SJW is “selling out” for the 2010s

by Cory Van der Pol on September 11, 2015

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On the heels of the recent kerfuffle involving Deiphago and SJWs hyping an incident into a politically-driven media event, Hells Headbangers Records has released a statement about the incident. It reads, in part:

In regards to the Deiphago incident, rest assured that Hells Headbangers, the Agora and everyone else involved in bringing you this event are very upset and disappointed. There is NO excuse to justify Sidapa’s action – he fucked up hard. An incident report was filed and the victim declined to press charges. Although the new Deiphago LP is due to arrive soon, this incident will undoubtedly have a negative impact on its’ sale and the bands reputation has permanently been scarred. Such a shame! Further ramifications will be dealt with internally.

Although the label was just trying to do what it thought was the right thing, this statement reveals the core of SJW: it is driven by commerce and designed to signal safety. Just like big corporations spend millions to show that their cars, vacuum cleaners and toxic foods are safe, metal bands, labels and media are trying to expand their reach beyond the “scary” realm of the underground by making it “safe.” This was the same thing that selling out did in the 1980s, which was to take all those dangerous violent heavy metal bands and channel them into glam metal, which was offensive but not dangerous. There was nothing there that would sidetrack your child from going to school, getting good grades and going on to a career. Sure, he might have a bit more sex, and the bands took tons of drugs, but there were no ideas there that fundamentally challenged the bourgeois view of the world.

In the 1990s, death metal and black metal were far from safe as well. They rejected the dominant ideology of their time, committed actual crimes and more importantly, embraced political and philosophical viewpoints that are incompatible with democratic society and bourgeois existence. Forget the petit rebels of hip-hop and heavy metal, black metal bands actually scared people, and by doing so they upped the ante for what a band had to do to actually rebel. In many ways all heavy music has been stagnant since that time because no one can figure out how to be more extreme, and so they sigh and content themselves with being merely outrageous. “Selling out” meant that process where a band stops trying to have authenticity in its music and outlook on the world, and instead settles for whatever brings in a consistent audience.

In our current time, SJW is the method of selling out. If you go SJW, you will offend no one. People feel comfortable around businesses who promise that they are motivated by ideology, not profit. This also seems to guarantee that everyone will be accepted. Of course it does none of those things, being like all public relations exercises a series of cheap promises whose compliance can never be verified, but people like to be told comforting things. It calms them down and then they feel complacently optimistic when shopping at that store. This is why companies — again with shades of SJW — will fire controversial employees, hire private security, put up spikes to drive away the homeless and put up happy signs talking about diversity and how the uranium they use to flavor their food is 100% organic. Safety sells, or rather, lack of safety precludes sales.

Just like glam metal in the 1980s was preferred to hardcore punk, thrash and early death metal by parents who were afraid it was unsafe for their precious snowflakes to hear, and might lead them to a life lived in a van down by the river, precious snowflakes now want to be safe in their music. They want to be rebels… well, no they don’t. They want to appear to be rebels and at the same time, incur as little actual risk as possible. That way they can talk it up at the water cooler at work about how wild they are, and still not have to pay the price for wildness, like endangering their easy transition into the middle classes. It is not surprising that as metal has sold out in the 2010s with SJW, quality has plummeted. Who can make good music about such insincere topics?

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Luckily a backlash has commenced. Using the tag line “Make Metal Great Again,” a small group of metal musicians have declared their intent to drive out SJWs by indirect methods, namely by demanding higher quality metal. Sell-out metal is poseur metal, which means that it is both fake and replaces real metal. Metal thrives when it replaces the fake with the real. That could in fact be metal’s mission statement. Poseur metal is fake because it is designed to signal “safety” instead of opening the can of worms of truth, realism, history, violence, disease, horror and existential doubt. Labels love poseur metal because it has high margins: cheap, without risk, and easy to clone, it returns on investment every time even if less than an out of the ballpark hit like a really great band can be. Magazines love poseur metal because they can re-type the same story every month. Web sites love it because no review is ever wrong when all the music is the same under the skin.

If you wonder why metalgate has hit such a nerve, it is that it has threatened the profit model of the entire industry. Metal ca. 2015 depends on a constant flow of mediocre poseur metal bands to make sure that all the journalists, label people, PR people, bands and studios get paid. The market has shifted from the smaller, more agile environment it was in the middle 1990s. Now metal is big business, and like Microsoft or Apple, it’s in middle age. It aims for conservative successes that do not alter the formula and will not take the risk on anything outside of the norm. Since the music is crap, the labels need some other way to sell it to people, and they came up with “safe rebellion”: it looks all leather and motorcycles, but in fact it is a PC nanny who will tell you that everything is fine so long as you keep buying SJW products and ignoring the obvious signs of impending social collapse.

There’s a lot of pushback out there against those who push against boundaries. This is to be expected, but you can tell who are the cowards in the room by the people who won’t call it what it is. It is resistance by those who are growing fat and lazy off of the easy money chain formed by mediocre metal. It is no wonder they get nasty. This is why David Ingram has a temper tantrum when other people commit the grave sin of failing to agree with him. It’s also why Viranesir, the band banned from BandCamp, found itself on the receiving end of quite a bit of vitriol:

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In theory, SJWs and the like would be above such behavior. But that is the key to understanding them: their political opinions are advertising, not something they actually believe, just like what businesses say in television commercials are things designed to make you buy the product, not truths. The advertisements lie and SJW is an advertisement. This is why SJWs are so hell-bent on controlling what others see, hear and think. It would be a corporate wet-dream to have mind control, but with SJWs, they have a type of advertising that simply takes over like a virus or plague. Is is to surprising that many SJWs have connections to racist and fascist groups? As authoritarians, they appear to have switched sides, but really what they have done is changed their justification from ideology to commerce, and are now getting paid to advertise for their new corporate masters.

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Iron Maiden – The Book Of Souls (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on September 4, 2015

Iron Maiden - The Book Of Souls (2015)
Iron Maiden’s main strength in their 1980s heyday was their ability to incorporate progressive rock tropes (and therefore useful techniques for song variation and extension) into what was otherwise a fairly standard, if well executed poppy heavy metal sound. Not the rarest trick in the book, but more than enough to turn the band into a commercial juggernaut whose influence can sometimes be heard even in the deepest dregs of the underground.

On first impression, The Book of Souls ages gracefully, offering an aesthetic mostly similar to the band’s earliest recordings with Bruce Dickinson if understandably and obviously brought up to modern production standards. Like the rest of the band’s latter day material however, it leans ever closer towards its prog-isms, resulting in several enormous tracks and inflating the content into a full-fledged double album. The unfortunate weakness of these epics is that they are replete with filler of questionable value to a track, and as the length of these albums and tracks grow ever longer, so does the tedium, as Iron Maiden’s ability to extend a track beyond 7-8 minutes or so has not advanced along with them. Tracks end up overwhelmed by moments stunningly reminiscent of old hooks and hit singles (for instance, the intro of “Shadows of the Valley” seems to channel “Wasted Years” from Somewhere In Time), and the true nature of the band’s recent weakness reveals itself.

Iron Maiden has become a band split between two souls that they are unable to effectively reconcile. Their urge to extend their songwriting and write metal epics is held back by their need to continuously sound like Iron Maiden and the corresponding need to push hit singles. Paring down some of the worst excesses would probably be the most profitable option, since the band has demonstrated many times through their career that they can handle some degree of extension. Even then, Iron Maiden is competing with their own past; a past that is more virile (if not as slickly produced or musically experienced) and still easily experienced at their live concerts. I expect this album to jump off the shelves of record shores for still being recognizably Iron Maiden, for having some memorable and well-written moments and for being a valid way to financially support the band, but as a work of music, I don’t expect it to retain much listener interest after its marketing blitz subsides.

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Myrkur – M (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on August 30, 2015

Myrkur - M (2015)

Ever get the feeling that some of the material featured on Death Metal Underground was constructed solely to bait us into posting something vitriolic and derisive? Brett-baiting is illegal in 43 countries, most recently Uzbekistan and Finland, but apparently not in America, where Relapse Records recently pushed out Myrkur’s M, a suitably ironic title for bittersweet indie-rock ironism pretending to be metal.

As a fan of analyzing music in its historical context, I’ve decided that digging too deeply into Relapse’s little stunt is to lose to them at the marketing game. You can read about the legends and myths surrounding M by Myrkur on your own time. For our purposes, it suffices to say that M is one of those “post-black metal” albums, and like most of the more commercially notorious content featured here, it’s a standard entry to the subgenre. Myrkur’s real problem isn’t that it’s a fusion, or even that it’s a failed fusion, but that the individual elements it pulls upon are not executed effectively, even in isolation. This is essentially the filler moments from a handful of black metal and indie pop albums spliced together and hastily glued by a the efforts of an ethereal vocalist who has trouble making much of an impression beyond that of vague prettiness.

That such an album as M might be a record of juxtapositions and asides is unsurprising, as this is a common and well-understood way to vary otherwise typically structured songwriting. However, it’s hard to find music with transitions and instrumentation shifts this awkward without delving into the wind-swept lands of the allegedly avant-garde. This generally applies only to the more dynamic tracks that make more effort to sound nominally metallic, but many were the times tracks melted into claustrophobic noise and reverb in order to dodge ending in a coherent fashion. Were these transitions better realized, we could probably pass this off as the mildly depressive shoegazing alternative rock recording it apparently wants to be when it grows up. But the occasional (and unsurprisingly rare) sections of overt black metal without obvious concessions to Myrkur’s shoegazing roots is poorly spent, with little in the way of intelligible riffing to the point that it’s almost a relief when the recording tries to do something different, even though it just ends up rehashing its previous ideas again.

You would have more luck loading up your favorite black metal recordings into a copy of Pro Tools and mixing in the misplaced indie pop promos we frequently receive, perhaps adding your own little twee ornamentation here and there. Perhaps this is why there are so many blackgaze recordings out there; Myrkur’s contributions would probably sink into the morass were it not for the incessant marketing of their label.

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Nile – What Should Not Be Unearthed (2015)

by Gabe Kagan on August 29, 2015

Nile - What Should Not Be Unearthed (2015)

Nile’s latest begins topical, with a blastfest themed after the recent years of strife in the Middle East. This is going to date the album some years from now, but from a commercial stance it’s still an excellent idea, certain to create buzz and boost the band’s reputation. They take a pot shot at a common enemy, and continue their legacy of Egyptian mythological themes in standard, professionally produced “brutal” death metal. All in a day’s work for the deathpop industry.

Surprisingly, I am not rehashing my thoughts on Infernus from a few days back like I expected I would when I first began researching this recording. On What Should Not Be Unearthed, Nile contributes to the corpus of accessible mainstream death metal in a broadly similar fashion to their Rutanian brethren, but in a fashion I find far less obnoxiously flat. It seems that Nile’s members have a better grasp of pop songwriting (and importantly, how to incorporate the instrumentation and technique of death metal into such formulas) that could potentially earn them enormous amounts of money if they were to sell their service as songwriters.

Nile’s Egyptologist trappings are one of their big gimmicks and therefore makes necessary discussion whenever they are brought up. The ideas certainly permeate the lyrics, but rarely go beyond that, with the notable exception of the occasional short filmic “Egyptian”/Middle Eastern interludes. There is nothing I can say for or against their authenticity, but few if any of the musical ideas they present in these asides make their way into the metal side of the songwriting. The constant usage of various musical scales and modes, though, might appear to be missing link for listeners not used to the general chromaticism and/or tonal experimentation of your average death metal band. The idea occasionally turns into a Billboard-style pop hook (see the intro to “Evil To Cast Out Evil” for an obvious example), though, and that’s probably good enough for Nuclear Blast.

Dwelling too much on Nile’s gimmick, though, is like only eating the plastic topper off an extremely sugary wedding cake. What Should Not Be Unearthed hasn’t got much in the way of coherent song structures or direction, and that’s why you’ll probably forget about it after a few spins. Judging from the content here, the band members understand on a basic level that they need to vary their parameters throughout a song in order to not come across as a vague buzzing sound. When they try to go beyond basic pop formulas, though, they collapse into stereotypical alternating blasting sections and breakdowns and occasionally make me giggle by, for instance, pitch bending a guitar harmonic chord at the beginning of the title track. It’s nominally better than no variation, but it’s going to take a lot more thought and organizational work than what’s on display here to write intelligent tracks.

Ambition is nothing without preparation, though, and Nile remains strongest (and commercially strongest) as musicians and songwriters when they stick to their basic deathpop. In that regard, What Should Not Be Unearthed is a partial success, and the rest probably… should not be unearthed.

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Heineken Nederland B.V. – Newcastle Brown Ale (2015)

by Cory Van der Pol on August 29, 2015

heineken_nederland_b_v_-_newcastle_brown_ale

Options in life often take the form of what is conveniently available plus feasible given resources. Imagine a standard American suburban Saturday night, when you are the squad are about to chill in the garage with some death metal and smokes. What can you pick up at a standard die-cut suburban liquor store or grocery store that does not hit either extreme, mediocrity or expensive novelty? One option for generations has been Newcastle Brown Ale, now brought to you by the same people who murdered Heineken and turned it into Budweiser with Dutch flavoring. Luckily, with Newcastle, there is less room to ruin: this has always been a medium-dark, sweet beer with a caramel-molasses flavor, and although this version is more watery than the ones from two decades ago, it mostly maintains that flavor. Pouring the beer releases a fallen leaves brown liquid with a medium head and an immediate note of its dominant flavor, a nutty warmth melded with malty stoved sugar with undertones of fresh bread and a hint of malt vinegar. It goes down smoothly with a creamy flavor and a lingering sweetness which might be the weakest point for this beer, followed by an earthy but not bitter flavor of hops. Like many commercial beers, its aftertaste is most revealing, which has the sugars dissipate to a slightly skunky yeast flavor. What saves it is that warmth and toned down brown ale flavor seamlessly mixed with a gentle sweetness. Sometimes this one is too sweet for me. But Newcastle Brown Ale provides a solid middle-of-the-road brown ale that can be found almost anywhere at a low import price, making this a go-to when the pale imitations of formerly great imports (and their 20% higher prices) make the lips curl with resentment and not anticipation.

Quality rating: 4/5
Purchase rating: 4/5

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#metalgate: SJWs make clear the agenda is making you OBEY

by Brett Stevens on August 19, 2015

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To succeed in modern society, it is best to style oneself as a victim. We live in a time of victimhood politics where the person who successfully portrays themselves as being harmed finds that society steps aside to let them ahead, handing out freebies in the process.

Rape victims — whether a rape occurred or not — become overnight celebrities. Politicians gain stature for having been opposed, not for having been right. Every celebrity and actor has a story of how life harmed them early on. In a society of equals, the only way to be more equal is to be perceived as having been made less equal, thus a recompense — and rise in moral stature to “hero” — is deserved.

For most of their careers, SJWs have stayed behind the cloak of victimhood. In their view, someone out there is harming them, despite living in the nation with the best quality of life on earth, having government incentives for their hiring and renting, and being generally privileged college students working in easy media careers. They portray their crusade as correcting injustices.

But, as any cynic or observer of human behavior knows, those who perceive themselves as victims are usually simply manipulating others. Grackles — small brownish-black birds known for raiding dumpsters — will fake an injured wing to cajole extra treats from people eating at open-air cafes. This behavior is older than humanity itself. The difference with humans is that once given power, SJWs become insatiable attackers demanding that everyone else be cleared from their way. Their agenda is revenge against anyone having a better life than they are, which — since SJWs are the cause of their own underlying misery — is anyone who is not miserable.

We can see this pathology in a recent article by Laina Dawes (who unfriended me on Facebook for having a different opinion than she did) about “Heavy Metal Feminism”. Here’s the pitch:

Despite the global appeal and presence of heavy metal culture, widespread online distribution, and increasing awareness among a diverse audience, there remains great resistance to discuss ongoing sexism, racism, and other issues that can potentially dissuade fans from actively participating in the subculture. “I don’t know why it is so hard for people to understand that not everyone is just like them,” Phillips told me. And Phillips isn’t alone; other artists and journalists are questioning the pervasiveness of discriminatory practices and beliefs within a musical culture that, ironically, not only boasts of its “inclusive community” (in which membership is predicated on fandom and not gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), but also, because of its underground status, places an emphasis on fan participation and economic support in order to create and distribute music that will never, and doesn’t want to, receive true mainstream commercial attention.

At this point, the true message emerges: agree with us or you are bad and must be destroyed.

Never mind that what is popular is almost always wrong and corrected by the next generation, or that heavy metal might have its own way of dealing with this issues.

Despite all the citation of academic articles here, Dawes’ approach is fundamentally unscientific: cite lack of tons of female heavy metal bands as “proof,” then claim that only that will rectify the “problem,” and demand that everyone else drop everything they are doing in order to get ahead.

And throughout it all, no one answers the real question: what have these female-fronted bands done to make themselves important to metal?

After all, Lita Ford, Jo Bench, Lori Bravo, Mythic/Derketa and others have had no trouble being metalheads who also happen to be women.

But that shows us the real agenda that Dawes is pushing: she does not want women in metal, she wants propagandists. She wants women who agree with her to be shoved to the front of the line so they can drown out that bad old white male music.

Never mind that metal has never been exclusively white nor male. Never mind the legions of women who have been in bands, worked as journalists (including the underground zines that mainstream media refuses to mention), run labels or otherwise contributed vital things to metal.

They claim they are anti-fascist, these SJWs, but while they are not fascist they are authoritarians. Their goal is to replace metal with propaganda rock with the “right” opinions to cure a “problem” that is not a problem. And if you need any more reason than that to kick them to the curb, you have not been paying attention.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews 07-25-15

by Staff on July 25, 2015

smrtop

Superficially repacking the old into the new for a younger, naiver generation is an abhorrent commercial practice of both record labels and Hollywood studios. These five independent artists have bravely submitted their failures in doing so to the Death Metal Underground. May our objective criticism prove constructive to their suicides.

archemoron

Archemoron – Sulfur and Fire (2015)

Archemoron. Yes, Archemoron. Yes, this band named themselves Archemoron. Yes Archemoron were not joking; Archemoron are serious. When not ripping off Slayer, Archemoron play melodic black and death metal riffs arranged into rock dirges. Many of Archemoron’s own “riffs” are pinch harmonics repeated for two minutes. Archemoron’s tracks are five to seven minutes too long. Archemoron invoke Hieronymus Bosch about as much as Dark Funeral taking their pants off and whacking each others’ dicks with pool noodles for an hour before running a train on the ass of the one in the gimp chains invokes heterosexuality. Archemoron are arch morons.

deathwhite

Deathwhite – Solitary Martyr (2015)

Hoobastank is back with a new EP. What remains of Roadrunner has surprisingly not signed them yet. I am watching a group of shaved-ape Russians fishhook a fat hooker with their dicks. The mascara is running as they pound her face and ass. The asshole stretches to accommodate more Poles. Time for the money shot. So this is a creampie scene? Damn they are ejaculating in her ass one by one. That’s nasty. She’s squeezing it out now. Mother of god that is not watery semen; this is a group piss enema into a prolapsed rectum. That bloody red, inside-out Russian rectal meat is wet with piss and shit flakes. Only Relapse Records could masturbate to this.

enthring

Enthring – The Art of Chaos (2015)

Is this Hells Headbangers Motorheadcore? Slayer? Slayer doesn’t have keyboards. Chanting? Why? Enthring want the lyrics to be important in these rock songs so why are they detracting from what I can’t understand with a melotron? Motorhead didn’t need keyboards in the 70s, Motorhead doesn’t need keyboards added in now. Stop remixing music you cannot comprehend into carnival music metalcore with breakdowns. This is the Transsexual Serbian Orchestra of metalcore soggy biscuiting that Fleshlight Apocalypse that came in Nuclear Blast’s die hard edition.

goattorment

Goat Torment – Sermons to Death (2015)

Goat Torment attempt to preach to Death himself by prying open fans’ assholes with Sodom and Slayer. While many experienced heshers can instantly see through such a ruse, many of today’s trve metal warriors only listen to bands that their chill core bros designate as “bestial.” This audience is unaware nor cares of the thrash rehash cash-in. The martyred Euronymous himself was fond of cutoff Sodom belly shirts and dildo prostrate massages so Pitchfork will say that Goat Tormentor having a daisy chain finished by using Tom Angelripper’s visage on the back of their shirts as a cum target is a socially acceptable sexual practice. Sermons to Death is an Outbreak of AIDS.

kyy

Kyy – Travesty of Light (2015)

Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir pandered “black metal” to Hot Topic tweens. Kyy attempt the same by sticking random minor key tremolo riffs in their nu metalcore. Twenty eight year olds with Vatnett Viskar backpatches, sleaveless jean jackets, and questionable sexual preferences won’t lap this up like they do teenage goth ass. Travesty of Light lacks the catchy screeched vocal hooks and emotional choruses to be distributed by Century Media. Only more randomness grounded by catchier vocal dichotomies may grant Kyy the hairy hipster fudge.

smrbottom

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Iskra – Ruins

by Brett Stevens on July 17, 2015

iskra_-_ruins

Another day, another pretender. Iskra claim to be black/crust, which is a nonsense genre in itself that insults both of its origins, but in actuality are more like an Angelcorpse style band with occasional flashes of melody and to avoid the un-PC Nietzschean narrative of black metal, lyrics about war and politics.

All of the above presents zero problem if well-executed, but the problem here is that Ruins is a collection of tropes from those genres held together by sheer momentum, which means that at the time of listening it is inoffensive but there is zero reason to pick it up. It is based on previous forms without injecting any essential spirit or direction of its. Like At the Gates Slaughter of the Soul, it is cleverly designed from a commercial perspective, in that underneath the fast tremolo riffs and breathless raspy howl the songs are very convention riff-chorus with one transition between what are essentially identical halves. Its other clever business strategy is realizing that people might enjoy a version of Angelcorpse that like Napalm Death Fear, Emptiness, Despair introduced a bit of melody and broke down the blitzkrieg drive into more recognizable song patterns.

Unlike most of these bands, Iskra do one thing well: they know when to break rhythm and transition tempo to avoid the monolithic wall of sound that war metal bands too often engage in, but they also miss the outsider perspective of crust and the atmosphere of black metal. If you were one of those people who were satisfied with all-ahead-go speed metal bands that did not write their own melodies, you will not be offended by this, but do not be surprised when it has a staying power measured in days and not weeks or years.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews 06-20-2015

by Staff on June 20, 2015

SMR

Besides being on the look out for promising bands and nurture them as the future of metal, there is also a place to examine the living corpses of decadent and useless products release by the emotionally needy and artistically impaired. Sadistic Metal Reviews to put the pretentious wankers, the clueless “experimentalists” and the postmodernist “intellectuals” in their place: in line and ready to be disposed of.

 

acrania
Acrania – Fearless (2015)

Latin jazz deathcore featuring conga breakdowns, sax solos, bass slams, gang chants, tough guy
empowerment lyrics, and At the Gates. This is Elements with ear gauges for those who enjoy the
bongocore of later Sepultura. To improve their future releases, I recommend the band overdose on
artificial opiates cut with chemicals usually found in anti-dandruff shampoos.

Vattnet-Viskar

Vattnet Viskar – Settler (2015)
Vattnet Viskar are screamo in the same vein as Deafheaven. On Settler they could have attempted to use careful melodies and riff progressions to emotionally convey to the listener the existential nihilism of an ordinary woman attempting to transcend her earthly existence only to be brutally splattered upon the Earth’s surface. Instead they disingenuously pander to a liberal hipster audience for whom Mayhem and Burzum are verboten by pretending to be an acceptable “black metal” band. Major scale tremolo riffs, sludgy hard rock, and hardcore breakdowns are randomly arranged in songs grounded by emotional choruses and vocal hooks. This is not shoegaze; Vattnet Viskar and Deafheaven are as far from My Bloody Valentine as they are from Darkthrone. Post-hardcore with comprehensible screeching as the primary emotional vehicle is screamo. Those who eat this album up and genuinely think it is true black metal are just deluding themselves about progressing beyond their whiny teenage musical tastes.

gyre
Gyre – Moirai (2015)
Gyre exploit the misguided nu-metal commercial revival driven by millennial ex frat boys wishing todefend their shitty taste as mall-dwelling tweens. Moirai is a nu-metal album with djent chugging and afew speed metal solos just in case a member of the target audience is the air guitar type. PreventingGyre from achieving financial success with this artistic failure is their lack of name recognitioncompared to Fred Durst and Serj Tankian. Thus Gyre are best advised to run back to the brostep clubs and never return.

ysengrin
Ysengrin – Liber Hermetis (2015)
Arranging simplified, slowed down Megadeth riffs around boring acoustic interludes doesn’t make for effective thrash and doom metal. Claiming to be blackened death metal as you play those riffs through distortion pedals into crappy solid state amps to get a more fuzzy than bestial guitar tone means you fail two more genres. Go listen to Rust in Peace again instead of subjecting yourself to this unnecessary career retrospective.

nightland
Nightland – Obsession (2015)
Slaughter of the Soul riffs? Check. Hit people breakdowns? Check. Random songwriting? Check. Metalcore with orchestral fluff played by guys in leather dresses is still metalcore. This time it’s just marketed toward fat Nightwish goths and frilly-shirted Fleshgod Apocalypse fans.

Cult-of-Fire-
Cult of Fire – मृत्यु का तापसी अनुध्यान (2013)
Here Cult of Fire randomly mix stolen Bathory, Immortal, and Emperor riffs with Abba keyboards and pointless eastern music into a pathetic failure of black metal. This album is yet more proof of how easily the basic compositional requirements of the genre can escape even the most technically accomplished musicians.

klamm
Klamm – Ernte (2015)
Blackened folk singalongs played by German hipsters? This music is the result of too much cuddling and too little beatings. Dumb to the point of being exasperating, Klamm tries to fulfill ideological cliches of what both folk and black metal represent. Press stop to leave the beer hall.

horrendous
Horrendous – Ecdysis (2014)
Steal Heartwork riffs, run them through a Boss HM-2 pedal, and throw in some random Journey to pad out the tracks. Contrary to the title and cover art, this pretentious pseudo-Swedeath fails to shed its melodeaf skin. The only thing this album transcends is listeners’ patience when it assumes they are intellectually disabled by building multiple nu songs from the riffs in one very popular older song called Heartwork. Horrendous prove themselves musically no better than Archenemy and far inferior to them when it comes to musical common sense.

Örök – Übermensch
Örök – Übermensch (2015)
Coming from the spiritual-minded ambient “black” metal camp, this self-absorbed music is so ego-centric it somehow manages to be unaware of its stagnancy, vacuity, it’s lack of proposal and direction. As the title indicates, rather than an excellent specimen’s product, this is more of a diva’s self-appraisal. Untermensch.

Dismember – Massive Killing Capacity
Dismember – Massive Killing Capacity (1995)
After the commercial success of Entombed’s Wolverine Blues, money-grubbing record labels pressured the rest of the big Swedish death metal bands to pander to the Pantera crowd. Dismember turned down the distortion and gazed back to seventies rockers Kiss and Deep Purple for inspiration. Unfortunately, downtuned and distorted butt rock riffs coming out of JCM 900 heads are still butt rock riffs. A few songs that rip off Dismember’s own prior good work and Metallica’s Orion make this slightly more listenable than the aforementioned Wolverine Blues but do not come close to alleviating this death ‘n’ roll turkey’s massive shitting capacity. This is Highway Star death metal.

Nebiros
Nebiros – VII (2015)
Mellotrons and makeup do not paint your metal black. These overlong songs are structured around
deathcore breakdowns and stolen Gothenburg riffs. This is more Heartwork for subhumans than a Pure Holocaust.

Archaea-Catalyst-2015-
Archaea – Catalyst (2015)
One could say this sounds like Unleashed only if Unleashed were one of those deathcore bands from five years ago with the token female keyboardists. This is a stereotypical blend of polka beats, breakdowns, Gothenburg candy melodies, and keyboard leads. Listening to it makes me want to lay my head down upon the train tracks just so an overweight man in a jumpsuit embroidered with his own name will be forced to power wash my brains off to the sweet voice of Kenny Rogers.

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Unholy Prophecy

by Spinoza Ray Prozak on June 12, 2015

schoolbus

The forest warmed as the late afternoon sun stroked it from above. Insects rose out of their protective hiding place in the underground and ascended thermals into the high trees where birds pursued them. Far from the solar fire too bright for humans to glance into the sky at all, a school bus surrounded by dead leaves hid under the canopy of light-absorbing leaves.

“Christ on sandwich bread,” said Dennis as he vaulted into the bus. He looked around and realized he was speaking to an empty space. Shrugging, he began preparations for the ritual. He took one of the wax-streaked dimestore candles from the ad hoc plywood shelving where the driver used to sit, and put it on an old kitchen table that was propped up in back between sofas. Lighting it, he cleared the leaves and bugs from one seat, and perched on it to enjoy the ninth cigarette of the day. As he was finishing, the emergency door at the rear of the bus batted open.

“World’s gone crazy,” said Mark Reissdorf, with his inseparable best friend Thomas Nagel in tow. They each took seats on one of the four sofas that formed the seating area at the rear of the bus. Dennis and Thomas gathered dead and fallen branches, cramming them into the fire pit as Thomas wedged a newspaper from his pocket between them. Soon a fire blazed and smoke leaked from the bus into the woods.

Finally they heard more footsteps through the leaves and Mark leaned out the door to give Sam a hand in. Sam stood taller than any of them, but also carried extra weight, the consequence of being both the bullied youngest sibling in the Bormanns household and as a result, the one his mother soothed with treats. He dug around in his insulated vest and found a plastic sandwich bag which he flung onto the table before them. “It’s from Canada,” he said. “Where’s R?”

Thomas shrugged, and Mark and Dennis made me-too motions with their eyebrows. Sam grunted, then began rooting around in the bag.

“It’s not time,” said Thomas.

“Shut up,” said Sam. He towered over Thomas, but the smaller boy held his ground. “We have to stay true to the ritual. Defenders of the Faith.”

“You’re right,” said Mark, holding the syllable for just long enough to crucify it with a short word as if punctuation: “Fag.”

They all started giggling at that point. Then the front door of the bus opened — only R used that one — and he stepped in, chilly in his sweater and jean jacket. Where the other boys had long hair, R had none whatsoever. He had in fact shaved his entire body only because he discovered that it freaked out over 85% of the people he encountered on a regular basis, where tattoos and piercings hovered in the 60s, drug use in the 50s, and casual sex in the teens. When R stepped into a room, most people recoiled in fear. He loved that.

Mark threw more wood onto the fire, which now blazed up in the fire pit and filled the bus with smoke. R took a bong and a bottle of Old Valley Road bourbon out of his backpack. Sam tossed in the bag of weed. Mark pulled out a handful of pills and a knife, and Thomas tossed in a bag with traces of cocaine. R — his real name was Ron Carpenter, but he told everyone in freshman year that his name was actually DLANOR and he was from Sumeria, so no one trusted any name he gave — pulled out a key from his pocket and unfastened the padlock on the plywood box. Inside was a portable stereo. He plugged in his off-brand MP3 player and cranked the volume to ten. No one mentioned the week they had spent burying wire to snake a line off the nearest streetlight, nearly a half-mile away, but they all swelled with pride at the ability to have their music in this remote place.

The sounds of Hellhammer filled the bus. They simply did not trust any music or — well, anything — from any more recent time. The 1980s was when it fell apart. People like to talk about what a great decade it was, but really it must have been a terrible decade, like looking out your window to see a tsunami of Ebola-infected sewage coming your way.

The ritual had begun.

“Today was unbearable,” Thomas said, taking his privilege as the physically weakest in what had become a combination support group, revolutionary meeting and occult rebellion. “Let me tell you all about it.”

***

His day began, he related, with going to his high school and sliding into his first class in a stupor of boredom. The teacher did not even notice, having a rubric which demanded she cover a certain amount of material per minute, and confronting late students only interrupted that. He performed the minimum, being half-awake at the time, since he had spent most of last night roaming the empty places of an adult world he did not understand or wish to enter. When his parents settled down after a few mixed drinks, and his brothers and sister were camped in front of the TV, he grabbed the packet of cigarettes they kept in the kitchen drawer and headed out. He just walked: through the parking lots, across the empty roads, trying doorhandles in buildings, down the alleys. If anyone had a problem with it, he had his flick knife and used to be a star on the track team, so it would be a fair combat at least.

“You can’t sit there,” said someone in his second-period English class. Still groggy, he asked why. “All the football players sit here.”

“Fuck off,” he said. It was his favorite retort to people, who he would like to murder with great pain and cruelty, but in his inner heart he knew what he really wanted to murder was the world. The all of it. The ugly parking lots everywhere, stupid triplicate forms, waiting in line for morons to tell you what to do, brain-dead churches and politicians and the people who followed them like sheep, and everyone else strung out on booze like his parents or heroin like his friends from the past year. They were all cowards. Thomas was a small kid and he knew that if one of the football players made an issue of it, he would be at a major disadvantage. But he always fought back, leaving them with enough wounds that they thought twice about trying again, a wisdom he learned during the early years of bullying in elementary school.

Instead, Danny the Irish-Polynesian football player came into the room, took one look at Thomas taking up the first seat in the front table, and turned to the kid who had warned Thomas and punched him in the shoulder. “Good job keeping my place for me,” he said and stormed off.

More football players came in. A couple threw books at the kid who failed to guard the place. No one else sat at the table. Thomas shrugged it off, and sat through the class. He heard whispers behind him but ignored them as the usual screwing around of idiots. Then Mr. Danforth heard a knock at the door and went into the hall to talk with the fat piggish administrator who had a form for him to sign. Thomas had just settled into the lull of the background hum in his brain when an unstoppable form hit him from behind, knocking the table forward against the wall and sending Thomas crashing into it. Right before he smashed his head against the edge, he tightened his hand around his pencil and instinctively stabbed upward. A howl came in response and more books and papers crashed to the floor as the table slammed into the teacher’s desk.

“What the hell is going on here?” said Danforth, coming back into the room with a sheaf of papers to muddle over later during a bottle of discount white wine. Two students stood covered in blood in a snarl of wrecked furniture and ruined papers.

“I, uh, fell,” said the kid who had warned Thomas, with Danny standing right behind him. But Danny had blood pouring from a wound in his armpit that looked suspiciously like a pencil.

“He stabbed me,” said Danny, pointing at Thomas. Danny eyed him warily. Thomas wanted him to attack again, so he could strike with the pencil. Again and again. Murdering his parents, his teachers and the people who designed this ugly, boring, codependent place.

“I didn’t move,” said Thomas. “You must have fallen on me. I guess you just stumbled on a pencil too.”

“Well what were you doing sitting in my seat?” Danny finally managed.

“There are no assigned seats. Get over yourself,” said Thomas.

“Thomas, why don’t you ever just go along with what people want?” asked Danforth. “Go to the office. Marsha will take you. Danny, go to the Nurse.”

The nerdy kid who had warned him scoffed. “Told you so,” he said.

“At least I’m not a suck-up to jocks because I’m a mouth-breathing nerd,” said Thomas. “You’re as dumb as they are. Just math-dumb not football-dumb.”

“Fuck you, Thomas,” said the kid.

“You go to the office too,” said Mr. Danforth.

Marsha walked ahead of them carrying the yellow slip of paper which said they were rejects. “You really know how to make a small incident a big one,” she said. “Why didn’t you just do what other people want?”

Thomas sighed. “Because other people are usually crazy. Most people wanted the new dam built that flooded the woods, most people wanted the new road that makes town loud, most people actually like that stupid class, and most people watch football and drink Coors Light. I can’t do it,” he said, and suddenly felt a little bit weak.

She turned to him and he saw her eyes, a gentle blue, had faded. “You better get to the Nurse,” she said. “I’ll tell Danforth you were bleeding. That’s true, at least.”

Lunch had been no different. Some guy in a Polo shirt wanted to take his chocolate milk, and Thomas used one of the jiu-jitsu moves he studied on the weekend and threw him. That was a problem, since behind him was a chair and behind that, a glass window. Both shattered as the unlucky dumbshit went sprawling. Thomas did not get to finish his chocolate milk. As the campus cop escorted him from the premises, he caught Marsha’s eye. It looked worried and amused. He shrugged and bowed ever so slightly, which caused laughter at her table. Most likely they were making fun of him.

He went to his job at the movie theater after that. Clean the floor, they said. He took several dozen wet floor signs, found a movie that would not be out for another hour, and swabbed the whole floor then began drying it. A woman exited the individual theater and Thomas took her arm and guided her around the wet floor. “It’s tricky,” he said.

“Is that blood all over your face?” she asked. Thomas shrugged. He noticed she did not go into the theater and the next thing he knew, the manager was tapping his arm. “Why is so much of the floor wet? We’ve had a complaint.”

“I swab it down first, then get it all at once with the bucket,” said Thomas. “That way I’m not putting dirty water back on the floor to swab the next section.”

“Why don’t you just do it–” said the manager, but Thomas finished his words. “– like everyone else. My way is more efficient. I can show you — ”

” — No, no,” said the manager absent-mindedly. He was short like Thomas and Thomas always liked him for that, and hoped he had found a beautiful short wife. This guy was better than most.

“You know what, I don’t give a shit,” said the manager. “You’re going to have to go home because we had a complaint.”

“Even if it’s a… uh… ah… not really true one?” said Thomas, searching for words.

“Yes, because if someone else complains, I look like a stupid asshole,” said the manager. “Your whole goal is to not make me look like a stupid asshole.”

“Even if it’s less efficient?”

The manager threw up his hands. “Yes… I mean, no. Do what is efficient. Just don’t cause complaints. Like, next time, use an empty theater.”

“Right,” said Thomas. On his way out, he passed Marsha. “Going to a movie?” he asked.

“Going to visit my Dad,” she said, and pointed to the door he had just left. Thomas slapped his palm over his face and when he looked up she was gone.

The only saving grace came as he exited the kitchen area behind the concession stand. “Hey, Tom, wait up,” said Mikey, who wanted to be called “Mike,” the longest-haired of the crew. “Can you swap a bud for some blow?”

“Better be the real deal,” said Thomas, feeling for a moment more grown up than his milktoast parents who never did anything dangerous like drugs, crime or violence.

“Hell yeah it is,” said Mikey. “Hey, I heard you served that Danny guy in class today…”

***

“Jesus, what a lot of drama,” said Mark.

“Jesus would have hated all of those people,” said Dennis. As the token Christian in the group, or so it was suspected, they tolerated him like they might a homosexual: warily. Dennis was pretty sure he was not gay but sometimes he wondered about Sam. Not like it mattered, he thought. A gay guy who was not a stupid asshole would be OK, but most gay people would be stupid assholes, because most people were stupid assholes and no one got a pass.

Sam shrugged, busy packing weed into the bowl of his custom modified EZ-rip bong. First he painstakingly separated weed from stems, the fresh herbal scent enveloping him like a memory of flowers, and reduced the weed itself to dust. He then intermixed this with blonde tobacco he got at the local tobacconist by swiping it and then buying enough lighters to cover the cost, paying for them, but leaving the lighters behind. He wouldn’t steal from Mr. Walton. The guy was OK — he actually looked up what Sam could buy at his age and applied the letter of the law. “If you ask me,” Walton had drawled, “We don’t need any of these frickin’ laws. But they don’t ask me.”

“What about you, Sam,” asked Dennis.

“Long day at the computer store,” said Sam. He had dropped out of school, then taken the GED, then gone on to work at a local computer parts store. Now he fixed computers for little old ladies and businessmen alike, and was generally appreciated for his attention to detail — forestalling future secondary complications — although it was universally noted that his manner was diffident, almost standoffish, in the way of people who distrust socialization itself.

Mark passed over a joint he rolled with some of the dirt-cheap weed he got from his cousin who grew it in the hills. It would get you high, like a 40 oz malt liquor would get you drunk, but it was such a blunting and numbing experience that it seemed to replace fun with a grinding duty to be wasted.

“Theme of the day was barriers,” Sam began after a few moments. “I fixed a computer, then all of a sudden, things were wrong.”

***

“Did you get that laptop set up?” asked his boss.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Needed a memory upgrade. Got it. Want me to install the usual anti-virus and repair software?”

“Sure,” said the boss, and disappeared between the shelves. Sam got to work. This one was more interesting than usual: two layers of security, and many cryptic files named only with alphanumerics in incremental form, like 1C5AFE3C0D1F.docx, stored in a generic folder. This one looked like a mess. He set about making a system backup, then preparing to install the suite of software that shielded the machine against hacks, spoofs, viruses, subversions, and errors.

He was about halfway done when his boss reappeared. “Ah,” Sam heard over his shoulder.

“–what?”

“Not that one. You can’t look in there. Just package it up for delivery.”

OK, thought Sam. He slid it onto the thin metal shelves and filled out the ticket, then turned back to his other tasks. But the memory tormented him: all those files, obviously inscrutable for a reason. Why? And the high security — for what? One did not lock doors beyond which lay only the mundane. His mind spit out a plan before his ego could approve it, but then he found himself drawn to it, cursing his lizard brain for having come up with such a perfect attack.

He dashed through the next computer, filled out the form, and slid it on the shelf, dallying next to the cryptic laptop which he plugged in to the wall, linking a network cable to its port. Then he re-arranged some bags, dropped his keys, straightened up again and left before the boss could get off the phone.

Back at his workstation he quickly fixed a point of sale machine in from a subscriber, then used it to sneak along the network and send a wake-up signal to the laptop. Then he ran a program that snaked past its security and showed him the file system. He began to download the mystery files. As he was opening the first file, he heard the door chime on the front door, seventy feet away. He paused as a voice burbled at the counter.

Walking as if heading to the stash of tools near the front, he got a glimpse of the check being handed over. His mystery laptop. The guy who owned it looked boring, reserved, maybe even a little bit withdrawn, but not paranoid as he expected a spy or criminal mastermind to be. Sam had other problems however. Within a half-minute his boss would reach over to the laptop, and have to unplug it and possibly explain to the customer why. Sam stepped back into the doorway of the loading dock, where he knew no cameras were, and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the fire alarm.

As the boss racked up the cost and entered the credit card, an ear-splitting siren blared through the store. Sam ditched the cigarette in a nearby flower pot. As employees rushed toward the door, he walked to the counter, then dropped his wallet. Straightening up halfway, he hunched over the machine and yanked out both cables, letting them drop, then joined the others outside.

“Weird,” said the boss. “Must have been a smoke test.” As it turned out, one of the new employees had inverted a power connector and popped a capacitor, which was accepted as the source of the smoke. The customer left, happy, and Sam wandered outside to pitch out the cigarette. When he came back to his desk, the boss was waiting for him. “We have lots of these high security jobs,” he said. “Here are another four that need doing today.”

It became a longer day than Sam intended. Toward the end, as he waited for one machine to restore its operating system, he peeked into the files he found. Columns of figures, debits and credits, on a weekly basis. He shrugged, but then looked closer. There were duplicate files for each week, but the numbers were not the same, and even without much life experience Sam knew he would rather pay tax on the second set than the first.

The boss came back inside. “Listen team, we’ve had a bit of a shakeup. I need you three to take weekend shifts, and shifts during the week are getting halved.” Sam realized his only chance to keep his salary was to take weekend shifts, so he doubled up on those as he penciled himself in to the sign-up sheet. Still, it felt unfair. The stroke of a pen and his weekend was obliterated. The voice of his boss and someone at least would be out of a job, since the total hours might support two workers but not four. And he thought they had been doing well?

His eyes slid down the counter and to the open door of the office. The computer in there might have answers. Maybe even double sets of numbers. As if sensing his discontent, the boss walked over and pushed the flimsy door shut, locking it.

Indirectly, the lowered hours brought him great fortune. Arlo sold him a fat bag of Canadian weed for a good low price, since he now needed money to hit the clubs and he would not get it from his four-hour shifts. These guys are all screwed, thought Sam, as he walked into the parking lot. He nodded as he passed the boss getting into his car. “Thanks for taking those shifts,” he said.

***

R stoked the fire. “Those are some of the most bum-ass days I’ve heard of it,” he said. “All I had was a short day at work, then wandering around looking for drugs for you guys, and playing guitar.” He showed the calluses on the ends of his fingertips.

He worked at a place that installs solar panels. When he got really stoned, R (his mother called him Ronald, before she passed on from unspoken-of ailments) talked excitedly about solar cells. How they work by allowing photons, which are particles of light, to knock electrons free from atoms, and these then form a flow of electricity. How much energy is stored in each. But then the moment fades and R is back to his sullen, defiant self, like the rest of them both detesting the time he is in now and fearing them more obligatory adulthood to follow.

“I thought you were studying for your license?” asked Thomas.

“Not today,” said R. He shrugged and Thomas returned the gesture.

Inside the bus, the cheap portable stereo blared on, both more background noise and a focal point which like a string running through random objects, tightens and pulls them together into a story, with each piece revealing the reasons for its presence and the action implicated by its effect on the other objects in the string. As twilight settled on the world, it turned all colors to gray, as if it were revealing the actual lack of interest, sincerity and purpose to it all, Dennis thought.

The bong came around again. Thomas and Sam did a line, then dropped the dust into the bowl and inhaled it with the smoke. A glass of vodka floated from somewhere. “Good stuff,” said R. “Tastes more like rubbing alcohol than diesel. That’s how you know it’s quality.”

“About the same for me,” said Mark. “Went to school, fell asleep in all but two classes, then went to work where I stocked groceries for four hours, then I’m here.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a bottle of cooking sherry, then added it to the table. He had scored that from a heap of expired goods.

“The best drink is a free drink,” said Dennis, eyeing the bottle. “I’ll tell you mine, but you have to promise not to laugh.”

***

Dennis got schooled at home. This was a condition of his parole, involving an incident with a car going too fast with alcohol, marijuana and underage women in it. He was proud of the arrest, really, and hoped to wipe it from his record at 18 and go on to, like his father, settle into a comfortable business and make an unchallenging life for himself. One night late in the evening, surrounded by the cathedral shapes of the campfire, he had wandered into a lysergic chasm and faced his inner self, and realized what he found was more like the shuffling obedience of his father than the wild maniacs he imagined he socialized with.

First chapter was photosynthesis. Dennis liked this because he found it fascinating how light could fuse together carbon and water molecules to make sugars, the building blocks of all life. The leaves in these trees came from a diet of sugar created by sunlight, rain and the carbon dioxide he and other living things exhaled. He got too into talking about that, because his mother cut him off and changed to a different subject.

His mother, embarrassed as always by her son’s failure to be a responsible citizen like his older brother Randall, made him recite the material he had memorized and then presented him with the least of life’s delights, the pre-printed test from the back of one of his history books. He had an OK grasp of the material, he thought. “Now?”

“It’s a weekly test and I won’t be able to give it tomorrow,” she said.

OK. He gave it his best shot, and felt pretty good about it, but when he came back from the kitchen where he got a soft drink, his mother was shaking her head as she ticked red marks down the page. “This isn’t good enough,” she said. He saw the grade: 61, or a D.

“Can’t you just, uh, give it a little bump?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “If I do that and you go back to school and fail, they will think I acted against the court’s instructions and I could get in trouble. You just were not good enough, Dennis. This will set you back a week before you can get back on track.”

He knew he was supposed to panic. There were a dozen weeks remaining however. “Fine,” he said. He sat there until she gave him something else to do, and when she petered out at about the same time Mrs. Taggart came by with the latest gossip from church, he slipped out the back door.

The court ordered him to stay busy, a state policy being “idle hands do the devil’s work” but not officially so, and this mandated his appearance at a job for life burnouts like himself. The Helping Hand thrift store hired people like Dennis to receive and sort donations, then sell them to well-meaning suburbanites for money that went into a hilarious anti-drug program that Dennis had suffered through, laughing and groaning in equal doses internally as choked his way through interminable days of videos and group activities.

Dennis wanted to get on register. At the register, he could listen to the radio, even if it was just alt-country, and stay away from the dirty back yard where they heaped up the stuff they could not sell before shoveling it all into the dumpsters that would get towed to the county landfill once a week. He asked Maisie, but she said his skills were not up to speed. “You need to be at least as fast as David on the keys,” she said. “You’re just not doing well enough.”

Grumbling a bit, but not too much, he spent his shift unloading stuff from the cars that stopped in the front driveway and sorting it out. He had gotten pretty good at it when Sean his supervisor flagged him down. “You’re not including children’s clothes in the instore pile? Because we can’t use those anymore, new state law.”

“I didn’t hear about that,” said Dennis.

“It’s on a circular in your box,” said Sean. “You know, in the employee area in back. Except I can tell from looking at it that you haven’t checked it for a week.” Sean was a few years older, definitely bigger and stupider, but always seemed to do things that pleased the adults, so he was super and Dennis was… well, gopher. Odd jobs man. A guy you trusted to do only really simple stuff because otherwise he would screw it up.

Dennis shrugged. “Are you sure you’re even cut out for this job?” said Sean. “I mean, asking as a friend, maybe you should be doing something else. Something where you’re able to keep up. I wouldn’t want you to, you know, feel left out.”

Left out. That summarized the sensation well: standing alone in the heap of junk, cast off from the lives of people who had matured past it or died or moved, looking for children’s clothes to cast aside and just knowing that Sean or Maisie would stare at it for ten seconds and find the one set of My First Non-Waterproof Pants or whatever and they would tell him again how he was no good at it. Dennis worked the heap until his shift was over instead, then took his final break to overlap with the passing of the hour, and left over the back fence, his box still stuffed with all the printed notices and neurotic whining these people felt they had to send to everyone even though fully half the staff could barely read.

He sneaked into the lot surrounding the school. Mark was on the roof, smoking a cigarette when he was supposed to be sweeping up the gym, a punishment for a prank involving a firecracker and a toilet several days before. Dennis waved, but Mark did not see him. Dennis as usual experiences the cold shiver of sensation that perhaps here he is not good enough either, or that they know he is either slumming it with them or they are slumming it with him, the nerdly dork who has done many things in life, none of them right. He sighed and walked until he was just about beneath the outer wall of the school.

“Dennis,” came a voice from behind him. He turned. Sean bore down on him with wide strides. “You forgot to clock out,” he said. “Maisie sent me to make sure you weren’t doing anything you’re not supposed to.”

As the lecture went on, Dennis shrugged at Mark on the roof, who by now has taken notice. Mark pitched aside the cigarette, and gestured with his hands: closer to the wall. Dennis backed up so that he and Sean were parallel to the wall, then stepped to his right until his should nearly touched the brick. Unconsciously Sean did the same. Dennis looked up to see Mark inching closer and lining up, then tossing over the water bucket he used to mop the gym. The heavy plastic bucket pitched forward as if ready to soak Sean, then straightened so that its bottom faced downward.

I should warn him, thought Dennis, but something inside him shrugged. Not good enough, Sean. The bucket hit Sean on the top of his head and although only a quarter filled with water, knocked him out cold.

“Give me five and I’ll be out of here,” Mark called on down.

As they went through the woods toward the bus, Mark rubbed his cold hands together. “Sure was good to see a friendly face. You guys are the only ones who understand just about anything. That school is so retarded it thinks it’s a genius, when really it’s a fat blob waving its flippers at the sun.”

***

Inside the bus there was silence. Then: “Heavy,” said Thomas. R agreed, passing over the joint.

“So,” he said. “I lied. I took my commercial license exam today, and I totally failed it. Too much smoking weed, not enough boring book. I took a walk along the river after that, looking for floaters, but as usual this town let me down.”

“Sucks, man,” said Dennis. He punched up the stereo with something new, an old recording by an obscure Finnish death metal band. The energy pulsed through the bus just as the beer, liquor, wine, dope and coke flooded their bloodstreams. But even more, they had finally forgiven each other for the failings each had exhibited that day.

Above them the roof of the bus made small metallic sounds as it gave up the heat of the day. Now that the sunlight had diminished and people could again look toward the sky, the trees emitted a cooling mist and scent of earthy wholeness created from the conversion of water, carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars. The forest takes in the sun that would kill them if exposed directly to it for too long, the water the rest of the world cannot use, and makes them into new life with the breath of people like these lost boys and angry men in the bus.

The alcohol and drugs converted tension into relaxation, if not hallucination. But as the music gained power, it converted their rage into a love. First of metal itself, then of the world that can produce such music, and finally of truth itself — the truth they find in this music, and imagine must exist outside of it somewhere else — that reduces the lunacy and irrelevance of their days into a nuisance occupying its proper role, like that of ticks and leeches, not the most important thing ever as authority figures want it to be.

As the forest quieted and hallucinogens seeped into their brains the music seemed louder. They were travelers in a world of icy power chord riffs and gurgling roars, temporarily passing through a clearing where a 1950s schoolbus rusted under the ancient trees. Its light spread farther as the light faded from the day. R fell out of the bus first, laughing with intoxication, pulling Mark after him. Thomas leaped out next, then Sam, with Dennis almost piling on top of them.

Soon they were circling in the light cast from the opaque windows of the bush, swinging each other in circles and colliding like atoms transfering electrons, passing energy along in a new form as it escaped the ashen world where all momentum dies.

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