Revealing the magic

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When I was young, metal bands were mysterious. They didn’t necessarily intend that; information was just scarcer in the ’80s. Bands never played the small town where I grew up, so the only visuals I had of them came from magazines and liner notes.

This let me make my own mental images of them. Def Leppard’s Hysteria was a gleaming spaceship. Metallica were stern dealers of precise rage. Testament and Anthrax were lone men fighting forces larger than them. Few things spark a kid’s imagination like hearing metal in headphones.

Now few bands are mysteries. Long before albums come out, bands post studio video blogs. They tweet and request Facebook fandom incessantly. The rise of video as a marketing tool — YouTube videos are much more engaging than MP3 streams — means that bands’ imagery now comes served on a plate.

This is double-edged. Take a band like Immolation, who were historically under-exposed until their signing to Nuclear Blast last year . This was unfortunate, but it elevated their mystique for me. Their roaring vocals, groaning bends, and aching melodies truly conjured up a world below.

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Now Nuclear Blast, who have perhaps metal’s most vigorous marketing department, have the band doing a series of making-of videos. (Vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan says this in the first one above.) Immolation also posted an exhaustive seven-part studio blog for Decibel. It’s a lot of fuss to make over writing music on a laptop.

It’s also strange to see Dolan and guitarist Bob Vigna, the band masterminds, as such average Joes. They’re clean-cut, standing in a sterile room under fluorescent lights, and in general not being Metal Overlords. One hears the computer demos for the new album Majesty and Decay, which just came out. The tones are small; the drums are rinky-dink. Talk about myth busting!

But this reduction to mundanity ironically enhances the Metal Overlord-ness. The second video above A-B’s the demos against the finished results. The comparisons are enjoyable; they’re like seeing napkin sketches for immense paintings. Live, this juxtaposition is almost punk. One moment, Vigna is sipping a drink, talking affably with fans. The next, he’s on stage, raining down audio hellfire. Immolation are still Metal Overlords for me, but now they’re also people. I find this weird. Fans raised on today’s all-access culture probably wouldn’t.