Laurie Anderson has a piece on one of her live albums entitled "Difficult Listening Hour," before which she exhorts her audience to do the opposite of what is recommended by "easy listening" DJ's: "Sit upright in that straight-backed chair, button that top button, and get ready for some difficult music."
Protest The Hero qualifies. You have to love a band that says it doesn't care about genres, and all of its fans are trying to figure out if it's Progressive Metal, Heavy Metal, or Punk Metal. The great part is that "punk metal" is now known as
metalcore, and metalcore that demonstrates a significant degree of technical virtuosity with instruments, complex time signatures, and unusual song structures has become known as
mathcore. Now
mathcore sounds like something I should like.
Mathcore. How win is that? All we need now is a Mathcore/
Nerdcore crossover band (Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, and MC Hawking all on stage together doing an overly complex twenty-minute long version of
Entropy with screaming guitar solo!) and the world will implode, drawn together by its own ineffable excellence into a perfect, cooling sphere of hyperlyrical neutronium.
Genre is completely dead. But I've been rocking to Protest The Hero all day. If you like the baroque complexity of Mozart, if you like your guitars as powerful as Maiden, if you want the vocal passion of Rage Against the Machine juxtaposed with the sudden rare sweetness of Annie Haslem, and if you admired Threshold's experimentation with gruntrock, you should give Protest the Hero a listen.
Just don't expect it to be background music.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}