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NEW Periphery - "Wildfire" & "Zagreus" REVIEW!
58 Plays1 year ago
Periphery are back with two new singles - “Wildfire” & “Zagreus” - from their upcoming album: ‘Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre’.
We analyse, review and react to these new songs from the Progressive Metal Djent giants!
You can also watch us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7mfJVCp_TzbPNZNMMemJuw
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Minds of Metal, my name is Daria and I'm Lat and together we're a husband and wife team, both professional musicians who love all things heavy
Introduction to Periphery's Songs
00:00:17
Speaker
metal. Today we're reviewing two new periphery songs. That's right yeah, periphery released two tracks a couple of weeks ago, one's called Zagreus and one's called Wildfire and we thought we'd take a look and review and analyze the songs.
Background on Periphery and Djent
00:00:33
Speaker
Periphery, let's give quick facts about the band. What have you got? So they're an American band from Washington DC that formed in 2005. They've only got six albums out and the seventh comes out this year and these two new songs are from the seventh studio album. Now they're considered one of the sort of innovators and pioneers of the gente genre. Okay, so I think we've spoke about gente briefly before in our videos but
00:01:02
Speaker
Do you have like a definition that you could share? Yeah, so Jen is like a sub, sub, sub genre in metal. It's like, you wouldn't only, I wouldn't say it came directly from traditional heavy metal, but from traditional metal, then you get the likes of progressive metal with, you know, Dream Theater would be a good example. Then you get progressive metal that goes heavier, a band like Hopeth would be example, would be a good example. And then from bands like Hopeth, this is where kind of Jen sort of, I'd say, stems from. It's
00:01:32
Speaker
far heavier than progressive metal. It uses odd time signatures, polymetres, which means playing different sort of time signatures, either on top of each other or one after the other. What other things, syncopated riffs, down tuned guitars. That's a big, big thing, especially with bands like Periphery. Some other notable gent bands would be Tesserac,
00:01:58
Speaker
animals as leaders, mesh sugar as well, I suppose you could consider a gent band. And yeah, that's it for gent. Does that make sense? Yeah, why is it called gent? Because it's the sound, gent is the sound. If you describe a riff, I say, oh yeah, listen to this riff. And someone said, let's take that
00:02:21
Speaker
GENT. GENT. That's what I think was absolutely hilarious. That is so funny. I know, yeah. Imagine that, like, just trying to think what other genres you can make from a sound of
Periphery's Unique Style and Humor
00:02:32
Speaker
an instrument. So the other two things about periphery, I've been told they don't take themselves too seriously. And some evidence of this is, even just from a bit of research we've done this morning, the names of albums, so their fourth album, or is called Periphery 4, is called Hail
00:02:56
Speaker
Satan, but they've sort of got rid of the A. Another thing is that this new Up and Coming album, which comes out on March 10th this year, is called Periphery 5. Gent is not a genre. So it's kind of a bit tongue in cheek, they're sort of taking the nick out of themselves maybe more than anything.
00:03:17
Speaker
And another thing what I mean about not taking themselves too seriously is that I've seen from comments under these YouTube videos of these two new songs that they're actually quoting riffs that they've previously put in other works of theirs in these new songs. Okay, so it's like literally sampling your own music? Yeah, it's just taking a melody from a previous song from one of the previous albums.
00:03:43
Speaker
putting that melody in this song, maybe with different contexts, a different sound, maybe it's heavier, maybe it's softer, whatever. But the interesting thing about that is that that's very normal in classical music. You hear these days when artists, when someone, was it Marvin Gaye? Marvin Gaye's company sued Ed Sheeran for using a same chord progression or a same rhythm or whatever. In classical music, you wouldn't call it copying,
00:04:09
Speaker
or plagiarism, you call it quoting. Because when I studied classical music and I'd sort of analysed symphonies, I'd say, or my teacher would say to me, look, he's quoted Beethoven here. And you can do that because it's just the melody, it's just a bunch of six notes in a different order, the same order that Beethoven did.
00:04:27
Speaker
And if anything, I think it's a respect kind of thing. Maybe that is part of their sound. This is how people know what periphery sound is because they kind of keep reusing some bits and pieces. This is what their sound is. But yeah, shall we get into the songs? Yes, let's do it.
Analysis of 'Wildfire' by Periphery
00:04:50
Speaker
Okay, so the first half of Wildfire, I don't know if there's too much to say about it, it's very, very gente in that sense. You've got the standard gente characteristics, technical, very highly produced, syncopated riffs, palm muted guitars, downtune, it sounds very low, harmonics and the weird guitar noises at the end of the section, so it's like, like something like that.
00:05:16
Speaker
But yeah, they're very, very heavy. Grounds, screams, what are we calling them? There's both. They're screaming mainly, but there are a couple of growls here and there. So, growls and screams are on point, and I think it's just a very, very good piece of djent music. Yeah, I think straight away since I heard it, there's a wall that's heavy. That's very heavy, but the song gets very interesting. Around pre-chorus, the singer starts singing, okay? Clean singing.
00:05:44
Speaker
and instrumentally however the groove sort of stays the same behind it which is very you know it's cool it's kind of keeping it constant there's something constant about all those changes that happen actually yeah and the clean vocals take you by surprise because as Dash said the music continues to be there and I actually think it's it's very good melody writing to
00:06:10
Speaker
that works over the top of incredibly complex riffs. Because that's not gonna be, there can't be an easy job to say to someone, listen here's the riff, listen like odd time signatures, like really syncopated riffs, write a melody over it please and make it work. Whoever writes the melodies is really cool because in this specific pre-chorus I think it really works. Yeah and then the chorus has a
00:06:36
Speaker
these really cool shifts in melody. And harmonics. Yeah. And so the harmonics, what we mean, they can be, there's obviously the harmonic you do on a guitar, but harmony and harmonic in that sense means the chords that are being played underneath. It's just something you don't expect to hear in a jam song, really. Maybe not in a jam song, you know.
00:06:59
Speaker
in a metal song okay let's just like generalize it okay this is not what i was like expecting at all you will hear exactly what i mean just listen to the chorus like you can really hear it well this is a characteristic of gen playing odd weird progressive chords um and i think if you were to analyze them honestly if you analyze the chords and play it on the guitar turn it turn down their distortion turn down their gain unpong their hand and
00:07:26
Speaker
more than likely I reckon you've got a jazz chord in there. Like a chord with a root or something and then an altered note added in or something. Interesting you say that but we'll talk about it in a minute. What about the guitar solo? What did you think in Wildfire? So one thing about Jen that I can't say I'm a big fan of is the guitar solos because there's one, the best example for me, and I might get hate for this, don't care,
00:07:54
Speaker
The guitar solo, I just feel it has such a heavy feel to it and I don't feel the guitar solo matches the quality of what you're hearing throughout the rest of the song. It's the same way I feel about thrash metal guitar solos. Kerry King, fantastic guitar player, but I don't like the way his solo sound. I know that's thrash. I know that's a characteristic of thrash.
00:08:17
Speaker
I don't like all the whammy and the wham, just shredding for the sake of it. It just almost makes it like cheaper. Yeah. It's too simplistic. Yeah. Compared to the fact that they have the skills, they have fantastic skills there. The Wildfire solo is great compared to the other solos I mentioned in my opinion. But again, it just has that sort of same characteristic that sometimes you feel there's this section
00:08:49
Speaker
you said about jazz chords that was really interesting because towards the end we have a little jazz piano section. Yeah it kind of it just completely changes if you watch the video it's quite interesting because they drop all their instruments and they go over to a tv and they watch it looks like they're watching back what they just shot but then behind it goes this piano jazz solo
00:09:13
Speaker
And that's followed by saxophone solo. And the gentleman playing the saxophone is from a band called Shining. I can't remember what his name is. But yeah, just a very unusual and odd section to add to a really heavy, gentle song.
00:09:29
Speaker
And those jazz solos were beautiful. I found the melody's play. It was just so lounge-y and... Yeah, that's the... When I studied jazz and when I was telling my family that I was into jazz at that point, everyone was like, oh, it's just stuff you hear in an elevator or a lift, as we call it in Britain, lounge music. And I thought, well, actually,
00:09:56
Speaker
If someone says a piece of jazz music is good enough to be used in a lounge setting, then I think that's a compliment to the...
00:10:04
Speaker
Because it's meant to relax you, it's meant to not be so disturbing that you go, what's this? It's meant to just kind of settle you into the mood. And I think that, like you said, the periphery do this well. And it really fits with the song. It's a really cool solo. The saxophone solo isn't entirely jazzy to that extent. I think there's some bluesiness to it. It has feel, it has heart, it has passion in it. It's not just jazz for the sake of jazz.
00:10:30
Speaker
Do you think there's a reason behind injecting that jazz section, or do you think they just did it because they could? Well, if you think about what other bands that are standing out at the moment are doing, bands specifically like Sleep Token, and we did our reaction to their video The Summoning, which had, I can't, what happened to The Summoning? There was something like this, wasn't there? It was jazzy.
00:10:58
Speaker
I need to look at my notes. I'm not going to lie, I don't remember. It's chokehold, the song chokehold where it's basically like an indie song until the chorus where the heavy heavy guitars come in and then it kind of becomes a metal song for that section. So I think we're seeing this wave, you know, bringing the horizon, bringing the electronicness into their music. I think we're seeing a wave of bands just trying to inject other styles of music into their own music for the sake of
00:11:28
Speaker
I don't know, accessibility, maybe trying to reach a wider audience, maybe it's themselves, maybe they're not fed up, but maybe they feel they've accomplished writing heavy music, and now they're trying to transcend what metal is by saying, well, fuck it, let's just put a jazz song in it. Just pushing the boundaries, maybe.
Exploration of 'Zagreus' by Periphery
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah, try something new, try something different. Yeah, very good.
00:11:51
Speaker
So the second track is called Zagreus and I thought the interesting thing here from the start is the title because Zagreus alludes or is the name of a Greek mythological character. I believe, was he the son of Zeus?
00:12:03
Speaker
Definitely sound of Zeus. And Persephone, that was the other one, yeah, Zeus and Persephone. But what's more interesting is that Zagreus is the main character from the video game Hades, and according to a tweet from one of the periphery guitarists, the Hades game fueled their writing sessions for this upcoming album, Periphery 5 is not a genre.
00:12:22
Speaker
So what they've done as well, if you've seen the YouTube comments under this video, not this video, the Zagreus video, that they've actually taken a little melody from the Hades video game and inserted it into this song. So remember we said earlier about them not taking themselves too seriously and sort of doing these little quirky things? This is them paying homage to the game that helped write this album by taking a little melody and sticking it in. It's really cool, because why not? Why not? And if it was an inspiration,
00:12:52
Speaker
than do it. Yeah, but it's a funny one because I just couldn't head bang to this song at all. Like, because of all time signatures and stuff, it's just really hard to get into that, you know, head banging sort of rhythm. Yeah.
00:13:10
Speaker
And I just gave up. I was like, right, I'm just going to listen to it. Yeah, it's like there was this odd time signature all over the place, the syncopated wrist. But this is what we've come to expect, these typical gents characteristics. And you hear it again here in the first part of this song. Now, I say the first part of this song because we mentioned in the last video that involving Opeth about the importance of classical music in progressive music in general. So you have the progressive rock, a band like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Keith Emerson was
00:13:39
Speaker
hugely influenced by classical music and you can hear it in his playing. Then you've got Dream Theater, who sort of were sort of like the next stage, the metal version of Emerson Lake and Palmer, and yes, and again, you hear through their music loads of classically influenced solos. Then you go to a Peth, who do the same sort of thing, a bit heavier, and
00:14:01
Speaker
music terminology could be considered a sonata form and it literally means three parts section a section b section c and i feel like we've got this with this song you've got section a which is the gen part you've got section b which is the soft rock part and then you've got section c which is like the classical music part at the end yeah and i really really love that observation by the way well done that's brilliant that's really really good and i think that
00:14:26
Speaker
If we were to compare this song to Wildfire, to me personally, it's much more melodic. And you've got this soft rock bit, which is actually quite melodic, and the ending also, you know. Yeah, there's a lot more melodies in this song compared to Wildfire, and I think that's what makes it so nice, is because it's more than just vocal melodies. In Wildfire, apart from the jazz section, there's not much melody in there, except for the cleanly sung vocals. But here, you've got a lot more in Zagreus, I think.
00:14:56
Speaker
yeah and you've got lovely chorus that you actually want to sing along to and you're like yeah it's a very memorable melody as well and I like his voice in this one too I mean I like his voice in the other one also but I think it just has this crisp clean tone reminded me of Coheed and Cambria singer a little bit yeah and with his with the chorus melody as you said it is crisp it's clean and in the chorus
00:15:23
Speaker
there is a a stability within the chords, the chords that they're playing, I don't know the lyrics but it's like and really easy going chords underneath and for me this acts as like a release to the tension the gen builds up, you just said that you can't headbang to it because it's hard, wait where's the one you can't sort of headbang in time, it's all over the place
00:15:47
Speaker
rhythmically, as in you can't sort of get into a good groove of head banging, that creates tension because you feel uneasy. You're sat there going, well, wait, does the riff start here? What's going on? And suddenly you flow into the chorus where it releases the tension and you're like, yes, this is nice. And that's what I think it acts as, which I think is really cool. I love, I love the post-chorus riff and the cleanly sung vocal melody over it. I think it's like,
00:16:21
Speaker
Experimenting going these times and it's just jumping from one to the other. Yeah, love the gent section in this I think it's really cool. Yeah, and again if we're comparing to Wildfire the guitar solo. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so melodic like it's literally
00:16:37
Speaker
opposites they're just so different. Yeah I completely agree and this is what I was talking about earlier if you listen to the feel and the heart and the passion that I feel is put into the Zagreus guitar solo compared to the Wildfire one and if it's two guitarists I'm not comparing I'm not saying that the guy who plays it in Zagreus is better than the guy who plays it in Wildfire it's just the neutral he says and maybe the Wildfire solo maybe they purposely made it like that
00:17:02
Speaker
I don't mind. It's just like I said, just my opinion. I think you share it as well, don't you? But there's a great guitar solo. Wow. Just really, it feels to me like that whole soft rock section could come from like an Empath album. Just so beautifully composed. The dynamics having gone from so loud to so soft. Really nice.
00:17:25
Speaker
Better never be honest, eh? Yeah, that was just lovely. It was dynamic as well. I think we're also seeing a new side to his vocals because in Wildfire...
00:17:35
Speaker
and the Zagreus up to this point, you're hearing him shout the clean vocals. Is that the right word? Shout or project those? He just projects it in a bit more like, a bit more energy. But this time it feels like you're actually hearing him softly sing and it's nice because it's almost a new tone to his vocals, isn't it? Yeah, it's just softer. It's a bit more maybe like a breathier tone and stuff. It's just softer generally.
00:17:58
Speaker
But I think that builds up though, doesn't it? Because there's a repeat of those words, will it ever be, will we ever live in honesty, you know? You just repeat and then... And then it builds up and up and up and we get to a heavy section again, which is kind of reminiscent, actually it's almost like a marriage of the gent section and this soft rock section together before we get to the final section, which is the classical music bit, which I found incredible because the first sort of 30 seconds of it with the piano
00:18:26
Speaker
It's always like you could be taken from a video game, but then after, when the percussion comes in and you've got the full orchestra behind it, it sounds to me like a Hans Zimmer score. Like it could have been Pirates of the Caribbean or The Dark Knight Rises, you know, something like that. I've got an epic end. And again, what we're seeing here is another mixing of the genres, another
00:18:46
Speaker
sort of experimenting stylistically. We said it, gent, soft rock and classical music, but this is to a crazy extent because you've got the whole orchestra there to end the song. So yeah, despite the soft rock section and the classical ending, this is without a doubt a gent song by a gent band under the umbrella of heavy metal.
00:19:07
Speaker
So if you were to choose Wildfire or Zagreus, what would be your choice? Zagreus, 100%, because I love the journey it takes you on. I think the cool little thing in Wildfire, the jazz section is cool, it's quirky, you haven't really heard of anything like that before.
00:19:24
Speaker
early takes you on because it really does emotionally, dynamically. It's little things like the guitar solo that tips the grass over the edge. That solo is phenomenal and we actually watched some videos yesterday of them doing a guitar playthrough which was really good.
00:19:43
Speaker
technically fantastic playing from all three of them. I mean the drummer and the singer as well you know technique wise but in terms of that guitar playthrough it's phenomenal. But what's your favorite one? Zagrezz for literally the same reasons as you. I really liked it because it was different.
00:19:59
Speaker
Would I leisurely listen to the song? Probably no. I would. You would, but you have a heavier taste than I do. Would I listen to it for the sake of curiosity? Oh yeah. Will I listen to the new album? Of course I will. People could be put off from a band like Periphery.
00:20:21
Speaker
from listening to the first minute of this song and even the next song as well but anyone if you're here watching and you're just curious and you haven't listened to the song yet don't give up if you find if you think the first minute or 30 seconds is too heavy for you don't turn it off because there's more to come and the way that they seamlessly go from section to section works fantastically. Periphery 5, Jenn is not a genre, comes out on March 10th
00:20:48
Speaker
already pre-ordered my vinyl cannot wait for it and yeah so looking forward to it yeah thank you so much for watching this video share with a periphery fan share with a metal fan and have a metal day have a lovely day we'll see you soon