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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"

    Rhythm Melody Aesthetic Structure Vocals

    Aesthetic and "Styles"

    Heavy Metal Ambient/Prog Punk Death Black
    Heavy Metal
    Speed Metal
    		 Ambient
    		 Punk/Hardcore
    Thrash
    Grindcore
    		 Death Metal
    		 Black Metal

    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.
    Death Metal and Black Metal Search Engine

    Mike Riddick Interview

    Sunday 29 June 2008 at 12:00 pm

    Experienced underground metal guru Mike Riddick (Yamatu, Equimanthorn, The Soil Bleeds Black) has launched a for-profit MP3-based label that sells MP3s, and sends promotional MP3s to zines and radio shows -- but somehow, he's not worried about MP3s "ruining the music business."

    Mike Riddick Interview
    one comment

    Natural Selection(tm) Reviews

    Saturday 28 June 2008 at 3:57 pm Ajattara - Itse, Aepere and Kalmanto: this is like metal bands who have failed since time immemorial (or 1970, take your pick). It's a bunch of well-known riff forms stitched together with rhythm, and skinned in lush layered vocals, keyboards and samples. Musically, indistinguishable from 1970s heavy metal, even if it has a black metal and doom aesthetic. Reminds me of later Cemetary. I can't listen to this shit.

    Anti - The Insignificance of Life: Great name, great album name, more black metal/rock combo. They have Gorgoroth-ish technique, but all polished and bouncy like later Ancient. It's hard to argue against as music, but as art, no presence and no direction.

    Bergraven - Dodsvisioner: It's like Comecon mixed with later Samael, lots of interesting background noises, and stompy riffs. It's catchy but it has no soul. I am worried that all the metal with balls has died. Take Vicodin, relax. Bergraven still sucks.

    Fanisk - Noontide: These guys get the Hitler sample in early, so you might feel obligated to keep listening. Like Dimmu Borgir, the best part is the keyboards between black metal parts, which remind me of Gorgoroth's "Under the Sign of Hell" -- a lot of blatant chromatics and basic melodic minor noodling. Do I fucking care? delete, delete

    Forefather - Steadfast: Vikingish metal that reveals its roots in power metal. Lots of cool guitar parts that don't add up to much, a very cheesy aesthetic, and a style of fast flexible lead rhythm shifts that reminds me of Enslaved, In Battle and Kvist. More organized than most, musically the most impressive thing I've heard recently, but it adds up to an aesthetic pile of confusion that narrates itself on a wander and then comes back to safe ground, only to effectively trail off.

    Gorath - Misotheism: How do they keep coming up with these plastic bands? They have no souls. This is paint-by-numbers rock-blackmetal, with lots of frilly adornments and absolutely no direction. Also sounds very emo-influenced, musically. It's like a carnival of distraction with a plodding heartbeat and an IQ test with more red ink than black on it. Yuck.
    No comments

    Hessian Action: Sweden fires teacher for metal beliefs

    Thursday 26 June 2008 at 1:16 pm

    A metal musician who is a teacher who was fired before ever setting foot in a classroom has lodged a discrimination complaint with Sweden's Ombudsman of Justice (JO).

    "He based the dismissal on my participation in a hard rock band, something that couldn't be accepted by other staff, or by the student's parents," wrote Koverot in his complaint to JO.

    "The contents of the band's lyrics conflict with the school's values," he told the newspaper.

    Sweden fires teacher for metal beliefs (The Local)


    Why would this surprise anyone?

    You can't be fired for being a member of Islamic Jihad. You can't be fired for being from a radical Christian sect that believes in hypostatic union with the Lamb. You can't be fired for blaming other groups for the failures of your own. But you talk about metal and suddenly, people are afraid.

    They're afraid because metal embraces ambiguity and a perspective wider than that of humans. Morality is a group agreement to keep us all in line, and it rests upon us taking certain anthrocentric opinions as perspectives as a form of reality more important than physical reality itself. Morality manifests itself in most religions or anything that, by serving the individual, agrees that all individuals must be served.

    Metal: the last true dissident group. If you're in Sweden, give these people hell. We're trying to find an email address for the principal so we can send him a few metal DVD rips as a token of our appreciation.
    one comment

    Ludwig van Beethoven

    Friday 13 June 2008 at 04:24 am

    Then, brothers, it came. O bliss, bliss and heaven, oh it was gorgeousness and georgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise, silver-flamed and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again, crunched like candy thunder. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures. There were veeks and ptitsas laying on the ground screaming for mercy and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot into their tortured litsos and there were naked devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them. -- from A Clockwork Orange


    The spirit of Beethoven is the Faustian: the beautiful emerging from the tormented, warlike and aggressive human soul that wants to make beautiful by imposing itself on life.

    It's an impulse balanced by a detailed understanding of both life, and humans. It's as if the human is a computer, intaking life, and returning to life an answer it needs: an enhancement of beauty through exactly placed effort.

    Like a partial redesign in each interaction.

    Some will attribute this spirit to specific groups, times or ideologies, but the fact remains that it is what motivates all of us who want more out of life. We want more beauty, and to that end, we struggle. We are never satisfied. We do not want comfort, we want greatness.

    Metal has this contemplative spirit. Unlike rock music, which focuses on the karmic drama of the individual, it focuses on the whole of life as a large design made by blind watchmakers. It is a spirit of freedom from mental neurosis, a lack of fascination with the karmic, and a focus on order and beauty.

    It is a form of worship for life; metal is perhaps the most religious popular music gets. It inherits the spirit of Ludwig van Beethoven and others like him, which is one where stillness of the soul is only found in Faustian rage for order.
    No comments

    Vikernes not getting out of prison

    Wednesday 11 June 2008 at 3:36 pm

    Convicted murderer Varg Vikernes is too dangerous to be released into society, according to justice officials. Government critics fear that his background as an ideologically motivated church-burning arsonist, and his connections with neo-Nazi groups, are making it impossible for him to get a fair parole hearing.

    "I can't understand it. They want me to make arrangements with social services, even though this is unnecessary. Must I be on welfare in order to be released? I have a house, a job and a family waiting for me," Vikernes told daily newspaper VG.

    Vikernes denied parole


    If they were metalheads, they'd see that an institutional appraoch to life doesn't work because we don't fit into neat and easy categories like "good" or "bad." Smarter kids like Vikernes especially. Considering his stated goal is making music and writing books, we have to view this as an act of censorship against metal.
    two comments

    National Day of Slayer - June 6

    Thursday 05 June 2008 at 6:49 pm June 6 is a perfect day for Hessians across the country to come together and engage in something upon which we can all agree - listening to Slayer! Also, do you really want those evangelical Neo-Cons to have all the fun with their "National Day of Prayer"? Enjoy a "National Day of Slayer" instead:

    National Day of Slayer

    * Listen to Slayer at full blast in your car.
    * Listen to Slayer at full blast in your home.
    * Listen to Slayer at full blast at your place of employment.
    * Listen to Slayer at full blast in any public place you prefer.

    Download Slayer's 1986 Demo with songs from "Reign in Blood"

    Then you can take that participation to a problematic level:

    * Stage a "Slay-out." Don't go to work. Listen to Slayer.
    * Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.
    * Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
    * Kill the neighbor's dog and blame it on Slayer.<

    National Day of Slayer

    Sponsored by:

    The Hessian Studies Center and
    The Dark Legions Archive
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    Dissenter, Eldrig, Cauterizer

    Thursday 05 June 2008 at 08:28 am Cauterizer - Then the Snow Fell

    This band made the classic mistake of trying to make death metal a bouncy, jaunty, ironic hard rock genre at the time it was moving away from all that garbage. Had they tried it eight years later, they would have been Slipknot, but instead, they're mostly forgotten. Sound is like old Therion and old Entombed played by Motley Crue.

    Dissenter - Apocalypse of the Damned

    We put Behemoth and Hate Eternal into a blender and got a highly competent effort that's painful to listen to. Repetition of themes is aggressive, as is mirroring of similar rhythms throughout each piece, and like all metal made after 1995, there's zero sense of dynamic, just a constant high-volume assault -- a lot like hip-hop. A shame since these musicians are clearly above average in proficiency.

    Eldrig - Kali

    I wanted to like this. As atmosphere, it's well-done; note choice is good, rhythm is good, dynamics are well done. As art, it's a non-entity because there's almost no change. It's like Hindu-themed apocalyptic wallpaper.

    Black Funeral - Vampyr: Throne of the Beast

    This is an inverse review: all the Black Funeral albums other than this one are lesser. Vampyr is the peak. Seek Vampyr if you like Black Funeral.
    one comment

    Deicide - Till Death Do Us Part

    Tuesday 03 June 2008 at 12:37 pm

    This is a good effort: they got themselves in better physical shape, focused their energies, and made a record better than anything afterSerpents of the Light. In form, it shows both a convergence to a mean (return to heavy metal influences of youth, mixed in a salad shooter and made generic by need of compromise) as well as a yearning for New York death metal like Immolation, whose internal rhythms and melodic rhythmic leads are borrowed here. Much of it sounds like more primitive versions of the rhythms behind Once Upon the Cross and Serpents of the Light, as played by a hybrid between Angelcorpse, Dream Theatre and Immolation. As a result they've thrown in some fairly advanced playing, but it is as an adornment, and not central to any message conveyed, which is the boiled-down version of the past mentioned above. It's a good effort; it may not be good enough to stay on our playlists for long, but it exceeds expectations based on past works and levels a groundwork for future works.
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    Autopsia

    Tuesday 03 June 2008 at 07:35 am

    Autopsia sent in a link to their demo recordings. They play a style of old school gore death metal in the nexus between Impetigo, Suffocation, Carcass and Malevolent Creation. For more information, contact them at their email.
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    Metal Notebook: Daath, Seventh Angel, Shape of Despair

    Wednesday 28 May 2008 at 07:09 am

    Daath - Futility

    This band appears to be an attempt to integrate industrial beats, Marilyn Manson-style dark hard rock, and black metal vocals and aesthetics. It ends up sounding like a cross between Ministry and Prong with the kind of emphasis on internal rhythm that made middle-period Metallica so much fun to listen to. Vocals emulate the kind of radio propaganda that Rammstein use, but end up sounding like a phone conversation intercepted mid-song. Fans of Girls Under Glass and other techno/metal hybrids (let's be honest about what this is) might appreciate it but the Pantera elements -- gratifyingly symmetric rhythms, rock/jazz lead riffing, uniform complementary melodic slopes for primary riffs -- make this sound like nu-metal to an underground fan.

    Seventh Angel - The Torment

    Exodus crossed with Morbid Angel: introductory death metal riffing breaks to bouncy, precision-strummed speed metal riffs that exchange leadership of rhythm between a few patterns which ultimate regress to the initial offering. Song breakdowns and overall concept of relationship between tempi is reminiscent of Suffocation, albeit slowed down, but the majority of the songcraft here is rendered in the form of jaunty, ebullient muffled-strum offbeat romps that made Exodus fun back in 1986 or so. Melodically a reasonable comparison would be Iron Maiden, as songs develop melodically from pentatonic to patterns approximating minor scales with majestic leaps that preserve harmonic suspense in bass-centric development, but its relentless speed metal styling forces this music through a compositional channel which simplifies it. In addition, the attribute of the best metal bands, namely the ability to maintain a narrative which finds beauty in the confluence of seemingly disparate parts, is in light supply, rendering this inaccessible to all but diehard 1980s metal fans.

    Shape of Despair - Shape of

    Imagine Burzum hybridized with epic doom like Skepticism or Sunn)))HIV), with rhythms like feet treading the path to the place of execution overlaid with gentle keyboard sequences over a Norse-style longboat-rowing beat. Probably this music is best for time in prison, or when sick, or locked in the cockpit of a propeller plane crossing oceans, because while it is quite pretty it develops slowly and its atmosphere conveys mostly repetition. Much like Satyricon, these composers are excellent at starting promising-sounding melodies yet have no idea where to take them, so they repeat and then squeak out with an improvised exit strategy as best they can. The result is somewhat "obvious" in that little mystery hides in its direction or the resolution to its patterns. Songwriting ability is high, but strategy is correspondingly low. It might be perfect for a soundtrack to a film about prospecting in the sands of the Sahara for water (on foot) but as a musical experience it is less than compelling.
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