09 September 2010

Genres of the Future 2: Chillwave Metal



The shoegaze aesthetic has returned as chillwave/glo-fi etc. Shoegaze metal has been around for a while – e.g. Justin Broadrick's Jesu. Logically therefore, we can expect chillwave metal to appear sooner or later.

In a way I can't believe it hasn't happened already: the requisite 80s signifiers are there in abundance, not to mention the arpeggios. It's just a question of looping, time-stretching, reverbing, delaying etc guitar shredders instead of synths.

3 comments:

Shaun Prescott said...

A lot of European metal in the mid-90s had subtle traces of what you're talking about. It was the confluence of goth, doom metal, and the influence of Radiohead (often noted by the bands).

Check out 'Gaia' by Tiamat. I guess more Pink Floyd influenced and barely metal, but still:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfM8YSOsnaE

Actually, you should check out the whole album, Wildhoney, for some very strange stylistic turns, particularly on the tracks 'Do You Dream of Me?' and 'Pocket Sized Sun'. Like a lot of their contemporaries (My Dying Bride, Anathema, Paradise Lost) Tiamat went on to release a trip-hop influenced album called 'A Deeper Kind of Slumber', which has no traces of metal whatsoever. After this period of experimentation in the late 90s a lot of these bands returned to metal, with mixed results.

Shaun Prescott said...

Actually, this might be a better example of Tiamat, from their 1992 record 'Clouds'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESsxTc7_mko

Sam Davies said...

hey, thanks for the links -- that first video starts off as pure chillwave pseudo New Age drift... very weird aesthetic going on in that band... I'd say there's maybe more of a bummer/downer vibe coming off it all though (the Radiohead influence you mention) - whereas yr typical CW/glofi band is more about the blissed-out mutual nodding you get in... well, this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOp1h7-srb4