Metal music lost me for a while there.
I remember being at Ozzfest in 2006, where the lineup basically consisted of 43 grindcore bands, Disturbed (puke), and SOAD (ruled). Oh, and SYL, who I’d seen like about 5 times already. At that point, I remember thinking, ‘who is listening to this crap?’, and looking to other avenues to boost my adrenaline during workouts.
Despite metal’s tendency to overtaxonimize (power-norweigian-black-ambient-mathcore anyone?), I find that there are two sorts of audiences in metal — those who are attracted to technicality, and those who are attracted to bands who really sound like they mean it. If you listen to Megadeth, for example, and you look at Rust in Peace and then at United Abominations, both audiences will gush about Rust in Peace. It was a technically stunning album when they wrote it, but it also sounded like they were pissed as hell for REAL. UA, on the other hand, had a huge group of people (audience #1) who were saying OMG TEH MEGADETHZ ARE BACK!1!!! but the rest of us (audience #2) who actually like bands to sound like they believe what they’re playing were not impressed.
This is why extreme metal has caused me to snore through the last decade. It’s because I’m in audience #2. If you listen to grindcore, usually it’s some technically ridiculous assault for 36 seconds, and then 1.5 minutes of a slow chugging riff while the singer shrieks the stupidest lyrics in the world into the mic. Newer death metal was basically blast-beat soup while the vox were gargled razorblades that was completely unintelligible. Thrash, as far as I can tell, degenerated into teenagers wailing about orcs. And so on. Black metal was occasionally the only saving grace. (Immortal, despite their goofiness, sounds TRULY PISSED OFF on their later albums. And yes, I know they’re technically not black metal. Get over it.)
ANYHOW. The point I am trying to get at is that things are coming around. Old bands sound like they mean it again. (Slayer, Fear Factory anyone? Well, Slayer only temporarily dropped off the planet with God Hates Us All. The rest of it ruled.) The lyrics and arrangements are just as stupid as ever, but they’re done as if they MEAN IT. And now I’m starting to stumble over stuff in the small-label space that is doing this in spades.
Hayaino Daisuki is the best example of this I’ve found in a while. They went extreme without going grindcore or death. Picture At the Gates played at 12 times the speed. That’s the gist of it. It sounds like the Gothenberg sound mixed slightly with modern melodic death, but you can barely tell because it’s SO DAMN FAST. But where speed generally causes bands to sound LESS brutal, here it just makes them sound insane. And thankfully, there are essentially no blast beats, which are possibly the most boring freaking rhythm that was ever invented (sorry Benante, but it wasn’t your fault anyhow. I blame the Aryans.)
So the gist of this is, freaking awesome. GET IT. Their entire discography (a whopping 8 songs) is availalble on hydrahead’s online store for 4 dollars total. (http://www.hydrahead.com/store/). Oh, and before you get all excited, don’t be fooled by their ‘band photo’ of the four drunk girls. HK is very male, they just throw that image around as a gimmick.
HK also shares most of its members with another Hydrahead-signed band called Gridlink, but I haven’t listened much to them. More on that as it happens.
Also, if you like raging at all, download the Hydrahead Sampler and check out Song 27 by The Austerity Program. Imagine Sweating Bullets at 1000x the insanity quotient as covered by Atari Teenage Riot, you’ve come close. Unfortunately the rest of the Austerity Program’s discography didn’t do much to inspire me, but this is one of their newer tracks so I’m excited to see where they run with it.