Context – losing hard in League of Legends

And we were so close to winning, too.  Damn the man.  At least FlyQuest is winning.

While I was losing hard I decided to give an actual listen to The Ongoing Concept, a metal band that sometimes plays with a banjo?  I liked their song “Cover Girl”, which also has a delightful music video.

The album, however, doesn’t quite live up to that promise.  It’s a solid effort, but it doesn’t really live well in its own pocket.  Using the unconventional instrumentation allows you to really dig into what it would be like to incorporate some bluegrass and folk influences and play with those rhythms.  “Saloon” does this very well, as it very much feels at times like it came straight from an old western movie.  This really upped my expectations for the rest of the album.

And there are some other moments that come close enough to, although I don’t remember which specific songs due to the aforementioned context.  I just feel like they either went extremely off message on some tracks, while at other times just feeling like a modern, djenty metal band.  And there are other bands that do the djent thing better than The Ongoing Concept, so let them do it and you guys worry about you.

The final track on this album does the predictably metal thing by closing with a power ballad.  Not that this is a bad song, just a sort of trite genre convention that I’m over.  It was cool when Underoath did it.  It was ok when Finch did it.  But it’s like, over a decade later and we get that you go big and kind of ambient.  This is a worrying sign, because they’ve now opened the door to writing almost exclusively power ballads in an attempt to chase that hair metal money that someone left on the table back in the 80’s.  I fucking hate when metal bands do that.

Maybe their sophomore album is a bit more realized.  There are just so many things you can do with all of these multi-instrumentalists in a band, and I don’t feel like they’re living up to their potential.