Monsterworks – Album of Man

monsterworks-album_of_manThe job of a reviewer is to describe music, not judge it. Assessment ultimately becomes obvious from the context of expectation created by the reviewer which shows where all things must fit in the bigger pattern.

Monsterworks resembles a mixture of things and prefers to stay that way. The majority of the structural parts of songs are like Led Zeppelin mixed with Southern Rock and early doom metal, using metalcore style rasp vocals, so that most of what you hear is very guitar-rock styled heavy metal. This is a welcome change from the less organic metalcore of late.

If you like guitar playing that is bluesy, varied and emotional, this album will pique your interest. While the vocals rant, guitars hit all the right rhythms and then work in leads with the fills, slowly building up intensity until the song explodes in sound. If you can imagine Led Zeppelin and Ion Dissonance collaborating on a stoner doom album, this might be about it.

Monsterworks create very much in the 1970s style, and yet with its vocals and aesthetics, very much in the 2010s style as well. The result is both deeply engaged and like newer metal hybrids, incessant in its peak intensity, which can make it meld together indistinctly. It often detours into “different” arenas, like progressive rock, tech-deth, and straight up hardcore, as if a variety show.

Album of Man reforms the anti-technical side of post-metal and metalcore however by using the guitar as a voice of its own, and breaking up the strident extremity with old fashioned instrumentalism. This both brings rock and metal back to their core and renews the intensity of the vocals. By doing so, it takes newer metal to a better place and makes for a more satisfying listen.

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The war on hipsters is accelerating

Taylor Swift

Many don’t see this as a metal topic, but as Cianide would say, “Metal never bends!” What does bend, to trends? The hipster and all other people who think a surface-level view of life is important.

A hipster is someone who leverages all aspects of their personality, art and social group for the kind of invisible magic karma points that “popularity” and “notoriety” confer upon the narcissistic personality. Like cultists, hipsters have shattered self-esteem and seek to compensate by knowing things that other people don’t know, specifically traded in artistic and cultural artifacts that are special — like the hipsters themselves — for being unique, odd, “different,” unconventional, distinctive, etc.

Notice what’s missing in there: realistic, accurate, informative and/or useful.

Hipsters originally shunned metal because metal is by nature a warlike genre. We look past the surface level of life’s drama, expressed dually by individual narcissism and social group zombie hive mind thinking, and instead pay attention to the situation beyond the individual. The heavy stuff: war, death, metaphysics, infinity, disease, history, the occult and the esoteric.

In 2008, Adbusters magazine blew the lid off the rising millennial hipster epidemic by proclaiming hipsters the dead end of Western civilization. An excerpt:

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Since that time, the hipster epidemic has only become more pervasive. Famous for being ironic, in order to be unconventional and different, hipsters wander through life making art out of garbage, Instagraming their oddball tastes in food, liveblogging their personal drama, treating their children like press agents for themselves, and generally making society more vapid, plastic, superficial, oblivious, trivial and vain.

Luckily, world leaders and authority figures are stepping in to help out.

First, North Korea is helping by threatening immediate war. But this isn’t a war on the USA. It’s a war on hipsters:

Some Texans, however, suggested the path in fact led 95 miles south to Austin, the state’s capital, and speculated that Mr Kim had taken against the liberal enclave’s young “hipster” population.

North Korea probably doesn’t get a lot of US papers. They probably don’t get too many Americans over there who aren’t credulous tourists or formal State Department types. However, they do get the internet. To them, America is an unending stream of Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit and FourSquare. From their point of view, the US = hipsters. So they’re taking out the real hipster capital of this place, and hope that will kill our culture like an ant mound poisoned with cianide.

From a completely different angle, Taylor Swift is mocking hipsters with her new single, including Instagram-style photographs, ironic hipster classes, and bittersweet lyrics that are poignant through indecision. She is hoping to curry her fanbase, composed of legions of young women with disposable income, to wage war on the hipster. This might succeed even better than Kim Jong-un’s nuclear attack.

And covering the domestic front, Boston’s police department are cracking down on hipster house parties featuring boring two-note pop punk bands with ironic themes about getting lost on life’s highway. Apparently, the officers are impersonating trendy hipsters in order to figure out where the hip ones are congregating in suburban houses, where they and their bad bands and PBR make noise until 4 am, prompting not one but many homeowners to open fire with rusty old weapons from the last real war.

While by themselves none of these seem significant, when added up these commonalities point to one thing: a world-wide backlash against the hipster and its superficial, ironic and selfish ways. As the hipster falls, metal rises, so we’re glad to see this development.

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Integrity – Those Who Fear Tomorrow

integrity-those_who_fear_tomorrowIn the early 1980s, punks had a wary attitude toward metal because they saw it as commercializing their music. As I finally get around to hearing Integrity’s Those Who Fear Tomorrow, I see their point, although it’s not an important one.

Merging punk and metal, Integrity add faster riffing and more complex song structures, as well as lead guitar noodling and a vocal attack that sounds like it is designed to be a more extreme version of the “Age of Quarrel” vocals from the Cro-Mags. It ends up sounding like something Phillip Anselmo could have used as his blueprint for his vocals with Pantera, in that it adds more of the confrontational shouted and chanted vocals and de-emphasizes anything like singing.

Staccato riffing with the choppy-edged sound of muted strum down-picking in the style of speed metal rounds out the package. Integrity likes to add broad spaces in their songs, such they hit with a riff and vocal attack, then pull back vocals and downplay instrumentation so there’s a pocket that draws in our attention. It is catchy but its repeated use lessens its effectiveness.

While there is probably nothing to be feared from commercialization here, as it makes for songs with more hook and polish, it is also in a genre different from punk and metal. These songs mostly follow pop song format, are mostly hook, and lose the total alienation of punk and the transcendental imagination of metal. For a hard rock or pop punk listen however, it’s a channel of rage that many will find appealing.

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Metal Orthodoxy

You may have noticed a metal orthodoxy forming over the years, but especially 1998 to the present. This orthodoxy emphasizes “trueness” to the concept (as well as the trappings, aesthetic, style, etc) of the original bands, and is paranoid wary of newcomers who do not embrace it.

Now that the official hipster central of the internet, The Onion, has published a metal list, we can demonstrate why metal orthodoxy exists: it’s designed to keep metal from being assimilated, or taken on by the larger genre of popular music as a style without ideas of its own.

Keeping it simple:
Ideas -> music -> genre of its own = metal orthodoxy
Just a style, any ideas = rock ‘n roll

See why there’s a distinct movement to metal orthodoxy? No one in a genre that is unique wants to be assimilated by what’s not unique, and in fact is the average of everything it has so far consumed. Rock music is like a large corporation, eating up small brands and removing what makes them unique, turning them into a label that can be stuck on just about any product in order to sell it.

Here’s The Onion’s list:

  • Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope (2002)
  • Amon Amarth, Twilight Of The Thunder God (2008)
  • Anaal Nathrakh, The Codex Necro (2001)
  • Baroness, Blue Record (2009)
  • Blut Aus Nord, The Work Which Transforms God (2003)
  • Boris, Pink (2005)
  • Converge, Jane Doe (2001)
  • Deftones, White Pony (2000)
  • The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ire Works (2007)
  • Earthless, Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky (2007)
  • Electric Wizard, Dopethrone (2000)
  • Goatwhore, Carving Out The Eyes Of God (2009)
  • Harvey Milk, Life… The Best Game In Town (2008)
  • High On Fire, Blessed Black Wings (2005)
  • Isis, Oceanic (2002)
  • The Mars Volta, Frances The Mute (2005)
  • Mastodon, Leviathan (2004)
  • Melechesh, Djinn (2001)
  • The Melvins, (A) Senile Animal (2006)
  • Meshuggah, Catch Thirtythree (2005)
  • Opeth, Watershed (2008)
  • Orthrelm, OV (2005)
  • Pelican, The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw (2005)
  • Pig Destroyer, Phantom Limb (2007)
  • Queens Of The Stone Age, Songs For The Deaf (2002)
  • Skeletonwitch, Breathing The Fire (2009)
  • Slayer, Christ Illusion (2006)
  • Sleep, Dopesmoker (2003)
  • The Sword, Age Of Winters (2006)
  • System Of A Down, Toxicity (2001)

Why do they like these bands? Well, first and foremost — you, dear reader, are not naieve enough to think that there’s not a financial connection here. These are bands distributed by or signed to the labels that help support The Onion and may at this point be personal friends or just “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” type buddies.

But next, they’re bands that rock listeners can comprehend. Except Melechesh, which is there for a different reason. And that reason is next: each band is different, meaning that it doesn’t fit into a perceived orthodoxy. Each band is “different” by being not the perceived norm, as perceived by outsiders who cannot tell the difference between Incantation and Immolation even though that difference is immediately perceptible to anyone who likes, understands and most of all pays attention to the music.

The “different” plays into the psychology of the individual. You’re just a cog in the machine. You’d like to think differently, but every day you keep doing whatever a cog does. So you find some way to be the cog that’s a cog, but also has a little something else. Interpretive dance. A flute on your death metal album. Or you’re an oddity, the one thing of type X that isn’t like the others.

See this in action, with bonus points for adding a sense of victimization — all cogs are victims, because otherwise they’d be running the machine! — added in:

Long before The Sword, Boris was getting smeared as poseur metal. It’s unlikely that would have happened if the band wasn’t Japanese, and if lead guitarist Wata wasn’t a woman

That must be it.

Not that this band is indie rock dressed up with some metal stylings and has nothing in common with metal as an idea, as a genre, but everything in common with indie rock. After all, irony is a key way to be different.

Here’s another great dickslap in the face for metal:

Metal, more than most genres, rewards consistency; a lot of headbangers would just as soon their favorite bands keep making the same record over and over. As elsewhere, though, there’s always something to be said for progress, and Goatwhore’s most recent record is a great leap forward.

The same album over and over means “the album sounds the same aesthetically.” It doesn’t mean the notes are the same; it means the distortion, tempi, vocals, and concept are similar. So it’s not the same album, is it? But for people who cannot appreciate that album, it’s important to find a good put-down so they can feel better about their own CD rack. Yeah, it’s the same old stuff. Yeah, it’s just consistent. But this other band… they’ve (gush here) progressed, which means they added a flute to their grindcore. Did they progress? No, but all of us can tell that a flute is a change, where only a few of us can tell that composition gained depth, or new emotions, even if the aesthetic remained the same.

Indie rock is what happens when you have a bunch of people making music just as vapid as Madonna or Sting, but they want some way to appear not-a-cog so they trick it out in this superficial progress using irony to be different so we know they’re the unique cogs. But their problem is that every cog thinks it’s a unique cog, so then they’re in an arms race to both trick out their own music with weirdness, causing it be basically ugly trash (this has happened to all modern art), and put down any music which does have artistic content, because it threatens them.

And at the end of the day, that’s what this Onion article is about: the fear of masses of hipsters that they missed something within the music (e.g. not adding a flute) and therefore, that they are just cogs after all. Which as they go back to their hipster “it pays nothing but I feel educated or socially important” jobs, is a bitter consolation indeed.

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