Understanding Atmospheric Metal

This genre is obsolete now, but as with all pieces of history, by going back and taking a closer look we will understand ourselves in the now better. Atmospheric metal, we all concur, is a ridiculous term. The internal question in it has been answered to the point of cliche: We don't call music atmospheric because all music has the goal to create an atmosphere or another, duh.

That's all well and good and we can feel smart for regurgitating this truism, but only for so long: when it becomes cliche, it behooves us to start investigating the opposite path, as it were. Be contrarian, metalheads!

What was atmospheric metal? It was a term used mostly (if not only, hard to tell) by european metal press to describe a variety of weird extreme metal in the early-to-mid '90s. It is tied with the rise of Norwegian black metal and also of british doom/death. Often thought of as dirge-like, slow death metal with a heavy keyboard presence and female vocals on top as encapsulated by Theatre of Tragedy, it also brought in a host of other outsider influences such as electronic music, gothic rock, neo-folk, martial ambient and industrial.

This definition is meaningless, and it has become more meaningless as time has passed and these formalist innovations have been diffused into the heavy metal corpus completely. There's dirty black n' roll bands with female vocals now, and there's keyboards in grind bands, sludgy industrial metal is now considered a mainstream category and whatnot. No wonder nobody talks about 'atmospheric metal' now.

However, a more useful definition of this genre is to look at how it uses the formalist material of metal music differently than in the subgenres before it. I propose that the innovation of atmospheric metal music was to create heavier juxtaposition of the metal riff and metal rhythm section by posing it against non-metal elements like subdued electronic music, ambient sections, orchestral bits, quiet acoustic music.

Most metal bands of the '80s were very concerned with perfecting their metal sound. This was a commercial issue as metal was popular and finding and keeping a niche was paramount to the career aspirations of many. Their songs were a series of riffs, choruses, solos. Faster than the next band, higher vocals or better solos, but the form was all metal, all the time. There was the keyboard intro here and there, but it was exactly that, a calm before a storm.

Metal in the '90s started deviating from this formula en masse. One reason was purely technological, as more and more it was affordable and viable to experiment in the studio, to have varied instrumentation on multiple tracks, to have a hand at fancy keyboards that once would cost a small fortune. Another reason was Nirvana and their popularization of quiet-loud pop song dynamics. Hidden underneath that base reason there was also the significance of what Nirvana stood for for aggressive music: more abstract, often more or personal thematics called for a wider range of dynamic and texture in the music. Metalheads would have you believe that they detested 'grunge' and would do the absolute opposite of whatever it was about in their metal in the '90s but the opposite is true. We can look at a half-decade of metalhead wandering all over the atmospheric, black metal, romantic doom and progressive metal map as a constant conversation with what Nirvana et al. brought to the table.

What's worth keeping in mind for our purposes is that metal bands started playing less metal (in a New Wave of British Heavy metal sense) in their songs and there was less metal on a long-playing record on the whole. Atmospheric metal in that sense is deliciously false. Atmospheric metal bands used one or two riffs in contrast to a quiet part, or a non-metal orchestral element (synth pads and pianos and violins and what-have-you). They extended intros into their own songs that didn't have any metal orchestration to them at all. They put interludes between songs, sometimes there was a 20 minute ambient piece at the end of an otherwise rough black metal record.

This, above any discussion of extremity is the dividing line a lot of 'true metalheads' will not cross when it comes to their selection of heavy metal. Not whether it's too extreme, if the vocals are screamed or shouted as opposed to clean and sonorous. But whether the band plays metal or if they put some metal in music that would otherwise easily play in an elevator.

In this sense, we can look at 'Atmospheric Metal' as a volatile synergy. Metal != Atmosphere.

But this is a rationalization after the fact. At the time, atmospheric metal contrast contributed in that where the metal was playing, it sounded more effective and forceful. For many then (now, not so much, perhaps) a My Dying Bride record is more savage and effective when they're playing full-on death metal than an Autopsy record, because Autopsy have a narrower palette to work with. All the blood and gore gets samey after a while.

It is useful at this point to listen to Wildhoney by Tiamat, as it was the record that broke atmospheric metal and paved the way for a million variations of this form. A metal riff and a gruff vocal here and there, as a sharp point of definition in a much softer sea of mood and color. It was and still remains a gem of a record. It's worth to keep in mind that Wildhoney came out in 1994, in the midst of the black metal explosion.

Much of what we see as black metal now is in this sense atmospheric metal. Darkthrone never were, as they were preoccupied with serving their one, two, three riffs to their ultimate logical conclusion. In the Woods... (then called 'pagan metal') absolutely were never a black metal band but instead epitomized what I describe, with every record after their debut even more, encapsulating fully the 'metal parts for contrast to something softer' definition in their third record 'Strange in Stereo'. Burzum at their best were an atmospheric metal band more preoccupied with a dream-like trance as also summoned by Dead Can Dance than with blastbeats and tremolo picking.


Food for further thought:

1. The opposite end of 'atmospheric metal' is the most brutal, technical, full-on death metal. Music that never cares to breathe and has no use for silly contrasts. It still serves to create a different, abstract, unfeeling atmosphere, similar to ambient music of certain stripes and some modern composition, so although it has an atmosphere to it, it doesn't have volatile contrasts between atmosphere and metal.

2. Atmospheric metal paved the ways for post-metal in the sense that post-metal also deconstructed the metal form to non-metal ends, but there are differences of both scope and intent. Atmospheric metal, when it actually cared to be heavy metal would be strictly 'correct' about it. Tiamat above were once a sloppy death/black metal band, and they can still write a convincing death metal riff even in Wildhoney and put double bass and brutal vocals over it. Post-metal bands deconstructed the metal form further, using sonic signifiers like distortion, double bass, screams and palm muting, but they didn't actually play - or try to play - metal riffs and metal structures with these tools. Post-metal can be seen as the vestigial evolution of atmospheric metal (a '90s phenomenon) for the '00s. It's no wonder that bands have regressed from that point to self-define as 'metal' again, now that metal music is enjoying a posthumous respect for apparently having rigidly stuck to its guns for 30 years. But the point of this article is to show that metal music has done anything but this, for the last 20 of its history.

3. As we said, full on death-metal is the opposite of atmospheric metal, but then a recent trend of -unlistenable, for this writer- 'cavern-core', as typified by bands like Teitanblood and Portal is all about subverting death metal technique again to create exactly what I describe as atmospheric metal, but without actually introducing flowery instrumentation and vocals. Instead - again an issue of arriving, accessible technology - they manipulate the sound design of otherwise pretty standard death metal form to make it appear distant, alien and indistinct. The use of heavy reverb and unusual equalization makes their death metal a soup of sound, from which once in a while a discernible death metal riff emerges, or a stop-start rhythm or distant clattering of blastbeats. Presumably the appeal is exactly this moment where a half-imagined riff actually peers through the thick fog and the listener achieves clarity. They didn't dream it, it was always in there.

Atmospheric metal returned and nobody noticed. I don't predict a massive interest in cavern-core, in a long historical view of the medium, but it's interesting how even in 2015, straight-up metal musicians are trying to find a way to use metal contrasts to evoke difference and otherness instead of the usual meat and potatoes metal battery.

Unholy - Second Ring of Power

Outsiders are afraid of Heavy Metal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I hear that voice

or was it just a hallucination

And what about those shapes

For fourteen days I haven't slept

Still my shadow the secret of my life

Kept

By going through a long period of depression



I reached a permanent state of enlightenment

I'm the master above you bunch of slaves

I'm the Demiurge, creator of this universe


Master of not-doing

I, myself not fooling

The God of not-being

Everything as it is seeing


Near my death I saw

the white Gate of Death calling

There I didn't fall in

Let self die

Loosen souls dimension

For the sorcerer exhaustion brings ecstasy


For normal people, ecstasy brings ecstasy instead.

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

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


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

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

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

Bethlehem - Dictius Te Necare

Released by Red Stream in 1996

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Atrox - Contentum

Released in 2000 by Season Of Mist

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

Anathema - Serenades

Peaceville, 1993

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An ode to their plight is this dirge

Some yearn for lugubrious silence
Serenity in the image of coffins

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

They die

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

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

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

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

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

Adorning me
A lovelorn rhapsody

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

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

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



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

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

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


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

The 3rd and the Mortal - Painting on Glass

Released in 1996 by Voices of Wonder


Ann-Mari Edvardsen - Vocals, Keyboards
Finn-Olav Holthe - Guitar, Keyboards
Trond Engum - Guitar
Geir Nilsen - Guitar, Keyboards
Bernt Rundberget - Bass
Rune Hoemsnes - Drums


Many additional musicians helped in this recording.


The 3rd and the Mortal were a Norwegian group. Their origins were in the 'doom/death' metal genre and from there they moved towards an amalgamation of such with ambient and electronic music. Their shift from here to there is documented in their four full-length albums and two EPs between 1992 and 2002. "Painting on Glass" is their second album, released in 1996, which straddles the apex of that evolutionary curve.


Doom metal is simultaneously the oldest kind of metal, as its characteristics (ponderous pace, extended song lengths, rhythmic austerity (no 'groove') and relentlessly dark lyrical and aesthetic subject matter, often concerned with personal anguish and existential futility) were those defining the first metal band, Black Sabbath, and one of the youngest as it has been formalized as a genre and cloned extensively only by the late '80s. Black Sabbath's early '70s material was not considered doom metal when it was first released as the term did not yet exist. In fact at the time, there were no metal sub-genres. 'Heavy metal' was a term coined to describe vaguely clumsy and loud rock and roll acts and it was an initially pejorative term at that. The co-opting of it and the further specialization in smaller sub-strands was the result of its rising popularity during the market heyday of metal, in the late '80s. In any case, any and all doom metal bands since adopt some their characteristics from Black Sabbath's palette. Other aspects of Black Sabbath -as interpreted often through Judas Priest or Iron Maiden - were extrapolated upon to give rise to almost all the other sub-genres of metal.


Death metal is a late development, occurring in tandem with the resurgence of doom metal in the late '80s. It is instead fast and visceral, it takes its morphology from thrash metal and hardcore punk and pushes the mix to a chaotic extreme. The most defining characteristics of death metal are the growled, inhuman vocals and its morbid fascination with depictions of death, disease and decay.


Doom/death is a British invention, typified by the band Paradise Lost and furthered by many in the early '90s. It takes from doom metal the sound design and dark lyrical matter and marries it to death metal's vocal extremity and bipolar tendency towards extreme speed. Their anemic progeny is dressed in frilly garments romantic and wept for extensively. Doom/death is really more than the sum of its parts, though it's unfortunate it never got a better moniker than the exact sum of them. It is unlike death metal in that it is entirely humorless. Death metal, concerned as it was with the nonsensical and random risk of mortality, carries a 'horror show' aspect, as if there's nothing to do when you see a horrible car crash but laugh. Consider also how some watch splatter films in a jovial manner - these are the people that at the time started death metal bands. Doom/death however services its morbid existential concerns with a framework that closely mirrors Romanticist notions and ontology. The car crash is not just the result of life's design, but a monument to its deepest principles, it is as beautiful as it is horrific. The implication is - as in 'The Birth of Tragedy' - that the purpose of drama is the affirmation of life, the re-appreciation of the here and now. It is often said that those that speak often about death and their desire of it are the ones that are safest from actually committing suicide - it's those that silently ponder death that reach for it. Likewise doom/death's morbid fascination seems to dispel the magnetic pull towards death, it instead incorporates it into life and so makes weakness into strength.


The 3rd and the Mortal did not employ any growled vocals in their records, nor are there any excursions into choppy thrash-inspired supersonics. However they were obviously influenced by the those romantic metal foundations laid by aforementioned British bands. They instead employed female operatic vocals and varied extra-instrumentation to broaden their palette. They were accompanied in this evolution by a great number of other graduates of doom/death in many countries around the world in the early '90s. This sub-strand of a sub-strand was later defined by some predominantly European journalists as 'atmospheric metal' and would become much more popular for a time than the genres it spawned from, before collapsing in and on itself. An unfortunate term, for what sort of useful music lacks an atmosphere? Nonetheless, one that clearly describes the direction metal music was taking in the early to mid '90s.


"Painting on Glass" sounds very much like ambient music, also. It it mostly gentle in textures and rhythmics and welcomes the listener in its introspective space. It could be used as background music, like ambient music is intended for and yet it takes a wholly different shape when listened to with undivided attention. Each piece is built upon few riffs yet has a progression to it and more importantly the succession of the pieces conveys a storytelling arc that could be lost on the inattentive listener. The material alternates between a mid-tempo pulse that seems largely the same for all the pieces that have it and weightless floating for the intermediate instrumentals that surround. There are only a few pieces that have distorted guitar chords as their backbone - an otherwise definitive aspect of metal music. More showcase delicate acoustic arpeggios along with extended & sustained guitar lead work on top. For long-time listeners of metal music, it must have been baffling at the time, to hear so many trappings of metal music (riffs, robust percussion, shimmering lead guitar) divorced from their common surface qualities (distortion, dry mix). This tendency was thoroughly explored in that decade of metal to the point where the definition of metal itself in the minds of many, drifted to include any rock-based music that is vaguely loud and imposing. It is something modern appreciators of metal music generally do not know: their tastes that now cradle anything from industrialized dance music to sloppy stoner rock to shapeless drone ambient to lowbrow hardcore punk as being metal, are the result of uncoordinated and unintentional efforts of now forgotten 'atmospheric metal' bands in the '90s.


The sound design of the album is remarkable. For most metal bands the performance captured in the studio is the absolute guide to the sound design. That is to say, an engineer is employed to augment and stylize the physical quality of the playing captured. The staccato bursts of activity, the sharpness of the stops and the pummeling drive of the rhythms. Here The 3rd and the Mortal take a very different approach. The mix is very even, every layer can be heard and no voice floats many decibels above the foundation. Dynamics are conveyed not by fluctuation in volume of individual parts, but by introducing or removing voices from the whole, almost like a baroque approach to mixing. Guitar leads hit accents as soft as the acoustic instruments that riff the context, the bass drums do not cut through as they usually do on metal records. Everything is washed in delay and reverb like on gothic rock album, perhaps. There is little treble to the whole, middle frequencies dominate and sand off the edges of the stone.


It is in this sound design then that The 3rd and the Mortal approach the idea of 'ambient metal' most of all. Their gentleness is of a wave, the continued flow and ebb and implied pulse is what characterizes this album. Even the silence between (or sometimes inside) songs seems to bid farewell to past and introduce future riffs seamlessly. That said, there are builds that lead to violent crescendos, but the peaks also slope back into the great plateaus that characterize the majority of the album's length. The vocals are layered and wet with reverb as well, giving them a spectral quality. There is no exerted passion to them, they carry sombre melodies like suspended lights flickering in the mist. And what do they sing about?


I am bound to past
And stagnant presence
Sallow faces, seducers
Seize my threads of mind

To suscipe pre animabus illis
Quarum hodie memoriam facimus


Common experiences for human beings are few. Hope and hopelessness, a sense of unreality, the passing of time. The rest which we pretend to be public domain is not. Each of us feels complex emotions differently and our language is only a tool for facilitating the friction between our subjective lives. Language, when employed to describe how we are alike in any other way than the fundamental, is a weapon meant to convince others of their sameness.


People make small-talk of the weather, isn't it funny? Seasons are primary and universal. Cold, warm, blooming, humid. "Painting on Glass" is an autumnal record. Not because I listen to it more at that time of the year but because whenever I listen to it, it conjures the feelings of Autumn in itself. That is generally, the power of great art, not to augment the daily lives of those that peruse it, but to manifest with force its own rule and dare the recipient to engage it. To survive it. "Painting on Glass" wages war with gentility, but a war it is, still. Who survives a war unscathed? Art that leaves one unscarred is only a plaything.


Autumn is often defined by memories of overcast skies, falling leaves and of rain. But a defining autumnal experience is also that of the new day after the rain, the smell of the earth opening up and the vibrant, almost unreal clarity of the atmosphere. In emotional parallel, "Painting on Glass" travels from a sense of sorrow, loss and resigned torment, to that of a solace, quiet and respite. The pendulum levitates weightlessly at the extremes but quickly returns to the long travel in the middle. This is also how The 3rd and the Mortal sounds, persistent and fleeting, never touching on extremes for more than a short moment. It is a circle that inspires both ugliness and beauty, mixed and varied in value but conserved in its palette.


I gave you my word
And the shafts of light
Opened the sky

But as your shadow rise
Passing colours in your mind
I bow down silently

I gave you my love
As the rusting trees
Sprinkled blades on the ground

And as your shadow rise
Passing colours in your mind
I bow down silently
Creeping frost pits my skin
Crystal orchids blooming


It often feels as if this music wants there to be no end to this back and forth. The romantic impulse is essentially narcissistic: I suffer therefore I am. I can tell of beauty because of pain. Those that do not suffer cannot appreciate true beauty. This is the terror of the pendulum motion, the endless sway that marries extremes to each other. But as the pendulum eventually comes to a rest without external force to fuel it, so here we do not truly run in a circle, but up a spiral fueled by human hope. Painting on Glass obfuscates its hope with the many beautiful flowers of hopelessness. behind its trajectory a guiding hope of teliosis. Not to say that this is a fantastic vacation in a horror sideshow meant to titillate and educate and once one leaves and returns to their normal life they can gloat over their brief stint with depression. Hope is hidden deep, here. Exit from the seeming circle of "Painting on Glass" is difficult, the record is long and not many will be attentive when it delivers.


The pulsation of my blood
The pressure splits my skin
Magma floats
Burns feeble flesh into ashes
Sulphurous screams in my head
In a petrified soul


Romantic music is inspired by terror but arrives to hope. There is awe in terror, there is awe in internalizing violence but violence is ends to different means: desire. This is why Romantic art will never be outmoded. As long as humans live, they will desire. And the desire of something greater, of something purer and clearer, is hope. We are trained in docility, but hope still burns hidden, shameful, inside us. Ultimately the desire is of theosis. Of immortality and absolute control of the inner and the outer. In Greek, the word for perfect is 'telios', whose root is 'telos', the final end. This is how hope feeds back into terror. To be perfect, you must not be. To live forever, you must die. To understand Heavy Metal, think of how these concepts resonate not in you the adult with your embroidered dress of common sense, but instead on you the shy, introverted teenager, feeling like an alien being inside your own skin, misunderstood and directionless, waiting for life to arrive. Is it a wonder that the premise of absolute control achieved only through self-flagellation and misery is attractive to the teenage psyche?


Heavy Metal is informed of this path, of birth, life and death. It is heavy exactly because of the weight of this realization. It is metal because it revolts to the path, it wildly gesticulates alternatives in full knowledge of their futility. It is intensely tragic, hope. This is a life in itself, that state of mind where beauty is eternally married to horror. The grace of such art is not easy to quantify but it is easy to feel. Romantic art does not inspire romantic act; We shall never conquer life through death, never destroy the old world to give birth to the new. Romantic art, taken literally and especially when looked upon with the eyes trained in modernity, is ridiculous. But what else is ridiculous is any true desire one feels in their heart and this is why we do not show each other our hearts easily. We are trained to scoff at romance in favor of some cynical, intellectually and emotionally bankrupt sense of 'realism' to which I am certain no human being alive truly adheres to. There is no real, but there are advantages to claiming otherwise.


Heavy Metal inspires one to abandon some of these advantages of participating in the play. Like a peculiar form of self-inflicted social autism, it asks naively, "Why be ashamed, what's there to lose but everything?". It pleads to unravel the romance in our hearts. Heavy Metal is an embarrassing thing and it's no wonder that, for those whose dalliance with it was limited, a need to put distance between themselves and that period, is a priority. As if to atone for their brief amour with romance itself. "I was momentarily deluded in my youth to think my youth would last forever, but I am older now and hear your voice clearly, outside."


The 3rd and the Mortal are very heavy here, but they are not crushing. Oftentimes, metal music is concerned with conveying weight and pressure with every element of its sound. Extreme shifts from fast to slow, lurching and uncoordinated to a machine-like unison crush, extremely loud to louder, all the while overflowing with minute surface information. The 3rd and the Mortal here are instead like anti-gravity. Airy and open to the point where one feels themselves suspend upwards, through the atmosphere and towards the greater darkness. It is there where nothing's left, where the boundaries between an external and internal journey are blurred. Like a sensory deprivation tank, the endless distance leaves only the inside for examination. "Painting on Glass" is a monument to the self-discovery that occurs in vacuum.


I want to inhale you like fresh air
But slowly you spin a cocoon and disappear
Let me open your seals and enter your garden
Let me seek to find your well
Then I'll sit down by the source
And wait for the deep secrets to reveal

I change with you
I extricate some threads
And make a place for you
Then I become you
And you become me


A useful lesson here for those that seek to make their own romantic art, especially Heavy Metal, is that the form is not as important as it might seem. What is important is the content and the intention it serves. It is too often that metal purists, disgusted as they exclaim to be with the state of modern metal, will revert their own stylistic efforts to some approximation of the genre tropes circa 1980. That music often succeeds or fails as Heavy Metal, but not because of its retro-conservative form but on whether it really has intentionally crafted aesthetic, philosophical and emotional impact as romantic art. Some people can only feel comfortable to explore romance when they're clad in denim and leather and spikes. Others - like The 3rd and the Mortal - do away with that dress code. At the time of their release, albums such as these were tagged as being 'avant garde' because they didn't fit in the existing metal canon. With the benefit of hindsight however, it is easy to trace a direct lineage from the aesthetics and concerns of Black Sabbath to them. There is nothing really 'avant garde' in the content of this album and it only serves to confuse the meaning of Heavy Metal itself to call anything that doesn't ape only its surface characteristics, something else.


That said, it is worthwhile to consider how The 3rd and the Mortal's trajectory through the arts did take them far away from metal in the end. In their next two albums (and in further offerings by resultant project 'The Soundbyte') the sonics slowly abandoned the riff as the morphological foundation and the lyrics became concerned increasingly with modern sociality and inevitably, reflections of life through the broken shards of post-modernity. There is a lot of merit in those recordings, but it goes to show that indeed it takes very little for something to become, or leave behind, metal. Romance and riffs, distortion and arrogance. The horror of loneliness and the salvation in individuality, the vilification of lust and the glorification of desire, order to chaos and order through chaos. Damnation and his beautiful sister. these are the ways to tell what Heavy Metal is. Once one knows what it inspires, they know what they desire.


Behind your door
Landscapes
Your name carved into a stone
Rivers
Water in your hands
Salvation