Re: This first sentence of this song describes mapz atm.
We are experiencing a lull lately, aren't we?
The old threads are still active, but we don't have enough new content of massive stupidity.
I can't even start a thread based on this 'cause we already did a ghost town thread forever ago. There was something I read the other day though where stuff reappeared in Tex-ass 'cause of the drought, like old buildings and graves and shit that was flooded from dams in reservoirs that have dried up and the like.
Also, Dark Tranquillity had some great song titles. Format C: For Cortex. And I really like Haven as a record. This will probably get me crucified by people who like normal metal. It's one of the few non-classic metal whatnots I still own a physical copy of. It's a pretty great piece of work. If metal was still as creative as it was say 10-15 years ago I would listen to a lot more of it? Once those guys (DT) started getting into synths and effects the way they incorporated them into their work was masterful. They are good songwriters and they incorporated the electronic elements very, very well. It sounds natural with them, it's not an obvious effect or something tossed in to be experimental; when they mellow out for a section of a song that is their sound- and it's way cooler for them to turn into Depeche Mode fronted by Rob Zombie* for sixteen bars than to just hit some clean chorused arpeggiated thing. I respect their anti-metal metalness.
*-Mikael Stanne is singing and hitting real notes in that voice on some of this stuff, the aforementioned Haven record being a good example. Which is cool as hell. Far from a monotone growler. There are discernible melodies there even in full-on DM voice. 'S funny, when he sings normally (which points for not doing a whole ton of though he can) his tone/timbre reminds me of the guy from Barenaked Ladies.
I've always liked them as they're a metal band that isn't just into their own subgenre. Metal can be such a recursive thing and that just kills it, in the not cool way of actually killing it.
Used to listen to those guys a lot circa late '90s-early-'00s when the stuff coming out on Century, Relapse and Nuclear Blast had really clever songwriting and incorporated lots of outside elements- progressive rock, electronica, goth and industrial, etc.- and that's around the time the production values for underground metal started going way up. So all of these really neat records were coming out that sounded like a million bucks. But I digress.
