May 16th, 2009 – Skepticism in Helsinki, Finland

Shall the words not sing of sorrow
Leave for others words of lament

The label ‘Funeral Doom Metal’ is used to describe a plethora of bands that share a largely fatalistic ideological outlook in common. This is an extreme interpretation of the inherent misery of Doom Metal as a wider movement that dates back to when 70′s bands such as Pentagram and Pagan Altar, and 80′s bands St. Vitus, Candlemass and Cathedral from the early 90′s carried the baton bearing these surface qualities taken from Black Sabbath. It was, later still, passed on to bands best represented by Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Katatonia, who integrated this slow and doleful style with Death Metal techniques, as this movement had reached it’s apex in the remarkable ‘goldmine’ period (1989 – 1993). This style called Doomdeath would eventually become more extreme, spawning suicidal and eschatological Funeral Doom Metal bands such as Mournful Congregation, Paramaecium, Worship and Pantheist. They would claim more of a descent from the band most synonymous with the tag: Finland’s Skepticism, however, whose consistancy and contribution to Metal music as a whole far outweighs their status as the archetypal form of some sub-sub-genre. Emerging almost simultaneously from the South of Finland, both Skepticism and Thergothon were playing music less concerned with the self-obsessed emotions of Doom Metal; infact, they followed more in the footsteps of Death and Black Metal, illustrating their reverence for nature/cosmos, it’s eternal patterns and magestic forces that confront our fragile and often illusory perceptions (and feed the despair of most Doom Metal in it’s fatalism).

This appropriately brings us to the annual ‘Dooomstock’ festival held at the Lepakkomies bar in the Sörnäinen district of Helsinki. More importantly, it brings us to Skepticism’s role not only as headliner, but the most uncompromising example of what has been discussed so far: that Skepticism – who bring the epic spirit of Romantic, nihilistic Metal to the Doom scene – reign supreme in a sea of shit. It’s the second day of the festival, and the opening act – Funeral Planet – amounted to little more than an extremely heavy and slow Rock band, which is the most unfortunate symptom of this kind of Black Sabbath worship. Thanks to the trial-and-error, improvisational nature of Rock composition, one or two riffs could be enjoyed but, without some meaningful musical context, only as a soundtrack to consuming bottles of Karhu – Finland’s premium lager. The Celtic Frost cover was a nice addition to the set but only served to increase the anticipation for Skepticism by hearing the work of another legendary band. Such an honourable title, the Finns in attendance would tell you, couldn’t be more applicable to the country’s original Doom Metal band and second act on the line-up: Spiritus Mortis, now being fronted by Sami Hynninen who is more well-known as Albert Witchfinder from Reverend Bizarre. Their brand of traditional Doom Metal is more competent than the preceding act, in that their sound hybridizes a wider range of influences, from Trouble and St. Vitus to the somehow rousing dirge-anthems of Pagan Altar and post-Nightfall Candlemass. But was there more to the set than a collection of tightly-played tribute songs for a diehard group of Finnish Doom Metal connoisseurs? Beside’s Sami’s enthusiasm for singing to his own band within this lot of fans, in a voice more suited to Spiritus Mortis than to a bizarre cover of Burzum’s ‘Dunkelheit’, the answer would be that there was no more meaning. The next band, Ophis from Germany represented the new generation of Doomdeath bands, and delivered almost as promised, a juvenile set of clichéd tracks that rip-off the approach played first by diSEMBOWELMENT and littered this with token chugging lifted from the cruder moments of Worship’s first album. Ending the set with a cover of a band that nobody had heard of planted Ophis solidly into the grave, but it did feature a lot more of that chugging which is ambrosia for the Doom Metal fan, as shredding is for speed-addicts.

With all of this noise done and dusted, the stage was set for the mighty Skepticism, and those who seemed to have better understood the significance of what would come made their way to the feet of the masters. Skepticism’s image is about as disparate from their peers’ as their music is, with the band maintaining a strictly non-Metal sartorial code, led by Matti on vocals and his dishevelled conductor’s suit. The set began with an awe-inspiring and trance-inducing rendition of the classic ‘Sign of a Storm’, opener to the debut album. The opening words are growled more chthonically than on record, accompanied by Matti’s gestures as he appears to summon and conduct the elemental forces of nature, explaining his customary choice of attire. His performance as vocalist is in sharp contrast with Sami’s; his actions are erratic extensions of a music which is greater than himself and, though he is aware of the audience, knows his role as mediator at all times. In the basic element of sound, Skepticism sound more like a coherent whole rather than an unbalanced loudspeaker for an isolated riff, some crowd-friendly chugging or double-bass layer. The next song, as the tracklist of the Stormcrowfleet album dictates is ‘Pouring’ and demonstrates the brutal harmony of their sound. None of their coherence is sacrificed as the set enters the classic ’Aether’ from the second album, which creates a lot more ambient space and dynamic demands that are delivered expertly. ‘The Curtain’ and ‘The Arrival’ from the latest album, Alloy follow to demonstrate the quality music that Skepticism is still creating – a very rare phenomenon in the world of Metal. Next came two tracks that, while enjoyable, explain why ’Farmakon’ was such a hit-and-miss affair. The riffs are quite cumbersomely arranged, but with their characteristic power and glimpses of innovation, Skepticism drive them forward regardless. To close, nothing could have been a more fitting choice of song than the epic ‘March October’ as the band returns to ‘Alloy’ one last time. What a gift to leave behind for the audience to be inspired – sonic patterns of the continuum of life. The epic Skepticism transcended the Doom Metal festival in every aspect of their music and performance, and this is what, perhaps paradoxically, makes a Metal band great; by letting the form of the music be shaped and directed by the fundamental impulses that inspire it, like the sea upon the coming of a storm.

-ObscuraHessian-

Proudly join the tunes sounding
Gallant ways the pulse beating
Take their place in the Alloy
Fortify the compound forming
And unite the substance growing
And meld matter made for lasting
To complete the March October

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Interview: David Herrera (Imprecation)

In the late 1980s/early 1990s in the expansive United States, the nascent genre of death metal developed multiple strains. The more accessible of them included the well-known, technically-impressive bands from the scenes in New York and Florida, respectively. A third major bloodline, arising from the likes of early Morbid Angel, Necrovore and Possessed found itself in darker territory, more readily embracing deep occult themes with palatable atmospheres of musical evil to match. Imprecation, hailing from Houston, Texas, were among the early participants in this subgenre, helping carry it to its mature phases in the mid-1990s along with acts like Incantation and Fallen Christ. The bands’s 1995 discography-to-date release, Theurgia Goetia Summa, is a succinct statement of death metal’s ability to inspire moral horror that reaches beyond the banal graphic fantasy often associated with it.

Answers by vocalist David Herrera.

What was forming a death metal band like, back in the early days before people really knew what death metal was? How did you explain it to people, and how did they react?

It was kinda strange, the whole “Earache” scene was starting to gain momentum, and yet there was an even ‘darker’ undercurrent that was gnashing it’s teeth into the throats of Christians. This is the cauldron that we bubbled out of! It was very unknown at the time, especially with everything being heard solely through tape trading or if you were lucky an underground radio program that would turn you on to bands that were only existing on word of mouth such as Incantation, Profanatica, Impaled Nazarene, Beherit, Phlebotomized, Demigod, Archgoat, and more. We had a radio program here in Houston called “Sweet Nightmares” airing on Tuesday nights/Wednesday mornings from midnight to like 4 am, hosted by Wes Weaver and Bill “the Master” Bates. We’d stay up out in the woods with lots of acid and alcohol and make bonfires to this radio program to check out all of the unknown stuff that they would turn us on to, it was such a drag when it stopped airing as this was a weekly ritual for us. I remember the first time I heard the new extreme in the underground, it was on this show in ’89 or ’90 and Wes had just got the advances from Earache of Morbid Angel’s “Maze of Torment” and Terrorizer’s “After World Obliteration”. He played them back to back and it completely floored us. That ‘s when I knew that I had to be creating this music, to actually live it!

I understand that two members came from the Kreator-y/Slayer-y “Dark Reign.” What caused them to make such a stylistic jump to greater extremity and darkness?

Well, Dark Reign were such a repected band in Houston, really no one was nearly as extreme as they were when they were around. To find out that I was gonna be in the same band as the main songwriters, well I could not believe it. It was like going from the pit to the stage in one swoop, I really lucked out to have my first official band to be rounded out with guys who took their craft seriously. I always felt that the “Ceremony of the Nine Angles” (NOT ANGELS! people to this day seem to think we misspelled this haha!) demo had a lot of Dark Reign and Undertaker (which was basically what Imprecation morphed out of) all over it. Basically I came in as a guitarist, they heard my vocals and decided they wanted me to contribute that way instead. The darkness was honed through some of the lyrics that i brought to the table, although Ruben and Phil were already some dark motherfuckers. I just let them know that if I was gonna be their vocallist, i wasn’t singing politics or government or anything of the kind, not that there is anything wrong with that. But my love lies in utter darkness, and blasphemy is my scripture.

What were the influences on early Imprecation, and did these change over time?

eh, basically it was more that we were inspired by certain bands, and these inspirations remain firm almost 20 years later. Phil came to me when we actually started to piece together our first song “Blinded” and said he was really bitten by the sound coming out of Sweden at that time, most notably Entombed and Carnage. I was always a big fan of Nihilist, so I completely understood! He’s also a big Hellhammer/Celtic Frost fan, along with Dark Angel and Possessed, so I think that is where we got our music stylings guitarwise from, kinda a mixture of those styles. Ruben has a drum style completely all to his own, Ben Falgoust once said that you could make a comp with a hundred bands on it and throw a project with Ruben involved and he could pick his drums out of the lot. I totally agree 100%! I once asked Ruben what made him tick, and he just basically said he was a big John Bonham and Keith Moon fan, as well as a fervant supporter of Mercyful Fate, Slayer and Exodus. To this day he definitely marches to his own drum beat heh heh. My vocal stylings were born of early Morbid Angel, Blasphemy, Beherit, and Immolation worship. Also a healthy dose of early Deicide, I always dug Benton’s approach especially on the self titled LP and “Legion”.

What is good?–Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?–Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?–The feeling that power increases–that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?–Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak–Christianity…

– F.W. Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888)

Theurgia Goetia Summa is most often compared to early Incantation, with a healthy infusion of early Morbid Angel. Did these bands influence you at all, or do you think you hit on a style that’s inherent in metal?

eh, Incantation is fuckin killer but I’d be lying if I told you they were an influence. I was a big fan, and still very much am, but they never came into the equation when we were writing any of our material. I saw them on their tour with Anal Cunt, supporting their “Entrantment of Evil” 7inch and their “Unholy Massacre” cassette at both the Pik n Pak and the Axiom and let me tell you, in 1990 it was a unheard of to see a band of their magnitude live. At least down here in Texas. Also in that same year we saw Morbid Angel on their “Altars of Madness” tour, with heh heh, you guessed it, Dark Reign supporting their Texas shows. I cannot deny the impact that performance had on my life, and what that album plus their “Abominations….” album did for us muscially, but as I said before it was pure INSPIRATION. I feel to this day that Imprecation were on to something special and original, especially with the “Sigil of Baphomet” ep and the Mark Beecher fronted ‘deathymns’ (A.S.!) that started the first three tracks on “Theurgia Goetia Summa”. Even when Mark took ’em in a more black metal direction it still had that Imprecation low tuned crush that made us easily identifiable!

What, in your view, is the difference between black metal and death metal, if any?

Well if you are talking about pure negligent praise of moral destruction and the end of life as we know it, there is no real difference. But that is where it stops when talking as a genre in it’s entirety. I always felt that true Black Metal was very focused on atmosphere and infernal aesthetics, kinda like a funeral shroud that draped around your being, candles lit and pure Satan worship whether Satan existed as a deity or a form of negativity. True Death is more embracing the soil, the musk of things decayed, the creak of a coffin lid, the chop of an axe, and focused on bringing it to you in a very unforgiving and pummeling assault to the senses. I prefer when either style mixes a little flavor of the other to make it a grand combination of destruction. That is where I think Imprecation succeeded most of all, through a perfect balance of Death and Black. Bands like Archgoat, Necros Christos, Teitanblood, Katharsis, Incantation, Watain, and Portal bring this type of rotting stench to my speakers! Death Metal that is as pitch black as a bottomless pit, falling through the infinite abyss…..

Do you think that metal bands, like indie bands, need to develop a “persona” that they support with a unique lingo, habits, styles of dress and mannerism, etc?

Sometimes it is okay to have something that can bring identity to one’s stylings, you know to give ’em that certain trait that makes them all their own. Venom, Voivod, Sadistik Exekution, Hellhammer/Frost, Carnivore, Judas Priest, Blasphemy, Bolt Thrower, Mayhem/Darkthrone, Misfits, W.A.S.P. hell; even Manowar whom I fuckin hate had something that made them stand on their own. I don’t think a band has to develop it’s own original persona or sound to succeed, however, but it definitely helps when they have CONVICTION in their musical execution!

You (David Herrera) also write and perform for Bahimiron, a gutter-vicious Gorgoroth/Motorhead-styled black metal band. What’s the difference in your songwriting there, as opposed to when working with Imprecation?

Huge difference. Where Imprecation focuses on getting most every note played with tightness and clarity, we in Bahimiron believe in being akin to “an eyeball loose and wild”. We embrace death and the devil, and are at one with ways of alcohol abuse and loaded firearms. Heh heh I know a certain someone who does not embrace our love for whiskey and the such, maybe “misguided” in our directions (I’m looking at you, Mr. Prozac!) but none-the-less it is how we live. As the Electric Hellfire Club once proudly displayed on an album “Drugs, Death and the Devil”. It is not for everyone, but when we proclaim that we are Whiskey Fueled Black Metal it is not in a “party” attitude, rather a result of the harm that this way of life can do to one’s self or to any who get in the way!

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

– William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

If sound is like paint, and we use different techniques and portray different things in our paintings, what does it say when a genre sounds similar and has similar topic matter and imagery? Can the genre be said to have a philosophy or culture of its own?

I think that sounds about correct. I mean, that is how cults are born, a group of individuals who try to accomplish the same goals, missions, or end results. I think as far as true death and black metal it definitely qualifies, especially if one lives it’s message as a completely dedicated lifestyle.

Like in the late 1970s, metal feels to many people like it has lost direction and become hollow. Is a change in direction needed, and if so, will that come from within metal?

Well it depends. I like my metal true to form, and if you start mixing techno or emo punk into it then it is complete shit in my ears and I could give a fuck if that is the new “saviour” of metal. I mean, look at the nu metal scene. And by that I am not talking Korn, I am talking Killswitch Engage or Job For A Cowboy. If that is the change needed to bring metal to a different plateau, then I’ll stay in the valley with my old standbys. I still put in my “Seven Churches”, “Reign In Blood”, “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, or “Fallen Angel of Doom” records KNOWING how many bands aped these styles, and it still summons the demon abyss from my speakers. Even the bands that border on plagerism of these styles score high points with me as compared to what some idiots are calling death or black metal nowadays. I’d rather hear a Blasphemy rip off than God Forbid any day!

Did you learn music theory? Did it help you or slow you down in achieving your musical goals? If not, did musical illiteracy help or hinder you?

No. I do not think that one needs music theory to create music. As a matter of fact i think when one knows TOO much about their instrument, it fails to “wow” me and the end result is total boredom. I get more out of a band who are shaping their music through pure devotion to make it work with the skills or lack of skills that they have than a band who is worried if they are playing in 4/4 time or how many diminished triads they can pull off in a measure. All the music theory I need lies in my record collection.

It has been observed that death metal and black metal use “narrative” composition, where a series of riffs form a sort of poem that tells a story about a change in states of mind. Is this reflected in your songwriting at all?

I’d like to think so. I mean, that has always been the appeal for me through a lot of metal: where are the instruments taking me? I need passageways to form lyrics to, sometimes a narrow corridor covered in blood will do, other times an ocean of blood with floating corpses does my mind good. Some people write their lyrics before music, I write my lyrics THROUGH the music. I let the Devil take my mind, and the instruments guide my pen to paper. Most lyrix i have writ were on the first stab.

Do you think a genre of unpopular “popular music” like death metal and/or black metal can be a form of art? What distinguishes art from entertainment, and if they overlap, is there a difference in goals between the two?

Absolutely. What seperates the two? Art succeeds from the within, damn the outsider’s opinion. Entertainment comes with the ideals that for it to succeed, you must please a group of people whether large or small. I think it is possible to be a bit of both, as when we write music we do it for ourselves firstly, but we do care if our message poisons the right people. I mean, if you really did not care if your music or art was embraced by anyone then why release it? Now, it does not bother me if we get negative response, if we wanted to be liked by all then we would be involved in a band hunting for a major label and become a tool for their bank accounts. That is where it ceases being art, and falls strictly into the “please the sheep” category!

Have the values of metal music changed from the early 90s? How and why?

Somewhat. Like I mentioned earlier, there are kids that really think these bands like Unearth are Death Metal. Pathetic.

Are there any skills you have learned from being a death metal band that can be applied to other areas of life?

eh, the only time it was a benefit for me was when I worked in the field of Demolition. Now I am a construction foreman, and i don’t think that really applies to the fine art of fuckin shit up!

Imprecation has just reformed after a dozen years absent, and now you’re opening for Mayhem. How does that feel? Where are you going next?

It feels great man. It feels natural that our first show back is gonna be with Mayhem and Marduk onstage. I mean, our very first show as a band was in early 1992 opening for Grave/Massacre and the very next one was opening for Entombed/Exhorder, so we are used to “breaking the ice” on a big stage. We have a real killer show planned in June with Father Befouled and Thornspawn, and we will be playing in Mexico in August and New York in December with some killer bands.

Is that live recording that made it to tape ever going to see a general release? What about a re-release of TGS?

No. It was only a small production, never meaning to be an official Imprecation release. If you got one, cool, but it stops at that cassette as far as our involvement with it. As far as Theurgia Goetia Summa, it will be re-released this summer on Die Todesrune records in Spain. The original release never gave proper credit to Phillip or myself. I mean, Phil wrote the music to at least 6 of those songs and my lyrics and vocals were on 6 of the nine tracks to no mention. Everyone who don’t know us think that Mark Beecher does all the vocals, when his vocal contribution stops after the third song. From then on it’s me, and Phil is playing the guitar on everyone of the Sigil of Baphomet and Ceremony tracks as well. So that’s gonna be re-released and also we have a killer new 7 inch that has been recorded on Negativity Records that will be entitled “Sigil of Lucifer”, to be released this summer.

We appreciate your spending so much time on these questions, and know it’s going to be important information in the underground. If you have anything else to add that we were too dumb to ask, please stick it here.

Thanks Herr Prozak for the interview. Hails and horns to ANUS.com, and to all affiliated with its writings!!

Here and NOW is our day of torment! Here and NOW is our day of Joy! Here and now is our opportunity! Choose ye this day, this hour, for no redeemer liveth. Every attempt made to organize the future must necessarily collapse. The present is our domain, and our chief duty is to take immediate possession thereof upon strict business principles. Strive therefore against them that strive against you, and war against them that war against thine. Lay hold of shield and buckler or their equivalents; stand up! Be a terrible one in thine own defense. Raise up also the clenched hand, and stop the way of them that would persecute you. Say unto thine own heart and soul: “I, even I, am my own redeemer.” Let them be hurled back into confusion and infamy, who devise thine undoing. Let them be as chaff before the cyclone, and let the Angel of Death pursue them, nay, overtake them. In a pit they have hidden a trap for thy feet; into that very destruction let them fall. Then, exultant, “sound the loud timbrel”. Rejoice! Rejoice! in thine own salvation. Then all thy bones shall say pridefully, “Who is like unto me? Have I not delivered myself by mine own brain? Have I not been to strong for mine adversaries? Have I not spoiled them that would have spoiled me?”

– Ragnar Redbeard, Might is Right (1896)

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Beherit – Engram

Scheduled for release on April 9, Beherit Engram faces high expectations. Thanks to the generosity of some people devoted to art, we were able to hear six of the seven tracks on the new album, and get you a brief review.

Engram thrusts forward through the past in a return to form for black metal, but takes it to the next dimension past Burzum’s Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, which effectively ended black metal by taking it to ambient in the first place. Developing on the concepts shared between ambient music and metal, Engram is really raw but intensely structured, with a deepening mood.

Instead of opting to make a black metal/ambient fusion, Beherit combine the ideas of raw primitive ambient black metal with atmospheric music that works with the texture of sound more than discrete notes. Faster than Drawing Down the Moon, it resembles the material from the Archgoat split given more structure and prismatic depth without losing its primitive gestalt. This is a smart way of not trying to reinvent black metal, but recontexting its riffs in such a way as to pick up where Burzum’s Hvis Lyset Tar Oss left off, which is an attempt to create a mood where one is barely aware that there’s music but gets lost in the muscular clarity of a raw emotion reflecting a primal, naturalistic reality.

The use of repeated non-distorted motifs reminds me of Burzum’s Hlidskjalf as well. There’s a clear Sarcofago influence, and something that sounds like a fusion between Bathory albums The Return and Octagon, sometimes augmented with a noisy, melodic cornering reminiscent of later Darkthrone. Like most Beherit works, these songs uncannily grow on you like mysticism in the darkness.

Black metal has been so stale and boring for the last fifteen years, it’s awesome to have something to look forward to with excitement again. This does not just rehash the past, but inherits it, and subtly develops its ideas consistenly and yet with creativity, moving to a new space for this music to flourish. Engram may win you over surprisingly quickly; it’s organized, has heart, and in the transitions of its dark moods tells us something for the ages about how to survive humanness with elan. Perhaps it is a template for the next generation of black metal.

01. Axiom Heroine
02. Destroyer of Thousand Worlds
03. All in Satan
04. Pagan Moon
05. Pimeyden Henki
06. Suck My Blood
07. Demon Advance
Length: 43:02

Spinefarm pre-order page

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Nocturnus – Thresholds

Nocturnus - Thresholds

Thresholds, the second offering from Mike Browning’s (ex-Morbid Angel) sci-fi death metal tour de force, is an uneven, messy, fusion-inspired, lurid and occult death metal album. The best bits on here such as the sparkling, baroque, Mozart-ian lead guitars on “Aquatica” and the super-addictive chug and rhythmic chant on “Climate Controller” will stick to mind but at times the observation leaps through that Browning & co. are nowhere near the composers that for example Azagthoth & Brunelle were. The polyphony of the looming synthesizers is mostly awkward atmosphere building instead of solid thematics incorporated with the guitars. Browning does have an uncanny primitivistic yet accurate touch with the drums, one he obviously is going for, even naming a track “Tribal Vodoun”. All in all, it was probably a disappointment for many who bought it back in the day simply because Trey Azagthoth was always wearing a Nocturnus shirt in promo pictures. Nowadays as a rare and seldom heard item it has both nostalgic cult value and alongside the equally fusionistic, strange but compulsive “Spheres” by Pestilence shows imaginative directions where death metal could have followed if it hadn’t been abandoned to the blind flocks with their “brutal chugging” and “melodic wanking” trends.

Devamitra-

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Interview: Ross Dolan (Immolation)

Death metal spread itself around the world, zooming in and out of media focus, and probably died and was reborn several times. Stalwart pillars of the death metal community remain, guiding it past the social hype and dead ends, and one of the most persistent is New York’s Immolation. These death metal craftsmen have created detailed, artful death metal since the late 1980s and have influenced every generation of the genre. We were lucky to catch Ross Dolan for a few questions.

When you started out in 1988, you were a different band than even a few years later. Dawn of Possession seems divided between the style of those early tracks, which sounds more like a collision between speed metal (Exodus, Metallica, Slayer) and Possessed than the newer material, which seems to me to be fully death metal in a “modern” sense, more like the European bands of the 1990-1991 era. Did your musical goals or influences change during this time?

I think with our first album, our influences are more noticeable than they are in the later albums. This album in particular was written over the course of three years, a few songs here, a few there, until it was finally ready, and actually the last two songs we wrote for that record were “Those Left Behind” and “Into Everlasting Fire,” two of the strongest and most memorable songs of the record in my opinion.

As a young band, we wrote songs for fun and had no intentions of recording an album, nor were we planning on making a 20 plus year career out of the band. We wrote songs as an outlet, we were all into the same music and were trying to create our own version of that, only better and different. I was only 18 when the band formed in 1988, so in a lot of ways I had a lot of growing up to do, and as we matured and focused, so did the band.

I really don’t think we nailed it until possibly our fourth record (Close To a World Below). The first three were a struggle for us to try to find our place, and although we were close, and all the elements were there, it was just a matter of fine tuning. I would say Here in After and Failures For Gods were albums that showed more of Immolation and less of our influences, but at the same time they were experimental in the sense that we were trying to create something unique and different, and didn’t quite know how to get there. I think we were all very happy and proud of our earlier releases, but as the band matured, so did our song writing and confidence in our material.

Our goals I don’t feel ever changed, we were just in a new place with each new record. Each new record was almost like a fresh start for us, leaving everything else behind and starting anew. We obviously wanted to make things better and better, but we never tried to out do ourselves and top the last record, there were way too many other obstacles without adding this kind of pressure into the mix.

As far as influences go, the main inspirations to play music are always there, and all I need to do to remind me of them is to see a great live show or put on a killer album that hits me the same way now as it did 25 years ago, then I am inspired all over again. The bands you mentioned above were all favorites and big inspirations to us as young musicians; in fact Exodus was the first underground metal band I ever saw live in August of 1985 in Brooklyn. They played with Carnivore, Nuclear Assault, Blessed Death and Agent Steel, and it was something I will always remember as a fan.

After the first album, Immolation seems to have gone through three stages of evolution. Technical metal (Here in After), a simplified but punchier style (Close to a World Below, Failures for Gods, and Unholy Cult) and the newest (on Harnessing Ruin, Hope and Horror and Shadows in the Light), a style that reminds me of the powerful storytelling metal bands of the late 1980s and how they wrote songs that seemed like the soundtracks to their fairly epic videos on then-new MTV. What spurred these changes in style, and do these reflecting your desire to reach different people or communicate differently?

I would agree with you, except as I mentioned earlier, I would put Failures for Gods in the “experimental/technical” stage, and the rest seems to fit. After the Unholy Cult record, we made a conscious decision to strip the songs down a bit, make them less bloated with riffs, and make them more straight forward. We wanted to make things more simplified in a stronger way, to make the songs easier to grasp right away, but still maintain that dark and haunting feel that Bob seems to create so well.

Harnessing Ruin was our first attempt at this, but I think we came closer with the latest album and the E.P. Harnessing Ruin was a great album in my opinion, I think it was probably our heaviest album to date, and it saw us taking a brief departure lyrically from the religious themes and focusing more on the world and the darker sides of life, which I think gave it a more personal touch. This change of approach came not to reach new people (let’s face it, if we wanted to reach more people, maybe playing extreme death metal isn’t quite the way to do it), but simply to write better music that got to the point quicker and stuck in the listeners head longer.

The Shadows In The Light album along with the Hope And Horror EP were a continuation of that, only difference is that these newer records had more of the guitar layers and embellishments that make the songs more epic sounding and much more interesting to listen to. It wasn’t a drastic change because all the core elements of Immolation are still in tact, but it was something that we felt helped make the songs stronger in delivery and dynamics.

Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving today a mind’s eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present.

– George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

Recent Immolation albums use melody lines with more “space” in them (are less chromatic), and emphasize harmony as well as allowing the solo to fit the themes of the song, making for more easily-recognized songs. What inspired you to explore music in this way?

Changes such as these just happen naturally as we grow as musicians and song writers. There was no conscious effort to add more melody; it just felt right at the time. Some of these embellishments are worked on before we get into the studio, but on the last album, most of the extra guitar parts were written and performed on the spot while Bob was tracking his leads, and this was the first time he really went in there with no preparation. He would loop the solo sections and just play over them until we found something that we liked and then he would build on it.

The instrumental “The Struggle of Hope and Horror” took a full day to add all the extra guitar overlays and solos. There is so much going on in that song it’s hard to even comprehend what went into it, and yet the finished product wouldn’t lead the listener to believe there are that many guitar tracks because everything blends together and works as one piece. It’s all done to give the songs more depth and personality, to create something different that’s both dark and musical in an epic way.

As a band of over twenty years, you have had to work substantially to maintain a level of quality that many never achieve even briefly. It seems a substantial number of death metal bands from the late 80s/early 90s burned out quickly, creating great works and then evaporating. One might guess that their creative abilities were more spontaneous and fleeting than yours. Do you think the difference between these “methods” of creation is obvious when hearing something initially, or after some study with it? How do you, as a band or as individuals, avoid becoming complacent?

I don’t think this would be apparent initially in any band. As we mentioned earlier, our first record had a lot of our personal influences mixed in throughout the album, and it did take us a few albums before we really crafted the band into what it was meant to be from the beginning. So I would think it would take some time, and some bands never made it to this point, and the bands that did, it was only the beginning of the hard work.

Once we fine tuned everything to fit our vision, then it became more of a challenge to move that vision forward, develop it in a way that wouldn’t compromise the “essence” of the band but enhance it and make it into what it is today. And even now as we are writing new material for the next album, we are still trying to make things better, stay true to what we are, and enjoy the process! It never ends, this creative drive never ends for us, we are still like a bunch of excited kids when the writing process kicks in, and this is why we keep doing it.

This isn’t something we do to pay the bills, it’s not a job and it’s not a chore, its something we are truly passionate about. It is something that each one of us needs in our lives, because without it, our lives would have a huge void. It’s very hard to convey this feeling to some people, but it is like a drug, a powerful driving force that we enjoy following year after year, record after record. So this is what kills complacency, our love for what we do and our passion and drive to move it forward and improve on it.

I could write a thesis on all the influences that I think I hear in Immolation. There’s something that sounds like Voivod, and an acknowledged Mercyful Fate influence, as well as sometimes some Iron Maiden. On Harnessing Ruin and nearer, I hear variations on themes Black Sabbath introduced. What are your most influential influences? Have you found yourself leaning more toward some and less toward others as your songwriting style has evolved?

Well, you are spot on with everything you just mentioned. VoiVod was a definite influence, especially the first three records, and as you know, Mercyful Fate is a huge influence on us as well. Iron Maiden was both mine and Bob’s favorite band back in the 80’s, and a huge influence on myself as well (Steve Harris is the guy who got me playing bass). Black Sabbath has inspired everyone playing metal today, and if they deny it, they are lying!!!! These bands were the beginning of the road for us, the foundation, and they have all left their mark on us as fans and musicians.

Honestly, we are very open minded when it comes to music, and our personal musical tastes are all over the map, so most of our inspiration over the last 10 years or so has been from more non-metal acts rather than from the old classics. This is true especially with Bob, and if you ask him, he will tell you himself that it’s the non-metal stuff that inspires him to try new and different things, but in a way that would work itself into our style of music.

We are very picky and try real hard to sound different and unique, so knowing what’s out there helps us to stay the way we are without unintentionally writing something that sounds similar to another band. For the last few records I think we have all been on the same page musically, and we know what we want to achieve, so we really use our past records as a sort of template to guide us. We know what works for us and what does not, and although we do try different things with each record, they are very subtle and do not distract form the core of the band.

You write almost exclusively on religious themes that are unnervingly well-versed in Christian theology. Many metal bands seem to use fantasy or metaphor to express ideas that would become too mundane if made political, psychological, etc., preferring the more poetic symbolism as poets like John Milton and William Wordsworth did. How did you discover this way of expressing yourself, and what effect do you hope it will have?

We have always shared the same feelings when it came to religion, and although religion played a small part in our earlier lives, to some degree this inspired us to move lyrically in this direction. We have always tried to be as honest with our lyrics as possible. We are writing about our personal feelings and giving our perspective on different aspects of the world around us, whether it be religion, war or personal demons.

I think our bluntness and honesty shines through and it gives the listener the ability to relate to what we are saying on a more personal level, which makes it more powerful. Again, I think we have always taken our lyrics as seriously as the music itself, and have always believed the two worked together hand in hand to drive home the point of our music. Over the years, as with the music and song writing, I believe we have also come along way in the lyrical department.

Since the Unholy Cult album, Bob has had a much more active role in the lyric writing process, and I think the result has been much stronger and much more personal lyrics that go beyond just the religious themes we had written about earlier on. Prior to that, it was really just myself writing the lyrics, a lot of times building the song around just a title or a basic idea that our first guitarist Tom would throw my way. After four albums, it became more difficult to deliver fresh ideas without sounding redundant or without rehashing something that we had already done, so to have a fresh point of view be introduced into the mix was something that I was extremely happy about.

Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintescence. Hence it arises that our imagination is so easily excited by music, and now seeks to give form to that invisible yet actively moved spirit world which speaks to us directly, and to clothe it with flesh and blood, i. e. to embody it in an analogous example.

This is the origin of the song with words, and finally of the opera, the text of which should therefore never forsake that subordinate position in order to make itself the chief thing and the music the mere means of expressing it, which is a great misconception and a piece of utter perversity; for music always expresses only the quintescence of life and its events, and never these themselves, and therefore their differences do not always affect it. It is precisely this universality, which belongs exclusively to it, together with the greatest determinateness, that gives music the high worth which it has as the panacea for all our woes. Thus if music is too closely united to words, and tries to form itself according to the events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819)

Your exhaustive touring (and longevity) brings you into contact with many of the newer acts (and fans) and every perceivable trend within metal. Could you comment on anything notable you’ve seen develop recently (or ever), how you tolerate the worst of it and to what degree you’ve subsumed some of the best?

We have certainly seen a lot of bands and trends come and go over the last 21 years, and we have also seen extreme metal go back underground at times, and come back out into the forefront at other times. Through it all we try mainly to stay focused on what we need to do and not what is going on around us. We knew we would still continue to push forward regardless of the trends and popularity of the music. What everyone else did never really concerned us.

Of course we were always aware of what was going on around us, but it never influenced us either way. We were always about introducing our music to as many different people as we could, and felt that the only way to do this was to tour a lot and get out there and do as much as humanly possible to get the music out there. We feel that this has helped us tremendously where the label support has not. Our willingness to get out there despite the odds and promote on our own is what has carried the band this far.

I would say as a whole, we are happy with the exposure the extreme metal scene has received in the last few years; it has achieved a sort of acceptance within the mainstream to a degree. I don’t mean to say it will ever be mainstream, because I don’t ever see that happening, and this is a good thing, but it is visible now where it was only visible back in the late 80’s in black and white fanzines and on college radio. Now we see coverage in full color metal and music magazines all over the world, on MTV and all the other major video networks, on lager scale tours that can attract more mainstream headliners to expose the music to a larger fan base.

So these are all positive things that have come to light in the last few years. Its just less of an uphill battle these days. Of course there will always be the trends and terrible bands that come out of nowhere and get a lot of hype and exposure thrown their way, which is a bit frustrating at times, but they eventually disappear into the unknown where they belong, and we live to fight another day…..hahahaha.

Here in After is your most complex album and a favorite of many a metal head. What made you elect to take the technical metal high road, and why did you opt for more straightforward songwriting after that? Did a technical riff-fest not express what you hoped it had, and if so, how do newer methods do this?

Here in After is our most complex album along with Failures for Gods, which I feel is even more complex in a lot of ways. Here in After was our second album, and this came after a long period of not writing any new material because we were in between labels, so it was about a five year period between the first and second albums, which in most cases would have been career suicide for most new bands, or a quick ride to superstar status to most bands today who come back after a long hiatus.

For us it was just business as usual. We were at that critical sophomore album phase, and knew there would be a little pressure to write something as good if not better than the first album which did really good for us for the time and amount of promotion. I can say that we never really made any conscious decision to take any technical metal high road; in fact, we never really felt this material was really that technical compared to some of the more tech bands out there. Sure, it had tons of tempo changes and many different parts coming and going, but I never considered it technical because we weren’t technical players, and I felt that if we were able to pull it off, it could not have been that technical.

Let’s just say the songs were a little too busy and involved for their own good at times. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and after the Failures For Gods album, we knew where we needed to improve the songs and how to do it. The problem with these albums, especially Failures For Gods was that there were so many great riffs that were never allowed to make their mark, they came in for a quick measure and were gone again and we were on to a new part.

Looking back, we could have probably written an entirely separate album just with all the extra riffs that were not needed in these first two records. I know to some of our die hard old school fans this talk is blasphemy, but its how we feel, and we have made conscious attempts from Close To a World Below to the present to change this, which I hope had made things better. It has for us, so that’s what really matters to us in the end. We have to be happy in order to continue.

It seems to me that Harnessing Ruin got a mixed reception in some underground circles because of the use of more “mainstream” techniques, like the whispered introduction to one song, and some of the “bouncier” drumming. However, this album also showcases some of the finest fusion of professional songwriting — using melody, harmony, rhythm and structure together — with savage death metal technique. Are you trying to compete with, or be better than, the newer styles of death metal-hybridized popular metal? What have the successes and challenges of this approach been?

I think this was an important album for us because it showcased our efforts to make the songs stronger and more direct by cutting out all the excess stuff not necessary and getting to the point much quicker.

As far as the whispering parts go, we did use the whisper vocals as a complete second vocal track under the main vocal on the song “After My Prayers” on the first album. I got the inspiration to do this from The Doors “Riders on the Storm”, which has that whisper track under the main vocal throughout the song, and I loved that creepy effect it had and wanted to try it behind a Death Metal vocal. Although it was very subtle, it had a similar effect. So the whisper thing was done not as a ticket to mainstream acceptance, not in the least, but as a way to create a different vocal dynamic since I was opposed to the clear vocal approach, and the whispered parts were suggestive of an inner voice, and they gave the heavier Death Metal vocal parts much more power and authority when they came roaring in (especially in “Son of Iniquity”, which is probably one of our darkest and heaviest songs both musically and lyrically).

Since the songs were more stripped down and to the point, it really allowed all the dark melodies to come right to the surface, and I think it gave some of our former critics a new appreciation of the band, which was a positive thing and helped to attract new fans to our shows. Are we trying to compete with other bands out there? No, we have never done this to be better than anyone else, we try just to better ourselves and make Immolation the best it can be.

We do what we do, and I feel we are unique and different enough to stand out among all the many great and not so great bands out there today. We are competitive only when it comes to working harder with each new release to make it hopefully as good and as strong as its predecessor. I think with what we achieved on the Harnessing Ruin record, it allowed us to make an even stronger follow up album with Shadows in the Light, and hopefully we will carry this forward to the new album.

Are there any skills you have learned from being a death metal band that can be applied to other areas of life?

It’s all about hard work, conviction, following what you believe in and are passionate about and realizing that not everything in life has to be what the rest of society expects of you. Its ok to be an individual, a free thinker, and someone who is willing to disagree with popular opinion at the expense of being outcast from some circles, but that’s fine as long as you are true to yourself.

I have a great family who always supported me, so I was always fortunate to have that support group behind me, but it still was a question of juggling your passions with your priorities. I learned how to work and be responsible at an early age to allow myself to be a touring musician with a full time job waiting for me when I came home. I learned early on that this would probably never pay the bills and it was something I think we all accepted early on, which made us very practical and realistic with our decisions. I learned that nothing comes easy in life, and with out dedication and hard work it was impossible to move forward with any endeavor.

These were all things I have learned from being in the band. We learned always to expect the worst, and if something good came out of the situation it was never taken for granted. And if you consider living out of a suitcase in a van with six other guys for a few months every year for the last 21 years, eating shitty road food, sleeping in rest stop parking lots and taking sink showers while living the dream is a skill, then we can add that to the list…..hahaha. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Did learning music theory, and becoming better musicians, help you in expressing your ideas? How did it do so?

Strangely enough, we never learned music theory, actually other than a couple of lessons when we were much younger, our musical training was more hands on. I learned how to play bass from a buddy of mine when I was like 13, and a few years later I took a few lessons locally, but I never learned how to read music or any of that stuff. I just always had a good ear for music, and had a knack for figuring things out for myself, and the same went for Bob, although he does know how to read music, but never had any music theory either.

I think this may have helped us instead of hurt us because we never see any limitations when writing or arranging songs, we do what feels right, so it was never an issue. I think the same goes for Bill as well, but Steve I believe had more training as a drummer and this definitely shows in his performance, execution and ability to figure out things very quickly and accurately. Becoming better musicians, which was a very gradual process, definitely helped us not only write better songs, but it allowed us to play better and more confidently live.

I am still learning and getting better with each album, its always an ongoing process for me as well as the other guys. I am pushed to improve my playing as our songs get more evolved and playing shows night after night is the best way in my opinion to get better as a musician.

But it was Schopenhauer who first defined the position of Music among the fine arts with philosophic clearness, ascribing to it a totally different nature from that of either plastic or poetic art. He starts from wonder at Music’s speaking a language immediately intelligible by everyone, since it needs no whit of intermediation through abstract concepts (Begriffe); which completely distinguishes it from Poetry, in the first place, whose sole material consists of concepts, employed by it to visualise the Idea.

For according to this philosopher’s so luminous definition it is the Ideas of the world and of its essential phenomena, in the sense of Plato, that constitute the ‘object’ of the fine arts; whereas, however, the Poet interprets these Ideas to the visual consciousness (dem anschauenden Bewusstsein) through an employment of strictly rationalistic concepts in a manner quite peculiar to his art, Schopenhauer believes he must recognise in Music itself an Idea of the world, since he who could entirely translate it into abstract concepts would have found withal a philosophy to explain the world itself.

– Richard Wagner, Beethoven (1870)

Jim Morrison (THE DOORS) sang and wrote repeatedly of a “frontier,” or a no man’s land where chaos and conflict ruled, but also open spaces were present. Was he speaking existentially, politically, or both, and how does this apply to music that loves nature (red in tooth and claw), destruction, emptiness and melancholy loneliness?

I kind of think he was talking about the capacity of humans to have this chaos and conflict struggling together with our feelings and the other beliefs we have learned throughout our lives as we grow and experience the world, and how to determine which is real and which is not, and which means something and which does not.

I think this frontier is within us, in our own minds, along with the inner struggles and conflicts we experience on a daily basis. The world is what it is, we are what ultimately decides our course and place in it to some extent, and I think this frontier to some degree is the unknown, the future, what lies around every turn in life, each new moment. Now, how does this apply to music?

It’s these inner conflicts and feelings that force us to look at the big picture, figure things out and to make choices. As an example, I am an atheist, and although I never really bought in to the whole religion thing, it wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally decided I was done with all religion, and music gave me an outlet to express all these feelings I had all along. There were many years of this “going through the motions” phase when I had my doubts about the whole thing, but kept it inside until it all came to the surface and I faced the reality of the situation on my own terms.

Morrison had a lot of chaos going on in his head, and between his lyrics and poetry this was apparent, but how it’s interpreted is an individual thing of course.

Do you think a genre of unpopular “popular music” like death metal and/or black metal can be a form of art? What distinguishes art from entertainment, and if they overlap, is there a difference in goals between the two?

I think it is art. When it is done for no other reason other than the pure passion of it, it is definitely art.

Entertainment is made with the purpose of entertaining others, so it is designed in a way to appeal to others, whereas art I feel is more personal, and done for yourself with no compromises and no care whether others will approve. We have always written music for ourselves, and the fact that others like what we do makes it a form of entertainment I guess, but that is not the sole intention or motivation for us to write music.

The two often overlap, when art becomes trendy or cool and all of a sudden is in demand, it becomes entertainment in this way, but it still doesn’t change the motivations when it was created. Music it seems rides along right in the middle, existing as art initially but becoming entertainment. When we perform, sure, it is entertainment for our fans, but when we are writing, it is definitely art, so there is a fine line between the two when it comes to music.

Do musicians end up writing death metal because it expresses their thoughts or worldview, and if so, does this produce any compatibility between views? In other words, do people who see the world in similar ways make similar music with similar topic matter and imagery? Does this mean the genre can be said to have a culture or philosophy of its own?

Well, I really can’t speak for anyone else, but I would imagine and would like to think musicians use their music to express their thoughts and feelings, whether it be on religion, or just their take on the world. For us, Death Metal was the perfect vehicle for conveying our feelings, sometimes angry, bitter and sad, but ultimately to express ourselves through the music.

I don’t think musicians sharing similar views will necessarily create the same types of music, because music is an individual thing and it is personal. Our music is very aggressive and powerful with a lot of heaviness, dark melodies, and very haunting at times, and this certainly reflects what the lyrics are saying. Some bands do have something to say in their music that is real and will make people think, other bands like to go in a different direction and create lyrics that are fantasy, pure entertainment for the listener, which is also fine, and we have also incorporated some of this to drive home our point on some occasions, but I think for the most part we fall into the first category.

We usually have something to say, and we don’t like to be preachy about it, but we like to present it in such a way that it does paint a bleak picture, and I think this certainly drives home the point quicker once you understand what the point of the song is. This genre definitely has a culture AND a philosophy all of its own.

Most of the bands we have toured with are on the same page with regards to politics, world views and views on religion, so it is a common thread that I have found. Of course we sometimes have differences of opinion, which is normal, but overall I would say there is a like minded mentality with bands playing extreme music.

Some have said that death metal and black metal use “narrative” composition, where a series of riffs are motifs that evolve toward a passage between states of mind for the listener. Is this true, and is this type of composition reflected in your songwriting?

I would agree with this. Most lyrics tell a story, whether it be fact or fiction, and this would certainly apply to us. We try to get our point across in an interesting way, and to create a story that is dark, powerful and unique to drive this point home is the ultimate goal. Creating the lyrics is always one of the coolest parts of the song writing process.

I have always found it easier to write lyrics when the music is already completed, because then I get a feel for the song, and this is very inspiring when trying to pen the lyrics. Sometimes the mood of the song dictates the tone of the lyrics and the topic as well. A lot of times we will have a lot of lyrical ideas that need a home, so we will go through the music to get a feel for the songs and see what topics will fit with these songs. It’s not really something that requires a lot of thought usually, it either feels right or it doesn’t.

When you write songs, do you start with a (visual, musical, lyrical) concept for the whole song, or do you save up riff ideas and fit them together?

In the past, Bob would compose one song at a time, which would take much too long because he would either get caught up trying to figure out where to take the song, or he would just get writers block and the whole song would be on hold until the riff reservoir was full again. This was a very frustrating process at times, and we could literally spend over a month on one song before moving on to something new.

For the last few albums, Bob will record riffs onto a multi track or now into his computer, program some basic drum beats to them, and then move on to the next riff. This way we are all listening to the riffs as he is creating them, and when the time comes, when we have plenty of good solid parts, we get together and start piecing them together. This way we never get stuck on one song, we can always move on and come back to it any time, and we can try many different things to make the songs work well, flow well and sound their absolute best.

Now that he is doing everything on his computer, he can e-mail all the parts to our drummer Steve in Ohio, and he basically knows the material before we even practice together as a band. Once we have a song arrangement, we build on it from there, changing the drum parts, altering tempos, determining where we want the leads to go, where the vocals would work best, and what parts need something to make them really stand out. So this is basically the process for us.

Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819)

Have the sonic values of metal music changed from the early 90s? How and why?

I think you may be referring to production values. If you are, then this has definitely changed. I remember recording on to 2 inch tape, and this was very time consuming, especially when tracking drums, because you couldn’t punch in for drums as easily as you could for guitars, vocals or bass. This really wasted a lot of time and was also very frustrating after being in the studio for 12 hours and accomplishing nothing. Digital recording made analog recording totally obsolete for extreme metal bands, because now you could save time on the tracking, and use that time to get the mix right.

We aren’t talking about huge recording budgets here, so the reality is that you had to get everything done in a few weeks time or you would have to start spending some of your own money. What kids look for in production these days is totally different than when I was 14 or 15 years old. When I heard early Venom, early Possessed, early Sodom, Destruction etc., I never complained if the drums weren’t crystal clear, or if each instrument was distinct in the mix; I listened to it as a whole, and enjoyed it as a whole and never dissected it too much.

Now, these early productions would be laughed at by kids today if they were released now. That is the difference, it was about the feeling of the music, the music as a whole, not the perfect production that made me a fan. Honestly, if those bands back then had these super productions of today, they would lose something and they probably wouldn’t have had an impact like they did, to me at least.

Although your music is technical, you have taken pains to distance yourselves from technicality for technicality’s sake. What is the difference between technicality, progression and good (death metal) art?

As I have always said, it’s all about the feeling. It’s never about the speed, the heaviness, the technicality, the production, the solos or how deep or not the vocals are, it’s about the feeling. Nothing else matters, and none of these elements define Death Metal to me. If these elements are used in the right way to create a mood or feeling, then that’s when they matter, otherwise you can be as technical and fast and heavy as you want, if you can’t write a song with feeling then who cares. Death metal to me has a certain dark, haunting and ominous feel, and when I hear it, it is truly music to my ears, but if I don’t, then its just another band out of thousands, with nothing new to bring to the table.

The author Kurt Vonnegut famously referred to art as a canary in a coal mine, or a warning signal for society. Other artists, notably romantics, have claimed that art serves a necessary role in celebration of life. Still others believe it should celebrate the artist. Where, if anywhere, do these views intersect, and is it possible for art to exist as a discrete one of them and not as an intersection?

Again, this is a personal thing, and art means different things to different people. Art can be all of these things, or none depending on who you ask. I seem to think all of these apply to some degree. For some, music is a canary in a coal mine, it is that escape from the dark and mundane repetitions of life. For others, it has a strong message that people read into and get, and it moves them to see things in a different light, thus becoming a sort of warning signal for society.

It is a celebration of life, because music generally brings out all sorts of emotions and moods, memories and events, certain periods in our life, and sometimes it even helped us to get through these periods. It is the artist that is remembered and celebrated in a sense when we go to see a performance or an exhibit, so I think all of these apply. Art takes us to a different place we don’t go to that often because we sometimes get so easily swept away in the currents of day to day life, but when we do get to that place, it does make us think and celebrate life in our own personal ways.

You’ve now put out a successful album (Shadows in the Light), an EP with an accompanying live performance that is in my view one of the best representations of metal on video record, and gone on a successful tour. What’s next? Do you have long-term plans beyond the next couple years, or are you just taking life as it comes?

At the moment, we are working on new material, which will be our 8th full length, and after 21 years, I still feel we have more to say and do. We still feel as passionate about our music as we did when we first started in 1988, and fortunately for us, that fire still burns strong within us. We try not to look too far ahead, one album at a time, one touring cycle at a time, and once we move past that, we take a break, take a breath and start planning for the next one. We love doing this and will continue until its not fun anymore or until we just physically can’t do it anymore.

Thanks for the truly great interview. I really enjoyed it and now have to give my hands a rest from typing!

But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

– Plato, The Republic (360 BC)

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The Best Metal Albums of 2008

Legion of Doom – The Horned Made Flesh (Zyklon-B)

This Greek band take their acerbic traditional metal and slowly meld in symphonic keyboard elements, making an album that is easy to appreciate but surpasses most others in artistic vision.

Motörhead – Motörizer (SPV)

Lemmy and Company rarely go completely wrong, and so they wing another one down the middle. Like all Motorhead, most songs are cut from similar patterns and the drone wears thin, but riffs remain cutting and rhythms compelling.

Neuraxis – Thin Line Between (Prosthetic)

We all know metalcore as a genre is like an omelette — throw everything in and hope the flavors carry a lowest common denominator mix. Neuraxis attack metalcore like a metal band, using melody and rhythm to centralize, to great effect.

Deeds of Flesh – Of What’s to Come (Unique Leader)

Getting experimental, this brutal technical death metal band play with some new ideas but deliver solidly resounding songs as they try to wrap their old school metal around metalcore technique.

Hellhammer – Demon Entrails (Noise)

Three bands formed this genre: Hellhammer, Sodom and Bathory. This re-release of formative material from the first of that triumvirate shows us again how mind-blowing it must have been to be there as it happened.

Gridlink – Amber Grey (Hydra Head)

Blurring grindcore with absurdist technical elements, Gridlink make an album that upholds the best traditions of thrash mixed with speed metal and technical death metal, and by keeping it short, don’t wander outside their content zone.

Averse Sefira – Advent Parallax (Candlelight)

This rarity upholds old school black metal and infuses it with classic death metal. Like Morbid Angel from the Convenant era colliding with Graveland from the time of Thousand Swords, this band makes vicious but beautiful music.

Bahimiron – Southern Nihilizm (Moribund)

Imagine early Impaled Nazarene and Gorgoroth combined: fast, melodic riffs with a tendency to deconstruct everything they touch. Although slightly confused in ideals, Bahimiron deliver music that does not compromise aggression or darkness.

Intestine Baalism – Ultimate Instinct (No Colours)

Swedish death metal fanatics make an album in tribute to all three eras of Swedish death metal — the initial surge, Gothenburg and NWOSDM, combined. It’s an improvement over their last and most things coming out of Sweden.

Master – Slaves To Society Re-Release (Ibex Moon)

Evolving from their early primitive roots, Master present us an album that is rippingly fast like Slayer and uses melodic fills to good effect, but never compromises the driving roadhouse rhythms that pound this music forward.

Skepticism – Alloy (Red Stream)

Lush ambient doom surges resoundingly throughout this album, like dye in a pool tracked by the motion of carp. It is meditative, powerful and insightful, but prefers not to state these explicitly, rather letting you absorb them from the resonance.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews 2-9-09

Legion of Doom – The Horned Made Flesh

LEGION OF DOOM attempt to channel later ROTTING CHRIST by becoming melodic heavy metal with ranting black metal vocals on the faster verses, but preserve their original intent and consistency over the past few albums: they compose in similar ways, but their technique and knowledge of theory has been upgraded to allow more keyboard interaction, slicker riffs, and correct approximations of some of the riff structures they must have admired in the metal that influenced them. Song structures follow patterns established on past LEGION OF DOOM albums; they are still chasing certain poetic ideas, like the complex song that culminates in a simple three-chord riff, or the slow introduction out of which builds a structural study. That being said, LEGION OF DOOM is ahead of every other oldschool Greek band because they know how to vary tempi and riff styles and are concentrating on atmosphere, which they generate in a melange of BURZUM- and EMPEROR-influenced riffs. This is far better than average for black metal of this time, but many of the old schoolers may find the “soft” aesthetic distancing.

Intestine Baalism – Ultimate Instinct

I believe form follows function but that form can have a wide range of things comfortably expressed through it. For this reason, when a band like GENERAL SURGERY or PATHOLOGIST is wholly derivative of another band’s style but also really good, it’s hard to in any way condemn them. In that sense, INTESTINE BAALISM strike me as realists who took the voice of Swedish death metal and tried to give it another life. They did, in that they’ve created a B-level SWDM offering on par with maybe INSISION or UNCANNY, borrowing liberally from UNANIMATED, CARNAGE, ENTOMBED, SACRAMENTUM and DISMEMBER to create a sound for some death metal of relatively average structure with two exceptions: most songs introduce themselves and slowly mutate their introduction riff to become the first verse riff, and many songs have melodic transitional bridges in the same way stadium heavy metal bands used to do, some featuring really brilliant guitar work. Where this CD falls down is that it tries to throw too much of the newer melodic Swedish “death metal” into the mix, and since that stuff is basically a warmed over ACCEPT/MOTLEY CRUE hybrid, you end up in hard rock territory really fast with death and speed metal riffs zinging around the room like petrified sharts.

Botch – We are the Romans

Before Botch, there was music like this, which interpreted metal riffs as a kind of carnival of opposites designed to cycle around a rock song structure. They focus on the groove that you can achieve, as avant garde jazz did, by wrapping bizarre-sounding spidery phrases around a dissonant harmony that serves as entry point to implied and indirectly stated verse and chorus. In this view, however, the metal and punk technique used by this album becomes decoration to this underlying rock music, and so while it doesn’t appear to be rock music, on the level of design/structure it is, and is correspondingly empty once you get past the fast ripped scales and emo chords unraveling into their root notes. The bounding, two-hit drumming that pervades this album underlines this basic normalcy so, like a hipster, it dresses itself up as something unique and weird but at its essence, is the same old thing given a good dose of technique. I really liked the title. Like the Candiria, Mordred, and Kong of old, however, it creates an oil-on-water separation of metal/punk from rock, and so comes apart in your hands like a boiled squishy turd. Clearly the archetype for most albums of this nature to follow, it nonetheless misses what is unique about metal and in its neurotic desperation to hide its inner humdrum normalcy, succeeds in making a mess where one did not need to be.

Father Befouled – Profano Ad Regnum

These gents try very hard to be the reincarnation of Havohej, with generous doses of early Incantation and Obituary, and come very close. Many of these riffs are note-varied or rhythm-varied interpretations of classic Havohej/Profanatica riffs, and song structures use the same simplistic, almost serial circular advance of riffs to produce a similar sense of dread. Vocals are patterned more after Incantation, and dirge material builds itself harmonically and rhythmically like early Obituary. The result is gratifying to those who want the old school sound but needs to define itself; being on the outside looking in to Paul Ledney’s vision means that we are forever getting an interpretation of an interpretation, and reality is inching away from us. After making sure we know they are trademark NYEUM (New York Esoteric Underground Metal) in the INCANTATION, REVENANT and PROFANATICA style, FATHER BEFOULED develop their own voice. On the third track, an At the Gates-ish affinity for single-note lead melodies comes in, and then on track 5 there’s a reinterpretation of Celtic Frost, and the rest of the album battles for a melodic influence that with the HAVOHEJ admixture ends up sounding like SARCOFAGO mixed with HELLHAMMER using the better technique of early INCANTATION played by a black metal band. In this style, however, Father Befouled is the best yet and what they understand that other bands do not is that songs need to be coherent wholes, where changes in riff and rhythm gesture us the listeners along to some conclusion. For that any reviewer will be vastly thankful — this disc is not random riffs — but at some point honesty compels us to tell this band to innovate its own germinal material. Clearly they have the technical and imaginative ability, and understand the “spirit” of the underground, which makes them one of the few candidates who can do this.

Darkestrah – The Great Silk Road

People are familiar with archetypes. Once they understand one of those, they can modify it. Only the best of them are able to craft a language all their own and use it to express a truth to which it is adapted. Darkestrah have mastered two arts: the art of power metal, and the art of all the trappings of a Burzum-Gorgoroth-Drudkh hybrid. They take the former and dress it up in the latter, and do it so well it takes almost halfway through the album before the veneer fades away like melting frost and the simplistic, bouncing melodies stand revealed for what they are. In a way, it reminds me of early In Battle, but more tricked out with black metal guitars and keyboards. Instrumentally very competent; artistically adrift on a sea of sewage, drinking big gulps from a cup labelled PRICELESS CHARDONNAY.

Kreator – Hordes of Chaos

What an original concept — the elites rule the earth, and so the hordes of the people will rise up and destroy them through chaos and violence and confusion — and what an original style of music to use to express it! Kreator match their signature ominous riffs, about one per song, with a vomit spew of mixed power metal, hard rock and speed metal cliches. There’s a lot of dual guitar activity in the Iron Maiden style thrown right up against later Sepultura two-chord march riffs, then some of the flamboyant lead guitar of hard rock thrown in with power metal fretwalk riffs. Does it add up to much? The first song is compelling if you listen when you’re distracted, but after that the album further lapses into genericism. The hilarious mixed metaphors cover art adds to the sense that, when one lacks forward motion, you throw everything you’ve got left into a conglomeration and duct-tape it together. For all its furious activity, this album bespeaks drained souls and energyless but resentful lives. The result for the listener is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Deathevokation – The Chalice of Ages

Every old school death metal fan would give a left testicle to like this. Killer vocals – check. Awesome title – check. Dumb band name? Skip that for now. Good guitar playing – check. Old school style, from Asphyx to Zemial, memorized? Check. What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that you cannot throw a bunch of random stuff, even in tribute to one of the greatest eras of metal, into a lattice of convenience and coincidence and expect something good to come from it. The style is roughly that of early Amorphis hybridized with later Cemetary, in that it uses melodic lead overlays on top of rushing power chord riffs and builds up to a promenade riff that trots out the inner melodicity in explicit form. It’s like later Cemetary in that cheesy hard rock, death metal, speed metal and heavy metal all take turns bleeding out from the mess, like it’s a bagfull of hostages each fighting to be heard, and the result is so random that it sounds monotone.

Amebix – Risen! promo

All the best punk bands seem to want to become metal in their more mature offerings. The most notable feature of these new Amebix tracks is that they sound like Lemmy Kilmister vocalizing over mid-paced speed metal, like Prong fused with Slayer, which aims for the theatrical impact of the bigger NWOBHM bands. Galloping muted riffs, chromatic shifts to end each bar, and short bursts of lyrics achieve this goal, aided by periodic keyboards and slower, ballad-like choruses which evolve into progressive-ish transitions. In this, Amebix are continuing the state they reached with Monolith but fulfilling it more accurately with the kind of aggression found on “Right to Rise” (off Arise!) but they’re adding more precise drumming and Slayer-styled tight control of tremolo strum to encode multiple rhythms in a phrase. Most interesting is that these effects are applied to three older songs, making them eerie as familiar sounds coalesce from a more technical and dominating assault. Look for an interesting conclusion as Amebix retrofits itself in this style for their new tour.

I Shalt Become – In the Falling Snow

When I Shalt Become first hit the scene back in 1996, he/they were almost instant celebrities because no one in the United States had yet figured out how to clone the Burzum sound and achieve that trance of dreamlike suspension of reality. ISB has mastered the technique; on their first work, “Wanderings,” ISB made half-finished sounds that took us into a vision of beauty in darkness, but had nowhere to go after that. On their second effort, nothing has changed, although technique is even more refined. It’s exactly like the first, maybe a little better, but part of what made the first charming was its unevenness into which we could read possible hope. On this CD, it’s more repetitive and that is why response has been so light.

Devastation – A Creation of Ripping Death

This is everything I hated about 1980s metal. The very block-cut basic riffs, the very obvious song direction, the vocals synchronized in rhythm to the chords of the riff, creating a cadenced shout effect like being part of a mob about to start a pogrom against smart people. Basically, it’s a lot of Slayer rhythms and ideas simplified and made catchier and a billion times more repetitive. Against all science, this recording may lower your IQ.

Krisiun – Southern Storm

More children’s music. These very simple, very obvious melodies are used to interrupt what are some pretty cool speeding riffs that go nowhere because the riffs themselves are not epic enough to give a sense of mood, and because they’re assembled in a rhythmically convenient order that gives you no sense of significance in the change between riffs and tempi. Instrumentally, this is brutal death metal not different from a faster Internal Bleeding or Malevolent Creation, with some of the chanting rhythms that made later Sepultura so obvious the band started thinking of grunge as “a breath of fresh air.” The obvious factor to these compositions is crushing, but even worse is that the band cannot confine themselves to making obvious and simple tunes, but have to try to trick it out with extensive guitar soloing and use of Meshuggah-style(tm) interruption rhythms. Kill it with fire.

Svartthron – Bearer of the Crimson Flame

I’m realizing people will claim to like just about anything because they think liking something not everyone else likes makes them cool. Either that, or they’re trying to set up random combinations of CDs so they can claim to be unique. I know intelligent people like this CD and I respect their opinion. Mine is that it is well-executed drivel, like 99% of metal. The instrumentation is great. The CD itself confuses boredom with a somber mood, and uses that as its artistic guide, producing somnolent drone or dirge material that has no animating spark or cause or worldview that makes it in any way viable, much less unique. If you’re tr00 kvlt, go buy this.

Akimbo – Jersey Shores

This album takes a covertly aggressive punk hardcore approach to a rock/post-rock hybrid, with more space given to the music where hardcore normally dominates it in washing abrasion of distorted guitar. Instead, it packs away its riffs and brings them out from the obscurity like a punch — or, staying on topic, a shark attack. Its weakness is the howling vocals which seem completely unnecessary in that they’re too constant for an album that this ambitiously hopes to use the dynamic of surge rock.

Banishment – Cleansing the Infirm

Fast brutal death metal, like later Malevolent Creation fused with Deeds of Flesh, and not bad for that. Vocalist makes the unfortunate choice to have his voice too closely follow the root notes the guitar is playing, which makes it sound like the whole band is a guitar effect. Catchy, but not particularly enlightening.

Apotheosis – Farthest From the Sun

We’ll pose a little at being epic black metal, then drop you into a Pantera riff. It’s what happens when metal loses direction; everything gets all mixed together, from Def Leppard through Graveland, and thrown into something that ends up being so generic you can listen without realizing the music is on. Skip.

Zemial – In Monumentum

Opens with one of the dumbest hard rock riffs ever, which pauses right on the bounce expectation as if it were anticipating the ears of a retard. I almost drooled. The CD continues in this direction, tossing Motorhead in with Motley Crue and Morgoth, hoping we don’t notice, but really, why would anyone listen to this when there’s AC/DC? Led Zeppelin? Even “Shout at the Devil”? It tries for evil but manages Marilyn Manson, the garage version that the hip kids like and everyone else is like whatever yo. I get the impression they’re trying to be an updated Death SS but without distinction.

Depravity – Silence of the Centuries

Finnish mid-paced melodic death metal; imagine Demigod periodically zooming into mid-period Therion and you have this interesting fusion between heavy metal and death metal. Unfortunately, a lot like Edge of Sanity, it strays too far onto the rock side of things, not understanding the geometrical language of riffs that made death metal song structures so hard to do right. It’s more like later Dio with death metal technique applied.

Unburied – Slut Decapitator

Blockhead brutal gore with a penchant for blast mania, but no real direction to these songs. Bounce, bounce, breakdown, blast, bounce, bounce, breakdown, stop. I understand the title: If you decapitate yourself with a slut, you no longer can hear this noise.

Storming Darkness – Sin-thesis

This is so much better than most of what crosses my desk I had hope despite the silly album name. It’s good. But not good enough. Repetition of melodic metal themes and a type of subtle breakdown that occurs internally to a pounding bass-snare will not do it. Nor will even the harmonically more advanced, well-played chorus passages and transitions. This really isn’t bad; unfortunately, it’s also non-distinct and directionless.

Damnation – Rebel Souls

Similar to Betrayer and Vader, this Polish death metal band fuses a number of post-1991 death metal styles into a format that is very close to Morbid Angel, but in its more “two-step” riffs, a bit more like Terrorizer. By two-step riffs I mean that there’s a phrase, and a counterphrase, and then the riff repeats until the end of a bar, when a two-chord shift turns it around; the riffing is orthogonal, unlike the geometric offsets of Morbid Angel or the even numbered structures of early Vader. Within this, there’s a lot of speeding riffs in a style eternal from Destruction through Massacra, propelled by furious battery reminiscent of Kataklysm and, at times, Deicide. Edges of Suffocation-styled palm muted blast picked death metal and double-time speed metal like later Hypocrisy intervene, but the standard is straightforward ripping death metal. Songs integrate additional riffs but remain mostly verse-chorus with transposition of early patterns into promenade riffs leading to conclusions. Like most material of this type, the constant battering becomes tiring and not exciting over repeated listens. Although this is most well-known for having members of Behemoth in the band, this album can stand on its own but is not distinctive enough for metal history to notice.

Anal Vomit – Demoniac Flagellations

Love the titles, forgot the music already. Standard grind with frenetic death metal touches, like Angelcorpse recording hurriedly in a lean-to studio outside a jail.

Urizen – Autocratopolis

Being avantgarde is easy. Combine everything that’s not popular, and make it groovy, but always do what you think is unexpected. Problem: you’ve thought two levels deep, assuming that most people think one, in a world of infinite levels. As a result, your music comes across as a childish reaction, and bears this out by being an omelette of rejected metal styles thrown together around the lowest common denominator, which is annoying pop songs given an additional level of complexity by dividing verse/chorus structure so that it recombines in a circular fashion. And we had such high hopes from the name.

Dark Fury – Fortress of Eagles

Black metal ended like WWII: after the Americans left and Central Europeans were defeated, the Eastern Europeans surged in with something that looked sort of like the functional governments that went before. In black metal, it is the same. These musicians are talented, and clearly they know their black metal, but without understanding the transcendent goal that compelled early musicians to render their vision in scratchily distorted power chords, the new bands are always outsiders looking in and then making their version. Yet like an architect who knows only how to copy facades and put them on the same boxy Soviet-era architecture, Dark Fury churn through Burzum riffs, Venomish riffs, Darkthrone trudges, and so forth, but never pull the whole thing together because there is no core to the music. It is pure aesthetics and as a result, directionless in the same way good wallpaper is: you don’t want it distracting from the action in the room.

Diabolic – Chaos in Hell/Possessed by Death

Did the completely unoriginal title clue you in? Yep, it’s a tribute to past bands that were much better by hoarding their themes, tossing them in the washing machine for recombination, and then spitting them out with the subtlety of horse rape. Metal like this causes metalheads to listen to Katy Perry.

Mirrorthrone – Gangrene

Ulver, Borknagar and Therion combine in a Summoning-themed metal band. Unfortunately, between gentle keyboard descents like the windsculpted surfaces of sand dunes, the “carnival style” post-Cradle of Filth black metal rears its ugly head as elements are thrown together in a salad of distractions from which each piece returns to a few exactly repeated themes. As a result, there’s a lot going on, like riding a merry-go-round and seeing the world outside flash by in disorienting random order, but there’s no development of theme; it’s just a more complex version of verse/chorus. I really would like to like this but it is impossible. Production and keyboard composition are excellent.

Autumn Leaves – As Night Conquers Day

Years before it became trendy, this band invented the new wave of Swedish melodic “death metal,” which of course isn’t death metal as much as, following the success of DISSECTION and UNANIMATED, melodic heavy metal with death metal vocals. You get some lovely IRON MAIDEN style dual-guitar harmony leading into a DISSECTION-esque rising melodic riff, and then drop straight into PANTERA or MESHUGGAH for a muted strum, offbeat, bouncy aggressive riff over which someone rasps like AT THE GATES. Over time, the album develops more of its melodic side, but it likes to keep that to a few variations on a theme and a contrasting chorus that uses half of the same notes. Much as the first THE ABYSS album defined a pattern for mimicking black metal, this CD defined the New Wave of Swedish Death Metal — basically melodic heavy metal with speed metal technique and death metal vocals — that aped a hybrid of SENTENCED (specifically, Amok), UNANIMATED, DISSECTION, CEMETARY and SACRAMENTUM but in cheesy, crowd-friendly heavy metal form. Better than those which followed in this style, As Night Conquers Day is both exceedingly well-executed and, because it aims for a hybrid between things popular for their unchallenging nature, a lowest common denominator assault of so many catchy things that they all equalize and you get one big unmemorable stream of noise.

Cult of Luna – Eternal Kingdom

If you apply punk rhythms to two-note power chord riffing, then add indie rock fills and metal vocals, you have Cult of Luna. This band was more inspiring when they did wash of harmonizing noise like Burzum and My Bloody Valentine, but now it’s standard saccharine dramatic indie rock which like a hipster, does a good game of raising inch-deep mystique and then vanishes around the corner, leaving a hint of promise in the air that turns to a stench of disappointment. This is a very average album dressed up as something significant and, while it executes that vision well, it leaves no lasting power or vision of life beneath the obvious, trite and controlled.

Cold Northern Vengeance – Domination and Servitude

If Maudlin of the Well had been fascinated by the black metal aesthetic, and decided to combine the quirkiness of bands like Spear of Longinus with about every metal variation of genres that have influenced metal, you would get this atmospheric and technical take on black metal. Like projects from time immemorial that have tried to throw diverse influences together and get a clear voice, it never quite gels, but that keeps its space open. There’s some nice melodies on here and songs that like most technical music, do not aim to be conclusive so much as they hope to pull together an idea from disparate origins. Like Maudlin of the Well, this is probably not for everyday listening, but will garner the appreciation of musicians. What it achieves that is most impressive is breaking the jazz-omelette barrier and making a metal-like, dark and ancient mood within so much modern musicianship.

Ecnephias – Haereticus

More vamping pseudo-Gothic keyboard-infused bouncy black metal. It has no personality at all, other than a fusion of later Cemetary with Skepticism and Dimmu Borgir, a mixture which sounds ideal but in practice cannot find common ground except on the most basic stylistic similarities. Spirit? Idea? Drive? Musically, it’s great and sometimes reminds me of later Rotting Christ. The beats are very similar and the composition staged harmonically much like the more erudite rock. But as a sum total of art, or a listening experience, it delivers nothing.

War Cry – Trilogy of Terror

Cut from much the same mould as Saint Vitus, the heavy metal musicians in War Cry make surging punk-influenced music like Venom but at a slower pace with the galloping rhythms of early speed metal like Satan and Sabbat. Interestingly, the vocalist sounds a lot like James Hetfield in both timbre and delivery. In the ways these vocals dive across large intervals and then present a sudden bittersweet melody and abrupt rhythm the band resembles Angel Witch. The usual gaggle of influences on older metal music emerge, including Iron Maiden most notably, but here it’s channeled into a style of music that hovers in the mid-paced arena but projects a somber aura like a doom band, when they’re not busy rocking out, that is. History swallows up any knowledge of where they would have taken it, but for a demo of its time, this was a solid B+.

Walpurgisnacht – Die Derwaert Gaen En Keeren Niet

Whenever metal starts a new tributary from its river of heaviness, that rivulet runs for some time and then fragments as it explores. After that, some people realize it’s a great opportunity to make a synopsis of those different directions, an opportune compromise if you will, and then norm the structure of the music back to the verse-chorus pop music of your average radio candy band for teenage brats to enjoy before life harvests them as cubicle slaves (pwnt). Some bands are smart enough to add variations like double riffs for verses, adding transitional riffs and making the bridge into a series of riffs that fit together like a telescoping umbrella before dropping you into the predictable. But it’s only a matter of time before the classic heavy metal riffs come out, along with their rock music bounce and simple-minded distraction, and in this case the transition is from Gorgoroth/Gehenna-style dark riffing to Mayhem-influenced epic pentatonics and then with a shrug straight into archetypes out of 1976 heavy metal. Of the bands out there now, this band most resembles Sammath or Fluisterwoud. Despite those additions, which end up being riff-salady, Walpurgisnacht is about blatantly sentimental melodic hooks and recurrent invocation of riffs from black metal’s history. Unlike most of its contemporaries, Walpurgisnacht has a beautiful misfortune advantage: between melodic hooks, rhythmic hooks, and pure speed/violence thrills, it’s catchy as all hell. This bestows the ultimate curse in that it both isn’t bad and isn’t inspiring at all because it too glibly speaks the language of appearance of form without altering the intelligible structure beneath.

Vomit – Rot in Hell

Jump back to 1985 or so. Stereos are blistering with Ride the Lightning and Hell Awaits. There’s no internet and metal publications are few and far between, so you get your news by dubbing a couple tracks from each of your latest finds onto cassette for your friends across the world. You spend your few bucks on postage but get more music than you could ever find in a record store or the flaky, xerox-distorted catalogs of the primitive mail-order of the time. Sound romantic? Then sign up for this hybrid of speed metal, thrash and the early death metal without death metal vocals that was Slayer. Vocal rhythms are profoundly Slayer; song structures and half the riffs are Metallica; the rest of the riffs are a meshing of the ideas behind Slayer, Sodom, Venom, Sepultura and Destruction. It’s extremely engaging music, with lots of energy and the banging of the drums, but it is like the rationalism it finds reprehensible, very fucking linear. I like it but never want to listen to it again.

Vile – Stench of the Deceased

Some albums innovate on the inside of the genre, while others take its disparate aesthetic influences and standardize them. Vile really nailed the sonic appearance of post-Cannibal Corpse death metal, complete with squeals in the Incantation style, Malevolent Creation creeping thunderous choruses, Suffocation breakdowns and windups, Immolation’s riff salad and leaps between tempi. But… this is good, but the gestalt of it is not great: in fact, as the term gestalt implies, music should give off a spirit that like an MD5 checksum gives us a single representation or shape to its direction. Here that clarity is so muddied that what we remember is a cinematic procession of riffs like a nightmare dream movie, inscrutable to those who do not know the narrative passing through the minds of these musicians. Riffs are quality but never so above the board good that they’re memorable, and their arrangements rapidly lose integrity and become a series of techniques. This is an album you will love the idea of but be unable to return to as a classic for inspiration.

Venom – Hell

I’ll give this band credit: they mixed influences, but then knew how to pick selectively the parts that work together. The first track is a Slayer rhythm with a speed metal style infectious chorus, Prong-inspired industrial noises in the background, and a Pantera-ish jaunty riff with monotone vocal deadpan. At this point in their career, Venom as musicians are slick and know the archetypes of their genre, so they pull off a very believable album to the degree that you never think to question whether this is a big band — obviously, these guys arrived long ago, and have been taking music lessons ever since. While the quality of this music is good, by aiming for the simple-minded and catchy, it sort of takes itself out of the running for contemplative profundity and in doing so, shows why Venom was a first attempt at black metal that never succeeded: it couldn’t leave the heavy metal, rock ‘n roll mentality behind. Even Sarcofago, Hellhammer, and Bathory, who I’d consider the first generation of black metal, developed themselves into art with a sense of the sublime and subtle. Venom is just like Metallica and Exodus, barging in with loud declarations where we’re supposed to assume words equal their meanings, like a reshuffling of the hippie symbolism of rock. I respect it but there’s no way in hell I’d ever reach for this CD given the other great options out there, although it’s a vast improvement on Venom’s classics, musically.

Ved Buens Ende – Coiled in Obscurity

You know what else coils in obscurity? Poop. This CD, of live and instrumental rarities by this band, showcases both what they were trying to achieve and why they were ignored by many of us. First, they’re trying to achieve what the reckless yells and blatantly ambitious singing on this CD seems to gesture at; a soul unconnected from awareness of social consequences (this is what people want when they bloviate about “freedom”). Second, the underlying Mayhem-inspired gritty but monotonous riffing shows how they hoped to achieve it, which is the same method every punk band since the dawn of time has used. Huge parts of this are blatant Burzum ripoffs with the atmosphere replaced by a sense of ashen directionless chaos. Dissonant chords howl against the grain of riffs, drums batter out something ironically confrontational, and then the track redirects itself, like the point of a pen drifting across words on a book in another language. The repetition gets old and the CD goes nowhere.

Portal – Outre

This album sounds to me like airplanes zooming over battleships. Their distortion is intensely melodic and they tend to use diminished melodies and abrupt tempo changes, drones zooming into abrupt, jazz-style recursions. In many ways, it’s a lot like what Molested tried to do, except the songs go nowhere. They thrash between different patterns that are marginally related and create a dark atmosphere, but then it doesn’t change, and so what ends up happening is that songs become monolithic and uninspiring. It’s an interesting concept, the idea of removing dynamics from the music except as a rhythm, and inserting small themes within larger patterns, but when it does not reveal any clarity to its changes, the result is like driving around in a maze with the heater on.

Rotten Sound – Exit

People were telling me this was death metal, but in reality, it’s a punk album with blastbeat drums and modified d-beat. It’s not bad but it’s not distinct enough from later Impaled Nazarene or Disfear to really care. They keep the energy going as if they’re afraid to slow down and make sense of their songs, which are two or three riffs and sometimes a tempo change. This stuff is kind of neat but one dimensional, reminiscent of Driller Killer in the way it uses very similar beats and transitions, and so sounds like one continuous linear riffing party with a variation on Swedish d-beat essentials. It’s unclear to me why anyone with access to Discharge, the Exploited and Dead Infection would choose this lesser variation.

Wolves in the Throne Room – Malevolent Grain

Having been a fan of Two Hunters for some time, this reviewer was excited to download and un-RAR the latest from Wolves in the Throne Room, one of black metal’s more successful acts. Soaring drones lace themselves over bracketing drums, and female vocals and black metal rasps guide these songs through mostly extended verse-chorus patternings, with a few discursive flights of fancy leading away and then returning. This is not an album for people who like black metal; it’s an album for people who want black metal to be what they like. Specifically, it’s a studied combination of indie rock, emo punk, crustcore and doom metal, most notably borrowing from Skepticism and Satyricon. It makes itself obvious in the protest rock style of clearly identifying what it complains about — GM crops (author’s opinion on this issue is irrelevant; this is a music review) — and makes that topic safe by construing it in the same Good and Evil game that Christianity likes to play, where moral absolutes are used to control the masses so no one has to think. There are black metal technique additions, for sure, but the spirit is mournful and poignant in that simple way that rock music makes you see a “I love her, but can’t have her, because she’s no good for me, but the sex is great” dual binary complexity to life. Unlike great art, this album never creates the chiasmus, where the opposite pairs recombine and a truth is distilled. Like Velvet Caccoon, the last great Northwest black metal phenomenon, Wolves in the Throne Room carefully study their quarry and put together a compilation of what has worked for indie rock tinged black metal for the past decade, but in doing so, they somehow lose their soul, which is borne out in the music that wanders yet not only never arrives but never decides where to go — it wallows in its opposition, like a surly priest fulminating in frustration beneath a rotting church.

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Amebix, Severed Head of State, Deskonocidos and Mammoth Grinder in Austin, Texas

Amebix, Severed Head of State, Deskonocidos and Mammoth Grinder
January 24, 2009
Emo’s, Austin, TX

Musical movements can only exist for so long. They birth themselves, flower, and then having said what they needed to, imitate themselves until so self-parodic they bore, they vanish into assimilation by other genres. Amebix remain one of the few punk or hardcore-related bands to preserve the germinal force that made the genre such a powerful cleaver of dead iconography, and they arrived in Austin for the beginning of their world tour.

As cities go, Austin seems a good choice for the godfathers of crust punk, a type of punk hardcore typified by howling vocals, melodic playing, and a tendency to live in squats and not bathe. Back in 1983, this seemed revolutionary; in 2009, it’s either necessity or an artifice, like wealthy tourists buying authentic peasant clothing to store in their overflowing cabinets at home. Two decades of crust punk bands have brought us greater diversity of music but fewer standout acts, although the population of “crusties” who live the crustcore lifestyle has burgeoned in Austin since about 1997.

At Emo’s, whose open-air second stage is the designated ground zero, crusties fill the courtyard wearing tshirts from punk and metal bands, spikes, leather, and boots. The name of the game is to become a self-aware iconoclast and to combine different influences in some ironic or unique way, and this audience tries hard. Someone with hair spiked by cold scalp grease and not hair care products passed; another appears to have literally defecated in his pants and even at a grungy show, keeps a wide circle of stench guaranteeing him personal space.

We arrived after Mammoth Grinder, who left no impression on those in the audience not acquainted with them personally. In overflowing scenes, the name of the game is keeping a circle of friends who will support you, because only then can you distinguish yourself from similar acts. No one knew what we were talking about when we asked about Mammoth Grinder. After that, Deskonocidos took the stage and pumped forth the prototypical punk hybrid: oi choruses, pop-punk hooks, d-beat drums, classic The Exploited-style riffs and lots of yeahyeahyeahs. People seemed to enjoy it but when it ended blank expressions returned.

Severed Head of State

Severed Head of State came well-spoken of, at least among the people present. When they took the stage, a clamor followed as people pushed into the covered area to hear them. To this reviewer’s ear, they sounded afraid: afraid to leave any dynamic spaces of silence in their songs, afraid to break pace, afraid to not use dogmatically punkish riffs. The constant wall of sound hybridized the last thirty years of hardcore into something insistent, loud, invariant and quite frankly, boring.

Luckily the crowd seemed content with a beat and the hurling shout of the sweaty, shaven-headed vocalist whose eyes betrayed a nervousness his elbow gestures attempted to erase. It reminded this reviewer of all of the angry, disturbed music made by Nazi lunatics and religious fanatics, a burst of explosiveness and discordance whose goal is not to use those extreme states as a contrast by which a point can be made, but to make them the norm so the shocking is the mundane. It depleted energy, not transferred it.

At this point, it was past midnight. Someone had chalked “Crush the System” on the brick wall, near grafiti for blow jobs and the ubiquitous Austin rockabilly bands. The pizza stand just inside the gate of the club was doing a brisk business selling the pizza that arrived in battered cardboard boxes and was then heated to apocalyptic temperatures and sold for five bucks a slice. A crowd of crusties stood outside the entrance, talking loudly about how they needed to borrow money — “anything you got, I’ve got five, I need fifteen to get in” — and then, when the crowd surge left them alone, extracting iPhones to call friends, dealers, cabs.

Amebix

Amebix did not seize the stage. They did not announce themselves. Their presence and aura did not alter the chemistry of the room or the weather. Instead, they walked out. Set up some instruments. Tuned up, did a soundcheck. Then let the feedback melt into the night until enough people got curious, and then crashed into their set. Unlike the previous bands, they did not watch the audience.

A threepiece — the Baron on bass/vocals, Stig on guitar, and a gent whose name no one caught on drums — the Amebix distinguished themselves by absence. There was no self-importance or manipulation of others with pandering. There was no recognition of event, or the people buzzing around including at least two people filming what are going to be the world’s shakiest concert videos, or even of their own status. With a grim set to the jaw, and a playful but professional mien, they played their songs with focus on details but little neurosis. The crowd could have evaporated in fire and the band would have continued amongst the ashes because their mission was both an end and the means to that end in itself.

The Baron maintains a low profile for a vocalist, with his microphone extended above his head and pointing downward in homage to Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmeister, an Explorer-body bass with what looks like either a German war cross or an outlined plus sign on it under a strap with a single red star and white cross on it. Like the rest of the band, he wears a button-down black shirt and black slacks. His face, slightly lined, looks weatherbeaten like that of a coastal fisherman, but his hair is thick and shaggy and his muscles rangy and accustomed to use. Stig looks more like he stepped out of Saint Vitus, with the lidded eyes of a stoner and longer hair and beard, but diligently played his guitar while periodically flickering eyes over the Baron to make sure they were in time. The Baron on the other hand appeared to check up on no one.

True to form for a punk and/or Amebix show, chaos reigned. Several members of the crowd got thrown out for doing something so stupid security laughed nervously as the new outsiders sprawled on the pavement, the guitar sound kept fragmenting in staccato fuzz, and the CD player which served as a keyboard/samples track plikking and gleeping on a sure path to failure.

The band repeatedly apologized for these glitches but among those paying attention, they passed quickly and without consequence. What was admirable about the handling of these “the show must go on” errors is that the band would quit the song, restart and apply it again so the audience got the full effect. We are deliberate, their actions seemed to say, and we will not just settle like drifting modern people picking DVD players or girlfriends.

After a seven-song set, the Amebix departed; two tracks were an encore of sorts, but then with a quick thank you to the crowd, they were gone back into that space between legendhood and alienation where they have been dwelling these past two decades. The crowd, most of whom paid secondary attention to the band and primary attention to being noticed by others, making endless calls on their cell phones, shuttling between pizza and beer and the leaking groaning porta-potties set up near the far fence, provided a monotone contrast. Unlike the band, they had nothing to call their direction in life, other than spending trust funds or working in video stores.

Unlike the band, they adorned themselves externally to be different but when seen together, appeared to be a crowd of generic indeliberate actions. Unlike the band, they showed no attention span and during a historic event acted as if it were about them, personally, and had no relation to these musicians who traveled over sea and land to be here. It was all about them, and this tendency made them fade into the background when in the presence of not just grizzled veterans but people who lived deliberate, purposeful, fulfilling lives that do not admit a need for external affirmation, although they are geared toward external manifestation.

It was embarrassing to see that the best Austin could offer were adult children who dedicated their lives to distraction. The intentional freakishness got shallower as the show went on and finally the word “pathetic” rose in the mind as these people did everything to bring attention to themselves but what would matter: serving some function in reality that made them live up to the contrived and dramatic self-promoting speech they made so abundant. The callowness of crowds at metal shows does not even approach the level of base disconnection, and almost outright scorn for the band, exhibited by this group of crusties.

Even the teenage scrawl of “Crush the System” rang hollow, since it was clear no one was here to crush the system because no one here wanted to even analyze or change their own behavior, only to justify an ethic of convenience with broad dogma boxing them into a position of no hope, from which their careless lifestyles then seemed apt. A skinhead openly walked around with suspenders and white laces, wondering if anyone would notice and stop him. They noticed, but turned their heads. Conversation was afoot, and an ethic of convenience does not permit confrontation. Oddly, that created a more tolerant atmosphere where anarchist crusty and fascist skinhead could rub shoulders in harmony.

On the other hand, Amebix exhibited a subtlety born of having escaped this theatrical cycle. They did not blow away their opening bands, but quietly put on a show that fit their material and personalities; it was just of another level. Their actions did not draw attention to themselves but put the attention on the material stretched between band and audience, even though fewer than one in ten had a chance of understanding it. Their energy was not demonstrated, like in gestures designed to be seen through a movie camera, but emanated from thousands of factors at once, harmonized across the frigid air as a vision coalesced. As much as ugly music can be beautiful, it was, and sustaining in that it affirmed the power of will in a world of the willless, which like an afterimage haunted both those with souls and those who lived without purpose as they escaped into the night.

Amebix setlist:

Winter
Belief
Axeman
(unknown)
(unknown)
Sunshine Ward
Largactyl
Arise!

Bands:
Amebix
Severed Head of State
Deskonocidos
Mammoth Grinder

Promoters:
Emo’s

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The Heavy Metal F.A.Q.

slayer

About

The Heavy Metal FAQ explores the development of heavy metal as a musical movement through its context in popular culture, and reflects upon the ideological and sociological circumstances that motivated that development. These circumstances are tracked through music theory, symbolism, and behavior.
Version: 2.0 / September 8, 2014

Contents


I. What is Heavy Metal?

  • Heavy metal originated as a counter-reaction to the hippie rock of the 1960s and was intended to sound like a horror movie soundtrack
  • Heavy metal fused progressive rock, hard rock, and soundtrack styles using the power chord to make phrasal composition
  • Heavy metal culture and lyrics resemble European literary Romanticism in its emphasis on the individual and nature, not social mores, dictating value in life
  • Heavy metal ideology is an active form of nihilism, in which the individual believes in nothing because belief is not needed as much as a creative, intuitive, warlike principle of vir
  • The musical and cultural influences of heavy metal suggest this idea has been injected into the mainstream, but that a constant struggle exists to “norm” it to social mores

1.1 Music

slayer-live-tom_araya

Defining heavy metal requires we look at its many attributes as part of a whole. Heavy metal is is a musical style with certain compositional tenets without which music cannot be said to be heavy metal; however, even more profoundly, it is also a set of ideas that shape its composition, and without those you can have something that “sounds like” metal but does not fit the whole profile of heavy metal. Musically it can be described by the following:

  1. Composed using forms of the power chord, or a fifth chord lacking a third, in a moveable form based normally on the low E chord. Since these chords lack a third, they are neither major nor minor, and can be played in any position, which lends itself to writing longer, more dynamically melodic or lengthier phrasal riffs.
  2. Musically “heavy” derived from a songwriting style that emphasizes a return to unison after a resolution of motifs. The promenade-style riffs and theatrical conclusions of metal songs derive from this need, which forms a heavy (emotionally significant) moment later in each song.
  3. Dark subject matter, and use of heavy distortion, vocal distortion, intensely fast or slow tempos, and other ways of converting that which appears noisy and ugly into a musical language, as if attempting to find beauty in darkness.
  4. Familiarity with the past musical language of metal riffs and imagery, and ability to build on it, both musically and ideologically.
  5. A preference for cadence where rock bands would use rhythmic expectation in the pattern of syncopation extended to the beats themselves. Although metal beats are syncopated, this is used internally within cadenced beats and reduces drums to a constant — or “timekeeping” role — which ends phrases on the downbeat.

Emerging from the ruins of rock music, heavy metal grew from the conventions of that genre, which possessed an international flair in its use of Anglo-Celtic song structures, European music theory, Middle Eastern and Asian scales, an Arab instrument converted by Spaniards and electrified by Americans, and timbral singing from Africa. These remnants were tempered by a tendency toward progressive rock song structures which approximate those of European classical music; the rhythms of garage punk bands, which come from the first two guitar lessons of an aggressive teenager; and finally, the thematic tendencies of horror movie music, which are generally borrowed from Modernist- and Romantic-era classical composers such as Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner, Camille Saint-Saens, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann and Ottorino Respighi.

The traits of this modernist music — mobile fifths, unison, thematic repetition with inflected motifs, layered harmony and inversion — extend heavy metal beyond its classical roots but also step further backward in time toward the origins of Western music, in that by liberating itself harmonic structures used to identify scale, it returns to the modal, melodically-structured, narrative compositional form originally pioneered by earlier civilizations like the ancient Greeks. When classical music emerged from the rigor of Baroque styling, and ventured into the theoretical but passionate world of the Romantics as defined by Beethoven, it reached a height that demanded a further gesture to continue its artistic specialization. The final point of departure was to liberate melody from the intricate harmonic structure of Romantic music and in doing so to make melody more than harmony the leading compositional tool, so that pieces were defined by the evolution of melody instead of strictly harmonic structure. In this form, which resulted in music that tended toward a nearly chromatic base scale with motifs clustered around it in varied modalities imposed on contact points in that progression of tones, the narrative method of composition reached its most flexible voice. Music became more motif-driven, spurred on by the “leitmotifs” of Richard Wagner, and united a juncture of music, narrative, theatricism and architecture — Bruckner famously referred to his works as “sonic cathedrals” — in which it evolved to within a step away from becoming the rigorously correlated drama, ritual and music of the Greek theatre.

Heavy metal inherited all of this through a modern form because of its desire to escape the cognitive dissonance reaction to modern life. In part, this impulse comes from the metalhead who realizes that the individual is basically powerless, except in a future time when predictions about the negative nature of modern society will come true. Of course, in the now, parents brush that aside and go shopping, stockpiling retirement funds so they can carelessly wish their children a good life before disappearing into managed care facilities with 24-hour cable movie channels. A more fundamental part of this dissident realism is creative. People who see most of society going into denial because they cannot handle their low social status, the dire future of human overpopulation and industrialization, and the negative motivations hiding beneath social pretense, aka “cognitive dissonance,” will often mourn most for the opportunities lost when people value putting their heads in the sand more than finding beauty in life. It is the convergence of these ideas that creates the violent and masculine but sensitive, Romantic side to metal: it is a genre of finding beauty in darkness, order in chaos, wisdom in horror, and restoring humanity to a path of sanity — by paying attention to the “heavy” things in life that, because they are socially denied, are left out of the discussion but continue to shape it through most people’s desire to avoid mentioning them.

This same principle underlies classic European and Greco-Roman art and music, the idea of an aggressive and warlike but wise and sensitive motivation that is both religious and scientific, peaceful and belligerent, because it understands a principle of order to the universe and asserts it because it is beautiful in that it is a “meta-good,” or the harmonious result of darkness and light in conflict. For this reason, it is not moral in the sense of judging as good or evil, and neither fits into the hippie “peace, love and hedonism” approach nor the conservative, market-bound ignorance-is-bliss smoke and mirrors of mainstream music and bourgeois art. Unlike any other musical principle, the one thing that unites the varied borrowings from baroque, rock, jazz, blues, folk, country, classical and electronic music that form heavy metal is this Romantic principle of doing what is right not in a moral sense to the individual, but in a sense of the larger questions of human adaptation to the universe, the conceptual root of “heavy” in metal and what throughout history has been called by a simple syllable: “vir,” the root of virtue in a sense older than a modern moral interpretation as chastity. Vir is doing what is right by the order of the universe discerned by asking the “heavy” questions, and speaks to an abstract structure of right as opposed to an aesthetic one, where the individual picks the non-threatening as an option to the threatening.

It’s a concept album about what once was before the light took us and we rode into the castle of the dream. Into emptiness. It’s something like; beware the Christian light, it will take you away into degeneracy and nothingness. What others call light I call darkness. Seek the darkness and hell and you will find nothing but evolution. – Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/

For these reasons, where rock has simpler unifying principles (tension between pentatonic and harmonic minor scale) and other forms of music have more clearly genre-specific technique, like funk, which supports a variation not musically much distinct from rock and jazz, metal is both a polyglot and a theory of its own, helped greatly by the flexibility which the power chord bestows. The ability to move chords rapidly without harmonic obstruction led to a desire to write more evocatively phrasal riffs, which led to the riff as basis of composition, which in turn led to longer song structures using a modal sense to unite motifs in an otherwise disparate, chromatic context. This process evolved through the proliferation of sub-genres that marks the development of metal since 1970.

Heavy metal music, as a genre, encloses sub-genres which implement the above list with varying degrees of proficiency, leaving behind rock conventions as they do so for a uniquely metal musical language. While much of this change occurred within speed metal, it was enhanced during death metal and perfected with black metal, and can be seen as an ongoing stratum of concept developed with the first proto-metal album, and continuing in refinement toward a higher vision of itself.

2.2 History

black-sabbath-band_photo-5

I’ve never thought it an accident that Tolkien’s works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties — they merely repead the Fifties’ foul harvest — but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties where the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there…[Tolkien] is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers — thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. — Peter S. Beagle, introduction to The Hobbit, 1973

Heavy metal emerged as a distinct musical form with the first proto-metal introduced in 1970 by Black Sabbath. The UK band created a new style of music, equally influenced by extreme rock and horror movie music, that strung together power chords into longer phrases which gave the music a dense and morbid atmosphere. The hippie lexicon of the day referred to it as “heavy” because of the sensations of dark realism and confrontation with reality hidden beneath the human world formed of the consensual reality of socializing, laws and morals.

Hippie culture, in full flower at the time, based its music on popular sentiments of pacifism and love. This was a negative reaction to the innocent but wholesome rock of the 1950s. In contrast, proto-metal brought a dirge of the insignificance of the individual, the brutality of life and the ominous unknown of the future. Where rock bands wrote about personal and political topics (sometimes referred to as “karmic drama”) proto-metal dug into the broader worlds of history, mythology and metaphysics.

The new music instantly attracted those who found both 1950s culture and 1960s culture to be unrealistic, including bored kids from the suburbs where reality was deliberately kept in quarantine and nothing an adult said could be trusted. This upset the music establishment who, despite its criticism of other industries as obsolete and oppressive, was as much a force of calcified “conservative” thinking as was the factory and agriculture establishment before it. Proto-metal made the rock elites look as fat, stuffed-shirty and retrograde as the suited bankers they replaced when the first Black Sabbath album reached number 8 on the UK charts and number 23 in the USA.

Since its inception, the heavy metal genre matured through several generations, sorted by time period:

  1. Proto-Metal (1970-1974)
  2. Heavy Metal, Hard Rock/Glam Metal and NWOBHM (1975-1980)
  3. Speed Metal, Proto-Underground and Thrash (1981-1987)
  4. Underground Metal: Death Metal, Grindcore and Black Metal (1985-1993)
  5. Metalcore and Nu-Metal (1995-2005)
  6. Hybrid Metal: Melodic Metal, Power Metal and Indie-Metal (2005-present)


Proto-metal (1970-1974)

Black Sabbath changed direction — mixing heavy guitar rock, progressive rock, dark apocalyptic rock and horror movie soundtracks — when Ozzy Osbourne observed that it was “strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies” and wondered if Black Sabbath (then named Earth) could make music with the same effect.

As musicians in the fertile UK rock community, Black Sabbath experienced wide-ranging influences, but heavy guitar rock like The Stooges, progressive rock like Jethro Tull and King Crimson, and apocalyptic rock like The Doors all made their impact on the new music. From the heavy rock, Black Sabbath took its basic power chord sound, from horror movie soundtracks its extended melodies, and from progressive rock its varied and complex song structures. The Nietzschean and apocalyptic themes of the music came from The Doors. Together this mix forged a new style which grew out of rock but by its different approach, also rejected rock.

Through both the horror movie soundtracks that inspired its new sound and the progressive rock desire to approximate the classics of generations past, Black Sabbath inherited a heavy classical influence. This influence eventually absorbed others because the type of chord used in heavy metal, the power chord, can be easily played with the same finger position in any part of the fret board. That ability lends itself to a technique of writing riffs with more phrasal development than rock riffs, which tend to bounce to a rhythm with a very basic harmony; metal riffs could and did move dynamically and approximate a melodic style of composing, and their dramatic horror movie underpinnings encouraged these riffs to imitate what they were portraying, giving them a neo-Wagnerian, operatic feel. This more complex style of distinctive riffing, and its “heavy” tendency to run through multiple motifs on its way toward a theatrical conclusion, was what above all else was to define heavy metal music.


Heavy Metal, Hard Rock/Glam Metal and NWOBHM (1975-1985)

Heavy Metal

The term “heavy metal” refers to both the genre as a whole and a sub-genre of the first wave of 1970s metal music. The successive generation of metal bands streamlined the variety of Black Sabbath into an identifiable set of conventions while merging it with the hard rock influences of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. Heavy metal shortened the longer power-chord riffs of Black Sabbath and instead used rock-influenced riffing, melodic lead-picked fills and harmonized guitars to produce a similar sense of structured riff without having to use the full phrasal riffs that require the music to move at a slower pace. This produced two waves of heavy metal, first a basic rock-metal hybrid, and second a revival in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM).

  • UFO
  • Thin Lizzy
  • Kiss

Hard Rock

Hard rock can be identified by its surface resemblance to heavy metal but use of riffs in the rock style as harmony and rhythm without the dependence on phrase that defines most metal riffs. In addition, hard rock bands tend to stay toward the pentatonic-harmonic minor transitions that define most of rock music, eschewing the darker modes and minor key focus of metal. Hard rock emerged with Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and The Who which remain its most iconic acts. It also created a hybrid in the form of “stadium metal” or “glam metal” which fused the guitar-oriented stadium rock of the 1970s with early heavy metal, producing bands with a big studio sound and professional songwriting but some of the metal edge.

  • Van Halen
  • AC/DC
  • Guns N’ Roses

Glam Metal

Predominantly a UK movement, heavy metal crossed the pond and landed in Los Angeles where during the early late 1970s and 1980s it became “glam metal,” similar to some of the “stadium metal” or crowd-pleasing variants of heavy metal. This sub-variant of heavy metal distinguished itself by applying Hollywood theatrics and the stadium rock sound to heavy metal, as well as some of the gender-bending aesthetics of big city art rock. In a theme that would become part of the bedrock of internal dialogue among heavy metal bands and fans, metalheads critiqued glam metal for “selling out,” or placing appearance and image before substance in order to become more popular with a vapid and uncritical public.

Already a division emerged in metal paralleling the division between “punk rock” and “hardcore punk” in the punk community: many people listened to metal, but its fanatical fanbase wanted music like that of Black Sabbath but more intense. They did not want heavy metal to become hybridized with rock to become a lighter, more socially acceptable and more commercial form of itself. They wanted to get outside of the consensual reality created by social agreement and wanted the music to lead them. Instead, society wanted to assimilate them and make them “safe,” removing the elements of the music that were not socially acceptable. This fracture spurred the next movement within the heavy metal genre.

  • Motley Crue
  • Poison
  • Skid Row

NWOBHM

In response to the influence of “stadium heavy metal” on both shores of the Atlantic, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) attempted to exceed the power of Black Sabbath by incorporating faster punk-influenced tempos and the grander song arrangements of prog-rock bands. Much as proto-metal derived an influence both from proto-punk (Iggy and the Stooges) and progressive rock (King Crimson, Jethro Tull), NWOBHM appropriated the dramatic flair and long song structures of heavy guitar prog-rock bands like Jade Warrior, Greenslade, Aphrodite’s Child and Yes in addition to the rock flair of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. Where Black Sabbath tuned down its instruments however the NWOBHM kept theirs in standard tuning and opted for a mid-range sound instead of the sprawling cavernous darkness of the extensive riffs of the proto-metal band. In addition, riffs showed the influence of heavy metal by being less phrasal using power chords, but instead implementing lead guitar — often harmonized as in Judas Priest and Iron Maiden — to create melody between complex patterns of strummed chords.

The new sub-genre also borrowed its intensity from the rising punk movement as well as a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to publishing, promoting and recording its music. The DIY aesthetic in both punk and metal arose in response to the intense commercialization of heavy metal that resulted from a handful of record labels releasing all of the music the public experienced, and that music — like Black Sabbath had in its later albums — tending to become softer, more personal and less critical of larger movements in social change. Instead of relying on major labels, NWOBHM released their own material, promoted with flyers and word-of-mouth, and cultivated an audience who instinctively distrusted commercial and socially-approved material. As a result, NWOBHM maintained its underground status and avoided being inundated by commercialism, and instead sent its most popular bands up into the mainstream where they influenced just about everything else.

  • Iron Maiden
  • Judas Priest
  • Motorhead
  • Venom

Styles

Styles refer to aesthetic conventions adopted within multiple genres and do not constitute a musical deviation from that genre but apply a different aesthetic.

“Black Metal” (I)

While musically within the heavy metal realm, aesthetic divisions within that sub-genre inspired future generations to expand upon the concept. Starting with NWOBHM and heavy metal bands Venom and Coven in the 1970s, this style of heavy metal used attitudes and techniques from punk to make a simple but surprisingly dark and expressive form of anti-life art. At first humorously Satanic for the shock value of offending an uptight world, these bands quickly found an audience interested in their blasphemic worldview, which in later generations expanded into the obsession with negativity that is a hallmark of postmodern consciousness, paranoia, and drone existence in western nations.

According to rock journalist Joel McIver’s 2004 book Justice for All: The Truth About Metallica, the origins of King Diamond’s look can be traced to a September 1975 Copenhagen stop on American shock-rocker Alice Cooper’s first solo tour:

It was Alice Cooper. I saw the ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ tour in Copenhagen in 1975. Even though there wasn’t that much make-up … it changed him completely. He became unreal. I remember the show so well. I was up front – and I thought if I could just reach out and touch his boot, he would probably disappear.

King Diamond’s theatrics, when combined with music heavier than that of Cooper, in turn paved the way for the legions of face-painted metal bands that dot the landscape today. It also subjected King Diamond and Mercyful Fate to accusations of Satanism, which Diamond addressed in Justice for All.

  • Venom
  • Coven
  • Mercyful Fate

“Doom metal”

When bands focus on the slow and moribund, dragging riffs that create atmosphere through resonance of repeated patterns that induce a sense of hopelessness and despair, they continue the Black Sabbath tradition of “heavy” in a new form. Doom metal bands come in two varieties, a heavy metal based sound derived from proto-metal, and a darker chromatic approach which owes its germinal material to death metal. These bands prefer detuned guitars, moaning vocals and lengthy songs which resemble dark passages of sound resonating through subterranean caverns.

  • Pentagram
  • Saint Vitus
  • Witchfinder General

“Power metal” (I)

The marketing department came up with this tasty term for energetic heavy metal that owes its musical essence to a cross between speed metal and prog-ish heavy metal, with bouncy rhythms and jazz-inspired double-hit percussion. At first this style referred to a somewhat emotional, exuberant and over-indulgent form of heavy metal, but as time went on, the style moved to include other genres. In the current time, power metal hybrizes its original heavy metal form with speed metal and injects death metal technique.

  • Helloween
  • Iced Earth
  • Helstar


Speed Metal, Proto-Underground and Thrash (1981-1987)

Speed Metal

After heavy metal became absorbed by the mainstream, upcoming metal bands sought to be faster and more extreme in order to avoid being assimilated, believing that radio and social pressures would impose a dividing line that would keep overly loud, fast and distorted music from reaching a mainstream audience. Speed metal arose from two influences: the NWOBHM bands who usurped the metal community in its last generation and the newly intense sounds of hardcore punk. The pattern of a new genre becoming popular, and changing itself to be marketable even though the result was “false” or “sold out” music, and in turn causing underground musicians to retaliate with a more extreme form, repeats through the history of metal.

The borrowing from hardcore punk gave speed metal a new edge. Hardcore punk bands wrote in the chromatic scale and used impromptu melodies with abrupt tempo and melodic shifts in aggressive, stripped down music that entirely obliterated rock conventions like use of pentatonic scales, pop song structure and frequent tempo and key changes. Unlike pop music or its progenitor punk rock, hardcore punk was “about something,” namely the condition of humanity and human thought. Metal bands from this moment on adopted this more skeptical view of society and its place in history as a whole, which translated the political realism of punk into the mythological-historical view of metal.

Photo of Cliff BURTON and METALLICA and Kirk HAMMETT and James HETFIELD and Lars ULRICH

Using the muted strum, in which the pick hand rests gently across the strings and produces a shorter and more explosive sound, speed metal bands wrote faster and more complex riffs which they fit into complex song structures derived from progressive rock. The faster speed required more aggressive vocals that were closer to shouting than singing and encouraged a different kind of technicality which emphasized less of harmony and more the construction of riffs and radical shifts in tempo. With the more complex riffing packing more detail into songs, speed metal bands expanded song formats beyond the cyclic verse-chorus that worked so well for metal genres before them and instead diverged into the progressive rock structures that had frequently intruded but never found a uniquely metal expression.

With speed metal albums like Metallica _Ride the Lightning_, songs became mazes of riffs. As a result, bands looked for a way to make their riffs “talk” to one another through an internal dialogue. The result caused riffs to find compatiblity with one another on the level of “shape” or similarity of phrase. Riffs aimed to contrast each other but to keep a narrative going, with each successive riff revealing a new aspect to the underlying truth like a voyage of discovery or the denouement of a horror movie. Late speed metal began its turn toward something more explicitly artistic with Slayer South of Heaven and Prong Beg to Differ, and soon other bands were modifying their own sound to reach this “high concept” goal.

Speed metal suffered a fatal flaw in that, as extreme as it was, it was also rhythmically hookish like a pop song, and soon lesser bands had adopted the style and were making pop music within it. That in turn drove speed metal bands into the public light, and by 1988 it was apparent that the formative days of the genre were over and the long slow descent into selling out had begun. The crucial moment came when Metallica, the band that swore never to release a video, released a video for a song with soft verses and distorted choruses, “One.” Pantera followed this with “Cemetery Gates” which used a soft/hard dichotomy as well. A year later, Metallica unleashed a self-titled album with a new logo and less disturbing lyrics with simplified song structures. The era of speed metal was over.

Thrash

Much as speed metal crafted itself from a hybrid of hardcore punk and NWOBHM, thrash music arose arose from the hybrid of hardcore punk and heavy metal. Where speed metal leaned toward NWOBHM, thrash based itself on more extreme hardcore and the older metal of Black Sabbath. Named after “thrashers” or skateboarders who were prone to like both metal and extreme punk, thrash bands wrote short songs comprised of bursts of metal riffs in punk song format. Lyrics criticized society as a whole and avoided specific political viewpoints for the most part.

Where a punk band would criticize the hold that industry or the army had on politics, thrash bands wrote from the perspective of one of the most disenfranchised members of society, the suburban skateboard punk. With no money, no adulthood, and no escape from the miles of lookalike homes on the floodplain, thrashers criticized society itself as a mistake and pointed out its inhumanities and glaring deficiencies with funny, acerbic lyrics. Songs were often as short as a few seconds and the bands crammed four times as many songs on a CD or LP as your average metal or punk band. For the first time, an underground genre embraced alienation, speaking as if it found no meaning in society and would not want to be allied with it.

Although the thrash genre consisted of only a handful of bands and died out after only a half-decade, its influence spread throughout both metal and punk undergrounds, effectively ending punk by being more extreme and forcing metal to race to catch up. Bands took the humor of the genre and isolated it, producing joke bands like Stormtroopers of Death and Method of Destruction whose sound cleaned up the original messy and abrasive thrash and replaced it with cleanly-defined chords and standardized song structures. Despite innovation in both genres, speed metal was destined to collide with corporate megaculture and thrash was to burn out its intensity as audiences moved away from the extreme to the more commercial in both hardcore and metal genres.

Proto-Underground

Another movement developed in parallel to speed metal and thrash. In 1982, a UK hardcore punk band named Discharge released an album entitled _Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing_. Unlike most hardcore bands, who carefully tied their riffs to their drums, Discharge let the drums play freely as timekeepers in the background while riffs changed independently. The resulting sound liberated the melodic power of the guitar to be entirely riff-driven and allowed the guitar to lead drums as the primary driver of change in each song. While the punk music that Discharge emanated tended toward a chromatic sound, the new flexibility of this format inspired many metal bands, including speed metal and “proto-underground” bands who established the basic techniques of two genres to come, death metal and black metal.

The new sound inspired bands who straddled the genres which would become black metal and death metal. Although they retained many of the elements of speed metal, these faded away as time went on, as did the use of the muted strum. Instead, bands of this type used a fast tremolo strum in the Discharge style and added extreme vocals caused by shouting or screaming while limiting the sound to highs or lows, producing a natural distortion effect. This type of vocalization originated with bands like Motorhead, The Exploited and Amebix. The new style built their songs around the internal dialogue of riffs that resulted in unique song structures fitting the content of each song, the use of “ambient” techniques where riffs changed independent of drums and instruments supported the riff in layers, and the tendency toward the mythological view of metal fused with the total social alienation of hardcore punk.


Underground Metal: Death Metal, Grindcore and Black Metal (1985-1993)

Where previous generations of metal hoped for acceptance, underground metal hoped for the opposite: it wished to remove itself from the mainstream mentality in addition to being too extreme to be sold out. Instead, underground bands wanted to create an alternate system of recording, publishing and distributing music. Spreading news and music through tape-trading and small “zines” or homemade, xeroxed and low distribution magazines, underground metal gained a worldwide audience of fanatical fans.

Death Metal

The first to emerge from the raw material of Slayer, Hellhammer, Bathory and Sodom was the nascent death metal genre. Death metal strung together chromatic riffs using the tremolo technique to create intricate shapes, or phrasal riffs, that then fit together through a process of “riff-gluing” which fit riffs together like puzzles so that they complement each other while contrasting, causing the mental impression of an expanding landscape or labyrinth as the song progresses. This creates a sensation for the listener of discovery as each new riff puts the previous patterns in contrast in a version of the “prismatic” composition used by Modernist classical composers to make repetition grow more intense through atmosphere. This includes a motif-style arrangement where songs return to themes and riffs fit the atmosphere altered by the meaning of the lyrics, which incorporates a theatrical element like the music of Richard Wagner or ancient Greek tragedies.

celtic_frost-band-original

The first wave of this technique with Slayer (1983) kept its roots in the combination of NWOBHM and hardcore punk but evolved to become faster, ripping-strum styled metal that shifted with muscle over rigid, ambient repetitive beats. However the second wave — Morbid Angel (1986), Celtic Frost (1985), Sepultura (1985), Deathstrike (1985) — were more obscurely and bizarrely formed from raw innovation and chromatic scales. As the decade waned and humanity seemed further flung into the pit of materialism, death metal reached toward the progressive and explored the extremes of melody (At the Gates), ambience (Obituary), percussion (Suffocation), atonality (Deicide), and progressive music (Atheist). Bands created intricate compositions in which song structure reflected song content as foreshadowed by the sigils of the riff forms themselves, with each successive riff changing context and expanding atmosphere to create a sensation of constant discovery.

Death metal successfully evaded assimilation from extrinsic forces, but instead degenerated within. As more bands entered the genre as the underground grew, the bulk of death metal shifted toward a more percussive and chromatic style, composing their material visually from power chord forms along the bottom three strings of the guitar. This lowered the requirements for entry as did the expanding world of labels and zines which supported them, and standards fell. This in turn compelled bands to turn to novelty to distinguish themselves, and bands began voluntarily incorporating mainstream conventions. Labels seized on this as a chance to form death metal hybrids with rock music, which produced “death n’ roll” and a form of proto-indie metal that left behind the power of death metal for socially acceptable ideas, musical conventions and aesthetics.

Grindcore

Descended from thrash, grindcore took the hardcore punk and metal hybrid and applied to it the death metal tendency to down-tune guitars and distort vocals. Like thrash, it featured short songs with unique “shapes” or structures built around the riff. Unlike death metal, it tended to follow the punk style of essentially cyclic verse-chorus songs with some detours. The genre birthed itself in 1985 with Repulsion and Napalm Death both releasing demos. The more rigid and technical playing of Repulsion contrasted the earthy, organic and chaotic — deliberately off-timed, absurdly down-tuned and discoordinated — style of Napalm Death. From the fusion of these bands modern grindcore was born, but other than a few late entrants was done with its creative output by the early 1990s.

An important side effect of thrash and grindcore appeared in its influence on punk. Toward the middle-1980s, punk bands had spent their fury, and explored instrumentally adventurous and more mainstream-oriented angles like later Black Flag and Fugazi (ex-Minor Threat). Many bands, such as Amebix, Discharge and Cro-Mags, drifted closer to Slayer-styled speed/death metal hybrids. The vast majority built together a hybrid of the more progressive punk styles, the rock-infused styles, and borrowings from grindcore. The result formed a pop-punk variant best exhibited by Jawbreaker, which took the poppy songs of The Descendents and built into the them a convoluted song structure. The most profound change was “emo,” which was punk music that focused on self-pity, sadness and compassion instead of rage. This music verged on indie rock in sound and developed a devout following before it was absorbed by pop and progressive punk.

An important genetic component of death metal, grindcore arose from the ashes of hardcore and thrash as the alienated punk-rockers and sociopathic metalheads of the world sought something more extreme, more evocative of the discompatibility they felt as a process of soul. In 1994, Napalm Death _Fear, Emptiness, Despair_ sounded almost the last note for grindcore as its course of innovation started to veer from the minimalistic to abrasively coarse and simple, death metal-like music with complex jazz-y rhythms. Grindcore, like hardcore, thrash, speed metal and early forms of death metal, continues to this day, but most innovation remains at the aesthetic level and the original thrust has been lost.

Black Metal (II)

Black metal, born to uncertainty and neglected for nearly a decade, flowered in the early 1990s. Arising from proto-underground metal, black metal took its primary influence from Hellhammer/Celtic Frost and Bathory. During the later 1980s the genre essentially suspended itself while bands attempted to find a new sound for the underground metal era. Since death metal had explored a form of structuralism, or phrase-based highly structured music, black metal aimed for ambience. Its earliest acts in its fully realized form detached guitars from drums such that drums kept constant time while riffs changed in an extreme version of the lexicon of Discharge — seen most profoundly on Immortal _Pure Holocaust_, Graveland _The Celtic Winter_ and Darkthrone _Transilvanian Hunger_ — and pitched the classic biologically distorted guttural death metal vocals into a high pitched whispery rasping scream. The bands of this generation deliberately engineered their production to sound like the worst of garage engineering and incorporated the noise and distortion into their music by allowing resonant frequencies to carry their simple melodies in layers like an ambient composition.

I told the producer, ‘Give me the worst microphone you have.’ The sound of the drums, we didn’t do anything to make the sound of the song special. Ten minutes and everything was ready. And he was asking, ‘Don’t you want to do anything, you know, you always have to adjust the sound.’ No! Because it was a rebellion against this ‘good production.’ We called it necro-sound, ‘corpse sound,’ because it was supposed to sound the worst possible. I ended up with a headset as a microphone, because that was the worst I could find. I used this tiny Marshall amplifier, you know this big, because that was the worst we could find.

Black metal arose in part in response to the degradation and assimilation by mainstream intentions that began to crush death metal in the early 1990s. With the rise of black metal, underground metal inherited the rejection of industrial society that marked thrash and some death metal and expanded it into opposition to modernity itself. Frustration with an increasingly liberal West that had become as oppressive as the conservative version, and a new global economy that seemed to be removing culture as fast as it attempted to make every corner of earth safe for business, as well as a Romantic desire for ancient times in which, it was perceived, meaning was more readily attained through tradition and struggle, drove black metal to become not only the most articulated form of metal yet, but the most popular to rise from the underground. After a dramatic series of church burnings, murders, and taboo politics which affected all but a few of the original Norse, Greek and American black metal bands, the genre was captured by hipsters who pandered to a market who wanted the image of extremity without the socially unacceptable views and behavior.

Black metal gained notoriety not only for its acts of guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism against churches but its negativity toward the “fun” culture of rock music that was pervading metal and assimilating it. Deathlike Silence Records, the label started by Euronymous of Mayhem, imprinted its releases with the famous slogan: “No mosh, no core, no trends, no fun.” Black metal band members gave interviews where they decried the “jogging suit” culture that had taken over death metal with safe, solely humorous and pointless lyrics. In the view of black metallers, modern society represented a series of trends which took good sub-genres and exploited them, removing their essence and making them into a standard product like a McDonald’s hamburger. This outlook fit within the desire to make the music as obscure, lo-fi and violent as possible. The goal was total alienation from the herd and its morality.

After its peak in the early to mid-1990s with the Nordic black metal explosion, the genre fell prey to bands who adapted the black metal sound to other genres and made easily-digestible versions of the sound. This flowered into a synthesis with indie rock in the late 1990s, at which point the genre had become little more than an aesthetic style and was essentially abandoned by the original bands, fans and community.

Styles

“Doom Metal” (II)

During this time period, former Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian started Cathedral, a band that borrowed from both NWOBHM band Witchfinder General and death metal to produce a new sound. While doom metal bands of the proto-metal variety such as Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus and Pentagram (US) had existed since the 1970s, this new form of doom metal based itself in death metal theory more than the inclusive rock hybrid of proto-metal. Doom metal thus serves not as a sub-genre, but as a style or technique by which bands play exhausting slow and ponderous music which creates an enhanced sense of darkness and mortal weight among the audience. Doom metal can be either of the heavy/proto-metal variety or the death metal variety. Following Cathedral in the death metal variety were Thergothon, Skepticism and Divine Eve.

“Speed/Death”

Early in the genre, most bands had trouble leaving speed metal behind and some formed a hybrid zone which mixed the techniques of both genres in the form defined by speed metal. A movement to combine speed metal ideals with a more abstract and logical, dark sequence of tones took hold in the form of bands such as Kreator and Destruction, who put together deathy speed metal, or intense hardcore-inspired extremists like Sodom who built three-chord high-speed songs to accustom an audience to enjoying a fast and violent melody. In addition, bands in the United States like Rigor Mortis and Sadus mixed the styles with an infusion of technical playing, which can also be seen on the first Atheist album.

“Industrial Grindcore”

One of the most influential offshoots of grindcore proved to be industrial grindcore as developed by Godflesh in 1991 with _Streetcleaner_. Combining machine-like electronic percussion with layers of distorted guitars, Godflesh created a spacious sound in which intense distortion gave rise to gentle melody and layers of melody created a harmonic landscape through which the motion of the song progressed. The possibilities of this new style stimulated minds in the upcoming black metal and later death metal works, causing many bands to work toward atmosphere and layers of sound in their otherwise traditional metal.


Metalcore: Metalcore and Nu-Metal: (1995-2005)

By 1994, black metal culminated in the most iconic and ambitious releases of its era, most notably Burzum _Hvis Lyset Tar Oss_ and later Darkthrone. At the same time both death metal and black metal languished, a new audience inspired by the headlines of black metal murder and the raw parent-shocking extremity of death metal surged into the genre. This created a financial opportunity for those willing to make music that was death metal or black metal on the surface, but underneath, was something safer and recognized. This new music specialized in avoiding the disturbing political and social themes of black metal and toned down the extreme mortalistic pessimism of death metal to a humorous focus on gore lyrics as exemplified by Cannibal Corpse, who lifted much of this from early grindcore pioneer Carcass.

Metalcore

The new post-underground metal music combined a new style of technical grindcore with groove, “mathcore,” best seen in Dillinger Escape Plan, with the hard rock and heavy metal styles of yesteryear and fitted these to the type of rock-punk hybrid of later hardcore, which evoked a “progressive” style in a punk way by insisting on the highest contrast between riffs to the point of randomness, such that songs cycled as if going between different exhibits in a carnival (and the music often resembled carnival music with its emphasis on polka-like beats and extended cyclic fills). In addition, black metal degenerated into what was called “war metal” which referred to exclusively chromatic, highly rhythmic music which imitated the primitive music of Beherit and Blasphemy without the emotional intensity, resembling more than anything else mid-period hardcore punk given metal rhythms. Some even took this hybridization to its next logical step and mixed crustcore, the genre which linearly inherited from Discharge and Amebix, with nominal black metal to produce “black punk.” Another form mixed with deathgrind to form “deathcore” and “slam,” which emphasized percussive riffing and heavy groove with numerous “breakdowns” or rhythm breaks leading to a half-speed groove.

Nu-metal

Mainstream metal added funk and hip-hop influences to death metal to create a rock-based variant known as “nu-metal.” Using the vocal rhythms of hip-hop in a style inherited from the “brocore” metal of Pantera and its descendants, nu-metal used rock song format and metal distortion to make riffs which were essentially funk- and rock-based but used metal techniques of chromatic fills and strum techniques. Perhaps the biggest nu-metal band appeared in the form of Slipknot, but related acts such as Rage Against the Machine and Marilyn Manson also incorporated these elements. Nu-metal added nothing to metal that hybrid bands had not attempted in the 1980s, but with death metal minimalism and the extremity and imagery of black metal, it became a marketable force at stores like Hot Topic which catered to rebellious teens who wanted to avoid stepping over lines of social acceptance and thus actually damaging their futures. Much as a famous ad campaign related “Banker by Day, Bacardi by Night,” the nu-rebels wanted to have both the merits of sociability with the appearance of alienation.

Blackened Death Metal

In the underground, some tried a new marketing technique and created “blackened death metal” or “black/death metal” which distilled to simple rock-style songs with the simplest form of death metal riffing with melody added. This trend peaked early because of the lack of stylistic distinction of these bands which cultivated rejection by existing black metal and death metal audiences, and their refusal to go all the way to socially safe material as nu-metal and alternative metal had, depriving them of an audience beyond an underground which only grudgingly accepted them. Others reverted to a previously successful form in the percussive death metal of Suffocation but streamlined the result into simpler song structures and added groove in the Pantera style, producing a variant of commercial metal known as “slam” which while it had underground aesthetics failed to uphold the structural and philosophical conventions of the genre and was for the most part quickly discarded.


Hybrid Metal: Melodic Metal, Power Metal and Indie-Metal (2005-present)

By the time the 21st century dawned, metal had almost four decades of evolution under its belt but to most, it became clear that it had stalled. No new genre ideas had emerged and people were rehashing the past. And so it came to pass that what the 1970s metalheads had feared was in process: metal was being assimilated by rock n’ roll and reverting to the mean. All of the sub-genres mentioned in this section fall within the rock world more than metal because they reverse and remove the unique metal method of narrative composition, and replace it with the cyclic harmony-based approach of mainstream rock music, no matter how “extreme” the aesthetic in which it is draped. During this age, metal recombined and hybridized but essentially failed to move forward.

Melodic Metal

Starting with At the Gates Slaughter of the Soul and related releases from Dissection imitators such as In Flames and Dark Tranquility, metal bands realized that they could capitalize on what Sentenced had pioneered in death metal: mixing in the Iron Maiden/Judas Priest dual guitar harmony of melodic leads. While Sentenced took a death metal outlook, and Dissection tended more toward heavy metal in song structure and sensibility, the new genre stirred interest in many because it softened the extremity of death metal and attracted an audience with a more even balance between genders. With the next generation, bands reduced death metal to technique alone and followed a heavy metal/hard rock format. The result then hybridized with metalcore to produce “melodeath” or melodic heavy metal with death metal vocals and metalcore song structure. Bands like Archenemy forged into this new domain which rapidly synthesized itself with the type of high-speed chaotic metalcore produced by bands like The Haunted (ex-At the Gates). This style reached its logical conclusion in Gridlink, who applied thrash aesthetics to technical melodic riffing and came up with 13-minute albums with more riffs than most bands put in hour-long works.

Power Metal (II)

Many metalheads expressed a desire for the relative straightforward approach, riff-centric music and compositional integration of 1980s speed metal. They felt that subgenre avoided the excess and dangerous thought of underground metal while preserving what had eternally made metal rewarding to listen to, namely the strong musicality and structural patchwork that produced a sense of ongoing development. Power metal worked in marginal death metal technique and adopted many of the more rock-oriented riff styles from the NWOBHM, sometimes using death vocals and hard rock riffs. Often these bands developed songs from verse-chorus loops but added transitional or bridge riffs to adopt greater complexity. Picking up on a black metal influence, most power metal bands tended toward fantasy-oriented lyrics heavy on medievalist and Tolkien symbology, although those had some precursor in 1980s heavy metal bands like Helloween and Omen. Many modern power metal bands of the Blind Guardian style also feature a use of vocal melodies that resemble those found in gospel and inspirational music, tending toward an upward tonal swing at the end of each phrase.

Indie-Metal

During the 1990s as death metal and black metal surged, indie rock had also gone underground while alternative rock dominated the radio and video channels. Originally born of the migration of DIY punk bands upward into a form of simple, folksy and low-fi rock, indie rock expanded in the 1980s as a method for bands to achieve a reach outside their local communities without becoming dependent on major labels for the same reason that punk bands opted for self-release. At the time and throughout the 1990s, releases that were not on major label imprints found themselves relegated to specialty stores and mail order. As indie matured it crossed-over with another minor-key genre that in opposition to the bombastic and egotist of mainstream rock became self-effacing and even self-pitying, emo. With the emo-indie fusion independent music expanded from a category in the 1980s to a sub-genre of rock music in the 1990s with its distinct sound.

Many noticed that indie bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth were very close to black metal, as both used high sustain distorted guitar to create ambient waves of sound, and hoped to find a way to bridge the two despite radical differences in composition, outlook and spirit. As black metal burned itself out, first with imitators and then substitutes like war metal, indie-metal arose first in the black metal genre with crust/indie/emo/black hybrids. This idea spread when Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore joined “black metal supergroup” Twilight, whose sound resembled drone/indie more than black metal. The headquarters of this scene was San Francisco record store Amoeba Records, which began stocking black metal in the late 1990s and recommending it to its clientele of urban indie-rock hipsters. Another big influence starting in 1995 was Swedish band Opeth who took on the death metal label but whose music, with its acoustic verses and distorted choruses, more resembled nu-metal or alternative-metal without the bouncy rhythms and served itself with a certain projected ostentation — “you wouldn’t understand this, it’s too deep and technically advanced” — that won it many fans among the lowered self-esteem youth who shop at Hot Topic.

slipknot-band_photo

The first salvo of the indie-metal revolution came through bands like Isis, Gojira and Mastodon who combined proto-metal with indie rock and progressive pop punk, creating longer songs that used metal riffs and aesthetics but other than superficially entirely resembled what the previous generation of indie rock and emo, notably Fugazi, Jawbreaker and Rites of Spring, had made the mainstay of their own successful careers. As the “melting pot” of indie metal continued, other styles emerged, such as “sludge” which erupted from Eyehategod’s punk rock take on the slowed-down dirges of Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus. Other bands took inspiration from the rising “progressive metal” movement which Dream Theater popularized with its mix of heavy metal and light progressive like Rush, and as bands like Cynic and Atheist drifted further into jazz technique, this snowballed together and formed a set of techniques which were recognized as more difficult than standard rock playing thus desirable. Further indie rock crossover occurred when Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl formed Probot, a metal band that sounded more like alternative rock (Grohl’s former bandmate, Kurt Cobain, identified Celtic Frost as the major influence on Nirvana).

Eventually this spread outward through “technical death metal” which, inspired by Gorguts _Obscura_ and other works in the death metal genre, applied death metal aesthetics and technical playing to an indie/death metal/metalcore hybrid. At this point an aggregate, this music followed more of the mainstream path, mixing the light jazz of the 1970s and 1980s with progressive heavy metal technique and indie rock. Its sense of technicality arose from the percussive death metal bands following Suffocation, Incantation, Malevolent Creation, Immolation, Gorguts, Pestilence and Deicide who incorporated intricate rhythms and “sweeps” which sound notes cleanly moving from lower to higher strings on the fretboard, but in the newer form this technicality fit into the late hardcore model of songs which aim for maximal contrast and minimal coherence beween riffs. With that in mind, this style was probably always misnamed as “technical death metal” because it has little in common beneath the surface with death metal, and much more in common with indie-metal.

  • Filter
  • Pelican
  • Opeth

2.3 Styles

slayer-jeff_hanneman

Rhythmic

Percussive

The major innovation of speed metal was the muffled, explosive strumming of power chords to produce a sound of impact and resurrect the power of rhythm guitar in rock music. This creates a sound that is both conclusive and demanding, which in turn requires greater coordination with drums and for rhythms to end toward a hard conclusion, not an open cadence. This style defined speed metal, but spread into death metal and other genres as a secondary technique.

  • Exodus
  • Prong
  • Suffocation

Phrasal

Riffs can be played with a tremolo strum to increase sustain on each note creating an effect much like that of playing the riff on a violin, which then makes its melodic component and “shape” or the patterns of its tonal motion and rhythm combined define the meaning of the riff. Phrasal bands use fast strumming to make riffs that talk to each other on the basis of contrast and similarity in phrase, allowing the band to fit together different riffs to make an internal dialogue so that the sound moves forward by successive revelations from the contrast of riffs. This creates a clear narrative structure and allows more riffs per song.

  • Slayer
  • Morbid Angel
  • Incantation
  • Immortal

Textural

Some bands use multiple speeds in the way they strum their riffs, producing a texture within the ostensible riff composed of notes, which in turn creates an ambient effect by relegating drums to timekeeper and taking over the lead role for rhythm with the guitar. Textural riffs tend to emphasize internal divisions of rhythm and create consistency through using these textures like motifs shared between riffs, advancing the song through internal dialogue between the textures.

  • Unleashed
  • Fleshcrawl
  • Bolt Thrower

Trance

A trance rhythm uses repetition of a simple phrase to create atmosphere through expectation and then layers additional compositional elements on top or (or texturally, within) that phrase. Like metal itself, this style is easy to do, and hard to do well. It requires a spacious and basic chord progression to work with and an ability to use texture, melody and structure to expand upon that initial setup. As with prismatic construction, the “sonic cathedral” effect creates a sound tapestry through addition or subtraction of harmony, and provides powerful but somewhat linear song structures.

  • Burzum
  • Molested
  • Von

Structure

Cyclic

In the most common type of song structure, songs are constructed around a verse-chorus pair that has a turnaround, bridge or solo section before returning to repetition of its main theme. This somewhat binary construction alters that cycle only to provide some sense of peak before returning to the norm. In such songs, conclusions are equal to precepts; that is, the song returns to the same position where it started. This is ideal for songs that express emotion about personal issues, like love and sex, because the singer does not want the world to change; he wishes it to remain static, but for this one alteration, which is the acquisition of the beloved/belusted, which is often seen as fulfillment in lieu of the world around him becoming something he enjoys more. “If I only had you, I could put up with the rest” might describe this mentality. Verse-chorus song construction also finds popularity for its ease of construction, because like opposite ends of a piston cycle the two parts of the binary reinforce each other, which allows artists to focus on harmony and soloing.

  • Venom
  • Motorhead
  • Exodus

Narrative

As the craft of songwriting becomes more complex, a need arises to organize riffs internally by their relationship to one another instead of by their general relation to a harmonic principle as can be done with binary cyclic songs. This requires that the riffs create an internal dialogue in which the shape of each riff comments on each other and shows a chance in relationship to an underlying idea, so that each new riff expands on the context of the old and allows them to be repeated — albeit less than in a cyclic form — in a way that takes advantage of an expanded context so that each successive riff reveals more of a slowly emerging idea. In this style, which more resembles a topography than the neat circles of binary songwriting, songs tend to take narrative form of either a purely motif-driven type which conforms to a story told within the content, or in a more abstract form where the narrative appears in immanent form from the interaction of the riffs themselves. In narrative songs, structure fits content rather than adapting to a pre-ordained form; in some classical music, form is highly articulated to reflect a certain type of story that is to be told, and there the two impulses find parity. In death metal, where the highest evolution of the narrative form occurred in metal, initial riff shape approximates a metaphor for the germinal content, which then in turn shapes song structure around it, more like a form of power chord poetry than a strictly symbolic use.

  • Demilich
  • Incantation
  • Morbid Angel

Layered

A song format brought to its height by technology, layered songs create a single unifying element and then place additional instrumentation around it both in support of it and by doing so, as a method of subtly altering context to change the overall impression of each cycle. Originally the province of collaborative improvisation which by necessity incepted through a simple, repetitive and harmonically open phrase played by one instrument so that others could join at will, with electronic music this form appeared as “dub” built around a sampled and sequenced significant element to which other repetitive sounds were added. Layered music allows the addition and subtraction of layers to manipulate the sonic form as a whole and influences its audience by atmosphere, or the sensation of each cycle as changed by the alteration of its layers which builds upon the trance-like unifying element. This shows up in metal more as a technique, such as allowing a riff to gradually find support in drums, bass and vocals, and saw its predominant use in death metal as this form. Frequently, bands break to a riff, mirror it in other instruments, then double the pace of at least one of those instruments and possibly add a second but closely related riff over the top to build intensity without breaking from a riff form.

  • Bolt Thrower
  • Dismember
  • Monstrosity

Flavors

New York Death Metal (NYDM)

Building on the techniques of speed metal, these bands mixed the percussive style of explosive muted-strum riffing with dark and morbid riffing exhibiting doom metal influences. Often song structures took a more literal direction and resembled musical essays commenting on different aspects of a form before peaking and then returning to stability. This style takes two forms, the guttural blasting death metal variety and the more intricate but mid-paced style.

Florida Death Metal

Florida death metal bands created a style which emphasized repetitive riffs closely mated to drums and pulsing rhythms. The result borrowed more from heavy metal and speed metal than most death metal, but provided an easily-grasped form which increased the renown of the genre through defiant, monstrously simple and direct metal.

  • Deicide
  • Monstrosity
  • Death

Swedish Death Metal

Bands of this variety used a new type of spikily distorted guitar, formed by applying high-intensity distortion via pedal and overdriving it at the amplifier as well, which created high sustain to the guitar and facilitated development of melody. In addition, the early bands in this style borrowed the “d-beat” (a broken rhythm between snare and bass drums) from Discharge and applied it to simple melodic riffing to create a style both savage and beautiful. Bands initially applied the traditional Swedish melodic aptitude toward death metal that initially favored complex riffing, but later reverted to a heavy metal form with speed metal influences that used cyclic song structures to make the most popular version of this style.

  • Carnage
  • At the Gates
  • Entombed

Progressive

Continuing the progressive tradition in metal from its influences in late 1960s progressive rock, death metal bands upgraded the wily fingered “technical” death metal of a previous generation with influences from jazz, classical and 1980s guitar shredder music like Joe Satriani. For a time, many of these bands found a unique voice for application of progressive rock ideas in metal without simply recapitulating past works, but with the popularity of Dream Theater it became clear that a huge audience existed for that which facially resembled classic progressive rock and had simpler internal structures underneath. Thus progressive music in metal had two generations, a native one and an externalized one which gradually became a more rock-like form that retained metal riffing and lost all other influences.

  • Atheist
  • Gorguts
  • Pestilence
  • Obliveon

Göthenburg/Melodic

From Göthenberg, Sweden, came a series of bands emulating At the Gates by making technical death metal with heavy metal influences and technical riffing. After At the Gates released _Slaughter of the Soul_, this form changed into mostly heavy metal with death metal tremolo strum and lots of melodic intervals. At that point, it essentially became assimilated by power metal.

  • Dissection
  • Sacramentum
  • Unanimated

Deconstructivist

Chaotic and nihilistic blasts of short information in three-note riffs founded this style, which through reduction of assumed musicality focused on the information it communicated, but ultimately recapitulated the punk tendency toward disorder and thus became assimilated by punk styles or the art-rock tendencies to which punk migrated. This style differs from the rest of metal in that it attempts to break down or deconstruct attention to a single point of focus, rather than enwrapping multiple points of focus into a single narrative, but resembles early thrash and grindcore in its construction and the arc of its evolution.

  • Impaled Nazarene
  • Havohej
  • Ildjarn

Epic

Descended from the devotees of Bathory Blood, Fire, Death, this style aims to create a mini-opera out of albums made with grand concept, “symphonic” instrumentation or added layers of keyboards and synthesized voices, and song structures which emphasize aggression rushing into vast and spacious processionals resembling the coronades of classical music. Often like its forebear Richard Wagner this style focuses on a fusion of folk tales, nationalism and mythology.

  • Emperor
  • Bathory
  • Graveland

Folk

Arising later in the metal canon but within the 1990s, this style took folk forms and hybridized them with metal. In this instance, folk refers more to the European music tradition of songs passed along in local areas over the generations, and less to the rock-infused variant of American country which derives influences from Anglo-Germanic folk music adapted to the simplest cyclic form possible.

  • Enslaved
  • Empyrium
  • Skyforger

Neoclassical

Deriving many of its influences from the late-period synthpop like Dead Can Dance that fused ambient/industrial with world music, rock and classical influences, neoclassical influences in metal attempt to resurrect classical song structure and spirit in metal music. In heavy metal genres, it tended to manifest in borrowings from classic melody used in lead guitar solos; in death metal, it manifested in structure that emulated the grandeur, power and breadth of classical music. Some bands, such as Massacra, described themselves as “neo-classical death metal” while others alluded to this influence only in interviews.


II. Metal as Concept

  • Metal is a form of composition rather than a specific music theory unique to metal but also found in classical music.
  • Metal bases its beliefs around the concept of _vir_, or aggressively doing right without reference to individual preferences.
  • Metal culture is not counter-culture, but a rejection of it and mainstream establishment culture alike.
  • Metal theory involves a number of techniques used to make sonic texture and narrative composition.

2.1 Theory

sheet_music-beethoven

“All music is the same.” – Paul Ledney (Profanatica, Havohej, Incantation, Revenant, Contravisti)

Heavy metal music uses the same music theory that propels all Western music: the diatonic scale and its harmony, the same rhythmic divisions and calibration, and the same instrumentation. Rock music arose from polyglot influences; heavy metal injected Modernist classical via horror movie soundtracks and then in the next generation stripped down composition to the barest elements and then built it up again into a language of its own. Thus much like rock exists within Western music, metal exists within rock, but by dint of its entirely different approach and outlook constitutes a separate genre.

What distinguishes metal is its use of riffs as motifs or phrases. These allow metal musicians to unite two highly contrasting points through an intermediate journey composed of dialogue between riffs in (usually) the same key. Through internal dialogue, these riffs negotiate a balance such that the song arrives at conclusions different from its starting point and can repeat its main themes in a new context established by the changing shape of the riff. As a result, metal song structures vary more than those of any other popular genre and contort themselves to the unique needs of each song. However, since metal is still a form of popular music, this variation occurs as an addition to the dominant verse-chorus structure, much as metal is an augmentation to culture as opposed to a counter-reactive, revolutionary force.

Through this method heavy metal inherits the technique of modernist classical composers like Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner, who used both leitmotifs and the prismatic technique of repeating themes after variation to increase intensity of mood, fused with the technique of hardcore punk musicians that stripped aside the conventions of rock to write in keyless chromatic phrases. It inherits its song structure from the progressive rock like King Crimson or Jethro Tull that was part of its founding inspiration, but wraps it around these phrasal compositions inspired byhorror movie soundtracks that were derived directly from modern classical. Using the instrumentation of rock, metal is able to channel its more traditional heritage and, like its founders Black Sabbath, oppose the dominant illusions of a time where pleasant mental escapism pretends it is combating a dominant undercurrent of decay based in human evasion of reality. Metal is not just “not rock”; it is anti-rock.

In this sense, heavy metal may be the first “informational” genre of music in that its riffs act more as a pattern language or design pattern to signal the intent of each motif than they serve in the rock music role of filling harmonic space to accompany a vocal which defines the melodic progress of the song. These motifs emerge from a sense of mimesis, or imitation of what exists in reality, but in the case of metal this imitation seems to be not of physical objects but logical objects. Metal is about information; information forms a level that unites thought, matter and energy by putting them in the same arrangements and thus having the same informational outcome. Thus a dream can metaphorically resemble reality, and the objects in reality can be re-shaped by the actions of the dreamer corresponding to events in the dream, and even the cycling of energy can be changed by an alteration in form of physical objects based on their abstract design or thought-based properties. This Platonic similarity explains much of the evocative power of metal: its riffs resemble sensations of reality if not reality itself, much like how horror movies speak through metaphor about the horrors of life itself.

The intensely ritualized vocabulary of metal riffs resembles other types of design where repeated patterns are used in similar fashions; the difference is that in metal this language of patterns is used toward fantastic and not functional ends. Architect Christopher Alexander, who designated the term “pattern language” to describe how similar needs produced similar architectures and how those in turn effected the layout of whole communities, explained the importance of pattern languages and their use in producing spaces for humans to live in:

When I first constructed the pattern language, it was based on certain generative schemes that exist in traditional cultures. These generative schemes are sets of instructions which, if carried out sequentially, will allow a person or persons to create a coherent artifact, beautifully and simply. The number of steps vary: there may be as few as a half-dozen steps, or as many as twenty or fifty. When the generative scheme is carried out, the results are always different, because the generative scheme always generates structure that starts with the existing context, and creates things which relate directly and specifically to that context. Thus the beautiful organic variety which was commonplace in traditional society, could exist because these generative schemes were used by thousands of different people, and allowed people to create houses, or rooms or windows, unique to their circumstances.

Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. As an element in the world, each pattern is a relationship between a certain context, a certain system of forces which occurs repeatedly in that context, and a certain spatial configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves. As an element of language, a pattern is an instruction, which shows how this spatial configuration can be used, over and over again, to resolve the given system of forces, wherever the context makes it relevant.

This sense of a pattern language producing design patterns specific to a certain function and adaptive to context resembles the descriptions of another great thinker. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote of divine forms which explained the patterns behind everyday objects and the reasoning for their existence. He viewed these forms as a truer representation of reality than a focus on the tangible and immediate material example of any given object. His description of these forms is as follows:

[There are] men passing along the wall carrying above their heads all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals…which appear over the wall. Some of them are talking, others silent…[The prisoners] see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave…And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? To them…the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

In this metaphor, Plato describes what forms are by describing what they are not. In the context of metal, the forms of riffs are not strictly mimetic; they do not imitate, for example, a chair. They imitate the mental experience of someone perceiving an object in an event or process and the resulting unity between that thought and the experience. The narrative riff style encourages the expression of a process through a story, such as how a person came to a realization, and the interlocking prismatic riff constructions emphasize this condition of change restoring order but amplifying its context and thus meaning. In this sense, metal reveals the underlying content to objects and experience as is relevant to the narrator. This fits with the metal idea — derived from Romanticism — of the lone individual trusting an “inner self” where truth and lie can be discerned and meaning can be found. The metal habit of knitting together riffs to tell an evolving story exemplifies this idea.

The narrative construction of heavy metal — especially underground metal, in which the genre found full expression after three generations — joins it with an elite fraternity of other genres in which song structure is specific to context. In particular, classical music, cosmic ambient bands and progressive rock tend to use this structuring scheme. It enables them to both experiment within a rule-based system where a language is shared with the audience and thus can be used by reference to incorporate a wide variety of ideas, and also to adapt their music as specifically as possible to its topic. This creates a certain “poetry” of the song where the lyrics explain what occurs and lead changes in guitar which determine the directional change of the song. In classical music, the song forms that developed over centuries reflected the generative patterns required for certain types of context, which in art means “content” and “topic.”

Metal creates an extremely naturalistic form of information music as a result. Its songs, like structures found in nature, use simple ideas expanded upon by their interaction over time so that through the internal dialogue of riffs, a journey unfolds and reveals the intent behind the content as framed by the artists. Much like in a poem, where the meaning is not “spelled out” but must be decrypted by the mind of the reader who compares it to past experience and uses analysis to unconver its relevance and metaphor, metal songs resemble subconscious ideas or even the shapes of memories and experiences in our minds. Like abstract art, the unconscious metaphor indicates a similarity and creates a connection between listener and topic.

A physicist, conceiving systems of differential equations, would call their mathematical movements a “flow.” Flow was a Platonic idea, assuming the change in systems reflected some reality independent of the particular instant. Libchaber embraced Plato’s sense that hidden forms fill the universe. ‘But you know they do! You have seen leaves. When you look at all the leaves, aren’t you struck by the fact that the number of shapes is limited?’

Narrative construction empowers each song to have a unique “shape,” much as riffs have shapes based on the phrase they repeat and the different tonal directions it takes. Heavy metal creates a type of mental symbol in each song such that it evokes a sense not just of the immediate but of the timeless archetypes of human life. Lyrics underscore this by avoiding the personal and sensual that rock music favors, and instead looking at life through a lens of mythology, history and fantasy. If a source of modern myth exists, it might be found in heavy metal, where not only words and images but also the shape of riff and song like sigils encode a type of not universal but particular experience that resonates with all who have undergone it and amplifies context from the immediate to the eternal. In this heavy metal also resembles Greek tragedy and other types of drama in which music plays a central role.

In its role as an outsider, metal opposes both current culture and anti-culture, preferring the intangible view of history external to the perspective of our society and the daily mundane ideologies and rituals we use to re-assure ourselves. Its “heavy” content shows us where there is a more fundamental truth; we bind truth up in words, and in stories of the individual, and obscure the larger picture. For this reason, its neo-Wagnerian motifs and narrative composition reveal an underlying need that our society cannot address. It conjures up visions of ancient greatness, and metaphorical myths of fantasy lands, to show us the world outside of the human definitions, rules, morals, laws and mental constructs that we use to self-congratulate on our importance. This in turn brings up vir, which is the notion of doing what is right; this differs from modern morality, which is focused on defense of the individual against imposition of the will of another, because vir focuses on what is right according to the mythic or cosmic order as a whole, and frequently involves acts that modern people would say are “wrong” because they involve the sacrifice of one or more individuals. The mythic-historical view of metal allows it to take this non-human perspective and from it, to create myth:

[Myths] are the world’s dreams. They are the archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. I know when I come to one of these thresholds now. The myth tells me about it, how to respond to certain crises of disappointment or delight or failure or success. The myths tell me who I am.

Although it takes some analysis to spot its origins, this mythic nature is the essence of heavy metal and its choice to use longer riffs in narrative structures. This tendency has grown over time from a way of writing riffs to a way of thinking and in doing so, lives up to the original influence of horror movies on metal. Horror movies demonstrate the influence of mythmakers, notably the greatest literary inspirations of metal including H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche and E.A. Poe. In pursing this mythological voice, heavy metal displays a number of technical innovations or other changes from popular music:

  • Technique –> Structure
    Technique, which normally serves to embellish, became under metal the science of structure by creating ways for guitar to lead composition independent of drums and vocals, which lead in rock music. Heavy metal worked through the austerity of power chords and a jazzlike rhythm to a deeply chaotic and abstract blues. Speed metal used muted-palm picking to create a mechanical, grinding sound, where death metal bands began to use a flutterstrum which would turn a chord into a stream of undulating sound with a massive tremelo effect, building a powerful tool for ambient melody.
  • Harmony –> Melody
    Harmony in metal is used to unify a number of melodies to a sequence of tone centers which represent the parts of the idea being manipulated by the song. The riffs which metal bands use are structuralistic in that they describe rather than categorize, by the nature of their wandering phrases which use structural similarity for coherence rather than tonal unison. Where harmony serves to preformat a range of emotions for rock bands, in metal, melody drives harmony, letting the composer take the music into whatever direction he/she desires by dynamically associating tone centers with contrapuntal arrangements, layering strips of reference to narrative and joining them with harmonies.
  • Tonality –> Dynamicism
    The major element of the evolution of heavy metal is a progression in tonality from the blues-rock extrapolationist grab bag to the chromatic, dark and almost mystically nihilistic tone patterns of death and black metal. The ability to change from a fixed-tonal system to a system which, like the Doppler effect, is based on proximity and speed to establish a current point of reference, provides for a basis of composition which is more specialized for systemic expression than for linear expression.

Metal musicians have frequently cited classical composers, such as Johannes Sebastian Bach (Bathory, Dawning), Richard Wagner (Burzum, Necrodemon), Ludwig van Beethoven (Bathory, Condor, Organic), W.A. Mozart (Morbid Angel, Organic), Niccolo Paganini (Organic), Modest Mussorgski (Sammath), Franz Liszt (Dawning), Bedrich Smetana (Condor), Antonio Vivaldi (Organic), .

“Strife is evolution, peace is degeneration.” – Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/

2.2 Philosophy

mayhem-dead

That depends on how you see Utopia. In a sense, an ideal society would be a static society, and any such society is an evolutionary dead end. Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
— William S Burroughs

On the surface, heavy metal appears a distant from philosophy as one can imagine. A genre of long-haired, beer-swilling, dope-smoking maniacs screaming lyrics about death, war and the occult seems far removed from any pretense of structured thought. Yet under the surface something else lurks. The word “occult” — original meaning: concealed — denotes hidden truths of an esoteric nature which cannot be learned from symbols, but must be experienced in layers with each layer giving rise to the ability to understand the next. It also applies to any genre like heavy metal that conceals its truths in such layers.

The occult resembles art itself which takes a narrative form in contrast to the representative form of symbols. The earliest art — a cave painting of a hunt perhaps — told stories: an attempt, a struggle, pitfalls and failures that were overcome to achieve a goal. The outcome of these tales was not the interesting part since it was already known; hunts were either successes or fatalities. What made them interesting was the struggle in each, and the overcoming, and the prototypical version of a “moral” — what was learned in the process — which meant that the teller revealed in narrative a change in his own mental state through experience in the physical world. As humanity grew, this story-telling attribute of art grew with it.

I grew up in an idyllic society, really. Homogeneous, no crime; everything was basically perfect. We had stables with girls riding horses, who were playing on the outside… there were no problems. Whatever. At some point, when we grew older, of course there were problems but we didn’t see them thus. Basically the truth, eh? But when you grow older, you see that things are not the way you want them to be. McDonald’s didn’t appear until 1991 or 1992, and when it did, we actually took a rifle and bicycles, we rode our bikes up to McDonald’s, and we sat down and started to fire on the windows. We were sneaking up and shooting at McDonald’s, we stockpiled weapons and munitions to prepare for war, because we not only suspected that there might be a third world war, but we hoped that there would be a third world war. Not because we enjoyed destruction so much, but because we knew that if you want to build something new, you have to destroy the old first.

Most philosophies take a utilitarian view of life and measure actions by whether a group of people would see them as “good” or “bad.” But that utilitarian view has an Achilles heel. Categories like good/bad become symbols. Symbols can take many forms: political, commercial, moral and most importantly, social. A social symbol conveys membership in a group or status within the group. For those who want to manipulate others, specifically groups of other people, symbols serve a role art cannot. When they associate a symbol like “good” with an act, they can trigger mass obedience, and by labeling other things as “bad,” can wage war against them using the superior numbers of the herd.

Heavy metal — which finds beauty in darkness, clarity in distortion, and justice in violence — constructs itself from contrasted patterns to reveal an underlying truth and a rejection of symbolism and utilitarianism. It worships power and nature, not morality. Its view strikes away from the modern utilitarian notion of good as that which pleases the group, and returns instead to the individualism tempered by nature worship expressed by the European Romantics in art, literature and music during roughly 1600-1900 AD. M.H. Abrams provides us with a definition of Romanticism.

  1. A revolt against accepted form: democratization of subject and language, a less formal poetic voice, and a new range of subjects such as the supernatural and “the far away and the long ago” adopted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and others; the visionary mode of poetry adopted by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake; and the use of metaphysical symbolism.
  2. Focus on the poet’s or writer’s own feelings instead of a universal emotion shared among all humanity. This emphasized spontaneity, meditative stillness, and a sense of discovery through intuition. Imagination was seen as more important than fact.
  3. External nature (landscape, plants, animals) became a persistent subject.
  4. Often written with the poet or writer as protagonist.
  5. A sense of progress, or of limitless good achievable by use of the imagination, instead of reliance upon past methods.

He contrasts this to the values of the neoclassical period that immediately preceded the Romantic:

  1. A strong traditionalism rooted in their respect for Greco-Roman classical writers, and a distrust of radical innovation.
  2. Literature was seen as being primarily an art, or a skillset created by nurturing innate talents through directed work. For this reason, complex formal rules and conventions were highly important.
  3. Art was seen as an imitation of nature, with human life being its prime subject and the communication of ideals toward humanity its goal.
  4. Emphasis was placed on what humans possess in common, such as characteristics, shared experiences, thoughts, feelings and tastes. The goal was to express common truths in an enlightening way.
  5. Humans were viewed as limited and having specific places in a hierarchy of natural events and beings, called The Great Chain of Being. It was considered best to find the appropriate place in this and not go above it.

The most important part of this may be the “own feelings instead of a universal emotion shared among all humanity” and “sense of discovery through intuition” which are complementary parts. A metalhead does not seek knowledge in the ideas of the crowd or the universal feelings of humanity, but in the experience of the individual and the inner truths revealed. The purpose is to find an order in nature both inside the self and in the outside world, and as a result, a way to escape the judgment of the herd and know not only what is true, for crowds lie to cover their misdeeds, but also what is important. Among other attributes, metal is a proactive and valuative philosophy which seeks to find an optimal experience in life.

They block out the landscape with giant signs
Covered with pretty girls and catchy lines
Put up the fences and cement the ground
To dull my senses, keep the flowers down
— Give My Taxes Back, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (Dealing With It)

Hateful savages
Strong black minds
Out of the forest
Kill the human kind
Burn the settlements and grow the woods
Until this romantic place is understood
— Absurd, “Green Heart,” (Out of the Dungeon)

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche draws a distinction between “Apollonian” or rigidly order-based thinking and “Dionysian” thought which resorts more to an expression of the human id, a chaotic and emotional force.

With Romanticism, Western thinkers rejected the order, balance, harmony and rationality of Classicism and replaced it with a tempestuous focus on the human individual. While this reflected the thought of the Enlightenment, in which the human form replaced the notion of a divine order to all life, Romantics tempered this with a strong suspicion and distrust of what is socially popular. The figure of the Romantic era is the lone actor who understands his or her world through inner passion and finds it reflected outwardly in nature. As part of this new discipline, Romantics emphasized “the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.”

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.

Romanticism produced some of the greatest works of literature the Western world has in its canon, many of which evoked form and content similar to that of ancient Greco-Roman literature without the surface formalism of the preceding Classicist generation. Among the important contributions of Romantic literature were poetry from William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, an epic poem about the fall of Satan entitled _Paradise Lost_ by John Milton, and from the later Romantics, _Frankenstein_ by Mary Shelley, _Dracula_ by Bram Stoker and _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ by Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe. In addition, later writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft borrowed from Romantic themes. Stoker, Mary Shelley, Poe and Lovecraft contributed the raw material of the horror story which is the basis of the horror film genre from which heavy metal received its first and ongoing most fundamental inspiration.

caspar_david_friedrich-the_wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog

In particular, the works by Mary Shelley, Milton and Stoker deserve further analysis in the context of metal. In _Frankenstein_, which contained many allusions to the French Revolution

, a scientist becomes intoxicated by his own power and creates a “perfect being” who then turns on human society; in _Paradise Lost_, Milton tells the story of Satan from the perspective of that fallen angel, revealing the depths of a human-like ego; in _Dracula_, a parasite attacks society and must be destroyed by chasing it to its Eastern lair and exterminating it. In that story, the parasite grew out of the changes in a local prince who rejected God after his kingdom was assaulted by Muslims and his wife slain. These books cover a huge span of European history and fundamentally reject not just Classicism, but much of the Enlightenment and French Revolutionary rhetoric of the time. Where the Enlightenment and Revolution saw all humans as valid decision-makers, and thus equal, the Romantics saw a society out of control that had left behind principles of reality found in nature to pursue its own swelling, monstrous ego.

The “new form” of her novel is more subjective, complex, and problematic than earlier monster fictions in the political tradition. Mary Shelley translates politics into psychology. She uses revolutionary symbolism, but she is writing in a postrevolutionary era when collective political movements no longer appear viable. Consequently, she internalizes political debates. Her characters reenact earlier political polemics on the level of personal psychology. In the 1790s, writers like Edmund Burke had warned of a collective, parricidal monster — the revolutionary regime in France — that was haunting all of Europe; in the aftermath of the revolution, Mary Shelley scales this symbolism down to domestic size. Her novel reenacts the monster icon, but it does so from the perspective of isolated and subjective narrators who are locked in parricidal struggles of their own.

Heavy metal picked up this theme with its embrace of “heaviness” itself: a hidden, or occult and esoteric notion, that truth is not accessible to the crowd. Ideas become heavy because they resurrect truths which are known to nature, but not the human social mass which chooses only ideas that flatter it and its sense of self-importance. To find these truths, the individual must look within to what they know is true and reject that which the crowd embraces. Much as in _Dracula_ and _Frankenstein_, the individual finds that others are unwilling to believe that anything out of the ordinary is going on, and must tackle the problem on their own without many resources.

Rape my mind and destroy my feelings
Don’t tell my what to do
I don’t care now, ’cause I’m on my side
And I can see through you
Feed my brain with your so-called standards
Who says that I ain’t right
Break away from your common fashion
See through your blurry sight
— Escape, Metallica (Ride the Lightning)

The social philosophy of heavy metal can be described as “antisocialism.” Metal embraces everything that normally we exclude from social conversation — death, ugliness, terror, genocide, disease, warfare, perversion — and somehow channels it into music that lacks beauty in the decorative sense but makes from these repellent conditions an appealing conflict in which we wish to see the best outcome push down the rest through those same dark methods. This view remains socially unacceptable in both liberal democracies and conservative theocracies, which is why the public view of metal disregards it and characterizes it as angry teenagers protesting early bedtimes. That description would apply if heavy metal uniformly rejected everything before it, but it tends to reject social illusion and human illusion and embraces forces of nature and objective change such as history and its codification in myth.

Antisocialism can be seen in metal on a musical level as well as in its lyrics. Rock music is based in harmony, or the idea of setting up a basic melody and then using vocals and change in key or shift to minor key as a means of inducing emotion, usually of a contrasting/combined form like sadness and delight simultaneously. This bittersweet feeling pervades most rock with a heavy sense of emotion focused in the individual. Metal distances itself by basing the song around the riff where changes in riff induce emotion instead. In that compositional method, what creates emotional intensity is the relative change in riff as part of an ongoing song structure, more like a poem than a pulsing constant sound. This inconstancy in metal proves essential to its method: instead of creating an emotional state and then manipulating the listener with it, metal creates a context and then adjusts this such that the change in riff and relation between riffs provokes in the listener a recognition of a resemblance to some facet of life or experience.

This establishes one of the fundamental thoughts implicit in metal philosophy: the individual as inconsequential in a world without inherent rules or an order above nature, in which meaning is derived not from individual desires and judgments, but the process of interaction within the whole. Metal adopts a certain kind of positive nihilism in this regard in that it sees life as a series of choices based on options that emerge, not a process of following a built-in path to acceptance. The esoteric nature of metal thought, inherited in part from its fascination with the occult, holds that there is no one path for everyone only paths that some may opt to follow which have different results from the others. Metalheads often draw a distinction between mainstream culture and their own beliefs, or use terms like “poseur” to exclude those who are of the mainstream mindset. That mentality originates in this division between private truth and public illusion.

According to the Romantic conception, the lost unity could not be restored by external means; it had rather to grow out of man’s inner spiritual urge and then gradually to ripen. The romantics were firmly convinced that in the soul of the people the memory of that state of former perfection still slumbered. But that inner source had been choked and had first to be freed again before the silent intuition could once more become alive in the minds of men. So they searched for the hidden sources and lost themselves ever deeper in the mystic dusk of a past age whose strange magic had intoxicated their minds. The German medieval age with its colorful variety and its inexhaustible power of creation was for them a new revelation. They believed themselves to have found there that unity of life which humanity had lost. Now the old cities and the Gothic cathedrals spoke a special language and testified to that ‘verlorene Heimat’ (lost homeland) on which the longing of romanticism spent itself. The Rhine with its legend-rich castles, its cloisters and mountains, became Germany’s sacred stream; all the past took on a new character, a glorified meaning.

Heavy metal rejects modern morality which aims mostly at protecting the individual from a requirement to conform to social standards, but at the same time asserts that the individual can reject any morality which is inconsistent with nature, history and mythology. Before this modern morality, the idea of doing right possessed a different meaning: “vir,” or a sense of aggressive putting of things to right according to a natural, cosmic or metaphysical order. Where modern morality is designed to preserve the individual against society, the ancient way sought to promote healthy in society and surrounding nature as a whole as a means of preserving the individual.

The expression of this belief in metal takes on a Faustian nature. A German Romantic writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote his immortal epic Faust about a man who makes a bargain with the devil and in it encoded the metaphor of the Faustian spirit: humankind struggling with the necessary evils of suffering and death, yet aware of the great things to be achieved once one accepts them in the bargain. As a result, the Faustian spirit describes any individual who does not seek to explain away suffering, but wants to accept life as a whole, and thus feels extreme passions in both pleasure and pain. It is the antithesis of the passive and world-negating spirit of not only far-east philosophy and populist Christianity, but also our modern notion of Utopian fantasies of making the world “safe.” Metal rejects safety, morality and the idea of “normalcy” or a single standard that tempers the nature inside of us. The raging spirit of metal that embraces the dark side of life is Faustian in its very nature, as is the tendency of black metal bands to glorify both death and the exultant experience of victory in combat.

Goethe emerged from the Romantic time period and outlook, but so did another group of writers who expressed “naturalism” or a belief in the order of nature as more realistic and often, more accurate and divinely inspired, than that of humankind. For misanthropes at a structural level, naturalism rejects human morality and invented religions and replaces it with substitutes derived from patterns found in nature, often through transcendental thought. Best exemplified by William Blake (a major influence on The Doors) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this movement seeks to understand nature and its wisdom by recognizing that it is superior to human orders for the purpose of adapting to and maintaing a high quality of life. Naturalists do not cringe at the red talons of the predatory hawk tearing the mouse; instead, they praise the greater strength of the mouse and hawk populations achieved as a result, and the trees which will be fertilized by hawk droppings. It is an organic, gritty philosophy with deep links to cosmicism, or acceptance of the universe as an order in itself which needs no remaking; this is in dramatic contrast to Judeo-Christian moralism, which inherently finds fault with nature and seeks to replace it with an morality designed to pacify fear of insufficiency, death and suffering. Blake’s concept of “the path of excess leading to the road of wisdom” is an esoteric statement of this belief, and clearly influenced early heavy metal and is an unstated influence behind death metal and black metal.

Whether born yesterday, or an older person, the individual faces a world in which many things happen, and some turn out positive for that individual, while others are negative. Herein is the reason humans philosophize. We live because to some degree, we believe in living, but it is a balance between emotions incurred by the positive and the negative aspects of life. In this the fundamental question of philosophy can be seen, which is, “Why do I live, and why is it that life includes negativity?” There are several approaches to this question:

  1. Deny suffering. Whether through stoicism, or numbness, or a belief that the individual does not exist, one can minimize the value of suffering to the individual. However, when one destroys suffering in the representation of the world that every individual has, one also reduces the impact of joy, and thus a stable norm is achieved but great deeds, which require great passions and enjoyment of life, are stultified. The problem of far-east philosophies comes to mind here.
  2. Embrace suffering. Self-pity is a fundamental notion to all humans, because by making the impact of suffering congratulatory to the individual, it allows the individual to endure suffering, but also converts the individual into a masochist. When this happens, the individual loses any higher impulse, and becomes fixated on the self and ways to keep it afloat through additional suffering and, as a palliative, reward, which usually takes the form of pity for others. This is the way of middle eastern religions, including Christianity.
  3. Explain suffering. Without finding a way to resolve the fact that it is real and its impact will inexorably be felt, suffering can be interpreted as not only logical but as a kind of logical optimum. In this view, one finds a reason that suffering exists, such as the notion that because there is negativity there is space for change, and that which is not fit for the future is eliminated. It is a naturalistic view, and this is common to all Pagan beliefs: they understand suffering as a mechanism by which nature maintains itself and encourages, gently when you consider how large the natural world is compared to the individual, the growth of individuals and species.

The only philosophy that expresses vir is (c), because in this one subsumes the role of suffering to that of a creative force, and thus does not lessen either suffering of joy, but finds it natural and right that one might pursue enjoyment (and what it encourages: creative achievement, whether writing better music or building bigger banquet halls) and also experience suffering. There is no need or ability to explain away suffering; suffering is simply suffering, or negativity, associated with empty spaces and “clearing” forces such as winter and death. The individual following this philosophy must accept that some things, such as mortality and suffering, are part of life as a whole, and while the individual will suffer and die, the whole will continue and it is right that it do so, because the whole is the source of both the individual and enjoyment.

In this, metal approximates the knowledge of hermetic, Pagan, Hindu and other occult sects more than the exoteric vision of Western religion and morality. Metal music serves as a popular target for those disturbed by evil, Satanism and occultism, only in part because those views are taboo; the bigger sin is refutation of the accepted view with something that may admit the taboo. During the 1980s when more people held Christian views, one of the primary charges against metal at events like the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings was that it encouraged Satanism. This occurred during a time when people were being convicted of child molestation under a theory of “Satanic ritual abuse” and the mainstream media never blinked at the accusation.

Since its inception in Black Sabbath, metal has expressed a fascination with both evil and the occult. At the point of its origin however this fascination mostly dealt with the threat of evil coming to pass. Its thought verges close to Milton and Blake in this regard by showing a utility of evil, and an experience of Satan which reveals the conflict in the human soul between ego and world. Unlike most descriptions of evil, early metal lyrics focused on evil as an explanation for the mass trends and politics shaping society. Black Sabbath portrayed evil as a negative force controlling humanity behind the facade of civilization and its institutions. Over the generations of heavy metal, the genre has changed its outlook on these the role of evil.

Now in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where their bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour

Day of Judgement, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings
Oh, Lord yeah! — Black Sabbath, “War Pigs” (Paranoid)

During the speed metal years, metal kept essentially this same concept. In the hands of popular culture and politics, evil found a way to corrupt good. However, the blame for this rested on external parties and those with wealth and power. This both continued the Black Sabbath view of “war pigs” controlling society and pointing it toward evil ends which culminate in the destruction of all for their sins, and modified it such that the forces of evil were seen as controlling that which was otherwise good. Witness this late-career summation from Metallica:

Lady Justice Has Been Raped
Truth Assassin
Rolls of Red Tape Seal Your Lips
Now You’re Done in
Their Money Tips Her Scales Again
Make Your Deal
Just What Is Truth? I Cannot Tell
Cannot Feel
— Metallica, “…And Justice For All” (…And Justice For All)

The death metal generation took over next but showed some overlap with the speed metal years through bands such as Slayer. In their vision, evil corrupted good because what was seen as “good” actually served to enable evil through the delusion, laziness and narcissism of humanity as a group. This view combines the historical and the mythological to create a “mythological-historical” perspective in which views changes in human experience as the result of a shifting of underlying ideas, in this case a tendency for evil to be considered good. Slayer express a vision of a society that has corrupted itself through “good” which was actually evil in hidden intent, resulting in an insufferable world:

Fear runs wild in the veins of the world
The hate turns the skies jet black
Death is assured in future plans
Why live if there’s nothing there

Spectors of doom await the moment
The mallet is sure and precise
Cover the crypts of all mankind
With cloven hoove begone
— Slayer, “Hardening of the Arteries” (Hell Awaits)

The following generation took the mythic view of history expressed by Slayer and made it into an identity. In this view, the world is rotten and good is the source of this ill; the solution is to destroy good, invert the cross, and let the churches burn. In this view, Christians and others who affirm morality of the herd are the negative and corrupting force of evil, and good can be found in doing evil to them. The idea of those who proclaim themselves as “good” being fundamentally manipulative, hypocritical and deceptive emerges during this time.

Chant the blasphemy
Mockery of the messiah
We curse the holy ghost
Enslaver of the weak
God of lies and greed
God of hypocrisy
We laugh at your bastard child
No god shall come before me

…Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
Rebel against the church
Drink from the chalice of blasphemy
Rise up against the enslaver
— Morbid Angel, “Blasphemy” (Altars of Madness)

At its extreme end, this philosophy begins to resemble advocacy for a Satanic holy war. In this crucial step, good is not so much corrupted as it is wrong; the idea of goodness is illogical and inherently manipulated and must be destroyed. This creates an important precursor to the philosophical leap taken by black metal bands in the next half-generation.

We deny God and his rule
We defy his supreme force
Crucified by the dark power
His death was a glory
Forgotten by our mind forever
He’s left the churches to torment us
We’ll destroy the high altar
Until we see the ashes of pain
— Sepultura, “Crucifixion” (Morbid Visions/Bestial Devastation)

When black metal approached this topic, it evolved its dislike of good to a final stage: not only was good corrupt, but it was illogical. Love, trust, equality, acceptance and universality were illogical not by their own rules but by the rules of nature. Christianity was — as Nietzsche saw it — the origin of humanism and liberalism which constituted a form of control of humanity through social influence, a method of using guilt and shame to tame the exceptional so they could be humbled before the herd. As a result, black metal created the first metal genre to not only reject corrupted good, but to reject the notion of good, and to build within the concept of “evil” a philosophy of natural selection, conflict, war and racial isolation. Naturally the latter became the most controversial as since the end of WWII the Western nations have adopted a policy of inclusivity and diversity. The embrace of nationalism that came with black metal — Mayhem practiced under Nazi flags, Darkthrone and Burzum advocated racial withdrawal if not supremacy, even mild-mannered Enslaved sang of their Nordic land as separate from all other peoples — shocked and appalled many which seemed to prove the black metal approach to evil: “good” makes people afraid to do what would be logical in nature, which is self-preserve and allow natural selection to weed out the stupid instead of soliciting them for votes and selling them products.

Run from this fire
It will burn your very soul
Its flames reaching higher
Comed this far there is no hold
O, all small creatures
It is the twilight if the gods
– Twilight of the Gods, Bathory (Twilight of the Gods)

Not all bands took these highly articulated approaches. During the death metal years, some bands took a mere atheist/materialist stance:

Drown your sorrows in prayer
But your prayers will never change the world
I separate myself
From those who chase the spirit
I can’t fall to my knees
And pretend like all the rest
This is a soul that doesn’t need saving
— Immolation, “I Feel Nothing” (Here In After)

It is unclear whether Christianity is the actual target, or whether that target is “herd morality” as Nietzsche would call it. Many metal bands, such as Slayer and Black Sabbath, have Christian members who do not hide this orientation; few if any metal bands wish to be identified as “Christian metal,” in part because of the existence of a parallel underground within the Christian community for popular music with an exclusively Christian message. Within metalheads there is a distrust for selling out or joining an institution such that one would benefit from it because then objectivity is occluded by the resulting self-interest. They apply that vision equally to commercial interests, political interests and of course mainstream religion.

Much like the Romantic poets before them, many metal bands embrace occult and pagan beliefs, including almost all of black metal and death metal. The Romantic poets found interest mostly in the European traditions of occultism including Greco-Roman paganism and, with the rise of nationalist sentiment in late Romanticism, the indigenous European cultures and their ancient gods. The interest of the Romanticists centered around the possibility of a wisdom with levels of revelaton as opposed to the single-level of modern Christianity which was then too easily taken over by social trends, the whims of its audience or political influences. Others used occultism and pagan beliefs as metaphor, including to explore a more naturalistic morality and to symbolize a past era.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
— “The World is Too Much With Us,” William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet (1789)

Heavy metal beliefs might be described as “transcendental.” Transcendentalists hold that an order pervades all of the universe which can be perceived by the individual and through its understanding, the individual can come to understand the logicality of the cosmos and thus discover the divinity within it. This order opposes the notion of “faith,” where the individual accepts as true what religious dogma says must be true, and dualism, which presupposes that whatever spiritual order exists must do so in an entirely different world where the essential laws of construction of that world differ radically from our own. Metal spirituality tends to take a transcendental view, usually that by observing nature and reality, the individual can find deep within themselves a revelation of the meaning and importance of existence.

Selecting for where they have more in common than not, certain ancestral beliefs can be grouped together as “pagan” (a term originally designating their prevalence in the countryside). Pagan and occult beliefs are similar on a structural level, with some arguing their origins in Hindu and Greco-Roman traditions have a single ancestor, and differ from Christianity in several key ways:

  1. A lack of official doctrine and ideological qualification for entry (exotericism).
  2. Good and evil as collaborative complements rather than oppositional.
  3. Process and eternal renewal instead of judgment and final states.
  4. Disbelief that a sacrament or magic words can substitute for knowledge or ability (esotericism).
  5. Nature-worship instead of worship of idealized humanity.

As if inspired by Dionysos, the crafty god of wine of the Greek era, or by Fenris, the wolf of apocalypse of the Norse, metal bands have rejected order in favor of chaos and impulses of the raw id. This dovetails with the naturalism of paganism and its refusal to adopt a written orthodoxy let it be co-opted into an exoteric philosophy capable of manipulation like the mainstream organized religions including the “New Age” neo-Pagan ones. Paganism at its heart embraces secrecy, hidden knowledge and elitism. Metal plays to this ideal with its own tendency to obscure its meanings behind a wave of riffs but to leave the meaning plain for those who can undergo a few levels of analysis to bring it out.

Metal bands incorporate occult, mythological, Pagan, Satanic, Norse and polytheistic imagery in a number of ways. Some incorporate ideas of it into their lyrics; others use numerological formulae in composing riffs; still others explore sacred ideas within their imagery or writing. With the rise of death metal, this became more common with Rudra (Hinduism) and Asgard (Asatru), but with black metal the use of lyrics expanded, including bands quoting from Eddas (Burzum, Enslaved) and outright Satanic texts or practice (Acheron, Dissection). As black metal faded, the rising power metal genre took up much of this material in a gentler form but remained fervently nationalistic and separated in identity from Christianity.

Heavy metal touches on another taboo thought which is the idea of nihilism. Nihilism is not so much an advocacy as it is an issue that most people tiptoe around. Is life meaningless? Our lurking fear is that nothing we do has any significance beyond our own experience which vanishes at death and that we are at best only physical bodies with impulsive needs. The gateway to this question and related lines of thought is found in nihilism. Nihilism states a triad of anti-beliefs: no truth, no values and no knowledge.

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

F.W. Nietzsche introduced the concept of nihilism with his dichotomy between the “last man” and the “overman”: the last man is a pure materialist who cares only about his own comfort and wealth, where the overman wishes to overcome the conditions of human life including its transient temporality and create greatness and beauty far beyond the bounds of self. In many ways, metalheads resemble the overman by discarding concerns for what is popular thus profitable thus conducive to personal comfort and convenience, and instead laboring in darkness to produce music that is meaningful to possibly themselves only.

The problem most metalheads find is that they encounter a world of self-destruction. A society that validates itself with its own theories, unproven because of the vast wave of technological wealth upon which we ride, has made itself into a crass mess of fast food, obedience-oriented jobs, flattery and pandering to special interest groups. The only option seems to be to drop out and live in relative poverty while avoiding its commitments, which then leads to evolutionary destruction of those who drop out. Modern life gives us a choice of giving and becoming last men, or constantly struggling to stay outsiders in order to strive toward being overmen.

“In our contemporary, youth are pretty much lost. They have no direction. Nobody is telling them what to do. That is, people are telling them what to do, but the youth have instincts telling them, ‘This is wrong.’ People are telling that Christianity is good, people are telling them that the USA is good, NATO is good, our democracy is good. But we know — if not intellectually — we know instinctively that this is wrong.”

Nietzsche saw last men as being a symptom of “nihilism,” which he defined as a lack of importance assigned to anything beyond material comfort because of the lack of inherent characteristics — truth, God, knowledge, values — requiring us to be otherwise. Metal retaliates with a form of “active nihilism” that instead acknowledges the void and seeks to find meaning in the possibilities of life instead. Metal bands routinely reject the mores and morals of society around them, but instead of replacing them with an ethic of convenience, replace them with morals of their own. The first and most important of these is the distinction between “poseurs,” or those who use music as a means to socializing with others and being popular, and those who are “true metal” and find meaning in the music for its own sake.

Metal identifies primarily as outsider art and always has. Its perspective views society as an error and sees the basis of this error in the pleasant illusions most people tell each other in conversation, hear from the television or read in advertisements. Like the Romantics, it scorns mass society and sees it as based in people flattering each other with what they want to hear, not what they need to hear, which is what they find within themselves — if they are brave enough to look. In this sense, metal opposes nihilism of the passive or fatalistic sort, and replaces it with an active nihilism that acknowledges the lack of inherent truth but suggests that we can find a truth in survival itself, in prevalence through conflict, and in searching our inner selves.

friedrich_wilhelm_nietzsche

The reliance on instinct hearkens to both the examination of inner truths that the Romantics explored and the reliance of early Idealist philosophers such as Kant on intuition as the basis of knowledge. It also dovetails with the Nietzschean idea of most morality as a control mechanism by those who need an external reference to avoid infringing. In his view, the moral questions that trouble the average person are not only common knowledge but unexceptional to a person of higher ability. For this reason, the law of social morality constrains those more able people and ultimately enslaves them to the problems of those below them in ability, producing an accelerating factor for nihilism.

Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath o the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused as “Dionysian value-standard” in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of the will to power, Nietzsche framed this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundamental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of the kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the “enhancement of life” and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory.

This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed “in the perspective of life,” he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between “master” and “slave” moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as “herd-animal morality,” well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality (As a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger). He further suggested the desirability of a “higher morality” for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic “slave/herd morality” categories of “good and evil” would be replaced by categories more akin to the “good and bad” contrast characteristic of “master morality,” with a revised (and variable) content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve.

From this view, Nietzsche was not overly fond of nihilism, but some have posited that the “active nihilism” is in fact what he argued for: an acceptance of the unimportance of life beyond its immediate value, and from that, a desire to expand it and make it improve the experience of life itself. This focus on experience translates into much of the hedonism and adventurism of heavy metal, with its creative side channeled toward the music itself, and its sense of improvement based on bringing what is “heavy” — or real despite human everyday denial — back into focus. The idea behind this version of nihilism is that it liberates us from the “slave morality” and allows us to see reality clearly, thus make decisions based on what is actually happening.

With its focus on results alone, and viewing them from the broader context of history, heavy metal posits a new form of active nihilism: that instead of judging our decisions by good and bad, we judge them by outcomes and whether those outcomes fit with what we find not just acceptable, but “excellent” (in the immortal words of Bill and Ted). We know how past acts have turned out and what resulted from them, so when we go shopping for actions to fulfill our goals, we can compare past outcomes to desired outcomes and pick which actions fit best. This creates a kind of table where we see that action A made result B, and A(1) -> B(1) and so forth, and thus lets us index these backward by looking down the column of outcomes and seeing which B(x) most closely approximates our chosen outcome. As metal puts this into a historical view, it changes the focus from what we want as a personal result to what we desire not just for today, but for ages hence. This also encourages us to see ourselves in the context of history and compare the calibre of our acts to those who have come before us.

Only death is real. – Hellhammer

Metal’s virus comes wrapped in the appearance of death, meaning that where there is a weakness to death, it equalizes and penetrates. The morbidity, paranoia, passion and politics of metal over the years has shown a passage by which one accepts death, and the nihilistic chaos of material reality, and in doing so lays down the foundation for transcending it. Metal, by introducing structure and spirituality and Romanticist individualism and nihilism, issues to its listeners a challenge to explore it deeper and bond with what causes it to be, rather than what it “is.”

Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger in the way that it is believed today. ‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value than the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening.

In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a high type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is a sort of superman. Such chance occurrences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit. – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

By rejecting inherent truths, metal explores an existential viewpoint in which the experience of life itself is the goal. The choices we make define who we are, and some live epic lives above the mundanity of the herd. This outlook emphasizes the experience of life itself rather than an external reward, whether monetary or in some dualistic metaphysical realm. In other words, the goal of humans is to find the best in life and to improve themselves by living not just well in a material sense, but finding health in their spirits and an enjoyment in life. Any metalhead who has noticed that most people appear depressed, lonely, beaten down, exhausted and generally at odds with existence will sympathize with this point of view.

It’s been my dream
To enter the stream
To let carnates know
What life really means
If one understands
That’s all I can ask
Life to you
is such a wretched task!
– An Incarnation’s Dream, Atheist (Unquestionable Presence)

In black metal, Romanticism took a turn toward its later forms which were explicitly nationalistic and naturalistic in defiance of the tendency of popular morality to “make safe” what nature once relegated to lawless conflict. As societies passed more laws, and focused more on defense of the individual against nature and social forces, the amount of control these societies had over their citizens increased. To black metal musicians, this was a sign of decline and a dying civilization because it favored the weak over the strong and produced a non-culture based on safety, shopping and politically correct opinions.

Romanticism though in its beginning little concerned with politics or the state, prepared the rise of German nationalism after 1800. It was an aesthetic revolution, a resort to imagination, almost feminine in its sensibility; it was poetry more deeply indebted to the spirit of music than the poetry of the eighteenth century had been, rich in emotional depth, more potent in magic evocation. But German romanticism was and wished to be more than poetry. It was an interpretation of life, nature and history—and this philosophic character distinguished it from romanticism in other lands. It was sharply opposed to the rationalism of the eighteenth century; it mobilized the fascination of the past to fight against the principles of 1789.

Black metal expressed this sentiment through strong nationalism. On the lesser end, bands like Enslaved and Immortal wrote songs about their homeland, its traditions and legends. Even death metal bands like Amorphis joined in this activity by writing albums based on the national epic, the Kalevala. On the more extreme end, bands like Graveland, Darkthrone, Burzum and Emperor expressed far-right sentiments and endorsed a strong nationalistic spirit. Even bands caught in the middle, like Mayhem, were rumored to perform in a room decked with not only Norwegian flags, but the flags of both Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Heavy metal utilizes a method of uniting riffs so that no linear truth exists, but an immanent truth is discovered as the listener connects the associations of those riffs. This is similar to the postmodern novels of James Joyce and William S Burroughs, where a series of divergent threads unified unspoken topics indicated by metaphorical assonance with consensual reality experience. The inversion of value so that its inside might be seen, postmodernism serves as a philosophical hall of mirrors by showing many potential truths as equivalent to a single truth at once.

What makes postmodernism most distinctive is its absorption of intensely “chaotic” theories such as quantum physics or non-linear mathematics, by virtue of its foundation in technology and looking past superstition, but also peering beyond the intellectual process of illusion to see how the universe functions as organism, with universal principles of growth. Afflicted with knowledge, postmodernism tends to emphasize the “subtext” of each situation, where there is an acknowledged reality and an underlying larger picture which often has nothing to do with the material props at hand. As such, dreams of death and great journeys past the land of the dead are complex and intriguing material.

Postmodernist philosophers ask us to carefully consider how the statements of the most persuasive or politically influential people become accepted as the “common truths.” Although everyone would agree that influential people — the movers and shakers — have profound effects upon the beliefs of other persons, the controversy revolves around whether the acceptance by others of their beliefs is wholly a matter of their personal or institutional prominence. The most radical postmodernists do not distinguish acceptance as true from being true; they claim that the social negotiations among influential people “construct” the truth. The truth, they argue, is not something lying outside of human collective decisions; it is not, in particular, a “reflection” of an objective reality. Or, to put it another way, to the extent that there is an objective reality it is nothing more nor less than what we say it is. We human beings are, then, the ultimate arbiters of what is true. Consensus is truth. The “subjective” and the “objective” are rolled into one inseparable compound.

Heavy metal explores this subject through first fantasy and second, the demand arising from any good story that it be at least plausible in comparison to what we know of existing reality. For a fantasy story such as _The Lord of the Rings_ to work, it must be sufficiently removed from our experience and yet congruent with it in parallel so that the world is plausible and the fantasy can be interesting to beings such as ourselves with our struggles in this world. Much like the conditions for metaphor and art itself, this requires both the postmodernist sense of truth and a tempering of it with cold hard reality as experienced in life here. This also parallels the metal view of dualistic religious faiths, easily summarized by “wishing does not make it true.”

In contrast to dualism, metal offers a sense of transcendent mysticism which shadows that offered by late Romantics and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. The basic belief of a mystic is that events and objects are interconnected in a structure that is larger than immediate material parameters and as such can be accessed if one is open to transcendence, or letting go of the visible for the abstract. The mystic finds significant experience in interpretation of everyday events because in the mystical view, all events are connected by an underlying order, even if not an inherent one. To the mystic, cause/effect reasoning dips deeper than the material and can exist on a purely informational level, much as how sacred symbols and sigils are presumed to grant a power over the objects they reference.

While we may believe
our world – our reality
to be that is – is but one
manifestation of the essence

Other planes lie beyond the reach
of normal sense and common roads
But they are no less real
than what we see or touch or feel
— Burzum, “Lost Wisdom” (Burzum)

Heavy metal tends to find order beyond where most look for it. It possesses a tendency to see chaos as a form of order or a precondition for order. The tendency of mathematical systems to go from the linear, or vector measurement, to chaotic multidirectional entities is a measure of its organicism, or the point at which it moves from chartable projections to the zone decided only by theory. Organicism is a philosophy of information science which holds that in order for something to articulate itself independently, it must be of an unmeasurable state of chaotic motion. This calls to mind one of the instigations to the rise of chaos theory, the research of Werner Heisenberg. His “uncertainty principle” is summarized as follows:

The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.

Among other things, this means that those who inspect reality are in turn influencing the system they are measuring. There are no impartial observers, only those who see what is presented to them in response to their presence. This means the observer becomes integrated into a system in which all measurements are variable in chaotic patterns without linearly predictable jumps. A pattern with linear jumps suggests the order is evident within that pattern, where a pattern with chaotic jumps suggests an order behind the evident pattern. Hence an emergent organicism appears in many things, including metal, which approach problems in which binary solutions (those composed of yes or no, off or on, right or “wrong”) lead to illusion, since the binary nature is a projection of the intelligences observing the situation and not emergent from the properties and methods of the system itself.

This returns to the metal and Romantic conception of the individual knowing the world through the inner self, or as Immanuel Kant referred to it, “intuition.” Kant saw intuition as the basis of our a priori knowledge of the working of the world and its causality. However, this line of thought remains distinct from individualism in both metal and Romanticism. Metal favors individualism but also devoutly rejects it in its present form. As embraced by modern society, individualism means the ability to make arbitrary decisions and still be defended. As seen by metal, individualism resides in the ability to reject the insane arbitrary decisions of others. Strongly in favor of the independent evolution of individuals so to allow them space to grow without the persistent damage of scar tissue formed to avoid intervention by the arbitrary appearances of demands by others, the individualist genre metal has developed a subculture with focus on the development of the individual as a force of chaos and change in the otherwise patterned material/causal world.

When night falls
she cloaks the world
in impenetrable darkness.
A chill rises
from the soil
and contaminates the air
suddenly…
life has new meaning.
— Dunkelheit, Burzum (Filosofem)

The reasons for individualist thought usually center around the idea that those who know what they want for personal fulfillment will not project that on to others for purposes of control. Individualism is a property of art and any other discipline which demands independence and focus; systemic and/or chaos thinkers understand it as a form of parallelism, where individuals in parallel discover the same truths by exploring their inner selves. Much like the Romantic notion of the lone wanderer above the mist, this notion of individualism shows metal encouraging the exploration of self to get over the self, in contrast to those unrealized souls out there who know only desires of the basest (and most commercially lucrative) nature, and thus enslave themselves to their desires.

Betraying and playing dirty, you think you’ll win
But someday you’ll fall and I’ll be waiting
Laughs of an insane man you’ll hear
Personality is my weapon against your envy
Walking these dirty streets
With hate in my mind
Feeling the scorn of the world
I won’t follow your rules
Nonconformity in my inner self
Only I guide my inner self
— Sepultura, “Inner Self” (Beneath the Remains)

As a method of interpretation, this metallic perspective verges on structuralism. Structuralism posits that no exoteric or face-value interpretation of truth exists, but that all truth is emergent and found from the analysis in the mind of the individual:

Since language is the foremost instance of social sign systems in general, the structural account might serve as an exemplary model of understanding the very intelligibility of social systems as such — hence, its obvious relecance to the broader concerns of the social and human sciences. This implication was raised by Saussure himself, in his Course on General Linguistics (1916), but it was advanced dramatically by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss — who is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern structuralism — in his extensive analyses in the area of social anthropology, beginning with his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). Levi-Strauss argued that society is itself organized according to one form or another of significant communication and exchange — whether this be of information, knowledge, or myths, or even of its members themselves. The organization of social phenomena could thus be clarified through a detailed elaboration of their subtending structures, which, collectively, testify to a deeper and all-inclusive, social rationality. As with the analysis of language, these social structures would be disclosed, not by direct observation, but by inference and deduation from the observed empirical data.

Structuralism describes a method for perceiving structure that requires interaction to be revealed. This applies well to language or reverse-debugging of computer code, but as a proactive measure applies to the methods that can be used to construct logical objects such that they do not have linear structure but an internally-balanced emergent structure. This describes the metal method of writing interlocking riffs as well as the method that listeners use to decode them and perceive an order to the song as a whole. Unlike rock ‘n roll, which has a linear structure in a cyclic arrangement, death metal has a layered structure based on internal correspondence between riffs that can only be perceived through observation and comparison in reference to the whole.

How do you account for the vision of the man possessed on stage, and the man sitting before me? We are quite the opposite to what is personified on stage. Every band has it’s own way of dealing with shit and if they play this kind of music, or even just any extreme music, maybe they are like that full time, maybe not. Like we always say, people like Rick Astley are probably the biggest wankers in the world. They probably come off stage, and wanna kill kids. With us, its the contrary, on stage we are executing the whole other persona, in regular social conditions we are pretty straight forward.
— Lemmy Kilmister, Motorhead

Influences

  • H.P. Lovecraft
    Lovecraft developed mythologies from simple brutality and built a spiritual structure of a phenomenology of evil from the myths of Ancient Sumeria combined with his perceptions of pre-religious darkness and fear. His imaginative and lurid tales not only inspired many horror films, but provided the basis of metal lyrics for every generation of metal. Of all the writers cited by metal bands, Lovecraft not only ranks as most frequent but as most esoteric.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
    John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professor of the English language at Oxford during the first half of the twentieth century, infusing his fascination with Germanic themes of honor and ancient mythology into a fantasy series involving a “middle earth” where magic and science were one. Like many metalheads, he saw humanity as in decline and in need of a unifying quest to give it purpose and to restore a sense of activities worth doing more than attending jobs, shopping and downloading free internet porn.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
    The most influential philosopher in metal, Nietzsche shifted philosophy from the somewhat inward-focused idealism to an existentialism that contained a practical component. To Nietzsche, Christian morality of good/bad was irrelevant because the universe thrived on conflict as a result of its will toward life, and this imbues each person with a will to power. In those who can clearly articulate their own will, this turns into a desire to do outward good; in those who do not self-actualize, it becomes a consumptive and narcissistic impulse. Through his rejection of social morality and affirmation of the lone individual striving against the herd and struggling to understand a reality best expressed in constant warfare and predation, Nietzsche created the grandfather of all heavy metal philosophy.
  • William S. Burroughs
    Heavy metal got its name from a William S. Burroughs writing. The infamous writer of Naked Lunch, is known as much for his heroin addiction as for his contributions to literature, including what might be called the first truly postmodern novel in _Naked Lunch_. However, his contributions were vast, starting with his “cut up” style of literature which would weave a complexity of connections between granular sections of text randomly recontextualized in a chronological narrative. The philosophies of individual freedom, control, darkness and politics contained within “Naked Lunch” and subsequent works (The Nova Express,The Ticket that Exploded,Cities of the Red Night) provided an unfathomably universalist basis to metallion rejection of authority, conformity, and materialist aesthetics.
  • William Blake
    One of the first transcendental poets to articulate his ideas in a structured metaphorology designed to transcend the calcification of Christianity, Blake spoke of sensual and intellectual excess as salvation for the soul and invented a form of morality based in joy which used its romanticism as a basis for its respect and fascination with life. Blake’s detailed exposures of human reason and fear at its most primal and yet most symbolologic delivered a scientific mysticism to those who came after him (including Jim Morrison and William S Burroughs!) a shadow in which motion was possible, a darkness which mostly concealed a limitless beauty of freedom.
  • John Milton
    An English minister and poet, John Milton conceived and wrote the epic poem, “Paradise Lost,” in which Satan is portrayed as a beautiful angel who rejects servitude in heaven and is exiled in flame, only to learn how to love the barren but self-decisional realm of Hell. The phrase “to reign in hell” from various metal recordings references his classic line spoken by Satan, “It is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

It’s a concept album about what once was before the light took us and we rode into the castle of the dream. Into emptiness. It’s something like; beware the Christian light, it will take you away into degeneracy and nothingness. What others call light I call darkness. Seek the darkness and hell and you will find nothing but evolution.
— Varg Vikernes, http://www.burzum.com/

Heavy metal can be seen as a subculture, or culture within a larger culture, as opposed to a counterculture, or oppositional culture within a larger culture. The reason for this distinction is that while heavy metal is rebellious it does not exclusively define itself as being the opposite of what exists, but sees itself as a modification (or “fork” to the brachitic hierarchy of revisions) to existing society, mainly because it operates on a level lower than that of institution — it is a spiritual re-alignment through a re-arrangement of values, or maybe we should say, a re-evaluation of all values.

In that light, it also makes sense to consider heavy metal to be a series of ethnocultures, because each nation produces music of a unique sound and attitude, often with a unique subset of the values and situations discussed in death metal. A fan can instantly tell the difference between South American black-death and Swedish death metal, or Japanese grindcore and American thrash. There are clear conventions to each that correspond to culture and ritual, which correspond to ethnicity and geographic area. Since heavy metal was created in response to the counter-culture, and was negative about the counter-culture but not enamored enough of the dominant order to be a reactionary counter-counter-culture, we consider it a subculture but refer to it generically as a “culture,” because it has all aspects of culture: values, rituals, symbols, clothing, lifestyles and art. Metalheads measure their worth through fulfillment of their roles in this culture, not by tangible symbols of the same.

The world may be explained in sociological terms. David Riesman describes three basic social personalities in The Lonely Crowd. ‘Other-directed’ people pattern their behavior on what their peers expect of them. Suburban America’s men in gray-flannel suits are other-directed. ‘Inner-directed’ people are guided by what they have been trained to expect of themselves. [General Douglas] MacArthur was inner-directed. The third type, the ‘tradition-directed,’ has not been seen in the West since the Middle Ages. Tradition-directed people hardly think of themselves as individuals; their conduct is determined by folk rituals handed down from the past.
— William Manchester, American Caesar

The heavy metal subculture makes itself instantly recognizable through its heavily codified visual appearance: youth in black t-shirts with logos across the top and cover art below that, with long hair and possibly tattoos, gathered away from society at events involving metal music and places where metal is distributed. They resemble a small army in public, which has caused many a hipster or journalist to wax poetic about the lack of individualism in the culture. It seems instead that in coherence with the concept of “heavy,” metal culture has placed itself zenlike beyond a simple division into individualist/conformist. It recognizes the need for unity in belief to make power. Within that, it allows for variation, as can be found in the proliferation of diverse tattoos and the variation in shirts that metalheads wear, with a type of caste and preference system formed by who appreciates what band, with those who like the brainier music being the unacknowledged elite. It has rituals — concert behavior, meetings for listening to new music, record store power structures, friendship and courtship — that borrow from their parent cultures, composed of both traditional culture and its modern adaptation, although they borrow more from the ancient remnants than the contemporary hybrid.

This culture was so distinctive at American high schools in the 1970s during the first generation of heavy metal that it was branded with a variety of names: heshers, threshers, Hessians, headbangers, metalheads. In Europe, other names came about from similar impulses, including metallion, metaller and metalist, although these grated on American sensibilities and did not transfer. The name mutated into “thrasher” for those who listened to thrash, a type of music formed of the hybrid of hardcore punk and metal riffing, exemplified by D.R.I. and Cryptic Slaughter. For this reason, metal culture became known as “Hessian” or “thrasher” culture, with most people outside recognizing its members by site without much knowledge of the music or values behind their behavior. Much of the reason for this approach originates in the attitudes of mainstream society, somewhat correctly, toward standard teenager behavior: spoiled by an indulgent attitude toward parenting, yet forced into rigid behavior to compete for future jobs, teenagers rebel but very few do so in a way that both asserts childhood and adulthood as metalheads, generally ludic types, do.

Metal culture, or Hessian culture, involves loud heavy metal music made in the postmodern interpretation of classical music and rock n roll arrangement, creating a disturbing noise and profound motion in its practice and social implications. Author Kurt Vonnegut likens the role of an artist to society as the role of the canaries miners brought into the coal tunnels to warn for the presence of gas: when the birdsong changes or stops, death is near. At the end of the twentieth century, as we suffocate in the meaninglessness of the social machine we have made, metal and punk music are striking alarms of misery and fear hidden beneath the commercially-viable good assurances which have more than once prompted the adage, “Talk is cheap.”

This sense of “role” pervades everything, including instilling a sense of honor relative to the materialism of society. Metal culture is what keeps the music from becoming like everything else that’s in the consumer market: products. Products want to do something so visibly, it is entirely distinctive, while not doing anything beyond the norm so there are no objections to purchase. Culture keeps spirit alive by serving as an interpretive landmark of existential questions, delivering to the interpreter a sense of combining the metaphor of the art with the catalogue of past experiences in life that might be relevant. In metal, the culture does not value making music for people who want entertainment; it rewards the creation of epic and powerful things out of the forces and remnants of destruction. As if it embraced paradox itself at the same time it attacked paradox as a notion, metal invents itself out of nothing and creates a Romantic, transcendental sense of the good through living according to its own tenets, untamed and not pandering to anyone or anything else.

“No jobs!” – Demonaz Doom Occulta, Immortal

2.3. Context

nuclear_detonation

Early Influences

Heavy metal arose in the 1960s when Western civilization re-examined itself in the light of two disastrous world wars and an ongoing struggle against communism. As the victor of both world wars, the United States led the world in thought and industry and its influence dominated the post-war world. Originally formed of colonies which first attempted to self-organize as a confederation, the new nation quickly committed to central authority in order to act as a single entity. This caused a conflict between the rural South and industrial North over what type of rule would prevail and after a disastrous Civil War, a strong federal entity was selected and embarked on a series of programs ostensibly to improve living standards.

Over the next forty years the United States unified itself with expansion of the founding concepts of the nation in accordance with the decisions of the Civil War. The highest power was the Federal State, but the Individual was its currency, and therefore America came to embrace its image as the “melting pot” in which the “poor, huddled masses” might find refuge. America invited and enfranchised new groups of people, starting with recently-freed African slaves and continuing to an acceptance of previously unwanted immigrant groups, such as Irish, Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans. After the second world war, Americans began to reconsider their mission in light of their opposition to both fascism and communism, and opted for a purely inclusive society which facilitated the individual desires of its members.

A similar outpouring of sentiment emerged in Europe, especially in France which had been the birth of these theories in its Revolution of 1789 when the ideals of the Enlightenment were put into political form. That union produced a period of massive instability in France followed by the Napoleonic wars which, foreshadowing the conflicts of a century later, involved an ideological struggle between liberal democratic forces and those who opposed them for majority control of Europe. The alliances that eventually triggered the first world war, which in turn triggered the second, emerged from the jockeying for power that created unstable alliances between European nations. As the 1960s dawned, Europeans and Americans began to assimilate the Revolutionary rhetoric much as the Napoleonic French did, and extended this to social engineering. As the forces of Revolution battled with the Establishment, a movement of youth arose which embraced with great fervor the new revolutionary outlook.

Before it gained any social status, the cultural force of this revolution — a “counterculture” — possessed “outsider” authenticity and cachet which made it a sought-after cultural force across the West, in part because of its contrarian status and its lack of acceptance among the cultural and social mechanisms of the day. Like a high school revolt riot, the counterculture united previously disenfranchised groups under the Countercultural banner. As this group became dominant, it adopted freely from both the “new left,” the 1930s pre-war socialism, traditional American individualism and the new science of managerial society. Rock music became the banner and motivating force behind this youth-oriented movement.

Industry invented rock music from existing forms but in the classic habit of industry, streamlined them into a simple product which could be inexpensively created and differentiated on the basis not of internal variation, but surface variations. This allowed industry to recruit a lower quality of musician and improve profits through novelty, advertising, and recording technique alone, which widened the margins on this new form of music. Rock mixed country folk, derived from English drinking songs, Celtic folk music, German popular music including waltzes and the proto-gospel singing of Scottish immigrants, with blues music.

The blues was not formalized until it was recorded, and at that point in time, a fixed structure was imposed on it based on the interpretations of others. Broadly stated, it used a minor pentatonic scale with a flatted fifth, constant syncopation, and distinctive “emotional” vocal styles including call-and-response vocalization. Of all of its components, none were unique, nor was its I-IV-V chord progression. To view it from an ethnomusical perspective, the blues is an aesthetic (not musical) variation on the English, Scottish, Irish and German folk music which made up the American colloquial sonic art perspective since its inception. From a marketing perspective, however, the blues had to be marketed as a revelation from the downtrodden and suffering African-American slaves, so that it might maintain an “outsider” perspective which, to people bored with a society based on money and lacking heroic values, might appear more “authentic” than their own. The birth of rock was the birth of the counterculture and the establishment of the dichotomy: the marginalized, outsider and ignored versus the vapid, boring and soulless mainstream.

When country music was re-introduced to the then-standardized blues form, the result was called rock music. Its primary difference from country was in its use of vocals which emphasized timbre over tonal accuracy, and the adoption of a more insistent, constant syncopated beat. While German waltz and popular music bands had invented the modern drum kit and developed most techniques for percussion, their music and that of their country counterparts in America tended to use drums sparsely, much more in the style of modern jazz bands than in the ranting, repetitive, dominant methods of rock music. However, it is hard to find someone in a crowd of mixed gender, race, class and intellect for whom a constant beat is intellectually and sensually inaccessible, so it was adopted as a convention. Much as the standardization of the blues took diverse song forms and brought them into a single style, rock swept a wide range of influences into a monochromatic form. It seemed that industry had created the perfect universal musical form.

However it arrived, blues-country became “rock” in the 1930s-1950s mainly because of technology. Adolph Rickenbacker invented the electric guitar in 1931, and recording equipment advanced from the primitive to the cheaper and more portable units brought on by vacuum tube and then transistor technology. Additionally, microphones improved, especially those which could capture the nuances of voice. Louder guitars and vocals required the simple shuffle beats of blues drumming to gain volume, prompting a revolution in drum kit assembly. As a result, the simple blues-country hybrid became a marketing standard known as “rock ‘n’ roll,” then “rock,” as it was absorbed into the American mainstream. The earliest bands lacked much in the way of style, but wrote complacently harmonizing pieces based on the European popular music of clubs in the 1930s (much of jazz is based upon the same music). As time went on, the stylings — appearance, performance and cultural positioning — of the music became more advanced, and the songs themselves became simpler and more like advertising jingles.

The 1960s: the Hippie Revolution

Rock music presented itself as an oppositional alternative to the “traditional, boring” life of “the Establishment” and quickly became a galvanizing force for the counter-culture. The innocent pop of the 1950s gave way to an angry voice that endorsed liberal politics, sexual liberation, and general hedonism; these traits had been a mainstay of Western revolutionaries since the 1600s, but starting in the early 1900s gained new force and after the wars and the alliance with the Soviet Union, became seen as a positive counteraction to industrial society, capitalism and authoritarianism. The problem offered by this new format lay in its simplicity: because the songs were simple, which enabled them to be mass-produced and sold through advertising alone, they also did not have staying power. A recording had to be made once, and musicians throughout history have never read contracts, so labels could just about print money with each additional copy made. The problem was that since the music was interchangeable at an underlying level, it was also unsatisfying, so record companies looked for new external aspects to add to the music in order to give it novelty, authenticity and thus the “cachet of cool” sought by its audience.

In the mid-1960s, rock exploded with a new variety that was both musically more advanced and possessed more of a rebellious streak. The Beatles took the forefront of this movement and created music which was melodically advanced (although saccharine) and took on more explicitly sexual topics with a stance of disaffected youth. Much of the posturing of this new rock music took its style from the 1930s alienated youth novels of the UK and the outsider lifestyles of the Beats in the USA. With this was born the counterculture in music: rock music distinguished by authenticity derived from its challenge to existing authority, including social standards and morals. The more it tweaked the nose of the Establishment, the more power it gained in the media and thus the more the product sold. The Beatles proved masters at this, inciting controvery and adulation wherever they went, and making edgy statements like “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ” which the outrage-hungry press dutifully reported.

As the 1960s advanced, the power of television combined with the intensity of the political situation led to a melding of the political counterculture and its rock music. It became essential for rock musicians to talk about peace, love and the happiness that was possible in a Utopian world of kindergarten-style sharing, all while amassing vast fortunes and living in mansions. When the Beatles sang “All you need is love” they were already on their second marriages, having covertly exiled one band member and possibly kicked another one to death. And yet the vision of “love” versus a mechanical automatron world of 1950s style career advancement, shopping as an activity and making war on the “misunderstood” Communists, as a gambit that enabled its audience to envision themselves as revolutionaries changing society from a primitive past toward an enlightened future, sold records like never before.

The 1970s: Mainstreaming the Dissidents

As the 1960s came to a close, it became clear that rock music had reached the end of its arc. Bands took the music to the extremes of progressive rock on on hand, and toward the dark primitive sounds of Iggy and the Stooges and Black Sabbath on the other. Everything that could be done had been done in its most elemental form. This spurred experimentation in the 1970s with both form and content. In this decade, progressive rock ventured farther from the norm, and new forms such as disco and punk appeared. In response, rock music took on a new populist edge as it went from the somewhat grubby hippie fringe to a mainstream hedonism that fused feel-good politics with digestible, slickly produced material. New forms of music entered the pop lexicon as reggae and a modern, rock-infused form of country music intruded. Even jazz found itself a rock hybrid with “fusion” music that applied rock percussion and song structure to jazz, translating the intricately plotted musical density of progressive rock into free-form jams that fit into rock songs like extended guitar solos.

No three words connote “PROG ROCK” more negatively than Emerson Lake & Palmer. Their music is incredibly pompous, for they are incredibly pompous individuals. One of them (does it matter which?) famously said their goal was to create “a pure white European music with no black influences.”

Culture responded to the tumult of the 1960s by making a safer mainstream version of it. Corporations staffed by unexciting men in suits adopted radical hippie slogans and used them to sell mundane products. Even more, all of popular culture got behind appropriating the hedonism of the 1960s and translating it into the everyday. Technological futurism without ideological structure mated the sensual lifestyles of the 1960s with the commercial values of the 1940s. “Free love” became swinger parties, psychedelic exploration became better living through chemistry, and pacifism became a popular fashion of self-expression but no longer as much of a political statement. The radicalism of 1968 gave way to consumerism with benefits of 1978. Commerce and conservatism assimilated the forces that once opposed them.

Similarly, rock lost its edge, and while many people explored fusion, synthpop, disco or reggae, the most radical drifted toward punk. Stripping rock down to its basics using power chords, punk destroyed the rules and democratized the art form even further. Now it was no longer necessary to play an instrument for months or years in order to become famous; you could play for six weeks, make a catchy (but edgy) song and make it onto the radio. The driving impetus toward punk was, much like that of early heavy metal, to remove the artificiality of rock music and replace it with something more elemental. Although many bands developed the sound, starting with 1960s bands like The Stooges, punk rock formalized itself with The Ramones in 1976. Their goal was to remove influences and escape the rock world, in part to avoid being commercialized and assimilated as they viewed 1960s and 1970s rock as having been.

Mr. Ramone once described his guitar style as “pure, white rock ‘n’ roll, with no blues influence.”

“I wanted our sound to be as original as possible,” he said. “I stopped listening to everything.”

Despite this brave statement, punk became quickly assimilated because its low threshold of instrumental ability and recording quality allowed just about anyone to make it. In response thousands of bands erupted so that by the end of the 1970s, punk consisted of thousands of bands with interchangeable names, songs, attitudes and recordings. What was first the work of pioneers became a big party where anyone could join in. Much as rock music itself democratized and streamlined genres as diverse as country, blues, big band and folk into a single entity, punk also became a snowball that picked up the flavor of the month and rolled it into a new easily-digestible format. As the decade clicked over into the 1980s, a genre known as “pop punk” emerged as college students began picking up instruments and making softer, gentler and more introspective versions of punk songs. The result assimilated punk rock into the mainstream rock industry.

The 1980s: the Material World

In outrage, punks reclaimed their territory with hardcore punk at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. This music went even more extreme, using chromatic scales and two-chord songs, and added more savage vocals that used the distorted voices that folk singers applied at parts of their songs when bad characters or negative events entered the fray. Punk hardcore changed music for two reasons: first, it removed itself from rock by deconstructing even the marginal rules of rock, and second, it designed itself to avoid the mainstream music industry entirely with a do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic and the creation of a separate network of zines, radio stations, tape traders and clubs who catered to this music and its fanbase and excluded everything else. For the first time, a sub-culture challenged the counter-culture and threatened to entirely drop out of society at large. Punks lived in squats, or appropriated empty buildings, and survived by foraging while they dedicated their time to not becoming either suit and tie guys or burnout hippies who thought peace would save the world. Punk had a message: society was terrible because people were terrible, and no easy solution like “love” would save the day. Instead, it was time for war!

Hardcore punk formed a parallel world to that of metal during this period. An innovation on either side passed to the other, and drove the next evolution of that side. Thus hardcore picked up on metal drumming, then sent it back with additional simplification, where it was adopted; metal adopted hardcore vocals, then made them more extreme, and sent those back where they were enthusiastically received. During the mid-1970s metal went through its own flirtation with stadium rock and was almost assimilated, but came back through a DIY underground movement in the NWOBHM who paralleled the punk attempts to do the same. Even more, both genres borrowed from tropes of the rock world and adapted those to their own forms, albeit in such customized form that they were unrecognizable. Metal adopted the lengthy complex solos of stadium rock but passed them through a hardcore punk filter to make them chaotic and violent, and converted the extended bridges of post-progressive stadium rock into new song structures. In turn, rock picked up on the idea of distortion and punk rhythms.

During the 1980s, the only relevant symbols were monetary and social success, meaning a modern adaptation of the white picket house in the suburbs, the minivan, local church and school groups and happy children with no cares in the world. A decade of overextension and massive expenditure on cold war buildup shattered most of this and replaced it with a literal reality of subservience, slowly flipping the power balance to a sublimated leftism. As the smiley futurism came to a close at the turn of the eighties it was clear the alienation was not an affliction but a condition of the system, and more extreme responses arose. Both the old-school conservative system and the hippie “revolution” had failed in their aims. In the mainstream, the previously “new left” leanings of our culture were overshadowed by the pragmatism of gaining money and power, and in the underground, a new series of dissidents found themselves in desperate paranoia against the industrial society slowly surrounding them. Slowly, the pragmatic “eat and assert needs” conservativism of America flowered with Ronald Reagan, and the underground new left moved toward media and went mainstream to combat the money and power of old school interests.

The defining aspect of the 1980s was the Cold War and its attendant threat of nuclear annihilation. Where 1950s and 1960s children feared bombers in the sky, 1970s and 1980s children feared first ICBMs and then cruise missiles and submarine-launched nuclear holocaust. Folklore absorbed the legends of the nuclear Cold War: seven minutes between detection and detonation, nuclear winter, doomsday machines and computers waging cancelation warfare across the globe. In the West, conservative politicians took office and began the biggest military buildup since WWII in preparation for either land war in Europe or a Naval/Air battle for dominance of the oceans. No one knew how long the Cold War would last, and each side over-estimated the other. For those growing up during this time, the threat of immediate obliteration proved a driving force behind the music they listened to, and musicians heard this call and made their rhetoric even more extreme.

The result was a decade which outwardly tried to affirm all that the people in their 30s and 40s found meaningful, namely a white picket fence vision of America from the 1950s but wrapped in a cushion of safety and removal from the internal problems of the West. It was a bracingly reactionary time, in which “Communist” was once again a career-threatening insult, and in which the Christian religion and the process of making money for oneself again became the way in which social importance was reckoned. Naturally, this provoked a resurrection of the Counterculture and its strongest incarnation yet, since it had been absorbed in the 1970s and, since popular opinion was close to its own values, had been assimilated. Now that it once again had something to rebel against, it manifested itself in a growing cadre of die-hard liberal specialist movements and alternative art, literature and music scenes. This gave metal a new commitment which was resistance to the dominant warlike culture and its tendencies toward control as the battle between revolutionaries and Establishment wore on into its second decade.

By the mid-1980s however hardcore punk waned because it both had exhausted its repertoire of simple songs and needed to be more complex to avoid overlapping with previous material to such a degree as to be seen as a variant of it, and it had been assimilated from within by those who, seeing how easy it was to make hardcore punk, opportunistically created their own bands despite a lack of artistic content or actual talent. The result was a flood of “DIY” sound-alike bands who promptly drove most of the serious fans away from the genre and replaced them with “fanboys” or those who wanted to be in the scene for the purpose of being in the scene, and saw music as incidental to that process. Metal had its own version of these, both “sellouts” who used the music for personal monetary gain, and “poseurs” who used the music to gain social prestige and from that gain personal importance. Toward the end of the 1980s, hardcore bands converted themselves to either post-hardcore bands like Fugazi, emo bands like Rites of Spring, or pop punk bands like Jawbreaker.

During the 1980s, rock downgraded its intensity from stadium levels for a flirtation with synthpop which created the archetypal 1980s sound: electronic drums, lush keyboards, distorted but soft guitar and stark vocals. As this sound gradually became assimilated by the type of shiny pop that American radio stations had perfected in the 1950s, a quasi-underground “indie” (independent) rock community came to life. Borrowing the DIY attitude and simple aesthetics of punk, this genre produced simple rock music with heavy emotional overtones of alienation, melancholy, loneliness and uncertainty. It styled itself as a form of counterculture toward the positive, financially-geared, strong and militaristic spirit of the politics of the time. Led by bands like REM and Yo La Teno, indie rock eventually became a fairly mainstream style, but for a few years in the 1980s it was the rebel of the rock world, doing everything exactly the opposite of what conventional wisdom dictated. The indie scene cemented the “new” dichotomy in music: one was either with the mainstream attitude and tastes, or went underground and catered to something else.

The biggest influence on music during the 1980s was not sound, but video. In 1981, the first music videos began rolling out over cable channels. Because they were on cable, and not regular TV, they could be more risque than what went on television sets. Songs had to fit within the format defined by the video, which was essentially a three- to five-minute movie revealing a storyline with some kind of ironic or otherwise high-contrast ending, interspersed (usually) with the band playing or lip synching within a scene. During the 1980s, a successful video greatly helped launch a song into the slipstream and soon became necessary for all bands hoping to make it in the mainstream. Indie rock bands were able to avoid this for some time, but as soon as they migrated to larger labels, the demand existed for them to also put out videos, which in turn influenced their songwriting to fit into the “MTV format” of slick verse-chorus with a lengthy bridge or other space for concluding action in the mini-movie.

Watch as flowers decay
On cryptic life that died
The wisdom of the wizards
Is only a neutered lie
Black knights of Hell’s domain
Walk upon the dead
Satanas sits upon
The blood on which he feeds.
— Slayer, “Die by the Sword” (Show No Mercy)

Also during this time arose the worst of the governmental attempts to limit the expression of rock music. Politicians had been itching to limit this music since the 1960s since, with the voting age lowered to 18 and television broadcasting constant entertainment into every home, rock music had become a more formidable method of changing public opinion than the New York Times and MacNeil-Lehrer report combined. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) campaigned for warning labels on rock albums; in 1990, Judas Priest was sued under the theory that they had encoded “backward masked” or reverse-order sound in their music that encouraged fans to commit suicide, based on a 1985 suicide-pact shooting by two teenagers. This was also the era of the “Satanic panic” that involved teachers at the Virginia McMartin preschool going to trial on the theory that they had sexually molested their students as part of the rituals of a Satanic cult. This paranoid outlook reflected much of the politics and political reality of the time, as society tore itself apart both from counter-culture remnants of the 1960s and a Soviet nuclear threat that had its citizens living in terror.

The 1990s: Counter-Culture becomes Culture

This changed in the 1990s. That decade dawned with the maturation and assumption of the reins of power by those who had been students during the tumultous, counterculture-dominated 1960s. In chasing the symbols of peace, happiness, love and tranquility, the “youth counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s embraced its oppressors and soon the peace sign became another icon of commercial culture. Capitalism and socialism became bonded in a new form of government, “globalism,” which felt that the industrial mix of capitalism, liberal democracy and social welfare was the ultimate form of government and the final evolution of human society.

Post-coldwar instability arose when the sudden collapse of communism under Western economic pressure created a vacuum of social direction which was eventually resolved in unity between moral emotion and needs for power. As little had changed, social boredom increased and with the official ideology of non-change created the most nihilistic, disposable society ever. Entertainment media became prevalent as CDs, VCRs, and stereos of a high-performance nature became common. The large screen TV lit America at night and warmed her power grids with the drooling inattention of a stagnant, functional land. Worldwide, America was seen as a cultural leader and thus was embraced despite the horrifying failures of the American system. The focus of world leaders turned inward to militarize against drugs, racism and separatism.

There is more chaos, war, pollution now than ever before in our recorded history. Of course, we might have known a period with even worse conditions, but the Christians burned all the records that could tell us about it anyway. Like in the library of Alexandria, wherever the Catholics or Protestants or Christians came, they destroyed the culture. They ruined the culture. They burned the culture. And they burned the records of these cultures. That includes the European cultures. That includes African cultures, Asian cultures, American cultures; wherever they were, they destroyed everything. They want to replace our culture with Americanization, with the Judeo-Christian cultures. Christianity is the root of all problems in the modern world.

Any analysis of this time will reveal the increasing presence of television, cable television, movies and radio in the collective consciousness of Americans. In addition, the Internet, a defense communications subsystem, exploded into public life with AOL and dot-coms clamoring for inflated market share. The new Clinton economy raced up to meet it with token appeals for heart-tugging issues but a fundamentally sound economic policy which fostered growth, allowing an increase in corporate power and correspondingly, distrust of corporations especially the multi-national corporations that globalism favors. World culture sighed a collective disbelief of ideology and iconography except as applied to hedonism, entertainment and public status. Belief in any meaning toward a cause was seen as a method of getting killed, and conflict avoidance for both commercial and moral purposes became the public standard of behavior in America and other countries in its economic model.

The hedonistic culture of the 1960s merged with the consumer culture of the 1950s. And while the edges of boredom on this vision showed, to many the classic 1960s archetype of the population being oppressed in being kept from the fulfillment of their urges, as a means of expressing a template of life, came true in the ability to have a job, make money and express hedonistic outpourings. People began talking about their careers in emotional terms when in fact they were signaling social status. With culture dead, religion dead, and no historical consciousness to speak of, what remained was being better than someone else or some other group. Underneath the positive pluralistic propaganda a new society appeared in which the goal was to improve personal wealth and power at the expense of others with whom it was assumed nothing was held in common.

hippies

The result was the “Me generation” turned into an ideal for new generations and created a new era of narcissism, where little allegiance existed even among family members. Broken homes, degenerate and abusive marriages, parents working until late at night and a constant stream of media emphasizing human failure and conflict took its toll. Almost aphasic in their approach to politics and ideology, the generations arising in this time were entirely temporal in their approach to values and without belief in any form of ideal, as all ideals had behind them a commercial engine. As if in sick replay of the Vietnam conflict, human intentions seemed “good” but turned out “bad” – through something we brought with us no matter where we went. Emotional nihilism approached, and raging spirits sought reason to live or, in other ranges, significance of death.

With the election of Bill Clinton, a sensation of new directions suffused the Western world. The world shifted toward Utopia plans just in time for the Soviet Union to fall. When the walls came down in 1991, people assumed that a new era had arrived in which the old threats no longer existed. Counterculture merged with mainstream culture yet again, incorporating the 1980s capitalist ideal with the 1960s liberal idealism. The result was that bands found endorsing counterculture themes no longer elicited the authenticity they craved, and turned toward other ways to oppose the dominant mostly-liberal power hierarchy. Indie rock merged with metal and punk to form a kind of primitive but hook-laden sub-genre known as “alternative rock.” Borrowing heavily from the 1960s, this sub-genre nonetheless injected itself with the cynicism and world-weariness of those who feel the promised Utopia was nothing but. Alternative rock essentially absorbed indie.

Welcome citizen of our adorable nation
Serve and be a part of us in modern time

Parents have never existed; your blood, state property
Leave personality; total trust will make security

Your ears – our information
Your eyes – our sight
Implanted in society – only for the security

From childhood to the grave
Every step will be safe as we are behind

Guided through life blessed in our birth
So our secret son welcome to the promised life…
— Carbonized, “For the Security” (For the Security)

Perhaps the biggest explosion of the 1990s was techno. Invented in the 1970s by fusing disco structure and synthpop technique, techno mutated two decades later as people began to use dual turntables to mix existing albums into a form of dub. Frequently, they combined techno and chill-out or ambient musics to create intricate layered dub “sets” lasting around an hour that took listeners through the stages of ritual: initiation, ego dissolution, orientation, union, deepening, clarification and absorption. By taking users through these “journeys” or “adventures,” techno sets extended music beyond a listening experience to a participatory experience. While not everyone enjoyed techno, the appeal and power of this approach influenced many other genres who wanted to incorporate the sense of unity and action in their work. Some of the most prominent music of this era, notably indie and electronica, distinguished itself by being minor-key and having high energy, creating an atmosphere of wistful sadness as one finds in Autechre or Nirvana.

As the Clinton years wore on, confidence increased. Cheap labor from Asia enabled vast profits to roll in, and then the internet created a new industry in which people invested and made fortunes. It seemed like life had finally returned to normal after the world wars and turbulence of the 1960s, but toward the end of this period, doubts intervened. The remarkable smugness of the globalist capitalist liberal democracy grated on many people, and the countries who were not participating in the great first world gold rush alarmed many who saw a minefield of future enemies being sewn. Music reflected this by turning the downcast mentality of alternative rock into a truly outcast and depressed mentality. Genres like doom metal and “suicidal black metal” thrived. The world wanted a negative trip and it found musical expression in genres with the sense of negated possibility of a bad situation being otherwise.

As this new generation assumed hold, the rules of the 1980s faded. No longer was it enough of a commitment to rebel against perceived authoritarianism, since the people in control were the anti-authoritarians. Nor could there be any compromise with counter-culture, since that also had won, nor with industrial society and its materialistic and consumerist urges, since that had either been assimilated by or had assimilated the counter-culture. Heavy metal had to invent a new path and chose, through black metal and death metal, that of rejecting modern society as a whole. This provided a new and more extreme direction that involved revolt against Christianity, the concept of equality, and even the notions of love and trust. Heavy metal reached maturity in its nihilism and at the same time invented its own path. Black metal blazed a path for itself through church arsons, murder and violence, but equally shocking reclaimed authenticity by proclaiming a love for Nietzschean natural selection, nationalism (and sometimes outright racial exclusion), anti-Christianity and anti-liberalism. Black metal rejected the entire postwar tendency toward liberalism and governments as protectors and guidance of citizens, and turned back to culture, nationalism and Social Darwinism which were in the 1990s the most powerful taboo one could invoke.

The 2000s: Interregnum

As the Clinton years drew to a close, it became apparent that the dot-com bubble was about to detonate and it did, creating a recession that damaged some of the mood. This was followed shortly by terror attacks across the world, including the “9-11” attacks in New York, and a resulting war on terror. During this time, most of rock music saw an opportunity to re-live the Reagan years: Bush II was in office, and the Soviets had been conveniently replaced by world terror. Music took a turn toward the rebellious at the same time that many of the 1990s genres began to appear visibly exhausted of any potential, but kept going through the motions because of a necessary faith that answers could be fond in this direction. This created an undercurrent of “counterculture II” during the George W. Bush years, but it remained unconvincing and faded quickly.

More than three decades after Black Sabbath conjured images of the dark arts, heavy metal is growing up. The genre is increasingly incorporating social and political messages into its dense power chords.

Cattle Decapitation vocalist Travis Ryan said his San Diego band’s mix of charging guitars and an animal rights message is drawing a diverse crowd that includes activists as well as traditional metal fans.

During this time pop music came to somewhat of a standstill, paused for a moment, and then began to explore past directions which had not quite been fully developed. Nu-metal rose as bands revisited rap/rock from the past two decades and made a more virulent form; pop recombined 1980s instrumentation, 1990s emotions and 1970s stadium rock to make a new form of pop. This in turn hybridized with rap and hip-hop, changing its rhythm and subject matter. As hip-hop became an accepted form of music in the mainstream pop community, rock and pop began a convergence which resulted in forms that were different on the surface but very similar at an underlying level.

It’s very hard to recognize the truth when you are bombarded by lies all the time, every minute of the day. Even in sleep, because you dream of the places you have during the day. You are bombarded by commercials and completely senseless information every minute of the day. If you turn on the TV, you are bombarded; if you turn your head in some direction, you see some sign or some commercial. If you read magazines, newspapers… senseless information. The news are themselves products being sold. Everything is meaningless. Sure, the truth is out there — not to sound like some ‘X-files’ but — the truth is of course to be found, but in a sea of lies. It’s just impossible to find it unless you know how to look, where to look and when to look. Of course, it’s not possible to just get up in the morning and just say ‘OK, I’m going to go find the truth this day,’ and go find it. You have to try, and fail, and eventually you will weed out all the lies and you end up with something at least similar to the truth. The truth is hidden, under grass, under some rocks, in a hidden trail, a forgotten trail in a forest. And when you are trying to find these trails, you will stumble, you will get snagged on branches in your face, you will make mistakes before you finally find it.

With the rise of personal computer technology, home recording had become simpler and more affordable. In the 2000s, the drive to get people on the internet manifested itself in vastly cheaper computer hardware and software. This caused a new generation of music to possess much more advanced production and to streamline toward variants of known styles that could be easily grafted on to a base of techno or dub. As a result, greater emphasis fell on the instrumental ability of those bands who chose to go the “organic” or semi-organic route. Coupled with an explosion in American education in the 1990s, including music education and a greater diversity of training materials, the technical ability of musicians and producers rose in tandem.

The 2010s: Instability Returns

When the Bush presidency ended in what seemed like universal disapproval, society launched itself in the opposite direction mandated by counterculture II and elected the first African-American President in the USA while pushing further to expand the European Union to include groups outside of Western Europe. At this point, popular music found itself unable to take a stance which reflected alienation other than on a personal level. Music became more introspective and emotional, focusing on specific issues such as environmental crises that were popularly approved, but generally tying these to a personal narrative. With the vast democratization of recording technology enabling people to produce full albums from a single computer and piece of software, more music flooded the market than ever before.

The years after that time brought great indecision to metal. It had achieved total taboo status and yet, as industry and popular desires took hold, had lost that same outlook and become assimilated by the norm. As a result, metal bands turned toward hybridization with rock and related genres, and began to adopt a more friendly attitude toward the former counter-culture values that were now mainstream. By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, heavy metal had been entirely absorbed by the culture around it except for a few die-hards. This impacted its creativity and threw the genre into a slump. At the same time, the popularity wave caused by the huge upheaval and consequent popularity of black metal for its perceived authenticity pushed metal further into the public eye. To meet this new demand, metal produced more refined versions of existing genres, mutating death metal into “technical death metal” which was essentially later hardcore merged with progressive rock and lite jazz, and fusing black metal with indie-rock, a move formalized by the transition of Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore into black metal supergroup Twilight.

The resulting cultural abyss assimilated all music which it encountered, subverting it to feed the dominant paradigm of the age which rewarded utilitarian and moral tokens based in narcissism above all else. The word “compassion” became popular as a way of gaining entry to a now-dominant counter-culture whose ideas threatened no one and thus as uncontroversial, did not assert any form of authenticity. The remaining authenticity was sought in the personal and the social, where artists addressed conditions of life without enwrapping them in any broader purpose than emotion. However, stormclouds obscured the horizon. Despite the modern assertion that all problems could be solved with education, science and technology, society appeared to be disintegrating from within. Artists had no way to address this other than to notice it, which was controversial enough that it achieved authenticity but not popularity, or to go further into re-iterating the dominant dogma through more and more personal perspectives. Becalmed in confusion, artists look toward greater extremity in an uncertain future.


III. Encountering Metal

3.1 Concerts

heavy_metal_concert

Metal concerts are generally advertised in local circulars and weekly newspapers like the LA Weekly or Houston Press. Promoters advertise in the backs of these publications, or in rare cases metal-specific magazines or papers, so fans can find concerts. When you locate a concert, call the venue, as often you can save some money buying tickets in advance or through a broker, but beware of “resale” outfits that are legal scalping agencies.

Ear protection

Amplified systems within clubs sometimes go over 120 dB in terms of effect on the listener, so it is wise to purchase intelligent ear plugs (either the silicon blobs or the compressible sponge probes). Anyone who scorns you for doing this is probably deaf already, so don’t bother replying.

Social interaction

If you walk with respect for self, others, and world, and do not interfere with the needs and spaces of others, you will almost universally be fine. You may witness violent cultures such as skinheads, cholos, or deranged Hessians on speed and the best way to handle it is gently. Provocative behavior usually will result in violence.

If you get a tshirt

Longstanding metal tradition holds that if you go to a show and purchase a tshirt, it should be worn proudly the next day to explain your bruises, new cast, dark circles under your eyes and general exhaustion.

  • (Preferred) As your sole garment except black pants all day on the following day.
  • (Acceptable) Underneath your uniform of slavery the next working or school day, hopefully wearing some mark of violence/evil as well.
  • (Deprecated) As your sole garment all day for the next three days.

Rules of evidence

Keep all “evidence” (things that are likely to be confiscated) on your person in soft objects rather than cases and put them either in obvious places (pockets) or in places that will not be found during a manual search. One is often frisked at the door and all strange hard objects explored to see if they are weapons. For example, if you are carrying smoking materials, a good place would be under the scrotum if a bag, in the wallet if rolled joints, or in your shoes if a pipe.

If you are smoking during the show, you want no flame to be visible near the scent of your smoke, so curl your hand around the joint and cup it to your mouth like you are holding your chin or clearing your throat. Always pass it to friends below the line of sight, e.g. at waist level, and blow smoke toward the floor.

Merchandise

Bands generally sell CDs and tshirts for $10-35. Bands often make their money touring on merchandise sales alone, but if you purchase during the show or within the club, the club owner may get a percentage. The preferred way to buy is before or after the show as the band is loading in or out when they can sell it to you for ready money and be free and clear. This does not work with bigger bands who have a merchandising contract. Labels often give bands a certain number of CDs in lieu of direct payment so purchasing those can keep the band on the road with the fewest additional hands extracting payment.

Here is the order of preference for buying objects in terms of how much money is returned to the band:

  1. From band at show after official merch period is over
  2. From band at show
  3. From band website or mail order
  4. From label website or mail order
  5. From underground distro
  6. From specialty record store
  7. From chain record store or large distro

If you purchase from the band directly, more of the money goes to the band; the more parties involved in any transaction, the more is skimmed off the top to those intermediate parties. For this reason, purchasing from a large generic store or mail order is the last resort, as that merch is sold by label to distributor to the final seller.

Distribution

Metal uses an internal network of underground distributors, activists, and content architects in order to ensure the distribution of music. It is a remarkably efficient chaotic machine. Most of these distros advertise in zines or magazines with contacts and price lists, but most are online at this point. A definitive list is no longer possible owing to the frequency of their appearance and disappearance.

Person to Person Sales

Net sales are common as they allow the seller to receive $6-12 for a CD that would otherwise return $2-4 at a record store or $0.50-2 at a corporate music outlet. Most transactions occur through a posted trade/sale list online. To purchase, a buyer contacts the seller and works out an arrangement through email or private message, then transfers funds via check, cash, money order or online banking. The seller then ships within a few weeks and the buyer adds that seller to a list of successful transactions; often these lists are publicized. Remember that how you treat others influences the likelihood of how you will be treated.

Tape Trading

The time-honored tradition of tape trading has allowed metalheads to find new music for the last four decades. With the rise of the internet and decline of cassette tapes, this form is less prominent. Originally it involved parties sending each other dubbed cassettes with all of their recent musical discoveries. Each party would send a tape to the other, and then dub those on to other people. This is how many early recordings got that “third generation copy” sound that was prized by black metal bands. At this time, with cassettes and recorders scarce, tape trading mostly lives on through podcasts, or short radio shows recorded live and published on the internet, either at a specific time or archived for later download.

Used CDs

Used CDs provide a good way to get a metal collection inexpensively if you trust the buyer or can inspect the CD beforehand. Record stores often make more money on used CD’s — for which they pay $2-$5 and sell for $6-$10 — than shrink-wrapped brand new versions. Hence most of them now have some form of used music display. Netwise buyers sell mostly used merchandise at often better prices especially if you buy in bulk. These also transfer any proceeds of the sale toward buying more metal. A newer breed of record stores exist which specialize in bulk resale, e.g. they have a ton of stock in a warehouse environment. These often will sell you two decades of metal for $25 or thereabouts. Large sellers like Amazon who have resale programs will often host third-party sellers posting classic metal for as little as $1-2 per disc.

3.2 Recordings

Terminology of Metal Recordings

  • Audio. Audio is any recorded sound, whether live (bootleg or live album) or studio (recorded with intent for release).
  • Live. Live sound is either a live album released by one of the band’s labels, or a bootleg recording which is released by a fan or sometimes for profit bootlegger.
  • Studio. Studio music is produced by agreement between band and label as pushed as the regular “product” containing the music of the band.
  • Video. Video is any recorded motion picture imagery, whether live (bootleg or official concert performance) or studio (recorded with intent for release as a separate production).

“I have always loved the Swede death metal guitar sound above all. Maxing the highs and lows on an old BOSS ‘Heavy Metal’ gets that heavy Entombed ‘Left Hand Path’ sound. Put the Level and Distortion each at half, then just adjust your EQ’s in your amp accordingly. You are more likely to find a BOSS ‘Heavy Metal’ at a pawn shop or something of that sort, seeing as how BOSS discontinued them a couple years ago…” – Gary (Morgion)

Recommended Works

Heavy Metal

  1. Witchfinder GeneralLive ’83
  2. Saint VitusMournful Cries
  3. CandlemassAncient Dreams

Speed Metal

  1. MetallicaRide the Lightning
  2. Nuclear AssaultGame Over/The Plague
  3. ProngBeg to Differ
  4. VoivodWar and Pain

Thrash

  1. Dirty Rotten ImbecilesDealing With It
  2. Cryptic SlaughterConvicted
  3. Dead HorseHorsecore: An Unrelated Story That’s Time Consuming
  4. Corrosion of ConformityEye for an Eye

Proto-Underground

  1. BathoryThe Return…
  2. HellhammerApocalyptic Raids
  3. SlayerHell Awaits

Speed/Death

  1. Rigor MortisFreaks
  2. KreatorExtreme Aggression

Death Metal

  1. MassacraFinal Holocaust
  2. DeicideLegion
  3. Morbid AngelBlessed Are the Sick
  4. TherionBeyond Sanctorum
  5. SepulturaMorbid Visions
  6. IncantationOnward to Golgotha
  7. Morpheus DescendsRitual of Infinity
  8. NecrophobicThe Nocturnal Silence
  9. ObituaryCause of Death
  10. SuffocationEffigy of the Forgotten
  11. AtheistUnquestionable Presence
  12. DismemberLike an Ever-Flowing Stream
  13. AmorphisThe Karelian Isthmus
  14. At the GatesThe Red in the Sky is Ours
  15. DemilichNespithe
  16. AsphyxThe Rack
  17. CarnageDark Recollections
  18. PestilenceConsuming Impulse

Grindcore

  1. RepulsionHorrified
  2. TerrorizerWorld Downfall
  3. CarbonizedFor the Security
  4. Napalm DeathFear, Emptiness, Despair
  5. BloodImpulse to Destroy
  6. PathologistGrinding Opus of Forensic Medical Problems
  7. CarcassReek of Putrefaction
  8. CianideA Descent Into Hell
  9. Bolt Thrower…For Victory

Black Metal

  1. BurzumHvis Lyset Tar Oss
  2. ImmortalPure Holocaust
  3. EmperorIn the Nightside Eclipse
  4. DarkthroneTransylvanian Hunger
  5. GravelandThe Celtic Winter
  6. BathoryBlood, Fire, Death
  7. IldjarnDet Frysende Nordariket
  8. SummoningDol Guldur
  9. GorgorothAntichrist
  10. BeheritDrawing Down the Moon
  11. EnslavedVikinglgr Veldi
  12. HavohejDethrone the Son of God
  13. MayhemDe Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
  14. SacramentumFar Away From the Sun
  15. MutiilationRemains of a Dead, Ruined, Cursed Soul
  16. VarathronHis Majesty at the Swamp

3.3 Resources

crimson_ghost

For someone concerned with historical accuracy, most of the internet provides nothing of value. Offered as underground and outsider opinion, the perspectives offered there for the most part repeat what larger media have said and distort according to the conventions of labels, but because these are popular illusions they are granted perceived authoritative status.

Instead, we suggest the following resources from the old underground:

For tracklists, band histories, and acquiring used or out of print (OOP) CDs, cassettes and vinyls:


IV. Meta

4.1 About

About this FAQ

During the early days of the internet, a form of distributed bulletin board existed for the whole net, called USENET. One of the earliest USENET hierarchies was the alt.rock-n-roll hierarchy, started to complement alt.sex and alt.drugs in the middle eighties. By the next decade, a .metal had been added and by the early nineties a new group, .metal.heavy was added to accomodate “heavier” metal, not knowing that “heavy metal” is a keyword for more commercial, rock-based offerings. Somewhere in this time alt.thrash was created for skateboarders and taken over by crossover music fans.

In order to advance this hierarchy to a contemporary state of metal knowledge, in 1993 I created the newsgroup alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death, which was followed by .progressive, .doom, and the newer hierarchy of alt.music.black-metal in the middle 1990s. Many users contributed texts during this time which encapsulated frequently sought knowledge, so I mixed those texts with my own texts that I had been developing since the late 1980s on the topic of metal. The result was the USENET version of The Heavy Metal FAQ.

As the internet has evolved, USENET has virtually disappeared and been replaced by a duality between small blogs and large sponsored sites. During this time, the need for accurate knowledge about heavy metal has accelerated because larger sites push their for-profit (or for-ideology) agenda on users, and smaller sites not only offer only fragmentary knowledge, but frequently vanish from the net. Each website now is like a user was on USENET, an atomized commodity.

The most recent edit of this FAQ addresses the changes in metal since the 1988-1996 period in which it was penned and updates the text to address a wider and more formal audience. This change is designed to counteract the predominance of non-information (marketing, propaganda) and pseudo-information (partial truths, social preferences) that currently dominates both on the internet and in the media products sold in stores.

About the Author

Brett Stevens began his life as a metal writer by writing and uploading lyrics files and record reviews to underground hacker websites like The Metal AE in the late 1980s. Since that time, he has branched out into heavy metal radio from 1992-1998, online radio, and writing about underground metal and the related communities such as nihilism, occultism, and objectivism. He has served as editor of The Dark Legions Archive, which first went online in 1991 as an open FTP directory, then Gopher server and finally a website on a series of webhosts. As the oldest and longest-running metal website, The Dark Legions Archive provides information about metal without either commercial bias or conformity to “non-conformity” based in socializing with participants in a “scene.”

You can read more here:

Inspiration

Call the Metal AE!
+1 201 879 6668 (8N1)
PW: KILL

4.2 Contact

https://www.deathmetal.org/

Death Metal Underground
PO Box 1004
Alief, TX 77411
editor@deathmetal.org

4.3 References

  1. Gabriella, “Ozzy Osbourne: The Godfather of Metal,” NY Rock, June 2002. Retrieved from http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/2002/ozzy_int.asp on September 8, 2014.
  2. J Cremer, “The birth of black metal: through the Mercyful Fate of our king,” The Copenhagen Post, October 27, 2013. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20131101030359/http://cphpost.dk//through-looking-glass/birth-black-metal-through-mercyful-fate-our-king on September 8, 2014.
  3. Varg Vikernes interview, Until the Light Takes Us, Factory 25, 2009.
  4. J. McIver, Extreme Metal II, Omnibus Press, London, 2005, p. 110.
  5. C. Alexander, “The origins of pattern theory, the future of the theory, and the generation of a living world,” speech to the 1996 ACM conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), San Diego, CA.
  6. C. Alexander, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, retrieved from http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/patterns.html on September 8, 2014
  7. Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Book VII, retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html on September 8, 2014.
  8. J. Gleick, Chaos, Penguin Books, New York, 1987, p 195.
  9. J. Campbell, The Power of Myth, Anchor, Rockland, MA, 1991, p. 14.
  10. Vikernes.
  11. M.H. Abrams, “Neoclassic and Romantic” in A Glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Orlando, FL 1993, pp. 125-129.
  12. A. Gatherer, “The Dionysian and the Apollonian in Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy,” The Oxford Philosopher, August 25, 2014. Retrieved from http://theoxfordphilosopher.com/2014/08/25/the-dionysian-and-the-apollonian-in-nietzsche-the-birth-of-tragedy/ on September 8, 2014.
  13. “Romanticism,” The Encyclopedia Brittanica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/508675/Romanticism on September 8, 2014.
  14. Ibid.
  15. L. Sterrenburg, “Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein,” In The Endurance of “Frankenstein”: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1979, pp. 143-71. Retrieved from http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/sterren.html on September 8, 2014.
  16. Ibid.
  17. R. Rocker, “Romanticism and Nationalism.” Retrieved from http://flag.blackened.net/rocker/roman.htm on September 8, 2014.
  18. “Nihilism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/ on September 8, 2014.
  19. Vikernes.
  20. Cambridge, 616
  21. H. Kohn, “Romanticism and the Rise of German Nationalism,” The Review of Politics, Volume 12 / Issue 04 / October 1950, pp 443-472. Retrieved from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5378456 on September 8, 2014.
  22. “Truth,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#SH5a on September 8, 2014.
  23. W. Heisenberg, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik”, Zeitschrift für Physik, Issue 43, Volumes 3–4, 1927, pp. 172–198.
  24. D. Allison, “Structuralism,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, Cambridge Press, Cambridge, UK, 1999, p 883.
  25. Dog 3000, “Emerson Lake & Palmer Trilogy,” Head Heritage. Retrieved from http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/1133/ on September 8, 2014.
  26. B. Sisario, “Johnny Ramone, Pioneer Punk Guitarist, Is Dead at 55,” The New York Times, September 17, 2004. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/17/arts/music/17ramone.html?pagewanted=print&position=&_r=0 on September 8, 2014.
  27. Vikernes.
  28. J Norton, “Heavy Metal Gets Socially Conscious,” The New York Times, August 10, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/10/AR2006081000925.html on September 8, 2014.
  29. Vikernes.
23 Comments

METALLICA fulfills promise to displeasure of former fans

LOS ANGELES – In the wake of increasingly insipid albums and unprecedented overexposure for Bay Area quartet Metallica, many former fans have realized to their horror that the band’s 1983 promise to neither stop nor quit has turned from a blessing to a curse.

“Man, when ‘Kill Em All’ came out, I wanted that band to last forever,” recalls ex-Metallica supporter Dave Lathrop, “That song ‘Whiplash’ was like a covenant between the band and the fans — ‘we’ll never stop, we’ll never quit, ’cause we’re Metallica’ — that they’d always be there. Who knew that they’d actually make good on it?”

Metallica, who have repeatedly maligned their valued legacy in metal music with songs such as “Ain’t My Bitch” and a squishy sonic turd on the “Mission Impossible 2” soundtrack, continues unabated and are currently in the middle of a new tour in support of their obnoxious new album, “Death Magnetic.” With no reported plans for the band to retire, original fans of the band’s pre-1990 releases are despairing of ever seeing an end to it all.

“I know what they said,” states former fan Jim Dooley, who has hated Metallica for the past 18 years, “Yeah, ‘Cause we’re Metallica’, I got it. So when are they going to fucking stop already? Christ.”

by Consvming Impvlse

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