Flush it Friday: Solo Acts
The year? 1999. The album? The Fragile. The consequence? A twelve-year-old me boring my parents to tears while talking about my grandiose plans to emulate Trent Reznor and learn how to play guitar, bass, piano, and drums. It shouldn’t be so hard, I argued. You just start with a keyboard, and then guitar and bass are basically the same thing, and I already have good rhythm so drums should be no problem, and bam! I’m a famous one man band. Of course, by then I had already, more or less, given up on my first round of guitar lessons (something I would pick back up in high school and then promptly drop in college), so I’m sure my parents had a good laugh at my delusions of grandeur. Nevertheless, I was infatuated with the idea that a whole band could be just one person.
Somewhere between the train station and the dumping grounds, though, I grew disillusioned with the solo act. Too many demos or albums from bands where the artist in question could definitely play at least one of the instruments, knew their way around two, and had a slippery grasp on a third. These projects always seemed myopic–too much of one person’s ideas and not enough collaboration. Music is about being played together, regardless of the quality!… at least, according to Bill & Ted Face the Music. Exceptions existed, of course, but we can’t all be Joe Preston, and we can’t all have written “Olobus.”
The last couple years, though, I’ve again changed my tune. I’m back in on solo acts, on single person ventures, on one-man-bandery. So much so, it has been my ardent hope that this very website would run a “Best Metal Solo Act” Bracket Challenge for some time now.
So, if such a bracket challenge were to run, who would be included? Share your favourite contemporary metal/hardcore/underground solo acts in the comments.
But before we get to all that, let’s boogie and shimmy with this week’s Toilet ditties:
Spear premiered (pre-speared?) the new one from Burial in the Sky, and the raw hot sax was too much to handle.
Rolderathis dusted off the typewriter to write beautifully about an Owlbum of the Year candidate.
A Spooky Mansion interviewed the dinosaur shit out of a very cool band whose name I can’t really pronounce.
Carcassbomb stared into the gaping maw of madness and sold us on the beauty therein with Fawn Limbs.
I wrote about some more EPs and then included it in my own Flush it Friday. Burial in the Sky must’ve named their album after me!
Give me those G/B/Us and those solo act recommendations in the comments. All my love forever to you all.
