After I fell into the Resilia hole recently, I’ve continued to happily swirl in the mathy rock swancore genre and came across I Met a Yeti (the past band of Resilia), and then learned about Space Weather of whom I am big fan.. really solid stuff and perfectly fit the kind of music mood I’ve been into lately. So.. happy to introduce you to Space Weather out of Pittsburgh.
I do also want to write for a few minutes about a trend that’s in this genre that I don’t think is represented across others and is worth pointing out… instrumental albums. There is typically SO MUCH happening musically in these albums (which does creep into the metal genres bands too) that I really appreciate that these bands (and their vocalists) are cool with albums getting released just with the instrumentation for us listeners just to dwell and enjoy. Belmont, Unprocessed.. Siamese, Thornhill, The Wise Man’s Fear are just a few recent examples that come to mind. It’s just a really cool trend and I hope it continues forever. And it definitely a different vibe than say… Scale the Summit, or We Lost the Sea or other bands who are .. instrumental-forward and typically forward and don’t have vocals at all (whom I also love)
and… i’d say that 99% of the time I’m a sucker for these albums and they are typically immediate adds to the library. And this did come up cause yes, Space Weather releases their own stuff instrumental too. Perfect.
And as I was curious, I did ask claude/chatgpt who was the first band or artist who released an instrumental math rock/metal album… where first an album was released with vocals and then later stripped.. it came back that actually Jamaican dub/reggae did this as early as the 1970s – strong early contenders being King Tubby (?) or The Paragons with his entire dub tradition… and that producers would release vocal records and then companion ‘dub’ versions striping vocals and emphasizing instrumentation/mixing. Pretty cool! I had no clue… but as i pressed a bit it more around metal/math rock scenes , got back, Animals as Leaders, Periphery, TesseracT, Protest the Hero… all which completely make sense .. really solid djent artists that have such a crazy degree of instrumentation that it almost BEGS for it. What an interesting thought that must have transpired during the recording process – “hey the musicianship is SO good that we should include instrumentals on an extended cut or something”. Well it worked. I’m here for it. Just about every time.
Leave a Comment