Do you like fusion-metal band Cynic? Are you eagerly counting down the days until they release Kindly Bent to Free Us in February? Is the wait until Valentine's Day just too goddamn long for you? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then today's band might just be the methadone to keep you going until you can mainline some more sweet, sweet Cynic.
Said band, Exist, even have a Cynic-al connection: frontman Max Phelps is a member of Cynic's current live line-up, as well as being the frontman for the current line-up of Death to All, the Chuck Schuldiner-tribute group organized by Death-alums and Cynic prog-nerds Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert.
What all of this six degrees of separation stuff means for you is that Exist displays a lot of the same jazzy-sounding prog-metal goodness that can be found in Cynic's more recent work, making Exist a pretty tasty way to make it through the next couple of months. Have a listen to "Self-Inflicted Disguise" from Exist's debut LP Sunlight and see if it'll scratch that fusion itch for you.
Oh, Canada! If any of you were disappointed or dismayed by the decidedly non-metal nature of yesterday's song, I've got just the remedy for you today, and even better, it comes courtesy of some fellow Canucks.
I'm just discovering Victoria's Fall in Archaea, but apparently they've been honing their sound for a couple of years now and are finally ready to release their debut LP Aura Magenta on Christmas Eve. With feet firmly planted in the realms of both djenty chugga chugga and new-school tech-core, they run the risk of being lost amid the din of similar bands, but Fall in Archaea display just the right flashes of melody to catch my attention.
Your song this evening is "Armistice", the recently released first single off of Aura Magenta, and it's chock full of enough groove to get your head bopping and enough strange, slinky guitar acrobatics to convince you that the end of the world is indeed at hand. Give it a whirl and show Canada you care.
When I started writing this blog, it was with the intention of writing more or less exclusively about metal. Now, I listen to a lot of metal and heavy music, but it quickly became apparent to me that so much of what I'm into falls under some other heading. It has since become my mandate simply to write about interesting music, heavy or not. I'll listen to music from virtually any genre, as long as it's not boring. Or country. Fuck country music.
With the thirst for interesting music in mind, I present you with this little gem I stumbled across a couple of days ago, a song called "What the Waves Brought" by an Armenian jazz pianist named Tigran Hamasyan. Regular readers will know that I like a bit of jazziness now and again, but this song has elements that should appeal to even the stanchest of metalheads: complexity, technical proficiency, a balance between consonance and dissonance, energy, dynamic "riffs" (licks? what do you call them on piano?)
I'm featuring this live version of this song from a performance on KUTX because I dig the vocal touches Tigran puts in, spilling over in beat-box territory towards the end, but even the album version (from Tigran's 2011 album A Fable) is plenty worth of a day in the spotlight. And if you're still not sold on the whole jazz piano thing, consider this: how badass would a metal cover of this song be?
In addition to being aware of my love for physical media, regular readers will likely also have picked up on my penchant for preordering. Whether it's in the form of an Indiegogo campaign or just a straight preorder, I enjoy knowing ahead of time that the album I'm looking forward to has already been paid for and will arrive at my door without any further action required on my part.
The only downside is that stuff can sometimes take a while to arrive in the post, and although lots of bands are now mitigating this problem by issuing digital download codes on release day for fans who've purchased physical version of albums, I'm still a little old school in my desire to wait for my copy to arrive before I really sit down with a release. Sure, I'll stream or download on release day to keep up with the Joneses of music journalism, but it's only when I get my grubby mitts on a disc that I really delve into the material.
For this reason, I was pleasantly surprised to find my copy of Mandroid Echostar's new EP in my mailbox earlier this week. For the unfamiliar, Mandroid is a techy Canadian band from Guelph that I've seen best described as sounding a little like Protest the Hero meets Coheed and Cambria. Their self-titled debut EP was pretty solid, and their new disc Citadels is more of the same: some really cool melodies spread across the soaring vocals and intricate guitar work and backed up by some tight and tasteful drumming.
I almost want to go with "Ancient Arrows" as your song today, simply because the intro-y riff strikes me as the best Avenged Sevenfold lick Avenged never wrote, but I think I'm going to settle on "The Sleeper. For a guitar guy like me, this one's loaded: there's some fat riffage, some very video game-inspired tapping that opens and closes the song, and even a sweet little bluesy-sounding solo too.
One problem/blessing in disguise? All I can find on Youtube is a stream of the whole EP, so you'll just have to ingest the whole thing, paying special attention to track five. Or just skip ahead to "The Sleeper". Either way, check these guys out pronto, and while you're at it check out the e-mail interview I did with Mandroid's singer Michael Ciccia back in the spring.
I mentioned playing some Metallica back in the day in yesterday's big mega-post, and today we're going to go with another song we really used to dig when I was an undergrad.
Your song today is "Confined" from As I Lay Dying's 2005 disc Shadows Are Security, a pretty solid metalcore song if you ask me. I've discovered a lot of new music since this album came out, especially since I started writing this blog, much of which has taken me beyond the rather limiting metalcore formula of As I Lay Dying. But I can't deny them their place in my musical history, and I won't deny that there are a bunch of As I Lay Dying songs that I still enjoy, like "Confined". So hate on, haters, while I and anyone who cares to join me will be rocking out like it's eight to ten years ago.
At the risk of sounding like I'm making excuses (which I suppose I am... shut up...) I'm going to lay a good chunk of the blame for my apparent inability to keep to a schedule lately on my early morning starts at work. My normal day starts at five in the morning, and the combination of that ungodly hour and an average of probably only five or six solid hours of sleep beforehand, on a regular basis, is that, unless I catch up with naps or keep myself well-caffeinated, by the end of the week I often end up falling asleep well before I mean to, and before I've gotten all of the day's shit done.
But, to paraphrase the words of House Lannister, "a bearded man always pays his debts", so once again you're getting a hat-trick post today (that's three goals in a single game, for you non-hockey types out there), covering Saturday, Sunday, and today all in one shot. So let's get started.
For your Saturday song, I'm going to need you to close your eyes and picture the following: old-school prog-influenced death metal (think old Opethy kinda stuff) filtered through the lens of a band like Baroness, if Baroness drew its melodic sensibilities and plaintive passages more from straight forward rock and less from countrified bluegrass. Now open your eyes, and find that you're gazing at the totally badass album art for Cormorant's 2011 disc Dwellings. There's a good chance you don't know these guys, but you should, especially if the word picture I painted you above sounded at all flavourful to you. A caveat, however: only two of the seven tracks on Dwellings clock in at less than five minutes long, so first time listeners are in for some attrition. But if you give Cormorant a chance, songs like "Funambulist" will take you for a ride.
Next up, Sunday, and I'm going to do the unthinkable and take a single track out of the context of its "greater than the sum of its parts" album. You know the kind of album I'm talking about, even if I'm not doing the best job of articulating it right now: those magical records that work perfectly as a single piece of music rather than merely a collection of separate songs. Sure, those songs are good, but put 'em together and you've got a real slice of fried gold on your hands. Such is the case with "Quittance" from the debut LP Februus by Uneven Structure, a cool tune in its own right but also a piece of a much more awesome whole. Listen to "Quittance", but by all means listen to Februus from start to finish if you haven't already. Djent has become kind of a bad word, but Uneven Structure will show you one example of how powerful that kind of a sound can be.
And for today, Monday, we're going to do a bit of a throwback to how I used to run Mondays around here with a Metallica Monday.In particular I'm picking "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", an old favourite of mine from way back when I was in high school and we used to attempt a few Metallica covers when jamming. Between us, we knew all the obvious ones, but we also liked to dust off this lesser-known (or lesser-liked, anyways) cut from 88's Master of Puppets, so I encourage you to dust it off too.
Whew. Caught up. Again. Meet you back here tomorrow? Deal!
I know you must have missed me desperately over the last couple of days, so as usual you're getting a a triple shot today to make up for it, whether you want it or not.
First, something a little mellower. I'm not a huge fan of techno/electronica-type music, but there is some bloopy stuff I enjoy. How convenient for me that one of my favourite bands has at least one cool song in this vein (and virtually every other vein besides). That song is "Digital Sea" from the Water portion of Thrice's 2007 album The Alchemy Index: Vols. 1-2, and it's also your song for yesterday.
Next up, we're going a little more aggro with one of my favourite Deftones songs. Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan were both really good records, but when it comes to the Deftones, White Pony still holds the crown in my book. And if we're talking White Pony, we need to be talking "Knife Party", if only for the spine-tingling vocal cameo by Rodleen Getsic near the end of the song. Her performance gives the song a particularly haunting quality that has stuck with me since I was in high school.
Finally, for your Friday song, we'll sample something heavier still. Specifically, we're going with "We Are the Nightmare" which is both the title track to Arsis' 2008 album as well as the opening one. This is the first song I ever heard by Arsis, and I was instantly intrigued. Tasty tech-death with a pretty keen sense of melody? Yes please. Their stuff since this album has been equally technically brilliant, but for me has failed to rebottle the lightning of We Are the Nightmare. If you're into this kind of thing, you should definitely give this album a spin.
