Difficult Music

I had a good chat with Henrik, guitarist for Evergrey, yesterday for the next Unrestrained! mag. I still don't think I'm the most scintillating interviewer yet, but I felt pretty good about the whole thing. So far I've lucked out by talking to people who know how the game works and who are well used to talking to inarticulate metal geeks. You can just steer them around to a general topic, and away they go. Of course I have higher goals as an interviewer than that, but I'll take whatever works for now.

The new Evergrey album, The Inner Circle, is really strong. I took the promo disk to work and after half a dozen listens or so, it grew on me quite a bit. The songs are catchy yet complex, and don't adhere to the Dream Theater/Helloween template that kills most prog-metal dead for me. For a concept album it's well-executed. It has a good flow and seems to be split into two halves like albums of yore...and it's a relatively restrained 48 minutes long. It's also very dark and Euro-melodramatic, with samples of different voices popping up at various points to bolster the storyline. There's a good balance of elements, and it's obvious they put a lot of hard work into it. I respect that it took me a few tries to get into, and that it's not the easiest pill to swallow. A concept album about religious cults and infanticide shouldn't be an effortlessly digestable confection.
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This morning I overheard Fancy and Cypress talking about music. Cypress claimed that the Swiffer song is one of the catchiest songs ever. We need some Devo in this house, but I'm afraid it's too late. "She's deliberately trying to make me feel a thousand years old," says Fancy.