Ideas to Revitalize Modern Metal?

Almost been done. It's called a baritone guitar. ESP started marketing models to the metal crowd a few years ago with what you're suggesting specifically in mind. Didn't help most of the bands that use them although the idea is good. Poor execution and lack of inspiration isn't much covered up by down-tuning.

ZZ Top, on the other hand, downtuned about six steps for "Mescalero." That record's a lot better and heavier sounding than many black/doom/death metal CDs even though it's still only blooz rock and roll.

Tuvan Throat Singing. Good joke, would take some work, though, and get beaten to death in less than six months.

MORE COWBELL!

Naah, the electronic hasn't even been begun. White Zombie use samples of traditional rock instruments (technically almost everyone these days does, if cut-'n-paste digital editing counts as sampling).There have been numerous pastiche/hybrids, but nothing close to a complete electronic approach, ie no guitars or guitar samples. I wasn't in a position to say this last year, but I've spent 12 months trying to find it and it isn't there. The closest was Aborym, but too cluttered and hybridized (a bit of techno, a bit of gabba, a bit of rock, black metal, and the kitchen sink) and still lots of guitar. Suicide were on the right track but no-one's taken the ball and run with it. It has to happen though.

I think it's possible to be too literal. I made this point in a previous rather interminable discussion of this matter, but we are not talking about stylistic hybrids. We are talking about an electronic/synthetic overhaul of rock, just as techno was an electronic/synthetic overhaul of disco(etc). Finding isolated examples here and there of artists who almost do it is not really to the point - thousands of artists could be doing it. I am very sorry for example that Judas Priest were scared off this direction after 'Turbo'. Just because they were over commercial in their songwriting on this one doesn't mean they couldn't have kept the synthetics and gone less commercial.

What Kiss records? Odds are that could be a real disaster.

MORE NIGHTWISH

Also, the Tuvan throat singer idea wasn't a joke. I'm deadly serious.
because a) it really does rock, and b) I've really gotten sick of the cookie monster vocal. (Century Media Burnout Disorder, man.)

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Will you allow distortion though? Because as soon as you start adding a lot of distortion to synths they pretty much sound like distorted guitars anyway. And I hate to say this but ... Nine Inch Nails? Plus you say thousands of bands should be doing it but when are there ever thousands of bands doing one thing well? Have there even been a hundred Sabbath-y bands on record? Are there even 10 worth mentioning?

I say the best way to revitalize metal is to write better songs. I guess that could be said about most genres though.

Now you're just being a wishful thinker.

Go directly to Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

-- walter kranz

You are right about that. That's pretty much the bottom line, qualifying everything else. However, right now, I would rather hear good songs with synths than good songs with guitars. Why? Because they will have the stamp of the monomaniacal home recording obsessive, whereas what comes out of the studios these days in the name of traditional metal is mostly bland, retro and overproduced. It's sounding really old fashioned and fondly nostalgic pretty much across the board.

Will you allow distortion though? Because as soon as you start adding a lot of distortion to synths they pretty much sound like distorted guitars anyway.

I sure would, walter - in fact I do. I would use all kinds of effects and distortion. Does the result sound like guitars? Well, yes and no. It hits the sweet spot in your brain that distorted guitars hit, so yes - but there are far fewer possibilities for subtlety and nuance in playing, so the result is colder and more monolithic. It favours the simplistic, chugga chugga approach of a band that doesn't go too much for tricky guitar work - say Motorhead or The Ramones, or even Darkthrone, rather than Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Again, the best metaphor I can think of is that it does for rock what house did for disco (which was not what disco with a few synths here and there did for disco - not the difference between a hybrid and a total techno approach).

As for NIN - no, not close. Those are not rock riffs and grooves, they are funk and dance inspired grooves. Jim Foetus is a little closer, but he too uses real guitar and it's really been a while since people were really listening to the implications of his musical approach... more's the pity. To my ears, Darkthrone and Beherit with their fully traditional approach sound a lot more electronic/techno in their aesthetic than NIN or even Aborym, because they are simple and linear.

What's the advantage? Not greater sonic possibilities, that's for sure. I know from my own experience that synths and drum machines can't possibly capture the range and dimensions of live instruments. What is gained is two things - a colder, more sonically intense/gigantic sound; and, more importantly, the possibilities opened up by home reccording for musical freedom with minimal expense - as no studios are required but a high sonic standard is still attainable.

Did Soundgarden and Alice in Chains write songs as good as "Strutter" and "Black Diamond" and such, though?

use stereo pickups, mix them randomly into archetypal amps--one grouping of, say, five players into an Orange stack, another to a Line 6, another to some bigass Voxes.

Vocals: Three women, singing "normal", but with their voices pitched shifted an octave down.

Lead instrument: distorted saw and wah-wah crunch-metal-box oboe.

ll the songs should be about 75 BPM. The lyrics should be taken from Cocteau Twin songs.

This would not be boring.

really, level-plan and relapse are two of the only hard music outlets i still trust.

this year was actually ok for hard music.

the following TORE:

pig destroyer - terrifyer
today is the day - kiss the pig
neurosis - the eye of every storm
mastodon - leviathan
isis - panopticon
fear before the march of flames - art damage
anodyne - lifetime of grey skys
minor times - making enemies
hot cross - fair trades and farewells

and that's only a few.

Been done. Go listen to the first track of Yakuza's Way Of The Dead.

"Kiss is a heavy metal circus act, where all the performers are
clowns. I keep waiting for the heavy metal circus animals to break loose and maul these talentless glam-rock cum-catchers.
Alice Cooper (the band) puts on a much more interesting (albeit
cheaper) stage show, plays edgier music, and has a more colorful
frontman. They also boast a much cooler recorded legacy. (What does Kiss have? "Rock & Roll All Night Long?" Alice Cooper could write something like that in his head while cooking an omelet in the morning. And his version would still be cooler!) Although both bands have a cheesy Tin Pan Assault rifle shtick, Cooper is just a better (band and) musician. Alice Cooper: the kitsch-metal Bob Dylan to the Kiss's shlock-rock Simon & Garfunkel.
His PCP-addled Neil Diamond sound meshes perfectly with his Hunky Dory-era Bowie nightmare world. Of course its Ziggy Stardust being tortured by conservative Republican pit fiends from the 9th circle of hell. Or maybe this is what the Rocky Horror Picture Show would've sounded like if Ted Nugent played Doctor Frankenfurter instead of Tim Curry.
That said, Alice Cooper is only as good as the first two GWAR
albums. Kiss loses even against GWAR's more recent, weaker stuff. To someone raised on Metallica, Kiss is generic brand herbal tea."

Just acknowledge and accept the Shitness of KISS.

I'll use that when I need another bit of reality as satire.

It seems to me this is too much about novelty. You know a good heavy metal album when you hear it and tastes obviously vary. Whether it revitalizes a genre or the genre even needs revitalizing any more than any other is open to argument.

I had quite a few heavy records this year that necessarily weren't popular with the heavy metal genre 'zine editorial contributors and readers. I don't recall anyone except Chuck Eddy and me, for example, recommending a listen to Rick Springfield's latest -- which wasn't going to revitalize anything -- but was entirely drop tuned metal glued onto good songs, like the Easybeats' "I'll Make You Happy."
Now what orthodox heavy metal fan was going to be caught dead listening to that?

Maybe the problem with the genre is as much with the infrastructure -- the fans, the media that supports it and the labels that promote it -- as the bands. All are far too catering and supportive in what I see as rules-based making of music. Plus they give way too many free passes and mulligans to bands that are generally worthless but possessors of literally pounds of print publicity in what are essentially fan publications. (And those are general symptoms, too, of many other genres.)

And the answer isn't jacking novelties for the sake of novelty into the rigid structures. It's a lot harder than that. Buying a new type of guitar, or distortion-generating widget, or getting a parrot or a donkey to supply vocals, isn't going to cut it for more than a cut or two and probably not even.

It's pretty damn hard just to make a good album and way harder to get it published and people to listen to it to the point where it begins to make a difference.

Though, I'd like a bit more detail on this bit...
Plus they give way too many free passes and mulligans to bands that are generally worthless but possessors of literally pounds of print publicity in what are essentially fan publications. (And those are general symptoms, too, of many other genres.)
Who's generating these fluff (PR|Adcopy) peices for these "worthless" bands? Fans with no taste or record company rackjobber winged monkey minions?

http://www4.islanddefjam.com/media/thursday/images/revolverthursday.jpg

Probot was a good example last year. That was a Southern Lord offering. Press about as thick as the Pasadena phone book.
All absurd claims and intelligence-insulting interviews but unintentionally humorous if you didn't take it seriously. Part of the lunatic aspect is that the generators of it seem to take it very seriously in complete absence of proof that it makes much of a difference at all.

Often Relapse bands come with a couple of binders worth of material. The bands are in no way as good as their weight in words. High on Fire are a good example. Now some people like this band but in no way does the press on them touch reality. High on Fire work hard, pay dues, but you just can't get around the fact they have no vocalist and no lyrics that aren't laugh out loud. They should just be an instrumental act and that would be good enough. There would certainly be no dishonor in it; it is their strength. All the press overlooks this -- the Emperor with no clothes -- instead tripping all over itself in attempts to contruct hyperventilating metaphors on the band's heaviness and how this is supposed to mean something.

Look, how many times do want to read in a story about the "legendary" album, "Jerusalem/Dopesmoker" -- years after the fact, before the word is just bandied around as part of a shtick. If Matt Pike had a dollar for every pieces of ventilation on it, rather than royalty checks of which, I bet, there are none, he'd be in a much better position.

Much of this, as I've indicated, is not entirely the fault of the bands but more of the infrastructure. Much more modest expectations and a newsy get-a-grip discussion in the outlets would certainly help artistically.

You can also take the guitar mags, which didn't start their lives as almost exclusively heavy metal rags, but are now such. Each one features a front-of-the-book section on half-a-page to two page "features" on whomever was being trotted out by metal record companies a month back when the issue went to bed. You don't have to read long before you understand that these are slotted pieces and the writers and editors are simply doing interviews and claiming good things about everyone in the yearly queue of releases they can fit. If a plateful of singing maggots were put in the queue, it would get a short feature with someone writing it was the greatest this, that or the other thing.

What, is everyone so insecure, that everything must be praised to the heaven or complimented for things which no compliments are deserved?

If there was no hyperbole, there would be no publishing industry. Faint praise of the mediocre is what puts magazines under. If you want to sell, the only answer is to hype, hype, hype all the way to the bank. I have a better angle of vision on this because I write for rock rags at night, but I edit a porn rag during the day. It's the exact same thing.

"This girl is the hottest girl you will ever see, and she's doing things so filthy your brain will melt as your balls explode. So buy this issue and see her stuff a plug the size of a canned ham up her ass."

"This band is the greatest band you will ever hear, and their new album single-handedly makes rock worthwhile again - your ears will melt as your balls explode. So buy this issue and read the bass player's incisive thoughts on the Bush administration."

High On Fire's new album really is much better than their last one. Yes, Pike's vocals are functional at best, but that's true of a million bands. The thing that bugs me about their press, at present, is the insistence that the addition of Joe Preston (of the wildly overrated Melvins) counts as some sort of substantive change. The new, bigger drum sound (courtesy Albini) is the real improvement on the new disc - the praise for Preston only amounts to insults directed at his less-indie-cred-weighted predecessor. They're both doing the exact same thing, as far as I can hear.

That only makes everyone extensions of p.r. firms. Eventually, you go out of business, or the writers do, anyway. It just takes longer. I reckon most people born and raised in Annoyica get enough p.r. everyday so as to ensure there's little if any reader loyalty.

This being the case, I still don't see a practical purpose to it.

You can go the opposite way to the top of the heap, the New York Sunday Times, and read infrequently someone tasked to do a piece on a hard rock or metal band. It's just as ridiculous but in a different way. You'll never convince me that anyone who reads the Sunday Times is going to buy a Rammstein record because they read something that made them think the band was performing Third Reich metal.

I understand the idea behind the piece if the goal is to write something bizarre but entertaining for people who like to read an upscale "Ripley's Believe Or Not" over brunch.

There's gotta be a middle ground.

High On Fire's new album really is much better than their last one.

Incrementally, agreed.

Well, yeah, exactly. I'm confused by your idealism, if that's what it is. I assumed all music critics realized they were press agents. I accept that - that's why I hew to the "consumer guide" model when I'm working. "Think pieces" bore the shit out of me about 90 percent of the time. I don't like writing them, either. I don't think a paper or a magazine is the place for me to lay the theoretical smackdown on a band, or another critic; I think if you're getting into print, you're obligated to tell whoever's reading you whether the CD you're talking about is worth their $15. (Yes, I still assume people pay for music.)

Ha-ha. Defintely not an idealist. But also anathema to press agents. They are inspiration.

"This band has the filthiest exploding balls you will ever see, and their new brain melts all over your album collection - So buy this issue or the bass player will shove a canned ham up your ass!"

x-x-x-x-x-post.

I wrote that. Hey, at least it leaps off the page.

I guess nobody's taken issue with this statement?

"Dynamic Range Compression" = biggest misnomer of all time.

I just think it's funny that what they do to modern records is being called "compression" when it's really "brick wall limiting" (also the gearhead phrase for it which I didn't make up). I mean there's NO DYNAMIC RANGE LEFT when it's done. I fail to see how that can be considered mastering, but nowadays it really is.

I realize that limiting is technically a severe form of compression, but chorus is a severe form of flanging which is a specific form of phasing which is a form of filtering or delay depending how you execute it... yet nobody says "delay" when they mean "chorus."

I love to compile such press. It's hysterical it's so embarrassingly and unselfconsciously awful.

Come on, thats part of the fun of songs like "The Yeti"!

His powers unknown by man
To catch a glimpse if he can
Wandering deep polar caps
Communication with saucer

Abominable nomad
The ancient monks know his clan
The time of yeti will rise
Because his ways have been wise

The yeti's feet take flight, upon the tundran ice
Carries the saucer's key, upon the space bound seed

The yeti's feet take flight, upon the tundran ice
Carries the saucer's key, upon the space