Many Lives -> 49 MP

Those months do slip away, don't they?

Oh shit, and we lost a year in there too. Fuckcock and so on.

 This blog isn't intended to be about my personal life - oh well. Writing one's midyear exams while sufferring from the flu's equivalent of Leviathan (fuck you Hobbes, I mean the other kind) is sincerely just not good times. Breaking the bank to provide your family members with suitably expensive baubles meant to convey my honest to God affection for them leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, much like (as you'll recall from earlier this paragraph) the gallons upon gallons of vomit I had to force out of my body in the days and hours leading up to the most important exams of my life thus far.

But I digress.

Jams and I lack the spiritual grit to produce a coherent, properly ordered best-of-the-year list of any kind just yet. Much as we adore such things, and are vehement in our desire to (finally) complete one, we've both been approaching the endeavour sidelong, without much verve or committment, under the assumption that a more direct attempt would degenerate into bile-encrusted trench warfare punctuated only by mirthless laughter and painful bitchslapping. We don't always agree, you understand.  

More to the point, I (and most of my friends and acquaintances, for that matter) am not of the nature to arbitrarily assign number values to one album or another. We're lovers, etc., and to be perfectly honest, how am I supposed to accurately rank a thing like TV On The Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain against a thing like Man Man's Six Demon Bag?

They're incompatible!

Hence, while we merry jesters put off our sworn duty yet another few days, allow me to assert this contoversial thesis:

Power metal is awesome and so is Dragonforce's Inhuman Rampage. Discuss.



I think I mentioned my predeliction for the hairier arts in an earlier post, I can't recall, or find the post. In what is apparent to me now as a grossly non-intuitive exploration of the greater genre of Metal, I discovered the Power subgenre after years of tepid spelunking through the infinitely less listenable Death/Doom/Black/Sludge varietals. A few things captured my interest, but being in high school I was much more inclined toward the Metalcore cross-breed than anything purer. Grind has its diversions, with An Albatross and the Locust being some of my permanent favourites in any extreme genre, but absolutely none of these avenues pack the viscerally exciting kick in the chest offerred by Power metal.

And yes, this is that kind of metal, the one obsessed with dragons and zombies and the cartoony, medieval slaying thereof. Common lyrical themes include epic battles against a great, possibly ancient evil through unspecified intense combat. This is only part of the style's beauty. Don't hate.

Bands like Hammerfall, Rhapsody, Symphony X, and some with much stupider names (Power Quest, Demons & Wizards, rawk) all have their respective great works, but last January's release by Dragonforce is a veritable paragon of the genre. Yes, I described it as a paragon. This international act based out of the UK (guitarist Herman Li hails from Hong Kong, bassist Frédéric LeClercq from France, keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov from the Ukraine, rythm guitarist Sam Totman from New Zealand, drummer Dave Mackintosh from England, vocalist ZP Theart from South Africa, shit I shouldn't have put this in parentheses) are well and fully aware of their chosen oeuvre's silly repuration. Their third album perfectly takes this in stride, focussing squarely on Power metal's penchant for content over form and dropping the whole thing through the best of Black Metal's technical aspects. Since I suspect most of my friends, and therfore most of my three readers, have no goddamn idea what I just said (I forgive you - this isn't important stuff), I'll elaborate.

Ye Mighty Commandements of Black/Power Metal:

The dual guitar lead is the Lord thy God.

Melody is thy God's one and only cardinal virtue.

An instrument's tone is more important than any other consideration in music.

The blast beat is the absolute pinnacle of drumming. Time not spent pounding out a good tight blast beat is only useful as it lends poignancy to the blast beat which will follow it.

Synthesizers ought to be as epic as possible but ought never to supersede the guitars until a song's obligatory breakdown.

Playing fewer than nine hundred beats a minute makes you a bitch.

Unconventional song structures and not repeating yourself are overrated.

Things like dragons and swords and shit kick ass and anyone who doesn't think so is a pussy or a liar.

Lyrics are only a way of getting sound out of a human being.

No one actually enjoys deathvox.

No one genuinely gives a shit about bass.

I kind of mixed them around in there, but you get the general idea. Inhuman Rampage is the ultimate product of a band realizing they can produce a handful of ass-kickingly breathtaking sounds and desiring only to produce those sounds as long and as intensely as possible. Songs don't differ very much from one another at all, not even lyric-wise, and if you really wanted to you could probably codify about three or four basic building blocks of all eight tracks on the album, different from each other only in key/scale/arrangement, maybe.

But that shit genuinely doesn't matter - when all you want to hear is a face-meltingly, mind-shockingly amazing guitar solo, or the crunchiest verse possibly created by man, when you want exciting music, this album fucking provides to the literal max.

The lyrics are amusingly dramatic at best, and honest to God tripe at worst, depending on your stance on such gems as "Rise over shadow mountains, blazing with power / Crossing valleys endless tears, in unity we stand / Far and wide across the land, the victory is ours / On towards the gates of reason, Fight for the truth and the freedom Gloria!!" found in the chorus of Revolution Deathsquad, but ZP Theart's singing is genuinely fantastic, in a style probably only recognizable to the uninitiated as being in the same vein as Justin Hawkins's of The Darkness fame, only much, much stronger and focussed on the mid-range than the falsetto.

Before I forget, how about these freaking song titles? Fathers, lock up your daughters and so on, this album's packed with literary jewels like Operation Ground and Pound (???), the aforementioned Revolution Deathsquad, and the straightforward Storming of the Burning Fields. All are evocative of the corniest, nun-angeringest vestiges of 1980's silliness one would assume died out when KISS stopped being relevant.

You can understand the flavour of these fellows' love for the epicly histrionic, can't you?

Drummer Dave Mackintosh is your run of the mill octopus-armed demigod, whom I sincerely cannot describe with much gusto beyond the fact that he can sustain eight different, invigoratingly creative blastbeats for an average of seven minutes at a time. That man must be in shape.

Bassist Adrian Lambert (who's since been replaced by the earlier mentioned LeClerq) has the unfortunate predicament of being a bassist in a metal band, receiving approximately eight cumulative seconds of solo time on centrepiece track Body Breakdown.  What's truly a bit regrettable is that Lambert makes it apparent in these seconds that he is really, really goddamn skilled. The rest of the time? You cannot fucking hear him over the other instruments. While his wall of bass is certainly felt, the definition of it is so low in the mix and so engulfed by louder, faster, treble-drenched sounds that it simply lacks presence. He allegedly provides backup deathvox-style vocals on most tracks in addition to his six-string, three finger bassing duties, but I can't hear those either. I don't think he and the album's producer got along, or something.

Vadim Pruzhanov's keyboard work gets much, much more time in the sun, frequently playing on equal ground with the band's guitarists and setting the, ahem, epic tone of most tracks. His tones and style are much in the same spirit of the guitars, and he's apparently replaced a standup synth set with a custom made keytar simply because the stationary unit couldn't handle his intense movements. Tell me that isn't one of the most hardcore things you've ever heard.

Tell me this isn't the most hardcore thing you've ever seen.

I'm sure a book could (and probably has) been written on the virtues of metal guitarists, and I'm not going to attempt to fully dissect Hermal Li and Sam Totman's playing herein. What I love most about the duo, something I can't honestly say about many similarly talented guitarists, is that they use their virtually limitless skills to actually craft beautifully provocative melodies. I mean, no one would doubt the best free-jazz artist's skill, but how many would actually want to sit down and listen to it at any given moment? The chord progressions and licks that compose the bulk of Inhuman Rampage's mass are gorgeous, exhilarating, and mind-fuckingly technical without being obnoxious. This is metal as fuck. It's loud, it's fast, and it's intense as five men with girl hair can be, but goddamnit, it's also incredibly listenable, easy to digest, and if you can tap into the side of you ,and every asshole with a functional heart has it, that finds sustenence in the fantasy drama of any Lord of the Rings battle or shit like that, you can bloody well enjoy this.

What's more, these guys have a readily apparent sense of humour. Their videos are rife with subtle self deprecation and classy shots at their own ridiculous subject matter. That's worthy of respect. And so is capping off fifty or so minutes of sheer verticality with a piano driven, new-age synth laden monster ballad called Trail of Broken Hearts that'd send Kenny G into fits of vomitting and crush every emo band in existence to death.

Do I sound defensive? Fuck you guys.

I'm going to go play D&D.