enslaved too. There is a band called Wolves in The Throne Room which seem to have been slapped with a hipster metal label, but they seem pretty cool to me.
I… I suspect that I would actually like Burzum a lot based on the snippets that I have heard, but after reading a lot about the Black Metal scene I don’t think I want to support that guy even with Spotify streams. He’s a bad guy. I actually find a lot of stuff about the early black metal scene to be somewhat disheartening. I watched the documentary Until the Light Takes us and was pretty disappointed to see Hellhammer from Mayhem praising Faust (summer of Emperor?) for maybe having killed a gay guy? So… Yeah.
I’m sort of afraid to find out that the guy behind Panopticon is actually a neo nazi or something, but as it stands right now I think this is my favorite Black Metal song I have listened to so far.
But I do think it clicked for me. I went back and listened to some of the early Mayhem and even Bathory and it sounded a lot less inaccessible.
I think the melodic/symphonic stuff recommended is going to be up next. I could use a change of pace.