yet more from the metal mailbag
Ari Abramowitz of http://pockitrockit.blogspot.com takes issue:
1) Metal/Hard Rock: I think you and Woebot are barking up the wrong tree here. The distinction between hard/heavy music with black influences versus hard/heavy music without those influences is more of a function of time period than genre classification. Basically, most rock of all kinds had strong black influences in the 70s (the rock was funky and the funk was often rocky), while almost no rock--metal or otherwise--had much black influence in the 80s (or even the 90s). I personally feel that the difference between hard rock and Metal resides in the essence/drive/core of the music. That's vague, so let me be clearer: hard rock, just like rock but harder, deals with sex, drugs, and, yes, rock and roll. This is the central reason why Zeppelin is *primarily* a hard rock band (except for tracks like "Immigrant Song") and why AC/DC and Motorhead (except on tracks like "Iron Fist"), are almost entirely hard rock bands. This is why "cock rock" is totally Rock, not metal. Metal deals with strength, power, and either the heroic or the foreboding. This is the essence that carries through the most archetypal and influential Metal bands: Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, Metallica, Slayer. You are correct to notice the non-sexual aspect of Metal, but it is not due to the absence/presence of blues or any other black influence, but to the essential characteristic of Metal being largely about Life & Death, itself. That's why Sabbath is a Metal band, despite its blues roots (I personally think their bluesiness is overplayed by the press. I still haven't heard any blues lines that sound like "Into the Void" or "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath". Even when they do get bluesier, their consistent emphasis on the "tritone" warps the blues sound into something different, something almost medieval).
2) Hipster Metal: Suffering, endurance, battling the world are all elements of the Metal essence. Hipsterism tends to fly in the face of all that. For the metal faithful, you have to have put in your work, paid your dues, and proven true solidarity. No one likes a tourist, a poseur--especially not an ethos infused with the life and death struggle. A hipster will be there for you one day and mocking you the next (maybe both simultaneously, if given the right crowd). The major bone of contention is that hipsters do not actually *like* Metal, its essence, its spirit, and likely not even its sound. Rather, the appearance is often that Metal is a mere pawn in the hipsters' arms race for coolness. That's why literary attributes must be ascribed to Mastodon to make them acceptable (as if their compositions were not sufficient), or references made to Tony Conrad and Terry Riley for Sunn O))), or overexaggerated claims to experimentalism on the part of Boris (neither of whom I would classify as Metal) (as for the Sword and Wolfmother, etc the problem is less with pretentious/pandering packaging as much as with stultifyingly unimaginitive derivativeness. Sleep and Kyuss showed that "retro" elements can be explored very effectively). If people could somehow experience music *as music* more than as a social badge/signifier, this probably wouldn't be as much of a problem and critique would be much easier (though, to your point, the critiques would not necessarily be longer or more interesting).
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Ted Hill from Houston, Texas notes:
“I remember when Guns and Roses came out, many black kids I knew who hated most rock really liked them...they had this sort of "groove" behind them, they didn't seem phony. I was heart broken when that "One in a Million" song came out. They were on the verge of being a huge crossover band with a lot of respect from black rap fans, at least here in Houston. Nirvana ended up with that honor. “
Yeah the thing about GnR is that they did have that undeniable groove thang going for them, especially “Welcome to the Jungle”, and especially the funk freak-out fast bass-run helter-skelter haywire bit two-thirds the way through. It wasn’t all rehash, there was something fresh there.
On the rave/metal overlap, Ted-- who deejayed (still deejays?) on the Texas drum’n’bass scene says also that D&B in the Houston area went downhill when “a new crop of kids came in who were into nu-metal and maybe industrial, and they worshipped Andy C/Ed Rush and Optical/Dieselboy/Bad Company.They were white kids who talked faux gangsta slang, and tried to look real hard and tough at shows while punching the air and stomping around the dance floor, yelling at each breakdown.” I think I once described Bad Company (which is a hard rock if not quite metal name, after all) as the Motorhead of D&B, which was meant as a compliment, but also as a diss on everyone else in D&B circa 98/99 (the analogy being Motorhead versus NWOBHM).
Someone told me that Photek of all people is now peddling an ultra-fast ultra-hard nu-skool D&B sound that is equal parts metal and gangsta--he calls it "thugfunk" or something like that. Rupert Parkes, the last time I checked, wasn't he making house music?! What happened? Did he need dough to buy another Ferrari?
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On the metal/gabba overlap, Marcus Scott notes:
“Jason Medonica - the lead singer of satanic metal group Akercocke --was responsible for the Disciples of Belial project and also the Dead by Dawn parties”
"a Simon Reynolds level culture blog" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"my brain thinks bloglike"
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
more from the metal mailbag
Provocative thoughts from Carl the Impostume on the New Solemnity
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Neil who does the great night life/clubbing culture blog History is Made at Night (look for the recent post on trad jazz) mentions the gabba/metal nexus in re. the 90s Brixton club Dead By Dawn, which was part of that whole Praxis/Alien Underground speedcore under-underground:
“I remember the last night at Dead by Dawn (1996) featured the satanic speedcore The Disciples of Belial complete with black hoods whose whole vibe was very black metal”.
Provocative thoughts from Carl the Impostume on the New Solemnity
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Neil who does the great night life/clubbing culture blog History is Made at Night (look for the recent post on trad jazz) mentions the gabba/metal nexus in re. the 90s Brixton club Dead By Dawn, which was part of that whole Praxis/Alien Underground speedcore under-underground:
“I remember the last night at Dead by Dawn (1996) featured the satanic speedcore The Disciples of Belial complete with black hoods whose whole vibe was very black metal”.
And of course Earache had that whole little moment there of putting out gabber records, I went to a really punishing gabber night in London that was the launch for that first big gabba comp they put out....
Neil also wonders about the gender question:
“is there an overlap between bloggers, dubsteppers and metallists as primarily (but not exclusively) fraternities?”
Hmmm, well it's true, 'blog' is uncomfortably close to the word 'bloke' but… there’s always girls who are attracted by these harder sounds, who get involved as fans, but also musicians and deejays.. Actually the last time I went to Dub War, the NYC dubsteppa nite, I was pleasantly surprised how many women there were there.
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Bruce Levenstein notes there’s even more of a KLF/extreme metal connection:
“That mention of the KLF/Extreme Noise Terror performance reminded me that KLF attempted to release a metal album tof follow-up The White Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Room "
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Robin Carmody contributes to the periodisation of “hipster metal,” noting that as late as March 1984 NME devoted an entire issue to heavy metal that was “overwhelmingly negative and critical in tone”, centered around a piece by Charles Shaar Murray that slagged it off for its gross exaggeration of blues machismo and hyperphallic sexism. I’m pretty sure Barney Hoskyns metal-appreciative remarks predated that issue by a year or so, but then (in his typical renegade style) they would have been totally against the general grain, that lingering postpunk mindset which treated metal as degenerate culture, even proto-fascist. The first time I can recall any one in postpunk culture saying anything remotely positive about metal is Mark E. Smith (actually in an NME profile by Hoskyns, circa Slates). Smith spoke appreciatively of the robustly Teutonic way metal kids carried themselves and described the scene as “healthy", because metal kids got all the typical postpunk/NME-reader bollocks of analyzing and over-thinking and discoursing out of the way and didn't make such a big thing about music. Presumably most Fall fans would have filed this pro-metal comment along with Smith's other loopy opinions of the era like the idea that the nuclear bomb was a good thing because it mean that conscription was no longer required.
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A fellow rejoicing in the name Vas Djifrens declares:
“there iss only one way to true metal knowledge of the scene and scratchening of its surface: http://www.myspace.com/byzantum "
adding
“HAIL CANADIAN WEREWOLF TRUE PITCH BLACK METAL”
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Matthew Moore from down under with an Australian perspective on the Goth/metal nexus. He observes that while there is a black metal record store in Newtown (“Sydney’s rock central) there are three stores “selling Goth couture”:
“We seem to be big on Goth (& Emo also) and we have the big hairy slices of Trad Rock (as Aussie as meat pies) such as Grinspoon, Powderfinger & You Am I - but little Metal per se. And I think part of this is due to gender. Put bluntly, chicks gravitate more towards the Goth scene than the Metal. And if they are into Metal then their signifiers are often Goth (bondage gear, flouncy dresses, make-up). And the dudes follow the chicks. Or make a definite decision not to. In a sense, Goth is Speed Garage to Metal's Techstep. What strikes me about most post-blues Metal is the extent to which recognisable human emotion is eliminated. The Will To Posthumanity (to be free of these messy, horrible bodies) can be found in Techno AND Metal. Except that one chooses The Plateau and one The Abyss. Or summat. Whereas Goth takes body mortification and amplifies it into exhibitionism. "This Horrible Body" becomes "This Horrible Beautiful Body". And emotion in the music leaks back in (or refuses to dissipate) through this drama of display. That said the extent to which Goth remains a style culture more than a music culture here in Sydney is debatable.”
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Phinally, p H i n n with a spelling correction:
'Finland is in Finnish "Suomi", not "Soumi".'
Friday, March 02, 2007
Blimey, who'd have thought it, Metal Week has proved to be the most email-inciting topic since the heady days of Alt-Rock Slow Jams, Prog and find-a-name-for-me-postpunk-book-please. A lot of people out there turn out to have had a phase of metal-love in their backgrounds. (Quite a few of them rave/techno/dance types, intriguingly. Perhaps there is some connection there: the tribal undergroundism, the extremism, the fact that the musics aren't song-based so much as riff-based, the orientation towards sensation, sensory overload, volume, noise, the euphoric aggression/aggressive euphoria, the going mental, even the uniformity aspect of the style. Plus rave music like metal can be quite dark and apocalyptic. There is certainly a thread of comparisons with metal running through much of Energy Flash, starting with the title itself--made by a guy, joey beltram, who loved zep and sabs and when i met him in early 92 claimed there was talk of him producing the next metallica album!) As a result the mailbag's so bulging I've been forced to start my own equivalent to K-punk's guest worker program...
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Bruce Adams (formerly of Kranky; now doing this http://www.flingco.com) remembers Gore very well:
"When it came out Mean Man's Dream was IT. I was working at a questionable distributor in the Chicago suburbs... when the Gore album was licensed for the U.S. I had it on LP and tape - 'cause I had to have it in the car, too. The album was heavy, it also had a rhythmic swing to it kinda like the Bad Brain's "I Against I". Fit nicely into what was happening then in the US with the afore-mentioned Bad Brains, Blind Idiot God and the first Helmet records. In Yurp Gore were aligned with Caspar Brotzmann Massaker (and Gore drummer Danny Arnold Lommen later joined CBM). A couple of years later I was working at Touch & Go and heard a little Gore in The Jesus Lizard (who toured with Caspar Brotzmann), and band members fessed up to being in possession of the record. It took forever for Wrede to follow MMD and it was a major disappointment. The economy and umph had been totally lost. Maybe Danny Lommen really was the heart of the band. I remember around then Gore FINALLY came to Chicago to play and the leader/bassist of the band was a real dink."
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I was asking what the hell Soumi Metal was and Nichoals Katranis obliges:
"SOUMI is Finnish for FINLAND"
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K-punk and I'll just have to agree to disagree re. KLF but Stephen Stamper did remind me that
KLF had their own metal moment:
"Lest we forget they recorded a version of "What Time Is Love" (retitled "America: What Time Is Love?") with the 'Voice of Rock' Glenn Hughes... AND there was their appearance at the Brit Awards with Extreme Noise Terror (and the notorious incident with the dead sheep afterwards)!"
And then later recalled an even more bizarre KLF/Sunn O))) connection, viz.
"....I just remembered late last night that Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley recently performed a live electronic accompaniment to the K-Foundation's "Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid"! You can find details somewhere on his website: http://www.ideoligic.org/index2.html"
I’m sure Mark and Alex Williams and others who have suggested that Sunn O))) are deadly earnest about the robes are right, it's more my own in ability to suspend disbelief (a common problem with metal generally, and Goth too), such that i can't imagine how they could enter into ritual w/o some kind of self-consciousness about it
then again the fact that they named themselves after a make of amplifier Earth used (that's right isn't it?) seems quite... not exactly pomo, but the sort of thing Primal Scream or Stereolab would do. (And Earth themselves were named after the original name that Black Sabbath used, right).
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Wallace Winfrey offered a bunch of suggestions:
1/ "be sure and check out Leviathan (aka Wrest). He contributed vocals on "It Took The Night To Believe" on Sunn-O's Black One and is the best of the"one-man-playing-all-instruments" black metal artists. He puts out pure guitar ambience albums ("Silouhette In Splinters" on Profound Lore), does oil paintingsfor his covers, and released like 20 demos in 4 years, and hardly any of them are shit. Start with the Verrater double-CD released on Tumult. He makes his living as a tattoo artist in San Francisco, and used to play in a "math rock" band called Gift Horse. He produced his first 10 or so demos/self-releases using only a Roland digital drumkit, a microphone, a guitar, a bass, a Line 6 Pod (one of those all-in-one amp modeler/FX/preamp deals) and a 4-track cassette tape. It's like Djay says in Hustle n Flow: "It aint just climbing Mt. Everest, it's climbing it with as few tools as possible." He doesn't have a web page, or a MySpace site. He is, as the black metallers say, TRVE GRIM KVLT. Keep in mind that obscurity is highly-regarded in the black metal scene. Here's his metal archives profile: http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=9562"
2/ "Also worthy of note is Judas Iscariot, Wolves In The Throne Room (google for interviews with these guys -- not your standard black metal fare),Wolfmangler/Dead Ravens Choir, and of course, the almighty Ulver. "
(What's with all the Wolf names?! cf Wolfmother)
3/ "Also, there's some interesting metal stuff happening in the breakcore scene. Hecate's recent 'Brew Hideous' release is black metal IDM breakcore and Drumcorps' Grist is a very nice mutation of breakcore and death metal. I know some of those guys, and from what I hear, a lot of them are currently working on metal-influenced stuff.
4/ You might enjoy this article - "False Metal: The Financial And Farcical Return of Heavy Metal" http://www.lotfp.com/content.php?editorialid=55 It goes into a lot of detail about recent media interest in metal, and in particular, takes it's time to dismember the Sword.
5/ "check out the black metal zine Oaken Throne. One of the best zines I've read in a long time. Kind of hard to find, I order mine through Aquarius Records in SF. Nice reviews and a great overview of blackmetal+. Very, very nice looking too."
Oaken Throne!! Ah Aquarius -- Jon Dale said that he thought they had been the force behind turning the hipster massive onto metal these last several years.
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Bruce Levenstein pinpoints the Goth/Metal overlap as key, elaborating further on the below at his blog http://absoluteclassicmasterpieces.blogspot.com/
"is Goth the missing link between hauntology and hipster metal? ... When i hear Sunn O))) it reminds me of the dark ambient/goth experimentalism of Lustmord or maybe Hafler Trio. and then i was thinking about Sisters of Mercy, a band that began and ended with a very metal sound (Vision Thing is loaded with metal riffs). It seems like goth is planted right between metal and the dark ambient aesthetic that leads to hauntology."
Black metal obviously has a Gothic aspect but actually, it's the Goth influx of influence into NON-hipster metal that is equally striking: everything from Evanescence with their floaty Cocteaus/goth lite thing to Avenged Sevenfold with the Alien Sex Fiend fun-Goth aspect to AFI i think it was who covered the Cure's "Hanging garden" . That leakage of Goth imagery and guitar sounds too into metal adds another aspect to what I was arguing about how metal is where the ideals of postpunk live largest today, in so far as Goth is one branch of postpunk.
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Cosmo Lee illustrates the metal/dance overlap/affinity--he is giving a talk on Berlin techno on the same dance music-dedicated EMP panel as me and Geeta this April, but he also runs a metal-dedicated Mp3 blog http://invisibleoranges.com which looks to be a useful way of checking stuff out. He also does stuff c/o Metal Injection and c/o Stylus.
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Ben Squires nominates Celtic Frost as
"the first hipster metal outfit as the term is currently being used. After three increasingly avant, but popular in underground terms LPs, they went totally crazy with 'Into the Pandemonium' with hip-hop instrumentals, a Wall of Voodoo cover, opera singers and other strange moves. Cries of sell-out from the underground and huge critical acclaim - then came their 'hair metal' LP - again quite popular with some critics - I even remember a comment about them being more intelligent than their fans in one review - but even more hated by the underground. May be I'm making this up because they are from the same country as the Young Gods. still they are back with a new LP and a slightly muted critic reaction - although as you know it was in the top 50 LPs of 2006 in The Wire. which may or may not prove my point."
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digression:
i was talking about Lime Lizard/the Lizard's metal-love and actually trying to remember this band they always used to interview at enormous length, treating the singer like he was some kind of seer with amazing insights into the human condition. Well it came back to me:
TYPE O NEGATIVE
Okay back to the mailbag...
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Terence J. McGaughey informs of the activities of Karl Blake of Sabbath-rehabilating Shock Headed Peters:
"he's actually working on a project now called "blake sabbath"!!"
and reminds of the Blake side project for el records not long after shock head peters 'i blood brother be':
"there's an album he recorded as the Underneath called "lunatic dawn of the dismantler" (!!?), which is absolutely astonishing.... apparently mike alway wasn't keen on blake's cerebral-metal approach (or ashley wales' electro & hip-hop influences [that's ashley wales as in spring heel jack, i believe--ed.] so he would give karl all these odd projects to do until the peters 'became' a bit more of what he wanted (i.e. frivolous and contintental, judging by el records roster), which of course they never became. "
not to be confused, the Underneath, with Underneath What, a neo-raunch/glam band for which i floated the unfortunate rubric, "crotchquake". yeeeees ah weeell....
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Dominic at Poetix has some more good stuff on Xasthur and ambient black metal, here
All his imagery of "toxic womb environments" and “an evil cradling” -- love it. I’m sure somewhere along the way I used a similar trope, to do with the dead womb, the oceanic rock impulse turned morbid and necrotic... about that Isolationist comp? or EAR?
Before we get carried away with the Xasthur love though original metalhead Francesco Brunetti notes wryly:
"speaking of lifeless music, well Xasthur itself would admit, since he covered them often, to be a not so really great copyist of the ultra obscure depressive metal of mid '90 Les Légions Noires
and Mutilation."
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Woebot, talking about the inspiration and copious research (that geezer's a nutter i'm telling ya) behind his latest, terrific animated episode of Woebot TV, makes the distinction between hard rock (what his fictional rock monsters Methuselah are) and heavy metal--and a good distinction, saying that hard rock retains the connection to the blues (and i'd say black music in general--r&b, funk, etc). whereas metal proper starts to leave black music behind--from judas priest and iron maiden onwards, the groove starts to go. and when the groove goes, the sex goes, as subject matter for song and as a feel transmitted by the music. Was AC/DC the last "metal" band whose songs could play in a disco? Well, I suppose there was funk-metal, and then later nu-metal, but neither of these seem like organic development so much as contrived re-infusions to compensate for the blackness/grooveness that had been erased. Especially in the case of nu-metal, where you had a feel taken from a sampled/looped/programmed genre (hip hop) transplanted into a live/played band-based music. i.e. that lumpen House of Pain type pogo-funk that was picked up by limp bizkit. (Although i guess that
last big Korn single was quite groovy in feel-- you know the one with the rich cultural studies text of the video where the band are played by hip hop stars like Snoop, the video seemingly being Korn arguing that their music was in some sense black music.) Oh and then there was grunge too I suppose, although again that had to be a retro move, a Seventies flashback to boogie and to precisely the sort of hard rock/heavy rock Woebot's talking about (I remember a piece by Greg Tate in the Voice saying he loved grunge for exactly that reason, soundgarden and pearl jam, for flashing him back to being a child listening to the radio at a time when hard rock and black music had greater proximity, ie. James Gang "funk #49", aerosmith, Free etc etc .) But yeah I'd have to say I much prefer hard rock, as Woebot defines it, to metal.
* * * * * * * * * *
and that's just some of the emails!
so: how come all this interest in metal --- meaning the K-punk and Blissblog guest worker programmes and associated blog activity, but also the last two-three years of hipster uptake? Well there was something I pursued in an early version of the Pazz essay but had to leave out for space/straying off topic, but which has more than a grain of truth to it i think. It relates to the dubstep/noise/metal axis as representing uber-rockist values of danger/darkness/difficulty. And specifically to the third one, difficulty as a value, a desirable thing. Difficult to listen to, in the sense of presenting obstacles to instant enjoyment; difficult in the sense of being fields of music that are dense and highly differentiated and as such a challenge to master. The point I would extrapolate from this is that this makes them stimulating and alluring to a certain kind of person.
At the height of the pro-pop delirium a couple of years back one proponent declared that “popism is about eliminating barriers to pleasure” while another poptimist argued “importance and relevance is a scam and a trap. Don't bother with it…. Once you stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable.” The trouble with this quasi-virtuous elevation of pleasure/enjoyment to supreme value and sole criteria is that, for critics and the critically-minded (the bloggerati, “serious” fans) enjoyment in itself is not that interesting. It doesn't take you anywhere. Actually it's bloody hard to write about pleasure alone. Go on, try reviewing a record entirely in terms of its pleasurability. I guarantee by the middle of the second paragraph you’ll be reaching for some kind of measure of significance or relevance. So it makes sense that critics, whose job it is to generate thought-provoking words, are being drawn to the harder stuff. Extreme metal is not only a music that lends itself to intellectualisation by outsiders, it is a subculture that--strangely, given the reputation metal has generally had historically of being kinda moronic--prizes intellectualism and learning and profundity. Just look at the song-titles, so verbose they're often comically over-ripe with lofty words and laboured cadences. Just read the interviews, the groups typically grappling with the grandest questions of the human condition, the mystery and horror of death etc etc.
The real problem with the poptimistic notion of enjoyment as be all and end all is that it is too narrow a definition of “pleasure”. Having demands made on you is rewarding, can even be fun, and at the moment metal is one of the few musics around that offers a winning combination of visceral release/catharsis/sensory impact with the work ethic of the engaged listener, grappling with a music based around density of sonics, complex structures, and in some cases lyrics/concepts/authorial intent that require interpretive exertions.
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well i'm feeling pretty metal-led out right now, maybe there's one more post in me left to catch up a few stray threads... and of course further missives from the massive are welcomed. to close for now, some light relief. Seeing as we're talking about ROCK here's a piece I "wrote" for a Geology magazine. For real. Actually what it is, my dad is journalist, he writes for a real wide array of places and for a while back there he was writing for this Geologist journal and had an idea for a whimsical piece on geology and rock music. He asked for some pointers and I emailed a whole bunch off-the-top-of-me-head. Next thing I hear he's gone and got it printed slighty rewritten but more or less intact in the mag, and under my name! It was only meant to be raw material for him to use. Anyway most of the groups are metal so it's kinda relevant.
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Bruce Adams (formerly of Kranky; now doing this http://www.flingco.com) remembers Gore very well:
"When it came out Mean Man's Dream was IT. I was working at a questionable distributor in the Chicago suburbs... when the Gore album was licensed for the U.S. I had it on LP and tape - 'cause I had to have it in the car, too. The album was heavy, it also had a rhythmic swing to it kinda like the Bad Brain's "I Against I". Fit nicely into what was happening then in the US with the afore-mentioned Bad Brains, Blind Idiot God and the first Helmet records. In Yurp Gore were aligned with Caspar Brotzmann Massaker (and Gore drummer Danny Arnold Lommen later joined CBM). A couple of years later I was working at Touch & Go and heard a little Gore in The Jesus Lizard (who toured with Caspar Brotzmann), and band members fessed up to being in possession of the record. It took forever for Wrede to follow MMD and it was a major disappointment. The economy and umph had been totally lost. Maybe Danny Lommen really was the heart of the band. I remember around then Gore FINALLY came to Chicago to play and the leader/bassist of the band was a real dink."
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I was asking what the hell Soumi Metal was and Nichoals Katranis obliges:
"SOUMI is Finnish for FINLAND"
^^^^^^^
K-punk and I'll just have to agree to disagree re. KLF but Stephen Stamper did remind me that
KLF had their own metal moment:
"Lest we forget they recorded a version of "What Time Is Love" (retitled "America: What Time Is Love?") with the 'Voice of Rock' Glenn Hughes... AND there was their appearance at the Brit Awards with Extreme Noise Terror (and the notorious incident with the dead sheep afterwards)!"
And then later recalled an even more bizarre KLF/Sunn O))) connection, viz.
"....I just remembered late last night that Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley recently performed a live electronic accompaniment to the K-Foundation's "Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid"! You can find details somewhere on his website: http://www.ideoligic.org/index2.html"
I’m sure Mark and Alex Williams and others who have suggested that Sunn O))) are deadly earnest about the robes are right, it's more my own in ability to suspend disbelief (a common problem with metal generally, and Goth too), such that i can't imagine how they could enter into ritual w/o some kind of self-consciousness about it
then again the fact that they named themselves after a make of amplifier Earth used (that's right isn't it?) seems quite... not exactly pomo, but the sort of thing Primal Scream or Stereolab would do. (And Earth themselves were named after the original name that Black Sabbath used, right).
^^^^^^^^^^
Wallace Winfrey offered a bunch of suggestions:
1/ "be sure and check out Leviathan (aka Wrest). He contributed vocals on "It Took The Night To Believe" on Sunn-O's Black One and is the best of the"one-man-playing-all-instruments" black metal artists. He puts out pure guitar ambience albums ("Silouhette In Splinters" on Profound Lore), does oil paintingsfor his covers, and released like 20 demos in 4 years, and hardly any of them are shit. Start with the Verrater double-CD released on Tumult. He makes his living as a tattoo artist in San Francisco, and used to play in a "math rock" band called Gift Horse. He produced his first 10 or so demos/self-releases using only a Roland digital drumkit, a microphone, a guitar, a bass, a Line 6 Pod (one of those all-in-one amp modeler/FX/preamp deals) and a 4-track cassette tape. It's like Djay says in Hustle n Flow: "It aint just climbing Mt. Everest, it's climbing it with as few tools as possible." He doesn't have a web page, or a MySpace site. He is, as the black metallers say, TRVE GRIM KVLT. Keep in mind that obscurity is highly-regarded in the black metal scene. Here's his metal archives profile: http://www.metal-archives.com/band.php?id=9562"
2/ "Also worthy of note is Judas Iscariot, Wolves In The Throne Room (google for interviews with these guys -- not your standard black metal fare),Wolfmangler/Dead Ravens Choir, and of course, the almighty Ulver. "
(What's with all the Wolf names?! cf Wolfmother)
3/ "Also, there's some interesting metal stuff happening in the breakcore scene. Hecate's recent 'Brew Hideous' release is black metal IDM breakcore and Drumcorps' Grist is a very nice mutation of breakcore and death metal. I know some of those guys, and from what I hear, a lot of them are currently working on metal-influenced stuff.
4/ You might enjoy this article - "False Metal: The Financial And Farcical Return of Heavy Metal" http://www.lotfp.com/content.php?editorialid=55 It goes into a lot of detail about recent media interest in metal, and in particular, takes it's time to dismember the Sword.
5/ "check out the black metal zine Oaken Throne. One of the best zines I've read in a long time. Kind of hard to find, I order mine through Aquarius Records in SF. Nice reviews and a great overview of blackmetal+. Very, very nice looking too."
Oaken Throne!! Ah Aquarius -- Jon Dale said that he thought they had been the force behind turning the hipster massive onto metal these last several years.
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Bruce Levenstein pinpoints the Goth/Metal overlap as key, elaborating further on the below at his blog http://absoluteclassicmasterpieces.blogspot.com/
"is Goth the missing link between hauntology and hipster metal? ... When i hear Sunn O))) it reminds me of the dark ambient/goth experimentalism of Lustmord or maybe Hafler Trio. and then i was thinking about Sisters of Mercy, a band that began and ended with a very metal sound (Vision Thing is loaded with metal riffs). It seems like goth is planted right between metal and the dark ambient aesthetic that leads to hauntology."
Black metal obviously has a Gothic aspect but actually, it's the Goth influx of influence into NON-hipster metal that is equally striking: everything from Evanescence with their floaty Cocteaus/goth lite thing to Avenged Sevenfold with the Alien Sex Fiend fun-Goth aspect to AFI i think it was who covered the Cure's "Hanging garden" . That leakage of Goth imagery and guitar sounds too into metal adds another aspect to what I was arguing about how metal is where the ideals of postpunk live largest today, in so far as Goth is one branch of postpunk.
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Cosmo Lee illustrates the metal/dance overlap/affinity--he is giving a talk on Berlin techno on the same dance music-dedicated EMP panel as me and Geeta this April, but he also runs a metal-dedicated Mp3 blog http://invisibleoranges.com which looks to be a useful way of checking stuff out. He also does stuff c/o Metal Injection and c/o Stylus.
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Ben Squires nominates Celtic Frost as
"the first hipster metal outfit as the term is currently being used. After three increasingly avant, but popular in underground terms LPs, they went totally crazy with 'Into the Pandemonium' with hip-hop instrumentals, a Wall of Voodoo cover, opera singers and other strange moves. Cries of sell-out from the underground and huge critical acclaim - then came their 'hair metal' LP - again quite popular with some critics - I even remember a comment about them being more intelligent than their fans in one review - but even more hated by the underground. May be I'm making this up because they are from the same country as the Young Gods. still they are back with a new LP and a slightly muted critic reaction - although as you know it was in the top 50 LPs of 2006 in The Wire. which may or may not prove my point."
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digression:
i was talking about Lime Lizard/the Lizard's metal-love and actually trying to remember this band they always used to interview at enormous length, treating the singer like he was some kind of seer with amazing insights into the human condition. Well it came back to me:
TYPE O NEGATIVE
Okay back to the mailbag...
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Terence J. McGaughey informs of the activities of Karl Blake of Sabbath-rehabilating Shock Headed Peters:
"he's actually working on a project now called "blake sabbath"!!"
and reminds of the Blake side project for el records not long after shock head peters 'i blood brother be':
"there's an album he recorded as the Underneath called "lunatic dawn of the dismantler" (!!?), which is absolutely astonishing.... apparently mike alway wasn't keen on blake's cerebral-metal approach (or ashley wales' electro & hip-hop influences [that's ashley wales as in spring heel jack, i believe--ed.] so he would give karl all these odd projects to do until the peters 'became' a bit more of what he wanted (i.e. frivolous and contintental, judging by el records roster), which of course they never became. "
not to be confused, the Underneath, with Underneath What, a neo-raunch/glam band for which i floated the unfortunate rubric, "crotchquake". yeeeees ah weeell....
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Dominic at Poetix has some more good stuff on Xasthur and ambient black metal, here
All his imagery of "toxic womb environments" and “an evil cradling” -- love it. I’m sure somewhere along the way I used a similar trope, to do with the dead womb, the oceanic rock impulse turned morbid and necrotic... about that Isolationist comp? or EAR?
Before we get carried away with the Xasthur love though original metalhead Francesco Brunetti notes wryly:
"speaking of lifeless music, well Xasthur itself would admit, since he covered them often, to be a not so really great copyist of the ultra obscure depressive metal of mid '90 Les Légions Noires
and Mutilation."
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Woebot, talking about the inspiration and copious research (that geezer's a nutter i'm telling ya) behind his latest, terrific animated episode of Woebot TV, makes the distinction between hard rock (what his fictional rock monsters Methuselah are) and heavy metal--and a good distinction, saying that hard rock retains the connection to the blues (and i'd say black music in general--r&b, funk, etc). whereas metal proper starts to leave black music behind--from judas priest and iron maiden onwards, the groove starts to go. and when the groove goes, the sex goes, as subject matter for song and as a feel transmitted by the music. Was AC/DC the last "metal" band whose songs could play in a disco? Well, I suppose there was funk-metal, and then later nu-metal, but neither of these seem like organic development so much as contrived re-infusions to compensate for the blackness/grooveness that had been erased. Especially in the case of nu-metal, where you had a feel taken from a sampled/looped/programmed genre (hip hop) transplanted into a live/played band-based music. i.e. that lumpen House of Pain type pogo-funk that was picked up by limp bizkit. (Although i guess that
last big Korn single was quite groovy in feel-- you know the one with the rich cultural studies text of the video where the band are played by hip hop stars like Snoop, the video seemingly being Korn arguing that their music was in some sense black music.) Oh and then there was grunge too I suppose, although again that had to be a retro move, a Seventies flashback to boogie and to precisely the sort of hard rock/heavy rock Woebot's talking about (I remember a piece by Greg Tate in the Voice saying he loved grunge for exactly that reason, soundgarden and pearl jam, for flashing him back to being a child listening to the radio at a time when hard rock and black music had greater proximity, ie. James Gang "funk #49", aerosmith, Free etc etc .) But yeah I'd have to say I much prefer hard rock, as Woebot defines it, to metal.
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and that's just some of the emails!
so: how come all this interest in metal --- meaning the K-punk and Blissblog guest worker programmes and associated blog activity, but also the last two-three years of hipster uptake? Well there was something I pursued in an early version of the Pazz essay but had to leave out for space/straying off topic, but which has more than a grain of truth to it i think. It relates to the dubstep/noise/metal axis as representing uber-rockist values of danger/darkness/difficulty. And specifically to the third one, difficulty as a value, a desirable thing. Difficult to listen to, in the sense of presenting obstacles to instant enjoyment; difficult in the sense of being fields of music that are dense and highly differentiated and as such a challenge to master. The point I would extrapolate from this is that this makes them stimulating and alluring to a certain kind of person.
At the height of the pro-pop delirium a couple of years back one proponent declared that “popism is about eliminating barriers to pleasure” while another poptimist argued “importance and relevance is a scam and a trap. Don't bother with it…. Once you stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable.” The trouble with this quasi-virtuous elevation of pleasure/enjoyment to supreme value and sole criteria is that, for critics and the critically-minded (the bloggerati, “serious” fans) enjoyment in itself is not that interesting. It doesn't take you anywhere. Actually it's bloody hard to write about pleasure alone. Go on, try reviewing a record entirely in terms of its pleasurability. I guarantee by the middle of the second paragraph you’ll be reaching for some kind of measure of significance or relevance. So it makes sense that critics, whose job it is to generate thought-provoking words, are being drawn to the harder stuff. Extreme metal is not only a music that lends itself to intellectualisation by outsiders, it is a subculture that--strangely, given the reputation metal has generally had historically of being kinda moronic--prizes intellectualism and learning and profundity. Just look at the song-titles, so verbose they're often comically over-ripe with lofty words and laboured cadences. Just read the interviews, the groups typically grappling with the grandest questions of the human condition, the mystery and horror of death etc etc.
The real problem with the poptimistic notion of enjoyment as be all and end all is that it is too narrow a definition of “pleasure”. Having demands made on you is rewarding, can even be fun, and at the moment metal is one of the few musics around that offers a winning combination of visceral release/catharsis/sensory impact with the work ethic of the engaged listener, grappling with a music based around density of sonics, complex structures, and in some cases lyrics/concepts/authorial intent that require interpretive exertions.
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well i'm feeling pretty metal-led out right now, maybe there's one more post in me left to catch up a few stray threads... and of course further missives from the massive are welcomed. to close for now, some light relief. Seeing as we're talking about ROCK here's a piece I "wrote" for a Geology magazine. For real. Actually what it is, my dad is journalist, he writes for a real wide array of places and for a while back there he was writing for this Geologist journal and had an idea for a whimsical piece on geology and rock music. He asked for some pointers and I emailed a whole bunch off-the-top-of-me-head. Next thing I hear he's gone and got it printed slighty rewritten but more or less intact in the mag, and under my name! It was only meant to be raw material for him to use. Anyway most of the groups are metal so it's kinda relevant.
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