{"id":728,"date":"2014-03-25T23:47:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T03:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fallingblox.com\/?p=728"},"modified":"2014-03-26T09:49:22","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T13:49:22","slug":"musicblox-khepri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallingblog.double-knitting.com\/?p=728","title":{"rendered":"MusicBlox: Khepri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally I’ll trip over something unique in my erratic stumbling around the web. Tonight, I found myself listening to some sound samples of a band I hadn’t, for some reason, come across before.<\/p>\n

There is a genre called “Oriental Metal” — I prefer to think of it as a subgenre of Folk Metal<\/a> — which uses eastern and middle-eastern influences alongside distorted western guitars. The trouble I have with this, as with much modern metal, is that even if the 30 seconds of preview<\/a> is excellent, there’s a decent chance that somewhere a little further on there’ll be a lead vocalist screaming\/growling\/coughing up a lung. This, frankly, ruins it for me most of the time. But not this time.<\/p>\n

Featured Artist: Khepri<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"KhepriAscension\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This time, I checked YouTube to hear a whole track. Lo and behold, there are no vocals! This is a blessing — vocalists in metal are risky. A rare few have real talent and musical ability; the others, I find, detract from the music I’d rather be listening to. So when an artist or band, through choice or simply lack of a better option, chooses to put out an instrumental metal album, I’m usually glad to snap it up. These albums put their instrumentation front and center, and more often than not when a band is willing to do this, it means that they feel their music is strong enough to stand up without vocals.<\/p>\n