When you die, maybe you’d like to be more useful than as an urn on a mantel (waiting to be knocked over and lapped up by the dog), or as fertilizer for soil that will eventually become condominiums. Maybe you’d like to keep making people happy – at 33 1/3 RPM.

For £3,000, And Vinyly, an English company, will press your ashes into 30 LP’s. (See story here.) These are presumably 12″ discs, with 12 minutes of sound on each side. If you want the sleeve to be a creepy portrait of yourself – with your ashes mixed into the paint – pony up an extra £4,000. (See “COVERS” at the company’s website.) Otherwise, you get a plain black sleeve with white text indicating your name, lifespan, and “R.I.V.” (Rest In Vinyl). “Groove is in the heart” has new meaning now.

Presumably the vinyl is black, though a clear splatter option (the splatter being the ashes) would be wicked. (Would that be the Die Hard edition?) I can see the reviews already: “gritty, lifeless sound… a style that’s DOA”.

24 minutes as a sonic last will and testament: for side A, I’d like some of my music, along with some Mitch Hedberg one-liners. For side B, I’d like Metallica’s “To Live Is to Die” (9:47, lyrics), Motörhead’s “Bite the Bullet” (1:38, lyrics), Nasum’s “Fatal Search” (0:28, lyrics), and Napalm Death’s “You Suffer” (0:01, lyrics).

What would be on your final vinyl?

. . .

PS. The only video I found of the ashes scene in The Big Lebowski was in French. That makes it even funnier. See it here.

Why doesn’t anyone tell me this stuff??? Wino has a ton of projects going on, but I hear about them in drips and drabs. So I’ve collected what I can find and put it all in one place: here.

. . .

Saint Vitus

Some were fortunate enough to catch the reunited Wino-era lineup live this year. Material from these shows will appear on the band’s next release, a colored vinyl 7″ on Volcom Entertainment Vinyl Club (an old-school-style singles club). See story here and ordering info here.

Shrinebuilder

Shrinebuilder tour the EU for three weeks in November. See dates here, and my review of their first show here. If they were that good then, they’re probably unstoppable now.

Wino electric

Roadburn has put out a CD of Wino’s set at the festival last year. His band had Jon Blank (RIP) on bass and Clutch’s Jean-Paul Gaster on drums. The CD packaging is pretty, and you can hear the cookin’ first track below. (Gaster sounds fantastic.) See details here and ordering info here. At the moment, it’s out in Europe only, but Amazon US lists an import release date of September 21. Vinyl will come later this year.

“The Woman in the Orange Pants / Punctuated Equilibrium”
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

. . .

. . .

Wino acoustic

This is the big story for me. Exile on Mainstream, a German label, is putting out Wino’s new acoustic album, Adrift. It had better make it over here to North America! The European release date looks like it’s October 13 (pre-order CD and LP here), but a special tour edition in a wooden box (limited to 200) is already available here (see larger photo here). And there’s already a review up here! I love the one song, “Hold On Love”, that the label graciously offered to us to stream. You can hear it below. Even on acoustic guitar, Wino brings the power of the riff.

“Hold On Love”
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Wino live

Wino just started a six-week EU tour for his solo acoustic act. Drone act Darsombra (whom I highly recommend) and Conny Ochs support. Below are the dates. “Premonition” is Wino’s new jam band, which includes Darsombra’s Brian Daniloski on bass. (See story here). I haven’t seen these dates posted much, which is a shame, since Darsombra and solo Wino sets would make for a great evening. If you can attend, you’re in for a treat.

. . .

WINO (SOLO ACOUSTIC) / DARSOMBRA / CONNY OCHS
European Tour 2010

SEPT 7 DENMARK Helsingor @ Elvaerket (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 8 DENMARK Copenhagen @ Loppen (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 9 GERMANY Rostock @ MAU Club (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 10 GERMANY Berlin @ Schokoladen (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 11 GERMANY Dresden @ Sweetwater Record Store (early show – Wino only)
SEPT 11 GERMANY Dresden @ Beatpol (late show w/ Premonition)
SEPT 12 GERMANY Hamburg @ Hafenklang (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 13 GERMANY Jena @ Rosenkeller (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 14 GERMANY Erfurt @ Woodstock Records (Wino only)
SEPT 15 GERMANY Munster @ Gleis 22 (w/ Premonition)
SEPT 16 GERMANY Iserlohn @ Dechenhoehle
SEPT 17 GERMANY – tba
SEPT 18 NETHERLANDS Tilburg @ Incubate Festival
SEPT 19 NETHERLANDS Tilburg @ Incubate Festival (Premonition)
SEPT 20 FRANCE – tba
SEPT 21 SWITZERLAND Zurich @ Mascotte
SEPT 22 SWITZERLAND Lausanne @ Cinema Le Bourg
SEPT 23 SWITZERLAND Bern @ Rossli (no Conny Ochs)
SEPT 24 ITALY Bologna @ Nuovo Lazzaretto (no Conny Ochs)
SEPT 25 ITALY Mezzago (Milano) @ Bloom (no Conny Ochs)
SEPT 26 ITALY Montebelluna @ Osteria Tocchetto (no Conny Ochs)
SEPT 28 GERMANY Munich @ Feierwerk
SEPT 29 AUSTRIA Salzburg/Abtenau @ Neudegg Alm
SEPT 30 AUSTRIA Vienna @ Szene
OCT 1 CZECH REPUBLIC Prague @ Studio Rubin
OCT 2 GERMANY Leipzig @ UT Connewitz
OCT 4 GERMANY Potsdam @ Kuze
OCT 5 GERMANY Halle/ Saale @ 2 Zimmer Kuche Bar
OCT 6 GERMANY Furth @ Babylon
OCT 7 GERMANY Wurzburg @ Cafe Cairo
OCT 8 GERMANY Cologne @ Christuskirche
OCT 9 GERMANY – tba
OCT 10 BELGIUM Leuven @ Sojo
OCT 12 GREECE Athens @ An Club (no Conny Ochs)
OCT 14 UK Bristol @ The Croft
OCT 15 UK Manchester @ Star & Garter
OCT 16 UK Glasgow – tba
OCT 17 UK London @ Borderline

. . .

Extreme metal is full of interesting characters. You’d have to put Brutal Truth drummer Rich Hoak near the top of the list. He’s a walking set of contradictions: a yoga practitioner with little use for an ascetic lifestyle; a pessimist who talks about the slow motion apocalypse, yet is quick with a laugh or joke; a man excelling at a musical form invented and usually played by people half his age.

Behind his stripped-down drum kit, Hoak looks like Lon Chaney reincarnated, a man of 1,000 faces. There’s the snarled lip, the open mouth, the clenched teeth, the furled brow, and the thousand-yard stare.  Every performance brings a new expression. There will likely be a web page solely devoted to Hoak’s facial expressions.

Hoak is also one of the most productive and thoughtful performers in grindcore. He’s played on two untouchable classics, Need to Control and Sounds of the Animal Kingdom, and is again touring and recording with Brutal Truth. He sings and drums for his side project Total Fucking Destruction. Whenever he has a break, he makes ambient music with Peacemaker.

Now Hoak is finally catching downtime with his family in Philadelphia after nearly a year on the road with Brutal Truth. The grind is about to start anew: Hoak says ten new Brutal Truth tracks are finished, and a new album could be released next year.

. . .

You are always talking about the apocalypse and end times and destruction, but you’ve never struck me as a negative person. In fact, you seem more like an optimist in a strange way.

Just because the apocalypse is going to happen doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. I’m not really superstitious. Satan Claus and Satan run together for me. I look at the apocalypse from a realistic or a practical point of view. I don’t see angels or Satan descending from the clouds slaying humans.

For me, it’s just the culmination of human civilization. We’re stuck in the middle of that, and there’s nothing cosmic we can do. You just sort of make noise and hope someone hears it and tries to change the world. And while you are doing that, enjoy yourself at the same time. I don’t think saving the world and enjoying yourself are mutually exclusive.

Zen and the Art of Total Fucking Destruction was a great album title. Does that epitomize your world view?

I’m not a trained musician. I just sort of go for it, and that’s the Zen of how I make music or make noise. That was very literal. It’s total fucking destruction, it’s Zen, and it’s art.

. . .

. . .

TFD has a song called “Fuck the Internet”. Yet you are on Facebook, MySpace, have videos all over YouTube, communicate via e-mail. What was that song a protest against, then?

It was against all the dumb emails I’d get with people asking me stupid questions or junk mail. As far as my musical or artistic life, I live that in public. There’s always been a public aspect to playing in a band. You put out an album. People will review it. They might hate it and say bad things about you. I was simply picking on the Internet as the newest means of harassing an artist.

Are you on Twitter?

Brutal Truth has a Twitter account, and Relapse is linked to it. My computer literacy isn’t great. I’m sort of mid-tech, not high tech. I tried to run Brutal Truth’s Twitter account, but I just didn’t have something clever to say every 30 or 40 minutes. With Facebook and MySpace, it’s more relaxed. If I have a video or a song or something philosophical to say about a project, I can post it. Twitter is anti-intuitive for me because I don’t move that fast. And a lot of what I’m about is intuitive music making and playing.

Your Facebook avatar is a gorilla cradling a kitten.

That’s Koko the gorilla. She was taught by humans and learned to speak in sign language. They gave her a pet kitten, and they lived together for years. All the way back to Sounds of the Animal Kingdom I was a huge Desmond Morris reader. I’ve always been interested in the human as animal. It ties into how I make music. It’s not thought out. I’m not Mozart or Beethoven, and I can’t play the piano. I get enraged and beat on the drums, y’know? I realize how and why I play music, and I came to terms with it by learning more about how humans are animals.

I lived on a farm growing up. I got to watch one movie a week, and it was whatever was on the science fiction Saturday afternoon showcase. We got two or three channels. So I’d be sitting on the farm watching the original Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, and Soylent Green. I went from there to The Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys. I went from there to being a punk rocker in 1984 with Reagan as President. 30 years later, I realize that an apocalypse doesn’t happen when you push a button. It happens over 100 or 1,000 years.

. . .

. . .

Regarding your facial expressions, one of the comments I saw on YouTube said, “Rich looks completely insane, but in a good way”.

When I’m playing the drums, I let go. It comes from the base of my brain. I’m goofing around, and I’m having a good time. I let loose and don’t think about anything. So it’s sort of a temporary insanity. It’s not like I’ve lost track of my morals and I’m going to stab you with a drumstick. It’s more like when Iggy Pop would smear peanut butter all over himself.

Rich Hoak on his funny facial expressions
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Your kit is known for being stripped down. But someone told me once when we were watching you play that you seem to get four or five different sounds out of a simple snare.

I’ve learned that with TFD, playing with an even smaller set. If you have a ride cymbal, you can hit it on the side, you can hit it right on the bell, you can hit in the middle, you can hit the very edge with the side of your stick. I’ve learned really subtle tricks. If I play with a wooden tip stick versus a plastic tip stick, it sounds like putting in earplugs, a whole different sound.

I’ve always quoted Buddy Rich, so I try to live up to him. It’s not the drums, it’s the drummer. One of the things about having a really small kit, aside from the fact that you don’t have to carry so much crap around, is that if the apocalypse comes and the lights go out, you are left with two sticks, some stones, and a log.

When you don’t have five or eight or 10 drums to hit, the two or three drums [you have] you hit in different places as per your needs of expression. I’ve even thrown my sticks out to the audience and hit my head on the snare drum. Emotionally, something else was required that night.

Do you think drummers these days, particularly in metal, rely too much on big kits and gimmicks and technology and couldn’t do much without all the gear?

I don’t want to say they couldn’t do much. There’s a lot of really talented people. But playing drums in a death metal band or technical metal and some grind, those guys are very specialized. They practice doing what they do the exact same way with the exact same drums and get the exact same sound. If you are going to play on a Morbid Angel or Hate Eternal record, that’s tight and precise. Especially if you capture that in the studio, then you have to go out and play that. Otherwise, you’d have kids go, “We heard this on the record, but when we came out, he was slapping his drums and it was terrible”.

Drummers for those genres or styles are talented and use their talents in a particular way. It’s a different approach. With my talent, I rehearse very little on my own. I prefer to play with people or bands or in jam sessions as opposed to sitting there with a click track. That’s the intuitive, ape-like style I learned to play. Other people like to play really tight and crisp. It’s very hard to do that stuff, physically and technically. It’s a very intricate way of playing. I don’t think I could do it without a year or two to practice up. But I don’t think those guys could do what I do without a year or two to un-practice and loosen up.

. . .

Rich Hoak drumming video

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

Is it crucial for you to keep a good level of fitness going to play like you do in your 40s?

It is, actually. I don’t exercise as much as I should, because I have family responsibilities and I don’t have the time. But I definitely maintain a modest level of health. With Brutal Truth and TFD. we are well-organized these days. I know two or three months in advance when I will record an album or tour. So I reverse engineer it. If I leave on tour on January 1st, in November I start thinking about getting a set list together. As much as I hate it, I’ll play through the set every day. The closer I get to the tour, I start working out. By the time I get to a week or so before I’m about to do something, I can relax and enjoy myself. By the time I get to the studio or tour, I’m like, “I’ve been rehearsing this for two months, but I’ve been relaxed for the past week. Let’s do it!”

How is your yoga practice going?

I’ve sort of lost touch with the assiduous practice I had for ten years. I did Bikram-style hot yoga. It’s a real butt kicker. I’d do a 30-minute bike ride to the studio and 90 minutes of Bikram practice in 105 degrees. When you are done, it takes you a half hour to cool off and another half hour to get home. I was doing that three, four, or five times a week for 10 years.

I just don’t have the time or energy to do that anymore. But I learned how to use my body. I can practice the yoga of everyday life. The practical application for playing drums is I know to sit up, flex my diaphragm. I’m able to breathe if I do a drum roll. When I used to do a drum roll with a Brutal Truth, I’d almost puke. Now I can do it and get to the end and make a funny face.

Bikram is a great thing. It’s not for everyone. It’s definitely very strenuous. It’s the kind of thing you can overdo, and maybe I overdid [it]. But I learned a lot more than a sequence of poses. I learned how to be comfortable in my body and how to breathe. I don’t think I could have done vocals and drums in TFD without it. When I was first learning how to do both sing and drum, that’s when I really started to work hard on Bikram. It strengthened me to the point where I can do it.

Do you have any spiritual beliefs? It doesn’t seem like a prerequisite for yoga, but for some folks it goes hand in hand.

Yoga has a physical aspect, but if there is a spiritual aspect, I’m not in touch with it. And that’s why Bikram appealed to me. I didn’t get into hippie-dippie yoga. Bikram is scientific. There’s no chanting, no incense burning, no meditating on your navel. I could walk in, the clock would strike, and you would start to breathe. 90 minutes later, you are done. There are yoga people that debate whether that’s good. But I like Bikram, because it’s more scientific. If you do the postures, you will benefit. It’s not how much you do, it’s that you do it properly.

. . .

Total Fucking Destruction – “Time Theft” (official video)

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

California has a ballot proposition to legalize marijuana this November. Do you think the prohibition will end in your lifetime?

[At this point there is a pause, and it sounds like Hoak takes a deep inhale.] I didn’t know there was prohibition (laughs). It would be great if marijuana was legal, and you didn’t have the hassle. In a lot of places it’s de facto legal. If you are in a rehearsal room, you can close the door and smoke up. The things that concern me politically are of a greater magnitude. I’d be OK if marijuana stayed illegal, but laws were changed so people wouldn’t be killed and tortured and murdered.

Did you ever have any bad drug experiences? Could you see the other side’s point of view?

I’ve never had any bad experience with marijuana outside of hassles from authorities. I don’t dabble with other stuff. My bad experiences on that side are friends dying from drug overdoses or going to jail for a long, serious time. That’s where I could say it would be good if marijuana was legalized.

I’d prefer that drugs be treated as a medical rather than a social problem. Junkies should be able to get treatment, and people working the streets for drug money shouldn’t get murdered. And the US should never have an excuse to go in another country and have a drug war with criminal gangs.

You made a guest vocal appearance on XXX Maniak album that even the most jaded might have found somewhat offensive. What do you think of pornogrind?

The XXX Maniak guest slot is something I would not have done today. I recently turned down a guest spot on Fuck Face’s new recording. The guys are good buddies, and I love them to death. But I’ve sort of spoken out against pornogrind and goregrind, and I feel the need to put my money where my mouth is.

When I first saw records with guts hanging out in the early ’90s I was like, “Wow, this is the most extreme cover ever”. But that’s all been done. You can’t get much grosser or more disgusting. I would rather use my art to try to make things better. It doesn’t do anything for me to make the grossest, most disgusting song ever. I honestly think that kind of stuff is kept going by teenagers who are just getting into gore. There are not that many people that are “porno-gore for life”.

Most of the guys doing pornogrind are [at] home with computers or drum machines. The people that really go out and hack people up don’t make demos. On the other hand, some of that stuff is shocking. But since I started writing lyrics for TFD, it is all about fighting back. It’s about the fight for life and the struggle to live.

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Brutal Truth – “Sugar Daddy” (official video)

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

What is the limit? Some people were shocked by the Reign in Blood cover.

I don’t find that shocking. I don’t find Satanic imagery or black metal stuff shocking. Some of the music is good, some is medium, some is bad. To me, it’s sort of like KISS or something like that. It’s the show of the band. I have to think that all those guys in Norway and Sweden, the large majority, are modern enough that they don’t believe in God or Satan.

Is there a meditative aspect to grind that some people don’t see?

That’s what we do in Brutal Truth, and that’s what I do when I play drums. When Brutal Truth goes on, I have a routine. At 9:45, I stretch out. At 9:55, I turn off my cell phone. At 10, I click the sticks, take a deep breath.

It’s like I wake up an hour later, and I’ve played all these songs. Everything fast seems slow to me. I can get into my head and see it all happening. I go inside myself to play with Brutal Truth.

When you were in high school, would you imagine that you would be grinding into middle age?

No way. I never thought that far ahead. In high school, I was in the marching band, and I was into the Sex Pistols. I didn’t want to think beyond the present. If you’d have asked me in 1984, “25 years from now, would you be playing in bands?” I would have said we’d already have been dead for decades.

. . .

. . .

When a friend and I saw Megadeth and Slayer play Rust in Peace and Seasons in the Abyss, which are both 20 years old, live in their entirety, he posed a good question:

What albums will bands play live in their entirety 20 years from now?

In other words, what albums of today will be the classics of tomorrow?  Off the top of my head, I had only one answer: Kylesa’s Static Tensions. Interestingly, Kylesa has actually played Static Tensions in its entirety on tour. In this interview, guitarist/vocalist Phillip Cope says that the band did so because people requested every song from the album live. That’s a good sign. In an age of 160GB iPods, people can barely even remember album titles. The fact that all 10 songs of a record moved people to request them live indicates a degree of engagement rare today.

What creates that engagement? And what sustains it so that years later, an album attains “classic” status?

I believe that the former is due to the music itself, while the latter is due to factors beyond the music.

. . .

The music itself

To an extent, the question of classic albums relates to the question of great bands. But great bands don’t always make classic albums, and not-great bands can make classic albums. So independent of the “X band rules, Y band sucks” fights into which these discussions inevitably devolve, I propose that classic albums – undisputed classics, not hidden ones or personal ones (though if an album is a personal classic to enough people, it becomes an undisputed classic; see below) – must have two qualities.

1. Each song must be distinct (and, of course, great).

This knocks out 99% of metal that favors style or sound over song, which includes most extreme metal (death, black, doom, grindcore). Many good metal albums are essentially variations on one song (hello, old-school death metal). But they don’t have what it takes, like Rust in Peace does, to make people mouth every word, air-drum every drum fill, and know every guitar solo by heart. Songs stick with people long after sounds and styles fade away.

2. The album must have singing (and, of course, great lyrics).

Songs are the fundamental units of popular music, and singing is the fundamental way in which people relate to songs. The human voice is the strongest sonic connection between people. Extreme metal’s innovation was to turn the human voice into something inhuman (growling, shrieking, etc.), which can be very cool. (Phil Freeman argues that this innovation has outlived its usefulness.) But it also creates a distance between the listener and the music. I doubt that even the most diehard Autopsy fan knows all the lyrics to any Autopsy album. That verbal connection, which manifests itself as singalongability, characterizes undisputed classics like Paranoid or Master of Puppets.

. . .

Future classic?

. . .

Factors beyond the music

When people discuss what makes music “great”, they usually discuss qualities intrinsic to the music (see above). But “classic” has a component outside of intrinsic merit: popular perception. Basically, a work of art needs enough people to consider a classic for it to become an undisputed classic. Every undisputed classic starts out on the personal classic level. Master of Puppets comes out in 1986; a young Adrien Begrand buys it on cassette tape; it changes his life. Multiply his story by millions, and Master of Puppets becomes an undisputed classic.

But numbers aren’t the whole story. This discussion of “what makes a classic?” observes that just because Dan Brown has huge sales doesn’t mean he makes classic art. “Classic” status includes quality of effect and time components. Does the work of art make a significant statement, set the bar higher, or provide an influence for future generations? And how long does that effect last? This is where intrinsic merit connects with popular perception. Good art lasts in the public eye; bad art doesn’t. (To an extent, anyway – demand for reissues and new formats for old products comes not only organically from consumers but also artificially from industry forces.)

But not all good art lasts. Art does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on market factors to survive. Things like marketing, distribution, and sales matter. Many of metal’s undisputed classic albums had major label backing (Rust in Peace, Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets, all of Iron Maiden’s classics), which meant that every record store carried them, and every metal fan had a chance to buy them.

Just as importantly, metal’s data set was much smaller during its golden era (roughly the mid ’80s to the early ’90s). Back then, there weren’t thousands of bands and thousands of albums. (See statistical discussion here.) The bar was higher for releasing music, and the Internet revolution hadn’t occurred yet. So everyone heard the same albums. That’s crucial for albums to attain “classic” status. Now everyone has thousands of albums on their hard drives, and people hole up in subgenre niches. So the general metal consciousness is extremely splintered. People don’t come together now over new bands or albums.

. . .

. . .

This multiplicity makes it impossible for any album now to attain “classic” status. There aren’t enough people paying attention to any one thing for opinion to aggregate around it. It’s not the fault of the music. I refuse to believe that music has “gotten worse”, especially since the number of practitioners has multiplied. (Mastering techniques, however, have certainly gotten worse and ruined countless albums.) More practitioners means more competition to be the best. But when I have hundreds of new albums in my queue, I’m bound to (a) give less attention to each one, and (b) miss a potential classic. There’s much less chance for the degree of engagement – rush home with a record, tear off its shrinkwap, listen to it end to end for days – that people need to have to consider albums classics.

So I wouldn’t mind if the record industry took a few body blows. It should release fewer albums. Not every band that can “shred hard” should get a record deal. Fans should raise their standards beyond “sounds decent while surfing the Internet”. Metal should not be a vast, indistinguishable soup of releases blanketing the earth. Winners should be able to emerge, and “classics” should be able to be recognized as such. Classics are what inspire young musicians to improve the artform, and what inspire fans to come together. I’m all for individual taste, but if you and I as metal fans don’t have Reign in Blood in common, what do we have?

. . .

Story and photos by Alee Karim

. . .

I just lost my job. In freelance-speak, I had a long-term contract end prematurely. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I feel the same way about this job as I have about most others: I won’t miss the work, but I will miss the pay. For the moment, I feel the breath of freedom. Lack of security, of course, is the major barrier to fully enjoying this freedom; I feel its specter encroach with every passing day. I’m certainly not in a position to be penniless again, and if there’s anything I hate more than moving, it’s finding a new job. With all these conflicting reactions in mind, I need a leveling. I want heavy, cathartic guitars: chords so chunky and three-dimensional, they’re almost edible. With that in mind, I went to see Boris, Red Sparowes, and Helms Alee last Thursday at the Great American Music Hall in SF. I got what I wanted… sort of.

Helms Alee barely took a half hour. They killed it. Their set was a primer for opening bands. Fat chordal stabs emerged from Ben Verellen’s custom-made amplifiers, not fuzzy but with a crunch that would have made AC/DC proud. There was a stunning clarity in the bass and guitar, which intertwined in a Fugazi-esque, semi-proggy collusion of clever yet primal riffs. This was punctuated by some of the best and most confident live singing I’ve seen from a hard rock band. Holy shit, these guys had pipes. Pitch-perfect harmonies cut clearly over odd-time motifs whose melodic shading harked back to early Crimson, Shellac, and at times the aforementioned Aussies. Helms Alee accomplished that rare thing that few openers manage: leaving the audience wanting more. This was a  generous crowd, regardless (all ages, lots of teens), but the place was packed early on, and people clamored for more well after they’d packed up. Theirs was the set to beat for the night.

I looked forward to seeing Red Sparowes, as I’d heard so much about them but had missed opportunities to catch them live until now. Red Sparowes’ principal commodity is an indistinct, minor-key wash on a perpetual dynamic level of about 6 (10 being highest). With no melodies or identifiable figures ever rising up, I wonder if this is the perfect realization of Brian Eno’s ambient music, designed exclusively for the background. Even at subdued volumes, Eno’s careful compositional aesthetic imbued even his ambient pieces with too much character to be truly relegated to the background. I struggled to discern character and identity in the inoffensive, concordant soup of the Sparowes’ live sound. The details of their music are enticing on record with a decent pair of headphones. Live, the effect of five rock musicians going full bore on complementary melodic patterns with no focal point is subtractive.

. . .

Boris – “Pink” (video)

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

On to Boris. Drummer Atsuo, Boris’ unofficial MC, was one hell of a performer. When he emerged onstage in a sequined vest and white gloves, ceremoniously grasping his gong mallet, the room erupted in approval. His energy was infectious, and his flamboyant persona came across as positive and inclusive, rather than egotistic. After his gong-banging ritual, Boris launched into a mix of everything they’ve done well over their nearly two-decade career: heavy, shoegaze dirges; thrash-inflected stoner rock; and mellow, controlled, dreamy pop. They pulled off each of these manifestations convincingly. It made for a dynamic and satisfying set.

That said, full-throttle rockers like “Pink”, “Statement”, and “Korosu” were my favorites of the night. Boris ripped the place to shreds with these numbers, though I was annoyed getting slam-danced by teens. Epic dirges “A Bao A Qu” and “Farewell” were prime baths of fuzzy chord bombs. This is my second favorite mode of Boris -  a sludgier, more Sabbath-y take on the lysergic swirl of My Bloody Valentine. Even a mellow number like “Rainbow” managed to transport and hypnotize while remaining minimal and restrained. These “slow dance” interludes created an effective breather between bashers and provided contrast to ensure they’d hit home.

All in all, ’twas a good night. I successfully left my worries on the shelf, and my ears rang happily from the amplifier worship. Coming up next: Slayer/Megadeth/Testament at Cow Palace…

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Asphyx DVD trailer

. . .

Time marches on. I don’t know how many of August’s metal releases I heard – probably too many yet not enough – but I do know that at least 150 new albums and demos are in my queue (even after vigorous culling), and September will bring a shedload more. Labels are scheduling fairly major releases all the way into November, so we’ve got a ways to go. Let’s get to work.

As always, you can see an incomplete-but-good-enough-for-most-purposes list of upcoming metal releases on this calendar. Use the “Agenda” view on the top right, and click on entries to expand and collapse them. One kind soul is attempting to create an automated version of this calendar that pulls from metal-archives.com and other web sources. This would be great, because not only would the calendar be more complete and accurate, it would also save me from compiling all this information manually, which is what I do now.

Label-wise, the most prominent action is occurring at Nuclear Blast and Relapse. Nuclear Blast has new albums by Accept, Death Angel, and Enslaved, as well as a live DVD from Immortal featuring their set from Wacken 2007. (You can hear previews of the Death Angel record here.) Accept are touring with King’s X (!) in late September/early October – see dates here. (Note addition of Cleveland date and deletion of St. Charles, IL date, neither of which news sites have noted so far.) Relapse has new records by Incantation clone Father Befouled, Black Anvil, Unearthly Trance, and a reissue of Today Is the Day’s In the Eyes of God. You can hear two tunes below, “Solar Eye” and “The Horsemen Arrive in the Night”, from the Unearthly Trance record.

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. . .

Speaking of Incantation clones, I’m kind of excited to hear Encoffination (well, what do you know – same vocalist/guitarist as Father Befouled), who are so encantado con Incantation that they have the same logo font. How cute! You can hear two songs, “Nefarious…” and “Beyond…”, from their new record here.

Other notable releases: Asphyx’ first official DVD (see trailer up top and details here), Dawnbringer’s Nucleus on Profound Lore (this will be in my top five of the year, hear a song here), new Drudkh and Mar de Grises records on Season of Mist, and albums from Black September, Kommandant, Limbonic Art, and October Tide.

Lastly, a lot of tours get going this month in the US.

• Wormrot, who got signed to Earache because of a collaboration between us and Grind and Punishment (see here), are touring the US for the first time, starting today (tour start postponed until Sept. 6, story here) – see dates here.
• On September 3, a reunited Sleep begin a 10-day tour – see dates here.
• On September 9, Dark Castle, The Atlas Moth, Zoroaster, and Nachtmystium start an approximately three-week run – see dates here.
• Raven (still going strong, judging from their new album Walk Through Fire), are doing the weekend warrior thing in September and October – see dates here.
• Venomous Concept (members of Napalm Death and Brutal Truth) are out for 10 days starting September 15, with support from Kill the Client for some shows and Nails for others – see dates here.
• On September 18, Batillus, who recently recorded a full-length with Sanford Parker, head out for two weeks alongside Kowloon Walled City – see dates here.
• Starting September 25, a reunited Buzzov*en try to get their groove back on a handful of dates – see here.
• On September 28, the reunited Swans head out for a week and a half – see dates here.
• Three big tours start on September 29 – Immolation/Vader/Lecherous Nocturne/Pathology (dates), Cattle Decapitation/Devourment et al. (dates), and High on Fire/Kylesa/Torche (dates).
• On September 30, Unearthly Trance and Suma begin a two-week run of DOOM (dates).
• Finally, Doro makes a rare, brief Stateside visit starting September 30 – see dates here.
  — Cosmo Lee

  . . .

. . .

Apologies for the downtime yesterday – the site has been growing at an incredible pace, which has been overloading the server. A good problem to have, for sure, but it came to a head yesterday, and I’ve been up the whole night dealing with it. It’s about 6AM now, and I’m off to grab a little sleep before the daily grind.

I leave you with this – incredible footage of Godflesh, live in Schorndorf, DE, on March 30, 1990. The song is “Christbait Rising”. Streetcleaner is four and a half months old. No breakbeats, no major label deal, no human drummer, no Jesu yet. Just two guys, a drum machine (and I thought I was biased against drum machines live? Perhaps I should reconsider), and the entire weight of the VHS-poisoned ’80s collapsing into some basement. Justin Broadrick’s gauntness brings to mind Ian Curtis. Godflesh as the cyborg reincarnation of Joy Division? Amidst such bleakness, G.C. Green’s strap is an odd splash of color. I’ve listened to Godflesh for over 15 17 years (I just remembered my first Godflesh CD – Pure, in a longbox!) and have seen plenty of promo photos – I was quite the Broadrick obsessive back in the ’90s – but I have never seen Godflesh in motion. This is blowing my mind.

Also blowing my mind is the Redux Edition 2-disc reissue of Streetcleaner that recently came out. I have not consumed it so much as it has consumed me. I will write at length on it later. Since Streetcleaner is so personal to me, exploring the Redux Edition feels like going up the river to find Kurtz in the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now (also called Redux, incidentally). The journey leaves no one unscathed.

"No new songs!" "No new songs!"

. . .

“Do you want to hear a new song?”

These are the most feared words at any metal concert.

(However, I have yet to hear anyone yell out, “No!” in response.)

A corollary to metal’s “I prefer their old stuff” stance is “I disfavor their new stuff”. Hence the resistance to hearing such stuff live, hence the outcry upon Iron Maiden’s insistence during their recent tour on (gasp!) playing music not 30 years old.

If a band is not creatively relevant to you now, why pay to see them?

“Because they’ll play the old songs”, you might reply.

“But the old songs are on the old albums – which you have”, I might reply.

“But I want to hear the old songs really loud on potentially dodgy PA systems alongside 20,000 other people willing to pay for overpriced beer and t-shirts”, you might reply.

“Then you go do that”, I might reply.

. . .

I am not a new song-fearing metalhead, or a non-hit-song-fearing one. Sure, I’d probably be pissed if I saw Slayer and they only played deep cuts from the Paul Bostaph-era records. (Actually, that might be morbidly fascinating.) But Slayer, like most bands, know which side of their bread is buttered. They will finish their set with “Angel of Death”, and everyone will go home happy. Given this framework of familiarity, a new song might be interesting, if only to see a Slayer crowd stand still for once.

One thing I’ve never understood is how people leave concerts complaining that bands didn’t play certain songs. (Well, I would understand if the band were Europe and the song were “The Final Countdown”. As far as I’m concerned, Europe is “The Final Countdown”, and a Europe set without that song would be as if Europe had not even showed up. Which it needn’t really do. Everyone going to see Europe is there to hear “The Final Countdown”, and is just patiently waiting through the set until that magic song. (Magic moment, really, i.e., the keyboard intro. Does anyone even care about the rest of the song?) Thus, the band might as well skip any pretense of a set and give the crowd what it wants (the keyboard intro) and then go home.) You have the albums; you can listen to their songs at any time. So why the fanatical attachment to the familiar?

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Europe – “The Final Countdown” (just the intro)

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

That I understand, actually. My understanding comes from listening to music while working out. “Loud and aggressive” isn’t enough for me in that context. If something is loud and aggressive and bad, my mind will rebel, my body will shut down, no weights will be lifted, and no sweat will be sweated. So I need good music for working out. That means that I do not listen to new music then. Like anything, really, 99% of new music is bad. Working out is not the time to be sifting through that 99%. It is the time to get it on to what works.

Maybe metalheads feel the same way about live music. If something is loud and aggressive – but new – the mind will rebel, the body will shut down, the beer will feel flat, and the wallet will feel lightened. These are lean times, after all. Every dollar pays for a minute that had better be maximized!

. . .

Drum 'n' bass bragging rights, i.e., a dubplate

. . .

A marked contrast to this mentality is drum ‘n’ bass, which (at least until I stopped DJ’ing it, 2003) is all about “new stuff only”. Drum ‘n’ bass is a constant arms race for DJ’s to play the freshest, newest tunes. I’ve seen drum ‘n’ bass crowds stand around with their arms crossed, just waiting to hear something new. (I know because I was one of those assholes myself.) Back when DJ’s used turntables, the gold standard of “new stuff” was the dubplate, the acetate disc on which tunes were pressed before they came out on vinyl. To this day, drum ‘n’ bass DJ playlists often feature song titles followed by the suffix “(dub)”, which indicates that (a) DJ’s have tunes before their release dates, and (b) they want to brag about that to the world.

Drum ‘n’ bass’ dubplate obsession comes from dancehall reggae, in which soundsystems “clash” with the newest tunes in order to get the best crowd response. That’s the historical explanation – but it’s an inadequate psychological explanation. Why are crowd expectations different between metal and drum ‘n’ bass? The desired ends are the same: to go out, lose one’s sobriety, and listen to music at unreasonable volumes. But why are the means completely opposite? In metal, the crowds only want to hear what they know. In drum ‘n’ bass, the crowds only want to hear what they don’t know. All this has nothing to do with the actual quality of the music.

Since I sadly don’t get out to hear as much non-metal music as I’d like, I’m curious about other genres. Hip-hop is hits-oriented, so I’d guess that hip-hop crowds don’t want to hear new stuff. Country, too, maybe? But jazz, which is often about reinterpretation – maybe that’s about hearing new takes on the old? I know that techno crowds like to hear old stuff, because that’s when their hands rise above shoulder level – but I also know that techno crowds are often probably too fucked up to care. The happiest crowds are probably Motörhead’s. The new Motörhead song sounds like the old one, and every metalhead and drum ‘n’ bass fan in the crowd goes home happy.

. . .

Allen Shawn is a noted classical composer and professor. He’s also a lifelong sufferer of panic attacks and agoraphobia. Shawn’s eloquent book Wish I Could Be There details his difficult journey. His fears aren’t robbers or jihadists, but mundane things most people overlook: the quiet road near his rural Vermont home, the store where he once felt like he was going mad during a panic attack, a highway drive.

Fear – or, more accurately, the fear that he will panic – demarcates the geography of Shawn’s life. It determines where he can go, where he feels safe. The book is about his journey to widen these boundaries, become a part of the larger world, and embrace fear so that it no longer suffocates.

Shawn’s struggles – common among sufferers of anxiety disorders and agoraphobia – are instructive when you consider metal. Why? Perhaps no other music has a more direct relationship with fear than metal. Metal fans live with fear every day. Fear is part of the ritual and experience of metal.

It isn’t something that restricts lifestyles or causes lingering dread. Rather, it’s something that’s endlessly dissected and discussed. Metal can also be cathartic in that it allows musicians and, by extension, fans to give voice to their worries, and thus to excise them.

Since its beginnings, metal has trafficked in fear: the demonic cover art of Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath, Slayer’s “Tormenter” waiting to attack a hapless victim, Venom’s Satanic posturing, King Diamond’s elaborate stage setups. Death metal bands still aim to outdo each other with album covers detailing body parts, gaping wounds, and less-than-efficient surgery. These efforts often end in unintentional parody, but the initial aim is to scare. Sometimes fear and public outcry seem warranted; the murders and church burnings that made Norway center of the metal world are the most glaring examples.

Musicians and critics have likened the scary elements of metal to horror films. Walter Kendrick argues in his book The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment that the scares produced by horror are something we enjoy, that watching a Grand Guignol or slasher movie isn’t different than a roller coaster. Evil will be defeated and the social order restored.

Kendrick’s book was written in 1991 and hence predated roughly two decades of horror, some based on real crimes. Many filmmakers now don’t give viewers hope. Down videographer Jim Van Bebber directed My Sweet Satan, a film loosely based on a Long Island teen killing unfortunately linked to heavy metal. His most recent film was the documentary-style The Manson Family, which ends with the gratuitously violent killing of a broadcaster investigating the sect and Manson’s new followers. Pessimism courses through Van Bebber’s films, which all end in suffocating darkness.

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Interview with Jim Van Bebber

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

What is it about metal that scares us? Can metal frighten anymore in a world where terrorists fly airplanes into buildings, climate change portends doom, and geneticists toy with genomes in Frankenstein fashion? The answer depends in part on who is playing an album.

The younger and less experienced listener, one unaccustomed to the barrage of crime and depravity on the nightly news, is more likely to be scared. A young imagination is fertile. Death and disease seem remote. Religion is sometimes omnipresent.

When I listened to the spoken opening of Mercyful Fate’s “The Oath” as a kid, my mind went haywire. I felt like I was damned and that it was too late to do anything to save myself. Yet something compelled me to rewind the tape and listen again.

It’s tougher for adults to be scared of metal, because we know it’s art and that nothing bad will happen if we play an album. We also enjoy the music for an infinite number of other reasons. Fear takes a willful suspension of disbelief and the ability to shut off the outside world entirely. When you worry about bills, it’s tough to make that happen. But with committed listening, it’s possible to at least mimic the feelings metal provided years ago.

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Mercyful Fate – “The Oath” (Live 1986)

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

Fear was a constant companion in my childhood. It lurked in homes, church, school, my neighborhood.

There was the priest who sat inches from my face, so close his beard bristles nearly touched my cheek, warning me that I risked Hell if I continued to misbehave. I imagined the ways I could end his tyranny: a tripwire at the rectory, a brick dropped from the steeple. His admonitions never left me. My anger at him never subsided.

There was the picture of a clown in my great-grandfather’s otherwise austere home, his face a death mask that belied the happy smile.

There was our Born Again after-school sitter, a stone cold ’70s fox with teased hair who told elaborate tales of how demons masquerading as angels visited her bedside to tempt her, and how they fled when she whispered, “Jesus”.

When there was a streaker in our neighborhood, our elementary school imaginations turned a garden-variety pervert into an axe-wielding lunatic who carried a severed head.

To make things worse, I was a nerd, perpetually frightened by my peers. The Close Encounters of The Third Kind lunchbox I carted on my first day at a new school met uniform derision. Later that day, I carried home a pile of books which were knocked out of my hands by a bully. He challenged me to a fight. I ran, blindly. For years, every walk to school felt like navigating a gauntlet.

My misfit group of friends dabbled in fear. There were games of Bloody Mary (say the name ten times in front of a mirror in a dark bathroom), séances, and “light as a feather, stiff as a board”. There seemed an unspoken agreement that much of this was silly – that we were playing dress up – but the simple act of turning out the lights and burning candles was enough to induce goose bumps.

Metal soon arrived in this world. The music initially seemed terrifying and induced nightmares. It asked me to confront images that were more blasphemous than I could fathom after a childhood in the Catholic church. What was I to make of the cover of Black Metal? At that point, I could have never imagined something that went further – Profanatica, Sarcofago, or Mayhem.

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Iron Maiden – “Killers”

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

The family across the street had a reputation for fighting and arguments that ended in screaming and door-slamming. While my parents were at work, the imposing live-in boyfriend slept through the day like Nosferatu (vicious hangovers were the likely culprit). A giant record store standee from Iron Maiden’s Killers dwarfed his window. The victim’s arms reached up at Eddie, but it was obviously too late. I looked up at Eddie every day, scared.

Everyone my parents wanted me to avoid seemed to have a tangential relationship with metal. The tough who flailed his nunchucks on the front lawn – he would have been perfect in a Mike Judge film – played Judas Priest on his boombox. Troublemakers had metal stickers on car bumpers. The music, while taboo, seemed a readily accessible way to enter a world that oozed strength and defiance.

The fear and power associated with metal became alluring. I was 13. Junior high was more brutal than elementary school, and I looked for ways to set myself apart. My bowl haircut damned me to comparisons to another nerd who had since left the school. I wanted to be something and someone else. I needed to change.

The coolest kid in seventh grade nicknamed himself “Maiden”. He pulled off an amazing balancing act: he fully embraced metal and was still sought-after by every girl in school. His long hair, leather jacket, affinity for Marlboros, and antisocial attitude completed the picture. I saw him walk down the hall in a Number of the Beast shirt and wanted to capture and bottle his bravado. I thought we could be friends, but I never became more than one of Maiden’s distant hanger-ons.

Metal is supposed to be about individuality and following your own path. Sadly, peer pressure played a role in my induction – it sent me in a different direction in the record store. Instead of purchasing Purple Rain, I headed to the “Hard Rock” aisle. I bought Paranoid, Piece of Mind, and a few buttons to pin on my blue wind-tamer jacket . The records didn’t leave my turntable for months. An Iron Maiden poster followed. My metal journey began.

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Black Sabbath – “Killing Yourself to Live”

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

I quickly learned that fear wasn’t just something that metal instilled in listeners. Metal scared outsiders even more. It allowed fans to exercise control and offered guaranteed distance from jocks and agitators. Metal offered power. I finally owned something that scared others.

I scrawled pentagrams on bathroom walls, risking suspension or worse, knowing that it would shock. Our collection of misfit boys tiptoed out of quiet homes at night to walk the grounds near an old mental institution, talking aloud about horrors we imagined took place within the walls.

Metal was not as ingrained as it is in American culture now, and far more likely to incite well-meaning but misguided adults. There were weekly sessions with the junior high counselor, a portly woman who decorated her offices with photos and calendars of garish chocolates and candies. She looked aghast, her hefty jaw dropping, when I said I believed sorcery was real. Fortunately, this was before any kid with an overactive imagination could be arrested or carted off to a brain garage for what amounts to severe growing pains.

Metal allowed me to set myself apart as special and different. But my parents were alarmed by the music and my friends, including the 18 year-old role-playing guru who had posters of demons covering his room, and who roamed the playground at night shirtless, wearing an executioner’s hood like a gaunt El Duce.

It wasn’t all about fear and manipulation. Once I began to find and lose myself in the music, I cared less about my place in the Darwinian teenage world. Metal spoke to me like nothing I’d ever heard.

There was something moving about listening to Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself to Live” while delivering newspapers as I smoked Lucky Strikes and the sun set in suburbia. Nothing felt like listening to Sabbath’s “Warning” alone in my room before my parents got home from work. “Evil Has No Boundaries” prepared me to endure days of bullshit with a history teacher who did nothing to kids who picked on other kids.

I ended up in an all-boys private school, my reward for my listening habits.

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Geraldo Rivera special on “devil music”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A quarter century ago, metal was in the crosshairs, its opponents as outraged and misguided as members of the Tea Party. Benign hair metal artists like Dee Snider and Blackie Lawless were paraded around like pied pipers seducing American’s children into lives of the occult and drugs. This was before Al-Qaeda, shoe bombers, and anthrax, before the economy went into freefall and workplace shootings became common. We had the luxury of being scared of men like Snider and Lawless who paid taxes and generated millions for record companies. What would politicians have made of Glen Benton a decade later?

During comfortable times, people need bogeymen. Metal was a perfect foil to the go-go, materialistic ’80s, primarily because of misinformation pumped onto the airwaves. Each week, there was a new special about Satanic cults or a slipshod piece on metal culture.

Part of it was that the music was a decade old, and people didn’t have gangster rap or teen pop to blame when children went awry. My parents, particularly my father, partially bought into the hype. It wasn’t entirely his fault; propaganda was pervasive. Friday nights usually meant another news report that could imperil my record collection.

Geraldo Rivera’s “Satanic panic” special was the worst. “This is not a Halloween fable, this a real life horror story”, Geraldo said before claiming teenagers could be “driven to commit terrible deeds”. The report immediately cut to video clips of Venom and Mötley Crüe, likely boosting record sales. Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” played in the background. Geraldo mentioned that most kids who listen to the music won’t end up killers, but the implication was clear: heavy metal will turn your kid into the equivalent of Jim Thompson’s sociopathic narrator Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me.

Watched decades later, the piece is laughable and frightening in a real way. These kinds of stories can ruin lives. Megadeth is called a Satanic band, despite never writing a Satanic song and the eventual conversion of their frontman to Christianity. Troubled teens presumably ruined by metal are allowed to talk unchallenged, with nary a word about what might have taken place in their homes.

The only voice of reason is King Diamond, sadly undermined by his decision to be interviewed in makeup: “I think people are too clever to be influenced by watching a band or listening to an album”, he said. It’s the only sensible thing uttered during the episode, which wouldn’t have cleared introductory journalism.

My father had enough. He taped another metal-is-evil special from 20/20 and made me watch it. Dad also got crafty. He knew I badly wanted a Powell-Peralta Steve Steadham skateboard but couldn’t afford it. He proposed a twisted Faustian bargain: if I parted with all of my metal albums, he would trade them for the skateboard.

I taped all the albums, hid the best ones, collected the remaining vinyl, and brought the records downstairs on a Friday night. The collected heft of the blasphemy I handed over was enough to make a convent combust.

Years later, a nationwide witch hunt culminated with the bogus convictions of The West Memphis Three. The people that we should have been scared of weren’t the bands or kids. It was the misguided authorities – the nicely dressed folks looking concerned in the front rows of talk shows – who went unchecked. People were taken to prison and accused of  horrific crimes for doing nothing except liking the wrong music or being in the wrong place (for an egregious example, see the recent documentary Witch Hunt). Lives were destroyed because metal and Satan offered the most convenient symbols.

We should have been scared of the fear-peddlers.

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Current Affair special on “death music”

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

What is it about metal that is really frightening? It’s not Satan, King Diamond, Vince Locke’s artwork, Chris Barnes’ early lyrics, or even the cosmic heft of Deathspell Omega or Portal.

It’s an idea that has vexed man since our earliest roots, one that is voiced throughout extreme metal: things are not as they should be.  Our world is off-kilter. This unifying idea manifests itself in metal about politics, violence, religion, and even sex. What is truly frightening is that our lives rely on the illusion that everything is in control, and that people and institutions have our best interests at heart, that the world is logical, that your life is meaningful and not a facade. Metal tells you that’s almost never the case.

Look at Napalm Death’s catalog, and you’ll see a unifying fear of the forces operating governments, corporations, and economies, a fear and anger that the powerful care little for everyday struggles or the poor. Listen to Burzum and Mayhem, and you’ll find a fear that mankind is entirely distanced from nature and has lost its way in a world of tract homes and technology. Death metal is rife with the fear that we are not connected to our bodies, and a fear of the fragility and demise of our physical shells. (For a further examination of this idea check out Mark Seltzer’s sometimes pedantic yet intriguing book Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture.)

This idea could even be extended to Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Their work, at least up until Agorapocalypse, straddles the line between music and noise. Listen to ANB’s landmark Altered States of America and one idea becomes clear: what we consider music is arbitrary. ANB’s music can be frightening, because it shows that everyday music – say, a 12-bar structure – is another form of control, a means to hold anarchy at bay.

Strangely, the same core belief, that life is little more than sleepwalking, anchors many spiritual and religious practices. This idea – that we need to open our eyes and confront impermanence, injustice, and death – is found in every religious tradition.

Most metal positions itself as diametrically opposed to Christianity, but when one considers the most primal emotion – fear – there are parallels. Early Christianity was essentially rebellious and revolutionary, the followers a group of radicals who also believed that the world was off its axis. The practitioners weren’t bureaucrats running the Vatican but young people who wanted to change the world. Metal may not offer transcendence, but it recognizes that we are guided by illusions and perhaps irreparably distanced from ourselves. Even Watain suggests that there’s little of interest in our physical world, and that we should instead turn our attention to the abyss.

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Weekend Nachos – “Reason to Die”

Click here to view the embedded video.

. . .

I am well into my 30s. The anger and resentment have passed. The music remains.

I own a massive metal collection and see bands that would deeply trouble my coworkers. I get on the train to commute every day with a gym bag and newspaper in hand. You would not know that I listen to Darkthrone.

Metal doesn’t retain the same power to frighten as it once did, perhaps because I’ve heard and seen so much of it that it’s become familiar. But I can still feel hints of fear in the primordial muck of Vasaeleth’s Crypt Born and Tethered to Ruin or the psychopathic rage of Weekend Nachos.

Outsiders don’t understand metal’s relationship with fear: the capacity to understand and own your darkest emotions, and the power to endure. Composer Shawn makes an interesting point in his book, that confronting fear and learning to become a wholly integrated person requires accepting that our fragile egos and lives are surrounded by nothingness. Metal sets us on this path from the get-go.

Metal is the audible equivalent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We are all a bit like the narrator Charles Marlow, headed upriver to confront horror and integrate what we learn in our daily lives:

I turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also was buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night.

Metal is ultimately an instructor. It teaches us to continue on life’s uncertain path, to push ahead in the face of fear.

. . .

One of my favorite records of last year is out on vinyl. Struck by Lightning’s Serpents now comes in a matte laminate gatefold jacket, with double 180g vinyl in limited quantities for three flavors: black (249), gold/black splatter (148), and clear (99). Ryan Patterson of Coliseum did the artwork, and Chris Common dialed in amazing sound: dry, crisp, hard-hitting. The music, a combination of Tragedy, Disfear, and Mastodon, keeps getting better over time. I think people will look back in a decade at this record with reverence. It’s lean and mean, yet big and sad. Now it has a package worthy of its power.

“Supercell”
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

“Widowmaker”
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Shirt Killer (gold/black, clear)
Soulless Creature (all three flavors)