WILT_2020-02

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 4 Oct 2020 to 10 Oct 2020.

1. Carousel – Haken
2. The Crystal Ship – The Doors
3. Sing! – Petula
4. UNFUTURE – Pain of Salvation
5. RESTLESS BOY – Pain of Salvation
6. Physical Education – Animals as Leaders
7. Of Mind – Nocturne – TesseracT
8. Of Mind – Exile – TesseracT
9. Of Matter – Proxy – TesseracT
10. Of Reality – Calabi-Yau – TesseracT
11. 1759 (Outro) – Richard Spaven, Sandunes
12. Only You – Jihae
13. Beneath My Skin / Mirror Image – TesseracT
14. Explore, Be Curious – Cloudkicker
15. golgotha – Glassjaw
16. King – TesseracT
17. Hexes – TesseracT

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2020-02

Notes

This whole playlist started because I was sharing with a friend that I was coming out of my progressive metal listening cycle (For whatever reason, just a lot of the Dream Theater album “Distance Over Time), and he recommended me two more bands, Haken and Pain of Salvation, which were both really good and started me on a further journey into the genre and my preferences.

For example, Haken demonstrates very strong prowess in musical arrangements and melodies, and there was a certain warmth to the production quality. However, I was still quite taken in by the cold, djent quality (I was also feeling slightly nostalgic to unpack the 2000’s trainwreck genre of nu-metal), so I re-explored the band Periphery, but it would be the band TesseracT that ultimately captured my ears last week.

By all accounts, I should not have been that taken by the band, the singer was technically very competent, but he sang in really high registers ala metalcore, that I generally find irritating ad-nauseum. But I suppose the entire band was combining many different textures, styles, techniques, grooves and melodies in their individual arrangements that just created a very complex, yet brutally simple canvas of sounds and ideas. I really hate that the band name is stylised as “TesseracT” though.

Other highlights came from the discovery of Jihae when my wife and I endured the movie, Mortal Engines (2018), and discovered that one of the actors was also a singer/artist, creative-creator. So Jihae’s got some interesting musical ideas, and I bookmarked some of her music just to perhaps refer back to in the future. It’s slightly avant, but without being tryingly so.

See you next week!