Can be from any genre. Mine is when an acoustic guitar comes in towards the end of a song and totally changes or reframes the mood/energy (see “Money” by Widowspeak)
I love when the track goes completely silent for a single rest after some buildup and then punches back into the full chorus. If that “gap” in noise is part of the melody itself it’s even cooler. It makes the following sound so much more impactful, even if the actual volume hasn’t increased by much.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorites too! Got any good examples you like? One of my favs is “Ivory” by Polyphia. It hits right towards the end of the song and always gets me good.
Going back to my skater teen phase, “hands down” by Dashboard Confessional has a good one.
Classic, it’s a good one.
Create by OVERWERK is a good example that uses what I’m talking about multiple times throughout.
I dig it, cool song!
Have to agree. Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins executes on this so perfectly.
I like it when the vocalist announces what’s coming next, like yelling “GUITAR!” right before a guitar solo or “bring back the horns” right before the brass section kicks in or “sing it, girls” right before the female backups echo the refrain.
I really like this one for certain genres like Funk or RnB that are generally more energetic and spontaneous when performed live. Helps the recorded material feel a little more alive.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mambo Number Five!
Even better when the singer “requests” it from their bandmate by name. (e.g. Honey Don’t by The Beatles)
GUITAR
I Believe in a Thing Called Love!
Siren noises and airhorns and generally post-ironic soundboard noises. Like remember DJs in the early 2000s? When the radio sounded like
(Tires screeching) Husky overly excited voice: you’re listening (Siren blaring) To the one and only (Red tailed hawk screech) (Machine gun noises) 97.4 (Dog barking) (mgm lion roar) KZRL “Krazy” FM (Choir sings hallelujah) Your one-stop-shop for hits from the 70s and 80s (Chorus from “don’t you forget about me” plays) (Guitar solo from Panama)
All those stupid noises are great when they get shoved into mid 2010s dubstep music, and when they are put into SoundCloud mashups.
Teacher: “You can’t hear text”
Random Lemmy Comment:
Back when you downloaded new ringtones via SMS short codes you found on the back of a magazine
Only assholes put sirens in music. Me in my car trying to find where the trouble is.
I love that train track or horse gallop chugging rhythm some songs have.
Gives me feelings of movement forward, travel or progression.
Great car songs!Muse - Knights of Cydonia, Roy Orbison - I Drove All Night is probably a good examples of this.
That is literally called The Gallop!
Oh, cool!
A lot of old Iron Maiden will fit that quite well, of course, maybe most infamously, The Trooper.
All the Kings Horses - Two Steps from Hell
Mixing metal with other genres or introducing instruments or elements that you otherwise wouldn’t expect in metal.
By now most of these are considered to be subgenres of metal but for me it blew my mind when I first encountered them.
Bands like Ayreon, Avantasia, Subscribe, Therion, Haggard, Nightwish, Ostura, just to name a few.
Wheel of Time by Blind Guardian is one of my all-time favorites. Looking at the other bands you linked, I’m guessing you’ve already heard it; but for others reading this, clicky the linky!
Symphonic Metal is such a small genre though… I want more! Q_Q
May I suggest Ne Obliviscaris, Épiphanie and if course, BaK music
Yellowcard with the violin, not metal exactly but 3 guitars and a violin sound good.
I quite enjoy it when songs sneakily build up, starting out with a mellow rhythm and after a few minutes, you find yourself in the middle of an epic solo on top of this thick carpet of rhythm, and it’s all very much over the top, but it works, because of that slow build-up.
I used to get annoyed by pink floyd songs being so slow. I now realize it’s so much more powerful and overwhelming because it started slow
I don’t know you or your general taste in music but if you ever want something a bit more modern yet als doing the ‘start slow until you made a wall of sound out of it’ thing, I highly recommend you check out the band Motorpsycho! Pretty much every album they made in the 90s and early 2000s have always at least one great song which will build and build and build up to a great crescendo. Their other stuff is absolutely great too! Their song Vortex Surfer got played for 24 hours on new years eve (I think it was 99 to 2000) on a Norwegian radio station.
Not sure if this is a trope per se, but I love when sounds don’t sound “perfect” - the producer kept in a little vocal waver, or the snare isn’t hit with the exact same intensity every time. The little imperfections make it feel/sound like real humans are playing the music!
I think that can be said about pretty much any creative work. Those little imperfections are what make it real, and I love it.
Hollywood using old vintage lenses for their design flaws, CG artists deliberately putting scratches and dust spots on their models, and so many more examples.To come back to music, I believe no robot will ever be able to play Clair de Lune with the gentle delicacy and softness that a human who just lets themselves flow with the sound can produce.
That’s what it’s all about.
Check out Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin. The kick drum pedal squeaks all the way through, and they left it in.
Key change!
Y’all dumb motherfuckers want a key change?
So you should like “Golden Lady” by Stevie Wonder. Its key changes many many times from start to finish
I like it when a song turns to sounding like a large group of people singing the song.
Breakdowns. Chug chug chug chug chug Random growls and barks
Mmmmmmmmmm. Soothes my soul.
I like it when a chorus gets built up more on each repetition, either with the addition of more instrumental parts, new harmonies or background vocals, or a beat change that brings up the intensity.
Similarly, I like when that same effect happens within 2 halves of a chorus. Example of one I heard recently is the chorus of the song “Breathing” by ELLEGARDEN. The 2nd half adds a higher vocal harmony + a picked lead guitar line that open up the sound a bit and just give it a nice little emotional boost.
Untitled 8 by Sigur Ros does this sort of thing.
It’s fairly slow towards the beginning, but then they go into the best buildup-drop-buildup-drop-final climax thing I’ve ever heard.
Music that is REALLY stereo. I recently-ish got a pair of open back planar magnetic headphones, which sound bloody brilliant. So wide, so open, so crisp! It’s almost like VR for your ears with certain tracks and albums.
So ye! Songs that really lean hard on having fun with stereo, or just really well engineered music in general. I was FLOORED when I listened to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral for the first time with those things, so much fine detail and incredible audio engineering in that album. I’d honestly consider it one of the best engineered albums I’ve ever listened to, and I’m saying this as a huge Steely Dan fan.
Another go to for me is Pond’s Man, It Really Feels Like Space Again. Psychedelic music just hits so incredibly well when I use those headphones, and this album in particular just really takes me through a friggen journey when listening to it.
All Along The Watchtower blew my mind when I listened to it through headphones for the first time. I’d heard it hundreds, if not thousands of times over the years, but either in pubs and clubs, or through fairly crappy equipment where you couldn’t hear the effect.
I got myself a pair of half decent headphones, and decided to try something different to the usual fairly modern punk and rock that I like, and it just happened to be in the playlist.
I had no idea that it sounded that good :)
Lucid Dreams by Frans Ferdinand was one song that stood out to me, at least it was the first one that did after I got my first pairs of nice headphones. It’s the 7:55 minute version, and the part starts to build around 4:38
Note bending. Blue notes. Slide guitar. Whammy bar. Probably because I was raised on the blues, soul, and psychedelia
i love the “stepped sound” electro swing music has, especially when brass instruments come into play; the best example i can find is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGbW44AEHeM
Not sure if it’s a trope, per se, but I love finding good covers of my favorite songs in other languages.
Edit: When the lyrics switch into a different language on a breakdown. That’s a trope, right?
My favorite example is this one, because it’s a faithful translation of the meaning of the song while substituting words to keep the rhymes.
If you’re on Twitter, the account @foreigncovers posts covers in other languages.
