Bryan reacts to and talks about his thoughts on SHYLMAGOGHNAR - Transience | Napalm Records ORIGINAL VIDEO: • SHYLMAGOGHNAR - Transi... Patreon: www.patreon.com/criticalreactions Twitter: critreactions
As the composer and engineer behind this song, I wanted to thank you very kindly for doing this (and the people recommending it as well of course, cheers guys)! It's funny - I've been seeing your channel in my recommendations for a while now and have already been thinking that it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on our work. Turns out I was 11 months behind with that... I can very much find myself in the things you found notable about the song and band, because they are all in line with the goals behind this project. Your analysis of the music being built around melody instead of around rhythmic riffs for example is spot on - almost all of these song ideas come from melodies I hear in my head or in dreams, and then everything else gets built around it. It causes a lot of discussion on what genre exactly we belong to, which truth be told we don't really know either so I'll leave that up to the individual. You were also correct about there not being a typical verse-chorus structure - I think that patterned repetition should only ever be done in a song if it serves a true purpose. I love when a song sounds like a story with chapters, a beginning and an end, so I tend to go for leitmotivs to create coherency in the songs over verse-chorus patterns. Not too many switch-ups, not too many repetitions (hopefully). The vocal being about equal level as the other instruments, instead of being clearly on top is indeed on purpose (in this song at least). My intention with this was to make things sound more atmospheric and roughly similar in function to the lead/counterpoint guitars creating that dreamlike state of a journey you described. I would vote for you checking out lyrics with these videos as well for future bands though, because I do sincerely think the lyrics (and the timing of their delivery!) by my bandmate Skirge on this song are extremely fitting to the journey we were going for on this album. It is a part that is easily undervalued in these metal genres, because they're obviously not always clear to understand on first listen. My hope is that through analytical channels like yours, people will start picking up on those nuances they may have otherwise ignored, and discover added layers of depth to songs they already love :) Thank you again, it's extremely helpful to me to hear critical views on our work, to know whether the project is coming across in the ways we intend it to, and if there is anything we should work on for future albums! PS: your pronunciation of the band name is exactly right and it is indeed a made up word that's meant to sound bizarre.
Thanks so much for the lengthy insight into some of the composition decisions! Utilizing leitmotivs to serve a similar function of verses is genius. You still get some of those concepts of familiarity and comfort without actually revisiting full ideas. That's something that I will probably explore a bit this month in my own music. (I started a composition jam with my community, just a laid back event to get people writing music and getting the creative juices flowing with lower stakes). I find it interesting that, for the counterpoint, you created equality between the vocals and the other melodic instruments by bringing the vocals down in the mix rather than bring the guitars up to the vocals -- which tends to be what I see happening more often. In hindsight this fits in a lot better with more traditional genres of music like classical music, rather than simply being a trend in metal with harsher vocals -- especially given your intent behind this decision. It recontextualizes how I view lower mixed vocals and hopefully that will help me understand more about vocal choices and they relate to the other instruments in future songs that I check out. As for lyrics, I do understand that this is weakness of mine and is something that I've mentally explored addressing but haven't really found any solution that I'm 100% happy with. I completely understand their importance to a work though and sometimes I can pick them up if the music is on the simpler side and the vocals are clean (my critique of Falling in Reverse's The Drug In Me Is You focused heavily on how the lyrics fit into the narrative of the music). I heavily believe in iterative design though and continue to improve my process so I'm sure I'll find a way that works for me eventually. On that note though, thanks for reminding me to go back to your song, Transience, and look up the vocals and give it another listen with the lyrics in front of me. I don't think I ever did that and now I'm interested again :) Thanks again for commenting and I'm glad that you appreciated what I had to say. My goal here is to introduce people to music they might not have heard before and to help people who love this music already find new things to appreciate about it -- and I'm glad that the latter is coming through loud and clear.
Thank you so much for you music. It is highly aesthetically pleasing. Contemporary music for me often is lacking the "transcendental" qualities that can elevate ones mind. I like to be able to fall into music and just be enchanted by its beauty. Looking forward to your next work. I definitely will get both of your albums as vinyl records - especially the very nice (but expensive) marbeled version of your first album. Usually i dont care about that but i´d love to get it signed one day.
Your music is so incredibly well composed. It is engaging in an „analytical“ and emotional way! And time and again it sounds like a soundtrack, or like it tells a story, something i really like and appreciate. Keep up the great work! 🤘👍
Yay, you did it! Thanks for the reaction and the very in depth commentary! I am glad you liked it. The band itself defines their style as "Progressive, Amospheric, Melodic Blackened Death Metal" ;) Actually this is a project by just two guys, one composer and muliti-instrumentalist and one textwriter and singer. They do everything by themselfes. And they are really best digested by going through an album in one sitting, the compositions and themes are all interwoven and they like to "quote" themselfes a lot without getting boring. Keep Rockin \,,/ Edit: The band stated that the name was just a collection of syllabes from words that mean sonething to them, so it is made up, but has a distinct meaning to the two guys. The lyrics here are surely worth checking out. Its not what you might expect from a typical metal band.
Absolutely fantastic two-man-band! Probably one of the only ones from my country that I actually love! The problem is that metal in The Netherlands is pretty much a no-go for the radio and mainstream public. Hell, even fucking Nightwish with Floor Jansen was pretty unknown, which is fucking nuts when you think about it. It took a fucking program on TV where Floor blew away other Dutch artists with her singing for more of the mainstream people to pick up on Nightwish.
Closest thing to Shylmagoghnars music that I can compate to is the Finnish style of Melodeath, stuff like Insomnium. However, Shylmagoghnar does it so much better than Insomnium has ever done even on their best days. This album is mindblowing. 🤯
Only a year into me learning guitar, I tried learning how to play the lead for In Parting. That was a huge mistake since I didn't just have any chorus or verses to learn and it was almost 9 minutes of always changing stuff.
You need to check out Summoning. Those guys invented the whole sub-genre of Atmospheric Black Metal combining classical music, orchestra, black metal and Tolkien mythology. Have been listening this for so many years and the band never stops to surprise me. They are not so famous in the whole metal scene, because they have no concerts, no videoclips and so on. Just pure music not looking for hype. But still is highly undervalued imo. You can see how Summoning influenced Shylmagoghnar too I would suggest Old Morning Dawn to see if this is your thing or not. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--Y9TsxeWGt0.html
I absolutely love this album! Certainly my album of the year 2018. I really like the idea of not having "verse-chorus-verse-chorus" and the fact that they have almost no repeating lines ON THE ENTIRE ALBUM is astonishing!
Soo I like your channel a lot! And I was pleasantly surprised to see you react to Shylmagoghnar! (btw I think it's pronounced sylmakognar) They have become pretty much my favourite Melodic death metal band, and agree for the most part with what you said about them.. Yes the vocals are a bit monotone but I think it's not necessarily a bad thing.. On the contrary, I disagree that the drums didn't really stand out. In my opinion this is some of the finest melodic death metal drumming inside the genre.. They made me Love the double kick and if you listen to both their albums you will find out that they have some very spicy drum parts and intros.. Anyways the thing that matters the most is that they are something completely different to what we are used to and that every song of theirs is like a journey.. Lastly I am really glad you promote this band because they deserve a lot more recognition!
For me this sounds very much like Wintersun. I have listened Wintersun like daily. But this band I heard now first time. So thank you. I will go to listen them more.
This is an album that has to be listened in one sitting, it is a part of the whole. You were correct in your impression that it is like a journey. You did not like vocals but you might also like the idea that not all of their songs even have vocals. There are plenty of instrumentals in the album. The instrumentals are not even half assed "midtro" tunes but full blown songs where nothing needs to be said and music does all the talking.
Hello there! I've been enjoying your reactions, particularly on Japanese bands, so initially I wanted to ask you to react to some other Japanese artists...buuuut then I've decided that it would be too simple. So, I would like you to react to a band *Gorguts*, for example Nostalgia or Faceless Ones. Both tracks are from an album called "Obscura", and it is an album that sounds like no other metal album on the planet. It had been released in 1998 (fun fact: it was actually fully composed and recorded in 1993, but the band couldn't find a record label that would want to release it until 1998) and is still able to explode almost anyone's brain (my brain in particular was permanently damaged by it 12-some odd years ago), unless you're really versed in the essentials of avant-garde and experimental music (and if that's the case, then you'll be able to see Obscura's major influences, one of them is an experimental grindcore band 'Human Remains'). Here's a short trivia about this album. When two main composers for Obscura, Luc Lemay (fun fact number two: the guy is a classically trained musician, including CMQM in Montreal, where he studied music composition formally, but it happened after Obscura was written) and Steve Hurdle, conceived it, they intentionally avoided most tropes of death metal, such as fast tremolo picked riffs, inverted power chords, chromatic scale, "meat and potatoes" double bass drumming with 16th notes, and so on and so forth... Well, you get the idea. Let's just say that it's really weird and oddball. It abandons a lot of surface-level preconceptions about relationship between consonance and dissonance, because it's *really* dissonant, very noisy, angular and unnerving, but at the same time it has one of the most haunting melodies and enchanting harmonic progressions I've ever heard on a record of any genre. But I also feel that a lot of people praise this album for wrong reasons. Many call it "atonal" (that's some pure bullshit, because there's absolutely nothing "atonal" about any of the compositions on this record) or "technical" (while I love a lot of modern technical death, I must admit that Obscura is almost like an "anti-tech death", because it intentionally throws off a lot of "correct" guitar playing techniques and machine-like perfect precision so typical of tech death out of the fucking window). Some people also try to bash it because they think it's intellectually pretentious, but Obscura's main appeal for me was always it's ability to transmit raw unfiltered emotions, albeit in an unconventional way. Basically, the lyrical concept of the album is about certain mythical and religious views (derived mostly from Hinduism and Osho's teachings) on human life, like the duality between joys and moments of grief in one's life, and the inevitability and acceptance of one's death, and I truly think that a unique conflation of dissonance and consonance, harsh and soft tones, walls of noise and intricate details in melody and harmony make Osbcural a very suitable album for conveying such emotionally intense themes. :D ...And if you don't find any of that stuff particularly interesting, here is a couple of Japanese bands with heavy jazz\funk influence that you might enjoy. I've been rocking both of them for a couple of years, and they make me feel positively re-energized every single time I listen to any of their tracks. *Gesu no Kiwami Otome* - *Parallel Spec* *Polkadot Stingray* - *Telecaster Stripe*
The entire album is incredible. A few of them are instrumentals. They’re brilliant. Amazing too that one guy plays all the instruments except vocals. I stumbled onto this band years ago. I love them:
It's always a great day when you discover new fantastic music - I love this! Thank you! Too bad I can't tell my friends to listen to this awesome band called...ehr...yeah right. Great music nevertheless - been listening to the album on repeat on Spotify now and surely I'll have to buy their albums. \m/
i'm pretty late to this, but I've been listening to this band since around the time this video came out, and I only saw this just now. Have to say that to get a proper feel you need to take a journey through the whole album, it really is a journey too.
This channel has the best requests. Please listen the guy who wrote the long comment, "Obscura" by Gorguts is one of the best album ever written, in my opinion. I also suggest Vektor - Recharging the void.
I completely agree. Every one of you beautiful people give me such great songs to listen to. I really couldn't have asked for better viewers. :) And I'll add those songs to the request stack. I'll be converting my text document to a spreadsheet this week, just to put into perspective the number of songs that have been requested 😮
Amazingly this "band" consists of a total of two people. Pretty talented couple of dudes if you ask me. Be sure to check out the instrumental track I Am The Abyss from their first album called Emergence.
Btw, when it comes to atmospheric black metal, this is my go-to album, genre-defining: "Caladan Brood - Echoes of Battle", and specifically the last track "Book of the Fallen". For a more gentle approach, try "Agalloch - Fire above, Ice below".
My favorite tracks by this band: "The Abyss (instrumental)" & "Emergence", tracks #1 and #2 on their debut (which I liked alot more than "Transience").
Man, fucking A, Fallujah are phenomenal (except their last album, sadly). Either that or 'Dead Sea' from Nomadic EP, or even maybe 'Scar Queen' from Dreamless LP.
For the lyrics, I take it as part of the song structure. If the artists feel the lyrics are really integral to the song, then they'll choose a style that makes them clearly understood.
I agree. The whole Album is mixed like this. On Emergence the lyrics where a bit more prominent, but I think they speak more through melody and music than through text. Don´t get me wrong, the lyrics are great and have a lot of meaning, but they are just another instrument to transport that meaning alongside the music. After all, about 30% of their songs up to now are instrumentals...
Maybe try reacting to Unien Havulinnaan by Havukruunu. They are a folk-ish black metal band from Finland, who are one of the best bands in modern black metal
If you like these sort of dark, atmospheric melodies, check out the song A Succubus in Rapture by Norwegian Band Dimmu Borgir. It's one of their older, slower pieces and is probably a good place to start delving into the whole Norwegian black metal scene.
I would enjoy seeing your reaction to the band Thantifaxath's song "Where I End and the Hemlock Begins" Not a huge band but one I thoroughly enjoy and wish to share with those who read this.
Those are exactly the kinds of bands that I enjoy reacting to most. I don't always walk away as a fan but it's always cool to see what's going on in the periphery of the genre.
@@CriticalReactions The band is an interesting take on black metal when you listen through the album from start to finish. I'll admit that I'm a sucker for concept albums any day.
More 13 minute songs to do: halloween by helloween, echoes by cult of luna. Or if you want real long songs.... Jump off the deep end with dopesmoker by sleep or mirror reaper by bell witch
would really like to hear your opinion about some song by "the ocean". like "firmament", "devonian: nascent" or "the origin of species + the origin of god" (actually 2 songs but should be listened to combinded) fun fact: the pelagial album was supposed to be instrumental but they just tried some vocals and released the album as a 2 cd version (1 cd instrumental and 1 with vocals)
Great band, with some Insomnium influence I think (another great band to check out "layers wise" !). For me the reviews are ok like they are, change nothing.
You have no idea how strongly I recommend doing a song from their previous album, Emergence. Particularly one of the first three songs: I Am the Abyss, Emergence, or Eden in Ashes. For me, their first album is a straight 10/10, whilst Transience is a high 8-9/10.
Here's a high-quality cut of the entire album. I really think you'd like it, based on your appreciation of this track. Peak Melodic metal in my humble opinion. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lMGo-9tKb90.html
I respectfully disagree, I think it's the other way around. Especially the song Transience and No Child of Man Could Follow transcends the album to another level. The mix is much more complex and thus the sounds aren't as clear as on Emergence, but still. The lyrics are amazing.
I checked out Follow the River recently and had a bit of a discussion with the person behind the project in the comments of that video. Might be of interest to ya: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OdJtdyhsCJ4.html
Yes you should look at lyrics. no doubt... specialy from this band. Here they are if it helps. www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/shylmagoghnar/transience.html#4
