33 rebellions per minute
"Need nothing else than just your pride to get there"
1994
Angra, ANGELS CRY
Angra are a Brazilian metal band whose first American release (now available as a 2-CD with the later HOLY LAND) features a 1:15 classical strings piece that is genuinely very good and a reverent cover of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights", and neither seems to have wandered in from the wrong album. There-- that's enough of a review to sell _me_. But so was an actual review saying they were heavily influenced by Yes, and since that isn't detectably true, I'll go on. Such are the risks of second-hand info.
To me, Angra are the band Shadow Gallery might have been with the ambition to try to learn from serious classical music (Beethoven/ Mahler style) and the penetrating intelligence to grasp what was worth learning in it. Angra and Shadow Gallery-- like Dream Theater, like the most ambitious moments of Queensryche-- belong to a bombastic genre called "progressive metal" which infuses progressive rock's complexity and length with heavy metal's speed and, well, heaviness. It's a more natural combination than you might think if your immediate mental association with "heavy metal" is the "drrn, drrn, deeeern, drrn, drrn, deer-deeeern" of the "Smoke On The Water" riff. The heavy metal subculture-- I speak partly from occasionally having hung out with the metal kids in high school, and partly from reading Deena Weinstein's Heavy Metal: A Sociological Study (subtitle approximate, I'll look it up when I remember)-- can be all very slack and aimless for the fans, but much more demanding for the musicians. A huge percentage of heavy metal's audience is devoted to that genre alone, which means a huge percentage of its fans get many opportunities to dream about being heavy-metal heroes themselves, and quite a few of those will decide to do something about it because what _else_ is worth doing in life? As a result, the quest to become a serious, paid musician in the field is a highly competitive one. You have to be phsycially fit, to stage long energetic shows. You have to dress correctly (long hair, tight jeans, black jacket), and ideally to look good in those clothes and hair (Shadow Gallery abysmally miss the ideal, which undoubtedly costs them lots of sales; Angra consists entirely of hunks, though the bassist should shave that stupid bit of hair from his bottom lip to his goatee). After that, it's a matter of being better musicians than anyone else. And the more you practice and become expert, the more boring it gets playing "Smoke On The #@$% Water", so metal bands-- even the large sub-subculture of deliberately unpleasant ones-- wind up composing ever more sophisticated pieces just to show their skills and keep from getting bored. As a whole, it's probably the most complex genre going.
The original force behind progressive rock had a lot to do with the simple late-'60's idealism that all musics-- usually defined ethnocentrically as rock, folk, jazz, and classical-- should merge into one, peace man. That said, those classical musicians had one awfully valuable skill: they were trained from the get-go to structure long, multifaceted compositions. The original wave of prog-rockers, like Emerson-Lake-Palmer, Genesis, Yes, and Gentle Giant, were people schooled on classical music themselves, learning those lessons directly and applying them to a context of electricity and songs. What you can so often tell, listening to bands like Shadow Gallery, is that the link to classical is gone; they learned from the people who learned from the people who listened intently to Mahler. Why that's a problem for me is hard to pinpoint; I mean, how often do _I_ listen to Mahler? (A little, but the fact that my favorite composers are Bela Bartok, Carlos Surinach, Wolfgang Fortner, Derek Strahan, and Colin Brumby almost certainly goes well beyond "idiosyncratic" into "uncomprehending dingbat".) I guess what it comes down is that if you learn from a curriculum of masters in another genre while preparing to play your own, you will have to reason out a distinctive blend of your own. If you just listen to Dream Theater all day, you will learn to sound like a 3rd-rate Dream Theater.
In Angra, by contrast, singer Andre Matos uses outside help to arrange his own orchestral bits, and almost every song is graced by them, as well as by an instinctive smoothness at merging many contasting segments into one unified, driving piece (the ten songs average under six minutes, but Angra play fast enough for that to be very impressive). "Carry On" picks up from the strings of "Unfinished Allegro" with a series of sharp bass riffs-- played like if early Black Sabbath used metallica's tempos and Smashing Pumpkins' sound engineers-- soon aided by keyboards and more strings, and contains two melodic sections, one of which modulates expertly through a number of keys. "Time" opens with classical guitar and delicate crooning but upsets its power ballad status with chugging bass and high-pitched Queensryche pseudo-operatic vocal force. "Stand Away"'s merger of classical guitar, strings, electric churn, chorale backing vocals, and slightly evil-sounding guitar solo is exactly what Savatage's THE WAKE OF MAGELLAN was aiming for, and since I liked WAKE a whole lot I'm obviously thrilled to see it done better and more instinctively here. "Never Understand" opens with hoedown guitar picking, percussion that could've been seized from the undercurrents of XTC's ominous "Travels In Nihilon", and reassuring synth washes more like THE JOSHUA TREE. "Wuthering Heights" faithfully bases around piano, however loud the chorus guitars get. "Lasting Child"'s opening vocal harmonies would do Queen proud, and the strings are back, providing momentum and heft yet again, while the drums chug busily away. I own quite a few metal and hard-rock albums that aim for this combination: fast, powerful, majestic, yet pretty and singable. I like the genre. And so far, ANGELS CRY is among the very best I've found.
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