You know your nation has reached peak sadism when kids are using the shooting deaths of their classmates to catapult themselves into celebrity stardom. That means the time has come for frequent, merciless, rapid fire sadistic metal reviews.
In an unexpected turn of events, Mortal-Kombat-tier Norwegian opera-metallers Dimmu Borgir have gone full on symphonic power metal in their new song. Embracing the trending female fronted power/quest metal sound that has replaced metalcore as the newest wave of a strange phenomenon known as “girlfriend metal” (the metal your girlfriend puts on while she’s cleaning the house), Dimmu have essentially robbed the sound of Nightwish, Epica, and Within Temptation while yet retaining the Hollywood-orc vocals of Shagrath. While moments resembling early Blind Guardian are in fact an improvement over a preceding album that was almost completely devoid of guitars, this is by no means quality power metal nor is it the hybrid of older Dimmu styles that the band has been mouthing off about the past few months.
Before you ask, the answer is no; you haven’t overdosed on power metal yet. You’re still alive and reading about how Nightwish, Sonata Arctica, and Delain (whom I’ve never heard of but was apparently formed by an ex-member of Within Temptation) are about to tour the United States and Canada. If you absolutely had to hear tracks from Endless Forms Most Beautiful in a live context, now might present a golden opportunity for you, or at least a yellowish one. However, this tour is apparently popular enough that some of its earlier dates have already sold out. Expect musical literacy, science advocacy, overblown melodrama, and whatever Sonata Arctica does to rule these nights.
It has been said that there is non-overlapping magisteria confining the world of scientific inquiry outside the the realm of “human purposes, meanings, and values.” (Stephen J. Gould) John Keats once said science presents a “cold philosophy” with a “dull catalogue of common things” that reduces life to terms insufficient to the subjective needs of man. Upon this assertion they then heap arguments of moral relativism, theology, and social revision which are based on their personal feelings and beliefs. This is common for religious or political figures but one also encounters this thinking in artists as well. In conversation one can easily find an artist prattling on about how x-piece speaks to man’s soul, or how true beauty lies in one’s personal interpretation, and that judgement is merely a subjective experience, that art itself communicates on levels that can not be directly observed or defined. All manner of feeble logic can you encounter, yet there is at heart a mirroring of intention. What they attempt is to self insulate from reproach, to self aggrandize through idealizing, and to manipulate your willingness to believe comforting thoughts. Because, to them, empirical definitions inundate the mind with a materialist philosophy that somehow cuts out the beauty from the universe around them. They say life is “too mad for mere material chains to bind” (Alexander Pope), and that “knowledge is not happiness, and science but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.”(Lord Byron) (more…)
Music analysis and judgement (of any of its attributes or as a whole) can be done from different vantage points and with different emphases. Generally speaking, there are a few main approaches that are common in pop and metal reviews. Some judge it by its production qualities and its popularity, that is, mainly as a marketable commercial product. Others that are inclined to “feeling” the music will base their reviews on technically uninformed emotional impressions of the music. Others with a limited but comprehensive understanding of the technical will judge music as if it were a contraption, even being able to separate emotional impressions from material achievements of music. These are broad categories but individual reviewers usually fall in grey areas in between them with stronger tendencies towards one or another.
DMU’s approach has traditionally been one of judging music as romantic-era (19th century) literary and music critics would: an attention to evocative results as a function of technical means with a holistic emphasis. What this means is that what is most important is the final and total result and not the individual merits. Additionally, we focus on the lasting evocative power arising from a layered and technically (at the composition level) competent work that moves beyond the technicality itself while not disregarding the musical balance it provides. In music we see the construction of Gothic cathedrals and not modern skyscrapers.
A useful analogy can be made between detailed music appreciation and reverse engineering in software engineering. Some might jump at the thought of comparing the two since “music is not a computer program” but these are nonsensically reductionist complaints. Anyone who truly understands how an analogy works knows that the source of its power arises from the insurmountable distance between the two obviously disparate objects being placed beside each other. The distance and disparity only serves to bring to the fore and underscore the characteristics we are interested in, achieving greater clarity by a negation of the irrelevant. The objects are not equated, they are superimposed. More precisely the main object under analysis is transposed into the space of the second one being used as an analogy.
To understand reverse engineering we must understand the order and direction of original construction. A vague idea is conceived usually behind a foggy screen since the builders have not yet figured out the details of how they will bring this into reality. Then, a step a time and usually with deviations from the original concept, the “material” shape of the concept comes into being. At the other end, when we are presented with a piece of software to reverse engineer, that is to say, to analyze and understand in terms of its parts, what we can see is the materialized concept only. The first step is to understand what this piece of software exactly does as we do not know how it was built. We get to understand what it does by categorizing input and output relations, which direct us towards an understanding its behavior in different situations — different contexts. The result of a successfully reverse-engineered software program is a piece of code whose compiled object behaves the same as the original one in every conceivable way possible. This code is most probably different from the original one, but this is irrelevant since the importance of this code is the understanding and reproducing of the final piece of software. Original software building moves from details and into the solidification of a vision. Reverse engineering moves from the solidified vision and into the details.
In other words, what matters most is the total end result (as in music or software engineering) and not the judging of parts for their own sake (but only in relation as to how they affect that end result). This is why it is important as an analyst to move in a backward manner. But for this to be valuable, the person must understand this holistic result first, and this is only achieved through study and knowledge. This is comparable to the analyst of software who needs to not only see the input and output relations but understand higher-level concepts and probabilistic tendencies derivable from those. In the same way the analyst of music must through his own lenses and knowledge grasp a picture of the whole in its relations between harmony, rhythm and melody derive a map of sequences of movements and balances.
Going from the general to the specific enables us to keep a holistic view in focus. It helps us place the sum of the parts over the individual parts themselves. Trying to pick out the traits first and then judging the whole by making a recapitulation of these is not only obfuscating the whole which some with a more limited understanding judge to be impossible to put in objective terms but can be deceiving of just what the true quality of this work actually is.
To illustrate this point we can observe how appreciation of many so-called progressive acts is carried out. The positive reviews of these usually entail a shopping list of traits to be filled. Tempo changes, signature changes, contrasting moods, variety of instrumentation, instrumental competence, catchy and captivating melodies perhaps, too. An album like Dream Theater’s Images and Words fits these requirements to the letter and yet the result is a messy carnival train wreck that expresses nothing in particular precisely because there is no view of the whole in mind as a musically-balanced entity, but only as a sequence of cool moments.
This phenomenon can also occur through ignorance of what music constitutes. This happens in pop and the so-called symphonic metal, which I will re-baptize with a more honest name: metal-like pop, or just metal pop. In this vein, an album like Nightwish’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful is received by its fans and judged primarily in terms of how catchy it is. How effective its hooks are and how much they will like its melodies. Arguably a more musically honest affair than the pseudo prog of Dream Theater, this reduces music to only one of its many aspects and judges the whole by its effectiveness.
Finally, I would like to mention the often mis-appreciated Obscura by Gorguts. Ignorant and pretentious journalist twats like Anthony Fantano spewing almost nonsensical and musically irrelevant descriptions such as “intense technicality”, “noisy surprises” and “dizzying structures” of Gorguts’ music in Coloured Sands represent the epitome of the post-modernist hipster’s appreciation of the band’s music. While popular arguments in favor of Obscura include how “technical” it is (while most fans barely even grasp what this actually entails, they think it has to do with how difficult it is to play or hear), how foreboding its atmosphere is while remaining “brutal” (an obviously superficial judgement of quality) or even worse, how “original” (by which they mean different) it is. They’ve basically reduced a masterpiece to “difficult to play and listen to, brutal and quite different from most stuff out there”.
The merits of Obscura are far more subtle than that, as are any real merits resulting from true excellence. The degree to which it sounds superficially different comes from a use of the riff that I would call mystical. That is to say, the riffs and their harmony here no longer represent what they traditionally do, but they remain significant in terms of the operations they build in the context of their neighboring riffs. They stop being translucent symbols that show the way into a harmonic and melodic conclusion and they become opaque, acquiring new meaning — a specific musical function dictated by their author– determined by their positions at different moments that instead causes the mind to reach that conclusion on its own through coherent indirection and dissimilitude of expression within a consistent language. In this, Obscura is the death metal counterpart to Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger.
Stepping away from the dynamic picture that music is and listening for the total results and relations in the big picture enable us to know exactly what to look for as explanations for these. In a way it implies focusing on an interplay between the subjective (our impressions of the whole) and the objective (the music structures themselves) to locate music — itself an expression of beauty, to which the dichotomy of objective and subjective is inapplicable — somewhere in between.
Playing a so-called melodic death metal in the vein of Insomnium, Chronicles try to step up onto the pop metal stage the . Infused with alternative metal inspirations and backed by keyboards playing standard progressions and happy-inspirational melodies, the only thing that tells us this is a metal release is that the drums are intense and that the vocals are growls. The squeaky-clean production is enviable and on par with pop metal divas Nightwish. The way the music elements are carried, the contrast between sections that serve as verse-chorus rather than phrasal progressions place this squarely in the pop modality. The percussive riff carrying the voice, the single-mindedness of the contrasting riffs also point towards a metalcore inspiration. By the third track (which is actually the second song in the album) they have already introduced mellow and comforting young-man vocals. In line with the modern tradition, when attempting to create variety, the band introduces incoherence in their music. Song’s are basically a long “inspirational melody” intro, pointless verse-chorus exchange, incoherent bridge and unrelated outro and/or verse chorus.
M.H.X.’s Chronicles have managed to unite in Infinite Ocean the diva-esque attitude of Nightwish, the boring melodic-based flatness of Insomnuim, the superficial pretentiousness of Epica and the easy-catchy, dumbed-down songwriting of metalcore inspired on Slaughter of the Soul. In other words we have here the summary of modern metal pop banality.
Sadistic Metal Reviews function as your goto list for albums that should be recycled as material for making more copies of actually good music, if that’s even possible. These releases deserve no better than to be piled up and flattened by a machine. They’re wasting space and resources on completely useless, half-assed art. Ethereal – Opus Aethereum (2015)
Playing a pseudo-symphonic black metal, Ethereal play a speed metal blanketed by racing, blasting drums with no creativity at all. The blanket comes in the form of the synth special “orchestral” effects which outline melodies on top of the repetitive music which never builds up to anything. The emphasis of the music is on how fast and brutal it is alone, in the spirit of the gimmicks of Godflesh Apocalypse. There are a few beautiful moments here and there in the album and this is the sort of candy some people will latch on to, but as an integral music work, it is of extremely sparse quality. Mellevon – Solace (2015)
Somehow trying to unite ambient, pop “metal” and deathcore, Mellevon embarrass themselves with this blatant attempt at making pseudo-progressive music, the modern misconception of what progressive music is. The songs are driven by groovy rhythms in power chords, alternated by single-string tremolos that are just the backbones for chords (as opposed to being motifs), with a synth outlining the Epica/Nightwish – like melodies with a modern cliche “prog” twist. Opium Lord – Eye Of Earth (2015)
Your typical sludge-like experience, this band’s music goes nowhere. It all relies on one rhythm, one riff and the pushing of this sole element by upholding how “heavy” it is. Representing one of the most superficial genres, Opium Lord give us 7 tracks with 10 riffs that are “ultra-heavy”. Get ready to headbang, brainless potheads. Saturnian Mist – Chaos Magick (2015)
Saturnian Mist play a cheap brand of alternative metal that tries very hard to be tough and to insert “extreme” elements to sound tougher. The whole attitude of this band seems to be based on that all too common sentiment of posing at being a tough kid. The songs follow a pop format, and are based on chords with screamed lyrics on top of them. Major impact is in the contrast of certain sections. Endings are just abrupt, the songs do not lead from one clear point to another, but are rather just very messy. Svärta – Sepultus (2015)
Ah, the black metal stereotype of flat-dynamics throughout a song have lead so many astray. With the idea tha black metal consists only on flat and intense sound repeated ad nauseam without any other aim than “Creatng atmosphere”, Svärta gives the world yet another bland modern black metal album. This band at least has the sense to be relatively consistent and they try to bring riffs back, or their main ideas at least. The lacking vision shows most clearly when they insert sections with no drums and clean guitar strums out of the blue with little relation to the rest of the song in order to create the cliche anti-climax that the unimaginative minds can summon as their only proposition. Cold Cell – Lowlife (2015)
More pseudo black metal from the modern sludge crowd with post-metal tendencies. They try to “improve” on black metal by bringing in more clean picked chords, inserting more blank spaces in the music and forcing variety on songs. Not the kind of variety that is linked strongly within a song through different musical dimensions, but the kind of variety that results from not fucking knowing what to write and so being forced to insert whatever comes into your mind. This is not creativity, this is mediocrity. Nightwish – Forms Most Beautiful (2015)
Representing the cheapest moves by the so-called symphonic metal bands, Nightwish makes songs with long, varied intros that vary from straight-up pop flares to the modern pseudo-prog groovy intros. Do not let anything here fool you, this is is just simple and low-quality pop music with catchy leads. The entire value fans of this music give it is reduced t “nice melodies”. It’s insulting that these people even want to sell themselves as metal. This is pop music, accept it once and for all and put all these candy-rock pop in the shelf next to Miley Cyrus. Profezia – Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem (2015)
More intense, low-fi black metal that does nothing but ride a riff and repeat it until the band feels it has filled enough minutes. Combine this with slower tracks to create variety and you have more repetitive songs that try very hard at the same trope of “creating atmosphere” by virtue of their repetition. This is as tiring on its own as it is as a result of having heard this approach by countless other mediocre bands.
