Holy pretentious gum-flapping, Batfaggots!

One of the more irritating aspects of interacting with people on the web is the constant bombardment of passive aggressive complaints and the stupid justifications people provide for watching television or listening to ARE YOU TALKIN TO ME?.  "Why can't you just accept _______ for what it is?"  "Why do you have to force your beliefs on people?"  "Stop overthinking things!"  I used to try and patiently explain the rationale behind my own thoughts and beliefs, but no more.  Now I just point them to Moff's Law and move on.

So when you go out of your way to suggest that people should be thinking less — that not  using one’s capacity for reason is an admirable position to take, and one that should be actively advocated — you are not saying anything particularly intelligent. And unless you live on a parallel version of Earth where too many people are thinking too deeply and critically about the world around them and what’s going on in their own heads, you’re not helping anything; on the contrary, you’re acting as an advocate for entropy.

And most annoyingly of all, you’re contributing to the fucking conversation yourselves when you make your stupid, stupid comments. You are basically saying, “I think people shouldn’t think so much and share their thoughts, that’s my thought that I have to share.” If you really think people should just enjoy the movie without thinking about it, then why the fuck did you (1) click on the post in the first place, and (2) bother to leave a comment? If it bugs you so much, GO WATCH A GODDAMN FUNNY CAT VIDEO.

Contemporary "classical music" isn't a significant cultural factor, and that's so obvious it isn't even debatable at this point.  In that sense, it is as dead as a the dinosaurs, even if, like dinosaurs, it remains of interest to a few academics and nerds who will grow out of it.

...but Full Blown AIDS!

Like all too many of the better bands of the old underground, Viogression's music has largely been forgotten due to inadequate distribution (and doing business with a rip-off label), the lack of a timely, quality followup, and the simple misfortune to live outside of scene hotbeds in Florida, New York and Sweden.  However, their debut full-length remains one of the more interesting efforts to emerge from the second generation of American death metal.  Perhaps best understood as a hybrid of first album Obituary and Autopsy's Severed Survival, albeit with a more ambitious, expansive compositional style than their influences (which often lends an epic feel even to relatively short songs, though occasionally also to momentary lapses of focus).  Simple in approach, esoteric in impact.

I was listening to Pure Holocaust recently, and I was struck by something I'd never fully appreciated.  The drums on this one are bad ass in the best sense of the phrase.  Immortal's other classic releases - like most of the better black metal from Bathory on down - used relatively simple, unwavering beats to create an ambient effect. On Pure Holocaust, percussion remains ambient in that songs tend to have long passages where the perceived pulse rate remains unchanged, but this is achieved by layering a variety of rhythms and drum textures at once, giving the ambient space vertical 'depth' as well as 'horizontal' uniformity.  Add in that wonderful engineering that renders the tom sound particularly...cavernous, and you have an almost magically immersive tool. Pure genius.  Listening to this really drives home the artlessness that most metal bands apply to drumming.

...underconfidence ensues.

It's the usual vapid mainstream bullshit, tied in with the usual vapid prog nerd inability to comprehend basic music theory. This dork probably wanks it to Pink Frothy AIDS.  Nonetheless, it's part of the emerging consciousness of metal as more than stupid, burnout noise.  There are obviously opportunities for promoting real music out there, but glomming on to the dubious credibility of jazz isn't the best way.

The most obvious bullshit here is the assertion that metal is primarily an 'improvisational' genre (though this was merely the most egregious error among many). There was always a tension in rock music between the directionless, improvisational spirit inherited from jazz and the unidimensional focus-grouped polish of commercial pop music. In breaking with previous generations of rock, metal, ambient music, industrial, some hardcore and, to a certain extent, the early generation of 'alternative' rock all made end runs around this dichotomy by making music that was at the same time complex and multidimensional, but also deliberately composed for effect, rather than just being jammed out in the studio. Instead of heaping praise on dumbass postmodern hippies like Steve Vai and Zakk Wylde, the article should have focused on artists like Atheist, Deicide, Morbid Angel or Seance, who borrowed tonal and harmonic elements from jazz to enrich their expressive lexicon without getting caught up in the more defective elements of jazz (i.e. the emphasis on improvisation over rigorous composition). But, of course, this was written by a douchebag who thinks video games lead to musicianship, so we don't get anything so useful.  

At the Gates - The Red in the Sky is Ours
Deaf Records (1992)

Within the history of any artistic genre or movement it is often possible to discern a discreet and predictable developmental pattern.  Its initial emergence is murky and indistinct, with multiple artists groping awkwardly around the edges of what it will later become.  Soon, the inconsistent fumbling gives way to a second stage in which new artists emerge to consolidate and codify, emphasizing the essential and discarding the dead weight the genre founders had carried over from the previous generation.  Finally, yet more artists arrive to build upon the now settled foundation, expanding upon it and ushering in a ‘golden age.’

In death metal these three eras correspond roughly to the years 1983-1986, 1987-1989 and 1990-1993, respectively.  It was during the last of these periods that the overwhelming majority of death metal’s greatest albums were released.  Bands like Deicide, Atheist, Incantation, Amorphis Demilich, Fleshcrawl, Dismember and Necrophobic emerged to push the genre to new heights, but perhaps no band pushed the limits further or faster than Sweden’s At the Gates did with The Red in the Sky is Ours.

At the Gates are often considered the ‘fathers’ of melodic death metal, and while the term itself may be of doubtful utility as a genre tag, it certainly provides a reasonable starting point for understanding The Red in the Sky is Ours.  While its basic approach to instrumentation clearly marks it as a death metal album, there is an underlying awareness of the emerging black metal movement in the fluid tremolo picked melodies (sometimes consonant, sometime dissonant, sometimes built just from the fragments of the chromatic scale - always with the chill of the Void in their depths) that form that compositional backbone and chief vessel for meaning in these songs.

Often these melodies are accompanied or embellished with strings.  In fact, The Red in the Sky is Ours frequently resembles nothing so much as string concerto emerging from the depths of the inferno.  Here, the guitars evoke the demonic, lightning-fingered cadenzas of Paganini (the title track), there a melancholic adagio for cello and double bass (“City of Screaming Statues”).  At other times, the melodic lines are juxtaposed disconcertingly with dissonant counterpoint (“Through Gardens of Grief”), bringing to the mind to dystopian visions of the darkest of Modernist nightmares.

Technically, The Red in the Sky is Ours is breathtaking.  While it doesn’t aspire to the nth degree musicianship of, say, Cynic, the instrumentation is considerably more complex than one would find even among many technically accomplished bands like Deicide or Morbid Angel (and certainly far more advanced than the viscerally primitive bludgeoning of the then preeminent Stockholm scene).  

But what really catches the ear is the vast array of techniques at the band’s disposal and the calculated precision of their employment.  The Red in the Sky is Ours makes use of everything from keyless modalism to polyphony to radical dissonance to elements of serialism and set theory to construct, enhance and complement (and sometimes deconstruct) its central melodies.  The Red in the Sky is Ours may very well be the most compositionally aware album in death metal history.  Still, none of these techniques are applied indiscriminately, and in their seamless incorporation into the broader context of song we are made more aware of the central experience of the whole of the music, rather than experiencing it as a series of constituent parts.

For this reason, The Red in the Sky is Ours distinguishes itself not just in the epic breadth of its vision or the diversity and innovative vigor of its technical execution, but in the totalizing holism and lucidity that mark it a master work among master works.  The mastery of tactical detail is matched and more than matched by a strategic mastery of metastructure in which each brilliant detail is rendered more vivid and powerful through its placement in the overarching narrative of song.  Similarly, each song is enhanced by its placement within the larger context of the album.

Equally impressive is the seeming effortlessness of the whole project.  For all the studied precision of its instrumentation, The Red in the Sky is Ours exudes the sort of intuitive genius that can neither be taught nor achieved through rote practice.  The Germans call it Fingerspitzengefühl – the ‘finger sense.’  It’s a term that strikes exactly the right chord, evoking both the sheer magic the album conjures, and the deft and nearly undetectable touch of the band’s skillful manipulation of the listener.  

Despite the labyrinthine complexity of much of the music, there is very little of the jarring discontinuity the characterized the work of many of band’s contemporaries.  Where artists like Deicide and Atheist built tension through abrupt rhythmic dislocation, At the Gates achieves the same goal through subtler manipulations of dynamics, texture, harmonic shading and melodic development.  As a result, The Red in the Sky is Ours retains a certain grace and fluidity of movement that aestheticizes the violence, rage and alienation at its core without diminishing or obscuring them.

It was perhaps inevitable that excellence of this magnitude would prove unsustainable, at least in the strike-while-the-iron-is-hot world of modern recording.  While At the Gates would go on to release three more albums, none even remotely approached the rapturous levels reached with The Red in the Sky is Ours.  However, the greatness of this album is such that even subsequent mediocrity can in no way dim the glory of a band that once stood at the very pinnacle of their artform.