noodles wrote:
well, they did start off as a pop punk band that played NOFX covers so you might be right about Rody's vocals. saying they have no substance is kinda silly though since i haven't found any other bands where i can listen to their album roughly 40 times in the first two months since it came out and still not figure out what's going on in half the songs. if anything they have too much substance since they rarely go more than 30 secondsor a minute without dropping some awesome hook, but they never repeat the hooks so the first ten times i listened to Fortress it was overwhelming just how much was going on.
same thing with saying they have no emotion @Zad because of the end of "Sequoia Throne" doesn't make your soul explode with joy then you're probably a lifeless shell who shuold stick to listening to death metal.
and comparing Protest the Hero to Dragonforce to OV is pretty ridiculous because other than that all three play fast they're all doing different things from the other two (in OV's case, a completely different thing from Protest the Hero or Dragonforce). i don't see where that connection even comes from lol. judging things because of stylistic things like being technical or playing metalcore seems kind of shallow and lame to me. also Fortress has a ridiculous amount of awesome riffs, just listen to "The Dissentience" or "Bloodmeat" or either of the two instrumental sections on the album.
Question. When you say there you “haven’t found any other bands where I can listen to their album roughly 40 times in the first two months since it came out and still not figure out what’s going on in half the songs” are you over exaggerating in any shape or form. I took your advice on those three songs, The dissentience, Bloodmeat and Sequoia Throne. I opened each one up in a window on youtube and gave them each four or five listens. Even within the first two listens it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on and I often kept pausing and switching back in forth between songs around approximate time and comparing. Isolate the guitarist and the bassist in each song and you hear a similar formula in each song. Each song, with slight variations, seems to follow the initial structure of some kind of running scale or arpeggio, followed or preceded by some kind dull breakdown. I actually don’t find the riffs in Bloodmeat or The Dissentience to be catchy at all. In fact, I found them rather irritating in an atonal, repetitive kind of way. The drummer is unremarkable at best, absolutely nothing about the drumming really catches my interest.
When you say that there seems to be a lot going on, I honestly think that its production and speed have a lot to do with it. Production-wise you get a lot of vocal layering, which I wonder how it would replicate live. Also, while the vocalist alters between three distinct vocal styles, he is pretty monotonous and sounds off key in each one (at least most decent dm vocalists can growl on fucking key). To me his vocals don’t sound emotional at all. If you hear him in one song you’ve apparently heard him in every song.
Now I realise I was earlier talking about van Drunen’s vocals being very distinct, for example, but I think the problem for me here is that he sounds, to my ears, more like he’s caterwauling off key than adding anything productive to the music. What I liked about van Drunen’s vocal style is that, in the context of a WWII album that focuses on the German advance into hostile Russian territory during a harsh Russian winter is that his voice sounds like it reflects that kind of fatigue and despair a soldier in that situation would face. By the end of the album on the song Berlin with the verses “The war is over, it is done” etc. you pretty much get the feeling that the soldier is on the verge of collapse now that the tireless march is complete. His vocals fit the emotion one might expect from such a soldier. I have a very hard time hearing any sort of convincing emotion in the vocalist of Protest the Hero.
You mentioned the end of Sequoia Throne as an example of the emotional performance of the vocalist. I assume you mean 2:23 onward? If so, his vocal performance seems just about as convincing as your average backstreet boy trying to convince his audience of his heart break over losing some love or other by singing in what I’d describe as a rather infantile style native to every pretty boy singer since New Kids on the Block. To me that is a classic example of a pre-packaged commercial attempt at a “woe is me look at how deep I am” style. Back in grade 6 or 7 I remember my classmates used to listen to a band called Prozak and there was a song they’d play over and over in gym class, at lunch, not to mention it seemed to be on every radio station. I remember this because the vocalist had that same annoying, droning “woe is me I sound like a pre-pubescent child” style. Maybe if I were ever a fan of 90s pop music this would appeal to me in some way or other. However, that is not the case and I have always found that style utterly nauseating. The guitar work matches the vocalist's all too sugary performance with his own, and it really is something I’d expect from Dragonforce (some clips could easily be mistaken for Dragonforce, in fact).
I actually wouldn’t go as far as to say that Dragonforce and Protest the Hero are aiming for all too different goals. Some similarities would be their shared tendency to run scales at lightning speed, which makes them, to your average “guitar hero”, sound like there is a lot going on technically when in actuality it’s a pure smoke screen. There’s a lot of superficial layering going on that adds to the effect. I’m curious to hear about some of these hooks that you claim aren’t repeated elsewhere because to me it sounds like they keep reusing the same formula with occasional variation.
As for my comparison to Orthrelm’s OV, if you look at the context wherein I made the comparison you’ll notice that it is referring to the repetitive nature of the riffs. I used of as an excessive example. I agree that Orthrelm are trying to achieve something quite different, but there is some similarity to be recognized.
In contrast to Protest the Hero, I think a band like Sleep Terror (off Probing Tranquility not their newer non-instrumental songs) is an example of a band that actually does employ interesting use of odd time signatures, shifts, stylistic variations and creative transitions that, despite their erratic nature, fit and blend well into each other without trying to mask whatever repetition there is with smoke screens. Though I’d say that Sleep Terror do get repetitive after a while and there’s definitive formula(s) to be found there, too, Jaeger’s work is at least an example of a band that genuinely does employ interesting theoretical techniques.
When it comes to Protest the Hero and bands of their ilk, while I may not enjoy the metalcore style musically speaking and, thusly, admittedly biased, what gets me even more is that they put up a façade of technical complexity that is easily exposed once you isolate their songs into their three or four basic sections as well as the respective instruments. The dishonesty of it is what gets me most (other than the sugary music that is). There's nothing inherently wrong with repetition, and some times it can work well in portraying a kind of cohesion in an album, but at least be honest about it.
Also, I think to make such a comment as “same thing with saying they have no emotion @Zad because of the end of "Sequoia Throne" doesn't make your soul explode with joy then you're probably a lifeless shell who shuold stick to listening to death metal” is a pretty ignorant one to make, but I've already rambled on for long enough.
Edit, wrote this up quickly and there seemed to be some weird spots...its late, too many energy drinks, I apologise.
Actually, the thing is that what I like about this site is that the reviewers are not elitist, and that a lot (all?) of the metal genres are covered. Also at the same time there is hatred for shit like nu metal, St. Anger and most metalcore.
