it can be interesting to pay attention to trends in music making. in metal today, one notices production values that tend to highlight a more live sound that conveys the experience of hearing a band perform in front of you. bass guitar is also showing up much higher in the mix than ever before. as a bass player, i love this approach. metal production can vary so widely that the music seems to beckon the listener to meet it where it stands, face to face. an obsessive fan might have dos and don'ts. do turn the bass way up in the mix, i say. don't put distortion on your vocals, i say; it sounds like a cheap compensation for the fact that you can't summon up a convincingly piercing scream. drum triggers are very controversial. purists say that triggers are weak, that they quantize rhythms making up for incompetant playing abilities and removing a terrestrial element, leaving rhyms sounding sterile and impotent. that can certainly be true. that's an argument that's difficult to refute. i might hazard a rebuttal to the aversion to programmed or triggered drums just by saying that, yes, this takes away a certain flesh and bones element to the music, and yet, in doing so, this approach can open up all sorts of inhuman possibilities. are they perhaps cold? perhaps. that doesn't mean they're not heavy as hell, if you ask me. in the end its all a matter of taste. it might be true that the band lvcifyre ceased making records after 2014's 'svn eater' because they realised that it was incredibly trite to replace the letter u with the letter v, let alone replacing the letter i with the letter y (as a bryan with a y, i generally am all for making that particular switch). or perhaps this band is simply on some unholy sabbatical. nevertheless, this lp is just two years old, and honestly, its production already sounds pretty dated, especially when compared with a record that is more freshly off the infernal press, like the cultes des ghoules record recently posted to this site. in fact, it is useful to compare those two records if only for the simple fact that it was those same ghoules that led me to this lvcifyre record. the singer from cultes des ghoules does guest vocals on more than half of this lvcifyre record. that fact alone was worth the price of admission for me concerning this here record. when meeting this record head on, it rips your face off despite the triggered and/or programmed drums, despite the massive amounts of compression applied to it squashing the soundwaves into something that sounds closer to the sound of a late era metallica record being blasted out of a car stereo than it resembles the sound of a band playing live in front of your face. this record may sound nothing like the sound of a band playing live. but if you say that's the only way a record should sound, i say get your fucking cross out of my face before i break it over your fucking head. peace.
_dj healthy sleep habits