[HEADING=1]Gildan's Guide to Good Music[/HEADING]
[small]The world of music is a vast ocean of crap - join me on a voyage to the tiny isolated islands of excellence.[/small]
[small]The world of music is a vast ocean of crap - join me on a voyage to the tiny isolated islands of excellence.[/small]
As the tagline not so subtly suggests, it's really easy to find terrible music - you have but to turn on your radio, and lo, bad music abounds. The good stuff though, well that's rarely quite so easy to find, and while some popular music actually deserves the accolades it receives[footnote]In which case it is certainly good music, but you don't really need me to tell you about it, now do you?[/footnote], most excellent music languishes in comparative obscurity. And that's where I come in!
- [small][img height=144 width=170 alt=What, did you think I was lying about the handsome part too?]http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/4551/editedface.jpg[/img]1. I'm a music snob - if you've heard of it (where "you" are average person on the street), I probably hate it. If it plays on the radio? I most likely consider it cultural pollutant and I'm judging you right now for liking it (unless you don't, but I'll probably still find ample reason to judge you anyways).Behold the face of snobbery!
2. I'm a music nerd with highly eclectic tastes - I love discovering bands and learning pointless trivia about them, and there are very few genres of music I consider to be entirely without merit; my snobbery stems not from any obnoxious "Indier than thou" street cred I try to maintain, but a simple recognition of Sturgeon's law at work - if we accept that 90% of everything is crap, what does that make music that's aimed at 90% of the population? [small]Crap, that's what.[/small]
3. I have borderline OCD - if I make it to the end of the week with only 3 new albums entering my collection, I have exhibited an uncharacteristic level of restraint. Consequently, I know about a bloody ton of excellent but relatively obscure music, knowledge I am magnanimously sharing in the hope that my good taste will rub off on you (ha ha!)[/small].
Today I'm finally going to talk about a band I mentioned in passing back in my very first review, who have created one of this year's best albums that you've never heard of - I aim to correct that oversight.
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[HEADING=2]Desert Call[/HEADING]
Musical Genre: Oriental Metal, Symphonic Progressive Power Metal
Running Time: 72 minutes
# of Tracks: 11[footnote]I have the North American version of this album, which comes with an 8-minute bonus track - the world-wide release has 10 tracks.[/footnote]
Particularly noteworthy songs: Madness, Silent Cries, Shockwave
Quick - name a Metal band from Tunisia! Okay, any band from Tunisia, that should make things easier, right? No? Of course everyone reading this with a decent grasp on deductive reasoning can now do just that, but the point of this little exercise was to illustrate that, assuming you aren't from Tunisia or say... me, you haven't heard of this band for a very good reason:
[HEADING=3]They're from Tunisia.[/HEADING]
Tunisia is not, musically speaking, a place the world at large traditionally thinks about much (or at all). If the in no way conclusively verified by me claims I saw one fellow make during the course of 'researching'[footnote]Otherwise known as "finding a few details that resemble facts and running with them". And then I go get ice cream (whee!).[/footnote] this article are in fact something other than 'wildly unsubstantiated', then they're actually the first band from Tunisia to ever land themselves an international record contract.
So what is Myrath? They're basically Symphony X [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.183857-A-Strangers-music-39-Demanufacture-by-Fear-Factory?page=5#6550952], if Symphony X were from Tunisia instead of New Jersey[footnote]It actually might surprise you how many excellent Prog bands hail from New Jersey. Seriously, if you play progressive metal and you're from the US you probably come from New Jersey.[/footnote]. That was my assessment after listening to their first studio album Hope, which (along with Desert Call) was produced by Kevin Codfert, French progressive metal band Adagio's keyboardist and the reason that anyone outside of Tunisia has heard about Myrath; running into him at a rock festival in Tunisia was their "big break" into the only near-complete obscurity that prog-metal bands enjoy world-wide as a general rule[footnote]Considering you probably haven't heard of Adagio either, I think I've made my point quite neatly.[/footnote]. As it turns out, (Wikipedia would have us believe that) Symphony X is their favorite band and they got their start playing covers of, among other things, Symphony X material, so my initial reaction was accurate in more ways than I originally thought.
For those of you completely unfamiliar with Symphony X or progressive power metal in general [small](who've ignored my obvious suggestion that they familiarize themselves via the link I helpfully provided, which points to a review of a Symphony X album from an unusual perspective)[/small], bands in this genre are basically operating in the "anything goes" arena of the weird and wonderful world of Prog, only in a more directed sense than pure form prog-metal - expect technical proficiency, multi-layered compositions, extended (and awesome) solos, key changes/tempo shifts/what have you, but with an emphasis on the core riff-based and (as a general rule) fairly fast-paced song structure. Rather than the sudden bizarre (but interesting) derailment of existing themes where a song completely changes gears for seemingly no reason other than "because we can" that one comes to expect from Progressive bands, this particular strain of Prog operates within the bounds of a more conventionally structured theme, offering an intricately nuanced performance of ultimately more approachable music.
What sets Myrath apart from other bands in their sub-genre, and the reason I like them so darn much, is their Oriental Metal approach to the medium - they incorporate Middle Eastern folk music, instruments, and vocal techniques into songs that would otherwise be relatively straightforward[footnote]For the sub-genre anyways, there isn't really anything particularly straightforward about Myrath's material when contrasted with more conventional genres.[/footnote] numbers you could easily imagine bands from Europe or New Jersey performing, and the result is, if you share my interest in Middle Eastern folk music, equal parts bloody fascinating and flat-out awesome.
I call a lot of things awesome though, so it's worth pointing out that I would happily label this as '2010's best album that you've never heard of' in a heartbeat if I hadn't already proclaimed Orphaned Land's The Never Ending Way Of ORWarriOR as that back in my very first Guide to Good Music article - a pronouncement I still stand behind by the way - so Desert Call will have to settle for being one of the best albums that nobody seems to know exists. But don't take my word for it, give the tracks I've embedded below a listen:
If you liked what you heard, you may also enjoy their first studio album Hope as well - they've changed vocalists and brought the folk elements of their sound further to the forefront since then, but Hope was my initial introduction to the band and the album I'd been idly planning on featuring ever since I first mentioned them; I probably would have done so if I hadn't picked up a copy of Desert Call about a month ago and discovered just how bloody awesome it was (I may still do that eventually, I'm whimsical and capricious).
And with that, another entry in the guide to music that I
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