The instrumental makeup of most metal songs tends to stick to a familiar formula. Guitars? Check. Bass? Check. Drums? Check. Bagpipes, didgeridoos and your loudest set of spoons? Well… it takes a certain kind of heavy band to think outside of the box like that.
True, nothing quite hits us between the eyes like a distortion-walloped guitar riff, but sometimes it's nice to get dazed by an irregular instrument choice. And from Mongolian fiddles, to sci-fi-flick theremins, to bluesy solos cut with a rusty Stihl chainsaw, the metal world has occasionally sought out uniquely left-field sounds to make us bang our heads.
"Unusual" is, of course, a relative term — surprisingly, a lot of you seem thrown by Ozzy's harmonica-honkin' on Black Sabbath's "The Wizard" — and some instruments are more unorthodox than others. With that in mind, we asked you to vote on your favorite non-traditionally-scored metal moment, and these were your top five picks.
5. Gojira - "Amazonia"
Gojira have got a supremely springy, metallic bounce going on through the intro of Fortitude's second track, and it's not just because Mario Duplantier is tap-dancing his way through a seismic kick-drum groove.
Instead, it's because Mario's brother, vocalist-guitarist Joe Duplantier, is biting down hard on a mouth harp and quaking that miniature, elastic-driven instrument through a bombastically chromatic riff that you can feel beneath your fillings. It gets even heavier once the rest of the band drill into the motif with metal machine precision.
4. Soundgarden - "Spoonman"
If you're singing a song about a spoonman plying his percussive trade down at Seattle's Pike Street Market, you'd best get the spoonman on the track to do his thing.
And sure enough, cult street musician Artis the Spoonman is in fine form whacking out a cutlery-clicky solo right in the middle of Soundgarden's first Superunknown single, stealing the show while feeling out the rhythm with his hands.
3. TOOL- "Reflection"
There is so much mystery baked into TOOL's broader aesthetic that it's no surprise that we're often a little unclear as to what's going on, musically, in an epic like "Reflection."
While not specifically credited in Lateralus' liner notes, many have speculated that the stately string-bowing going on at around the 1:40 mark is coming out of an Indian Sarangi, which would suit the undulated, tabla-esque percussion running through that section, too. Whatever the precise unusual instrumentation may be, the result is a heady, hypnotic piece and a standout moment in the TOOL catalog.
2. Sepultura - "Attitude"
We tend to think of Max Cavalera as either a cutthroat thrash guitarist or a groove-focused metal beast, but on Roots' "Attitude" he proved that he can make even a traditional, one-stringed and completely distortion-free berimbau sound just as ominous as his usual output. Indeed, he gets a soul-rattling resonance out of that gourd-shaped thing.
Yes, Max, we'll gladly take it.
1. Korn - "Shoots and Ladders"
We can't count how many times we've seen Korn frontman Jonathan Davis freaking the fuck out onstage while wearing a kilt, but we can pin down his band's most iconically tartan-friendly moment all the way back to "Shoots and Ladders," off their 1994 self-titled debut.
The ambient, wind-droning intro conjures thoughts of Davis emerging from an early morning highland mist with his favorite set of pipes, though the Celtic-flavor is a bit of a bait-and-switch. Once guitarists Munky and Head take over with the detuned heaviness, the singer put away the woodwind instrument to start subversively barking out nursery rhymes.
