The Benja-man Is Verbose

I thought of copying and pasting all of the "things I learned about..." sections at the end of each post, but that seemed a little annoying given that there are sixteen of those posts. *   Nonetheless, I've spent a lot of time thinking about power metal and occasionally even listening to it over the past year-plus of the "?Classics? of power metal" project.  And yeah, I do flatter myself into thinking that I've learned a few things. 1)  I like power metal The starting premise was that I liked the idea of the genre more than I liked actually listening to it.  I was struggling to reconcile why I, a listener who likes things too heavy to be a serious pop fan ** and too melodic to do anything but gravitate to the hookier side of metal, couldn't seem to connect with power, do more than appreciate it from a distance.  I think I was reacting to its roots in '80s metal.  Something about European men shrieking about wizards in a way that reminded me in their...

Past exposure to this artist/album:   I am already familiar with  Under The Veil Of Madness .     I got confused back in 2023 when I first heard this record.  I did know that I was impressed.  This was before I was a blogger, but I did do annual rankings for friends, and I ended up ranking it as my #10 record of the year.  The thing that threw me was that my first impression was the record's heft.  Veil  seemed like serious big kid metal, heavyweight stuff.  Yet, when I read reviews, even those who liked it a lot tended to emphasize, often in a positive tone, the cheesiness.  The excesses.  The melodrama.  The, well, power-metaliness of the whole thing.   Listening with that in mind, I could hear it, and get why others might consider Ascension cheesy.  My ears don't, and never have, heard them that way.  Why was power metal such silly shit, but this power metal not, to Benjamin?  You could say...

I just accomplished a major - task? challenge? - today * , and wanted the sort of song that proverbially makes me want to run through a brick wall.  At the moment I can't think of a better candidate than "Awakening."  Talk about propulsive.  Listening to the chorus reminds me of exactly what power metal does well.  Ye gods, do I ever feel like my dreams and memories will be immortal when listening to the song.  Since this band shamelessly writes songs about  Chrono Trigger , *** I'll say that they've given me the metal equivalent of the  Chrono Cross  intro **** , mixing adventure and wistfulness into one. So as the killer riff of "Divine Providence" started around listen #5 or so to Ascension , I finally sorted out why, listen after listen, I was having a hard time maintaining interest in these songs all the way through.  Because so many of them are so clearly good stuff.  At first I thought maybe they lacked hooks, and I was...

Previous exposure to this artist/album :  Half-listened to a song once on YouTube, had to hear more. None of us multitask as well as we imagine we do.  I know for a fact that my retention of music is basically zero unless I'm devoting time to listen to it.  Yet I do imagine that half-listening to something during work is a useful "initial screen" to decide if something's worth devoting actual music time to.  That's where I kinda fell in love with the  idea  of Paladin.  I was sampling one of their songs, can't remember which one, and was struck immediately by the immediately catchy heft that, as half of my brain told me, so neatly balanced power metal and death metal.  There have of course been loads of power/death bands and that crossover started way before 2019, but how often does a song catch the aesthetics of both equally convincingly, with its two singers playing off each other?  Hearing that Paladin only had managed ...

Now that I've had some time to sit with Awakening From Abyss , you know what I notice more than any individual element?  Well, in other entries in this series, I've frequently brought up the vaguely described feeling that some songs' disparate elements don't come together.  I don't always have the right words to "prove" anything, but I frequently try to evaluate whether or not something has that coherence that makes the difference between a great song and a song that has a bunch of cool elements haphazardly mixed together.   Artists with grand musical visions, musical virtuosity, or both, are prone to the latter.  I've even floated my little unfounded pet theories that certain bands with multiple hands in the songwriting had different members trying to write different albums and were thus, musically speaking, at war with each other, whether they knew it or not.   Lovebites' debut stands out to me as the antithesis of that.  Whet...

Previous exposure to this artist/album:   Just a few listens to a few songs in the background.  They sounded pretty cool.  Note:  Just to avoid eyesore, LOVEBITES shall hereafter be known as Lovebites, and other bands that I mention in posts about them will have their names written normally rather than in ALL CAPS. I've mentioned a few times my approach to diving into the well of new music by deciding on a listen by listen basis whether or not to listen to each record three times, and then to decide from there whether it gets thrown into my running list of candidates to consider further for the year-end top-fifteen.  Minus the annual list, my approach to listening to older music is pretty similar.  It's a moot point when I'm reviewing something to write about, because of course I'm going to be listening to it a lot.  But if I were just checking out this band in my free time, would  Awakening From Abyss  get a listen #3 based on how I felt aft...

I asked a few questions last time about how my relationship with  At The Expense Of Humanity  would evolve, whilst presaging that I probably wouldn't have anything interesting to say about why it is or isn't power metal.  So let's get that part out of the way.  You've got speedy riffs that change notes more than they change keys, and usually a baseline of Helloween-style drumrolls.  Granted, sometimes it skews more towards just plain old metal, including the parts with a Maiden-style mix of galloping riffs and power chords.  The basic chord structure consists almost exclusively of riffs that're versions, maybe a bit simpler, of what you'd hear on an Iced Earth record circa The Dark Saga , which most people would call a power metal record.  So okay, it's not a stretch at all to slot  Expense  in amongst the classics of our little subgenre here, moving on. I think that's actually what I need to explain the dichotomy I'm hearing when I try ...

Previous exposure to this artist/album :  See below I have a bit of a weird relationship with Judicator, in that I first became aware of their existence a few years ago when checking out new music and I clicked with their quirky 2022 record, The Majesty Of Decay.  I learned just enough about the band to know that Majesty was a bit of a departure, thanks in no small part to John Yelland basically becoming the band's sole creative force, whereas main guitarist and bassist Alicia Cordisco (known at the time and credited as Tony) had been pretty much the composer previously, and so this was this big reinvention in trying to write songs without her.  Thing is, I quite enjoyed The Majesty Of Decay  for what it was.  Whereas, I'd also listened to one of Alicia's post-Judicator projects, Project: Roenwolfe, and at least their EP, well, I wasn't mad at it but I didn't really connect with it.  And then the new version of Judicator went on to put out Concord , a recor...

There's a moment in "Farewell My Hero" in which everything changes.  What seemed to be one story becomes another, one much greater.  Using nothing but a change in tenses, * Daltor transforms from world's guiding light to martyr.  The way his drawn out death serves a springboard to let the others rise up, is one of those celebrations of the human spirit that you can only... ... okay, no; I cannot keep a proverbial straight face while typing that.  This is some silly-ass shit right here, and I am fundamentally incapable of getting into it.  Return to fucking Sendor ** .  Of all the power metal records with deeply embarrassing lyrics,  The Alliance Of The Kings  is very much one of them.   I don't bounce off all of them quite so hard, though.  It's worth asking what it is about Alliance that keeps me from meeting it halfway.  I mean, this is a series of rambles about power metal, a subgenre in which embrace of goof...