Annihilator - Never, Neverland

Roadrunner, 1990

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lyrics set the stage here:

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

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

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

Speed, I've got to make it home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I Hate Keyboards in Metal"

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Anathema - Serenades

Peaceville, 1993

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An ode to their plight is this dirge

Some yearn for lugubrious silence
Serenity in the image of coffins

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

They die

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

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

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

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

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

Adorning me
A lovelorn rhapsody

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

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

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



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

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

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


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

Social gaming in metal communities.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anacrusis - Manic Impressions

Metal blade, 1991

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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



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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

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


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


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



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


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

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

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

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

Your voice seems harmless through
These softened tones of grey

But grey is still black"


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

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

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

Your substance is nothing
But a lightened shade of grey

But grey is still black "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your front is nothing,
Nothing but misted cloud of grey

But grey is still black "

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

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

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

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

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

True metal, false metal and no metal at all.

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

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

Many.


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Heavy Metal as a Father Figure

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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