Arcadia Philippines, many Filipino metalheads are saying that this band has no originality, just a copycat of Parkway Drive and other famous metalcore bands. Are they really imitator?
Or Does people just hate them merely because their getting successful these days? I'm a fan of Arcadia but not an avid fan of metalcore and I'm not interested in the so called metalcore movement or anything like that. But I respect the genre and the people within the metalcore scene.
 |
| Arcadia Philippines |
I hate seeing metalheads divided and debating each other of who’s the superior metal genre. That's only a complete waste of time.
However I do listen to metalcore bands like killswitch Engage, All That Remains, and Lamb of God. Yeah Lamb of God, I don’t know why people considered them as metalcore but for me they're just heavy Metal that plays heavy riffs good enough for a headbang.
When I first heard Arcadia, the first thing that came out from my head was killswitch Engage. And if you listen to their song "A Broken Portrait" then jump to 2:43, you will hear a riff that sounds very similar to the song "The End Of Heartache" by killswitch Engage. I cannot blame them, that riff is very cool and worth imitating for. It makes me raise my fist and stand my ground.
Here's the music video for "A Broken Portrait" by Arcadia. Jump to 2:43 and compare it to "The End Of Heartache", then you will see what I mean.
Here's "The End Of Heartache" by killswitch Engage
Are we not all imitators?
Human beings are great imitators. This is a very vital skill throughout the human evolution and this skill bought as here on what we are now. When we were babies, we were trained to imitate. Imitate to speak, walk, eat, and other stuff that a full grown human normally do. Humans are wired to imitate since birth and you might disagree if I say that we are all imitators.
In business world, imitation is a very profitable strategy. Have you ever wondered how Samsung overtaken Apple in terms of smart phones sales, it's because of imitation. Once again, it proves that imitation works.
In music industry, there are also a lot of imitators. This is a common phenomenon among musicians and there are some artists who are really serious about copyrights. One example is the Joe Stariani plagiarism case against Coldplay, accusing the band of copying part of Satriani's song "If I could fly". Sometimes a riff or tune can be copied accidentally and the artist doesn’t even know if there's already an existing song with similar tune. However, there are also instances that a tune is being copied intentionally.
Bands of the same feather sound together
Most often bands or artists in the same genre would have similarity in sound and style. I have noticed this with blues which is one of the roots of metal by the way. Most blues songs are using the 12 bar pattern and they sound very Identical. You can also notice similarities amongst songs within certain genres like reggae, hip hop, pop, NU Metal, trash metal, death metal, Gay Metal(Oops!) :),...etc. And of course metalcore is not exempted.
In the case of Arcadia, to me it seems like they copied the riff intentionally and they added some notes on it to sound a bit different. Although they did not copied completely but you can clearly spot the similarities. We cannot really conclude that they are a complete copycat metalcore band. Maybe this is because those famous metalcore bands have a very strong influence to them in terms of musical structure, style, and how they write songs.
I'm a fan of Arcadia and I respect them as artists, but to be honest I do admit that most of their songs have close similarities with some famous metalcore bands. However, I believe on this band and there is always a room for improvement. I just hope that they are also looking forward into that and they'll be injecting more creativity on their future albums.
Few words to end this post "Imitation is good but once abused, it becomes annoying"
BTW just a little info, there are two other bands called Arcadia. One is a pop group and the other is a metal band from Australia. So if you want to more about the Filipino Arcadia, be sure to Google these keywords "Arcadia Philippines" or "Arcadia Band Philippines".
0 comments:
Post a Comment