aesmael

Whenever I listen to it I almost always conclude I like metal better without the singing (my recurring joke is “The intro was great, they should make a whole song of that.”). Which, in fact, was a lot of what put me off even trying it for so long - the stereotype of a bunch of men shouting into a microphone so hoarsely as to be incomprehensible.

Maybe what I really want that often my experience of metal almost gives is ‘chamber music for rock band’. This might sound like I dislike metal as musical genre / set of genres but so far I have liked a fair chunk of what I have tried [1]. What I am realising at the moment is that a lot of the more melodic(?) strains of metal come across to me as more… musically dense(?) than a lot of the rock music I listen to. So I am possibly responding to it more as if I were listening to art music than to pop music, and then from that perspective lyrics, especially performed harshly, will interfere with what I am trying to get out of it [2].

So I feel like I understand a bit better what I think of metal now.

But sometimes vocals make a pleasing line too. As I write this am trying out the album Paradise Lost by Symphony X and enjoying it a great deal. Assuming nothing happens to change my mind, I should add their name to a list and eventually go buy their albums.

[1] So far what suits me best is the region where it crosses over into drone music. Sun O))) does exceedingly pleasant things to me.

[2] Possibly for similar reasons I am not in the habit of enjoying opera, possibly not.