They Say Rage is a Brief Madness

Alternatively: "On the topic of death metal, black metal and why death/black is (mostly) a sham."

For those of you that haven't managed to penetrate into the aesthetic of the more extreme genres of Heavy Metal, this piece might serve as a key. For those that are well versed in and enjoy these genres, it might help to further illuminate why there's such a sizable disparity between them though they appear on the surface to be easily interchangeable.

To get anywhere with this I will provide a semi-historical definition of genres that are, on the whole, more nebulous that I make them appear. I say this to preempt notions that there is black and death metal quite outside the modern paradigm. I know. But in that there exists a paradigm to begin with should provide enough basis to examine it. This world is the best world there is by the virtue that it is the only world that exists and so forth.

Death metal, as examined here is of the American mold (though not necessarily from the US). Muscular, very compressed and given to violent swifts in tempo. Dense composition, usually very chromatic and emphasizing chaos more than velocity. There is no respite. Melodic sections are easily throwaway if the band feels like it. There is no center or showpiece. The vocals are usually deep and growled as with Suffocation and Immolation, or in middle, menacing drawn-out and unintelligible grunt as with Obituary or Autopsy.

Black metal, as examined here is of the early '90s Scandinavian type, as typified by Dark Throne, Burzum and Mayhem. It grows in reaction to the death metal described above. It appropriates some of its technique (indeed, the teenagers that pioneered black metal's second wave mostly played in 'trendy' death metal bands before that - when they were twelve). Its characteristic remains a return to the romantic core of Heavy Metal of old, or a further romanticized understanding of it by Norwegian teenagers, as it were. Long tremolo phrases in minor keys, with a restrained and normative use of disharmony (malformation versus beauty). Repetition and drone, a floating atmosphere. The vocals are predominantly raspy or screamed.


Let's also peruse two audio examples before we move forward.

In popular perception, this is what 'Death Metal' summons:



 In popular perception, this is what 'Black metal' summons:


Death metal has ill intent towards you, dear listener. Were it a psychic force capable of manifesting physically as in some '80s b-movie, it would gut you and devour your entrails. It would symbolically make you into a womb to enter once again, and eat back out of from the inside. Its malice is that of the sociopath. It doesn't understand you and it has no interest to. If it has a fascination with you, it is to make your 'inside' come to the outside so that you, the hypocrite that you are, that is so taken with the idea of any metaphysic quality or spirit residing inside you, will finally concede the point that 'only meat is real' with your passing. No, not death. Death is not real, it is no more real than life is. There are no metaphysics when the worms eat your flesh. What there is is nonsense and pain.

Death metal is for the socially impaired. Manchildren, neckbeards and other nerds that do not know how to talk to a girl. Their gateway into understanding comes through shock treatment. They imagine a vicarious violence not because they desire to inflict it but because it is at least quantifiable. Why? Because it's funny. How? Painfully. They empathize with the victim-as-victim, not the victim-as-human. The bitch was asking for it. These people are mostly harmless for what they do best is write otherwise. Those you should fear are those that haven't written a word and are just smiling at you, ever-smiling, fitting in. There is a sociopath in your workplace. Someone in your family has tortured small animals for fun.

The cookie monster vocals that the genre favors bring into stark relief the truth of the genre. It is a man trying to appear inhuman by lowering the pitch of their growl. When was the last time you've heard a person, consumed by a murdering rage, growl like a demon in a film that they will kill someone? That's right, never. That voice is not normative, it is how a social introvert imagines rage to manifest. They will never test their growly voice in the highschool cafe-- excuse me, while they "gut that prostitute". This is how the social critique against the questionable subject matter of death metal is explained away by its audience: never tested. Pure fantasy. Leave us alone. Boys only in this tree-house.

The monster in death metal is a monster of sociopathy, of loneliness and stress, of delusions of grandeur. It is very life-affirming to play with the symbol of death and alienation. To make it as clear as possible, Death metal is the imagination a serial killer, as perceived by a mostly-normal introverted teenager.



Black metal has ill intent towards your world, dear listener. Were it a psychic force capable of manifesting physically it would be your ruthless philosopher autocrat, cruelly sentencing you to darkness and imprisonment while all the while explaining to you why it must be done. And you would agree. It would strip you of your humanly characteristics because you do not deserve them. In that it can imagine these characteristics it follows that they exist and they are of value. It, then, understands you, or at least has tried enough to exist besides you. It knows of no other way to contribute to this world, it has never felt the transcendental value of offering something to the world with no wish to see returns, besides perhaps its new black metal CD (in hand-numbered copies, to be sure).

The piercing scream of black metal is that moment when that entity gives up on your world, and the resulting triumph in its minor-key dirge is that of autonomy, of being unchained from your conventions. Metaphysics are all that exist. The flesh is a nuisance, in fact it might be there expressly to not be touched. To be resisted, as all temptations besides the call of death. Many of these teenagers wrote their peans to dark gods and spirits before having felt a man or woman's sexual touch. Most that listen to it certainly can attest to what thrill came first, that of the Awe of Death or the Cry of Passion.

Black metal is for the socially impaired. Pale-faced peter pans and outcasts, the 'weirdos'. Their gateway into self-actualization (or fantasy thereof) is through the triumph of will, through the blood-red flowing romance inherent in Heavy Metal. Any violence they imagine has no real external object, it is not about you; It is self-inflicted. The 'depressive black metal' trend was the final, crass (and of course American) realization of what all black metal ever was. The mistress has a high price, she demands holocaust. The voice of black metal, the piercing shriek or grating rasp are the manifestations of hysteria. A hysterical person might end up killing you, but only because they didn't manage to destroy themselves first.

The monster in black metal is the ultimate representation of social alienation. It is the capitalist Atom-person, outside social context, its burning romance without avenue to offer to the world. It is not a careless automation, all blades and pincers, mangling all flesh, living and otherwise in its path like death metal is. It is a painted scowl on rosy cheeks, a constant dialectic between life, the value of life and the tragedy of mortality. Black metal doesn't want to die, but it will if it has to in order to live forever.



From the above point of view it can be easily extrapolated why it is almost impossible to have effective and convincing black/death metal. Furthermore, it is very clear why black metal had to come out of death metal, and why black metal bands that in later age return to death metal were, and are, mostly laughable for it. Choose a side, lonely man.

Or at least, so I posit. I welcome contradiction, discussion and examples.

The gardens of this Subculture will be watered with some regularity again.

Burzum - Hvis Lyset Tar Oss

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?

Totalitarianism in Heavy Metal

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'.

Absu - Tara

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