The Playlist of Life --- Trollheart's resurrected Journal

Trollheart · 10-29-2015, 06:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland

It's not an avant-garde album, it's an avant-garde metal album. Do you think if someone else recommended it, you would come to the same conclusion? The metal on that album is pretty undeniable from my perspective, but maybe it's the jazz elements throwing you off (yes, there can be both!) Remember, metal can vary quite a bit

Avant-garde metal bands generally have a sound that differs from whatever else you'd hear in the metal world while holding on to a metal vocabulary. If they didn't, they wouldn't be called avant-garde.

Lastly, the only track with guitar on it is Chthonian. The rest are just saxophonist Luca T. Mai playing his horn through effects with Pupillo on the bass and Battaglia on drums (ok and occasionally Patton hops on).

Anyway, that was pretty much the reaction I expected, but I thought I'd be seeing some green interspersed throughout there though. I'm a little confused on how you're reviewing these though, I didn't know that you would be rating them based off of how metal you thought they were, but rather that you'd do it by how good you thought the music would be.

Yeah it's all a rich tapestry I know.
I'm not rating them on how metal they are, just to my mind an album needs to sound metal for me to be able to recognise it as such. I realise I have a very slippery handle on avant-garde anything, especially metal, so chalk that up to my inexperience with the subgenre. My main gripe with it though was just that I found it dull and boring. I mean, Gorguts was, to me, terrible, but not boring. This was. It's just how I perceived it, how it came across to me, and obviously millions out there think differently, so it's only one owl fella's opinion.

I do however try to be as genuine and honest as I can when reviewing, and if something really impresses me which I didn't expect it would (see Sigh last year) I make a point of admitting how wrong I was about it. If, however, something I expect to perhaps impress me does the reverse (see Necrophagia just now) then I also mention that. I'm open to being impressed, just sometimes these albums don't chime with me for whatever reason. Batty likes your Zu, so I'm sure it's widely respected and regarded as a great avant-garde metal album. I'm not disputing that (the comments at the end were couched in an attempt at your kind of dry humour, may have backfired) but even so, I will never pretend I like an album, even if every other person on the planet loves it. So I give my opinion, it's my own personal one, doesn't necessarily reflect the views of others, and at least the one thing you can be sure of with me is honesty; good or bad, I won't pretend.

Also, that review was written I think in September so the discussion we had had about your other albums, Gorguts in particular, didn't really have any bearing on the review, and as time is precious to me now as I rush to complete Metal Month III, I just posted it as I had originally written it. Had I reviewed it this week, perhaps I would have had a different view of it, slightly.

But probably not.

Anyway, green shoots? If I can say good things about Anaal Nathrakh, which Batty expected me to hate, then surely I'm making some sort of progress?