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Подписчик с Ноября 2012-го |
Наткнулся тут на тред  | Цитата | I have a host of problems with Mortician's music:
• Terrible guitar tone. I like fuzzy, murky sounding guitars, but here we have a very non-menacing, ugly tone that lacks any kind of punch. Same goes for the static-filled bass, which has none of the character of grind and death bands that typically use fuzzy bass.
• No vocal range. Just the same low gutterals with no attempt at enunciation or rhythm. It sounds like he's not even interested in what he's singing about.
• Bad drum programming. It's either blast beats or mid paced, with boring fills and no variation. The drums themselves sound extremely stale, and the snare in particular has no punch at ALL.
• Overall production is lacking. Everything sounds flat and isn't mixed down well. Even after 20+ years, their music still has poor production, denying the listener of any kind of brutality.
• Shit guitar playing. Sorry, but you can't just tremolo pick and palm mute endlessly without variation. I love simple, straightforward death metal, but there is no range here. You could remove 10 frets from the guitar neck and still play all of their music. In the two decades they've been playing there has been no sign of progression. Even simple techniques like hammer-ons and pinch harmonics are never used.
• Cliche use of samples. I'm not saying they don't have their place, but Mortician is NEVER creative about it. There's a sample from a horror movie for as long as a couple minutes, then the song starts. That's lame and does not create any kind of mood, which is what I'm sure they were intending.
When you take all of these things into account, I don't see any kind of redeeming factor for Mortician. They act as if they don't even particularly like death metal, like they're just going through the motions. They insult my intelligence by presenting me, the listener, with sub-neanderthalic, amelodic, completely generic death metal with no solos or surprises of any kind.
1. Mortician basically doesn't have riffs and is really far more influenced by grind than death metal proper. The guitar tone is great at creating the menacing wall of atonality the band needs to maintain their atmosphere. It's faceless, much like the tremolo riffs themselves, but has enough body to stay heavy when the slow, chugging parts come in. The buzz itself is meaningless, like the fast riffs.
2. Don't see why enunciation is necessary as Mortician's vocals are clearly used as another instrument which is designed to blend in with the rest of the music sonically. Like with most of your complaints, it comes down to a matter of taste, but I think Rahmer's vocals are suited to the music- overly low, incoherent, and nasty.
3. Correct. The drum machine is not meant to be used like a real drummer; it is a machine, and an obvious one at that. It is there to provide a skeletal rhythm and an added layer of noise, but its purpose is not to function as an instrument proper. In fact, Mortician's music suffers greatly when a real drummer is added; see their godawful live album for evidence as to why the minimalism of the machine is crucial to their sound.
4. Mortician's music is not designed with individual instrumental tonality in mind; instead, production is designed to bring all the voices together into a basically indistinguishable mass. Again, Mortician is not really attempting to be 'death metal' proper, and trying to analyze their production based on typical death metal standards is going to disappoint every time. View it like a grind or noise record instead.
5. Correct. Mortician's guitarwork is minimalistic to the extreme. This is because the riffs typically don't matter. The downtuning is so severe that the tremolo riffs are basically indistinguishable and the band regularly uses the same riffs in different songs with only the slightest variations to differentiate them. This is because the guitar is not used to create riffs; it's there to provide an additional layer of noise except for when the slow, Celtic Frost-style parts kick in, in which case some actual effort is expended on creating something memorable. Again, don't listen to it like it's death metal.
6. This is another example of Mortician's overt musical dadaism. Describing the usage of the samples and why it is important that it is executed the way it is would take a very long time, but in short, the samples are basically arbitrary- you could probably swap one for any of the others with little change to the song itself. The samples are not important- the PRESENCE of the samples is, and frankly you could replace them with dead silence and have much of the same effect.
In short, listening to and enjoying Mortician necessitates not listening to them as a death metal band, because frankly I've never considered them to be overtly death metal. Most of the influences found in riffing and overall song structures are much more reminiscent of early grind thrown against Celtic Frost, albeit with a sense of starkness and minimalism that even that pair never quite attained. Mortician is closer to noise in execution that death metal; the individual tones are often irrelevant to the whole, and you have to learn to enjoy the STRUCTURING of the tones just as much. There are Mortician songs that fit certain paradigms- the short microtracks, the slow, chugging ones with a middle blast break, the more varied ones with gore-polka beats- and many of them within a certain paradigm will be basically the same song. This is because the individual songs are irrelevant, but the fact that this song is placed here and goes in this way rather than that way is important.
Maybe it's easier if you think of it in terms of the gorenoise scene, which I'm a big fan of. You'll have tapes with 100 tracks of basically improvised music; they program some blast beats and fills and play some bleary distorted bass over it and then lay over that some lyricless gurgles. The individual tracks are meaningless; no one is going to listen to track 23 from a random Omphalectoicxanthopsia release over number 72. But the fact that there's 100 tracks, that the album is structured in this way, that the art and the presentation of the release are a certain way, are all important to the whole. If you don't like that, it's fine, it's a matter of taste and kind of an abstract and dumb thing to love, but it's just something very different.
In short, the music proper of Mortician isn't very important, but the way they go about constructing it is. |
| Цитата | | Mortician, the Wesley Willis of death metal. |
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" © Sunshine T.
, но сначала подумал, что за вокальной стойкой Джеф Харди 