Like many people, I go through phases with the type of music I'm in the mood to listen to. Sometimes I'll go weeks or even a couple months without ever playing a metal song because I'm just listening to old jazz records or outlaw country or Tchaikovsky symphonies. Even when I'm on the mood for metal, the sub-genre I want to hear will go through phases too. Death, black, folk/viking, and doom are the most common of these. As the title of this post plainly states, right now it's doom.
I'll be writing another new guest review for Full Metal Attorney soon, but beyond that I haven't picked up anything brand new that I'm terribly interested in reviewing, so instead I'm going to talk a little bit about my recent listening.
The one find in particular that I've enjoyed, though I've just been playing some of the tracks on YouTube so I haven't heard it all yet, is last November's release by Esoteric. I'd never listened to them previously, and I have to say that I've been pleasantly surprised. Looking at the their past album reviews on Metal-Archives reminds me of looking at The Chasm's discography. They have a few reviews on every album, and they're pretty much all stellar. If their entire catalog sounds like this, then I can understand why. This record has the blend of slow heaviness and haunting beauty that I was really hoping to hear in the new Swallow the Sun record. To any fan of death-doom who isn't familiar with these guys, I'd strongly recommend giving them a listen. That's especially true if the slower groups with soft, pretty sections like Opeth also appeal to you.
This isn't really a review, because A) I'm just not in the mood to write an actual review, and B) I'm trying at this point to stick to albums released this year for "formal" reviews. Due to that, I'm not going to go into great detail about the sonic elements of the record beyond what I've already said, nor am I going to give it a rating.
In other news, I was excited recently to hear that South Park was renewed for another 5 seasons. That will run them up to 20 in total, and I'm just hoping that they can maintain their current quality of output.
[EDIT: It may or may not have come through here, but I was about 75% of the way asleep when I wrote this. So if it seems a little spaced out, that's because it is.]
Esoteric is indeed awesome. I picked up that album but haven't had a chance to listen yet, although I have listened to The Maniacal Vale. Doom has been the longest kick I've gone through--I've been on a doom kick for something like a year and a half now. At some point it's not a kick anymore, I guess. Although I think a part of me wants to explore industrial metal some more.
ReplyDeleteI used to be into Tchaikovsky until I was introduced to the work of Arnold Schoenberg (or Schönberg). Beginning around the late 1920's he started using his unique twelve-tone technique, which involves using each note of the chromatic scale in a melody and then experimenting with that melody. It's just so weird, it's awesome. I've also listened to a couple of his students, like Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
Then there's also Xenakis and Respighi (not related to Schoenberg or the twelve-tone technique), whom I mentioned in my metal classical article last year.