Songs I'm listening to or recommended to people

[Lennie Briscoe]

I thought it would be fun to include stuff I had recommended to people or happened to be listening to during the game. since I didn't think of this until now I'm doing catchup so this is just stuff I mentioned previously.

[Lennie Briscoe]

[Lennie Briscoe]

[Lennie Briscoe]

[Lennie Briscoe]

Galactic Cowboys were so fucking good, I'm not a Christian but even their more-or-less-explicitly Christian stuff can be amazing. Why Can't You Believe In Me is pretty straightforward thematically but honestly it's wonderful. nobody else could really combine melodic harmonized vocals with serious riffs the way they could (except maybe King's X but they're super close and GC clearly listened to more Metallica)

[Lennie Briscoe]

I feel like backpacker rap from the early 00s is viewed as like, headphone listening, like it doesn't go hard, it doesn't slap, or whatever fucking kids say today, but the beat on this Aesop Rock track is so good and honestly I always dug his flow even if it's sort of that cram-a-million-words-in-and-be-sure-to-use-a-thesaurus style

It's weird, this Pharcyde track about unrequited love is borderline corny but it's so earnest it always brings a smile to my face

[Lennie Briscoe]

re: Galactic Cowboys maybe I'm just a fan of metal songs about Christ regardless of pro or con

also seriously Nocturnus wrote a song about going back in time to kill baby Jesus, that rules

[Lennie Briscoe]

Judy actually liked Opeth and wanted more recommendations, and I kind of went overboard on something where the answer is "well nobody really sounds quite like them"

So Opeth occupies a kind of unique space with having the mix of melodic and harsh vocals but having a fairly "produced" sound, and sort of proggy song structure. They also grew and changed a lot, so Blackwater Park (the album Bleak is off of) was followed by a pair of albums, Deliverance and Damnation, where Damnation is all soft/acoustic and Deliverance is all harsh, but then after that they gradually sort of grew into more of a prog rock sound. I'm more of a fan of their earlier work, like Blackwater Park is probably my favorite, but Still Life; My Arms, Your Hearse; Orchid; and Morningrise are all great too (maybe Orchid and Morningrise are a little sloppier)

So that all said, for recommendations, the first one I think of would be Katatonia, who Mikael Åkerfeldt (lead singer for Opeth) was with briefly and worked on production for them. they started sort of as doom/death but trended away from that quickly I haven't listened to them a lot so I'm stabbing in the dark a little, here's a track with Åkerfeldt:

and one I've listened to a bit more from a few years laterr when they're more in a gothic metal/hard rock sound with just clean vocals:

Another recommendation I'd make which isn't necessarily super similar to Opeth but was similarly a gateway band for me would be In Flames, a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg. So the metal bands you pasted earlier are "metalcore" which owes a lot to the Gothenburg sound, the later In Flames albums start to converge a lot with the metalcore bands, with more clean vocals and the like. But for me the gateway was more the riffs in their earlier work, and the growls were kind of tepid/inoffensive.

And here's another of the Gothenburg bands, Soilwork, this is one of the earlier examples of harsh verse/soaring clean vocals on the chorus:

And last I should mention Porcupine Tree, which is a prog rock band led by Steven Wilson who produced and worked with Opeth a lot and was very much responsible for their sound and ultimate trend towards prog rock (also you heard him doing harmonized vocals on Bleak). Porcupine Tree - In Absentia and Fear of a Blank Planet are both great albums

Okay I realize that's a lot, no need to listen to it all to respond

[Lennie Briscoe]

sent these to Lucifer. both Florrie and Little Boots don't really have the most compelling voices but I love their production and composition. Florrie was like the in-house drummer for Xenomania and I love how prominently that comes across in her music

[Lennie Briscoe]

I've been trying and failing all day to find this Lumsk track that's running through my head but here's another one, they're folk metal w/ a female vocalist who has a very pretty voice

[Lennie Briscoe]

Wobbler - Rites at Dawn is seriously one of my favorite albums. Prog rock very much in the vein of 70s prog rock (this is the sort of thing that some folks argue isn't "progressive" because it's copying a previous style but fuck those dumbasses). There are really very few albums that can bring me to tears but this one has just such an emotional response from me purely based on the music, not really related to the lyrics at all

[Lennie Briscoe]

El-P's verse on this is so good but it's all good

[Lennie Briscoe]

[Joss Carter]

This song has been serving me well ever since 4th grade.

[Lennie Briscoe]

This song has been serving me well ever since 4th grade.

if only I'd been more familiar with it I would have gotten that question about the two yemens right last season

BTW Rumskib's first album is an amazing shoegaze album, albeit with programmed drums