Belted Sweater – Wilt
Modern heavy music is, for the most part, deplorable. Why you can’t begrudge anyone for making a living, and you have to give it up to the people who manage to play festival crowds while promoting heavy music, it’s all rather ridiculous.
Most bands hide behind masks nowadays. Nobody’s figured out how to make their drums and guitars sound louder, and nobody bothers making them quiet. And you can hear harsh, distorted vocals in metal just as much as in modern pop nowadays.
Does it mean anything anymore? The vast majority of song lyrics read like summaries of B-movie horrors produced for 8th Grade English class. It can be entertaining, but hard to take seriously.
Belted Sweater’s “Wilt” is a very imaginative take on heavy music, or, at least, on the art of gritty, distorted vocals. It’s the way that the vocals fit the unusual, swirling chord progression that makes it special. But it’s also the fact that the vocals are built on pure emotion, not on theatrical performance. Besides all of this, the drumming, a focal point all into itself, provides the perfect foil for the singing, the heartbeat behind the screams. The majority of modern metal singers would be lucky to ever stumble upon something like this.
San Francisco al Sur – Hiper
How are you wrestling against life’s big questions? How are you facing up to the uncertainty of life, to the fact that it could all be gone tomorrow? Certainly, your line of questioning isn’t any less valuable than anyone else’s. But chances are that your questions make their way into your diary, or in a conversation held with a friend. If the right question was asked, hopefully, some of the angst goes away.
But you’ll need a bit more. Before those questions can be put to bed, you’ll need something that can match the emotional intensity that you’ve felt in your soul. For most people, that connection can only be created with modern art, and most likely, music.
This is the reason why you have to give it up to those who have taken the riddles strong enough to keep them up at night and have poured them into music. What was it that they started out with besides the nagging enigmas? A whole lot of silence.
Argentina’s San Francisco al Sur may have had start with the difficult task of filling out the silence. But once the band found its direction, it ran away with the confident, muscular, prog-rock inspired “Hiper.” While this feels like a song for people stuck with restless nights, it is the commitment to classic, finely recorded prog-rock that makes this stand apart and be a good fit for all those looking for some relief from their rock radio.
