Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20170901233307/@comment-3547390-20171027221210

Oh, sorry to hear that indeed.

Heh, it is definitely great that I live in a dark basement these days where I never have to worry about gamma. These thoughts remind me why I insist on living in an area most people feel is wrong. "It is unhealthy to live in a basement, you only want to be there because you have never seen anything else". I have seen how else it can be growing up, it is much better down here.

It would be strange if you didn't have any issues at all. I can load up a save of Shub-Niggurath's Pit I happen to have and it results in the Rotfish turning into deadly 25 Healths.

I should actually do that, at least to get names. Mostly I just have been going for the big bands or those mentioned in youtube links. The biggest weakness with me is that I am slow when listening to music in a genre I like, I want to actually listen to it and find out if I like it or just find it boring. So I need no distractions and to devote all my energy to listening to entire albums, so an hour just focusing on music. I generally do that on weekends that are a bit slower, like this one, which means I can check out Therion. As you can see, that means I can't just flip on a radio and listen to any song. God forbid it is a newer Within Temptation, newer Lacuna Coil, newer Tarja, newer Nightwish, or Epica song. All those are currently barred to me.

I just learned how to play Follow in the Cry on the guitar actually. Absolutely adore Prison of Desire. People of course mock me for listening to it, saying how it doesn't sound like metal and isn't hardcore. People especially love to laugh about the female vocals, apparently if you are a man you need to listen to just men to show how tough you are or something. I never was about trying to be brutal or having some appearance of being tough. My goal was always to find stuff that was melodic, highly classical, and symphonic metal tends to have that. At least until the bands fall apart. Symphonic metal seems to have a curse where any good band eventually falls apart entirely. In any event, it is fascinating, since it shows just how image-based most people seem to be. They will play death metal, but perhaps are just doing it to show how edgy they are, and yet they are in their 30s-40s.

Of course, the craziest things come from my own family. Upon hearing After Forever, my family insisted that I should love the Cranberries as "the female vocals are exactly the same". I totally disagree, the female singer annoys me there, but even if that was the case there are plenty of examples where a singer sang stuff I found annoying on the same album from stuff I absolutely love (not to mention all those symphonic metal albums I dislike just because they lack that epic feeling, it feels instead static). Then they told me I should love Air Supply and Meatloaf, the latter of which has the most melodic music of all time. Now they have settled down, feeling they have figured me out. Apparently I am trying to go against the grain by doing the obscure. In a way, that is a bit depressing, since that just shows how unable they are to comprehend that people like different things. I don't understand it at all. Why would people put themselves through so much... listen to stuff not because they really like it but because it makes them look better... just to put on an image and then expect everyone else to like identical things? If playing symphonic metal loudly has taught me anything, it is that I am more alien than I thought.

Had to rant my confusion over all that after that was the response to me playing an After Forever song on guitar. Maybe you can explain it better, since you interact better with people. I may do things I dislike, I do things I dislike a lot, but at least I am not doing them repeatedly just to present some image contradictory to who I am.

EDIT: So I have checked out Therion a bit, listening to their earlier songs as I go through their entire discography with the help of the metallum. Their earliest demos were garbage, though even Therion themselves said they were, and the biggest problem was that they were disoriented messes. Upon listening to their first album, I felt confused about how this band was in any way different from any of the other early death metal bands. I should note I have never successfully found a song I liked prior to 1995 besides Metallica. Their first album is as generic sounding and dull as any of those other early bands, plus there is something about their disoriented direction that bugs me. Their second album was much of a continuation of the first, but suddenly I was noticing something in each song, they actually had great riffs and sounded pretty melodic. I wouldn't blame you for listening to it, I can see an appeal existing (I can't for a great many bands), but it just isn't my style due to the disoriented vocal style. The third is absolutely insane, suddenly they took that melodicness and turned it up to 11, suddenly we went from a band I felt was decent melodic death to something pretty impressive indeed. Of course, they still have a disoriented mess on the vocal side. I guess the best thing to compare it to is thrash metal, it feels like a bunch of sentences strung together just to yell in any sequence. The instruments by the third album are quite highly impressive, for 1993 it is astounding indeed, as this is the sort of melodicness I spend a lot of time hunting for and failing due to melodic death metal being nothing but a false label. I can highly respect it, I can even detect gothic flairs reminding me of Tristania when they were good, but it is just missing that core vision that converts a song from the ramblings of a guy yelling into a microphone into something musical. I guess it is comparable to Lulu by Metallica. The music in the background is pretty good, in fact it is downright impressive, but I am at the same time bored out of my mind due to feeling I got a growling Abe Simpson telling me about bumblebees.

There, I just made a new Therion song. Add some occult references. Yell about Cthulhu every now and then. Pay me $20 and make it into the newest hit. I shall continue of course, because I am insane, but I am not sure the songwriting here is my style no matter how epic the instruments behind Abe Simpson are. The fourth album feels about the same as the third, maybe less epic, and we now lost the death metal vocals for some punk-style vocals that I heavily dislike. So, yeah, four albums in and I still have yet to find anything I fully like. The third album had some impressive guitars, but lacked a good song style. Maybe the fourth was more "catchy", but the vocals entirely threw me off it. Well, Abe Simpson lyrics or not, the third album works as alright background music if you want some variety, just something best to squint at due to being a flawed experiment. The fourth I regret highly listening to for the normal vocals. The soprano style of course worked better, but I don't tend to like male operatic voices and this seems to continue the trend, it is just as grating as the voices on After Forever's second album. Of course, I realize System of the Down doesn't have the worst vocals out there. That is because nothing has made me laugh and cringe at the same time as Darkness Eve. A shame, with the right vocals this stuff could be really amazing. But as it is, it is hard to hear the music over the sound of my own laughter, for the vocals sound so horrible I cannot take it seriously.