Going nowhere ... musically
Today I decided to listen to a backlog of new release metal podcasts from one of my all-time favorite labels, MetalBlade. If the state of MB over the past several months is any indication, metal is going through a serious growth crisis, not unlike the late 80s ... where a shakeup is required to bring new influences into the genre
I don't know when it became cool that "cookiemonster" vox were the only way to "sing" (good God, this term could not be looser in meaning) in metal. At the end of the day, it's yelling, and it's hard to consider yelling musical. I find the indiscriminate use of CM vox to make many bands indistinguishable from one another, as well as sounding like they all fell out of the same cookie cutter, spam musubi maker, same production line.
The other thing I have noticed is that no one has really moved the ball forward. If I could classify most bands out there, I would apply the following categories of characteristics
1. CM vox
2. Slayer chunka-chunka riffs, with varying speed ... but it's biting RIB hard. Note that RIB is now 20 years old
3. The melodic bands seem to either be stuck somewhere around late 80s IronMaiden harmonies, and Metallica's 2nd, 3rd & maybe 4th albums. I don't really subscribe to the theory that Swedish DM moved the ball in the mid-90s, I think it is just rehashing IronMaiden and Metallica ideas with CM vox
4. Speed is fine but there's a point where again, it is not musical.
5. Shrieking makes it tough to understand what you are saying, even if you look like a Kmart halloween of badly applied black greasepaint and whiteface
5. The other thing is the use of arhythmic breaks. Unfortunately, I think this is the influence of nu-metal -- you can call its timing math metal, I call it crunchy, rhythmless crap.
All things considered, so-called indie metal right now is stale, stale, stale -- too bad, really.
So, it's back to the old warhorse bands, waiting for something to get me interested again in heavy music. Some of the recent releases of the warhorses have left much to be desired, treading over old territory, stupidly mocking new crap styles to seem relevant, or fundamentally changing sounds to be different
Maybe metal is dead to me ....