I don't know man, I'd rather be stuck listening to Coal Chamber or Hed(Pe) than #7-#16. Or Incubus, for that matter. For me the only Incubus is the thrash band. Hell, Evanescence is one of the worst bands I've heard in my entire life.
But I can't really argue with your top spot. The only nu metal albums I ever listen to are Around the Fur, White Pony, and also Korn's The Untouchables which to me is musically the best album in that genre, insanely catchy and I liked the 80s pop influence running through some of the tunes, and maybe a smattering of other tunes from them off random albums.
I guess Devildriver is considered more groove/thrash metal these days but if they counted they'd be way up there for me too.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Korn's first album was solid, although admittedly I haven't gone back to it in a long time. It was fun seeing them in a club in the mid-90s. That style felt pretty fresh at the time to me, but I was also 18-19 and everything was fresh and new to me.
They're certainly one of the bands in that niche to create and then maintain a distinct feel from pretty much everything. Even bands that copy them don't really sound like them.
Lyrically though, they are like 6-year-olds, which they'd tell you was the point but I can't take it for too long.
Limp Bizkit is objectively the best nu metal band, and I'm not just saying that because they were the second band after Rob Zombie that I got into as a kid.
Woooo, I'm back home from work and now with a functioning smartphone. Time to get caught up on the thread.
In the meantime, this was a really good watch regarding the rise, fall, and evolution of Nu Metal: https://youtu.be/ATllyNXF3Kg
Also I have been listening to so much damn Slugdge the past two weeks while out on the boat. Thank you thread for introducing me to this awesome band. HAIL MOLUSKA
I don't know man, I'd rather be stuck listening to Coal Chamber or Hed(Pe) than #7-#16. Or Incubus, for that matter. For me the only Incubus is the thrash band. Hell, Evanescence is one of the worst bands I've heard in my entire life.
But I can't really argue with your top spot. The only nu metal albums I ever listen to are Around the Fur, White Pony, and also Korn's The Untouchables which to me is musically the best album in that genre, insanely catchy and I liked the 80s pop influence running through some of the tunes, and maybe a smattering of other tunes from them off random albums.
I guess Devildriver is considered more groove/thrash metal these days but if they counted they'd be way up there for me too.
Agree to disagree. Coal Chamber and Hed(pe) have too much of an aggro meathead vibe for me. At least Amy Lee and Brandon Boyd have good singing voices and some introspective lyrics. Meanwhile Hed(pe) literally have a song with the lyrics "Bitch shut up before I rape you". That's a hard pass from me, dogg.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Limp Bizkit is objectively the best nu metal band, and I'm not just saying that because they were the second band after Rob Zombie that I got into as a kid.
I wasn't kidding when I said Limp Bizkit minus Durst is good.
Fair enough, but yeah, not for me. Evanescence is a terrible mash-up of 4th rate Lacuna Coil style fad-jumping and hilariously bad nu-metal riffing (and...rapping?). Safe, gutless, radio pap. And their lyrics are about as introspective as a Hallmark card from 1995. Linkin Park was at least catchy at the same crap.
I've already stated that I dislike the overwhelming majority of Hed(pe)'s material, so I'm the last person to mount a defense for any of their shitty provocative gangsta rap lyrical leanings, but at least they could write a good riff once awhile and when the singer's pissed off, he actually SOUNDS pissed off and not fake.
To change gears, since nothing good can ever come out of a nu-metal discussion, I've been listening to a lot more Skull Fist lately, almost all their albums are growing on me. They're kind of compensating for my tepid reaction to that newest Enforcer.
Wasn't that like one song, though? My wife liked them when they first came out, so I heard them occasionally, and there were a couple of songs that were okay. I only remember the rapping on their first single.
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Good news is UK shows in February, with the as-yet-untitled new album in tow. Still a long wait, and only four shows with none in a convenient location for me, but I can deal.
Bad news is that Merel is (amicably) leaving the band, at least as a permanent member. No news yet on if they'll be looking for a replacement or going back to a single guitar.
Wasn't that like one song, though? My wife liked them when they first came out, so I heard them occasionally, and there were a couple of songs that were okay. I only remember the rapping on their first single.
You are correct, I should have written 'nu-metal riffing', not 'rapping'. Good eye. Do they even have rap except for some male backup counterpoint vocals? I've only heard two full records by the band, both were abysmal, and then a couple singles off the other ones. So I might have missed if they had more rapping.
Wasn't that like one song, though? My wife liked them when they first came out, so I heard them occasionally, and there were a couple of songs that were okay. I only remember the rapping on their first single.
You are correct, I should have written 'nu-metal riffing', not 'rapping'. Good eye. Do they even have rap except for some male backup counterpoint vocals? I've only heard two full records by the band, both were abysmal, and then a couple singles off the other ones. So I might have missed if they had more rapping.
I'm far from the expert on them, but I only recall that guy being a guest vocalist for that one song. He did a little lame rap part at some point in the song, but it wasn't very long. Everything else I've heard from them was just Amy, who I think is pretty good. There's like 2 songs on their debut that stuck out to me as catchy, and I remember nothing of the rest.
Actually, that infamous performance they had many years ago pretty much sums up my feelings on them. I don't remember what it was (some awards show, maybe Billboard?), but they were doing a performance of "My Immortal". Most of it was just Amy and a piano, which was quite nice, then at the crescendo of the song the rest of the band was lit up and kicked in, and I think they were out of tune or something. Maybe the mixing was just off. Either way, it sounded horrible. At the end of the song, I think Amy actually said "wow".
I heard something to the effect that dude rapping was a record label mandate — I believe you can get a “director’s cut” version of the track without him on another release. He wasn’t a member of the band, right?
Edit:
“In a 2013 interview, Amy Lee discusses her ‘aggressive’ femininity, saying she embraces it as it’s different, but that back at the start of her career, she had many chats with “the suits, the powers that be” who saw her femininity “as a negative thing” and something to “overcome”.
“That’s where the rap in ‘Bring Me to Life’ came from,” she reveals.
“They threatened us that they weren’t going to put out album out or do anything unless we full-time hired some dude to be in the band and sing too.”
She explains how they refused and walked away, but came to a deal two weeks later when they were told they could compromise by just having a male on their first single.
“I was really pissed about it but I was like, ‘It’s just one song, let’s find somebody good to do it.””
I don't think I was ever really able to get into any Nu Metal. Not even Korn or Slipknot when they first hit on the scene. The only exception would be Mudvayne because there are some legit good math/prog elements in some of their songs hidden deeper in the LD50 album (like Know Forever) , but I didn't like any of their albums after that. I think at the time I was more into Tool and RATM and Metallica so the other stuff just kind of slid off me. I also did like Incubus but I never thought of them as Nu Metal, even when Science came out.
In the future when they do a reunion tour they’ll just use a hologram of him like they did with Tupac
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
edited June 2019
Early on my biggest problem with Evanescence was the US music press giving them a sloppy blowjob for their "originality" and "unique sound" after Fallen broke big and became the metal darling of the 2004 Grammy season. Amy and Ben Moody never gave a single shout out to the bands they'd obviously copycatted that had almost zero mainstream exposure this side of the Atlantic and just kept giving themselves a pat on the back and claiming it was all them. They came from Arkansas, not a sensory deprivation tank or cave with no record stores.
By the time Fallen went to no. 1 Within Temptation, Nightwish and Lacuna Coil were all 3+ albums into their careers, The Gathering, After Forever and Tristania were out there, Liv Kristine and Theater of Tragedy had been going for a decade (Velvet Darkness They Fear is one of my favorite goth albums of all time), etc...
I have no problem with bands making bank, but going full diva is such a dick move. Nowadays Amy doesn't quite have her head all the way up her ass, and I have to admit that I did enjoy the Synesthesia album she put out of Evenesence songs arranged for just piano and orchestra and acoustic ensembles, and I went with some friends to a show on the tour and it was decent. The lyrics still are somewhat insipid and trying too hard most of the time, but she had taken care of her voice and sounds pretty good live, though she'd probably not even make my Top 10 of female metal vocalists I've heard live.
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No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
I don't think I was ever really able to get into any Nu Metal. Not even Korn or Slipknot when they first hit on the scene. The only exception would be Mudvayne because there are some legit good math/prog elements in some of their songs hidden deeper in the LD50 album (like Know Forever) , but I didn't like any of their albums after that. I think at the time I was more into Tool and RATM and Metallica so the other stuff just kind of slid off me. I also did like Incubus but I never thought of them as Nu Metal, even when Science came out.
I was a big Marilyn Manson kid when I was 13-14, but mostly avoided nu metal (I don't consider MM himself nu metal, but nu metal adjacent). I had a brief Linkin Park phase but quickly decided they were too whiny for me. Otherwise I really only liked SOAD and Deftones, and a handful of Incubus songs here and there. Hence the "line of listenability" in my ranking.
I also pegged Trapt's "Headstrong" as the death of nu metal. I distinctly remember hearing that song and thinking "Yep, we've about reached the end for this sort of thing".
Being a teenager in Iowa around 2000, we were issued wallet chains and copies of Slipknot's s/t. It's hard to overstate how much their success meant to us. Here was this shitty funk metal band we saw in somebody's backyard, only they got it together and now they're on MTV and Sam Goody is selling masks and orange boiler suits.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
God, I hated nu-metal. I was at that perfect age when it came out to have enough experience with popular music to understand what it was doing and resent it for it. Korn's self titled came out in Oct '94, so I would have been a sophomore in high school. I didn't get it until about a year later, but I did like it a fair amount, to be honest. They were kind of proto-nu-metal at that time, and tolerable to me compared to what would follow once record companies got a sniff of the success they could bring.
My first real delve into music of my own was with the glam metal of the late 80's. I saw it murdered and its corpse paraded around by grunge and alternative. But there was also the popularity of other things I had gotten into by that time, stuff like Metallica, Megadeth, and Pantera, so it wasn't all bad. But then nu-metal came out and did to them what grunge did to glam metal. And since they were melding groove and rap, things I didn't care for (whereas grunge/alternative were still using elements on the rock side of things), and also the fact that I had gone through this previously, I had no patience for it. Anything associated with it was a hard pass from me. I remember that Limp Bizkit Victora's Secret thing that was kind of the birth of the whole thing, and I wasn't having it at all. There was also the pop-punk explosion around that time, which I didn't care for, but I didn't abhor it like I did nu-metal.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited June 2019
I was huge into Nu Metal from about 94 til about 01 (edit: or so, my memory is kinda shit), when I got a one-two punch of Alive or Just Breathing and My Arms Your Hearse from an online friend and I didn't look back after that.
I still remember the note on the package: "Here, stop listening to shitty music."
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited June 2019
Oh shit I forgot about Spineshank.
They had some p decent stuff too. I know we were talking about vocalists who sounded like they meant it, and those fellas were just pure spite and anger.
Hey, now. Suicidal Tendencies was awesome, especially the 1988-1990 period ending with Lights...Camera...Revolution. And I like their old punk/skate stuff. Their latest album is surprisingly decent, too.
The new Gygax is pretty solid. Lots of good riffs and leads but the choruses are a bit weak.
You are right, the chorus parts don't really elevate the songs, but they're pretty damn good to start off with so I can let it slide in some cases. Also it's pretty short. Really digging it though.
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I don't know man, I'd rather be stuck listening to Coal Chamber or Hed(Pe) than #7-#16. Or Incubus, for that matter. For me the only Incubus is the thrash band. Hell, Evanescence is one of the worst bands I've heard in my entire life.
But I can't really argue with your top spot. The only nu metal albums I ever listen to are Around the Fur, White Pony, and also Korn's The Untouchables which to me is musically the best album in that genre, insanely catchy and I liked the 80s pop influence running through some of the tunes, and maybe a smattering of other tunes from them off random albums.
I guess Devildriver is considered more groove/thrash metal these days but if they counted they'd be way up there for me too.
Lyrically though, they are like 6-year-olds, which they'd tell you was the point but I can't take it for too long.
In the meantime, this was a really good watch regarding the rise, fall, and evolution of Nu Metal:
Also I have been listening to so much damn Slugdge the past two weeks while out on the boat. Thank you thread for introducing me to this awesome band. HAIL MOLUSKA
D'oh, too late. Sorry about that.
Agree to disagree. Coal Chamber and Hed(pe) have too much of an aggro meathead vibe for me. At least Amy Lee and Brandon Boyd have good singing voices and some introspective lyrics. Meanwhile Hed(pe) literally have a song with the lyrics "Bitch shut up before I rape you". That's a hard pass from me, dogg.
I wasn't kidding when I said Limp Bizkit minus Durst is good.
And this is a legit roided out RATM style corker until the vocals come in
I've already stated that I dislike the overwhelming majority of Hed(pe)'s material, so I'm the last person to mount a defense for any of their shitty provocative gangsta rap lyrical leanings, but at least they could write a good riff once awhile and when the singer's pissed off, he actually SOUNDS pissed off and not fake.
To change gears, since nothing good can ever come out of a nu-metal discussion, I've been listening to a lot more Skull Fist lately, almost all their albums are growing on me. They're kind of compensating for my tepid reaction to that newest Enforcer.
Wasn't that like one song, though? My wife liked them when they first came out, so I heard them occasionally, and there were a couple of songs that were okay. I only remember the rapping on their first single.
Good news is UK shows in February, with the as-yet-untitled new album in tow. Still a long wait, and only four shows with none in a convenient location for me, but I can deal.
Bad news is that Merel is (amicably) leaving the band, at least as a permanent member. No news yet on if they'll be looking for a replacement or going back to a single guitar.
Steam | XBL
You are correct, I should have written 'nu-metal riffing', not 'rapping'. Good eye. Do they even have rap except for some male backup counterpoint vocals? I've only heard two full records by the band, both were abysmal, and then a couple singles off the other ones. So I might have missed if they had more rapping.
I'm far from the expert on them, but I only recall that guy being a guest vocalist for that one song. He did a little lame rap part at some point in the song, but it wasn't very long. Everything else I've heard from them was just Amy, who I think is pretty good. There's like 2 songs on their debut that stuck out to me as catchy, and I remember nothing of the rest.
Actually, that infamous performance they had many years ago pretty much sums up my feelings on them. I don't remember what it was (some awards show, maybe Billboard?), but they were doing a performance of "My Immortal". Most of it was just Amy and a piano, which was quite nice, then at the crescendo of the song the rest of the band was lit up and kicked in, and I think they were out of tune or something. Maybe the mixing was just off. Either way, it sounded horrible. At the end of the song, I think Amy actually said "wow".
Edit:
“In a 2013 interview, Amy Lee discusses her ‘aggressive’ femininity, saying she embraces it as it’s different, but that back at the start of her career, she had many chats with “the suits, the powers that be” who saw her femininity “as a negative thing” and something to “overcome”.
“That’s where the rap in ‘Bring Me to Life’ came from,” she reveals.
“They threatened us that they weren’t going to put out album out or do anything unless we full-time hired some dude to be in the band and sing too.”
She explains how they refused and walked away, but came to a deal two weeks later when they were told they could compromise by just having a male on their first single.
“I was really pissed about it but I was like, ‘It’s just one song, let’s find somebody good to do it.””
https://www.nme.com/news/music/evanescence-explain-sexist-reason-theres-random-guy-rapping-bring-life-2158372
I wouldn't be surprised if he did in some capacity, at least early on.
According to Wiki, the male vocal was performed in live shows by the band's guitarist.
Steam | XBL
By the time Fallen went to no. 1 Within Temptation, Nightwish and Lacuna Coil were all 3+ albums into their careers, The Gathering, After Forever and Tristania were out there, Liv Kristine and Theater of Tragedy had been going for a decade (Velvet Darkness They Fear is one of my favorite goth albums of all time), etc...
I have no problem with bands making bank, but going full diva is such a dick move. Nowadays Amy doesn't quite have her head all the way up her ass, and I have to admit that I did enjoy the Synesthesia album she put out of Evenesence songs arranged for just piano and orchestra and acoustic ensembles, and I went with some friends to a show on the tour and it was decent. The lyrics still are somewhat insipid and trying too hard most of the time, but she had taken care of her voice and sounds pretty good live, though she'd probably not even make my Top 10 of female metal vocalists I've heard live.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I was a big Marilyn Manson kid when I was 13-14, but mostly avoided nu metal (I don't consider MM himself nu metal, but nu metal adjacent). I had a brief Linkin Park phase but quickly decided they were too whiny for me. Otherwise I really only liked SOAD and Deftones, and a handful of Incubus songs here and there. Hence the "line of listenability" in my ranking.
I also pegged Trapt's "Headstrong" as the death of nu metal. I distinctly remember hearing that song and thinking "Yep, we've about reached the end for this sort of thing".
My first real delve into music of my own was with the glam metal of the late 80's. I saw it murdered and its corpse paraded around by grunge and alternative. But there was also the popularity of other things I had gotten into by that time, stuff like Metallica, Megadeth, and Pantera, so it wasn't all bad. But then nu-metal came out and did to them what grunge did to glam metal. And since they were melding groove and rap, things I didn't care for (whereas grunge/alternative were still using elements on the rock side of things), and also the fact that I had gone through this previously, I had no patience for it. Anything associated with it was a hard pass from me. I remember that Limp Bizkit Victora's Secret thing that was kind of the birth of the whole thing, and I wasn't having it at all. There was also the pop-punk explosion around that time, which I didn't care for, but I didn't abhor it like I did nu-metal.
I still remember the note on the package: "Here, stop listening to shitty music."
They had some p decent stuff too. I know we were talking about vocalists who sounded like they meant it, and those fellas were just pure spite and anger.
Well, the note was half-right.
I mean, is Suicidal Tendencies really elite art
But. You. Can't. Bring. Me. Down.
Also, new Yellow Eyes Friday
You are right, the chorus parts don't really elevate the songs, but they're pretty damn good to start off with so I can let it slide in some cases. Also it's pretty short. Really digging it though.
As a well-read jackass in real life, this album speaks to me on many levels.
And going from Sartre-esque existentialism to Baconian skepticism between tracks 4 and 5 is a bold lyrical move.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Conforza
ANLMA isn’t actually Opethcore as previously stated but can be neat
Derelict Dream is rough but has promise
Frantic blackened death