To me, nothing is as fully sweet like pop music played heavy and with controlled virtuosity. It’s like a famous master chef whipping up simple, delicious hot dogs for my face; it seems foolish to abandon such classic fare to high-volume/low-margin assembly lines, right? Hence my devotion to the jamz of Rush, Bay Area thrash, Iron Maiden, Deftones, Devin Townsend, Love/Hate, Blessed By A Broken Heart, and tons more snappy songwriters with big boner crunch.

So I warmly welcome Look Right Penny, whose debut album Sugar Lane (out Tuesday) is a slam dunk of pop-djent metal. Click to read more…

Destiny Potato – Demo Preview by David Maxim Micic

This was not supposed to happen. Djent was not supposed to be the next annoying pop-metal trend.

When what would later be termed “djent” started brewing in the message boards frequented by guitar / home-recording nerds in 2002-2003, the genre had so much promise. Players who were passionate about their craft creating songs en masse for everyone to hear; good musicianship; the Meshuggah-revival guitar chug sound that was, at the time, novel; ambient atmospherics; interesting song structures and orchestration. Sure, the elements that caused djent to catch on like wildfire later on — namely catchy guitar hooks — were there in the genre’s infancy… but not to the degree they’re being mined, exploited  and endlessly imitated now.

This was not supposed to happen. For an interesting read, check out a guest blog TesseracT’s Acle Kahney wrote for MetalSucks about the birth of the djent movement. He was there way before you were and will be there long after.

This was not supposed to happen. It was nice knowing you while you were still fun, djent. I bid thee farewell.

-VN

Thanks: Dan Wolfson

So… what do you guys think of TesseracT?

I ask because I’m conflicted about what I think. TesseracT have been a band for many years, and were sporadically releasing songs on the Internet to widespread acclaim in underground circles way before the multitudes of so-called “djent” bands they inspired even existed. But it’s taken all this time — until March 22nd of this year — for them to release a proper full-length album, One (the Concealing Fate EP containing six songs from One was released last year). This puts them in sort of a weird spot; it feels like they’re late to the game, and to the unknowledgeable observer it would certainly appear that way, even though they helped to create that game to begin with.

Click to read more…

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Brent A. Petrie.

It says something that Mesa, AZ’s Brent A. Petrie uses his rather account-like legal name for this project, rather than something more descriptive like “Refracted Bionosphere” or “Celestial Mitosis” or “Djentleman Scholar.” Petrie’s just a regular dude. He posts regular dude pictures of himself on his website. He posts his personal e-mail address on his website. He plays everything on Vary Us, Artist himself. On one hand, this exploratory album is all about Brent A. Petrie, Creator of Music. On the other, I hear very little ego in it. No vocals, no flashy solos, no epic song lengths. Just deeply textured, often very heavy soundscapes.

Click to read more…

When MetalSucks correspondent Angela Gossowski interviewed recent Sumerian Records signees Periphery last month she asked them about the word “djent,” a phrase that appears on some of the band’s t-shirts (pictured above). Guitarist / band-mastermind Misha Mansoor answers thusly:

It’s basically just a guitar sound. It’s not even a word I invented, but it has become synonymous with the band. It’s something we appropriated because of the way we play our power chords. If you play guitar and you play a power chord and you use four notes… you use a big power chord and you palm mute really hard, it makes it really metallic sounding. There are some guitars and amps and pick-ups that are really conducive to that sound, which I’m a very big fan of. So I started describing things that I liked as “djenty,” because they had that characteristic. Just like you would say ‘bright,’ ‘dark,’ or whatever. It just seemed to have caught on for some reason. I actually heard the term from Meshuggah. They’re the ones who coined the term as far as I know. But for whatever reason people have been associating it with us… So if you’re in standard tuning, for all you guitar nerds out there, it would be 0-2-2-4. Or if you’re in drop tuning like we are, it would be 0-0-0-2.

So, Djent. It’s a term I’ve been hearing more and more lately as a result of the fact that it’s a sound I’ve been hearing more and more lately. It’s a staple of the Sumeriancore sound. And I can 100% get behind it! (for now). Here are a few bands that our readers have sent in that I’d definitely classic as djenty.

• Fuge - Scott Bahash sent this one in and wants us to know that it’s “just some guy from Hungary who makes some tracks at home but they blow away any progressive/djenty bands.”
• CiLiCe – Sent in by BTK 666. “Better than Tesseract??” he asks. Maybe so.
• Haunted Shores – The instrumental tracks up on this band’s MySpace page were actually produced and mixed by Mr. Misha Mansoor himself. They sound damn fine, and damn djenty.

Djent djent djent!

-VN