Stay Positive Sunday - Painfully Earnest

As I've previously alluded to, I was a massive nerd in high school.  Exhibit A?  Power metal.

I guess I've been on something of a nostalgic kick the last couple of weeks - I blame my recent trip back to California.  But whatever the reason, my listening habits have definitely swung toward my high school tastes - guitar rock, goofy pop punk, and of course uber-cheesy power metal.  This track is one of the last category, by the criminally underrated Kamelot, a band from Florida of all places.  They're pretty much exactly what you'd expect: galloping guitar riffs, insane drums, and songs that run the gamut of your classic fantasy tropes.  In fact, this band is solely responsible for me having read Faust - their two best albums, Epica and The Black Halo, are a rough adaptation of Goethe's classic story, as told via a rock opera.

And I think rock opera is really the best word, not only for those two albums but for Kamelot's style in general.  There's something soaring and grandiose about the music, a larger-than-life quality that no doubt appealed to the same part of my brain that ate up comic books and video games.  A big part of that is Roy Khantatat, aka Roy Khan, the Norwegian-born vocalist that served as Kamelot's frontman for the majority of my fandom.  In my mind, he makes the band - beyond just having a magnificent voice, he has a classical delivery that just seems slightly more polished and professional than some of his metal contemporaries.  More than that, he really sells the emotionality of the music.  A band like Kamelot, so heavily built on storytelling and subject matter within their songs, requires a profound sense of earnestness to really make it work.  A quick excerpt of the lyrics...

Here we are under the same old sun
All alone yet somehow bound and unified
Dust to dust - Ashes to ashes won't take long
We search for a harbour, somewhere to belong....

Any kind of sly wink to the audience, or snicker in the voice, completely ruins the illusion, and brings the entire enterprise crashing down.

If there's a point o this week's 'Stay Positive' (and there so rarely is), it's that.  To cheerfully bite off Oscar Wilde, it's the importance of being earnest.  I think there's a very real sense of irony and detachment that pervades modern pop culture - we separate ourselves from the things that we like, call certain bands a guilty pleasure or an old shame.  I'm guilty of it in this very post, talking about Kamelot as if they were part of some bygone era of my life.  The fact of the matter is I've been listening to them all week, and I loved every second of it.  Are they cheesy?  Hell yes.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.