<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mighty Midget @ Aug 22 2006, 02:42 AM) [snapback]250110[/snapback]</div>
Heh, I'm from the UK... and there are some really good bands from the UK, but many more terrible ones sadly. The USA also produces very few really good bands these days. That's not to say there are NO good American bands. Just, the vast majority of them seem to be very.. awful. The American sound is very.. commercial these days, and most of the stuff from over there just sounds far too over-produced for me a lot of the time. Even the unknown American bands sound very over-produced! I guess it's just part of the American sound.. but there's really only a handful of American bands I listen to much these days.

I'm really into Scandinavian stuff though. And I have a big liking for Japanese rock music too.

In terms of metal, most of the stuff I listen to comes from Norway, Sweden, Finland, or Germany (of course many other places too, but I think more of the metal bands I listen to are from those countries than anywhere else).

Horoma, you should try listening to Slipknot's "Iowa", if you're in to the whole "wall-of-sound" metal. The entire album manages to have an extremely addictive quality to it, it's hard to sit still while listening to "People = muck".

As for me, I personally hate metal that is absolutely nothing but blank, downtuned sound <_< ; that's why I like Slayer's "God Hates Us All" so much, it's intense, it's gritty, and it has tune! :w00t:

Just a thought bubble i was discussing with my brother.

has anyone noticed how some metal bands ( I do not care what genre they are or if there even not "metal" ) get really toned down, or aren't as good as the first album. After a few albums i noticed Godsmack, Disturbed, Stone Sour and some others i cant remember became less load and less angry sounding.
All i know is godsmacks "Faceless" is crappy, and Disturbed's "10,000 fists" wasn't that heavy.
Stone Sour's new album is just plain good. I can not critisize it at all.

That probably just happens because the idea of experimentation in metal is alive and well...but it isn't always a good thing...

Well Sully Erna from godsmack does have a kid now so i guess thats why they got less heavy. :unsure:

Well sometimes that happens, mostly it's experimentation with sound, especially if it's a debut or second album, but the examples you mentioned all mainstream metal and really it's obvious why they would tone it down, to make it more accessable to the mainstream, for profit. So really it usually half the time happens with bands that want to move to the mainstream, a lot only make minor changes and keep on the style they have been playing.

Excuse me, but because you all seem to know so much about music, there's a question that's been bothering me for a while.

I used to think Linkin Park was the greatest band on earth, I still love their music, but now everywhere I go people are saying they "sold out"...how did they sell out, and what exactly does "selling out" mean?

It means they sold every ticket for their gigs :whistling:

Seriously, it means the band has given up their ideals in favour of (mostly) big money, giving them less artistic control, cred or whatever. I don't know the band, so I wouldn't know if they sold out.

A thing to remember is that most bands evolve. For some fans that is a tough pill to swallow. They want 'their' band to sound the same, record after record, to front the same ideals as before, disregarding the fact that most people, musicians included, grow up and change their view on things. It does not mean by itself that they sold out.

If you look it up, you will find in the entry "sold out", a picture of the Dead Kennedys. They opposed the big music industry with all the empty-minded 'stars' doing nothing but to sell brands, but after they thumped their only political aware member, they hired their guns to comercials. THAT, my friend, is a sell-out. :wallbash:

Or another example was Metallica, their first 4 albums were as has been mentioned serveral times, classic albums. That all changed with the black album where they began to make a more accessible sound of their music. Actually if you want to go back further, they said in the 80's that they will never make a music video, because they didn't like the way mtv protrayed bands, guess what happened in 1989, they made a music video for one, so that was the start. With Load and Reload they went even further mainstream with their sound, now look at them, with their last album St. Anger, they are no longer metal but hard rock, they turned their backs on the fans that got them to the point of getting recognized all for the quick buck.

Linken Park has turned to total mush, i completely gave up with them when they did that collision coarse cRAP. MTV ruins music!