Heir Apparent - Graceful Inheritance

We may have never lived but we will never die, we are eternal and so, here we are again.

Let me introduce to a record from my childhood. Let's walk through the steps of how such a thing happened and how it is meant to happen again. If you know it and love it, give me a hug, metal sister, brother, or metal non-conforming, I salute you. Stay a while and read... be reacquainted through my eyes with a vision of your long-lost future's past. Fall in love again.

Let's fall in love, again.

If it is new to you give us a hug anyway, we're here as friends and we will part as comrades, you will see. Art has never lied and the truest steel cuts deep the vein of romance that will drown this world of utter lies, ah... you know the score.

Surely you hear the funeral bell by now, for decades it has been massing in the distance, this cacophony of anger...

Let's leave aside the rotting death for a moment and play a part in the summer bloom of love. The flowers are so fragrant, in heat the locust grinds away a madness all-encompassing, the mountain song is wordless, as if sculpture'd in air.

From the ancient ritual site of Dionysus I send you this lonely letter, and it reads:

Let me introduce you to a record from my childhood.




I got it on cd 10 years after it came out, which means the record cover has been absurdly shrinked from the LP original down to a little jewel case.

Did you know, dear reader, that it has been a long-standing tradition in the world of comic book art, back in the ancient times when humans read them on printed paper, for the artists to do the art at double the size of the intended print resolution and then have the art shrank down for the final product? They did this because it hid away imperfections and tightened the art on one hand, but it is also of another effect, the effect of miniature, of sharpened detail that invites the eye to look upon this Entire City all at once.

Comic books are a cubist medium by structure, you can follow the panels one to one in pleasing free jazz tempo, the languid sequence as it were, but at the same time you're also unconsciously always looking around... below, behind the current panel, the whole page you take in in furtive glimpses, you pervert. You're constantly spoiling the future and you connect it to the past, such is the beauty of the most ancient of our artforms of de pict ion, from an apeman hunting a mammoth on an ancient cave painting to Little Nemo and to whatever superhero crap springs to your mind now, the power to look at this, but also look behind it and ahead of it, all at once is a most ancient power. It grew our brains, it did.

So it is that the perfect format of a comic book is not so big that you cannot take the whole page in at once, it is, somehow, handy to make things small so that you may see them better.

That effect came into play when child Helm (Helmet, indeed?) came to possess this album, because the impossibly detailed and complex composition by artist Eric Larnoy, such a piece that would induce an LP appreciator to spend hours potentially, following every little nook and cranny of the grotesque and magical forms is all but augmented by the miniaturization of jewelification. It speaks to the fantasy therein before we even tackle the what-is-it-about-ness of it all, we are taken with the intensity and sharpness of the detail. Perhaps the music will match this ambition, a child would think.

It would be such cruelty to let a child down, and this is not a story about such, don't worry.

Take some time to look at the art and be transported back, years, to meet me in a small greek room. The fairest metal warrior of them all was still alive back then, he looked with pride and support to you as you perused this artifact of magical power. His echo never left us.

As to what-it-is, a horrifying duality confronts us. A conjoined twin – surely the work of a foul magic – wearing a kickass jacket to be sure, together but apart but of one transcendental, stitched together mind. He is standing in a passionscape of chiaroscuro, neither here nor there but surely everywhere you've been and felt a chill run up your spine.

A dead one and a live one, a serpent and a ring, a spider and a demon bat?! It has that je ne sais quoi energy of a record cover chosen after the fact for a selection of music instead of one explicitly drawn to the music and as such it is selected because of an existential concept that it matched to, not because of a storyline that needs to be exact and to the letter to fulfill its fantasy.

For me it is one of the perfect heavy metal album covers, then and now and I have indeed spent that hour looking at all the details. I must have been 12 or 13 then. I am 41 now. The form of an angel tops the bracycephalic, shared brain of the past and future twins, like an illumination that can only be resultant of thesis and anti-thesis coming together to produce... a thesithesis? I don't know these things very well you have to excuse me. What if I bang my head to this but also think it through? In any case we may not become any smarter today but wiser still is on the table.

Heir Apparent were here to tell us that heavy metal can be and indeed is much more than an one-sided affair. It is more than the sum of the parts, even! It's the music of the future, sans cliché. This is where, what we would come to call 'progressive metal', was also born. Q-ryche local to this Seattle scene paved the way. 'Tower in Texas an affront to every poser who thought in their puny minds we can draw a circle around what's wrong and what's left. Fates in Connecticut the effervescent soul of it all. They were all conjoining a twin of inspiration and aspiration in a similar manner. Though today relegated to the 'true metal' bin because it's old people with beer bellies and mullets that still listen to them, back in their day they were carving with force a new way through the hair metal of their contemporaries, tryin' to bring the message to you, and as such we must remember their pioneering spirit and not just how they conform today with a refurbished heavy metal immitation.

The label? Black Dragon records. Of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus fame, so much I knew. The time was 1986, but truly, the time is now. A black dragon, such a fearsome imagination!

The band is called Heir Apparent because they're here to collect their crown and the album is called Graceful Inheritance, for the crown must be passed on to them with all due honours and all social graces must be observed. 1986 is the defining year for everything we have ever talked about, dear reader. Have you noticed?

With age the paper seems all the more yellowed I notice. This ancient manuscript, what does it reveal? Well, as it always is this is a thing made by people and because we will all pass from this earth eventually, scripta manent.

Let us celebrate the people and have a little peek at their mugs before we let the fantasy unfurl. That was and remains a part of the experience. If the band took a band photo and put it on their stupid cd, we will look at this photo and make our judgments.

Ah, yes. Dress-shirt metal of the highest decree.

I see a vest, I see a skintight sleeveless, I see the perms. But I also see the steely eyed resolve, I see a band that isn't here to fuck around. Do you also see? I see young men that dedicated their lives to something utterly useless and it moves me deeply. If only I could through my persual of the utterly useless also inspire one single other human in this billion earth, it wouldn't be a waste.

Heir Apparent for this recording are:

Paul Davidson Vocals
Terry Gorle Guitars, Vocals
Derek Peace Bass
Raymond Black Drums

Also, if this band had a real budget they would have a photographer worth a shit to tell them that in this arrangement there's a visual illusion: it looks like scarf boy is holding the hip of vest man and vest man has his little precocious fingers of his reverse hand in scarf boy's belt loop. Do you see it? You're never going to unsee it now, you're welcome. What a strange thing, to both somehow find a couple of talented musicians with two left hands each and to have them touch each other so sensitively.

Enough fucking around, time to listen. You could listen along, or listen first, or listen first and then listen again as you read, whatever's your kink is fine with me, pervert.

The album starts En Trance, gettit? A wordless minor key fanfare of an intro, percolating in an air of mystery. Like gates opening, revealing to child Helm an altogether outer realm. Such an intro track feels like it's setting up an existential concept and not a storyline album. It's as if to say 'welcome to our world, leave all else behind'.

The introduction of the instrument tones and sound space is in a word elegant. There's no technical excess to it, it's restrained and short. A hooky chordal opening establishing the key we'll be spending a lot of our time on in this record to be sure. Given the emergent form of heavy metal relying on a guitar's lowest available open string tone, you'll often find a lot of any given album centers and wanders around that lowest tone. Heir Apparent are – and continued to be on their second album, it's no accident – a very airy heavy metal band. They're robust and tight as a unit but not so concerned with grinding your face on an palm chugged E note over and over the thrash revolution happening around them notwithstanding. The heaviness here is more of a theatrical weight, tubular bell ringing along with rhythm, bass, lead and cymbal in unison. Apocalyptic tolling, you are enthralled, pulled to the edge and then left to shimmer as we fade on to

Another Candle

From intro to intro, we gently glide, dreamlike from the gates to this oneiric plateau, punctuated by shimmering delay returns and chimes, soft and inviting. Today such elements of a heavy metal soundpicture get flattened down for there has been so much metal inbetween of every stripe, of every genre trying this and much more. But for 1986, for you having just bought this and for you playing it expecting the lightning bolt of Marshal steel, it is a fake out. The conjoined creature is given to such melancholic shifts, it gives it a soul and a longing. We haven't even heard a human word and we are already in a complex musical world. An inbetween place. And then there is a man, talking in harmonic parallel, in fact:

I've seen through times of mystery
And dreamed of truth in history
I can't imagine why we'd let our lives be stolen away
For armageddon

To be their pawns
And fear their gods
With no free will – No!

And the band enters into the metal gallop in earnest. Now with modern ears we can discern weaknesses when put next to aforementioned Q-ryche or a Fates in terms of the singing power, or in terms of production and sound design that could relate to us why this band is seen as an obscure entry, for die-hard enthusiasts as it were and not a band that put out an Operation Mindcrime and made a million... But if we set our modern ears aside and listen to it as if it's the only heavy metal record that ever was we will see not deviation but innovation of the form. I will briefly highlight the harmonic-heavy ornamentations of the guitar player – of his time surely a guitar hero of a sort – that here and on every song very clearly establish an identity that is unmistakable. When you listen to Terry Gorle play guitar you immediately know it's him not so much because of technical affectations but because of his chorusy tone and his compositional choices that always highlight these gestural mannerisms that come from an era of guitar playing where a heavy metal player of some accomplishment didn't seek to be a Swiss army knife of tricks and tones but instead to purely express one or two particular ideas at the full logical extent of their application. This is the best way to describe the guitar approach of this band: Terry, in rhythm and solo does just a couple of things, all of the time, but he does them to their utmost.

Heavy metal is inspiring because it isn't jazz fusion or classical music. It's inspiring because it is the overreaching achievement of regular humans wanting to play rock n' roll for the gods, it is exciting because you can hear the sweat and lust to materialize something useless in full force, something only a few thousand humans in the world would end up vibing with, but vibing with it hard. Terry plays for that crowd and he will until the end. His hand brings the soul to this band.

I don't know if Heir Apparent had misgivings because they didn't make it big, if there were inner arguments and band strife about how to commercialize their sound – historical anecdotes point to yes, mind you – but when it comes to the immediate riffery and tone and attitude of this guitar-driven power metal band from 1986 it surely doesn't come across as confused at all. It comes across full formed and confident.

The picture in the poetry is lucid as it is abstruse. It could be about anything but it isn't. It's about a real anxiety and a real foretelling. It is of consequence as are all the lyrics, we shall find together throughout the duration. There's the weltanschauung of a studied mind, young but studied. Confident enough to tell the truth, naïve to a fault, it's the voice of heavy metal circa 1986, a voice that thought the world would go much different but in reflection is not surprised it went as it did.

The band confidently hits their beats throughout the verse leading to a rousing, chorus-and-wah washed solo. You'll find every solo on this album to be absolutely memorable without ever devolving to brainless pyro. Heir Apparent didn't put 'grace' on the cover for show, they're cut of a different cloth in regards to their peers in american metal.

The song coalesces to a powerful coda verse with muscular drum and bass punctuation of every little emotive detail of the simple riff.

Desire – the lust for total joy
The fire – a world it shall destroy
And there's nothing you can do
Cause the world you've known is through


A perfect heavy metal song? An eternal staple. A song sang along to by the metal faithful again and again indeed. And we're only getting started.

The Servant jumps off with its arch riffery and loquacious soloing and young Helm was headbanging then and old Helm is headbanging (more carefully, neck issues) today. As we dovetail into the verse section the vocal comes in with such melancholy, Heir Apparent aren't a simpleminded band. You can say on its face an album such as this is about spraypainted wizard mural on the side of a van kind of theatrics but that'd be missing the (or a) point. The puppet show is a puppet show but the lead puppet is taken with these melancholy moods, often. The puppet play quiets down and there is a spotlight on lingering, small emotions, you know there's a human holding up the puppet, really and the human is letting you off easy. You'd be a fool to throw away this tension between this absolutely grandiose verse loopy guitar playing and the softness of this, ostensibly, power metal singer going on about a misty dew that settles down on this earth below, the winds of time are telling us there's no play for us to go.

We're on our way, alone.

Progressive metal isn't about Berkley chops. It's about this tension. It's the power metal band, stealing from Iron Maiden and Rainbow but to tell a human story, an inspiration to strike steel and melt the heavens in a cast that is abstract, it follows the crevices and frames our most hidden desires. It pictures us as kings propped up in our fantasy by servants – us, as well, servants to our own fantasy – we are the ones that sweat for this fantasy, we are the ones crowning ourselves for our useless achievement. We are the ones playing and the ones listening, this music was - and is - ours.

These are the emotions this song pulls out of me, then and now. As Icarus is falling to the earth surely there is a moment where the dread subsides and there is a stoic joy to this ending. To believe in your wings as they melt, to rejoice in life as you die. Icarus regrets nothing, he'd fuckin' do it again, believe it. I could listen to Terry Gorle solo the fucking phone book to be honest.

Two perfect heavy metal songs back to back... Slowly you begin to understand, as countless heavy metal bands and their various offerings start to observantly move aside for Heir Apparent is walking in the centre stage. That feeling, that ancient feeling: this is the only Heavy Metal band that ever was.

Tear Down the Walls slows things down and delivers another pristine guitar hook, supplanted by these ghost noted volume swells that feel like violins. This regal, yet melancholy feeling. Heir Apparent are very unique in this way, they don't surrender to the campy cheese of the Kingly metal thing like a Manowar would often do, yet they don't decohere in the other direction by a way of a confused, fragmented composition. There's such confidence and direction to this song, it's no wonder it's another eternal live show staple, another song sang word for word by regular humans at the top of their lungs, people like me and you. Because this song is actually about us, as it goes:

They dwell in a palace of ivory and gold
In beauty and comfort, a fortune untolled
Yet, out in the courtyard injustice prevails
They've turned their back on what lordship entails

They squander their riches on oceans of wine
The masses are starving while ministers dine
The bringers of Sorrow, the masters of Pain
Rise up in anger, let sweet vengeance reign

Tear down the walls!

So we see Heir Apparent are on a humanist crusade, an enlightenment borne through heavy metal steel. For decades in the interim heavy metal fell prey to the funeral of meaning of a globalized, neoliberal post-modernity. Reading lyrics is embarassing, so let's stop. Extreme metal is about a vague feeling of superiority, let's keep things vague because if you look too close it all falls apart.

For decades people would laugh at you for taking a heavy metal song seriously as if talking about the human plight of the downtrodden through purple allegory and Conan the Barbarian prose like this. But in 2025 looking back, guess who was right? That heavy metal spirit was right. It never lied. We had to grow up to become children again and realize that what we once felt was true was the only thing that was true and we spent our whole lives struggling for the wrong things. Art never lied to us, ours souls were just too small to accept it without some fingers crossed behind the back, without some sort of moral escape clause lest we are mocked for our simplicity of mind. With age comes the torture and from the torture the soul either withers or engorges itself with wisdom.

Unafraid, now, now that heavy metal has survived itself, somehow, and the world accepts the spandex as much as it accepts the double bass and hollering as part of the cultural milieu at large we headbang demanding more, we demand this human spirit, we demand a cry for justice even if it is the last naked scream that will percolate through a blasted nuclear universe, the last thing of value that humans had to say is right here in songs like this, dumb heavy metal songs by idiot savants, not a symphony, just a dumb riff and a rousing message that burns incandescent, still.

Running from the Thunder

This bar room boogie pace switch-up best serves as a backdrop for the guitar man to go wild, showing us the more Dionysian flavour of his playing. Old heavy metal records were not obsessed with keeping style consistent from every track because what they were selling was not a subgenre niche, they were conveying the whole thrust of heavy metal, ambiguous and open ended as it felt to them before it congealed into selected offerings for selected audiences. This aspect of heavy metal isn't easy to reinvent without appearing instead as some sort of post-modern circus music conglomeration of styles. For Heir Apparent, as they were of their age this is seamless and congruous, much like it would be for '70s Priest. Strong chorus about being filled with dread and inexplicable power. Every bar punctuated with some sort of guitar wailing, all propped up perfectly by an incredible rhythm section. Truly the power metal essence of this band isn't necessarily to be found in the guitars in the conventional sense, it is in the extremely lock tight and groovy pocket rhythm section where we see clearest the deliniation between older styles of rock and heavy and what we called USA-styled power metal. There's also an inventive key change in here for the musically observant, and at the very edge of this short song Heir Apparent threaten to take off, they just cannot contain themselves. That's my favourite part of this song even after all the guitar theatre, it's where the song lands of this threatening V and surges on its climax.

The Cloak

Another shorter one. It's actually interesting how fully formed the sorter tracks are on this album by this band that I squarely would place in the progressive metal originators camp. That's a thing they have on all their competition, these extremely catchy shorter tunes that work themselves out fully without ever feeling throwaway. Another killer, winding riff going into taut and gallopping verse sets up this morbid fantasy. When Heir Apparent do grim melodrama it acts as this beautiful foil to their more high minded ambitions on the signature tracks. This and another track down the line are some of my favorites from the 'heavy metal of the darkest night' variety of composition on offer on the debut.

Often I listen to this album and just follow the bass, it's so on point and it does the lion's share of outlining the harmonic movement as the guitar often is arpeggiating in a chorus sheen and building to a soaring solo from such foundation. Only Crimson Glory had an equally crucial bass element to their US power metal. There's been many others with a strong tone or chops, but that the songs so depend on the space given to the bass to propel the compositions is where I find Heir Apparent very unique.

R.I.P.

Ah, the heavy metal instrumental on side two... here, Heir Apparent return to that regal melancholy, painting a vivid tale without a need for a script. From the harmonic double led introduction to the beautifully twisty verse riff, this is one of the two guitar workouts on offer on this album. A strong Rush influence (there is no progressive metal without the seminal influence of Rush) rears its conjoined head, worshipping Dionysus and Apollo together, IAAA... mid-soaring in the verse riff, the power chord is pulled and we are plunged into this deep darkness of a soundscape. In an understated way, Heir Apparent here are providing a blueprint for motivic and suite-like composition as much as any of their proto-prog peers that could inspire many a contender for the crown. Much like the deep well in the middle of 'La Villa Strangiato' this is one of the highlights of this record that the listener's ear longs to re-experience. The attentive will be drawn into an otherwordly trance as the bass player gets a chance to lead us deeper and under floating pad chords and chiming spell... Terry blesses us with his most beautiful solo... often when in orgiastic mode I accept the solo as a wash of sound, but it's when we get a slower and more compositional extended lead line like here where I truly feel that feeling, as a guitar player you know it as well “I wouldn't change a single note of this solo, I wouldn't change a single bend or expression of his touch'. One for the ages, melting in controlled amp feedback, shimmering in chorus and that particular reverb... we do not make them like this anymore and when we try it's just a mockery of our own vacuousness of spirit.

This band, had they two guitar players would be tremendously diminished. I do not need a rhythm track propping up the solo work, I need just that punchy bass and Terry trading riff with lead with himself. It's exactly what the cover promised, this schizoid tension that in the end collapses into a brilliant, shimmering illumination. Pure steel but airy and inchoate. The riff reminds its dark majesty on exit and then the record needle scraches to awake us from this morbidly beautiful dream. A perfect heavy metal instrumental.

Hands of Destiny

Oh my god, how many peaks can this mountain range have? One of these perfect anthemic songs, in full splendour we again see this juxtaposition of glory and tragedy:

Yet in our abundant wisdom
Man can't tame the sky, the mountains or the sea
Held beyond our understanding, helpless to deny
The hands of destiny

For a heavy metal genre so taken with abject tales of shock and terror this is downright modern, yet in literary terms this is a point as old as The Odyssey. That's how Heir Apparent come off, that's why their style can both feel arcane and cutting edge. They understand rock and roll as a music that belongs to the people and so it should be thrilling, you know... the basic idea of the post-industrialization pop song, it's entertainment but it owes to people something more than that. There's not a shred of pretension to this and that's a very fine line to walk, to the point where a lot of listeners wouldn't necessarily place this in the progressive metal camp exactly because it's not self-absorbed in that particular way.

Keeper of the Reign

This is the other anthem back to back. Again the theme of melancholic regalia at focus. Much is expected of the first amongst men, a heavy burden to be king. The standout element of this track for me (beyond the endlessly singalongable chorus) is the romantic bass solo culminating in an extremely rousing coda that transforms the balladry into full-on power metal. The slow triplet, punctuated by the complete rhythm section is so classy, a stroke of understated genius while guitarman does guitarman things at full blast on top. Airy Heir Apparent only a couple of times on this album go full-on rocket fuel and as you'd expect this is a moment much beloved by everyone that has been to a Heir Apparent live show or listened to this record with any attention. If you're new to this, you're welcome.

Dragon's Lair

Back to the heavy metal of the night style, here. Impossibly great riff sets up one of the all-time greatest metal screams recorded on wax. Much like the Number of the Beast scream, once you've listened to this one you will often find yourself wanting to play this track just to listen to it again. Perhaps the vocal isn't as strong on the whole on this album at the impossible standard set by Tate, Dickinson, Dio and co. and, verily, Heir Apparent would try their luck on a second album with a more conventionally powerful throat on the mic but that's a story for another time. There are moments, though where the vocalist really gives it their all and this opening scream on this track is such a moment indeed.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa he goes and I am as excited about heavy metal as I've ever been. Time collapses to madness!

Looking through the windows to your mind
Can't you see that there isn't much more to find?
As you take the crystal deep within
Waiting for the magic to begin

And are the broken mirrors of your soul
Dying for a lesson to be told?
And will you ever find an answer there?
Daring to approach the Dragon's Lair!

Lurid melodrama and manic fantasy, a child taken by sojourns of the imagination. Songs about power, songs about darkness, songs about fear and dreadful joy. Heavy metal! The post-verse bridge juxtaposes again this particular brand of melancholia to the muscular verse rhythm. As usual with great heavy metal records, songs about dragons and such often betray a parable, here one about giving in to the worst vice. Chopping one's breakfast down a mirror as it were, daring to approach the dragon's lair, a rush that never seems to satisfy, tempting us once more before we die. Beware!

Masters of Invasion

This lurching beast takes a while to come together and groove, I always enjoy this slow start after the insaniac energy of Dragon's Lair. It settles into this bass pocket and a lyrical vocal outlined by a slow rhythm gallop. An Omen kind of feeling if you would allow. Though in the lyric one could pin the narrative to a particular war truly the crucial stoicism of Heir Apparent's approach broadly scrutinizes and condemns the inexorable inhumanity of modern warfare in general. The solo has this beautifully tense middle section that ups the tension before surrendering into itself again and returning to the sparse verse rhythm. When you think it's all over a coda solo soars as if to escape this madness, once again. A masterclass of understated grandeur and one of the best songs on this incredibly stacked record.

Nightmare

As we're nearing the end of the offering we are treated to another up-tempo banger filled with phantasmagorical visions. The only fault I can find on this album is the thin background vocal on the verse but even that is quickly assuaged by a killer bass break post-chorus that pumps me up every single time as it hits the solo. Once again bass player MVP on this track. As far as songs go that are about, broadly, 'nighttime is scary' this is a winner. This is another very short track that perfectly sets up the final statement of the album.

A.N.D. ...Dogro Lived On

For the life of me I have no idea who Dogro is and I haven't chanced on any interview material that would substantiate the title of the track (perhaps that can be a fun reader participation element in the comments if you, dear reader, know more than I do) but I have to say this is probably my favourite track on the album and the strongest all around statement on the debut, for a few different reasons.

First of all that segmented stop-starting riff is pure progressive metal majesty and I have tried to emulate the emotion such riffs evoke many a time in my own writing. That is to say a riff like this opens a whole new department in the mind thereafter from where many inspirations will come that are internally validated by enthusiastically the Ego confirming the base drive by going 'oh, yes, like the Dogro riff, yes! Yes!' and for that I can only be eternally grateful to Heir Apparent.

The way the rhythm section supports the mysterious riff with intelligent syncopation just melts me. You can imagine this band in fucking 1985 playing this in the rehearsal room and looking at each other with gold in their eyes it's so prime prog without a hint of affect about it... it's as if the riff tablature was found carved in a stone and there were parts rubbed off by millennia and that's where the band just opted to restart the riff over and over, mesmerized by the winding, menheiric gravity. One for the ages indeed.

What solidifies the approach here however is the lyric:

Face the facts of Life On Earth
The nature of Mankind
Pages from our past are now defined
Humanity has common sense
We all know right from wrong
We've lived in false pretense too long

RISE! RISE!
Face the facts of present day
RISE! RISE!
Rid yourself of ancient ways

Fear of gods and demons is the folly of your mind
Acknowledge facts of Science - don't be blind
The war of Good and Evil is what you create within
The Facts of Life are where the truth begins

RISE! RISE! RISE!

Prepare for your future - don't live within the past
The ancient cultures never knew the facts
Technology has given truth where myth had been before
It's time Humanity stepped through the door

This is where, in earnest Heir Apparent put their contribution forward to what they imagined 'a heavy metal for the future' could truly be about. Obviously withour Rush we wouldn't get here. We called it progressive metal afterwards and in our confusion we led it astray, but here it is, without much comment needed, honestly. It's 1986 and while the thrashers were still caught in a mosh Heir Apparent are conveying an altogether different worldview.

It isn't so much that I agree or disagree with the thesis, it's that I had, and continue to have a wealth of thoughts about it, passionate thoughts, complex and sometimes uncomfortable thoughts. That I sing along with it, I yelp 'Rise!' every time, puts me in a place where I am half-arrested, I am at a distance but I am in it at the same time. That Brechtian moment captured to be relieved for decades, the promise of heavy metal to me is right here. One can only hope to give a difficult but inescapable challenge like this to their listener in 1986 or in 2025.

Thank you sincerely, my dear reader, for listening and scrutinizing this old masterpiece with me. We did well, didn't we? Beauty only grows more beautiful as it grows old only in the sublime realm of art and all that will be left behind even after we are gone are these explorations of something that is of us but beyond us, it is of that other realm where a sound can be as a mountain, where a poem is as if it was never penned by instead always has existed. I wish to go to that place myself and spend a forever or two surrounded by these finer forces, indeed subsumed into them like I was never even here, because truly it never really mattered in any other sense that I was, but to become, once, solved inside the etheric alchemy of quintessent art.

I wish you well until we meet again.

Pirates of the Underground

 In the long and ill-considered term where old internet got subsumed into the grotesque corporatist conglomeration of 'web 2.0' services and when all the little useless homes of personal chronicle like this blog felt truly outmoded, people of our subculture struggled to recreate and retain their spaces with variable degrees of success on the new attention economy platforms.

One such small community is 'Midnight Lighting Steel.', a facebook group of 100-150-odd people, lovers of old metal, weird metal and unique metal all the same that I was part of founding. 

In this space over the last few years many topics were brought on for discussion and many an obscure metal gem was dusted off for re-appreciation. Interesting thoughts came out of seeing disparate individuals appreciate forms of metal and particular cuts that I thought were truly passé for the constitution of the modern heavy metal listener, but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that even in this crippled state the promise of internet connectivity still inspired something new for me and others.

Web 2.0 being the cretinous machine that it is, however, it soon became apparent that even the groups internal oral history was getting lost in the obscurity of the near yesterday, as the search functions and, generally, the archival functions of the platform are pointedly inoperable, discouraging any sort of conglomeration of fact in lieu of an endless re-discussion. That's attention economy, isn't it? 

My mind rebels to that idea, especially when it comes to matters of passion and fetish; Surely we have talked about Secrecy before, right? Surely we have all listened to Last Crack by now, no? We can build upon an edifice, but how? How do we know what is worth bringing up and what's been enshrined in the certitude of fact?

The idea that new members come and go and old members forget and we can't simply fish out our own discussion out of a deaf-dumb archive set me to ponder on the kinds of ways we propagated metal wisdom in the older world, the nascently connected but not yet overconnected world. What is an attractive package, even for a very small audience, even better, exactly for a very small audience to remember and remind itself of its oral history? 

In the world of tomorrow no-one should seek to talk to the many, the many are deaf to the world of tomorrow. One should seek to talk to the few because the few can become a community that imagines freely what will come to pass.

In this sense, for Midnight Lighting Steel I sought to do a little bit of a pirate radio show. I do not want to be a 'content creator' for youtube, I don't especially want to have my face or voice on the internet at all to be honest, but I thought it a decent challenge to contain my generally extremely verbose brain on all things metal down to the radio show format, and to hearken back to a different standard of how we package and convey information on this style of art to each other all the same.

Furthermore I sought to be a living example of how 'we listen to music', in ways that to people of similar background and idiom to my own will seem obvious but to a generation of listeners fed by spotify and listening to music on a phone that mutes their song with a ding about a video ad will be a challenge. Offline hard drive of meticulous collection, record cover and lyric, year and country, genre and ambition, the lives of little humans given with such passion and steel dedication to a purely useless thing. The inspiration is to never forget them, so we as well may never be forgotten. To listen to music with love and to comment with wit, it is a simple thing to the loving and curious but fewer and fewer of us remain...

Ultimately, and this is no shame it is in fact the biggest ambition of them all, these are meant to be videos you put in the background that deal with something you dearly love with passion and mature understanding, to keep you company and give you a feeling of comradery while you have to work a stupid fucking dayjob or take a long car ride or just assuage the loneliness of a long night, here and there. Steel has always been there for us and I am paying it forward.

The videos were unlisted, they were meant to be seen by 10, 15 people tops. They were meant to incite small discussions and more than anything they were meant to do that one magic thing where when, say, Secrecy would come to mind for one of the viewers/listeners, the memory would also conjure up a comment, a bit of wisdom, something mentioned or something sparked in relation. A metal brother has already given years of life to thinκ of this, we learn from each other.

To assuage this catalogue fixation, the rateyourmusic wound of endless scroll and no papyrus of what the metal chronicle has become we need to get a little post-apocalyptic. A small human's story, an interesting anecdote and not too much more, an overarching theme and concept to this subcultural endeavor of metal, all of it dancing madly on a stolen radio-wave, hijacking a service meant for gross self-exploitation -- pirates of the underground, lightning, the speed of sound we will prevail


I did a few of these inward-looking radio shows for the group and then I thought since they're unlisted and they still fall in a hole of facebook groups backlog not easily fished out, I might as well give them a final resting place here, where all my other thoughts are, where my heart always rests, in the ethereal tomb of Poetry of Subculture: my most useless and in some ways my most cherished creation - and trust me, I've indulged in so much uselessness over the decades - satisfying the double credo of maximum effort and for no apparent credit. Levitating between the anonymity of the unlisted internet of yore and the data aggregative totality of the future, we soar the liquid seas of imagination.

As these videos are not meant for general use keep in mind they need not be circulated, nothing has to be made out of them, and I don't particularly want to think of them as media to account for in any other way than a measured discussion in this old world comment space. If you've found yourself here there is surely a reason and they're meant for you, instead. You understand this distinction and you know what to do with such information.

As always I remain your faithful correspondent, beyond time and space, amidst world-ending chaos and uncertainty. We met a long, long time ago and before this is all over we may truly never die.

The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.

Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.


Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...

The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.

When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?

No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.

A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.

Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.

Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.  

The Final Hour

Heavy Metal told me we are nearing some sort of end, a long time ago. You heard it too, the tolling of the funeral bell.

We had a a little bit of fun with it, huh? Sad fun, but fulfilling. Sometimes I read some of my past words, but what kills me are the comments.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for ever talking to me.

I don't know if you know, but in Greece, deadly terrain and cruel waters often get nicknamed with fairly positive sounding names. This simple dialectic irony is more ancient than any other human thought because it is driven by the most ancient feeling we have.

An edge of a cliff where women and childfolk were driven to suicide rather than be captured by invaders may be named 'the hill of the beautiful daughters'. A sea path that crushed the ship of many an Odysseus might be curiously dubbed 'the fair chance passage'. You get the drift, but do hold on as it gets treacherous...

Heavy Metal is like that, but in reverse. It pretends to be about terrible things, but it Negates the thesis. Ostensibly we were inspired by the darkness and horror packaged within a safe aesthetic experience because it was a containable darkness and horror. We glanced, sideways, inside the wound of existence and we headbanged. I have no regrets on that front, I think we did well, friend.

However a realization is dawning upon humanity now that cannot be assuaged through crayon blood ablation and tough guy leather biker poses on the back of the jewel case. An end to what we perceive as our world seems to be emanating its premonition with an undeniable, existential certitude. 

The end is demanding recognition, and the only way a demand for recognition plays out is, ultimately, with a master impressing their truth on the servant. We won't headbang our way out of a climate apocalypse but I am sure we will try.

I'm not going to presage the disaster to come with the classical fetish of the hobbyist writer (purple prose, I'm talking about purple prose) there's enough warning & admonition in any of yours, mine, our favorite arts to cover the issue a thousand times over. Perhaps I may be allowed to use my own poetry, only once, I hope you will forgive me  - but otherwise, yes, there will not be a 'top 10 heavy metal songs about the apocalypse' running in the background while we discuss. 

 If anything, I want us to look upon ourselves, curious and full of wonder, and to notice the phantom scars of a myriad of 'false endings' we have headbanged our way through, full of dark exuberance. I want us to contrast that to this oncoming demand of recognition of the true end of things. It feels different, doesn't it? As meaning falls apart, there is bitter and there is sweet, but one is fleeting and it's the other that we'll have to hold.

Or, perhaps I have nothing to really say, I just wanted to write a little bit, a little bit of unstructured poetry about how it feels to recognize this dynamic, myself, but not alone... I want to turn to my subculture - perhaps that's all that this was ever about, a child Helm, feeling lonely on top of the head of a 40 year old man. 

I wanted to tell you that I am thinking about meanings. I am sensing the end of the road for the human experiment, I am contemplating the thing no human was ever equipped to shoulder... but yet, collectively our total function is to shoulder... this, right? We wanted to be free. This is our meaning.

You'll help me one last time to work this out a little bit, why not? It's just me and you in this room, at this point. 

Since it's just us, I'll tell you this: I am certain you feel it too, I don't have to explain it too much to you. You heard the funeral toll a long time ago and your heart was filled to the brim with that emptiness. A power from nothing, a freezing flame, a rotten seed of undead vitality. You headbanged the head away until only steel remained.

We told ourselves that meditation on the toll of the funeral bell will make us strong, and make us prepared. The black metal nazi wizards are still on this vain and futile kick, invoking belial and tiamat and psyduck and begging for dark power to destroy...  no Goddess will help a creature so pitiful that it masturbates to the stench of dying children. 

But the nazis aside, the ones we will meet in the street, again, and have our turgid passion play out once again... we, on the other side, we were just eaters of culture in a world in moral cryostasis after world wars and holocausts and massacred godheads... we leave behind our defiant freedom from everything but ourselves.

The rest will happen as it happens and we will do what we will do, in a way that cannot be stopped or changed.

As the tension waxes and our meanings fall, I recognize you and make no demands, I hope you will remember me, also

In memory of Mark Shelton

This is a post about fathers, in a sense. It's also a post about metaphysics. A physical father can die. A metaphysical father lives forever. Mark Shelton, guitarist, singer and mainman of long-standing underground metal legends Manilla Road has passed away. Manilla Road are however, eternal.

I'll have to walk the long way home with you on this, dear reader.


My father got me a (tiny) classical guitar and signed me up for lessons when I was just 5 years old. Isn't it a cute mental image? In reality, the memory is sad. I was a sad child because there was a lot of family sadness on the family table and I wasn't allowed to leave and go to my room until I had eaten my daily, it felt, portion of family sadness. So, guitar was just more to do on a full stomach.

I learned the most basic music theory (which is what I still use, the rest are personal inventions), a little bit of sight reading and my basic chromatic exercises before I even had any sort of musical taste. If I remember correctly, I got the first couple of classical guitar degrees at my music school, before we had to move again, you know how it goes.

Classical guitar just meant more homework for child Helm. A series of generally disinterested guitar teachers didn't help ignite any sort of fire, because they were thinking about their abject fantasies of being guitar heroes while they were looking down on a tiny confused child that didn't know why it was frettin' them frets at all. It's easy to feel disgust even at children when they stand as impeding symbols to your own actualization.

Few years down the line, around ten years old, I think - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood consists of kaleidoscopic floating shards, inchoate in some sort of dim mist. Is it the same for you, reader? - I asked my father to stop bringing in the guitar teacher, because I didn't like him, the work, or the guitar much. He had in his mind that he owes it to the children to provide some avenues of culture and expression so he fought me on this, he fought a tiny ten-year-old that wasn't learning Sagreras compositions, it's kind of funny to think about. Anyway, he did a smart thing around the same time that helped us meet halfway on the matter.

At age 10, 11, 12 - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood is like looking through venetian blinds onto the scene of a minor but perpetual accident - I developed a fascination with heavy metal music. My father was skeptical about the morbid themes but allowed it because at least he could see some fire in his youngest child's eyes, and also, we were an atheist household so a little bit of satan here and there wasn't considered anathema.

This fascination coupled with a classical guitar lying around and basic motor skills to operate it meant that now little teenager Helm was about to cross a particular threshold, from the childlike solipsism where one does something because they've been instructed to do it to one doing something because they've set personal goals. This sounds fun and good and as a kind of progress, but it is also a very destabilizing process as I remember it, because what teenager me wanted to express was mitigated through the demonstration of other, adult and accomplished musicians.

I wanted to play fairly complex music to express fairly complex (and very teenager-dramatic) emotions and ideas, but I was just a little kid and I had just got my first electric guitar and it didn't sound like that, you know? It didn't sound like my rapidly emerging pantheon of heavy metal heroes for sure. I won't bore you with hilarious details of my first 'guitar rig', though, truly I can attest that a whole host of aesthetic sensibility was established for me just out of these early limitations, so it's worth getting into that at in the future, perhaps.

The point is, gear concerns aside, on some level, also, I knew from this young age that I never would truly sound like my heroes. It was a weird sort of prescience, from a weird little child with big ideas but also a sense of self-reflection that described these limitations, I could see my own limitations in certain ways. Nobody will ever tell this to a child, or a teenager: there's certain things you will probably never accomplish because you will not have the willpower, the mental fortitude, the peace of mind to dedicate enough to achieve. Heavy Metal goes on and on about how death is real, and I'm not so sure, honestly. Death happens, I guess. That's not so heavy metal a motto, is it? Sadness is real, however. It's real and ongoing and it describes limitations. If you're sad, you're going to have to be smart about how you get things done for the rest of your life because just turning the willpower knob to eleven won't work for you.

Parents certainly would never tell this to their children, because they are the instigators of various and frequent emotionally distressing events that contribute to such sadness. So one is left to cope and understand themselves and try to work with what they've got.

In this teenager state of mind, as I was going through that, I was looking for allies, for inspirations, for some sort of guidepost that encouraged me on my way. Amazing guitar players with their fluid legato and impossible sweeps were more like gods to me, I couldn't see myself in them at all.

But heavy metal is a beautiful genre. In its vast and ambiguous spaces live and thrive not just Apollonian guitar gods but also mutants, troglodytes, outcasts and weirdos. One could say that so they do in the punk and dark wave scenes and there even moreso and I would agree but the magic thing for me was that all these heavy metal mutants were trying to do what the Apollonian guitar gods were also doing: they wanted, with their limited means and weird talents, to build something, to construct an almost architectural monument to the same gods of romance and horror. A weird punk band, regardless of how much I might like their songs, always felt more like an ephemeral and scene-related exercise. You play in a punk band because you started a punk band, you go to squats, you are in the broad anarchist space, you try to meet people, you play gigs for them, you sell some t-shirts, perhaps you put out an album eventually, sure you express beautiful and worthwhile emotions but it's all too human.

This wasn't my child fantasy of heavy metal (and there is no other fantasy of heavy metal worth a damn). No, I got into heavy metal because I wanted to do something at once bigger but also more personal. Interfacing with the genre in these terms is not a social exercise, it is instead a moral one. You build your own backbone one riff at the time and it doesn't matter who likes it or even gets to hear it. You hear it. When your steel is true and real, virtue is its own reward.

Ask any metalhead that you think has a bit of virtue to them and they will all get to that point of description, regardless of their divergent paths: when they listen to the best this genre has to offer they are not thinking about the world-as-it-is. They aren't thinking about a cool squat gig or a great party or a person that they dated. They are thinking about power. About darkness. About grandeur. Malice, eternity, nothingness, God, the devil and themselves in eternal dialectic relation. All these nodes of immense and overwhelming force are directly connected to a single recipient. It's direct and immediate and absolutely exhausting, it inspires a thousand things and they aren't all beautifull as that song goes. Let's connect one more thing from another song, another book, another something, because eventually you'll have to learn this if you don't already: "For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy." and there aren't any happy sorcerers, alright?


This is the mindset and I've been trying to elucidate but honestly, I think over the years (and we've been doing this for some years now, friends) it becomes more and more clear: if you don't understand this mindset, you will never understand how heavy metal feels. If you have actualized this mindset from other experience and culture then you can map it onto the ridiculous grandeur of metal music and appreciate it even if it wasn't there in your childhood. But that achievement of experiencing art on the metaphysical plane cannot be gifted. Open your eye, yeah? Do it, you know how. Do the work and then all this nonsense will achieve some shape and grace.

Well, for inadvertent reasons I did the work early. My hands couldn't play shit, but I knew what I was seeking. And there we enter Manilla Road.

Boy, are Manilla Road a weird band! Not to me, to me they sound complete and correct. But to outsiders they sound off in so many ways. This is why, as a dear friend of mine has remarked, this shit, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, this shit is called "underground metal" to outsiders. But for me, and for him, for us few, it's just HEAVY METAL. The weird little mutants mean more to us than their mainstream inversion. See? In my mind, Iron Maiden or whatever is the inversion of Manilla Road. Manilla Road are more important to me. If you listen to their music, now, as an adult, you probably would not understand why.

Yes, Mark Shelton's voice was nasal, and the production on their arguable best effort, "Crystal Logic" is garage sub-basement. There's no virtuosity on display, there's barely any bells and whistles to this, it's actually quite punk rock in a way. The material has no uniformity, the record cover looks like this:

But the ideas! The lyrics! The moods! Listen to "The Veils of Negative Existence", by God if you do one thing today, listen to this song and read the lyrics and open your eye.

I sail the seas of negativity

To banish evil from this place

I fight with sword of fire and lightning

I am the guardian come this day

I will never put my sword down

I will never run away

In The Veils of Negative Existence

I am the master here to stay

My crystal shield will never fail me

It can withstand the devils rain

And with the Lords of Light to guide me

I bring forth vengeance in their name

I will never put my sword down

I will never run away

In The Veils of Negative Existence

I know it's not my mind at play

Upon the Island of Damnation

The Horde of Hades screams and wails

The blood of life and execution

Has put back light into the Veils

I will never put my sword down

I will never run away

In The Veils of Negative Existence

I am the master here to stay

Inside of the darkness

Between the planes

A tesseract dimension

Few know its name

On Prydwen, my long-ship

Of silver sails

Excalibur at my side

We shall not fail

Yeah, this isn't any old bullshit about the Lonelyness of the Long-Distance Runner or whatever. This, for teenager Helm was a revelation, not because I hadn't understood what heavy metal is before this point (even my entry to metal with Metallica has the core essence of metal right there, no worries) but it was the first time I felt like I could do this. I can play weird shit too. Manilla didn't sound off to me, I could sense that in the weird outsider choices that had led them to this place, I could replicate not their choices, but that ethos. Mark Shelton was the ethos of heavy metal, for me, and he still remains. The first song I learned to play along to was "Riddle Master", off of the same record, Crystal Logic. It's a simple song with an alluring atmosphere. And it allowed for me to come inside it and seek both riddle and master for myself. Every time I play that riff and wait for the cymbal accent on the two of the beat, we're all in there together. Manilla Road knew how to be their real selves but also allow listeners to step in their world with them. That's love, if you ask me. Love for their most tender and true self, in their heart, and also total openness and access for those that seek.

Mark Shelton was old, not old enough for his passing to not be untimely and therefore tragic, but older than heavy metal. He was a hippie. Metalheads hate the hippies, usually. Mark managed to synthesize the ground-floor 'love is all you need' of hippiedom and slotted in '...but arm yourself with four feet of cruel steel while you're at it". On Crystal Logic is this lyric that I keep thinking about, all my life:

"There's Good and there's Evil and there's no in-between
We shall slay evil with logic, Crystal Logic".

I wrestled with this idea for years, through my most post-modern and moral relativist sojourns, even when I disagreed with the word of this, the spirit burned right through me. Now I am 34 years old and I agree 100% with the text as written. I don't know if I'll ever have the courage and power to slay evil with crystal logic, Helm is too sad, but I can surely know and say that this is right and just.

There's as many Manilla Road stories for me as there's Manilla Road songs, almost. It's no joke when I'm telling you that I've seen Manilla Road live twice and when they played "Death by the Hammer" it felt like I was getting crushed by metal like never before or since. Absolute exhaustion and ecstasy, because as Manilla Road are crushing you with their hammer, they also actually love you. Witness:





Mark served this ethos through thick and thin, he served heavy metal in its purest distillation for 40 years. I had the pleasure to meet the man briefly and can attest to the continuity between his higher self (the spirit of this band) and his actual meatspace personality. Pure class. I'll always remember him fondly as one of my few and sacred, really, Heavy Metal Father Figures. He wasn't instrumental just to my journey through heavy metal creativity, Manilla Road's work has touched hundreds of thousands of little metal mutants, and through them, many more millions. He's touched the musicians that speak to the broader public in ways that Manilla Road never were equipped to do so. Their moral seed germinated in a myriad more successful bands that have the money, the opportunities, the mainstream talent and the determination to go further than the underground. In a way, Manilla Road are the metalhead's metalhead icon. There's a reason, though rife with misgivings and acrimony, that this shit is called 'true metal'.

In the world of aesthetics, there's nothing that is true and false, there's only impressions and arguments to make. But in moral terms, verity lives. It is on that plateau that Manilla Road's steel was true and real. Though they would never ask or need for accolades and respect, as virtue is its own reward, I am sure that love would always be welcome in their hearts.

I've loved Manilla Road for 20-odd years. I'll die before I stop.

Xerxes - Myth and Poetry

My love,

It has been years since we've last corresponded.

I still see you in my dreams.

The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.

I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.

I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?

I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.

A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.

I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.

Please believe me.




Months later, you came to me in a second dream.

Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.

A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.

I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.

I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.

You ran to me and embraced me.

You kissed me on my lips.

You whispered to me two things:

"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,

"Hold me tighter".


I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.


I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.


Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?

Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.

This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.

Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.

It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.


Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:




Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.


Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.

Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?

It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.

This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?

Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!

In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.

As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.



The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.

And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?

Good answer.




The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:


"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.

Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."

It's okay to cry.





The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.

What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.

What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.

And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.

After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.

"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.

I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.

The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.

"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"

But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.

Xerxes will never tell you any lies.

Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.

Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?

If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.

Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.

Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.

But in the distance you will see a bridge,

floating

Heavy Metal Means a Long Memory, part 2

In the first instalment of these series we began to establish the actual extent of fascism's creep in the heavy metal subculture and we connected out and proud neo-nazi black metal with lesser over but still sympathetic reactionary proponents of the scene that hide underneath less objectionable language like that of 'heritage' or 'national pride'. I wholeheartedly recommend reading the first part before continuing onward.


My grander aim with this series concerns the issue of memory. The first order of business is getting a grasp over the actual nitty-gritty of it all. We have to remember what we are as metalheads and how we came to be (on the face of it) a reactionary force in social politics. There is, however, a second order of business, a gambit in which I am invested in. I think if we take care of the first order of memory, the nitty-gritty as I said above, then the solution to our problem with right-wing extremism in our midst will appear, whole and congruous as if it always blatantly existed, screaming at us though we would not listen.


Metalheads have long but very selective, fragmented memories. That makes their memory a vice. If we can get metalheads to have longer and comprehensive and more structured memory (and therefore a sense of history and ultimately a sense of community structured around said history), then memory can become a virtue. On virtuous ground you can found a community. To vice there's no community, there's only a market that caters to it. That's what's happened to metal music: no community, only market. No long and arduous memory, only trivia.


My hope is that we can sublimate that desire to collect metal trivia into a knowledge of a deeper and more interconnected metal-mental map, one which includes the shaping influence of the outside world and one which understands and tempers its own romance, myth and poetry with modernist structure. One where if one has an question like, say, "hold on, why did metal become filled with neo-nazis and other right wing reactionaries?" their understanding of metal history can actually hope to provide an answer, instead of a cynical shrug and a "who knows?".


We are at such a low point in terms of how we understand ourselves as metalheads that such a question would be considered by most in our midst an impossible one to tackle. They wouldn't even know where to start and many of them would be hostile to whether such a question even deserves an answer from an insider point of view. We'd get lost in the mists of mythos and poetry before we even can pinpoint a single political agent that set this trend in motion. Murder and church burnings, something something. Teenage, twisted hearts igniting. The past is alive. Death product for you to buy, market market market. That's all we can do.


For such a long time we've left the scrutiny of metalhead culture to people on the outside of it: academics, pop-culture writers and social critics. It's easy to hate the outside world and how its critical of us when we have relinquished the tools to understand ourselves in our own community.


Why is memory usually a vice to the metalhead? It's a memory of metal trivia that they insufferably inflict on each other and outsiders alike, it's often a contest of envy and confused masculinity and in other times it's a neurotic compulsion to excitedly share functional minutia and other catalogued data as if by sharing them we are substantiating our own identity. Do you know who the first drummer for Motörhead was? If not, you are a false, do not entry. Or, oh my god oh my god let me tell you all about how Rebellion in Dreamland's guitars were recorded it's so cool.


If we can have a clearer command of the historical narrative that brought us to this point then by the force of history itself, playtime is over and we cannot hide behind convenient lies anymore: everyone will have to shoulder the weight of their choices and untenable positions such as 'I like music, bro, I don't care about politics, if you don't like it don't buy and if you like it and it's made by nazis then just listen to it on youtube and don't send them money' will be seen for what they are. But first, once again, all together and with feeling: for us to remember first we have to understand.


Q. But metal is supposed to deal with ugly subject matter! Are you saying that every band that spins a gory tale of a middle ages pagan taking the knife to the Christian invader are nazis? Where does this terrible political correctness stop?

Our core understanding of what heavy metal stands for (and therefore, what is allowed to happen within it, lyrically, aesthetically, politically, metaphysically) is a complex one and in order to answer the above query honestly we'd have to go a very long way around. Much of the Poetry of Subculture corpus is attempting to tackle this from various vantages, not always successful, which conveys the frustration with the difficulty of the original question.


Yes, heavy metal deals with 'heavy' themes, but that doesn't mean it should do so in exclusively in an exploitative manner. However, it often does. Don't forget, Black Sabbath took their name from a horror movie, not some occult ritual. Indeed, I posit that the greatest heavy metal music is borne through a distillation of exploitative 'shock rock' tropes into a quintessential, deeper embodiment and acceptance of horror and awe. This is why metal music isn't just another type of rock n' roll, it achieved a singular thing. The way metal music usually does this is not with words, it is with morphology, instrumentation and composition choices. It is usually so overwhelming and dense and hyperbolic it elevates schlocky ideas to some divergent level. Heavy metal does this in its special way, but heavy metal can do this in the first place not because it's a special sort of art unlike all others. It can do this because it carries within it, consciously or unconsciously, Romantic ideas. Granted, these ideas were not direct transplants: they were and are the product of regurgitation through the meat-grinder of culture-at-large and as such they're often found in metal music in a confused or contradictory state.

I think for every hundred metal bands that have made music that others then described as 'Nietzschean', there probably is one or two metal musicians that has actually read Nietzsche and probably near none that understood him as he would want to be understood. This is not a bug, this is a feature! It is, in fact, the life-saving feature of 'low' culture, that it is vague and ambiguous and confused about its own dramatic onset. Heavy metal came to be through sympathetic alchemy. That's fine.

But that shit happened in 1980 and we now have tools to understand ourselves.


So, the first tool that will help us answer the question above is exactly being able to discern between a deeper and profound use of 'heavy' themes versus their surface exploitation; The latter use doesn't necessarily make for bad music (a lot of exploitation cinema is very enjoyable, just like how riffs and solos and double-bass is enjoyable, animated music to listen to) but it places upon us, the listeners the weight of a necessary moral choice: It is we that have to shift through and decide what has a deeper level and what is pure exploitation. It's not copping out. It's actually the most heavy metal thing to do: take responsibility for one's own choices. We have to discern on a case-by-case basis and then make a grander assessment of the culture field. Is heavy metal music dealing with the horror of reality in a predominantly surface way?


I posit that it is not. I think heavy metal is dramatically suited to a deeper simulation and scrutiny of fringe experience, predominantly of a dark variety as suits its morphology. Death (always death), nihilism, violence and destruction are valuable simulated spaces to explore through metal music. However, when it comes to dealing with historical reference or even quasi-historical metaphor as the vessel for these explorations, metal music at large becomes quickly extremely exploitative. Much like a horror film about Dracula might hand-wave historical accuracy and just go "one night, in deep Carpathian forests..." so does heavy metal, but for a different reason. Some of this is due to ignorance of the subject matter (not many metal musicians are also amateur or professional historians or academics, though some are) but most of it is intentional in its malignancy.


The motivator for, say, Marduk writing music about the Second World War is not a healthy interest in understanding world history and spreading salient critique so as to hopefully avoid such atrocity again. The motivator is hateful glee. They get off on imagining gas chambers and panzer tanks crushing humans under their threads. Marduk (or any such other band) will try to hide behind false pretenses and tell you that one cannot judge them for their hateful glee without judging metal on the whole for dealing with dark subject matter but you shouldn't buy it. Death, nihilism, violence and destruction are indeed core themes of metal music.

But is hatred one of them?


To answer that we must look at Romanticism closely. The core of a Romantic understanding of the world is the imagination. Not logic or reason or science, but mad, daring and dark imagination. Through a history of human terror and atrocity that would bend and warp any mind that truly aims to comprehend it, its revolt is existentially life-affirming: it occurs and recurs periodically when our rational tools of discourse and science fail to paint the whole picture. Romanticism is not a prison of thought, it is not meant to replace reason and science and all our analytical tools, it is instead a deeper memory of further reaches of cognizance, ancient and from-the-future, all at once. Terror and awe and the impossibly profound qualia of experience that we simply cannot talk about and pin down on a map but must instead express in sideways means and lust and long for. This sideways, kerning quality of myth and fantasy describes heavy metal as well.


Anyone can slip in a romantic mindset even if they don't live there all the time. Try it. Look outside your window and hopefully there will be a tree. Look at that tree not as a codified species of natural organism as described by the science you either know or half-know. Look at it instead as a fissure of alien consciousness, some eldritch impossibility that lives eternally in its connection to its brothers, deep, under the ground. Think of where its roots reach, unknown and unsearchable to us on the surface. Imagine what tree-being is like, how it must differ from our human temporal existence. Did you know there's still trees around from the last Ice Age, 9,000 years ago? That puts some perspective to our empires as they come and go, doesn't it? Strain your imagination to the point where your body feels a thing. Not your mind, but instead somewhere in your heart, that is the ache of that old stone, Romance.


Can you feel, further in your heart, that ambiguous twilight, in which there can exist All Forms? Can you connect to your anger that isn't borne of the evil of this material world at large but just of the trauma of sentience? Can you spook your own self out by imagining meeting a withered old woman in a dark forest? What is she doing out here? Can you push yourself to imagine a world where the sun will no longer rise and all communication is done in hushed song under the light of the moon?


And what of hate? Of course we must acknowledge it. It is there. We all hate. But do we really hate the Other? Social sciences say that we do, we absolutely do. But, remain in that Romantic mindset, instead. Be truthful and virtuous: For the Romantic, is there really any lasting hate for other humans, as caste and religion and historical origin? There is certainly hate for the self. And there is hatred for God. And other people disappoint, sure, but it's only in their projections of the self and God that we hate them. Can you really find it in you to hate other humans for who they are, as if they're all the same? What a failure of imagination is it to take other humans, beings of pure imagination as well, in Romantic terms, and say 'they are all the same'. Is this failure a solution, and to what? How will it assuage the terror of sentience? how will it help? Can you feel how, in the romantic context, the solution of 'oh, yes, we are beings of pure imagination but we are white and they have brown skin so they're not beings of pure imagination' is purely bankrupt exactly in terms of imagination first?


Yet, obviously there's a lot of deeply hateful and bigoted romantic art (not just metal). It would take the further tide of history to shape that from just an undercurrent to a full force. As Romanticism is a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it is in the interconnection with national identity through an invented mythical past that we finally find the key for this sort of bigoted hatred.


The Romantic longs for some long-lost time of purity and natural beauty, before the modern world became so corrupt and decrepit. From invention of that long-lost antique perfection to the insistence that it was a real, historical era, and one to which we should return to we can finally come to a useful conclusion: This pretense that an invented past that's better than the modern world was a historical reality is a tragic failure of imagination and the racial detritus that necessarily follows such a failure is inherent. If you imagine a glorious past where white men can think and feel on a higher plane than whichever invented other you hate, then you have trapped yourself in an imaginative dead end.

Romanticism is all about imagination being the utmost human quality. And by historicizing our imaginative inventions of a 'better past', by crystallizing our nostalgia into hatred, we fail Romance, and we fail ourselves.


This is the answer to this question and it has nothing to do with self-censorship and the right-wing rhetorical invention of 'political correctness'. If you listen to heavy metal that is filled with hate (and national pride is certainly the other side of a hateful coin) then you are listening to Romantic music that has failed itself and it has failed you as well. Your imagination stands to gain nothing from regurgitation of white nationalist bullet-points, again and again and again. From all the things the we can imagine, what a disgusting state of affairs is it that we're imagining what our racist grandpa out in the country thought was true.


I don't posit that it just is a nice thing to do to avoid easy hatred and easy targets and invented national histories in our metal music. I posit that it is a very heavy metal thing to do to be distrustful of any one failure of imagination. 

I don't care if you're nice. I want you to take responsibility.


The further question is, hold on, Helm, are you calling all that old pre-World Wars romantic art a failure as well? Because there's a loada hatred in there, too!

Yes, but then the World Wars did happen. And we saw what hatred made manifest. And we can never again be blind to what we already know to be true. That wouldn't be very heavy metal of us, would it? What does it say for a human that acknowledges the power of the imagination, and in 2017 turns theirs to imagining more ovens and more millions dead? This is exactly the reason why white nationalists behave in such an inconsistent way on the subject of Holocaust denial: Some neo-nazis say it happened and are gleeful about it, others say it didn't at all but it should have and yet more say that it did but the actual death count is blown out of proportion, but that doesn't mean they don't condone it. They say that even if it's true that millions of Jews were exterminated systematically, then they deserved it. But it wasn't really that bad. But they would deserve it, if it were. Perhaps in the future . . .
That's the trick to get around a very real historical and ideological problem for the furthering of their neo-nazi cause. They see the Holocaust at once as a crowning achievement of the Third Reich, but they also wish to downplay the number of dead so as to not shoulder the actual burden of what the Holocaust signifies: the death knell of their bankrupt ideology. They're putting it as an exciting eventuality of the future that perhaps then, when the Final Solution 2.0 is actually implemented, then we can see what this world truly would be like without the demonic Other we are predestined to hate. And as such, until 2.0 comes into effect, their imagination hasn't yet failed.

But it has. And we must remember.


Q. So if metal music that's hateful is historicizing an invented past, where did it pick up this propensity and who brought it to metal? Furthermore, what is the actual cultural source of this mode of thinking in the grander sense and how does it connect to modern neo-nazism?


Join me next time when we inevitably come to connect a certain kind of 80s post-punk/industrial fascination with nazi exploitation to the types of Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler and all that to Varg Vikernes and ultimately the birth of the internet, anus.com and other such failures of imagination.