With my posting schedule having dwindled down to nothing, I am always amazed when I check the site mail and find that there are still people reading, and that they still care to send me email. What is more surprising is the topic that is generating that email: Music.
I don’t know a damn thing about music. Sure I can play the guitar (not as good as I could back when I practiced for hours on end every day, but I still have the gear just in case I get the call from Metallica..), but my musical tastes are, at best, questionable. The Dungeon Metal that I wrote about in the last post, and one some time earlier, generated more feedback than anything I have written here that wasn’t poker related. There are two possibilities here: 1) There are a lot more people who like this type of music than I had ever thought. 2) There are only a few people who like this type of music, so few that they found my site because there are no other sites talking about it. While I refuse to believe the latter -can anyone seriously be coming to my site for actual information?- it is almost as difficult to believe the former.
Spending in excess of two hours in a car every day really gives me the opportunity to listen to a lot of music. The first few weeks I just listened to cds, but after I had worn out just about everything in my collection, the wife added me to her Sirius Radio account. There are dozens of stations on there dedicated to Rock, and many different types of it. I am partial to Octane, which plays mostly new Metal, mixed in with some classic Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and the such, but when a band that I don’t care for comes on (System of a Down, for instance) I venture to other stations. Mostly Hair Nation (big hair bands rock!) and Hard Attack. I can’t listen to either of those stations for long though; I hate the growling, cookie-monster-esque voices of most of the bands on Hard Attack, and one can only take about so much Bon Jovi. During those times when I am listening, however, I do occasionally hear a band that I like, that I had never heard of previously. And since I had to listen to hours of mediocre crap to get to these few shining gems, I am really doing you a service by pointing them out here.
A lot of the times when I do hear a band that I like, it never merits a post here. Some of the bands, Forced Entry and Dark Angel come immediately to mind, are bands that I should have heard back in the early 90s, but for some reason missed. Since they aren’t putting out albums anymore, I don’t see a reason to tell anyone about them. The ones I put up here are currently putting out music, or at least currently enough that they have an album released within the last year or so. The one that I discovered today though has about 30 cds in the last 10 years, how the hell had I never heard of Nightwish?
These guys are like the Dungeon Metal I love so much, but take it to another level. The music is really fast, the beats are awesome, you can certainly bang your head to it… But, and I am sure I am going to lose some of you here, there is actual singing. I am not talking about a gruff sounding man barking out lyrics, or words for the sake not being an instrumental, I am talking about full-on, almost operatic singing. Looking for an example on Youtube, I found this version of Kinslayer(which is laid over clips from Silent Hill, and looks pretty good IMHO).
I understand that this isn’t the music for everyone, but if you have listened to any of the other Dungeon Metal I have posted and enjoyed it even a little bit, and if you haven’t heard any Nightwish, go listen now. You won’t be disappointed.