This has made the rounds, but it never fails to warm my heart: a video of two guys playing Vital Remains’ “Dechristianize” on piano. Their performance is a little sloppy. But it’s charming that they put the time into this endeavor. Minus distortion, drums, and vocals, the song reveals classical influences and majestic themes (i.e., riffs). I just spent the last hour watching piano versions of metal songs on YouTube. (Yes, I am single.) For example: Metallica – “Blackened”, Slayer – “Seasons in the Abyss”, Necrophagist – “Stabwound”.
I don’t think it has classical influences. At least insomuch that they’re conscious, studied and intentional. This has classical influences like all popular music has them, from Britney Spears to Agathocles. On the subconscious level, because the lexicon of composition in western music is pretty much constant and anyone that has ever resolved a phrase to the tonic and has felt it feel ‘right’ is basically canonically informed.
I mean to say that this song – or any other Vital Remains song – is probably written in a very metalhead fashion. Composition based on mesostructural repetition (riffs) and scale flourish on top. Below you review Fleshgod Apocalypse exactly to make that distinction.
The only reason I’m making this comment is that it has in the past been very embarrassing for all involved when people have claimed a classical influence on their metal (usually black metal) just because they could imagine it being performed by an orchestra. People like Spinoza Ray Prozak on anus.com base a whole rhetoric on that imaginary conception (hmm… Emperor sound like Wagner!!) and go on to suggest that metal is the modern continuation of classical music (and of course not related to ‘nigger music’ like the blues). I know you’re not aiming there but let’s not give excuses for that sort of thing.
For something to be directly influenced by classical music the people involved should have studied classical composition. The difference between ’sounding like Bach’ just by adopting a few key phrases common to the fugue form, and composing a fugue honestly and adhering to contrapuntal concepts in immense.
As a postscript I don’t say all this to suggest that a classically-informed sort of HM would be better or higher art than regular HM, necessarily. I don’t have an inferiority complex about the music I love, it can be as dumb or smart as it needs to be to get its emotions across. I just want music to be celebrated for what it is. Of course we won’t all agree to such a subjective point, but I don’t think we should reach for – dangerous – straws.
Interesting thoughts above–but what about Necrophagist on the ukulele?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98urSM4sG8
man I like their version better