Is That A Behemoth?

Is that a Behemoth on your iPod, or are you just happy to hear me?

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.

When Did That Happen?

I've been working nights for a while, which means I'm on my way home somewhere around midnight or a little later. It means, primarily, that I can't listen to NPR, because the NPR station changes to incomprehensible jazz at some point in the evening. (I know it's un-American to not like jazz, but I don't. Four guys all playing four separate songs at the same time isn't "innovative", it's just plain irritating.)

So I've tried listening to the local FM radio stations, and I don't know when it happened, when the change came, but man, they suck!

I don't know who established the formula for modern FM rock radio stations, but whoever it was needs to be punished, and by that I mean in the Frank Castle fashion. KUPD establishes a new low, as its "DJs" just sit around and talk about bodily functions and sex acts. No, they don't. Talk implies an exchange of ideas and information; they might as well just sit there and read lists of "bad words" for all the communication that goes on. Feces. Anus. Coprophilia. Oh, what fun. What, do 15 year old mallcore aficionados listen to this nonsense and think that it makes them macho? Whatever the case, it isn't meant for me.

And the music! Good heavens. I never thought I'd live to see the day that they made "metal" music that was whiny and spineless, but there it is. I don't know what kind of metal it really is. I don't think it's metal at all, because it violates the Basic Precept of Metal, which is this: Metal Doesn't Whine. I think I'm going to refer to it as "mallcore". Take ye a metal tune. Dumb it down and take out the hard, technical stuff. It's best if you can somehow turn it into a single monotonous riff that goes on and on and sounds really heavy but is really just kind of dumb. Add to that some scratching from rap, and some electronic effects from God knows where. Make the lyrics whiny. Dwell on the hideousness of your 15 year old white middle class lifestyle. It isn't even real hideousness; it isn't real pain or loss or suffering. It's the bogus bullshit suffering of some clod who bought a t-shirt at Hot Topic and then had an emotional meltdown because he saw some clod wearing the same t-shirt. It's hard for me to take very seriously the suffering of a high school kid whose parents give him a car, a cell phone, and enough money to buy Slipknot t-shirts at the mall. But oh, how they suffer. Woe is me and my affluent lifestyle, I ran out of eyeliner and my brother Timmy ate the last of the Cap'n Crunch ::cries:: I'm sure that someone one or another of these hideous bands is writing a song extolling the virtues of self-mutilation as a means of dealing with the pain of second period PE.

It's like emo, only loud. And worse. At least I could tune emo out. Oh no, another Dashboard Confessional song; well, at least I can not listen to it and amuse myself by thinking about neutron stars. But not this stuff.

I have got to get a car that my iPod will plug into. That's all there is to it. Between the vile (not to mention screamingly unfunny) FM DJs and the whiny mallcore, I'm fixing to go clean off my feed. Better to just the radio off and listen to the wind.

(And I haven't even started on the stupid FM radio commercials.)

The only bright spot in any of this is the late-night show Alice Cooper does on KSLX. The music isn't much to write home about, but at least Alice can assemble words into intelligible, occasionally funny and sometimes even reasonably interesting sentences. Compared to the hooting simians on the other radio stations, whom I imagine are easily flummoxed by bananas hanging on strings just out of their reach, he's a breath of fresh air.

666

This is my 666th post. Let he who hath understanding reckon the number of this post...

I may have to go listen to Iron Maiden just because!

What's a "Dimmu Borgir"?

I've always liked metal music, starting from the very earliest days when Black Sabbath first started to define what metal was. This strikes some people as odd. Once I was wearing a white belt (I don't remember why) and my sister exclaimed "You can't like metal if you wear a white belt!"

The mistake most people make is assuming that everyone who likes metal wears black, spikes their hair, and either mopes around in an unbreakable melancholy or aggressively strikes out against the world. One can just as easily be a professional who wears Norm Abrams-style flannel shirts and be a fan of metal. Let's not buy into the stereotype here, please.

I just like the way it sounds. The rhythms and sounds are what appeal to me, not some manufactured "metal worldview". Besides, the vocals of most of the metal I listen to are absolutely indecipherable without a lyric sheet, and sometimes not even then. Case in point: "Corporal Jigsore's Quandary" by Carcass. I have no idea what the guy is saying, and I don't care; I just like the way the song sounds. (And to be honest, when you do figure out the words, they are almost always silly anyway.)

One of my co-workers is a 90-pound woman from Singapore. I let her listen to the song "Sickening Art" by Dismember on my iPod, and she actually screamed when it started. So do I, but not in the same way.

Not surprisingly, there are dozens of metal genres these days, many of which I don't really care for. Here are some genres I don't much like:

Industrial (Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails)
Metalcore (Hatebreed)
Nu-Metal (Slipknot)
Euro Speed Metal (Yngwie Malmsteen)
Grindcore (pick one)
Goth Metal
Gothic Metal (not the same thing as Goth Metal at all)
Hair Metal (Poison, Whitesnake)
Pseudo-Metal (Quiet Riot)

Here are some metal genres I do like:

Melodic Death Metal (Dark Tranquility)
Sunnyside Death Metal (Carcass, Dismember, Entombed)
Viking Metal (Enslaved)
Norwegian Weird Black Metal (Burzum)*
Thrash (Metallica, Sepultura)
American Speed Metal (Racer X)
American Blackish-Thrashish Metal (Slayer)
Norwegian Not-So-Weird Black Metal (Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir)
British Metal (Iron Maiden)
Doom Metal (Black Sabbath)
Doomdeath Metal (Fall of Empyrean)
Power Metal (Saxon, Manowar, Bolt Thrower)

So what is a Dimmu Borgir, other than a Norwegian symphonic black metal band that seems to be consciously trying to out-do Cradle of Filth? I ask you, Morton Kondrake!

*Some bands are tough to defend, even in academic terms. Burzum, for example, has a murder conviction on its discography, and most of Dismember's output is pretty unsettling if you listen to the words. So don't listen to the words!