Hey, I like you too! I was reading the posts that you, irminsul, mr mikev, Sdavis22, vocals and bass, black santa and a few others have written... insightful and hillarious. (Except for macleod... he's just hillarious and arguementative) And nope, can't call it a debate because I haven't started to argue with you yet. No worries, I'm positive I'll disagree with you on some things. Now, about the bands you listed, some of them were hard to listen to. I gave it the good college try; part of it was I don't have my own computer and I was hesitant to annoy the people around me, and another part of it was, as you mentioned, the tone of the singer's scream. That will take me a while to get used to. Unfortunately I've only listened to a few artist at a time... I tend to post on bandmix at work, but because I work in a government building, myspace and other media-type sites have been banned. (this one has slipped through the cracks, I guess. As long as I don't listen to any music samples I believe it's okay. There are all these really interesting links floating around the internet that are off limits to me! You can't imagine how frustrating this is. I'll be following some music related thread or find an artist I just
have to look up,
but I can't hear what they sound like.
Record it! (the tounge-teeth thing. I cannot imagine what it sounds like. I tried to do it myself, but failed miserably. Takes some parctice, eh?)
Okay... so my openness with music has been helped along the way by my parents and my own strange tastes. I like seal, tears for fears, enya, sting... all those and more. There are a few genres I'm more partial to than others; I'm not a big fan of most country and rap. There are exceptions, but the ratio of like to dislike for these genres is much smaller. On the eastern european side of things; my father plays macedonian, greek, bulgarian, romanian, etc - if it's slavik, chances are he plays it. One of my mothers also plays this type of music. She plays two of the most annoying instruments in the world - the bagpipes (or the gajda) and the accordian. I remember in high school I was having trouble getting up in the morning, so my mother, sick to death of my lazy behavior, finally came into my room and gave me the early morning bagpipe wake-up call. I'll never hear the bagpipes now without wincing. My father plays the flute, the tambura (sorta like a guitar), the gudulka, and multiple percussion instruments. He aso plays Sufi (whirling dirvish?) devotional music, which I think is really awsome. Music = spirituality / a way to get closer to god sounds pretty wonderful to me. Maybe not metal per se (Metal & 'getting closer to god' sounds like an oxymoron), but some music certainly envokes feelings of awe or euphoria. Back on topic, I love world music, especial middle eastern (bellydance sounding stuff), bollywood (bhangra/indian sounding stuff), asian rock (I'll discuss this later), and spanish pop. And of course eastern european music. In addition, my father, in his youth, listened to a lot of what we now deem "classic rock", so through him I now enjoy Led Zepplin, Cream, Hendrix, Rush, the Beatles, the Doors, Queen, etc... (too many to name. if I missed a few greats, my apologies.) I also picked up some music of my very own, not influenced by my parents but by the radio or my peers. Through this I came to like alternative rock, then grunge, then metal. (So I went a different route than you
) When I say metal I have to admit that I never was a big fan of Metalica (prefering apacalyptica to the actual band), but fell into the nu metal side of things (Yes, I like disturbed too. In fact on their Down with the Sickness CD, I love the intro to their song Fear. It starts all techno and soft (ish) then suddenly the guitars come in and it's exciting!!! It reminds me of a song fron a Devil may Cry AMV called Fre@K $How that starts in much the same manner. The rest of the song is, well okay (japanese band, really bad english), but when I was playing the video game and I heard the beginning I almost died (no really, someone was shooting at me) cause I stopped moving to listen. I really appreciate when bands build up to a climax rather than starting hard - like a good book. Yes, the reverse can be just as moving, I'll admit, but when you can hear each individual layer start playing (drums, bass, giutar, vocals) I find I listen more closely to the music. I like a sense of expectancy!!!)
I wrote a whole lot.... i need to take a break and do some work. I'll return to write a bit more when i've go my thoughts in order and I've collected the mail. You're really an interesting (and fun!
) person to write to! hope I don't ramble too much.