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Metal Styles and Technique (Interactive)
"Styles" are divisions of a subgenre not pronounced enough to warrant a new subgenre. "Sounds" are aesthetic variants of a subgenre. Just as "doom metal" means music that is either heavy metal or death metal played slowly with morbid/gothic surfacing, "sounds" differentiate groups of similar musical approach from each other. The evolution of "sounds" can be viewed as a hierarchy of specialized technique and aesthetic within a genre, the technique creating an effect that reveals the intent of the creators as communicated to the listener.
Technique and "Sounds"
Aesthetic and "Styles"
You can understand the styles of heavy metal by looking at the musical techniques and theory used, the aeshetic created, and the patterns of underlying structure pursued (as you can do in differentiated not just genres but types of music). Styles of death metal, black metal, heavy metal and crossover metal divide into "containers" for stylistic and compositional tendencies which reveal the interpretative structures in the music evoking the larger meta-perception or "life philosophy" beneath.
Aesthetic -- or styles, arrangement, and production decisions -- "works" where it supports the internal compositional structures of whatever music it encloses. Technique and production and performance come together to produce an aesthetic, which matches a compositional style, which in turn reflects the ideas that inspired the artist to communicate with his or her audience.
Heavy metal, in general, is music of loud, intense, nihilistic, feral, atavistic sound that reduces the individual and places them in a context of history where they are nothing (some would call this realism or nihilism). Accepting the reaction of despair to the violence and paranoia and insanity of human world living in denial of fear/death, and turning it into a living, willful, and distinctive nihilism that affirms nothingness as a gateway into more profound realms of thought -- this is the goal of heavy metal, and it has many voices, or styles.
Rhythm
- Syncopation
By playing off of internal rhythms, metal bands achieve syncopation -- the inversion of stress in a passage. Normally strong beats are weak and the weak are strong; this effect is often achieved through polyrhythmic overlay by double-bass in death metal bands or by the chaotic, threshing blast beat of blackmetal drummers.
The variation enables an excited internal sub-rhythm to drive the song, as many bands do with double bass drums, letting snare and high hat/cymbal disassociate for key structural textures.
- Slayer
"Hell Awaits" and beyond featured the granddaddy of double-bass technique.
- Deicide
"Deicide" featured songs with anti-synchronized pump-beat percussion similar to the "Jaws" theme.
- Suffocation
The master planners of moving syncopated air and bass drum integration.
- Unleashed
"Shadows in the Deep" used this technique to warlike effect via guitar player forearm.
- Polyrhythm
Using multiple rhythms to enhance layering effects bands create multiple dimensions of rhythmic space, using a normally linear framework in new shapes and often long or indeterminate phrases. This can occur in the dominant rhythmic instrument (guitars) or the background rhythm (drums/bass).
Some bands have taken this to extremes of chaos piling into itself, revealing an inner consistency and beauty, where others have interpreted this in the way of more contemporary ambient composers and have layered counterpoint or complementary rhythms in complex neo-electronic compositions.
- Immortal
"Pure Holocaust" features raging chaotic polyrhythm and ambient melody.
- Burzum
"Hvis Lyset Tar Oss" layered repetition to create epic meta-structures.
- Morbid Angel
"Altars of Madness" began with an inverted polyrhythmic beat.
- Mayhem
"De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" used high-speed polyrhythms under ambient guitar.
- Percussion
Explosive or definitive notes in a phrase are accentuated by percussion in drums or stringed instrument. Most often in guitars this occurs in the bands who muffle chords and strum staccato or interplay phrasing for conclusive effect, more than open-ended styles.
- Metallica
"Master of Puppets" used emphatic muffled chords for percussive centering in riffs.
- Suffocation
"Effigy of the Forgotten" used intricate polyrhythmic progressions to center complex songs.
- Sepultura
"Beneath the Remains" combined speed metal percussive strumming and death metal speeds.
- Texture
Often bands give texture to rhythms by playing multiple levels of rhythm. For example, a guitar changing chords has a dominant rhythm in the beats on which the change occurs, but the chords themselves have a layer of rhythm in the speed with which they are strummed, or in death metal technique, at which their two most essential notes are varied through strumming or hammering. Even further, often the strumming itself has an independent texture which moves with the composition as a whole.
- Slayer
"Haunting the Chapel" invented the flying wrist technique of achieving hummingbird tremelo strumming.
- Unleashed
"Shadows in the Deep" featured slow masterpieces of micromotion and precision.
- Morbid Angel
After their monumental "Altars of Madness" which used this technique to create ambient melody and rhythm, Morbid Angel used it for prog-rock precision in the details of their epic "Blessed Are the Sick."
- Mayhem
"De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" features ambient strumming over Bathory-style rigid percussion matrix.
- Rigor Mortis
"Rigor Mortis" and more significantly "Freaks" built this technique into classical melody and structure.
- Cadaver
These Norwegians made rhythmic expectancy a part of their half-sliding, half-paused progressive metal.
Melody
- Consonance
"Normal" melodies are used by older styles of heavy metal and sometimes by progressive bands integrating a jazz or rock influence. They are built around the scales used by these forms of music historically and in present essence, and as such are more easily recognized by listeners familiar with more mainstream music.
- Atheist
"Unquestionable Presence" built jazz harmony into a style of melodic progressive death metal.
- Metallica
"Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence.
- At the Gates
"Slaughter of the Soul," this band's final work, made use of mainstreamification in the death metal sound.
- Dissonance
Using dissonant alignment of notes in melodies produces a mournful yet technical sound, so many bands use this technique in both melodic and harmonic construction.
- Voivod
From "Dimension Hatross" onward Voivod have built songs around dissonant melodic tension.
- Obliveon
"From This Day Forward" established the ability of dissonance and atonality to build complex jazzlike compositions.
- Immortal
"Pure Holocaust" and "Blizzard Beasts" feature dissonant melody and use of inversion contra rhythm.
- Atonality
Atonal arrangements of notes produce bizarre and perverse melodies, causing instigation of uprising in the mentality of the listener. The "not tonal" nature of this etymology comes from the lack of a fixed scale, or use of an cycling scale of arbitrary tones.
Most metal musicians use this style of composition in conjunction with chromatic scales, dynamically acquiring tone centers through counterpoint and experimenting with classical music theory in key-less anti-melodic architectures.
- Morbid Angel
"Altars of Madness" through "Covenant" used atonal solos to great effect over dissonant compositions.
- Deicide
"Legion" used atonal lead guitar to emphasize the nihilism of chromatic composition.
- Layered
In the style of classical composers from years past augmented with an focus geared more toward an attention span "in the now," metal bands often use modal layers to create songs.
These layers, each forming a portion of the main melody in the song which changes over time to narrate song development, create a resonant harmony which the composer can change to develop the complex matrix of emotions required to manipulate atmospheric mood.
This style easily succumbs to being only technique, but is useful for developing a language of melody in which harmony serves a subordinate role.
- Burzum
Simple in outcome but complex in how far it varies from predictable in conception, the music of Burzum unfolds longer narrative by manipulating environmental depth to melody.
- Ildjarn
Short deranged pieces create atmosphere through two or three melodies sequenced in different orders to form narrative, with layers of two-note modal complements influencing direction in mood.
Harmony
- Classical
Classical harmonic formations stay within the same key and manipulate different registers of mode or tone. The chromatic scales and intricate arpeggio formations of death and black metal lay their ancestry here and develop into a more direct sense of musical motion.
- Morbid Angel
"Altars of Madness" evolved this technique into fast-picking and ambient relationship to beat, accentuating it with atonal lead guitars.
- Deicide
"Feasting the Beast" demonstrated this technique in an ambient but violent setting.
- Burzum
"Det Som Engang Var" built simple classical music out of power chord arpeggios.
- Jazz
The freedom and complexity of jazz harmonics attracted many metal composers, who have worked in that area to create bizarre and startling freaks of brutality.
- Atheist
"Unquestionable Presence" built jazz harmony into a style of melodic progressive death metal.
- Metallica
"Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence.
- Demilich
"Nespithe" built bizarre harmonies from rudimentary fusionesque randomness
- Rock
Oftentimes rock-n-roll influences creep into metal bands and are easily identified by their influence on the dominant rhythms, and by the more mainstream tonal ideas of the pieces. Since rock is essentially blues filtered through the cowboy hobo country music eyepiece, these bands often bear a lot in common with jazz-influence acts.
- Metallica
"Kill 'Em All" brought metal's separate blues legacy into focus with new styles and heavy metal essence.
Structure
- Cyclic
Most rock songs come of the verse-chorus tradition and consequently so does unstudied death and black metal, as well as most grindcore. The tedium of this technique is sometimes temporarily alleviated by adding another structure or riff pattern on top of the double elements of cycle but even this is transparent.
- Narrative
When many riffs are joined to form a progression of ideas not as much concerned with creating a piece but a sequence of moods a narrative composition occurs; others call this "riff salad" or "grab-bag metal."
- Architected
Music created with massive conceptions in mind often builds entirely unconventional structures to serve the individualized needs of each song. At this level of composition, nothing is as fits the norm as each piece has an entirely custom use in unique and intricate compositions where details matter.
- Emperor
"In the Nightside Eclipse" featured drifting and meandering songs built around central melodies.
- Burzum
"Hvis Lyset Tar Oss" used bafflingly simple and distinctive riffs in layers to create epic compositions.
- Morbid Angel
"Altars of Madness" often sequenced seemingly jarring changes in the smoothness of compositional integration.
- Metallica
"Orion" from Master of Puppets introduced this technique to the metal community at large.
Vocals
- Sung
Like rock and blues before it, people sing these. With melodic voices and enunciation of words. Though sometimes it seems bizarre now, most people like ALL of their entertainment to sound this way.
- Helstar
A mid-eighties hybrid of Slayer metal and Iron Maiden rock, their album Nosferatu used sung vocals to pragmatic effect.
- Shouted
Hardcore punk brought us angry shouting for vocals and it re-appears from time to time in death and black metal but is limited by the clarity and monotone of vocal it produces through uniform emphasis.
- Distorted, Guttural
The majority of modern metal works utilize this style, yet it arose from crossover music like grindcore after being inspired by the grand old growler of metal, Lemmy Kilmeister of Motorhead, whose membership in both heavy metal and punk communities affirms his historical importance.
Metal originally adopted the gravely cigarette-burnt and alcohol-eroded voice of punk rock's more deested vocalists, favoring its obscurity and the difficulty of marketing such an indistinct image in the world of concrete images concealing nebulous actualities and negligible rewards.
By reducing timbre from absolute tone to gritty, naturalistic, distortion and shearing melody to textural variance only, this style de-emphasizes vocals while making their presence fit into the texture of the music, allowing more dynamic variation in composition.
- Napalm Death
"Scum" revealed extremes of this technique for their potential in disturbing the aesthetic sensibilities of listeners.
- Possessed
"Seven Churches" brought the voice forth in primal form.
- The Exploited
With a sequence of groundbreaking hardcore albums the Exploited let the voice get growlier each time.
- Morbid Angel
Death metal cofounders Morbid Angel implemented this technique to great effect on "Altars of Madness" and beyond.
- Distorted, Rasp
A more fragile sound, more like a warning than the guttural vocals of death metal, this high pitched muffled shriek is distorted so that it sounds like warnings from the dead.
- Emperor
Used vocals to accentuate melody in majestic pieces of speedy production and demonic drive.
- Darkthrone
Fragments of melody in vocals harmonized with miminalist riffing to expand mood.
- Antaeus
The master of searing growls with both texture and punctuation in rhythm, MkM paces each piece with violence and depth.
- Mütiilation
Droning melodic vocals within distorted chaos frame the structural changes in this music.
Heavy Metal
- NWOBHM
Taking over from Black Sabbath when too much Led Zeppelin clonage invaded the airwaves, NWOBHM bands used more punkish riffing with more precise, technological structures in phrasing. The imagination ran wild and fantasy/mideval concepts in lyrics developed here.
- Doom Metal
As Sabbath was slow, the doom metal genre demanded slower and more dramatically manic depressive songwriting. These bands bridge power chords across glacial rhythm for atmospheric impact. Often accompanied by drugs, esp. marijuana.
- Narrative
Probed right after NWOBHM made its appearance, narrative bands strung together collages of riff and transition to make unfolding retellings of experience. This style is eternal and re-emerges every generation.
- Stadium
Viewed by many as the nadir of metal, stadium metal is influenced by post-progressive rock atmospheric bands who used instrumentalism and pure pop hook to make sentimental but explosive songs. In metal this translates to an epic ballad flavor to everything. Once again, an eternal style which recurs with each new cycle of metal.
Hardcore
- Punk
Punk is simplified 1950s rock voiced in power chords and sequenced to a pulsing basic rhythm. Vocals and aesthetic emphasized dirt and unsteadiness, and disregard of musicality freed bands from the form and compositional dynamic of rock music. Often bouncy or humorous, punk music moves with a friendly but simple motion.
- Oi
Anthemic workingclass punk with often abrasive sounds mixed with guitar work reminiscent of surf bands from the generation before, Oi came into its own as its own influence in the next generation of hardcore.
- Melodic
Building tension through emphasis on melodic notes within otherwise rigid progressions, a subset of the hardcore community made music with constant unchanging percussion and fluidly shifting riffs.
- Grinding
The earliest hardcore to secede from normalcy became truly a handful of power chords grinding against one another in conflicted progressions and interrupted rhythm. This music is essentially similar to grindcore after the first generation.
Speed Metal
- Percussive
The major innovation of speed metal was the muffled, explosive strumming of power chords to produce a sound of impact and resurrect the power of rhythm guitar in rock music.
- Trance
Bands like Prong produced the first hypnotic rhythm "mellow" metal which while violent in methods of creation produced an atmosphere of calm and allowed emotional aspects of the art within to emerge.
- Epic
Some bands aspired to the fantasy- and progressive-inspired works of NWOBHM and toward that aim produced neoclassical and often lengthy works. The most commonly known example of this is Metallica's "Orion."
- Progressive
From the 1970s progressive bands metalheads began making larger structures and wider gains in technique in the rendering of intricate but impact-oriented music. While power chord riffing remains predominant, many progressive metal bands moved beyond the accepted "progressive" sound and created theoretically literate avantgarde works.
- "Thrash Metal"
Misnamed speed/death metal hybrid bands were called "thrash metal" because of their violent and self-conflicted music, aggressive attitudes and thrash-based ideological assertions. The origin of the term "thrash metal" is European big corporate media magazines trying to sell speed metal as something more extreme than what it was.
- "Power Metal"
A style that emerged as the speed metal genre was dying, power metal is speed metal riffing played either in an epic heavy metal or tuffguy pseudo-death metal style.
Thrash
- Thrash, punk
One branch of thrash reveals more of its punk influence, and in bands like MDC or COC expressed itself with loosely hardcore songs played quickly with a metal influence in phrasing, but in punk song structures and major keys.
- Thrash, metal
The other half of the thrash tree demonstrates a more metallic approach and is a proto-death-metal hybrid subgenre, found most clearly in the early works of Cryptic Slaughter and the later works of DRI.
Grindcore
- Rigid
Open intervals and precise furiously fast structures distinguish this variant. Bands like Repulsion and Terrorizer defined this style.
- Disassociative
The schizophrenic out of time rhythms and blurry, organic, lavaging rush of this style produced disorientation and loss of individual characteristics in the rising phenomena of chaos.
- Crustcore, melodic
Loosely derived from Discharge, this genre worked melodic hardcore into a blurring ripple of speed and fury that unleashed itself in short bursts of anger.
- Crustcore, rhythm
In the style of the mighty Assück, these bands created pounding furious rhythms from even intervals of the fretboard, roaring forth in some complexity but mostly disassociative, violent, random, disorienting music.
Death Metal
- Phrasal
From the pure origins of death metal, the faster styles took after bands like Slayer, early Sepultura and Massacra in making architectures of intricate rhythm and melodic construction.
- Percussive
Derived from the slamming, explosive street-level speed metal of Exodus or Exhorder, percussive death metal evolved from the New York Death Metal and Tampa Death Metal sounds to become a generic style of impact-oriented, explosive muffled strum death metal.
- New York Death Metal (NYDM)
Explosively percussive and equal parts speed metal and angst-ridden New York Hardcore (NYHC), this music flew from the depths with guttural vocals, edgy rhythm riffing and essaylike song structures. In two styles, one of which is more percussive than its longer phrased variant.
- Florida Death Metal
Some of the most "heavy metal" of the death metal movement, the Florida bands mated bold rhythm to the pulsing rhythm of early percussive death metal and created the most defiant, monstrously simple and direct metal of the era.
- Swedish Death Metal
The first major evolution of theory occurred within the Swedish Death Metal movement, where Sunlight Studios/Thomas Skogsberg(tm) fuzztone production and longer phrases contributed to a melodicity fully evolving with At the Gates.
- Progressive
Continuing the progressive tradition in metal, the progressive death bands adhered to a style which was part rock with jazz and classical influences, and part the wily fingered "technical" death metal of a previous generation.
- Deathgrind
A stylistic hybrid, deathgrind is death metal using the simpler song structures and rhythmic expectancy riffing of grindgore. So far, nothing of stature has emerged from this style.
- "Death Thrash"
This term is marketing slang for retro bands making faster speed metal music using death metal picking technique and vocals.
- Göthenburg metal
From Göthenberg, Sweden, came a series of bands emulating At the Gates by making technical, jazz-and-rock influenced death metal. This only became a problem after "Slaughter of the Soul," when At the Gates sent out the word to become commercial rock music hidden within death metal stylings.
- Grotesque
Pre-At the Gates.
- The Abyss
Template for this style.
- Dissection
Black metal that is heavy metal derived from this death metal style.
- Doom metal
The moribund, self-pitying and sentimental style of doom metal has emerged in both heavy metal and death metal genres, where it is essentially the same music played with an emphasis on slow chord changes and resonant, recursive resolutions.
Black Metal
- Deconstructivist
Chaotic and nihilistic blasts of short information in three-note riffs founded this style, which through reduction of assumed musicality focused on the information of its communication.
- Melodic
Early experiments in structuralism allowed melody to serve as a fundamental principle and therefore emphasized use of the melodic sound in riff construction and chord voicing.
- Melodic, heavy metal
Some relapsed to a former style and made melodic stadium metal of NWOBHM era with black metal vocals and technique.
- Blasting
For the few who sought more extremity a style of grinding metal with nihilistic clipped emanations of information in abrupt explosions of riff was created, with variants moving closer to grindcore or pure unleashed melodicity.
- Epic
Descended from the devotees of Bathory "Blood, Fire, Death," this genre works folk song nationalism and epic narrative of multi-generational movements on the level of a people, creating symbolic black metal with lengthy melodies.
- Trance/Ritual
Minimalism taken to the furthest extreme hybridized with metal produced an electronic music influenced genre which favored unchanging simple beats (similar to Discharge) under shifting melodic context- and lexically-sensitive phrase evolution.
- Darkthrone
"Transylvanian Hunger" is the best of this style.
- Von
Ultra-minimalist.
- Immortal
"Pure Holocaust" is a related idea.
- Drone
Focuses on matching rhythm to expectation of a tone and then wearing it out, like the tedium of living in a dying society, anticipating radical change.
Ambient
- Technopop/IDM
The music of Kraftwerk and its descendants, this is long melody evolving over a complex beat structure, often without human vocals.
- EBM/Industrial
Emphatic and pulsating dance music that was a fundamental influence on developing techno and industrial genres, EBM sounds like what Nine Inch Nails would be if executed by Godflesh or Beherit.
- Ritual
Influenced by throwbacks to mideval and music from before recorded history, ritual ambient uses simple melodic patterns in evolution and a primal sense of rhythm to emphasize its constructs.
- Neoclassical
Somewhat of a summary of the genre as a whole excluding most popular music influences from EBM, neoclassical ambient/industrial uses technological instrumentation and song structure to emphasize classical influences in melodic construction.
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Tuesday 07 September 2010 at 09:42 am
A team of graduate students is working in an experimental science facility when the world goes silent. The people outside are either dead, or have vanished. The students and advisers have to figure out what's happening before it’s too late. The longer it takes, the worse things get. The students are safe for now. But that's about to change. Because something new has shown up, and it wants in.
http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/egg
Audrey and Aaron's collaborative videos and installations have shown in galleries and museums in New York, Tokyo, and Europe. Their award-winning documentary about the black metal underground, "Until the Light Takes Us," comes out on DVD this September:
http://www.blackmetalmovie.com/
Saturday 04 September 2010 at 11:03 am
Rice University plans to sell its radio station KTRU (91.7 FM). This would remove a rare source of local, independent, non-corporate radio programming. Secret negotiations excluded input from Rice students and alumni. KTRU, which was created independently of the university by students with alumni funding, was never funded by Rice and is only "owned" by the university through a technicality. Help us oppose this sale by following the simple steps on this page:
http://savektru.org/
Sunday 22 August 2010 at 7:11 pm
Some good stuff to chew over:
Lyrically, early black metal fused virulent anti-christian politics with Nietzschean-inspired satanism and ecological mysticism. As the scene grew into the 1990s, however, satanism became a problematic notion and several figures tried to find new ideological backing to their music. One solution, adopted by figures like Ihsahn, the vocalist for Emperor, was to treat satanism as merely a metaphor for Nietzschean individual freedom. Another far more problematic move was that taken by Varg Vikernes of Burzum, who dropped satanism in favor of nazism, and emphasized themes of mystical ecologism in opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The third path was to reject satanism for a return to traditional Scandinavian paganism, a move made in the early years by Enslaved and one which has since spawned a new sub-genre: pagan metal.
What is fascinating here is the consistency with which black metal has pursued religious forms. Satanism is replaced, not by a basic materialist atheism but with almost anything else: Occultism, Nietzsche, paganism, mystical nazism. Such religious pluralism begs the question as to whether these are just new and interesting attempts at youth rebellion, or whether something more is playing itself out.
What if metal is drawn to the religious because it aspires towards a similar goal? What if it is not in opposition to religion, but in competition with it? In the 2005 documentary Metal: A head-banger’s journey, a fan is quoted as saying: ”Is heavy metal a sacrament? For some people it is. If it keeps kids alive, if it gives them hope, if it gives them a place to belong, if it gives them a sense of transcendence, then its a spiritual force and I believe it is a pipeline to God.”
Metal’s obsession with religion is part of its obsession with living at the limit. The goal of metal is extremity—to push music to the boundaries of noise without concern for the comprehensibility of the final product. Black and death metal groups in particular manipulate time structure, tonality, tempo and production quality to ensure that anything resembling a traditional rock, jazz or classical sound is deformed beyond recognition. Of central importance to this manipulation is the need to be heavier, faster, more technical, more “brutal” or more “true” than the past generation. - James Robertson, "Death Metal: A Pipeline to God?" Social Sciences Research Council blog "The Immanent Frame"
While I agree with much of this, I think metal's conception goes back to the word heavy, the idea of horror movies, and a rebellion against the counterculture.
Metal sprung from the counterculture... but in opposition to the peace and light, it was the dark and heavy. It wasn't music for taking life non-seriously or coming up with with trivial answers like "love will save the world" (you truly have to be fucking stupid, delusional or corrupt to believe that).
Metal's message can be found in the song "War Pigs":
Now in darkness world stops turning,
ashes where the bodies burning.
No more War Pigs have the power,
Hand of God has struck the hour.
Day of judgement, God is calling,
on their knees the war pigs crawling.
Begging mercies for their sins,
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
Oh lord, yeah!
While humans distract themselves with trivial shit, including the hippie con about love and light, the cruel manipulators are profiting behind the scenes and laying the seed of mythological levels of destruction.
While every popular music act except metal is espousing the "it's all about you, have some fun, we're all important, it's about humans being individuals" karmic snake oil, metal was telling you to look at history, look at bigger patterns, realize that technology and "good intentions" were not going to save the day. We are insignificant, it said. What matters is not that we're alive, but what we do with the time.
In other words, metal is an entirely different existential coping strategy than Christianity (an inherent God judges you based on your deeds) or hippies (if you just make happy socially, you'll be OK and part of the group). Metal's idea is this: the world is out there and it's very real, which makes life very intense, so make sure you have an intense life, in part by not doing the stupid self-defeating shit that has dogged humanity like an expert parasite through the modern time.
It was only when black metal came around that this got fully Nietzschean, and people started talking about how equality was bunk, how most people are too oblivious/distracted to have any competence in making political or social decisions, and how we'd be better off if we slashed down the weaker/stupider and handed glorious victory to the strong, rising above the herd and exterminating them so humanity would evolve to a new level. Eugenics, Social Darwinism and natural selection as a purification of the artificial, sterile, "everyone wins" equality-based world of both the Church and the liberals (1789: "liberty, equality, fraternity").
But this is an extension of the horror movie theme, which in turn derives itself entirely from the work of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. Here's the basic plot: something from a foreign culture or undiscovered part of our world emerges and starts wreaking havoc. People panic and the dumb sheep screw it all up by not only failing to respond to it with any intelligence, but also by shouting down anyone who tries to deal with it as a real, functional question instead of an emotional/technological one. Finally, the loners re-invent technologies to defeat it -- or not -- and the few beat the threat, so that the many live. But it's not democratic. The point of horror movies is mainly to make you hate your own species as you see that all but a few cannot discipline their minds to respond to new stimulus. They panic, they make excuses, they steal now-worthless cash, they get drunk, they run away, they flake out. What they don't do is achieve any effective action at all.
If you want the origins of metal, I think that's it -- modern society grips our society like a plague, and as years go by and the decay gets more advanced, people are still unable to do anything about it because they're caught up in their own emotions and drama. But that point is far too realistic for any academic.
Sunday 22 August 2010 at 08:03 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVeBys6_TOA
Amazing, and better than 99.9% of all metal bands since. Something to think about.
Tuesday 17 August 2010 at 09:07 am
I want to say that I will start with the year 1984. Death metal had been around since 1984/1985 depending on who you ask. Mantas, Genocide, Deathstrike, Possessed, Slaughter and others had started years earlier and wanted to make music that made Slayer sound like Wham. “Black metal” had already started with Venom and Mercyful Fate. Then Bathory and Hellhammer came along. The term “death metal” was more widely used back then. Hell, there was even a compilation called “Death Metal” that had Running Wild and Helloween on it! Although I do dig both of those bands, they are hardly death metal! But the comp did have Hellhammer as well. So there was a back and forth there for a while. Even Sodom came along and called themselves “witching metal” to start off with! hahaha. But bands jumped back and forth and it was common for bands to be called both at times. Once Massacre, Repulsion, Death, and later Xecutioner, R.A.V.A.G.E., Morbid Angel and others started getting going with demo tapes flooding the underground, death metal was really starting to spawn. My comment about Slayer was a joke. Slayer upped the ante, so to speak, on playing faster and more aggressive. Slayer was influenced by D.R.I., Cryptic Slaughter and the fast hardcore punk that was coming out. Just like those hardcore bands became influenced by Slayer and other metal bands later on. So these death metal bands took the Slayer formula and made it even more aggressive and even faster and heavier than ever before. Black metal was kind of regulated to the same bands for a while. Possessed had the imagery of a black metal band, but were total death metal/thrash. Mercyful Fate broke up and Venom and Bathory started getting a little different in their musical direction.
Flash forward to 1989. I was already a couple years deep in the metal underground, but this is when I really got into the DEEP underground scene with the tape trading and fanzines and all of that. ALL KINDS of underground bands, that played different “styles” were all in the same fanzines and on the same compilation tapes. The black metal of Samael, Beherit and Blasphemy was featured right next to the death metal of Autopsy and Nihilist. The thrash of Merciless and Sindrome was right next to the grind of Agathocles and Anarchus. Everyone seemed to get along in one, big happy underground metal family! Then over the next few years, death metal then broke as a worldwide phenomenon. Everything either had a Swedish guitar sound or was recorded at Morrisound Studios with Scott Burns producing it. And had Dan Seagrave doing the artwork on the cover. Morbid Angel became mainstream, Carcass and Obituary started getting play on MTV more often. It seemed EVERYONE was familiar with “death metal”! But then weird stuff started happening with these bands. In Sweden and Finland, some of the old death metal bands started getting more rock or gothic (or both) with their music. Opeth and Katatonia followed suit with a progressive rock or gothic rock sound. Entombed did a horrible mix of death metal and rock and roll. Therion got weirder, then went all show-tunes. In Finland Abhorrence became Amorphis and ended up having more in common with classic rock. Disgrace went punk rock. Xysma went hippie. Convulse went “death and roll” (PUKE!) There was a disconnect that started and some bands and members of the scene felt slighted. But it was felt that death metal went cheesy as fuck. Some people grew tired of all of this, and decided to form a new thing. And the leader of this new movement was Euronymous of Mayhem.
Flamingly interesting post, on Metal Maniacs of all places.
Sunday 08 August 2010 at 5:48 pm
This amusing list has been making the rounds:
One of the real delights of listening to truly great music is the capacity it has to continuously surprise an attentive listener. Great music makes itself known, in part, by the ways in which it yields up its secrets: slowly. In a sense, great music never "gets old" because each experience of it reveals new insight, allowing us to approach it as if for the first time.
The corollary to this, of course, is that while genius manifests itself in infinitely variable ways, all bad music is pretty much bad in the same predictable ways. Error was always thus: it cannot grow, it cannot meaningfully change, it can only, like a virus, reproduce itself in hosts who have not previously been exposed (which is why, to the experienced and attentive listener, each new iteration of bad music becomes more easily identified symptomatically while the inexperienced and/or stupid listener is likely to fall for FAILS that their more competent brethren spot from a mile away).
A Taxonomy of FAIL
Carnival Music
Symptoms: Like a carny barker or a snake oil salesman, many bands try to distract listeners with novelty or wild stylistic gesticulations designed to steer attention away from the underlying emptiness of what is being offered. Often, this will take the form of superficially "innovative" gestures like adding flutes, "technicality," exaggerated, cartoonishly executed additions from "surprising" outside influences, or maybe just really long songs.
Classic FAIL Archetypes: Opeth, Dimmu Borgir, Deathspell Omega, Necrophagist, Cynic, later Therion
Sonic Wallpaper
Symptoms: Most often associated with black metal, this FAIL is typified by a failure to grasp the dramatic, narrative aspects of metal. As a result, these bands make music that is often pleasant, inoffensive and even impressive in its constituent parts, but devoid of meaning, spirit, passion or lucid organization. It may work as background music, but it cannot stand on its own merits when listeners pay close attention. Basically, when you find yourself hitting the snooze button four minutes in, you've stumbled on this brand of FAIL.
Classic FAIL Archetypes: Ulver, Drudkh, Negative Plane, pretty much anything involving Stephen O'Malley
Metal as Mainstream Pander
Symptoms: Most often spotted in the wild among established bands who have depleted their creative fire and genre tourists with no established connection to metal, this FAIL can be easily spotted by the way it apes mainstream music while superficially applying metal technique. Often includes elements of either Sonic Wallpaper, Carnival Music or both. Comes in both "high brow" and "low brow" versions.
Classic FAIL Archetypes: later Metallica, later Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room, post-Hell Bent For Leather Judas Priest
Angst for Autistics
Symptoms: FAILS of this sort reveal themselves by an emphasis on dumbed down rhythm to the near total exclusion of all other traits, usually accompanied by some sort of superficially "shocking" or simply mind-numbingly aggro lyrical content. Basically, they exist to mollify the angry impulses of speds, emotionally crippled jocks, JNCO-sporting malltwats, meathead bigots and assorted other human defectives.
Classic FAIL Archetypes: Pantera, Cannibal Corpse Origin, later Deicide, pretty much all metalcore, deathcore and NSBM
From a user named Dylar114.
Friday 06 August 2010 at 10:47 pm
"Glorious Times: A Pictorial of the Death Metal Scene (1984-1991)" is a retrospective of the early death metal scene, written by the bands themselves, and edited by Alan Moses (Buttface Zine) and Brian Pattison (Chainsaw Abortions Zine). If you want to see what the early bands were thinking, doing and how they helped invent death metal, this original book gives you a window into the past and future of death metal.
Glorious Times: A Pictorial of the Death Metal Scene (1984-1991), interview with Alan Moses and Brian Pattison, and review of the book
Sunday 01 August 2010 at 08:21 am
Someone finally explained heavy metal in terms simple enough for the nodding nobodies to comprehend:
Biff Byford, lead singer of 1980s heavy metal behemoths Saxon, is preaching to convert the non- ferrous among us to his cause. "Heavy metal is a tribal music and everyone is a member of the tribe," he explains.
A wistful look passes across the features of a man memorably described by one critic as "the dray horse of heavy metal". "The music's not about love," he adds, warming to his theme. "Our songs are more about Richard the Lionheart, steel trains and thunder. But when you do click with a big audience, it can be quite an experience, a massive connection… I suppose you could say it is a religious experience in a way." - The Independent
As some people have been saying for years, metal is the one true alternative in pop culture -- most of pop culture is about the individual and its desires, and the ethic of convenience that accompanies them. Don't do the right thing -- do what feels good! Ignore history, we're inventing a new regime! One for the people, by the people, about the people. And when we gain power, and throw out those bad old fuddies with their social standards, everything will be totally awesome!
Heavy metal is the opposite. It minimizes the individual, and reduces you to the role of one in a tribe. It de-emphasizes the now, and replaces it with a broader view of history. It makes desires secondary to quests, goals and heroic struggles. It's the anti-pop-culture, or the counter-counterculture. It's a war against all of the illusions that allow our modern time to be corrupt. You can't fight a corrupt society with flower power, pacifism and universal tolerance.
You can fight it by taking a look at reality for once, which is what heavy metal does. And because we're the oddballs, we are the tribe of those who drop out of the "consensual reality" created by media, social pressures, advertising, government propaganda and what the crowd is talking about. We look at hard reality, fire and iron and blood, instead. While we may look like the other drop-outs, space-outs and individualists from the outside, we are in fact made of different stuff.
Wednesday 28 July 2010 at 8:37 pm
Hayaino Daisuki - The Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell, or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki?
Although this band is hipster fodder because everything they do is ironic, and it's out-of-the-closet postmodern in that method of finding narratives in randomness that has been trendy since Joyce, I find it excusable because their music resembles the ranting of an abused child. No, in a good -- well, maybe not good but a mixed bag -- maybe in a way that's half good and half horrible.
I don't want to listen to it again because it's screeching and annoying, but I think it valid as music and art, and you shouldn't care what I think, anyway. The really good record reviewer is not a personality engine but as close to transparent as you can get, by using their own personality as an obvious, visible, repetitive filter and thus one you can Photoshop out of your mind to get the gist of what you want to see in each record.
But back to the record: on the surface this is blister speed grindcore with some of the comic circus of random influences that made bands like Mr Bungle and Fantomas so annoying, but here it's moderate. Most of this is straight ahead grindcore, or I should say, in grindcore format. Underneath it are nursery rhymes and children's songs, in this case hidden (think steganography) within the fertile ground of 1980s sentimental metal like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest or Queensryche. Except here, they're played at sixty times the speed.
That speed ruins drumming as an instrument, and backgrounds bass most of the time, and reduces vocals to a timekeeper with some nuance, which lets the guitars sing. And the guitars are singing a song of a child alone who has maybe thirty minutes a day when he listens to Iron Maiden and dreams of being on stage, or maybe of being a powerslave in Ancient Egypt or being a WWII flying ace. Escapism collides with an unyielding, high intensity, too-fast-to-be-anything-but oblivious reality here.
The riffs are good, by the way, like what a creative child might do; they're cut from archetypes you recognize, mostly NWOBHM and speed metal, but with enough of their own interpretation to be quality. They fit together. Songs masquerade as chromatic blasting chaos but underneath a melody sneaks out, like a fantasy you dare not name.
And as your civilization crumbles, as you go off today to another boring job and to spend time with insincere frenemies and business associates who wouldn't dust you off if you died, through streets of glowing neon hawking products for morons, you should think: is humanity the kicked child? How would its inner voice of clarity gain retribution, or breathing space, as the world presses on ever faster because it's in denial and never wants to slow down and face the obvious.
The kind of thing a child would see, a kicked child maybe. Maybe it's irrelevant in this case that hipsters like this band to be ironic; a big part of me thinks the joke is on them and big, ugly and mean in a way they will never understand. I hope they play more of this on the radio because it throws back at our time exactly the kind of crap it throws at us every day, except someone snuck in a counter-virus, and this one is the hope of a youngster for the moments of beauty and clarity found in the stadium heavy metal of years past.
Wednesday 28 July 2010 at 8:00 pm
Metalbolical Compilation Volume 1
1. Equinox - Night of Churchyard Watcher
Florida death metal with a tiny bit of groove, like a cross between Massacre and Cadaver, this track grows from a a verse/chorus loop with infectious chant-rhythm vocals into Exodus-style speed metal. The rather straightforward nature of these riffs may make it hard for this band to carve a niche for themselves.
2. Seeking Obscure - Battle of the Undead
Reminiscent of a slower and more brooding Deicide, this one-man band writes strong but non-distinctive riffs that would echo the infectious vocal rhythm, but this in turn reduces internal tension between instruments in the song and consequently, development of the song itself over time.
3. Waxen - I Claim Your Throne
This unabashedly sentimental heavy metal cloaks itself in death metal, then black metal, and finally brings out its true soul, a Dissection/Judas Priest style band with lots of lead rhythm guitar riffs showing off chops that get lost in a song that does not develop much beyond its initial ideas. Add to that the vocals that resemble a chihuahua with a head cold and you can see how confused this approach is.
4. Unburied - Domicile of flesh
Coming to us from the death metal styles of the mid-1990s, this song is half bouncing riffs reminiscent of a more organic version of what Six Feet Under does, and the other half is charging two-chord riffs. If you can imagine a sped up, groovier and more porn/gore-obsessed version of Mortician, the essence of this band takes form in your mind.
5. Archaic Winter - Colors of Despair
This band is at its peak when it sticks to fast death metal riffs that come in clusters of two complementary phrases and a melodic fill, and while the song structure doesn't evolve much, it varies just enough to bring the mood to a closure. This track suffers from some confusion as to how to stick to the style at which this band is best.
6. Toby Knapp - Polarizing Lines
If you took Joe Satriani and Dissection and put them together in a goofy, over-the-top package like Iron Maiden, you would see the essence of shredder Toby Knapp's style (he's also in Waxen). The entire song is like a solo divided into a series of motifs that evolve briefly and then repeat, leaving us without the sense of vast emotional conflict and resolution that made Satriani's solo albums reviewer favorites. Knapp might do best with some supporting musicians to help shape his raw energy with less musically precise riffing.
7. Dyngyr - Scourge
Reminiscent of other carnival metal bands like Tartaros, this raw black metal with keyboards band manages to keep a basic surging rhythm but throws in too many divergent impulses to tie them all together, creating a riff salad that because its riffs are so similar in rhythm, represents a rotation through different views of the same basic idea. The result is a fun roller coaster that is not particularly memorable afterwards.
8. Onward - Beyond the Strong
As if anticipating that only a few years later, men would stand on stage in tights with guitars and sing about Odin as part of the folk-metal movement that birthed out of black metal, Onward get out there with the old school NWOBHM and speed metal riffs and a soulful, bittersweet vocal track. This is well composed and unabashed in its worship of metal past, like a more hopeful version of In Battle but too pouring out its soul for most power metal listeners to take at face value.
9. Serpent Son - False Hope for Survival
This credible death metal offering aims to throw out many different riffs without them becoming divergent, in the style of bands like Demigod or Pestilence, and succeeds to a degree although many of its melodies use too many connecting notes to unleash their inner atmosphere and subtlety. Instead of throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, they need to refine what they have so its interplay keeps the song intense and growing throughout.
10. Fetid Zombie - Pleasures of the Scalpel
Reminiscent of where Deceased took their music, this band works hard to disguise old school British heavy metal as American guttural goregrind. It's pounding, chortling, gurgling, burping, crepitating madness until you realize the underpinning riffs are jaunty melodic middle fingers at common sense, similar to Gwar.
11. Nepente - Red Suns
Raw riffing meets interesting combinations of those riffs to make a dark atmosphere that submerges us in repetition made unexpected by changes in context. If you ever wondered what a hybrid of Von and Mortem might sound like, this is a good candidate.
12. Unearthed Corpse - Stench of your Decayed Blood
Ultra-basic death metal in the older style like Master meeting Malevolent Creation, this simple but catchy song uses a few riffs to good effect, pounding out a very similar verse/chorus pattern and then opening a sonorous transitional riff like a wormhole. Reminiscent of early Insidious Decrepancy.
13. Killing Addiction - Thresholds
This theatrical take on the mayhem of old school death metal combines slow necrotic riffing of the style Morpheus Descends made with the upbeat variations of post-Suffocation percussive death metal bands, challenging themselves with tempo changes that remind me of cats leaping between vehicles moving in different lanes of a superhighway. Like their undernoticed "Omega Factor" from 1993, this track has potential but suffers from dominating vocals and messy production.
14. Unit 100 - Bring Me the Circular Time Collapse
Of all the Toby Knapp projects in existence, this one provides the most interesting outlook because it mixes metal genres so fluidly, pacing Fallen Christ style chromatic riffing against avantgarde stylings reminiscent of Supuration. It's enjoyable to see how the band hold them together and then blend them, creating a confusing musical experience that lingers in the mind after it has passed by, even if aesthetically the mix of stadium rock, Iron Maiden, death metal, crossover and progressive rock is too much of a buffet and not enough of a main course.
You can get this comp for $2 from Metalbolic Records. This is an older compilation, and volumes 2-3 are now available as well for the same price.
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