Amaranthe: A Fine Guilty Pleasure

Amaranthe is a band that metalheads either hate, don't understand, or have as a guilty pleasure. For me they fall squarely under guilty pleasure currently. I even wrote a post a long time ago in a galaxy not so far away that started off with me bashing Amaranthe for having too many vocalists. You can read that here. But now I sit here as the converted. Let me tell you why Amaranthe isn't such a bad band after all.

The first, and most important, point is that they are actually metal. Unlike other guilty pleasures like Korn or Slipknot, you can actually find Amaranthe on metal archives. Sure, they're listed as power metal/metalcore, but they wouldn't be a guilty pleasure if they were 100% pure. The music does have some of the poorer music tropes such as breakdowns and overly poppy keyboards, but they balance it out with solos and harsh vocals. Nothing is amazing but nothing is overly bad either. They've also got their main hook of extremely catchy choruses.



Hunger! Save me! One world depending on me-... Oh sorry, we're still writing a blog post here. My apologies. I am glad though that they got the guy from Dark Tranquility to do harsh vocals.

That brings me to my next point, and the thing I have to atone for. I still stick to my opinion that having three vocalists is overkill. If you're going to have three vocalists though, this is the way to do it. I don't expect Elize or dude-bro-guy to do harsh vocals so I suppose it's alright that they bring someone else in. I like that they don't put too much emphasis on the harsh vocals guy. He's just there in the background on some songs to give it that extra oomph. This is all evidenced by the fact that he's the only one in the band to be replaced. That's right, on their next album Amaranthe will be welcoming a new guy into the background. The two main vocalists are really good at what they do though. Elize is of course the main draw because she's an attractive woman and teenage boys (ie metalheads) eat that up like crazy. She's also a really good (albeit slightly poppy) singer. The verses usually go boy, girl, harsh, boy, girl with the choruses a true chorus of both male and female voices. It's a formula. Formulas are fine. This is me not complaining about the vocals.



So perhaps Amaranthe isn't too bad after all. Their attitude is completely pop, but their music is actually mostly metal. They do follow a pretty strict formula for their songs though this also means that they don't really have any bad songs because they always play it safe. As far as guilty pleasures go, you could do much worse. And for all the non-metalheads listening to them, it's a decent way of getting into metal.

And hey, they have a new album coming out on October 21st entitled Massive Addictive. I have no idea what that title is supposed to mean. Keep an eye out for the first single from the album Drop Dead Cynical to be released on September 9th. Ok this album looks like they just pulled a bunch of random words out of a hat. I'm sure the music will be good though!

-Zombie Viking