Asskickery

I've been casting about in my music collection, seeking Just The Right Thing. I seek Metal To Kick Ass By. Not that I want to kick anyone's ass in particular. I'm not even in a bad mood. I just feel the need to listen to Metal To Kick Ass By. There are times when it becomes necessary to lay the pretensions and boundaries of civilization aside and listen to the sort of music the Germans might have listened to before killing 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoberger Wald.

Not all metal is suitable for this purpose. Black metal has a cold, evil tone, but it doesn't sound particularly violent or aggressive. In many cases it sounds thin and "wiry", which I think was an acoustic accident in the early days of Darkthrone and later became a stylistic element as ubiquitous as corpsepaint (ironically, the first Mayhem album sounds much richer than "Transilvanian Hunger", but there's no fighting progress). Mind you, I like black metal, but I don't find that it appeases the Inner Teuton much at all.

I'm also greatly fond of melodic death metal in most of its forms, especially Insomnium and including the quasi-pop schtuff like In Flames. It's moderately aggressive (a review of an Insomium concert concluded that they "left no ass unkicked") but it's not stupendously so. Too many melodic breaks, too many keyboard washes, too much discipline to get stuck in a riff that would make Nathan Explosion nod. I'm reminded of Still Moving Sinews by Dark Tranquility. I think it's positively brilliant until 0:41 elapsed, when all of a sudden the bottom drops out and the thing hacks and spits like a Poppin' Johnnie at idle. I love my melodic death metal (or Karelian Metal, or whatever they're calling these days) but it doesn't really defeat the legionary, if you get my drift, and to extend the Teutoberger Wald motif.

Sometimes metalcore can get the job done, but I don't have a large metalcore collection and the only real metalcore album I have, "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet", never quite seems to go over the top. I like it, in particular for its narrative thread and for its interesting mixture of styles and textures, but Hatebreed it aint, and it doesn't take long for that monotonous hoarse shouting to grow old on me.

I'm not a fan of Florida death metal.

So when one desires Metal To Kick Ass By, one must reach for the Carcass, its ancestor Carnage, and its by-product Dismember. The first two songs of "Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" are usually enough to take care of my need for Ass-Kickin' Metal. How can one go wrong with Inpropagation and Corporeal Jigsore Quandary, two songs which amount to almost thirteen minutes of high-grade ass-kickery? That'll get your Teutonic tribesmen jumping, ja! Hell, even Carcass in its later death-and-roll phase is still pretty vigorous - clap ears on Rock The Vote someday. The story is that Carcass got tired of doing grindy death metal and changed styles, producing something that wasn't quite heavy enough for old fans, but too heavy for the mainstream, but it'll do for me, because I can't get enough of that "electric saw" guitar sound.

I don't listen to metal all the time. In fact, most of my real favorites aren't metal at all. If you asked me to quickly name my top ten favorite songs, the list would look something like this:

Dance With You (Bowling For Soup)
A Tale Untold (Robin Trower)
Twice Removed From Yesterday (Robin Trower)
Castle Walls (Styx)
Big Log (Viktor Krauss remake of Robert Plant)
Run Like Hell (Pink Floyd)
In the Groves of Death (Insomnium)
Adagio for Strings (Samuel Barber)
Cosmic Messenger (Jean-Luc Ponty)
Freeway Jam (Jeff Beck)
Why Me? (Planet P)

But when you're in a mood for ass-kicking music, I'm afraid that the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Styx just aren't going to get it done.