Bonelang – Dog Cannibal Ft. Kweku Collins
Genre: Experimental Electronic, Alternative Hip-Hop, Indie Rock
Give it enough time and every music genre has the habit of being reduced to its lowest common denominator. As daring as the genre’s innovators may have been, it hard for any style not to become a parody of itself after a certain amount of time in the spotlight.
Hard rock tends to drift towards songs about girls and cars. Metal, when out of inspiration, turns into chants about the devil. Similarly, modern hip-hop, at its worst, is filled with braggers rapping about supposed power and influence. Frankly, life’s real struggles, the ones with which certainly the fans are dealing, are often unrepresented.
Bonelang’s Dog Cannibal takes modern hip-hop on a strange hike out through the woods. It’s a song about principles and a struggle to find some kind of moral compass. But, it’s no Christian-rap song either. There’s anger behind the woozy electro beats, and wisdom behind Bonelang’s rhymes. Alternative hip-hop is one of the forces looking to change the system from within.
FES – Force Feed
Genre: Math Rock, Emo
Modern rock music is all about precision. I’m sorry to tell you, but the modern-day Jimmy Page, in all his sloppy glory won’t be much of a concern to modern audiences, outside of those reading the classic rock websites. Those days of innocence are long gone.
It’s the day of ultra-fast processors, and of AI that can create unconvincing Beatles songs. Nature has no choice, but to resemble its masters. And, in this case, this means that all processes have to be akin to those of the very best machines around.
Rock is precise, strategic, and certainly not sloppily played. This is very well shown by Sweden’s FES’s Force Feed. The result is a tune that sounds like a child’s nightmare after playing a little too much Playstation. The emotion is certainly there, but also the codes that govern the delivery of emotion. FES is a rock unit employing mathematical precision, and one can’t help but think we’re hearing one of the style’s likely futures here. It will be up to the AI to decide.
