We talk often here of how form-over-content/means-over-ends thinking has predominated in Late Heavy Metal. That is, people got good at the mechanics but forgot what the music was supposed to express, so now heavy metal is wallpaper to signal anger and partying for normies.

That is after all how they use it in movies.

How many times do they signal to us that a character is a loser, a partier, or just on the wild side by playing heavy metal in the background? They milk metal posters for edge cachet. And if all else fails, some Satanists listening to Slayer can be the bad guys.

Since the media juggernaut is far more powerful in numbers than metal is, it naturally takes over. Metal began imitating media. That led to lots of metal that focused on technique and aesthetics, but completely missed the glue that holds it all together, the intent behind the art.

It turns out that this means-over-ends type thinking — where technique takes the place of goals — is pretty common, even in education:

She found that high-scoring essays shared features related more to the ability to express complex meaning, such as lexical diversity, noun modification, and soundness and number of arguments, than to structural complexity.

Imagine that. Kids get higher grades for “ability to express complex meaning” instead of “structural complexity,” which reflects an essay conveying actual points and making arguments related to one another. Form over function. Appearance over structure. Surface over essence.

For art — and metal is a form of art, although it overlaps with entertainment and ritual — to be interesting, it must reflect our world in such a way that it takes us out of this world, shows us the world via metaphor, and then returns us to it with a new appreciation of it.

This process is called transcendence, and it is a cycle of accepting that reality is not just what it is, but must be as it is in order to remain wholly logical, and that therefore, what we see as the impure and imperfect world in fact expresses the divine.

Yes, you read that correctly. Dualism dies a hard death there. Heaven and Earth are not separate, but one. As the pagans view it, the material world connects to the lands of the dead, and after death there are more adventures, but the basic rules do not change. All must remain wholly logical.

After all, in a relative universe, all things must not only exist relative to each other, but relative to the whole. Those Platonic forms include an ur-form which is the fabric of the universe itself, something which may be informational and expressed in gravity more than energy or matter.

The researcher contends the “excess” gravity necessary to bind a galaxy or cluster together could be due instead to concentric sets of shell-like topological defects in structures commonly found throughout the cosmos that were most likely created during the early universe when a phase transition occurred. A cosmological phase transition is a physical process where the overall state of matter changes together across the entire universe.

As gravitational force fundamentally involves the warping of space-time itself, it enables all objects to interact with each other, whether they have mass or not. Massless photons, for example, have been confirmed to experience gravitational effects from astronomical objects.

Perhaps gravity is merely… relevance… as has been suggested by some authors in the past. Like the Law of Attraction, objects are drawn to each other by the possibility of interaction, and this creates an effect like gravity. Information, mass, energy, and gravity convert into one another.

The transcendental outlook sees the universe as an informational construct. It makes sense wholly because its relative parts also interact relative to a whole which is formed by logical need, which is something like those Platonic forms.

Plato saw the transcendental outlook as necessary for civilization because otherwise, humans fall into gaming the system for their own short-term benefit:

For when your guardians are ignorant of the law of births, and unite bride and bridegroom out of season, the children will not be goodly or fortunate. And though only the best of them will be appointed by their predecessors, still they will be unworthy to hold their fathers’ places, and when they come into power as guardians, they will soon be found to fall in taking care of us, the Muses, first by under-valuing music; which neglect will soon extend to gymnastic; and hence the young men of your State will be less cultivated. In the succeeding generation rulers will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of your different races, which, like Hesiod’s, are of gold and silver and brass and iron. And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and irregularity, which always and in all places are causes of hatred and war. This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung, wherever arising; and this is their answer to us.

Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly.
Why, yes, I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak falsely?

And what do the Muses say next?
When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things. There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them.

I believe that you have rightly conceived the origin of the change.
And the new government which thus arises will be of a form intermediate between oligarchy and aristocracy?

To the transcendental mind, the true riches of life involve peace of mind, family, culture, race, nature, sanity, and most of all, something to do with our time that makes life enjoyable. Transcendence comes from making everything make sense and then making our own minds orderly.

When society deviates from transcendence, you get the me-first money + victimhood pathology that currently rules. People become narcissistic because they must portray themselves as victims in order to justify deserving things from society, and it controls all things.

Whether under democracy, National Socialism, Fascism, theocracy, or Communism the same results persist. There is no way around the decay except to get forward toward a transcendental viewpoint, which requires accepting things as they are through hard realism and then dreaming big.

Metal, which finds beauty in power and noise, helps us toward that end.

If you think this sounds overly complicated, recall perhaps that the purity, perfection, and equality model of human thought is in fact overly simplistic. It misses the need that reality has to trap energy through chaos and disorder:

Entropy is a hot mess. Randomness and disorder are not exactly virtues in science. Yet it turns out, a sloppy jumble of differently sized atoms can do a better job stabilizing certain nanocrystals than a tidy arrangement of such elements. These so-called high-entropy materials are now being eagerly studied because they could revolutionize a broad range of applications, from energy storage and conversion to ultra-high temperature thermal insulators and electromagnetic interference shielding.

For the universe to exist, it needs disorder to tie up all that loose energy so that it does not immediately dissipate. We, the entropy legions, make it happen, in part through metal music which makes beauty out out chaos.

However, metal is under assault by careerism as each individualistic musician seeks his piece of the pie by making technically-competent but soulless means-over-ends imitation and recombination of the past.

It turns out that this is simply an industry expanding to fill the space carved out by underground metal:

The Law of Stretched Systems captures the co-adaptive dynamic that human leaders under pressure for higher and more efficient levels of performance will exploit new capabilities to demand more complex forms of work (Woods and Dekker, 2000; Woods and Hollnagel, 2006).

That is, the better we make metal, the more we attract labels, Hot Topic NPCs, and other parasites to take over that space. Success makes failure on the other side of the stroke; being a B-student forever however achieves a balance.

Speaking of metal, it seems that it is ineffective against bears, mainly because bears love heavy metal:

Colorado Parks and Wildlife workers turned to Black Sabbath to try to scare a stubborn bear out of a tree near the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden on May 15.

They began blasting “Iron Man,” the loud, rousing metal anthem from the English heavy metal band at the black bear, which had not budged after wildlife officers had sent up a drone to buzz by it.

The music had no effect. While Prince of Darkness Ozzy Osbourne was not successful, actual darkness did the trick. The bear finally crawled down on its own at dusk.

Should have tried Deicide? Do bears really enjoy Absurd? We think early Pestilence might have gotten that bear in motion, but perhaps only to mosh.

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Brainsore – The Grip of the Naked Mind: lots of chaser riffs and breakdowns, pounding percussive rhythm riffs, and post-hardcore style expansive vocals do not add up to anything more than a standard hardcore release with grindcore and deathcore influences, but not much to interest a repeat listener, despite the cool title and the obvious effort put into production values.

Thou – Umbilical: if you wanted alternative rock with emo/metalcore vocals dressed up as some kind of doom metal that sits evenly between stoner doom and 1990s doom-grind like Winter, Morgion, and Eyehategod, you can enjoy this pile of random riffs that fit around a groove, just slowly and with raving vocals, before sort of running down into a drone and then collapse, but it really achieves very little.

Sad Whisperings – Return to Autumn: doom metal should be scary, not built of obvious three-chord runs and sappy Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond choruses over bouncy heavy metal riffs, and definitely not with keyboards playing along like one of those Disney shows that they have on the big stage while customers guzzle down overpriced fancied up steak and potatoes and people in costumes repeat lines from movies, but if you like that kind of self-pitying predictable sap maybe this is the retro release for you.

Spacecorpse – Shapeshifter: big dumb basic metal built on the hardcore model of outrage, from the angry storming verses to the choruses which emphasize wide gaps in interval and fast rhythm to give you a sense of reality evaporating beneath your feet, this band tries very hard to be avantgarde but ends up creating something unlistenable simply because it is all so bloody obvious and contentless.

Funeral Storm – Chthonic Invocations: music lessons ruin metal bands by teaching them the typical way to go about musical patterns and while this creates the nice consonant mixed-emotions bath of commercial rock, jazz, blues, or country it also deprives the music of its unbalanced character and sense of adventure, which comes through in this album clearly inspired by the first Varathron and attempting to reprise that but putting the old patterns into frameworks inspired by modern metal just make this anticlimactic.

Heimland – Tronearvingens Doed: participation award black metal implements the usual tropes from late-1990s black metal in songs that do not build so much as come into conflict with themselves, diverge into some post-metal and then speed metal, before returning to late Dimmu Borgir style soaring and lush but directionless black metal, making for a listening experience like passing a record store on a scooter after the death of a genre while the contents of a dumpster decompose nearby in the heat island warmth.

Sotherion – Vermine: this feels like someone trying to give the Nifelheim treatment to recent funderground black metal, specializing in driving rhythms and songs that do not so much come together as steadily make their parts anathema to each other, ending in a feeling of chaos with a faint hint of melody but lots of crowd-pleasing riffs and bouncing rhythms that make this as headache-inducing as speed metal.

Comaniac – None For All: chanty speed metal that leans toward the power metal side of melody but writes circular songs with a few breaks in the middle and proficient guitar leads, but at the end of the day the problem with this style of music and this album is that it is fungible; drop the needle anywhere and listen from that point and you get basically the same experience as any other point.

Fluids – Reduced Capabilities: deathcore of this nature exists to make you fall into a heavy cadenced groove and then put your brain on the shelf, literally eroding cognition with pop-like rhythms that collide with pounding felony murder rage, but in the end, this music feels like it belongs in the background to some very basic process like making feces sculptures in jail while getting dialysis from an obese trainee nurse watching TikTok videos on an iPhone with a pink sparkle glitter case.

Azketem – Azketem: depressive suicidal black metal returns with a Doris Day vibe to these sing-song little ditties that taking a page from middle period Dimmu Borgir sway gently between notes with uplifting melodies tied to trudging patterns and dark harmonies but really the end result is so repetitive that the listener becomes lost in the production effects and only later wakes up in time to catch the latest podcast on installing Lunix on a digital enema.

Death Dealers – Files of Atrocity: entirely workable crustcore and d-beat hybrid, with modern influences mostly on the vocals which sound like grindcore with only a smidgen of the post-Pantera dramatic rap-pace vocalization, guitars following old hardcore and Discharge patterns but with enough of a spin and compelling rhythm to make this a pleasant listen to avoids being entirely repetitive of the past or itself.

The Other Sun – Daimon, Devil, Dawn: they must be laughing their asses off at the thought of metalheads listening to this warmed over 1960s folk-rock with occasional distorted riffs and lots of organ, but the same basic song structures based around the lead vocals, producing nothing of riffology and everything of some kind of ironic throwback to a time none of these people could have understood except as anarchy with adult diapers anyway.

324 – Rebelgrind: the same criticism that applies to Grand Belial’s Key applies here: these songs are unfinished; the band sets up a collision of riffs then loops with layers of vocal emotional expression and rhythmic variations on the theme, but basically the song is over, and just has to hash through its cycles to get to the end where nothing has changed since the beginning.

Virologist – Ameliorating Vicissitudes: great title and band name, but bog-standard gurgling deathcore makes this album go nowhere that the last twenty-five years of death metal has not, and the standard patterns in songs that are barely organized besides a verse and chorus with some rhythm layers do nothing to improve this, leading to a participation trophy for this band whose machine-stamped patterns remind me of making pancakes in a kitchenette with too little butter.

Antiflesh – Hosanna: the post-metal influence waxes strong here, followed by the type of frenetic melodic sawing that made the norsecore clones so abusive, with focus on whisperlike vocals which seem to be the focus in this work which emphasizes — to be honest — a sense of ironic boredom, like a desire to waste life out of a combined fatalism and neurosis, droning in like your grandmother when she catches you smoking weed in a funeral home.

Selias – Headshot: this is alternative metal in the metalcore style mixed into power metal, so you get basically 1980s glam with some buttermilk melodies from alt-rock/grunge and Pantera-style groove speed metal, then it becomes terrible worship music that goes into a major key with energetic aerobics in leg warmer bouncy stuff before getting out some more ranting and then repeating the whole thing, making your reviewer want to go listen to a Cuisinart full of onions instead.

Maudissez – Maudissez: discordant sludge music with atmosphere borrowed from post-rock allows songs that alternate between predictability and barely holding it together harmonically, resulting in an experience like frotting a pissoir, which is what the name means in the language of regicides, but like most hipster bands this act focuses on sonic effects and production more than trying to write songs, so the result is disorienting like getting lost in Ikea when the Taco Bell and Modelo diarrhea hits.

Void Witch – Horripilating Presence: this band feels like a group of random guys who picked up instruments at the mall and are trying to keep a credible doom metal song going by using basic formless hard rock riffs and then throwing in lots of fills and distractions before getting back to the same repetition, producing not so much a feeling of dark melancholy as the mental sensations of finding a parking spot at the same mall three days before Christmas.

Varices – The Undoing: finally something at least tuneful and organized slides across the desk, a cross between second-album Uncanny and The Haunted, basically solidly executed heavy metal with death metal vocals and right-hand technique, oftentimes not so much random as much as often using generic licks as fills and basing its riffs on well-known archetypes, but for all that, it remains better quality music than most of the output of this genre.

Web – Burden of Destiny: this album alternates between European speed metal verses and Pantera-style choruses, throws in a few extra riffs to intensify its path, but basically loops between a dramatic riff and a trudging riff as a means of driving focus toward the yelled vocals which sometimes evoke power metal, but in the end while nothing is particularly wrong here there is no real reason to listen unless you crave more speed metal.

Ad Patres – Unbreathable: the riff shapes are fairly developed but have less form than a great death metal band would use, and the choice of chord progressions feels like a reprise of pop music from the 1950s, but the worst is that the songs seem to be about nothing but getting to that toe-tapping chorus and layering some budget riffs through the verses, with very similar rhythms between songs. Well-executed but for nought.

Malconfort – Humanism: are people really fooled by this dreck? Old sad 1970s jazz tropes with occasional black metal vocals and some distortion on the guitars, but mostly tending toward hippie rock, these songs hide their lack of direction or purpose behind technique, but the technique itself is the boilerplate you can learn at a junior college music program in order to be able to slash out soundtracks for local furniture commercials.

Omega Diatribe – Deviant: at least this album is listenable, with songs fitting together well enough to express a general idea mostly unique to each song, but these are loops based around groove metal and industrial metal that emphasizes the vocals like rock music, so the result sounds a bit like Ministry paired with Pantera and Rammstein but consequently does nothing more than give a general impression of that synthesized mood in a way that develops little over the course of each song.

Mausoleum – Defiling the Decayed: if you wanted a hybrid between Master and Impetigo, this one might scratch the itch, its strength being some inventive transitional riffs but the majority of its airtime is unfortunately devoted to almost formless rhythm riffs in the punk style, giving it energy on the surface but underneath draining away power because everything is so very similar except for the aforementioned transitional riffs.

Regicide – Resist Control: Exhorder-style speed metal, tempered with late hardcore style vocals and mid-tempo pacing, which focuses on chantable choruses but does not develop songs much at all, leading to domination of the vocals but no real reason to listen beyond that, which means that this release will make it to two weeks and then promptly be forgotten for having little relevance.

Kanonenfieber – Die Urkatastrophe: sounds like a metalcore hybrid with Rammstein, with lots of rhythmic chanting and formless riffs interrupted by occasional lifts from Bathory and Darkthrone, ultimately having about as much relevance to metal compositionally as Taylor Swift but with good production and cool aesthetics that will fool the O-mouth sweaty hands kids long enough to get a positive mention by ChatGPT.

Totale Vernichtung – Ritualmordlegenden: candy funderground horseshit album kicks off with emulations of the past (Gorgoroth, Absurd, Darkthrone, possibly Samael) tied together around unrelenting melodic intensity and lots of gently falling melodies stacked up against line-drive chromatic riffing with the precise even rhythms of music for children who have had brain injuries, evoking the past but not exceeding it nor even getting close to reaching it.

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Let us leave you with this paean to knowledge:

The fact of the accumulation of human experience is the central significant fact of human civilization.

These latest Late Stage Heavy Metal additions, do they offer more accumulation of wisdom, or its erosion?

Tags: fisting, smr, Transcendence