As you all know by now, I am the sort of person that likes most types of music. I listen to a lot of music of different styles and genres, and it pains me immensely to complain about music, because the last thing I want to happen is to be labelled an old fart. But now I throw in the towel. Go ahead. Call me a geezer. The Sultan of Geez. The Geezmeister.
Why is this, Jeff? I hear you cry in dismay. Because I am officially confused. I can't deal with all the different subgenres and subgenres of subgenres of metal. Can't deal with it. Grindcore, speedcore, metalcore, mathcore, Nintendocore (no, I'm not making it up - Google it), call it what you will - to me, it's just loud guitars and lots of screaming.
It all started the other day. My darling girlfriend Laura wanted to play me a YouTube video by Welsh rockers Bullet For My Valentine. I am open to anything initially, so I sat and watched this video. She described me as having a pained expression throughout. Which I did. It's just shouty music. A bunch of young men in designer ripped T-shirts and ripped jeans in the rain, posing like seasoned rockers with their tight-pant-swagger, and then for no particular reason bawling like hoarse bobcats who've just had a plutonium rod shoved in their rectum. Hard.
All of this was a source of great amusement to Laura, who just had to up the ante by presenting me with a copy of a CD by a band called Atreyu (not her CD, I should mention - her daughter Amy's), and challenging me to listen to it for as long as I possibly could. Atreyu (named after a character in The Neverending Story, oddly enough) are exponents of metalcore, which, if you're still interested, is a combination of death metal and hardcore punk, apparently, and has at its heart an emphasis on what is known as the breakdown, in which the music slows to a good moshing pace and is then layered with vocal harmonies, dissonant minor chords and SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!!!
Well, not being one to back down from a thrown-down gauntlet, I attempted manfully to listen to Track #1 from Atreyu's CD A Death-Grip On Yesterday (charming title, even more charming sleeve, containing Photoshopped pics of the band members in their carefully torn jeans and well-chosen grungy-looking T-shirts - ON FIRE), and after having studied the lyric sheet, pressed play.
15 seconds later, while shielding my ears, I pushed STOP.
Then I tried to make sense of what I had just been subjected to.
Then I tried to understand how the noise I heard could possibly be the same jolly lyrics I had just been reading.
I couldn't. It's just loud annoying shouty music.
And if they were the only band doing this kind of stuff, I would say "Bravo, Atreyu! I commend your originality!" But unfortunately there are hundreds of bands out there putting out slick, overproduced, well-marketed, neatly packaged shit like this all over the planet (Especially in Scandinavia and California, strangely enough).
This was not the only shock I was treated to. I then made the mistake of going online to YouTube and finding this, this, this...piece of... sacrilegious... stuff..
At long last, I have proof-positive that there is no God.
eeek
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