Metallica brings metal and classical closer together

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For their performance at the Grammy awards, Metallica paired up with Chinese pianist Lang Lang for a performance of their dramatic protest song “One” originally from …And Justice for All.

According to VH1, the bond was formed in just 45 minutes of practice time the day before the performance. As you can see below, the result was smoothly integrated despite this lack of extensive practice.

Metal and classical share a defining trait in that both use narrative composition, or knitting together riffs to develop a theme over the course of a piece. This is in contrast to pop music, which is essentially binary, formed of a verse-chorus pair and a “contrast” via a bridge or turnaround. Thus Metallica’s knotwork of riffs and Lang Lang’s melodic development through structured composition are entirely compatible.

The question remains whether metal will adopt this outlook as anything other than a surface aesthetic. If it does, expect metal songs to get more densely riffy and longer with contorted structures like progressive rock, which derived its song structuring principles from classical as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c58EfMhd2YE

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MIT teaches heavy metal

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Academia did not always embrace metal. When I suggested the idea in the early 1990s, it was mostly laughed off, with some notable exceptions. But the point remained: heavy metal is a unique art form in our society and a powerful indicator of our unfolding history.

Metal is unique among popular music genres because it is not dedicated to the individual, but that which is beyond the individual’s control, such as power and fate. It is also unique in that it does not preach pacifism, love, social behavior and comfort, but instead alienation, independent thought, feral amorality and nihilism. It is in short that which resists social control and rejects the notions of sociality, like guilt and love, that are used to keep social order. Metal is the lone wolf of all music.

Starting a few years ago academia began to dig into metal. Most of them are looking at it from the surface, using familiar tropes from academia, but they are starting to dig deeper. The next step is to see heavy metal for itself and to understand it on its own terms.

As a brick in this long and winding road, MIT’s Heavy Metal 101 is an attempt to introduce metal through history and musicology. The course has been going since 2006 and incorporates a number of metal albums with a somewhat “the best sellers write history” viewpoint, but otherwise hits all the right notes or at least bands.

The future of the class isn’t in doubt but the question remains whether MIT will open it up further as they have done with other classes. As MIT’s alumni page notes, “The remaining seminars will be held January 23 and 30 from 5-6 p.m. and are free and open to the public.” If we’re really lucky, they’ll make them into open courseware so anyone worldwide can participate or at least watch.

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Stormbound Books bridges academic and popular writing about metal

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As people who enjoy heavy metal in all its forms and wish it to succeed, we keep an eye out for upcoming metal journalism and history projects that have a realistic yet spirited portrayal of the art form and its origins. One such project was , written by author Salva Rubio, who has now launched his newest venture, Stormbound Books.

Unlike most metal publishers so far, Stormbound Books aims to bridge the gulf between academic metal writing including histories, and the type of popular metal literature that exists for the music fan whose interest is primarily in the music and not the study of it. Read on for a description of the publisher, its team, and how it plans to conquer the world of metal journalism.

What will Stormbound Books offer that is not currently available to metalheads?

Shortly we will start offering what we call “Blast Reads” (studies longer than articles and shorter than regular books) dealing with specific points such as the influence of Gothic Rock music in Extreme Metal or the presence of Satan in Western culture and its culmination on Extreme Metal. We think that up to now, no other publisher offers these kind of studies on Metal.

On the other hand, we will publish books dealing with larger subjects, and we will offer the English-speaking readers translations such as “Extreme Metal” by Salva Rubio, which has gotten great reviews in the Spanish speaking world, or “Slow Metal”, an study in doom, drone, sludge, etc currently in the works by the same author.

Who do you think are the people who will be interested in your texts?

We think there is a wide array of metalheads that can be interested in our books, starting with the newcomers (we will have some introductory guides for them, such as “Opening the Tomb: An Introduction to Extreme Metal,” “Extreme Metal Appreciation” or “Into the Abyss: Introduction to Death Metal”).

But also, we think experienced metalheads will find studies of their interest, such as the aforementioned “Diabolus in Arte: Satan in Western Culture and Extreme Metal” and other thematic studies currently in the works, such as “The Universe of H.P. Lovecraft in Extreme Metal” and the tentatively called “Battle Cries: War themes in Western Culture and Extreme Metal” which will be finished in the next months. Also, we are very open to the idea of publishing other authors. Check our guidelines and let us know of your projects.

You have an unusual business model involving “giving away” texts and asking people to pay for them later. Can you tell us how this will work?

This is actually a very common strategy in the e-book market: we plan to freely give away some titles to use them as promotion samples and we aim to have interesting “special sales days” in which we will drop the prices and give freebies for a limited time. This is a rather difficult thing to do in the “paper book” industry, but it’s really manageable in the e-book industry.

If you are interested in receiving these freebies and promotions, we sincerely advise you to join our mailing list, since it will be our main tool for communicating them.

Reviewers, bloggers, journalists, etc interested in getting copies for review should contact us here, making sure to tell us which magazines / zines / webzines you write for.

You can find us also in Facebook and Twitter.

What’s the background on Stormbound books’ staff, and how did all of them get involved with metal?

We like to think of ourselves as one of the many small, underground record labels in Metal (only that we will publish books instead of records), created by a musician (writer, in this case) to distribute our own, and others’ material. This is our ethos and of way of working.

Right now, Stormbound Books is comprised of me, Salva Rubio, author of the majority of the books to be published for now. I am into Extreme Metal since the early nineties, I am an Art Historian, I have played in a couple of metal bands and I am the author of the book Metal Extremo: 30 Años de Oscuridad (1981-2011) which is currently running at its 4th Edition in the Spanish speaking world. Should you want to know more about me or the book, check my profile at DeathMetal.Org.

As for my partner, Jimena Díaz Ocón, she is mainly into Black Metal and Industrial and she is a graphic designer, layout artist and website / book programmer, so we are a really small yet complete team.

We are fortunate enough to have an experienced writer such as Brett Stevens from DeathMetal.Org (as you know, “the net’s oldest and longest-running metal site”) taking care of the copy editing and style correction.

Do you think we’re at a turning point for heavy metal texts, such that there’s more interest than say ten years ago?

That is correct, I definitely think there is more interest because most of the texts published until now about Extreme Metal have been written mainly from the journalistic or critical points of view, but there are many cultural fields (literature, aesthetics, philosophy, politics) that can uncover many interesting points in Extreme Metal and Heavy Metal and which fans and readers are willing to discover and discuss. That is our goal.

salva-rubio
Salva Rubio: author, screenwriter and metalhead. From his website.

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Near Death Condition prepare Evolving Towards Extinction

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Swiss extreme death metal band Near Death Condition plan to unleash their sophomore full-length Evolving Towards Extinction on Unique Leader Records.

Evolving Towards Extinction was mixed at famed Hertz Studios (Vader, Hate, Dead Infection, Vesania etc.) in Poland and mastered at Iguana Studios in Germany.

Track List:

  1. Words Of Wisdom
  2. Between The Dying And The Dead
  3. Intelligent Design
  4. Pandemic Of Ignorance
  5. Praise The Lord Of Negation
  6. The Anatomy Of Disgust
  7. Anagamin
  8. Evolving Towards Extinction
  9. Vertigo
  10. Communing With Emptiness
  11. Nostalgia For Chaos

Founded in the band members’ native Switzerland thirteen years ago, Near Death Condition unleashed their “Delusional Perception Of Reality” demo in 2005 which earned Near Death Condition a signing with noted brutal death metal label Unique Leader. In 2011 the band released their first album, The Disembodied – In Spiritual Spheres.

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Slayer releases May tour dates

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Those who read this site on a regular basis know of our devotion to the unholy triad who invented underground metal, namely Slayer, Hellhammer and Bathory. You can see one of these bands, albeit missing one original guitarist and drummer, as Slayer comes to your town this may.

2013 brought some good and some bad, but the shockingly and disturbingly bad was the loss of Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman. Nothing can really be said here except that he was the voice of a generation — Generation X — and one of the few people to spin a truthful line about reality instead of writing “yeah yeah yeah” and some chat about hooking up with girls in discotheques.

With Gary Holt (Exodus) on guitars and Paul Bostaph (Forbidden) on drums, Slayer rattles onward with original members Tom Araya and Kerry King rounding out the lineup. With tourmates Suicidal Tendencies and Exodus, both members of that liminal time in the early 1980s when all of these genres formed, Slayer will be visiting the following cities in May, with more dates to be posted soon:

  • May 9 The Great Saltair, Salt Lake City, UT
  • May 10 Fillmore, Denver, CO
  • May 11 Shrine, Billings, MT
  • May 13 Uptown Theatre, Kansas City, MO
  • May 15 The Pageant, St Louis, MO
  • May 16 Eagles Ballroom, Milwaukee, WI
  • May 17 Rock on the Range, Columbus, OH
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Dead Infection – A Chapter of Accidents (2002)

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The simpler the music is, the harder it is to execute in an interesting way. The best of grindcore rises to this challenge by inventing ways of making texture expand upon a simple riff idea. Like grandmasters Carcass before them, Dead Infection use a gurgling bass deluge to convey a hidden complexity.

A Chapter of Accidents benefits from its concept, which is anchored in lyrics, and gives to each song a different set of needs because each is a short narrative or story relating an unfortunate and often miserably ironic incident. This bends the song structure to the story, which consists of a setup, a quandary, a revelation and a conclusion, and thus allows the band to adapt its grinding riffs to a simple but not simplistic process of development. As in most grindcore, the main riff repeats with interruptions; some of these are offsets, which are like counterpoints formed of different shapes or rhythms, but others are deviations to small motifs which represent parts of the story. As a result, most of what you hear when listening to Dead Infection is one powerful, thunderous and bounding riff that breaks for contrary views, thought-detours and development by layering, where drums or guitars either double-time or vary texture to add complexity.

Where Carcass is slower and is based on what sounds like 1930s-1950s music translated into power chords and made ironic with grotesque lyrics, Dead Infection is more like a troupe of mercenaries backpacking through the mountains on their way to set up an assassination or coup in that it is self-contained and for its own purposes only. It sometimes plays with riff motifs from the past, like heavy metal riffs reduced to their simplest essence, but essentially it is its own thing: a vocabulary of grindcore adapted to this type of worldview. Combine that with the vocals that sound like a dog guarding the gates of hell, and you have a formidable but thought-provoking package.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oASEW0QZlI

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Interview with Dom from MetalRecusants.com

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Photo: Paradise Lost from a MetalRecusants.com article, by Vivien Varga.

Online resources for metal pose a problem. On one hand, smaller entities tend to dry up and blow away as their members move on in life and get tired of paying hosting. On the other, large centralized resources are quickly gamed by industry and dominating by small in-groups. Thus the post-modern metalhead always has an eye out for new resources.

A recent entrant in this field is Metal Recusants, a semi-unorthodox site known for its wise-ass reviews and scathing commentary on the metal scene. We were fortunate to be able to get in some words with Dom, head reviewer and site founder, on his activity and the appeal of Metal Recusants in a time of increasing metal information overload.

What’s a “recusant,” why did you pick the term, and how does it describe what you do?

“Recusant,” similarly to “non-conformist,” is a term taken from English history. Recusants were Catholics in England who did not convert to the new Anglican religion. I thought of this term because I was looking for something similar to non-conformism. As you wrote on your site, metalheads do not conform easily and that is the message I want to pass on with this name. I think it fits in perfectly with our mission to promote less-known “underground” music but also in describing the “underground” way we write in and organise ourselves.

Our aim is to not only feature the most obscure metal band that no one knows about but also to provide a balance of the less-known acts with the better-known ones. Additionally, there are many opinions, different tastes and different writing styles that people have. I aim to highlight this with our site by not having strict writing guidelines. Apart from the way our articles are formatted I do not ask our writers to write in a certain style. I do not want MetalRecusants to become the next fruitless mainstream metal magazine in which you cannot easily tell the difference between reviews apart from the album name and the rating.

In many cases they are all written in the same way, most commonly in the third person the writer distances himself/herself from the music and gives an authoritative opinion of the music… Therefore, I do not ask our writers to write in the first or third person, I do not tell them to write in British or American English, I do not ask them to write “death metal” in capitals or small letters. Moreover, I do not ignore genres or sub-genres which I may not like. For instance, I hate metalcore but you can see that we have featured that sub-genre quite a few times. There is no one single music taste which is superior or better, we all have different styles whether it is the way we write or the music we choose to listen to. No one on this planet is a “metal guru” who tells you what you should listen to. We write our opinions in our own way and we let you decide whether you want to check that band out or ignore it.

“Recusant” is also an obscure term, a word not used in everyday language, and, hence, whether someone remembers the word correctly or not, he or she will remember that that is the site with the weird name – which is actually the majority of people, haha!

Apparently MetalRecusants.com started after you’d been writing other reviews. Where did you write, and what was the reaction?

I did not have any experience writing for other websites or magazines prior to starting this site. I have only been writing personal reviews on my last.fm journal after attending gigs and discovering new music. Therefore, the audience was usually my family and friends as well as the odd last.fm user who would stumble upon my writing. The reaction from my family and friends was great, everyone supported me, especially my parents and siblings. I always have the urge to share the stuff I discover if not by writing articles then by sending out emails or messages. On some occasions some friends and family learnt about new bands through me while on other I was just being a nuisance by filling their inboxes with messages.

Do you consider yourselves “elitists”? What is an elitist? How is that different from a snob, poseur, scenester and hipster?

Not at all. As I mentioned before, even though I am the one taking most of the big decisions for MetalRecusants, I still feature music which I may not like but my writers like and want to write about. Since my aim is to feature all kinds of metal (and non-metal with our “31 Flavors” series) music and I do not decide what music is featured by just looking at how the band dresses or if they are labelled as metalcore or black metal, I can safely say that I do not consider MetalRecusants as elitist.

What is an elitist? In metal, the most common term I came across of an elitist person is someone who listens to only the most obscure underground metal – usually death and black – and hates anything else unless it is an old band which had an impact on the metal scene.

I think elitists have many parallels with snobs, poseurs, scenesters and hipsters. They certainly tend to follow a certain limited type of music while ignoring other types. However, poseurs, snobs, scenesters and hipsters may be doing it more in order to show off and fit into a scene. This happens a lot in metal as well but I think the “elitism”, “hipsterism” and “scenesterism” in metal is much more than just showing off. It is a community in which you share the music you listen to with like-minded people.

That is why going to small club metal shows is my favourite activity because the atmosphere is very intimate and makes you feel like at home. Wherever you may find a metalhead, you straight away have something to talk about – you may not have the same tastes and opinions but who does? Metalheads may seem to be elitist but I think it happens in many cases because they have found what they like, they learnt which labels, magazines and venues they can rely on. They feel comfortable with that and I think that is perfectly healthy as long as you keep your mind open of course and do not start following blindly these institutions – something which unfortunately is happening in metal. Sometimes I think commercialism is taking over and some people are becoming victims of it by following things blindly. Sorry, I am straying away from the main topic so I will just stop here!

Do you treat other genres with the same outlook? Is heavy metal different from other genres, with — dare I say it — heavy metal “exceptionalism” such that it merits different treatment?

I always used to (and still do) compare heavy metal to classical music. I do that because when I was crazily into Iron Maiden at the age of 12-13, I would compare their three guitars and all the layers of their music to an orchestra. Being brought up with a variety of music, going to music school in the afternoons almost every day, caused me to draw parallels with classical music. The more I listened to stuff like Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin (which is playing almost constantly in my parents’ living room), the more I could compare it to metal music. Since this was happening in my early teens, it made me into a kvlt (or elitist) metalhead with easy justifications that metal is the only “just” genre in popular music because it has such serious and historical roots!

You could say I matured a bit now as in the same day you can see me listening to stuff such as Vader, ABBA, Beethoven, The Doors, Pearl Jam or Immortal. Anything goes really. It’s all music in the end. To answer your question, I do not think metal should be treated differently than other genres but I do think it is as much of a serious genre as classical music and it has a rich and fruitful history. Heavy metal is already not treated the same way as all the other genres, therefore, I believe, the greater society should start treating heavy metal seriously and not as just some teenager’s rebellious phase.

Is metal an art form, entertainment, both or does it straddle the line? Is there a difference between Beethoven’s Fifth or “Journey to the End of the Night” and Miley Cyrus (“Bangerz”) or “Game of Thrones”?

In most cases, I see metal more as an art form rather than entertainment. The fact that the majority of metal musicians create the music first for themselves, they make music based on how they are inspired, makes it art. They do not care how it is received by the greater public. If you start caring how your music is received by the average person, then that means you are not creating art anymore, you are trying to sell a product to a certain audience.

Metal is not all about entertaining people, however, metal creates great music to rock out to on a night out, right?! I know this has been talked about in all documentaries and interviews and it sounds like a cliché but the following is true: metal music is always there with you and for you. It can make you smile, laugh, cry, feel depressed or be there just as a great soundtrack to getting drunk (or whatever else you might want to poison yourself with). You can only understand this if you truly get into heavy metal by listening to the albums, reading about the bands’ history and going to the shows.

What do you look for in a band that makes you think favorably of them and possibly write a favorable review? Do you treat demo and first album bands differently from established acts on major labels?

There are various things to look out for but I am always up for surprises. Actually, if I listen to a band expecting something totally different and I end up loving it then we have a winner. Nonetheless, for a band to receive a favourable review from me, the music has to reach out to me emotionally and bring me into a certain state of mind. There is no mathematical equation for this really. Some piece of music can reach out more to you than me or the other way around. And here I am talking about myself – I can’t speak for the other writers on our team. They may disagree with me.

Everyone is treated the same by us. Of course, I love to listen to demos and new bands – recently I discovered Dismemberment and we streamed Thunderwar’s debut EP The Birth of Thunder. Because we receive LOADS of requests every week, we end up picking randomly the music we feature. There is only so much we can do since this is not a full-time job for us. Therefore, I would like to aim this to any bands or record labels which got in touch with us and never heard back or did not see their music on our site: please keep getting in touch with us, maybe in a few months we will feature you.

About how many people come through MetalRecusants every day (or month)? Has this gone up over the past year?

The numbers keep increasing every couple months or so. At the moment we have on average 4,000 unique visitors per month. If I remember correctly, half way through or towards the end of 2012, we had some 1,000 visitors, so yeah, the numbers are going up all the time. It is overwhelming when I think that I had literally zero people coming in when I started this as a blog in 2011. The more writers we got, the more bands we featured then the numbers kept going up.

Can you give us your (Dom) background in writing, music and theory? Does your day job/school overlap with your metal identity and life? Do the people in your daytime world understand your nighttime world (metal) or are the two incompatible?

I was brought up with all kinds of music in my family and I went to music school until the age of 19 where I did music theory, history and learnt to play piano and guitar (both classical and electric). My background in writing? I am a History student at the University of Essex in the UK – and currently as an exchange at Purdue University in Indiana, USA – so I guess I get to do a lot of writing like most students do! I think having this website and being a humanities student benefits me both ways because I am now used to writing all the time but it is also improving my writing style.

So far, I did not have to “sacrifice” my metal way of life for my university studies and social life. On the contrary, I will be writing a dissertation about heavy metal behind the Iron Curtain and I have met some wonderful metal (and non-metal as well) people while at university. At Essex there is a Metal Society of which I was an “executive” last year. We did – and they still keep doing – loads of awesome stuff; from organising simple socials at the bar to hosting our own metal nights on campus. I had an amazing time with those people and I am looking forward to going back in June and seeing all of them again as well as meeting any new faces!

MetalRecusants does not rate (assign a numerical value to) a band. Can you go into depth about why you don’t like this method?

That is correct! So people actually notice this? Haha! I always found album ratings ridiculous and especially the ones with decimal points. I mean, seriously, 98.6% or 5.5/10?! Focus on more how the music on the disc in front of you communicates with you, what do you feel when you listen to it? Does it make you smile, laugh or cry? Be creative, let us know how you feel instead of coming up with a weird ranking table. I actually talked about this with the great guys from Cattle Decapitation, we had some laughs about some of the Metal-Archives reviewers.

Music, in most cases, for me is an art form. I do not understand how I can give a numerical value to an album. An album/band rating is misleading, in my opinion, because if someone sees a 3/10 rating, he or she will most probably disregard that album. That person would not have noticed that there might have been something in that album that he/she might have enjoyed. However, if there is no rating, that person can read a balanced and detailed review of the music and come across elements of the music that he/she might have not learnt by looking at the rating. I just find album ratings to be limiting one’s imagination.

Do you think there’s a hazard to over-simplifying ideas expressed in written form? What makes an effective review/article for you?

It can be a hazard but all you have to do is choose the right words. To be honest, sometimes I can’t be bothered to read through a 1,000 word article. Therefore, it is nice to see articles with embedded music players or videos. We have a rule of at least 300 words per article (excluding news posts) on MR which equates to a longer paragraph, which is not that much. As long as the review/article goes into depth about the aforementioned qualities of the music (that we are told whether the writer felt anything while listening to the music) and also given a brief background about the band’s history then it doesn’t matter whether it is a 300 or 2,000 word article.

Can you give us a bit of background on MetalRecusants, i.e. what year it began, how it has grown, and where it’s going in the future?

I started MetalRecusants in March 2011 during my last year of high school on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus. I somehow started getting more and more familiar and associated with the Cypriot metal scene. A German black metal band, Ctulu, got in touch with me about playing on the island and doing an interview so I gave them the contact details of all the promoters I knew and also contacted them myself to get them to the island – guess what? They played on the island twice so far and I’m now good friends with them, we keep meeting at Wacken Open Air almost every year. Regarding the interview, I decided – after being convinced by members of Cypriot death metal act Vomitile – to start a blog with my friend from school, Christian, since there were no proper active zines in Cyprus; there was only a forum (Cy-Metal) and zines from Greece, nothing truly Cypriot though. As you can see though, I did not make this site into a site about the Cypriot metal scene; I wanted something more than that, haha! There are many great bands in Cyprus though.

As I wrote before, the site has grown because we kept on writing and writing and getting more contributors. It works on a word of mouth basis really. We write a review, a band shares it on their pages, people like it or dislike it and we get recognised. It is important that bands and record label share these reviews – especially at the early stages.

What does the future hold for us? Well, I want to keep on carrying the flame and continue what we are doing as long as possible. I would like one day to start paying all my writers for their hard work but that’s the future. One thing which will definitely not change is that we will keep on writing honest articles and we will never rate releases!!!

Do you think the metal industry has changed over the past few years? Have any genres waned? What seems to be “happening” now?

I actually ask a similar question in some of my band interviews. I like older bands to compare the times when they were starting out to now. I think I came to an agreement with Jonas Renkse of Katatonia/Bloodbath that the metal scene has become more “professional” over the years, it turned into this proper metal music industry which lost that “underground” spirit which was more evident in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I was not really present in the scene (or alive) back then so I can’t really tell. However, I can agree that the metal industry is “professional” at the moment.

There are more people taking care of the bands’ tours, the record labels, the public relations with the press and promoters. Nowadays if you don’t have a PR, you’re less likely to be recognised outside of your own local scene. There are so many bands nowadays that it is very hard for a band to break through on its own. I don’t think any genres have waned over the past few years. On the contrary, every genre seems to have many bands – whether it is new bands forming or older ones creating new material. How many “comeback” albums did we have in 2013?! I am not the one to follow what is “happening” now and I hate editors or journalists who think they are someone and tell the world what is “in” or “out”. Of course, it is great to tell the world what you think is “in” or “the next big thing” but stating such opinions in an authoritative way is rubbish. Nonetheless, there seems to be some kind of stoner/doom/old-school 70s type of revival with loads of such rock ‘n’ roll bands forming which I don’t mind at all!

Do you use subgenre terms, like “death metal” or “discogrind”? How would these be useful to a metal fan?

I usually use the basic subgenre terms like “death metal”, “thrash metal”, “black metal”, “glam metal” and “doom metal”. I have come across a lot of weird terms like the one you mention “discogrind” or “trance death metal”. These terms might be good sometimes to label some piece of music very briefly and might come handy for a review. I am, however, not a big fan of labelling. I prefer to use the basic terms and if I see that there are other styles in the band’s music then I will point out that it is a mix of thrash and death or doom and black.

Finally, the hardest question of all: what is heavy metal? What makes a band heavy metal? How do we tell the difference between a band that is hard rock, industrial, etc. and heavy metal, death metal, grindcore, etc?

That is a good question and a hard one indeed! I guess it is rather hard to define heavy metal nowadays because of how much the genre has evolved. Everyone likes mixing their metal with everything now; there’s jazz metal, discogrind, trance metal, psychedelic/progressive, operatic, orchestral, there’s literally everything you can imagine. For me, heavy metal is something that really rocks, really moves you and fills you with emotions. I will borrow our writer’s, David Halbe, phrase here: “if something rocks, it rocks!”

In the famous documentary Heavy Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Deena Weinstein defined metal with a deep bass, distorted guitars and masculine leather-wearing men. That could have been applied in the 80s but cannot be applied anymore in the 21st Century because the genre has expanded so much musically but also visually – you see a lot of bands not wearing the “traditional” black uniform with band T-shirts but still a lot of these bands do play very good metal. Winterfylleth comes to mind straight away.

If someone wants to learn to tell the difference between traditional heavy metal, death metal, thrash metal, grindcore, black metal and all that, then I would suggest going on a listening history trip back to the late 60s and make your way up through to the early 90s. There you can see the traditional evolution of these sub-genres and learn what are their basic differences and even come up with your own description/formula.

Keith Kahn-Harris, a UK-based academic who writes about metal, has recently opined that there’s a glut of metal and it has become impossible to tell good from crap, thus the genre’s stagnating. Does this type of thinking factor into your reviewing choices at all? What about your purchasing choices?

I actually did not know Keith Kahn-Harris’ work before – although I have seen that book on extreme metal on Amazon somewhere – but I checked it out right now and he does have a lot of interesting things to say. He is right that the scene is overflowing with a crazy amount of bands, especially now with the Internet. But I can’t really compare to how it was before when there was no Internet and your only choice was to copy a tape or trade. I was born into the Internet age and I’m used to having everything ready for immediate download either legally or illegally… I discover most of the bands that I listen to either through the Internet or from relatives/friends. And now thanks to MetalRecusants my e-mail inbox is a never ending discovery lane of new and old bands which is something I’m very lucky to have.

Anyways, to answer your questions, I do not think that it has become impossible to tell good from crap – obviously here everyone has their own definition of “good” and “crap”. You know, I think that the more you learn about the metal scene, the more you research and listen, you find your own personal satisfactory source of new music whether it is a few record labels you trust, a website/blog or a magazine. Metalheads are a very opinionated bunch of people and they can definitely tell what is good or crap for them. So, to give you some definite answer out of this brainstorming session, yes it can be sometime chaotic with the reviewing choices; what to assign to our writers, which band should we focus on more and interview, which show to attend. All of this can get frustrating at times but as I said before we choose what we review randomly; sometime because we like the music from first listen and want to learn more about the bands with interviews and sometimes because we want a bit of a challenge in writing about something new.

As for the purchasing choices, yes, I sometimes do end up having a headache as I want to buy too much stuff. That’s why I limit myself to purchasing music at concerts and record shops. I rarely order online nowadays – maybe if it’s a pre-order which I can’t wait for or if it is something which I know I won’t be able to find at my local record shop or I won’t be able to see the band in concert in the near future. I do not like purchasing digital downloads because it feels like buying air. If I am going to spend money, I’d rather have the whole package.

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Morfin – Inoculation

Morfin emerge from the potent musical texture of the late 1980s and the transitional era between speed metal and death metal where Sepultura, Destruction, Kreator and Sadus ruled the day. This period was known for its tendency to wrap up a diverse influences under a speed/death banner and make music that straddled the genres, which often produced a potent ferment of riffcraft but left songwriting behind as it tried to balance many diverse elements in the same band.

Although the vocals on Inoculation are heavily van Drunen-influenced and often exhibit rhythms found on the first two Pestilence LPs, riffs and their underlying melodic sense are straight out of late speed metal, with a comparison to a more melodic version of Kreator or Arise-era Sepultura being apt. The primary technique in riffcraft is the ability to ride a rhythm established by the vocals, then extrude it to achieve an effect of completeness, and then return to its initial state. This creates riffs with lots of focus on the offbeat and a tendency to wrap up firmly at the end of each phrase. While this is more compelling than your average death metal riffing, it is also less likely to rely on the phrasal riffing that produced the best of the death metal genre.

Fortunately, like transitional bands Dark Angel and Sadus, Morfin uses a great deal of internal riff variation and knits these riffs together to keep a mood rolling. In these riffs, familiar patterns from heavy metal through death metal can be recognized, but ultimately the band will return to the roaring rhythmic hooks that create foot-tappingly powerful choruses. Notable is the ability to use melodic mid-paced riffs to flesh out the second half of a song, creating an intermission and contrast before returning to bouncy mayhem with more of those classic Destruction-era riffs. Like Mortem from Peru, Morfin is not so much a death metal band as it is a retrospective of metal past and present with a focus on energetic, compelling tunes.

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The funderground evaporates and metal goes underground

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Blue skied days make me think of aliens landing amongst us like in the old science fiction films. Except this time, the aliens are disappointed in what they find. “We have analyzed your transmissions,” the vocoded digi-translator says. “We are hoping to contact the people of Aurelius, Plato, Nietzsche and the first Morbid Angel album.”

Sadly there is no one here who can help them. The old Romans are dead, the ancient Greeks long gone, even the days when philosophers wrote about real topics are over, and Morbid Angel have ventured on to different goals and styles. If the aliens came looking for old school death metal, they’d find themselves presented with over a million options, very few of which resembled the glory of what once was.

This leads us to the interesting question: what causes some human endeavor, whether a civilization or a culture or death metal, to collapse? Nietzsche believed the answer to be nihilism; Joseph Tainter thinks it is when groups find diminishing marginal returns in self-organization; Aurelius saw a failure of spirit as the cause. When I was less experienced, I would have agreed with Nietzsche or Tainter that an internal/external source was the cause; the more I’ve seen, the closer I veer toward Aurelius’ view which is that things die when their spirit dies.

In metal, we’ve had a great spiritual death for quite a long time now. Death metal and black metal produced a huge backlog of technique, imagery, creativity and complexity between 1984 and 1994, but then pretty much faded away. In their place first came imitators, then metalcore, and now the emo/indie/gaze crowd of “post-metal” types who are making the same music that was popular back in the late 1980s. History has reversed itself as it always does when collapse comes to town.

Erik Danielsson of erstwhile black metal band and now happy melodic heavy metal band Watain offered his own vision of how this inversion occurs:

I think that throughout the course of history, there have always been very few bands that have been able to live up to my standards, at least of black metal… Then there are thousands and thousands of misrepresentations and misconceptions of it. But true and genuine black metal is always something that will always be a minority in the music scene. A small minority even.

Then there’s all these people that kind of want to… It’s just like punk, you know? You have a few real punk bands, and you have a thousand bands that try to do the same thing, but fail because they don’t have the right spirit and they don’t really believe in it. But at the same time, it fascinates a lot of people, because it is an extreme way of expression, and it is controversial, and it’s therefore also popular and people are fascinated by it.

That’s why it’s also so often, like with other forms of extreme art, whatever it may be, that’s why it’s also so often misused, and just even commercialised, just for the sake of that, horror sells. And extreme metal sells, controversy sells, and that’s why there’s so many charlatans in this kind of music.

He makes a good point but it’s not the whole story. At some point, the genre was stronger and had a higher ratio of actual black metal to imitators. What is an imitator? Someone who adopts the surface appearance of some other thing without understanding its spirit, inner structure, values or motivations. Why do imitators do it? For the social value; that’s all imitation can deliver. If you imitate something, you can sell it, achieve popularity, or even just have some rationalization for your lifestyle and a way to spend your time that you feel doesn’t make you look like a complete l00zer to your friends.

This makes the original ideals of black metal look smarter than they seemed at the same. “No more, no core, no fun and no trends” is an anti-social statement, meaning that it is designed to block the passage of metal into a social movement. As discussed in Until the Light Takes Us, the decay of meaning is inevitable once power passes from the innovators to the art shop displays, poseurs, political types and record label tyrants.

Luckily, there’s also good news. hybrid indie/metal band Twilight is calling it quits:

Black metal supergroup Twilight welcomed a new member in the middle of 2012: Thurston Moore. “We’re not coming together to make music,” Moore said then of the group. “We’re joining forces to destroy all rational thought.”

Unfortunately, the band itself has also imploded. With news of their new album—III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb, out March 18 in North American and March 17 in Europe through Century Media—comes the announcement that Twilight has broken up. The album will be their last.

I will never be happy for anything that inconveniences Imperial of Krieg in any way, as he carried the black metal flag at a time when the USBM underground had declared itself dead fetus and put up the banner of failure. I also have no enmity for Thurston Moore, who was quite a gregarious and interesting fellow when I met him, or any of the other musicians in Twilight. They’re just trying to have careers. However, they were also symbolic of the downfall of underground metal in that they symbolized its acceptance by the indie rock hierarchy.

The thing about rebels is that they either fail and are destroyed in anonymity, or they become the new Establishment. Since most people love a chance to believe that their problems are caused by oppression, not their own poor life choices, revolutions are very popular; just about everyone loves one, except the cynical and flatulent elderly. Thus as a revolutionary you have a better than average chance but, if you succeed, you live to become that against which new generations revolt. First country, blues, jazz and rock were a revolution against established music, then punk was a revolution against popular music. Then indie was a revolution against punk.

Black metal, like heavy metal before it, was a revolution against the mentality of revolution. It was “heavy” in that instead of promising flowers, love and peace — all appearances, all social things — it promised darkness, warfare, conflict and predation. Metal has always been the music that says our problems cannot be solved by appearances and must be addressed by dealing with reality itself, which is the one thing that most people never want to do.

The message of metal is never initially popular. What is popular is the perception of metalheads being “outside” the social system, and thus able to perceive a truth and enjoy a freedom that those inside cannot. This makes those inside want to emulate the outsiders, but they do so only in appearance, resulting in them making imitations that have the spirit, values, goals and internal structure of the inside. Thus, the independent truth is dragged down into a morass of conformity and the same failed thinking that it tried to escape.

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Interview with Joe Gonzalez (Cruxiter)

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To those who have watched metal for some time, it presents a paradox. To the public, it seems like a railroad, where a line of cars stops and then we see what is in each, one at a time. To an experienced watcher, it more resembles an ocean, with currents swirling below and influenced by air above, and periodically the crest of a wave emerges before being dragged down by the rest, obliterated and recycled.

One of the warmer undercurrents in the metal ocean is “true metal,” which is that which stays true to the solid line of evolution leading from metal’s origin. As part of this movement, bands across the globe are continuing to make music that we associate with earlier decades, except that it’s newly created and generated from a contemporary impulse if not contemporary influences. Cruxiter, a Texas heavy metal/guitar rock band, is part of this movement.

We first reviewed Cruxiter’s self-titled first album in these pages a few scant weeks ago, but already the band’s spirit and dedication to its style have piqued interest with our worldwide readership. To go more in-depth, we interrogated vocalist Joe Gonzalez at length via a very modern iPhone yet with classic heavy metal spirit.

You formerly played in Hammer Whore, a death metally band. What prompted the switch to a heavy metal style versus a death metal one?

HammerWhore was a big mix of a lot of metal genres; because each band member comes from different eras and has their own taste in metal music we had to compromise and we created an album that contained a bit from every sub genre. In 2007 HammerWhore broke up because of personal differences, so I kept some of the songs I wrote and started a new band that was more hard rock/heavy metal. In 2009 Miggy Ramirez and Rick Ortiz joined the band and this is really when we started to develop our sound. Then in 2010 we had personnel issues again losing our bassist, drummer, and guitar player. This is when we recruited the rest of the old HammerWhore line up to help us out. The “switch” to heavy metal just came naturally after spitting from HammerWhore and working with such a great group of musicians. I’m doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to do, and that’s sing in and front a heavy metal band!

What is the Cruxiter? Is it a concept underlying all of your work?

The Cruxiter is a fictional alien computer that works through touch, connecting to the users nervous system and to the mind. The thing is, it doesn’t quite work with human biology and drives anyone who attempts to use it insane, but the Cruxiter is only a small part of the Cruxiter universe. It’s one of the few artifacts that we have here on earth from the faraway alien planet that is the subject of most of our music. So far we have not made contact with these extraterrestrials on our first album. First contact will be made on “Madness of the Void,” a track that will be released on our next full length. A look at this faraway world is probably similar to seeing ourselves in the distant future where technological advances have only made life more complicated with longer life spans and more inventive ways to kill each other.

This is a two part question: (a) what are your influences, musical and otherwise, in Cruxiter? (b) what bands do you think sound closest to Cruxiter?

I cannot speak for the rest of the band because each of us is very different when it come to the style of music we listen to. But for me it’s a combination of classic AOR, NWOBHM, eighties thrash and early seventies prog. Styx, Judas Priest, Lizzy Borden, Torch, Agent Steel, and Overkill were some of the first bands to really get me excited to pick up a guitar and sing. Really every time I hear a metal vocalist hit a high note or a guitar lead it really gets me going. As far as individual artists its Jon Oliva, Tommy Shaw & Dennis DeYoung, David Byron & Mick Box, Schmier, Tom Angelripper, Don Dokken, and Joey Tempest are all on the top of a very long list of talent that inspires me to play music.

The second part of your question is very hard to answer because we are trying to create something different but not straying from what we love. In my personal opinion I would say it’s a mix between early King Diamond, early 90s Mercyful fate, Uriah Heep, Stryper, Judas Priest, Di’Anno era Maiden. We still have a lot of material that we are working on that I think is more advanced and widens the spectrum even more.

Do you think the “true metal” genres like classic heavy metal and old school death metal and black metal are making a return? Or did death metal and black metal get lost in the shuffle?

“Making a return” destroys the true metal genres and spawns craploads of bands that really don’t know where the music comes from, then they make everyone look cheesy and people move on, which has already happened to thrash metal twice. All true metal genres have and always will thrive in the local and underground scenes. What genre is “in” at any given time is determined by what the “cool kids” are listening to, It’s very political, and it will never change.

Cruxiter is a classic heavy metal band, but you incorporate a lot of elements from what I’m calling “guitar rock.” How hard is it to combine the two?

It’s actually pretty accurate for some parts of our music because we are very heavily influenced by progressive music and classic rock but we really try hard to mix it up and make the music we write contain all aspects of rock and metal music. With the tempo changes and melodies of classic prog, guitar riffing from rock and metal, and AOR style choruses, even trying to add a bit of glam to it all.

But each song we write is different and has its own massage so it’s hard for me to explain it all without breaking down each song. Combining all these styles of music happens during the writing process… letting the song pretty much write itself, and allowing the changes to happen. It’s the vocals and solos that are dominant, and take full control during the writing of the music. We do work hard on the proper flow of the song making sure it’s chaotic and complex, keeps the listeners attention, and is pleasant to the ears. We also try to keep the music from being too heavy and noisy, down tuning and excessive kick drum is great for other bands but we like our listeners to hear without trouble how the guitars, vocals, drums, and bass interact musically.

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You’ve just released your first and self-titled album. How did you record it, and where? What were the biggest challenges of recording?

We recorded this album at our home studio in a ranch house in Jim Wells County just outside Alice, Texas. Every aspect of recording was a challenge since we really had no experience. I had to watch all kinds of how to videos on YouTube about mic’ing vocals, drums and guitar cabinets, it was a lot of trial and error. The best part of recording was reworking the songs after playback adding harmonies, fills, and leads. But we learned a lot from recording this album and we are currently in the studio again and everything is running smoothly. Our next album is going to sound a lot better for sure and we are pretty excited about it.

If you had to identify the most important element in what makes a good song, what might it be? Do you think it’s energy, passion, emotion, content or some combination of the above?

A great song perfectly portrays a complex clash of emotions of a single moment in time with the appropriate energy pulsing and fluctuating between emotional highs and lows. It also needs guitar and vocal melodies that engrave themselves into the mind and the message and words find a spot to reside in listeners mind. Honesty goes along way when it come to reaching people through music.

What’s next for Cruxiter? Are you going to do small tours through Texas cities, or record more, or go national?

Right now, we are back in the studio recording new music for a second album. Now that we have some experience it should move very smoothly and we will get an even better product. We should be releasing a few demo songs on YouTube and maybe a short demo tape soon. They will not be the album versions of the songs just demos before fine tuning the structure, vocal melodies, and fills. We have already released “Under The Moon” demo on YouTube.

We will probably not be playing very many shows this year since we will be trying to complete our work in the studio. But we are playing in Houston February 8th at the White Swan for our good friend Angel’s B-day (bassist for Owl Witch). It’s going to be a really killer show. Houston is the top place to play metal music in Texas the scene has always been very strong and diverse. I’m alway excited to play in Houston.

Are there any challenges to being a metal band in Texas, with the local scenes being what they are and the distances between towns often being great?

It is pretty hard here in Texas especially since we don’t live anywhere near any of the major city. Corpus Christi is closest but they have no local metal scene and what’s hitting there now is grind and crust which is great but we don’t fit the bill. It’s a struggle for us to be a part of the scene in texas since we are so far and can’t participate in playing or attending shows very often. Playing gigs always means travel for us but its just part of the gig. Texas as a whole is full of die hard metal heads and familiar faces friends that will be playing music and supporting local shows till they die.

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