Fallen From Grace

And the true colors bled. Her temple began to freeze. Her eyes began to fall and so did her soul, turning into the icy grave of passion. Beholding the eternal sorrow of the cosmos, she is rendered helpless. She flies through spaces of literature and searches and searches her name and finds only grief and sorrow. She enters a realm of the sadness and finds her bound in black chains of the infinite gloom. Tries to fight, tries to let go, but she is bound.

She wakes up in a place where everything is pale. Everything has a shade of grey that is incomprehensible to the naked eye. Purple colored turtles and lizards walk around her on the roof and the walls. Four men looking at each edge of the room stand emotionless and peaceful. Each of them has a body of a human and a head of a shark. Looking away, facing the dark corners, focusing on the infinite. She is bound by this sadness for ever. She shouts her heart out. It wrenches her anger, which makes her soul bleed more profusely within her body. There is nothing she can see or hear in this hell within her self. She needs to grieve, but she cannot canalize her grief. She needs pain yet fails to hurt herself. She needs drugs but fails to get high.

Finally giving up all hope she lies down on the floor and looks at the queer creatures walking around on the roof of her room. She follows the brown patterns and observes them closely as they creep up to consume each other. Some hide, only for a while before they are sought and consumed. Others give in on any hope of cerebral help and comply to a certain and painful death. Their hacked and half eaten flesh falls on the floor, staining her satin skin.

Consumed in a pleasure of savagery and the certain unpredictability and the randomness of her mind, symmetric in a way to the surroundings around her, she thinks of how it used to be. How she used to be a real person with senses, feelings and emotions. Not any more can she relive such days. Not any more will she be allowed.

She has fallen from grace.

Age of the Neo-Romantics

Not a very big fan initially, the sound of Opeth has intrigued me a lot lately. Previously, the only Opeth record I cared about or listening to was Blackwater Park. After infinite recommendations and praises by friends and progressive metal forums, I decided to watch the Lamentations DVD. The video starts with almost all the songs from the Damnation album. Damnation is one of the most unique metal records I have ever heard. It is full of extremely lucid, dream like compositions. However the feel, unlike bands like Cradle of Filth and Nightwish, isn’t classical at all. 80 % of all guitars layered and acoustic or clean( read that extremely juicy PRS clean sound ). The solo passages, bass work and the drumming emulates a lot of jazz influence. Orchestration is virtually absent from the foreground. The arrangement is lighter than even most Porcupine Tree tracks. Moral, it is a record that hardly classifies under modern day metal.

To understand the album better and to answer some of the fundamental questions about it that were bombing my mind, I decided to dictionary for “Classicism” and the related topic of “Romanticism”.

Classicist : An artistic person who adheres to classicism.

Romantic : of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a style of literature and art that subordinates form to content, encourages freedom of treatment, emphasizes imagination, emotion, and introspection, and often celebrates nature, the ordinary person, and freedom of the spirit (contrasted with classical).

Thus everything about Opeth, rather the Damnation record specifically, was answered. What these guys are essentially doing is bringing about an evolution in the era of music. The album isn’t a mix of stumbled upon grooves and riffs composed over a couple of jams. It is a carefully thought out package of melodies and phrases. Jazz influenced solos, their usual long drawn out passages, brilliant chord progressions and vocal melodies, all in all one of the most notable metal records in my book.

However, what I am trying to say is not about the virtues of Opeth musically. Its the stylistic shift that the band is brining up. With Damnation, Opeth have ended the, sort of classicism in modern music. Just like the neo-classicists, we might be at the dawn of the neo-romantics. I wouldn’t be very surprised, if such similar movements have started mushrooming in Literature and Art. All we, the lesser talented and lesser cerative people have to do now, is wait and watch the masters grasp, consume and regurgitate creativity to a new shape.

Future Music. My rantings on Progressive Rock

It is the music for the faster kind. Music influenced by the propensity of the Internet and technological developments in sound and delivery. It’s a form of music that is filled with odd and changing time signatures capriciously fitted in compositions that are both confusing and complex. It’s a genre that roots on technical and lyrical virtuosity and depth. After the musical slack of the Grunge era of the early 90s, and the lyrical and contextual slack of Nu metal of the late 90’s Progressive Rock has picked up both the fallen pieces and attributed them firmly to its roots.

 

Western classical music, especially the Romantic era has been my staple diet for the past 5 years. As Beethoven marked the end of the Classicists with his thunderous 9^th, the Romantics picked it up and composed music without most of the rules that had involuntarily crept into Classical composers. Such a change was the fundamental distinction of the Romantics from the Classicists.

 

Since the onset of dominant usage of percussions and rhythm since the early 90s, music of the 20^th century marked a notable difference from its predecessor. Forms of music with drums as an integral instrument started springing up such as Blues, Rock and Roll and Heavy Metal. Experimentation in rhythm began and became very popular among the Jazz drummers like Buddy Rich and a few rock drummers like Neil Pert of Rush and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. However in the 90s, following the pointless Punk movement, such experimental music took a back seat. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains took centre stage and the progressive sound was lost in the underground. This was followed by a long and boring spell of the nu-metal, or as I like to call them “noob” metal. Bands started adding rap, samples, scratches and bull-shit for lyrics in their songs. Both these eras sold out pretty well to the listener, but obviously, owing to the lack of depth, proved time bound. Bands failed to hold on to the sound and it ended in a downward spiral.

 

With the onset of the new millennium musicians and listeners alike craved for music to be deeper, more virtuous and more intelligent than that of the 90s. The obvious answer was the revival of the Progressive movement. Although bands like Dream Theater, Tool and Porcupine Tree were doing good stuff even during the whole of the 90s, the new millennium is welcoming a plethora of new progressive acts. The name of the game is to experiment. While bands like Meshuggah and Lamb of God, have decided to purely experiment with rhythm, bands like Opeth, Dream Theater and Pain of Salvation are playing around with new and unorthodox melody structures. The context of the music is also very important. Concept albums have become very popular and bands are bridging the gap between Literature and Music by writing extremely creative and complex songs. Pain of Salvation’s album BE is a concept album that speculates the existence of God. Tool albums are very interesting and deal with complicated structures and hidden messages. British bands like Porcupine Tree and Blackfield are doing very good song writing and are covering various dimensions of thought and emotions almost like the Beatles. Themes like drug abuse, politics and sex are slowly filtering out.

 

Technicalities in music are at an all time high right now. Most of the really good Progressive Rock bands thrive on technical brilliance of all members. The inherent rhythm of 4 4 or 3 4 that is instinctual to humans is being replaced by a lot of 7 8s and 5 8s that bring about an effect of surprise, intensity and open a whole new dimension of music composition and experimentation. Unorthodox scales and melody structures are finding extensive usage in bands like Opeth, Symphony X and Arcturus.

 

Moral of the story, future of music appears brighter than ever. Technological developments have given progressive music of the 70s a huge boost in the 21^st century. One can expect the future to be a heady concoction of complex, deep, unorthodox and wholesome music, delivered as clear as crystal that every connoisseur of good music would appreciate.