Recent Rock Experiences
Mar. 28th, 2006 09:23 amKhymera should have been one of the best rock bands currently alive. I'm sure the producers thought they had a great thing on their hands: vocals by Steve Walsh, the former lead singer of Kansas, great instrumentals, and composition by just about everyone in the damn universe. Their first album had a piece by John Bettis, another by Neal Schon, and another by Georgio Moroder (WTF, over)?
The producers might have thought they had a good thing on their hands, but they should have looked back into history and considered a past project: Asia. Remember Asia? Take some of the best musicians of bands like Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and King Crimson-- the absolute lights of the progressive rock movement at the time-- and put them in a studio, and what do you get? Ten instrumentally perfect but intellectually and compositionally vapid hunks of disposable pop music. Khymera is like that in a lot of ways: vapid and lacking, and it really has no excuse for being so. It probably doesn't help that Steve Walsh's vocals sound as if they've suffered way too much from all the whiskey and cigarettes. Khymera does for progressive metal what Asia did for progrock, and not nearly as well.
Gojira's album, Terra Incognita, has only half of these problems. They have fabulous instrumentals and solid musicianship-- and the lead singer uses the "cookie monster" voice. Pity that.
Elvenking seems to be getting a lot of press and I'm at a loss to explain why. Their album The Winter Wake sounds a lot like something a teenager would come up with: "A lot of my friends who like metal also like this Celtic stuff: let's do both!" And that's the way it comes off: as a teenager's project. It doesn't help that the lead singer's voice sounds so immature, or that compositionally they're never quite sure if they're playing metal on guitars or folk on the fiddle, and rarely do they manage to make both work at the same time. About the only real thrill I've gotten from Elvenking is their cover of "Penny Dreadful" by Skyclad, and still the vocals are weak. I'll have to look up the original.
The producers might have thought they had a good thing on their hands, but they should have looked back into history and considered a past project: Asia. Remember Asia? Take some of the best musicians of bands like Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and King Crimson-- the absolute lights of the progressive rock movement at the time-- and put them in a studio, and what do you get? Ten instrumentally perfect but intellectually and compositionally vapid hunks of disposable pop music. Khymera is like that in a lot of ways: vapid and lacking, and it really has no excuse for being so. It probably doesn't help that Steve Walsh's vocals sound as if they've suffered way too much from all the whiskey and cigarettes. Khymera does for progressive metal what Asia did for progrock, and not nearly as well.
Gojira's album, Terra Incognita, has only half of these problems. They have fabulous instrumentals and solid musicianship-- and the lead singer uses the "cookie monster" voice. Pity that.
Elvenking seems to be getting a lot of press and I'm at a loss to explain why. Their album The Winter Wake sounds a lot like something a teenager would come up with: "A lot of my friends who like metal also like this Celtic stuff: let's do both!" And that's the way it comes off: as a teenager's project. It doesn't help that the lead singer's voice sounds so immature, or that compositionally they're never quite sure if they're playing metal on guitars or folk on the fiddle, and rarely do they manage to make both work at the same time. About the only real thrill I've gotten from Elvenking is their cover of "Penny Dreadful" by Skyclad, and still the vocals are weak. I'll have to look up the original.
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