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Hipster metal has officially jumped the shark

Wednesday 30 December 2009 at 09:53 am

HIPSTER METAL
Hype Cycle: 2004–2007
Key Artists: Boris, Wolfmother, Dead Meadow

What It Was: Dave Grohl's unexceptional Probot vanity project brought attention to avant-metal label Southern Lord, making it cool for the ironic-ringer-T-shirt set to share warm PeeBeRs with the denim-jacket-back-patch set. Soon, bands like the Sword, Priestess, and Saviours brought all the energy and aggression of metal without zitty geekazoid tropes like "chops."

Creative Peak: Mastodon, Leviathan [2004]

Typically Effusive Praise at the Time: "If Sunn 0))) is the ZZ Top of experimental metal, with matching beards and Gibson Les Paul guitars, Boris might be the Kraftwerk, or the Ramones, or even the Jimi Hendrix Experience, depending on the album." —The New York Times Magazine, 2006

What Happened?: For most people, standing through two hours of Sunn O)))'s fog machine and drone turned out to be "not really my thing." Indie rockers started their own terrible metal bands (David Pajo's Dead Child, Rob Crow's Goblin Cock), and the burnouts nerds laughed at in high school resumed shaking their heads at us all. - The Village Voice

When even the Village Voice says hipster metal has jumped the shark, you know it's official: both that "hipster metal" exists, which hipsters deny, and that it's a dead played out trend, which is good news for people who like real metal.

Indie hipster music and metal cannot coexist. They're coming at the world from opposite angles. Metal is about power, but indie hipster music is about sounding cool and ironic to pacify your friends. Power is war, pandering is pacifism. No pacifism in metal -- only war -- IF YOU ARE A FALSE...

Best metal of the decade 1999-2009

Tuesday 15 December 2009 at 11:40 pm The twee indie hipster ironists at A.V. Club put out their list of the 100 metal albums of the decade, forgetting of course that what we, the listeners, need is"quality over quantity." We don't have endless time, money, or even bandwidth to explore all the goofy stuff that seems nuanced and interesting to a reviewer who will listen to it twice in his lifetime, once to write the review and once before he shuffles that promo CD on to Half Price.

This list is not going to make me friends at big labels who want you to pick up the latest dreck by some indie rock band that started playing metal ironically. It won't win you scene points with the kvlt and trve. It will surely not impress your friends with how open-minded, cool and different you are. What it will do is re-awaken your interest in some of the best metal made during this decade, even if it was so good there was no need to make drama about it, and so it slipped under our radar as the years went by.



Demoncy - Joined in Darkness (1999, Baphomet)

When black metal had just discovered keyboards and carnival music, this lo-fi roar straight out of hell cut through the fat and pared our ears to the bone. Sounding like Incantation and Havohej, its primitive riffs in archly elegant songs retain their power a decade later.



Profanatica - Profanatitas de Domonatia (2007, Hell's Headbangers)

For a return later in their career, Profanatica took the primal riffing of their earlier albums and worked it into longer melodies like a Swedish death metal band, creating an enduring mood of occult darkness.



Antaeus - Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan (2000, Baphomet)

This album sounds like battle, with clipped rhythms and clashing riffs, but out of that emerges a sublime sense of melody in one of the last albums to really uphold the old school of early 1990s black metal.



At War With Self - Torn Between Dimensions (2005, Free Electric Sound)

Most technical metal is an oil-and-water separation, but At War With Self find a voice that smoothly wraps a progressive/jazz jam session around metal riffs and emotions.



Immolation - Unholy Cult (2002, Olympic)

Immolation achieve a rarity: technical death metal that doesn't aim for highbrow technique, but a solid slamming songwriting technique that never leaves you in confusion, and on this album, the guitar fireworks match the fire of the stories told by these vivid, evocative songs.



Beherit - Engram (2009, Spinefarm)

As if attempting to sum up the past twenty years of black metal, Beherit makes an album in the style of early Bathory but updates it with quirk and insight, etching a complex sigil that requires repeated listening to decode.



Skepticism - Alloy (2008, Red Stream)

Funeral doom hangs drooping waves of distorted noise upon mortuary keyboards, dragging us through a dirge of misery, but Skepticism make it sound like an interesting mindset we could explore and even enjoy.



Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Ildjarn-Nidhogg (2003, Northern Heritage)

Ildjarn, with its minimalistic riffs and incessant high-speed drumming, is a band that people either love or hate based on how it sounds, but hidden in all that noise are transcendent short compositions that stroke the inner brain.



Gorguts - From Wisdom To Hate (Olympic, 2001)

Gorguts takes their subtly melodic brutal death metal and pulls it inside out to make mechanistic, complex song constructions that followed classical patterns and used multiple themes.



Summoning - Oath Bound (2006, Napalm)

To bring the sound of ancient Hobbit-infused landscapes into black metal, Summoning slowed it down but played at higher registers and faster than doom bands, interweaving keyboards and longer guitar riffs to create an ambient metal sound.



Blaspherian - Allegiance To The Will Of Damnation (2007, Blood Harvest)

Blaspherian prove underground old school death metal is not dead with this music in the style of 1991, but with the wisdom of years of atmospheric metal channeled into these riffs that resemble a subconscious thought with their eerily familiar rhythms and shapes.



Celtic Frost - Monotheist (2006, Century Media)

Returning from a recent history of false starts, Celtic Frost get back to their 1987 sensibility and modernize it, mixing industrial, gothic, speed metal and morbid death metal into an energetic but necrotic album.



Graveland - Memory and Destiny (2002, No Colours)

To be epic, black metal needs to transport us from The Now to the vast and lawless past, a frontier that Graveland opens wide with their martial, Conan-influenced black metal.



Cosmic Atrophy - Codex Incubo (2008, Metalbolic)

Just as metal gets codified, Cosmic Atrophy return to put the weird back into metal with a unique voice inspired by Demilich, Timeghoul, Voivod and all other metal bands from the other side.



Avzhia - The Key of Throne (2004, Old War)

Melding flowing black metal with militant fast drums, Avzhia take over where Emperor left off and throw in the new world sense of urgency and gritty, nihilistic, feral and crafty battle.



Legion Of Doom - The Horned Made Flesh (2008, Zyklon-B)

Like the roar of a hunting lion, this album makes destructive sound into a signal to attack, joining raw black metal riffs and melodic keyboards for a dreamlike listening experience.



Slayer - World Painted Blood (2009, American)

After long years of not having an artistic voice, and trying everyone else's vision by their own, Slayer drop most of the "modern metal" influences and pick up where 1992 left off, in simpler songs that use rock-style pocket rhythm but keep the classic acerbic Slayer riffs.



Sammath - Triumph in Hatred (2009, Folter)

You might think black metal died and got so mixed with other styles it had no voice, but Sammath have mixed death metal technique carefully into their black metal songs, making a testimony toward aggression that sounds like Zyklon-B merged with Angelcorpse.



Motorhead - Inferno (2004, Sanctuary)

Motorhead have made a career of not changing their basic approach, and "Inferno" is no exception, fitting on the shelf next to the others but also being tighter, faster and darker than most of them.



Asphyx - Death... The Brutal Way (2009, Ibex Throne)

Performing the rare trick of coming back 20 years later with an album as good and un-diluted as their first, Asphyx bring you heavy basic riffs and lots of repetition, but song structures that emphasize the profundity of contrast and give these songs spacious atmosphere.

See a more detailed version of this list:

• Amazon.com


• Examiner.com

Becoming a classical listener

Tuesday 15 December 2009 at 08:27 am For kicks I decided to listen to nothing but classical music for a month. Having bounced around looking for the next genre to capture the power of old school metal, I realized that none were coming close, so skipped the drama and went right for the heavyweight -- classical. In specific, I'd found the following frustrations:

1. Jazz fans tend to praise music for its external traits, like how wild the sounds are, not the composition. This is because jazz composition is either based on pop music from the 1930s, or totally random. Most of the soloing is 80% random or memorized licks used to kill time while the musician tries to think up something good. Jazz fans don't want to hear this because they listen to jazz to seem profound to their friends, and like talking about how it's superior to every other form of music, especially country, metal and classical ("those people can't improvise," they say of the people who invented and still practice structured improvisation).


2. I like the idea of noise music and many of the people involved with it. The music itself is fucking boring. It's a texture study with some dynamic manipulation for effect, which gives them only a few semi-linear song structures they can develop. The result is a focus on the trivial, so that anyone who mikes his colon and samples a tractor engine through it then finds a way to distort it using atmospheric noise and biofuels becomes the Latest Genius, even though the end result sounds about like everything else.


3. Similarly, I like the idea of industrial music, but it has been swallowed up by dance music and the beat-addicted nature reminds me of all I don't like about our modern time: spoon-fed, concentration-interrupting, doofus-friendly society. Even stuff like VNV Nation, which is pretty brainy, gets old after a listen or two for this reason.


4. I like the idea of country, and can enjoy bluegrass and pre-hippie folk, but not all the time. Much of it sounds very similar to my ears which may have to do with its reliance on similar techniques.


5. I would never listen to metal for metal's sake. That's how you make something weak, by being an unquestioning audience. For this reason, other than a handful of releases, I skip out on post-1996 metal. The exceptions are great however.


6. The "youth culture" aspects of popular music -- how it's a high-ticket item sold on certain assumptions, how millions of people use it as a cause/life/goal substitute, how it's generally not profound thus people contort to give it extra gravitas -- are what doomed metal and doom these other genres. I want to avoid the kiddie marketing and in-group/out-group social club aspects that get in the way of the music.


7. This "youthiness" to the music means that you are expected to be willing to spend absurd sums of money, waste hours of time poking around magazines and web sites and youth chatter boards, all while becoming a target for the "youth market" of large corporations who realize that you can pander to people while condescending to them. They treat anything "youth" like it's for morons and still people eat it up. They're not going to do anything but insult your intelligence and cryptically hide information so someone can be the smartest monkey in the group for having found it.


8. Popular music is, under the hood, very similar in melody, harmony and rhythm. As a result, dressing it up becomes the most important task. If you take a standard pop song and add a screaming female vocalist, a tuba player and a disco beat, it's now "edgy." Take that same pop song, drop the drums and add a chorus of gay penguins, and it's "innovative." Or just indulge in camp and mixed-up styles from the past and you're "ironic." Does anyone actually fall for this? Well, they know nothing of music theory, have little experience of life, and... here's the secret: they have low self-esteem, are ordinary, but are trying to socialize by having something in common with others that they can trade around in a transactional basis. So they have rock music and they don't care as much about the music as the cool.

Because of this, I chucked aside the notion of listening to popular music -- at all. Even if it's underground or indie, if it's in the popular music format, that's how it will be perceived and treated, which in turn affects how I'll have to interact with it and get ahold of it. Specifically, I noted how the greatest artists were straining to escape the kiddie music ghetto, like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Fripp and Eno. Why keep pushing the dead agenda?

Instead I hauled out an already moderate classical collection and went on a shopping spree at Amazon and Joel's Classical Music, a local shop. My idea was to go the opposite direction for a month and see where it led me. I didn't do any research because I wanted to emulate the experience of the normal, curious listener who has a job and family and so discovers things by serendipity while the music is playing in the background, over the screaming kids, chattering coworkers, and blaring TV.

What made the transition hardest was the difference in dynamics. Rock music is meant to be a constant pulse; classical music is like a ocean wave, sometimes loud and sometimes inaudible, usually somewhere in the middle. With rock music, you hear the first thirty seconds and set your sound level; with classical, you really have to find the loudest part of the piece because the bulk of it may be softer.

Even more, there's a textural difference. Where rock is guitars and bass and drums and vocals, classical musicians have a choice of more than a dozen instruments. They use them unevenly because what's a good effect for one emotion, or part of an emotional journey, doesn't fit in another. You can be awash in violins one moment, and caught up in bass and brass the next.

Finally, there's a time difference. Rock music is three-minute songs, with a few exceptions. Classical music has some three-minute songs, but more commonly, longer pieces are composed of several movements. Themes are shared across these movements, like a conversation with question, answer, debate, modification and restatement. You can't hum a melody knowing that in thirty seconds, after the chorus, it'll be back.

But I did it: I spent a month listening to nothing but classical, except the unavoidable retro swing-rockabilly at the 'Bucks and the clinky ringtones of my fellow subway riders. Having fought it through, I have a few recommendations for those wanting to get into classical music.

1. Stick with the standards. Learn to listen to the music by sticking with the most time-tested successes, namely Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, and Wagner. You can branch into baroque later, and modern classical later, as these are reaches. Learn first how to listen to the music.


2. Don't find the most obscure, dark and stormy or avant-garde classical you can. Every cretinous idiot who wants to show you how profound he is will come out of the woodwork and recommend you listen to Buttzurski's Ten Meditations For a Dying, Fly-Covered Child in Marshall McLuhan's Singularity, but the modern stuff doesn't meet the challenge of the older and is in fact kind of trivial. Equally idiots will try to get you to listen only to "dark" classical or classical for rock fans. This is always a path to stupidity. Learn to understand the big names and anything else will be easy.


3. Pick conductor carefully but worry less about orchestra and year. Conductors are like film directors; they interpret the piece and can either ruin it or make it shine. However, the difference between great conductors is minimal, while the difference between a great conductor and a bad one is infinite. Pick some established names, like von Karajan or Harnoncourt.


4. Don't shy away from Naxos. Naxos has a simple business model: find inexpensive orchestras in out of the way places to record classical pieces in interpretations based on the greats. It's part-clone, part-practicality. We can't all afford the big name conductor box set, but we can afford a $8 Naxos CD that uses a similar approach and unknown, rising musicians.


5. Support your local classical store. Among other things, the people that work there took that job because they love the music -- they're not getting paid much. They are probably susceptible to polite conversation, almost always open to questions, and if encouraged, will give you a viewpoint you can use to plot your own course through classical music. If you find someone who hates everything you love and loves everything you hate, the value is not lessened -- apply the "Rule of 180" and go nuts.


6. Don't tell your friends until you are listening to classical music regularly. People are going to try to talk you out of it because they fear that you're going to see The True Musical Truth of Truthy Truthness, and turn around and treat them like they'd treat you, by saying that their music is the random mutterings of droning peon brains. Even if that's true -- and in my view, it is for most rock and jazz -- you don't want to get into that fight. Don't act like the jazz fans. Instead, do your thing and when someone asks, tell them the composer name but don't mention it's classical. "I've been listening to a lot of this Italian guy, Arcangelo Corelli." If you're a total deviant like me, you can describe the music as atmospheric narrative instrumental music, and no one is going to think it's anything other than Autechre with a voice-over.

I found it rewarding to throw out the rules and plunge into the abyss, and leave behind all the safety blankets I had come to know. I still love metal, but I've found that classical music listening has sharpened my ear and made it easy for me to throw out the crap metal and keep the best, which means that the metal in my life is stronger in quality not quantity and so it is able to compete well with any other genre. In addition, I've found a new musical passion that doesn't require me to ever hear the term "ironic" again. - Chris Stevens

Update: Timeghoul, At the Gates, Bolt Thrower

Wednesday 09 December 2009 at 1:07 pm A quick news update:

• Timeghoul interview probes the origins of this unique, quirky, but deliberate progressive death metal band.


• At the Gates reviews cover the entire discography of this amazing band who never got the credit they deserved, in part because their later albums tapered so badly.


• Bolt Thrower reviews describe the entirety of this innovative melodic grindcore band's career from messy post-crust to polished thematic work.

Check 'em out, and then whine up a storm in our forums.

Lost Cat

Wednesday 09 December 2009 at 12:58 pm Audrey Ewell (one of the directors of Until the Light Takes Us, the black metal movie) commented in one of her Facebook updates that metalheads tend to care intensely about their animals. I'm counting on that now: a friend found a lost cat that needs a good loving home so it doesn't end up in a crush video. If you're in the Houston area, speak up now and give this cat a good life.



Again, that email is: kitty.lost@yahoo.com

Refreshing metal: Avulsion

Sunday 06 December 2009 at 7:09 pm Avulsion - Dimensions of Darkness



Production: thick and blurry like sound behind a curtain.

Review: As death metal diversified from its roots, a branch extended from those who made their death metal at slower paces. The cavernous impact of Avulsion emerges from the mental moment of this conception even if the music was released some years later: trudging, echoing, flattening sound that like a vortex of destruction immerses a listener in a sense of the vast before dissolving it with retrograde motion.

The most obvious influence on this album comes from Incantation, whose riff styles and tempo changes appear throughout the work, including the title track, but Avulsion develop their own style with a feral mixture of primitive death metal and the thunderous doomy styles that Obituary, Gorguts and Therion made into a language. This album broadcasts its American tendencies but also reveals influences from a panoply of metal bands worldwide.

Like doom metal, this music roars slowly into a medium pace with a compelling rhythmic hook, and then through a series of full stops and redirects builds up to a tempo change, after which it takes off only to decay, shift timing again, and then end in a complementary riff in the same rhythm. Similar to the interlocking passages of a maze, it unites itself through constant contrast.

Vocals rush over the microphone in a whisper-infused roar, and drums guide each song expertly with a wide range fashioned from simple techniques. Guitar composition favors harmonically localized riffs, giving these songs an ashen feel in the absence of melodic development, but makes up for it with motivational rhythm. In the old school death metal style, Avulsion makes complexity from simplicity and intriguing aesthetics from morbid droning.

1. Nocturnal Wrath (4:16)
2. Disgorged Entrails (4:09)
3. Skin Defilement (4:53)
4. Inexorable Suffering (3:44)
5. Near Death (4:07)
6. Dimensions of Darkness (3:54)
7. Desecrated Ground (3:43)
8. Gathered in Ashes (3:44)

Avulsion - Indoctrination Into the Cult of Death

Avulsion's Indoctrination into the Cult of Death is a record that scratches the same itch that Blaspherian does: oldschool without being "retro". It's a very dark album that melds together the slow parts of early Carcass, spooky Finnish stuff like Demigod, and the doomier side of NYDM and Swedish death metal. The atmosphere it exudes is comparable to that of the first Demoncy album, which makes sense, seeing as the band features members of Demoncy. - Chapel of Torment