Trial By Ordeal

Usurper, "Blood Passion"

2012-02-24T02:52:00.000-05:00

I have to go to bed "early" for work tomorrow, but here's some ridiculously heavy black metal from Diabolosis (1995), the first album of Chicago stalwarts Usurper. The obvious description is Hellhammer/Frost taken to a gut-busting extreme, and in that these dudes are a lot like Winter. But listen to that greasy main riff--it wouldn't sound out of place on an Alice In Chains track or an early sludge album. Long before "USBM," Usurper were playing a distinctively American strain of black metal, and one that actually sounded American. This is Lucifer's blues.

The neurosis of metal nerds (part 1 of 2)

2012-02-23T06:10:00.000-05:00

Metalheads are simply an individual species of nerd. A nerd, most simply defined, is just a person with an intense fixation on a particular aspect of culture. Being a nerd isn't a bad thing in and of itself; it just means that you are more distinctly interested in something than a casual fan is. There's all kinds of nerds out there, with obsessions ranging from model trains to Star Trek and everything in between, and the vast majority of them are perfectly cool people who don't let their nerdy fixation overwhelm who they are as an individual. Unfortunately, there's a minority of bad nerds out there who ruin things for everyone due to their own personal hang-ups and arrested development. Since most nerds discover their particular passion in their teen years, they tend to form a fairly close emotional attachment to it that sticks with them throughout their lives, either through active participation in their hobby or through simple nostalgia should they hang it up. The negative side of this, though, is that those who don't quite make it out of high school unscathed end up using their hobby as some sort of metaphorical diary for their own misery, putting all their frustrations into it and fixating on it as a lone venue of control in an otherwise uncontrollable and unsatisfying life.

Most metalheads tend to be the good nerds, but there's plenty of bad ones out there who make heavy metal obnoxious for the rest of us and unappealing to most of the world. The bad metalhead is the one who ends up forming their identity around heavy metal, becoming overly protective and defensive about it due to an overgrown sense of their role in the metal scene. They obsessively bar outsiders from entry unless they go through some sort of hazing process, denigrate other genres of music reflexively, and desperately espouse the supremacy of their personal fixation at the cost of others. A lot of metalheads go through a phase of this (and I'm no exception) that usually leaves them when they gain a bit more perspective, but others become stuck in it, relating to the world through heavy metal alone and becoming progressively more obnoxious and vehement as the years wear on and frustration steadily mounts due to being perpetually 15 years old mentally. Do you know the grotesquely obese guys who play Magic: The Gathering primarily to mock new players and assert their own superiority? Well, the bad metalheads are those guys, just in a different form.

Bad nerds tend to arise from a lack of personal identity. The human brain is pretty good at protecting itself from uncomfortable criticism, so it tends to rearrange one's perceptions in a way that are more favorable to the individual. These particular odious metalheads, devoid of any accomplishments or personal qualities to define themselves by, desperately search for an external thing to define themselves by, confusing an interest in a particular subject as the equivalent to a real identity. Heavy metal is a great option for these types: it's big, complicated, has a ton of classification and compartmentalization, and most importantly, has a community built around it. The community's important because it's a social group with different standards than a more mainstream social group, who are more tolerant of social awkwardness and obnoxious behavior, and (like most nerd social groups) are much more resistant to ostracizing a member than well-adjusted people in everyday society are. Bad nerds flock to communities like this; having failed amongst their more well-adjusted peers, the lower bar set for decorum and a premium placed on general knowledge rather than the more ephemeral aspects of social interaction form a more comfortable environment.

Of course, the bad metalheads don't stop at seeing themselves as defined solely by their taste in music: that fixation becomes a worldview which gets projected on everyone else as well. The same thing happens in most intense musical subcultures: out of resentful narcissism (almost always there to mask self-loathing,) the bad nerd begins to promote his personal genre as being the greatest in music, requiring the greatest compositional skill, presenting the most high-minded of concepts, and featuring an audience of only the most discerning and intelligent listeners. Metal has a bonus of featuring a history of minor moral panic (which most of the nerds weren't even alive for) and misperception by the public which allows the nerd to soak up the delicious juices of manufactured victimhood and oppression. Suddenly, it all becomes clear: metal is the style of music for intelligent and strong people who are mocked and disregarded by the public out of stupidity and fear. Metal is a genre by and for the elite who perceive life as it REALLY is, devoid of the fictions and irrational notions of the herd. Metal is for geniuses, warriors, philosophers, and heroes, and by listening to it, I am all those things!

~

The best way to identify a bad nerd isn't by looking at what they love, but what they hate, which is usually the sort of thing which reminds them of their "oppressors": the likeable, socially capable, popular people who ostracized them in the past and began the cycle of self-loathing they were never able to escape. A great example of this is among people who play video games or tabletop games: if you want to immediately pick out a loathsome gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on the Call of Duty series. Some will enjoy it, some won't, but the bad nerds are the ones who venomously decry it as a horrible mockery of the fine art of video games. The more vociferous the reaction, the worse they are, but you're looking for one key element in particular which removes all doubt: whether or not they direct particular anger towards the people who DO play and enjoy the games. If they begin to express a torrent of irrational hatred for the series' fans, you've struck gold and have found the very definition of the bad nerd.

Why is this? Well, for those of you who don't play video games (which probably isn't a whole lot these days,) it's because the Call of Duty series is currently the most popular video game series in the world. More importantly than that, playing Call of Duty is seen as a perfectly normal activity; while playing an obscure Japanese RPG will undoubtedly raise some eyebrows from non-gamers, enjoying a few rounds of Call of Duty with friends is common for just about every young male in the country. Most importantly of all, and the linchpin of this particular breed of nerd's anger, though, is this: Call of Duty is not seen as "nerdy," and has a following among mainstream social groups who don't typically get engrossed in video games. Call of Duty is played by jocks and frat boys who wouldn't be caught dead with a copy of Eternal Sonata, and even though they're both video games, the jocks and frat boys blowing each other away with MP5s on Xbox Live would STILL laugh at the nerd despite the general resemblance in activity. The people who ostracized the nerd and humiliated him have now followed him into what he thought was a protected community and are slowly but surely changing its social standards to match those of the mainstream world. The nerd is left feeling enraged, confused, and powerless- just like he was in high school.

Feeling some annoyance at sudden interlopers in one's community is understandable to a degree, particularly if they're attempting to impose their own cultural values on a community that already has its own standards, but was distinguishes a good or bad nerd is in their response. The good nerd will roll their eyes, mock it a bit, and then just ignore it, understanding that in all likelihood it's not a genuine threat. The bad nerd, however, goes from zero to sixty without pausing for breath; it becomes a matter of life and death rather than annoyance, because for him, it IS a matter of life or death. If the interlopers succeed in changing the culture, the nerd will have to adapt or be ostracized yet again and have to find another community which will accept him. Because of this, the nerd isn't really just fighting to preserve a community he loves: he's fighting to preserve himself, terrified by the idea of losing the identity he's spent so much time and effort in creating. This is the source of the really crazy, overblown stuff you see from any kind of nerd who has a complete breakdown: they literally can't handle the idea of change, as they were unable to handle it before.

Bad metalheads work the same way: when they feel threatened, they freak out, and much like gamers, freak out a little bit extra due to the infatuation with victimhood they've embraced. The most obvious place that this can be seen is in the absurdly overblown hatred they have for whatever pseudo-metal genre happens to be popular at the moment. There was glam, grunge, nu-metal, metalcore, deathcore, and probably something else coming around the bend right now. It's readily apparent that the nearly psychotic rage many expressed towards these ultimately harmless offshoots is hardly indicative of a well-adjusted personality. Not only are these displays dumb, embarrassing, and incredibly inappropriate, but they have the side effect of making metalheads appear to be either crazy or mentally retarded. How heavy metal is perceived by the public at large should hardly be a substantial cause for concern by the scene, but if those bizarre outliers (who rarely contribute in a real way to the community anyway) could be ejected from the scene simply so others don't have to be afflicted with their presence, the added bonus of appearing less like petty men-children can be safely considered a net plus.

~

It's interesting to take a look at some of the metal artists out there who provoke the most ire and the syntax used to complain about them. There's no such thing as a synonym, really; there's a specific reason behind the words that we use to express ideas, whether conscious or not, and looking at the phrasing of statements can often elucidate their meaning better than the content of the statement itself. Take, for instance, Pantera, a metal band that's widely listened to by casual metal fans who often don't consider themselves "metalheads"- what sort of complaints to we typically see leveled at them? From my experience, it tends to involve phrases like "redneck music," "tough guy," "meatheaded," "jock metal," or references to Phil Anselmo's profanity-filled lyrical style and sometimes aggressive or offensive attitude in interviews or onstage. In fact, Phil Anselmo in particular is the target of the most ire of any member of the band, oftentimes treated like an idiot or someone who's not a genuine metalhead. But Phil's proven himself very intelligent in interviews, and his discography outside of Pantera, while spotty in quality, features black and death metal records made without receiving nearly the attention of Pantera. So what's the real issue?

Peel back the layers on the weird, personal-sounding criticisms of Phil and Pantera and you'll find a pretty simple core to a lot of them: the words used to describe them are the same used by outcast teenagers simmering with resentment towards "those asshole jocks" who make fun of them for being socially awkward. Phil has a shaved head, a gruff, hardcore-style vocal presence, and writes lyrics that express simple, straightforward, blue collar aggression without the Satanic metaphors, established symbolism, or intense hyperbole that defines a lot of metal lyricism. The band's aesthetic is that of hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-living Southern outlaws, and their music is immediately comparable to an intensified and stripped down version of stuff like Van Halen- all elements which are more immediately appreciable to a mainstream audience than the more overwrought elements of most extreme metal. This isn't at all to say that disliking Pantera is an inherent sign of social failure and insecurity, but citing social or aesthetic reasons which on inspection have almost nothing to do with the music itself certainly is. If you're angry at a band for social reasons, it's time for self-examination: more often than not, it's because you're afraid or resentful of the fans for reasons that have nothing to do with the music.

Ironically, given metal's overall aesthetic and thematic nature, a lot of the shots taken at bands like Pantera or styles like nu metal tend to run along the lines of them being "tough guy music," "thuggish," or "blunt"- the words used are those which suggest an intense, straightforward display of masculine aggression. A great deal of metal involves a hypertrophied display of stereotypical masculinity, with stories about war, honor, violence, and extremity taking up a large chunk of common lyrical themes. The difference between this and the way bands like Pantera express intensely masculine themes is that most metal bands convey them in an intensely exaggerated fashion: war is catastrophic and inescapable, violence is unbelievably brutal and elaborate, and distaste for Christianity takes the form of church burning and literal Satan worship. Pantera and other "tough guy" bands, on the other hand, express these masculine themes in an immediate and real fashion: instead of threatening torture and murder, they just offer the ass-kicking of a lifetime. For the insecure nerd, this is much more immediately threatening than the obvious fantasy of most lyrics: the members of Pantera most likely could beat the living shit out of the average metalhead (myself absolutely included,) and the fact that they indirectly laugh off the inherent absurdism of metal's aesthetic tropes means that they aren't afraid of the nerd's protective symbols. Angry nerds love to study martial arts, convinced that the elegance and skill needed for the form will allow them to overcome a much more physically imposing opponent, when in reality, their first attempt to use their Jiu-Jitsu techniques on one of their football player tormentors more often than not will result in them being face-down on the pavement within seconds.

In short, these bands and styles of metal (or metal-influenced music) tend to capitalize off the intensity and aggression expressed by metal, but couch it in terms more immediately applicable to the average individual. The neurotic metal nerd needs these tropes and stylistic ideas to direct his aggression, but he also needs them to be couched in fantasy to make him feel safe. The "jock" interlopers threaten and taunt him with a confident and practiced masculinity which reminds him of the social groups he was unable to be a part of and the qualities he was unable to embody. He cries and gnashes his teeth at these bands and styles and their constituent audience because they're often the authentic realization of the fiction he's built for himself. The normal, well-adjusted metalhead sees the drama of extreme metal for what it is: a fantastic interpretation of real thoughts and feelings which, divorced from a true persona with a genuine force of will, is completely meaningless. The nerd, though, thinks that he's granted that persona and will through the music itself, and is time and time again denied the satisfaction of realizing his fantasies whenever they're confronted by reality.

Occasionally, they believe too greatly in their fiction, and this happens.

~

Part 2 coming soon.

Forgotten Albums: Sodom - Tapping the Vein

2012-02-23T00:17:00.000-05:00

With this post, we're gonna begin a new feature called Forgotten Albums, where we take a look at some of the more overlooked works of major artists' discographies. To fire it up, I'm gonna take a quick look at my favorite Sodom album ever: "Tapping the Vein."

Released in 1992, "Tapping the Vein" came out at a time when thrash was basically disappearing left and right in favor of either death metal or "groove metal" (I've always preferred the term post-thrash.) In the early '90s, there was a prevailing sense that every thrash band had to go SOMEWHERE; there were a few stalwarts who decided to stay the course and did all right, a lot who stagnated, and a lot more who wandered off into more experimental territory with varying degrees of success. Of the Teutonic trinity, both Kreator and Destruction ended up dicking around with pretty awful bids at mainstream success, but Sodom ended up doing really well for themselves by doing what seemingly no other thrash band decided to do (apart from, oddly enough, Testament years later): get more extreme than ever before.

"Tapping the Vein" is an unbelievably fucking brutal album. It's not unreasonable to call it a full-fledged death/thrash album, but rather than getting to death metal via actual death metal riffs or blast beats, Sodom takes the Demolition Hammer approach of simply playing thrash so heavy, fast, and extreme that it basically borders on death metal simply due to sheer ferocity. Tom Angelripper's vocals are a full-throated death growl, easily the most extreme he ever performed in the band's history, and the guitar and drum presence of newcomer Andy Brings and Chris Witchhunter is razor-sharp and rhythmically convulsive. There's an incredible sense of speed and tense, gnashing energy behind the songs on this album; the palm-muted tremolo riffs and hyperspeed skank beats give this stuff a feeling of claustrophobia and and dark energy that most full-fledged death metal can't even match. This stuff's definitely cut from the mold of "Darkness Descends," another thrash album that seems intrinsically designed for death metal fans, and both should be heard by such listeners.

I've never been particularly big on thrash, but "Tapping the Vein" represents a sort of ideal form of the style to me: it manages to be incredibly brutal and stack up against even modern death metal in sheer barbarism, but never sacrifices anything about its intrinsic nature as a thrash record to achieve those heights. It's unfortunate that it gets passed over so often in favor of Sodom's more formative works, but it's definitely worth more attention than it's received so far.

Get Into: Tyrant 666

2012-02-22T03:06:00.001-05:00

I don't have the energy to write much tonight, so here's some shit that speaks for itself. 4 years ago I found this band on Myspace. This was well ahead of the current fad for cocktails of bottom-shelf black metal and watery hardcore, so when I saw that Tyrant listed their genres as "Black Metal/Punk/Blues," I was basically sold. The album, goofily entitled Reclaim The Flame, was not a disappointment. This doesn't really sound like any of today's trendy bullshit, perhaps because these dudes were actually in kvlt Swedish Second Wave bands like Vinterland and The Black (with Nodtveidt himself!). It also sounds totally old-school without sounding retro at all--the influences are apparent, but the style is distinctive, and this shit is heavy enough to go toe-to-toe with any modern-sounding band. Tyrant bring a bonecrushing wall of fuzzed-out guitar and bass, a brutal midtempo riff-form based on bludgeoning down-picked quarter notes, and a vocalist who sounds like Tom G Warrior in the Hellhammer days, only twice as tough and angry.

Part of the charm of Reclaim The Flame is that Tyrant clearly wrote it all at once and cranked it out in a single drunken recording session, probably live in the studio. Most of the slow songs are virtually interchangeable with one another, but they rule anyways. Tyrant broke up after recording this and a split with Alehammer, which bummed me out. But not too badly, because it's not like they really gave a flying fuck. Brews were crushed, Satan was hailed, black metal was made. Bang your heads, fuckers.

BONUS BATHORY COVER! notice how on the chorus they make it sound like The Misfits.

Sick throwback nu-metal jamz (Part 1 of 2)

2012-02-21T05:48:00.000-05:00

When I'm relaxing after a long day of painstakingly researching the kind of music that will make me look the coolest for promoting on TBO, you can probably guess what I do to unwind. There's only one answer to the question of what style of music best articulates the misplaced resentment of the suburban middle schooler: nu-metal. For me and a lot of people in my age bracket, nu-metal was the point of entry for heavy music in general. Nu-metal was for a long while basically the only "heavy" (whatever that may mean) music played frequently on the radio or MTV, and while certainly not full-fledged metal music from a taxonomical standpoint, certainly represented a big step up from the hardest of hard rock available at the time. Metalcore was still a ways off from the sort of market penetration it would end up achieving by the mid '00s, so nu-metal was basically the only game in town, functioning as the single largest gateway drug for novice metalheads to enter the realms of "true" metal (a phrase I'm using for lack of a better alternative.) Of course, like with every style of music which draws elements from heavy metal without actually being a part of the genre, a big contingent of the metal scene hated nu-metal for representing some sort of corruption of heavy metal itself, when in actuality it was a pretty independent style which just so happened to pique the interest of a whole host of people who would go on to enjoy a myriad of heavy metal styles.

Now that nu-metal has essentially disappeared as a major force in mainstream heavy music (although it's starting to come back in an updated form with stuff like the last Emmure album,) a lot of metalheads who previously dismissed it outright are starting to come around and look at the style with a less reactionary perspective. Because nu-metal is no longer the go-to definition of heavy metal for a pop audience unfamiliar with heavy music, metalheads are no longer forced to judge nu-metal through the prism of heavy metal. With the acceptance of nu-metal as an odd little branch off of rock music, it's become much easier for a devout metalhead to simply enjoy nu-metal for what it is- opinions on nu-metal are no longer a political position. After I discovered full-fledged heavy metal, nu-metal rapidly fell out of my regular rotation apart from occasional moments of nostalgia, but over the past few years, I've started to seriously revisit the style with an altered perspective. The results were a bit surprising: despite the compressed, fad-like nature of the genre's rise and fall in popularity, some of it has actually aged remarkably well, not universally suffering from the overtly dated sound that one might expect from it.

As such, I figured I'd offer some examples of stuff that's still surprisingly solid today. What exactly defines "nu-metal" is a pretty general concept, so some of the stuff I'll show off might not fall into the genre as you think of it, but keep in mind that nu-metal is a style that's more defined by its time period and general impression rather than distinct musical qualities, so try not to split hairs too much. As a bonus, Youtube has become to last bastion of those few remaining individuals who are still devout fans of the nu-metal bands of yore, so I'll also be posting the most hilariously awesome comment for each of the following videos. If anyone's interested in another couple posts that cover some of the nu-metal bands that have aged especially poorly, throw up a comment begging for shitty music.

Korn - Clown

To many, Korn represents the archetype of nu-metal in its purest form; probably the most successful of any of the big-name nu-metal bands, Korn still enjoys perplexingly high album album sales despite their almost complete disappearance from the radio. "Clown," off their self-titled debut, is a song which perfectly articulates why their older work still stands up years later, namely because it happens to kick an unbelievable amount of ass. It's a combination of three musical elements which can be specifically isolated. First and foremost is Brian "Head" Welch's unique riffing style: the combination of tense, essentially amelodic, almost ambient textures with crushing hardcore-derived chugging created a wonderful sense of musical tension and flow. Second is the phenomenal drumming of David Silveria, whose clustered, syncopated beats and emphasis on kick/snare interaction over steady hi-hat as the leading percussive voice created a musical environment which allowed the strings room the breathe and expressive their own rhythmic themes while contributing to the sheer force expressed in the songs' most intense moments. Finally, there's the vocals of Jonathan Davis, whose unique, varied, and expressive style of singing essentially created the blueprint of nu-metal vocals as well as blending well with the rest of the band's slow-burning, deliberately paced style. The result of these elements was music that really sonically conveyed the repressed anger, neurotic fear, and animalistic cravings expressed by the band's lyrical themes. There's a lot to praise about Korn's ability to match a sound to a conceptual aesthetic- many bands could learn from their sense of artistic unity.

Everyone has their own opinion on when Korn started to suck and just how far into their discography one should bother to explore. I'd say that the only really essential records from a "heavy music" perspective are the first two. "Follow the Leader" and "Issues" both have some pretty great pop songs on them, but the former marks the band's transition away from underground abrasiveness and sharp, ugly riffing in favor of a more conventional pop-rock sense of songwriting. Everything from "Untouchables" onward is just progressively greater levels of unlistenable.

A bonus track just because it's really sick and especially because the break at 2:00 is remarkably similar to the sort of breakdown structure you might find on a modern deathcore release:

Korn - Chi

Best comment from each video:

Clown - "maybe my #1song ever. Epic.. Why hasn't someone made a Dragonball Z video to go with this. The amount of times vegeta calls goku clown and all."

Chi - "@iEAT0rphans i dont think weed has ever killed n e 1(you know from smoking it)"

Mudvayne - Death Blooms

Mudvayne has always been without question the most musically proficient band from the heyday of nu-metal, effortlessly outpacing all others in both technical ability and compositional complexity. Hell, all things considered, they're probably the most musically proficient band I've ever encountered on modern rock radio or television. The band's debut album, "L.D. 50," is one which continues to surprise me every time I listen to one of its cuts- it feels like each listen reveals a new bit of subtle melodic texture or rhythmic interplay I hadn't noticed before. It's not very surprising when one finds out that the band was heavily influenced by death and black metal (citing Emperor in particular,) and it comes out not only in technical ability, but in the surprisingly gripping and multidimensional emotionality of their music. "Death Blooms," above, is a good example of the band at their best: even in the song's heaviest and most straightforward moments, there's an array of subtle melodic and rhythmic undercurrents at play, along with an impressively mature lyrical concept bolstered by a strong and confident vocal presence.

By all means, any metal fan should give "L.D. 50" a chance- and then stop there. Everything after that album is a complete musical atrocity, with the debut standing as a lone beacon of artistic dignity. Truly a horrendous fall from grace.

Best comment: "THIS IS BASICALLY RAP. THIS IS WHAT WAS CALLED "NU METAL", LIKE OTHER SONGS OFF THIS ALBUM LD 50, THIS HAS R N B ELEMENTS (THE SINGING PARTS), AND THEN HE RAPS OF COURSE THRUOUT THE MAIN AND THE CHORUS, MAKING IT A GHETTO/GANGSTA RAP SONG."

Static-X - I'm With Stupid

The absurd musical success of early Static-X is either raw genius or utter coincidence. "I'm With Stupid," off their debut full-length "Wisconsin Death Trip," is a very succinct explanation of the band's entire style: a sort of match made in hell between backwards baseball cap wearing date rapist aggro rock and what that same date rapist imagines "techno" to be in absence of ever having actually heard it. It's about as idiotic, primitive, and minimal as things get, with riffs rarely more complex than two chords, monotonously ranting vocals, and deliberately obnoxious, needling synths. It's a sort of jock impression of what "industrial metal" would sound like in theory, and a prime example of what I'm going to call the "Rigor Sardonicus Effect," where a band plays a unique style of music that's aesthetically obvious but still surprising to hear simply because you thought no one was dumb enough to actually do it. Out of this comes some fucking impressive music, though: the incredibly stripped-down, binary sense of songwriting and utter lack of nuance, dynamics, or variation actually give the music an intensely industrial feel despite not actually sounding like, you know, industrial music. In fact, it surpasses that: along with the ugly, convulsive clatter that makes up most of the music's content is a complete lack of any emotion or beauty. When combined with the distinctly odd lyrics which come off as a panicked, Tourette's-like disgorging of neurotic paranoia and self-doubt, the overall effect is something that's probably closer to the industrial ideal than a hell of a lot of "real" industrial music.

"Wisconsin Death Trip" is mandatory, and "Machine" has a handful of worthwhile tracks, but everything after is oddly dull, bland, and progressively more generic.

Best comment: "i like this song but dont like hearing when im playing runescape i only like listing when i play roblox"

Check back later this week for part two.

I listened to "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" tonight for the first time ever

2012-02-19T03:19:00.001-05:00

For whatever stupid reason I sorta skipped De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Transylvanian Hunger when I started getting into black metal... of course I heard songs from both albums, and figured they were cool, but neither sound seemed like what I was looking for at the time--generally speaking, stuff that sounded like super-early Emperor and stuff that sounded like punk (Under A Funeral Moon, etc). Plus, even to a neophyte those two Classics seemed so damn standard, and nerd/contrarian that I am, I wanted to find my own way. Thereafter, Mayhem languished on my list of "shit I really should get around to." Well, tonight I was jamming some Mysticum as I stalked through the warehouses on a cold, wet night, and when that finished I saw the "Mayhem" listing just above it on my iPod, and realized I had DMDS.

Holy fucking shit does that album rule. While I didn't have my mind blown in quite the same way I did when I first heard Hordanes Land, I was every bit as enthralled. When I got back to my place I had to leave the headphones on to finish it, uninterrupted. I have heard a TON of black metal and discovered a lot of brilliant albums over the last 5 years, but Mayhem's first one still sounds completely fresh. Is all other black metal basically a footnote to De Mysteriis? Not completely, but close enough.

Some things I noticed, that a lot of other people have probably noticed by now:

1. EURONYMOUS. Not just a classic black metal guitarist, but a genre-transcending guitarist. Not a virtuoso, bu a consummate musician. The solo on Freezing Moon is hands down the coolest solo I have ever heard (that isn't Led Zeppelin), and it's crazy how he created a specifically black metal, specifically Mayhemic style for his improvisation. I have never heard anything like this anywhere else. On the rhythm parts, he plays with effortless authority. He doesn't pick as fast as people later did, but that actually make the music seem faster, because you can pick up on the pace of the strumming and the way it syncs with (or strains against) the drums.

2. Many times you think you're going to hear a riff repeated, but you actually hear a really cool variation on it, with an unexpected harmony or extra chord. This means that the basic riff-units are two or four times as long for Mayhem as they are for most Mayhem-imitators.

3. Varg was a great bassist! And the parts truly add another dimension.

4. Punk as fuck. Here, Hellhammer's doing at least two different kinds of blasts, changing up the usual snare-kick with a kick-snare pattern that's basically a sped up hardcore beat. "Funeral Fog" riiiips out of the gate with that shit. Another reason this album feels so fast.

5. Breakdowns! Unlike almost every BM band after them, Mayhem weren't afraid of syncopation or backbeats. When they drop into half or quarter time, shit gets heavy as fuck. Deathlike Silence may have labeled their productions ANTI-MOSH, but from the thrashing fast sections to the lurching, grooving slow parts, Mayhem play black metal as body music.

6. Not as repetitive as you might think. It drones and pummels away, but there'll be subtle shifts in one of the guitar parts, or the bassline, or Hellhammer will start introducing staggered cymbal and snare stuff into the blasts. No neat little sections here, everything liquid.

7. Attila rules, and lends a real sense of tonality to his vocals. There are some melodies, and hooks!

This is just sublime. I am so glad I finally heard this. And I'm glad I waited too, because now I can hear how it utterly dwarfs the imitators. A new all-time favorite album, for sure.

Get into: Fanisk

2012-02-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

NSBM mostly sucks- everyone knows this. Like most genres of music which are inherently attached to an ideology, the ideology tends to come before musical quality in most cases, leading to a bunch of boring or outright terrible sounds which have no purpose other than to function as propaganda. As an adjunct to this general principle is another that's equally consistent: the more ostentatious such a band is about their given ideology, the worse the music tends to be. Most of the really good NSBM tends to be of the more subtle variety; the presence of Hitler, an SS symbol, or a swastika on an album cover more often than not means that the music within is utterly tragic.

Fanisk is one of the only exceptions to this rule. Look at the above cover: there's a giant, GIANT, completely unignorable swastika on the cover. The swastika is actually glowing. If the swastika could somehow blink with a bunch of LEDs like a Christmas display, I'm pretty sure it would. However, it just so happens that the music contained within the album is not only some of the best NSBM I've ever heard, but some of the best symphonic black metal I've ever heard regardless of ideology. Seriously, listed to the above track and try not to be impressed that it's made by a couple Nazis from Oregon.

Their Oregon origin might have something to do with the music's quality itself; while the band predates the Pacific Rim black metal style by a few years, it has many of the elements which would come to define bands like Wolves in the Throne Room: long, sprawling, linear songs, reduced vocal presence, and shimmering layers of synths and guitars creating a wall of somewhat droning melody. Fanisk, however, takes these typical elements and tempers them with a distinct edge of NSBM aggression and pride. Their songs aren't written so much as painstakingly composed; there's less "riffing" and more slow, ostentatious revealing of melodic themes over the course of long, winding tracks. The somewhat brittle production and speedy drum machine brings to mind acts like Daemonlord or Nevelrijk, where the too-fast, rushing rhythms give the glorious sort of melodies a wonderfully enthusiastic template to twist and turn over. Listening to a Fanisk track is an exciting experience, and the influence of classical music is more readily apparent in this stuff than in anything Yngwie has shit out over the past decades.

Now I just wish there were a few less swastikas on their album covers so I could show them to more people.

(A quick note: I'm pretty sure Fanisk's interpretation of national socialism is a bit sideways of most. They're pretty lyrically abstract and don't seem to dwell in mind-numbing racist boredom- they seem a lot more Savitri Devi than Vaginal Jesus about things. I'm not well-versed enough in nazi occultism or paganism to pick apart the details, so someone with more knowledge of what exactly is getting covered in the lyrics will hopefully comment, but for those put off by obnoxious "gas the Jews" chatter, there's a lot more going on.)

reverorum ib malacht actually put out a full-length

2012-02-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it actually fucking happened. Of all the bands in the world which everyone forgot about, Reverorum Ib Malachtactually released a full-length on AJNA Offensive late last year. From what I've seen it doesn't look like anyone's actually HEARD it (big surprise,) but it's still kind of cute in a nostalgic way. Who knew that they were actually a band?

I got into black metal when DC++ was fading away and Soulseek was the main hotness for acquiring obscure music (before download blogs and torrents devoured everything.) Because Soulseek had a bunch of chat rooms attached to the program, one of the biggest being a black metal room, there's a whole host of obscure little bands who gained prominence basically out of nowhere due to word of mouth hype and typically disappeared just as quickly (Wormphlegm being one of the sole exceptions.) Reverorum Ib Malacht was one such band: a cassette-only black metal/ambient project with a lineup that was Shrouded In Mystery that was a really big deal for like 3 months until everyone forgot about them basically at the same time. Looking back, I guess it was sort of the pseudo-LLN version of Deathspell Omega or something. It was kind of a big deal for a while, and a lot of people were super stoked about them being some sort of future of black metal, claiming it was really disturbing and True Satanic Music. It made an impression on me when I was like 15 (which is about as old as you can get and still have this sort of thing be particularly resonant,) so checking this stuff out again has been sort of a nostalgia trip for me. No, that doesn't mean I'm actually going to listen to the full-length.

Listening to the above track now, though... my god we liked some dumb shit.

Based Style/Cloud Rap

2012-02-17T05:36:00.000-05:00

*TRIGGER WARNING - STUFF OTHER PEOPLE LIKE*

If there's one person who's really responsible for this style of hip-hop becoming a distinct stylistic entity, it's not a rapper at all: it's Clams Casino, a 23 year old physical therapy student from New Jersey who just happened to become probably the most important hip-hop producer in the scene today.

An amateur producer with no particular ambitions of becoming a big-name hip-hop icon, Clams essentially stumbled onto a production formula that would end up becoming the foundation of the "Based" style, pioneered by infamous outsider-art rapper Lil B. Defined by hazy washes of synths, wordless, looping vocal samples, and a drugged-out, simultaneously melancholic and joyful atmosphere, the end result is pretty straightforward to any Music Person: it's little more than post-rock and shoegaze brought to hip-hop. While Clams himself doesn't seem particularly fixated on those styles of music- it seems like the similarity is more coincidence than an intentional merging of styles- the resemblance is immediately apparent, and its result so instantaneously appealing and logical that it becomes a wonder why no one thought of it before. Listening to a Clams-produced track is a lot like listening to Devourment: you're sort of incredulous that this is where the parent style ended up going rather than originating from.

What Clams Casino's sudden and massive explosion in notoriety around the hip-hop scene (well, the hipster edge of the hip-hop scene, that is) signifies, beyond establishing the based style, is the death of "instrumental hip-hop" as we knew it. Instrumental hip-hop was originally the pantheon of music that was aesthetically similar to traditional hip-hop beats but simply wasn't suited for an MC to rap over- however, Clams' beats have basically wiped off the entire chalkboard by displaying that just about anything imaginable can be rapped over by an adventurous enough MC. Often too slow or too scattered to conceivably work for a verbal flow, Clams seems to entirely ignore the basic principles of hip-hop beat construction, throwing rappers to the proverbial wolves to try to make sense of his rhythms. Some of his most far-out musical creations barely seem to have any coherent rhythmic center at all; they drift aimless and ambient, with only the murkiest, most distant accompaniment of bass drum or chiming electronic effect to provide a dim set of lights to guide a rapper.

It goes without saying that this sort of strange, wandering production would necessitate an equally strange, wandering rapper to match it; after all, cloud rap isn't supposed to be an instrumental genre. The first, biggest, and most important artist in the establishment of the style is none other than Lil B, a rapper who has massively divided the hip-hop scene, leaving equal numbers of frantic proponents and venomous detractors gnashing their proverbial teeth at one another over his veracity as an artist. Lil B's work and persona have been dissected up and down in just about every major music publication, so I won't devote excess text to describing his style. Instead, here are some important bullet points:

-An unformed stream-of-consciousness rapping style, often fully improvised, which places less importance on clever wordplay and rhyming and more on displays of naked emotion and authenticity
-Subject matter which ranges from subversively shallow, monotonous ranting about money and bitches to uncomfortable earnest and straightforward commentary on society and morality
-A visual and auditory lexicon centered around simplicity, lo-fi production values, and amateurish honesty halfway between Daniel Johnston and a teenager's awful Livejournal poetry
-A bizarre self-made philosophical system which itself necessitates a whole article to describe accurately

I have no doubt that the dreaded "W" word is heavy on the tongues of commenters, and that's perfectly logical: Lil B's, and the style as a whole's, artistic and aesthetic sense does have a lot in common with traditional "white" standards- or what we perceive white standards to be. The importance of racial issues in this movement is pretty minimal, though, and does nothing but cloud what's happening musically. The based style isn't a movement of black culture reappropriating white aesthetic elements so much as simply exploring some of the opportunities naturally available in hip-hop. Lil B's deliberately amateurish style (very deliberate- check out his work with The Pack to see that he's a perfectly capable rapper by all traditional standards) and trenchant focus on naked displays of emotion and almost childish earnestness are a clear musical decision which give the based style a distinct musical and artistic identity- and one that shouldn't be ignored simply due to its resemblance to some elements of "white" culture, whatever that means.

The based style is still in its infancy, but in the wake of Lil B has come a surprising second leader in the form of Soulja Boy, who has in many ways jettisoned his original pop-rap style in favor of this much more abstract aesthetic. Soulja Boy's work is a little less overtly positive and nostalgic and more distinctly drugged-out and "weird," coming off more like a reinterpretation of mainstream rap tropes through the cloud rather than Lil B's odd sideways move. It's no less relevant, though; while Soulja Boy is clearly still finding his legs stylistically, and has a less immediate and consistent output, his interpretation of the based style has plenty to offer, and I'm eager to see where he goes with it as time passes and he matures into the new style he's so eagerly adopted.

I'm not really sure what to make of this stuff; it's hardly getting any mainstream airplay, and the artists in the scene itself seem more interested in releasing reams of free music online than generating sales, but it's acquired a surprisingly large fanbase in a pretty short period of time, so who knows. I think it goes without saying that the parallels between this style and a lot of extreme metal and punk are readily apparent, so for those of you who don't regularly listen to Chris Brown like I do, you might want to give this stuff a shot.

You guys listen to Wardruna, right?

2012-02-16T03:14:00.001-05:00

Just checking! Lately I've been recovering from some sort of stomach virus and lying around reading A Game of Thrones, and Warduna has become my constant soundtrack. To the loremasters among you they're undoubtedly old news, but if you haven't yet listened I can't recommend this project enough. Noktorn did a post many months ago about how much he hates the folk side projects of metal people, and I generally agree, but there has to be an exception to any sweeping generalization, and this is it. An evocation of the past, rather than a clumsy attempt to recreate it. Grounded in post-industrial and ambient music, rather than New Age bullshit or goofy fantasy tropes. Steeped in nightside skaldic lore. The reason Runaljod has a 99% average among four different Metal Archives reviewers is that it's actually perfect. Enough to make me forgive Gaahl for ruining Gorgoroth!

The secret hero of Wardruna, by the way, is the guy who plays mouth-harp. Dubstep bass has got nothing on the original wobbles!

ADDENDUM: if you want to see some more substantial thoughts on Runaljod and ambient music, check the comments section below. A couple people mentioned the lack of apparent pattern in this music, and I wrote a reply that ended up being almost a full album review.

Deathcore I Actually Enjoy, Part II: With Dead Hands Rising

2012-02-14T02:16:00.003-05:00

How do you make Gothenburg-style melodic death metal that isn't weak and boring? There've not been many satisfying answers to that question. At The Gates did it for one or two tracks on Slaughter of The Soul by actually living up to their potential as riff-writers. The Crown did it by actually being a really fast thrash band. Hypocrisy does it by actually being a death metal band. Amon Amarth did* it by actually being vikings. But they've all missed the obvious answer: just crank the extremity up to 11 and then drop a GIANT FUCKING BREAKDOWN. Turns out that works just fine.

This is also a good answer to the question "how do you write deathcore that doesn't suck?" Working in a more melodic style seems to have helped WDHR focus on the songwriting elements that make music truly heavy. They actually care about the fast parts, whipping off tight, thrashing riffs instead of blundering through a morass of pseudo-technical noodling en route to the chug. But get to the chug they do. Highlight is the call to moshage at 2:10. "LET'S BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN!" Indeed.

Thanks to my bro/bass player Travis for showing me this tonight! Check out the "Get Into" I wrote on his main band Grudges a while back. (No bias. If my friends are in lame bands I just don't write about them.)

*edited at the suggestion of perceptive readers... new Amon Amarth does suck.

Heldentum, "Wildsaulied"

2012-02-12T01:36:00.001-05:00

Just found this tonight in my eternal wanderings of Youtube, and thought it was worth posting straight away. Heldentum shared two members with Absurd, and this band seems to have been an outlet for some more aggressive material. Because it fucking rips. Headbanging thrash all the way with a fist-pumping break for some sick NWOBHM-style soloing at 00:23. They nail the heroic feel without ever letting the consonant harmonies become bland, adding just a hint of something darker on the riff that hits at around 00:13. The main riff at 00:23 is very clearly a place where they decided not to just repeat the classic phrase that opens it--they actually develop the idea. But the coolest moment, by far, is the grim majesty of the chorus riff that hits at 00:55. Oh, and those German vocals. So full of spite!

On "Wildsaulied," Heltdentum seem to be borrowing from extreme speed metal (Kreator) and hardcore punk (the Misfits) to create something that is most definitely true black metal. Rather than imitating other BM bands from the Second Wave or later, they've built up a distinctive sound "from scratch" by returning to the bands that influenced (or could've influenced) the genre when it was coming into its own in the early 90s. There's a more general point here: to create something new and interesting within an established genre, try inscribing your music with a sort of alternate history. Show us the latent possibilities that the founding bands missed.

Get Into: RIPPING CORPSE

2012-02-11T15:39:00.001-05:00

For reasons I can't entirely explain, I never really 'got' Ripping Corpse until about a month or so ago. I'd heard Dreaming With the Dead numerous times, but it just didn't click. Have you ever had one of those, "How in the fuck was I so oblivious?!" moments? I certainly did. I was pretty much sick and tired of every other death metal band one night, and decided I was gonna put Dreaming on my Zune for the drive over to a friend's place...

Holt shit! How was I so oblivious to Shaune Kelley's riffs? My god, these are riffs to die for. It's infuriating that RC seems to be primarily remembered as "Erik Rutan's first band" (and Rutan had little musical input anyway) and not as one of the BEST death/thrash bands ever. The riffs are sleek, sexy, catchy and complicated, but never lose their emotive and infectious feel. Brandon Thomas possesses a freakishly good drum sound, as well as very bouncy and tasteful approach to blasting. And then, the icing on the cake is Scott fucking Ruth. His hardcore-derived grunts and shouts are some of the most bad-ass vocals in metal; adding a charisma and uniqueness to the vocals that makes this album that much better. Words are superfluous this time, just listen:

Deeper, deeper, in the woods they're found

Chanting, chanting, Cthulhu cometh now

Sacrifice, sacrifice, give it flesh they sing

Calling, calling, the lord blasphemy...

Review: Ljå - Til Avsky For Livet

2012-02-11T01:21:00.001-05:00

A Norwegian black metal album that sounds more Swedish, and somehow becomes a really great album because of that. Ljå is a name that my eyes must have skimmed over countless times, yet the three letter Norwegian translation of 'scythe' didn't leave much of an impression. Not until recently; as it has actually become a new favorite. One of the most exciting and genuine takes on the Scandinavian sound of anything released after the turn of the millennium. To loosely describe Ljå's sound as the best traits of Taake, Sorhin, Kvist, and The Black fused in a way that is at once gloomy yet brutal is at once true, yet too-generalized. Ljå's sound is a natural product of equal parts Swedish and Norwegian influence, with some subtle idiosyncrasies that distinguish it from more generic marriages of Scandinavian styles. Though the frosty, melodic leads that characterize the Swedish trademark seem to give this album's sound tremendous strength.

At first listen, it seems as if Ljå's sheen of Swedish influence is interwoven with the moods and general atmosphere found in some of the DSBM (yes, the term is very dumb, but at least you'll know what I'm referring to here) scene. For instance, the gloom of Strid and Nyktalgia seem to seep through periodically, yet Ljå's music is original enough to keep itself from becoming too saturated with that particular sound. There's no denying that there is also definitely some thrash and heavy metal influence here - when the band resorts to the low end of the fretboard, the Hellhammer/Frost spirit really comes out. Through a keen tradeoff between icy tremolo leads and blocky, thrashy riffs, the band creates an album that in many ways hearkens back to what 'black metal' meant in it's early stage. It's nearly something from 1987 transplanted in 2006. And this album's fusion of past with present creates something familiar and original, but ornate enough in composition to really move the old-school influence beyond what it originally may have been. Progressive work, where subtlety is a strength, and specious philandering of ten-plus influences is never abused for the sake of proving a point. The songs being well-crafted, developed works, are strong alone in songwriting. It's how there's a peculiar sensitive aggression burning within these ten songs, that really gives this a fiery spirit all its own.

The musicianship is tight and the percussion is quite pronounced in the mix. The drum work is often fast and blast-happy - perhaps also being the single largest connection with the Norwegian sound on this album. The juxtaposition of the speedy, death-metal styled drumming with the pseudo-complex melodic lead guitar isn't anything terribly original, but it Ljå have a way of doing it where the mood approaches mystical yet brutal. It's sombre and dark without being morose. The thrashiness is the reason for that; rejuvenating their highly nuanced style of composing, where there is a well-crafted playoff between riffs, hooks and chilly high-note leads. The songwriting isn't anything too out of the ordinary; just the mere mix of influences and styles here creates seemingly conventional songs that are actually progressive and original; each one with an identity and character. No songs goes undeveloped here; it's a refreshing, creative display of new dogs doing old tricks well. One of the finer black metal releases of modern times.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Soulja Boy has basically become a genius

2012-02-08T20:34:00.000-05:00

Okay, since you're reading this blog you probably remember "Crank Dat" and basically nothing else (and probably despise the very existence of the individual who made it on principle.) Well, I'm making this post to inform you that the shit that Soulja Boy is making these days actually sounds like the above track more often than not. Drugged-out, shoegazey washes of synths and light, distant percussion forming a gentle, ocean-like bed of music for stream-of-consciousness rapping to drift over in an equally airy, imprecise manner. Basically, black rappers are taking stuff from white hipsters and applying it to hip-hop and creating something utterly brilliant, beautiful, and enthralling out of the ingredients.

The above track is actually just one example of the rapidly growing "based" style of hip-hop (also getting referred to as "cloud rap" in some circles.) I'm super into it at the moment, and if there are enough weirdos who comment on this post who are interested in this development in hip-hop, I'd be happy to give a primer on the who, what, and why of it.

Fuck "darkness"

2012-02-07T04:23:00.004-05:00

A few days ago Wolves In The Outhouse played a well-publicized, apparently wolf-themed gig with Chelsea Wolfe in LA. For those of you who haven't heard of her, Wolfe writes pretty standard singer-songwriter stuff reminiscent of that disgusting "freak folk" thing from 6 or 7 years ago, but she laces it with inoffensive atmospheric noise and some vaguely metallic electric guitar riffs, while shamelessly copping imagery from black metal, neofolk, and goth. Half a decade ago it would've been kinda weird for a solo artist, even one as painstakingly edgy as Wolfe, to play a gig with an extreme metal band, even one as flaccid as WITTR. But now it seems perfectly natural. Something is wrong here. Of course, I'm not at all against cross-genre performances or collaborations, but I'm sure as hell against what this performance represents--the scooping-out of formerly rich musical genres into hollow vessels for a homogenized, affected gloom that renders them all commensurable. How did this come to pass? I think we can get to the heart of the matter by focusing on one little adjective.

For the last couple years, the internet echo chamber has resounded with the flagrant overuse of the label "dark," as well as cringe-inducing synonyms like "occult" and "doom-laden." Hack critics and cynical culture salesmen bandy about variants on "dark" as a kind of catch-all descriptor for everything from extreme metal to hardcore to indie rock. They say it as if it actually told us something about the music. But nothing could be further from the truth. "Darkness" is such a nebulous concept that it's virtually useless. Mayhem is dark. So is Throbbing Gristle. So is The Cure. So is Tom Waits. So is Schoenberg. Of course, these artists exude completely different feelings, have completely different sets of thematic concerns, and work with completely different musical vocabularies. "Darkness" isn't an emotional affect, isn't an atmosphere, isn't a proper mood--it's a tone, a shade, the shadow of a shadow of a feeling. When we say that something is dark, we're saying little more than "it's not cheerful." Sure, there are times when it makes sense to say that, but writers who treat this as some sort of substantial statement about a band are fucking idiots, or really fucking lazy.

I'm not just ranting about bad writing, though. I have two concerns. First, all this babble about "darkness" makes a fetish of it. It's as if "darkness" were a real aesthetic quality with some kind of inherent value, as if its mere presence made music good. Eg: "Dude, how can you say Leviathan is for posers? That shit's so dark!" With this attitude holding sway, "darkness" has become a stylistic condiment to be liberally sprinkled on almost anything. Just look at the new roster of "dark-core" bands on Southern Lord. A few of these bands happen to be really good, and seem to come by their atmosphere honestly (APMD, Xibalba), but take a look at the rest. The Secret? Nails? Seven Sisters of Sleep? A couple tremolo riffs and some "occult" imagery on their merchandise doesn't make these bands anything more than mediocre screamo, powerviolence, and sludge, respectively. (SSS goes beyond mediocre. When I saw them live they lived up to their name, literally inducing me to doze off while standing up.)

"Darkness" has become a brand, a buzzword, something to be touted in press releases and in a body of critical writing that has increasingly come to resemble said press releases. Just head over to Pitchfork and read their new shit on Factory Floor--they work "dark" into the first fucking sentence, and it's prominently featured in the link to the article. When you read that a band is "dark," it's not just a feeble attempt at describing their music, it's a signal that the music is pregnant with cultural capital.

Second, lumping together disparate genres under the risibly nebulous heading of "dark music" disregards the fundamental differences between them, obscuring the distinct ideals and musical strategies that make each style what it is. Finding common ground between genres is fine, but it's folly to look for commonality in a pseudo-feeling, in an aesthetic concept so devoid of content that its embrace is all-encompassing. It's not just stupid, it's pernicious. Why? Because people start mistaking a trivial point of convergence between far-flung bands for some kind of essence shared among them. "It's all just about the darkness, dude."

That sure makes things easier for the dilettante. Black metal is "soooo craaaazy" and a real trip--if you just forget that it's a glorification of war, a religious invocation of Satan or Odin, and an expression of total scorn for the comfortable world of liberty and equality. Death metal can be great fun at parties--if it's just about zombies or whatever instead of graphic accounts of murder and rape. Neofolk is really nice background music--if, to you, the Algiz and the Sunwheel are just edgy "occult" symbols that you can't wait to purchase on some new Mishka crap.

Thinking in terms of "darkness," then, allows listeners to hear their own garden-variety malaise and rebelliousness instead of hate, bloodlust, elitism, nostalgia, total alienation, and any other number of genuinely challenging emotions and ideals. And then the trendy kids seek out worthless bands that channel the "darkness" without any of the cognitive dissonance or complexity. Even worse, they treat the music as a vehicle for dark vibes while paying almost zero attention to the music itself. Bands that can write songs are ignored. Bands that can pay a good graphic designer thrive.

Of course, this isn't just about "darkness," per se. My goal here was to diagnose a cultural disease--the reduction of strongly defined musical genres and subcultures to a single set of empty gestures--by working up from its most prominent symptom. All sorts of current musical and cultural ventures contribute to this flattening effect without necessarily using the word "darkness." If you're still not quite sure what I'm on about, there are some websites that embody it. Just take a look at Cvlt Nation or Actual Pain, or the aforementioned Mishka. And for the record, FUCK THAT SHIT.

The few, the proud, the tortured

2012-02-07T00:39:00.000-05:00

As I said in my post about Wormphlegm, I'd be following it up with a post detailing a handful of torture doom artists who actually make good on their promises of sickness and overwhelming oppression. Most torture doom bands kind of suck because they don't understand the subtler elements of the music: developed song structures, unique melodic sensibilities, and a well-crafted aesthetic, all of which come together in the following bands to make that rarest of breeds: the worthwhile torture doom band. Note that some of these artists might not fall into the category of "torture doom" as some purists might describe them, but whatever; it's about a feeling, not a set of bylaws.

Senthil

Senthil began, in my mind, as a pretty standard Wormphlegm-worship project. One of the first out of the gate after the torture doom concept exploded, they started off with the "Crypticorifislit" demo, which is a pretty listenable if relatively generic slab of torture doom that gained them a lot of attention. Unfortunately, they followed this with a split with Portuguese funeral doom band Bosque, who ended up greatly overshadowing them; their side of the split, in the form of the sprawling, two-part "Premeditation," came off as slapped together, overlong, and distinctly repetitive. After hearing this, a lot of torture doom fans (including myself) basically wrote them off as another failed attempt at Wormphlegm's unbelievable heights.

But this turned around significantly with their cassette-only EP "Septisemesis," which you can hear above. With this release, Senthil finally found their legs and broke away from the remaining similarities to Wormphlegm which still lingered in their sound. Senthil's style became realized as a potent, malignant breed of basement-crafted torture doom, more caked in filth and dissonance than nearly any other band in the style. While bands like Wormphlegm celebrate medieval torture and occultism, and others like Funeralium concentrate on drugged out depictions of nightmarish depression and insanity, Senthil decided to make the torture doom of the modern serial killer. Rather than a refined, clean sound, the music of "Septisemesis" brings to mind the sort of bloodscapes found in films like "August Underground," where innocent, unwitting victims are subjected to unspeakable rituals of cackling mutilation and humiliation, streaked with blood, cum, and shit before finally dying, slowly and painfully, in concrete cellars filled with rusty knives, fetish porn, and the ghosts of a dozen others past and future. It's an intensely real and disturbing style that truly brings a new face to the torture doom style.

(Plague is also a pretty cool guy. I still prefer his other project, Nivathe, to his better-known work in Senthil, but this tape is certainly worth a look.)

Planet AIDS

It's to the great misfortune of the doom scene that Planet AIDS only managed to produce a single EP before breaking up, but it's so fucking good that I'm willing to celebrate them anyway. Taking a very different tact with the torture doom style than most, Planet AIDS juxtaposed extreme funeral/drone doom with noise and ambient elements, with a distinct emphasis on electronics which helped to set them far apart from the pack. Their sole, monolithic work, "Apocalyptik AIDS," is a brilliantly realized one-track composition which slowly and painfully develops over the course of 28 excruciating minutes, with slow, thunderous programmed drums distantly pounding under a bed of feedback-soaked, maliciously dissonant guitar, slowly articulating more detailed "riffs" as the tempo increases, before the insistent throb of destruction and darkness explodes and dissociates into what sounds like completely improvised noise.

The real star of the show, however, is the vocal performance, which stands to me as one of the most remarkable in the history of heavy metal period. A ranting, dogmatic declaration from some sort of perverted and obsessive priest, the lyrics are taken entirely from the Book of Revelations, describing in dramatic detail the ultimate end of the world as we know it. When juxtaposed with the heinous, malignant music that slowly swirls and writhes beneath, what is designed to be a statement of God's eternal glory and magnificence becomes a hellish dreamscape of darkness, suffering, and the ultimate triumph of evil on the planet that once was our home. It's tough to get through but a very worthwhile piece nonetheless; I tend to listen to it two or three times a year, and each time it's as enthralling as the last.

Stabat Mater

The funeral doom project of Mikko Aspa of Deathspell Omega, Stabat Mater is a wonderful example of what can be done with torture doom's most traditional elements. Unlike many of the other bands listed here, Stabat Mater is extremely conventional, using the standard funeral doom tropes of slow, mournful lead guitar, static, pounding drums, and deep, cavernous growls- even the song structure of "Give Them Pain" is little more than an alternation between two main riffs. What makes it so compelling is Aspa's intuitive grasp of long, sinuous melodies and how to use the degraded production to the ultimate benefit of the music itself. Of course, the real centerpiece of this track in particular is the seemingly endless, utterly horrific sample of a woman being whipped and screaming in pain. It's not a loop, and Aspa's position as a publisher of BDSM pornography suggests that the sounds are taken from his own personal collection. The screams are some of the most heinous found on a metal track- wildly unhinged and alternately loud and distant, they often dissociate into a mewling, defeated whimper- perhaps even more frightening than the more obviously horrendous sounds.

Stabat Mater brings essentially nothing new to the funeral doom table, but executes the style so well that it rises head and shoulders above the rest of the torture doom scene. While "Give Them Pain" stands out as a particular gem in the project's sporadic and irregular catalog, most of the other material is just as good, with perhaps the most distinct apex being "Above Him," the sprawling paean of Christian defeat found on the 6-way "Crushing the Holy Trinity" split. While I think Aspa's output tends to vary wildly in quality, Stabat Mater is among his most consistent and worthwhile work.

Black Bile

Much to my chagrin, Black Bile doesn't have any samples available on Youtube for you to check out- which isn't much of a surprise, as the Cypriot project's output is limited to a 100-pressed CDr demo which sold out of just about every distro on the planet within a couple months of its release. Cut distinctly and unapologetically from a Wormphlegm-cum-Senthil mold, "Cloacal Meditation" is an unbearably creepy, basement-recorded exploration of the blackest reaches of human misery. "Cloacal Meditation" doesn't develop so much as wander, lost and alone, over the course of its 29 minute running time- I feel it's best described as the soundtrack to someone trapped in an ancient labyrinth of sewers or catacombs, desperately feeling along the stone walls in pitch darkness for any sort of exit. It's harrowing, filthy, and immensely hopeless, making it a demanding listen even within the already demanding niche of torture doom. If you think you can stomach it, it's certainly worth a try from the style's seasoned veterans.

Bunkur

Rounding out the pack is Bunkur, one of the oldest entries in the style who tend to take a lot of flack for their admittedly somewhat pretentious style. Omitting six-string guitars entirely for a dual-bass attack, many have described their style as "ultradoom," owing to their infatuation with the most straightforward cliches of doom driven to their most absurd conclusions. Bunkur is far on the droning side of the torture doom style, tending to smash a single riff into the listener's forehead for an almost interminably long time before changing things up. What makes them worthwhile, though, is their particular atmosphere; Bunkur sounds like World War I given a soundtrack, with the grinding monotony and horror of trench warfare represented by the equally grinding and horrific repetition of the music itself. While it's hardly the sort of thing a first timer should be exploring, there's more to their music than might first be let on- even if it arrives from there actually being less than nearly anyone else.

"Collapse In Eternal Worth:" ripping new Goatwhore song

2012-02-06T03:26:00.005-05:00

I've always considered myself down with the Goatwhore, but never followed them. Maybe that was because they're on Metal Blade and are kind of "mainstream" for extreme metal, but hangups like that are ridiculous, and I'm glad I'm over them. What I heard off Carving Out The Eyes of God was devastating, and this is just as cool if not better. Despite being named Goatwhore and having a vocalist who sounds like he's puking, these guys play with real grace and agility, gliding between disparate riffing styles without ever letting up on the amphetamine hardcore groove. At this point you should all know that Goatwhore is grounded in vintage metalpunk, Motorhead and Discharge style, and I'm happy to say that foundation remains strong beneath the black/death/thrash riffing.

You will notice that this is a "lyrics video," and that's because this is music for shouting along. I have no idea what it means to "Collapse In Eternal Worth," but I'm chomping to "digest the archetype," and you know I'm always down for "filthy rites of outrage." The coolest moment of the whole song, for me, comes at 1:50, as Goatwhore change up the riffing and order us to "mount the wings of death." A horrible cliche to be sure, but as that epic thrash riff enters it just clicks, reminding us that some images are cliches because they're inherently awesome. I love that Goatwhore always have and always will stubbornly insist on writing about Satan and how cool he is and how we're all gonna jump God in some dark alley and fuck that dude up.

Looking back on Wormphlegm

2012-02-02T22:07:00.000-05:00

This isn't quite meant to be a "get into" since it's less about Wormphlegm as a band and more a look at their historical importance in doom. I mean, yeah, of course you should listen to Wormphlegm- they're one of my favorite bands and have released nothing but essential work that any so-called "extreme music fan" should already be very acquainted with. But this is more designed as a retrospective of what they did in doom, and how they influenced the deeper reaches of the genre in ways that are still being felt today. This isn't about Wormphlegm's sound so much as how their sound sculpted extreme doom, so I'm going to be writing with the assumption that you're at least familiar with their work.

Wormphlegm were probably the first band to really make their bones in the metal scene via filesharing. In 2001, the band released their first demo on a 100-limited cassette, entitled "In an Excruciating Way Infested With Vermin and Violated by Executioners Who Practise Incendiarism and Desanctifying the Pious," which made its way around the deepest reaches of the underground doom scene (the Finnish one in particular) but otherwise made no waves in the greater metal community. It wasn't until an enterprising fellow or two decided to rip the tape to MP3 and start shuttling it around the various filesharing services the they truly began to find an audience. In particular, the turning point was Soulseek- when Wormphlegm's tape hit the Soulseek crowd (a few years after the demo had been released, mind you) things went fucking insane, and this is where the story really begins. Were it not for filesharing, Wormphlegm would likely still be a footnote in the doom scene, known only to the sickest and most depraved individuals out there- as it stands, though, they're nearly a household name.

Wormphlegm's demo tape essentially created extreme doom as we know it. Yes, there were other extreme doom releases before it and in theory many releases which came out parallel to it that weren't necessarily influenced by it, but let's be real: every extreme doom band out there today owes their existence to Wormphlegm, without which they would be completely different. The demo tape itself posited a style of funeral doom that dropped much of the traditional melancholy and beauty in favor of torturous dissonance and darkness, resulting in music that was far and away some of the most extreme sounds heard ever in doom (or metal, natch) without question. The tape is, of course, utterly brilliant for many reasons, but actually, like most seminal, formative works, has little to do with where the extreme doom scene would later go.

What many people forget about Wormphlegm's tape is just how ambient and droning it is. The "torture doom" style that many have suggested Wormphlegm to play (and form with the tape) has been suggested to be a sort of fusion of funeral, drone, and death/doom, but the drone and ambient elements come out stronger on Wormphlegm's demo tape than they do on any other torture doom release. In many ways, this makes it some of the darkest music that's ever been released in this vein, owing to the seemingly static nature of the music itself along with Wormphlegm's utter mastery of how to make long, winding songs which slowly unfold in a manner so deliberate and subtle that tracking their development is nearly impossible. Of course, this wasn't really the element which struck people the most- instead, it was the sheer cruelty of the aesthetics, in particular the hideously deformed and chill-inducing dual vocal performance which to this day strikes me as one of the most malignant and harrowing I've ever heard. I think that this tape still stands as one of the most extreme and torturous musical pieces I've ever heard- while it's over a decade old at this point, little matches up to it in sheer barbarity and brilliance.

This tape, or its MP3s at least, ushered in an entirely new era of extreme doom metal which essentially captured the attention of the doom scene entirely for the latter half of the '00s. Everyone and their brother came out with an extreme doom project- some good, some bad, but nearly all tending to fall short of the original. The problem is that most people didn't realize that what made Wormphlegm so essential and remarkable was the incredible songwriting and pacing of their music and how it bolstered and was bolstered by the extreme, raw aesthetics. This resulted in a lot of projects which captured the basic sound of Wormphlegm, but not the terrifying mood and memorability of their style- most of it ended up seeming sort of shallow, particularly since the simplicity of the elements at hand are so easily misinterpreted as a freebie to cult stardom (like most funeral doom) rather than a challenge to create something truly unique out of such bare-bones ingredients. While the demo tape created extreme doom as we know it, little extreme doom before or after actually sounds like it, making it a sort of "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" for the style- revelatory, influential, unique, and basically impossible to replicate in style or quality.

A half decade later in 2006, Wormphlegm released their first (and so far, only) full-length album in the form of the vinyl-only "Tomb of the Ancient King." Eagerly anticipated and quickly fired across Soulseek as soon as it got into the hands of a slavering audience, the reaction was extremely positive, but strangely mixed in its positivity. "Tomb of the Ancient King" was released in a very curious environment by musicians who were firmly aware of the influence of their earlier work. One of the things which makes Wormphlegm so interesting is that, despite the rather cult and underground trappings of their music, the members themselves are quite approachable and active in the internet doom community. Frequently posting on doom-metal.com and having a somewhat hilarious tendency to pop up whenever the band's name is mentioned (sort of like saying "Biggie Smalls" in a bathroom mirror at night,) the members have proven themselves quite aware of their influence, and in some ways created "Tomb of the Ancient King" with a clear understanding of their position and the expectations of their audience.

(I'd like to take an aside to say that the Wormphlegm guys, despite the sheer insanity and horror of their music, are incredibly nice and humble fellows who are a lot of fun to talk to online! It's neat to see a band with such an undeniably dark and cruel aesthetic feature members who feel no need to play characters, and whenever they pop up, it's a joy to chat with them about what they're doing and the other projects they're involved in. Here's hoping they run across this article in a fit of Googling!)

In a lot of ways, "Tomb of the Ancient King" resembles what "nowadays torture doom" sounds like more than the band's original demo tape, but as a product of Wormphlegm, functions as a display of what more conventional extreme doom SHOULD sound like rather than what it is. The full-length jettisons much of the murkier, more ambient tendencies of the demo in favor of a more straightforward, riff-based attack which is surprisingly catchy and memorable despite the sheer brutality of its style. Most extreme doom resembles this more than the demo tape- a sort of blackened, ultra-heavy, oppressively slow take on stuff like Winter. Wormphlegm kicks it up a notch with their custom brand of wonderfully nuanced and layered songwriting, however- riffs slowly change and morph alongside the atmosphere, and where the vocals have been scaled back from their ostentatious display on the demo, the rest of the music has picked up the pace a bit to balance things out, making each track on the full-length a multidirectional and detailed composition which rewards multiple, careful listens with a sense of organic, whole songwriting rarely seen elsewhere in doom.

In many ways, the issues I take with torture doom (a term that, while somewhat silly, I've come to accept as a fairly legitimate description of the style) are the same as those I have with funeral doom as a whole (torture doom's arguable parent.) Funeral doom launched with bands like Skepticism and Thergothon, whose unique styles and brilliant songwriting helped establish funeral doom as a unique and fascinating entity of its own. Unfortunately, most of the musicians out there who loved these bands didn't understand the finer aspects of what made them so great, and ended up making simplified, stripped-down versions of these sounds that weren't nearly as revelatory. The component elements- simple, big riffs, slow pacing, seemingly static percussion, deep growls- were taken to be the sum of the music, missing out on all the subtle elements which truly made those bands what they were in terms of quality. Much of it has to do with mood- Thergothon's paeans to existential sorrow and the irrelevance of the individual in the face of the universe and Skepticism's mixture of melancholy and seemingly pantheistic glory in the study of mankind's relation to nature were replaced with what amounted to Peaceville doom/death's weepy, gothic self-pity. Similarly, Wormphlegm's crushing inevitability and demonic sense of occult victimization was instead replaced with simple, bland stories of rape, torture, and murder no more interesting than the average death metal album.

Like funeral doom, torture doom does have its share of worthwhile artists who carve their own niche out of an overdone sound- in fact, as the years have worn on, it seems that torture doom has slowly begun to distance itself from the plain Wormphlegm worship of yesteryear and created a fertile ground for unique, interesting artists- my next writeup will be a quick look at a handful of torture doom's worthwhile constituents. Still, Wormphlegm reigns, in my mind, as the king of torture doom, and a king of heavy metal in general, proving just what can be done with the musical elements that others so carelessly throw away.

Get Into: Catharsis (and Holy Terror)

2012-02-02T03:29:00.003-05:00

If you are a straight up Metal Dude who has never really listened to hardcore, here's some shit that should hook you in. For the last couple days I've been completely immersed in the world of Holy Terror. Unlike beatdown or crustcore or powerviolence or fastcore, Holy Terror isn't really a subgenre, because it's hard to pin down why these bands sound different from anybody else playing d-beats and breakdowns. It's more of a movement of like-minded bands, and it all radiated out from Integrity during the 90s. While Hatebreed were perfecting a streamlined, punchy brand of jock aggression, Integrity were using some similar elements to develop music with a completely different feel. They worshiped Cro-Mags and Discharge, but also paid careful attention to the sounds and symbols of early extreme metal. Even on their first album, Those Who Fear Tomorrow, Integrity were beginning to bring the stark brutality and lofty drama that have become the Holy Terror aesthetic.

The name is derived from The Church of Holy Terror, a theosophist cult founded by Integrity frontman Dwid Hellion. It has roots in the Process Church of The Final Judgment, as well as the ancient gnostic tradition, and seems like a kind of Satanic re-interpretation of Christianity. Or something like that. But being a Holy Terror band never meant toeing Dwid's ideological line, or even sounding a lot like Integrity. What these bands had in common was imagination: Hardcore had been a rigidly prosaic genre of music, obsessing over politics, scene beef, or tough-guy bravado, but Holy Terror bands pushed beyond that, striving towards a kind of spiritual revelation. They wanted to create eschatological hardcore, not just bemoaning the coming apocalypse but actively rallying the troops for the final battle.

Of everything in this vein I've heard thus far--and there's still a lot more to hear--Catharsis evoke the most classically "apocalyptic" atmosphere. Their two full-lengths, Samsara (1997) and Passion (1999), are as grandiose as hardcore gets, and do pretty much everything a good metal album should do. Catharsis can hardly be accused of aping Integrity's monolithic thrash'n'chug. Instead, they raced through intricate, through-composed songs full of exultant leads and some pretty grim tremolo harmonies. Tracks like "Choose Your Heaven" have far more genuine melody than "epic crust" ever did. They did draw on the formal tropes of primitive metallic hardcore--the thrashing fast parts, the half-time buildups, the chug breakdowns--but these show up less as discrete musical building blocks than as fleeting moments within a torrent of rage pouring over everything in its path. They did some pretty weird shit too, like the last two tracks on Passion. "Desert Without Mirages" is a surprisingly convincing cut of brooding metallic reggae, and "Sabbat" is based on a sample of that wailing Mediterranean folk singing you might know from the latest Rotting Christ album or The 300. Totally pretentious gestures, especially from the perspective of the hardcore rulebook, but this is the kind of daring, outrageous stuff that makes music fun to listen to.

Their frontman, Brian, brings some totally bestial roars that wouldn't be out of place on a black-thrash album, as well as a strongly defined anarchist agenda. He was apparently known for long-winded preachiness, but this must be based more on his monologues between songs than the lyrics themselves, which often aren't overtly political. From the song titles and moments of intelligible singing, it seems like they're mostly about the destruction and/or subversion of Christian ideals. But I think his lyrics do have a political significance. My guess is that Catharsis have less to do with today's bullshit "be nice to living things" anarchy than with the explicitly Satanic anarchy of the late 19th century, when opposition to state power was cast in religious terms. The first militant anarchists saw how conservative justifications of state power drew heavily on old theological arguments, and aligned their war against the god-like Sovereign with a war on the sovereign God. For these guys, smashing the state was just part of a broader struggle to throw off millenia of internalized servitude.

Still, despite the fact that these guys were probably militant anti-theists, this is absolutely religious music. Filled with the wrath and jubilation of single-minded fanaticism, it's a fitting soundtrack to some ragged outland prophet calling down the doom of a decadent city. But for Catharsis, as for the other Holy Terror bands, spiritual experience isn't confined to the spectral "beyond" or its miraculous intrusions on our daily life. Rather, it's about a kind of material transcendence found in the violent ecstasy of the circle pit.

While I've become more and more interested in Holy Terror shit over the last couple years, I owe a big thank you to JGD of The Living Doorway for turning me on to more bands on this scene (including Catharsis) with his post on Ascension a few days ago. He's done a number of great posts on this stuff, as well as other strange and extreme relics from the 90s, a decade that's long been a glaring gap in my hardcore chronology ("Uhh... Converge? Hope Con? Refused?"). All the relevant Mediafire links are over there, along with some pretty hilarious write-ups. Here's Passion and here's Samsara. Check that shit out.

oh god oh man oh god oh man

2012-01-30T21:42:00.000-05:00

I'll touch on this briefly.

Well, there's not much to say, honestly. It's not like I can really say that this in particular is a defining moment of black metal's ultimate descent into decadence and irrelevancy, but I'm struck with an unbelievable level of disappointment just the same. Not for the book itself, really- I mean, what else should one expect- but in the idea that metalheads are still so infatuated with the symbols and signs of their subculture, devoid of any meaning or significance, that they would gladly pay for a bloody, recently-shit turd like this one if it looked like a hand throwing the horns. The same goes for the mentioned Sasha Grey movie- Christ, put all the mentioned characters in one room together and a denial of a "hipster motive" becomes the sort of foxhole atheism that just isn't useful. None of it's going to be good; I just hope that most people don't have the motivation to investigate them further.

One good point: it led me to this delightful thing.

Black Metal begins here

2012-01-29T01:43:00.001-05:00

Paganini's "Caprice for Solo Violin in G Minor, Op. 1/6." Before even Wagner and Grieg, the spirit lived in Paganini. He composed the caprices around 1817, and toured Europe in the early 1820s to astonished audiences who had never heard sounds like these coming out of a violin. A sallow-skinned, rail-thin, black-clad virtuoso, he was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil. He did nothing to dispel these rumors. You could consider him the Trey Azagthoth of the Romantic era, though that analogy is, of course, better turned on its head.

Paganini's prefiguration of black metal should be obvious enough to anyone with two ears and a brain, but I do want to direct your attention to this: listen to that ominous trembling sound as Kogan drags his bow across the strings. It's a bit like a trill, but each note is separately articulated, which requires insanely fast twitch on the left hand. What that produces is a kind of analogue distortion, along with a harmonic effect that's really close to the kind of two-string tremolo picking pioneered by Thorns, Mayhem, and Burzum in the early 90s. Hearing it torn out of a wooden instrument through sheer skill and force of will sends shivers down my spine.

I just started a new part-time job at a classical music venue, and heard this piece for the first time ever last night (and again tonight). It was performed by this guy, and he fucking tore it up.

Get Into: Hecate Enthroned

2012-01-26T01:13:00.005-05:00

It's been a while since I've done a proper "Get Into," and even longer since I've done one on an old black metal band! Time to get back to what I love.

You've probably heard of Hecate Enthroned, and probably know them as either Cradle of Filth wannabes or just some generic English black metal band. I can't speak to their later material, but lately I've been really enjoying their early shit. Their wordily-titled debut album, The Slaughter of Innocence, A Requiem for The Mighty, is a really enjoyable exercise in the lofty, sweeping, keyboard-embellished black metal of the ancient brood. Yes, Hecate Enthroned owes something to Cradle of Filth, particularly the vocalist's hair-raising shriek (which thankfully lacks the "angry duck" quality of Dani's early stuff), but they seem to have paid just as much attention to the Norwegian forefathers, especially Emperor.

My favorite track by far is album-opener "Beneath A December Twilight." Hecate Enthroned introduce themselves with a brooding disharmonic groove strongly reminiscent of "Wrath of The Tyrant" (in a good way), but just before the 2:00 mark they completely turn around and hit the fucking gas. The drummer drops a charging Slayer beat as the guitarists open up into an exultant harmonized melody that takes a full 8 measures to run its course. This sort of thing pretty much sets the tone for the album, and captures two of Hecate Enthroned's greatest strengths. First, they tend to write thrilling breaks and transitions, keeping the album interesting all the way through even when the guitars get a little same-y towards the middle. Second, they value pure ripping forward momentum, something that was lost in a haze of blastbeats as black metal became a formula. The other brilliant moment in this track, by the way, is 5:35. Just when you think you've heard it all, a crushing, much darker riff brings the song to a whole new level, setting up one of the most dramatic conclusions I've heard in a long time.

But it's the final full track, "The Danse Macabre," that hints at an even cooler Hecate Enthroned sound. Here their melodic sensibility is warped into something far nastier, and you can tell it's drawn from earlier writing sessions. I was curious to find out where the fuck this came from, and checked out their Promethean Shores (Unscriptured Waters) EP. Turns out I may like this even better than the full-length that followed it. This is some sick, primal shit--Second Wave black metal before it stopped drawing strength from the poison wells of death metal. Here, Hecate Enthroned still favor heavy guitars and power chords. They infuse their riffage with darker harmonic ideas, so that some proper dissonance creeps in around the edges, and they play fast sections that rip even harder than those on The Slaughter... The keyboards often provide an interesting extra dimension, instead of simply reinforcing guitar ideas or adding flamboyant embellishments. Every track is killer. I chose the sprawling "A Graven Winter" because it's fucking brutal. But you also have to hear the introduction to "An Ode For A Haunted Wood." So I stuck that at the end here.

Review: DBCR - Two (2) Song E.P.

2012-01-25T03:10:00.005-05:00

Two (2) Song E.P. by DBCR
Kenneth of local punk band DBCR got in touch with me about reviewing his band's new 7", and had the class and generosity to send me an actual physical record! Needless to say, I couldn't refuse. Here are my thoughts.

If I remember correctly, DBCR stands for something along the lines of "Drunk Belligerent Confrontational Rock," and the band's bellicose self-presentation amplifies this message. Needless to say, this creates certain expectations--GG Allin? Pussy Galore? The Dwarves? The Cramps?-- and I was interested to hear how these guys approached their time-honored concept. I was immediately struck by their subtlety. Rather than blasting us with distortion and feedback, the two guitarists wield a warm, rich fuzztone. They skillfully play off of one another, creating interesting textures and moving in and out of unison at just the right times. Rather than incoherently foaming at the mouth, frontman Mike favors an articulate yell reminiscent of early-80s American hardcore vocalists like Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, and Jello Biafra, cramming tons of words into compelling vocal patterns.

If the two songs on here are meant to show two sides of DBCR, or two possible futures for their sound, then I strongly hope they follow the precedent set by their leading track, "Let Them Eat Bikes." It opens with a single guitar, on one channel, thrashing out the main riff and embellishing it with squiggly fret runs. In these first 10 seconds DBCR manage to give the song a definite character and direction. Before the drums even enter, I can already hear the badass groove. Without even hearing the bass, I know how this is gonna sound: DBCR have fused Sonic Youth and Motorhead into a single riffing style, and they make this improbable combination sound inevitable. It all unfolds from there, gloriously, with the drummer locked into the riff and the vocalist pushing ahead. He fumes, and occasionally gives in to full-on rage with a very convincing scream (my guess is he's played in straight up hardcore bands). This is a perfect punk rock single, a mailbomb of righteous anger crammed into a deceptively polished, catchy package.

B-side "Reverse Broken Window Theory" sounds like, well, a B-side. This is the slow jam, and while it's supposed to complement the energy of the first track it just makes me want to hear "Let Them Eat Bikes" again. The bluesy leads, rumbling basslines, and tom-heavy drumming of the verses owe a lot to The Birthday Party, which is cool, but I don't hear any of their power or danger. Melodically, there's just not much going on: the guitar and vocal lines kind of lack a raison d'etre, as if they're mostly hanging around to support the lyrics (which are admittedly cool). I'm also not a huge fan of the cleaner, deeper vocals here, partly because they remind me of Fugazi-era Ian MacKaye (not my thing). They're well performed, and I'd much rather listen to DBCR than fucking Fugazi, but this sound is just nowhere near as cool as the "barely restrained ranting asshole" thing on the first track.

On the basis of their sounds alone, DBCR definitely qualify as "ballsy" and "pissed," but I'm not sure I hear the "confrontational" or "belligerent"--the music is simply too clean and accessible. It's the lyrics, though, that make the difference, and I think they're actually central to what these guys are doing. While some bands rage against Christians, some rage against politicians, and some rage against posers, DBCR rage--eloquently--against affluent NYC hipsters and the plague of gentrification. This is urbanist punk rock, music oriented towards the defense of the rough, ugly spaces inhabited by working people and genuine weirdos. Armed with social theory and keen bullshit detectors, DBCR are not afraid to bash bike-normativity, "greening," and the cosmetic reconstruction of neighborhoods as skirmishes in the class war constantly waged by this city's rich against its poor. If "Let Them Eat Bikes" laments New York becoming a playground for successful graphic designers in cardigans, "Reverse Broken Window Theory" proposes a novel solution--fucking shit up. That's what punk's about, boys and girls.

My guess is that DBCR started off as the semi-joke band of a few veteran dudes, but quickly evolved into something more serious in all respects. That's a promising trajectory, especially since they haven't lost their sense of humor. I love the notion of a rock 'n' roll band that is also a sociological critique, and I am digging the blend of hooks and hate. As the weather gets warmer I'll definitely be jamming "Let Them Eat Bikes," and hoping for a new DBCR release with a slightly rawer vibe and more of that sick Motoryouth sound.

Fuck it, just download this EP for free.

Spewings From The Pit: Draize, Ruin Lust, Consumption, and Gang Signs (2/15/12)

2012-01-23T04:25:00.002-05:00

The last two weeks have been a bit of a mid-winter festival for me. When I haven't been at work, I've been going to shows, working on music, staying out until the wee hours with my bros, sleeping until the afternoon, and chilling the fuck out. But "festivals end as festivals must," and now I'm ready to post your fucking asses off. Two shows in particular left me with more tinnitus than usual, a sore neck, and some angry muscles. I thought I'd start by giving you a brief report on the first one. (Edit: It's not as brief as I'd intended. Whoops.)

On the coldest night of the year thus far I trudged across the concrete tundra to The Acheron, a murky warehouse venue where cyclopean amps hang from the ceiling on giant chains. Yeah, pretty fucking kvlt. The Acheron is special because it's a DIY venue dedicated to extreme music in all its forms, and in under two years of existence it's become a cornerstone of the NYC metal and hardcore scenes. In fact, it's a place where these communities cross-pollinate to the point of indistinction, and it's not uncommon to see bills defined less by genre than by the overall feel of the music and/or friendships between band members. Last Sunday's show was definitely one of these, mixing hardcore with crust, sludge, and black/death metal.

I missed the first act, some band called Nailed Shut, but arrived in time for Gang Signs. This power trio took the stage in Giants jerseys to celebrate a victory in some pro football game, and proceeded to bang out jacked, bulging riffs with an energy that completely justified their jock attire. While the music's intent was clear--it's about headbanging--it was hard to place stylistically. That, of course, is a good thing! After some thought, I've concluded that Gang Signs are basically a sludge band, but one that draws more on death metal than trad-doom and hardcore for its sonic building blocks. This is a pretty cool combination, but there's one problem--in my book, sludge pretty much fucking sucks. While Gang Signs' crisp, intricate riffs were far more interesting (and far heavier) than standard sludge fare, I still felt let down when cliche swinging "southern" rhythms undermined what could have been genuinely crushing grooves.

Nevertheless, in the course of their set Gang Signs brought me from "unconvinced" to "impressed and curious." They unleashed a fucking killer final song, working surprisingly pretty harmonic textures into an otherwise dense onslaught of chug and swagger. In this way, they brought the grim heaviness of masters like High On Fire while slyly hinting at the "fun" genre sludge has become. In the final analysis, I think a lot of TBO readers will really dig Gang Signs' blend of creative songwriting and blunt trauma. My hatred of sludge is--to some degree--a subjective thing, so it says a lot that I found these guys convincing, and that I've had this much to say about them! They'll probably show up here again. Check them out.

If Gang Signs were an example of how to do something interesting with a kind of shitty genre, Consumption were an example of how to do something sorta lame with a sound that's inherently awesome. This band plays extremely straightforward crustcore, crustcore so typical I would play it for you if you asked me what the fuck "crustcore" meant. (For those who don't know, it's basically the more metallic side of d-beat hardcore, which means that the guitar tone is heavier, the vocals are closer to metal screams, and you might hear some palm mutes and slow parts.) If you're a huge fan of the genre and live in the New York area, then you might want to see them, but otherwise this band is basically a placeholder.

To their credit, Consumption were much tighter than the norm for this kind of music. Their hands blurred with the speed of their picking, and they made it sound natural to play d-beats at thrash speeds. They certainly brought a few cool riffs and a nice breakdown or two. But the fact that these moments stood out to me was a glaring sign that the songwriting lacked character. Consumption are certainly not a bad band, but unless they start refining their riffage and diversifying their song structures they'll remain another symptom of the current d-beat glut.

In between sets I huddled around the space-heater next to a couple guys from the evening's headlining band, Draize, who had come up from Boston. I had never heard them before, but my friend had predicted I'd be into it. He was right. I'm not kidding when I say that Draize are one of the most extreme hardcore bands going today. They moved quickly from frantic d-beat and insane gravity blasting (I'm pretty sure those were gravity blasts???) into cthonic pit riffage, sprawling passages of ringing open chords that rarely led straight back into the fast stuff. It wouldn't make sense to call these breakdowns, because they weren't just moments of release--they were actually the center of music. Draize's songs revolved around hostile lacunae waiting to open wide, to exert command over every body in the room even as they effaced all traces of humanity. This crushing abstraction distanced Draize from traditional hardcore bands, and--to my ears--gave them a kinship with the strangest and most intense reaches of extreme metal. I was reminded of the colossal beatdown sounds of the legendary Straight Savage Style, as well as the breakdown-happy metalcore of fellow Bostonians New Lows.

While Draize's sound was impressive enough, this was also a case where the frontman truly mattered. Tommy Draize wasn't just a sick vocalist, he physically embodied his band, linking each riff to an elegant, clearly-defined gesture of wrenching violence. He whipped his limbs around with such force that he seemed to carve out a space for himself, literalizing the notion of "stage presence." Between his brutal hardcore dancing and his militant skin-punk attire, the guy came off like someone Not To Be Fucked With, but turned out to be an upbeat and super friendly dude (I still wouldn't fuck with him, though). Draize are an amazing band, and TBO readers will definitely dig this shit. It just doesn't get heavier or nastier. They've got a record out, and some dope merch. Check 'em out.

After Draize, a hardbitten contingent remained to see local heroes Ruin Lust, one of the only actual black metal bands to come out of the new crop of USBM bands. Strictly speaking, Ruin Lust play war metal or black/death, and they unloaded on The Acheron with a withering wave of tremolo fuzz and thick blastbeats. I'd really enjoyed listening to their rough demo tracks, but that night the show was more impressive than properly enjoyable. In this live setting the guitars disintegrated into pure white noise, obscuring the finely crafted riffs that help set Ruin Lust apart from the legions of "bestial black metal" bands. It must be really hard to strike the right balance, so I'm not complaining, I just hope they're able to place more emphasis on melody the next time I see them. The sound problems did, however, allow me to focus more on the drummer, who was going to town on his kit with the abandon of an Iron Age warrior, looking up from his blastbeats to release powerful screamed vox in support of the guitarist/growler. Overall, the set was deafeningly loud and passionately delivered, and I came away thoroughly convinced that these guys are the real deal. I was also lucky enough to receive a free demo tape with a much better mix from their guitarist, Joe, and I'll be reviewing that on here shortly. In the meantime, download the rough demo or actually buy the actual demo.

I would write a more elegant conclusion to this post, but I am falling asleep and have to go to work tomorrow. Blargh!

Stoked for the new Marduk full-length?

2012-01-23T04:03:00.006-05:00

I didn't hear this when it came out last spring, and shame on me for that. It rips. I have no idea what "Headhunter Halfmoon" means, but it sounds grim as hell, and it's a perfect vocal hook. The guitars and drums, of course, grind onwards into joyous oblivion. After years of Stupid Slow Stuff, Marduk have finally remembered what they do best.

P.S. I was working on a real post tonight, I swear, but then I had to write a job app! Sorry! Coming tomorrow, a review of two killer metallic hardcore shows from last week.

Some of my favorite RAC asskickers

2012-01-21T20:33:00.002-05:00

A quick addendum, in deference to some concerns of Pavel's. I think it goes without saying that I'm a long way away from being a proponent of any sort of national socialist or white power ideology. I've never been affiliated with it and consider it wrongheaded and misguided at the very least. However, I'm as staunch a proponent of freedom of speech in art as there is, regardless of how hugely I may disagree with its ideological origin or lyrical message. I believe that every single person should have a voice in art no matter how unpopular that voice may be, and I also believe that there's substantial value to exposing yourself to viewpoints very unlike your own. I listen to many bands who espouse values I am massively opposed to- white power, Christianity, communism- because I'm confident enough in my stances on ideological issues to feel perfectly comfortable having them challenged. Moreover, I keep art completely and utterly separate from ideology and do not make choices about what music to listen to based on the people who make it. If a song is great, a song is great, and that's where it ends for me.

In addition, I'd like to say that my musical appreciation of RAC, NSBM, or any similar music is not at all indicative of someone ignorant of the reality of white power ideologies. In my home region of central Florida, the metal scene has a fairly large contingent of people who subscribe to such ideologies in varying degrees. I have spoken to them, been at shows with them, and associated with them outside of the music scene. Each one has known that I believe their stances to be incorrect, as they believe mine to be incorrect, and the vast majority of the time we've been able to have civil, intelligent debate about the subjects without any recreations of "American History X" occurring. I firmly believe that the way such ideologies are portrayed by many extreme anti-fascists is not only incorrect, but propagates the very ideologies they want to stamp out. Simply demonizing such people is not only ignorant, but serves to create a dynamic where white power groups are portrayed as a struggling, oppressed underdog. The best way to combat such ideologies is not through propaganda, but through open debate, discussion, and education. Otherwise, we run the risk of stereotyping, categorizing, and holding irrational prejudice against the very people we lambast for those same actions.

With that out of the way:

RAC is a fantastic musical genre, not only because the sound of it is so inherently pleasing, but because saying you enjoy it without exhibiting the appropriate amount of apologism for it is guaranteed to piss a lot of people off. Unfortunately for the more socially conscious among us, RAC happens to be just some of the most fun music on the planet. I'm a big fan of the style- more specifically, the variety that mostly appears from the '90s onwards, where the more thuggish, burly style of the early incarnations of the genre fuse with a more contemporary sense of pop-punk, making some of the most infectiously asskicking music on the planet. Here's a selection of five personal favorites of mine.

Final War - Aryan Pride

Final War basically just sounds like The Offspring gone RAC. Unbelievably catchy stuff with fast, propulsive rhythms, a great usage of keening lead guitar, and a well-delivered, ranting vocal style, it's a great intro to the RAC niche that I call my own. This track in particular is a fantastic one- the guitar dropout near the end, the "Whooaaaa!" gang vocals, and the brilliant lead guitar theme all bring to mind the fiercer edge of Cali skate punk with RAC's insistent, demanding flow.

Hate Society - Hail Blood & Honour

Hate Society might just be the most cheerful, enthusiastic RAC band on the planet. The sunny, bouncy style of their tunes brings to mind stuff like Sublime as much as Skrewdriver. "Hail Blood & Honour" (there have to be at least a hundred RAC songs with that title) is one of their catchiest and best. I love the overly gruff vocals contrasting with the phenomenal riffing. The verse-prechorus-chorus flow is so impossibly organic in that great pop-punk style that it's utterly incapable of being ignored.

Whites Load - 88!

Whites Load is actually a Ukrainian band that appears to be a side project of some bigger members of the NSBM scene from that country. Most of their material is more on the heavy metal side of the RAC equation, but "88!" off their sole full-length is a straightforward RAC rocker with a great chorus, simple, engaging structure, and probably the best solo I've ever heard in an RAC song. A pretty unknown entry in the RAC field, but definitely one worthy of attention.

Oidoxie - Terror Machine

Picking up the pace again is Oidoxie, who bring a classic pop-punk/RAC fusion with "Terror Machine." It's about as pure a mixture of the two styles as you can get: the rough-hewn vocals and tense, insistent melodic sense fuse beautifully with the enthusiastic, rollicking rhythms and gang-shouted declarations. Middle of the road stuff, perhaps, but definitely a great execution of a traditional style.

Race War - They Were Heroes

Race War just might be my favorite RAC band of all time. Not only do they have pretty good production, in contrast to the bulk of the genre, but they create a brilliant cross-section of RAC, traditional metal, and pop-punk with their style. Simple, engaging, and organic, their style is burly and powerful as well as agile and propulsive. "They Were Heroes" is probably my favorite track by the band; who knew so much mileage could be gotten out of the most bare-bones and primitive three chord riff imaginable? But the beautifully lucid drumming and inconceivably well-plotted vocal melodies make for a track that's as memorable as it is dangerous to play around your leftist friends.

Post your favorite RAC bangers in the comments!

In case you forgot, Tool is a great band

2012-01-18T22:30:00.003-05:00

An hour or two ago a Facebook friend of mine posted an open invitation to try and explain to her why Tool was any good, and why they were so popular. I took her up on it, and of course ended up writing way more than is socially acceptable for a Facebook comment. So I've worked it up into a Trial By Ordeal post. Because you, dear readers, should be convinced that Tool is a Fucking Dope Band. Kind of fitting that this little reminder of the obvious follows on the heels of Noktorn's much-needed defense of Cannibal Corpse.

I am not coming at this as a Tool expert, or anything of the sort. I haven't dug deep into their albums, and mostly heard individual songs on the radio in middle school and high school. But I'm always stoked when one of their songs comes on, and there are times when I just have to hit Youtube and jam out to some Tool. I don't think this disqualifies me to defend them, though. If anything, my scattershot experience of their music captures one of their greatest strengths. Tool excel at writing Big Hit Singles, and talking about why these are so cool is a lot more interesting than quibbling about the overall quality of their discography. I read that 10,000 Days had a ton of pointless filler on it, but if it also had "Vicarious"--and it did--then who the fuck cares?

What strikes me most about Tool is the dynamism of the music. Of course, it's not dynamic like Cryptopsy is dynamic--it's really repetitive. But even during the long hypnotic passages that open up in tracks like "Schism," Tool are doing things and going somewhere. They're adding layers, developing themes, etc. The simple guitar and bass parts mesh together into something much more than the sum of its parts. And, perhaps most important, Tool actually know how to play a crescendo! When the climactic change-up comes, it comes with tremendous force and grace. You really hear the music well up into something new, and yet it always seems like the new idea was hidden within what came before.

While the "tension and release" thing is undoubtedly a formula, the band makes it work. Their organic songwriting approach leaves a lot of room for them to truly play together. Tool thrives on a shared intuition, a sense for inflection and timing and harmony that's been built up through years of practice and probably one of those mystical innate connections. I was stoked about Tool at about the time I was just getting into Led Zeppelin, and to me the connection seemed natural and totally obvious: Part of the pleasure of listening to their music is simply hearing it produced. On the outer fringes of metal and punk, where musicianship is subordinated to songwriting, we tend to focus more on the riffs themselves than the fingers behind them. Bands like Tool remind us that how you play it matters too.

Of course, Tool are pretty "uncool" to like, and that can affect how people hear the music, even if they don't think so. And it's true, alt-metal was pretty fucking reprehensible. But these days, I don't really see Tool as a part of all that. Rather, it was a small part of what Tool are/were about, almost incidental to their music. While they borrow metal techniques, I think they have way more to do with goth than metal. They're a musical and spiritual link between the primal occult weirdness of Killing Joke and Fields of The Nephilim and the whole tribal-industrial Burning Man thing that came into its own during the 90s. During the 80s, the members of Tool must've been tapped into bands further north on the West Coast like Red Temple Spirits and Savage Republic, who were building on UK goth, post-punk, and industrial at a time when their compatriots on the American scene were busy selling out hardcore and inventing "indie rock." Indeed, the true musical analogue of Tool might actually be Neurosis, who drink from the same aesthetic ferment and take a strikingly similar approach to songwriting (though not, usually, with Tool's elegance).

Tool are one of those rare bands that are popular for doing something right instead of doing something easy. They fused sounds and ideas from throughout the nasty underbelly of the 1980s, and then shaped them into songs that somehow do the pop thing without really being pop songs at all. For all your contempt of things that don't have blastbeats, think about it--a 9 minute epic filled with drone and subtly shifting time signatures just isn't a pop song. And yet it gets stuck in your head and, if you're not an uptight square, makes you sing along with Maynard and pound on the steering wheel. Sure, Tool became the mainstream, accessible face of dark underground rock, but they also never stopped being dark underground rock. That's not selling out, it's winning.

Don't worry, TBO hasn't gone mainstream. We'll be back by tomorrow or later tonight with more posts on weird bands that scream in your face and want you to die.

Get into: Cannibal Corpse

2012-01-18T01:33:00.000-05:00

The very idea of this article undoubtedly seems ridiculous. Why, exactly, would I need to promote Cannibal Corpse, perhaps the biggest, most mainstream-visible, highest selling death metal band of all time? No one needs any help "getting into" Cannibal Corpse- they're probably the first death metal band that half the metalheads out there were exposed to. They're the closest thing the death metal scene has to Metallica: a massive, widely-known band that forms the gateway to a whole genre of music for many. And, like Metallica, they're often widely despised and have, especially over the past five years or so, become a popular target of historical revisionism by those looking for an instant appearance of iconoclastic celebrity, saying that the band has always sucked, relied on shock value, and does nothing more than damage the mainstream culture's impression of death metal as an artistic entity through their obscenity and tunelessness.

Of course, as is usual given my feelings on extreme music and its relation to the greater culture, all that sounds wonderful to me. Let the mainstream culture be put off; it's not as though I was clamoring for their involvement in the first place. Obscenity? The absence of melody? A refusal to experiment? Where are these elements more at home than in death metal. I take no issue with a person hating Cannibal Corpse; frankly, the band is probably better without that person as a fan.

What I will take issue with is people mischaracterizing Cannibal Corpse as a generic, faceless, disposable band. Most often these sorts of statements tend to come from people who consider Portal to be death metal's ultimate goal; as someone who considers, say, Enmity to take up that title instead, my opinion tends to differ. Anyway, dismissing Cannibal Corpse as irrelevant is a statement so half-cocked and poorly thought out that it verges on objectively untrue. Not only was Cannibal Corpse an utterly indispensable part of making death metal what it is today, but the band's music itself is more often than not so excellent that they'd have a place at the adult's table even without their historical pedigree. Very few bands in metal history have managed to go so long and so far without ever compromising their personal artistic vision- while other death metal bands in the mid-'90s were busy experimenting with clean vocals, aping Cynic, and adding synths, Cannibal Corpse were plugging away on their own path, staunchly refusing to puss out or change in any fashion.

Stating that Cannibal Corpse's style is that of a "generic death metal band" is a gross misinterpretation of reality. Considering how long the band has been kicking around, they're some of the people responsible for establishing those aesthetic tropes themselves- if anything, generic death metal bands sound like Cannibal Corpse, not the other way around. But even this, I think, is incorrect, as no band truly manages to sound like Cannibal Corpse but themselves. The styles of riffing, drumming, vocals, and songwriting inherent to Cannibal Corpse's music are incredibly unique and nearly impossible to imitate, as they're the result of a band that has existed for over two decades: the style has been rarefied to the point where attempting to emulate it is a fool's errand.

Cannibal Corpse has also always been a band unconcerned with the scene politics of oldschool versus newschool. Contrary to popular belief, Cannibal Corpse's musical style has changed dramatically over the course of their career- no, they've never added arbitrary elements like acoustic interludes, but they've sharpened, refined, and advanced on both a compositional and technical level. Cannibal Corpse's last few albums (without a doubt some of the most consistent and excellent death metal records released by such a venerable band) have positioned them right at the forefront of modern death metal, but even then the band's thrash roots are readily apparent. Cannibal Corpse somehow turns the gulf between oldschool, thrash-infused death metal and modern brutal death into a fine line and manages to walk it without difficulty. A recent video interview with George Fisher showed him lauding modern deathcore bands, and not as an attempt to curry favor with a younger generation: Cannibal Corpse is composed of guys who don't give even a fraction of a fuck about the scene's opinion of them, and it's resulted in an undeniably honest and true breed of artistic integrity.

In addition, though it's not a hugely important part of what makes them so good, it seems that many downplay the technical ability of Cannibal Corpse simply due to Paul Mazurkiewicz' restrained, steady style. Not only does this do Mazurkiewicz a disservice- what he lacks in flash he more than makes up in timing, intensity, and musicality- it ignores the rest of the band's abilities, with the exception of bassist Alex Webster (who absolutely deserves praise for his bass technique, but not at the expense of the rest of the band.) Not only is the guitarwork incredibly fast, technical, and dextrous even by modern extreme metal standards, but the riffcraft is organic, memorable, and exciting despite its ludicrous density. And of course, there's always the matter of the much-maligned George Fisher, who is diregarded for the same reasons the band as a whole is and in a similarly incorrect manner. Fisher's vocals are unbelievably forceful and savage, combining an older, more shouting technique with a modern sense of tone. His ability to swing from low to high without faltering is remarkable, as is his impressively clear enunciation as well as the sheer speed with which he can deliver lyrics during the music's most intense moments. He is, without a doubt, a consummate death metal vocalist.

Take the track above as an opportunity to learn, and pay attention to the following features:

-The perpetually shifting, evolving rhythms which reverse on themselves in a manner that's abrupt but not jarring.
-The completely ludicrous riffing which is very clearly rooted in thrash but just as clearly death metal in nature, with a note selection that is convoluted and brutal but absolutely logical in its construction.
-The magnificently textured bridge riff at 1:42 which does exactly the same thing that others laud Ulcerate for but is ignored because it comes from Cannibal Corpse.

That's about it, but I can't help but think I'm forgetting something. Wait, I've got it.

-The completely unbelievable amount of fucking ass the whole thing kicks.

(As a small addendum: I've met the guys from Cannibal Corpse numerous times milling around at metal shows. They regularly come out to the local metal bars to support the small, local bands that come from Tampa. Every time I've spoken with any of them, they have been incredibly kind, gracious, and appreciative of the support their fans give them. I have never heard any of them ever say an unkind word about anyone. They are true metalheads who have not forgotten their earliest days and refuse to let their success swell their egos or diminish their appreciation for the little guys. Very, very good people.)

New Cannibal Corpse- unanticipated level of dopeness?

2012-01-17T01:02:00.001-05:00

Very cool new song. The riffing actually surprised me a good deal; it's still distinctly Cannibal Corpse, but doesn't seem quite as starkly chainsawing and dissonant as stuff off albums like "The Wretched Spawn"- honestly, the main riff sounds a lot like something Vader would do. It feels like this is a really natural progression from "Kill" with little hints of that modernized thrashiness off "Gore Obsessed." Sounds like a really good one is coming down the pike!

holy fuck I didn't know that Conqueror covered this song

2012-01-14T06:31:00.004-05:00

I just posted about Slaughter, and when I went to find the Youtube link for "The Curse" I saw this. Of course, Conqueror completely strip the song of its groove and replace it with pure militant bashing. And of course, it's a massacre. Hail Canada!

Get Into: Slaughter

2012-01-14T06:15:00.005-05:00

I stuck this song on a mix for a party tonight, and it was the first time I'd thought about Slaughter in a while. They're really good, and if you haven't actually listened to them by now you damn well should. People talk about them as "death metal pioneers" because they played thrash so fast it wasn't thrash anymore, but this doesn't sound much like what death metal became, or even what most of it was at the time (mid to late 80s). If anything, Slaughter was like a crossover punk band that was really into Hellhammer. But while crossover tended towards spazziness, Slaughter was all about continuous, bludgeoning tremolo/chug attack. There's a liquid flow to the music.

Everything on Strappado is awesome, but "The Curse" is my favorite track. It's based on these thrashing micro-riffs that all follow the same basic rhythmic form but stand out clearly from one another, and the transition from each to the next feels totally natural, absolutely necessary. It seems like such an obvious way of writing metal, but I've heard very little in this vein. "The Curse" clearly came straight from the gut. It will hurt your neck.

Get into: Waka Flocka Flame

2012-01-13T01:31:00.000-05:00

"When my little brother died, I said 'Fuck school.'"

It's surprising and welcome how rapidly hip-hop has settled into the metal scene over the past few years. With the must of nu-metal thoroughly blown away and urban aesthetics more fundamentally accepted through deathcore, slam, and similar styles, a metalhead also being a hip-hop fan is rapidly becoming the rule rather than the exception to it. A few years back, proclaiming a love of both styles would have at the very least raised some eyebrows and more commonly inspired snorts of derision; nowadays it barely elicits a second glance. Hip-hop and metal aren't fusing in any obvious way (apart from in the aforementioned deathcore and slam, which is a precarious statement at best,) but it's to the benefit of both. It's definitely a joy for me, as although my first love is and will probably always be metal, hip-hop is certainly my second passion, and quite often makes up just as much if not more of my everyday listening than metal.

With hip-hop's inroads in metal becoming firmer by the day, there becomes established a certain canon of hip-hop artists that are acceptable to the sensibilities of metalheads. Like post-metal artists bring metalheads into the post-rock fold, there's certainly a selection of hip-hop artists whose immediate style can be immediately identified as appealing to metalheads. Much to the fortune of both hip-hop and metal, most of these artists are pretty good; beyond the obvious (and typically lackluster) Necro, Ill Bill, and similar artists, there's other, very quality material out there that receives acclaim in both the metal and hip-hop communities: Odd Future, Tech N9ne, and Death Grips are but a few names worthy of real attention from all over the musical spectrum. Still, I personally believe that if there's a single hip-hop artist active today that best captures extreme metal's ethos, style, and overall atmosphere, it's one that makes no particular effort to appeal to any crowd other than that of hip-hop: Waka Flocka Flame.

I like to think that it's not just my metalhead mindset that makes comparing Waka's overall role in hip-hop to slam death's position in heavy metal as a whole. Both are brute, reductionist interpretations of their respective parents, as equally derided for their simplistic aesthetics as they are revered for their postmodern atavism. What you get from a Waka Flocka Flame track is very similar to what you get from a Devourment track: simplicity to the point of absurdity, incredible catchiness, and an insistent, bone-rattling heaviness which taps into the most primitive, reptilian part of the brain. Metalheads will immediately latch onto Waka's typical production style: bassy, ominous, and melodramatic, like a Wagner piece reinterpreted in the theater of urban criminality. The unapologetic forcefulness of Waka's music, in some ways both a progression and regression from the crunk sound which dominated the latter half of the '00s, is immediately recognizable to a fan of Waking the Cadaver: they have similar artistic goals and ways of achieving them. Waka regularly states in interviews that he's "not a rapper," and the argument could be made that he's correct: his words are not meant to be lyrically advanced or clever. They're confrontational, straightforward threats directed at various enemies.

Turn cops to Christians and choppers to claymores and the content of Waka's music isn't massively different from death or black metal. Listen.

New Begging For Incest tomorrow

2012-01-13T00:05:00.002-05:00

One of the most hated bands in the European slam scene is finally coming out with their first full-length after numerous lineup changes. BFI's first material was pretty straightforward, stripped-down Waking the Cadaver worship, but the track above, off the new release, indicates a more blended combination of styles that ends up coming off like a more distinctly wiggerized Short Bus Pile Up. Sounds like an essential middle-of-the-road slam release for aficionados of the style.

Review: Alaric - Alaric

2012-01-11T02:24:00.001-05:00

How can I possibly hope to measure up to the epic posting spree perpetrated by Noktorn over the last week? I'm not sure it's possible. But I do have a pretty cool interview with Amebix's The Baron coming up, and I just received two sick Ride For Revenge promos from Finland's Kvlt Records. For now I'll start with this, which I've been meaning to write for a while.

Alaric is an Oakland band composed of metal and punk veterans playing apocalyptic post-punk, and this fall they released a self-titled debut album on 20 Buck Spin. This is one of the first full-lengths to emerge from the new wave of punkish goth bands, so I was pretty excited to hear it. At first listen, it is impressive indeed. In opener "Eyes" and second track "Ugly Crowds," Alaric approach over thumping midtempo toms with riffs reminiscent of Christian Death and Rudimentary Peni. Despite the overt gothiness of all the individual elements at play, these combine into a thunderous bombast that has more to do with the band's roots in metal and crust. The chorus of "Eyes," which first hits at 2:54, is a great example of this approach. Between the power-chord thrashing and backing chorus of deep male vox, it is seriously ominous.

Alaric have also written a couple "hit singles," really memorable, somewhat faster songs that sound closer to old-school deathrock or straight-up punk. "Your God" starts kind of slow but eventually bursts into a clever, irreverent kiss-off of a chorus--"I'm so tired of your God/cause he acts like a jealous child..." Towards the end of the album they improve on this winning formula with "Animal," which is gripping from beginning to end. A really nasty chugging buildup gives way to a long, intricate chorus. It's built up from smaller phrases that seem to push off from one another, like bodies in the circle pit this song will undoubtedly generate.

Still, Alaric doesn't really reward repeat listens, and I think it might've been better as a very good 4-song EP than an uneven 8-song album. Too often it simply drags, even during the better songs. And when the weaker tracks yield a payoff, as in the reasonably anthemic chorus of "Alone," it's not enough to justify the minutes where not much is happening. One problem is that Alaric rely almost entirely on their vocalist to carry the music, and that's simply an unreasonable expectation to place on the singer of a punk/goth/metal band. There's plenty of space here for cool riffing, especially on the verses, but I just don't hear many powerful hooks or interesting textures. The other problem is that Alaric seem too wedded to playing slow. I think it's an attempt at being grandiose and atmospheric, but playing slow without cool riffing is just plain playing slow--low on energy, and inherently not as cool as playing fast. It says something that "Laughter of The Crows," the album's longest track, finally gets exciting when Alaric pick it up just before the 4:40 mark. Alaric want to be some kind of slow, "doomy" goth band, relying more on atmosphere than overt riff-power, but they've failed to realize that atmosphere comes from riffs.

While I've harped on about the songwriting, I think what this comes down to is an identity problem. Alaric are at their strongest when they draw confidently on metal and hardcore, flowing into the aggressive playing that comes naturally to them. When they restrain these impulses in attempts to be more indirect, to be more stereotypically "post-punk," it just backfires--They're not doing justice to themselves or their chosen genre. I'm on the fence about this album, but I'm definitely optimistic about Alaric. These dudes just need to loosen up and rock the fuck out.

Thanks to Dylan at The Bone Reader for hooking me up with this promo. The review will be reposted to his site pretty soon, but TBO readers get it first.

P.S. This band does have a pretty cool name. Aside from sounding badass, it's a pun. Alaric menaced the later Roman Empire as king of the Goths.

Blog plug - A Lifetime In Dark Rooms

2012-01-07T08:29:00.000-05:00

I figured you might be tired of reading overblown appraisals of the significance of a website, so here's something you might enjoy.

A Lifetime In Dark Rooms is to horror films what Trial By Ordeal is, in some ways, to metal. Handled solely by Cliff Evans, the blog contains some of the best reviews/analyses of horror films that I've ever seen. With a keen understanding of film-making's elements as well as an intuitive grasp of what makes a truly great horror film, he dissects horror films in an unapologetically academic manner, treating them as art first, films second, and "horror" and the grab-bag of stereotypes the word invokes last. His writing is intelligent and analytical but eminently readable, and of five or so films he's recommended that I've managed to check out so far, every one was excellent and unique. In another parallel to Trial By Ordeal, though, he doesn't let the academic tone of his work prevent him from analyzing work typically dismissed as prurient or exploitative: check out his brilliantly lucid two-part analysis of "A Serbian Film" for a firsthand example.

If you're into horror or intelligent analysis of film in general, you owe it to yourself to check this out. My only complaints are his somewhat erratic update schedule and perhaps consciously restricted article length- frankly, at the end of just about any of his reviews, I want to hear more about his interpretation of symbolism, cinematography, and atmosphere.

And though it's mentioned infrequently, he's a metalhead, too.

A long, strange story: An incomplete and half-remembered history of the Metal Archives (Part 3 of 3)

2012-01-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

This, I imagine, is where the accusations of self-indulgence and pretense will fly fast and thick. It's also where the narrative becomes the most fractured, as it's not only my story, but the sort of many other users on the Metal Archives, and many people in general. Trying to capture the point I have in mind is difficult, because I'm not sure there is a point- just an endless series of partial thoughts, feelings, and ideas, of contradicting statements and acts and probably no real resolution in sight. This is where my story and the story of the site converge, as well as where it ends- but it doesn't really end. Both are works perpetually in progress, and these pieces have only captured a small part of either. Maybe, though, you'll be able to glean something from it- unsatisfying, strange, and difficult as it may be.

~

On the waves of users: the first was older, more deranged, and more cynical. The second was less of all those things, but in reality, I've come to discover that the second wave of users were all just a half decade away from becoming the first. The '05 and '06 teenagers who joined up looked at the older users and wondered what the fuck happened- there rarely seemed to be a normal, happy, settled one among them. Of course, in a few years, life happened to us and we started to understand why so many people decay into mental illness, drug abuse, and other destructive walks of life. Some bad relationships, failed bids at college, and lingering unemployment quickly but the second wave in nearly the same position as the first- it just took some time, and by the time we got there, we'd basically forgotten that it was simply the resolution of what was nearly written in the stars. The site, with its freedom, weirdness, and propensity towards transgression didn't simply attract a bunch of freaks and then us as well. We were freaks, and so we were attracted to it as a result.

My writing reached its most ridiculous fever pitch around '08/'09, when I was dealing with a particularly destructive relationship, a sort of breakdown in my relationship with my family, and the looming sense that the direction I was going in life- my major in college in particular- had nothing to do with what I actually wanted. It's without a doubt the worst period of time I've experienced in my life. That being said, it was extremely productive in some respects: I wrote reams of reviews, wrote a ton of music, and experienced perhaps the most creatively fertile era I've had. Granted, I was hardly loving it while I was going through it- the misery was pretty all-consuming, and it's probably only for the writing and music that I didn't eat a bullet- but looking back, it makes much more sense than it did at the time. The funny thing about this is that I wasn't the only one doing it, and those insane, obsessive interactions with the Metal Archives that I detailed in the first entry were mirrored in many of the users around me. With many of us at the end of high school or the beginning of college, the economy rapid spiraling towards places unknown, and our personal lives dissolving around us, we poured our time and attention into the Archives- a sort of infinite realm of busywork with which we distracted ourselves from reality.

With the newest wave of users, there's a very different feel. The mid-teens which have just joined the site in the past few years, and will soon come to form the essence of the site itself, don't seem quite as damaged or bizarre as we did, and certainly not as much as those who first forayed into the forum's murky depths. They are, in a sense, normal, paralleling metal's increasingly mainstream position in the greater culture, and while they obsess over the database and reviews like we did, they do it for other reasons. We did it as an escape from misery- they do it out of a sense of duty and contribution. As kids who have grown up with the internet- the contemporary internet- they are more electronically fixated than any generation before. While my wave of users was raised with the internet as well, the internet mode of learning and culture had not quite fully asserted itself on the culture at large. Things were more organic and free-flowing; the newer wave, though, learns about metal through guides on various websites, acquiring the discographies of Mayhem and Deicide and Iron Maiden and voraciously devouring them all at once, structuring their exploration of art like they would the curriculum of a mathematics course. They don't go to shows much, nor do they buy music, nor hang out with other metalheads: they are isolated and commune with the music almost entirely through the internet. In many cases, for all they know, heavy metal might be something entirely fictional.

The new wave's obsessive interest in the Metal Archives- more numerical and quantified than ever before- isn't an expression of avoidance like ours was. It is instead, on a subconscious level, the only way they know to experience metal and feel like they're adequately contributing to it. With the absence of physical music, metalhead friends, or even local shows and bands in their lives, metal becomes something almost entirely digital, to be experienced, manipulated, and added to with the computer alone. The Metal Archives, in this respect, becomes a sort of symbol of the genre in their eyes; by contributing to the Archives, they get the sense that they are contributing to metal itself. Growing up with Wikipedia as an omnipresent force, they're better at seeing negative space than anyone else and, amusingly enough, appear to be terrified of it. The unknown must be known; gaps must be filled; the unattainable must be attained, and if impossible, should not be a goal. They are simultaneously the most capable and potential-filled people I've ever seen and those most unwilling to take advantage of it, so afraid of the possibility of failure and ignorant of the benefits of risk that they huddle, alone, dwelling in the comforting glow of the established and defined.

All armchair philosophy and sociology- and, of course, a topic for another, much larger article. We'll get back on track.

~

Everyone assumes that their home will always be as such, when in reality, it changes hands like anything else. When the forum started to shift in the direction it's heading now around '09, myself and many others in my wave of users were pretty cantankerous about it. You have no idea how many discussions I've had about the Archives which parallel a normal person's discussions about the different eras of "Saturday Night Live"- "this year was cool but shitty, this year was good but uncool, this year was just a big ball of shitty and uncool rolling around together." I'm smart enough to know that it's just human resistance to change. The Archives aren't worse than they were before- they're just different. And more importantly, they're not for me or my group of people anymore. The site has passed- in spirit, if not ownership- into the hands of the '07s and onwards, pushing it in a direction very different from its origin and certainly not one for the likes of me. I still post there from time to time, but it's more habitual than anything- day by day, it grows more foreign, and at one point or another in the future I'll likely fade out of the it entirely like most everyone does eventually.

The forum is, as a whole, much friendlier and more inviting than it used to be. Much bigger, too- as I said before, I remember the days where you knew every active poster by memory; now it's completely impossible. I'd say that the exchange for this (my own opinion, though many are inclined to agree) is that the level of discourse has gone down on average. The typical discussion on the older incarnations of the Archives tended to be more nuanced, with longer posts, deeper discussions, and a distinct sort of unified set of basic, concrete artistic values- as well as mercilessly underground, with threads about major bands sort of chuckled at by reflex, if still treated seriously. It was a forum for black metal tapes, forgotten private press thrash records, and the wild, untamed, experimental edge of the metal scene. Nowadays, it's closer to a "normal" metal forum than ever before: straightforward opinions, discussions that tend towards bigger bands, and a sort of plain, unadorned manner of conversation. The taste in music, also, has changed greatly. It seems to me that the userbase's overall tolerance for extremity has gone down, likely due to the larger, more mainstream nature of it. Discussions about brutal death, grind, and raw black metal were more frequent- Paysage d'Hiver was a common favorite, and discussions of deathcore were borderline verbatim (the reversal of which has been, of course, to my relief.) Now it's more traditionalist: power metal, oldschool or retro black and death, and modern, mainstream movements like post-metal and black/shoegaze.

There are four major events which I would say truly shaped the way the forum has turned. While the new form of the Archives isn't one that appeals to my sensibilities, I'm not going to sit here and complain about it like an old man decrying "this hip-hop music"; I'll accept that my era has come and gone. And since this is a story, at its heart, about people, these moments take the form of users: I believe in naming names (not to suggest the nefarious intent that turn of phrase naturally possesses,) especially since the my position there is more of an antique than anything and these names in particular greatly impacted the form of the Archives today. This, more than anything, might show the trajectory; they're not listed in chronological order, necessarily, because my memory fails me:

1. UltraBoris departs the site - While I've already discussed him at length in the previous installation, his leaving the Archives massively, if implicitly, changed the site. Even in its earliest incarnations, the staff of the Archives have tended to have a bit less in common with the average users than one would think: while, especially in the earliest phase, the users tended to be weird, deviant, and not entirely functional types, the staff were usually the more squared-away and normal: regular jobs, families, and possessing a certain level of mainstream acceptability that many of the users lacked. Still, among these types, there were still those who had a reputation as being a bit more fast and loose with the rules, willing to mingle and argue with the regular users, and generally not positioning themselves in a state of authority over others. UltraBoris was in many ways the figurehead of this set of the staff. He was playful, funny, and jovial, not taking his position as a moderator seriously and rarely, if ever, commenting on the actual staff work or policies of the site. In most regards, he was just a regular guy who loved metal and saw the moderator tag more as a way to make edits easily and get his reviews accepted quickly.

His leaving signaled the slow but steady erosion of this sort of moderator personality. Others continued after him but slowly fell off or were shown the door, leaving in place a more curt, professional, and strict staff with less tolerance for bullshit and a more authoritarian manner. Eventually, this led to the extremely permissive policy on freedom of speech getting progressively scaled back, and distanced the staff from the userbase in a big way. The days of being able to get into insult matches with moderators without a ban ever being a possibility is long gone- they simply don't have the time or patience anymore. It's probably this that I miss the most of anything.

2. The butterfly sisters take hold - The butterfly sisters, despite their name, were a set of male users from the second wave who were most known for their protracted, multi-page conversations amongst themselves in the forum's general section, almost always about personal, emotional issues that annoyed and alienated the other users. Each was renamed "Butterfly Sister X," where X was the name of a flower- another artifact of an older style of moderating, where users who weren't worthy of a ban might have their name or title changed to something insulting and relevant (I always liked one of mine: The Esteemed Noktornius I - "Writer, philosopher, apex of humanity.") It was an effective and funny way of reprimanding posters who, while at the core solid and musically intelligent, were straying into more obnoxious territory. The butterfly sisters, however, never really picked up on it. They were annoyed by the change and took issue with the staff of the site over it, but they continued to talk (and talk, and talk) about the minutiae of their personal lives basically unabated.

The Archives always had a sort of unwritten policy against excessive personal talk- it was, as elder administrator Nightgaunt often said, a metal forum first and foremost. With the existence of a general forum, personal discussion was bound to arise (I'm certainly not innocent of it,) but never had it become the focus of users' posting like it did with the butterfly sisters. Some attempts were made to staunch the bleeding, most severely by deleting the picture thread where users (female ones in particular) had begun to treat the site like Myspace, but the damage was done and the unspoken moratorium against the personal had essentially evaporated. Now it's nearly unrestricted, and as a result, the amount of actual interaction between users in the general forum essentially outstrips that of the metal forum- not helped by older members like me, who still want to talk to the same people but are disinterested in the overall musical taste of the forum in newer days. The forum is more social than ever, but it's also less metal.

3. Autothrall arrives - In the most intense period of the competition between hells_unicorn and I, there was a sort of race between us to see who the first user to 1000 reviews would be. In many ways, it was the highlight of the pseudo-rivalry we'd established, and a good chunk of the site's userbase was watching as we churned out review after review, perpetually seizing the lead, falling behind, and repeating in the rankings. There was a fair amount of excitement built up around it, and the two of us were so evenly matched that it was anyone's guess who would end up taking the crown. We both emerged as writers at about the same time and so far outstripped anyone else in numbers that it was a genuine showdown of the nerdiest, most metal variety. It was silly but fun, and the achievement of 1000 reviews for any individual user was a milestone that a lot of people thought difficult to imagine. Sometime in the twilight days of our informal competition, with both of us deep into the 900s with the finish line in sight, a user named Autothrall emerged from out of nowhere and began posting reviews at a completely absurd rate. He raced up the user rankings faster than anyone had before- we figured, of course, due to stockpiled reviews from his own site getting copy/pasted to the Archives. Through no fault of his own, the sheer speed and number with which he was posting reviews prematurely ended the competition simply because attaining 1000 didn't seem like a big deal anymore. I don't even remember who hit 1000 first now- I think it was hells_unicorn- but soon after, Autothrall usurped the top spot, and we realized that even without stockpiling, Autothrall wrote at a rate and with a consistency that was literally impossible for either of us to surmount. Now he sits at over 3000 reviews, with hells_unicorn and I hovering around at 1650 and 1500 respectively. The show was over.

Autothrall was fucking despised by a pretty big chunk of users (myself included) initially for a lot of different reasons. Making the race fizzle out was only a part of it. More importantly was the sense that he was a sort of interloper, a dark horse writer who showed up out of nowhere with no attachment to the site itself- similar to the reaction from employees when a company hires a manager externally instead of promoting from within. Moreover, his style of reviewing- tight, concise, professional, and magazine-like- and between this and the speed with which he rose to the top of the pile, he was viewed as a sort of mechanical nightmare of a reviewer, lacking the personality, uniqueness, and attachment to the community of other big-name writers. Of course, this was all just bad timing on his part- had he been attached to the community from the outset of his writing, he likely would have been more accepted, with his written voice's evolution on display for others and his interactions with other users helping to sculpt his place on the Archives. I've grown up since then and abandoned the juvenile resentment of him that I once had- while I'm still not personally very fond of his writing style, opposite as it is to mine, he's a solid, professional writer with a place at the table- but his legacy still stands.

By unintentionally cutting the legs out from under the reviewers on the Archives who enjoyed the persistent competition of reviewing, a lot of the energy and interest in it that had made the site such a great critical resource was lost. Autothrall isn't just the top reviewer- he has nearly double the number of the one under him, and isn't slowing down his pace at all. Everyone is aware that short of spontaneously combusting he'll never topped, and so goes a good deal of the excitement of the reviewing community. In some ways, it makes sense, though: Autothrall's jack-of-all-trades style does befit the new form of the Archives more than either my or hells_unicorn's more esoteric and specialized manner of writing. Ultimately, though, his arrival signaled a shift in the reviewing community of MA that has never really been recovered from.

4. Droneriot's failed suicide attempt - Super crazy, super drunk, super German user Droneriot (he'll hate my capitalization of his name) is one of the oldest users still kicking around the board, well known for his intense disapproval of, well, most music, long, scathing reviews, and various musical projects. One day, drunk and depressed in the Archives' dedicated IRC room where various regulars hang out, he stated his intent, and then followed with a blow-by-blow description of his suicide attempt via broken glass. The reaction of the forum's users, especially the newer ones, was oddly hysterical: lots of pleading for him to reconsider, displays of concern about his mental health, and the general huggy, "we're there for you" sort of reception the day after that's about as far from a metal forum as it gets. I couldn't believe it, and neither could Droneriot when I talked to him about it, who said that "they were acting like the Christians they claimed to hate." I'm inclined to agree.

It'll sound remarkably callous, but circa '04, a drunken suicide attempt on the part of a user would likely have resulted in endless jokes, questions about why it failed (and suggestions for a repeat performance,) and, in general, an utter lack of sympathy or emotional connection. It wasn't that kind of place; it was a forum filled with weirdos, degenerates, and crazies, none of whom would have looked on a drunken, poorly planned suicide attempt as something to soften up over. Droneriot, as one of those original members himself, was able to find it bizarre- but the majority of the forum reacted in exactly the manner one would expect the average person to: dismay, fear, and tenderness. It's perhaps the single moment in time where it could be most clearly proven that things had changed: the Archives as we knew it was over, and something unfamiliar had been erected in its wake.

~

In the original incarnations of these three articles, I talked a lot more about myself. I ended up deleting nearly all of it- it simply didn't seem relevant. In the end, I think I've come to realize that the rather odd relationship I have with many in the metal scene has less to do with the "character" and its role and more to do with being a relic of an era that's now passed.

I haven't really been interpreted differently over the years- I was a pretentious asshole then, I'm a pretentious asshole now, and I will probably continue to be a pretentious asshole in the foreseeable future. The difference is that before, I was the community's pretentious asshole- a known quantity, an established member, and someone that, ultimately, most grew to accept as one of their own. And just as importantly, pretentious assholes were more common in those days: abrasive, sarcastic, prickly metalheads who didn't want to help you decide which Iced Earth album to listen to first. Now, though, things are different. The metalhead of today is friendlier, more tolerant, and has lost some of the bite and verve which made approaching them in the past a tricky ordeal. I am no longer the community's pretentious asshole so much as a stranger who enters your home and mocks your interior design sense. The Archives feel foreign, now- I barely recognize any of the names, and the overall vibe of the place is just so off that I can't find the flow of discussion anymore.

It's okay, though, and it's not as though the place was designed with me or anyone else in mind. Communities change, evolve, grow, die, and are reborn elsewhere, and it's up to you to either keep up or leave when the time is right. I suppose I've kind of straddled the fence these past couple years, but I can't help but be curious what will happen in the future. In the end, it's not that the community misperceived me: I misperceived the community, failing to see that it was no longer the place I'd grown up.

We all leave home one day.

Jesus Christ looks like me...

2012-01-07T04:57:00.004-05:00

Slick and polished, stitched together from shockingly disparate fragments, and sprawling over an unbelievably bloated 9-plus minutes, this song embodies a lot of things I hate about heavy metal. It sounds like metal that learned nothing from punk, like Pete Steele selling his hardcore records and trashing the legacy of Carnivore, just to piss people off. It should put me to sleep, or make me really mad, but instead whenever I get to the end I wish it were longer, and I play it again.

A long, strange story: An incomplete and half-remembered history of the Metal Archives (Part 2 of 3)

2012-01-07T03:35:00.000-05:00

To give a proper history of the Metal Archives, like a history of any other website, necessarily involves a level of oversimplification and deception. For nearly anything I say about it, I can come up with a handful of counterexamples; for any theory I try to apply, I can think of a dozen others equally applicable. You'll undoubtedly read a lot of things in these entries and wonder where they're coming from, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction. You have to remember, though, that the Metal Archives you see today is a beast so radically different from its inception- hell, so radically different from half a decade ago- that it can barely be considered the same thing. Since the site's establishment a decade ago, nearly the entire userbase has departed and been replaced by new members, and slowly but surely, the original culture was eroded away and built on top of. What remains of the old concept and feeling is like a shadow that flickers around the edges of the body that exists now. The internet, though, is ephemeral, and even I have trouble remembering a lot of it. Trying to remember something that happened online is much like trying to remember a dream- and after all, neither, in the end, are real.

This is the part where the things I talk about will likely put me at odds with a lot of members of the Metal Archives community, both new and old. Given my admittedly contentious position in it, it only makes sense, but keep in mind that they're simply one individual's heavily colored and utterly subjective experiences. Still, they're experiences nonetheless, devoid of any desire to manipulate or distort. With that, read on.

~

The Metal Archives is at its core a database, and apart from the thin line of security and verification that the moderators provide, one that is essentially open for anyone to contribute to. Because of this, characterizing the nature of the Archives as being dictated by its overseers is like saying that World War II was won by Roosevelt alone rather than the individual soldiers that fought it. This is not to minimize the contributions or role of the administrators and moderators- obviously, their contributions to the structure and form of the site are crucial- but the ultimate heart of the Archives is distributed among an uncountable number of generally anonymous, faceless users who assemble and perfect most of the content the average person interacts with. While the site was established and refined by a very small group of people, the grunt work of endless band submissions, reviews, and forum posting has always been handled by a much larger, and, in many cases, very different group. While, as stated at the end of the first section of this piece, the early expeditionary force of the Archives was filled to the brim with the socially and philosophically deviant, the more formal power structure (if I can use such a dramatic term) of the site has always been much more normal. Moderators were never chosen from the sections of the site detailing their voracious love of heroin, which is a good thing for the structure of the site, but not always as good for reflecting the reality of its userbase.

Now, the internet is very anonymous: in the most general applications, it can be said to be perfectly anonymous, as minus an extremely dedicated stalker, government intervention, or your own fuckup, it's extremely possible to remain utterly unknown to the average person while still interacting with them. That being said, the internet is also only as anonymous as you choose it to be, and as it has further entrenched itself in the fabric of our culture, more and more people are choosing to let its anonymity slip away. The ego, like a diver struggling to surface for air, rarely lets itself disappear entirely, and in many circumstances, it seems that the more effort is made to quash it, the more stubbornly it insists itself on those around it. Look at 4chan: a site where enforced anonymity was one of its main selling points still deals with the personality clashes and desperate bids for recognition that nearly any other social community does. On the Archives, anonymity was never forced to such a degree, but seems to have been established by people who never thought of it, or of the personalities that would arise, as a potential issue.

Here is a more straightforward version of that roundabout paragraph: the Archives has always had, and continues to have, an unwritten system of status and celebrity. I know how dicey a claim this is to make; not only will many consider it a sort of slight (which it isn't, really) or patently false, but others will level the accusation that it's merely a manifestation of my own ego- after all, I'm one of the better-known writers there, and above and beyond that one regularly accused of rather staggering displays of narcissism and attention whoring. This is fine and to a minor degree accurate- however, the celebrity associated with certain users is hardly limited to myself; in fact, when it comes to that feature, I'm a small fish in a big pond, and probably smaller now than I was a few years back. But already I'm tired of talking about myself- let's get back on track. Keep in mind that there's many aspects of the site which can be broken up into discrete social groups: forum posters, moderators, site updaters, etc., many of which comingle and feature members which occupy more than one group at once. But since most of my experience is with the writing side of things, and because I think you'll be better informed by a more precise view of a smaller part than an unwieldy, misinformed glance at its entirety, I'll be focusing on that more or less exclusively.

As I said in this article's first part, a combination of several factors in the site's structure and userbase led to the Archives containing perhaps the most intense and important community of metal critics on the internet. Not only did the site's policies result in a standard of writing far above that of the average (which has only increased over the years,) but the site's position as the center of metal's web presence, its point system, its user rankings, and its large community of metal critics itself resulted in said critical community becoming one of the most fiercely and directly competitive I've ever seen. When one of the larger names on the site writes a new review (especially a contentious or vehement one,) it isn't merely shot into a vacuum; it's discussed, questioned, and occasionally torn apart on the site's forum. The site has always been host to a stable of remarkably talented and prolific writers who all, in a certain section of the community, eyed each other as competition. Be it for the person with the most reviews or the owner of a less numerical and more subjective title, there was a sense of battle to the writing process which improved the writing itself. Write something you know the community will feel opposed to and you'll have to defend it, so seal up your logical holes and be prepared to settle into a long stretch of debate.

The vast majority of reviews on the site are contributed by people without a particularly large background in writing; typically, they'll do a handful of reviews on a lark and then disappear. The community I refer to on the Archives is a small subset of extremely prolific and equally talented writers perpetually in contact with one another, and frankly, the pool is small, with probably no more than twenty at a time being "big name reviewers" regularly producing content of interest due to the name behind it alone. It's hideously incestuous, undeniably self-serving, and occasionally unbearably pretentious- it's also, it turns out, the breeding ground of some of metal's best writing, and continues to be the first and best proving ground of new writers. Hate the egos which may emerge, but understand that they're a reflexive byproduct of the structure which produces such quality work.

~

Each of the big name writers was, in a sense, competitive. We were hardly slashing each others' metaphorical tires in an effort to get ahead, but upon reading a really excellent piece by another person, the immediate reaction was usually to get in the game and try and top it. There were various goals among the writers, insofar as what particular ribbon they might be going for at any given time. For instance, I was a numbers person: while I never did bullshit reviews simply to get more under my belt, I had a certain mechanical system in place and was able to push out an alarming number in a surprisingly short period of time. Others might be length people, trying to write the longest available on the site (which, with my Catasexual Urge Motivation review, I think I've attained, through no intentional effort of my own,) or humorists looking to see how many punchlines they could dot an album's review with. Amidst the larger writers of the site were tons of different voices, personalities, and styles of writing, distinct enough that in many cases you could identify a review's author simply due to its descriptive tendencies. It's the rare result of so many people getting together and comparing proverbial notes on the fly.

I attained my level of notoriety significantly in part to the quantity and speed with which I was able to write, pushing through the rankings quickly to hover near the top. My primary competition was in hells_unicorn, a writer who continues to contribute to the Archives and who I stumble into conversations with regarding reviews on a pretty regular basis. The two of us, during our most fervent periods of production, were perpetually neck-and-neck for first place on the site, regularly dethroning each other only to fall behind again two days later, and who would rip through unreviewed content in the site's regular virgin review challenges, vying for the crown in each one. We were, in some respects, cheered from the sidelines, which makes sense considering how, in many ways, we were polar opposites: he dealt primarily in power, thrash, traditional, and progressive metal, while I handled extreme metal almost exclusively. He tended to review entire, sprawling discographies of bands, covering obscure Japanese singles of major artists and other such strange niches in a collection, while I tended to flitter somewhat randomly between underground artists- a demo tape here, a self-released album there. It was almost a competition to see which writer would be the "face" of the site: the older, more refined traditionalist, or the younger, rawer, transgressive one.

Nowadays, hells_unicorn has greatly expanded his reviewing pallet; though his musical philosophies are still rooted in the traditional forms of heavy metal, they now form a prism through which he tackles a surprising amount of extreme metal records, resulting in a genuinely perceptive, unusual, and interesting take on albums like "Transilvanian Hunger" or "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas." His writing, especially over the past few years, is some of the best in metal criticism. I expanded in a reflective way: over the past few years, I've begun to review many prog, thrash, power, or otherwise non-extreme records from the perspective of someone rooted in the extreme edges in the genre, which has exposed me to a heap of new musical ideas, some great records, and hopefully, some new perspectives on classic albums left mostly unexplored by the metal writers of the world infatuated with Enmity and Intestinal Disgorge. In truth, neither of us were quite as striated and one-dimensional as we might have appeared in our more fervent days- while we've certainly expanded since then, we were never as focused with laser-like precision on our particular niches as it might have seemed. However, when placed in proximity with one another, and in the unspoken competitive environment of the Archives review community, we became more caricaturized than we might have been otherwise.

This brings me to the core of, perhaps, this entire series of articles: the identity of the Archives reviewer, and how it can tend to get away. As I said before, like it or not, there is a certain status and celebrity associated with being a big-name writer on the site; this is not to suggest that it has any meaning or real value, but the system exists. With such a large and competitive pool of writers, though, to stay at the top of the pack necessitates the constant production of new content and the perpetual refinement of the written voice in order to maintain visibility. While this leads to better and better writing, it also takes its toll on the person behind the writing, who, subconsciously enslaved to public opinion, ends up slowly but surely catering to the whims of the crowd, and often ends up losing much of themselves in the process. This happened, to a certain degree, with me. But I can be fairly sure when I say I'm not projecting; it's something I've seen happen several times before, and, in particular, to probably the best-known writer in the history of the Archives.

I'm talking, of course, about UltraBoris.

~

Given your likely position as an internet metal nerd like myself, you have probably heard the name before. UltraBoris was one of the earliest moderators on the Metal Archives, and also its first and most foundational big-name writer. In the site's infancy, he flooded it with reviews- short, punchy, funny, hyperbolic ones, most often about thrash releases both classic and forgotten. He continues to be one of the most revered and romanticized writers in the history of the site because, though his brackish, abrasive style would not immediately suggest it, he was a remarkably talented writer. Unafraid to use distinct, colorful, outlandish description and phrase his love or hatred of an album in terms both vulgar and undeniably witty, UltraBoris evidenced an incredibly ability to cut to a thrash record's heart in a concise and eminently readable fashion. Perhaps his most remembered work, oddly enough, is the one most at odds with his standard: a scathing, essay-style review of "Master of Puppets." Extremely long (especially for its time of publication,) abstract, literary, and very much unlike a standard album review, this review is perhaps the most influential to the entirety of the Archives' stable of writers, creating, in essence, the essay-style review many of us practice and positioning himself to be remembered for as long as the site exists. Eight years after its writing, its value, both as a review and as a critique, are heatedly debated.

For a long while, UltraBoris was the number one reviewer on the site and one of the most popular moderators, but over time, conflict seemed to arise between him and other members of the staff- first in private, later in public- and eventually he departed without any sort of protracted goodbye. It was never explained by himself or anyone else why he left- every once in a long while, he'll impishly post something brief and pithy, more to be amused by the landslide of attention it will receive no matter its nature. In many ways, he's the origin of the Archives celebrity- a title which, I'm sure, he never wanted. In fact, I'm almost positive that he didn't want it, especially when a message from him emerged years after his departure, posted by a fellow moderator and friend of his. As the Archives' forum has been reestablished several times now, posts before 2008 are no longer possible to find, so it's entirely possible that the message in question is lost unless backed up on another member's hard drive. While I feel like I'm coming to court empty-handed without the message available to print, I'll paraphrase its contents as best I can.

UltraBoris stated that his dissatisfaction with the site and his decision to ultimately leave it was caused by, at least in great part, a loss of identity. UltraBoris enjoyed reviewing thrash albums, and felt that it was the genre he was best equipped to write about- he had fun pulling apart the riffs and expressing his enthusiasm for the craft. However, over time, a peculiar thing happened- his writing style, rooted originally in his own personality, began to feel less like his own and more like a character's. UltraBoris stopped being a moniker and became something of its own entity, and began to disengage from the person behind it, endlessly striving towards an increasingly minimal end result, following the obvious steps in its writing in make an UltraBoris review that would please the public. After enough time, he decided to simply break it off entirely; the attention wasn't worse the loss of identity that it brought with it seemingly as a matter of course.

It's only recently that I've begun to realize that where UltraBoris was then is very much like where I am now: unsure, disconnected, and wondering where, in a way, it all got away from me.

~

The nature of celebrity- whatever form it might take- is that it takes your appearance to the world more firmly out of your own hands than anything else can. Your persona- or, at least, your character- is distributed into the public domain and manipulated into the form that serves it best. This would seem tragic were it not for the fact that you help it along the way: ultimately, you are the one who goes through the motions, usually so infatuated with the idea of attention and status that you fail to recognize the pitfalls of your course of action. I wanted- both consciously and subconsciously- to be a major player in metal criticism, which is both piteously lame and surprisingly attainable. To some degree, I've managed to attain that goal, but in the process, I've realized it wasn't myself who attained that goal so much as my avatar, which is as much in the hands of others as it is my own. While it might be the puppet that I operate, the puppet is there to entertain the audience, first and foremost- and so, in many ways, I've been usurped by my own creation and had it confounded with the authentic article to the point where trying to pull the mask off, even now, poses a unique challenge.

The biggest lie we tell ourselves (and often loudly crow in a defensive gesture) is that we don't care what others think of us. Humans are social animals, and we can only slightly more deny our need for approval from our peers than we can our need for air or water. The best we can do in most circumstances is to acknowledge this foible and consciously minimize its impact on our lives. We do this in various different ways. I've done it through a sort of compartmentalization; keeping different aspects of my life separated from the others through various symbolic gestures. For instance, I keep my life in the metal scene distant from my "real life" (whatever that might mean) by using pseudonyms and rarely letting the two intersect in any meaningful way. I've come to realize, though, that this has its own set of problems: while I've kept my life in metal mostly separate from my life outside of it, its response has been to take on a sort of life of its own; the character of Noktorn, once used as a simple measure of anonymity, has in many ways become its own entity, no longer reflecting who I actually am to the degree that I'd like.

In the interest of full disclosure, and perhaps to unite the two in the manner it always should have been: I am Noah D. Richards of Bradenton, Florida. I am Noktorn, but Noktorn has also become something in and of itself: a brand name, a voice, and a distortion of its parent now severe enough that I feel the need to reel it in. And so, there I am: real, living; a human behind the sheets of text.

This series of articles began as an attempt at a watershed moment of self-exploration. I realized that, over time, much of the discussion of my writing had become less about the content of my work and more about my personality, with the writing used as little more than a platform for others to use as a foundation for a more personal critique. I was, at first, perplexed by this, and sought to remove the veil in a manner that would hopefully ameliorate some of the more poisonous perceptions of me that have become so entrenched in the minds of many. For some reason, though, I was unable to express it properly. The first part of this piece went through two long drafts, both scrapped entirely, before I arrived at what it is now. The first was too apologetic and whiny; the second, ironically, sounded exactly like something that Noktorn would write. Both were scattered, borderline incoherent. It was only the third time around that I realized the reality of it: this wasn't a story about me, and I had no interest in writing an autobiography. It was the story about my small part in a very large change in the Archives and the metal scene as a whole; how I arrived, unintentionally, at a major shift in the subculture's worldview and unknowingly went along for the ride. And I realized that, by talking about that rather than myself, I could better communicate something about me than if I approached it directly.

~

We have one part left, where I'll discuss myself, how my character has been formed, and what it means in terms of the Archives, as well as an appraisal of where the site is now and how it got there. Read on and enjoy.

The day has come - selling my entire collection

2012-01-06T10:09:00.000-05:00

Times have gotten hard in Florida- harder than in many parts of the country, and especially bad in my town in particular, where the true unemployment rate for my age bracket hovers around 25%. Things have gotten rough enough that I've decided to bite the bullet and do the unthinkable: put my entire collection of music up for sale. I have well over 2000 CDs, tapes, and records available, and any reasonable offer will be considered. I'm looking to get rid of these quickly and in bulk, so jump on the opportunity while it's available. I'll accept nearly any form of payment (apart from trades, of course,) so contact me at Noktorn@gmail.com with your offers and questions.

My entire musical collection, almost perfectly up to date, can be viewed here:

http://www.metal-archives.com/collections/Noktorn

Enjoy.

A long, strange story: An incomplete and half-remembered history of the Metal Archives (Part 1 of 3)

2012-01-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

The first thing you need to know, before anything, is that Noktorn is a character.

When I say that Noktorn, the name I've used throughout the entirety of my metal writing history, is a character, I don't mean to suggest that everything I've said or written under the name was entirely manufactured. It's certainly not; after all, it's a name that I chose, write under, and am known by, and at first it was simply a name. It was only over a long period of time that I began to feel less and less in common with it, and, eventually, came to sort of despise it. At its root, like any internet avatar, Noktorn was essentially me, but distorted by the internet and its tendency to hyperbolize, misdirect, and politicize ordinary thoughts, feelings, and statements into caricatures of what they originally were. Minor frustrations become enraging, small preferences become die-hard support- and more insidiously, without the help of body language, tone of voice, or any other display of a person outside of text, we're left nearly unable to parse each others' real feelings outside of taking them at face value. It's the sort of thing that produces these discreet, bizarre characters; it happens pretty regularly but rarely gets mentioned as a recurring pattern. There's one place in particular, though, where I've seen it happen with a strange regularity: the Metal Archives, which long ago established itself as the most important cultural bazaar of the metal scene. It's certainly changed a lot over the years, both for better and worse, and gets bigger and more essential every passing day, but there's still something odd about its community; a sort of current that runs through it which seems to attract the weird and only make them weirder, and results in some truly strange subcultural phenomena along with great writing. To have any hope of explaining things (or, hell, finding out myself,) though, a history lesson is required.

~

When I first arrived at the Metal Archives back in '04, the landscape was pretty different from what it is now; while it was on the cusp of becoming what's today practically the core of the underground metal scene's collected knowledge, it was at that time a much smaller, much more cloistered community. Over the years, it's softened in tone, expanded in membership, and become much more inviting to newcomers. Back then, though, it was a tougher nut to crack; the initial response to new posters on the forum typically ranged from a cool, removed neutrality to an intentionally excessive hostility, a sort of hazing process designed to weed out the irrelevant white noise posters who took up space but failed to contribute anything interesting. The general depiction of the site from other metal venues was of a sort of bunker staffed by cantankerous, unapologetically elitist metal grognards who had perhaps the best knowledge about the music on the internet but demanded a pound of flesh in exchange for it. A good portion of the scene considered it not worth the trouble and acrimony its community held so dear. That general image of the Metal Archives has just started to fade as of about a year ago, and I can't say that it was ever entirely accurate; however, around '04/'05, it was probably the closest, just old enough to have an established identity and distinct personality but still young enough to have that small town, "everyone knows everyone" feel. The inhabitants didn't put a premium on overt friendliness and they tended to be substantially weirder and more eccentric than they are now.

While the community was hardly the most inviting, its odd cast of characters, unusually deep well of knowledge among them, and reflexively wary attitude towards outsiders gave it a sort of distinctly metal, ominously important sense. By '05 everyone knew the writing was on the wall simply due to the core site's database: it was too big, had too many contributors, and was too useful a source of information for anyone to compete with. One of its crucial distinguishing features, though, were its reviews; with a moderating staff vetting them individually for a standard of quality, but the actual submission of reviews open to anyone, it had three effects on things. One, the Metal Archives rapidly became the center of metal criticism on the internet due to the quality and quantity of its reviews; for a while, it was typical of new writers to cut their teeth on the Archives before moving on to a more specialized webzine- now, though, you see it more often in reverse. Two, it turned the reviewing of metal albums into an individuated Thing, a sort of pseudo-artform wherein the more generalized talents of webzine editors were usurped by a more refined, precise, and professional breed; you could simply be a Metal Reviewer, and it was a defined idea which held weight. Third, and perhaps the first, biggest clue in explaining what exactly happens to writers on the site, is that the site's popularity, review standards, establishment of the metal review as a structure of its own, and point system which rewarded users with increased page editing privileges for contributions to the database (including reviews) resulted in the formation of what was and continues to be the most distinct, tightly-knit, and competitive community of metal writers ever seen. It was a sort of perfect storm of elements, and the result was the most fertile and creative ground for metal writers on the internet, but also an incredibly strange and often obsessive one, which turned writers into a community of their own and saw a whole lot of weird shit happen as a result.

Everyone who's been kicking around the Archives for a while has their own opinion of its golden age, and it's always older then yours. I'd say, though, to paraphrase fellow TBO contributor TheCount, that if you were a teenage kid truly delving into extreme metal for the first time in the mid-'00s (when both of us joined,) the community on the Metal Archives was probably the best introduction and education possible for a span of several years. There was a section of time, with the emergence of web 2.0 peeking over the horizon, Myspace consolidating itself as the primary social networking site, and the majority of other metal sites left twisting in the wind waiting for inspiration, where the Metal Archives reached a position of such inarguable dominance that just about every other metal site could likely have packed it in and disappeared without anyone noticing. It was in this period that MA truly consolidated itself as, in all practical terms, the only site for metal information; if Myspace didn't quite kill the idea of the official band site, the Archives undoubtedly finished it off. For several years, MA owned the internet metal scene, until, as sluggish about new platforms as usual, metal fully embraced the blog format, finally coming up with a form of content that MA couldn't provide themselves. The Archives were still the center of the internet metal scene and entirely indispensable despite this development, but the monopoly, at least, was broken.

What emerged from this pseudo-monopoly period, which ended around the second half of '07 or the beginning of '08, was an unbelievable upswing in the site's writing community, motivated in turn by a flood of new members between '05 and '07, many of whom were talented writers eager to get into the game. '06, a year after I joined, might be my absolute ideal: young, motivated writers joined left and right. The forum's feel wasn't as arbitrarily aggressive as the pre-'05 crowd, nor as overtly accessible and friendly as '08 on; it was appropriately relaxed to enjoy conversation in but still possessed a certain rigor for the quality of discussion that kept things interesting and at a higher average discourse than just about any metal forum I've encountered. It was a very unique time and place that taught me many of the fundamental building blocks of critical musical analysis, and to which I owe much of my development as a writer, despite the odd (to be charitable) turns it might have taken along the way.

I'm just waxing nostalgic now, though. Back to business.

~

Like any place, real or digital, the Archives has a history, with its own cultural movements which have impact and influence beyond their immediate era. Because it's located on the internet, though, these movements are compressed into much faster, more frequent, and more intensely observable bursts; without a real city's need for generational transition, a "generation" on a website occurs every summer, when a new crop of bored kids awaiting the start of a school year joins up, starts posting, and by September is entrenched in the fabric of the site's culture, manipulating and changing it even as the horde learns the established standards. When looked at from a more pragmatic standpoint, it can seem pretty silly to treat the history of a website and its forum as being so significant, but this is merely because it's easy now to accept the transparency and unobtrusive omnipresence of the site. The Metal Archives may not be the most immediate and crucial resource for a given, anonymous Behemoth fan, but for those more intensely involved in the heavy metal scene- people who read this blog, for example- it's become difficult to function without it. Still the most complete and fully realized database of its kind for any style of music in scope, detail, and ease of use, the ardent, invested heavy metal fan uses it almost daily. It's a rare occasion that I don't have two tabs on Firefox open to it- one for the main site, the other to the forum.

To put things in a sharper, more relevant perspective: in 2008, the Archives were often plagued with downtime due to bad hosting. It would often be down for several hours a day, and a few times, for stretches of several days in a row before reemerging. What did many of us do- especially the writers, the forum users, those who worked frequently on the database?

We waited.

I'm not joking in the slightest. The seriously invested people who were involved in the day to day updates and additions of the site reacted to its downtime in a remarkably similar way to how most people react to their power going out. For nearly unexplainable reasons, it was almost crippling to a lot of people. We would sit on our computers for hours, randomly scanning Wikipedia or otherwise occupying our attention with mindless busywork while refreshing MA every few minutes. The moment the site went down, flurries of IMs would be exchanged confirming that it was a server issue and not with a person's router. I remember a few occasions where, in the middle of a multi-day stretch of downtime, the site would emerge, half-broken, for maybe five minutes at a time. If you looked at the "recently updated bands" box during one of these periods, you'd see a solid wall of bands updated at exactly the same time; dozens, if not hundreds, of updates would occur in a single minute: this means that there were god knows how many people hitting refresh at exactly the same time who, at the moment the site somehow managed to struggle to the surface, tore through the database, updating everything they possibly could in the brief window allotted. My version of that was similar to that of other reviewers: crashing through pages in the brief uptime, attempting to submit as many stockpiled reviews as possible before it went down again.

Looking back, this sounds utterly fucking insane, mostly because it was utterly fucking insane, but we didn't think of it that way at the time. Nor did we think that writing reviews continuously for 12 hours at a time for the virgin review challenge was insane, nor that obsessively trawling through Myspace for entire nights to find undiscovered bands to add was insane, nor that arguing for days over the inclusion of a Yugoslavian goregrind band in the database was insane. Of course, it was all completely insane, but we were firmly convinced of its harmlessness or even utility. The most bizarre thing, perhaps, is that what I'm describing isn't far from the average of the types of things the dedicated members of the site were doing; if we were to get into the true outliers, you'd get even more unbelievable stories. Amusingly enough, the admins and mods of the site often expressed incredulity at the sorts of marathon sessions of unpaid labor many of us would engage in; the very people who ran the site didn't indulge in near the level of masochistic fact-checking that we would. Perhaps the most vaguely unnerving at all was that none of us obsessives did it with any expectations of reward, approval, or status; frankly, the mods and admins were ciphers to us. We interacted with the database and ignored everything else- our obsession had become distinct, sharp, and pure.

Why did so many people get so obsessed, though? And how does this connect with the reviewing scene? We'll get to those in time- to really understand why the site is the way it is and it can have such a strange effect on people, you have to understand a lot of different puzzle pieces. For now, though, another history lesson is necessary.

~

As I stated earlier, the history of a web site is in many ways similar to the history of a city: culture changes, generations arrive and depart, and the reflections of generations previous continue to play a part in its evolution even if long passed away. I'd say that the site's history can be divided into about three distinct phases (though some I've spoken to have suggested four): the original wave, running from the site's inception in '02 to '05, the middle wave, from '05 to '08, and the contemporary wave, from '08 to now (others suggest that there should be another division, with the contemporary wave split from '08 to '10 and '10 to now.) The vast majority of the first wave has disappeared; only a small handful of mods and admins from that era are around, and regular, non-staff posters are even fewer in number. Having registered in February of '05, more or less posting actively since then under various different names (due to god knows how many bans by now,) I've ended up becoming one of the older (in terms of site history) posters still kicking around now. When I started posting and writing in early 2005, there was a certain feel to things which suggested the older members saw what was happening- that their close-knit, intimate community of posters was about to be expanded and fractured. What happened then hardly compares to the forum now, where it's patently impossible to rattle off a list of all the active posters, but still, it was an important moment for the site.

I've already mentioned that the Metal Archives in the older days was not a particularly friendly locale; the site had an inherent sort of xenophobia to its userbase, and in some ways, getting accepted into the fold necessitated taking a certain amount of abuse. The fact that, before the second wave, the average age of a given poster was much higher didn't help things- a small enclave of mostly adult posters was invaded, in a manner of speaking, by teenagers like myself and other registrants from the same era. The forum's tone changed- it was faster, had more threads, and lacked the elaborate in-jokes that were listed in the forum's for-kicks glossary section but never appeared, their time over even before we got there. It may very well have been an outgrowth of the xenophobia displayed to new members, which, though essential to the ultimate turns the community would take, was not nearly as important as the remarkable freedom of speech that was enjoyed from the inception of the forum to about '08.

That's the sort of statement that's both true and not true. In practice, we enjoyed freedom of speech; its theoretical basis, though, seemed more like a matter of no one giving a shit than a philosophical stand. Looking back, the sheer amount of leeway given to posters was nearly unbelievable; fights over personality conflicts would break out with considerable regularity, shit would be openly talked to moderators, and no topic of conversation, really, was off limits. In all but the most ridiculous cases, the moderators would generally let whatever spectacle was occurring at the moment run its course without interference. From this generally noninterventionist policy of moderation came a forum that, weird, thorny, and angry as it might have been, was a self-cleaning organ. The users decided the nature of sin- most often sheer stupidity, whining, or obnoxiousness- and pushed the undesirables out of their community more via making the setting so uncomfortable through persistent, endless mockery and abuse that the victim would leave without needing to be banned. It was a remarkably efficient system, and one that greatly influenced the later direction of the site's writing community.

Which, too, is a lie and not a lie, and where we finally set the stage for many of the bizarre aspects of the site's later incarnations, as well as the real meat of our story. What was important wasn't necessarily the freedom of speech, but the sort of people that freedom drew in. As the one visible, populated, and musically informed forum in the metal scene with such a practice of free speech, this combination functioned like a bat signal which drew in the types of posters that most other forums would immediately ban out of principle, but on the Archives managed to prove themselves intelligent enough to settle down, become a part of the community, and weave their influence into the forum's greater culture. This is where the story really begins: with the nazis, drug addicts, nihilists, and sociopaths who helped define the Metal Archives as extreme metal's true home on the internet, and set the stage for the insane and bizarre events that would occur years later.

Come again in the oncoming days for the continuation of our story.

Get Into: Afgrund

2012-01-05T04:01:00.001-05:00

When it comes to grind, Noktorn covers the gore, I cover the 'core.

I played Afgrund for a good friend of mine who was just getting into extreme metal, and he said it sounded like urban warfare. Spot-on first impression. This is music for shotgun blasts methodically meted out in the light of burning storefronts. These dudes are probably anarchists, but if the music is any indication they are some disciplined, militant fucking anarchists.

Afgrund are Swedish, and boy do they sound Swedish. Their last full-length, Vid Helvetets Grindar (2009), is crisp and polished and packs an extremely heavy low end. While they are no strangers to d-beats and thrash, Afgrund really shine on the crushing jackhammer blast-fests and the breakdowns that punctuate them. It's just really fucking heavy, dude. "A Burning Cross On Your Perfect Lawn" is a clever condemnation of banal suburban reactionaries, and features Afgrund's wall-of-blasting approach at its purest and most relentless. You will dig this if you dig Nasum and Rotten Sound and the boys, but I think it could also be fun for people who are into Marduk and other blasting black metal, but haven't really explored grindcore proper. Oh, and of course, this was put out by the generally excellent Willowtip Records.

I got into Afgrund a couple years ago through the excellent but now-defunct Chainsaw Justice blog. By way of saying thank you, here's a link to the new blog of C.J. writer Flesh Monolith.

On the modern role of metal criticism

2012-01-03T17:11:00.000-05:00

Metal's writing community- like those of all other styles of music, I'm sure- is something of a "scene" in and of itself, beholden to its own expectations, standards, and ideals. Unsurprisingly, these elements often come in opposition with what many in the rest of the metal scene might believe; the qualities of metal writing and its ideal form is a major one. There's a certain disconnect between the perspectives of those who don't write in contrast with those who do, and I'll be bold enough to suggest that it's primarily a matter of ignorance and misaligned perspectives on the part of the former. Despite the devotion that many metalheads might feel and exhibit towards their particular stylistic baby, they can display an astoundingly specious sort of reasoning about it (an issue I covered extensively here.). I'm hoping with this article to bring into clearer focus what I, as a metal writer (and one who's been doing it for a long time and fairly prolifically,) feel and think about this little niche of journalism, and perhaps get people to reexamine their reflexive views of it.

The purpose of a music critic in a niche style (and especially in a DIY one) like heavy metal is not the same as that of a more mainstream, mass-market critic. A review of Immortal has never been, and is not, designed to provide the same information or reading experience as a Ke$ha review. Mass-market music criticism is designed for the majority of music listeners, whose interest in the artform is casual, dabbling, somewhat flighty and fad-based, and typically ignorant of musical history, terminology, or style beyond immediate gratification (none of this is meant to be a dig at these people, by the way; I'm not about to suggest that a love of music is some crucial building block to a fully-developed personality.) They come at music and music criticism from a point of general ignorance most of the time; they're unable to pick apart instruments or melodies, interpret production, mixing, or playing quality, or analyze a given artist from a substantial historical or technical perspective. They tend to swallow music like a pill and treat a song as a single, somewhat blunt instrument rather than a process, narrative, or structure based on a relation of parts to a whole; rarely are they able to articulate their impressions of a song in a detailed fashion, or, in most cases, judge it on a level beyond straightforward like or dislike. When reading a music review, these people are generally only interested in the obvious essentials: how does it sound, what is it similar to, what is its style, and would they enjoy it. This results in the most common and straightforward style of music criticism, which ultimately is a roundabout path towards a single, essential question: should I buy this album?

There's nothing wrong with this style of criticism; though it bores the hell out of me, I don't resent those who write in such a manner, nor the generally nonmusical people who consume and appreciate such writing. It's not as though the level of dedication expressed on blogs like this one is at all standard; the vast majority of people see music as a background element to their lives, but one they enjoy nonetheless, and that's both a perfectly legitimate stance and a perfectly legitimate audience to write for. Where things become difficult in the metal scene, though, is when readers or writers insist upon this "buyer's guide" approach to heavy metal criticism, and sometimes stridently insist that it's the proper ideal of music criticism in general. While it's sometimes hard for me to believe, I can only conclude that these people have either never been exposed to a more academic style of criticism or merely lack the interest or patience to immerse themselves in more detailed writing. The most well-known and discussed metal critics on the internet (as the more academic style of criticism of heavy metal rarely makes its way into print,) though, on sites like the Metal Archives, major blogs or webzines, or even scene outliers like Pitchfork, tend to be of the more academic, detailed, and in some ways artistic style of reviewing. I'm of the opinion that the buyer's guide approach tends to be inappropriate for heavy metal and typically misses an opportunity for better criticism, better writing, and better understanding; it's a style of music which inherently, in my mind, asks for a more academic style of criticism. There's several reasons for this:

(I'd like clarify terminology here: when I refer to a "niche" genre of music, this is not to suggest anything about its size. I'm simply using it as shorthand to refer to non-entertainment-oriented, artistic styles of music that predominantly exist outside of the mass market such as heavy metal, electronic music, or punk.)

1. The music: while I deeply appreciate and respect pop music, considering it a legitimate artform and as worthy of understanding and appreciation as any other, I acknowledge that there's a grain of truth to the old stereotype of it being less complex than more niche-oriented styles of music. Not on a technical level, necessarily- listen to a popular song by Lady Gaga or Lil Wayne and imagine the sheer difficulty of composing something so infectious and memorable- but on a conceptual and structural one. Heavy metal, being more or less an intrinsically ideological and artistic (in contrast to the goals of mass-market entertainment) style of music, simply tends to have more to express in its albums and songs than more mainstream styles of music. While heavy metal, like all styles of music, does have its pop-oriented artists that litter the rosters of labels like Nuclear Blast, the bulk of music composed in the style is of a more nuanced and artistic variety. Every style of music tends to have its own distinguishing features beyond mere sound, be it in ideology, musical goal, or idealized method of composition, and heavy metal in particular slants towards the ambitious, dramatic, and weighty, in contrast to something like dance music, where the emphasis (which, ironically, has ideological overtones itself) tends to be on the sound alone.

The buyer's guide review, in its effort to streamline itself, cut out nonessential "fat" in writing, and answer the question of whether an album should be purchased or not, usually ends up deliberately ignoring the more abstract elements of an album, and most certainly ignores the nonmusical elements which, though not a part of the sound of the music itself, influence, inform, and relate to it. Doing this is fine for albums where extramusical, conceptual, or ideological concerns are absent (though I'm not a hundred percent certain they exist entirely,) but, heavy metal tending towards the abstract and conceptual, its albums tend to beg for more nuanced and complex take on their contents. Ignoring these seemingly extraneous elements tends to not only miss an opportunity for greater understanding (and better writing,) but can cloud the very act of criticism itself. Without conveying the nature of the whole album, a buyer's guide review of an album can hamper the potential listener's understanding of it, turn away or invite those who would or would not appreciate it respectively, and generally provide an incomplete or even incorrect portrayal of the album itself.

2. The fans: Fans of a niche musical style, and especially those hyper-invested in it and its community like metalheads, tend to appreciate the style not merely for its immediate sonic characteristics, but the more abstract, ideological, and conceptual elements which help define its personality beyond sound. In the age of filesharing services, Reverbnation, and even pay-what-you-feel albums, immediate, firsthand analysis of an album's sonic characteristics is easier and more accessible than ever before, and metalheads make great use of these and other, similar tools to determine whether an album strikes their fancy. The buyer's guide review, to me, comes off as a relic from an age where entire discographies weren't available at the push of a button or hearing a new band on Youtube wasn't a person's prime means of exposure to new music. In this age, music was less accessible, and music critics functioned as gatekeepers of sorts who one often relied upon to suggest new music to track down. Times have changed, though- no metalhead needs a critic to tell him what to purchase, as Myspace has already let him know what he should. With nearly any recorded music available on the internet for free, the fan no longer needs to know whether or not to buy a record: he already knows himself.

Moreover, metalheads, like other ardent devotees of a niche style, usually have a greater appreciation and understanding of the more seemingly extraneous aspects of an album than those who read mass-market criticism. They delve deeply into the genre, learn its history, and often make music and play instruments themselves. The lowest-common-denominator tact of most mass-market reviews is something of a necessity; these are people who know little about the deeper parts of music as an artform interested in whether or not to purchase music that's rarely overtly artistic. In such a situation, delving into the deeper compositional or nonmusical aspects of an album can be alienating or irrelevant. But when writing a metal review, the level of discourse can be safely raised with little risk of alienation. A black metal fan knows what blast beats and tremolo riffs are, and so these and other terms can be used to sharpen the writing and provide a clearer picture of the album for him. There's no need to write, as I always heard recommended and always despised in school, as though the listener knows nothing. In this case, they do, and as a result can handle deeper analysis than the pop fan might. Juxtaposed with the availability of music in the modern age, this means that criticism can be more refined and elaborate than ever before: as less importance is placed on describing the most obvious elements of the music to a potential listener, more time and attention can be given to the abstract aspects of an album which give it its unique impression.

3. The writers: metal criticism, like most music criticism, and again like most writing in general, is not done professionally. I've been paid a little over the years for writing about metal; for a while, I reposted my reviews to Epinions, which has an affiliate system which pays product reviewers based on some nefarious algorithm not supposedly tied to sales. Even that is a pretty wild exception in the metal scene, though; most reviewers are only ever paid in CDs or the occasional shirt, and even then most reviewers are never paid in any form, instead choosing to review items from their own collection for no reward at all. Through my writing over the years, a larger part of my collection than most has been given to me for free by bands seeking a review; this, however, is hardly the reason for writing, because if I'm supposed to receive a shirt (or a paycheck, for that matter) for every review I write, I've been getting utterly cheated by my supposed benefactors. Of course, the reality is that I, like nearly every other writer in the metal scene, do it for one primary reason: because I love writing about metal and consider it perhaps my favorite hobby.

Being unpaid amateurs for the most part, the typical metal writer is motivated to write purely out of a love for the scene, music, and act of writing itself. The most known metal writers, from what I've seen, eschew the buyer's guide style of reviewing simply because it bores them, preventing them from expressing themselves fully and gaining satisfaction from a review. As they're unpaid, there's no financial or professional motivation to adhering to a certain structure or following any sort of established critical guidelines, and because of this, the process of writing about a metal album becomes more a matter of personal satisfaction and a way of interacting with the scene than any sort of material gain. And so, without professional pressure or a job to maintain, metal writers are able to write in whatever manner they choose that satisfies them the most. While those who remember their school essay days too well might not understand it, people who love to write gain immense satisfaction out of the act of writing itself- even in an arguably inartistic style of writing like music criticism. They do it out of a passion for it, and out of that passion rises unique writing styles which exhibit the writer's personality and very rarely tend to obey the guidelines of the buyer's guide.

(As something of a tertiary note, I'd like to add that, in my experience, those who extensively write metal reviews tend to have a passion for writing above and beyond that form, perhaps more often than amateur writers for other genres. In addition to this, the writing which metalheads tend to appreciate is often, like metal itself, verbose, illustrative, abstract, and detailed, which no doubt influences the metal writer to echo such a style themselves.)

~

I'll give credit where credit is due: since I started writing about metal, the overall quality of writing in the scene has improved by leaps and bounds. The reviews and articles being written today make the work of the '00s look like the awful print zine reviews of the '80s, and this is when it comes to averages, not outliers. Back in the '00s, a review like the one I wrote a few days ago would be immediately dismissed as nothing more than an endurance test with an ego boost for a finish line- even now, I'm fairly incredulous at how positively it's been received. Still, that's something of an eccentricity- my review of Deathspell Omega, on the other hand, was lambasted by many for wandering outside of the buyer's guide ideal. Many suggested that my review could be barely described as one; that I had, in some strange way, defiled the form itself due to its lack of resemblance to the standard. Amusingly enough, both criticism and praise for my writing style tends to involve the exact same elements with only the qualifying words replaced. Stack up some of my fan mail next to my hate mail and you'd see a remarkable similarity in the points covered: length, extramusical discussion, self-referentiality, and more. Clearly there's a difference in opinion as to what a review "should" be.

It's not as though I can't write a concise, straightforward buyer's guide review. It's like writing a five-paragraph essay: everyone knows how to do it, there's a defined, foolproof structure, and it's proved tried and true for many applications over the years. But I hate writing both of those things, and both tend to strangle the life and style out of a piece, making it functional in the most basic sense but otherwise with the readability and flavor of a VCR user's manual. It's popular because it's easy; it doesn't demand the writer come up with unique perspectives, structures, or usage of language, making it the journalistic version of mad libs rather than criticism proper. It doesn't help that the few professional outlets for metal writing (and in the minds of many, "professional" correlates to "correct") are outfits like Terrorizer or Metal Hammer who, despite the bland, shallow musical analysis, focus on uninteresting, illegitimate artists, and substantial rumors of cash-for-10s payola, continue to represent to many the highest level of metal criticism- simply because it pays. They're paid because they're great writers, and they're great writers because they get paid- no wonder metal criticism's always been in such a dire state.

Proponents of the buyer's guide review format (dogmatic as they tend to be) take huge issue with the essay-style reviews that myself and several other high-profile metal critics have adopted as their preferred style. The problem they have with it is clearly an ideological rather than material one; for all the (ludicrously subjective) points they bring up, nothing changes the fact that such essay-style reviews are, despite their increasing popularity, still only a tiny fraction of heavy metal reviews overall. The talking points are exactly what you're expecting: that the style is pretentious, the reviews are overlong, they're uninteresting, and that they are inherently flawed because they don't function as a buyer's guide (the circular reasoning of that last one seems to escape their notice most of the time.) And time and time again, they make the point that such reviews can hardly be called "reviews" at all.

Well, I'll concede on that last point: perhaps these types of reviews should be given another name. But if a review ceases to be one because it is "too much" a certain thing- be it long, detailed, essay-like, or artistic in its aspirations, then I have very little interest in "reviewing" anything. The music critic (most obviously, but also the television critic, the film critic, and nearly any other kind) has been made obsolete on a functional level by the sheer preponderance of filesharing, which functions better as a buyer's guide than any combination of words could. Want to find out whether or not you should buy an album? Hop on Youtube, type its name in, and enjoy listening to the entire thing streaming in the comfort of your own home before you put down your cash. A critic will not tell you anything as informative as an actual listen to the music; moreover, as a metalhead, the chance that you actually buy records with any regularity simply due to a reviewer's buyer's guide piece is incredibly slim. The role of the critic as a tastemaker- as the gatekeeper that invited worthwhile art in and kept mediocre art out- is fundamentally over.

And that brings us to what is, in effect, the unstated question of this whole article: what, with the advent of filesharing, is the role of the music critic, and given this, what should a review be? Well, the mass-market versions of criticism will always exist, but for the niche scenes which day by day stray further away from mainstream media's structural legacy, the role of the critic, and the form of the review, must stray with it. In my mind, the expansion of the essay-style review is an example of metal criticism finally reaching the place it always should have been: open, creative, and without the dogmatic boundaries of form and style which strangle creativity, ghettoize the unconventional and independent, and generally reflect the unnecessarily obstinate Luddite attitudes that metalheads claim to despise. Instead, as a writer, I consider it less my job to tell you about an album and more to have an enjoyable, illuminating, and interesting discussion about it.

As a reader, I feel the same way. I don't need anyone to tell me what record I should purchase- I'm a grown-up. In fact, I rarely read reviews that aren't for albums I own already, and I don't think I've ever bought an album on the strength of a review alone. Instead, I like to read reviews about albums I've already heard or even reviewed myself, and explore the contrasting perspectives of others as well as, hopefully, enjoy some good writing. While I'm not entirely sure as to whether a review can be considered art in its own right- though the idea has certainly been suggested- it's obvious that a good review can be appreciated like any good writing, be it illuminating, informative, funny, evocative, or anything else. The essay-style format offers both readers and writers the opportunity for any given review to more easily and naturally be all those things, and its emergence as a legitimate, appreciated style of review is a long-awaited indication that metal writing has evolved.

~

Regardless of how popular the essay-style review may become, it will likely always be a fringe part of metal criticism. It's simply too demanding on writers, nearly impossible, in many cases, to do for new releases, and tends to inspire a rather enervating sort of discussion which often forces the writer to defend himself personally as much as his critical position. The buyer's guide review will always exceed it in number with its ease of construction, relatively uncontroversial format, and speed of development. Human attention spans seem to be perpetually dwindling (some detractors claimed that my Deathspell Omega review was so laboriously long at just over three thousand words they weren't able to finish it- I can't help but be concerned) and the audience for this type of writing is naturally limited. However, it is an audience; a vibrant, involved one who are willing to invest the time and energy into a piece of art that many others won't. I doubt the day will ever come that the essay-style review becomes the most common variety, but I'm content with that being the case as long as there's a healthy supply of writing in that vein being passed around.

Over only the past few years, metal criticism has, in certain circles at least, developed more than it has in the decade previous to it. Despite the metal scene's rather slow adoption of new styles, technologies, and platforms of expression, the blog format, unusual zines, and expanding views of the metal critic have resulted in an explosion of creativity and intelligent discussion. Finally, after years of needing it, there's structured, non-forum entities which exist in the wide swath of grey between Metal Maniacs and ANUS, which allow a formality of uninterrupted expression alongside an agility of format which makes the expression of complex, abstract criticism more accessible and relevant than ever before. Presumptuous as it may be, I'd like to think of Trial By Ordeal as a part of a vanguard of new metal criticism: open-minded but concrete in its objectives, academic but appreciative of the brute and primitive, and illuminating, entertaining, and enjoyable in a manner that befits the music. Don't be afraid of the standard; embrace an individual voice and mode of expression and let your ideas stand on their own.

Killing Joke, "Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances)"

2012-01-03T02:04:00.008-05:00

I was going to write a more substantial post, but I ended up sticking around after band practice for longer than I'd thought. So, to be brief, here's a really cool video by The Killing Joke, an old favorite of mine who've recently become one of the biggest influences on my band. I've mentioned them here a lot, but never actually posted on them!

This is the catchiest track from their fourth album, the first after their early "classic" period with the original lineup. Later Killing Joke doesn't get that much love, but I've lately been realizing it's just as good as their canonical stuff (in its own way). "Let's All Go" is clearly a kind of pop song, but it retains the strange, deep harmonies of Revelations, along with their famous "tribal" pounding and their pagan exuberance. It blows my mind that a major label put this out. Speaking of which, sorry about the Vevo bullshit. I wanted you to see the video.

Review: Catasexual Urge Motivation - The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders

2011-12-31T12:39:00.000-05:00

"- Serial Killers: I like serial killing more than mass murdering. We don't worship murderers and killers like most of bands that write about that. We're psychologists of murder and we perform psychological aspect only. Serial killers have most unique mind to do research for. I'm very interested in why they did it, what they thought, what was the motives, etc. Human beings are all slaughter and our history proves it. But modern crimes, especially serial killing is not really simple to talk about in a word. So that is a most definite topic."

I think it's time now.

Like most of the best moments in one's life, my discovery of Catasexual Urge Motivation was unintentional and roundabout. No one recommended them to me- I didn't see a review or interview which piqued my interest, nor did I randomly stumble across them on Youtube (since Youtube was barely a glimmer when I found the band.) They've achieved no more fame or notoriety, really, than they had when I discovered them nearly a decade ago. I first heard of the band, funnily enough, on Darklyrics, the same place that so many nu-metal kids from my age bracket seem to have cut their teeth on before moving to bigger and better things. Hell, I didn't even really "discover" them there- I merely passed there name over and over on the way to other bands in the "C" section. I didn't actually investigate the band until years later; they were nothing more than a name that I passed over and over again.

Still, the name alone stuck in my brain like a bit of food lodged in the craw. I saw the name while I was just beginning to dabble in extreme metal, and despite my flirtings with Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and the like, the name alone was enough to give me pause. Long collections of unfamiliar syllables- you basically understand what each word means but have no idea of how to assemble them into a statement- that together created a sort of primordial, sickly groan of a name. It was distinctly obscene yet weirdly detached and cold- there was no emotion attached to its grim, murmuring moniker. My exposure to extreme music at that point had displayed a genre where each band seemed to be competing to achieve a level of heat and intensity exceeding all others- this mysterious band, on the other hand, was content to be positively frozen in its delivery, and it was a distinction that enticed and unsettled me. Still it wasn't for a couple more years that I decided to actually investigate them fully.

One evening at the tender age of 14, milling around on KaZaA, I was randomly searching for bands that I'd heard of but never bothered to actually listen to. By this time I was firmly entrenched in extreme metal, and my random searching of half-remembered artists had previously brought gems like Cryptopsy and Skepticism to my attention. This time, though, I keyed in "Catasexual Urge Motivation" and let the search rip. I was massively surprised when it turned up results- who the fuck would actually have music by a band with that name, after all- and what results they were. A seemingly endless list of short, horrifically titled tracks popped up, and at that point I realized that I was going down a certain rabbit hole that I'd never seen before. I wasn't particularly shocked by the content of the titles, but the way they were expressed: cold yet frenzied, detached yet oddly joyous and celebratory of the violent sexual acts depicted within. As was my general policy at the time, I downloaded the first track off the full-length I found, the ominously preparatory "Mutilation, Rape, and Serial Murder As Modern Metaphor," and slept on it to listen to at school the next day on my Ipod.

My first class of the day was Introduction to Information Technology (really just a typing course given a more elaborate name,) which featured a teacher generous or apathetic enough to let us do whatever we liked after completing our work. I got through the day's assignment (which, for all its seeming pointlessness, is definitely the reason for my WPM today) and decided to give my new pet project a spin. Keep in mind that I had never seen the band even mentioned elsewhere but in my own experience- I hadn't mentioned them to anyone else nor vice versa, and I was coming at it from a completely clean, unfiltered perspective. It was untainted in a way that nearly none of my other musical discoveries were, interpreted through a prism of reviews and forum discussions to the point where and objective opinion was difficult if even possible to form.

It's a rare joy when you manage to isolate a moment in your life that you can describe as wholly euphoric and revelatory: this was one of them. Sitting in that class room at 14, listening to that song, was the moment that crystallized that extreme music was my ultimate passion in life, and that I wanted to make music of my own. It was, in short, the most important song I'd ever heard. I discovered what was and continues to this day to be my favorite album and band of all time- music so unique, atmospheric, and brilliantly composed that I continue to listen to it to this day and feel all the same majesty I did as a young one.

To articulate exactly what made it such a heady experience is nearly impossible. Discovering it at such a formative stage in my musical development certainly helped, but even now there are aspects I can't quite put my finger on. It ignited a love in me of certain aspects of extreme music that are often benighted: drum machines and electronic influences, goregrind's incoherent, barely held together blasting, and an appreciation for the basest, most prurient aspects of art often hastily discarded in favor of the more outwardly intellectual. By this time in my musical history, I'd come to fall in love with both brutal death and goregrind's insatiable, gnawing, entropic sense of chaotic beauty, and just as importantly, early industrial metal's (most importantly Godflesh's) oppressive, chilling stomp on the mortal soul. Never before, however, had I heard the two ideals merged in such a compelling and intensely harmonious manner. It's probably more telling that most of the people I showed this music to were completely unable to understand it- even the other metalheads in my school who appreciated stuff like Behemoth or Emperor had opinions ranging from "this is weird" to "this is total shit." For me, though, it was like coming home.

After hearing this first track (which continues to be a favorite of mine,) I went home and devoured any and all information about Catasexual Urge Motivation I possibly could- which, I would find, was very little. Even today, in the age of cross-referenced information and wiki pages, finding stable, coherent information about the project is a challenge, and every time I go through a storm of Googling looking to unearth more information, I dredge up some new chunk of information: an interview I've never read before, a release that may or may not have ever materialized, or strange whisperings of other side projects. I insistently added tidbits of information to the Metal Archives and devoured any track from the band I could possibly find. I laboriously unearthed the band's ritualistic noisecore project Sadistic Lingam Cult (also brilliant but tragically difficult to acquire material from) and delved into the band's bizarre, rarely elaborated upon philosophical views. Discovering information about Catasexual Urge Motivation is still, to this day, an artifact of Web 1.0- endless reprints of zines hidden on forgotten Angelfire pages and desperate clawing for snatches of mentions on forums back in '02. It's challenging and rewarding in a way you rarely see anymore.

This hodgepodge of facts which never seemed to coalesce into a coherent narrative, however, only further obsessed me. That there even were bands that could still be so shrouded in mystery amazed me, and when combined with what I still say is some of the darkest, most purely and unrepentantly evil music ever recorded, created an overall impression of a sort of criminal musical enterprise. It wasn't hard to believe, given all the insane elements involved, that these guys just might be stalking schoolgirls and putting them to blood and semen-streaked ends in alleys and basements across Tokyo. Their origins in Japan, seemingly Earth's center of the sick and unquantifiable, just made it better- there was no way Westerners could construct music like this. It was just too far removed from everything I defined as rational and human to explain.

And here I am, eight years later, still with more questions than answers about these guys. I'm hoping, though, that by writing this, I might learn a little more. Enough chatter about me. The ensuing dissection of this album's is one incredibly obsessed person's elaborate and abstract interpretation of it which may or may not be accurate. If you want a simple statement as to whether you should purchase it: yes. And that's the last time in a discussion about this band that anything will be straightforward.

"- Mass Murderers: A man talked to himself about how many people have I killed. This is the reason he cannot count because he cannot stop killing. Murder is his life. To kill is to live. This also is very interesting as above."

Catasexual Urge Motivation is a Tokyo-based project staffed by brother Tomoaki and Ujin Kanai, backed by a drum machine they've dubbed Cyber EMF. Tomoaki (under the name Sadochist Ejaculata) handles the majority of musical composition, while Ujin (Sadochist Spermata) assembles the lyrics, artwork, and conceptual nature of the band. Each is crucial to Catasexual Urge Motivation being what it is: despite how lightly things like lyrics and aesthetics are taken (and rightfully so) in the metal scene, Ujin's contributions in the more abstract realm are just as essential to what Catasexual Urge Motivation is as the more concrete musical aspects- the band is a complete aesthetic package and must be taken as such to fully appreciate. To date, "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is the only full-length the band has managed to release, first seeing the light of day on the obscure German label Deliria Productions in 1996 with a 500 copy release (one of which I'm proud to own,) and later seeing a re-release on Razorback Records with new art, layout, and very slight remixing in 2000, now also out of print. Copies of the latter, though, are still easy to acquire.

Catasexual Urge Motivation- what does that mean, exactly? In an interview, one of the Kanai brothers stated that the name means "motivation that causes catasexuality"- in short, the urges and precipitation causes that inspire murder as an instinctual act. The acronym C.U.M. is not a joke or playful coincidence- it's the word for sexuality's most vulgar, violent, and unromantic act. Other interviews with the band (and exposure to their music alone) reveals that Catasexual Urge Motivation is, at its core, a conceptual project by two brothers with an utter obsession and fascination with serial killing, mass murder, torture, and violent sexual acts. Tomoaki Kanai has himself in an interview admitted to being a practitioner of extreme, deviant sexuality, as well as a proponent of cannibalism and vampirism. The band states that they don't "worship" serial killers and mass murderers, instead preferring to examine their psychological states alone, but the content of the music suggests otherwise: Catasexual Urge Motivation appears to revere these sadistic killers in a nearly religious manner, elevating them to a nearly godlike status and openly celebrating their acts and the lingering aftereffects thereof. Just how much of it is artistic license and playful aesthetics is hard to determine, but from what I've seen, the brothers are the most believably evil and deranged characters in this niche of extreme music. They are, in a sense, death/grind's equivalent to the black metal celebrities of old: unapologetic, utterly distant from "normal," and unrepentantly infatuated with the worst aspects of humanity. But where the black metallers seemed to have a goal or direction with their criminality, Catasexual Urge Motivation masturbate to crime scene photos for the sake of it. It is wholly negative music: there's not a single trace of humanity to be found.

What we hear on "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is a combination of old Catasexual Urge Motivation tracks (cultivated from an ocean of split tapes, demos, and 7"s) rerecorded for the full-length and new material. What you hear on this album is not actually its original form; after the band approached Deliria Productions with the established tracklisting and running time, the label requested the band compose enough extra material to pad the record out to a full hour. It's not possible to tell which tracks originate from this decision- they dovetail perfectly with the rest of the material, and the hour-long block of music, which would be tedious and overlong from another band, flows flawlessly, as though the new tracks were meant to be there all along. It is, in my mind, one of very few perfect albums- not in that it's objectively flawless, but in that I cannot think of a single element I would alter that would improve it. It is a monolithic work which stands whole and unyielding- to change it in any way would be to its detriment.

"- Sexual Homicide: Man killed woman because of his sexual desire. Murder is erotic. He knows it."

Catasexual Urge Motivation describe themselves as a death metal band first and foremost with significant influences from grindcore and industrial music. To neatly categorize their sound, however, is impossible, as no band before or after (including worship projects like Psychosadistic Haterapist) has managed to capture the band's essence fully. Frankly, while death metal, grindcore, industrial, and event hints of doom are all apparent when listening to the music, it doesn't really sound like any of them. Catasexual Urge Motivation's sonic presence appears to be hewn from whole cloth, and even the bands that the brothers cite as influences bare few, if any, traces on the end product. Instead, Catasexual Urge Motivation seems to speak to a sort of musical ideal, first arrived at conceptually before being translated into sound. While the band's earlier material has more in common with death metal and goregrind, by '96 Catasexual Urge Motivation had evolved into a wholly different and more terrifying beast, composed of technical and conceptual elements never seen before or after the band in question alone. Others have been influenced by them, but none have arrived at the no-man's land that the band appeared to revel in whenever the opportunity arose.

It's necessary to break the music into its compositional elements to have any hope of creating a sonic impression. The pieces: vocals, guitar, and drum machine (with, if I recall trawling through interviews correctly, a programmed bass guitar.)

The drum machine is in many ways the core of the music: as stated in interviews, the usage of a drum machine was an intentional musical decision rather than a plan B arrived at by the lack of a human drummer. Hearkening back to the band's stated appreciation of bands like Godflesh, Pitchshifter, Dead World, and even Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, no effort is made to give the impression of a human drummer; the drum machine is used as an instrument on its own terms. In lieu of conventional, metallic programming, the band's industrial legacy shines through in its rhythmic composition: the majority of beats on this disc are claustrophobic, scattered, and even somewhat danceable in nature. Where traditional rock or metal beats might have sufficed, they've been replaced by wandering, undulating waves of Godflesh-style syncopated snares, offputting note placement, and a strange combination of passages packed to the brim with contrasting rhythms (as though the band literally added as many sounds as possible before it overwhelmed the entire song) and moments of similarly unbelievable restraint and minimalism. It's without a doubt the best programming job I've ever heard on a record- it neither dives into breakcore excess ala Noism nor lazes about with the static, brainless rhythms of the most generic of black metal. Peeling apart the layers of rhythms is in itself a joyful task, and the detail given to the programming is clearly a labor of love: careful listening reveals tiny, almost inaudible background samples that mesh with the rhythm's greater whole to subtly accentuate notes and give the songs a richness they'd otherwise lack.

Of course, as a record influenced substantially by grindcore and goregrind, it's not all mid-paced dance numbers: vicious blasting does make up a certain portion of the music. While typically not inhumanly fast by today's standards (Catasexual Urge Motivation rarely indulges in the spine-splintering blasts of Mortician,) the blasting is cluttered and suffocating due to the nature of their programming. Instead of obeying the unwritten laws of metal programming (namely, again, that it should reflect a real drummer,) the blasts are typically composed of far more than just hi-hat, snare, and kick drum. While that will form the skeletal system of a blast beat, other elements will be introduced: multiple cymbals crashing on top of each other, glimmering electronic effects dousing the blast in synthetic coldness, or quiet background rhythms refusing to obey the ostinato, instead playing along with the riffs or wandering off in their own direction entirely. Listening to some of the band's older tracks, it's clear that this style of programming is something arrived at through years of practice and reinterpretation; older tracks rerecorded here feature much more elaborate, compelling programming than before. Through the band's staunch refusal to compromise their musical vision to fall in line with a conventionally metal sense of rhythm, they've created something infinitely more memorable and exquisite than would otherwise exist.

Notable in the programming are the sample choices themselves, nearly all of which are, like the rhythms, more in line with electronic music than metal- one of the elements which has caused many to describe Catasexual Urge Motivation's sound as a sort of primordial form of cybergrind. The kick drums fall into a delicious spot right between clicky, triggered modernity and the hammer-on-flesh tone of old death metal, and the snare has a vicious, barren crack to it, but the rest of the pieces are much more electronic in nature. The cymbals have a washed out, synthetic tone to them, as though they don't originate from an actual cymbal recording, and they glimmer in the upper registers of the album's sonic room, shining like moonlight on a killer's blade and providing a respite from most of the rest of the music's churning low end. Other, more openly electronic effects are also implied: chiming tremolo effects, the perpetual, smooth rumble of the programmed bass moving in lockstep with the drums, ghostly, shimmering tones, and a thousand other tiny additions that might appear on one track and then never again. Very occasional, brief samples of human voices laughing, crying, or screaming sometimes emerge from the morass, woven into the fabric of the music and never lazily used as an intro or outro to stand alone. The level of compositional detail is dizzying.

Just as dizzying is the sheer variety of drum sounds employed on the record: counting the number of different cymbals and electronic effects used would be nearly impossible. A sense of dynamics comes out in the sample choices: the band even uses different snare drums in different musical sections, or even alternating within the same musical passage for dramatic effect, with one softer and more murmuring and another vicious and snapping. Catasexual Urge Motivation circumvents the drum machine's problematic static tonality by providing a veritable buffet of different tones and effects to the listener, making the songs feel alive and organic despite the machine's cold, unyielding presence. Despite the danceability of the beats and the wide variety of samples, though, the machinelike quality of the programming is essential to the overall sound: never is a note misplaced, and that incredibly sterile, industrial sound provides an intensely unsettling undercurrent to the often more chaotic other instruments that writhe and twist above and within it.

The drum machine is the crucial, driving engine of the music: it's the most complex piece, by far, and is what sets the pace and tone of the song more than anything else. It's musically and conceptually essential, and provides the logical, emotionless core from which the horror emerges.

"- Torture: To hear screaming of death is what I long for. It shivers me."

While the programming is an omnipresent force driving the music, the guitar is what takes up the majority of the sonic space, sandwiched between the drums and the vocals. Unsurprisingly, like the programming, the guitarwork is an utter inversion of the standards of extreme metal, but instead of looking towards electronic music for direction, it strips all the commonly appreciated elements of extreme metal and reinterprets them in a fashion unlike any other band. Before we delve into technical aspects: the tone. Gutwrenching. Like maggots writhing. Like partially coagulated blood viscously dripping from a cooling corpse. Incredibly distorted yet possessing a purity of tone that allows the riffs absolute coherency, its rumbling, sickening presence is one of Catasexual Urge Motivation's most defining elements. While not tuned unbelievably lowly (only to around B or A#,) its tonal construction and the album's overall production makes it one of the most unbelievably heavy and unsettling guitar sounds ever heard. It's flawless for this music, a perfect fusion of dirt-caked filth like it was unearthed from a shallow grave and a clean, melodious presence that's essential to maintaining the instrument's musical commentary.

The tone, of course, is only the aesthetic face of the riffs, which are themselves some of the most fascinating, dark constructions I've ever heard in extreme music. They are assembled without what one would think are some of the most crucial building blocks of metal, leaving behind and incredibly unique and enthralling and equally dark style utterly at home with the band's bizarre sense of songwriting. First and foremost: tremolo riffing is almost entirely absent. Even during the most vicious and speedy blasting, rarely will the guitar match pace, and when it does, the tremolo riffs are typically ultra-minimal, two chord constructions that would appear more at home on a Von demo than from people who cite Impetigo as a primary influence- and when those chords aren't in tremolo mode, they're typically etching out slow, hypnotic patterns of repeatedly strummed, blurring curtains of bare, creeping melody.. Speaking of which, appreciate those chords while you have them, as they're a rare treat. Catasexual Urge Motivation uses chords sparingly: the most common style of riffing eschews them entirely. So with little tremolo riffing and little usage of chords, what, exactly, is left behind?

Single notes. The majority of riffs on "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" are composed of snaking, single-note assemblies, leaving the crunch of chords or the chaos of tremolo to transitions and blasts respectively. Picked at a staunch midpace in a deliberate, predatory, sinuous fashion, handfuls of notes are used as melodic fragments that loop into themselves, beginning and ending in the same place like a ouroboros of darkness and violence. Over the push-pull of the dancing, grooving rhythms, these riffs delicately coil around the drum machine's rhythms, black and serpentine, like the darkest, most doom-ridden parts of Autopsy given a repressed, tense energy, perpetually hiding and preparing in anticipation of exploding into a frenzy of violence and aggression. These slow, sensual, ritualistic riffs are the building blocks of tension that come tumbling down when a blast detonates. They're the distinct, unmistakeable sound of a serial killer: slow, drawn-out predation that only at the perfect moment unleashes itself on the unwitting victim in a frenzy of blades and teeth. This is to say nothing of the occasional "solos," which are so noisy and insane you'd think Kerry King was jamming with Ride For Revenge.

What you are hearing, I think, is the sound of an amateur guitarist with absolutely no formal study behind him. Tomoaki's riffing style brings to mind, oddly enough, Justin Broadrick: someone who is not by any stretch of the imagination an accomplished musician on a technical level, but who forces themselves to do the most with what they possess. In lieu of striving and failing to make conventional death metal or goregrind riffs, Tomoaki remakes that music in his image and makes songs based around his own unconventional style of playing. While just about any guitarist with functional hands could play these songs, very few if any but the originator could write them, as they necessitate dissociating from conventional compositional rules so completely that something entirely new arises in their stead. Even the somewhat amateurish playing works to the benefit of the album; the imprecise timing and note changes that all appear to be exaggerated slides add to the degenerate, virulent feel that the album masters. While Catasexual Urge Motivation is not a particularly riff-oriented band, the riffs, simple as they are, are still some of the most memorable I've ever heard.

"- Rape: This is not physical movement. To rape one's mind is the one I wanted to say. First the mind, second the body. Talk to her sweetly and give slow death with raping."

Finally we arrive at the final piece of the puzzle: the vocals. Perhaps the element which stands out the most upon a cursory listen, they are, like the rest of the music, perfectly assembled and crucial to the music's overall vision. They are, in a word, appalling, and yet again refuse to cooperate with the rest of extreme metal in manner of delivery or application. There are absolutely no convention growls or screams to be heard on the album, instead replaced by an ensemble cast of vocal styles as rich and varied as the electronic effects which dot the programming. It's possible that they're all inhaled, but the manner of delivery is irrelevant to the ultimate effect: that of sheer terror, disgust, and a desolate hopelessness that's usually more the domain of Austere than goregrind.

First and foremost among them is a sort of half-spoken, half-gurgled groan of a style which forms the main voice on the album. Alternately murmuring in the background and stridently proclaiming in the front, it salaciously purrs and moans in a manner both uncomfortably sexual and potently threatening, sometimes seemingly mumbling to itself and other times philosophically monologuing its views on rape and torture (not that you'll be able to decipher the lyrics.) Leaving it at that, though, would be far too simple for Catasexual Urge Motivation. The other styles are almost like a cast of characters, or voices in a schizophrenic's head, all employed for different purposes. The next most present style is a sort of blood-flecked hiss, ranting, impish, and breathy, like the sadistic id made manifest via the throat. Much of the vocal performance on this record is composed of a sort of dialogue between it and the central groan, a perpetual conversation or argument occasionally intruded upon by other voices: a pitch-shifted, monstrous gurgle that rarely seems to articulate actual words, a distorted, Last Days of Humanity-style roar, or ghostly, nearly subliminal whispers that play in the background like the trapped souls of forgotten victims.

Of course, those different voices merely existing separately would be much too simple for Catasexual Urge Motivation, so expect their employment to be just as offputting and abstract as the rest of the music. Rhythmically they fall more in line with normality than the other instruments: they snake and coil with the riffs, and they rant in a fairly straightforward manner during the blasts; they're entirely indulgent when the rhythm allows for it, but also understand that sometimes less is more when they need to be the spearhead for the music's message. The way they styles play off each other, though, is far from normal: they dart over, under, in, around, and through each other, almost randomly swapping between smiles or colliding into each other, seemingly reciting different sets of lyrics, creating an utterly chaotic cacophony of voices during the music's most intense and aggressive moments. I'm not sure what's the more disquieting effect: when they all seem to battle with each other for dominance, or when they come together, chanting a single line or word over and over again, an order from five different demons all screaming the same thing.

As the only appreciably human element on the record, it might have been easy for the band to rest on their laurels and give a mediocre vocal performance, but instead they chose to make it as compelling as the rest of the music. Ironically, being appreciably human might make the vocals the most hideous, frightening voice on the album; while the other elements can almost be discounted as a soundtrack composed in another dimension, the human voices, most often devoid of any sort of electronic treatment, force the listener to confront the torturous, despicable reality of what they're hearing. Tomoaki and Ujin Kanai aren't demons: they're human beings, like you or I, capable of acts so evil and treacherous that they might well be monsters wearing mens' skin. The immediacy of the vocals and their utter refusal to bow down to the rest of the instruments is what gives them such power: the rhythms are assembled as you would assemble them; they sound as you would imagine the voices of the insane would sound. They form the bridge connecting the listener to the more abstract musical elements, which allows one to truly feel the darkness which seethes from this album's every pore.

"- Cannibalism: You know the ancient history. We ate each other at the time. But now? Religion doesn’t allow us to do that. Animals eat animals, and we should eat people. This is my opinion. And this is my opinion on cannibalism. It's not illegal."

When you put these various elements together, the effect is utterly entrancing. Catasexual Urge Motivation do what few metal bands manage: create a collection of songs that all stand on their own but also mesh perfectly as a whole album. The technical elements of each song are essentially the same (though, much like Goatwhore's willingness to add disparate elements to contribute to individual songs, Catasexual Urge Motivation doesn't shy away from adding solitary features to tracks to perfect them); there are no ambient interludes, acoustic passages, or intro samples to laboriously and mechanically define them. Instead, they let the music and aesthetics do the talking; they show and don't tell. Each track is staggeringly unique and identifiable from mere seconds of beginning, but never do they feel at odds with each other, despite the impressive level of variation the band has managed to establish with such seemingly simple elements. While some tracks are frantic, minute-long bursts of frenzied dementia and others are sluggish, doomridden beasts, all of them are recognizably Catasexual Urge Motivation. A slow track doesn't feel like it was included in an arbitrary effort to round out the album, nor does an extremely fast one feel like a grasp towards some endpoint of extremity; each is a natural outgrowth of the band's musical vision.

From what I've gathered, Catasexual Urge Motivation's songs are assembled in a top-down manner; a title or concept is decided first, and then the music is composed to match it. The result of this preparatory sort of songwriting are songs which are all distinct narratives or discussions about human depravity, and it bleeds into the music in an outstandingly clear fashion. Each track very clearly has its own story to tell, despite typically lacking any sort of guidance for the listener apart from titles and the very occasional snatch of lyrics (only 8 songs have had their words published.) Every track is filled to the brim with personality and really allows the listener to construct their own personal nightmare scenario out of the dread-ridden riffing and cackling, maniacal vocals. Interviews reveal the subject matter of a few: "He Shot Her Down and Ate Her Flesh, and Then He Said Excuse Me For Living But I Prefer to Be Eaten Rather Than to Eat" is an exploration of famed Japanese cannibal killer Issei Sagawa, while "I'll Confess Everything That I Have Ever Killed 5 People and One Was a Little Girl" is a tale of a serial murder's cathartic confession, and "The Man Who Aimed At Maximum Murder to the Greatest Pleasure" centers around one killer's quest to achieve the world's highest body count.. The rest, though, go unexplained apart from song titles, and most feature Japanese lyrics which further shroud them in mystery.

While the riffs are simple, the songs typically aren't. While they tend to begin and end in similar places (the cyclic nature of the riffs and the songs themselves give an eerie, hopeless, ritualistic feel,) they tend to twist, wander, and transform over the course of a track before coming home, as though an exploration of a murder has led to a justification of the murder itself. Despite the album's mastery of aesthetics, its true genius lies in the underlying structure of the music itself. In the pursuit of unique, independent tracks somewhat shackled by the inherently simple riffing style, the songs are forced contort and surprise at every turn. The core of Catasexual Urge Motivation's songs, like in most great music, is a flowing dance between tension and release, and this band has mastered the dynamic in ways most others can only dream of. They'll establish almost unbearably tense, slowly piling fear before cathartically unleashing it upon the listener in a bloodsoaked musical orgasm that only they can truly craft.

Certain tracks, primarily the shorter ones, have more intensely specialized, single-minded structures, but among the others there's a bit more commonality. Many of the songs have a fairly simple dynamic at work: a slow, brooding, preparatory establishing section followed by a centering, anchoring blast passage which allows the track to ground itself. Where it goes from there, though, is where things get interesting. With blasts mostly used as tension-releasing valves and the oppressive, doomy sections employed as openings or interludes, Catasexual Urge Motivation is left with the real meat of the songs left for their most unique and varied stylistic playground: a mostly midpaced, multidirectional attack that spirals out like a spiderweb, lightly guided by the song's narrative before collapsing, heaving and spent, at the song's climax. Every song is satisfying and every song is unique, and it's very much the mood and atmosphere established by the melodies and song titles which dictate its trajectory: some are bleak gauntlets of crushing slowness, others tortuously patient and perpetually transforming, and still others emerging as brief, explosive bursts of activity like a rapist's thrusts.

"The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" doesn't come together as an album so much as a collection of short stories, but it doesn't suffer for it. Each individual song is an absolute joy to experience, and they're so equally strong picking out favorites is most certainly a matter of opinion- none stand out as being head and shoulders above the others. Still, I have my picks, through which you might pick up on this band's particular game.

Opener "Mutilation, Rape, and Serial Murder as Modern Metaphor" is clearly designed as an intro track, with its simple and hideously catchy structure. A lurking, excitable drum machine and one of the most hideously gleeful and sinister riffs I've ever heard set the stage for a simple alternation of shimmering blasts and d-beat(!)-laden passage that sounds like it comes from a Neuropathia track before dissociating into a wild, uncontrollable solo. "Bleeding For Spermqueen," the track which has seen perhaps the most refinement since its early forms, is one of the most memorable on the disc, heaving its bloated, sluggish frame onto the scene only to devolve into a deranged ménage à trois between hyperspeed blasting, crawling, worming midpaced sickness, and long stretches of dead silence occupied only by Tomoaki's murmuring, purring vocals. "Multiple Parasexuality Disorder," one of the most complex tracks on the record, is a nefarious, tortured, indecisive animal that perpetually twists and reverses on itself before settling into the album's most rock and roll passage where it's finally given direction.

And on and on it goes, each track with as much elegant, carefully planned brilliance as the last. Even through an hour of the release's particular brand of sinister malignancy, at no point does the listener feel bored or as though the band is retreading previous ideas. The sheer uniqueness of each track, and the individuality of their stories, gives the record a staying power and replay value unknown to most other metal records. This is not to say that it's not an exhausting listen: by the end of the album's running time, the perpetually building and dissipating tension that the music embraces so firmly will definitely take its toll. At the end, though, is a feeling of satisfaction; "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders," especially for those not firmly entrenched in the most repugnant and hideous parts of extreme metal, is an album you sort of undergo rather than listen to. Needless to say, for the full effect, it should be listened to laying down, the lights off, and allowed the time and space it truly needs to worm its way into your brain.

"- Vampirism: Believe it or not, I really wanted to become a vampire at my younger days. I was possessed. Vampire is my father. Blood is my mother. I am a vampire, too."

The prism through which much of the music we consume is interpreted is the production; it's the lens through which we "see" an album. Fortunately enough for "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders," a flawless lens was selected. Recorded in Tomoaki's bedroom on a simple 8-track, the resulting production job is almost unbelievably well-rounded and perfectly in tune with the musical style. Despite its home-recorded origins, the mixing job is remarkably free of common errors, and displays a blend of intelligent, seemingly professional production experience with a willingness to step back often unseen in metal production. It sounds like it comes from a mid-range studio well acquainted with this style of music: the inherent filth and putrescence of the band's style is firmly intact, but this allowance of extreme metal's aesthetic flavor doesn't prevent Tomoaki from assembling it in a pleasing fashion. While filthy and distorted, every instrument is extremely clear, given enough filmy, imprecise fidelity to let them blend into a single mass but letting the listener pick out individual parts with ease. Despite the hyper-distorted guitar tone, every riff is clear and easy to make out, even in the blasting sections, and even with the band's infatuation with volume dynamics in the vocals and programming, even the most subtle electronic glimmer or murmuring growl is given its own sonic space and representation in the tracking.

Going beyond merely representing the music, however, the production accentuates and propels it further. Each voice has been doused in a significant amount of reverb (particularly cavernous on the vocals,) but not in the digital, echoing manner of modern black metal; instead, you get the sense that the music was recorded in a subterranean chamber of sorts, warm from its analog origins but letting the sterile, cold drum machine maintain all its impartial, synthetic cruelty. The reverb provides the music with a nightmarish, surreal quality, as though what you're hearing is a quarter-step off of our reality- just enough, perhaps to let a human suffer more before they eventually succumb to death, or to give a killer the strength to pull chunks of flesh off of bone without the need for tools. The end effect is as though the album was something plucked from the dumpster behind a motel primarily occupied by hookers and methamphetamine addicts, or found in a plastic bag washed up on the shore of a polluted urban river- the musical equivalent, perhaps of Harmony Korine's "Trash Humpers," but more immediate and concerning than you'd ever like it to be.

All of this, of course, is in pursuit of the feature most often ignored by this sort of extreme music: atmosphere. "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" drips with it, from the bizarre, fetishized cover art to the silence between tracks. Other death metal or goregrind bands deal with similar topics as Catasexual Urge Motivation, even from the perspective of serial killers and mass murderers, but none force you to step inside the mind of one in the manner that this band does. Instead of focusing purely on the murderous, violent acts that dot other bands' album covers, Catasexual Urge Motivation realizes that there's much more unsettling material to be mined in the psychological and philosophical aspects of these acts; they spend more time on the mental state and the preparation for a kill, and as such, the music worms its way into the most negative, depraved part of your brain in a way few others can't. Atmospherically, this music reminds me of artists like Wormphlegm, Intestinal Disgorge, or XXX Maniak more than the conventional big names of extreme music; "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" encapsulates the depraved, sickening core that drives those bands and takes joy in dissecting it and analyzing it from so many different angles that you're exhausted by it.

More unsettling, though, is the tact the band takes with their subjects of choice. It's a matter of rooting for the killer in a horror movie taken to its natural conclusion: Catasexual Urge Motivation forces you to become the evil individuals it details in its songs, and to embrace every part of them: the chaotic, mentally ill, incomplete mindset, the romanticized act of ritualistic murder, and the joy of sadism, exploitation, and victimization. Rather than Devourment's goal of disgusting and shocking the listener, Catasexual Urge Motivation all but invites the listener in to stay for a cannibalistic dinner party. While the conflicted, perpetually shattering and recombining nature of the songs might suggest some level of regret or internal strife, this is merely a symptom of the sort of mental imbalance which causes a person to commit such gruesome acts. Ultimately, as the band's moniker suggests, these impulses are innate and instinctual, embracing a sort of atavistic, hedonistic worldview that suggests no alternatives: to rape, torture, and kill is life's greatest joy, and all actions running up to it, no matter how mundane, are like foreplay to the sexual act of murder.

As an aside: the song titles and lyrics, as sparing as the latter may be, are masterfully realized and three-dimensional in a way few other bands are with their written works. It's easy to discount Ujin Kanai's contributions to the band as minimal, but his presence is felt in every note, even if he wasn't the primary composer. As the individual responsible for the aesthetic whole of the music, he's as crucial as Tomoaki. It's easy to discount these elements at first glance, but keep in mind the brothers' all but stated vision of Catasexual Urge Motivation as a conceptual project dedicated to analyzing the violent urges of humanity made manifest: while the band may be indulging in many of the same subjects as the rest of the goregrind or death metal scenes, they come at it from a wholly different perspective. The somewhat mangled English employed, surprisingly enough, does not make the writing come off as silly or ridiculous; instead, it gives a bizarre, surreal tone to the proceedings, creating images and concepts that are shockingly unusual and vivid due to the lack of fluency in the language. The intent is not to shock, however- those involved in extreme music are hardly shockable, given what they're exposed to as the bread and butter of their content- and yet shock the songs do. Even in the lyrically hidden tracks, the titles alone convey a sense of evil far greater than most black metal bands could realize with their reliance on Satan: Catasexual Urge Motivation realizes that the truest evil comes from human beings with the ability to do good who choose the left-hand path. A demon is evil because it is born from evil; a human, on the other hand, embraces evil with a love for it in his heart.

Perhaps the most distinct aspect of the song titles and lyrics worthy of discussion is what they omit. Rarely do they mention a violent act in and of itself; direct references to killing or other violence are a rarity. Instead, they savor the act's surrounding elements: fear, despair, joy, cruelty, and indifference. In addition to this is a ritualization of the acts described, almost portraying them as either spiritual, religious experiences or as psychological states which can be appreciated on a logical level. The only way to truly understand the insane, however, is to become insane oneself, and so we are forced to embrace the ideals and concepts of a worldview opposite our own. Of course, the insanity is something of an assumption; can a serial killer be called insane if he methodically plans his abductions, executions, and attempts at evading arrest and authority? And if killing is the ultimate act, is the serial killer or mass murderer not something of an ubermensch, asserting dominance over the more feeble humans unable to stop such acts or commit them themselves? And so comes the pseudo-religious aspect: these are creatures beyond men who merely wear the skin of men, godlike beings with the power to assert their will over others in a manner most of us could never conceive.

"- Mutilation: Murder is art. What do you use when you draw or build a sculpture? Dead body just lying on the floor is not interesting to me. To make it better, that means to mutilate the body and create an original sculpture with the body. Human body is a canvas. You can paint it, cut and paste it, taste it, move it, and feel it."

The following is purely my own conjecture. As Catasexual Urge Motivation is the most philosophical and conceptual band I've ever encountered in the goregrind scene (or the metal scene, really,) I think it's a shame that no one has made the effort to analyze their music on this level. I'm hoping that now I can get some of my personal thoughts on the band down and perhaps open up discussion for the more academic (or pseudo-intellectual) reaches of the metal scene; while a goregrind band is hardly the first stop for those looking for heady, psychologically intricate metal, I've come to think that Catasexual Urge Motivation might have gone further than nearly any of the more ostentatious, obviously self-conscious bands out there.

As Catasexual Urge Motivation is the product of a sort of prurient obsession- with murder, with sexuality, with insanity, and with evil and darkness- all parts of the ultimately package logically point back to that obsession. What this means for the listener is that the conceptual basis of the music and the music itself are inextricably intertwined: it sounds the way it does because of the concepts used to create it, and the concepts are transformed and manipulated by being viewed through the prism of the music itself. If the Kanai brothers were simply interested in discussing the nature of violence, sexuality, and cruelty, they would write a book, but instead they wrote an album, and so the philosophical ideals of the music are inherently filtered through their expression as an artistic piece. While Tomoaki states, as mentioned above, that Catasexual Urge Motivation is supposed to be a detached, objective study of the subjects at hand, I'm going to be so bold as to suggest that that's a cover story. Despite the unbelievably bizarre and distinctly unapologetic way Tomoaki speaks of subjects like rape, torture and murder, I think that calling Catasexual Urge Motivation's music an objective, apolitical look at the subjects it preoccupies itself with is nothing more than a poor attempt to veil reality: that the Kanai brothers are more entrenched in a romanticized portrayal of criminal violence than they'd like you to believe. It's protective dishonesty, and half-hearted dishonesty at that- one glance at the music tells you much more.

Catasexual Urge Motivation's songs, universally about the act of murder, tend to be openly sexual, with rape, sexual torture, and fetishism as a frequent theme. However, I think this is a somewhat redundant exercise: the sexuality inherent to the songs (which even pops up in the band's name) isn't enjoyed on its own terms. Sexuality is used as a form of torture; rape is a tool with which to terrorize, demean, and ultimately destroy with. The band's usage of fetish-related imagery (with the shibari on the cover of the Deliria edition being only one example of many) points to the sexual aspects of the fictional crimes as being part of a more elaborate sadomasochistic, dominant/submissive fantasy. As my own experiences with BDSM have taught me (and as Tomoaki himself states when discussion rape,) the impulses which drive such deviant sexuality- rape fantasies, humiliation, sadomasochism, and dominant/submissive behavior- are not a twisting of sexuality so much as a sublimation of a more psychological craving for authority, dominance, and control (and in a roundabout way, love) than they are about the sexual act itself. Sexuality is merely the mechanism through which these urges can be satisfied; the root of it is entirely psychological in nature. Little satisfaction is found in dominating a partner in and of itself; what is satisfied instead is a perceived reflection of the self as powerful, in control, and (in the case of men) masculine.

The sexuality is merely a more distinct, communicable exploration of the more abstract reality: that the murder itself is a sexual act far beyond that of intercourse. As the band states with "I Am As Beautiful As I Have Killed," "The knife is my hand/The gun is my phallus," and so sexuality and violence are inextricably intertwined: any sexual act is inherently violent, and any violent act is inherently sexual. Musically, the band mirrors both a sexual act and a homicidal one, and in turn the two mirror each other. The songs begin with a slow, preparatory passage (foreplay vs. stalking and observing,) transform into a midpaced, more complex, varied one with slowly growing tension (the primary sexual act vs. abduction, torture, and sadism,) and end with an explosive, violent climax (orgasm vs. the actual act of murder.) While the heart of music is in a gradual juxtaposition and progression of tension and release, Catasexual Urge Motivation's music features tension and release so harshly delineated and destructively realized that it's hard to imagine that the resemblance to both violence and sexuality, given the band's themes, is entirely coincidental. The gradual growth and eventual chaos that most of the tracks contain is so distinct and carefully plotted that each gives the impression of a sexual encounter concluded, or a violent act realized. With the lexicon of the band and their conflation of the two, though, the idea becomes even more distinct.

As sexuality is instinctual, and aggressive, sometimes violent (depending on interpretation) sexual events are somewhat commonplace, it's easy to see the two as inherently linked. When men have their brains analyzed while viewing pornography and/or violent media, many of the same receptors light up. Many of the same chemicals are released into the brain and bloodstream, and, in general, the same parts of the brain are used to process thoughts regarding the two. The compulsively and regularly violent, from murderous criminals to British football hooligans, have stated that the runup to a violent act as feeling similar to the act of approaching and flirting with a woman, and the realization of violence as providing a high similar to that of a sexual act; it should come as no surprise, then, that a common theory among psychologists and psychiatrists is that the compulsively violent are in some ways addicted to the dopamine and other chemicals released during a violent act- the same mechanism that causes many sex addicts to compulsively seek sexuality (who themselves often state that the bulk of the fulfillment of the sexual addiction is not in the act itself so much as the pursuit and eventual attainment of the sexual partner, again mirroring the stalk and slash fantasies of Catasexual Urge Motivation or the reality of many serial killers.)

We're again forced to realign our view of Catasexual Urge Motivation's subject matter- it's not about sexuality, and surprisingly enough, not about murder. It's a morbid and elaborate fantasy centered around power and control- the dominant's desire to obtain it, and the submissive's desire to cede it or have it stripped from them. Catasexual Urge Motivation is composed of men, though, and likely those with dominant sexual fantasies- the submissive side of the equation is entirely unexplored. What composes that aspect of the music's conceptual framework is an empty vessel: Woman. Men are never portrayed as victims, and the only women featured in Catasexual Urge Motivation's music are those being victimized. The apparent misogyny of this frame of reference is tempered by two things. The first is the Japanese culture from which the project grows, which places a premium on female submission, powerlessness, and a demure, coquettish approach to sexuality which often involves simulating pain or unhappiness during intercourse (watch any Japanese-made porno and you'll see.) The other is that the women are faceless and intensely objectified; they're reduced to bodies without personality or will through which these power fantasies can be realized. The generic and anonymous Woman that portrays the victim in Catasexual Urge Motivation's songs brings the cultural influence into clearer focus: they are not murdered because they are women, but because women are culturally perceived as weak, and in the sexually dominant man's mind, weakness is to be conquered and battered down by strength. Children are another prime target of the music's malice for the same reason.

Throughout this shamelessly misogynistic portrayal of women, though, runs an undercurrent of obsession and infatuation that's subtly noticeable. The act of murder (inherently visited upon women, the band's perfect victim) is never portrayed as a burst of anger; in fact, anger and hatred are rarely mentioned at all, and when they are, they're random, chaotic, and surprisingly self-contained. Murder and sadism are, instead, portrayed as joyous, celebratory realizations of human instinct, and through this, women are portrayed as those able to make these realizations occur. Through song titles like "Bleeding For Spermqueen," "I Am As Beautiful As I Have Killed," and the later "Whore Is Beautiful Like a God, and God Is Voluptuous Like a Whore," one can see that the victims of violence and cruelty are not hated, and the violent acts visited upon them are not an inherent manifestation of repressed anger or hostility- they are instead, in a roundabout way, deified. Many rapists, in reality, have stated that to forcefully dominate a victim is not an ideal realization of the psychological compulsion; instead, it is a compromise for the real desire: for the other party to give themselves over willingly and without reservation.

Beyond the realization of the power fantasy, though, is the band's implied distaste for the modern state of society. In interviews, Tomoaki states that the acts described in Catasexual Urge Motivation's music- rape, violence, and murder- are not a perversion of the human experience, but an inherent part of the human experience itself. It follows logically, then, that the civility and pacifism that much of human society has embraced is a great corruption of reality than violence and cruelty are. It's nothing more than death metal and goregrind's interpretation of the sort of social Darwinism that so many black metal musicians espouse: that humanity has weakened itself and abandoned authenticity and reality out of fear, replacing it with the constructions of religion, morality, and politics to make up for its absence. In a way, Catasexual Urge Motivation is holding a mirror up to the human condition: it's not that the acts they describe are unnatural; you are the unnatural one, as without the system of checks, balances, morality, and punishment, this is what you'd either be doing or suffering from. In a society where the most inherent signs of strength and weakness, dominance and submission, and success versus failure (particularly in Japan's incredibly repressed, claustrophobic society, with its industrialized sense of corporate slavery and debt to various power structures,) the achievement of a true sense of power, control, and strength is impossible- leading one to sublimate these urges through deviant sexuality, political/social maneuvering, or heavy metal.

It is for this reason that the serial killer is deified and his actions are ritualized. As one of the few who has chosen to obey his instincts to kill, rape, and seize control of the world around him, the serial killer is, in Catasexual Urge Motivation's eyes, the last free man, and perhaps the only man to perceive reality as it actually is. The average human being, through their cowardice and unwillingness to embrace the nature of reality, is viewed as less than an animal (the title of a demo tape and an unrealized compilation CD being "Death to Pigs" is hardly coincidental) and as such free to be victimized at the leisure of the strong. The serial killer (a step above the mass murderer in Catasexual Urge Motivation's hierarchy, as the latter is reactionary rather than deliberate,) however, has obtained the level beyond human. The deification of murderers, the religious iconography used to represent murderous acts, and the ritualization of the preparation and execution of murder itself are all part of a system of belief which elevates them to godhood. The band states it themselves with the song title "Mass Murder, the Only Way to Become God": the truly free man, and the only thing above animal, is the man who is conscious of his impulses' instinctual, natural motives towards evil and chooses to embrace them. Catasexual Urge Motivation: not merely the cause of evil, but the embrace of it as an animal right.

We come back to reality and close the circle with the missing piece of the puzzle: that of hatred and aggression. One of the most curious features of Catasexual Urge Motivation's aesthetic is their handling of hatred and anger, typically the core of black, death, and grind. It's oddly absent except in fits and starts, and even more oddly, it isn't outwardly directed. Instead, hatred in mentioned purely within the context of the self, and though it's never distinctly stated, hatred needs a direction, without which it is rendered meaningless. Catasexual Urge Motivation is too philosophically rational to bother blaming society, religion, or culture for the state of man (and by extension, their own, as they haven't murdered anyone to my knowledge,) and so the only remaining direction for hate to be directed is inward. Songs like "Hate From the Womb" ("I am the master of hate/Symbol of being hatred/Hate is the reason for being") or demo track "Sonic Hate Spleen Rupture" ("Sympathy with the serial killer/Absolute order from them/'Do it, at all costs'") portrays hatred variously as a natural outgrowth of existence devoid of an origin or an external force that possesses the narrator. The serial killer doesn't feel hatred, as he has realized his calling and place in the natural world... Tomoaki and Ujin Kanai, however, do. The subtly veiled self-hatred reveals the key to assembling the album: much like feudal Japan's view of ritualistic, honorable suicide, death is preferable to a life of weakness and shame, and so through the death of the songs' many victims, they are granted a gift and a level of dignity they would be unable to obtain on their own.

And so reality snaps swiftly into place; the elaborate power fantasies portrayed in the songs are just that: fantasies. The hatred, anger, and general emotionality that occasionally flickers into view on this album is both the cause of failure and an outgrowth of it. Trapped within the eternal cycle of shame at being unable to realize one's place and seize power, and yet the shame itself preventing the individual from obtaining that place and power, is the core of this music's philosophical concept. Surprisingly Buddhist in structure, the idealized serial killer is deified because he has thrown off the shackles of society, morality, and the unnatural state of man to embrace a valueless reality beyond modern culture- but as individuals raised within that culture and brought up with its ideals and values, we are powerless to obtain the glory with which the band describes its murderous "protagonists." And so the shame, failure, and dissatisfaction with the self and the surrounding world perpetuates a cycle of endless grief and misery, sublimated in one way, covered up in another, but perpetually painful like a wound left open. Like most of metal but more distinctly and clearly than most, Catasexual Urge Motivation's music is the sonic realization of existential angst and cognitive dissonance: intelligent enough to see outside the sham reality we've constructed for ourselves yet without the strength to break free from it, we are left adrift with only our fantasies, hopes, and dreams to provide us comfort. Be it through murder, love, or achievement (all of which have the same general structure,) we battle to reconcile our desires with reality, and express our perpetual frustration and occasional triumph through art and the ultimate divinity of the human experience.

This, of course, is all conjecture. But no other album has made me think so much, and that alone, I feel, is worthy.

"- Sadism: Violence. Anger. Hatred."

For all the philosophical and psychological commentary above, "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is first and foremost a heavy metal album and an artistic piece. In both of those facets, it succeeds to the fullest possible degree. As a heavy metal album, by deconstructing the genre's most ostensibly standard and essential elements, reinterpreting them, and coming back as both a brilliant heavy metal album and a brilliant album of its own volition, and as art by presenting a flawlessly unified aesthetic that transports the listener and makes them think, feel, and question themselves and the world around them. If a piece of art's impact on the listener is its measure of value, "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is priceless: it wholly transformed the way I see music and art, showed me what my central passion in life is, and inspired me to attempt to create art of my own, which in and of itself has been one of the most wonderful, intensely rewarding experiences of my life. Be it drinking beer with bandmates while tossing out ideas for lyrics, sitting at home alone puzzling the next riff in a black metal song, or simply letting go on stage with music I wrote in the ultimate act of catharsis, I have this album to thank for it, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful to the Kanai brothers. It might seem funny to think such hideous, intensely negative music could have had such a beautiful, positive impact on my life, but sometimes life throws you a curveball and you have no choice but to catch it. And I'm happy I did.

The most important thing that "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" taught me was that the perceived boundaries of music, style, and art were just that: perceptions. If one merely described this album's individual components, it might sound more like a weird bit of industrial experimentation than heavy metal, but a few seconds of listening tells the whole story: it's distinctly, obviously, and inarguably a metal album, despite how it inverts every typical element of metal and chooses instead to dwell in the genre's negative space. This revelation went further down the line, though. This album proved to me that one could compose breathtaking, incredibly real art out of the base, uncomfortable, and sinister; art itself has no boundaries of taste, intellectualism, or perceived value- one of the reasons why even today I make it my mission to expose and examine what appears to be the lowest and most vulgar music and treat it like others would a symphony. Perhaps most importantly, though, is that this album taught me the relativity of perception in a way nothing else has. Where others I showed the music heard only brackish noise and chaos, I heard perfectly ordered and phenomenally constructed compositions. Where others perceived blunt stupidity and shock value, I perceived sharp minds, both psychologically and musically, that chose to seriously explore the topics that all of us thought about but few would ever mention out loud. Where others saw ugliness and emptiness, I saw beauty and verdant richness. And ultimately, where others felt negativity, "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" felt like one of the most positive things I'd ever encountered. As long as I took joy in something that mattered and was true to my own feelings, nothing else mattered.

I've long passed the time where I thought that this album was a hidden gem merely waiting to be uncovered by the metal scene- in discussions about it, both prompted by me and run across on the internet and at metal shows, I've heard just about the widest range of opinions possible. Some dismiss it as prurient garbage, other discount it as mediocre and unremarkable (the opinion I disagree with much more vehemently than a wholly negative one,) a large chunk find it bizarre and fascinating but ultimately not for them, some still enjoy it in a simple, straightforward manner, and finally, a handful are like me and express an obsessive, slavish devotion to it that I've rarely seen elsewhere in the metal scene. While I'd like to say that I know more about this strange, nearly forgotten project than anyone else, I very much know that I don't; to this very day, I continue to research them, trawl through reams of websites, and eagerly snatch up any tidbit of previously unknown information I can find, as though I'm looking for a final piece that will ultimately make sense of the puzzle that the band is. Frankly, though I think I've made a decent dent in grasping their whole "point" (presuming there is one,) I think that one of the things which makes Catasexual Urge Motivation so magical to me and others is never truly knowing the answer. Seemingly unconnected with the scene around it despite a multitude of split releases, shrouded in mystery not due to intentional posturing but from simply being buried and forgotten, and playing music so strange, evocative, and stridently independent that it seemingly insists on some sort of explanation, they're exactly the sort of band designed to inspire such a rabid and cultlike fanbase. Funnily enough, I'm not the only person I've met with this sort of quixotic infatuation with the band; Catasexual Urge Motivation is almost like a secret handshake among goregrind grognards, and mentioning their name on forums will more often than not feature someone coming out of the woodwork to show off their collection of rehearsal tapes, 7"s, and nostalgic memories.

I suppose it goes without saying that I urge everyone to give this record a try. I harbor few illusions of somehow creating a movement of new fans with this review (if you can even call it that)- it seems, sadly, like most of the people who would fall in love with it like I did have already done so. That being said, all melodramatic, slavering hyperbole aside, it's a record that's worthwhile to listen to. Even if you hate it, it will almost certainly make an impression on you; "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is something you experience more than listen to, and your ideas about metal will probably be expanded a bit by listening to it. Tomoaki and Ujin supposedly reactivated the project a few years ago in anticipation of upcoming releases, but as is nearly all information about the band, there's a lot more rumor and assumption than concrete fact. I was privileged enough to speak to them briefly on Myspace a few years ago- they were gracious, kind, and appreciated the support shown by their crazy little fanbase scattered across the globe. I feel that I owe it to them, in some way, to bring as much attention to their weird, unlovable classic as possible. You'd be surprised just how many bands cite Catasexual Urge Motivation as an influence; its tendrils spread far and wide, and yet the band never seemed to achieve the sort of recognition that I always felt that they were on the cusp of. I hope that if you decide to give this album a spin, you fall in love with it and take joy in trying to figure out the puzzle of the band along with the rest of us.

Of course, I'm lying about all this. There's no secret. Tomoaki and Ujin Kanai are a couple brothers from Tokyo who loved extreme music and wanted to make their own. They picked a cool aesthetic, wrote phenomenal, horrifying songs, and played characters in interviews; from my brief contact with them, and with logic guiding me, I know full well that they're probably just a couple weirdos- not much weirder than the rest of us- who like heavy, extreme music. I certainly know that there's no such elaborate, existential concept behind their work like I ranted about above- it's just taking bits and pieces of interviews and musical ideas and assembling into something I find pleasing. I know that the musical techniques I'm so in awe of and fascinated by were likely mastered by other, equally obscure bands before- hell, I'm sure that Catasexual Urge Motivation's particular sound was likely pioneered by bands before them that they merely rejiggered and made their own. I know that, in the end, there's no grand secret, no philosophical revelation, and no puzzle to solve. "The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders" is, in the end, just a heavy metal album. Catasexual Urge Motivation is just a heavy metal band, like many others before it and after.

But it's my heavy metal album and my heavy metal band. Even if things are just as boring and normal as they seem- and in all likelihood, they are- this ultimately irrelevant heavy metal album changed the way I felt about music, art, and life. Like nearly everything else in the world, I know that it's disposable, but it's not disposable to me. If a heavy metal album, as plain as that sounds, motivated me to write so much about it, and listen to it hundreds of times, and come up with thought experiments about its lyrical concepts, and pick up a guitar and write stupid black metal songs, and feel such joy and positivity and creativity, how can I dismiss it as valueless? It's not. To this day, there's few things I enjoy more than sitting in the dark, cranking this album up, and soaking up its sinister, wonderfully evil sound with a grin on my face. It continues to be, without competition, my favorite album of all time, because it makes me think, feel, and experience things I never could on my own. Even looking back now, so many years later, I tear up thinking about it, because when I listen to this album, I'm 14 again, sitting in my high school classroom, listening to this music for the very first time and getting the whole world opened up to me. It's a moment so special, tender, and real to me that even if it came from a curious place, it continues to be and will forever be one of the most important and wonderful things I've ever experienced.

In the end, I guess this review was less about Catasexual Urge Motivation and more about my Catasexual Urge Motivation. And if you haven't found yours yet, I hope that someday soon you will.

"Be sick to the core
Straight to the day of end
I am insanity being
Dancing in cocytus
At the moment of dying
I'll awake for myself"

Happy new year, TBO readers. Do something you love.

Top 7 For 2011

2011-12-29T01:25:00.001-05:00

Finally, I've written a list for you. I've only recently made a serious effort to keep track of new releases, so it's hardly exhaustive. There are definitely some very promising albums I've not yet heard in full, such as the new ones by Aosoth and Ride For Revenge.

As it is, here are 7 full-lengths with my brief comments. These certainly aren't ranked according to quality or anything like that--I'd have a hard time choosing, and for the most part comparing them would be totally "apples and oranges." Instead of posting album covers, I've posted Youtube links, because I want you to listen to them if you haven't already. There are 7 because that's about how many I could think of, and it's a magick number.

1. ANTEDILUVIAN - THROUGH THE CERVIX OF HAWAAH

Hands down the most important album of the year. This is one of the best black/death recordings ever released, an unholy rebirth of the style that remains completely true to its essence. Antediluvian have nailed that overwhelming, utterly inhuman feeling you get from the very best extreme metal. If you enjoy the concept of Portal but wish they were actually brutal, this is for you. The most exciting thing happening in the underground right now is the Renaissance of war metal and bestial black/death, and Through The Cervix... may be its foulest fruit yet. Trial By Ordeal fucking loves this album--I've already reviewed it and B's praised it in his own year-end roundup.

2. TAAKE - NOREGS VAAPEN

The year's truest, noblest, and most beautiful album of pure Scandinavian black metal. It's probably tied with Cervix as my personal favorite of the year. Hoest has done a lot of new things within a very traditional framework, incorporating sounds from country and southern metal and writing riffs that simply don't sound like anything anyone's played before. Along with Craft's excellent and innovative Void, this should serve as a real fuck you to the posers of the USBM scene, who have shit-talked Scandinavia as "stagnant." But far more important than originality and scene politics is the ecstatic power Taake radiates throughout Noregs Vaapen. This was made with so much love. Check out my full review for The Bone Reader.

3. AMEBIX - SONIC MASS

A glorious return by one of my all-time favorite bands. Blending post-punk and prog-folk into burly, catchy metal, Amebix unleash pagan hymns for the darkest days yet. Sonic Mass certainly sounds very different from their old 80s recordings, but this difference shows us what they were all about the whole time. Play it from beginning to end. I've already written a ton about this, so if you wanna read more check my original review here.

4. DISMA - TOWARDS THE MEGALITH

Head and shoulders above the trendies. As I'm sure you've noticed, it's been a big year for old-school death metal. Not really a good year, though. Even the best of the Stockholm clones, such as Miasmal, couldn't entice me to repeated listens. And it's hard to tell what's so special about Vanhelgd, aside from the fact that they sound like a thinly disguised crustgrind band. Then there were the real bottom-of-the-barrel hype magnets, like Vastum, with their strangely impotent pseudo-death, and Necros Christos, with their plodding, forgettable doom-death.

But there have definitely been high spots. Some old-school bands continue striving to make The Most Brutal Thing Ever instead of just imitating early 90s bands who tried to do that. Acephalix bring some fucking jams, and Sanguis Imperem's In Glory We March Towards Our Doom brims with martial fury and ancient atmosphere. But in death metal it's important to go with your gut, and I really fucking enjoy listening to Towards The Megalith. People always compare it to Incantation, but I'm not even really a fan of that band. Rather, I love the way Disma draw on Grave and Hellhammer/Frost. Simply the heaviest, grooviest, colossal-est thing I've heard this year. Plus if your idea of appealing real estate is a giant crypt flanked by screaming demon skulls, Towards The Megalith is just an awesome place to hang out.

5. CULT OF YOUTH - CULT OF YOUTH

Hell-raising, mold-breaking neofolk from my very own New York City. Where Douglas Pearce cultivated an aesthetic of distance and David Tibet swathed himself in mystique, Sean Ragon strides fiercely forward, light on his feet, sawing at his guitar and howling with battle-joy. I am continually amazed by his vocal patterns, his skill at giving real rhythmic character to every phrase and syllable. But it's not just about him. Cult of Youth's violinist, bassist, and drummer are crucial to the album, contributing a melodic depth and rhythmic power that's uncommon in neofolk (where the emphasis is almost always on the lyrics). Indeed, their full-band take on the genre really brings out its post-punk/goth undertones, evoking strange, forgotten English groups like Theatre of Hate. What's best about this music, though, is its untrammeled, uncompromising sincerity. Cult of Youth is the sound of truth being spoken.

6. NEW LOWS - HARVEST OF THE CARCASS

Bloody fucking hatred unleashed. Strictly speaking this isn't as heavy as Disma, but it still might be the year's most crushing sonic assault. And it's certainly my favorite punk full-length. Of course, I'm using the word "punk" loosely here. New Lows play armor-plated metalcore influenced equally by Bolt Thrower and Integrity. These guys understand that before style, before memorability, heavy music is about channeling raw physical force. They've designed Harvest of The Carcass to send bodies spinning into a destructive frenzy. These riffs do work. And because New Lows have worked towards a concrete effect rather than a certain "sound," the music is strikingly original. This has never been done before. It's closest in attitude to beatdown hardcore, but more interesting, more agile, and even heavier. I think New Lows are summed up by their logo, which proclaims them heirs to Negative Approach. That's not a statement to make lightly, especially about your own band, but these guys have earned the right. For more in-depth writing about the music and a sick live video, here's my old "Get Into" feature.

7. SARGEIST - LET THE DEVIL IN

This came out very late in 2010, and topped my (imaginary) list for that year, so I'm sticking it here because it damn well deserves to be heard. Let The Devil In didn't get much attention from critics, but I was hardly surprised because this shit is just too true for people who cream themselves over Agalloch and Deathspell Omega. And that's as it should be--Sargeist are the ultimate Finnish kvlt band. But they no longer sound like it. Where their earlier albums were notable for sounding a whole lot like Transylvanian Hunger but actually being pretty good, on this one they've truly come into their own.

With its elegant, sinister counterpoint melodies, Let The Devil In is a worthy heir to Gorgoroth's Under The Sign Of Hell. It has the same sense of decadent Baroque grandeur, of evil ascendant and proud. But there are two big differences. First, Sargeist are still minimalists, and this album is all about the hypnotic flow of tremolo riffage and blasting. Second, they've definitely hit on a mood all their own. Every epic harmony, every tortuously drawn-out scream is imbued with yearning. True to its name, Let The Devil In is a kind of Satanic devotional, a Black Mass, and there's something honest, naked, and even tender about it.

Oh, and an honorable mention goes to Gates of Slumber for being bearded badasses and recording one of the most depressing albums of all time. I'm just not a doom guy. Something I would've included if I'd done a full top 10.

Review: Centinex - Malleus Maleficarum

2011-12-28T02:45:00.000-05:00

Centinex is a positively maddening band from a historical perspective. With their roots in the early '90s but not getting their career genuinely underway until the mid to late parts of the decade, they seem to have come too late to be formative, and yet traces of this band seem to be all over modern artists. For instance: I had no idea that The Berzerker really owed just about their entire riffing style to this band's mid-era. Much of Vehemence's melodic sense and pacing seems to stem from these Swedes. It goes on and on down the line, with Centinex very rarely getting cited as an influence to anyone, but with the band's tendrils seemingly sneaking into a big chunk of what we hear nowadays in some of extreme metal's biggest names. Undoubtedly, the band occupies a very odd space in the metal scene, never having received the widespread appreciation they probably deserved, and at the same time, never having really pushed the envelope in a way that would earn such praise. I'm inclined to think that, whether consciously known or not, Centinex may have been a great deal more significant than we give them credit for; there's just too much about albums like "Malleus Maleficarum" that seems a pinch ahead of its time or a shade too well-constructed to be simply passed over like so many other '90s releases.

Calling this a pure Swedish death metal album is so reductionist is verges on objectively incorrect. One of the least spoken of elements inherent to Centinex is the obvious, massive black metal influence in their style, which comes out in spades on "Malleus Maleficarum." To define things a bit better, though, what Centinex more genuinely reminds me of is bands like Aeternus: stalwarts of mid-'90s Scandinavia who never felt the need to refine their sound clearly into a death or black metal box after the genres became more stratified. Even the Swedish death metal that understandably forms a major part of this release is utterly hybridized: Stockholm meets Gothenburg, which along with a good chunk of Tampa death metal makes "Malleus Maleficarum" sound like the poppier, more accessible brother of "Spiritually Uncontrolled Art." It's a sort of fusion of Dismember, Dissection, and bits and pieces of Obituary and Autopsy on the more sluggish, doomy end. It goes without saying that the album is pretty varied in its sound, especially with the older death/thrash demo tracks kept on as a bonus, which portrays yet another face for the band.

Due to the multiplicity of available styles, the general structuring of "Malleus Maleficarum" can come off as somewhat haphazard and riff-saladish. Unlike more modern bands with this musical approach, though, instead of drastically changing style from riff to riff, Centinex approaches things in a more narrative fashion, with discrete songwriting blocks dedicated to Gothenburg melodeath, ominous, Emperor-style black metal, or Stockholm trundling, using each stylistic shift as a sort of musical paragraph of its own. This doesn't entirely diminish the quirky, occasionally offputting nature of "In the Nightside Eclipse" placed directly next to "Like An Everflowing Stream," but it does suggest that the band put a great deal more thought into the sort of structuring you see here than is typical. While some of the shifts are jarring, none of the passages themselves are any weaker than others, and when bound together with a fence-straddling but oddly representative production style (nearly identical, especially in guitar tone, to "Death Metal" a year later) the various stylistic juxtapositions are navigated much more cleanly than would be expected.

The band's black metal pedigree is distinct- as distinct as the death metal- and it comes out both thematically in the occult-oriented lyrical topics and musically in the forward-thinking black metal riffing that combines an erudite Emperor style of romantic melody with a stripped-down, punky energy, bringing to mind much later bands like Throndt in their sort of juvenile fervor. When combined with the Gothenburg on display, it's musical candy- the two styles dovetail magnificently, and somewhat unsurprisingly, it's the chunkier, more brooding Stockholm death metal which tends to get left out in the cold more often than not. The oppressive, somewhat doomy strains of Entombed can seem sort of static and lifeless compared to the flying, blast and harmony-oriented extreme metal that defines the rest of the album, and while its inclusion is something of a product of the album's time, it still poses a sort of speedbump for the listener. You've been forewarned. Still, the riffcraft is second to none: a beautiful fusion of the most accessible elements of both black and death metal at the time which makes for ripping and raw yet uniquely appealing and, dare I say, "happy" sounding music despite all its growling vocals and abraded, corrosive guitar tone. Hell, listen to the cock rock solos on songs like "Luciferian Moon" (off the later "Bloodhunt") which set the stage for The Crown years later- they're having fun with what they do.

"Malleus Maleficarum" isn't the band's best album simply because they hadn't yet managed to find their distinct sound- that of a Hypocrisy/Limbonic Art blend with half the pretense- but it's worth investigation for its possibly revelatory position in extreme metal. I'm not sure if I'll ever know whether this band was as big an influence on others as it outwardly appears to be, but there's little doubt in my mind that this and the band's other albums are hidden gems in the Swedish scene. Absolutely worth a purchase, especially considering how cheap the band's discography has become on underground distros.

Crush the spawn of Bethlehem

2011-12-25T22:00:00.007-05:00

Drink to the coming of Midwinter, and hail the Horned One in his forest deep.

Deathpunk Destruction: Mauser, Bootblacks, Rosenkopf, Anasazi, Dead Reich at Ding-Dong Lounge (Part 2)

2011-12-24T00:55:00.006-05:00

(Continued from Part I, written on Monday)

Next up were Rosenkopf, the co-headliners, who have gigged ceaselessly over the last year and established themselves as fixtures of the New York goth scene. In a sign that their hard work has paid off, they certainly drew the largest crowd to the front of the stage. A trio of drums, bass, and guitar, Rosenkopf crafted extended bass and drum grooves wreathed in verbed-out guitar arpeggios, occasionally punctuated by their guitarist's verbed-out screams. Think of it as ambient deathrock. Their really impressive drummer was, as always, the center of the band, playing his kit almost like a melodic instrument, and throwing in really cool fills. Rather than settling for straight kick/snare thrash or "tribal" tom rhythms, he favored off-kilter funk rhythms and breakbeats. At times this made Rosenkopf come off like hip-hop goth, or even an instrumental reinterpretation of the whole "witch house" thing. (The studio tracks on Youtube don't really have this sound.)

Rosenkopf definitely has something unique and interesting going on, but despite the percussive pyrotechnics their set didn't do that much for me. I saw them play a much stronger show at The Pentagon this fall. And overall, it sounds like they still need to work out some kinks in the way they construct their music. It might help conjure up that hypnotic gloom if they toned down the flamboyant drumming a little bit (it can get distracting) and put more work into developing their riffage (right now it just doesn't have much character). And while I like the idea of a goth band incorporating harsh vocals, the screaming sounded too much like Liturgy for me. Something nastier and more visceral could actually add to the sadomasochistic vibe that Rosenkopf is going for.

Don't let the criticism put you off checking out Rosenkopf, though. There's a very cool concept behind the music, and you sure as hell won't hear anything else that sounds like this. I look forward to hearing what they do next.

Bootblacks were excellent as always. As I've mentioned before, they work in the tradition of The Birthday Party, Die Haut, and the like, but have avoided sounding like a retro clone band (not that I'd mind, really). They actually remind me a lot of Gang of Four, but how Gang of Four ACTUALLY played, as opposed to the refracted image of them we got through the "dance punk" of 5 or 6 years ago. Bootblacks' new thing, apparently, is playing extremely short sets--as in, 4 songs in 15 minutes. That might seem like a musical blue-balling, but it corresponded nicely to the focused intensity of their songs, and allowed them to play each one like it was their last. Their disciplined, heavily syncopated riffing contrasted nicely with the thrash and atmospherics favored by the other bands, and definitely got people fired up and moving. And the band moved too, laying into each moment of catharsis with the zeal of a metalcore band playing a breakdown. Bootblacks also pulled out a sick new song, as yet untitled, with a bit of a different feel. It was more driving, more Joy Division-esque. Needless to say, right up my alley.

After Bootblacks, I felt like the show had reached its denouement--I'd stick around and see Mauser, who I'd checked out and liked, but I had already seen the bands I'd come to see. Little did I realize what was coming. Mauser fucking wrecked everything in their path. This was the essence of raw noise d-beat fury. As everybody's favorite drumbeat kicked in, I ran forward to mosh, and found that even with earplugs my ears kinda hurt. They played so fucking loud, so that every blast of fuzz and shriek of feedback took on a clear, concrete existence of its own, so that the wall of distortion completely dominated and reshaped its environment. We were now in their bar. Mauser's vocalist was the quintessential punk frontman, raging like a berserk and entrusting himself to the unsteady hands of the small contingent who braved the frontlines. At one point he got a boost up and scaled a pole, first hanging off with one hand like King Kong, then wrapping himself around it sideways stripper-style, all while puking pure distorted hate on the heads of those below.

Their songwriting was brilliant, too: Mauser had clearly re-imagined their chosen style from the inside out. While most bands charge onwards continuously over a continuous d-beat for the entirety of each song, Mauser opened up new rhythmic space with split-second stops and sudden slowdowns. The drummer would seamlessly flow from d-beat into continuous rolling fills, as the guitars whipped up raw noise. These sections of pulsating chaos momentarily checked the song's hurtling momentum without breaking it, seeming to compress the sound in preparation for the next burst of thrashing speed. Sort of like inverse breakdowns, they increased tension instead of offering cathartic release. With their flowing, mercurial take on traditional raw punk, Mauser sounded more genuinely "chaotic" than any other noisecore band I've ever heard. Late in the set, they busted out a straight-up stomper in the vein of Discharge's crushing midtempo stuff, a side of the band that's been waaay too often neglected by the subgenre they inspired. I was into it.

What else can I say? These dudes fucking destroyed, and I bought their brief tour tape, which I might review on here soon. They were on tour up the East Coast from the old punk/metal hotbed of Gainesville, Florida, and will be going to play in Japan soon. Buy some of their shit and help them get there. Then maybe they'll bring you back a radioactive samurai sword or something.

All in all, this was an aesthetically perfect gig for me, and I got to see some sick performances. A very exciting look at what I think is the coolest scene going in my hometown, and one of the best times I've had at a show all year.

A couple small notes

2011-12-20T13:19:00.000-05:00

Always Unprotected is up and running again, with five new releases posted at the time of this posting with more to come. I was busy and distracted with work/home/vehicle/boner concerns, but with things settling down, I'm prepared to flood you with more Ecuadorian CDr releases than you can handle.

In other news: a new blog is in the formational stage between myself and a mostly unknown but vehemently talented writer from the Metal Archives. This little slice of heaven will be squarely dedicated to covering deathcore, slam, goregrind, gorenoise, and everything in between. If you're interested in reviews, interviews, and other features around bands like Catasexual Urge Motivation, Intestinal Disgorge, Raped By Pigs, or Anal Birth, this will be your one-stop shop for everything that abducts, rapes, and skins alive. Don't worry; this won't take time away from Trial By Ordeal, which is my first and favorite child. But as those styles are a major passion of mine, I thought it prudent to create a space just for them, to prevent Trial By Ordeal from getting cluttered with Abominable Putridity videos and keep things cosmopolitan for you guys. Those styles will still be covered here on TBO, but if you want more, this new blog will suit you just fine.

We anticipate getting it up and running by the end of the year. I'll keep you posted with the details.

If you're not in a band you're probably dumb as fuck

2011-12-20T08:43:00.001-05:00

The title is inflammatory, but I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it. Buckle up; this is going to be a long one. And, of course, an abstract, difficult to follow one with probably few rewards at the end.

Metal is, at its heart (at least after punk's influence on thrash and styles thereafter,) a DIY genre. The most important impact that the DIY ethos has on a musical genre is that is massively lowers the bar necessary for people to get involved in the scene- and by involved in the scene, I mean on a deeper level than merely listening to the music. This can take many forms: being in a band, running a dumb tape/CDr distro, setting up shows, or even just writing self-indulgent screeds about bands no one's heard of on the internet. In other styles of music that don't possess the same degree of DIY ethos, some of these fields can be harder to break into; jazz sort of necessitates the live environment and a high degree of instrumental skill, classical demands collaboration in an academic or extremely restrictive professional environment, and so forth. Metal, on the other hand, needs a cheap guitar, a pirated copy of FLStudio, and too much time on one's hands. To extend beyond that: a metal label needs a grand and a decent starting album. Writing about metal simply requires the wherewithal to submit a bunch of Drudkh reviews to the Metal Archives. It's a fairly level playing field, all things considered, and if you're not taking part in any aspect of it beyond simply listening to the music... well, here's where things get contentious.

After a lot of years doing various stuff in the metal scene (playing in bands, running a label, writing a ton... I'm not a Renaissance man, just incredibly unfocused) I've come to look at those "mere listener" types with a grain of scorn that's admittedly unfair. It's not necessarily because I feel that these people need to "support the scene more"- hardly, if anything, I think the scene needs to be supported LESS, or at least in a very different way- as much as that, by not involving themselves in the more technical workings of the metal scene, they're given a very skewed, strange, rather one-dimensional look at the hows and whys of what goes on within the community. The title of this article is a false claim: you don't have to be in a band, but you need to do SOMETHING that establishes a more well-rounded look at the scene you're so ostensibly invested in.

(While I'm loathe to do it, I'll stop here and say that, yes, you can simply listen to and enjoy the music and have a realistic, concrete understanding of how the scene works. It's simply more challenging to get all the necessary perspectives and is probably a lot less fun for you in general. This is the only apologism I'll allow here, as just writing this much has already reduced my self-righteous erection to half-mast.)

Simply being a part of the community in some concrete way massively changes the way you see it, in ways that are both better and worse. It's much easier to see metal (or whatever your pet scene may be) as this holy, monolithic, sort of faceless entity that stands outside of the rest of culture when you're not involved in its workings. By getting more into it, you see the reality of it, and in many ways, get a more genuine appreciation and understanding of it: you can more accurately see the ways that it compares and contrasts to the mainstream. After spending about a decade in metal now, I've come to realize that, no, metal's not a divine presence that exists wholly on its own terms, but it does have enough distinguishing attributes to suggest that it's a rather different kind of animal from the others out there. Unfortunately, without playing in a shitty black metal band, you're unlikely to gain such an intimate and thorough understanding of things. Deena Weinstein in "Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture" refers to the metal scene as a bricolage- an entity composed of smaller modules that are at once independent and interrelated- and this is a pretty accurate portrayal of it. Delving into it might remove some of the magic, but if more did it, it would certainly cut down on the dumbest threads that clog metal forums all over the internet.

The most relevant example, and the one that perpetually frustrates me and inspired me to write this, is the massive, glaring misunderstanding of how musicians in the metal scene work- or, perhaps, musicians in general. Those who merely listen to different styles of music tend to believe that the social groups within the greater pantheon of "music" are striated purely along the lines of the genre, or in terms of mainstream vs. underground, when in actuality there's a million more ways that people are broken down and categorized than that. One of the largest is the "musician" social group: those that compose and play music of whatever genre. Relationships in any social group have a sort of default, baseline level of interaction and understanding, and, perhaps to the chagrin of the ignorant, it may come as a surprise to know that, as a metal musician, I immediately identify more and will be able to communicate more clearly with a fellow musician who plays wimpy folk rock than a metalhead who doesn't play instruments but listens to all the same bands as I.

Bruce Dickinson's son plays lead guitar and sings (I believe) in a melodic metalcore band. When this information hit the preening metal public, the overreaction and insane, judgmental logical leaps that occurred are without a doubt one of the most demented and inexplicable things I've seen in the metal scene. The outcry on metal forums across the web was at a fever pitch: people were actually decrying Dickinson's son, saying that he was somehow besmirching Iron Maiden, his father, and by extension, metal as a whole, for daring to play a more unacceptable style of heavy music. The truly mind-boggling posts, however, stated with unwavering certainty that Dickinson must be ashamed of his son for performing that style of music. We are dealing with people whose obsessive belief in these ultra-stratified, cultlike concepts of genre convince them that a father will disown his son for playing a different style of music than himself. Other examples of this sort of thinking are common: the perpetual, churning fury over Kerry King considering Slipknot a metal band, or dumbfounded angst over Slayer touring with Marilyn Manson, or any other indications that a metal musician is not properly obeying the unspoken guidelines of philosophical indentured servitude to the unquestionable, dogmatic entity of Metal.

Here's a few examples of bands I've played with:

-A retro death/thrash band from California
-A nu-metal band featuring a turntablist
-A crossover band from New York that sounded taken from the pages of Cryptic Slaughter
-A cybergrind band which featured only a guitarist, a vocalist, and an endless array of samples and electronic beats
-A band that was 75% bar rock, 25% Pantera, and composed entirely of members wearing Black Label Society shirts

It goes without saying that no project I've played in live has sounded even remotely like any of the above; I played melodic black metal with the nu-metal band and oppressive doom/death with the cybergrind project. At no point, though, were those distinctions relevant or even brought up between us, apart from in the form of jokes between members. These sorts of juxtapositions are legitimately ghastly to many of those who don't understand how the greater musical scene actually operates. Did I like the above bands? About 2.5/5. Did I, at any point, shudder with barely-restrained rage at sullying my black metal by playing with a band featuring a vocalist who insisted to the crowd, "When I say 'Fuck your' you say 'TV'?" Of course not. You know why? Because we lent a power cable to one of those guitarists, and they helped us load our amps into our van after the show was done, and we traded Myspace addresses and text messages- all things infinitely more important than following some scattershot concept of musical segregation established by those who've never picked up a guitar.

Another community that operates in a similar manner, though much smaller, is that of label and distro operators. Those people are part of the metal scene but exist in a realm completely different from the rest of it. People constantly ask why a label might release a certain album that's radically different from the rest of its discography, or why something was misprinted in a booklet- but because they've never been involved in the business, they have fundamentally never come in contact with many of the little things people on that side of the equation have encountered. Those who haven't taken part in it don't know these little abstractions: trying to arrange a pro CDr deal with Ukrainians whose broken English actually makes it harder to communicate than it would be if Pictionary was the operative language, figuring out which of five artwork revisions is the one that should be sent to the printer, or long nights on AIM talking to other label owners, taking shots at each other's releases in between organizing trade agreements. It is not that there's one thing or another that will answer the questions of how a label runs, but the sum of different feelings, thoughts, and experiences which give one an altogether different appreciation for what happens. Labels in the metal scene- even fairly large ones- are more often run out of bedrooms than offices, a distinction that seems to elude most of those who haven't given it a deeper look.

I'm not using this as a platform to suggest you play in a band or start a label or write a review (though of course you should,) but to illuminate the fact that, if you're simply listening to the music and not taking part in the process of it turning from an idea in one person's head to a CD in your player, you're more likely than not going to miss a fundamental part of the overall experience. You don't know how things work because you haven't been there, and while this isn't some sort of ethical deficiency, it does mean that you should be more willing to profess ignorance when such is the case. The next time you express incredulity at a collaboration between Satyricon and Joey Jordison, ask yourself: do I know anything about what the fuck I'm saying? Or are 14 year olds in Chicago telling me what to think?

Deathpunk Destruction: Mauser, Bootblacks, Rosenkopf, Anasazi, Dead Reich at Ding-Dong Lounge (Part 1)

2011-12-19T04:12:00.007-05:00

This post is taking me a really long time to write because I wanted to do it as 5 separate mini-reviews with youtube links. And also because I just haven't written that many live reviews yet (and by "not that many" I mean one). So I'm breaking it up into two parts, second one pending.

On Saturday night I ventured way the fuck uptown to a low-key punk bar with the silly name Ding-Dong Lounge, near my old college stomping grounds, where I caught a show with probably the coolest lineup I've seen all year--entirely deathrock and d-beat. This combination of goth and punk might strike some people as a little bit odd, but it totally makes sense when you think about their intertwined roots in the bleak, morbid punk scenes of early 80s England, Scandinavia, and Japan. In the last year or two a group of NYC bands have taken this common history to heart, ditching the stupid subcultural divide and making awesome music. I'd go as far as saying that this particular show was a kind of sonic manifesto for the young scene, and it was every bit as cool as I'd hoped.

I got to the venue just in time to see most of the opening set by Dead Reich. These guys are a new d-beat band who have been gigging a lot, often with goth bands, and I was glad to finally see them. They played an enthusiastic set, whipping up real speed and aggression rather than relying solely on low-end heaviness or a wall of guitar noise to do the work for them. Their style was more or less traditional Swedish/Japanese crustcore, and from what I could make out many of the riffs were pretty standard, so there's certainly some room for growth here. But I definitely enjoyed it and I'm optimistic about where Dead Reich is going. The songs seemed to get better as the set went on--one song really captured the primordial energy of Discharge with brutally simple, memorable riffs, while a couple others had a thrashing "Motorcore" sound that reminded me of Kuro and the more metallic side of crust. It'd be cool to hear them go more in that direction. I should also mention that Dead Reich look great, like a bunch of wasteland barbarians clad in bone necklaces and Thelemic insignias. I'm serious, badass sartorial style is actually really important for raw vintage crust. It's meant to be heard live, and bands that dress flamboyantly stand out. Check out some pictures of Black Uniforms or Confuse and tell me there hasn't always been a subtle glam rock undertone to this stuff (as with black metal, of course).

Dead Reich were followed by Anasazi, who drew on classic shit like Christian Death, Fields of The Nephilim, and Killing Joke to create the most quintessentially "deathrock" sound of the evening. I'd seen them for the first time a week or so before, and had been blown away by the dark energy they brought to a small room packed with punks: I'd expected some kind of circle pit (this ain't The Cure, dude), but I was stunned by the outbreak of full blown NYHC-style mosh violence, culminating in some kids throwing a chair around. Strange, but fucking sick. There was none of that destruction on Saturday, because the space wasn't right for a pit and the crowd lacked the critical mass of raging drunk fat kids, but that gave me a chance to pay more attention to the music itself.

While most deathrock bands evoke murky subterranean atmospheres or straight-up thrashing vitriol, Anasazi use similar ingredients to create vast, majestic spaces. I was really digging the keys, especially the sprawling keyboard intro to "Burn Everything," which served as the perfect setup for the pounding post-punk diatribe that followed. But the center of the band is definitely frontman Chi, an elaborately eyeliner'd deathpunk with iron lungs. He somehow manages to shout-sing from deep within his chest, calling up the cavernous clean tones of classic goth without sacrificing hardcore aggression. A cool, very unique style that must be physically demanding. Despite Anasazi's flair for the grandiose their music had a visceral pull, and I found myself headbanging, airpunching, and even clenching my fist into The Black Metal Claw. Again and again, I had that awesome "fuck yeah!" moment you get at the best of shows. Anasazi killed it.

Note: Footage of Dead Reich is from a previous show at the same venue, I'd post a studio track but there isn't one on Youtube yet. Thanks to user Joexjoe for taping and uploading it.