Poetry of Subculture

Deathrow - Deception Ignored

2012-02-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

Noise Records, 1988

Milo: Vocals, Bass
Sven Flügge: Guitars
Uwe Osterlehner: Guitars
Markus Hahn: Drums

Deathrow were a German thrash metal band. Their first couple of records are exactly what those interested in thrash minutia expect from German thrash metal. While the Bay Area scene created the genre through a merging of the melodic sensibilities of the British New Wave of the early '80s with the urgency and severity of hardcore punk, German initiators seemed much more obsessed with the latter half of the equation: Speed, raging savagery, an emphasis on non-sense in song structure an atmosphere of pervading dread. From that common well (sometimes referred to as 'speed metal') there came not only Sodom and Kreator, but bands that morphed quickly to different shapes, like Running Wild and Blind Guardian. The problem with calling it speed metal is not so much that it's outmoded (so are 'atmospheric metal' and 'techno-thrash' and I endorse both) but that not a lot of people seem to agree what a speed metal record is. That's never good for a definition in aesthetics. They all agree it has to be fast, but hell, half of metal music is played super fast. I have this curious feeling that what they mean is that speed metal is metal that is *only* fast and not much else of interest or important is happening in there. Anyway, for historical reasons it's useful to remember that once, there was such a thing as speed metal even if nobody exactly agreed where the lines were drawn between it and power metal and thrash metal. If you're into history. You big nerd.

But for now let's just call that German stuff thrash. Sloppy, raging evil thrash.

Although Sodom and Kreator were sloppy (Destruction, the most American sounding of their original German thrash bands, not so much), with each record they became more strict in playing and showy in technique. This is interesting because the other rival school for savage thrash metal - that of South America - really did not follow the same path, they're still drenched in reverberated chaos over there, in fact compared to a few of the Blasphemy clones in Brazil, their grandfathers in Sarcophago were veritable virtuosos just by keeping in tempo.

I theorize that the reason German savage thrash became more and more reigned in and technical with each release by the seminal bands is that the German culture is one that rewards a sense of structure and cohesion (even in atrocity), and it discourages blatant displays of emotion in art that cannot be backed up by some aesthetic achievement.

So Deathrow on their first couple of records play really fast, relatively tight but really forgettable German thrash metal. Then they grow up. There are others who enjoy juvenile raging thrash more that consider that early material to be masterful and their latter two records (the better of which we are discussing here) to be a pose and false. I understand that point of view and agree on both counts. In fact, the band also agrees to an extent. It is both a pose and false of Deathrow to switch to techno-thrash after two Sodomite records. They never grew up at all! They're just teeeenagerrssss

So as far as I know what happened was, a new guitarist, Uwe Osterlehner, joined the band and basically took over by virtue of compositional and playing prowess. Perhaps the band trusted him because techno-thrash was on its brief heyday by 1988, what with Metallica putting out their Watchtower-inspired "And Justice for All..." a year earlier and introducing many a headbanger to rhythm syncopated, an unresolved melody and a sixtyfourth. Osterlehner's songs were more technical than Metallica's effort, the rest of the band struggled to keep up. The riffs are very strictly played, alternating between the muted-chord chug of German thrash and flowing legato melodies that come from somewhere left-field. There are a lot of interesting harmonizations offered by the guitar duo, while the rhythm section barely keeps up with the density. At their best, Deathrow sound almost symphonic. And then they return to thrash monophonic and the switch is very affecting.

The original members of the band, in interviews have explained that the situation was sour and that they prefer the earlier thrash-thrash material to the modernist convolution of "Deception Ignored" and (to a lesser extent) its follow-up, "Life Beyond". But - and I know this is perverse - I view Deathrow as a vehicle for Osterlehner first. I have no emotional ties to their earlier thrash (though I had bought their sophomore 'Raging Steel' on vinyl at the time and remember having a good time with it) and perhaps more importantly, that inner strife of the band at the time actually augments the sterility and austere feeling "Deception Ignored". The band can whine all they want that an externality pressed them to create a masterpiece, the music itself is forever.

Techno-thrash is very interesting because its concern is the human condition, much like with any modernist art. However actual modernists were almost always attached to a political wave, they recognized allies in the lower classes and expected well, they expected a revolution. They believed their art was a herald to it, in fact. Some urged for smaller revolutions than others, but they all were forward-looking people. Heavy Metal music dealing with modernist themes has a blatant difference at its core in that very rarely does it sincerely profess that the solution to any problem is found in the 'We'. Instead bands such as Deathrow or Sieges Even or Megace, discuss the hopelessness of the 'I', trapped in a world of modern machination. In essence, modernist Heavy Metal like techno-thrash and progressive metal is not really primarily political.

Heavy Metal bands by 1988 were not the domain of the working class. The disaffected youth that played thrash metal were middle-class and their issues are of the middle class. The disaffected youth that played techno-thrash probably went to University too. It's very clear in the lyric found herein what the level of discourse is. Let's look at the lyric of the best song here, Machinery:

I am walking through the streets
Of my old town
Looking back on the days
Of my youth
There are factories in the fields
Where we used to play
Clouds of smoke hang in the sky
And block out the sun

God bless this house, the car and the TV
Show us our idols in magazines
They build us prisons without any walls
Money rules we can't resist

Snakes of commercial TV
Decoy with their apples
False priests spit out their lies
Because God sells
If we don't pull ourselves
Out of this mud
Our children will have to pay
For our sins

We're just wheels in a great machinery

Encircled and trapped by ourselves
We're enslaved to mass productions
Self-deception from a better life
Our behavior brings corruption
We buy a pig in a poke
And we drown ourselves in the garbage

Supermarkets sell
Us their shit
We can't free ourselves
From this world of abuse

For someone to have a car and a tv and to be enraptured by money, they are being seduced by the siren song of Capitalism, they're moving upwards and outwards from their sense of self. It doesn't matter that they work in a factory or not, they do not have class identity as workers. And that's what captures my interest. The concern expressed above is one I feel completely. And I feel alone for it. I do not feel like joining the communist party. I do not feel like telling other people they should change their lives. I do not expect a revolution. I want the despair expressed, this is enough for me. That loneliness, that existential singularity is how modernist Metal is still part of the great romance of Heavy Metal itself. A revolution is an inner happening, the outside world will forever be hostile and its purpose will be to dehumanize you. That struggle of the intelligent but disconnected youth is what drives techno-thrash and also what makes this particular offering convincing. The words themselves betray a lack of political knowledge, and the pose is exposed easily if this is compared to say, a real socio-political hardcore punk record's lyric. No Marx has been read. But what is true in the core of this is what is alluring: intelligence and loneliness breed paranoia. When the most important thing you have to tell to the outside world is 'I don't trust you'. When the strength you have is yours essentially because it is not shared with others. I believe this weakness turned to strength, it is an important part of Heavy Metal. This is why whereas most of thrash is forgettable, the few techno-thrash gems I present should not be. Deathrow here, actually a little bit ahead of the curve, have created one of the best offerings in the genre and almost nobody knows of them, they hardly seem to know themselves. As apt as it is ironic.

one thirty and a twelve

2012-01-29T18:37:00.000-08:00

Cold and tired. In some pain. Work tomorrow, uncertain of the further future. Vague entities soon to call their in their debts. Resolute choices that lead to loneliness or marginalization. Makes for a certain mindset, might as well make something of it, however brief.

So, yes. Heavy Metal.

Since starting this blog, I have only thought about this art more, not less. I feel no closer to the identity of the allure. Oh, I think dialog has been produced. Words of varying function, certainly. But the core of it. Too deep. I'm pointing my finger in the darkness and it's getting colder.

I re-read some of the older texts on this website. I expected to feel embarrassment at how half-formed they'd be but to my surprise they stand, I'm proud of their clarity. I'm also entertained, privately, by how baffling it is for some readers to call anything written in this website clear, but so it is to me. What is bad is that my self from a year or so ago makes a convincing case for my current self. I must consider my next moves carefully. I have attempted to tackle the music by dissecting morphology, marrying the results to aesthetic theories, and from there to the inverse, turning abstract impressions into power through well, malice towards reality, really. The way is as dim as ever. It isn't a matter of being a better writer, about that I am certain. It is - I fear - a matter of having a better mind, or less distractions, less directions to be pulled towards/hoops through. Perhaps I need to be older.

I hope that the dialog - and ramblings, sure - produced here will contribute in some small way to when other people with similar interests attempt to explain them to themselves. I wonder if they'll ever find their way here or not. I found myself in many strange places on the internet, for one.

I'll keep writing I think. But first I have to rest.

Post Surgery

2012-01-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

Post-rock has a few definitions. Most people consider the sound definition of 'instrumental songs played by a rock band that slowly build up to a crescendo and then do it all over again'. This is a valid definition, after all, from a point and onwards that's what most post rock bands sounded like. I see your Mono and trade you my Explosions in the Sky, zero sum.

However earlier on, post-rock seemed to be an attempt to subvert and/or invert the tropes of the rock genre while using its own means. Hence, since rock and roll is generally considered a physical sort of music, we'll write songs that are terse and lacking in groove. If rock and roll depends on charismatic frontmen, we'll have none of that. If rock and roll depends on verse/chorus/verse structure, we'll just write long suites.

Then we have post-metal. It certainly also subverts similar rock cliches, but in a very curious way, not too many metal tropes. Sure, rock music has tame structures, but there's very adventurous metal music (structurally) and there's been such for a while now. Whereas the adventurous rock music (the more outre types of progressive rock) is comparatively outside its mainstream, in metal terms, Metallica and Iron Maiden with their 12 minute songs are right there in the middle. So, for a post-metal band to write a long suite doesn't subvert anything in metal terms. Or say, repetition. The original second wave black metal bands (completely and totally the opposite of 'post-metal' anything) were droning on the same riff ten years before Pelican.

What are the metal music tropes post-metal could really subvert? There's guitar solos, and indeed most post-metal bands do not have too many of those. But still, guitar solos are not the pure domain of metal music. There's double-bass drumming and constant palm-muting, really. That's pretty much it. Harsh vocals are also very punk-related. Curiously, post-metal bands do not shy away from double-bass, muted chords or people yelling at all. There's melodic (and usually high pitched) singing, and indeed post-metal bands do not attempt anything like that most of the time. If there's a pattern in post-metal choices, it's hard to detect.

But I do submit that there is a pattern, and it's a very schizophrenic one.

1. Post-metal bands understand - and communicate - with various types of rock music much more than they do with metal music.

This has to do a lot with how metal music was coming out of an aesthetic depression so to speak circa the end of the '90s so nobody knew exactly what metal music was (outside of black metal which was startlingly clear to identify). Post-metal bands then are in a dialogue instead with the same old common rock and roll tropes, and some of the time punk rock tropes in particular. A heavy metal guise is a tool utilized, it's not the point. Consider arty punks that perhaps like a couple of metal bands -let's say Celtic Frost and Metallica- and they're subverting rock and punk tropes by playing with a few metal sonic identifiers like double bass and palm muting. In effect this means post-metal most of the time is post-punk or post-hardcore in most of all, post-indie. This is probably infuriating to real punks that consider their post-punk to be a historically different thing, but if they could be open-minded for a minute here...

2. Post-metal bands are not subverting metal tropes as much as they're incapable of achieving them in the first place.

To play a complicated and considered guitar solo takes a certain degree of capacity that the metal musician has to hone for a few decades. Heck, to have two guitarists playing interesting harmonies without it all coming out like mud takes a certain precision too. So, no soloist? No solos. No guitar bros for life? Single guitar. No audible bass tone? No bass. A disturbing aura of an autopsy permiates. Most post-metal bands, for all their rhythmic or compositional graces, do not seem to employ any talented lead players. There is no trope to subvert when one is incapable of scrutinizing the trope first-hand. Likewise with a talented lead singer that's willing to span a range. Not too many of those around, and those that do exist would be more interested in actually playing to the trope than to subvert it (for good or worse).

This is revealing for post-metal, especially why long-time metal music listeners feel ill at ease with it. Post-metal is the outsiders looking inside metal music for incidental reasons, it's not forward thinking metal music made by passionate metalheads trying to come up with something new by testing limits.

A case could be made that whatever actual post-metal experimentation occurred, it happened in the early '90s with the short rise of progressive metal instead.

Isn't it startling how little time post-metal listeners have for progressive metal and its meandering solos, overdramatic singers and complicated song structures? It's because these post-metal listeners aren't actually interested in metal music, they're interested in the warped reflection of other rock types on the metal mirror. This also explains why although most real metal listeners were captivated for a spell by the types of Pelican or Isis, ten years down the line do not listen to that music much if at all. It's not just because they're getting older and more conservative, it's because it's exhausting to confuse the outsider perspective for the inner one. It leads to alienation from one's own core ethos.

Coroner

2011-12-24T04:08:00.000-08:00

Let's try to do this with small words only.

Small words are lonely. The more they're made from the simplest parts, the more they're surrounded by words made up by sounds similar to them, the more lonely they get because they are lost in a semiotic sea. A word like "extravagance" shines a charismatic light amidst the puny syllables that surround it.

Coroner were a Swiss trio that came about in the mid '80s. They started out playing thrash, similar to German thrashers but perhaps with more fluid guitar bits here and there. With each record they mixed up their thrash until it sounded little like thrash at all. They followed this road to its end in the span of ten years. For a techno-thrash band, they put out a lot of records and for the purposes of this text we're going to deal more with the tra-je-cto-ry than any one record itself.

You see, Coroner have gotten back together. They've been playing around Europe and they've been clear that that's it, there won't be a new Coroner record. I saw them live in downtown Athens a week ago and a lot of big thoughts in big words I've had about them, a lot of in-tu-i-ti-ons have been jolted into place by that show, and their meaning is surprisingly simple.

The reason Coroner do not want to put out a new record is because of said career arch; They're finished and they know it. They did what they set out to do. It's not often a Heavy Metal band starts out with anything but their masterpiece. Coroner started out promising and increased expectations until their end, so it's a good idea for us to examine what it is exactly they wanted to achieve. All that I've got to say about Coroner can be gleaned in my recount of the live show.

Coroner do not move about a lot on stage. The light choices are a cold blue, a bright green and some times, an orange. The blue suits them best, though the orange is good for when they step outside of their pa-ra-di-gm. It is very telling that they brought along a keyboard player to recreate exactly the effects they put in their latter-era music. Coroner aren't half-assing their reunion shows. They want to show exactly how their music was meant to be experienced. This means Coroner are still very proud about their material. They aren't a sloppy middle-age Candlemass doing pub-rock renditions of once mighty Epic Doom Metal hymns. They're playing everything as well as they ever could. This is important.

Coroner's selection from their records is also telling. They played only two standard thrash numbers. "Masked Jackal" was part of the set, and their early opus "Reborn Through Hate" was part of the encore. These choices are apt, because not only are these two songs some of the best thrash metal ever recorded (especially the first track), they're also the only necessary demonstrations of the thrashy side of early Coroner, much to the chagrin perhaps of younger listeners in the crowd, their blood boiling in their revivalist tube jeans and cut off denim jackets. Coroner are very aware of which parts of their work are worth showcasing, and to what extent. Pride again, but also, a desire to convey a progression and an end.

Thrash bits aside, the mood of the rest of the material we saw was consistently bi-polar. This is where I describe what Coroner sound like, in small words. Heavy Metal - and especially thrash metal - has these riffs, see? Riffs are melodic phrases that are played over and over. Riffs are catchy and fun. People like riffs, and they really love thrash riffs because they're very dense in rhythm, they make the body move. By the time Coroner got to thrash, everyone was in competition about who can make the busiest riff. Coroner played this game too, early on, and their method of making riffs busy was to put between chords these beautiful neo-classical scale runs, arpeggios and other flashy guitar pyro. This was a novel idea for a thrash band, and Coroner could have tried to ride it for a longer time. But instead, by the third record, Coroner got to chopping these riffs up into little pieces. The whole of the mother riff is the same complicated, scale-heavy riff they always did. But they no longer play the whole thing in sequence. They break it up to little pieces and instead play the little pieces to death, in a circle. A, B, C, A, B, C, D, A, B, C, A, B, C. Coroner are really tiresome to listen to.

The bi-polarity comes from the solo sections in their music. While the chopped up half-thrash (and this is an important term, historically) riffs are very punishing to the senses to the point of, let's say, a boredom that is close to a trance (like some electronic music), the solo and melody breaks are very fluid and beautiful, full of color and a desire for life. Then it's back to the grind.

This is the style Coroner perfected from record three to five. The voice on top is raspy and rhythmical as well. The bass guitar is usually in lockstep groove with the guitar. The drumming started out typically thrashy, tom roll heavy and busy and by the end of their trajectory, it had become a very very simple kick - snare - crash stomp. The simplest drums you can imagine behind these chopped up riffs. Whereas a band like Pantera grooved with their half-thrash to convey exactly a 'Walk', a macho stomp, muscles taught, beer belly proudly jiggling, confused sexuality and bravado, Coroner groove in reverse, like an external machine, a body on automatic, neverending process. What is it processing? What is driving this machine, and to where? Internal conflicts.

So this is what Coroner sounds like. But what do they feel like? What did they feel like live?

There was a point of synaesthesia which prompted thoughts of this article (and more about how the article is constructed) that is worth conveying. Wait. Smaller words. There was one moment in the show where lights, sound, people around me and my own sense of my body came together and made me think. And I wanted to tell you what I thought. Yes, yes.

Coroner prefaced "Semtex Revolution" with their awkward English "this is a song about feeling paranoid, about terrorists, about looking at the word strangely". Blue lights washed over the stage and people started doing their half-thrash dances (which is really something to enjoy, if you ever find yourself in a techno-thrash concert. The riff meters don't line up, spines are strained!) and words were said over music and it hit me then: this is remarkably lonely. The music is very lonely. People are having some strange type of fun below and they're all together in this room, but in reality what this music is communicating is solitude. Everyone's on their own. We might enjoy the same thing right now, but not all in the same way. This is not a Manowar concert, there are no metal brothers in arms here. This is more modern, actually. Even the people on stage are not playing as one. They're playing the same thing, in lockstep, actually, but they're not becoming one.

Coroner had gone to great lengths to have a very clear live sound. Four people on stage and you could hear exactly what every one was playing. This is important (and rare, oh boy is it rare). It isn't because they play as a unit so much as it is because everyone is playing alone. The lyrics of Coroner songs are also telling.

Let's look at Internal Conflicts, sans the usual italics. These lyrics do not need italics:

"I will crush my skull when I feel like doing it
I will break my bones when I feel like doing it
I will cut my veins when I feel like doing it
I will shred my skin when I feel like doing it

Self destruct

I will smash my teeth when I feel like doing it
I will slash my face when I feel like doing it

Self destruct

But I never will touch you"

People were singing along and headbanging below to this, it was surreal. I was singing along and headbanging to this, seems so strange now. But I was completely alone. I wasn't thinking about whomever it was that drummer and aesthetic leader of the band, Marquis Marky, would never touch. I was thinking of those I will never touch. Diagnosis: Modernity. Solution: Self destruct. Status: Body Destroyed, Brain Intact. Process: Still Thinking.

Then and there, the a-e-sthe-tic choices of Coroner finally clicked for me. Of course the riffs are chopped up and repeated to the point of exhaustion/ecstasy. Have you seen a lonely person move around in their room? A time-lapse of loneliness, perhaps? Of course the lyrics are mantric chants where most of the words are simple and interchangeable. Have you seen an autistic child move back and forth? Of course the solo sections jump out with lust and desire, because in spite of themselves, the autopsy is inconclusive. The corpse still longs to live. Hence, Coroner reunited and toured the world, twenty years late from a ten year career to tell this story again. And why? It's because the follies of modernity have not been assuaged. They never will be. Coroner (the entity, the spectral wisdom behind Heavy Metal), face unknowable, masked with duct-tape and gliding backward towards you in a concrete parking lot, manifested in that live show. There was no dark wisdom passed, there was no ritual blood spilled, there was curiously nothing at all to mark its passing, but at that moment where light and crowd and lyric and rhythm collided, I felt like the teenager Helm again, alienated from a world I thought I understood too well and which misunderstood me totally. I felt as if looking outside a window to a world without a future. I felt as if an atomic bomb might fall and devastate Europe because of a geopolitical sequence inconsequential...

There I go again with the big words.

I wear the cat skin gloves

2011-10-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

Dark sorcery against death eternal. I shall not rot in the sun, yet my invert method will never be communicated. I stand in solitude because to co-exist requires alligiance to one side and hate for the another. I do not want to spend myself in hatred of anything, nor do I want to love. I would have it so that the Other did not exist, were not a concern. Darkness swells in and makes the bravest fires suppress into tiny points of light swimming in a mute ocean. Surely if other travellers exist, their faces cannot be seen anyway, just shapes and vague, spectral movement. What use are reminders of distance anyway? Just as well, I know it inside my heart that I am above them, I have no desire to present an argument for it, thus it is self-evident. All that is true is self-evident in solitude.

Heavy Metal starts and ends with an ambiguous scream, every listener interprets it in the range from triumph to anguish according to their idiom. It does not matter what the interpretation is as long as the source of it is clear. Many times the sentiment in Heavy Metal lyric has been expressed "if you don't feel it, you won't understand". A dividing line has been drawn, perhaps the line, on the trajectory of the globe's tall curve becomes a circle, and inside the circle stand some men and the occassional brave woman. These individuals, in an uneasy alliance, inspect each other and wait. In certainty they know that one of them will soon step over the line and be ostracized for it. At the end only the self remains in the circle, but the circle is not small, it spans the whole of creation. No one else in sight. There's power there. I'm sure you know what else is there. The more I contemplate the killing art of romance the more I realize that in lieu of the high toll that the mistress calls for (go on, guess what she wants from you) the listener attempts to assuage her with the more bearable currency of solitude. "Already dead, see? Alive forever!". For the sorcerer, exhaustion is ecstasy.

Trapped alone in an empty world, taken by the love of death, only esteemed faculty being that of the imagination, it turns to dreams of immortality. What a combination.

Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol

2011-10-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about Greek metalheads. Greek metalheads are weird but they don't remember. They listen to weird metal and they think it's normal. I'm a Greek metalhead that listens to weird music and tries, once in a while, to remember that its weird. My fascination is not lessened by this realization, if anything it is augmented. I like weird. I do not feel I am like other human beings. Do you? I don't think anyone feels as if they're normal, yet we pretend. There is usefulness in pretending you're normal, socially.

What is normalcy? I suspect it has to do with opinion bias. Let's say you have this tiny opinion, a small thing, no, not an opinion, more an intuition. Let's say your intuition is that Men Are Strong and Women Are Emotional. You're not exactly certain where this intuitive thought comes from. You express it all shy like at first and see how your reality around you deals with it. Unbeknownst to you, that little intuition was planted there by the same society that now will validate it for you. Yes, yes, good boy. You look up to certain individuals, they may be peers or parents or other figures of control and authority. When someone smarter than you confirms one of your small ideas as correct, when they pat you on the ass and send you on your way to plant the seed, you feel wonderful. You no longer have to think about this little thing anymore, since it's verified as true. File under 'solved'. Perhaps you're here on this blog for this same reason. Well I've got nothing normal for you, I spit on your normalcy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

So, the construct of normality is based on what a society expects of a society. It feeds itself, it perpetuates reality in order to function. That society-image that is constantly enforced is not necessarily connected with real events, only interpretations of events (certainly, men and women exist, certainly men and women are different. That's as far as any tidy epistemological review of the genders can go. The rest is interpretation). What I'm getting at with my second grade sociophilosophy here is that no matter how many people agree on a conception of the 'real world' and of 'what is normal', their shared fantasy remains a fantasy. There's many different groups with different reality-fantasies, they all consider the out groups as wrong and their psychological well-being hinges on the suppression of the Other. War's always in fashion.

But why would people do something so risky as to interpret reality? Can't we all agree to look at the real reality straight in the eye? Wouldn't that make sense?

There is nothing more terrible as unfiltered reality. The razor of Occam will cut you in half. The Nooumenon, if accessed, will destroy our sense of self, our will will dissipate into aether. When we realize everything we know is wrong, everything we believe is unfounded, nothingness takes the place of somethingness. What is worse than death? Oblivion. You haven't died, you never existed. There is no going back when time hasn't even started.

People need to make sense of reality. Reality is non-sense in its core. People therefore wrestle sense out of non-sense, because non-sense annihilates. People need to agree with each other that the sensical frame they're put all this nonsense in exists, much in the "are you seeing what I'm seeing, g-good, this means I'm not dreaming this" reflex. Domestication of wilderness.

Yes normalcy is a fantasy. We all remember this deep inside. The dread of non-sense, of in-humanity, of non-causality, is at the core of the being. A shadow strikes in the absence of light and molds terror into insanity. Don't go that far out in the darkness, now. At best, take a sideways glance into the wound, let's say from morbid fascination, for higher inspiration. That's what we've got art for.

And from all the arts, oh the weirdest of them all is Heavy Metal! (this is false but go with it). Romantic chaos core yet the product of modernist means. It has a classicist conceit but not half the talent of any b-grade classical composer. It has roots in rock n' roll but there's no swing to it. It's an ape trying to become God through imagination. Heavy Metal is trying, like anything else, to establish a reality, a normalcy, but it's just so misshapen, so ill-wrought that any way you look at it you have to notice it: there's a lot of nonsense in Heavy Metal. There is power in those ambiguous spaces, and so often we try to hide them, we're embarrassed for them.

Greek metalheads. My nom de plume on the internet is 'Helm'. It doesn't come from Brocas Helm, but it also comes from Brocas Helm. I was introduced to Brocas Helm by people who consider them, Omen, Manilla Road, Cirith Ungol, Warlord, Manowar to be Gods. I capitalize because I am literal. Have you heard of the weird fascination of European vinyl collectors with fabled US metal? It's a weird thing, but I've come to a small understanding of it over the years.

You see, Greece in the late '80s and early '90s was a country under American cultural influence. American cinema, American comics, American music, American television. We grew up with Rambo, Batman, Robocop, Conan. I remember my childhood fascination with American entertainment vibrantly. My age and grasp of English wouldn't allow me to understand all of the cultural signifiers inherent to these imported arts. I instead would appropriate their strengths and discard their weaknesses and place them in the same mythical mindspace where artifacts of a higher cultural ethos also wandered. Robocop would and could team up with brave Odysseus, on his long voyage to Ithaka. Hercules was both a character in marvel comics and a demi-god of courage and roid rage. I saw no incongruity to this absolutely weird mix of small gods. The only god that never featured was the Christian one, his essence too mystical and complex for my young mind to ever bother fathoming. What do you mean he's one but he's three, and why did one of his three die to save my soul? No thanks. The only aspect of the christian god my child mind could roll with was that he existed before time. My small Greek child mind saw time as eternal, no beginning, no past, no end. As far as little Helm was concerned, Robocop has existed before time too. I didn't like the part about how God created time though, I though that's bull. Human beings created time, they were the ones telling me I will grow from a child to a man and from a man into a corpse.

In the same way, the early adopters of Heavy Metal music here in Greece, after the initial culture shock of the British innovators, seeked US steel as if it was of inherent higher quality by virtue of it being from the US. It didn't hurt that the US did create amazing metal and in great quantities. In their broken-English understanding they stripped away irony from almost trash-culture influenced US metal vinyl, and with irony together something else shed away: ephemerality. In the strange universe where Conan arm-wrestles Thesseus, these weird little records, product of America's 5 year long fascination-cum-appropriation of the 'next new thing' (Heavy Metal) became much more than they appeared. The US moved on, but Heavy Metal in Greece stood still. It became ancient, timeless and the records they became masterpieces of pathos.

I'm not joking. Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol are a big deal here for (a lot of) metalheads over 25. Perhaps for the American reader this sounds weird, and that's because it is. However inside Greek cult-and-true metal circles, it's not weird, it is normal. It has become an enforced fantastic-reality, and to be True of Steel and Spirit, you have to swear by Robocop and Apollo both that you find it absolutely normal as well.

I'm not going to deny what I am. I've listened to Cirith Ungol and Brocas Helm for so long they sound normal to me too. I can swear the Oath too, I can converse with my similars. But it's very useful to step outside of one's mindspace once in a while and appreciate how weird all of this is, because there's a power that's often forgotten there. This is what this article is about.

Still on board? Great. So, what's the fuss, why search for strangeness in Brocas Helm? Well, because if Brocas Helm are normal, and if Cirith Ungol are normal, and if Warlord are normal, and if Manowar are normal, that means all these things are the same, and must be appreciated in the same way. This is problematic, and it is how the myth of 'US metal' came to be. These bands couldn't be any more different from each other and nobody should be expected to like Warlord like they like Manowar. The (not so) secret brotherhood of True Metal hinges on the idea that this all makes sense, a linear, masculine sort of sense, brought by Apollo with his thunder perfect mind. But instead these bands are really weird. Queer, one could say. It's worthwhile looking at them from this vantage.

Brocas Helm's first record, 'Into Battle' is my preference, but for the purposes of this text, we shall investigate their second offering, 'Black Death'. A nice anecdote I have to share that makes my case is that a close friend of mine who comes from a black metal background decided to give Brocas Helm a listen at some point. He doesn't have an early start with obscure US steel so he only had second-hand impressions to go with. He listened to the record and told me that found it very interesting how not-at-all-like-US-metal the record sounded. Listening to US metal fans praise Brocas Helm to the heavens, he expected really muscular, tight and complex power metal, but instead he found strange, reverberated psych rock and stop-starty rock and roll and drug folk and a bongo-drum freakout topped by a thrash maelstorm and all sorts of weirdness. When he told me this I put the record on (well, I double clicked on some mp3s) and tried to listen with his ears and he's right. This music is misrepresented. I don't know exactly why yet, but it's a shame it is.

The production makes everything swim in uncertainty what with it's endless reverb waves. Guitar phrases come and go, letting the bass underpin most of the melodic movement in the song. Playful rock and roll licks are elevated into something altogether individual by unorthodox twin-lead harmonies. Songs are short and the energy is fierce. The vocalist sounds like he comes from a bar rock band. There's choruses of twisted chanting midget vocals, reverse-taped keyboard leads, there's medieval-sounding flutes and there's extensive neoclassical solo bass. Lyrics are always short phrases that make less sense the more I read them, their tales of fantasy much less to do with Tolkien and much more with the pulpy writing of... well, the usual suspects. There's a song to give courage to new capitalists joining the fold after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And there's humour. Is this US metal? How the hell did this become integrated into any normalcy, how did liking Brocas Helm become a perquisite for belonging in any masculine subculture?

Hell's Whip is one of my favorite tracks from Brocas Helm. Let's take it as an example and discuss its morphology.

0:00 - 0:12 Intro with a staccato medieval-sounding bass+guitar phrase with cymbal embellishments. This choppy sort of riff characterizes Brocas Helm. It sounds like Greek traditional island music if you ask me.

0:13 - 0:44 Sound effect of thunder. Sound and fury! The verse riff below is a more robust variation of the intro, still staccato and march-like (no groove to speak of) with palm mutes and then singer contradicts the whole thing by hitting a faltering falsetto note at the end of the verse, made even better by the endless reverb wash. Studs and leather! Hell's whip flashing! Coming down on meeeeee heheh

0:44 - 1:15 Open chords underpin the vocal melody here, a common rock trope to strip down the riff to let the singer be, but of course the drummer chooses this spot to put all his fancy fills in. Oh and then the bass guitar pops through the mix completely. It's like the band refuses to commit to a single mood and stick with it all together, there's a discussion between the members as the song goes on. They make the less dense harmonically passage sound the busiest. When you're not paying attention, almost all Brocas Helm songs are achieving the same mood, all the time. When you're paying attention, Brocas Helm songs are achieving many different moods in different combination at all times.

1:15 - 1:32 Of course everything comes to a dead stop and we get the reprise of the intro. Usually after a chorus a metal band will play their awesome power riff to drive the hook deeper, but this is Brocas Helm's idea of an awesome riff. This staccato minstrel melody, you can almost see the wee men dancing around the fire to it.

1:32 - 2:00 ABCABC, there's also a sound effect of what sounds something like howling wind but could also be a jet engine in the background.

2:00 - 2:15 repeat of intro, with a very distant and cavernous guitar harmony somewhere in there, sounds like an afterthought in the mixing stage.

2:15 - 3:41 The band finally lets loose completely outside the ABCABC structure suggested above. Sound effects of breaking class (?) and a barbaric clash of double bended leads and double bass until we enter the solo proper. Of course the solo is underpinned by an amazing riff that other bands would use as the main hook. Has there ever been so many sound effects in a Heavy Metal song?

3:41 - Out of nowhere and with no flow at all we are presented with a final reprise of the intro theme and the song ends. This music is weird as well with the standards of Heavy Metal bands. I love it, and I'm certain those others that love it do so in earnest, but let's remind ourselves how outside even Iron Maiden's concept of song construction (which is weird in itself) even one of the simplest Brocas Helm songs is. If we like this, we like weird music. If we like weird music, let's be sympathetic towards weird human beings. Let's not make a fantasy-normality out of weirdness, let's embrace it. I posit that if there's any lover of strange Heavy Metal like Brocas Helm that also has a problem with minorities of any type, of non-privileged out groups, they need to listen to their music closer.

The rest of 'Black Death' is wonderful and varied (if you're paying attention). In some songs you can barely hear the vocals. In others the lead guitar is obviously and intentionally completely out of harmony. There's a song in there that sounds like everything Venom ever wanted to achieve but better (see if you can guess by the name which it is). There's a high-energy anthem that sounds so anachronistic for *any* Heavy Metal era it surely must have existed outside of time as if the notation for it was found carved on some monolith. There's sword-unsheathing sound effects that are so reverberated that they sound more like octave-shifted toilet flushes. Towards the end you'll start thinking the sound design of this album is perfect and you wouldn't have it any other way, don't worry, that's weird, but it's okay.

And Cirith Ungol. Ooh, Tolkien name, M. Whelan cover of the Albino sorcerer-king, surely this will be more normal sounding proud and powerful US metal, right?

Well, the rhythm guitar sounds like a hoover running at half speed, the bass guitar has a round wet tone that's top in the mix. The drummer's sense of meter is not exactly terrible, but let's instead say that if the drummer went in to record these songs to a click track without accompaniment, this would be a drastically different sounding record. And the singer, oh, the singer. Double-tracked troll screeches (usually in pitch though!) that could not have existed in any other rock n' roll subgenre but in Heavy Metal.

Cirith Ungol are more often talked about as an acquired taste than Brocas Helm, but I do not see the difference. Cirith Ungol play extensive '70s-esque epic compositions, where Brocas Helm alternate between stilted minstrel melodies and storm-and-fury two-minute proto-thrash (though thrash was over by '88 when 'Black Death' was released). Cirith Ungol attempt a famous J.S.Bach composition, Brocas Helm put neoclassical bass runs under rock and roll riffs. Cirith Ungol write about the death of the sun, Brocas Helm throw glasses at the wall for Hell's Whip. Where's the difference? They're both completely unorthodox, and they sound nothing alike.

Cirith Ungol's second record discussed here, named 'King of the Dead' is truly a gem of weird metal. By the time this record had come out, Metallica were setting the bar with 'Master of Puppets'. Ungol's offering could have come out in 1974 instead, though had it come out then people would have exploded. The songs are long and the changes meticulous, there's almost constant guitar harmony and the solos are harmonized even further on top. It sounds like a chamber music quartet of hoovers, playing either carefully planned and composed minor thirds or wild improvised solos in parallel. Some of the songs in here are as perfect as any Heavy Metal I've ever heard. 'Cirith Ungol', 'King of the Dead', 'Master of the Pit'. I wouldn't change a single note here. The tone is uniformly dark and apocalyptic and unlike Brocas Helm, there is no humor at all here. I think in their fantasies, Cirith Ungol were creating a classicist masterpiece here, though the end result owes more to the combination of disparate influences they exhibit than any one overarching tendency.

My suggestion is that you listen to these records. If you've never listened to them before, I envy you. Try to not hold them to preconceptions of what '80s metal should sound like and you will find your definitions enriched by their inspiration. Don't let anyone tell you that their truths are self-evident. They're not, you have to work for it, you have to do your part for their mess to cohere aesthetically. Especially in an age where the 'old school metal revival' seems to mean 'sounding like Iron Maiden', it's worth to keep in mind just how weird metal could get even in the '80s.

If you've been listening to these records for two decades, well, listen again (can't hurt, can it?) and have someone in the room with you while the vinyl spins, preferably an outsider to metal. Let them give you their impressions on say, 'Death of the Sun' when two screeching trolls carve the End in your eardrums in perfect stereo splendor and then the riff goes nowhere, is dropped for another sound-alike riff in a different tempo and feel and then an inexplicable solo swims from left guitar to right guitar. Their vantage will remind you that you're a weird human being, underneath it all and that they're weird as well and we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves that we need to appear as normal to justify our tastes.

Don't play them 'Toccata in D minor' to justify how 'metal music is directly related to classical music, see, see?' though.

Techno-thrash has not died, it never existed.

2011-10-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

There's this new band Vektor. They're good. They have a new album out soon. This short post isn't about that however, it is about how people are describing their music online. From a download blog:

Have you ever wondered how would a thrash metal band would sound if they structured their songs in such complex ways as in a tech death band?

This is really hilarious in how backwards it is. Is it really such a stress of the imagination to think that even when thrash metal were new and trendy twenty-so years ago there would be ambitious people that would push it in terms compositional and technical? Do we really need to compare a retro-thrash record that is more involved than say, Exodus to technical-death metal to get the point across? Did Watchtower never put out records? Mekong Delta? What about Voivod?

Here on the press release concerning Vektor's new album, he find the following quote:

VEKTOR’s arrival sent shockwaves throughout the metal world that were felt in all corners of the globe. Having established themselves as pioneers in a genre thought by many to be exhausted of new ideas

Is the exhausted genre in question thrash metal? Is it retro-thrash? Because it certainly isn't techno-thrash, where much more was left to be said and wasn't as bands rushed through to become progressive metal bands in proper. Whatever is left to do in techno-thrash is not pioneered by Vektor, though their contribution is worthwhile.

Do a good deed today, play a great techno-thrash record, and let someone you know that the genre existed for a pocket of time in the late '80s / early '90s before it becomes all-new and all-shiny again in our infinite regurgitative regress.

Just a thought.

2011-09-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

Well, 'a thought' in Helmland means three dense paragraphs.

Here's why some people can't get over Heavy Metal or other romantic arts. In a time where a popular use of political ideology (for the lower-middle class and up) is to restrict the expression of desires that are deemed unreasonable and vent the resulting frustrations towards so-called applicable goals, the arts that have aligned with modernist concerns (that is to say, which are in the service of sociality & humanist progression) are also expressions of this same method. These arts are potent perhaps but they do not often speak for the desires deemed unreasonable. And even if they are keen on inner darkness, they tend to portray it as a psychic wound, in a curious way both Christian and agnostic, a repentance for sins that have been judged as such by nobody in particular. These arts recognize their own sense of ethical responsibility, because Ethics and Morals are grown-up talk, such symbols give power to puny arts.

Heavy Metal, and other similar arts are inverted. With their pretensions of such ancient antiquity that they become perpetually almost-out-of-time, they are unashamed to speak about all the desires of life (and death!), to glorify them even. In the negative zone, what lends power to symbols, is art itself. This isn't to say that there aren't moral weights inherent in Heavy Metal expressions, it's just that the creators of Heavy Metal so fervently pretend that these weights are meaningless, that they are useful as a means of fantastical liberation for those that listen and vicariously live through this music. It is a startling thing for many to realize that there is power in feeling like a misanthrope, a misogynist or misandrist, like a racist homophobe: to feel like the feeling behind all these -isms without aknowledging the word that the -ism is describing. To feel like a beast, then. Unreasonable. Inhuman. Any such socially barred concept, because it is barred, holds some small means of liberation were it to be allowed back into the whole of the human psyche. The trick is to realize that the symbol is powerful while the word is meaningless. A causal chain of logic broken, links from the chain now become portals to different worlds.

Heavy Metal doesn't make us better human beings, it makes us cognizant of the span of our sentience, and therefore the width of our afflictions and strengths. Whenever someone goes on about how Heavy Metal is escapist music that lets them step outside their dreary realities, all I can think about is how if they still think there is a reality to begin with, they haven't yet understood what art-as-magic does. There is no return to the corporeal. "I want to know", cries the young longhair to the entity in the darkness. Can't go back to not knowing. If you meet any retired-metalheads, now ashamed of the sexist, horrible music they once listened to, slay them where they stand. They have mistaken art for conversation.

Carnivore

2011-08-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

I appreciate a band who has the gall to print their name
and the same title of the record twice on their cover

1984 Roadrunner Records
Lord Petrus Steele (R.I.P. 2010) Vocals / Bass
Keith Alexander (R.I.P. 2005) Guitars / Vocals
Motherfuckin' Louie (still alive) Drums

It is not true that humour has no place in Heavy Metal music. What instead will forever stand outside its range is levity. Weightlessness, the feeling of suspension from one's sense of reality (and fantasy is the reality of the solipsist) is anathema to those concerned with the pressure of gravity, the inner pull to personal truth and eventual self-destruction. Trapped in the killing vector of the black hole in the center of the universe, in the endless time in the in-between, this twilight, radioactive half-life of distance do you have time for petty jokes, fool?

Of course not. You are cursed. Levity is for the children (as opposed to the wisest of all: teenagers!) that have yet to realize they are alone. They the cursed make curious art instead, ironic in the sense that they are underpinned by the lack of underpinning, the aesthetic of suspended animation. The only thing worse than being a child is being a man-child, the product of arrrrrreeeeesssted development. Heavy Metal is often accused of this, what with dragons and skeletons and blood and guts, but how the morbid joke at the chaos core of romance is comfortably sidestepped: Heavy Metal is in on the joke, but the joke is a heavy burden, man.

Levity doesn't belong in Heavy Metal, but sadness shall prevail. Heavy Metal is hilarious, life is hilarious and then you are born dead, you traject and you die. Close your eyes and consider the vast darkness of the universe. No, seriously, do it. If you cannot, this ceremony is not for you, you are just a bystander writing a critique of a critique. You are unwanted. Wimps and posers please evacuate the premises. The rest of us (me), eyes closed, blackness in mind, add the counterpoint: A black star in the sky pulls everything towards the center, slow crush. We (I) are a tiny nothing compared to this vast force, yet we resist. Where does the power come from that keeps us upright, why this lust for continued existence, why not give in to gravity and crumble into nothing? Because. It's hilarious, isn't it?

That's the morbid joke in the center of this American proto-thrash band named Carnivore. You probably know them by a different name and you probably took them more seriously than they ever intended to be taken under that secondary guise but that's not really very important at this point in 1985. The sideways vagina dentata on the cover of this record grins, because all Petrus Steele had to offer the world really has been achieved on this debut. Another sad joke, isn't it, to peak so early, before you even get your shit together. Then you put out more records and you're more successful, but you know the deal inside: it's all diminished returns. Then twenty years later you're doing live one-offs back in the ol' Road Warrior getup to recapture the essence of that first, killing joke. You traject and you die.

But enough about death (for now, always, for a time). This record is about fear of death, ergo, life! Here's a joke: this record is basically akin to a jazz record where the band is reinterpreting jazz standards, only with Venom as jazz. Such irreverence! And like that one jazz record most music nerds hold in high regard, I like it more than the source material. Recombination wields strange glamour some of the time. There really isn't much to say about this record from a morphological standpoint, not because it's not well made (it's actually quite perfectly done, this is the Poetry of Subculture, and these are one hundred records after all) but because what's on offer is already a bit passe by 1984. Metallica's just about to release Master of Puppets but they've already peaked with Ride the Lightning a year earlier and that record sounds absolutely sci-fi compared to Recombinatorial-Venom on display here. There are however a few - very funny - musical innovations worth reporting here, and so I shall report, although they wound the high-concept flow of this piece. If for no other reason than because they wound the high-concept of this piece. It's hard not to get snarky when writing about Carnivore. It's hard not to bite into something, that is. What's available most readily usually is one's own flesh.

Morphologically, this record is not very much about riffs, it's about changes. This comes from Venom, and through them from earlier forms of rock and roll. There's a vital power in singing two bars over E chug and then going to the fifth for another two bars, alternating between hell and earth (heaven, the octave, as is funny and proper, is absent). Carnivore play very fast and there's a lot of double-bass but underneath all that they're on the Kill 'Em All stage, their music is naive. The glaring exception to that mode is their slower passages (punctuated by cowbell, of course), where their Black Sabbath worship can easily be spotted. That aspect of Petrus Steele would be explored so very thoroughly on future offerings, but on this debut it's a rare occurrence, rare enough to be a punchline. As any great comedian, they know that the vital humours are excited by sudden variance, by the illogical. It's funny when someone trips and eats gravel because human beings are supposed to walk upright and to not make such simple motor mistakes, you know? Likewise for a raging thrash band to bridge from their raging thrash to a chorus of "God is dead" while a cowbell and Cure-like-clean guitars chime in, is illogical. It's funny, but it's not a joke. Even morphologically, Carnivore are all about this effect. The constant double-tracked vicious vocals of Petrus Steele (rolling his r's all the time, of course), mixed high and pulling heavy duty on narration sound less threatening and more like a character because well, they are a character. But if all you can do with this character is laugh at it, you idiot, you're laughing at yourself and you don't even know it. You're already dead and you don't even know it.

Here's some psychomusicomorphology and I'll burn in some music-critique-hell or another after I realize-I'm-already-dead for it, surely. This record feels uncomfortable sometimes because it's too well-played. What I mean about this is that I get this curious feeling when I listen to it that the leader of the band (possibly Petrus Steele, but it'd be funnier if it was someone else, like Louie the drummer) seems to be pushing everybody else too much. There's so much effort here to make the double-bass line up with the rhythm guitar chug, so much attention paid to make the record sound not-sloppy but instead linear-muscular, that it becomes a bit pitiful (and therefore funny) on some level because the musicians here are struggling with playing above their level. Visionary-dictator decreed it vital to his cosmology, and there probably were a lot of takes to get this record to sound as together as it does. I bet live they were a different proposition. This is a big separation from early Venom but - tellingly - not later Venom. Carnivore had a full soul from day one.

So what is it that this band is saying that requires all this hard work, isn't this about a joke in the end? Well, the whole record is a lyrical highlight for me, I could just post any song and discuss that but you know what would be funnier? What if I posted every lyric of every song instead? (don't worry, I'll do only the first three tracks as they have a conceptual arc) Yes, yes, excess. What did you expect, for me to cater to your attention span? I piss on your attention span. If you're squirming in your seat now, you haven't realized that you've been asked to leave many paragraphs earlier. You thought you were a man but you now realize you're a child! Cooked in the fire and served with a side of irradiated radish, infant!

PREDATOOORR

They live beneath the ruined city
Call the subways home
Anxiously wait to see the sun
And a land as of yet unknown

Gone below to escape
The death of the nuclear winter
Ice and darkness
Due penance for the sinners

Six generations 200 years later
Their ancestors crawl from their holes
Hungry and frightened and barely surviving
They're tired of living like moles

This record starts by setting a scene of post-apocalypse. "The Terminator" had come out only a year earlier, you can hear the sound effects of Skynet robots shooting lasers in the intro. "They live beneath the rrrrruin'd city..." With the first rolled r, we know what's up (only we're wrong, but that's the thing with Carnivore). Humanity has destroyed itself, the monument towards actualization of modernity that is technology has self-imploded. This sin against what we learn later is the negligence of carnal, primordial self-interest, will to power, receives fitting penance of two hundred years of nuclear twilight. Then, a new-but-old breed of man emerges, he is our Übermensch, to him is the love letter of this record.

Up on the surface a fate worse
Than dying, meeting
The end of the food chain
Teeth yielding pain

I sense that living human beings
Dwell below my feet
An important source of protein,
You are what you eat

Post Armageddon, neo-barbaric,
The nuclear warriors due battle
to satiate our hunger
We breed human beings as cattle

The character is at his most cartoonish in the first track, as if Petrus Steele is shielding himself from 'serious' scrutiny by painting with the broadest strokes first. Those that persist for later songs will get a more personalized version of the nihilist philosophy later on. For the initiated however there's a positive trait to how broad this record starts, this is, I dare say, something of an anthemic starter. How many times I've sang "postarmageddon, neobarbaric nuclearwarriorsdobattle!" along with Petrus I can't count. In some ways, Carnivore were my Judas Priest, if you get my meaning. It becomes increasingly difficult to sing along fully with latter parts of this record, however. The joke bears heavier and heavier.

Hunting in packs ready for the attack
We eat our prey raw-rabid animals
Frothing and ripping the carcass
We're stripping our own yes we're cannibals
Eat or eaten beat or beaten
I am on my life rest assured, a predator

Broken splintered bones, boiling blood
Torn and bleeding skin
Blackened burning flesh melting fat
Amputated limbs
Eviscerated, lungs torn out
Heart ripped from the chest
Decapitated, a meal of
Vagina and breasts

The second aspect of Carnivore rears is head here, the 'slow part'. They sound at their most menacing here but the cowbell+Black Sabbath thing mellows out as the record progresses. Again as I said, Petrus Steele has the tendency to be more frank when the music is slower (is this a more general realization? Does fast metal inspire more arrogance and force and therefore more distance between lyric and personal reality? Is this why doom metal fans are so taken with their slow metal and its dirgeful testimony? It might be harder to lie without muscular, linear speed metal to back you up with bombast. In this sense perhaps Skepticism are the most honest metal band there ever was. "And Stream brought meanings, and stream brought words..."). The truth of this particular Carnivore-breakdown can be found in the introduction of the misogynist theme, as we go from "I am what I eat (I eat hu-mans)" to "I eat vagina and breasts" which means "I am lonely". Joke's getting heavier...

Eyes plucked from sockets, gaping holes
Through which picking brains
Phlebophilia love of blood
Life spills from the veins
I detect the scent of prey by
Her menstruation
You have been chosen
The main course
Congratulation!

Petrus Steele impresses us with his medical dictionary here and then delivers some of the best Heavy Metal writing there ever was. Congratulation indeed. If you're laughing at this, I sympathize. If *all* you're doing is laughing at this, you're missing the point. Well, I guess that's the encapsulation of this whole text and the essence of Carnivore, really, but I'll keep going. Forever, really, I'll keep going forever and then I'll be dead.

CARNIVOOORR

Greetings and felicitations children of technology

Drool dripping out
My tongue hanging south
Saliva flowing free
My eyes full of lust
My balls gonna bust
Give yourself to me
Thirst I can't quench
Come here you wench
There's something that I need

Carnivore
I'm a meat eater
Carnivore
I'd like to meet ya
Carnivore
I know I'll reach ya

When you thought there'll never be as embarrassing a Heavy Metal Lust Song as the early versions of Metallica's 'Hit The Lights', Carnivore up the ante. This is such an one-two linear, muscular, DUMB metal song, it's perfect. "I'm going down, dive! dive!" ENTER SOLO and then woman fake-orgasm moaning? This isn't funny on purpose you fucking ironic pig. Have you known real loneliness? I've sang along to this song many times and all I'm singing and all that Petrus Steele is singing is "I'm lonely, I'm lonely, I'm horny, I'm lonely :((((" over and over again.

The hunger I feel
Makes you a meal
Oh girl you sure taste sweet
By my hair pull me there
Guide me to your treat
Spread your legs I'll seed your eggs
Oh, feel me deep

Note the interesting turn from the first song to the second. The act of sexual-cannibalism, the 'vore fetish' as it were on the surface seems like a selfish reflex. To eat the mother from inside, to consume all that is nourishing to the point of un-logic, to the point of sense-death. For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy. In-human, Un-holy. However Petrus Steele here introduces (knowingly or not) the idea of sexual - cannibalism as an act of insecurity, of self-loathing. What he's presenting in the above passage is not wanton self-fulfillment at his partner's expense, it is servility. Virility is a facade in Carnivore, underneath is a fear of women and a desire to please. If you've made it this far, you know this is going to get funnier/sadder, ultimately human. This is a very human record, this 'Carnivore' caricature is very very human. I feel him utterly, and I'm pretty sure you do as well.

Oh, you don't?

:(

Lick me she begged she pulled
Down my head I love to eat pussy
A taste so fine like sweet april wine
I won't trade for any money
did you cum I eat and run I live for sodomy

:( :( :(

MALE SU PRE MA CIEEE

I live to war it's in my blood
If I want it I take
The men I've killed the children slaves
And all the woman I've raped

Between my legs I've got
What it takes to be called a man
Fighting, feasting
Fucking all I can

Moonlight on horseback till death we will ride
Northern winds pushing us towards suicide
Mars god of war masturbating in rage
Wild libido I've freed from its cage

The reality here is that what it takes to be called a man is the desire for self-destruction. Not to rape women and hold child slaves, but the desire to destroy oneself. Your only human power is that of overcoming. The ultimate overcoming is to kill oneself not out of sadness but of ecstasy-in-life. There's a philosopher that's all about this, I can't remember his name...

I eat the brains from my enemy's head
I proudly wear their scalps
I burn their towns to the ground
To me the prisoners bow
Muscle, sweat, long hair and dirt
Leather, fur and chains
My uniform torn and worn covered with blood stains

Testosterone mates with adrenaline
Bearing a son of insane aggression
Woman will never know or understand
the power men feel to kill with their hands

For what it's worth, I think Petrus Steele is serious here and at one point in time believed this to be a real dividing case between the sexes. Caricature aside, this is a read of gender norms and sexuality that might seem unfounded today for a person that is well-read in sociology, psychology and history, but what if you've mostly read that one philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment?

The issue is not whether Peter Steele is right or wrong, it is on what he chose to manifest in his Heavy Metal record. Again, the key to appreciating this is not to indeed feel like a strong chauvinist male pigdog that fucks and feasts and rapes what they can (I have no such experience, and I doubt those that do would care what Carnivore have to offer to them. They don't need fantasies, they're living them) but instead to feel powerless and alone. When people go on about the ethics of art, the moral obligation of art as they see it from their privileged consumerist point of view I want to throw up because that's not what art is here for. Art never told anyone how to live their life (or as a correction, it shouted to everyone on how to live their life and then nobody tried to do this at all). Art is here to make manifest desire and desire can be senseless and idiotic but is most importantly above anyone's petty moral scrutiny. Desire comes before anything else you've ever felt, pay it some respect even if you can't bear its full weight. Who can? Isn't it funny that we have inside us a black hole that pulls the outside to crush the inside? Funny, funny, funny. Loneliness and alienation are funny too. Feeling ill at ease inside your own material shell is hilarious. Being misunderstood by your peers and family is a riot. Sudden death is the ultimate punchline, but this'll also do:

After the war I come home weak and sore
I fall into your arms
We lie by the fire
You feed my desire
With me, safe and warm
Outside the wind blows cold
Inside the embers glow
Shelter from the storm

Years been away I fought night and day
For my land and my king
Woman it's true
I do battle for you, you my everything
When on the fur I make love to her
How her body sings

Dark Quarterer

2011-08-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

Dark Quarter are mighty. In their own special dimension they are probably the most important Heavy Metal band there is. Fact is though that this dimension is not well populated, as they're relatively unknown. That is wrong and unfair and therefore this article is fair and just. I don't often try to sell bands to readers on Poetry of Subculture but this'll be as close as I'll get because Dark Quarterer are still active (unlike most other bands covered here) and most importantly are putting out wonderful music that's very much worth the attention.

This Italian band reputedly came together circa 1974 but they waited for more than a decade before they put out this, their debut album. Though I can only theorize as to why such a delay was necessary, my theories are to do with the basic troubles of say, procuring a multitrack sound board in Italy in the late seventies to record your Heavy Metal record. In 2011, and especially for say, a reader from the US, those sorts of problems might be considered positively banal but hey, Italy's right next to Greece and it still isn't the easiest or cheapest thing to get together the resources to record a debut here, so I can sort of understand it. There's good in the bad, however, because Dark Quarterer probably benefitted from spending ten years in the proverbial woodshed. Their sound is a parallel evolution from the rest of 80's Heavy Metal. I'm getting the feeling that they started out as a progressive rock (or pomp rock) act and got into Heavy Metal exactly as it was emerging in the early eighties. There's a curious meeting of influences here, half Manowar, half Genesis. Not to scare anybody off though, this isn't to say that the record is confused. I'd say, from an aesthetic point of view that Heavy Metal (that is to say, Manowar) "won" in this mixture. This debut is resolutely concerned with the high spirit, the illogical romance, the almost magical potency of sound that can be captured only through low cultural trends that nobody important really pays attention to. The many parallels between progressive rock and metal aside, it's certain that bands like Genesis and Yes were aimed for public scrutiny from their conceptual beginning (progressive rock doesn't work in cryptic light) whereas Dark Quarterer were so obscure that even when this record first came out it sounded like a curious relic. 20 years later we'd have trouble to imagine a record with such an unrefined sound at all, it's an almost impossible mixture of peaked treble, dueling bass and guitar, reverb-heavy vocals, clearly recorded live without many overdubs, mistakes included and all. It somehow works, though this is a sound that makes the listener work for it. Modern mastering practices dictate that everything must be clear and fried, bass kicks go there, distorted wall of guitars goes here in the front, there is no bass guitar. That is the current sound of metal and against this calculated and safe extremity Dark Quarterer sound as aged as they are. No, not even aged, this record's probably confounding for people that expect a mix to make any sort of sense. It's a fossil. Like a vestigial organ of an older permutation, it survives as information. Like a wing on an animal that chose to crawl on the ground for the easier nourishment of worms, it withers with every generation, atrophying to nothingness in disuse, all but for a memory of where once its blood had traveled. But wings exist to take to the air and so even 20 years later, the promise of Dark Quarterer pulsates with raw life. It takes work, but there's magic here.

Concentration is key. Dark Quarterer hold within their sound the performing quality, the easy fingers of a progressive rock band from the 70s. They do not play in the stiff, monophonic manner that was in vogue in Heavy Metal the year this record came out. Instead they flirt with after-the-beat accents, syncopated rhythms, chromatic enrichment of their phrases. These things come naturally, they flow through their songs as if to say "This is the only way to compose and perform Heavy Metal". Dark Quarterer, in a curious way, then, hold in their ranks highly prized Heavy Metal virtuosos: far from the stereotype of limp-wristed egocentric shredders wanking away in the limelight. Instead, capable performers that translate their personal desire through the focus of group concert. Nobody is overplaying on their own, they overplay all together, all the time. Most bands of that era would wait for a solo section to attempt a humble counterpoint between main melody and their embellishment. Dark Quarterer, with a gusto that makes it seem more easy than it is, navigate through parallel melodies, key changes and bright variation of their main phrases that would be the envy of various self-declared serious composers. They're just a power trio, and all this is achieved with sweat running down foreheads, with a manic urgency that signals a personal end, with a passion that can only manifest when someone is for real.

Every moment of this record is epic in the sense of the word that predates the conception of "epic metal". I am talking about goosebumps and emotional elevation. Pathos overflows. Their dazzling singer, Gianni Nepi, whose high-pitched scream one would expect to dominate, is in conversation with every solo, every drum fill. This band sings in concert and when one is finally used to their song and their antiquated sound and their quirks, it is moving. Their antiquity becomes a return to the sky, their oddness becomes their idiosyncrasy and you love them for it. You are in their universe and you are listening to the greatest Heavy Metal band there ever was. I guess this is what happens when a talented band takes ten years to record their debut?

In records of this caliber there usually isn't any filler. The opener, "Red Hot Gloves" destroys barriers and its monstrous brother, "Colossus of Argil" sets siege but it is "Gates of Hell", the third track, that conquers me, finally. Follow the music along with the words:

I have decided
To live as a rebel
Without showing
Never my face smiling

Without giving my help
To live as the worst man
And slandering all my friends
Hating who is loving me

Don't try to change me
I don't believe it may be
Let the evil be my food

I have decided
I don't ask your pardon
And every time I take my revenge
For all the good around me

And I shall dress myself
In red and black
As Blood and Death
Before the last breath
Gates of hell will open

And I shall fly
Into the deeper place
To usurp Lucifer's Throne

These words in the hands of a simple Heavy Metal band would be adorned with the arrogance of those that have lived nothing. Not to say that anyone in the band has had the experience of sitting on the throne of the underworld, but here's the thing: when Dark Quarterer were singing this on their debut, they were old men already. This isn't a lyric from a teenager that somehow made it to the debut a couple of years later. They mean this shit. Where the premise of this song by a young Manowar would be performed with a lofty, aristrocratic morbidity, here instead Dark Quarterer present it with a Doric stoicism. Heavy Metal is about skeletons and demons, blood and violence, right? Dark Quarterer rise above the popular status of their genre. The funeral drum beat emerges from the sound of the beating heart and signals a melancholic pride about ones damnation that even the damned mourn but willfully carry. This has been the choice and let it be remembered forever that it was a horrid one, cursed and lonesome. The solo after the chorus seals with its fervor the passion and honesty of this admittance. This song has been for me one of the greatest of the genre and it has opened my eyes, when I heard it years ago, as to the potential of Heavy Metal. I've returned to this song again and again, no less impressed and no less affected. How high a somewhat clumsy lyric can be elevated through passion and performance and emotion. As I fantastically pursued the path of this damned protagonist and at the same time, felt repulsed by the shards of dark matter that surround its chaos core: lord of light, usurper of Lucifer's throne - I wondered how that life would be.

This song, with its kind way, shaped me. It shaped me in a way that peers, school and family rarely managed. It urged me to confront the worst aspects of my character and realize that choice is much less the issue than it is to bring to the light the dark glamours that influence every one of them. It's not a song about what is right and wrong, it is a song about desire and tragedy. Fantasy, at least, should be free to travel all trajectories of choice, it shouldn't be ridiculous to wonder how that life could be. There's a lesson in everything deemed ridiculous and unworthy of attention by modernity.

That is the power of Heavy Metal for those that love it: It tears away the many layers of identity and found labels and all the other bullshit we citizens flatter ourselves with and it takes us back to when we were children and our spectral wings had not yet atrophied. It makes us face the limits and the desires we have yet to conquer. The promise in Dark Quarterer - and every great Heavy Metal band has in its premise a promise - is that it will hold inside it that memory, even 20 years later when we are old men. It will never lie to you or let you forget. That the song ends as it starts - with the sound of heartbeat - tells us so. We should remember that we are still alive and we should be glad for all the good things around us, yet as the long shadows of aspersion are cast and contours of a madness take shape, concentration is the key, the awareness that every story we imagine can be for a time, ring true. The lessons found in fantasy.

Unholy - Second Ring of Power

2011-07-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

Outsiders are afraid of Heavy Metal.

This might be a thought you haven't entertained in a while, reader, if you are on the inside. But there's truth there. Especially during the formative experiences that shaped us into a metalheads, at some point every one of us decided to take something of a sideways step from normalcy.

It could be said that the shift is minimal and phenomenologically, normals and not-normals act much too similarly. It could be further said that normalcy is a manufactured medium that society pays lip service to for utilitarian reasons and otherwise disregards 'behind closed doors'. It can be finally argued that this whole "I choose darkness" thing is a non-choice, that odd people find odd escapes deterministically, but this piece is not a debate on free will (for once). What interests me is to explore and clarify what was sacrificed in that perceived move outside the norm and what was gained for it.

Life in modern capitalism can be seen as an endless pursuit of carnal vanity. What is achieved through the purchase of pleasures is undone by definition daily: pleasure is fleeting. You are not done with food after you've tasted great cuisine nor are you done with sex after satisfying your lust once. You are not done with life just because you lived it briefly. One must chase the specters of fulfillment, defined endlessly by his consumer profile of the twenty-thirtysomething well after that time has passed and then suddenly, they're old and soon, dead. 'Spirituality' sounds like such a mumbo-jumbo, new-age term, doesn't it? It is instead the opposite, resolutely old-age. This is difficult to conceptualize if you've grown up watching The Simpsons endlessly point their finger to their own finger.

The pursuit of life's pleasures, even as it is encouraged by market tendencies and reinforced psychoactively through media, is always a risk. It takes a certain... animal-like obliviousness to see, desire and take, again and again. It's schizophrenic how that tendency in humans is discouraged by the ethical apologia of capitalism that is protestantism, yet the achievements of that tendency are glorified. The modern consumer is at once encouraged to be servile and community-minded and yet reap the benefits of pleasure like a trained killer, eager to strike. It's a curious state of existence that will ring true for some readers, to be surrounded by potential pleasures and yet feel paralyzed by the fear of their indulgence. I... I don't really want to kill anyone and steal their pleasures. And if I look to the left and right I see capable specimens place their hands at the small of the back of life and pull her in closely, though barely just acquainted, with such entitlement, without thought. Envy, yes?

I theorize that that fear is characterized by loss of control. Orgasm as death, gluttony as a brief madness. I will not however theorize as to what brings a man or woman in fear of loss of control at a formative age, it suffices for now to accept that such a fear exists in some. People such as this (and such as I) have this wrongheaded notion that those that desire and take automatically do so in full control of their capacities and faculties. This, experience shows, is not so and it is exactly in the surrender of higher reasoning that one may best explore pleasure. The trained killer is not trained after all, it comes naturally... But this initial envy-fueled recollection is never discarded because it builds on fear. The fear inside is that we're fundamentally broken for not being able to achieve what seems natural to others. Counter-definition of capacity and imperative, society tells us what to think.

The picture that comes to light is exasperating on many levels: to be pulled towards passions by definition unfulfilled, to be pulled off of a course that is at least dictated by one's sense of control, one's center, until one is old and withered and ultimately, dead. The fates laugh. All the while around one's life of slow motion, the rest, the more capable conquer and pillage without thought. Doesn't that feel like a waste?

Some philosophers and artists (and other sensitives) over the ages have felt it to be so, at least. Of all the higher strata of intellectual discourse that can offer alternative paths for the despairing youth, it's a cruel joke that some of us were most affected by the low regurgitations of Heavy Metal bands. But be it so, there was also a strength traded for lost clarity of thought from Nietzsche to Virgin Steele and from Castaneda (as the case is) to Unholy: These old philosophers and mystics are not scary anymore. The great Heavy Metal ghost is. Miraculously, as much as they have tried to cheapen it (and it could be argued that we have only barely survived a decade's worth of concentrated effort to defang Heavy Metal and market it to outsiders), it still is. Outsiders are afraid of Heavy Metal. It might be third rate philosophy, but spikes and chains and blood and darkness make up for it.

Did I hear that voice

or was it just a hallucination

And what about those shapes

For fourteen days I haven't slept

Still my shadow the secret of my life

Kept

By going through a long period of depression

I reached a permanent state of enlightenment

I'm the master above you bunch of slaves

I'm the Demiurge, creator of this universe

Master of not-doing

I, myself not fooling

The God of not-being

Everything as it is seeing

Near my death I saw

the white Gate of Death calling

There I didn't fall in

Let self die

Loosen souls dimension

For the sorcerer exhaustion brings ecstasy

For normal people, ecstasy brings ecstasy instead.

Unholy are a perfect band in this way. They're completely inapproachable to the outsider. Which isn't to say they're not alluring, it exactly means that they are, in fact. But they can only be approached on a bended knee, in their own terms. They will never be trendy (though it could be argued they made attempts at a more mainstream sound with each release) They sound demented but strong, no, the word I'm looking for is in-human. When some men become as beasts and rape life's pleasure, other men will become gods and denounce all earthly things. What is left when the soul dies? Surely something must remain the darkness at the candle's rest. Perhaps it is likeso, those whose eyes are accustomed to the light miss the world in twilight, but those who purposefully move from the light to the darkness keep the remembrance of the overworld as they descend into a different world of possibilities, of magic, of solitude.

I'm entertained when I read reviews of Unholy records and people go on about how 'weird' this music is. It's not weird at all. The people in Unholy were a bunch of teenagers from Finland, they were not gods. They probably were shunned by some girls. They dabbled with drugs. Their hair was real long. They kicked a member out of the band because he joined the Army as the Demiurge shall serve no man (elementary, yes?) and you probably know a few people like the dudes in Unholy, right? One of them is writing to you. None of these people are fundamentally different from the beasts, yet they pretend. They make fear into a weapon. Outsiders fear us as we fear them. As long as we are in-human, we will never futilely chase pleasure, as long as we are dead, we shall never die.

Conservation of energy: what must be sacrificed to achieve immortality, is movement. Become like stone, like a statue and you will never die. Center your energy and cruelly guard it until it is cold, entropic, imperceptible. In eternal darkness, time dies.

But flesh is not like stone. Have you ever stood up for six, seven hours straight? Muscles ache, one must endure. What is traded for everlasting life, for this neverending day, is an eternity of small pain. That is what the music of Unholy describes: small pains for eternal glory. Those of the outside will never understand.

This is why Heavy Metal still inspires fear: they seek pleasure to delay their thoughts on inevitable death. When death finally comes they are like pups, bargaining with the perfect end. "I... I don't really have to leave, do I? I was having such fun." But we bargain with death from day one, give him pain daily so that when he comes, his spectral visage is chartographed, or, has it come already? Is he here? I can not tell in the darkness if I have ever lived. In-human. Un-holy.

If you enjoy this blog

2011-06-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

You should also read this one. The piece on the Fates Warning is very well done. I secretly dread having to write in earnest about these records, it could be said that the rest of Poetry of Subculture is a warm-up to that, and here the blog author Zero has not only tackled them in his first post, but done an inspiring job of it too. Inspiring as in, only-person-on-the-internet-to-do-it-justice-so-far inspiring. Honestly, I'd recommend this blog even if due to unforseen circumstances this were the only post on it, though naturally I hope for the opposite. I am very interested on what other records will be discussed and in what way.

As I often say, I do not write here in order to make friends or socialize and it seems to me often that when bloggers cross-post there's something unhealthy about the resultant back-patting, yes, why thank you, you too, splendid splendid. But I honestly do believe Zero's writing is deserving of your interest so I hope you'll excuse me the exception.

Burzum - Hvis Lyset Tar Oss

2011-06-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to offer you that is real. This isn't a review of a record. It will neither confirm nor contradict your bias as to the quality or character of "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss", Burzum, or the person behind these names. You will not leave Poetry of Subculture any more secure in your preconceptions, nor will you feel wiser & tolerant for having briefly weighed a different point of view against yours.

It's startling to me now, when I allow myself to consider the reasons people write about externalities such as rock and roll records on the internet. It wasn't always so, naturally. I have just forgotten. As a teenager reading Metal Hammer magazines and fanzines the intent and function of the reviewing process was automatically clear to me: I am reading this because I trust the writer's taste and I have this pocket money to spare on a couple of records, eventually. I might not buy the record this particular review is raving on about, but I am at least massing relevant information to the genres of interest to me and building a cohesive internal map of Heavy Metal. I am domesticating this wilderness. Decades later I will be drawing up little historical/aesthetic maps of Heavy Metal and posting them on the internet and in the comments there shall be a discussion about Judas Priest and irony. But years before that, my scavenging in reviews will not only lead to purchases and the primary enjoyment of music, but also to a secondary boon in self-characterization. If I know so much about Heavy Metal, then surely that's worth something in some social circles. My hair has become very long and my stare austere. What do you mean you haven't yet listened to Ostrogoth's "Full Moon's Eyes", you pretender? Do you realize that men have died so you can sing that chorus? Return to me when you are of a higher level.

The reviewer also I automatically understood, once: they are communicating their love for their field of study - empowering in itself, for a love unrequited becomes a stone on which paranoia will build. "Do I really feel it if I cannot express it?". The love's acceptance is so intoxicating in fact, that it may outlive the love itself. One may become a professional in writing love letters. I have received this promo CD, it is not bad nor it is especially good, yet something inside me compels me to write pretty words about it. People will respect me for it, I shall hate myself for it.

The reviewer is also reaping the social benefits of being learned in a field, in any field. Most people know even less than nothing, so, longhair'd dark-eyed gazers in the dark, you'll do for teachers too, perhaps for a while. They're exerting power over their students, they're reaping the benefits of many lonely days spent searching in warehouses full of moldy LP's and poring over mail-order lists. Do you realize the sadness in a man in his forties writing record reviews about new metal cds? Someone has to do it! I concede to them that the trade of some power for this sadness is a fair one.

So I became a knowledgeable person in Heavy Metal also and I reaped, perhaps, some similar benefits for my risky commitment, a trade for a small sadness. It has been a few years since I last thought of myself (and of the reviewing process) in this light. I have forgotten the use of all of that because I realized that life's running out and the risk of being "a record reviewer" is too large for the dubious benefits left to be gained. It is because my love for Heavy Metal is true that I felt I had to stop. Abandonment of something loved being a source of much pain for my particular psyche, it could never be a choice I could be proud of, so instead of dropping the whole thing, I re-purposed my efforts in my love for this music outwards and initially became a commentator on foreign blogs and forums (where I thought, I had no power), trying to achieve communication that stepped aside from the usual social gaming that metalheads engage in in open forums. My alias of "Helm" was never meant to become a persona, it was meant as a diversion from the ego. I didn't want to make new friends (who call me "Helm" instead of Telemachus) or to be respected for my knowledge or opinions on all things Heavy Metal. I wanted my output to provoke response on a specific level, one I found lacking in the discourse surrounding metal music. I wanted exposition and risk. I wanted people to talk about their own truths, not the communal truth. This was to be a small return for past power and some social integration granted to me for wasting so much of my childhood internalizing Heavy Metal records. I think I've had a couple of girlfriends that liked my metalhead looks and austere gaze, after all.

I succeeded for a time but failed, ultimately, in this endeavor for 'metalhead expressionism' for various reasons having to do with that I am after all somewhat socially impaired and a difficult person to extend good will towards. It became clear that what I was attempting to do was doubly difficult to achieve on foreign soil and that I should instead pretend as if I have built a castle like all the other reviewers do and have the faithful flock to me (after all when you click on through to the blog, you are preemptively giving me a position of authority). I find this funny and sad because it is a diversion. There is no wisdom here, there is only an open question and I require your answers. What is Heavy Metal to you? This is what it is to me. Please let me know. That's what this blog is here for.

This is a reminder then that I am not a grand wizard, I have nothing true to say, and I do not need admirers or antagonists (pretty much the same thing). If you've read up to this, both in this text on on Poetry of Subculture on the whole, you probably suspect as much. I hope you can forgive me every time I speak with a voice of authority and still remind me that you exist and are different to me. I have created this blog not for gathering of power but for the discourse of it. I am a man with just a lantern for possessions, I sleep in a tub, so on. I will not carry the allegory further, cultured ones.

There's nothing to say about this record. It doesn't exist. It has never existed. I have forgotten the stories surrounding it. I do not know the name of the one who summoned it, nor do I know where he's from. I do not listen to it and see, in my mind's eye, treetops of a northern sort or any other cataloged flora. I see spectral leaves, iridescent in the darkness, lit as if from inside, stretching towards the stars, pointing towards the unknown. All your life you have been taught you are a mirror that reflects the radiance of authority and educators, that your societies give you meaning and purpose. That your imaginations and dreams are byproducts of your socialization. Art such as this stands perfected, dead, forever, a testament to the fallacy of that modernist model of life and the radiance of inner ambition. What you desire is what all life has desired, you have been taught nothing in your waking hours but appropriation, construing and deconstruction in a confused tongue.

We look at the tree bark and we touch it and we can discern a volume and a presence, but as we are ephemeral we can only measure worth in ephemeral ways as well. How will this tree serve me in my lifetime? It may provide some shade today. Tomorrow it may be firewood. My body can be nourished by this and all other products available to me while my mind wonders in increasing horror towards the end. This record also, I hear a racist murderer recorded it. It may provide entertainment for me today, and tomorrow I shall have an animate discussion on the internet about whether such a racist murderer deserves my hard-earned patronage for his artistry. I measure myself in ephemeral currency, and I shall soon be dead.

The trees I dream of when I listen to this record have existed for so long, they are from before time, before 'to exist' has been the sought prize of the lightbringer, he who taught men to measure all things in terms humane by stealing from the gods. The notes, a length of string cut from the thread of destiny. The harmonies like quantum reverberations, in many universes alike but different only slightly (and noisy!): not one might gave this any conscious thought, they are just there. And rhythm, at last there we find the man, endlessly restless and driving towards something, some destination. What is that destination? Tomhet.

There is no desire that this music communicates besides the quest for teliosis, the love of death itself, the shedding of the ephemeral. There is nothing real here. The naked screams that tell tales, so blatant as to be rarely mentioned in 'reviews' and almost never directly referenced by the legions of followers of the product dubbed "Burzum", never seemed to me the voice of human anguish. They originated there, surely. But now, millennia after this art has existed, if there is any pain here, it is fossilized. If the tree's roots grow and encroach upon the domain of weaker plants who lingered too much in the shade, their cry would be similar. If the rock, sundered by mindless lightning has a voice, it is this as well. If there was a human once, that screamed words into a microphone, he is long since gone. Nobody knows his name. Isn't it strange if you are in your twenties and you feel as if you're older, perhaps illogically old? Perhaps you have died before you were born?

The man that made this music didn't have anything to say to me about race or politics. If we wanted once, some structure to the chaos he inherited, I am certain that he himself views his ramshackle temple to consequence, to logic, as a humorous, sad thing. Instead his art, it says all there is to say in wordless speak. I am sure that that man wonders, why do people keep asking him for answers when he has posited the only question worth pursuing in his art? That so many believe words-in-a-row doesn't lend any truth to them. Belief is not truth. And yet they keep asking, drawn like moths to the flame of death. What can you tell us, murderer, about anything, anything at all? You can with your blood power, make a discussion about guitar pedals vital again, you can make it real? The only thing we fear is death, therefore death is real.

Hvis Lyset Tar Oss doesn't fear death, it welcomes it as part of the circle. It is therefore, not real in any way we use the word today. You have been given back what knowledge you've always possessed. Is it enough for you, this inspiration? What of its implications, can you count how many ends this thread leads to? Can you feel it in your heart or do we really have to talk about small deaths of introvert teenagers in a privileged society where boredom is the ultimate despair? Will that make this real? Don't you know about all that already?

Saviour Machine - Saviour Machine I

2011-05-31T08:36:00.000-07:00

Self-released in 1993
Jeff Clayton: Guitars
Eric Clayton: Vocals
Dean Forsyth: Bass
Samuel West: Drums

Shadows may follow the man
One thing is leading the others
Follow the veil in my hand
Nothing deceiving my brothers
Look into my eyes, walk into my vision
Drift upon the streams, enter vast dominions
Welcome to my dream

Heavy Metal seeks to impose a reality. Pathos and drama presented as a spectacle meant not only to entertain, but to ensnare the hypothetical listener. Though we defecate most of what we consume, something must linger, time after time, something builds inside and affects in such a way that we cannot be said to have a capitalist transaction with it but instead an uneasy symbiosis.

The curious thing about the many realities that live inside us is that as roads to awe, they return endlessly in on themselves. Though there are higher places they might lead to briefly, they are not real, that is to say, they can not be communicated as a reality, they cannot be made stable and they cannot be graphed. The wilderness cannot be domesticated. The ultimate end of romantic art is a vague sense of inspiration, for what? Towards what?

It is no wonder that when pressed for it, most listeners of extreme music (or Heavy Metal in particular if you prefer) cannot quantify what it is they take from the music. They often attempt to divert the argument by exclaiming how if they were to try, words would cheapen that unquantifiable "it" that they return to. Whereas this might speak as to the lingual limitations of metalheads (or modern pop culture consumers broadly), it also betrays that there is something there that is worth protecting, something that the speaker feels tenderly about and that they will take special note not to blemish with easy talk, a fire they will not disgrace with lesser offerings. Can the gods, in 2011, still be angered by impudence?

As I've mentioned in the past, Heavy Metal music is so potent for a certain breed of teenager introvert because it seems so insular, so determined not to be scrutinized by outsiders and those who are false of spirit. Whatever meaning and inspiration the young listener takes from their favorite Heavy Metal records, they must wrestle the ghost, their "summoned entity". Look on the cover of "Live after Death" and tell me if you can battle the reanimated horror on the cover for his secrets of life and death. Do you dare?

Heavy Metal is not an easy friendship. If it were a bond it would eventually be akin to that of brothers (as the Manowar-speak, for all its gross commercial application, is not chosen in error), for as brothers quarrel and antagonize, they are also tied with illogical bonds of blood. To discover the potency of Heavy Metal, blood must flow. Again I am reminded of a thread on a metal forum where a man of at least three completed decades was railing against some other, more Dionysian black metal fan, whom exclaimed they like their beers and pussy in their metal. "Such things have no place in metal" he replied sternly, wizard glasses pressed closer to his eyes, "it is only meant for dark occult magickal studies". Do you realize how much a person has to suffer for Heavy Metal to say this, straight-faced, to the world? How much his early experience of growing up and his interpersonal relationships have been colored by the solitary ingress that some undead beast on a metal album cover inspired?

If you wonder how metalheads can be at once so elitist and insecure, start by examining their priorities in their teen age, as compared to their peers.

The paradigm of the mad alchemist up in their tower, concocting strange mixtures they only when they have felt them perfected do they intend to make public is another one I often employ. There's a mad brilliance in going through all the trouble to make a dense, unparsable artifact of romance, drop it in the culture flow, watch it sink like a stone to the dark depths below and then exclaim with pride "many will drown for years to reach the beauty I have created, and this is just as well!". I've been listening to, writing about and composing Heavy Metal for what is increasingly more of a candidate to be described as a "long time" (you know this once you realize more than half your life, and certainly all of the life that was worth it, has been spent around molten steel) and at the above description my heart still resonates warmly. It is I, I will dive into the mirror pool and I will unearth your beauty, or I will willingly drown and be forgotten, that is my gut response.

I believe most artists are secretly jealous of their listeners who reach the closest to the inscrutable core of majesty that they have - perhaps - by accident conjured. You, the close listener and appreciator of Heavy Metal, are neither friend nor brother to the musician that has created it, you are an usurper. They will begrudgingly tolerate and accept you for your patronage, perhaps. And if you show some free-standing merit of your own they will call you friend perhaps, but be certain, romance is a cruel mistress, it yearns for holocaust. The mad lover will kill every suitor first and then themselves to slide between her thighs.

As love will die within the force
That drains is from the grail
She drinks the blood of prophets
And she drinks the blood of saints
Between her legs they crawl in torment
For the souls they lay to waste
Upon the altar, the sacrifice begins
The dragon takes another, and feeds upon his sins
To live and breathe again

I have argued that Heavy Metal is a solipsist reflex. What beauty is there that you found, you stole, so on. Capitalist terms can and have explained the transaction of such art. Where did you buy your first Heavy Metal record, anyway? Did you climb a mountain for it? Did you cross unknown lands? Of course not. However romanticism has a slightly different aspect to it that cannot be explained in the words of commerce, one cunningly complementary to the main thrust of pathos, the lust for death, that is so infinitely marketable. In order to kill one must create. The romantic desires power to affect, to shape the outer as a testament to the control of the inner. This world must burn, must be raised to the ground and then the destroyer shall rebuild it in great splendor. This betrays that the outer shell, so distrusted and maligned by the dark hearts dreaming in the darkness, now in their thirties and still dreaming of 'occult studies' in their small bedrooms while their mother sleeps just a cold wall away, is something of importance. The romantic desires the world to enter them, they desire for themselves to have a place in the world. They only way for the romantic to achieve anything, really, is through sacrifice. All art for them is a sacrifice, even if the smoke that rises to the night sky, heavy with the vitality of burned flesh is meant for an unfathomable shade, a spectral god that nobody can really identify, a symbol of the great self.

Come before the sacred heart and sacrifice the mind
Come before the silent invitation to the signs
Let us enter frightened ones, suppress the need to hide
Let us cross the river's streams unto the other side

Out in the distance of all time and space
As the Force of the Entity reigns

The process of creating art is in this light a process of diminishing the self, cutting off the offering to burn, and then instead of waste in dissipation (which, in lack of monetary returns, is the only way the Capitalist can describe the act of creation), the hope is of impregnation of the outer world. It could be said that the only reason society tolerates the mad shaman, the reclusive poet and the drunken writer of low repute is because in the end, in how they offer to their higher, dreaming selves, they offer to everyone else as well. The act of creation, even if meant in the narrowest egotistical sense, is inescapably a step outside the self. It is illogical as it is economically counter-intuitive.

Heavy Metal often is concerned with satanic or demonic forces and much is made of that. The most popular modern interpretation of what the impulse for bands to glorify dark forces might signify is comfortably capitalist. Praising satan, the light-bringer, is to praise individuality and personal accomplishment. All these satanic bands can be read as if they're rational egotists, effectively creating monuments to their own imagined greatness. If you can sell it, then it must exist.

Elements of this reading I've often endorsed and felt to be true with stipulations. However in discussing the curious case of Saviour Machine, a band often considered to be 'christian metal', I have to discuss how the exception underlines the rule. What if in the glorification of any higher force (as satan, or the old gods surely are) is more important than the identity of the entity and its ethical demeanor (if any)? Is there truly such a great difference between those that glorify Azazoth and those that plead for communion with the Pantocrator?

White metal and black metal, the difference can be argued to be an aesthetic. It is the small mind that immediately rejects one of two siblings because they are wearing the wrong colours, in the end they are so much alike. The impulse of both is the offering to awe, a minor transcendence that connects all living beings through hope.

Follow me in madness, follow me in fear
Touch me in your silence, rape me in your tears
Let the sea sadness free the chosen one
Legacy of horror, manifest the son

If there is a God that Saviour Machine are calling towards in their debut album, its face is obscured by the killing light, much like Apollo, much like the great devil, Satan, much like the visage of the sun itself. Tributes to the eldest of all gods, do they bring us together or tear us apart? Saviour Machine do not urge you to join a church, nor do they have any judgment of non-believers to offer. Their faith is in freedom itself, an existential teliosis. Their burnt offering cannot be described in commercial terms because it has not moved me to either endorse any superficial creed or belief system. It has only inspired in me to keep on living, to create in turn and offer what I can, hoping to unlock something of myself I dread to realize exists. It can be said that Romance, the most selfish of fervors, leads to this.

There's no ephemeral salvation here (if anything this is a tortured record) but an inspiration of more lasting impact. The language used is universal, the symbols employed can be understood by any man of any creed. The message is as clear as it has ever been: to find oneself one must risk, they must create, and to create one must sacrifice with no small desires of immediate returns, only that though many drown in the darkness of their ingress, the few will find a way to unearth their capacity, a freedom that has been given back though always possessed.

Without hate, without pain
Without suffering insane
Without death, without fire
Without lies that feed the liar
Without war, without games
Without fear to take the blame
Without fame, without power
Without drugs to heal the coward
Without violence, without rape
Without sickness, without plagues
Without judgment, without crime
Without hope, without time
Without two, without three
Without torture over belief
Bring us love
Let us see
Set us Free

Hard drive failure

2011-05-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

Now, if I were a superstitious man...

Anyway, transmissions will resume shortly.

Fifteen years of accumulated spring cleaning

2011-04-17T02:29:00.000-07:00

click for bigger psycho-mnemonic cartography

In sight of a theoretical moving out, I've finally started making practical steps. I've wanted to let go of the plastic for a while now, so that's what's left. If you were ever in doubt on my commitment to essentiality, here you go.

I felt remarkably little remorse throwing out the CDs themselves. CDs aren't beautiful. I kept my meager vinyl because it is. I plan, in my new place, to create a wall-of-art with the more striking of the cd booklets, but then again, I might not do that at all. I've lived a long time in this house/room and it had been overcompressed with little trinkets, toys and memorabilia for the larger part of that duration. When I get a new place I intend for very spartan interior design, at least for a couple of years.

Goodbye to plastic. That which was worthy has long since been digitized.

Here's a few interesting thoughts that came with taking out the trash:

1. Curiously, some of my CDs have been breeding in the piles. I apparently have two "Lost Paradise" CDs by Paradise Lost, two "Invictus" copies by Virgin Steele and two of "Red" by King Crimson. Also three different print copies of Psychotic Waltz's "A Social Grace", but at least I remember how that happened. Not the rest.

2. Fuck, I bought a lot of trash when I was younger. I have Exxplorer's "coldblackugly" in here somewhere (and Symphonies of Steel, thankfully, but still). Probably the most putrid thing in here was however, and somehow twice, Jag Panzer's "Dissident Alliance". I do not remember having bought either of them.

3. I had a *lot* of cover compilations from various magazines. Turns out I remember most of the songs on them extremely well. I must have listened to them nearly as much if not more than I did real records. I'd never do that nowadays.

4. Melissa is still the best heavy metal cover.

5. I have absolutely none of the collector genes my brother and father seem to have in spades. For this I am thankful for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not enjoy the feeling of nostalgia, generally. In an indirect way this is also connected with how I'm trying to take positive steps forward in my life (the moving out is just part of that mindset) and being tied down with fifteen years of CD weight is something to be liberated of, definitely.

6. Once I got through the CD piles, I started tearing down posters and removing small items of no consequence that had accumulated through decades of teenage entropy. I threw away bad comics, I gave bad books to my dad (as he cannot bear the thought of throwing away books), I seriously didn't stop until I ran out of garbage bags. I wish I had more of them, actually. It's a good feeling. I'll finish up this project in the coming week. I intend to leave this room as bare as I arrived in it.

And in a neat little pile, as these things go.

Progressive metal -- Attempt at a Definition

2011-04-05T04:35:00.000-07:00

This has been swimming in my mind from when I read Jeff Wagner's book on the subject of Progressive Metal. I got a real handle on it a couple of weeks ago as I was playing choice cuts from the genre for my girlfriend. I tied down the nascent description I'm about to present to exact musical quotes and this helped in solidifying my theory. I'll try to do the same here, though keep in mind I'm still working out the implications.

So, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Progressive metal has been defined literally to mean "metal (or metal-esque) music intent on constantly changing/evolving' for decades now and it's a favorite pastime of pony-tailed metalheads to argue about how a band is truly Progressive (or merely 'progressive' or 'prog') so why mess with it and them? Because that definition doesn't work, even worse, because it's pathological. In the popular conception, Progressive metal owes to its name to keep on moving forward, ultimately further and further away from its 'Heavy Metal base' and further away from the archetype into curious reconfigurations that constantly push the envelope, any envelope. This is a recipe for disappointment if there ever was one and it's very curious, psychologically, why people would obsess over their favorite bands eventually becoming something different from what made them their favorites to begin with. After all "inclined to constantly progress" is not a positive or negative attribute in itself, it isn't something one can love and attach themselves emotionally to. It is to what one progresses towards that could possibly be the attraction point for the listener, but then, even if the band reaches that initial promise, the mandate of "Progressive" demands that they then discard it and move on. It's schizophrenic. But that - the psychological profile of the pony-tailed metalhead and his mock (I contend) desire for ever-forward moving progress - can wait a while.

I think Progressive metal, as we've experienced it from 1986 to roughly the end of the '90s is actually defined by very different things than what are popularly accepted. Metalheads have this curious incapacity, well, perhaps not incapacity, perhaps it's a lack of desire, but anyway, they don't want to consider the social context that shaped the subgenre variations of Heavy Metal they're devoted to. It's as if speed metal, then thrash and power metal, then progressive metal, were destined to come into existence because the Metal Gods willed it so and that's as musicological one has to get about it. Do you like it? That's the issue for them, not how or why something came to be exactly. Jeff Wagner took a brave step outside of this mentality in his book by tracing the musical lineage of Progressive Metal to its rock counterpart, but there's more there, I think.

Rush is a big deal for Progressive metal, so thinks Jeff Wagner and so do I as well. But besides the obvious technical chops and lengthy compositions of the band, we can take a sideways look into Rush and explain what Progressive metal really is about. The Canadian trio is considered the forefather of most, if not all things Progressive Metal for the straightforward reason that the forefathers of that genre (Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Watchtower but not Queensryche, who were influenced by them only by a degree of separation through Iron Maiden) are all professed fans of the band and because traces of their music of Rush can be directly found in most of these bands material. It's not high musicology, 'Ytse Jam' sounds like 'YYZ', there you go.

However, Rush were not a band infinitely bent on progress, and even if they gave that illusion during the one quantum leap in their '70s discography between the first two records and what came after, or if we're lax and consider their shift of sound towards the more streamlined, techno-pop of their '80s material a move in that same progress, it still then ended. In fact, that '80s shift in Rush is I think, emotionally, the crux of modern proghead mentality. '80s Rush found their final, adult sound and have occupied that niche since then. Progheads keep hoping that an equivalent adult metal sound will be found, but no such thing exists so far.

Furthermore, keep in mind that when Progressive Metal was in its heyday, Rush have been putting out the same record for half a decade already. Rush as an inspiration was not to push the Progressive Metal stalwarts towards infinite progress (what we instead came to call 'Avant-Garde Metal' instead, for good or worse), so... what?

It was the gradual move from the fantastic, romantic and solipsist (the domain of Heavy Metal, now and forever) towards the modernist and humanist that Rush started. Rush were an inspiration to young metalheads in the late '80s to attempt to write songs about their real and current human situation. Rush, for every 'By-Tor and the Snow Dog', for every 'Necromancer', also presented (Ayn Rand inspired, curiously but not surprisingly) paeans towards self-will and actualization, allegories towards surviving modernity and even negotiating singular identity in a mass-consumption world. These are concerns that every sentient being in the modern world has to deal with, and that's what Progressive Metal tried to introduce into the Heavy Metal cannon. The psychological reasons for such a violent shift of context in metal music in the latter part of the '80s has to do, I theorize, with the increased outsider interest in the genre and the market pressure on it. As I've said many times before, metal music felt that in the spotlight, it had to come up with something 'grownup' to say. This may sound damning but I do not necessarily think that nothing useful and artistically vital could come from such pretensions of adulthood. If anything, those that got the worst of it were not the musicians that created Progressive metal masterpieces but the naive progheads that structured their identity on the basis that their 'grown-up metal' was better than everything that came before it. Progressive metal was an open question but yet it was percieved as a final answer by many.

I've said this in different ways on Poetry of Subculture and other places, but never so clearly and directly. Progressive Metal (of that ten year period, modern prog is a different matter, which we'll get to) is not focused on endless forward movement as an end in itself, it is about the introduction of modernist themes that deal with the social human condition while using Heavy Metal tropes to achieve energy and direction. That modernist concerns are inherently confusing and sap willpower, whereas Heavy Metal music is inherently simplistic and directive are contradictions of intent and form is very much apparent and at the core of the genre.

To qualify my statements we'll have to look at a few disambiguating examples. First, let's think a bit on technicality. Much is constantly made about Progressive Metal being the technical frontier for not just metal musics but rock instrumentation music in general. Indeed if one listens to Watchtower or even Dream Theater's debut (1988-9 releases) there isn't much in popular rock music that offered such pyrotechnical display. However jazz and fusion musics were miles ahead, even then, in the pursuit of intricacy as raison d'etre. Perhaps today the two fields have been largely equalized, but listening to say, Tribal Tech, back in 1989 would put the rigid ditties of Dream Theater in some perspective. Furthermore, in the metal field it could be said that the true frontier for technical intricacy had been pushed by the many children of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, in the 'shred' sub-genre. Or from a different vantage, the barrier for information density had always been the domain of technical death metal, not Progressive Metal itself.

Could Progressive Metal players of 1985-1995 play even flashier, more dense, more intricately? That question is diverting from the important fact that even if they could, they didn't. Progressive metal, especially in its infancy, was flashy, but not too flashy. They were trying to do something with their chops that wasn't devoted to the chops themselves. They were using modern technique and equipment to express modern themes and considerations. There were much more technically obsessed types of music than Progressive Metal in that period and its only due to musically illiterate fans (it's true, the elitist progheads usually can't tell consonance from dissonance, they can only tell when 'there's a lot of notes') that the reputation of Prog is primarily one of technical overindulgence. One needs only compare a Dream Theater instrumental with any given top-player fusion jam session to see the difference in focus. Progressive Metal overplays like a nerdy but bright pre-grad university student trying to attack a subject they have burning interest in from every which way. And that interest was the human condition. Naturally, a sophomoric atmosphere is inherent in much Progressive metal due to this, but even that can have its charm.

The other issue I have to tackle is the mythos of Progressive Metal constantly having to move forward to dignify its moniker. This is a trip many Progressive Metal musicians of the early '00s (the decade of post-modern self-reflection for metal) fell into as well, eventually taking their bands and aspirations completely outside the field. Fans rejected most of these bands for their 'betrayal' while at the same time still considering the need for ever-forward progress as the definition of the sub-genre they so loved. This must have been confusing for musicians and listeners alike. Bands that have enjoyed the interest of Progressive Metal fans have instead kept to a narrower path. Dream Theater is the most striking example of a Progressive Metal band that is very conservative, almost never moves forward. But even slightly outre bands like Fates Warning, have enjoyed their lasting success for keeping to a general formula of Progressive Metal. Bands on the fast track to actual progress, like Mayfair or Depressive Age, were finished with metal in the span of one or two records. There's a reason for this: Heavy Metal can do only a few things, but it does these things great. If you try to make it hit different beats, it's a lot of work for relatively few returns. Eventually the struggling musician realizes they can actually achieve the moods they're going for without depending on distortion, solos and double bass, and they morph into the electronica or post-punk or whatever else outfit they needed to be anyway. Those that keep the metal tropes are doing it because they still love Heavy Metal for its romantic core, and that's not 'Progressive' at all.

So that's the tension inside Progressive Metal circa 1985-1995, romantic tools in the service of modernist goals. The genre was bound to suffer commercial death early on with such a volatile tension in its core. Rush circumvented implosion by dropping the romantic tropes of grand compositions and overplaying arrogance by the '80s and instead found the contemporary rock niche in which they could explore their modernist concerns and they grew a whole second audience for it.

So what of modern (post '90s) Progressive Metal? Or, to put it as its now known, "prog". That's second generation music that has had to deal with the confusion I describe above and it has had to take a stand on what it wants to be in light of such information. Most of it has tried to be all things at the same time: hyper-technical, yet constantly bastardizing the metal with outside influences, both completely left-field and at the same time rigidly conservative when it comes to Heavy Metal play structure and composition. The end result is schizophrenic: imagine Meshuggah covering U2 while Tangerine Dream supplies keyboard drones. Some people like that type of music, I personally can't stand to listen to it for long because it hasn't made a choice of focus, instead it has made its focus to not have to commit to a choice. This is the perfect music, psychologically, for people who suffer from delusions of grandeur and/or enjoy self-validation by how elite their hobbies are. At any case, not a good path in life.

Humanist arts are necessarily wimpy. They're not tough, or macho. In fact, the forces behind such stances are under the critical eye of humanism. Chauvinism, racism, sexism, inherent philosophical aspects of most romantic ways of thinking are deconstructed in every way by modernist arts. That is after all, their purpose. Watchtower have nothing in common with Exodus or any other beer-thrash band. If anything, Watchtower felt they are here to destroy this conception of what Heavy Metal music is. Now that all that stuff's in the past it's easier to see it in a docile light, but the minor revolution of Progressive metal was that it was flamboyantly weird, wimpy, nerdy... even gay, at times. Modern progressive metal that tries to be all things for all people all the time is terrified of being gay and wimpy and weird predominantly. It thinks the way to counteract that aspect of its identity is by slapping on Pantera and Meshuggah riffs to keep the image 'tough', it's schizophrenic.

Let's listen to this, the quintessential Progressive metal song, and see if we can find anything even remotely 'tough' in it:

This is not at all manly. As intercourse, this is erratic and interrupted. As rhetoric it's rambling and multifaceted, fractured thoughts going every which way. Driving pulse is sacrificed for scope and color. This song goes in many directions and it most importantly takes the most roundabout route to its destination. This is the essence of Progressive metal. It's the audio version of a painting such as this:

That struggles so not to say one thing in the most direct and clear manner, but instead to convey as many aspects of a situation, with its many actors and disparities and often even illogicality. Of course this high concept is wimpy! Machismo is a simple and heavy concept, a bold red color that destroys nuance and detail, it has no place on the page. Listen to that fractured riff, modulated through many keys and rhythms, as if Fates Warning are trying to present it in as many ways as possible, leaving it to the listener to decide, in dialogue with it. Of course the guitar sound is hollower (Rush producer being no accident) and lower in the mix, so that every voice in the mix is equal. Democracy, such an incompatible notion in dynastic Heavy Metal, yet, here it is. From this song to everything vaguely Progressive metal that came out in its shadow, these concepts and concerns are clear and bright to the educated listener.

This means that it's possible to make Progressive metal as such even today, and still keep to the formula. Indeed many bands do. The clarity of the approach should be judged on the modernist grace of the music, not on whether it's overtechnical, genre-bending or all-things-at-once carnival music. Progressive metal is judged on how it utilizes composition to augment its modern program. As the concerns of modernity have not been assuaged (and never will) so will every living popular music have a fringe aspect dedicated to it. Literal-minded metalheads will eventually need to develop the knowledge and language to understand what it is Progressive metal tried to do.

Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond

2011-03-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Released by Virgin, at some point in time or another.

They say Hansi Kürsch, André Olbrich, Marcus Siepen
and one Thomas Stauch partook in its devising.

I am going to hurt you. I will try you with cruelty. On the precipice where you stand, you sicken me. A foolish step forward will plunge you into darkness and the faltering, cowardly step backwards will see you blinded forever. Platonic light at your back, endless dark cave forward. Your long shadow, like an arrow, leads you only to your death.

Yet you'll have to move, otherwise it's slow decay for you, withered entropy as the world turns. You are useless. Why where you ever born? We will see what you have to say with a tender heart only after your flesh is rent and flayed. I will not push you. It is pain that will push you.

You are sixteen, fifteen, thirteen now. Do you recognize your body? It doesn't recognize you, it doesn't submit to you, it doesn't agree with you. The face you look to every second morning is slightly different. Features move tectonically, volcanically, you burst and bleed and change and beauty is only a word. The world knows. They know you do not belong inside yourself, you are simply an impostor. A child's heart in a body half-way towards adulthood, responsibility, continuity.

Yet, at night. Interminable dreams of death and pathos, they drive you secretly to absurd rituals of dirtying and cleansing. Does your mother know what you do alone under the sheets? What does she tear down only for you to studiously build up again, day by day, in the killing light? The Iron Maiden poster you hang above your bed, how many times have you re-placed it? You do not plan to quit, do you, you sickening child? It is the picture of death, you know, that is what you put above you. There is no Christ, no savior there to crown you. There is instead a reanimated corpse, forehead struck with occult lightning. See death walking, death alive.

What is it that pulls your fantasy to death? Is it that you cannot bear the interim between childlike naivety and the responsible life of adults? Hanging in the middle, waiting for life to begin.

Let no one know with what violence you beat yourself, all bones and tendons, sickly thin. You have no friends, you only have conspirators within the Guild of the guilty. They will forget you with robust bodies and cars and jobs and normalcy, eventually, you'll see. Yet you'll remain in the middle, you know it. Your sin is aberrant, a lust for the impossible, the knowledge of something far beyond. The vital drug you take with your black sword, you rob it when you slay chaos gods trapped in plastic, vinyl, tape. You wrestle them until you forget the middle where you stand, you test wax wings in free fall. You fool, do you not know this is not how birds fly? You are crushed in black volcanic stone, sad wings destroyed, in magma you ingress. Inside your molten waters a black stone you find. It radiates wisdom, it speaks in ancient tongue

You are not a child. You are not an adult. You are forever, you never existed. Time does not exist. You are a god, With this power over time, you become a god. You will never explain it to anyone else, they will never understand. Yet, should you ever forget this way you feel, you will age and wither, you will become but another linear traveler, trajecting time in the foolishness that is two dimensions. Light at your back, long stretching shadow at the front. Kill yourself now if you are brave!

This much any mystic, any bard can tell you through ritual and song that they intuit. This is the endless quest, they who undertake it can never achieve it. Odysseus sails to Ithaka forever. His wife plundered by the mores of modernity. His son, Telemachus the idiot, he bides his time.

"Fantasy metal" adults scoff. Polyhedral, pretend pathos and distance, so much distance. Analysis, anthropology, musicology, philosophy and sport, so much sport. And humor. Let us laugh, ha ha. This is the way they take a sideways glance inside your dark pool. They pacify the wisdom that has been passed on you, they interpret it until there's nothing left but an interpretation. Power is a word. Death is a word. Art is a toy.

But I eradicate the distance. You have learned nothing. You are not an adult, your years are MEANINGLESS. Time doesn't exist. In your thoughts and in your dreams, what is always in your mind? That is all that exists. I manipulate you to that final step where everything begins. I do not believe any lie. Are you a child or are you a human, or are you what is in between? Souls travel endlessly inside the black chamber, they want to know what is outside this palace called life. I want you, faithful fool and human, to explain to me what you believe there is to this life. I will wait forever while you burn inside, for the words to come.

Now let's talk about cheese. Cheese smells funny. Synthetic orchestra strings and multi-tracked falsetto vocals and fake violins weeping thirds over parallel fifths, they smell so funny. People smell funny too. When you smell funny, people make fun of you! Mom, I don't want to go to school today, they say I smell funny. Twenty years later the adult in his perfect attire and groomed countenance, he's so worried he's going to smell funny. More wine than cheese, the idiot fabricates an Ideology of Cheese. He says he's an adult, he holds consequence in high regard (after all, it is in trying to make his new words cohere with his old words that he has arrived in this perfect mess - from childlike fear of cheese to an Ideology of Cheese), yet all I see is a nose. A nose so honed to smell cheese, I often wonder if his other senses have subdued completely to make space for his olfactory prowess. From the numberless senses the adult counts and assigns to the pity extremities on his ape-like paw, they forget the sense of wonder. They forget the sense of ambiguity, of uncertainty, the sense of a world that isn't finite because it has never started and never plans to end, it is forever.

Instead, the psycho-sexual castration of distance: I know things because I can judge them to be lacking in this or that regard. You can trust me because my judgments pile and stack, my whole identity is a series of betrayals to rationalize and the debris of disappointment. This fantasy metal is so cheesy, don't you agree? Let us instead choose this perfectly inoffensive post-metal-about-nothing-in-particular-exactly to mock rape us with its flaccid penis for a few minutes. Here', I'll turn it up to three, we don't want to upset the neighbors while we die a little, do we?

On the precipice where you stand, do you want to travel sideways into this? Perhaps you prefer the pain of further indecision instead. I knew you would.

You are ugly, you know that. But at least your face suits you. Blood shot wide eyes, and strong, wired legs, they suit you t0o. Because you'll have to take that step eventually. If we earn our face with years and our features reflect what we have lived, let's say that you didn't strive for a hound-like nose signifying decades of such scented judgment and disappointment, nor for a mouth full of rude tongue suggesting your impeccable sense of taste. So you have not yet taken the role of the perfect bourgeois consumer. Let us instead hone that hidden sense, the vision which looks in the far distance and sees the second horizon behind the globe's tall curve. Let us grow the strength of stride for the vision quest, that sacred circular trek. If there is wisdom in fantasy, if there is strength in oblivion... you know where the arrow points.

Step followed by step, inside the darkness of the self. You will lose everything on the circle back to the start, but what will you miss? I will wait here, on the stone. Forever for your answer.

Metal Consumerism part the second

2011-02-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

"I think I'm cool because I chose to have something done to me."

For as long as I've been communicating with music aficionados of any type, that's what I've been sensing their tastes mean to them. They derive a sense of self-worth over belonging in a subculture rotating around this genre or type of music, as opposed to that other one. The most recent development is that subculture with so hybridized tastes that they take pride in not belonging in any traditional musical subculture because their tastes are so eclectic, that they therefore create the ultimate antagonistic subculture, that which denies it itself exists, yet very neurotically clings to their ultimate status as knowers-of-taste. Though the post-modern definition of such a group is tricky, how it functions is ageless, it's how any societal in-group functions. We are better. The Other is worse. Those people that listen to that other type of music are lame, obviously. Music taste as an ornament, not much different from having body piercings or an ironic tattoo, only even easier.

Listening to music is the easiest thing a person can do on this earth. It's actually almost not even an action. Music is done to you. Easier than watching a movie because there's no plot to follow and it can be done completely passively and in the background. Easier than reading a lowbrow romance novel because you don't even have to turn the pages with your fingers. Music demands almost nothing from you, and even the few requests it may project are subject to the consumer's adventurousness. You don't even have to pay for music anymore. And in return you can now claim to be better than other people that have different, 'less advanced' tastes than you.

Self-definition based on what a person chooses to be a willing victim to is problematic. If this or that music means something more to you, figure it out. Explain it to yourself, and to others. Be proactive about what you learned through art, put your theories to the test.

Taste is meaningless. Actually, let me qualify that, taste is very meaningful when one is searching internally to see what their aesthetic sense will lead them to. When that has occurred, taste is now bereft of function. You are you, your tastes are just a reflection of you. You can't talk about tastes without talking about yourself. Yet people try. They use their disembodied taste, socially, to maneuver around others and ultimately hide themselves. This is counter to the function of aesthetics. What type of music moves you is not useful to anyone unless it's in conjuncture to an explanation on how that music moved you. For such an explanation, the focus shifts inevitably from the 'music', to the 'you'.

There's been a critique on Poetry of Subculture that it's too subjective, too based on my own experiences with the music. I find that critique absolutely fitting, and I encourage anyone who's looking for faux-objective reviews of records to move along. What type of music I've allowed to have happened to me is not very important. What I got from it, is. If there's anything I want to encourage with this blog, it's a dialogue on the characters (myself and commentators) behind the tastes, the human beings that are trying to negotiate what a "Heavy Metal" might mean to them. The equal process could be done with a "punk rock" instead. The only reason it's not is that I can't talk about punk rock because I haven't been exposed to a lot of it. I'm sure there's a blog out there somewhere trying similar things with that, and with whatever else type of art.

I have a Heavy Metal blog because I spent many years listening to Heavy Metal. Not because Heavy Metal is better than any other type of music around. That sort of antagonism is diverting from the function of aesthetics: a common language to discuss intuitions and personal philosophy.

There's a few social reasons people what art to be just something that they 'chose to be a victim to'. First of all, the modern concept of art is that it's the product of some sort of savant geniuses, who, eschewing societal norms, choose to dedicate themselves to the Great Art. Towards them the consuming public feels constantly inferior. They listen to the loud music and they feel raped by their betters and they love that place of powerlessness, the small death of having someone else's will completely envelop them for a few minutes a day. Obviously artists play up to this role, there's much to gain by pretending to be a god. People do not love art and the artist and therefore make them successful, people love the artist and their art because they are successful. Artistic failure is the subject of the cruelest mockery instead. First the rape, then the Stockholm syndrome. A rapist with a flaccid penis is a failure of ontological proportions.

Deep down inside, the consumer loathes the power of the art over them. They then try to play it off as if it's just entertainment. They pretend art is a toy. What is the functional definition of a toy? An approximation of a real thing, a fakery that is given animation only at the hands of a proactive party. Music isn't a toy because the listener is not giving it life with their will. They're just pressing a button and the art takes over. The listener is the plaything of the art.

Either vantage towards art is distant, it bridges no space towards the center. It's just an endless revolution around an inscrutable core, obfuscated through social reinforcement of the 'art' as something simultaneously frivolous and beyond the capacity of the consumer to achieve on their own.

I do not know if every person has it in them to become artists. And when I hear absurdly talented and very successful artists such as Steve Vai go on about how 'making music is a human right and every person should know how to play an instrument' I get sickened by the distance between what he's describing and what my reality is as much as any consumer around me that hasn't even touched a guitar. The issue is much more systemic: what are the systems of authority and power in our western world that want art (and not mere performance, which has been subverted to commonality over reality talent shows and other such debris over the last decade) to be both unreachable but powerful, frivolous yet mystical? Is this because this is the best way to keep people buying product? When they at once feel that they never could create this art on their own, that it's special, but at the same time that it's a consumable commodity that needs be replenished as soon as possible?

Metal Consumerism

2011-02-17T03:46:00.000-08:00

Some art is here to remind the audience of positive past memories and to provide a comfortable space in which to re-approach them from slightly different vantages. The interest in that type of art rests on those reconfigurations being inventive enough for the familiarized audience to want to follow them for a duration, but not so derivative as to make the effort seem not worth it. At the end, this type of art is at best supplementary to the original material: it might be conducive to an enjoyable time, but the exact tool it uses to be approachable (its reference of past art forms) serves also as the main reason for it being inessential.

How essential art may be could be judged by how the audience is drawn to repeated experiencing of it and/or of how enduring the internal representation of the art is, how it connects with various strands of one's psychic web. Most people do not rush to re-experience art that is strongly referential to past glories. They go instead, directly to those past glories. What identity is left for this strongly referential modern art artifact, is that of yet-another product. Inoffensive, taking up bitspace and perhaps hoarded by collectors of artifacts.

When compulsive consumers-cum-critics praise this or that modern piece of referential art, they're pretending that they're spending a lot of time with it and that this is a testament to the quality of the material (they're making a claim then, of the art being essential, as explained above). Do not trust them, divide their claims of how much they've experienced the object of art by ten or more. If they say they've been listening to a record for two months straight, this means they've given it a half-dozen incomplete listens while surfing the internet, perhaps. The reason they're lying is because they know nobody will pay any attention to their recommendations if they were truthful about how they're using the product. Art is still sold on the basis of essentialism even when both critic and consumer do not consume the product with mind to its essential quality. The merit of art has been sidestepped, it has become at best a selling point on a marketing sheet. What is sold and bought instead, is a brief feeling of elation, belonging, an experience of something one already is prepared to experience.

Art that builds strongly on past foundation often becomes blurred together in the minds of the audience; in this way often Heavy Metal bands are no longer interpreted as if they're making confident strides forward with their musical offerings to the form, instead their - often decades long - contributions are slight and non-cumulative. This band introduced more orchestral elements, perhaps that one plays faster than most. This one has some kickass graphic design to go with their extreme metal. These aren't innovations, they're safe variations. There is no 'one album' that cuts through the mists as a definitive statement. Ergo, listeners do not come to these bands to be immersed in a singular world, to feel as if the only thing that exists at that moment is themselves and the Entity summoned by this mythical piece of art. They listen to this music instead on shuffle, a record's as good as any other, all from a distance. They can appreciate what the band may be bringing to the table on some intellectual level, but they're not enchanted by the music to the degree that they suspend the language through which they categorize and codify their experience. This art is just not startling enough to achieve that. It is in this way that say, a black metal band in 2011 becomes just a black metal band in 2011. The riffs might be nice, the songs might flow well, the black mountains and treetop frost cover is pleasant to look at but... all these aesthetic signifiers are gazed upon from a distance. With distance comes irony. The feeling of being outside and afar from what one feels is a defining aspect of modern life. Art, romantic art in particular, was intended as a remedy of exactly that. If it fails at eradicating the distance between host and emotion, it has failed completely as romance. What is left is mostly a comfortable, safe product.

There's also a different type of art. Strongly iconoclastic, it channels most of its strength through violence, an eventual destruction of all past reason, 'artistic norm' and audience expectation. Often this music is abrasive and extreme, it likens in its assault the psychosexual charges of sado-masochism. It aims to destroy boundaries. Appreciators of this type of art endlessly try to negotiate what this music means to them and its seeming resistance to pacification. This type of art means the audience harm. It means to strike at their core and watch how the organism mutates to cope with the reminder of mortality. The purpose of the subculture around this type of art is one of understanding, applying of meaning and eventual pacification. When someone says "oh yeah, I love listening to noise music" what they're saying is "I am fascinated by how this music startles and shocks me, and I'm trying to wrestle some meaning out of this by owning these feelings and fashioning an identity out of my weakness".

This type of art is more difficult to commercialize because its benefits are less obvious to the distanced consumer. It's very difficult to keep one's distance when they're being raped, though modern culture is trying its best to achieve this.

Art that doesn't rest well in the mold of commerce struggles to find a place in a capitalist society. Some is branded 'outsider art' (whatever that means), or often it is forgotten as some curious evolutionary dead-end buried in some niche of extremity.

Both tendencies described above exist in Heavy Metal music. I'd go as far as to say that the most successful examples of Heavy Metal music are found in bands that straddle the space between these two impulses: to build and to destroy. They make music to be enjoyed, but not to be enjoyed too much. They make music that suggests, but doesn't make itself a slave to suggestion. Heavy Metal failure is often the inability to keep this balance. Some of it is strongly classicist in its self-considered place in musical history. It draws directly from past sources with reverence and docility. There is nothing extreme in an Iron Maiden clone band in 2011, nothing startling, nothing to crush the distance of the disaffected consumer. Those that appreciate it do so because it reminds them of something that once was startling and strong. That's as much as they need from this music anymore. Other is so bent on extremity and destruction that it forgets that to ensnare a listener there needs to be a promise of enjoyment on the surface. In either case, there seems to be a market for the debris of this friction between extremes.

Heavy Metal is intensely commodified and this is easy to see by how its treated by the internet world: blogs upload product, reviewers talk about 'value for money' and aesthetic considerations are bypassed as so much as homework: "we're here to tell you this might be worth listening to once, the work of what it means is best left to the consumer". Pretender taste-makers rush to exclaim how much they care about lyrics and cover art and meanings only to so clearly show how little they actually do. Their reflex is to shift through product, catalogue any reaction slightly above complete apathy, and (through detestable hyperbole of said slight emotions) shift the public's gaze towards anything that isn't bare nothing. You should totally listen to this, dude. It's your new favourite band, trust me. I've been blasting it while working out for like, two months now.

In this climate, even Heavy Metal music bent to startle, to rape, to destroy, is promptly de-fanged. When the listener has no stake in what they're perusing, when there's so much distance to be thwarted, even the most savage voices in Heavy Metal will be muted. In this climate, what has become the outmost savagery, is a return to the human, a return to ambiguity and a challenge to the consumer to stop consuming and start reinterpreting.

So much extreme metal, in this sense, is anything but. It's safe, it's comfortable. The consumer that buys a goregrind or a national socialist black metal cd knows what they're getting. There's nothing to interpet. If there's anything scary, anything startling in this process is how willingly they indulge their consumer vices. The music itself is just a reference to a time where blood and guts and crematoriums were briefly shocking for their teenage psyche. The consumer is building an identity as an eater of woes. Gulping down the worst psychic wounds of humanity in prepackaged, easy-to-swallow artistic representations. They're pretending to grow up by eating harm and shitting distance. Sideways glances into a wound that would be insufferable to gaze directly inside of.

But romantic art is made to push you beyond your limits.

As I've explained, the artists themselves feel these things and they try to negotiate a path through it all, and there's much valid critique to be made of what they come up with. But also, at some point, the art itself is blameless. Even if an artist is doing their best to transcend the debris of commercialization (though most are not even trying), the eaters will eat them all the same and feel a slight heartburn perhaps, something that classifies as barely above the nothing. And then they'll burp their transient opinions on some blog. The only remedy to this for someone who wishes to use art to better themselves, is an aesthetic diet: to stop eating so much horror so as to remember what horror means. To stop eating so much comfortable referential-exultant reprise of the past so as to remember what the original emotion felt like. As one rids extraneous fat and toxin, they will lose the taste for most extravagant perversions. Then, when they return to listen to the few great records and they will be again shocked by them. They will fear them. They will be touched by them. And they will have again to live with them, not just consume and pass them as they're trained to.

So, my suggestion is to consume less art. Download less of it. Have less to say on every new thing that comes out. Hone taste until taste doesn't matter. Spend more time with less to focus on, get to the bottom of what it means inside. I know this is not a fashionable opinion and that it potentially robs a lot of bloggers of a hobby, but perhaps that's for the best in the long run. Perhaps if one feels so burning a desire to share something new with the world every day, they should look into sharing cooking recipes instead, there can never be enough of those.

Black Sabbath

2011-02-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

Brother,

I write to you of dread. A fear that I suspect is close to unknowable from your enlightened, future vantage. I need your ear, I need to recount my experience not for the sake of your intellectual curiosity, but in hopes that the retelling of what - already - feels more akin to the dream-imaginings of a fevered patient long past the point of no return, will help burdensome emotions dislodge from my thoughts, so that a narration might stabilize, overcome the senselessness that thins my blood. I do not write to you to save myself, I am already dead - no, it is worse than dead... I hope to trace the outline of horror, for the sake of your future, the future that so once repulsed me from your side. Furthermore, Brother, I have no one else to write to. Humor me this missive, let there have been at least some purpose to my madness.

I was wrong. I will concede this not to appeal to your pride (and take my word, as you did on that day, I never will return). I was wrong as you were also. Though I once scoffed at your mundane desires, blinded as they were by these newfangled 'mysteries of logic', for a life dictated by reason and causality, it is my path that has taken me to the precipice of nothingness instead. Far beyond my dreaming inspiration for an unnamed God- do you remember, our discussions? I remember every word.

How you said the ancient, green luminescence of sacral decrees, for whatever reason they came to be, has long been extinguished in the grey waters of history, there were nothing can by itself explain any other one thing. How it is now a burden -- no, a responsibility of the community of man to shape a common reality, where one light will shine from many sources to extinguish utterly, the shadows of unreason. I thought that future to be one of a different terror, a surgical one. Where the innards of the human being, dissected on the stone slab would dispel the grand mystery of life. A man and a woman separated only by their altered machines in their bellies, it disgusts me still, this idea, I hide it not. A world where one knows all and all know one, what occulted meaning can there hide? In what shadow can a secret garden flourish?

I have secrets. I did not find them easily but I didn't find them with great difficulty either. I did not plunge into the darkness with a light heart, but neither was I ready for what I found there. It is a song of irony then, that the resources I perused in my lorn path were made available by inventions of your future world. The printing press, brother, it changed everything. Words of masters of ancient wisdom... I did not have to kill a lord for a glimpse of them, I did not have to cross unknown lands for a fragile Alexandrian scroll, made incomprehensible by the ravages of entropy. In books, printed with a typeset perverted form its sacral function, mass-produced, brother. There I found plenty mysteries. And trust in me that what I did have to destroy for them will be missed by no one.

In the thirty years we have been strangers, I have pursued greater art, I have become a sorcerer whose dreams shape the dreams of others. You were right, brother, the worldly domain is made of marble that cannot be chipped with willpower alone, it is there, it is what it is and the analytical tools that you so fell enamored with can help in divining its purpose. It takes the might of many to move that will, I will concede you that. It is instead, in the hearts of men that mystery still lives, it is in the deepest crevice of sentience that no light will ever shine. Tell me brother, if you're brave, what do you know of a man's soul? How has your dissection of the brain informed your understanding of what it is to feel and experience? Has any of your 'philosophers of the light' anything to offer that would explain the atavist stench, the pull towards violence and lust? I am certain you feel it too, you know what experience drove us apart, you know what experience binds us still.

The light cannot guide you to the cathedral of the soul. Nothing can guide any of us there. Nothing can help us live in that darkness. Now I know.

It was no more than ten days ago, brother, though it feels a withered age instead. After the consumption of the sacred flower (do not pretend you do not understand me, surgeon!) and the utterance of prayers which you would not fathom even if every word were categorically defined for you in common language, I lay to sleep, much as I have done for decades. With certainty to dream of darkness. I do not know what it was that made my dream quest behind the walls of sleep different that night, it could be the ringing of the church bells, curse the mad monks and their perverted tastes for inversion, I never understood them: is it not enough to worship a warped reflection of the demiurge, do we have to flaunt it as well by striking the bell at the hour of the witch? It could have been the storm, Brother. No, it must have been the storm. Do you remember the oldest of our gods, thunder? It was at his command that I met the messenger.

Power over dreams is a bittersweet fruit. At once addictive for what one experiences in the mist is of the same potency as what resides in the killing light of your reason, you learn that well and certain, surgeon. But at once, there is the disappointment (and knowledge of further disappointment for those more experienced in the ways of darkness) of the waking; Though the power is real and what you feel is real, it is not forever. The sleeping village awakens. If there is a teaching I can impart on you is that, contrary to what your Aristotelian 'logic' would desire, the darkness must be tended to with the same reverence that the priests offer to their pity candles and incense to the Autocrat above. Darkness doesn't merely occur in the absence of light, no... that is instead, nothingness.

That is what I met, brother. Excuse my long road to this, I cannot bear to recount it. What I found in the mist of dreams this time was not what there I had left before me. My power words of flight could not take me to the castle in the skies at will, my power was robbed of me. Instead I lay grounded, crushed, to walk in a dead forest for what felt like two lifetimes. I grew so desperate, for you see, there is neither thirst nor hunger in dreams, and worst there is no tiredness to schedule time around. I walked forever, it seemed, my only beacon a fluttering black light in the distance. Before I reached it it reached me, it overtook me with a swiftness that your physical experience may not parse. It was there before I knew it, it felt like it was always there. A black shape with eyes of fire, it points at me. There is no scorn that your evangelists warned of, in the presence of the Lord below. There is only a smile and a question. What is it that I desire?

You will laugh from your ivory tower brother, but you know well what I asked for once I recovered my wits like a good sorcerer. It is what you would have as well. Knowledge. Awareness. Truth. I longed to write to you with absolute certainty a different letter, one where I would in perfect speech convey the supremacy of the inner world against the outer. I wished you would wield to the inexorable conclusion and perhaps then brother, we could be brothers again, I cannot lie on this, not with my last breath. My lust, displaced as you well know from the flesh of women for decades now, towards this higher goal of awareness, it drove me to this hubris. The messenger paused for an eternity, then made it known me that this knowledge is forbidden, it told me that what I seek is what tore the world apart in the beginning of time, not between 'above' and 'below' but between inside and outside. Yet it did not scold me, there was no grandeur to its mist shape at all. Only onyx flame, raising ever higher, waiting for my impossible desire. I still wanted to know what prizes lay hidden in the darkness. And it is in this way that I learned the only truth there is, brother. I cannot impart to you its realization, only in common words describe it and I know it is meaningless, worthless. You will not understand it, you cannot understand it, it is better that you never do. Bear it even so.

The truth is there is nothing. Nothing exists, nothing has ever existed. Nothing has lived, nothing has died. We have never lived, we haven't died. We never existed. Dreams is all there ever was, and the dreams may pass. There is no romance to the Earth, brother, no higher beauty to the animals or stones. There is no idol that a god might reside in, even for a time. There is no idea, there is no hope, there is nothing. Nothing at all.

And yet I hope, as I am sure you have divined by the purpose of this missive, still. I hope to dissuade you and more importantly your children from ever seeking the truth in darkness. The cruel joke is on me, your light is a lie, but it's a useful one. Let not your children seek the darkness, it will, if they are strong, and I know our blood is strong, lead only to something worse than their death. Oblivion. If you can, destroy the power of Art over man, make it an entertainment, a consumption safe, robbed of its eldritch potency. Parlor magics for a generation drowning in luxury. They will be unhappy but at least they will continue to be. In your future world, make the pursuit of Great Art a masturbation intended for fools and narcissists alone. Neuter all talk of souls and Gods, they are useless to us, they are only a symbol of our own inexistence. Where there is beauty, hide it behind reason. Where there is force, pretend it belongs to the many. Where there is hope, cling to it, appropriate it, enforce it with your ethics and social programming, enforce the desire for man to exist, to never understand he has never existed.

As I write this I feel my will extinguishing, my last hope is fading, as I am fading too. My hands are neither old nor young, my knowledge spectral. My severed head is bloodless white with eyes silver, blind.

Intercontinental Jealousy

2011-02-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

Heavy Metal is born in the UK, the first time as a passing notion in the '70s and the second time, for real, with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Great music comes from the UK is the cliché. The US looks with reverence to the old country and also jealousy. "I can do that as well" they say, "and I can do it better!". There you have your Jag Panzer, with their three Judas Priest album's worth of riffs in their one song. Succeeding with excess.

The United States are a country constantly searching for history. One needs watch only a couple of the newer Scorsese films like "Gangs of New York" or "The Aviator" to see the great pains their psyche goes through to evangelize and invent upon some would say paltry two hundred years of recent activity. A country of immigrants trying to do the world one better: let's invent the perfect nation.

This is a weakness and a strength. Shoulders unburdened with the weight of an Aristotle or a Nietzsche, when the US get in on some cultural action, they do it with such earnestness and desire to augment ("put on steroids" is the ugly cliché I'm trying to avoid) that the mutant results are equally grotesque and fascinating. Yet, for all their enthusiasm, they usually move on to the next thing in increasingly brief allotments of time. Five years in the maximum.

Such was their involvement with metal music, between 1984 and 1990 or so. They took the basic formula of Heavy Metal and made it faster (speed metal), made it punkier (thrash metal) made it more shocking and weird (death metal) and they even tried to make it modernist (progressive metal). And then they were bored and done with it, they moved on to reinventing and augmenting different musics. Only very recently have they returned to savage the corpse of past inspirations again, I guess we must be running out of 'new' things to make 'newer'.

Here's where it becomes complicated, however. Europe isn't just the United Kingdom. Other countries around these parts that were in the sphere of cultural influence of America, due to the language barrier and other reasons did not notice the incongruity between NWOBHM and US metal, they took everything prima facie, a real history and an invented one both together, the grand Heavy Metal tree with all its various co-habitual branches. This was a misunderstanding, for as far as the US type of cultural thinking goes, once you augment the music you started with, once you take Heavy Metal and you create out of it 'Power Metal', then Power Metal has killed Heavy Metal. This is the anxiety of a country with little history: how to carve out a niche for oneself, how to ascertain one's continued existence. Roots must be invented, exploited, discarded, start again. "Thrash metal" wasn't meant to live side to side with old world metal, it was meant to replace it.

Europeans, due to naivety and perhaps lack-of-naivety as well, do not think in this way. They were impressed and inspired by the US boom of metal sub-genres and they took them and expanded on them infinitely, they found a place for invented history in real history, and that's how the story goes. Where the US is jealous of the artistry that comes with the management of the weight of history, the old world vampires are jealous of the spontinaety and vitality of the US.

Bethlehem - Dictius Te Necare

2011-01-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

Released by Red Stream in 1996

Rainer Landfermann : Vocals
Kläus Matton : Guitars
Jürgen Bartsch : Bass
Chris Steinhoff : Drums

Let's say a 'musical instrument' is defined by the sound it makes when manipulated. Where does the sound come from? Though the actual physics of sound are complicated, let's say that the conjured sound that comes from this manipulation does not originate in the human playing the instrument, instead it originates from within the instrument itself. Wherewithin exactly? Let's say it is in the exact center of its mass, in its absolute core. For us humans, that core would be the place you feel that burning, fluttering sensation when you're on the verge of action. Remember that feeling? Right at the edge, the precipice of life? That is the feeling of being alive, and in a carved piece of wood with strings over it, music is the same: a conjuration of life in the inanimate. The first man who hit one piece of wood with another felt as much. From these sounds came thoughts, and the thoughts, as modulated through the pitch of the imagination, became meanings.

Modern electronically-augmented music, in this context, is a misleading. A piece of machinery is manipulated by the human, and the sound is carried to a displaced location through wiring, reproduced and treated by a disembodied signal processor and amplifier. The thing itself, the object in the hands of the musician doesn't produce the end signal, it translates intention as a secondary degree of separation: a conduit of a conduit. Through this muddling of the signal, through this broken telephone, we achieve inspiration. We are used to this now, but please consider the world in a stupider, more primal way for me, just for a second.

I stand to your left and strum my electric guitar. My amplifier far to your right lets forth a resonant, distorted chord. You look at me, and my hands, but the sound comes from somewhere else. Isn't it ridiculous? Let's say the amplifier is at a very low volume, don't I look silly toiling at my mechanical erection only to summon forth those tiny, displaced cricket sounds? There is something there, some would call it dishonesty, some would call it a subversion. Let's consider that now I am attacking my instrument with renewed fervor, I am bending the strings, grinding them on the frets, I am making guitar-player grimaces, I am sweating. We turn the amplifier up until the whole room resonates. What physicality, you think. Yet the sound of my labor doesn't connect to my body, the weight, the violence of it is meta-physical. I am entering your mind, I am burning your soul, and I haven't touched you - I haven't even touched the sound that I am using to do this to you.

Let's now kick me and my amp out of the picture and consider a Heavy Metal song in its entirety, as experienced by the listener in their privacy. The stereo sound space is packed with information, meticulously crafted and placed in the range by a recording engineer and the band. There's often multiple clones of the guitarists playing on the far left and right of the field, some dry and in-your-face, some farther away and dampened by room acoustics of a room that doesn't exist. The drum set, whose physical location in the studio session was centered in a three meter cubicle, now spans the wide stereo range, the toms in a amphitheatrical radius around the listener's brain. Lead guitars appear suddenly, cutting right in the middle, competing with a chorus of singer-clones, or they instead are barely felt tens of meters away, deep in a nearby cave, reverberating ghastly. Keyboards rumbling low in the ground or perhaps instead high in the celestial heavens, black stars in the sky and flashes of bright thunder. What a stage that is, right? Absolutely impossible, improbable, sublime. How little it has to do with how the performers looked when they engaged their conduits-of-a-conduit in the recording session. Sometimes one at a time, playing to a click track. Sometimes their performances replaced in part or in whole by triggered electronics, their inputs stripped bare of nuance and error, only the binary intention left: a note appears here, or else there is silence here. This is how music crosses the Rubicon from the world of the living flesh, to the elysian fields of memory. This is how music dies to become perfect. The memory of its physicality remains an alluring connection to our experience, yet it has become spectral, intangible. It can never again be contained, scrutinized, dissected, like a physical effect. Do you know that even musicians forget how to play their songs some time after they've recorded them?

Heavy Metal is part of a long lineage of electronically augmented musics to embrace this paradox of meta-physicality. Whereas its spirit hearkens back to that primal state of "hitting the instrument so it may channel", its sound design is resolutely modern and programmatic: how can we place these disparate performances in a wholly invented sound field so as to conjure imaginative and inspiring vistas? How can we use the sound pool, the prime material to encourage the listener to tell a story that is more than the sum of the parts of the recording session?

When I listen to Heavy Metal I very rarely imagine a bunch of sweaty dudes in a room playing something, the sound coming from them or even from the instruments in their hands. I do not imagine physical human beings at all. It is therefore very odd to me, often disappointing, when I go to live shows and hear music that I've been intimate with for sometimes decades and I see these people play it out as if it's some kind of song, played on a couple of guitars and a drum kit. The older I get, the more I've been able to pinpoint this source of disappointment, and the more it's keeping me away from live shows. No matter how perfect the performance of the musicians in respect to the recorded material, it can never be perfect enough, for I still see it in front of me performed by musicians. The perfect state of (most, not all) Heavy Metal music is far away from human hands and instruments plugged in to amplifiers and PA systems, the perfect state of Heavy Metal is meta-physical, beyond life, a mirror to death. A bridge between lonely sentience and natural grace. Have you ever wondered why there's so many Heavy Metal album covers where there's a levitating guitar, sometimes set on fire, sometimes struck by lightning, once or twice coming out of an Albion lake, not a handler, a human in sight?

Heavy Metal knows itself, and even as it tries to perfect itself (=to kill itself) it rebels to that same process (it wants to stay alive). It levitates in the middle of the journey, it tries to have it all. That is what is most alluring about it, the headless statue that through chaos probability may magically find its head, the living who is dead. There is the violence of Heavy Metal - it has nothing to do with worldly pursuit of power, it has everything to do with to live and die at once. Breathing corpse. Beautiful & grotesque, morbidly angelic, a dream of death.

What there is to feel in Bethlehem's music can be found in the sound design of "Dictius Te Necare". You've probably heard a million different bands playing their variations of angry rock music by now, but please, return to that stupider, more primal state for a few seconds more and listen as if it's the only thing you've ever listened to. Classify the metaphysics of this with the urgency of survival. Beyond the obvious malice and menace of the screaming head, levitating high and low, laughing, weeping mumbling endlessly, there are other signifiers. Listen behind and around it. Dry, linear tremolo riffs abruptly giving away to open spaces where little happens. Stop thinking about this as entertainment, stop trying to have an opinion, a characterization that will make the incessant screaming head safe. You don't have to like it or dislike it, it isn't art, it isn't made by human beings, it is instead like the the stone, like a tree. It is there and what you do with it is imagine.

Amidst guitars and reverberated battery, the sound of fountain spring, few melancholy notes listlessly linger. The accusation towards Bethlehem of making music that sounds premeditatedly insane is a surface one, for those that can only hear the screaming head and cannot parse what it is saying. There are as many colors and movements here as there are inside any romantic art, though the value and meaning of them is dark. Whenever we most closest to a meaning, the band seemingly gives up, they run away at different directions, leaving behind distant murmurs or perhaps a lonely guitar playing little queen codas to nothing.

I do not know how many songs there are on this record, or what it is that separates one of them from the next. I have never listened to it in part, on purpose, nor do I have any favorite sequences I could point you towards as indicative of the benefits of it as entertainment. My mind rebels at trying to describe it, even. What I can tell you is that it took a long time to accept this music as it is, to look behind the screaming head. This achieved, what I am left with is a space that feels my own and yet alien. Listening to "Dictius Te Necare" for me is a dark walk outside on the inside... is it worth it to describe something so ingressive as if it's not? What would happen then?

Let's return to our smarter, modern, more self-aware mindsets now and see. The scientist has to say from his reductionist outlook and his Aristotelian tool set that this is made from riffs, common song structures, relatively safe minor melodies and common rock beats. There's even parts that sound like Iron Maiden and Scorpions. It is methodically robust, like most extreme metal, it is even conservative in structure. And yet, that screaming head, none of its choices make any sense. Could it be that it didn't make choices? It feels as if the band captured this person from the street, gave them the lyrics sheet and pressed record and this man cut off his head and let all the hateful blood jet out coldly, all at once, no grace or taste in it at all. Here are your “lyrics”, gents. Every word uttered perfectly, yet its all so wrong, the cadences out of time and the rhymes unfinished. This I believe to have been malice against the scientist, intentional and clear. If it is something Bethlehem did not want their music to be, is safe and enjoyable for the reductionist that pacifies everything with knowledge. Wrestling with art, armed with a scissor will always result to its wielder winning, but at what cost? When all the weird has been cut off for logic to add up, we're looking at the hands beating the instrument and saying how beautiful is the sound we have chosen out of it. If it was a matter of choice, there would be no instrument involved, music would be an academic thesis, printed and distributed but never felt in the space beyond space.

But that's not what we do with music. If "Dictius Te Necare" has a meaning, it's difficult to tie down. It's very lonely, but I am not lonely when I listen to it. It is dark, but it does not drive me to depression when I engage it. It is demented but I am saner and my focus more crystallized when I experience it. This is what romantic art does with the ghastliest of sources and it's how it's often misunderstood: the end result is of inspiration and imagination, not of impression and subjugation. What resonates, the quality to seek is not in values and ideals conjured but the space that's left sparse to wander.

Pretension!

2011-01-23T06:28:00.000-08:00

How can you climb a mountain to kill a God?
Why do you cross unknown lands, to kill our Gods?
Why do you build walls to starve our Gods?
Is it for the same reason you blind us?
Is this way you punish our children?
And rape our sisters?
When will we drown?
When will we burn?
Will you die with us? I think so
You are slicing your own wrists
You are tearing your own hearts
And you are drowning your own children
So you can end it... or we will
We are telling them the truth
And revealing all your lies
We do not need to climb a mountain
Or to cross unknown lands
Because we are Gods
And we will drown you
We will burn your homes
We the people, we the spirits, we the Gods

There's this complaint leveled against some Heavy Metal music that it is pretentious. Against actual human beings, it is a very winning strategy because we are all internally unsure of ourselves to various degrees. We assume roles we hope will win us various social benefits and it's a tell that we won't be getting what we need when we are exposed for 'trying too hard'. That's what pretension means, on the inter-personal level: you're trying too hard to act like a grown-up and I can tell, little boy. It's a very cutting critique because everyone is trying too hard. It's like the loser with no life that always jumps at the chance to berate others for being losers with no life. If we focus on the other guy, we're safe for the time being, right? Everybody's playing a game of hide and seek with each other, exposing as little of themselves as they can while still pursuing their social agenda, and always on the lookout to point at and laugh with the next-door emperor with no clothes.

I have problems with the term when used interpersonally not only because it presupposes generally unfair expectations, but because more importantly, it fails in describing the psychodynamics involved in social transactions. Nobody that talks to you is telling you anything real, even if they think it's real anyway. In the space where what they want and what you want interject, there's nothing real there, there's just pleasing congruity. Cries of pretension are a cheap description of something complex and they're used as weapon. However in the context of art it's worse, it becomes a really baffling critique that shows a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the listener as to the inherent qualities of art.

All art is pretension. The very essence of art-making involves reaching outside the mundane and the expected. If there's a piece of music that has ever touched the reader and inspired them, chances are it wasn't made with any humility. With romantic art (the most naive type of art, perhaps) and Heavy Metal foremost (the naivest of the naive), this centered desire for teliosis, this death fascination, goes well beyond reason and 'realism'. Humility is for the living. It's really baffling that anyone would buy a record with a memento mori skull gazing back at them on the cover and expect anything mundane and humble.

What I get from this critique of metal music is that some listeners go to it thinking that it isn't romantic at all. It's a band, let's say, Mercyful Fate, who perhaps play some cool-ass riffs and have nice singalong songs, they're primarily a bunch of guys making entertainment. So if these guys are pretending to be something else than base level entertainers, then the entity of Mercyful Fate is pretentious, it's trying too hard, it's embarrassing. This is perhaps the mindset of the scene socialite; the social gamer that is trying to play angles to make friends and win status. They will side with the more honest artists whose art they think more realistically depicts their lives because that's who they want to make friends with, these people are the most useful (this is also the reason punk and hardcore scenes are still, and will always remain, the more active). I never wanted to make friends with Mercyful Fate -- as drawn as I am to that entity, I also fear it, I am surprised at what it can do. I feel reverence towards it. I may come to be entertained by their riffs and melodies, but I stay for something else entirely.

That may sound very basic to some of you, you might be baffled by what these people are trying to do to themselves with Heavy Metal. How can today's metal listeners be now leveling critique of pretension towards this type of music? It's because they think they're metalheads but they're really punkers.

Punk rock scenes often operate under the assumption that the musicians are true to a credo of beliefs and that these beliefs will factor into their every action, both artistic and mundane. Using this system, the scene will gage how 'down to earth' and 'real' the musicians are at any time. However, Heavy Metal music is very solipsist, it is impossible to judge the artist's ideology through the movement of the band itself... romantic art doesn't care about you and your friends. The only way for punker to gage Heavy Metal music is for how entertaining it is. Though metal musicians operate inside a society (the low level economics behind putting out records are certainly social) they're doing their hardest on the higher level to disregard those inherent modernist charges. The end result is that although punkers and metalheads, their scenes and their methods are (now, or perhaps always were?) very alike, their artistic product is variable in its resistance to social critique and scrutiny. Punk music (especially hardcore punk of the American variety) goes out of its way to be a transparent conduit to the belief sets of the individuals that make up the band, to be a reflection of 'real life' (whether it achieves that or if this is achievable anyway is a different discussion) whereas metal music goes out of its way to obscure the faulty individuals behind the music, instead to summon an entity as ancient as it is inscrutable with our modern tools of logic and dialectics. To look into a Heavy Metal record and comment on how pretentious is it is akin to looking inside a natural chasm or fountain spring and doing the same. That level of critique does nothing to the art - and it gives no tools for the critic to understand it either. Only disappointment can be found there for the listener. And then the natural question is, what are punk rockers doing in Heavy Metal scenes? Do they need it so much, to be disappointed? Is some existential belief in them hinged on finding pretenders and outing them? "Everyone is a liar", that sort of thing?

I believe the answer may be that after metal music's stab at the mainstream circa 1988-90 and the resulting commercial disaster, it went underground by necessity, to survive. There it met other debris of the same process like punk rock and gothic rock and whatnot, and these scenes cross-polinated with metal-curious punks leaving their ideological mark on (most of all) the then-nascent extreme types of metal. But that's a different post for a different time.

To offer a counterpoint to my position above, however, let's say that calling a piece of romantic art pretentious can also mean that the art is failing in its romantic intent even for the romantically-inclined critic. Though such theoretical entities should know better than to use that language, let's go with it. It is very embarrassing to be exposed to failing romantic art because it's an acute and unflattering reflection on us and how we spend our time to be caught up with such bullshit. So, effectively, when someone positively inclined toward romance, critiques a Heavy Metal record on grounds of pretension, what they might be really saying is "it doesn't capture me, it's transparent and I can see through it, to the people behind it and they're just people after all". Whereas calling something pretentious is a communication shutdown if there ever was one (and tellingly, the best invitation for flames), the above breakdown of the same accusation is perhaps braver and promotes further discussion.

Why do we feel let down when we can see that people are people after all? Is it that the stronger the spell may be, the worse it is when we realize what imperfect beings can temporarily summon such power over us? Is it the inevitable fallout of any masochism to be disenchanted when the one-who-hurts is demystified? Is this why some of us move towards auto-gratification (making our own Heavy Metal) instead?

Atrox - Contentum

2011-01-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

Released in 2000 by Season Of Mist

Eivind - guitars
Rune - guitars, samples, sounds
Monika - vocals, synths
Tor Arne - drums
Hingst Hirbel - bass

There's a woman and a man inside every soul. Opposites longing for reconciliation, a lifetime spent to bridge this gap, one fashioned of modern usefulness and reason. Men destroy, women create, a quaint, outmoded line of thinking. Men will spear and kill and women will take the kill and make it into life, what a laughable simplification of the endlessly complicated human condition. A simple existence-for-existence drawing, it has nothing to offer the modern citizen. But this life we mock, invented perhaps, of the Neanderthal, whose memory for one hundred and fifty faces, vocations and uses dictates the span of his tribe, it might put a limit to his anxiety as well. His tribe is is world, his direction, you can see it on the horizon.

Mouths aghast when such words are said, on the faces of the facebook generation with the tens of thousands of faces and no clear vocations and uses, the sentient mind of the world-as-community. You savage, they cry: The tribe has no horizon, it is numberless. There is no space left nor is there function. Our raison d'être is to consume then shit ourselves out in smarter, more compact shapes. Our god is pleased with our invention.

This life is no longer simple. Inside human beings there burn the ancient natural calls for birth & death all the same - that we'll begrudgingly acknowledge. But the ever-longing for functional simplicity, for ease and safety that brought us here in this city -- is the one that represses the darker side, it must be repressed because there is nothing left to hunt, nowhere left to go. So we play video-games, and we watch like Americans sports and we fight bloodlessly with words on the internet and we watch televised renditions of atrocity in some faraway land and our destruction is so petty, our small deaths too small, more a sneeze than an orgasm - not even a dream's worth of sleep. We are now no longer animals. We are no longer men and women, we are ideas, our god is logic and in the eyes of this god, what is shameful must surely not exist, must have never existed.

But I feel it, the pull towards Nothingness and the lust for Everything. I want to die a thousand deaths and I want to create a universe of strange life. The dark magic of Heavy Metal to me is not a reminder of petty ideals and citylogic that your excretory grind-core achieves, it is a melancholy reminder of a landscape I have never visited, angles turned into themselves, ancient obsidian monuments carve the cerulean sky. I feel it so well yet my vision is blurry, like in a dream.

There's a woman and a man in me, I know. This world knows nothing, this world that dies every time I close my eyes, I must be imagining it. I will not trust it. Whatever decree your god has for me, whatever killing light he casts inside this cave to illuminate ideas and ideals, there is always a sharp shadow to hide within and imagine everything, askew, wrong, beautiful. In there, the dark dreaming pool, the carnage is shameless and in the winter of its respite, so is love.

Heavy Metal is masculine and feminine. Its surface description is of the latter form. Linear, pummeling riffs, fascist rhythmic dictation, killing thrust. This violence is what attracts us to it initially. But its core is feminine, because it is creative art, it is a genesis of pure emotion. It takes sounds and events and it makes them into something that would have never otherwise existed. What makes us respond to romantic art is this inner tenderness that one must wound and hurt so much to reach. There is the reconciliation of opposites that - I theorize - earlier man, less sentient and less comfortable, would achieve much more simply than the dualist worldbrain we're part of today allows for.

Atrox are a sister band to The 3rd and the Mortal. Their fascinating reflection to their atmospheric metal is warped; Where The 3rd and the Mortal achieved weightlessness and introspection through a very sanded-down and solemn audio sculpture, Atrox push towards a pluralist direction, awash with sight and sound and curious detours into caricature realms.

I remember buying this record after reading a bewildered review of it in a magazine. The reviewer couldn't parse the goings on in "Contentum", but through his description - which he meant to use as means of dismissal - I could see there would be something there for me. Indeed, on my first few listens it clicked instantly and seamlessly with my aesthetic sense and it is with difficulty now that I try to remove myself from it and look from the outside to describe it to you.

This music, I suppose, in this remote mode, is weird. The record cover is lurid with saturation and formless detail, beings of undefinable purpose and sense belong together in chaotic symmetry. The music inside might be upsetting because the singer tends to dance around the linear riffs wildly, almost maniacally at times. As the bird tries to escape the cage, the cage must grow around it in fractal fascination. Little about "Contentum" is straightforward, but not nothing. There's riffs and songs and metal here, but it's what dresses them that's curious.

Some sense can be forced on this curious record if its predecessor is examined. Of a more standard doom/death form, there the female vocals are used in the sedate & usual "beauty and the beast" mode pioneered by Theatre of Tragedy: a very anguished man is screaming prose and between his gasps, an ethereal female voice swims. This is how metalheads want their womanly presence in their metal: sexless and discrete, being told where to interject and with what geisha anecdote.

On "Contentum" there are no tortured male screams. The other difference is the constant melodic leads on both guitar and keyboards that decorate the muscular riffery underneath. This is a braver way to portray a womanly presence in Heavy Metal, one that is fleshed out, not the impossible idealized shadow of femininity but instead a human entity that travels freely from lower to higher strata, unbridled by laws and expectations, rude and playful as it is gracious and skilled. That female voice to me sounds, as it always sounded, like the voice of pure creation.

It's brave to write metal music like this, not only because there is no precedent for it but also because there's a reason there's not any precedent for it. Metalheads are embarrassed by the feminine aspect of their music even more than they're embarrassed by the maso-homosexual implication of being pummeled by riffs: Atrox conjure a space where their accomplished and directed attack seeks to destroy in familiar and pleasurable ways the listener while an impish female ghost witnesses and laughs. I can see why some metalheads were infuriated at the vocal excursions here, they're not discrete. They demand acknowledgment. This streak of manic assertion makes it an intensely female record, and that makes it even more difficult to present to the army of perpetually teenaged-feeling guys that make up the metal hordes. Atrox can be seen as if they're making fun of muscular metal with their vocal histrionics.

However, they're not. Opposites are reconciled through talent, here. For the extremities this record achieves in places, it very rarely feels as if it's pulling itself apart by going in many different directions at once. There's grace and nuance as to the positioning of voices and density. Atrox know what they're doing.

Also let's consider from the outside another reaction to this music, one not of bewilderment and annoyance, but passé and cynical acceptance. "So it's avant-garde metal with a gimmicky singer, Helm. What's the big deal?" It's true that in the essence of avant-garde often is the invention of a gimmick. A good reason why I contest the usage of the avant-garde term in metal music is exactly because metal music is far too constructed to be truly experimental. For every vocal pyrotechnic here, there are equally brilliant and nuanced rhythmic and melodic offerings on other instruments, the music coheres. Atrox achieves a gestalt that has little to do with 'experimental' music and much to do with carefully and conservatively considered compositional technique. Play the voices of almost any song here on a piano, and then compare that material with actual avant-garde music.

So it's an interesting thing to note that 'avant-garde' in metalhead perspective is a music that to outsiders sounds mostly like other metal music. The range of expression expected (and desired) by metalhead audiences is limited. There is a reason for this, it is that sound is only the gateway to something else for the metalhead, it is not the focus itself. Experimentalists of prime sound do not fascinate if they cannot take us where we long to go, in that place where chaos and order are reconciled, dreams of death assuage the modern scars of logic.

I hold what Atrox have achieved here in great respect, and it's one of the few cases I feel a little disappointment that there's been no merited follow-up to it from them or other hopefuls. The track "Ignoramus" here with its confused power-groove and ill-fitting atmosphere sadly suggests the direction that Atrox would take with every successive release. The balance is ruined. The beautiful is also the scary on "Contentum" - intuitive movement, non-directive, fluttering emotion, prone to exhaustive depths or heights, fragile as is strong - it comes from a woman's psyche. There should be more metal music that isn't afraid to show these colours. Euro-metal with washed out Opera singers doesn't achieve this, nor does extreme metal with women gurgling and screaming, pretending to be one of the boys.

True femininity brings terror to those accustomed to sexuality-as-spectacle for in it are carried a thousand desires, not all of them prepackaged and safe. The gamut of wistful playfulness, wanderlust, dramatic disappointment and ultimate melancholy - the emotional range of a teenager of full heart, before the world breaks them with logic, is here. We all know how our heart beats, but we're ashamed of some of it, most of it. When we're brave and enter Heavy Metal with romance in our eyes, we often yet overextend in the anger of destruction. To deny the equal pull towards creation, is to create lifeless monuments to the Nothing. Stillbirth. The risk must be taken, a smile must be carved on the stone - the playfulness and levity of this music stands important exactly because of how grave and serious its intent is to convey all of the psyche is. Life and death, together.

Heavy Metal Spectacle

2011-01-03T17:27:00.000-08:00

Metalheads are easily impressed. The hook of Heavy Metal music on the surface level is the same spectacle that captures the attention of fans of other pop music, i.e. what the artist is wearing in their photo-shoot, what big statement they made in the press, how catchy the first melody of the first song on the record is, so on. On that level, how hard, fast and/or technical a metal band plays serves the same purpose as the new outfit worn by Lady Gaga. Different language, same argumentation.

Most Heavy Metal listeners aren't musicians themselves. I suspect an unquantifiable section of them are failed guitarists, but even so, failed for a reason. It's depressing to see how bands with little meaning to their music are often revered by metalheads as not only important but more important than pop music because they employ technical trickery that impresses the musical illiterate. Nearly everything metal music does on an aesthetic and compositional level is a more technically dense version of what more tame popular music does, only with the conceit that the added chops and technicality can only exist because they serve a higher purpose. Like many sophist arguments, underneath the hood this is a circular argument "Of course my metal is profound, otherwise why would it be so complicated sounding?"

Density doesn't equal complexity and complexity doesn't equal nuance. The more tech-heavy modern metal gets, the less it seems to have anything to say emotionally and the palette in which to say it becomes more and more monochromatic via dictates of loudness wars sound design. Instead modern metal is increasingly base, the basic idea is how most to augment the linear sexuality of the riff, the mechanised sadist thrust of sixteenths over double-bass. Slow metal, fast metal, noodly wanky prog metal and anthemic chorus-laden pop metal, all with the same values, all peaking over the red, all loudly cracking speakers in a simple triangle room. Speaker left, lonely guy, speaker right.

When humans are trying to describe reality, they do so in simple terms, simple stories that make sense, semi-realist fantasies that capture the generalized shape of something deeply confusing to make it safe, to domesticate it. Conspiracy theorists look at geopolitical happenings that are so infinitely complex to unravel and they offer simpler, safer constructs to explain away that feeling of dread inherent in gazing inside an endless machine: the Jews did it. The New World Order. I don't blame conspiracy theorists for reaching that caveman-structural end to their paranoia because 'simple solutions' is an ancient reflex. It got us where we are. It is inherent in the belief in basic language. In the adoration of grammar, as Nietzsche said, we may find the strongest suggestion that the populous is not finished with the concept of God.

Humans like simple things. If you can't explain it simply, it doesn't exist. The curious thing with the fantasies of these simple solutions is that once humans present them in the culture and if they achieve traction and enter the public subconscious, they inform the endlessly complex structures on which they are commenting on. This means that although the Jews are not controlling the world, after widespread conspiracy theorizing as to the opposite, there absolutely must be now influential (or self-considered influential) Jews that are stepping up to that fantasy, they're trying to control the world. They're trying to turn a fantasy into reality because a fantasy is simpler and safer. This effect is the same on all levels. Take how human beings explain away the complex interpersonal interactions between lovers in the model of 'women are from Venus, men from Mars'. Ludicrous as such dualism may be, after it has penetrated the public subconscious, there are now men who are trying to be extra Martian and women so unbearably and artificially pink that it becomes an aggressive, sadistic tactic. God does not exist but we have invented him and look how people flock to deities of all stripes and colors, they cannot all be right, can they? What if they're all right in the simple terms of their simple life story, though? What if the lowest-entry personality cult member is achieving the exact same grace that high-echelon Christians are? What if the biggest pull to simple structure is psychic safety?

Likewise, Heavy Metal music, a complex cultural and artistic phenomenon, has suffered decades of attempted simplifying, its rough edges sanded down for public consumption. Every new metal genre name is a wound in this sense, it is a further codification of what needs no more. And exactly because these tags and genre codes gain traction with the consumer public, this feeds back into the making of metal music on the primary level. Musicians are not trying to make unpredictable, chaotic art that may solidify as it itself desires, they're trying to make "thrash metal". "True death metal". "Orthodox black metal". They're channeling nothing more profound than their own surface expectations. They know beforehand what this music is supposed to be and they're trying to fit their inspiration in a predetermined mold. Modern heavy metal, as all modern art suffers from these expectations-coming-to-life. The more mainstream the metal strand, the clearer the ravages of this feedback loop: it has become what was infuriatingly the cliché outsider view of it was for decades: obnoxiously loud without nuance, subtlety and higher meaning. Deafening, pummeling walls of distortion that decorate either low angst or desire for fucking. It wasn't always so, but once humanity has fantasized a simple solution, outliers will subconsciously feel the pull to cater to the expectation, to belong, to exist.

Humans like simple solutions. They like structure and order. These things are safe, they mean we will not die today. But safety isn't exciting. Exactly because we know we will die someday, we also have a deep pull towards senselessness and chaos. The killing reverie of art is a homage to lust and death. We try to hide it and we pretty it up when we can no longer hide it but a very basic reason we celebrate art-making and art-experiencing is because it is startling to remember we know nothing and we're soon going to be not of this world. Nearing the gates of unfathomable delirium, from the first time ancient man banged a piece of wood and danced around a fire so high it could touch the black stars. Now that's exciting.

Art achieves holistic grace in that it is magic that tempers the forces of life but stands in awe against the uncontrollable chaos of death. It must grace both Apollo and Dionysus, otherwise it's not very good as art. If it's too structured, it becomes a (mainstream) video-game: put in specific data, get other, fancier but completely systematic data at the output, predictable as is may be pleasing. Most of modern metal is a video-game in this way: the consumer knows exactly what they're going to get for what they put in before they press play. Of course, humans cannot help being humans and even in the most predictable modernized vacuous metal records there are elements of chaotic death-reverie, startling jolts, no matter how brief and underachieved that remind of that other aspect of art, the dark reflection in the mirror pool: for you to live you must die a little.

Metalheads are easily impressed and they're self-conscious and of low self-esteem. They celebrate the tamest, the most video-game aspects of their beloved music in public conversation. How hard this band plays, how ripping the sound design of this band is, how many beats per minute this drummer can achieve, how many notes in this solo, how much this song sounds like that other song. Or even most insidiously, how sad this song makes one, how deep this band is, how far out the atmosphere of this record. Yet these things are expected, they knew they'd get that before they pressed play. What they got was pleasing melody, conservative, safe structure and a relatively good time. Metalheads often dress up those experiences common with any popular music fan throughout the world as something higher, more important, hidden behind the Heavy Metal ghost, the power of hi-gain distortion and double bass.

If someone is getting more out of their art than this, they must be startled, fundamentally shocked by it, even years after first contact. They struggle with words when called to explain the deepest core of what art does to them and most importantly, when pressed to find these words, they non-standard, they weird, like poetry perhaps. They moved to introspection because of art, they alter themselves in their ingress?

For most music listeners around the world there just isn't enough time and inclination for this. Metalheads aren't any different. The spectacle of art is a tyranny of safety. Much of our identity is defined by what we consume and we are listlessly reminded that our prime directive is to seek comfort and safety in things and services. The information of this way of life on art is captured on our syntax and grammar, subject, verb, object, a God a desire and a product.

Perhaps you've noticed that although I'm talking about music which means the most for me on this blog, I don't reach for hyperbole often. Aside from considerations of taste that inform my writing approach, there's a deeper reason for this. Frenzied praise common to most music reviews (and at the altera pars, cynical deconstruction) I believe are reflexes of self-obfuscation. They focus the reading on the supposedly valiant feats/grave evils the music is impacting on its own, cutting out the perception and life experience of the writer. This is the way to market to one and all. What I am trying to do with this blog is not to domesticate the art in this way, it is to connect disparate personal experiences, aesthetic charges semi-inherent in the form and reaching theory into a whole that is more exuberant and startling in its chaotic non-clarity than any riff or song on itself can accomplish in its disconnected safety. There's nothing to be impressed with in the guts of metal as a music, just melodies harmonies and rhythm like all before and after it and I tire of those that try so far to convince otherwise, to build a simple but grandiose metal machine to hide their persons behind. The parts of a music, the melodies, harmonies and rhythm are put together by people and they who listen to it are people too. To understand the true beauty of art in all its horror and grace is to understand them foremost.

As to 'best of' lists, in case it wasn't clear...

2011-01-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

Ask me again ten years from now if I'm still listening to anything that came out in 2010.

A - nd what's left

2010-12-31T06:04:00.000-08:00

Since I'm almost done with the letter A (only Atrox left and I'm having some trouble writing that review because I don't want to repeat what was said in The 3rd And The Mortal review -- but I'll get it eventually) I figured I'd post mini-explanations of why I didn't include other exemplary records in my collection from the first letter of the alphabet in the final top100.

Autopsy - Mental Funeral

Archetypal death metal band from California, wildly influential in both their home country and abroad (especially in Sweden) with their superficially sloppy and rude but fundamentally composed and impactful attack. "Mental Funeral" is their second record, from 1991 and the one I find most effective as a long-runner, though I often listen to their best-of just as happily. Autopsy didn't write many bad songs and the worst they offer is some disposable punky side-waste they're excused for as far as I'm concerned. At their best they are very effective in channeling this morbid fascination with the dead and dying that oftentimes comes hand in hand with erections in puberty. They are most effective because they colour their death paeans with a sloppy, almost sexual sense of movement. Furthermore, of all the sound design approaches in metal music, Autopsy's has the most body to it, pungent and horrid as it may be.

However I do not include their otherwise excellent music in my top 100 because their many variations of

"Dead
Stiff and cold
In your box
To decay
Dead"

strike me as a rudimentary instrument with which to peel back the layers of meaning inherent in the sentience/mortality conundrum. More a shovel, less a scalpel. Their slower (for Autopsy only seem to have two modes, very slow and very fast) compositional aspect was parallelized by the British doom/death
bands like Paradise Lost whose odes to not only existentialist despair but also ancient beauty, strike closer to the core of my interests.

Artillery - By Inheritance

Thrash metal band from Denmark. Wild guitar gesticulations but very melodic, often close to the Megadeth approach to technothrash. I used to listen to a couple of their records a lot, and "By Inheritance" is the one I'd keep if I had more space in my heart. However over the years and with a stronger appreciation for the history of Heavy Metal music, I've realized that what Artillery achieve in 1990 with 'By Inheritance' has been preempted by a width of dutiful thrash acts, most of them American as is the usual. Though it's hard to find fault with the inventive and convincing riffery explored throughout this LP, after all it is hard to get excited about it too after you've found its well of inspiration to be more vital and innocent. Even their lyrics are a pastiche of thrash 'issues of the day', well after the expiration date of their poignancy. Small things like that pile up and so, sadly leave Artillery only barely under the limit of first-rate Heavy Metal.

Arcturus - La Masquerade Infernale

On the other hand this is not second-rate at all. Norwegian theatric & atmospheric metal with roots in the - then - vital black metal scene. This record has been a companion over many years but I no longer listen to it with any regularity. It seems to be one of these unfortunate cases where the aesthetic space that could be said to have been first colonized by Arcturus around that time, was later explored more successfully by bands of lesser ambition but more honed vision. The influence of Arcturus is expansive not in that there are Arcturus clones (and if there were I wouldn't prefer them to the real thing) but in that Arcturus and some co-aligned bands of their time made it okay for their scene of extreme metal to attempt left-field experiments. As is the thing with experiments, they're hit-and-miss. Much of the wandering on "La Masquerade Infernale" depends on novelty to carry it, but novelty passes and what is left is songs with less inherent meaning that expected, sometimes they feel under-composed or (less flatteringly for the writer of this critique) perhaps all that is really missing is a plethora of solid hooks and ear-candy.

This record enjoys a sterling reputation, though I suspect it is not often put to the test for it. It's something like an elitist achievement that I think certain Arcturus members would find ironically enjoyable, to be so widely respected yet so rarely enjoyed.

Angra - Holy Land

Brazilian europower, highly prized as saviors of that certain brand in what was in the mid '90s a very difficult era for the more traditional types of metal music. Led by a very charismatic vocalist & guitarist duo. This, their second release was part of the soundtrack of my youth and initiation to the mysteries of steel, along with other Teutonic power metal bands like Running Wild, Helloween and Blind Guardian.

The love didn't stick for Holy Land however because I started to feel the tensions between the more faux-classical/progressive/wimpy aspects of the band (spearheaded by their singer, Andre Matos) and their down-and-dirty speed metal ripping the cohesion of their music apart. It became uncomfortable to listen to something standing with one leg in metal, especially at such a formative age where being 'true' was very important. By the time 'Fireworks', their next record came out in 1998, it was abundantly clear Angra were saviors of nothing.

My Heavy Metal interests by that time were beginning to widen, I had accepted strains of extremity that I wouldn't be caught dead listening to only a year earlier, Angra, even at this, their best, seemed passé. This is unfair because, on revisitation, the material is mostly solid, however such weight of memories and expectations is almost impossible to shake off. And if I were to attempt to remedy such biases, it'd be for something with a more idiosyncratic taste than what remains, at the end of the day, another europower band.

Angel Witch - s/t

Seminal New Wave of British Heavy Metal record, sadly not the whole of it keeps up with two of its more well-known songs. Charmingly earnest like a lot of NWOBHM and very catchy, however uneven. The second best thing Angel Witch had going for them was the imagery that their name conjures. Probably my favorite metal-inversion name after 'Dream Death'. The strength of naming in Heavy Metal cannot be underestimated. I cannot listen to a band named 'Pigfuk' or perhaps worse, 'Lesbian', no matter how good their music might be, as the name conjures nothing grand in my mind. Sadly most of the great names seem to have been taken, which is to be expected with forty years of Heavy Metal history behind us.

I might be selling Angel Witch a bit short here, it does say something that I can play the title-track in my mind right now from beginning to end and enjoy myself for it, doesn't it? Sometimes when caught in public transportation without an mp3 player, I do this, meaning I play back Heavy Metal favorites in my brain, I can't be the only one? Well, "Angel Witch" is in the NWOBHM best-of for sure, even if the rest of the record doesn't achieve such high atmospheres. If you ever meet a metalhead who can't sing at least the chorus to that song, on the spot, they're possibly deluding themselves as to their subcultural identity.

Aftermath - Eyes of Tomorrow

Even a band like Coroner can have something of a clone, it seems. Well, that's selling Chicago's Aftermath short, actually, as they do some pretty inventive things with the "Mental Vortex" formula here, although much too late (1994) for it to be historically significant. Though I enjoy a couple of songs off of this often, listening to a whole record in one sitting proves tiring. The material is too homogeneous, though thrash metal's done worse in this respect. There are some pretty interesting lyrics here too "he has visions, he has premonitions / he can see, he knows / eyes of tomorrow / predictions have been made / throughout the course of history / the future can be seen" A heavy metal song about predestination, what do you know? The biggest reason I do not include this in my top 100 is that I have not yet had the fortitude to sit the whole record through, and I've had it for years and years. Though this certainly says something, I'm open to amending my position in the future, who knows what tomorrow'll show -- wait

Adramlech - Irae Melanox

Italian power/progressive metal which often is referenced as being similar to early Fates Warning. Low-rent guitar production cuts initial excitement short, though one gets used to many things when they're search for gems in the underground. It even becomes something of a curious merit of the record to be able to hear the bass and drums so clearly to the expense of the tinny guitars. Furthermore the trebly tone suits the tendency of the guitarists for dual leads and other harmonizations, because, though their two chosen tones are terrible, they are substantially different and complement each other well.

This record opens strong with 'Fearful Visions' and 'Zephyrus', both excellent tracks in which, even through his clumsy Italian-English, their talented singer manages to tap into potent lyrical symbols. The rest of the record is almost as good. I'm not including this in my top 100 due to lack of familiarization, as I've only been exposed to them for a couple of years.

Acid Bath - When the Kite String Pops

From the record cover down to the last note, Louisiana's Acid Bath are interested in juxtaposing the ugly with the uglier side of life. Their very talented frontman, Dax Riggs (who went on to a diverse career after this) is preoccupied with stories of drug abuse, social alienation and resultant psychic and physical violence. Acid Bath are excellent at this, at pushing real-life horror in the forefront while the listener is at the edge of the high that only well-written and performed metal music can achieve. However a certain air of falseness permeates this recording. I'm not saying that Acid Bath were strangers to the ugly side of life when they made this record, quite the opposite, it's an issue of aspiration, not inspiration. All Heavy Metal music is a pretension in that it reaches to something beyond one's experience, it is a leap of faith. It is relevant aesthetic sense and destination that dictates the direction of this leap. Given that all Heavy Metal music essentially hopes for something without evidence, I'd rather hope for something beautiful than find it beautiful to pretend to be hopeless. Hence, though I sometimes return to this record, it is always from the vantage of the alienated observer.

Abraxas - Future World & Shattered by a Terrible Prediction

I have fond memories of their "Shattered by a Terrible Prediction" EP as it was one of the first things that a dear friend of mine played me on his turntable when early into my Heavy Metal initiation. I remember he was impressed by how the lyric to the main song referenced the image on the cover of the record. Meaning augmenting meaning. I had forgotten about Abraxas for a long time between then and when I tracked that record down again some five years ago, online. The music of it, besides its obvious sentimental value to me, felt overly familiar (in both good and bad ways) and amateurish (only in bad ways). A more sloppy take on Helloween-styled speed metal, an almost lifted chorus section, double-bass and palm muted major melody. Though an interesting curio, I would never include it in a best-of list of any kind perhaps save of "...Other Teutonic speed metal you might have missed out on" along the likes of Scanner and Not Fragile.

However the shame here is that I took my sweet time to ever get to their belated follow-up "Future World" due to the somewhat underwhelming experience with the EP. Also that there is Helloween song named that, certainly didn't help.

In reality their "Future World" has little relation to Helloween, or their past sound in general. They play an ambitious form of power/progressive metal, augmented by startling dual-guitar fluency, beautiful melodies and tirelessly dynamic composition. I play the record often now that I have began to uncover its many graces but it'll be a few years before I'm ready to say if it belongs in the pantheon.

Angus - Track of Doom

Angus are a strange band. They're something of a throwback, playing a simple and derivative type of Heavy Metal that could be said to be passé even by its 1986 year of release. The songs of this Dutch quartet are mostly similar yet the music doesn't become boring. I guess Angus are a little like my AC/DC, which makes their choice of name apt. Their singer has a clear and imposing voice that I can't get enough of, strikes a similar feel to Dio's more mythological excursions. In a certain mindset, Angus become The Best Band That Ever Where, however in other mindsets its almost impossible to listen to them without spotting their lack of forward vision. Very earnest, driving stuff, but not as spiritually elevating as it'd have to be to be in my top100.

Agent Steel - Unstoppable Force

Talking about speed metal, here's the prime candidate, really. Paranoiac futurist/alien conspiracy speed metal at that. And therein lies the problem: though I enjoy this record to the point where I think my first whiplash-related injury that I remember was during the high note of the same-titled track, I really am not enamored with the concept of alien intelligence as the thematic focus of a Heavy Metal record. At least not in that literal sense,

"From the walls of the ocean
From the waters they rise
Share their wings they will take us
Hundred light years in minutes

Split through the cosmos
The universe is falling
Earth base II the city underwater

See Atlantis is rising
Watch the skeptic is sinking
From atop of the Andes
Stands our city of gold

YOU CAN'T STOP IT,
IT'S ALREADY COMING
TOO LATE! NO HIDING!
THEY'RE COMING FROM THE AIR
UNSTOPPABLE FORCE!!!
[solos]"

(the capitalization reproduced as found on darklyrics.com, as it best conveys the excitement on that chorus)

I mean, I feel slightly robbed when I am made to bang my head like there's no tomorrow for some space aliens that are coming from the air and it's too late to stop them. So what? I'm sure John Cyriis, singer and lyricist for the band at that time (and it turns out, he has returned to the fold for however briefly, in the present) takes the possibility of aliens amongst us and conspiracy theories much more seriously. I find it difficult to do the same.

At the Gates - The Red in the Sky Is Ours

Swedish fractured black/death metal with folkish influences and a very idiosyncratic idea on parallel guitar riffing that approaches what I sometimes call 'metalhead counterpoint'. Written by what we now know were gifted teenagers, it captures very lucidly (but not succinctly, as this music is rambling) the disparate psychological pulls of the introvert, talented adolescent. Teliosis and suicide, self-mutilation and hate for the outer. Right up my alley as it were, however not strong enough to be top100 material because of a lack of variety. Given their compositional approach, it's easy to take a part from one song and put it in another, or perhaps worse, to take a part of one song and have it be of no decreased quality for its loss. These are errors, so to speak, that make sense for At The Gates's early approach to music writing. When they went to correct them they ended up with commercialized and straightforward music that doesn't appeal to me, so it seems like a damned if they do and if they don't damned kind of situation. As a composer of fractured music of many parts, I have sympathy for At The Gates, but it's nonetheless a very taxing experience to follow this record through its many twists and turns down what at the end becomes a very well-trodden labyrinth, and though the emotional returns are perhaps worthwhile, there are other bands in my top100 which hit those beats just as well or better and also achieve other goals in the span of their record.

Amorphis - Tuonela

This artifact from the '90s by the Finnish once-death metal band Amorphis has been widely celebrated as a bridge between atmospheric metal and what was once briefly called alternative metal. The songs are very catchy, succinct and the sound design of them is obviously labored upon. The melancholy that characterizes the beautiful lyrics is then coated in a laminated sheen, it's easy to be impressed by that record but more difficult to feel close to it. Such was the fate of many '90's bands trying to become something more than Heavy Metal. Amorphis gave an interview to british magazine Terrorizer once from where I remember a very telling quote. When asked about their influences and music likes, they said "certainly nothing from the dreadful '80s". As the '80s where the apex of Heavy Metal music, this says a lot. Tuonela offers '70s art (and not progressive) rock trappings in an approachable '90s sleek mainstream metal veneer. The quality of the songs here overcomes the inherent weaknesses of that combo, not not enough for this to be something I can outright profess to love eternally.

Aarni - Bathos

Confounding Finnish experimental doom music. Has a humorous quality to it which is completely outside of how other metal bands have approached humor (usually awful Monty Python impressions by Germans is what we get, or worse, faux socially poignant didactic finger-wiggling by thrash bands) in that the joke here is that nothing makes tidy sense and whatever expectations the listener is trying to build through listening to the record are upset gently but certainly two minutes later. I suspect the point of this music is a celebration of quantum uncertainty as an end in itself, akin to reading Robert Anton Smith. To effectively hold no views, to have no identity, to be swallowed in potentiality. This goal I detect (and I'm glad to accept that I might have misunderstood Aar-- haha haha hahahah) is a high one, however the music is let down by a degree of amateurism in sound design and recording. Now, I am sure the personae involved in Aarni have a good (and cruelly humorous) explanation for sound shortcomings and how that may or may not fit into their meta-concept, but for me those explainations will not fix the problems with the recording here.

All this isn't to say that Aarni are a joke band. The record doesn't make tidy sense but it certainly achieves a (messy) mood and there is a worthwhile construct to revisit here. I just feel that the Aarni entity has it in them to make this record again, better.

Ageless Wisdom - demo

Greek Manilla Road-esque Heavy Metal worship with a tender heart and the force of steel. As much as I love these two songs (and I love them fierily) they're just two songs. Get over it, Helm.

Annon Vin - A New Gate

Voivodesque progressive metal (with roots in technothrash, as it were) with overdone vocal harmonies on top. One of many German bands enamored with that type of music, they congregated around Mekong Delta like most. Their vocal harmonies are distinct and rare enough in metal music (not to mention, thrash metal) that they have a little page in HM history just to themselves. The quirky Nothingface-esque guitar playing and the active and inventive bass lines carry the songs just as well as the alien metal Beach Boys thing their singer has going for himself (as it is, unlike the Beach Boys, one person singing all the harmony parts on multitrack recording here). However problems persist. Being out of key in one voice is problem enough, harmony vocals that quiver around their intended note is sometimes too much. The material however is very promising and I might get over my small issues with this record and find a place for it in the pantheon.

Aspid - Extravastation

Raging Russian technothrash in the vein of Destruction's "Cracked Brain", only more accomplished in that particular metal idiom. I listen to this a lot and constantly find new things to love. However it's far too soon to tell if it's top100 material. Check back with me five years or more from now.

Abstract Algebra - s/t

Post-modern power/progressive project by Candlemass's Leif Edling. Much of interest to be found here, great range and variety that Edling would never reattempt. The sound design is modern and robust, the music deceptively simple for what it attempts to convey. At one time many thought the future of metal music might be found in outings such as these, however for good or worse it wasn't to be.

Not every song holds up to scrutiny and even a few that do outstay their welcome with an extra chorus or whatnot. Minor faults for a minor classic whose main reason of exclusion to my top100 list isn't that it's not good enough musically, but what it means, what it stands for.

Angel Corpse - Exterminate

Raging death/black metal. The graces of this record are compositional and aesthetic, not just of blunt force as many exclaim. Their singer has taken the time to craft the rhythmics of his vocal delivery in such a way that, although his range is limited, whenever he rips through his verses and choruses, the music flows onward. Most death/black vocals are throwaway rasps ("well, someone has to sing something, this isn't Cynic for goat's sake!"), or timekeepers at best. The riffery is of high quality as well, warped and adventurous it underlines the feeling of triumph and transmogrification that the whole of this achieves. I rarely listen to this genre because its exact problem is lack of flow and cohesion between parts, as well as aesthetic dullness. Angel Corpse are sharp. They achieve a strange sense of beauty with their death/thrash that would be envied by high caliber progressive metal bands. Part of it is that the beats they hit are few and work well together (for example, the tempo is usually fast or faster -- easier to write music that flows when there aren't many meter shifts) but the talent, forethought and hard work that went into this record cannot be denied.

All that said, I do not have a strong like for blasphemy and iconoclasm as an end in itself and this is the concept in which Angel Corpse at this stage in their career were working within. There is no shock for me nor is there any empowerment at christmaiming lyrics. It is a small shame because seriously, these are some of the best Heavy Metal lyrics written from a technical and aesthetic standpoint. Eloquent and well-considered as rhythmic devices that capture attention. I can feel that the singer and lyricist here (I deny the possibility that they are two different people) spent a long amount of time just shifting words back and forth, finding synonyms for words that lend to a better cadence and so on.

At the end of the day this music screams 'Assertion of Will on the Weak' to me and the question begged is what the one asserting is obfuscating in their own psyche that compels them to this demagoguery. These questions are not acknowledged, much less answered here and that's what I would have liked of Angel Corpse to consider this a perfect record. Am I asking too much? I think that in that this record compels me to rise my expectations of what a christraping black/death record can do you may glean how impressed I am with its quality.

Totalitarianism in Heavy Metal

2010-12-17T06:16:00.000-08:00

Heavy Metal music has been often accused of promoting such naughty ideals. I've briefly touched on why Heavy Metal as ideology and ideology in Heavy Metal are problematic, but this is of a slightly different focus. Let's say Heavy Metal indeed can carry the weight of an ideological system and communicate it succinctly and attractively to the impressionable public, like propaganda. Does Heavy Metal promote Fascism, Nazism or other Totalitarian-regime ideas?

Heavy Metal indeed speaks often of willpower and personal triumph. Misconstruing slightly Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical output, most of (especially '80s) Heavy Metal seems to promote a 'Noble Savage' ideal, where a man may achieve grace unhindered by the moral dictum of society, somehow inside it (sometimes) but above it (always). Heavy Metal loathes the idea that society must be obeyed, that the Other should be the master. One should burn themselves pure and strong as steel and withstand the outside forces of the world. Anyone introverted enough, and anyone with romance beating in their hearts finds that conception pleasing on some level regardless of its practical impossibility.

Yes, Heavy Metal, in its ignorance, crowns willpower as the prime mover of history. The strong individuals do, the weak are crushed, the world keeps on turning. This is very close to the practical center of many totalitarian social regimes where the privileged classes profit and the underprivileged one suffers. However most Heavy Metal music doesn't go into detail on where will this mysterious willpower come from that will push the strong to be strong and is curiously lacking in the weak that are to be crushed. This is key in understanding the appeal of Fascism and Nazism. The magic organon that explains willpower in those systems is pure blood and biological predestination. You are strong because you are a true German, not an inferior mudblood. And the true Germans must come together and create a society where the weak shall be in the service of the strong, forever. The favoured class of citizen is stroked by this premise because they do not have to do anything to be the chosen ones. They were such just by being born with a specific of genes.

Heavy Metal scoffs at the idea of society and predestination. Heavy Metal sees teliosis as the product of intense hard work. The reader will find very little of this music (especially in the naive '80s) promoting socialism of any sort, Communism or Fascism, wide-set social change and organized movement. For all its talk of internal willpower and becoming strong and defeating weakness, it doesn't get to how that would change and reshape society and how class-based society would take these ubermen, were they to exist. Nor does it explain where this willpower come from, it presupposes that the listener will conjure it somehow out of thin air. This is both the draw of HM music for teenagers, who feel perpetually powerless, and also the explanation on why its listeners are a curious breed of masochists.

The center of Heavy Metal's fascination with power is not relevant to the actual, real-life practical applications of power. Heavy Metal loves the psychological idea of power, the premise of external control being the mirror of internal control. Heavy Metal loves power because the people that write Heavy Metal are not powerful. It is an ode to a god, so to speak. When Heavy Metal goes on about being strong and crushing the weak, it is not describing the reality of the world's strongest men, it's not metal made for Conglomerate super-Companies and world leaders. It is instead negotiating a method for purging internal weakness and achieving total control, for the small fries that are enamored with the idea of self-actualization.

However, as I've gone on about before, total internal control can be actualized only in death; for one to be perfect, they must be ended. The psychological weight of this realization is what pushes Heavy Metal music to conceptualize its inner ambition as outer force: since we do not want to kill our own selves to be in absolute control, we shall slay the Other, pacify the plains and with a commanding gaze, survey all that is around us as static, ended, complete. The death of the outer to appease the fear of inner death, hail satan! In this way, Heavy Metal appears scary to the outsider. However the theater is easily exposed when the outsider realizes that the only action the small fry enamored with Heavy Metal usually takes towards that 'death of the outer', is to print a fanzine, make a small record label or record its own Heavy Metal.

Furthermore the hopelessness of the idea that for one to be complete they must die is what causes revolt, the draw towards chaos, improbability and randomness. Perhaps if we were to turn our gazes away from the headless, perfect statue, given that all is possible in quantum probability, we may turn our gaze on it again and chaos will have altered reality, given it back its head. A way to have everything and still exist, Heavy Metal pulls towards the impossible. That pull is creative however and also feeds back into the creation of more Heavy Metal artifacts. Every record made with this intent is a small chaos probability field, a magical grimoire that may or may not give life in death.

Heavy Metal has endured a brief cultural heyday in the end run of the '80s that brought it to the attention of teenagers of every stripe. Jocks listened to Judas Priest and beat up the nerds in school that Judas Priest's music was intended for. At that curious peak of its popularity, perhaps it had under its wings believers of every sort of ideology who then fervently tried to bend metal to support them (and this explains progressive metal and its modernist/humanist conception as well). However soon after this sort of music was forgotten for other more pliable forms of pop and the demagogues and ideologues fled, those that remained with it (and still remain) are the wimps and nerds and shy introverts (with sometimes big internet mouths) who harbor said desires for control and self-actualization. They are harmless. At worst they shall concoct further dark magic of world destruction that will manifest itself with... yet another black metal cd. Heavy Metal doesn't lead anyone to congregate with like-minded bigots and go on rampages against the weak. The skinheads and other neo-nazis that do that sort of thing and also listen to metal music would do it without metal music as well. Hitler would look at the National Socialist Black Metal bigots screaming in the woods about a 'purer race' and send them panda face-first into the crematoriums.

Heavy Metal is psychotherapy for introverted teenagers, it's not a means for social change. It holds its own dangers and rewards for the individual. Those that are afraid or hostile towards Heavy Metal for ideological issues misunderstand it, either due to not being familiarized with it or willingly doing so, and with some directed malice at that. It is especially curious how proponents of other musical subcultures like indie rock and punk are so scathing in their critique of Heavy Metal as ideology while at the same time are so enamored with its sonic attack, which they have in recent years thoroughly appropriated. There is now a great plethora of post-metal releases in which there is no exaltation towards willpower, no individualism, no romantic poetry of any kind. Instead they are characterized by either oblique and sometimes completely obfuscated lyrics coupled with natural-neutral iconography and aesthetics, or straight-up teenage anger and angst without any higher direction. If Heavy Metal music is socially relatively harmless as I suggest, then these post-metal mixed strands of it are instead safe for it. Heavy Metal music has had its kitty claws removed and those that are the most upset from this are fashioning their scathing retorts to society in the form of jewel cases and cds, with which you cannot seriously wound or maim anyone, as far as I know. The intended audience doesn't care. Instead eager metalhead masochists lap up these odes to world destruction are the proverbial converted choir and the cacophonous feedback-choral that is their aggregate quantity is what we call 'the underground'.

Jeff Wagner's "Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal"

2010-12-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

Bazillion Points add to their astounding track record with this extensive review of one of the more misunderstood metal sub-genres by Jeff Wagner. I picked it up a week ago and it arrived yesterday. I read it in a day, which isn't to suggest that it's a sparse volume. At 364 pages, it's actually pretty thorough examination of the origins of the form and the various global 'scenes' of progressive metal that occurred during the late '80s and '90s. It avoids the usual pitfall of devolving in an A to Z buyer/collector's guide, however this leads to its chief flaw.

Jeff Wagner's very serious about his examination of this sub-genre. His one interview with John Arch of Fates Warning (which still can be found on FatesWarning.com I think) was the first piece of Heavy Metal journalism I looked up to. He has an understanding and a love for "Awaken the Guardian" that touched me. I learned a lot from that interview and held Jeff Wagner in high regard since. The problem is that the book doesn't tackle what progressive metal is in social and cultural terms. It's a bit closed up in the introspective metalhead box, talking to the initiated. It doesn't aknowledge the outside forces that pushed Heavy Metal music towards embracing modernism and humanism for that brief period. I would have considered that aspect perhaps outside the bounds of the book if it was more of the familiar A to Z collector mold, but as a thorough treatise on the essence of progressive metal it is sadly spent on quotes from the musicians themselves that fail to express what exactly progressive music might be. Which is to be expected because most musicians are engaged in the art of making art, not in the practice of musicology and the study of culture from an outside point of view. I have had similar concerns with the documentary "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey" also.

I don't know what that tells about myself or Jeff, but I didn't learn much new about bands I might have overlooked from this book (aside from Xysma and Hieronymus Bosch that is!). Perhaps this suggests the field of progressive metal has mostly been explored, save for the furthest reaches of the obscurantist underground. The useful distinction that the book draws between 'Progressive' and 'progressive' types of music (the capitalized form being the name of an established and conservative genre and the latter being music that embodies the spirit of progress) is explored to some degree but I wanted more, heh. These are small shames as I doubt there'll ever be a follow-up benefiting by such rigorous research on this subject, it's too niche.

If I'm making it sound like it's a bad book, it is not. It's a great introduction to a misunderstood genre. There are valuable positions and information throughout. As I went through it I underlined certain passages, positive and negative reminders. It probably says something that I do not do this even when I tackle philosophical texts but I did it for a book on something as niche and progressive metal. In the possibility that Jeff ever finds this blog post (I place a reasonable amount of trust in that people engaged in public creative pursuits will google themselves occasionally), here's the few of the underlined passages with nitpicky commentary from someone very close to the center of his target audience.

Last page of prologue: "There doesn't seem to be much bad taste, excess or bombast in a band like Pain of Salvation, yet they're decidedly progressive, and metal enough to earn the title".

I realize this is a matter of opinion and not fact, but I think even close friends of the band would agree that the majority of their music is bombastic. I'll add that the way they treat a lot of their 'heavy' subject matter is epidermic and riddled with Americanized lingual cliche ran through a Swedifier and therefore tasteless, but taste isn't a high priority in art-making so that's of lesser significance.

Chapter Invention / Reinvention, page 5: "Art rock was song-oriented yet avoided the disposability of the pop formula by virtue of quirk and intelligence."

I found this to be a very astute contrasting definition of art rock.

Chapter Passing the Threshold, on Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime" : "While many concept albums are mired in messy, cliched or overcomplicated storytelling, this story of prostitute-turned-nun Mary, junkie Nikki, and the manipulative Dr. X flowed persuasively from beginning to end".

Prostitute-turned-nun is exactly a cliche, as is the devious 'Dr.X' and so on. The story is sadly contrived but I will agree it's convincing due to Geoff Tate's talent for the dramatic and the theatrical. The concept of the album has a beginning middle and end but that's not the same as being understandable and well-done: "Operation: Mindcrime" is not a badly written story, but it's a very confused one. Geoff Tate seems to me to have given up on the sociopolitical commentary of the work early on and instead focused on soap opera interpersonal conflict to carry through. It is critical for an examination of progressive metal, of which Queensryche were a big part of early on, to assess "Operation: Mindcrime" in a less forgiving light, seeing as it inspired a big part of US progressive/power metal scene to follow in its confused humanist/political footsteps, and ultimately contributed to the creative stagnation of the genre. Reading something like this shows how much metalheads bought into the half-assed politics of "Operation: Mindcrime". It diverted the focus of metal music at its commercial peak, from romantic fantasy and esoterica to sappy drama masquerading as social critique.

This isn't to say that I don't like the record. I do, quite a bit. But we must be strict with the things we love.

Same chapter, page 59

"Alder had fantastic power and control, and probably a wider range than Arch".

A wider range is probable, but surfaced demo and live material with Alder handling not only John Arch pieces but also his own (circa No Exit) show him to be a 'studio singer' in that he sorta hits the notes but he wavers in and out of the safe space and is out of breath a lot in a live situation. It's difficult for the audience to appreciate the exactness of pitch control on very high notes, they tend to sound the same. Alder hid behind that when he was trying to match the US power metal singer zeitgeist and it was a good choice for him to slow down.

Chapter 6, Killed by Tech

Although 'tech metal' is a wider term that perhaps captures the modern range of this sort of music better, it's worthwhile to remember that that brief movement that starts with Watchtower and ends at the onset of 'tech death' was mainly a thrash sub-genre. Therefore, techno-thrash (it says "complex, abstract techno-thrash" on the featured flier). Thoughout the chapter, this term is found once and the slightly historical revisionist term of 'tech metal' is found plenty more. I realize that 'techno-thrash' was a buzz word more with European journalists (especially, it seems, with German ones who had an affinity for this sort of music) and that it outlived its usefulness once industrial metal came about but it's worth mentioning anyway.

On page two, "Tech metal uses disorienting time signatures, 5/8ths and 51/32nds flying everywhere..."

Is this a typo or perhaps humor? 51/32 is a very improbable signature, I don't think any techno-thrash or progressive metal band messed about with anything so exact perhaps Ron Jarzombek on "Headache and a sixtyfourth".

On Sieges Even ripping off Watchtower, thank you for getting both sides of the story on this, it's been a long-time open question for me.

"Dream Theater have become essentially the Grateful Dead of prog metal"

Excellently put.

The connection between Cynic's robot voice and Dead Brain Cells was interesting as well.

The photo of Allan Holdsworth explaining his chart to Ron Jarzombek is a great find, absolutely hilarious.

On chapter Swedish Oddballs, "Quorthon pointed to composer Richard Wagner and the most epic Manowar material..."

I thought Quorthon, in a fit of self-importance had gone on record saying that he had never listened to Manowar before long into his epic metal phase?

Next page when discussing Leif Edling's adventurous Candlemass related projects, "Dactylis Glomerata showed Edling had no interest in writing to formula, even if it brought him a healthier paycheck" and at the end of the paragraph, "Edling returned to Candlemass's more recognizable style for future albums, and to more familiar lineups."

I have here an annoyed pencil note by the underline saying "why not connect the dots?". I love Candlemass too but we must be strict with, well, you know. I felt as if the book was trying to keep away from reporting controversy and 'dirt' so much that it became slightly anodyne.

That Gonin-Ish started as a tribute band to Anekdoten blew my mind.

The "Still Moving Pictures" gag is very funny.

That's it. That I went through the trouble of keeping notes and writing this probably is the strongest recommendation I can give for the book. It engaged me even when I disagreed with it. It's pretty exhaustive and due to this I will not play the game "you left out _____ band". The important and influential bands are here and even some obscure ones for the more adventurous. I recommend this book to people that like reading about the history of Heavy Metal music and especially the cross-section of that category with that of those who were put off of progressive metal after just listening to a bit of Dream Theater or some Queensryche. There's a lot of beauty under the surface.

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence

2010-12-11T17:22:00.000-08:00

1991 Metal Blade

Kelly Shaefer - Vocals, Guitar
Rand Burkey - Guitar
Tony Choy - Bass
Steve Flynn - Drums

Unquestionable Presence is a pop record. That's how it always sounded to me. I came to it as a fifteen-year-old fully prepared to be blown away by its density and excess. Watchtower's "Control and Resistance" was on steady rotation and I had been informed by elder metalheads (back before the days of the internet -- well, before my days on the internet) that these particular Florida upstarts were of similar cut. Dizzying composition, disregard for metal convention and instrumental prowess heavily on display was what I expected.

What I got instead was a collection of airy and beautiful songs. Sure, I guess Atheist sound vaguely angry to the uninitiated but for anyone with a metal education, they're just so catchy they become joyous, in a weird way. At some point when one writes a very beautiful composition, no matter the aesthetic conceit that colors it, it's life-affirming just by being beautiful. "Unquestionable Presence" indeed flew in the face of what death metal music stood for in this way. It's so highly composed and tightly performed that it can't help but make me happy to listen to. I wouldn't admit to this impression back when I was sixteen (I think I pretended this was 'difficult, dark music' for a while, like everybody else) but now, being honest and without fear to express my own opinion, this music is not difficult, it is beautiful in its force. The songs are non-standard, sure, but they're not convoluted as an end in itself, there's no real excess to be found here. If anything the guitars underplay, leaving breathing space for the fluid bass lines that often carry the changes. Yeah, the drums are flashy and choppy like Watchtower and the vestigial remains of Florida-school death metal can be traced in the serrated vocals of Kelly Shaefer, but what defines this music is not the constant pressure and aesthetic inhumanity that typifies death metal but, curiously enough, a certain grace, almost a weightlessness that I would associate with natural, organic beauty.

Yes, calling this music 'pop' is asinine. Perhaps in my imaginary Helmworld, music such as this would deserve the interest of the wider public but back when this material was released it famously was met with a gamut ranging from incomprehension to outright derision and it all ultimately amounted to neglect. Even dedicated metalheads, or perhaps it's more telling to say. *precisely* dedicated metalheads ignored them.

Many latter-day Atheist fanboys opine that the reason for this negative reaction was that what the band had achieved with their second release was ahead of its time. The implication is that this music was too advanced, complicated, cerebral for the metalheads of 1991. However the reality is less flattering. After all, by 1991 it seems most of metal was bent on achieving some sort of egotist self-satisfaction via clinical technicality, and for a brief time it even seemed like this approach would be metal music's gateway into some sort of mainstream acceptance. "Sure they're angry, but listen to how they play!". Every thrash and death metal band under the sun (and they were legion by 1991) were in the process of adding 'tech' to their genre tags. As mentioned, Watchtower scaled dizzying heights by 1989, Psychotic Waltz not far behind. Hell, even Atrocity had put out a crazy-complicated and dissonant debut "Hallucinations" by 1990. Closer to home, brutish, satanic-shocker Slayer-worshipers Deicide put out their second record, "Legion" mere months after "Unquestionable Presence" came out and their effort was much more front-face complicated than anything Atheist had to offer. Even if Deicide's palette remained limited under the dropped beats and added syncopation, death metal fans lapped it up. Why were Atheist shunned? Because Atheist were wimpy. Not complicated, airy. Not savage, contemplative. Not even metal.

Metal music is masculine in its thundering linearity. A riff is a repeated melodic phrase, a left-to-right phrase struck down by a barking typewriter. The drums that punctuate the rhythms of that melody are in tight lock-step to its design. Bass drums pound pummeling sixteenth patterns and hard snare hits dictate the even pace. The head-bobbing (or "head banging" if you prefer) that the steady rock n' roll pulse summons, never before so augmented as it is with the above metal sonics, is also akin to the thrust and ebb of fucking. Metal music, a battering ram is breaking down your door, entering your soul, it is burning your mind. From Judas Priest to Cannibal Corpse, in this respect, little has changed. The speed of the act and the severity of the pendulum motion might have been exaggerated over decades to match the cultural zeitgeist of increasingly desperate times, but the masculine, penetrative sexual intent of it is unchanged.

Most of metal music is macho in this exact respect with its linear staccato melodies and jackhammer beats. The bands that hit the stage and come out striking the hammer feel like metal gods, you better believe it. There's an immense libido-based satisfaction in sending out these brutish sound waves that push heads back and in the silence between the beats magnetize them forward to bang against the stage until metal takes its price. Aficionados of this sort of music are masochists in that they derive a pleasure out of being punished so by their masculine heroes, whom, like any fetishist, they're not ever allowed to touch (or in the implied context, be intimate with on a human being to human being level). Imagine being in a weird outfit that plays like Atheist and having to follow a live act by one of these macho linear death metal bands, what with your empty space and oblique melodies that go every which way. Can't rape anyone with spaghetti.

Harmony is vertical, it has no forward motion. The many notes that make up a complicated chord achieve a nuanced, combinatorial emotion. The listener may have to focus on different aspects of the chord at different times, they have to be pro-active in selecting the direction of the journey. Pauses between harmonic centers also beg for interpretation, like a pointillist painting the gaps need to be filled for the art to make sense. This is like a conversation, yes? Lush vertical spaces full of multi-faceted emotions and then rests in between waiting for the listener's response. This is conversation, it is birth, it is inherently feminine. Metal music is traditionally sparse of harmony, distortion and blunt force render 'fancy chords' nigh-inaudible, for most, useless. Though there are exceptions, metal music is not feminine, it doesn't have something to *discuss* with you, it has something to tell your face as it melts it. The metal listener that wrestles conversation and ambiguity out of punishingly linear metal is doing so at the cost of physical fatigue and some sanity. Metal music is war and who comes out of war unaltered, unscarred?

Many of these more feminine-minded metal bands of the late '80s and early '90s, inspired by Rush and other progressive rock acts attempted to bring more harmony and dynamics into their metal. Atheist's first record is a much more head-on, linear and thrashy affair and it was met with a degree of acceptance. Here on their second album, they (mostly, there's a few ragers still) were deemed too wimpy for fan ears hungering for death metal cruelty. Although their later fans (and also, the band, judging from their interviews) remain convinced that their musical genius was ahead of its time, I suspect the real reason they were shunned was that there's too much ambiguous space between phrases here and too much harmony. Not enough linearity, double-bass and palm-muted chugging. I suspect that if they had arranged all of the songs here to sound more like "The Formative Years", they'd have achieved some success.

But I'm glad they didn't. As is the weird metal pattern, Atheist turn their apparent weakness into strength. All the better that Atheist are a wimpy take on death metal, it's not like the masculine archetype is in short supply. The material here is, once digested and interpreted, rife with symbolic space that matches the tempo of the somewhat oblique and introspective lyric. For the life of me I couldn't tell you exactly what many of these songs are about and I've been listening closely for over a decade now. But I can tell you what the conversations I've had with this music were about. From the first harmonized (of course) fifths of Mother Man that open the album, it's not a race and it's not a beating, it's a dance. Of course metalheads found it embarrassing, do you know any of them that like to dance?

Unquestionable Presence has an overarching theme to it, the gentility with which it states it notwithstanding. The feeling I always get when I listen to this is one of epistemological concern. Epistemology, the study of knowledge itself, it seems to me like Atheist tackle the concept of knowledge (and self-professed knowledge-holders) from different vantages on many of the numbers here. Figures of authority and systems of belief are constantly referenced and in a way the playful music takes a mocking tone. Atheist is indeed Heavy Metal music exactly because the beauty of the music they devised seems a testament to the potency of their individual viewpoint, as hazy as it may often be. In an epistemologically bereft modern world, it falls to art to rise to the magical standard: this is the Word and the Word is True, as long as I believe it to be so.

The song "Brains" especially captures me in this vein

Retrieve all that flows with memory
Obtain all you know with sensories
Approaching every act with contemplation
Attacking every vision with indecision
Conditioning is a routine of minds
Recruiting all the intellect it finds
Insecurity is merely your fear
Of maybe the outside hearing what you hear
Can't let 'em see,
Don't let 'em hear
Projecting like an airplane in flight

I dream of things
That just aren't quite right
A projector shines on the back of my eyes
So my position of perception can rise

So, although nobody much cared to understand Atheist at the time, it seems they picked up a cult following over the years. I would bargain that Atheist brought into metal music much population that wouldn't otherwise bother. Nerds and outcasts, overthinkers and other epistemologically curious beings that weren't into it so much for being allegorically raped by jackhammer beats and linear yells but instead for the polite company and conversation. In their strange way, Atheist achieved a legacy that had little to do with their technical excellence in itself and much more with how technical excellence can vindicate an outside take on metal music. Much of the extreme metal world of the last two decades was shaped by the realization that you can be a bit queer in metal music if you've got the balls for it. And although we've had a lot of queer metal as a result, not much of it has had as much songwriting grace as found here. And perhaps more importantly, the aesthetic open space for the listener to feel the need to contribute to a conversation with the art. There still isn't much out there that achieves what "Unquestionable Presence" does, nothing as sublimely wimpy and ultimately beautiful.

Annihilator - Never, Neverland

2010-11-24T14:49:00.000-08:00

Roadrunner, 1990

Coburn Pharr - Vocals
Jeff Waters - Guitar
Dave Scott Davis - Guitar
Wayne Darley - Bass
Ray Hartmann - Drums

I had written about a specific track off of this album on my regular blog back in February. I feel that that text, now significantly amended, stands well as an encapsulation of the merits of the record on the whole.

Metal music conjures potent images in the mind's eye. Most often these images are vague and not directly informed by the specifics of the lyrical material. Instead they are more like abstract, dream-like scapes in washes of violent warm colors. I think this happens because for metal bands the riff-writing is a separate act to the writing of lyrics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of angry rock or metal bands write the music first and it doesn't later change much or at all to contend for the feel and meaning of the lyrics. In fact when we're talking about metal, the writing of riffs (of which there are many) is simply addressed separate from the writing of coherent compositions (of which there are few and far between). The former are self-contained situations, repeated for impact and then discarded in favour of linear movement. The latter is a holistic attempt to make the broader movement achieve a lateral coherency, not the forte of metalheads, generally.

It is then a small wonder when a thrash metal (of all the metal styles, the one most obsessed with riff construction) band, ends up conjuring very relevant images to the lyrics that dress them. Annihilator are such a band.

It's worth noting Schopenhauer's position on the purposes of music here.

Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. "Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintessence. Hence it arises that our imagination is so easily excited by music, and now seeks to give form to that invisible yet actively moved spirit world which speaks to us directly, and to clothe it with flesh and blood, i. e. to embody it in an analogous example. This is the origin of the song with words, and finally of the opera, the text of which should therefore never forsake that subordinate position in order to make itself the chief thing and the music the mere means of expressing it, which is a great misconception and a piece of utter perversity; for music always expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, and never these themselves, and therefore their differences do not always affect it. It is precisely this universality, which belongs exclusively to it, together with the greatest determinateness, [364] that gives music the high worth which it has as the panacea for all our woes. Thus if music is too closely united to words, and tries to form itself according to the events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own."

This smart man here explains - as I understand it at least - that the reason music is a universally loved and potent art is in that it doesn't (or shouldn't) seek to describe specific emotional phenomena but instead to tap into archetypal emotions that all of life's particular scenes are derived from. In that sense metal bands might approach this definition of 'high music art' and comfortably consider their three chord riff-based abstractions to be a link to the primordial and be done with it. They'd often be right about this, too. Aside from Schopenhauer's different standard of composition, to which most metal music probably falls short of, there's a different reason I'm sceptical of leaving it there when it comes to music's capacity for emotional specificity.

I think that this concept of music as a gateway to emotional universality has been hijacked by post-modernists with a consumerist agenda. How often do you hear, when trying to discuss the aesthetics and meanings of music, the offering of "Relax bro, it's just music"? I'm not sure Schopenhauer would be particularly proud of getting anyone to 'relax'. His sentiments can and have easily been appropriated (by degrees of separation, of course) by salesmen who would exclaim that since the music expresses universal emotions, then every one of us should buy all of it. If we look at popular music we see just that: distillation and abstraction of very broad emotional beats. In both form and effect it is simple music that sells best. So no offense to this smart man, but let's try to see what slightly different approaches offer us.

Annihilator above were not a band of very lofty ideals really. They were a thrash metal band and as the zeitgeist of that movement dictated, they diluted their romantic metal fantasy with prima facie 'socially aware' aesthetics and lyrics. Circa 1990, this is how metal music was trying to negotiate an unprecedented height of public interest. A lot of thrash music lyric reads painfully like a social study essay buy an introverted teenager that has only a rudimentary understanding of how and why society operates. It's painful to read because it's true.

The song posted doesn't have a high concept, then; It is in the plentiful abilities of main guitarist and composer, Jeff Waters that the composition of 'Road to Ruin' and indeed of most songs on their first two albums, had become more involved than the average AC/DC song. He sounds like he has ADD and hyperactively crams in as many licks as he can but - unlike a lot of technical metal bands - has the good sense to compare what he's adding to what the song is achieving for it. Very rarely does he leave in a phrase in that is at odds with the thrust of the song. Jeff Waters can do what Annihilator do, then, because he's both extremely able on his instrument but also because he has the good sense to let the song's voice dictate what he (over)plays, where. This is a virtue that is becoming increasingly rare in the world of modern metal.

In contrast with a capable classical instrumentalist, most metal (and rock) musicians struggle with a limited ability in shaping their voice. It is often a climb to express even a basic abstract concept in the confines of such otherwise highly structured music. Does this riff sound sad to you, or perhaps maudlin? What is the difference? Perhaps this riff just sounds like a riff, instead? This sort of confusion pushes metal musicians to throw their hands in the air and just play riffs from the gut and not worry about what emotions they're hitting. Sure, a lot of them play very fast or very precise, but what they play is often very limited and derivative. It might startle some knowledgeable Heavy Metal people to say for example that Autopsy (in the minds of most people a sloppy rude death metal band) are more erudite with their music than Meshuggah (a highly technical post-thrash band). The former simply have a larger musical and emotional lexicon. Most bands do not employ their hard-earned speed and fretboard mobility to achieve nuance and grace but instead bludgeoning force and constant pressure. You get used to beatings and you get used to pressure and when the tolerance level has shifted all that's pretty boring, however.

Not being a virtuoso is a blessing as well as a curse. When one has barely 5 riffs in them, they tend to make them count. They speak of the grandest emotions not by cerebral design but 'by accident of being human'. Put all your skill into crafting a riff and it may sing of despair and hope, of horror and awe. This is the main characteristic of Heavy Metal, really and it also explains why a lot of absolutely incredible bands often had just one great album in them, some even just a few great songs. That said, it's a pleasing variation and I feel, a worthy introduction to outsiders, to consider a minority of more skillful and considerate players that paint with a finer brush.

The lyrics set the stage here:

No control tonight, the lights are going dim
The floor begins to tilt, it's blurring to a spin
Just let me find my keys, look down below
Fresh air is all I need, then I'll go

Leading up the road to ruin
You're full of alcoholic speed
Leading up the road to ruin
No last chance, don't bother to plead

High, over the limit, got to take it slow
Concentrate, kill the radio
It's not the first time, it'll be the last
I've said that before, in the past

Speed, I've got to make it home

Not too far to go, you're getting near
Just down the block, there's nothing left to fear
Carefree, on top of the world, feeling power
Impaired security at ninety miles an hour

Somebody's driving drunk, it doesn't end well.

The beauty of the thing is how the choices in riffs and voicings by Waters, along with the clean and tight lockstep of the capable rhythm section underline and amplify the sense of barely controlled chaos of the situation. Nearly every section of the song for me augments the picture, it supports the otherwise pretty simple broad strokes with nuance and detail.

Note the natural harmonics lick at the end of the theme at 00:30 and how even before the plot is introduced a sense of instability and fragmentation hints of it in an otherwise straight ahead speed metal riff. Speed is the thing here but also blurriness, incoherency, confusion. These are the emotional elements that Waters's guitar pyrotechnics are most suited for.

In fact, for the duration of the verse, pay attention to how the regular palm muted riff is commented upon by a variation of different end licks, most of them choppy or syncopated, almost never repeating themselves, offering the listener no sense of security. Have you ever had manic thoughts that seem to dissolve before you're able to make them cohere to a larger structure, only to reappear and taunt you to try again? Have you ever gotten blindingly drunk?

The chorus, with its more austere and controlled rhythmics speaks in the second person. You're leading up the road of ruin, you're full of alcoholic speed. Look how effectively Waters shifts perspectives without any confusion just by musical cues. The unstable, chaotic riffery belongs to the protagonist of the tale, the slower and regimented responses belong to an objective authority, a beholder. The listener feels compelled to empathize with both: id and superego together, schizophrenia. This is the overarching theme of Annihilator's early output.

Not to say that the song doesn't default to the familiar trappings of rock music, with its melody, verse, bridge, chorus, solo and repeat. This is because Annihilator did not consider themselves purveyors of modern classical composition or anything, they probably had not heard of Schopenhauer. nor did they enjoy programmatic music. They were writing hooky pop songs, but their inner ambitions overpowered the form. This is the basic definition of Heavy Metal in relation to its bordering musical genres, actually. The positives of the skeletal remnants of the basic pop song composition under this song are that the themes are reaffirmed and the listener is put to a hot-cold alteration between musical coherency and safety and then the wild chromatic deviations of Water that constantly upset.

In the artier side of modern metal, much is made of super-structural music that is meant to be 'experienced' but not enjoyed per se; Deathspell Omega with their heady metaphysic thematics and austere aesthetics are a commonly cited example of this. I do not disbelieve proponents of this approach are gratified by it (you get a lot out of a piece of art if you put a lot of effort in making it work for you), nor am I saying 'Relax bro, it's just music'. Modern art made a big deal about not being enjoyable or beautiful but instead a commentary on psychological and sociological situations, starting almost a hundred years ago. It took a while for metal music to be informed by that approach, but here it is. A distracting game happens however when proponents of either school of thought clash. Modernists attempt to shoehorn modernity in the primary space of enjoyment that most simple art is taken. It's that depressing situation where the communist is trying to explain to a layman why his beloved social realism is 'just as good as real art'.

Broadly, I think it's a distracting lingual argument to dance around terms until we can make something ugly appear 'beautiful to us' and make something very unenjoyable appear 'enjoyable because I am involved with it'. Most of the time people cannot accurately gage how they feel, this shit is not making it any easier. The more nuanced the emotion the more at a loss we are at self-reflecting on it. Being graced by beauty and feeling inspired are some of the clearest emotional states that music can achieve for us (Schopenhauer makes a roundabout return) and Heavy Metal often achieves those peaks. It's a disservice to that achievement to try to fit ugly music that is meant to shock and confuse us in that category too. Ugly art is potent and powerful in its own right. Confusion is an emotion too, dissociation is an emotion. If people seek these emotions, good for them, they'll certainly lead somewhere. But people that like songs that they enjoy instead of semi-incoherent experiences that they traverse are not dumb either. Annihilator here make masterful songs that anyone would recognize as such (which is why I think they're a good entry point for outsiders). They reach through riff artifice to beauty that overcomes their pedestrian lyric and this approach should never be considered outmoded because it's briefly culturally passe at the time being.

Check out the abrupt stop-starts under the first solo voice how they comment on its almost sonorous and hopeful tone (the driver hopes that he's going to make it home) but the second solo comes in mockingly, bending, rolling, laughing with this hope. It is appropriate that the most 'rock and roll' sounding part of the song is the voice of a higher fate, it's as if Annihilator are saying 'you're gonna crash and burn and let the devils dance in the flames'. This is in its own way as metaphysical as Deathspell Omega ever get, the big difference is that the music is meant to be enjoyed, not witnessed.

After a third chorus, the main riff is punctuated by sharp turns, futile floor breaks and finally the winding guitars signal the inevitable sounds of a crash. Every time I listen to this song I hum for hours after it not just the chorus or some melody but three or four parts in a row. I get hooked on a emotionally involving composition. I really love early Annihilator.

As a personal anecdote though, I really hate early Annihilator too. If you are, like me, a guitarist of meager skill and at that crucial juncture in your teenager years - where you had ample free time - were pulled in many different directions instead of studying with your guitar for 8 hours a day, this stuff will be hard to play. I can sorta hit the beats in the first two songs but the cleanness and tightness of them elude me. It's perhaps the more convincing argument on the merit of this record that I still like it as much as I do, after connecting it so thoroughly with a reminder of my own shortcomings.

Not every song here is so rich in musical imagery, but most are. The most enjoyable ones actually are those written to lyrics of mental instability, Annihilator's forte, they let Jeff Waters go, appropriately, a little nuts. Always a light band however, they're an easy way to get new listeners to appreciate Heavy Metal in other ways than just as a primal force that paints bluntly only the basest of scenes, screaming and growling and bludgeoning what is in effect existential ennui. The strength of Annihilator is that unlike many of their peers, they achieve beauty here and are far more graceful about it than their lowbrow American thrash culture signifiers might initially suggest.

"I Hate Keyboards in Metal"

2010-11-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

"Can't stand growly vocals". "All this doom stuff is too slow, it's boring". "Power metal is cheesy". Statements like that are so broad as to be nearly meaningless as actual qualifications of taste.

With so much metal music out there, it's near-certain that there is a band somewhere out there that has devised a permutation of the form that utilizes whatever stylistics one might consider awful in such a way that they're convincing and engaging, beautiful. The more you dig (especially in the underground) the more you find beautiful exceptions to any rule. Saying "I haven't heard a lot of Heavy Metal music in which keyboards played a significant role" is a much safer statement for example, but one that very rarely substitutes its more extreme variant. Why do people refuse to dig in a music they profess to love and why do they prefer this broad and useless pontification?

Such statements are useful for turning ignorance into a strength; The person behind the statement probably hasn't had enough close experience with that they dislike (which is generally understandable, do you spend a lot of time with art that irritates you?) so they take their limited phenomenological data and with it fashion a categorical statement that seems final and complete. Seen this, done with it, on with the next artifact of culture that needs codification. Progress!

The person who is receiving such a statement might be impressed by how airtight it is. I know something concrete about them, I know where to stand with them when it comes to Keyboards & Metal. I know I can turn to this piece of data when I want them to agree with me and reinforce our relationship. Since I'm so impressed, I might adopt this position, also. This is how conservative minds work, they enjoy clean-cut positions and they're always on the lookout for new such statements that fit their preconceptions and opinion bias. Effectively, when a person is making such a statement, they're trying to a) create controversy, that means, put attention on themselves, and b) appeal to conservative like-minded folks. All this with as little personal risk as possible: after all, they're not putting out there a revealing personal opinion, they're just spouting clichés, which are anonymous and endless.

I do not consider the conservative impulse to be necessarily 'evil'. It's certainly one of the psychological traits that has kept us alive in very strenuous evolutionary situations in the past. Not every member of the caveman tribe should feel compelled to put their hands in the fire to test out if it 'really hurts' like the village elder told them, nor should a second hunter-gatherer go up to pet the rhino next to the pulverized remains of the first one.

However connecting the dots from that tangent to our initial subject, why do people treat culture identification with the same reflexes that they treat survival situations like those above? The telling answer is that social gaming (where 'taste' and 'art knowledge' are usually tested) can be just as scary as a rhino charge. It brings up all sorts of insecurities and hang-ups, dirty laundry that the individual feels much compelled to fashion into some sort of kingly dress and hope nobody notices the stink. The more self-conscious and insecure the music nerd, the more hardened their armor.

Most of the categorical statements I'm talking about here have evolved (de-volved?) into clichés in metal communities. Behind every cliché like that there is a big fat ugly truth: lack of profound intimate experience is substituted for communally-bulwarked identification, group-think that tries to pass off ignorance for self-assuredness. Unless one has a very thorough experience with metal music, their general opinions have little to do with the music and much more with themselves structuring a useful identity. Even if they do know more about Heavy Metal than most, broad categorical statements are so loaded with the charges of social gaming that even when meant honestly and innocently, they tend to derail any argument into polemics.

For example, in my little chronological chart of metal here, I note 'post-metal, metalcore and other irrelevancies' which is exactly such a statement. I did not mean this as an attack on these sorts of musics, more that regardless of how good such music might be, whatever is metal in it has been so inverted or diluted so as to put the music beyond the scope of this website (though not of my interest in general, I keep up with post-metal due to social fascination). I should not have written that, then, because it diverts interest from the information presented (the chronology) to this guy Helm who doesn't like post-metal. On the most essential level, what bands or styles of metal I like are absolutely irrelevant to what I'm trying to accomplish with this website.

One should then not expect that thorough experience of the art form would lead to a more permissive stance and less categorical damnation of this and that. Knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to less hard opinions. Most of the people I know who are metal encyclopaedias (myself included) engage in this self-identification as well, though perhaps their opinions might be less broad and more nuanced here and there. It seems much of what drives an impulsive information cataloger is an addiction to the social gaming applications of their knowledge. Poor Socrates who knew too much yet professed to know too little, not a sterling example for most.

So when you come across metalheads or other music nerds who speak in an endless torrent of broad categorical statements, condemning genres and styles of music left and right, keep in mind you're in the presence of somebody who really doesn't have the music at heart when they speak but instead they're furiously gaming you and any other onlooker, trying to either annoy you or get you on their side. Their greatest defeat is if you completely overlook their efforts and have no opinion on them whatsoever. If you do not notice them, you do not include them in your life. If you don't include them in your life, they don't exist. They feel this acutely.

Is this a cruel thing to do? Initially I think so, there is some sadism and revenge for every time we've been ignored, when we ignore somebody else. However, when ignored once too many an individual might feel compelled to reconfigure their social approach and create a persona that is less dependent on external validation. This is healthier for them and healthier for the social dialogue over art. Or anything else, for that matter: as you might have noticed a lot of the broader critique on this blog could easily have its subcultural identifiers switched for those of another clique; I'm looking at the world at large through the narrow scope of Heavy Metal.

The type of statement on Heavy Metal that is useful for the culture and useful for the individual, in my opinion, is that which is qualified not with vague group-think mandates such as "Keyboards suck" but with exposition of actual personal experience. The risk involved in saying why one thinks this is so, is bound to humanize the statement (human beings, if allowed, cannot help but be human beings) and since we're all made of the same meats but in startlingly different permutations, clichés are weakened by this personalized exposition. The downside is that people can't do this in snappy, highly stylized pieces of snark in which the internet usually likes to converse, they'd have to write more in-depth and more at length. Well... that's a downside for twitter users mostly!

Anathema - Serenades

2010-11-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

Peaceville, 1993

Darren White - Vocals
Daniel Cavanagh - Guitar
Vincent Cavanagh - Guitar
Duncan Patterson - Bass
John Douglas - Drums
Ruth - Additional vocals

I can hear the laughter already. Early Anathema are a hard band to like in current metal circles. As mentioned in past articles, the 'atmospheric metal' experiment in which English romantic doom/death metal tentatively contributed to, was a way out of the canon for many musicians. It had many ties to punk rock (defocus on technicality, at the same time when the rest of metal music was becoming hyper-technical), dark wave (morose subject matter, fixation on darkness) and indie rock (enduring dissaffection) it's no wonder that after a couple of Heavy Metal records most of the collectives involved moved on to different pastures, and even less wonder that the form doesn't enjoy a positive reputation with metalheads today.

Now, this is a strange situation: when a metal band breaks away from the mothership they usually try to get a different target audience. It's a very risky endeavor and it usually ends in failure, but the few bands that achieve that keep everything but the name, effectively. They change their whole aesthetic to suit the demands of their new followers. 'Atmospheric metal' bands that go off in non-metal territories however are naive in a special way: they keep their surface aesthetic signifiers but they just do away with the heavy guitars and growly vocals. They are trying to become indie, electronic or gothic rock outfits while they're still earnest - though moribund - metalheads at heart. They didn't get the memo you can't play metal without the metal and expect it to still work.

This creates special situations. Most of these bands, Anathema foremost, retained some of their metalhead audience (lost some hardcore doom/death fans, got some mainstream metalheads, perhaps) and gained little to no broader fans to justify their switch of style. The metalheads that retain their interest in them are those that either are a) open-minded to the point where their brains leak out when they tilt their heads or b) feel guilt over being metalheads and try to camouflage the hard liquor with a false front of more palatable tastes. It is oddly fitting, after all, the most self-loathing type of Heavy Metal to have the most self-loathing metalhead fan-base.

It might be difficult to understand in the current climate where metal music's coolness is judged on a crazy 'purity' two-end scale where on the far left is how extreme you can be on your instrument and on the far right is how conservatively you connote your aesthetic concept, but in the early to mid '90s - where this Atmospheric metal business came to a rise and fall - metal music listeners were constantly bombarded with outsider communication on how the music they were raised on - Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Manowar et al. - was now considered dreadfully passé. But they still wanted to listen to metal music and new metal music to boot. The self-loathing of that era was channeled into mainly two psychologically parallel paths: black metal and doom/death (and eventually 'atmospheric metal' as it were). The former cried denial of the modern and a return to the - mostly retroactively invented by teenagers with shallow historic appreciation but sensitive instincts - aesthetic origins of the form. "So what if what we play is passé? It is more than that, it isancient! We haven't died, we never existed" they cried in a shrill womanly voice, blastbeats and tremolo clattering in their mists. The other path was of doom/death where the conceit was subtly different, diversionary. "No no, we are not passe. We are instead, misunderstood" they murmured and moaned. Aren't you misunderstood too? Some tragedy marks your life as well? Join the club. More akin to the gravitas and self-awareness of gothic rock, they said. A type of music that had survived its own brief stint with public awareness and hadn't died away. Would someone accuse Joy Division, theurgically sealed in everlasting public reverence by suffocation, of being passé? I think not.

But the metalhead take on gothic rock was still Heavy Metal music for a simple reason: what draws people to Heavy Metal, then and now and forever, is the promise of beauty, romance, hope and imagination. Gothic rock was - and is, last time I checked - a far more facetious type of music, where irony and double-talk are grimly celebrated as extracts of modernity. "I dare you to be real" wasn't a real dare. Bela Lugosi's an actor that played Dracula, not Dracula himself. Dark wave fundamentally remains post punk in this way. One cannot get too excited about an ironic type of music. The goths, for all their frilly embroidery, are very obvious about their dress-up being an exploration of a character in a play. This self-awareness was lost on the metalheads that turned their metals of doom and death to 'atmospheric metal'. Their romance was earnest to the degree that it was required for their Heavy Metal to strike true.

What is more powerful than death? Is there a truth more real than death? Will anyone survive it and come back to tell us of its falseness? There is no reply to death. Death is forever, he shall never die.

Yet, what is more painless than death? Will anyone suffer it and come back to tell us of its horrid torment? Will any of us truly be there to die? Or will our faculties breathe last a moment before death comes certifiably? Death is unknowable, he will never have a face.

What a perfect combination that is then, for reclusive introverts that seek the most powerful symbol with which to adorn their ordinary, middle-class existences, yet do not have it in us to go through the fullest hardship to achieve it. For one to love death they must be alive. Heavy Metal is a music fundamentally based on this attraction to death. No sub-genre captures the drama (and melodrama) of this than doom/death. The most embarrassing type of metal, how I love it. Well, some of it!

Anathema here come late to the doom/death mope party, and they have distilled the lessons of their forerunners to a great degree. They aren't concerned with appearing super-metal, there isn't a slayer riff to be found here. They get their credibility by appearing super-sad instead. It's all slow, all the time. This doesn't mean that 'Serenades' is a focused album, it is in fact, very torn between what it is and what else it briefly entertains being instead. However when it is on, it is beautiful and touching.

'Serenades' is a difficult record to like. The vocals of Darren White are very weak as death metal vocals (from whence they definitely trace their pedigree). Whereas most death metal vocalists of the era endeavored to sound as inhuman - and therefore extra-terrestrially powerful - as possible, he sounds short of breath and winded. Shallow lung moans and whimpers, a human in anguish. Whereas death metal inspires violence, this doom/death vocal style suggests the outcomes of violence. The beauty of this approach is only made apparent to those that spend time with the lyric here. What could possess a human being to voice such language

All tears restrained for years
Their grief is confined
And destroys my mind

An ode to their plight is this dirge

Some yearn for lugubrious silence
Serenity in the image of coffins

Shall life renew these bodies of a truth?
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Fill the void veins of life, again with youth
And wash with an immortal water, age

They die

In tones so wretched and foul? In this dynamic is the strength of Heavy Metal. It will take all that society taught us is useless and bad and ugly and with the sharpest edges it will chisel a monument to everlasting beauty. The vocal of Darren White here is sublime, the entity summoned, that 'Anathema', the voice of the disembodied, rotting head. Its mouth aghast and between the stinking humors and bile has grown a flower.

In fields where
Grass grows tall
Golden carpets swell
And whisper
Autumn trees
Will weep

Dawn breaks open
Like a wound that bleeds afresh
In bleak misery
The lifeless lie in squandor

Love has left me
Fled from me
Fragrant lust waits beside
And dies

Like flowers that wilt
Without refreshment
In midday sun I sit
And bide time

Adorning me
A lovelorn rhapsody

The only death left from death metal here is in the pulse and rhythm of the songs. Shambling, see death walking, death alive. Oft stop-starts, while a vocal punctuates, as if the corpse is struggling to do more than two things at once. It's a wretched sight, this slow-motion re-animation and yet, beautiful because reanimation implies sorcery - power, will. Music such as this is misunderstood as a consumer product (like which is undoubtedly reached the listener's possession) because it doesn't seek to entertain in a surface way - in fact those that are entertained by 'depressing music' misunderstand this the most. This is not music to cry over, it is not music that inspires sadness. It is a celebration of magic. Our bodies may die but look what beauty comes from the knowledge of the end. Your sadness is ours, we take it and fashion with it a flag, a tapestry, a cloak, a shield. Very few casual listeners that dabble in with fringe tastes of the metal multiverse get to the core of this.

The beauty of this world is shown in the guitar interplay of the Cavanagh brothers. For all the ridicule that their future career as 'Radiohead for metalheads' has brought them, their debut album finds them in perfect sync with each other. One guitar will start a voice and let it linger mid-way, only for the other channel's guitar to pick it up and give it conclusion and rest. This game between brothers touching and yes, harmonious and joyful. There is no death-lust in the mental image of two brothers playing their instruments together, reaching agreement. I have been enchanted by their conversation on their early material before and long since I could realize similar musicality in my own multi-part composition. Though the brothers here connote this record has come from common grief (a family loss is alluded to directly in the liner notes of the record via a commemoration) I hear in their guitar stereo compositions, joy and lust and desire for something beautiful.

It is in that dynamic that is record can be found to be inconsistent. Though the lyrical material is uniform in its melancholy, the music strays from the mourn path often. For a fundamentally doom metal record, there is much here that puzzles the new listener. One example is the third song, 'J'Ai Fait Une Promesse'. An acoustic and vocal piece of relative simplicity that has a medieval feel to it. The promise being that the woman singing will 'pledge herself unto us' is repeated in French and English. Regardless of the success of the song in melodic or thematic terms, it's easy to get the vibe from the song that this is someone's girlfriend that is being asked to participate in this record they're making. Although this is a metal faux pas if there ever was one (no girlfriends allowed), the end result - curiously due to the still tones of the voice, no vibratto at all - sounds lifeless and distant. More a sculpture of a girl than a girl herself.

Anathema succeed in their excursion from metal in spite of themselves.

There are more examples to this (besides the obvious up-beat 'Sleepless' that everyone loves to hate). The end track 'Dreaming: The Romance' appears to be the perfect storm of kitsch at first. Pretentious title, obvious overstatement and a 23 minute synth pad ambient track that sounds like an outtake from a Tangerine Dream record. And yet, it works. It works as the bookend to the high drama of the record, it's a gentle wash to a shore outside, shallow consciousness, almost dreaming. Though the heights the record reaches are artificially pushed (as in most metal records - how often does your life make you scream in guttural tones about the death of everything?), the long stretches of melancholy are very human and real - Heavy Metal fantasy peaks and long stretches of gentle melancholy. 'Dreaming: The Romance' serves this notion. Anathema succeed in their ambient excursion in spite of themselves again.

The clearer and most focused Anathema are here is on the fourth track "They Die", a reworking of their own earlier composition. The lyric and music are in perfect synchronization. The brothers complete each other's sentences while Darren White gives his weakest (as in, best) performance to his most beautiful and poignant lyric. Is it a wonder that by the end of its length the doom/death dirge rises to a symphonic, hopeful end?

Anathema would oust Darren White from the fold an (brilliant, yet also uneven) EP later. They would go on to slowly mutate into an alt-rock/mope rock outfit without him. For the fans this would gain them they also suffered nigh-universal derision from other quarters that saw them to be escape artists. It is difficult to like old Anathema and make a case for them as I am here because so much of what they achieved seems to happen almost by mistake, and is foreshadowed by their tendency to wander outside the form. But then again, the form of doom/death (and 'atmospheric metal' as a whole) proved to be a limited one, exsanguinated for all that was potent in a mere five years. So although I do not enjoy later Anathema material, I do not participate in the hate towards them. I take from their long career a full-length and two EPs worth of enduring art. Sadness is marred by hope like a crack on the funeral monument, yet through the crack often senseless, joyful flora grows, the artifact of grief is as beautiful as what it inspires.

Social gaming in metal communities.

2010-11-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

There was a discussion in the previous post in the comment section over metal lyrics, ideology and listening to bands that might be singing about concepts that do not align with ones own beliefs. Those opinion fragments got me thinking on the subject enough to inform with it a broader point of view which I now present for discussion.

I do not go to Heavy Metal to get answers to my questions, I do not go to it to make friends (real or imaginary) and I do not go to it to figure out what to vote. That doesn't mean I have not made friends through my interest in Heavy Metal, nor does it mean my sense of reality is not informed on all levels its aesthetics and themes. Those things are the gentle byproducts of an interest whose primary focus is more difficult to define. I listen to, play, and write about Heavy Metal in the way that I do now, because it engages my imagination and has a lot of ambiguous space for interpretation. I find in there, a distant, perfect self that calls me forward. It is not other, yet it is not I. A son and a father, a ghost and a god. The characteristics of that entity, though they fascinate me, I do not want to figure out and tie them down. I want to figure me out through that reflection.

However I remember puberty. Like most people, I also wanted to belong to a subculture then. I wasn't a huge joiner so I stayed (or was made to stay, depends on the point of view) on the fringes of my chosen subculture of metal. This meant that though I had ample vantage to inspect and interact with its various specimens, I never counted myself as one of them nor was I included too often in broader excursions. I never belonged to a large circle of metalheads, I never was a groupie or supporter for any local band, I never went to too many shows. These things never interested me enough to pursue. I instead wanted to find more about the music, experience more of it, form my own band and reach my ideal of its capacity.

Proponents of the metal scene however are very anxious to 'get' what metal music is for social reasons: They need to understand it to have an opinion on it and use those opinions to form a social profile. With this profile they'll approach other metalheads (or listeners of extreme music, as it were in modern lingo) and test out interactions, iterate their profile and test again. Their concern is to come out on top, make allegiances, be considered knowledgeable and interesting. Men build bridges and go to the moon for the same reasons, that's how you get - eventually and hopefully - laid. (And in the case of the super obscure metalhead elite that discusses amongst its almost-all-male body in hidden recesses of the internet, the case is of simple intimacy transference: discussing about vinyl is like getting laid without all the messy repercussions of actually getting laid).

Nothing wrong with wanting to get laid (possibly plenty wrong with intimacy transfer but who is the guy with the Heavy Metal blog to judge). However, those that are trying to 'understand' metal to get a social profile going reach for shortcuts, because there's nothing to understand in it. There's only something there to inspire, to trigger awe and hope. However talking to girls about your Heavy Metal hopes and aspirations is a risky deal (and here the guy with the Heavy Metal blog can have an opinion). Instead then, the eager scenesters (try to hear me saying this word with the minimum amount of judgment: in the abstract, a scene and its actors is what we are discussing) latch on to surface concerns about metal -or extreme- music and understand, form opinions, discuss, fight and hopefully get laid over those. Think of a popular music forum for a minute, here.

The easiest way to arouse interest on one's own person is to draw a dividing line between themselves and other people, and paint their side in flattering colors. The easiest way for metal aficionados to do this is to say band x sucks (which is much stronger than saying 'band x rules' which is an inclusive statement). Then someone who perceives themselves as being put on the other side of the line in the sand will challenge the opposition to qualify why band x sucks. This is a four hand game that can go on for much longer. The third hand is then that the instigator will qualify his statement in as impersonal a way possible. Band x sucks because of their image, because they're boring, because of the ideology they endorse, because they sold out, because they're old, or young, pretty or ugly. These qualifications must sound like facts although they're not. The person behind them is shielding themselves from scrutiny by phrasing his critique in such a way that it is impossible to reach them through it. The fourth hand is then either a personal insult (trying to circumvent the loop - the game ends, people get wound up, drama explodes, the point of the game has been reached) or idle discussion on the merits of the opinions expressed (in which case the game goes on until someone insults someone). The latter loop can go on forever, people discussing their 'music taste' (though taste is very rarely brought up, accounted for, or examined in any rigorous fashion) in lieu of actual intimacy. Onlookers rate the participants with their opinion bias (: whether or not they agreed with the abstract 'band x sucks' to begin with) and with how entertaining they found the method of argumentation. Even when the game doesn't reach a satisfactory conclusion, it serves as a secondary determinant in opinion forming for the outsiders. It is not uncommon for real-life friends to play this game online without any malice or stake against each other directly, yet reach hysterical drama for the benefit of the audience. Today the one guy will win, tomorrow the other guy. Time is structured, sociality achieved, intimacy circumvented.

The easiest way to get noticed on the internet is to be a contrarian, and entertaining about it. This is a game I call, 'This Band Sucks'.

As you've noticed, although I'm talking about a lot of bands here, I've generally kept from making damning statements about them because I'm avoiding playing this game. I'm terribly good at it and it's easy to fall into a loop. Instead I'm talking about albums (and not bands) that I love and I go to great lengths to make my love clear for what it is: personal and inspirational to my life. I do not want to be rated by some reader for my good taste, I want to engage with them, get to know them and what they love and especially what their love inspires in them to create in return.

But 'This Band Sucks' is a very popular game on the internet, and so it has become very sophisticated through repetition. What once was a crude two-hand game of '-Metallica are better than Iron Maiden!' '-But Metallica cut their hair!' now has become an elaborate construct where band affiliations, ideological conceits and crucially, concerns of integrity are commonly employed.

So, let's say I love this record by the band 'Carnivore'. It has clearly misogynistic, misanthropic and chauvinist lyrics. Would it be a surprise to you that most mentions of Carnivore on internet message boards would quickly degenerate to games of 'This Band Sucks' over these prominent surface qualities?

People want to have an opinion on metal to get laid in their metal subcultures so they must judge how they feel about Carnivore singing about misogynistic, anti-humanist and racist topics. Their opinion, whatever it may end up being, will serve to draw a line, some will be with them on the matter, some against them. They'll try to be savvy and manipulate their opinion in such a way so they end up close to the people they want to befriend or have sex with through this process, that really has nothing to do with Carnivore, or the ideological concerns themselves. It's a game. Often participants will have wildly contrasting tastes: they like this band but hate another sound-alike of it because the former one has a conceit of ideology that suits their social needs better. Outsiders to this game could feel baffled by the near-randomness of the choices of the participants until they understand that there isn't a compositional merit or melodic quality that distinguishes good bands from bad bands for them.

It is exactly because I do not play this game that I do not judge art on surface qualities. I take them into account and keep them in heart and mind while I experience it at a different depth. When I first listened to Carnivore, I was shocked and felt kinda bad over parts of it. A year later, still listening to Carnivore, I thought the shock material was mostly meant as a joke, but the music was very compelling. A year later still, I was certain that Carnivore were trying to reach out to people through their shock antics because they were depressed or paranoid, but my love for the music grew. A year later I believed Carnivore meant every word they sang and when I listened to them, I meant every word they sang too. And a year later still, I now know that all these states are valid, they occur simultaneously, the quantum state of probabilities is determined by the capacity of the onlooker for risk. Art is not a game, it is cruel magic. Those that dabble with magic risk altering the inner and the outer.

One thing's for sure, Carnivore were worth dabbling in, for me. The things I found out about myself through that process did not get me laid (and/or did not get me high fives by racist morons), nor did they have any other social effect, but they were extremely useful in building character and exciting imagination.

So, when you see someone play 'This Band Sucks', because of their ideological subject matter or image or whatever else, know that they're not really interested in the music primarily, they're interested in playing a game with you. If you want to play this game, fine. Just know you're not primarily interested in the music right then either.

Does this mean that I'll listen to anything? Yes, it does. It doesn't mean I'll keep listening to it but I'll give it a chance and if there's enough beauty in there I will stomach even the worst connections it can make to human misery and ugliness. At the end of a certain time I'll know whether I should keep this art close or not.

Most of the Nazi metal I've heard has been awful not because it's nazi metal, but because it's all it is. 'This Band Sucks' is such a popular game now that people are actively forming bands just so they can have them be the subject of the game. It's sloppy and mediocre, empty metal that annoys me most, not metal that flirts with horrid imagery and notion.

And the type of metal that is most empty is that which proclaims to be all about fun and good times. A variant of the 'This Band Sucks' game is then 'Relax Bro, it's Just Music'. The instigator there is playing (or participating) in a game of 'This Band Sucks' and is watching out for anyone that is trying to turn the discussion towards ideological merit. They reply to that with 'Relax Bro, it's Just Music'. Which is meant to connote that there isn't any deeper significance to art and that the other person is undoubtedly problematic for having divined depth in a puddle, or -perhaps- even worse, is gullible and simple for having fallen for the 'image' of the band instead of its musical merit. This game is also very popular, to the point where aggressively anti-intellectual takes on a type of music that has been customarily meaningful have surfaced, and are enjoying ironic appreciation by scenesters internet-wide.

I'd take a few nazi metal bands over this, for example. The former at least has the capacity for beauty, the latter has nothing.

Anacrusis - Manic Impressions

2010-10-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

Metal blade, 1991

Kenn Nardi - Vocals, guitars
Kevin Heidbreder - Guitars
John Emery - Bass
Chad Smith - Drums

Here's a dividing line between Heavy Metal and extreme music in general: the former is a tribute to beauty. Metal music is loud and abrasive and the subject matter is sometimes horrifying but the internal aspiration of the musicians that toil in their bedrooms to construct those baroque riff structures is that of reverence towards beauty. Effort is required, but is not indicative of beauty. A grindcore band might have to work very hard to get to the point where they are fast enough to play their material, or tight enough as a unit to make it cohere, but that effort doesn't necessarily contribute towards the pursue of beauty; I may be the fastest guitarist alive but if all I find in myself to play are chromatic power chord variations on the first four frets, then I'm metaphorically drawing one of Pollock's action paintings, let's say.

There isn't only one beauty, much the opposite. But there is, and can be detected in the work of many artists, the personal intent to reach ones vision of beauty, or ones vision of ugliness. The art world has been concerned with this divide for the last fifty years. Post-modern theory applied to the visual arts for example, dictated that the pursue for beauty in the modern world is best left to illustrators and marketers that shall employ their skills to make pretty shit to dress ugly shit to sell to consumers. Real artists, was the modern decree, should look beyond surface beauty and invariably, to inner ugliness. On this command, if you'd care to visit an art gallery you'll see much modern & strikingly ugly monument to strikingly ugly & modern living.

A recent semi-movement towards a return to beauty has been brewing in art scenes around the world. They argue that the pursuit of natural beauty - and the skills to achieve their representation - are not throwaway and shouldn't be defaulted as commercial by use of marketers. They want to get pictures of beautiful people, landscapes and scenes back in the art galleries. The merit of both sides of the argument is debatable, I only bring it up to make a parallel with Heavy Metal's history.

Metal music has been straddling the middle space between modern art and ancient art since its inception. As a cultural movement it is resolutely modern and could not have happened in any other climate. Just the concept of young disaffected youth picking up costly electric musical instruments, recording in high-tech studios to put out vinyl that is to be distributed around the world, it is easy to see why this is a modern thing. However the high intent for the art produced was and is - as is the thesis of this website - mostly romantic, looking towards beauty and tragedy. Romance is anti-modern. Its concerns are not phased by the solipsism of knowlessness that has afflicted us of late, indeed it is sometimes something of a cure to it. Blood and death, passion and lust are a lexicon of a primal language, for whom do they not resonate?

So we have then the curious case of 'cyber cave men'. Expressing something ancient and eternal with the tools and methods of a future that not only has no use for instinctual imperative, primordial lust and romance, but resolutely pretends that these things do not exist, they never existed. Internal tensions, combustion, self-destruction. The curators of modernity mock the earnestness with which metalheads reach, ill-equipped as they are, for the grace of god, yet at the same time they're intrigued by their fervor.

A lot of confusion between listeners of metal music comes then, by their focus on either the modernist or the romanticist aspects of it. Many listeners are taken with the high concept of metal and approach its modern guise as a necessary evil. These people usually do not care for their metal to be super-well produced and cutting edge, they like idiosyncrasy and a bit of rustic autism in the sound design. They're interested in the ancient feeling inside the riff structures, the entity that is summoned.

However other metalheads prefer their metal-product to betray its modern world trappings primarily and consider its romanticist conceit as a vestigial leftover. "Metal bands sing about dragons, whatever. But check out that double bass!". This latter type of listener is interested in metal foremost because of its sonic impact, the gut level physiological reaction to audio battery. The pain, they figure, is similar. The ugliness is similar. They've known it before. They listen to a lot of metal as they listen to a lot of extreme music, because that is the sound of the modern world and it taps into something ugly inside, an undeniable reaction to the ugly outside.

Though I fall mostly in the former archetype as I grow older, I do remember, and can appreciate the latter type of fascination with ugly, harsh sound. I do not condemn the Other for being false, I seek to merely highlight the lexicon through which we may come to communication and understanding over our differences. Metal music, as I've said before, belongs to everyone. However Heavy Metal is in my heart and I wish to communicate its many graces with the outside world, I wish to entertain existence through effect.

The ugly in metal music has always come from punk rock. The influence of that on metal is undeniable and deep. The modern structures that spread the New Wave of British Heavy Metal far and wide are rooted on the do-it-yourself punk ethos. Without the punk renaissance, Heavy Metal would have been a dalliance of rock acts that would have ended in the late '70's. But with the impulse to get your friends and cut a gnarly seven-inch validated by the punk experiment, comes the baggage of ugliness. Cheap and commodified is the modern world, and so shall be its art. Contrast this "four ugly dudes cut a gnarly seven-inch" process with the fantasy of the high art wizard, carefully structuring his art in his ivory tower, investors and patrons knocking on his door constantly, begging, imploring the art wizard to choose them as his financial backing. They promise the world for the beauty the wizard is privately concocting. Heavy metal has this progressive rock fantasy of how art works in its mind, but at the same time is impatient, it's going to cut that seven-inch right now and the investors will come later, right? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The young wizards now older and cynical, retreat to the underground. They still speak of beauty but they remember the ugliness too. History married with modernity. The past marred by the future.

Thrash metal was one of America's interpretations of this gruff & pimpled, young & old, New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Power/speed metal was the other, and hair metal was another yet. A country of shallow history, with ties to the old world that it feels ambivalent about, is excited and inspired to make their own beautiful and ugly metal. Much is made in underground circles of the US Power/Speed metal sound. Some of my favorite albums come from this substrand of American metal, certainly. In listening to them through the lens presented by this article, it is easy to see what the appeal of it is. As an American reinterpretation of something European, it is a 'trash culture' take on romance. If Black Sabbath sounded baroque and horrifying, if Rainbow sounded arch and lush, then Jag Panzer sound pulpy sci-fi, hysterical, bi-polar, savant geniuses. American metalheads, shameful for their lack of deep history chose to amp up metal in a different way, play more riffs, make more complicated songs, throw in more extravagant solos, sing higher than ever before. The lyrical material takes a back seat. Sure it's still fantasy, but where Dio sings of wizards and their fantastical towers, Jag Panzer shall sing of post apocalyptic gangs clashing for street dominance. Feel the spikes in my baseball bat. Ugliness found a back door to metal and through clandestine passages, comes to the forefront.

US Power/Speed metal is fascinating for its combustible mixture of ancient romance and American consumer culture ugliness. Slauter Xstroyes sing of their 'need to survive' yet wear quasi-kabuki face paint and road warrior shoulder pads on stage. Thrash metal, US Power and Speed's younger cousin, has a slightly different mixture of the same. Eschewing romance almost completely (only approaching it through second-degree pulp novel affections) it instead hones in on a critique of modern living much like American punk rock did, though unlike it, from the vantage of the lone individual. Hardcore Punk approached Marxist ideology and communality mostly as a shocking mechanism for middle America, but metal music was shocking enough without the great red ghost, so it did without.

The trajectory of thrash metal can be seen on the rise of Metallica. On their first record "Kill 'em All", Metallica sing of metalheads, partying, bringing the metal to you, phantom lords, leather and chains, banging your head against the stage 'till metal takes its place. Then they start to see success and the world is looking at them. On their second record, Metallica sing of capital punishment, of ensuing nuclear holocaust, of feeling dejected and on the fringe of culture. Modernism and humanism have entered metal in full force. Write us an essay, Heavy Metal, tell us about world hunger.

Everyone would take a page from Metallica after their success. So many thrash metal bands concerned with real-life topics and with a very punk rock 'street cred' pretension to their image would spring up. It's tempting to call this material metal only in sound design and punk in thematics, but the truth is more complicated. And here let's talk about Anacrusis, and their 1991 release, 'Manic Impressions'.

Anacrusis formed late in 1986 and they went through the usual trajectory of 'Judas Priest is awesome!... oh wait, what the hell is this Metallica band doing?' that typifies the thrash boom, only in fast-forward. By 1988 they had their debut, 'Suffering Hour' which is an extremely competent thrash record. But by 1988, thrash metal was already played out, its strength diluted by the many Metallica followers that latched on the formula. As the underground was concocting its new, death metal sound, many thrash metal bands - now inspired by Metallica inspired by Watchtower - went in the far edge of modernism, making their sound less visceral and headbangable and more cerebral, cold and intellectual. Techno-thrash came into brief prominence. Anacrusis made their jump towards this vague sub-category of metal with their second album, aptly titled "Reason", and perfected their take on their third, and subject of this examination, "Manic Impressions".

The sound of Anacrusis here is fascinating. The rhythm guitars have their middle frequencies scooped extensively, and the distortion tone is very jagged and sharp. This sound identity makes the guitar melodies distinctive, but overall low in the mix. Drums and bass dominate and offer propulsion with the usual thrash graces of polka beats and Slayeresque sixteenth tom rolls. The vocals alternate between a reverberated moan, perhaps reminiscent of goth punk outfits of the time, and a serrated, inhuman scream that cuts through the mix. The complete thing sounds sterile and curiously - for a thrash record - empty. Anacrusis main man Kenn Nardi would later seek to amend this by remixing the record in his privacy in 2006. What he did was raise the guitar levels some, re-equalize them and apply a lot of signal compression on the whole mix. I theorize he thought this is a better sound for the record as it fits the modern metal archetype. However his new mix is very destructive in its compression and contributes to nothing but ear fatigue for the listener that is very familiar with the material from its original pressing. As such, whereas I will not disregard the impulse for the remix (in fact, I consider it very important and telling, as I'll explain below), I will be drawing from my experience with the original mix.

The material here is mostly fast paced, with lots of choppy stop-starts, changes of theme and harmonic derivations. Anacrusis retain their raging thrash edge from their earlier approach, but increasingly a melancholic aspect is brought to the front by the use of chorused and reverberated clean guitars. The juxtaposition is very relevant to the lyrical themes at hand. Anacrusis here deal almost exclusively with feelings of despondency, guilt, the burden of existence, the search of something real. These thematics are the full truth of modern ugliness. If there ever was a type of metal that captures modernism, techno-thrash is certainly it.

Modern extreme music listeners, especially coming from a hardcore punk or metalcore background, are probably very familiar with the idea of a band playing raging extreme music, their singer screaming his lungs off about lyrical matter that is very oblique, inexact, personal, existential and morose. Anacrusis were at the forefront of what only retroactively can be seen as an improvised movement that introduced this type of approach to thrash metal in the start of the 90's. The fascinating thing here is that - unlike a lot of metalcore - the end mixture of sterile thrash, melancholic interludes with moaned and screamed vocals over tremendous teenage guilt achieves a synergy that is very potent. The difference is one of class and subtlety.

Anacrusis have captured on this record, the sound of teenage rebellion, self-doubt and indeed, the irony of early resignation, young men feeling like they're two hundred years old. There isn't much hope to be found in the lyrics of this record. Even in the follow-up to this, "Screams and Whispers", the only hopeful note on the whole thing is the question mark that serves as its bookend. Yet, there is something here that is hidden, something that redeems the angst and pain.

This must have been a difficult album to make in 1991, where metal was still concerned either with appearing tough and macho to outsiders to alienate them, or scrambling for something high-brow to say to appear intelligent for them. Here's a band that had shown considerable capacity for metalhead-pleasing savagery on their debut, putting aside that approach for bearing their personal baggage. This might be old hat in extreme music today but I'm sure the response to Anacrusis at the time was not encouraging. I believe it is exactly because of those embarrassing memories that Anacrusis would choose to remix this record to make it sound tougher for today's climate. I am thinking of a young Kurt Cobain at the brink of world-wide success, still trying to get his close friend to score steroids for him so as to improve his weakling frame. That feeling never goes away. Taking my volume knob away from my won't make it go away either.

This record should sound exactly as it sounds. Spacious as a young empty soul, a void of paranoia, let down by religion, by institution and society. The story here is in the riffs. These riffs, composed so meticulously, harmonized in discordant parallels that mock traditional orchestration, alternated between compact muted linears and delicate vertical arpeggios, here is the cure to the ills of Anacrusis, in full display, can you see it? Heavy metal, even the most punk-infused versions of it like thrash metal, still retains its romantic heart in how riffs and structures are meticulously constructed to point to something higher. Anacrusis here have no words of hope for us, but they have music. Towering monuments, metallic scaffolding that pushes through the modern atmosphere and onto weightlessness and void. Where one is left alone, where there is nowhere to go but inside. There are no answers, but at least now there is a space, an insulated space in which to work it out, completely alone. This is the most fascinating thing about Anacrusis, that they summon not an entity with answers and ideology, but a space in which the useless nothing of modern society, the introverted teenager, is allowed to stretch a wingspan they didn't know they had. To be given back what one always possessed, that is what Heavy Metal is. Romance is a language, but even in lack of language, the broken, battered, beating heart of Heavy Metal beats the same. In the machinery, the clash of deterministic gears with free-willed steel. Look at the blood-red sparks, here is your beauty.

Let's listen to one of the tracks on this album closely. The aesthetic choices here are rife with ambiguous space on which to assign personal meaning. This interaction makes this record intimate, pushing aside the jagged shards of personality that inspired it. I chose the song "Still Black" because it speaks to me the most but the morphological notes here apply to the whole of the album. There is no filler.

0:00 - 0:11 : Tuned a fret low, Anacrusis introduce the main theme of the song, which is chromatic. Sixth, Augmented fifth, perfect fifth, diminished fifth, this is the sound of direction-less anxiety. There is no third to paint this sad or hopeful, there is no movement forwards or backwards. The by then customary thrash frill of punctuating the start of each bar before coming in in unison is upset on bar two, the phrase left to stand on its own. Doesn't it sound weak, almost comical with the hollow sound design, on some level? Now think of when you were a teenager, locked in an argument with figures of authority, how shrill and powerless you sounded.

0:20 - This is that voice, coupled with the second guitar harmonizing the stacked diminished fifths, the sound has more power but sounds askew. Combustion, propulsion, impulse, but no certainty, where will this take us?

0:21 - Stop-start, a heartbeat's worth of breath, and the lyric comes:

"My touch means nothing
It's just a sympathetic mock embrace
This pity for you leaves nothing
But a bitter taste
Persistent lies, nothing
But useless words of waste

Your voice seems harmless through
These softened tones of grey

But grey is still black"

Remember when you were young and compromise, middle-ground and half-measures seemed so alien and confusing? How 'good enough' was still bad? The way 'grey is still black' is voiced by Anacrusis here rings true to me, every time.

On the second verse, as irritation rises, the last word of each line is screamed, voice cracking.

"Your face is nothing
But a transparent fixture
Perception is nothing
But a distorted picture
Expectations are taking in
The deceptive mixture

Your substance is nothing
But a lightened shade of grey

But grey is still black "

Here is the guilt. Perception is nothing, nobody is right, we all hope but we all fear, and it doesn't stop hurting.

1:21 Note how melancholic it sounds, the verse of

"A carousel of vanity
Apparently persuading me
Still all the while evading me
Accepting all, believing none
Always pretending we are one
So meaningless"

Being played on top of thrash metal gallops and palm-muted riffs. The theater of metal is falling apart, the gleam of virtual armor is betraying the human flesh inside. Note how the vocal comes in and out of the mix - no doubt due to bad recording at the time, but how apt it is. This isn't something to fix in a remaster.

1:39 As 'so meaningless' is called - and here is the startling beauty of it all - the most refined and complex theme of the song is introduced, it unfolds like a flower and in

2:03 the form dissipates into the liquid arpeggio of the mangled power chord that is the spine of the song. Polka beat harshly punctuates. Listen to how little there is left to the song at this point, beautiful fragility. Of course Anacrusis are glorifying emotional distress here, but this is at least, turning pain into a tool, using it to put oneself back together.

"Intentions mean nothing,
It's only for the one inside
Regression prevented,
Carried on the truthless tide
Cold breath, mistaken,
Whispers with a senseless pride

Your front is nothing,
Nothing but misted cloud of grey

But grey is still black "

Note how at the labored vocalization of 'grey' that marks the beginning of the chorus, stop-starts are employed with a degree of triumph, as if the argument is coming to a head and at least the argument is dynamic, vital, it arrives to an emotional externalization. This point is made again and again on this record, when the right words are finally let out, the music stops to commemorate.

4:09 Note the wonderful switch-up under the melody. The polka beat went from snare first to kick first, propelling the return of the fragile theme towards a subtly different emotional end. I tend to feel snare first polka beat as battery, violence, a series of body strikes, whereas kick first feels for me like someone moving - away or towards - something. Something positive has come from this argument after all. Hidden beauty, hidden hope.

I am not advocating that Kenn Nardi and the rest of Anacrusis composed this piece of music with these clear conscious signifiers in mind. I think instead that a lot of great art is understood in the analysis of the subconsciousness of the artist, as betrayed in the art object. It is not imperative for these aesthetic intuitions I present to be validated by the artist or by the public at large. That they are inspired, that the music makes me feel and think and try to put these two things together, is enough.

And after all this a guitar lead is allowed to comment on the main themes of the song. It is melancholic but active, searching for different accents and punctuations to the arguments at hand. It holds a high note for its exit, an idea that lingers, the original idea restated in a final verse and chorus repeat, vocals more savage than ever, words are fading, only the emotion remains.

On 5:42 - a moaned, distended scream. Gray is still black.

True metal, false metal and no metal at all.

2010-10-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

Reader Lumines brings up an interesting issue in the comments of the previous post.

It is often remarked by purists that there is 'trve' 'kvlt' Black Metal and that anything that doesn't fall under these classifications is poseur metal garbage. This is not exclusive to the Black Metal culture, it can also be observed in many others subgenres. Death Metal, for instance, can be rejected on the basis of lack of acceptable brutality or technicality. Progressive Metal can be derided for regressing into less complex song structures, and so on and so forth. Essentially, when the subgenre fails to meet perceived intersubjective expectations, say due to experimentation of sound, genre hopping or hybridization, or drastic change of thematic direction, those that have invested temporal, emotional, and financial capital into the genre can feel betrayed, hurt, and deceived by something that they had concluded was static, consistent, unchanging, predictable, or something along those lines. It would seem that this ties into the psychological hypothesis of Heavy Metal as a father figure. Any thoughts?

Many.

I generally do not feel very hurt or upset when a metal band I like produces something I don't. There is some disappointment, but it doesn't devalue what of their past contributions I still enjoy. You'll notice in my master list, very rarely is a band featured for more than once. This isn't because I listen to only one record by each of these bands, but because generally, "it only takes one" to go to the pantheon. They can record twenty albums' worth of absolute tripe after that for all I care. Essentialism is a valid concern in a cultural climate where consumerism seems to be the raison d'etre of most. However, my current feelings weren't always so.

As a teen growing up with Heavy Metal as father, I had thoughts on the 'future of the genre', the viability of it, the social ramification of it and the place of myself in its sub-culture, and the place of the sub-culture within larger counterculture -- metal music was largely ignored by the mainstream in the mid-90's where I jumped on board, so thoughts of metal's relevance for society at large were never a priority. I found Omen's '80s singing "We are tomorrow's warriors / Marching in the streets" with complete earnestness, very baffling. But I recognized metal music as being a smaller stream amongst many in loud musics that competed for the attention of the youth around me.

It was within that mindset that I was most concerned with what 'the next step for Heavy Metal' would be. I remember listening to Pelican's album 'Australasia' when it came out, specially the riff-salad instrumental composition 'Drought' and thinking - with complete seriousness and if I recall, some elation - 'so that is the next step for metal!'. A step out of the dark ages of the late 90's. As if there was a problem waiting to be solved. There were many that felt the same way then.

I think the issue is one of transience. Proponents of transient (that is, pop, current, vital, relevant, all these awful buzzwords) culture self-identify as such as long as the type of art they follow is also such. Yet the very definition of vitality, of life, is that it is fleeting. Swallowed by death and oblivion. The concern of scenesters is that they do not become yesterday's news because that would bring to the rise their own inherent doubts about the merit of what they're engaged in. If it can just be forgotten tomorrow, then how strong is it, really? This pushes the scenester to two very disparate directions.

On one hand the conservationist path seeks to shield the art by defining it and tying that definition with something enduringly true in one's own psyche (Heavy Metal as romantic art that speaks in ancient language, has these merits). This path eventually leads out of transience and in a historical appreciation of the genre. This is how I personally found my way out of the self-doubt that would make me look for 'the next step in metal'.

On the other, how to evolve the form so it remains relevant not only to the inner primordial core, but the surface modernist facade as well. Heavy Metal is not music very suited to such conceit, though at one time or another almost every listener of this music felt otherwise. Can't move at two directions at once unless you rip apart. And metal, and metal listeners, did. They only kept being part of the same 'metal' in name only.

These movements I believe echo internal and external existential concerns of the growing teen. It is very easy to mock the primordial human life concerns, where passion and angst lays. You will notice that almost any art that taps into that sort of atavism is ridiculed by many eager commentators for being juvenile and base. Therefore a veil of modernist seriousness, of communal and social function is sought for and tied to the form. You can see this with the rise of the very popular thrash metal movement in the mid-80's. The sociopolitical modernist thematics of that era - borrowed as it where from hardcore punk - is Heavy Metal noticing that the outside world is looking in on it and scrambling to come up with something 'grownup' to say.

On the matter of truth then, and the cries of falseness. Teenage metalheads enjoy being victimized and victimizing, it's a violent dynamic that suits the psychological, individualist unrest that fuels such art, and fuels back into the common teen neuroses that most people are familiar with. Indeed Heavy Metal self-defines in the early '80s during the NWOBHM movement by a direct contrast. Holocaust sing "Rock n' Roll... much too slow" and give birth to Heavy Metal Mania. Posers, wimps, disco-listeners and such were comfortable targets well through onto the '90s. But as that generation grew it realized that this humble dialectic didn't cut it. It became curious about the self-victimization that is in the core of metal culture's social conceit, and it experimented around it. It drew in influences from all these 'poser' and 'false' sources and the result was the widening of the genre tree that occurred from 1990 to 1995. Many metal musicians felt liberated through this because - adults now - empty antithesis no longer resonated. What they thought was Heavy Metal, wasn't anymore. Progressive metal attempted to marry metal sonics to complicated social and modern concern. Atmospheric metal blurred the distinction between popular and extreme music and rediscovered hedonism. All these strange concoctions of sound, even 'funk metal' was attempted. People were modding the machinery of metal.

But the next generation, - very teenaged and burning with antithesis - decided, as it wants to do, all this was wrong. Enraged by the 'trendy metal' of their elders, they devised a return to Romance, and there you have black metal. That this sort of music took off so furiously is no wonder given what the rest of the old metal guard were doing. The notion of 'true versus false' returned with a vengeance and it fuelled metal like never before. A new generation of teenagers found a reason to exist.

The volatile dynamics of this lead to murders and arsons. These teenagers overstated their decree of 'truth' and their hatred of 'falseness' to compete in their social circles. Where water runs once same water cannot run again, and this wasn't the naive '80s any longer. What people unconcerned with 'trueness' were achieving could be seen directly in parallel to their efforts. When faced with this schizophrenia, one can either relent and reassess, or push until logic breaks into complete non-sense. Some black metal people relented and infused their 'true' black metal with various shades of falseness and gave birth to even more subgenres and cultural artifacts of variable interest. The rest unfortunately increasingly in the public eye, demented in their quest for senseless closure upped the ante and played their killing hand.

The events concerning those particular Norwegian black metal kids had a startling existential effect. Finally, every listener of Heavy Metal could see results of where being true to the inner romance would lead: to death. There is no escaping this finality. All those that morbidly group around Norway's scene still are looking for something real in their lives, and nothing is more real than death to them.

Naturally however biology kicked in and after those events, nobody else of note martyred themselves for that cause, but the ripples of what had happened could, they realized, be their ticket to relevance and existential teliosis for a long time to come. You don't have to die for your cause if someone else dies for it instead. Just like Jesus validates those that follow him, the Norwegian events of the mid-90's validate the cause of metal music for many. As long as these events are remembered - and they are indeed, endlessly eulogized by almost anyone that has sat down to write a word on black metal - the issue of 'true versus false' in metal music will burn incandescent.

'True death metal' is a hilarious concept in this light. As death metal gave rise to the objections of the Norwegian kids that resurrected the 'true versus false' metal ghost in the first place. But that is the point of my long-winded argument: after the death of Euronymous, every metal genre became retroactively concerned with 'true'ness again. We have 'true doom metal' now, and doom metal is a bastardized genre if there ever was one, true death, an intellectually bankrupt notion. And the crowning achievement: National Socialist black metal is the Truest true black metal, for when teenage satanism no longer cuts it, what brings the dreaded stench of death about more aptly then gaping crematoriums? "We like the holocaust. It is grimm." Anti-human, anti-life, anti-sense, anti-self: death.

(There is a useful note to make at this juncture. Which subcultures of metal are most concerned with true-ness? I posit that in the future, the more extreme the type of metal, the more concerned it will be with its perceived 'trueness' in lieu of actual emotional and ontological content to be judged on relative merit. Progressive metal, unlike what you remark above, is very rarely seen as 'false' for not being complex enough. It simply stops being progressive, metal, or both. There never was a more eager to jump ship type of metal than this.)

What is at the core of it? The realization that Romanticism is an unworkable belief system and that the only way one can traverse it with pride and honor is to die and kill for it. But metalheads are weak and the siren call of romance, for all its awe and inspiration, will not suffice for them to reach their final destination. Living is too much... biologically ingrained in the organism. This results to self-loathing. Self-loathing creatures project their feelings on others, because they are not 'true' to their romantic desire for self-destruction, they berate externalities (proponents of their scene, band members, organizers, writers, whatever) for not being true either. At least this way they divert attention from their own failings. It can become so time-consuming to spot & stamp out corruption in the midst that - hopefully - they won't have to look inside any time soon.

I think there is a way to navigate through this minefield between intent and failure, and it's a broader concern on the merit of ideology. Taking philosophical concepts and thinking them binding, internalizing them and making them part of ones belief system. Any ideology is unbearable in this respect, people become neurotic in their inability to traject according to their moral vector. Heavy Metal is no better or worse an ideology than most in this respect, that is to say, they're all a pathway to failure-induced neurosis. What I try to do with romance is neither to deny its call nor to embrace it as an ideology. Ideas are something small, but human beings are infinitely profound. Those that seek to become ideas seek to become something smaller than they are, something that will confine them to their breaking point.

So I do not take romance as my master. I come to conversation with it (this blog, and my own art) and I open myself to be inspired by it. I explore ambiguous spaces and entertain many notions, but I do not take them for truth. I find hope in Heavy Metal, not certainty. There is no room in life's complexity for certainty. It is too blunt and simple a tool to unravel anything but the basest of mysteries.

It is in that way that the matter of 'truth versus falseness' in metal has become irrelevant to me. Those that cry over this hate their own inability to be true to their convictions, and I do not have any binding convictions, I instead entertain thoughts and follow inspirations. I am open to the possibility that tomorrow I will feel compelled to never listen to Heavy Metal again and this doesn't upset me. So as far as the capacity of music to be Heavy Metal instead of merely 'metal', it is always a quantum state of uncertainty. Until I peek in and assess, it is and it isn't. And if I change my mind, I changed my mind!

All that said, I do find the common arena over truth and falseness to be interesting and try to keep up with the cultural climate that explains why a band seemingly stops being what it used to be, or when an outsider band decides 'we're metal now' and enters the paradigm. I do this not out of any 'metal watchdog, sound the alarm!' impulse, but mostly because I am well-versed in metal culture and since I have this knowledge, I use it to abstract broader social information from it.

It is in that mode (the dispassionate, sociological one) that I see a different shade of 'true versus false' worth differentiating from the self-loathing symptom described above. When people tell me to listen to this or that band for it is good metal, it is a shock not so much if it is good or bad, but often that it is so far removed from the expected forms of metal I am used to. The good-willing person would entertain the surface notion, Helm is out of touch with modern metal. That may be the case, but I think there's a socio-lingual issue there as well. People are discussing music that isn't metal as if it is metal because they feel more comfortable with that tag than any other. That's fascinating and worth examining. Why are so many hardcore punk bands masquerading as metal now? What are they getting from it and what are the listeners getting from it as well? Why are so many affectated indie rock/britpop/shoegaze -inspired bands content to be some sort of metal, where a scarce half a decade ago they broke out in hives at the mere mention of it?

I am interested in the phenomenology of this and I have theories. I am not upset over it nor do I want to defend Heavy Metal from the barbarians. Heavy Metal has nothing to fear, it is forever. And if I'm wrong and it will be forgotten, then so much the better that it is! But why are people trying to slum it metal-style now? In the '80s, the manufactured idea of the 'poser' was hilarious in its simplemindedness. You could tell it was a poser by how they dressed. If it wasn't long hairs and denim and leather, it was an outsider. The 'posers' reportedly detested metal all the same and all was tidy in the mind-space of the teenager metalhead. However now, punks and indies are complementing metal, they're stroking it, they're playing metal sounds and those upset over it cannot tell them apart from themselves. They wear the same clothes, have the same hairstyles and play the same distorted power chords and double-bass. They are them. It's fascinating!

Though it's worth a post of its own, I think the reason outsiders are now honestly and actually co-opting metal music tropes is an increasing fear of post-modern senselessness. People are feeling less and less like themselves and information overload leads to an even more wounded personality. Social networks are becoming so paramount that the young person is starting to feel as if they're not a singular entity anymore, and don't like it. Life stops having a story in it and instead it's all about how many people are following you on twitter and how many friends you have on facebook. Yet they cannot be something else than what they are, so they can only return to forms of art that have a romantic conceit, simpler semiotics and basic ontologies, by approximation and simulation. Metal music fits the bill and if it's too hard to be properly metal, you can always go half-way. We may be living in the first decade where metal music is actually looked upon from the outside with a degree of reverence, simply for being a thing. A basic, primal thing. Yet at the same time these reverent masses fail at actually becoming Heavy Metal exactly because the underestimate it in their simulation, because they cannot stop being products of an overcosumerist world bent on an information overload that threatens to make everything meaningless by this constant near-approximation-is-good-enough.

Heavy Metal as a Father Figure

2010-10-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

If you've ever come across metal music aficionados and perhaps had a conversation or two with them, you might have noticed two major types of attitude relevant to the extreme music subculture. On one hand there are those whose affection for metal comes with a host of related juvenile infatuations, like role playing games or perhaps professional wrestling, whose enthusiasm is matched by an earnestness that borders on obliviousness. On the other hand there are those whose interest in metal is coated in a thick veneer of irony and who resist intellectualizing or even contextualizing of their musical tastes with assorted cries of 'it's just music'. The former type tends to consume a broad scope of loud music vigorously and with a great appetite for discussion over the cultural minutiae of the form, i.e. what genre this record belongs to, latest gossip over this or that 'metal icon' and just how much they hate this particular record by Metallica, but at the same time is uninterested in a critical examination of their taste of this music on the whole. The latter type tends to consume just as wide a selection of loud music though they wouldn't be caught dead endorsing much of it publicly, taken as they are with their identification as taste makers, they fashion their statements on the culture with a cynical edge. That type actively resists music criticism as if the music itself is beneath it, yet still laps up amazing quantities of it. Neither archetype is able or willing to coherently explain their enduring fascination with metal music.

I have met very few people who belong to this subculture and do not fall into either of these categories. In the scarce cases where their interest is more complicated than that, they seem to be metal musicians more often than not. Here I will attempt to examine both stereotypes and exceptions with a mind to their psychological profiles.

If an empirical observation is allowed: the majority of people who still listen to metal music in their late twenties or early thirties (and especially further on than that), no matter their current demeanor on it, got exposed to it in their early teenage years. I simply have not met many people for whom the attraction to metal music started at a later age and stuck with it. Furthermore I've noticed that for people of mature age, even if one is successful in describing the appeal of Heavy Metal to them - successful insofar that they seem to appreciate intellectually what is being described - they very rarely, if ever, have more than a subsequent brief stint with the form as a result. Heavy Metal then, seems to gel with some aspect of teenage mentality.

To examine why that is, we'll have to look at the profile of the typical metal teenager, and also identify the aspects of metal music that appeal to them. Here I am drawing from a wealth of empirical knowledge since I myself was once a metal teenager and I've known many dozens of them too. I appreciate however how there are exceptions to any theory I might entertain. The point of this argument is not to be the last word on metal and teenager attraction, but to make a foundation and encourage discussion on this frankly overlooked aspect of this culture.

So, the teenager that encounters metal music, does so at a very precarious age. Teenage reality is often characterized by a shifting of values. On one hand, it is at this age that one starts to realize that the traditional authority figures in their life (parents, school administration, grownups in society at large) are not only fallible but often downright ignorant or malevolent. This results in doubt and reexamination of the inherited ethical prototype that is shoved down young people's throat since they can remember being sentient. On the other hand, this is the onset of hormonal arousal and the awakening of the libido. With thoughts of sex (often aggregated with shame, as negative value judgments on sexuality are impressed upon young teens relentlessly) comes repression and thoughts of death as well. The two grand mysteries of existence (birth and death) are those that are seemingly, in the modern world, the ones less allowed to be described, discussed and scrutinized in a honest and brave fashion. Teenagers turn to esoteric pursuits that promise enlightenment.

It is at this age where old symbols gradually crack, then crumble. Teenagers are estranged from their parents, they turn to their peers for support and ill-fitting guidance and they begin to lash out at authority figures with a plethora of dabbling in various 'wrong' things. Metal music is just one of many such, nearly everything our parents might have told us is bad for us, in light of the startling realization that they're not infallible, is explored. Violent entertainment, sexual experimentation, sub-cultural cliques, illicit substances, so on. The more daring are usually those that destroy or enlighten themselves the quickest, but what of the shy introverts, nerds and obsessives, who feel the parental figure rejection but do not have the genes for self-destruction? They get into computer games, fantasy role-playing games and esoteric literature, metal music and other such dorky pursuits.

Those avenues have variant characteristics but common core appeal: they allow for fantastical exercise and ethical experimentation. This is a big part of teenagerdom, the gradual breaking down of the early borrowed belief system and its replacement with a hodgepodge of new influences, meant to steel and shield the teenage psyche from oncoming realizations about the nature of the internal and external world. Metal music is one of many weapons taken up then, to battle the sometimes explosive sense of unreality that comes with puberty. What my parents told me isn't working, I feel so strongly about things I do not understand, how can I cope as an individual with what now seems like a world that misunderstands and is against me.

This teenage look on life is famously lampooned as some passing phase of paranoia, where the world isn't really against anyone and they eventually come to realize that and join the ranks of adults. However it seems to me that the inconvenient truth is that by and large, any mass of people is always against any individually minded person by default, be them child, teen or adult. Indifference is a gift of non-proximity, at best. And that magical adulthood revelation that leads to social integration and harmony is not only an invention of wishful thinking, it also camouflages what's truly going on: well-functioning adults are just teenagers whom have fought the world and were wounded for it and have created defense mechanisms that obfuscate and shield their tender teenage heart. Adulthood is merely the semblance of cynicism, a smoke-screen underneath which the existential angst of the teenager always lies. We seek - like all - with intimacy to assuage those sanguine wounds, but intimacy is risky, isn't it?

Metal music, then, is one of many partial replacements to the once-stabilizing parental figure, a method through which some benefits of intimacy (time-structuring, belonging, stability) are achieved in lieu of actual intimacy and its risks. It has inside it specific ontology and moral code and what makes it so attractive is that it is not force-fed to the teenager listener, it is instead resistant to initial scrutiny and only gradually does it cohere and integrate within the belief system of the teenager. One has to fight for it (unlike intimacy, for which one has to be soft and welcoming) and the resultant ethics system seems misleadingly self-inspired as a result. Its dictum is as simple as it is impossible: the call towards willpower, shaping the world according to one's desire and at the same time, complete individuality and self-control, self-definition (where intimacy is no longer needed). These are very attractive notions to teenage introverts, whom are all to eager to give up on the external world and focusing on sharping their internal world.

However - and here we are returning to the broadly painted initial archetypes - this high Romantic call of Heavy Metal, as emotionally potent as it is, is practically impossible. It is perhaps ironic that the people drawn to such pursuits are the ones least likely to have the willpower to achieve them, self-define, burn brightly, achieve control and purpose. It is introverts looking for the path of least resistance to some form of quasi-intimate enlightenment that stumble on this sort of music. Shy teenagers with lots of free time and disposable income at that. They give themselves enthusiastically to the collection and absorption of many metal records and they gradually come out of this process changed.

On one hand for those that are still eagerly lapping up sometimes hundreds of records each month, the initial attraction to high Heavy Metal ideals is seamlessly replaced by collector mania and the tell-tale traits of overconsumption: they retain data related to this music like a sponge but they're unable to coherently discuss what the music means for them and how it affects them. They have achieved some parts of intimacy (time-structuring, belonging to a group) and they stopped there. For those people, metal music was a gateway out of teenager doubt, and their teenager mind-state is made inaccessible and hidden by their consumption habits. If they were to remember how it felt to be a teenager, thinking as they do how they're over all that, they'd rapidly break down in realizing they haven't taken many steps out of that mind-space at all. Their heart has been put in a little box, cushioned by layers of many hundreds of carefully wrapped and categorized Heavy Metal lps. They have genre tastes like any music snob, but the act of collecting quantities of metal, shifting through them and discussing their genealogy is a sort of zen-state for them. It doesn't promote any enlightenment, it is just stress relief. Heavy metal is drugging them and yet they cannot turn away.

On the other hand, those that still listen to metal music and follow its modern happenings but yet do not compulsively collect and categorize it are those who entertained at some point the possibility of trusting metal music, and it wounded them. They bought in the 'evil' of it, or the high command of bravery and individuality in it and they thought these musicians to be Gods, or more aptly, fathers. It is especially cruel when this happens because metal music puts forth an aura of infallibility indeed and it is easy to confuse what is effectively, small humans praying to higher entities through their metal music, for small humans becoming higher entities through it. These are the types of listener who at a late age are still burned over how King Diamond 'wasn't a real occultist' and how Glenn Benton didn't kill himself at age 33 like he said he would. The common complaints against a father they felt intimacy for. They often strike back at what they consider was a betrayal by making fun of metal music and with the conceit of ironic appreciation of its cheesier aspects. Yet they still listen to, and indulge in the sub-culture of metal. Heavy metal is hurting them and yet they cannot turn away.

There is a magnetic quality to Heavy Metal. That I can write so many words on it should clue you in: those that came close to its chaos core are altered forever. However the mutation is not inherently to the better or worse. What one takes from metal music can be examined only insofar as how harmoniously it is integrated in their psyche. Self-loathing is a telling signal this has not occurred. Just as father figures fall from grace, so do transgressive ethical systems such as political ideologies or indeed, metal music, eventually cave in. The holes are there for anyone willing to see them, yet most, in their quest for some benefits-of-intimacy-sans-actual-intimacy, disregard them. No idea-space concept can stand the test of application because flesh is weak and faltering and the way through conflict is dim with the blood-mist of carnage. People must adapt, and the Heavy Metal inside them has to be fashioned into a spear, not as a shovel to haul inside the gaping maw vast quantities of surface entertainment. It is telling then, that the people I've met whose affection for Heavy Metal seems to help their psychological evolution the most, are those who engage with it pro-actively. Musicians and writers have turned a pass-time into an active pursuit. The interest psychological parallel of what I've been working towards is that then, this is taking the dictum of a higher, parent-like entity, and pursuing it in first person. In doing this, misconceptions as to the potency of romanticism are put to the endurance test and what is left is almost always a leaner and more streamlined, yet curiously more ambiguous and liquid thing.

This is not an ode to the metal musician, however. A great number of them are frauds and intellectual midgets hiding behind the big scary Heavy Metal ghost. Indeed those musicians who come to contribute to the medium with the stereotypical mindset of the metal music collector or the extreme metal cynical taste-maker often put out rubbish music themselves. However it seems to be that those that stand a chance of personalizing the Heavy Metal dictum, making it their own, turning it from a father figure into an internalized force, stand to do so via proactive methods. Making it, scrutinizing it and being savage with it, testing out what they love to the point of hate. Very few things can withstand such bravery, but when they do, the complexes of authority and control inherent in ideal can be divorced with the positive aspects of its individual philosophy and creativity.

It is worth keeping the complexes of post-puberty in mind when looking at metal music listeners. If they seem to be avid over-consumers, keep in mind they're yet to test out the ethics of metal music. If they're cynical hip taste-makers, they probably did and it didn't work out for them and the result is self-loathing. If they're hanging around metal communities without contributing pro-actively to the form then they stopped at time-structuring and belonging, and so on. If they are musicians or other pro-active proponents, worth keeping in mind how their demeanor aligns with their metal-related output. Usually those that talk the biggest talk are those who make bad metal, yet those who don't talk any talk often make even worse. Beware of cliches, as in any aspect of communication, cliches are there to discourage intimacy. They are a communal hymen which the prodding individual member always fails to penetrate. The resulting feeling of castration is powerfully used against the individual. When you hear cliche talk about metal, the people talking are trying to discourage intimacy, exposure, risk. When you find one of the few individuals whose speak is from the heart, then their metal art is probably potent as well. But even beyond the base scouting I suggest here, the real question to take from the construct I've presented above is "how do you relate to your metal music as a figure of authority?" and by answering that question, many things are inspired. Not always pretty and not always safe, but useful and brave.

Agnes Vein - Of Chaos & Law

2010-10-05T00:10:00.000-07:00

Self-released in 2004

Foivos - Drums
Erikos Negros - Bass
Sakis Kioses - Guitar, Vocals

"Elric, sorcerer and swordsman
Slayer of kin
Despoiler of his homeland
white-faced albino

Last of his line"

In the writings of Michael Moorcock there is a foundational notion of eternal strife between the forces of Chaos and those of Law. The former seeking to destabilize the fabric of common reality with their horrid beauty and constant spider motion, the latter standing for stoic staticism, stalwart celibate champions of a world that makes sense, coheres, follows causal premises, is ended. Evolution and entropy, birth and death, the inner and the outer, mirror fragments fall into the mirror pool, how darkly they reflect.

This duality is one that has had more than a surface appeal to the Heavy Metal artists that were inspired by Moorcock and many of his peers. The parallel is simple and so I'll illustrate it as Moorcock did, with his tales of the Melnibonéan prince. His sickly flesh, deficit genes and languid lifestyle in the ancient palaces of his bloodline could not withhold his lust for exploration and adventure. And unlike the barbarian Conan whose journey was an outer one carved on the flesh of many, the depths that Elric of Melniboné plunged were inner: his questioning of the very basis of his existence was the gravitational pull that sent him on wild trajectories throughout the young kingdoms of man and beast.

For the teenager reading fantasy pulp, there were many strong-willed heroes that plundered the earth with great abandon to idolize. And for Conan the conqueror, given as he was to his famous bouts of depression, it was still the rippling tendon and muscle that crushed the world with iron will that characterized him.

Elric instead, of frail flesh and dwindling spirit, seeks refuge in alchemy to not even prosper but merely survive. Concoctions eldritch, potions fashioned to lend a mockery of atavistic vitality. A perversion of the natural ways, where the strong survive by crushing the weak. Elric drew from the countless centuries of tradition of his cruel homeland, his artificial willpower. He was after all borne of high class and had ample opportunity to study sorcery and metaphysics. In the end he meets his counterpart in the black sword, Stormbringer and needs the lesser drugs no more for the infernal black sword swallows the souls of those it slays and lends the wielder their occulted will. It slays the outer and gives birth in the inner. What does it tell us for those that at an early age were ensnared by the tales of its onyx light?

Heavy Metal is romantic art, and as such, has in its core a tall order. The quintessential tall order, as it were: live forever, destroy death, purge the world and give birth to it anew. Omniscience and End. Those that are inspired by art that has these ridiculous measuring points often feel tremendous guilt at their own incapacity to materialize in the real world even a semblance of such tenets. There is a certain kind of pain, unlike the common physical one or even the mental anguish of psychological withholding and social deprivation that many dreamers share: the pain of being unable to achieve what dreams inspire. This pain is private. If it can be explained to others it is not easily and not without risk lest one enjoys constant low-brow mockery by self-appointed 'realists'.

It is two-fold our embarrassment that most of us come from a comfortable middle-class background and haven't wanted for anything too terribly in life. Heavy Metal was not borne of this middle-class ennui but it was certainly adopted heavily by its sufferers. Much like Elric, metal fans do not have the willpower that characterizes the savage will to kill to survive. They instead are decrepit and morose, they have everything they need but they're not happy for it. They turn to the fantastic alchemy of the heavy metals for they need a tool of strength to open up their weak hearts.

So then Moorcock, with his tales of Elric and his black drug-sword created a potent alternative to the cruel feedback loop of romanticism, where the Fates look down on the weaklings who like the songs of splendor but can only achieve dour daily nothings in their name. He instead restates the ancient premise that the fantastical hero that survives many perils and prolonged Odysseys is but a vehicle for Fate itself and his own powers are limited, nay, augmented by an Aristotelian Organon: a killing tool that yet gives life. As Elric loathes and loves his black sword, so the listeners of Heavy Metal may through that see the way to accept not just their incandescent love for the high art that inspires them, but also the hidden loathing for own aspirations not achieved.

Heavy Metal is a black sword whose power is only lent and will in the end assist suicide, ablation for what gifts it has bestowed. For the time one has it in their hands, they have to choose to what polarity they will turn its moon-carved blade. Will it be to praise elder god Apollo, bringer of light and cruel law, his white-cast eyes bearing judgment and science on all earthly things, or will it be to glorify mega Dionysus, cradled in grapeseed and maniacal with frenzied laughter? Either season though it appears never-ending, does gradually, with the passing of the storms and cold sleep, give way to the other.

A human life seems to me to be an unlimited thing, experientially. I will not know death because when they say I have died, I will not be there to live death. Therefore, although evidence of death is plentiful around me, it is with a certain arrogance that I secretly believe I will never have to leave here. 'Here' will leave with me, instead. Isn't that a comforting thought?

Death is then, for society to function, substituted with something that I, as all, have experienced: suffering and loss. Others plead you not to give them death with this explanation of external loss and pain. It is the constant fear of suffering and loss that humans have christened death in its wake. Death is useless.

But suffering and loss is an internalization of an outer experience, it is something the outside inflicts on the individual, it does not equip them in the least for any ingressive quest. It could be said instead that the constant pain that the outer world inflicts on the individual retards their potential for the self-discovery of what death could mean, inside, what it could be to not exist, to never have existed.

What is chaos, then but the end that came before the beginning. It means that what 'they' say exists, doesn't. It never did. Chaos is motion, eternal motion, undefinable and unlawful in the purest sense. Law, in ancient Greek, also described the etymology of physics, the description of causal relationships. When everything is in ever-constant mutation and motion, such relationships are impossible to define. Then and only then, when the pain of a static world inflicted on what is fundamentally a jubilant reason-less inner existence has been halted, can the lone traveler ponder what it could mean to exist, and what it could mean not to.

Agnes Vein are a Greek band that plays epic doom metal. Their demo "Of Chaos & Law" is very evocative of the qualities of Moorcock's work (though not his style of writing). They employ a pulse that flows from the ponderous and glacial to a frenzied and war-like gallop. There is a lot of antithesis in their songs, yet the compositions, though simple, are elegant and cohesive.

The aspects of the whole here are very foundational: the most advanced technique on display is seen on the '90s metal informed drums. This means they're quite busy and heavy on the double-bass, with the rolls following the cadences of the riffs. This is an artifice devised by thrash metal bands and since then employed generally on the whole field of extreme music. Agnes Vein are dated to 2004 purely on this level. The songs on display otherwise could have belonged to many great Heavy Metal records from 1986 and onwards.

There are rhythm guitars that play the structures of the songs in power chords. Saturated middles put meat on the bones and there is no excess fat, no technical flourish and needless belaboring the point. The riffs here are specific and refreshed sparingly. The mode is muscular and therefore masculine, direction is conveyed by repetition and simple ABCABC structures. The songs go in very specific places though what is to be found there is left to the imagination.

The bass guitar is uncharacteristically prominent for modern metal perhaps, but this is more common on the doom metal sub-genres where 'heaviness' is often equated literally with the low frequency stack. They play fluid lines that often counterpoint with the more choppy rhythm guitars. The classicist beauty of this record is found in this interplay and I would hesitate to call it ample. There is however something very enticing about a band that plays on very primordial themes yet sparingly embellishes on them with gentle elaboration between no more than two or three voices. I think that a lot of metal music and its widespread appeal can be summed in this effect: something simple and direct, yet with a layer of subtle grace.

On top of the mix lie watery guitar leads, drenched in curious reverb and distance, along with the vocals. There is a certain suspicion that Agnes Vein felt their singer ill-equipped to stand front and center in the mix so they instead buried him in echo chambers and thought nobody would notice his faults. This - perhaps - unfounded assumption arrives to a winning idiosyncratic sound. The singer is adequately tuneful and his vocal lines are splendid, his Greek accent is very clear. The reverb downplays the importance of the individual lyric (scarce lines may be caught but no more than that). For those familiar with the works of Michael Moorcock, every signifier offered here is strong with his archetypes.

There have been other great Heavy Metal bands inspired by the tales of Elric (Cirith Ungol first and foremost) but what attracts me to this take by Agnes Vein the most is that it is not a literary approximation of the source material, it is an aural one. I read the Elric stories many years before I ever knew of the Greek band, but when I finally did listen to them, their aesthetic simply clicked with the weight of many invented memories of a fantastic place. I cannot imagine one without the other now, and it is very significant when such a thing happens to art that is separated not only by disparate mediums but also decades of social change. The individuals in Agnes Vein did not live through the sixties nor were they British neither, I would expect, have they taken copious amounts of psychoactive substances, all of which contributed very directly and clearly to the work of the fantasy author. Yet somehow, from London to Thessaloniki and from hippie communes to conservative middle-class ennui, a silver string connects. The lumbering crack of shifting earth and storm, defiance to the outer Law and glorification of the inner chaos.

What is there to take from this approach, considering that one is gathering lessons to apply to their own Heavy Metal, is that it is perhaps a balsam to the wound of romance to acknowledge Fate as a contributing force, and not just will and absence of. And that even if one's footing is found - after the veil of decades of passing seasons has been lifted - to amount to no clear stride in any direction, this is no failure. It is however, drama, motion and force and perhaps it is that, that the Heavy Metal musician should focus to express. Not just the Gods of Law & Chaos with their frowning, grinning faces, but also the man, the plaything of fate whom so often fails them and disappoints and then eventually realizes what it means to not exist, to never have existed. Perhaps there is a song for him as well to sing. A song of hope as well as laughter in the face of unsurmountable desire.

Glossary pt.2

2010-09-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

As requested,

Blastbeat

The telltale sign that you're listening to not just metal but extreme metal in particular, is a certain busy drum rhythm that aficionados call the blastbeat. Metal adopted the technique from hardcore punk initially and not without some internal friction has it become a metal music staple. To understand the blastbeat one has to first understand the polka beat, and to understand the polka beat one has to know a few things about rock and roll in general.

Rock rhythm is usually in 4/4 at moderate pace, with accents on the first and third beat (kick and snare, respectively), divisors being hits on every count on the hi-hat. Go on, play that in your head. You're playing the backbone of sixty plus years of music right there. This is a very simple beat which allows for a lot of personal interpretation, variation and humanization. Many rock drummers enjoy playing slightly in front or behind the beat to suit the feel of the music. Feel, generally, is more applicable in slower tempos. The faster music gets, the more important it becomes for the divisions to occur clearly.

Early metal music added a lot of propulsion to the rock drum formula by adding syncopated kicks between the snare on the third beat, or straight up eighth notes on them throughout and other such slight alterations. However, the faster the rock beat became (and as noted before, metal music tends to the extremes) the more it becomes simplified to the 2/4 basic beat of polka music by necessity. To clarify, polka music and culture have nothing to do with metal music, it's just a common name for a certain technique: Kick - snare with no divisors between the two accents, just a hi-hat or other cymbal on the beat. This beat became predominant in metal during the heyday of thrash and somewhat earlier chronologically for punk music. The difference between the two schools of drumming is mostly one of rigor: metal drummers obsess over metronome efficiency at high speeds whereas hardcore punk drummers were fine with being sloppy if the end result connoted immediacy and panic. In either case, the polka beat has a very driving pace, perhaps physiologically it could be likened to running, one foot after the other with equal accent on both (drummer skill and sound design allowing).

Now, extreme music being what it is, the polka beat was eventually pushed to its extreme too, especially within the confines of hardcore punk, a type of music not very concerned with constant clarity like comparatively virtuoso metal music. The polka beat pushed until the distinction between the first and second accents is unclear, is a blastbeat. To the uninitiated, watching a drummer play a blastbeat seems as if he's hitting everything in unison on every accent, hence 'blasting'. However as the ears become accustomed to the flurry, the one-two division can still be felt. Blastbeats were introduced in metal music largely by Napalm Death and perhaps made a more distinctive impression in the work of one of the early death metal band, Morbid Angel. They were used by them usually in brief statements and embellishments. Being a hardcore punk staple, they were initially seen with some suspicion in the metal world, but in the end the need for speed won over the argument for debatable musical merit. Double-bass drumming and the capacity for an even blastbeat at high speeds are the bare perquisite skills for modern day metal drummers by result.

Blastbeats have become increasingly faster too, pushing speeds of 250 bpm (to get a grasp of that number, it's about four hits per second). Athletic and dexterous metal drummers now employ a host of specialized techniques to keep up at this pace, and those with such ability are highly sought after in the extreme metal world. This explains - to a degree - why drummers tend to belong to a plethora of bands and side-projects at the same time. I will not venture an extensive guess as to what other psychological and educational forces at are play that contribute to this, suffice to say that extreme metal drummers might enjoy putting most of the emphasis on the 'extreme' part of the equation: if I get to bash more stuff/faster, yes I will play for your band.

Blastbeats became common in two main genres of metal music: death metal and black metal. They are employed in these contrasting types of extreme music in subtly different ways. My opinion is that the biggest telling on whether you're listening to death metal or black metal is not aesthetics and lyrics and vocal styles, but the manner in which blastbeats are employed.

The blastbeat is a curious thing. It was borne out of the need for speed, as explained, yet it doesn't capture propulsion in the way its cousin, the polka beat does. Even that, in turn, lacks something a brisk rock beat has. Namely, divisors.

As mentioned, a rock beat has a suspended hi-hat hit on two and four of the 4/4 pulse. This serves as a dividing agent that tells the listener "this is one part of the linear progression of the rhythm, and this is the other". We thus learn to follow the kick and the snare as primary directional forces, they dictate a marching pace and purpose.

The polka beat, because it is faster and it becomes increasingly difficult to shove divisors in there, omits the hi-hat between the accents and only retains the hits that occur simultaneously with the kick and snare which are therefore, somewhat masked by their clamor. The result is a faster pulse but not necessarily faster pace. The polka beat in thrash metal instead depends on palm-muted rhythm guitar parts to act as divisors. Meticulously sound-designed to stand out in the mix, they dictate the in-between pace, and therefore thrash music sounds propulsive and linear as well.

However, the blastbeat, being as fast as it is, usually occurs in unison with the smallest element of guitar rhythm. And if it's not (there are some fast guitarists out there) the issue becomes one of clarity of sound design. And even if the sound is dry and crisp and properly mixed, then it is an issue of brain capacity: there's only so much processing the brain can make of disparate musical events before they all sound like a blurred soup. Extreme metal listeners have been training their brains for decades to keep up with that pace of information, but for new listeners, current top metal drummers might sound unimpressive in any other metric than that of decibels.

Music set to blastbeats then tends to not actively sound fast like a runner, it just sounds rapid, like a stream. Death metal, a production of thrash and therefore very concerned with conveying speed, used to deal with this problem by using the blastbeat sparingly. In the context of surrounding polka beats, straight rock and roll beats and double-bass rock beats, the sense of propulsion could be retained. Morbid Angel on their seminal debut, employ this technique. Blastbeats are sparingly used and even then their beginnings and endings are very prominently accented so the listener is always clued in as to the where and why of the composition.

However a slew of latter day death metal bands pursued extremism for its sake and their music is often described as a blastfest. The end result sounds barely controlled, or often outright chaotic. This is used to positive effect by some crafty musicians, however.

Black metal music, which came into prominence in direct contradiction to the popular death metal paradigm of the time, consciously employs long streams of blastbeats in a different way. They slow them down so that their bareness and simplicity is audible and they do not often accent the beginnings of bars. The end result is active but curiously still. Propulsion is sacrificed for constant and equally applied force. Furthermore the usual sound design of black metal is that of obfuscation in washes of distant-sounding reverb. It is in this way that black metal music strives to achieve a sense of trance, much like certain types of electronic music. The kick drum especially is of much less priority in black metal, to the effect that sometimes it seems one is listening to a sea of snares.

Black metal's trajectory towards trance and hypnosis lead to the logical conclusion of rhythms built on drum machines, which can play completely evenly and for as long a time as required and never quit your band to go join someone else's more successful outfit. This ties in with how much black metal is made by solitary individuals handling all instrument, vocal and programming duties, and goes some way to explain why there is so much black metal out there.

More terms to be dissected as they come up.

Wait, what? Comments?

2010-09-23T03:44:00.000-07:00

I said in the Preemptively Answered Questions post that after externalization, the secondary point of the blog is for communication on the topic of Heavy Metal. Blogger defaults new blogs to open comment mode, which means comments get posted as people post them without any managing by me. So I had made a few posts here, with many many hours of toil behind them and I was under the impression I had not gotten any comments. I was going to keep going on, hoping that people would comment later on perhaps, but it was a bit disappointing nonetheless.

However I now realize people have been commenting all along. Please don't think I am above replying, I just didn't notice. I have replied to most comments in past posts below and will endeavor to engage with interesting thoughts posted here for as long as the blog goes on.

I'm switching comment notification on, now.

A simple graph

2010-09-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge. Don't mind some simplifications, it is meant as a guide to newcomers. Every single entry to the timeline deserves posts and posts disambiguating it, but for that stuff you can go to wikipedia, right?

Absu - Tara

2010-09-20T02:20:00.000-07:00

Released in 2001 by Osmose Productions

Sir Proscriptor McGovern - Vocals, Drums, Keyboards
Shaftiel - Vocals, Guitars
Equitant Ifernain - Bass

"With warriors like these, he won victories wherever he went. . . the heroes of a legend never really die, and a hundred years was neither here nor there for the Celts. Their champions remained unfettered by logic and could even be reborn through the transmigration of souls."
- Jean Markale

An occult belief system hinges on willpower; What is in binding effect in life - according to such doctrine - is not a physical reality governed by positivist axioms, but a shared communal dream-vision which is mutable according to what our will makes manifest. Therefore, eschewing Aristotelian concepts of causality, the occultist chooses to believe in their cosmology not because it has been enduringly proven and tested in external reality (or indeed, because anyone else tells them they also believe) but because they seek to make it manifest through willpower. Believe in the bridge and the bridge may hold you.

As a thoroughly atheistic being, I've always approached the religious or occult aspect of metal with a grain of salt. I believed my nascent quasi-ideologies as a teenager to be informed by reality and I only trusted them insofar as I could see they were the result of what is loosely considered by leftists to be 'historical necessity'. It's a dry mind-world, that, in which believing in nonsense was merely believing in nonsense. Heavy Metal shaped me extensively, but I only acknowledged its influence on my gradual adoption what I now realize is 'magical thinking' very much later.

Occult metal itself is difficult to parse unless the listener follows a similar path and is familiar with the semiotics that are constantly referenced. As I have never involved myself in any sort of occult study, I never could. However I came to appreciate it through, curiously, Heavy Metal that I considered to be much different to it and free of occult ties. This Heavy Metal, I realized slowly, is informed by the same basic existential concerns that occult metal is and as such it proved a stepping stone in acquainting myself with the latter.

Metal music on the whole is preoccupied with internal/external tensions. The cognitive dissonance between what one feels inside and what the world tries to violently convince them really is. They tell you you go to heaven after you die but you feel inside that after death there is only worm-food left. They tell you to work hard and be humble to get ahead but you feel inside that this world should be yours and work is for fools. Metal music glorifies the individual and trusts on their high functions to see them through the perils of community. At the same time, it is very aware of the low animal drives in the human and glorifies them as well. Anything inside you is sacred. Anything the world tells you should be inside you is suspect. Metal music belongs to nerds and outcasts and introverts exactly because of its awareness of this duality. Whom amongst them has not, at an early age, felt the pull towards higher ontology as an escape from the perils of the flesh? Some read sci-fi and fantasize about a life amongst the stars (and very far away from the flesh). Others get into role-playing games where they explore their desires safely away from the flesh. Others get into occultism and summon intangible forces of lust and power. Others listen to Heavy Metal and dream of a world where willpower dominates, where those that suffer less, and therefore are equipped less to manifest their will, subordinate to their domination of the Grand Maligned.

Heavy Metal is one of many ways for those that fear intimacy to justify it to themselves. Fear of intimacy, self-loathing and unfulfillment are the world-wide symptoms of humanity. Metal offers a bottleneck through which to safely explore some aspects of an otherwise overwhelming reality. It educates on interpersonal relationships with fantastic inner constructs of 'the other'. If this is all starting to sound like occultry, well... All Heavy Metal is in effect, occult metal. The music album is, when profound beauty is captured, a small ritual meant to suspend belief in communal truth and glorify the inner desire of the listener. The metal musician is not giving the listener a gift with the album. In fact, any beauty that the listener may capture from the monument to another person's narcissism, has to be violently wrestled away from the source. Metal musicians make metal music for themselves and they seek to take energy from their audience. The audience that manages to instead take energy for themselves through the ritual of listening, are not friends or compatriots to the musician at all. They should instead graduate to making their own art eventually because the channelling is much more exact in this fashion. The progress through the ages of Heavy Metal can thus me illustrated: series of independent, slightly insane alchemists, publicising the results of their latest project as if to say “I have done it, fools! See what you can chip away from this monument, what you can wrestle away from this Gordian knot, if you can”. Those that drink the concoctions are not consumers (with friendly consumer rights and other such nonsense) they are victims. This is why owning 5,000 LPs doesn't necessarily make one a valuable source of wisdom on music. What they have absorbed and what they're confident to speak about because of their time with music, does. A collector anxiety doesn't necessarily lead to that. Metal artists secretly (or not so secretly) loathe the consumerist mindset and it's the source of much anguish that the more successful they become, the more they're tied to the whims of consumers. When you hear a metal musician say things like "We do it for the fans", nine times out of ten you should run as far away as possible.

People don't easily get over Heavy Metal once they get really into it, and those that never did will never understand them. One can listen to metal music just for the catchy melodies and rhythms for all their lives and not get it. Or one may listen to metal music for years without acknowledging the spell that is weaved when they get really into it. They might scoff at the ignorant manchildren that have taken metal to be something akin to a religion for them. And it is detestable on some level, to see grown men worship the artifacts of the self-discovery of other, bigger men.

But is it the worship of the artifact, or what it could mean that ensnares listeners? Heavy Metal doesn't make tidy sense. There's lots of unexplored corners in it. It creates an ambiguous space, open to interpretation but very catalytic to an expression of personal fantasy, desire, will. It's like a conduit. All Heavy Metal is what some mockingly call 80's metal "Dungeons & Dragons metal". It serves the exact same function as sci-fi literature and role-playing and all that: let's pretend my willpower shaped reality. What kind of world would that be? Those that graduate from listening to other people's metal to making their own are those that are the most affected by the power of this process. They told you you couldn't do anything of value in this life, but this music allows you to shape a world. Not 'the' world, but then, they never mentioned there are more than one worlds...

Modern living scoffs of one's desire to tyrannically shape 'the' world by willpower and force and for good reason. However it is the duty of the individual to the individual to realize that while his community will never accept his Quixotic fantasies, he must treasure them, glorify them, take them to their logical conclusion, inside. This is the only way for the fantasist to remain alive. Tearing out your fantasies is the same as cutting off your own head. This is why people turn to the arts, a pure creation space in which they may manifest in as tyrannical or gentle terms they desire, their own reality. All art is narcissistic and all human beings have a beautiful narcissus in their hearts, gazing at their warped reflection in the mirror pool. Listening to Heavy Metal is much more interactive than listening to pop music because the metal listener needs to wrestle anything beautiful away from the creator of the music, to make the entity the creator summons, their own entity. The telltale mark of this process is when the listener graduates to being a creator of worlds themselves.

I don't believe in free will. I do not think there is some metaphysical force tied to the physical body that I call 'Helm' which makes pure choices about my future. I believe completely and thoroughly that everything 'I' have done so far is the result of all the inner and outer forces that are applied on me, on which I have no metaphysical control. And given that these forces remain the same if we were to rewind time, the exact same sequence of events would have played out - and if not, it would be due to quantum irregularity, not because of my Helmghost living in my brain or my tummy or wherever. I don't seriously believe in the concept of self, even. Yet, I listen to and create Heavy Metal, a music that glorifies will even at the face of destruction.

It has taken me a long time to parse why. It seems what I believe and what I do are asynchronous but after all they're not. I do not have any choice but to find beauty in the idea that I have a choice. This realization has helped me immensely to realize that ideological systems are very petty things to which we retreat to out of fear borne of a challenged inner-reality. Neither is my positivist/humanist/leftist ideology nor my determinist bent in conflict with the high romance of Heavy Metal. After all, my fundamental existential beliefs, that things will be alright in the end, that my story will make sense and perhaps a contentment will be achieved before I die, are as irrational and fabricated like any the axioms of any occult belief system. I may have no god, but I have hope, and hope is always a thing of human sentience and magic.

As said before and will be said many times again: Romantic art does not lead to romantic act, I will never slay and conquer for my heart's love to thrive. I will instead, live communally as a member of a community. Inwardly I shal be, through art and word, what my lust desires me to be. Those that feel cheated by romance because it didn't make them into a god should readdress what it means a god to be. Heavy Metal is not a self-help book, it will not get you chicks and success in the workplace. If it is anything to do with other people, you've misunderstood it. They've got their own inner struggle going on, what about you? Heavy Metal defies you to tear from it any meaning you can. And like all art, it is a sort of therapy for it. Heavy Metal stabilizes higher belief (“try to find meaning in this”) while leaving the lower turmoil to rage (“fight me and slay me to achieve this meaning of yours”). Real life doesn't allow this, it tells you that your low impulses are ugly and you should always hide them. But the only way for the human to entertain high concepts is if their animal lust and desire that provides them the fuel for living, is glorified, is seen in all its endless beauty and horror. The narcissus longs to fall inside the dark mirror pool.

Today, I am callous
Tomorrow, I am king
Immortal, strong, exultant, and conquering

My song and my word are iniquitous
Gathering assemblies in days gone by

Fire burns with the Pillars of Mercy
My chariot races through saw-toothed hills,
And hurls through every valley and mere

Pillars of Mercy
Watchtowers collapse before the lift of the twilight,
I am swift in battle
My voice is heard

And Absu, oh, Absu are floating down there in the bottom of the pool. The vehicle of a Texan that has taken the name 'Proscriptor McGovern', they explore beautifully embroidered semi-invented mythologies which feed into their Occult belief system. Absu is a manifestation of an entity which Proscriptor both owns and belongs to, both worships and subjugates. That tension is volatile. Often Absu sound out of touch with any external reality, at other times they ride the serrated edge of demagogy (as in, I want to believe what they believe because it is so fervently expressed, not because it sounds correct - again, consider occultry) and at all times they are absolutely manic, raging in their self-worship. Imagine the dance around the ancient stone monument, the fever-pitch that it reaches, that is “Tara”. Are they dancing for their god anymore, or are they dancing for they've become gods? That fleeting impression is what Absu try to capture and prolong as long as possible, a cosmic masturbation beyond and above the concept of time and history.

Their vehicle is a curious middle point between old-school forms of Heavy Metal, full of power chords, palm mutes and ABCABCA riff structures, the linear drawn out melodies and screechy vocals that characterize the second wave of black metal and the infectious rhythmic backdrop of thrash metal. What does this all mean to the uninitiated? It means Absu on "Tara" hit the trifecta: the hooks are parsable and joyous but not to the expense of the romantic journey, and the savagery, it is endless and beautiful. A blooming, violent internal world to explore. Truly, very few metal records I've heard come close to the virtual expanse of Tara's landscape.

Blazing to their pikes
Turning to dust
Gusting with the wind
They dream of an older delusion

Reigning, raining
Dampening the empire
Their excursion burns with the ashes

Calm lakes mirrored
Glistening everywhere
They rove through the waters and fires

Silent seas paused
Enlightening low light
Their visions for imperishability

The weakened flesh
Expecting downfall
Their ashes spread through lightless, starless skies

The Eminence
Not expecting wind
They now think of a newer illusion

How did this happen? The morphology of this record is fascinating. The initial impression, as far as I can recall it from almost seven years ago, is that this record sounds thin, the drums too up-front at the expense of the guitars and the drum sound isn't that robust to boot. Also the singer had a lot to say. At the time I was coming from a mainstream metal background more or less and I had grown used to the uniform, sanded down and over-compressed sound of metal, so this took a few years of readjustment. But once it did I found a lot of joy in the jagged edges, for isn't a joyous life, brimming with violence and lust, a conception full of unexplained and unexplored edges?

"Tara" turns its seeming weaknesses in deep strengths: That the drums are high in the mix became justified once I started to realize just how much nuance there is to the drum tracks here (whereas the riffs are finely crafted but their form static). Proscriptor is not only the singer but the drummer and his choices on how to support the stellar riffing on display are worth much study. What this black/thrash mixture achieves, that neither ingredient on its own can, is a constant sense of propulsion through extended melodies. Black metal has the extended melodies, but it often relies on a rhythmic drone to underpin and mesmerize. Black metal of this type is a morphine drip journey downwards, through small deaths. Here instead Absu switch up the beat underneath the riff very often and always to the effect of something fast seemingly going faster, a tried and tested thrash metal technique. Where Absu show their brilliance and grace is in making their compositions - which are inherently riff-salad, there's not much harmonic movement here - cohere and seem linear enough to allow for fantasy and travel. A lot of thrash metal, in hardcore punk fashion, indulges on this or that riff for only a brief moment and then either starts again with a new one or ends the song. The sound of angst and discontent, to make an emotional parallel. Here Absu switch through great many riffs too but very rarely do I get the feel that they're stopping something, and starting something else. The deluge flows, and every aspect of the instrumentation contributes to this. The constant singing, which I once thought overdone, helps in this, and that the guitarists prefer the tremolo-riffed railroad melodies instead of more thrashy choppy guitar parts also lends linearity. There is very little empty space here and this record goes on and on, with no filler to be found.

That is the only criticism I have for this record really, it's too good to be this long. The senses are dazed after twenty-twenty five minutes of this assault. The second side of the record might not get the attention it deserves. I solve this by listening to the second part independently often, as well as generally listening to music in the way music is meant to be listened to.

The rest of my initial impression had to do with just how much the singer had to say in the course of the songs, and how much of it was impenetrable by my young mind. Well, I'm 26 years old now and I still can't say I've got a comprehensive grasp of the mythology here, exactly because it's so intertwined with what I guess to be Proscriptor's belief system. But it no longer matters to me to literally capture the intent, otherwise I'd be missing the point of this music. Tara is a record that most of all in my collection captures this feeling of a fantastic dream-world made manifest through sheer joyous willpower. And much like how in Dungeons & Dragons I do not want to be railroaded by the Dungeon Master into this or that path, I let my willpower dictate what this all will mean, what journey I will take. I do this in full knowledge of how Tara might not always let me do what I want (indeed the sound of battle and conflict is a defining aspect of "Tara") and that at all times, the journey will be finite, but for a time, believing in this bridge may make the bridge hold me.

I have made, for myself, a space within Time
I mutely descend to the cavity of my Cell
I am the furtive seeker ensnared Underneath
Vorago

Just went through the glossary post

2010-09-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

...editing out many instances of 'often' and 'sometimes' and 'almost'. I tried way too much to allow for exceptions in my descriptions of usual metal tropes that it became counterproductive. I'll be describing the exceptions in a case-by-case basis anyway so there's no point to try to cover my ass when I speak in generalities. This brief post here will serve as a reminder to not do that in the future.