Character Silliness: Oh. My. God. If my character Seth Graves were a real guy, I know what I would get him for Christmas: A String Tribute to Tool and Anotomica--a string quartet tribute to Tool.

Not that he's ever heard of Tool, mind you, being a well-brought up pureblood Slytherin, but he would love this stuff. It's beautiful!

Thank you to my step brother-in-law Andrew for introducing me to this music!

Two Alleys: From Seth: Inquisition Symphony--a tribute to Metallica by Apocalyptica.

Seth figures that Piotr will like some of it, and Sergei will like some of it.

I've spent much of today listening to tribute albums which are classical-sounding versions of music by heavy metal bands. Most of the music I have enjoyed a lot. My only gripe comes when they try to make the instruments sound like electric guitars. For instance, cellos that are played to mimic the sounds of electric guitars sound horrible. The whole point of playing a metal song by a string quartet or a cello quartet is to make the metal song sound as if it was always meant to be played by a quartet.

To my mind, the goal is not to have an exact sound replica of the metal song; the goal is to play the metal song the way it would sound if it had been written for the classical instruments and in that style, not the metal style and not in an imitation of the metal stule.

Still, kudoes to the people who do this. They are amazing!

As an aside--Chamber Maid--a Baroque tribute to Tool barely sounds Baroque in most of it. There's quite a lot of Middle Eastern drumming, and one song sounds almost as if it could have been written by Barry Manilow. There is one song on the album that has a lovely harpsichord bit, and the song "Aenema" sounds quite nice on this album. The rest of them, though...Meh.