Now don’t get me wrong, I really do love metal for the most part, it’s one of my favorite genres of music! There are a few aspects of it however, that I really can’t stand. I loathe them. One of the worst of these aspects that I hear over and over and over again in metal today are absolutely terrible transitions. There are many different kinds of awful transitions, but in this post I’m just going to focus on bashing one particular type of transition, the kind I hate the most. Lets get started.
Metal Band X is writing a song, they have Riff A and Riff B. How do they get from Riff A to Riff B? Well it’s quite simple really. Once Riff A has reached is climax with every member of the band playing/screaming at full force, every band member suddenly stops playing besides one of the guitarists. The said guitarist then begins playing Riff B alone. Maybe they’ll play it once, maybe they’ll play it 4 times. It depends on how long Riff B is I suppose. Anyways, after the guitarist does their thing, the rest of the band jumps back in and they all play Riff B together. Transition completed. Simple as that.
It’s really not so terrible, until you realize that this type of transition typically occurs lets say….10-20 times on your average metal album, and it gets pretty stale.
