Pirates of the Underground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

How to Appreciate Death Metal Dialectics

Let's play a little game. Read this first.

Now, let's go down the line, one by one:

1. Pay Close Attention to the Tearing Guitars and Unusual Vocals. What could it be that urges these musicians to perform in this particular way? If they were going to play classical music, they'd have played classical music. But instead, they're playing death metal. What are they screaming about? Pay attention to the attack of the music and the particular themes of the lyrics. There's a question begged in all of this, and you shouldn't disregard any aspect of the whole to appreciate the whole. If the severity of the music or the inhumanity of the vocals annoy you, that is great. Never listen to death metal again, if you can. If you find yourself drawn again to this music though aspects of it startle or annoy you, that's good too. What does either response say about you?

2. Do Not Watch Any Live Performances by Death Metal bands. Do not observe how band members manipulate any of their instruments. There's nothing that should impress you in the process of making these sounds and it's the crutch of intellectual frauds to defend something that sounds like this by saying that it takes a lot of skill to do it. If you want to pursue something that will provide tools of understanding all music, study melody and harmony and the history of music on the whole, not idiots pressing fingers on fretboards. Studying the history and guidelines of music composition will illuminate that most death metal is too much fuss over very little. Playing in little chromatic boxes, moving hands up and down fretboards in a confused masculine performance.

3. Most Death Metal bands do not write their own music. They're regurgitating the same ten tricks that the originators of death metal came up with, with slight variations in technique or aesthetics. Most of their desire to be in a death metal band stems from 'the desire to be in a death metal band'. This means their music product itself is secondary to the performance of the role of the creator of the product. They need no more respect for indulging in their vices than any other pop music performer that's outright reproducing earlier material.

4. Take the context and subject matter completely personally. These songs are exactly about you. If they were not, they would not have reached you. In their function as products that enter the culture, their truth is communicated. There's nothing useless on a death metal product, everything about it tells you what it is. At the same time, there is nothing behind the curtain. Do not trust people that say you need to 'get' something to appreciate it. There's nothing to get. How do you feel listening to some suburban white man's fantasies of gutting prostitutes and raping the bastard Nazarene? If you're offended, take that offence seriously. If you like it, take that attraction seriously. What does it say about you?

5. Learn nothing about sub-genres. And never engage a metal fan in conversation about metal sub-genres of any other such trivia. Instead ask them how they feel when they listen to music about gutting prostitutes. Don't let them off the hook. Earnestly ask them to explain the joke, as it were, and watch them crash and burn. There are many fascinating things to explore about death metal and almost none of them have to do with the discussion of the form.

6. Show absolutely no respect for the artists.

Thumbs up.

Morbid Angel - Blessed are the Sick

Released in 1991 by Earache records.

David Vincent - Vocals, Bass
Trey Azagthoth  - Guitars, Annoying Midi
Richard Brunelle - Guitars
Pete Sandoval - Drums

Do you think your life is fair? Do you think you deserve the hardships that befall you? Do you think your life will ultimately make sense as a narrative, and whose will be the authorial intent that dictates this narrative? Will it be God that kisses the boo boo and makes everything alright? Will you be rewarded with an afterlife of bliss for your service? Surely, for life to be so cruel there must be a reason. We can't be brought to this world of screams through coincidence and non-sense and we can't be just left to fend for ourselves. Surely, someone must be governing our rise and our fall. Someone must be keeping score.

What if there's no one? What if there's no God, or at least no God that is good, that cares about us and that is going to make everything plain and clear upon our reunion with Him after this world of lies goes up in flames? What if nobody understands anything? What is this world then, but a wound - an open wound that, were you to look directly inside it, you would grow mad from disgust and anguish?

The concept of the world as absurd. We toil for no master, to no end and then we die. The gods - if they even exist - extend at most a cruel laughter in our general direction. We can strive to do no good because there is nobody that can prescribe goodness. To toil eternally in an empty grave, to enduringly lament.

At the face of this realisation we must stand forever shocked. For those of you that think now "what a banal point to make" I dare you to revisit it from the vantage of yourselves as ten year olds, if you can connect to your past at that age. Try to hone in on the first memory of pure injustice, of unwarranted pain and loss you've experienced. Did your puppy die of cancer? Did your mother send you to live with your drunk father? Did your best friend get killed in an auto-mobile accident? Did you realize you were of one gender trapped in the body of another? Don't just reflect on that feeling, relieve it. And then loudly say, in your full grown-human voice "there is no reason why this has happened. It has served nothing and no one". I dare you to say this to that negative being in the room there with you, that shadow-self, that mirror into nothingness. Go on, tell them that your whole life's story, so gloriously pivoting around your personal narrative of sacrifice and loss is just pure nonsense. Smile to the darkness.


If we are to move away from this feeling, it we are to remove either part of this hellish equation, we are intellectually bankrupt. We can't unlearn what we already know, so if we know there is no God, we cannot invent one. If this world is absurd, we can't pretend it adheres to some system of morality. There is no good and evil. Whatever hope there is, it is inside us. The will to exist, the drive to live, it is the uroboros snake, it gives birth to itself and in the end it will consume itself.



All systems of belief and systems of ideology pretend to give a more comfortable answer to this question by avoiding either premise. All spiritual overbeings are variations of the Gnostic Demiurge. A flawed god, with human qualities, looking over us, for good or worse. An intermediate step of consciousness between us petty humans and the killing light of a true, uncaring God. Oh how we miss our daddy, all of us.

And the satanist? Oh, the satanist is their own daddy. Talk about a snake eating itself. Such a bright, burning flame will surely burn out fast. How many great records can a satanist make? Judging from Morbid Angel, at best, two.

Here we will look at their second, aptly named "Blessed are the Sick". There isn't much poetry that I will conjure, dear reader. We can instead look at the text-as-it-is:





Havahej

Another me, born to serve
To plague 
So many years 
My seed condemned
Now free to roam

Will is yours? 
So, creator
No intent could shadow
Shadow my disease 
And everlasting pain

World of sick
Blessed are we to taste
Life of sin

My touch inhumane
Nocturnal beast inside
Devoid of light
And empty shall remain


There is something very suspicious, here. Parts of the text seem to say that the prototypical "I" subject of the song is becoming something less than human through this Luciferian fall, but what is the full impression of the thing (especially if seen and heard in the accompanying video-clip) It is of Lucifer triumphant. To become less-than-human is to become a god. Morbid Angel here are eulogising the passing of human weakness, as they understand it. The empty shell that remains is an animal or, to state it carefully, a fantasy of an animal and animals are purer beings than humans.

The root of this approach to Nietzscheian thought is clear. To put it in a less useful but knowing way, this is "How to become a cat". Do you wonder why philosophers are so taken with our feline guests?

What is the human weakness, whose passing Morbid Angel so triumphantly extol? The answer to this question is found in the chorus: World of sick, blessed are we to taste life of sin. What they abhor is morality and ideology, the schizophrenic tools of self-negation that are so endemic in Nietzsche's slave mentality. Pure beings, beasts of darkness claim their killing power directly. Those of us that are weak and cowardly instead congregate under their tyranny and declare our weak bodies to be one, and in our death we triumph as martyrs. God listens to us. God will make this story cohere. God will reward us for our tragedy.

Hot wind burns me
Burning as I fall
Cast away speechless 
In the holy way
I survive the scourge 
And banishing
To scorching land
I am lord, I take command

Fall from Grace

Forgive me not
This knowledge 
Makes me strong
To resurrect
The cities of the damned
All the treasure of Sodom
Now belong to me 
Celebrate, fallen angels 
Take my hand

Whores long for my flesh
And my desire
Lust anointing me now
Consume my soul

I ride the flesh and the sinners of hell
I am Belial
I bend knee not before my selfish desire


Forgive the flowery prose, as the flowers of evil are want to be sickly sweet, after all. Morbid Angel are the best Heavy Metal has to offer in representation of malignant beauty. Their death metal is aeons apart from the crude, angst-driven odes to meat & death that most of their compatriots were concocting concurrently. It writhes wryly and so sensuously slithers that perhaps it even justifies a nipple ring or two in that video above. The answer that Morbid Angel have for the absurd world is "my might shall make the world right, but what is might if it is not beautiful". This is their contribution to our world, to make such twisted and odd-sounding music that still sounds beautifully constructed. Form justifies content. Underneath it all, Morbid Angel want to subvert the listener's preconception of beauty, they want to tell you what is good and what is evil. They want you to taste the forbidden fruit.

Gods transform me
The storm will cleanse me
Civilized I shall not be
By this holy strain of laws

For I'm no human now
I burn the ways conform
The gods are pleased with me
They speak my name in tongues

I am the seer
I know the texts divine
Thunder words
Demons race into my hands

Azazel
Lend me your wings of twelve
I shall fly into the storm
I, son of fire, in anger become
The lightning bolts that strike the earth


Like good LaVeyian satanists, their odes to self are fully founded only in how convincing they can be for pedestrians such as you and I. Most apocryphal esotericism desires an audience to whom it shall meter out secrets prudently. A Morbid Angel without a crowd to worship him is worthless. Why the hell did he ever leave God's side if not for humans to worship him? Consider for a moment a very attractive celebrity of your liking (for their power is esoteric to the highest degree). Think of them withered and old and lonely at age 80, incontinent, senile. Well, Morbid Angel suffered from an advanced case of progeria because it only took them a couple of years to turn from Dionysus to husk. The moment their audience stopped taking them so seriously (and that moment is very closely connected, I theorize, with the slaying of one black metal personality by another in far-away Norway) it is they stopped being Belial and just became a few dudes into alternative sexuality. According to your vantage point, objects may appear bigger than they are, after all. Or smaller.

But this record has survived the perspective shift. What is conjured in this offering is an entity altogether divorced from a David Vincent or a Trey Azagzoth, much to their chagrin  Isn't it ironic how their egos have fallen but this testament to their virility and prowess stands erect fully of its own volition? To this world absurd there is another answer, one that doesn't, like a pathetic satanist's, revolve around the negation of weakness thru deceleration of strength alone . It is to offer tributes to hope itself, outside the self. For what are these endless paeans to self-empowerment you've read if not paeans to hope of self-empowerment? After all, no member of Morbid Angel managed to pass through a solid wall (regardless of what rumours you might have heard). A smarter man than David Vincent would have, immediately after Blessed are the Sick either left the band, or have made a record that has a sense of humour about how much more powerful his music is than himself.

What is so different in believing in yourself-as-seen-through-a-metal-album-you-made and believing in a deity of any stripe? This knowingness that your conjuration of this entity is false and can only serves a finite end. That of coping. The absurd wound is there. You own it. You're looking inside the wound sideways through art that is inherently vague, a curved mirror. What is left of any enduring quality in the end of this process is not an ascended being, it is the beauty of the effort.

What Morbid Angel achieve on this record is difficult to appreciate by a modern Death Metal listener, jaded as they presumably are by constant shows of instrumental dexterity. But Morbid Angel were the first to play such wrong-sounding music with such precision and drive that they made me think "p-perhaps this is right, after all?". It's easy to juxtapose a loud part and a quiet part (a la "Smells Like Teen Spirit") to propel a pop song dynamically, but Morbid Angel achieve full thrust without ever really putting two disparate parts against each other (and when they do, it's not the main propulsion point). Instead they keep in one mode but they streamline their form and they play them thus that they are aerodynamic. Think of how a snake slithers seemingly effortlessly. This is no mean feat. in fact, almost all of the modern technical brutal death metal I've heard fails at this.

But to have dynamic song-writing wouldn't be enough for this record to retain such glamour after all these years. The master-stroke here is that, as unsatisfying as the satanist's guidebook presented therein ultimately is, its main thrust comes, well... timely. The mechanics of this music's morphology excite and the lyric (which Vincent, one of the best growlers then and ever, took great care to be audible and understandable) gives a direction for this excitement. Simply put, it is very hard for me to listen to this record and then not feel immediately more powerful and focused. Of course I strip out the "Altars of Madness" retreads and the indulgent midi keyboard instrumentals.

This group would never achieve anything like this, and without careful examination it's hard to see why. After all, the record just after this has many of the same graces. It's called "Covenant", which is kind of a bad name but at least had an apt cover. The record after that, however, is idiotically called "Domination". If you have achieved such in your first two records, you're only going to set yourself up for failure by naming your fourth record "We are the best". Even "Domination" has some bright spots, but what I've found goes wrong in most of the songs in those follow-ups are that the dynamics are not there or when they are they do not connect with a triumphant message. "World of Shit"? Seriously? I thought your lightning bold carved the mountains and drained the oceans. The best you could do is "World of Shit"?

Needless to say after that third record, the rest don't even ever try to portray any malignant beauty, settling for otherworldly chaos and malice instead. And there's some racism thrown in there because David Vincent hasn't misunderstood his own message circa "Blessed are the Sick" enough, it seemed. Anyway, the crawling chaos and darkness was best conjured by many other death metal (and ironically, black metal) bands instead. The band's main writer, guitarist Trey Azagzoth never had a strong aesthetic vision. The person responsible for the warped beauty here is David Vincent, but he also - like all the satanists, in the end - became overfed on his own prowess. They are back together in this band now but I doubt they'll be able to recapture the spirit of this material, even live. Too old, too complacent, too distanced from youthful arrogance (an altogether different thing from middle-aged arrogance). But it only takes one such masterpiece to elevate Morbid Angel to the pantheon, after all.

If you do listen to this for the first time, grab the remastered version. Listen to the whole thing and then experiment with listening to only from 'Intro' to 'Thy Kingdom Come' (excluding also "Doomsday Celebration") and then tell me I'm right.

They Say Rage is a Brief Madness

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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


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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence

1991 Metal Blade

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

The song "Brains" especially captures me in this vein

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

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

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