Sonorant

I promised posts, so here's some more free music. Introducing Sonorant (AKA Chris Catharsis), a Georgia-based metal guitarist well worth keeping an eye on. These days, metal bands can often be divided into either melodic or rhythm-focused groups in terms of their instrumentals. The more melody-based metal acts (Bullet For My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold, etc.) tend to have a wider appeal than, say, rhythm-centric (and, in my personal opinion, fascinating) groups in the vein of Meshuggah. This is arguably all the more reason to appreciate acts like Sonorant which manage to strike an even balance of melodic and rhythmic craziness. Not only displaying a keen ear for melody, Sonorant appears to be heavily influenced by none other than the mighty Meshuggah, as evidenced by the cover of Meshuggah's song Sane on the band's Myspace page. For those of you unfamiliar with Meshuggah, they are essentially the masters of rhythmic displacement, polyrhythms, polymeters, and inordinately heavy guitar grooves. As Meshuggah guitarist Fredrik Thorendal once told Guitar World magazine (quoted from the September 2012 issue), "I understand why people hear odd meters in our songs, because we group our notes in different ways. But just about all of them are 4/4." The band's tracks tend to focus more on creating a groove than a melody. Sonorant's songs, however, combine the interesting rhythmic elements of bands like Meshuggah with some fantastic melodies. As an added bonus, Sonorant's songs don't have vocal tracks, allowing them to appeal to those who would be repulsed by the menacing barks, snarls and growls of Meshuggah's singer. As usual, more of Sonorant's tracks can be found for free at their Jamendo page. Enjoy.

Soon...

Well, it's time for finals. I'll be done with finals late on the 16th, and will be back home on the 18th. In other words, I'll be able to start posting again quite soon. I have a bit of a backlog of stuff to share with you, so I'll be posting quite a bit this Christmas break. See you then! Guitarman

Hot Fiction, and a status update

Well, it's been about a month since I've posted. Between writing essays and reading school texts, I haven't had much time to breathe. Anyways, it's been too long since I've been able to post some free music, so here we go! Hot Fiction is a London-based alt-rock and blues outfit that's caught my attention lately. Their music somehow has a strong groove while remaining loose and open. It's a fairly minimalist sound, which works quite well for their style of the blues. Naturally, their primal sound and two-man lineup will draw forth the inevitable Black Keys comparisons, but Hot Fiction definitely has their own distinct feel. For more information, you can find the band's bio here. I'm a sucker for heavy blues, so they drew me straight in. I'm hoping that they might do the same for you. As usual, you can find their music for free. Enjoy. (By the way, the reason the formatting for this post is a little odd is because www.blogger.com is being weird right now. I'm actually typing this into the html editor, because the normal text input will only let me type while I hold the left mouse button for some odd reason...)

Life. It happens.

It seems I wasn't able to get a post out this weekend. Well, such is the life of a college student I suppose. Judging by the current state of my calendar, I won't be making regular posts for a little while. Also, the campus internet is a little spotty, preventing me from spending too much time looking around for interesting music. Once I get those two issues sorted out, I'll return to a more regular schedule. Until then!