Written by F3ynman2000 on 04.11.2021 at 15:05

Sun of the Night has got to be in the top 10 metal songs of all time - it's got it all: epic vocals, poetic lyrics of darkness, mesmerizingly and catchy riffs and a beautiful guitar solo - and Dan The Man does it all!

Have you listened to Witherscape?

Written by JoHn DoE on 04.11.2021 at 15:12

Written by F3ynman2000 on 04.11.2021 at 15:05

Sun of the Night has got to be in the top 10 metal songs of all time - it's got it all: epic vocals, poetic lyrics of darkness, mesmerizingly and catchy riffs and a beautiful guitar solo - and Dan The Man does it all!

Have you listened to Witherscape?

Not yet

At about 1:26:59 into this super interesting interview of Dan Swanö, he is talking about Moontower. He was very much inspired by 70s prog and originally wanted to do clean vocals, but noticed that they didn't fit with the cool riffs. It pissed him off that his falsetto singing would inevitably distract the listener from the riffs. So, basically out of frustration, he chose to growl almost all the lyrics! In his words, without the growling the album could have sounded like "Dream Theater on a bad day"

He also says that he came up with the songs while playing on a "nylon-string acoustic while waiting for my son to fall asleep. I would sit there and play to him and come up with all these super weird chords".

Sadly he says that Moontower had initially a bad fan reception since many found that the growling ruined the beautiful harmonies.

At 1:33:49 Dan also says that he was "blown away" when he heard how well Mikael Akerfeldt could growl on Orchid. He points out that since both he and Mikael first learned to sing very good clean vocals, their growling still retains that singing melody; it's not just senseless gutturals - beneath it there's still the melody.

At 1:37:05 Dan also points out the difference between his switching between clean and growling vocals and the way that metalcore does it: "We were doing the verses for the girls and the choruses for the guys. All the other bands were doing it the other way around." So he means that he could do the in-between verses with clean vocals but then save the growling for the recurring chorus.

I hope you guys appreciated these insights into Swanö as much as I did!

Top 200 Gang! This is still one of the best extreme prog albums out there, on par with Blackwater Park and Still Life in my opinion

Written by F3ynman2000 on 26.07.2022 at 20:02

Top 200 Gang! This is still one of the best extreme prog albums out there, on par with Blackwater Park and Still Life in my opinion

Glad to see this in the top 200! I've got it at 161 on my list, so hoping it will slowly move up.

At this point this goes without saying, but Moontower is a great, timeless prog metal album. I prefer this over most Opeth albums.