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Favorite metal recommendations - Metalbros unite!!!

Old comment but whatever. Exactly same with me. I love progressive stuff but more like Dream Theater, Ayreon, Neal Morse Band, Devin Townsend etc.

Since this kind of progressive metal is your cup of tea, may I suggest Horizon's End and our latest album Skeleton Keys. This came out 2 months ago and you might find it interesting.
 
Since this kind of progressive metal is your cup of tea, may I suggest Horizon's End and our latest album Skeleton Keys. This came out 2 months ago and you might find it interesting.

So I listened to it. Wanna my honest opinion? I expected worse and it turned out pretty professional stuff. Great musicianship overall from every member, often there is a case when guitarist are good but section is underwhelming or keyboardist is lacking or most often everything goes great until mediocre vocalist shows up. Not this time, everyone knows his craft well and vocalist is also skilled and on point. Compositions are well thought out, there is no boring part, keyboards provide interesting sound design (although they are maybe slightly too loud in a mix). Overall it's piece of really good music for what I think is unknown band.

What I dislike has nothing to do with quality of music and everything to do with my personal taste. There are fragments that sound kinda like what Threshold used to do (end of Land of Decay for example) and I like it very much. But more often it falls into this neoclassical/power territory that I used to listen years ago but somehow grown to dislike it eventually, stuff like Helloween, Rhapsody (in the chorus of Forming Fantasies vocalists sounds like Fabio Lione), elements of early Nightwish, maybe Yngwie Malmsteen stuff and echos of Masterplan. There is great unexpected 'reggae' part in Dreamer's Hands that is super fun but it is quickly followed with this very melodic double kick driven gallopade and this happens almost every time I start to think "wow, this part is awesome" nope, here come Helloween again ;) Dream Theater maybe but if so than mostly from their When Dream and Day Unite album but that stuff was 30 years ago ;)

But as I said, that's just my thing. I don't know if you are familiar with band Myrath. They released great album Shehili this year which I also can't listen for same reasons, to many power metal stuff in there (although in their case it's mostly Camelot-like stuff). And even world class bands can be similar, Symphony X I can't listen for same reason and hard to argue that they are absolutely world leaders in this stuff.

Overall it's a big yes from me, I'm sure I will listen to this in the future and I'll just pretend that I don't hear the parts I'm not a fan of :)
 
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Wow, such a great analysis, much obliged. Since I'm the keyboard player and main composer, I have to admit that everything you said was spot on! I love Threshold but I also love Rhapsody and Symphony X and even Myrath:)! And one of my favorites Dream Theater albums is When Dream and Day Unite !! It' s really what they say, different strokes for different folks. Nevertheless I really appreciate that you took the time to listen to it. Thank you and I wish you a happy new year:emoji_fireworks:
 
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I stumbled over this one a couple weeks ago and was wondering if there are any bands making instrumental (!!!) albums in this style?

 
Check out the Metallica 'What if series' by youtuber 'State of Mercury.' Some of them are great! Introduce yourself to them with Sandman... Justice styleee.. \m/
(you have to be familiar with most of the albums to appreciate the styles)

 
old - black sabbath, iron maiden, dio, judas priest, motorhead
new - unleash the archers, avenged sevenfold, jinger
more - dream theater, sabaton, pantera
acoustic - apocalyptica, rodrigo and gabriela
industrialish - ramstein, strapping young lad


 
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Long time metal head that can't listen to a lot of today's metal, but there's one band I don't get tired of. I don't know what genre you would call it...danish rockabillly metal maybe. If you've never heard a metal band with boogie woogie piano and a sax, here's Volbeat.

 
I'm not anymore into metal. There're countless great classics out there however. Megadeth, Pantera, Dream Theater and Atreyu will always end up on my playlists. I admire them for their expression, melodies and workmanship. Today I look at all those other bands and I just can't get bothered to listen to them, knowing that I'll get dissapointed.
 
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Myles Kennedy's voice is just awesome.
Slash and Myles Kennedy is on my playlist all the time. Not Metal, but great rock! Great vocals and drive, perfect for driving.




To be honest there're also great prog bands out there who still carry the old charme, but with modern takes:

 
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I'm always amused at all the sub-genre Metal (Black, Doom, Post, Viking, Grindcore, Brutal, Star Wars, etc). It's all the same, no? The music features Cookie Monster on lead vocals, screaming lyrics that can't even be understood. Ok, all that being said, I'm a fan of Children of Bodom and Nevermore. :thumbsup:

Also a prog/symphonic fan. Rush is my all time favourite, but there are so many good ones. I recently got into Sabaton (Sweden) and Trivium (USA), they are excellent.

It's like any other genre, it depends on how much of a concrete type of music you listen to and how deep you dive into it. But that sentence would equivalent as to say classical music is all the same, just a bunch of strings and classic instruments mixed all together, so why call this baroque and that romantic or just soundtrack music, it's all just violins, isn't it?

If you're not into a concrete genre you cannot hear the differences between the different subgenera but if you are into it and listen to a lot of bands the differences are very clear and you will see how Suffocation do not sound like Emperor or Judas Priest or Paradise Lost or Veil of Maya or Mötley Crüe... to just name a few examples.

I used to listen to a lot of metal in the past myself and rarely listen to it these days but I don't think it is childish or fake or anything like that, there are a lot of talented musicians in that genre that aren't dumb nor fake, but for me it just got boring, because even music with guitars and traditional instruments kind of got boring in general.

It is very hard to find interesting compositions that sound fresh these days so I guess I just took a different pace and started to add "new sounds" or new ways to mix traditional and new sounds in music in an interesting way.

Metal fans, like many other music genres fans, have a tendency to become very conservative and narrow the possibilities of artists and start saying this or that band is not true metal. The positive effect is that if you like that music you know where to look after bands you might like but the negative one is that it kills a lot of creativity or just pushes away bands that might be talented but don't match their expectations of true metal to 100% anymore.

At the end if you get bored with this style, what most people do the sooner or the later, that limitations can end up killing the whole genre and convert it into a niche for a very small public that will surely feel very good about being true to the genre but honestly, keeping it from advancing into more interesting ideas.

Anyways, I think metal is one of the genres that has survived this the best and that's actually because of those many subgenres that keep this style moving forward even when slower than maybe other music styles.
 
concrete type of music

This word actually reminded me of one new band which completely blew me off the chair: "Concrete Winds".
A Finnish ex-death metal band ("Vorum") which wasn't bad at all, but as I'm way more into BM myself, Concrete Winds was much more appealing to me. A hint of Altars of Madness combined with some serious Australian bestiality and a pinch of good old fago sounding like it was done by Katharsis? Yes, please!


 
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