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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5159 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

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As a recovering metalhead, I have made an active effort to find upbeat songs to counter a playlist I've literally titled "oppressive despair" (ask me about that one LOL).

Check out:

  • Young the Giant - Proggy Arctic Monkeys but less sexy-all-the-time. Their popular stuff is great.

  • Sammy Rae & Friends - Just plain fun. Their top spotify picks are great.

  • Silk Sonic - Just plain funky fun but Bruno Mars. Start with Leave the door open & Skate.

  • Vulfpeck - funky fun turned up to 100. Lyrics can be a little nonsensical. 1612 & Wait for the moment are good starters.

  • King Gizzard - Psychedelic derpy fun. They're prolific. Start off with 'The River', 'Catching Smoke', 'Fishing for Fishies' and ofc, the infamous: 'Rattlesnake'.

Pirate metal is pretty upbeat. Alestorm - Fucked With an Anchor for example!

There’s an alternative: Embrace hair metal. Fairly upbeat, not very serious and often party atmosphere while still being metal.

The music should serve the theme, and not vice versa. Genre should be seen as tool-kits. You start writing music with the intention of constructing something. A good musician knows to find the right tool-kit to build the structure they have in mind. If the tool guides the dream, then the dream loses all purpose.

Hair metal can be fun in context : stadium & road trip music. But it does not lend itself well to deep listening. Metal is by-definition an intense & tense (alliteration not intended) type of music. That's why it lends itself well to intense emotions which can only develop after years of festering. Grief, anger, wrath, despair & violence are obvious. Meditative states, yearning, (the feeling of) enlightenment are less obvious ones that lend itself well to the genre tools leveraged in metal.

Some metal tools make for great happy music. Djazz is one such example. But mainstream metal genres make for schlocky happy music . Although admittedly, I have occasionally indulged in some of it. Speaking of schlocky metal, here are my 2 "favorites" : Children of Bodom : rebel yell cover and Iron Maiden - Charlotte the Harlot.

I want to ask you about oppressive despair. There’ve been times when Call of the Wretched Sea was just what I needed.

'Viljartha - Den Helige Anden' is the poster boy of the sound I am trying to capture. Atmospheric, Deep sub-bass, and never gives you that bright climax you keep expecting. Usually they induce this thick tension by having very few accent beats (think high E strums, Snare hits, Crash), but the count on the drums to keep tempo is really fast. So it has this incredible speed to it, while being made quite long for the accent hit that resolves the tension.

Death Grips's On GP & No Love are great examples of this sound too.

I like blackgaze too, but that's too melodic. It tries to be beautiful in grief, and that's not the point. On the other hand, extreme metal just comes across as noise without tension. So this playlist tries to avoid those 2 styles of music.

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