I am utterly fascinated by my deep and abiding liking for metal music. It's so strange and unexpected. And it keeps getting worse. I note among many of my friends a tendency for musical tastes to mellow over time, and I catch them saying things like "Yeah, James Taylor really rocked out at the concert last night." Not that there's anything wrong with James Taylor. I just can't figure out why all my peers seem to mellow, and I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of underground metal.
Not that I go to "shows" or try to blend into the "scene", or whatever they call such things these days. Metal as a fashion statement is pretty hideous, and metal as a lifestyle is pretty unappealing. I just like the music; I have no particular use for its accessories. I don't even own any metal t-shirts, which are apparently obligatory if you're to fit in, and I often find myself in the position of listening to extreme underground metal while wearing button-down shirts and white sneakers. I don't have much hair, and I can't even head-bang without getting dizzy and staggering around like a hugely oversized Weeble.
The whole black metal "thing" gets particularly silly. I don't know if the musicians still use corpse-paint makeup and adopt odd nomes d'metal like Count Grishnakh or Quorthon or Euronymous. But the whole over-the-top Satanism of black metal seems particularly affected, trite and dumb to me, and I don't think that has gone away. There are black metal bands that I enjoy listening to, but the whole cultural edifice erected over the music is pretty silly, if you ask me. (If you want to know, I prefer Mayhem to Emperor, so you know where I come down on the whole "symphonic black metal" question.)
I really don't inflict my metal on anyone else. I've posted one or two links to Insomnium songs on Facebook, but I can't see what good could possibly come from trying to get anyone I know to listen to Amon Amarth, Mayhem, or Vader. (I don't care for music videos in general, and I generally hate metal music videos. The other day I watched the video for the Metallica cover of the old Bob Seger classic "Turn The Page" and it was some strange business apparently involving prostitution and domestic abuse, neither of which have anything to do with the song. It may sound pretentious, but I generally prefer my own mental images to the quotidian nonsense the director slaps together.) And while I might like the music to "Gods of War Arise", my friends might listen to the words and say "You know, they're not sending a particularly good message there..." And they aren't. So I don't listen to the words, and I don't ask anyone else to listen to the music.
Tonight I'm listening to the album Evangelion by Behemoth. I think it's of a form called "blackened death metal", sort of a combination of the musical style of death metal and the vocal style and (goofy) thematic elements of black metal. It's pretty good - pretty heavy. And it's another milepost on my personal road to perdition: it's Polish. Most of the metal I listen to is either British, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or Polish. Where's the American stuff?
American metal seems to me to take three forms these days, none of which I really care for. There's metalcore, which I can stand in small doses (though, curiously, I never seem to get tired of the album "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" by Avenged Sevenfold, a commercial mainstream metalcore act that should make my flesh crawl). Then there's nu-metal, which I really don't like at all. And then there's industrial metal, made most famous by Marilyn Manson, but the only industrial act I really like is Rob Zombie.
So I have to go to Finland to get my metal these days. Or Poland. One curiosity of the metal world is why German metal is so bad. No offense to the Vaterland, but geez, how many power metal bands does one country need? And why do they always sound so happy?
One exception the never-make-a-friend-listen-to-metal rule is the album "Swansong" by Carcass. Carcass started out making grindy brutal death metal, including two albums that are pretty much must-owns for a death metal fan ("Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" and "Heartwork"). I guess this got old, or they wanted to do something else, so they did the album "Swansong." Old-school Carcass fans apparently hate it - it moves away from the grindy dissonance of the earlier stuff and sounds somewhat more mainstream - what Iron Maiden would sound like if they had a vocalist that growled. It's a combination of death metal and mainstream rock and roll that I like to call "death and roll", even though this label was apparently claimed by Entombed with their album "Left Hand Path".
The point is that I've played the song R**K The Vote off the "Swansong" album to a few people as a test. If it disgusts them, there's no need to go any farther into the dark forest and the experiment stops there. If they can hang with that one, I play them The Hive from the album "Whoracle" by In Flames, which is a little more metallic but not extreme by any means. If they're still with me, then we move on into darker realms.
So far, nobody's even gotten past R**K The Vote.
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