ONE-MAN, INSTRUMENTAL, MESHUGGAH-INFLUENCED BEDROOM BANDS: THE BIRTH OF A NEW METAL MICRO-GENRE

We need to come up with a new genre name for one-man, instrumental, groovy, Meshuggah-influenced bedroom projects. Pioneered by dudes like Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi and proliferated amongst the myriad guitar message boards of the Internet, the metal micro-genre is a force to be reckoned with that’s spawned many bands/projects we’ve written about — such as Keith Merrow, Chimp Spanner, Cloudkicker, etc — and hundreds more we haven’t. This is not Sumeriancore, though that genre is akin to something of a cousin. “Djent” is stupid. “One-man, instrumental, groovy, Meshuggah-influenced bedroom projects” is way too long. “Groovy progressive instrumetal” doesn’t have a good ring to it. Halp.

The latest example is Tre Watson of the Baltimore band Carthage. Tre emailed us last night to tell us that he just released a solo album under his own name that he’s made available for free download [updated link] to the masses (side note: putting up your album for free download is totally the “IN” thing to do in this scene). Then The Number of the Blog‘s deseee posted about it this morning with an embedded stream of the track “Conflicting Intentions” from the album. Don’t let the super thrashy intro fool you; about a minute into the song things get mighty groovy and progressive.

What can we call this genre? ‘Cause lord knows the need to categorize exists in the human psychology and we at MetalSucks certainly aren’t above pigeonholing. So let’s go… give it your best shot. Anyone who answers “crap” (or similar) gets an e-slap on the face.

-VN