Welcome back to the realm of the extreme !

Reeding the reviews that many magazines or publications do of the music of the bands or artists of the most extreme genres, a thought has arise on my head: many of them have a preconcept about what music should be and they hold this thoughts as if they were some kind of table that could save them from a shipwreck.

Specially, on magazines dedicated to power/heavy metal I have found a certain musical purism that I would define as "putting boundaries or limits to the musical genre that they are trying to support, and throwing to the rubbish to those bands that are not within this patterns (I think that it would be better for people that they would not do reviews on this bands, because destroying an artist because it doesn´t fit in a critics short-sighted mind is not what I would call constructive).

What do this persons understand us music? Harmonies, keyboard solos, clean guitar bases, guitar solos, melodic vocals, choruses. That reminds me when sterting to learn music: you are given a lot of rules (those who have studied with methods and books from Berklee like me would understand what I am talking about) on metrics, harmony, substitutions, scales, etc. But, the musician that goes beyond this understands this limits and knows that a lot of them can be flexibilized or surpassed without loosing musicality.

Is music a mix of the features that this people talk about in their reviews? I think that is only a very very small part of music. A definition of music would say that is a "combination of sounds done with coherence". But "coherence" is something that is completely different for each human being, it is something inherent to each person, as it is the capacity of reasoning of each of them.

Thanks god, most of the musicians today seem to be beyond this short-sighted boundaries that this critical people try to impose to them and they continue to extend the boundaries of their music in many different ways. I hope this starts to be more and more freccuent in the future.

Federico Marongiu

Editor