Post Reply - Music Appreciation

Days of Grays

 dtguitarfan wrote:

6)       Give an album a few
chances, especially if it�s a band that has already earned your respect.

This is kind of
expounding on #4.  I�ve been talking about
Sonata Arctica a lot here because they are a great example � I did NOT like
Unia when it first came out�but then I saw the band live, and when they played
songs off of the album they were so great live, that I went back to the album
and discovered�I LOVED it!  It�s now one
of my favorite albums.  I mentioned a
similar thing happened with Days of Grays. 
And it�s happened with countless other bands and albums.  So I�ve learned that if I don�t like an album
or band right away, but someone I respect does, I probably ought to put that
one aside for a while, and then give it another chance later on.

10)       Pandora is an
AWESOME tool for music appreciation.

I�m going to use
Opeth as an example for this one because it is a recent occurrence: I never
really appreciated them, until recently I set up a mixed station on Pandora
that contained Riverside as one of the handful of bands I put into the
station.  Because of this, Pandora kept
selecting some of the quieter songs with compound time signatures by Opeth, and
without knowing who it was, I�d say to myself: �hmm, this is cool, who is
it?�  And I�d look up and be surprised
that I was really enjoying�Opeth!

11)       Your current life
situation changes how you appreciate music.

I�m thinking of two
particular examples for this one.  One
was in college � I was depressed, but mostly angry over�surprise�a girl.  And this was right after a certain album by
one: Linkin Park.  The angst in that
album spoke perfectly to my situation at the time.  Now, on the flip side of this, I had a very
different experience with a Redemption song: Keep Breathing.  This album came out when my son, my first
born, was about 9 months old.  The song,
Keep Breathing, was written by one of the two guitarists, Nick Van Dyk, about
his daughter Parker, who has a degenerative disease causing her to lose her
eyesight. The lyrics explain how as a father he can't stand to see his daughter
in pain, but at the same time is amazed at her strength and bravery and tells
her that it inspires him to go on. 
Listening to this song at this point in my life was like perfect timing,
and something rare (for me) happened: I had to pull over as the tears began to
flow.  Thinking about my love for my own
son, and my desire to protect him, made the song so much more beautiful to me.

6) That sword cuts both ways you know.  I loved Days of Grays on the first listen; but after a few more, I reconsidered.  Eventually, I expelled it from my CD collection.  As you probably understand, writing a review for an album on the first listen is a bad idea.  The more solid your opinion, the better off you will be when reviewing.  That said, I really find that the "I hated [x album] the first 999 times I listened to it, but I absolutely loved it on the 1000th listen." idea almost never applies to me.  Hit your hand a thousand times with a hammer and yeah it will eventually stop hurting, but you'll have seriously fucked your hand up.  If an album gets a 2.5 or less from me on a first listen, I find that on subsequent re-listens my score actually goes down.  Such an occurance happened with Gorguts' Obscura in my case.

7) I never liked internet radio.  I don't like not having control of what I listen to, because if something comes on that I already do despise like Suicide Silence when I want Immolation or Incantation I'm going to flip shit.  I prefer my music played in the order it was intended to be set in on the album it appears on.  If I need new bands, all I really need to do is ask around.  This is all personal preference though.

11) As most of the rest of you may know, angst ridden lyrics are often a reason for me to give the middle finger to a band.  I am turned off by "whiny" lyrics about how shitty the lyric writer's life is, especially if it's a mallcore band who uses these themes to milk money from the music industry.  Now do I like depressive and sorrowful atmospheres?  Yes, I do.  Black metal in particular tends to be an ideal place to project this atmosphere with acts like Coldworld, Xasthur, Drowning the Light, and Shining; and death doom/funeral doom metal acts like Katatonia's debut, Bethlehem's debut, October Tide, Skepticism, Funeral, and Ea.  I like all those bands because I think their music fits much more ideally with this type of theme than metalcore does and I feel that I can take them more seriously because of that.  And not all of them even have lyrics dealing with depression; Skepticism for example mixes nature in to make a simple, but effective set of lyrics.  Here's the lyrics to "Sign of a Storm" as an example:

By the healing waters
of my lovely shores
I laid
The air so bleak
so cold
I breathed with my eyes
with my ears
Through aeons went my journey

From these mountains
I swear the world
I am the hammer
I am lightning
By the signs I shall return
To burn all land
beyond the seas

  Added to them are bands like Esoteric and Leviathan who partner the depressive atmosphere with misanthropy to create an atmosphere of pure hate of the world.  They've succeeded in making their music not exactly sorrowful sounding, but more along the lines of being full of animosity.

What does all that bullshit have to do with your original point?  There's definitely a sizable age difference between the two of us, but I've got too much pride to let angst bother me.  The last time I was frustrated, played a couple of songs by some death metal bands with lyrics about killing God, which, being the Christophobe I am, made me feel quite powerful and ended up forgetting about the frustration.

Again, this is personal preference. 