Music is the most abstract form of artistic expression, and thus, the most ambiguous.  Visual media -- film, painting, sculpure, photography etc. -- usually ultilize some sort of directly representational expressive technique.  That is, visual expression corresponds to the "real world" without being mediated through language.  As a result, visual media require less effort on the part of the audience to decode.  

Literature and music, on the other hand, have no direct correspondence to the real world.  They must be mediated by language, requiring at least one extra layer of symbolic expression that must be decoded before an audience can apprehend the artistic content (much less comprehend it).  Because a large measure of collective consensus exists regarding meaning within formal languages, literary works operate within a framework that is relatively well understood and largely codified.  Even if some writers occasionally "play" with the value and meaning of words, English remains English , Spanish, Spanish, Urdu, Urdu, regardless of the work or author.

Music exists in a far less symbolically formalized environment.  Ideally, each composer and artist develops his or her own unique musical language or dialect.  As a result, music is the most purely structuralist of all formats; ideas are encoded within a unique language or idiom that can only be interpreted through the relationships between expressive structures internal to the work itself.  In a sense, music is a language (really, languages) that consists entirely of neologisms.  While this means music can "speak" with far more spiritual precision than other media, it also buries content within many layers of ambiguity, and thus requires maximum effort on the part of would-be interpreters.

Sounds like anus.com's brand of nihilism. Where most nihilism is existential, or people worrying about meaning in their own lives, anus.com's nihilism is a spiritual discipline. It's not finding no value, it's removing objective value in order to find objective structure. Value = subjective, structure = objective; we are judged by what we value, and justly so...

DEATH TO THE UNDERMEN
who prefer ulver to burzum

I don't see any real break between these forms of nihilism, as they are elements of the same process rather than opposed functions.  The nihilism of devaluation is a necessary precursor to the nihilism of revaluation.  The broken facade of illusions must be stripped away from the framework of reality before new (old?) values can be worked out to clothe it again.  Even after this is achieved, the nihilism of devaluation still remains useful; as we must constantly test our values against reality or error will seep back in.

It's no great secret that music composed by committee generally sucks.  It's usually a sign of onrushing creative obsolescence when a band that previously was a one or maybe two man show from a songwriting perspective suddenly becomes more "democratic" in its creative process.  The people who have ideas start to run out of them and the band begins to lean on input from people who just want to keep being in a band.  

Sort of a microcosm of the scene as a whole, no?

There is some (very limited) truth to the audiophile claim that vinyl sounds better, but only with older albums originally recorded in analog.

For the most part, the fellation of vinyl is a big pile of pseudo-elitist bullshit, akin to hand numbered editions, leather seats and writing about wine.

An answer to all of that is simply: No. Metal is no fucking escape at all. It's just knowing the market. Kids are alienated? hey then this noisy angry shit'll keep the dollars flying. they can buy their social medicine from us. Burzum and Graveland are no escape at all. Check out how they sell on ebay, or Mutiilation or Absurd albums. They all fall in to this format. Of course they do, they're made within a society which is the target of our criticism. There is no outside.

There's a certain fatalism here that I find rather discouraging.  Of course there's an "outside," at least in the sense that ideas and possibilties exist independently of the current order (if there were no "outside," social order would be static, but history disproves this).  Social structures are self-perpetuating, yes (and those that aren't, of course, simply disappear).  And, of course, they tend to move to co-opt transgressive forms of expression (as this society has done with "black metal").  That doesn't make the ideas of, say, Burzum, a product of what it critiques, it just means that our society has managed to channel the energy of those who listen to Burzum away from the ideas and ideals embodied by the music and toward something non-productive (and thus non-threatening), in this case, socializing.  Burzum and the ideals it represents still stand on the "outside," so to speak.  The fans, on the other hand, don't.

I found The Luster of Pandemonium to be a difficult album to appreciate on initial listens because the technicality does seem, on the surface, to be a distraction.  Then again, I felt the same way about Obscura.  But on repeated exposure, I find both albums to be utterly brilliant.

I think a big part of what tends to put people off about albums like these is that they aren't intuitive in any way, structurally, harmonically, melodically etc.  Most albums within a given genre, no matter how innovative or interesting internally operate within a broadly understood musical idiom, so it becomes easier to hear what they're doing, at least initially.  Because they operate in a manner intuitively familiar to listeners, their own variations on the common idiom become immediately apparent.  When artists (or authors) break outside of an inherited idiom, we tend to process things initially as undifferentiated "noise" or "pretense," a reaction made even easier by the tendency innovators of this sort to be quite self-aware in stepping outside the received tradition.

All I can say is that it took me probably 20 or 30 listens before I really began to enjoy The Luster of Pandemonium or appreciate it's own internal logic and language for what it is.  The pyrotechnics do have a point, but ambiguity is what the album aims at in the first place, so it's not a "point" that resolves itself.