WW2 is finally over and we realized the easy answer of world democracy, social benefits, patriotic obedience, Christianity, and civil rights was merely another form of Control. If you want Order, have a goal and reward the good; if you want Control, get a means-over-ends system that punishes individuality.

As written by W.S. Burroughs, Control is the use of means-over-ends reasoning to influence your thinking. It can take many forms, even gaslighting by your first girlfriend or peer pressure. Like all types of Crowdism, it emphasizes unity through conformity instead of striving toward goals.

Metal suffers greatly under this now. Is anyone else amazed at how competent, professional, and deliberate the bands are now? Nothing unsystematic or idiosyncratic about them, only cultivated quirks and sensible marketing decisions. Metal is now a job like any other!

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Entrails – Grip of Ancient Evil: if you make Swedish death metal technique a goal into itself, you get songs which serve as a delivery mechanism for classic Swedish branding, which forces the songs to be simple, sort of like how postmodern novels incorporated so much technique that the story at the center of all the maneuvering and manipulation (like the Puzzle DA but more complex) had to be dumbed down to basic human gestures and impulses.

Agenbite Misery – Remorse of Consciousness: in theory this is alternative metal of some sort, but it sounds mostly like sludge with extra attention spent on making the time signatures more difficult than the usual, without enhancing song development by having much of a relationship between the riffs, so you end up with a surging mood that descends into a muddle and emerges as repetition of the same.

Imperishable – Swallowing The World: these guys successfuly compiled every trope of Swedish melodic death metal and packed them together in songs that hold up to basic analysis but seem to symbolize nothing but a rehash of old Carcariass and Unanimated albums, making for a listen that is both enticing and ultimately very hollow, causing a need to search for snacks and maybe some of that pygmy goat porn the Californians like.

Edoma – Immemorial Existence: sweeping mid-paced blackened death metal with post-metal elements, this band makes nice background music that will excite no one but is at least musical, unlike the steady procession of war metal bands who sound like someone managed to tune an entire guitar so that every fret plays a muddy E5.

Mors Principium Est – Darkness Invincible: the problem with free markets is competition paired to jobs: people in jobs imitate other people in jobs because that guarantees job safety, since they handled the competition by cloning it, so they are “competing” even if this means a lack of direction, and this band shows a recombination of past successes by others in a fruit salad with extra jelly and sour cream that makes a directionless but predictable AI-style offering.

Imperishable – Revelation In Purity: no, not the Swedish band, the American Imperishable with second-generation members of Nile and Hate Eternal, sounds a lot like Hate Eternal with more odd chord voicings and melodic lead rhythm playing, but still keeps dedication to basic pummeling interrupted by fireworks before returning to the same antigroove, making this even worse than the other Imperishable.

Nailed To Obscurity – Generation of the Void: someone sandwiched a Coldplay ripoff between bouncy, sing-song riffs with some death metal influences that sound a lot like Alestorm and Babymetal making the beast with two backs, but then in comes the modern metal tuffguy metalcore vocals and sweeps of arpeggios that go nowhere but form a nice emo backdrop, please nail it to obscurity somewhere very obscure.

Der Märtyrer – Der Märtyrer: industrial metal gets a bad rep because very little is as good as Godflesh or that Pitch Shifter EP but this band combines techno with Desecresy and Graveland riffs in textural loops that use sound samples and percussion tangents as a basis for structural changes, which gives this otherwise driving maniac harangue of pounding machine noise some depth and lets emotion arise from the derivations of its general alienation, creating a dystopian dance.

Amorphis – Borderland: that awful Coldplay style of indie-emo with a self-help twist guides this release which is basically Christian-like alternative rock with occasional distorted power chords and lots of allusions to old disco and 1980s records, making something that is both musical and so typical of this era that there is absolutely no reason to pick this over any of the other stuff.

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We need to talk about some metal metaphors that apply to the rest of life:

• The Metallica Problem: Any product adapts to its audience, but since the audience wants to avoid actually controversial things and embrace personal poses instead, gradually shapes the product around the audience, which since it buys all the other products, demands something as equally dumbed-down, edgy, dramatic, emo, simplified, and personal as everything else. A band like Metallica or Black Sabbath can exist until its executives point out how much money they are losing by not doing what Pantera or Led Zeppelin are doing, since those are the really big sellers. Most of metal sacrificed itself on the altar of Pantera and Cradle of Filth.
• The Pantera Problem: Any product which is distinctive and purposeful will suffer from obscurity, so in order to compete, it will adjust to the lowest common denominator so that it does not become an expensive hobby for its members. This is the curse of lowercase-c conservatism: what has succeeded in the past becomes a necessary part of anything that survives, forcing bands into aggregates of the past five best-sellers to the point they become incoherent, which serves the individualistic audience just fine because they are projecting themselves onto these bands anyway.

To the labels: when you re-issue classic albums, please do not include the demos. We do not want to casually listen to the same song five times in different forms. Keep the original production and cover, maybe add a few pages to the book with historical details, and then separately release a demos and live compilation of rare tracks. Your audience will thank you.

Also please stop with the fake remasters, since they do nothing but eliminate dynamics and wash out detail. We have powerful stereos and will turn the volume knob upwards if we need to blast out the room. We would rather hear the actual music than an overly-compressed simulation of it.

To the listeners and streaming services: please stop with the stupid playlists. These encourage people to treat music like a background soundtrack in a shopping mall. People no longer make distinctions between bands and in this democratized equality, cannot tell the crap from the quality. This weakens the genre even if it boosts your sales in the short term. None of your most promising acts will go far, musicians will flee the genre, and thus you will end up with constant churn and no real successes.

Most of the bands now are in metal just to get their hooks in the genre. They want to issue forth a release or two, get on the playlists, sneak their interviews into zines, and then use this CV as the basis for soliciting recording work or label jobs. It is a giant pyramid scheme at this point.

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First, a bit on how heavy metal has become a symbol for others to use to sell products:

Hawley trades in the franchise’s gloom and doom for something a bit more aligned with metal’s more theatrical aesthetics. This is most evident in each episode’s closing needle drop, many of which are heavy metal classics, including the pilot’s eerily timed Black Sabbath cue. But those are only the most superficial nods. Like the musical genre that inspires the show, Alien: Earth can be grisly and grim as well as occasionally ponderous and plodding—Hawley’s incessant dissolves wouldn’t look out of place in a Metallica video. The show thinks about violence and death in ways that can be bleakly insightful and trite within the space of a scene. It’s dead serious to the point of comedy, but its unembarrassed sincerity is also somehow admirable. And shooting the iconic Xenomorph at length in full light, as the show often has occasion to do, emphasizes the way these aliens look as if they’re clad head-to-toe in black leather. Even from the moment they explode out of the poor human rib cages they’ve been gestating in. Chestbursters and headbangers.

At times, it electrified me the way the best of the Alien films do. At other times, the barrage of sounds and sensations began to blur together. Xenomorphs, like heavy metal musicians, live off of speed and darkness, but the only way they can do that is through uncanny precision. The fathomless noise and the flawless execution wash over you. Sometimes, at a heavy metal show, the transcendent tangle of the mosh pit makes you feel at one with the people around you, the community of fans and fanatics, the fellow devotees to this violent beauty. Sometimes you’re just getting pushed around.

Next, a little bit about how loud music is the opposite of emo:

In a new study, high-energy, less acoustic songs evoked personal memories featuring amusement and excitement, while lower-energy, more acoustic songs evoked memories characterized by calmness, romance and sadness.

The researchers found that more acoustic, lower-energy songs (for instance, Debussy’s Clair de Lune) tended to evoke memories characterized by feelings of aesthetic appreciation, adoration, calmness, romance, and sadness.

Memories evoked by such songs were also reported to be less social and more vivid, unique, and important. Meanwhile, less acoustic, higher-energy songs (such as Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen) tended to evoke memories of amusement, excitement, and high energy. Memories evoked by such songs also tended to be recalled more quickly.

Finally, how noise clarifies signal:

And when working at the nanoscale, there’s almost always a substantial amount of noise. That combination can cause the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to fall sharply, making the data misleading or unusable, especially if small errors are mistaken for exotic new phenomena.

The team used a new statistical machine learning method developed by the ISyE research group, called Bayesian matrix completion (BayeSMG). This method is designed to make sense of messy and incomplete data by finding patterns and reducing noise. It works well when there are similarities across different measurements, helping to reveal meaningful signals that might otherwise be hidden. In the context of PFM, this method helps researchers better understand how the material behaves.

Understanding noise requires finding structures in parallel, an analogue to Platonic forms, the logical causes of the objects we find here in materiality.

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Trending topics this week include WW3 (again) and how bad social media is. Yes, let us blame the technology for our lack of culture; metal depends on having a strong background of culture to riff against, since it is not merely contrarian outrage but is a critique within culture of our fear.

Any moral or aesthetic system requires a cultural backdrop; otherwise, it is a false imposition of objectivity, universality, and absolute truth in the same method used by organized religion.

Blaming social media is an easy answer and like so many others, falls short of a full perspective. However, we can see how social media is not helping. In particular, by bringing the underground into the mainstream, it also brings the mainstream into the underground.

It makes little sense for underground bands to be posting updates on Instagram that feature personal stories, crowd-friendly drama, and personal emotional expressions. The underground grew great by avoiding all of that mainstream peer pressure mind control.

But now, in the interest of reaching the audience, it has reversed that process, and created a new audience which can only pay attention to screenshots and videos. Read a link? Too hard. Listen to something unusual? Also too hard. Everything is television now.

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Tags: commercialization, sadistic metal reviews, signal-to-noise ratio, smr, social media, the metallica problem, the pantera problem