Modern Metal makes me laugh...

These kids from Denver (Dreadnought) are doing it right, I think:



And last year's Portal album ION was killer. Probably an acquired taste, though.
 
Ben Randolph said:
Plenty of good modern metal if you know where to look. Nightwish, Dream Theater, Eternal Champion, Symphony X....

But if a band sounds like this, they should really drop music and take up gardening.

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The bad part is that guy can actually sing. No need for the screaming , growling parts.
 
Don't forget that if you want to listen powerful music (and yet sophisticated) it doesn't necessarily need to have the "Metal" label.
When I was a teenager I had a tape of Prog Rock mixed with Heavy. I didn't put it on a different basket; I just enjoined it as I recorded from different borrowed vinyls (there was no internet to bitch about styles)





It doesn't even need to have a guitar





And that was part of the old saga. For a modern flavor, there is Flower Kings, IQ, Spock's Beard, Arena, Transatlantic, Neal Morse, Roine Stolt, Pendragon, Tomas Bodin, RPWL, Magenta, etc
 
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FreeMind said:
Fundimentally there isn't anything wrong with the music.
what I am tired of is all bands sounding the exact same, within each trend. I couldn't distinguish deathcore bands one from another, metalcore, Djent, and now a "Solo bedroom prog project". Everyone just sounds the same. Within every trend - Same influences, Same guitar tone, same vocals, same riffs, same drum samples... I'm not a fan of autotune and sample replacement.

But of course, there are plenty of good bands that stick out...
I mean, who hates gojira?
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Is someone going to tell him that most bands sound the same in most genres, since we had genres?
 
ksandvik said:
That's why you have to invent your own genre -- be yourself rather than copying others.
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In which case the first step is not to start a band with the aim of making music in the style of bands X, Y and Z. Just find some people who you can gel with, and then see where it goes. You might find some interesting 'shit'. Unfortunately most bands are started by teenagers, and they are mostly still in the copy phase of their musical career. Your own musical voice and style comes with time and experience, and even more unfortunately, not every musician outgrows his or her copy phase.
 
Point taken. Even U2 started as a new wave pop band but then when their found their unique voice, well the rest is history.
 
Well, U2 also had the advantage that they were willing to change, having come to the conclusion after the War album that they had taken that style as far as they could go. So they put themselves at the mercy of their (experimental) producers to let themselves be taken wherever that experimental ride would go. They also didn't shy away from seeking and embracing success. If the Unforgettable Fire was their journey into experimental waters, the Joshua Tree was their journey to take the results of the previous album and fine tune it into commercial success.

Unfortunately there are way too many bands, especially in metal, who call that 'selling out'. And to whom just the merest hint of commercial success is 'selling out'. Even though I strongly suspect every band secretly dreams that if their socalled uncompromising sound were to find commercial success and they would end up touring stadiums they'd be dancing the happy dance.
 
Aside from the dodgy vocals, generic guitar tones/songs, and overall lack of any melodic sensibilities, I find that most 'modern metal' (even metal from the last couple of decades lol) just doesn't have any groove or swing. It's all squared off and sounds like a metronome.

Oh, and they all take themselves way, way, way too seriously and are humorless cretins lol.

Malcolm Young gets it right:

"There's very few rock & roll bands," Malcolm Young explained to a Dutch TV interviewer around the time of AC/DC's 2000 album Stiff Upper Lip. "There's rock bands, there's sort of metal bands, there's whatever, but there's no rock & roll bands – there's the Stones and us," he chuckled. When asked by the interviewer to explain the difference between rock bands and rock & roll bands, he replied, "Rock bands don't really swing ... a lot of rock is stiff. They don't understand the feel, the movement, you know, the jungle of it all."

That's it, exactly....they don't get the "jungle of it all"...

Judas Priest "Electric Eye" has a swing to it. It grooves. As does Black Sabbath "Neon Knights"....I miss metal like that...
 
Yes, when you quantize guitar chords and kicks down to 1/64 resolution you lose the human touch as we humans don't play like robots.

Heck, even early day techno had drift due to the MIDI clocks drifting between devices and the drum machines having imperfect clocks.
 
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