(Credits: Far Out / Kreepin Deth)
Who do you think is making the most inventive rock music right now? Deerhoof? Swans?
Maybe your tastes are a little rougher around the edges than that, and you think that Fontaines DC, Turnstile or Amyl and The Sniffers are the most interesting groups on the contemporary scene. Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash had something a little heavier still, something a little more metal, in mind when discussing who he thinks are the most engaging groups around at the minute.
“I’ve found that, recently, the most innovative and most interesting stuff going on in rock and roll right now is in the metal bands”, Slash told TotalGuitar in an interview for their YouTube channel a decade ago. “It’s not really so much in what you’d consider straight ahead rock and roll, it’s the metal bands.”
At the time, he was talking about groups like Kvelertak, Gojira and Mastodon, who he had seen playing together on a bill before the interview at a gig which he described as “one of the best concerts I’ve been to in a long time”. Then, when thinking specifically about what it was he found so groundbreaking, innovative and exciting with regards to Gojira, he explained that it’s to do with a “combination of the way they do the double bass and guitar riffs together along with these chord changes and then there’s a lot of melodic harmony and harmonic stuff that’s going on that makes it sort of epic sounding. It’s very, very musical. It’s not just pounding away.”
In the ten years since Slash explained that it was modern metal that made him sit up and listen in recent times, Kvelertak, Gojira and Mastodon have continued to release critically acclaimed albums and have been joined by groups like Whitechapel, Knocked Loose, Spiritbox and Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, among others, in receiving their share of high praise.
Some of these groups can be said to be more melodic than others, while some could more readily be accused of, in Slash’s words, “just pounding away”. Interestingly, one of the groups that Slash described as making the most impressive metal in music in recent years, Kvelertak, didn’t even set out to be a heavy rock group in the first place.
“We weren’t supposed to be a metal band when we started,” guitarist Bjarte Lund Rolland has said. “We wanted to be more like a rock band that has metal influences here and there. Of course, we all like Metallica, and grew up in Norway with the whole black metal thing, but there’s so much other stuff that we like that has influenced us.”
Stuff like Fleetwood Mac and Dire Straits. Stuff like The Damned, Johnny Thunders, and The Rolling Stones. The Beach Boys are also on that list, which explains where the more melodic elements of their work come from. And another group they’ve mentioned being influenced by over the years is Guns N’ Roses, which, of course, explains where some of the interest from Slash comes in, as well.
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