Album that changed my life:
"Black Seeds of Vengeance" by Nile
As you may have noticed with Obituary and Bloodbath being my two most recent album posts, at this point in my musical journey I was starting to explore distinctly heavier music. It was at around this point that I entered that phase (which I think most budding metal heads have at some point) where I began to consciously look for the heaviest music I could find. Queries both online and in music stores turned up several names, but the two most common seemed to be Nile and Cryptopsy. Armed with this information, I took to the record store and came home with Nile's "Black Seeds of Vengeance" and Cryptopsy's "Once Was Not". Aside from Flo Mounier's amazing drum work I was fairly unimpressed with my early taste of Cryptopsy, but Nile really struck a chord with me. Not only was it probably the heaviest thing I'd heard up to that point, it also primed me for my later love of folk metal by bringing in all manner of unconventional instrumentation to add atmosphere to the tracks. Additionally, Karl Sanders set the new standard in my mind for deep, monstrous death vocals (which stood until I heard Craig Pillard with Incantation). This is still my favorite Nile album, and the overall impact it had on my musical direction was strange. Despite being very heavy, it actually did a lot to turn me away from just seeking brutality in music. Tracks like "To Dream of Ur" showed me a grand, slow, atmospheric side of metal that would guide me in a new direction as I continued my journey.
That's an interesting observation about how looking for one thing led you to start looking for something else. For years I was trying to find someone else who sounded like Meshuggah, and that led me down a number of paths over the years trying to figure out what their essential Meshuggah-ness is. I never found it, but I did find a lot of things in the process, like technical death in the form of Necrophagist, Suffocation, and indeed Nile, as well as other Swedish stuff.
ReplyDeleteThat right there is a pretty good catalog of finds. It's funny sometimes the unexpected results of just poking around.
ReplyDeleteFunny thing is, now that there is a whole genre that "sounds like Meshuggah" (in a cold, scientific way), i.e., djent, it actually sucks.
ReplyDeleteHuh, I'm not familiar with the term.
ReplyDeleteSearch it on my blog.
ReplyDeleteI pretty much avoid the whole djent scene. I'm not a big fan of recent Meshuggah material myself and most copycat bands really are not that good.
ReplyDelete