Wow, I'm glad you like Winds so much! Never been much of a following for this band here, at least not in the last 7 or 8 years. Can't even remember how I got into them, maybe I was reading something about Arcturus and stumbled upon them. I figured they were a bit of a gamble, partly since they're more laid back ...sort of, in a way.
...but they ARE dark, even if it's in a different way than most metal bands go about it.
Your comment about the strings caught my interest. I often dislike strings in metal, too, but there are reasons for this. For one, a lot of prog metal bands do really crappy string synths, it gets annoying and sounds cheap in the overwhelming majority of instances you hear these. They just aren't done tastefully, some band just wants to sound big and special and ultimately throws in crap instead. Second, many prog metal bands use strings as an embellishment. Something that easily sounds forced, why the Hell are you doing that here? Other times it's just some standard thing thrown into their music, it isn't even really a part of who they are, so you don't get a feeling you're listening to that band but some recorded piece. Don't anyone get me wrong, I'm not saying it's always done badly, these tactics work great occasionally, but I've heard too many bands that would have been better off just skipping it.
Winds, though, avoids these problems. Strings are an integral part of who they are, the whole project is based on doing a sort of classical metal band. Take the strings away and you'd be sitting with woefully incomplete songs, but moreso, they USE the strings to create a sound rather than just place strings into their sound. They end up crafting a whole sound that works for all the individual pieces.
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I will make my submission, soon. Odd, this group rarely gets any talk on this forum, but while I'm picking songs I've ended up in two separate conversations regarding them elsewhere on this forum!
Topic: an obscure roulette and chat thread/ R9 results! Guess what! (Read 101151 times)