That Metal Thread

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Check this out: a Fear Factory song in an old Philips commercial. I finally found it after years of looking. My mistake was that I remembered it as a toothpaste ad because the guy uses a big tooth-shaped shuriken to cut the rope. Also, I like that Burton says "skeletons" in that song because I like skeletons.

 
Is there a term or explanation for this dogshit style of production that became omnipresent in the mid 2010s?




Here's when it goes for a crunchy guitar sound:


I don't think it's just a digital production issue, as plenty of new albums sound fine (and it's not as though the "before" Mystifier example sounds great, it's just not as aggressively bad). The style is not only reverb/cavernous, nor just brickwalled, but it always sounds completely plastic, dry, muffled and somehow also overbearingly filled out in the mix. It often seems to create a fake sounding wash of grinding guitar that either swamps the vocals or the rhythm section. All permutations of it give me a headache when using headphones.

It's often used completely inappropriately. Eg. these two (first sounds acceptable, second sounds bad) I can understand since it's supposed to sound "big", but when it's used in something melodic it turns what should be catchy music into something grating, and when it's used in something traditional-sounding it undermines the entire point of the music in the first place, as what's the point of being old-school if it sounds dated to 2012 onwards? This might be an indicator as to what happens if you don't make everything in the mix sound overbearing. The drums and vocals drown out the fuzzy guitar, so you need to blow it out in the mix to compete(?) Why does the guitar need to sound like a beehive in the first place?
 
Molesting the Decapitated said:
Yeah it's called being an underground death metal band and not having that much money to hire a professional producer
Click to expand...
I'm not sure that bands had much to spend before that either but I suppose it's a factor. It's just such a specific and seemingly intentional form of badness.

On the positive side of irrelevant bands with presumably no stable income, I ran into this one that got weirder the deeper I looked.

Deathgrind name, band aesthetic, logo, album titles, etc. The type of band you immediately close the tab on when you look up their discography.

I clicked a few albums and hold on a sec. Stabbed in the Eyes with a Crack Pipe despite the degenerate artwork averages around 6 mins per song. To Walk the Path of Vomit is over 10 minutes per song.

Begin playing songs--it's basically well-done melodic death metal (not Gothenburg) intentionally hiding behind pornogrind aesthetics(?) Some of it sounds a little like Intestine Baalism and has a lot of melodic breakdowns. The super long songs album surprisingly doesn't pad the durations with non-metal sections. I was expecting Ruins of Beverast or Nagelfar type keyboard sections, but it's loose, episodic atmospheric death metal without the progressive or quirky stuff of recent Tomb Mold or Blood Incantation. It has some narrative sections a little like Bal-Sagoth. Sounds like somebody had a vision.

Then there's them in between melodic death metal releases making two black metal albums(?) One of them is more in line with their standard melodic style, but with a post-bm veneer that is really catchy with its extended soloing and acoustic parts that seem drawn from blackgaze or something. The other is completely strait-laced bm that is also surprisingly decent with their usual ability to craft cohesively structured songs (the ending section of the opening track reminds me of the debut of Meads of Asphodel).

This all coming from what looks like a pornogrind band that as usual has Metal Archives genre tags that in no way acknowledge what is going on in their discography, since nobody listens to this shit, much less corrects it. I think they're genuinely recommendable, however. Maybe try their latest EP which is in their melodic dm style, it's dynamic and eclectic without being annoying and there's always a dope melodic break coming out of nowhere.
 
Lemmy of Motörhead (and others) would’ve turned 80 years old today. Raise a Jack n’ coke for him (if you indulge). I’d like to share my favorite Motörhead “deep” cut:


Originally only available as the B-side to Killed By Death, it was released in 1984. It later was included on the ‘Meltdown’ Motörhead comp from 1992 and subsequently included on certain versions of No Remorse. It is the introduction of 4 piece Motörhead! Pete Gill on drums played with Saxon prior to Motörhead and brings a more traditional heavy metal angle to his drumming. Pete Campbell and the immensely underrated Würzel have guitar duties. This “era” of Motörhead was relatively short lived. Gill was ejected from the band after being late to a studio session after Orgasmatron was released.
 
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