After hermetic silence, we return to the arid plains of Jalisco, Mexico, in search of the chilling touch of undead spirit that permeated cult satanic Death Metal glory in Sargatanas’ debut album “The Enlightenment”, painstakingly detailed in our feature on the history and Weltanschauung of Mexican metal. Around the same time as Sargatanas, the essentially Latin American approach to death, mysticism and underworld powers was invoked by the rather short-lived Tenebrarum who left nothing but a legacy of one curious album. In consistency and endurance they would be overshadowed by their brothers, but “Alta Magia” is drenched with a creative, possessed instinct which makes it deserving of the mystic title. Stylistically somewhere between the chaotic pathos of dark skinned warriors of Mystifier and Italian black metallers obsessed with organs, masses and interludes, Tenebrarum juxtaposed noisy riffs and soothing breathing lapses in order to produce cerebral pleasure in annihilation of opposite principles.
Early Black Metal tended to be founded in Death Metal or Grindcore technique but an instinct for elongated, languid, even feminine architecture injected it with an atmosphere of subtle terror and reverence. “Alta Magia” goes for a simultaenous assault on senses and reason by building a Mortuary-like foundation of extremely dramatic and nuanced simple chromatic riffs, on top of which corny synthesizers exercise diverse pagan rituals as if in mockery of “vampire metal”, yet in their intensity and rather precise musical formulation approximating the most otherworldly moments of Nocturnus or even the classic progressive rock of Jacula. Some of the simpler riffs are only provocative, but the band is not one to exercise blocky repetition in the manner of Sargatanas; instead it takes delight in shock and explosiveness. This improbable, mercurial album is mostly recommended to Death Metal fans with an affection for the stylistic tenets of early Grindcore and Black Metal, as displayed for example in the ridiculous excesses of Blasphemy, Beherit and Imprecation.
What is life? A mechanistic-deterministic reaction cycle of alkaloids, proteins and nucleic acids? A quantum spell of randomness or the whim of a willing god? Certain purposefulness, subtle intentionality and synchronic magic that leaks through the cracks of everyday reality seems to invite both mystical speculation and transcendental philosophy but elude a fully satisfying rational explanation. The brain-melting reaction to existential, eschatological and essential questions such as the existence of sin and afterlife was both more rational and nihilistic (plus masculine and lofty) in the death metal of
Protestant countries of Europe (and USA), while the South European and Latin American manifestation was feminine, instinctive, intuitive and categorically destructive of the social place of human in the cosmos. The sensual Italian attack in “Into the Macabre”, enveloped by the scents of leather, sweat and blood, is by no accident a bastard brother of the proto-war metal invocations of “Morbid Visions” and “INRI”, while the technical details show that the necro-warriors spent years studying the works of Slayer and Destruction. Most of all, “Into the Macabre” is an opera of rhythm, of intense vocal timings, stampeding blastbeats and onrushing chromatic and speed metal riffs which warp under the extremely analog old tape production into ambient paysages of ghostly frequency, much like the evil and infectious “Equimanthorn” of classic Bathory. Songs like “Necrosadist” seem to have the structure of a grotesque sexual orgy where each consecutive part tops the previous in volume and hysteria, with short breathing spaces in between to capture and organize the listener’s attention. Like the aforementioned Brazilian albums, “Into the Macabre” is one of the cases where music is about as far from an intellectual exercise as one gets, into the catacombs of a devil/alcohol/glue-possessed teenager’s brain but for the discerning and maniacal old school death metal listener there is no end to the amount of pleasures, revelations and evil moments that make it seem some transcendental guidance indeed dwells at the shrine of the unholy mystic.
If we say that the average life-expectancy age in the western world is 80 and simplify things a little further by positing that half of those years are spent asleep during the night, then we’ve only got about 40 years to do some real, serious living. It’s been that many years to this day since Black Sabbath released their debut album, as good a day as you’re going to get to hail the 40th anniversary of Heavy Metal, and every single one of those years has been spent wide awake through procession of the daily sun and the darkness of the night. Heavy Metal arrived at a time to sentence a generation of delusion to death and confront the rest of modernity with the weight of reality and the power of the occult. A lot of newer generation listeners entered the Metallic planes of hell through bands that were breaking away from Heavy Metal’s Rock formalities and Blues atavisms, giving an impression that the older music was in most cases obsolete. From the moment that Sabbath had arrived and Satan unveiled his majestic black wings, the spirit of Metal was unlocked like a Pandora’s box that held all the secrets from the past and future, and the subversion of the present ensued, encoded in the language of the riff! Let us mark this unholy day with the truest celebration of Heavy Metal imagineable, as Devamitra introduces his epic compilation chronicling this wise and powerful art-culture:
History has become obscured, for few are interested to learn and explore the dawn of the barbaric and romantic sounds of metal music. All sorts of glam and joke bands are mistaken for Heavy Metal, which they aren’t, and many even believe there was never any serious merit, dark insight or focused direction to Heavy Metal in the past. The “Anvil of Thor” compilation was created to aid discourse on death metal and black metal with a friend of mine, as our musical learnings were composed in entirely different moulds and I wanted him to see the language of heavy metal with its forms, symbols and motion at least partially from my perspective. “If you don´t know the past, it´s impossible to understand the present.” Listening to these tracks in the preferred order as they appear in the playlist file, it should be easy, for example, to see how the tritone blues of Black Sabbath and the poetic narrative of Judas Priest contained the suggestion of high energy riffs as they appeared in occult bands Mercyful Fate, Death SS and Angel Witch, consequently mutating into Doom Metal in Trouble and Candlemass, Speed Metal in Slayer and Metallica and Epic Metal in Manilla Road and Manowar. This isn’t quite a “best of Heavy Metal” but one of the possible paths of seeing through core visions, techniques and moods of Heavy Metal music. For old heavy metal fans, it will hopefully revive fond memories of these sinister and majestic LP’s and for others, broaden the perception and hopefully bestow surprises.
Anvil of Thor – Heavy Metal Thunder Compilation
Filed under: Death Metal Essays and Death Metal Research,Death Metal News — Tags: Heavy Metal, Occultism, Religion, Satan, Speed Metal — ObscuraHessian @ February 13, 2010 02:58 — Comments (10)