There goes another decade - a retrospective

[Scar Symmetry]

To revise on the topic I'd like to add that the majority of my all time favourite albums have been released this decade... scratch that actually, the past 5 years.

There's stuff from the 90s that I think is incredible (Slaughter of the Soul, Destroy Erase Improve, Chaosphere, The Divine Wings of Tragedy) but I find music from this decade far more interesting. In fact, my favourite music is usually the brand new music that is pushing the boundaries of metal.

Watershed, Obzen, Planetary Duality, Catch 33, Epitaph, The Negation... all from the past 5 years.

[Aeszvidel]

Wintersun!

I'm looking forward to 10's metal.

It's definitely going somewhere.

At the end of the day its not like any of us would stop listening to it if it did have a bad break. There will always be good amongst the bad. I'd say thats how things will always be.

Badcore < Good everything else.

As trendy as core is. It's a pretty big trend.

Don't think it'll go away anytime soon.

And as much as they try to follow in the footsteps of more technical metal, Fringes hinder such progression and they will always be 100 steps behind the good

It was a bit biased. But it's amusing to think about it that way.

[JohnIce]

When I think of what makes the 00's different from the 90's, I immediately think of downloading.

The musical climate has been turned completely upside down by this change, and will undoubtedly keep evolving over the 10's. Over the last few years, downloading has finally come to be accepted by the music industry as something they can't stop, and now they're finally trying to work around that. The CD is dead, and it died during the 00's.

I'd say guys like Devin Townsend and bulb will have a bit of an up-swing now, because common people are less dictated by major companies, now they can much more easily find music that they really like online, not just what's played on the radio. You can link a band's entire discography to a friend in seconds. This is great for the less "mainstream" artists who can't have a major record company promoting them and putting their record in stores.

However, the downside is obviously that it's much harder to make money. Making profit is hard but just breaking even is hard too. This is what both the record companies and the individual artists are trying to do now. Now we're really in need for entrepreneurs in music, the Gene Simmons guys with one foot in music and one in business. Sure, we'll probably see less gold-digging poptarts and talentless rappers, awesome, but when a talented and innovative musician can't release an album because they have to work two jobs every day, we all lose from it.

[Mattayus]

I will say one thing... it seems to have been a ....ing cracking decade for death metal, despite the fact that certain aspects of it have been hijacked by ....in scene kids

Originally Posted by Scar Symmetry

^ No? Who do you mean?

Behold... The Arctopus! come to mind.

Originally Posted by Esp Griffyn

stuff

Totally man, there is just no wow factor. I remember very clearly Slipknot's first album coming out, as I skipped school to get a bus to Cambridge and nab it from a tiny side-street vendor who used to sell really "underground" stuff

That's just it though isn't it. There is no "underground" any more. That phrase used to mean something. Even though bands like Slipknot were ....ing "huge", they were still considered very "underground" to begin with at least, because even Kerrang! was considered underground. Metal Hammer was like this totally elite cult thing! If you read Metal Hammer you were the shit, and really knew your stuff! It's funny, the bands that are still considered the huge metal "superstars" now are the ones that were back then. i.e. there have been no new ones created, because it's impossible. They were created in a time when it worked. Now it doesn't, so there aren't any.

Originally Posted by JohnIce

stuff

Exactly. That's another thing I forgot to mention, the fact that the actual industry itself, not just the fan behaviour, but the very business side of it has had monumental short comings. The film industry is the same. The only thing that seems to be surviving is the ....ing game industry, simply because it's more difficult to pirate!

[Scar Symmetry]

Gotcha. I like spazzy bands, but BTA aren't one of those I enjoy.

[Variant]

I think a few of you guys (including maybe the O.P.) went through your late teens in the late '90s into the '00s, and are letting nostalgia get the better of you. Because a lot of the "this band, that band" stuff is pretty anecdotal, and a lot of opinion. 'St. Anger' a more relevant release than 'Stabbing The Drama'? Please.

Frankly, it's really easy to contextualize a decade (like, say, the '80s) when you weren't there to elapse at realtime through the megatons of crap. I've been guilty of doing the same with the seventies (I was born in '77) thinking it was all 'Nursery Crime', '2112', and 'Dark Side Of The Moon', etc. I'm pretty sure that's not exactly how it went down. The '00s were hardly banal, when you look at the influential piece parts of heavy music scene, it moved along quite well, and pushed back to the surface to a large degree: Meshuggah, SikTh, and Periphery are more then djenting, and with bands like Opeth, Isis, Devin Townsend, Porcupine Tree, Gojira, Dark Tranquillity, Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon, Scar Symmetry, and so on finding headway & respect... that's all hardly passable, IMHO. Death metal, grindcore, and black metal guys who were as obscure as fusion greats, found huge respect due to a big portion of the scene acknowledging them as influences, and copping their styles. Sure, not every band with a growling vocalist, and blast beating drummer are worth their weight in salt, or even relevant to the now or the future... but the '00s brought extreme metal out of being a parroted "guys making random noise" punchline. Prog, too, has had the chance to be refocused on listeners who didn't resolve it all as all 12-minute long, pretentious wank-fests. Those are big ....ing steps, in my opinion.

Also, the idea that there is no underground is CERTIFIABLY ....ING INSANE... there might not be in England (though I highly doubt that), or you might not be looking in the right places, or you (stuck in your coming-of-age years) are waiting for the next Slipknot. Well, if there's anything I've learned, you don't get another Slipknot! I didn't get another Dream Theater, Faith No More, or Ministry. I got a Gojira, Ulver, or Meshuggah. What makes the changes appreciable, is that you can't contextualize them with the last revelation you had. It all makes sense in hindsight, trust me.

[Scar Symmetry]

There is an underground scene in England, of course there is

[Mattayus]

No I think you've misunderstood the context completely. Of course there's still an underground, there always will be, but it doesn't cover the SAME ground as it once did, and has therefore drastically changed the definition of what makes something "underground". I don't like the phrase anyway, it has an air of pretentiousness about it, but it's the only thing I could think of to describe what I meant.

[Variant]

^
But that's what I'm saying... it won't ever be the same. It'll be different every time around. The world changes. I don't know what your malfunction is, but when I stumble across a band in 2009 (like Hacride, for instance), it's still the same thrill as when I stumbled across, say, Fear Factory when 'Soul Of a New Machine' bowed. Do I find it through the same channels? No. But, who cares, dude. It was a late night metal show on a college station back in '92, it's a link-from-a-link-from-a-link on Myspace in '09.

I can record my band's demo on a cassette tape and pass it to you in a dark alley if it'll make you feel better about it.

[Mattayus]

Fair. But I'm still entitled to being a jaded codger.
I still adore discovering new music, it's fantastic, but I'm more than aware that it's not feeling as special as it once did. Again though, that could just be down to my age

[Esp Griffyn]

Originally Posted by Scar Symmetry

There is an underground scene in England, of course there is

In the 90s bands that were "underground" were all but unmentioned in Metal Hammer, save the occasional album review. No big interviews, no photoshoots, no real info about the albums. Then they did a pull out mag that was inside each of MH called "Subterranea" or something, and that had bands that were, at the time, really underground. Even though the internet was obviously around at the time, even the big forums of musicians were in their infancy, some of them were not even around at that time, so a lot of bands that appeared in that mag really were underground. Very little buzz elsewhere, so when you read that magazine you could find bands that you would be unlikely to stumble across anywhere else. I remember reading about Axis of Perdition in there just after their first demo was released, and bands like Khold were in there just after they released their first album. A great many of the bands in there disappeared unnoticed in the way that many underground bands do, and unfortunately I long since threw those magazines out and cannot remember anymore of the bands that were featured.

I think what Mattayus is getting at, and I agree with him if I have interpreted him correctly, is that the internet age took the shroud away from the underground. Now that every band has a myspace, a soundclick, a logo designed by the drummers best friend and a tour schedule of the local dog-and-bollock circuit posted up, few bands (only those shirking such marketting strategies) are truly under the radar. The music of "underground" bands was hard to obtain, and even in a big city like Newcastle there was only one shop that sold anything remotely less than mainstream. It was called Steel Wheels, a little independant record shop that was a goldmine for extreme metal fans - you never knew what you could find flipping through the racks. Nostalgia maybe, but the magic of finding something truly awesome is gone. I remember looking through Tower Records (the only "big" cd store that sold really out there stuff) just next to Picadilly Circus in London and finding a Yattering cd. They don't even have their own wikipedia entry, but the music, crude though it was, did have a certain aura to it. It was cool listening to something and feeling like you had made a genuine discovery through your own efforts. Listening to something great that not many others were hearing was a good feeling - a bit elitist maybe, I certainly try to stay away from that trve shit, but it was a good feeling.

I think that has been lost, particularly from about 2003/2004 onwards when Myspace really started blowing up and people recognised its potential for publicity. The easy accessabilty of new bands through myspace gives them a throwaway quality. Load the page, listen to a couple of tracks on the player, leave a comment, move on. I've heard loads of bands that people have touted, but out of all of them, I can't think of any that struck me as genuinely worth my listening for more than a few minutes. I think the quick rotation style of younger listeners has only added to the trend-cycle, as bands more quickly become aware of their competitors and alter their image and sound to follow suit and stay ahead of the game. The underground has sort of gone above ground as public marketing channels became so readily available, which just shows how quickly things can change - even 10 years ago when Subterranea was still in circulation it was one of the only places to clue up on bands like that.

Call my view that discovering bands before the myspace era being more enjoyable nostalgic if you must, but I certainly found it more rewarding. I paid my money and stuck with the music for better or worse. Sometimes I would get into stuff I didn't enjoy at first, sometimes I had no choice but to stop listening and move on. These days its all "Listen on youtube, if you don't like it, don't buy it", or "download a leak". Sure CDs were expensive, but that combined with the promotion of metal bands made music a more perservering, rewarding experience.

Originally Posted by Mattayus

Fair. But I'm still entitled to being a jaded codger.
I still adore discovering new music, it's fantastic, but I'm more than aware that it's not feeling as special as it once did. Again though, that could just be down to my age

This, absolutely this.

[Triple-J]

The one thing I think is missing in music as a whole is diversity as it seems like most bands crank out an album of 10 tunes that don't stray too far from the template of the opening track, some of the best albums in any genre are diverse and feature an ebb and flow to the material but due to downloading breaking up records into small chunks the idea of an album being this cool as .... sonic rollercoaster is fading and I think that is the worst thing about music in the past ten years.
Don't get me wrong though as I think there are plenty of bands that see the bigger picture when writing an album and manage to create a complete collection of songs that has a flow to it and off the top of my head I believe that both Rammstein and Meshuggah do this very well.

I also think that the internet and it's endless series of bullshit genre tags are eroding things as the moment a genre is tagged with some type of name it becomes unfashionable as it's INSTANTLY seen as uncool and then becomes a figure of hate and ridicule.
In the scramble for musical identity genre tags serve a purpose for bands but in the long run they just induce hate and fragment the public, plus what's worse is that there's plenty of people who may like a band such as A7X or Suicide Silence but because of their association with a genre they don't give them a listen this to me is far worse than people who do the opposite and want to listen to a band because it's part of a scene or trend.

[willyman101]

I think a lot of the times bands are starting to sound like each other because there's only so much music to be made within the genre of 'metal'. After a while stuff will start to sound the same because people genuinely can't write stuff that sounds new without it sounding like something else entirely.

I don't think it's fair to accuse myspace of taking some of the magic out of music though - I'm a teenager so my opinion is going to be different seeing as I was but a child at the turn of the century, but myspace has definitely opened my eyes to loads of new bands. Shit is evolving and teenagers these days just don't go into record stores and buy albums to discover music, sadly. If we have the chance to listen to a hundred new bands who could well end up being our favourites then I don't see a lot wrong with it, though I do understand the attraction of going out and buying a record and bringing it home and all that. I just think that in a world that is constantly evolving we should accept new ways of doing things. Granted, the way you older guys (no offence ) did it had far more integrity.

I don't really know what I'm getting at here but I think I'm defending myspace because it's introduced me to hundreds of new bands. At the end of the day we have to figure out whether the industry is suffering or whether the music itself is suffering from this stuff...

[HeavyMetal4Ever]

The internet has made the underground, well, less underground. Today, anyone can jump onto a computer and check out music they would have not only never heard of, but never had a chance to hear of.

Back when I was a young whipper snapper (i'm 35) the only way I could hear new metal was to buy it, usually on order. The closest store that stocked alot of metal was about 3 hours away. Nowdays it's 3 mouse clicks, and imho thats not a good thing, it's an absolutely ....ing awesome thing.

Rock on!

[distressed_romeo]

Originally Posted by Esp Griffyn

In Call my view that discovering bands before the myspace era being more enjoyable nostalgic if you must, but I certainly found it more rewarding. I paid my money and stuck with the music for better or worse. Sometimes I would get into stuff I didn't enjoy at first, sometimes I had no choice but to stop listening and move on. These days its all "Listen on youtube, if you don't like it, don't buy it", or "download a leak". Sure CDs were expensive, but that combined with the promotion of metal bands made music a more perservering, rewarding experience.

God, I totally agree. I really miss tape trading...

[SkullKrusher]

INCOMING DEBATE & Off Topic!

BUT...............

A New Decade doesn't actually start until 2011.

2010 is the last year of this decade.

[Scar Symmetry]

FAIL.

This decade started 2000... the next decade starts tomorrow!

[SkullKrusher]

Actually, you're wrong. A decade is a 10 year stretch.

so year 1 - 10 is a decade. 11 - 20 ect ect..

Look it up on wiki.... While it's popular belief that decades "start" on a 0 year, IE: 1910, 1920. Math says otherwise.

SO .. WIN?

Again it's all relative and debatable.

[zimbloth]

Originally Posted by SkullKrusher

Actually, you're wrong. A decade is a 10 year stretch.

so year 1 - 10 is a decade. 11 - 20 ect ect..

Look it up on wiki.... While it's popular belief that decades "start" on a 0 year, IE: 1910, 1920. Math says otherwise.

SO .. WIN?

Again it's all relative and debatable.

There's nothing to debate really. Everyone's lists are 2000-2009. Whether math agrees or not, that's irrelevant to this discussion.

[Scar Symmetry]

Originally Posted by SkullKrusher

Actually, you're wrong. A decade is a 10 year stretch.

so year 1 - 10 is a decade. 11 - 20 ect ect..

Look it up on wiki.... While it's popular belief that decades "start" on a 0 year, IE: 1910, 1920. Math says otherwise.

SO .. WIN?

Again it's all relative and debatable.

So 0-9 isn't a ten year stretch?

[Cynic]

Originally Posted by Scar Symmetry

So 0-9 isn't a ten year stretch?

Yes

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

Count 'em.

[Cheesebuiscut]

What is from strength to strength?

[Samer]

Well this decade was a big win for metal IMO, Nu Metal from the 90's pretty much died out and technical guitar playing and interesting song structure made a comeback.

I remember in 99 i went into a guitar store looking for a delay pedal to play lead, the guy working at the store told me he never has tried playing lead / or even as much as done a pinch harmonic because its not needed to play metal (nu metal that is)

Bands like After The Burial, Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession, Veil of Maya, Born of Osiris have broken new grounds for death metal; along with some really good prog bands like Adagio, Angra, Sonata Arctica, Zero Hour, and Spheric Universe Experience have taken prog to the next level.

Overall it has been a great decade for metal; you just have to know where to look.

[SkullKrusher]

Originally Posted by zimbloth

There's nothing to debate really. Everyone's lists are 2000-2009. Whether math agrees or not, that's irrelevant to this discussion.

While yes 0-9 is 10 per say. The years started at 1 AD, not 0.

But yes, this is major off topic so i'm done thread crashing.

[vampiregenocide]

I think the 00's shall forver been known as 'The Decade of Autotune'.

Reality TV, commercial music and the false sense imminent financial success has muddied the mainsteam more than it ever has been. But then what do you expect, its been prety shit times what with 9/11, 7/7, Iraq, Flu scares, recession etc etc. People are looking for comfort and the state creates that in the form of mass produced media that shows a skewed view of things. Much like Pop Art looked optimistically at everyday items in the wake of the Great Depression, reality TV and mainstream music have served in the same way, to give that vibe that theres people out there shitter than you are, and someday you'll be richer than them.

But towards the end of the decade, a bit of a resurgence seems to have occurred within underground music, which has spread nto the mainstream. With metal, people have got boredof the same old songs being written over and over, and with Meshuggah rising in popularity, more unorthodox song structures are being heard in a variety of genres. Metalcore has given way to more technical 'core genres' including progressive core influenced bands and whatnot. Its like nu-metal started the decade, then when those bands realised they were becoming too mainstream, they either changed style or quit, either way generally taking the backburner a bit. Then pop music was rampant again, which in turn has brought the rise of indie and hardcore music, which I feel is nearing its end and peoples tastes are once again looking for that next step.

IMO, the next decade will feature a lot more bands like Periphery, After The Burial, Fellsilent etc etc pushing the boundaries of music and gaining popularity. 'Djent' will (as has really) become a genre. As for pop music, I think people will grow tired of dickheads like Kayne West. I think older styles of music will be reimagined and jazz, soul and other styles will be a lot more widely appreciated.

Or something like that, I'm tired as .....