@Asantehene
By best composed I don't mean greatest show of technicality. If I did, I'd stan shyt bands like Dream Theater, Dillinger Escape Plan, Necrophagist etc. I'd like Paganini more than Corelli, etc. Technicality is cool, but it's not what I look for exclusively. Some of the best and dopest metal bands are really simple, like Havohej or Burzum. But they express something using musical language in a metal framework. I don't fukk with most sludge stuff (I like Neurosis and Jesu to an extent) because I just don't find it that impressive.
Black Metal isn't about complexity or technicality either. It's about using melodic development to express the self. Good metal at it's core is sorta like music from the baroque->romantic period; it expresses through composition.
For example those two bands i posted are actually quite conventional in some respects. They use consonant melodies to construct their music, but do so in a very intelligent way. Atheist is incredible because they twist 80s and 90s death metal riffs perfectly into a free jazz framework like Coltrane or Coleman, and there's a similar tonal approach. Yet it's still intrinsically metal. Compare this to a Between the Buried and Me or other 'progressive' bands that simply play in contrasting time signatures and throw in keyboard interludes here and there to give an impression of being free and forward thinking. But all they're doing is pasting things together from different sources without integrating them and building upon them thematically and musically. At the Gates are incredible on that album (and their second, but they later became shyt), because they drive songs forward using musical motifs with contrast in counterpoint and harmonization. It seems simple, but the intertwining melodies they use are modern classical in nature almost like a Bruckner. Listen again, and note that this music is not based upon repetition or novelty, but upon a progression from one point to another that supercedes a rock paradigm into something approaching the ambient or romantic music spectrum. You have to see beneath the noise to discover the melodies underneath. They may be dissonant, but they're there.
Sorry if that's incomprehensible. But don't be fooled by the label of 'progressive'. Most of these guys calling themselves so aren't constructing things smartly, just fast and with different time signatures
I don't expect people to enjoy or like it though
You guys all know your shyt. What are your respective favorite albums from the genre?
........I see you, breh.........
.......My exact thought. The timing and interplay of the instruments is INCREDIBLE!!! When peeps ask 'How can you listen to that noise?' I know they aren't listening to what I'm hearing........
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realm though.