Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! Thanks for clicking on this edition even though I used the term "bedroom band" in the title. I think it carries a lot of negative connotations along with it but that's the best way to describe the band I'm featuring today. It just reminds me of that sharp, heavy sound a lot of one-man "djent" projects utilized when that was a big thing… and I mean that in a great way. You'll see when you listen to the music (which is what you should really be judging this on). Anyway, you know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on Bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I've been saying, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
Let's go ralph some ralphin' jams with The Ralph!
The Basic Idea
The Ralph is everything every "groovy-metal-meets-catchy-pop-tendencies" tries to be and falls far short of. They're kind of like if Tesseract, David Maxim Micic and older Cloudkicker got together for a jam session and recorded the whole thing and the result is just beautiful.
Why I Love It
To be super blunt about it, this album is catchy when I'm paying attention to the overt melodic bits and technical when I'm paying attention to the intricate band work. So the best of both worlds without beating you over the head with either one. I love that under a gigantic vocal line you can sing along to is a guitar riff that would leave quite a few players scratching their heads, kind of like the entirety of "Fractured." Even in songs like "Evolution" the roles get reversed a little bit and the vocals take a backseat to big, simplistic guitar work that provides the same melodies vocals would otherwise. When it comes down to it, Delimiter is a melodically-centric album that you're going to know most of by the time you spin it twice.
I hate to call The Ralph "djent" because they're not really fitting in terms of the low tuned guitars and the fact that djent bores me to tears, but the sound they're deriving a lot of Delimiter from comes from a lot of the failed projects from the genre. Hey, if we had to sacrifice a bunch of milquetoast music to get something like The Ralph, then let's all go get our sacrifice hats and start knocking a few off the mortal coil, yeah?
