Helloween - Warrior

ETERNAL FALLS THE HAMMER

This is a thrash song, see? Yes, the main riff is in a major key but can you really call it happy? Given the subject matter, it instead sounds ironic, like the triumphant martial pattern of the army falling at the battle of Waterloo.

Listen to how the sections are clearly segmented, the riff does this, the bridge that, the chorus is shouty. Just one song before, Helloween were starting to break down these chunks of song into smaller orchestral configurations. But this song is grim and linear. Lots of galloping guitar triplets. Mr. Kai Hansen is getting this sort of song out of his system as it's one of the very last straightforward bangers on record. Markus Grosskopf (bighead? That's the extent of my German) can't resist throwing in more melodic bass licks around the staccato rhythm guitar figures but that's pretty much it as far as flavour for this song. The three-part solo is remarkably uninteresting, mainly due to the weak switch-up in the rhythm pattern between part two and three. Helloween will do so much better at this sort of thing. Very soon.

Had this been the direction this band pursued, Helloween would have been remembered by obscurantist enthusiasts as an interesting second-tier speed metal band that contributed a variation to a form that, by 1987 would be considered charmingly outmoded while the death metal bands and the technothrash bands upped the ante. Like Pyracanda, perhaps.

The lyric is interesting for a few reasons.

Blackened sky a final flash

Death is in the air

Warriors without a face

Destruction everywhere

Silent falls the hammer

Noone hears the cries

No escaping from this hell

Your prayers won't be heard...so die

Brainless cruel commanders

Sending death and pain

Soldiers only robots

Fight for their life in vain

Die, now! die, warrior!

Somewhere in the shelter sit the men

Who hold your fate in hands

Playing chess and you're the loser

You're a small pawn in their game

Somewhere in the shelter sit the men

And they don't realise

A war without survivors is a fight

That's never won
So die!

Barren land desolate waste

Destruction is complete

Survivors creeping thru the ruins

Decaying flesh and meat

Somewhere in a shelter

Some pigs are still alive

And still they play the game

They don't give a damn

This is a very stereotypical view of war by teenagers and that's why the song still is resonant for me. It's not a politically informed thesis, it is instead a sideways look into a common wound. How much do you know about war? Do you understand the geopolitical confluence of events that led to the second World War? Why are some wars called 'humane' while others are considered unjust in the eyes of history? Do you understand the functionality of war? How supply lines work, what trench warfare is? Well, Helloween did not. They had an open heart and open hearts are also open sores. The colour of the lyric is existential, as expressed by someone you had no first-hand experience with the philosophical movement. War is seen as senseless and alienating. The motives of it are misunderstood; Powerful men playing a sadistic game. Mom and Dad are engaging in tactics that little Helm and little Helloween are ill-equipped to understand. Again, the dark beauty of oblivion turns the teenager towards a morbid fascination. "Decaying flesh and meat... they don't give a damn... SO DIE".

It could be said that much of Heavy Metal's fascination can be traced back to these two words. Wielding death as a weapon. Darkness descends.

Understanding why Heavy Metal of darkness is a dead-end requires the understanding of what wielding death entails. The final command is self-destruction. Outward devastation, internal desolation. Letting light in is as much a choice as continuing to exist can be said to be a choice.

Helloween are dabbling with death, it's fascinating. Song by song they're shedding skin. Even by the next song to this, the light will begin shining through the mists of oblivion. Are there better weapons to wield than the cruel scythe of death? Helloween will make their case. But for young Helm, and for young Helloween, up to now this record has had to say this to us: Drugs are bad. Society misunderstands me. My parents quarrel. Nobody gives a damn about me so I'll teach them all by dying tragically!

Carnivore

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

Annihilator - Never, Neverland

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.

Anacrusis - Manic Impressions

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.

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