Bland Street Bloom by SikTh Full Band FC

It was a long, long time coming. In the period when I got cartoonishly mad and stopped tolerating people jumping into bass blind because "lol at least it's not as hard as guitar and drums!", my opinion of this song has yo-yoed considerably. And regardless of whether or not I'll listen to the song again after this, playing it ever again is not happening.

Now, SikTh are known as one of the real progenitors of djent, but to me this stems more from math metal. Which goes a long way to explaining the difficulty. In a lot of measures, the rhythm is in fifths per beat, which is not easy to wrap your brain around. Or to wrap notes around, apparently, if you look closely the distance between notes in certain patterns is dissonant and incorrect. And then of course this adds up to one of the game's most maddening polyrhythms, that Chris had to play twice per run. Between multiple chokes on drums at the end of the final polyrhythm, chokes on bass going into the slow part (I warned you!) and a choke on the quad right near the end, this grind took an hour and a half. Which is fine. That was the expectation. But if we got someone who wasn't great at strings to play bass, we never would have gotten it. When drums are that fucked, everyone else has to be rock solid. And no one understood that. But now I have no reason to grovel because it's over! The reaction sucks and I didn't get all of it but whatever, just turn the video off before that point if you want.