I'm one of those prog fanatics. I love technicality in every corner, and i want it in massive disturbing abundance. I've been an enormous Opeth fan for as long as i remember the first time i started to play my guitar. Love it top to bottom, all along with my daily Megadeth fix.
Now if you guys don't understand what Djent is, here is a quick lesson. Djent is actually derived from the sound the guitars with more than 6 strings sound like. It's a "djenty" sound when the strings bounce on the neck and the reverberation of the sound creates a bounce, very similar to slap base sounds. Now this can be used in different kinds of styles, but mostly it's confined to its own because there is a restriction of sound due to 7,8, and even 9 strings make. It's mostly due to the limitation of chords, the lower tones make it physically impossible to perform chords because it gets extremely muddy and incoherent so you are forced to play 1 note at a time. So a whole different mentality needs to be adopted to compensate. The flip side of this whole thing is that now you can't be technical with chords but on the other hand you must be technical with timing and allocating notes in higher speeds, like 32nd and 64th notes more frequently. Very technical stuff; this in turn makes a whole new style of metal, quite distinctive if you are a metal enthusiast.
So, lately I've been losing some interest in metal. I'm a metal guitar player and i've been going down this downward spiral of motivational loss. The only reason i pick up a guitar in the last 6 months is for work, and that's about it. So I've been trying to discover some new bands to reignite my love for metal.
I sat down and i spent about a good 5 hours listening to the more djent style bands. Bands like Meshuggah and so forth. Meshuggah in the back of my mid was good but i just never took the time to sit down and listen to them with full attention. This isn't new music to me, but then i started really looking at other bands with relative sounds towards this Djent style.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc98u-eGzlc
Real great sound IMO. These guys i believe are the originators of Djent. I know they play 8 string guitars and on 1 or 2 songs even 9 string guitars. So you can hear some real harsh and profoundly deep tones. Just nuts. This is some brutal stuff. I love it!
I came across another band called Animals as Leaders.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihqT1aA4Q88
Now this song really struck one of those untapped nerves in the back of my spine!...in a good way though. This guy Tosin Abasi plays an 8 string guitar and does a lot of technical stuff, flamenco picking, dual split arpeggios, sweeping, and you guys know the rest...lol. Now this is something on the very extreme where to fully understand what this guy and his band do you have to be a musician to pick up all the subtle little details he puts together. This band really mastered the usage of timing to a level i haven't seen anywhere else. The little subtle added notes in between 32th and 64th notes just blows my mind. It's off putting but in a really good way where it forces you to re-adjust your ear. I love bands that change the way music can be perceived, really good stuff. Can't wait to see more of what these guys come out with and as well as following where Tosin Abasi will go, this guy is a new standard of master musician. So after finding about Animals as Leaders, i just had to find more bands with this kind of caliber.
If this is a little out there for you guys, i've got something softer. So i kept looking around for more variety and more of this "Djent" sound. I found out about Tesseract,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hnSlicxV4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=get0cXOsSXg
These guys have a real good progressive influence to their style. I'm really big on creating an environment with your music. To take your listener out of their mind and put them in an open space. This is music that helps your creative juices. Very ambient and soulful without losing the metal grit and still having that Djent sound.
Another one that really stuck out is a band called Periphery.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUltTV3t4OM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=spCmStMOiHE
These guys have quite a bit more energy with their sound. I'm generally not found of higher pitched singing...kind of reminds me of those scremo/hardcore bands which i just can't stand. Though i still gave it an open mind and took my time and listened to it. I'm quite surprised how good this band is, very technical and yet so much variation from harsh to soft playing, heavy to light singing, good time signature changes, and lots of energy. Their songs don't drag on which is nice if you want to listen to some quick stuff. I know lots of metal tends to be 5+ min long pieces which is great but nice to have a change of pace.
Bands don't have to be aggressive with this style which is really great to see, a ton of other genre's are really confined to one method of singing, or one method of drumming/guitar, etc.At times, it can get really stale because bands in lets say Black Metal which i love can start to copy each other in certain methods and i believe that Black Metal is starting to get a little to saturated with the same sounds. There are a ton of good Black Metal bands, but lately it's getting very recycled, and it's sad to see that many musicians in the metal community are that lazy and don't bring anything new to the table.
I know I've been dragging on for a long time now. If you read through all of this, i'd like to commend you. If you guys really like this style of playing, please recommend me some djent stuff. To the guys that got interested to this, i'll put a link at the bottom with some bands you may wanna check out.
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/ashep13/djent_bands_worth_checking_out/