Kevmaster wrote:Die Apokalyptischen Reiter - 18
Dog Fashion Disco - 26
Buckethead - 22 KILL
Equilibrium - 10
Boris - 20 SAVE
Mastodon - 28
I know and like Buckethead, but compared to the others, he's the weakest imo.
Fix'd (note the error I originally made in my second vote today, which I "fix'd" in the quoted post above)
Ehh.... Buckethead >>> Boris, in my view.
At the risk of being politically incorrect and generalizing too much, I find that Japan produces a lot of sterile instrumentalists. It might be a cultural thing - and actually, I find that Japanese instrumentalists have good discipline and combine very well with European and American musicians, but on their own have a real deficiency in terms of chops and intensity. They do make up for it in one way - they have a good sense of subtlety and texture. Which is why genres like shoegaze and post-[whatever] are very popular in Japan, I find - and I dislike both; a more appropriate term for them would be navelgaze and post-intelligent, attempting to find depth in mind-numbing monotony and cliched dynamics, which in my view are just ways to mask a lack of chops and a restricted compositional mindset. The alternative to this in Japanese music is assaulting the listener with fuck-your-mom's-ears wall of noise and banging, which is again reflected in two popular streams in Japan - noise music and Japanese varieties of extreme metal. Again, masks lack of chops and a restricted compositional mindset.
Boris (and several other Japanese bands I know, like my brother's favorite 'post-hardcore' band Envy) do both texturist navelgazing and wall-of-noise banging - and are thoroughly underwhelming in either one. They have interesting ideas but are relatively poor instrumentalists. And they also have completely horrid sound design. If Steve Wilson ran a bootcamp for sound design/production, I'd send them there pronto, they need it bad.
Buckethead, meanwhile, has 4x more chops, compositional talent and 'soul' than the two guitar players (if you count the wacky 2-neck bassist) in Boris combined. Nay, I'll even say that Buckethead has more chops, compositional talent and 'soul' than all guitarists in the current lineup combined! and I'm not even that much of a Buckethead fan. He's just a solid instrumentalist, a very good composer, and has a thoroughly refined taste for electric guitar sound.
The Birds are using humanity in order to throw something terrifying at this green pig. And then what happens to us all later, that’s simply not important to them…
