rio wrote:
I'm surprised at the number of people here who argue that DEP are "just noise". What is the difference between sound and music? At what point does noise become melody? :? There are no answers to these questions.
http://www.musictheory.net
Seriously though, I understand what you are getting at. But there is a point where music does become useless noise. That line is just different for everyone. Music vs. Noise is subjective. For some people it starts at heavy metal, some at thrash, some death or black metal, others into tech and so on. I don't think a lot of people here would argue that a recording of me running around a music store and bashing intruments would be much in the way of good listening, but for some that might as well be me playing the new DEP.
I agree with milk and Gast in that DEP sounds sterile and that the large percentage of the new wave of "techcore" or whatever you want to call it is childish in it's execution, respectively. I can take spiraling chaotic dissonance, but only if it is pulled off by someone with a little more taste or sense of craft. Of course, it only takes a run through the album to see what kind of minds this is coming from. Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants is fucking screamo, replete with every awful element of the psuedo-genre. At least one test of a Metal band's mettle is the slow song, the clean song(in some cases, section), the ballad, whatever it turns out to be. Bands like Green Carnation, Opeth, Emperor, are/were able to blend that into their music, DEP shows exactly what kind of skill they posess when it comes to writing outside of their established genre by writing an awful song that could easily pass for any number of screamo bands that pop up constantly.
DEP and their ilk simply fail to impress me outside of their instrumental prowess, which can't make up for the lack of substance in the music. Remove that technicality and all you have are a bunch of hardcore and emo kids, who also don't offer up anything I can enjoy.