so strong that transients are eliminated in certain cases (see the intros to "Faces Imploding" and "Peeling Arteries"). Also, there appears to be a very strong noise gate on the guitar. or a pair of Apple earbuds? Sounds like somebody put their scrap metal in a wood chipper. I mean, I'm listening to the album on a pair of Skullcandys right now and the guitars sound like shit, but. I have wondered before how the djent guitar tone became so imitated. It's that same mids-cranked "djenty" tone that was so infamously first demonstrated by Meshuggah's mid-2000's works. And let's not even get started on the tone. So you can sweep-pick a diminished scale at 300 BPM with the help of beat correction, big whoop! I suppose they're trying to make it sound "alien-ish", to stay true to the lyrical content (more about that to come), but what they're doing is making it sound like an R2 unit getting raped. Not only has the lead guitar been drowned in FX and time-warping, the note patterns are far from being impressive. Speaking of sweep picking and tapping, how about those solos? You have to wonder if that's actually a guitar when a solo comes around. It's all about the dissonance, baby! If there is something that sounds like an actual riff, it's either unimaginative crap disguised with fancy picking patterns, or some form of sweep picking/tapping. It seems like, about 75% of the time, the guitar parts are just riffless chugging. If you can even call them "riffs", that is. I mean, even if they left the parts at normal speed, the riffs would still sound like shit. Another factor that hinders the playing of live shows. How about those guitar parts, huh? Rings of Saturn's (former) drummer actually has admitted that they speed up the guitar parts for their recordings. If I tried to write a list of the timecodes on this album at which you hear a drum pattern that's not humanly possible to play exactly as it is, I'd probably end up writing something about the length of a Game of Thrones novel.
Zero groove, zero dynamics, everything's just 300 BPM maximum velocity vomit the whole way through. So why do they write drum parts that aren't even playable live? What is the purpose of programming these parts - and not even giving a shit whether it sounds like an actual drummer? Or, if it's actually a human playing the drums, then he/she needs to lay off the triggers and beat correction, grow a pair and actually make the track sound like an actual drummer, which this does not. Rings of Saturn does live shows, believe it or not. I mean, I suppose you could use double strokes to somewhat imitate the kick and use gravity rolls to somewhat imitate the snare, but you'd still be hearing human groove, dynamics, and timing (ALL of which this album's drums lack), not to mention the fact that you could only maintain speed like this for a few seconds before falling off. The kick drum sounds like a combination of a baseball card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle wheel and a fart, while at the same time being utterly impossible for an actual human to play without boatloads of enhancements.
Oh, and by "brutal", I mean "absolute shit". Oops, did I say "drumming"? I meant "drum programming". The drum parts on this album give a whole new meaning to "brutal drumming". I shall now proceed to dismantle this album, and, in the process, give you some reasons why bands like this one killed modern metal. Rings of Saturn's unique sound is one of many that changed the metal scene for the worse. The only problem is, once a band's unique sound has been established, a load of imitators will appear to rip off that sound because they want some of that band's fame. When developing that sound, they were obviously building off of proto-djent bands like Meshuggah. I suppose that Rings of Saturn, like every other musical act who's gotten really popular, developed a unique sound that fans wanted more of. It honestly baffles me how this new generation of technical deathcore/post-prog (or, more properly, djent) bands has managed to gain any footing at all in the world of music. And the younger metal bands continue to churn out piles of vomit that - unbelievably - generate praise from their fans of the same generation. Cannibal Corpse PC'd up their lyrics, In Flames became an alt-rock band, Metallica. Even the "old guard" has lost a lot of respect. I'll spell it out for you: Modern metal music is not worthy of being respected.
So you're wondering why heavy metal is "dead", huh?
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