Something else happened this year that also ties in rather significantly to the nostalgia I lamented previously, but in a much more positive manner—which is that I’ve started playing guitar again. I’ve been playing bass and guitar on and off for about half my life now, but I’ve always nominally been a bassist, and I’ve never really been all that good at either. Whatever the “musical mind” is, I just don’t have it. Playing an instrument is a primarily mechanical and extremely physical/spacial experience for me. I drilled notes and scales back in the day, but none of them ever stuck, and although I enjoyed building up a semi-impressive repertoire of songs by the likes of Machine Head, Metallica, Parkway Drive, Death and even Between the Buried and Me, I was even more prone to forgetting them. As a result, it felt like starting all over again, every time I went back to them after a bit, and I found little motivation to practice regularly once I stopped playing in a band or with other people.
So it was that the instruments I didn’t sell (a sexy fretless MTD five-string bass, and an even sexier red and gold Ibanez Destroyer II) were relegated to the corner of the spare room at my previous property, and I’ve barely touched them for the last few years, other than to learn and then immediately forget the occasional riff here and there, and a lone month developing a pretty killer fretless version of “Master of Puppets” that I couldn’t remember how to play now if you held a gun to my head. When moving into a new house at the start of the year though, I ended up leaving my guitars out in the lounge room for a bit, while I worked out where to put them. This meant I was always walking past and picking them up, and I’ve barely put them down since.
This revived instrumental interest along with the excitement spurred on by the (nostalgic metalcore revival facilitated) show I have tickets for later this year, means that I have spent most of the last few months attempting to learn all of their 2006 melodeathcore masterpiece Music for the Recently Deceased in its entirety. And, you know what? It’s going pretty well! I’ve got eight of the its ten songs pretty much down pat, with the last two well on the way, along with the outro track, which I’m (rather ambitiously) trying to work out how to play both parts of at once. That’s including the solos, which is something I’ve never really been able to do before. Instead, it’s the chugs I’m having the most trouble with. I still find it frustratingly easy to get lost when attempting to play along with all the other instruments and even easier to fall back into other familiar picking patterns, rather than the one that’s actually called for. However, this frustration has also brought to light just how deceptively complex and integral to (Deez Nuts frontman) JJ Peters’ drumming really is, not just to the rhythms, but a lot of the melodies as well.
Learning these songs has also revealed just how similar and formulaic a lot of these songs are—watch out for the triple riff repeat in the intro, and then the minor harmonies on the third and fourth repeats of the verse riff, descending minor chords during the atmospheric sections and the drop-out/kick back in on the final chorus, which is otherwise made up of big fat open chords, or tremoloed octaves—oh, and don’t forget to finish with a solo that begins on the twelfth fret and ends with some tapping up to and then a seesawing pattern descending back from the twenty-second one, not to mention those painful five-fret stretches! (“Shit IKTPQ does” video/post coming soon?)* But it’s a great formula, and these similarities, along with the generally arpeggiated, single-note structure of their content, has also made it a lot easier to pick up the other songs as I go, while also reinforcing patterns and techniques that I can apply elsewhere. I have no Idea why I never attempted to learn any of these songs before, but they’re a world away from the thrashy, low-end, staccato stuff I was primarily used to playing in the past and I think a genuinely great album to help a beginner or—in this case—a lapsed intermediate get their bearings across a range of techniques and the entire neck of the instrument, especially if they (like me) already know the songs inside and out otherwise.
He's obviously been a major influence on my musical life and tastes, but I also want to take a moment to recognise the largely unsung Jona Weinhofen as one of the most influential guitarists in modern metal. Between his work with I Killed the Prom Queen and on the best Bleeding Through and Bring Me the Horizon albums, he’s had no small part in shaping the sound of modern metalcore, and has more or less single-handedly revived my interest in its actual instrumentation. I’m hoping to have a chat with Ahmed at some point, to try and help me work out what the hell I’m actually doing with this thing. But even though it’s only been a few months, I honestly think this is the best I’ve ever been at playing guitar by quite some distance, and I’ve gone from seriously considering selling my guitars to eying new ones off on marketplace all day for something I can stick in standard tuning and go to town on. Here’s hoping for a healthy tax return!**
*Speaking of “Shit I Killed the Prom Queen Does”, let’s not overlook their newly returned frontman Michael Crafter’s history of disgusting, online misogyny, which came to a head when the band were removed from headlining the the 2018 Unify festival at the last minute for “historical comments made on social media”. I didn’t go to that festival, and I wasn’t really paying attention at the time, but I was pretty shocked, while writing this to learn that the comments in question weren’t from the band’s early days, but to just a couple of years earlier in response to that very festival’s attempt to address gender imbalance on their line-ups. This also sits uncomfortably with the the fact that band’s name itself—borne as it was out of the malaise of early-200s metalcore misogyny—is perhaps inherently inherently misogynistic, not to mention Peter’s early Deez Nuts material, which I maintain was always a tongue in cheek parody, but also don’t feel at all comfortable listening to today and which Peters and his band themselves quickly moved away from.
I feel comfortable writing about my love for Music for the Recently Deceased given Crafter wasn’t actually on that album, nor are such sentiments reflected in its music. At the same time, I won’t deny the degree to which my friends and I idolised him at the time it came out (which, ironically mostly has to do with his time fronting Carpathian after being fired from IKTPQ, after their “relationship disintegrated”), or that it didn’t also own when Parkway Drive brought him out for the breakdown of “Boneyards” on their most recent tour. I would still perhaps prefer to see them fronted by The Red Shore’s Jamie Hope who served as the frontman during their most recent incarnation, or even a returned Ed Butcher (Eternal Lord, The Hunt for Ida Wave), who Wikipedia tells me is off fighting fires somewhere these days.
However, I’m also choosing to give rafter the benefit of the doubt and take his subsequent apology as genuine, especially since he doesn’t waste time making excuses and it essentially boils down to a credible formula of “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it then and I wouldn’t do it now”, even if the unnecessary leveraging of “I have a daughter” remains off-putting. Weinhofen also condemned his comments, labeling them, “utterly idiotic, misogynistic and not at all any representation of the beliefs of the permanent members of the band” while also accepting his apology. Maybe I’m jumping through a lot of hoops to justify continuing to enjoy the music I grew up on, but that’s where I fall for now. I completely understand why someone else without that same history might not be so forgiving.
**Update: The tax return came through and I have since purchased a sick-ass Dave Mustaine flying V and have discovered I am much worse at playing Megadeth songs than I am at melodic metalcore ones. One day I’ll be able to shred like Marty Friendman. If I practice enough. Maybe. ...I won’t be writing a personal defence of Dave Mustaine though. That guy sucks.