Today it is time to explore some bands I hate. I have never really done a post like this before. I have talked about not liking bands, I have reviewed albums I did not like, but this is the first time I am naming names of bands I truly dislike. A lot of people are going to claim I am an elitist, maybe that is true. A lot of these are bands that are popular, but that's not what I don't like them. I like plenty of popular bands, I have been a big Metallica fan since I got into metal and they are as popular as metal gets. These bands simply do not do anything for me. If I offend some readers, I don't really care. This is not a forum, these are my opinions. If you like one of these bands, good for you, I don't. You probably hate something I love.
So, without further ado: Bands I Hate:
I liked Slipknot at one point. I would never say they were a favorite of mine, but I did enjoy their self-titled release quite a bit when it came out. To this day, there are some songs on there I still enjoy, but I have not listened to the album in quite some time. Then came Iowa, and I bought that album. That one is a difficult listen, the band was clearly trying to be the most brutal and extreme band they could. Again, there are some good songs, but that album rang hollow to me. It didn't feel authentic. I don't know how else to describe it. They just seemed to be trying too hard. Then Vol. III hit and they tried to scale back some of that extremity and return a bit to the self-titled release, and they completely lost me. I never really looked back at them from that point on. I have heard the tracks on Liquid Metal over the years and nothing has convinced me that I have ever missed out on anything. And then I saw them live (I was there for Gojira and Behemoth). I always thought they were supposed to have some great live show, but man, they really sucked when I saw them. They did not have much energy and they sounded horrible. Since then, I simply do not care for the band.
Again, there was a time I liked this band. I had Adrenaline, and there were a lot of songs I liked on it. This was when they were trying to sound more like Korn and other nu-metal acts, but it was a fun release. I completely skipped over the next album and checked them out again on White Pony, and that album bored the fuck out of me. It is currently hailed as some kind of landmark release, but I don't see it. I was annoyed by the whiny vocals and the music simply did not do anything for me. I did like the track they did with Maynard James Keenan, but that was it. Again, I have heard the songs that make it onto Liquid Metal or the other channels and not one of them has changed my opinion. I am always baffled when I see people hail this band as revolutionary. I simply don't get the hype.
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Alright, let's start with the album cover. What the fuck am I looking at? And that's just the start of the pretentious bullshit that comes from this band. They refer to themselves as "transcendental black metal" which makes me stabby. The music, if you can call it that, is just a fucking mess. I get it, they are trying to be experimental, throwing a bunch of random shit together, but it simply does not work. At some point, band leader Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix decided to start incorporating some kind of glitch effect, which is used frequently throughout the music in the last couple of albums. It's not clever, it's fucking obnoxious. I have tried to sit down and listen to this stuff multiple times and I can rarely make it through an entire song before skipping to the next one, eventually giving up completely. I am even more baffled when I read some reviews that declare this album one of the most important albums in music in the last several years. I can't stand this fucking band.
Deafheaven is made up of a bunch of indie/emo kids cosplaying as a black metal band (or post-black metal or whatever the fuck). And that's fine, if the music was at least genuine, but I just cannot get past the fact that none of them seem to actually like metal. They take what Alcest was doing before them and water it down even more for the shoegaze crowd. The music is ultra-repetitive and it ultimately just sounds like any other indie band, just with screeching vocals. I hesitate to even find the real black metal influences. Truthfully, they sound like the only black metal band they are familiar with was the aforementioned Alcest (and I actually do like some of Alcest's music before anyone calls me an elitist). I just don't get it. I wouldn't be worked up about it if there weren't people claiming this was some massive step forward for the genre or a masterpiece. But there are and so I am.
Spiritbox is one of the bands currently getting shoved down listeners' throats on Liquid Metal (I have been listening to a lot of that channel driving between courthouses). I could probably branch this out to include any other nu-nu-metal band, but this is the one that the channel seems to have the biggest hard-on for, so this band gets the brunt of my rage. Seriously, we all decided nu-metal was an atrocity 20+ years ago, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to revive the genre? There's some elements that are fine, I guess, and I don't hate all their songs, but I am already sick to death of them, and they have only been around for a few years.
Holy hell does this band suck. I could probably branch this one out to include most deathcore bands, a genre that is nearly universally a horrendous thing. But, we will stick to Slaughter to Prevail for now, I'm sure there has to be at least one or two decent deathcore bands, and I vaguely recall liking Carnifex and Through the Eyes of the Dead a little bit, but it's been a long time since I have heard them. Anyway, Slaughter to Prevail is a Russian deathcore band and the singer has had to fend off allegations of ultra right-wing and Nazi ideologies. But beyond that, there is the fact that the band is just simply terrible. They try very hard to be ultra-brutal and it just comes out as a loud mess.
Here is another band that has a ton of hype around them. For a long time they were just another deathcore band, then they started incorporating some symphonic elements and then they got new singer Will Ramos, and suddenly people were saying he was this incredible new talent with some of the most extreme and brutal vocals of all time. I have heard him, he is nothing special. There have been vocalists like this in brutal death metal bands dating back to the 1990's. The slam genre is pretty much all vocalists like this. He's decent, just nothing unique, and I could like him a little bit more if the music wasn't just mind-numbingly boring.
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Sleep Token is one of the most popular newer bands in the metal scene the last couple of years, which is quite a feat considering they really are not a metal band. Not for the most part anyway. The big deal with Sleep Token is they combine a variety of disparate styles and genres and can shift and change easily across songs, and sometimes even within songs. There's nothing wrong with that, so why are they here? Because of the countless articles I have seen claiming they are some kind of saviors of metal or elevating the metal genre to something more. It's no secret that there have been a few pop stars that have been borrowing metal in their music for some time and Sleep Token seems to be an extension of that. But as I have always preached, metal is much better when it is outside the mainstream. The last time we had a movement of bands combining metal with mainstream genres, nu-metal was the result, and we all know how that went.
Why do so many of these damn bands on this post wear masks? There's nothing inherently wrong with it, I listen to other bands that wear masks (Uada, Ghoul, Batushka), but a lot of these modern artists doing it just don't do much for me. Now, I saw it described best recently that Gaerea is black metal for people who don't listen to black metal, and that seems to have hit the nail on the head. It's like the band members studied black metal and knew what elements to put in it, and just fucked it all up. There is an episode of Parks and Rec in which the character Mark talks about a camel being the result of a committee trying to make a horse, this is what we have here. The elements seem to be here, but the result simply is not black metal. I wanted to like this band, I really did, but I just don't.
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