I was born without you, baby...

I was a Boy Scout, but I was never dutiful, responsible, or enthusiastic. A couple of moribund years passed before I could say this to my parents, who told me "joining is the only intelligent decision you've ever made in your life." Camping trips and handbooks thus became doleful obligations. This set the tone for the summer of 1993, with another unhappy trek to a campground in the boonies. The experience was ritual by now: you sit in a group at the wooden picnic benches, and exchange macho insults. Two older boys were waiting at one particular bench. They were supposed to teach us how to tie knots, though I received knowledge of infinitely greater value.

Someone had a boombox on the table, and a neighboring stack of cassettes.

"What's that?"
"Not for you."
"Anything good?"
"You wouldn't like it; it doesn't suck."

He pulled a tape from the pile. It was red and black with lightning bolt figures in place of the letter "S." The cover art was stark, simple, and it bore vaguely fascist iconography. The mood became just a little off-putting. He slapped the plastic door shut and flipped the switch on top of the box, and I heard those loud droning bends on the guitar chords. Some Englishman was shrieking about a time traveling robot coming back to save us from ourselves, only to decide that we didn't deserve to live. Contacts buzzed within my twelve-year-old brain, and cyborg circuits hummed with life. Iron Man lived again, and I was reborn.

And in short order I, a nerdy and socially awkward suburbanite became obsessed with heavy metal. I did this in ignorance, at the outset of the Great Metal Purge, a time when the English speaking world decided that metal was passe and that its fans were drooling mongoloids. For roughly a decade, listening to metal was about as cool as painting flames on a hopped-up Gremlin. There was nothing clever or ironic about it. You walked into a music store, announced to the surly clerk that you were spending your allowance on a Savatage CD, and they looked at you like someone who collected wombat turds.

But Black Sabbath were still hip. Vaguely. Mostly. They retained the vestiges of psychedelia and hard rock that informed grunge. If Soundgarden and The Melvins were allowed to listen to Master of Reality on infinite repeat, then so was I. Getting my very conservative and very White Catholic parents to overlook an album called We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll was a more delicate matter. I expended two years of begging, mowing lawns, and pruning shrubs. I finally broke their resolve at age 15, and Tony Iommi's buzzing roar overwhelmed our house. My dad was unthrilled.

"It's satanic garbage that rips off Cream, set to tuneless screaming."

His love of Bob Seger, Cream and the Allman Brothers led me to this place. The rough beast slouched toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

Dio was more of a departure. By the time he joined Black Sabbath in 1979, their downtuned heavy psych was subsumed by prog and arena rock. This, combined with the diminutive tenor's operatic delivery made him an easy target in the era of Seinfeld. Dio Sabbath represented everything grunge fans and punks mocked about metal: theatricality, homoeroticism, escapism, and romanticism. This was music for the terminally uncool, and listening to it felt like begging for a swirly. I promptly bought Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell. I might as well have drawn a middle finger on the receipt.

Over and over I heard "the Ozzy albums are the only good ones," and I took pride in dismissing that conventional wisdom. I was in my late teens, and a pompous contrarian. Still, I had to confess that Sabbath's day had come and gone. I'd only seen one rock concert, ZZ Top, and my prospects for a Sabbath show seemed a pipe dream. That was before I found out about Ozzfest...

Filming for Vengeance

Postwar audiences didn't just watch movies, they went to the movies. Patrons piled into studio system relics, pulled up at drive-ins, or caught the flicks at mid-century modernist joints like Detroit's Metro Mercury.

credit: Wayne State University Library

In 1963, that final year of Americana, curious strains drifted through Europe. The Beatles released their debut album, novelist Pierre Boulle penned the sci-fi satire "Planet of the Apes," and director Mario Bava gave us the horror anthology "Black Sabbath." Bava had better work, but this film secured a distribution deal in England. It found enough of an audience to stick around, slowly winding its grubby little way to the Black Country.

In this setting circa 1969 we find a young Birmingham band named Polka Tulk. They spent their nights rehearsing at a local theater, and noticed the large crowds attracted to horror movies. Bassist Terry "Geezer" Butler was a horror fan, and suggested nicking a film title for a new song based around scary themes.

That song became the band's calling card, and subsequently its new moniker. In a few short months Black Sabbath had two albums in the can, and an image geared to the macabre. The central thesis of metal owes to a colony of factory rats observing that "people will pay money to be scared."

Not that the western world had a lot of money to go around. "Heavy rock" (as it was then known) grew in fits and starts. Sales dropped sharply in the era of Jimmy Carter -though bands continued to pack the concert venues- appearing incongruous with trends at the cinema. The 1970s was a decade where American horror flourished. Movies such as "The Exorcist," "Halloween," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and "Alien" gave a vital dimension to the New Hollywood era.

And metal's faithful paid attention. Rob Halford lists those movies among his favorites, and you can spot references to them in the work of Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Possessed. The reams of low budget celluloid and midnight screenings gave us band names such as Witchfinder General, Evil Dead, and White Zombie. Phil Anselmo is such an obsessive horror nut that Pantera lifted an album title from the dialog of "The Exorcist." He now hosts a yearly festival in Texas, dedicated to the intersection of metal bands and horror films.

Which still doesn't answer the central question: "why?" What is the appeal of blasphemous and supernatural themes to working class youths from dying factory towns? My best guess points me towards the declining authority of the church and the state in the first world. They depreciate at an almost one-to-one ratio with the industrial economy. I'm not going to say that correlation is causation, but the effects were similar: an erosion of trust in institutions and established social mores.

Granted, horror narratives range from acute incisions to blunt force trauma. The slasher genre largely eschews the fantastic, and relies instead on earthly antagonists wreaking havoc upon the common people. I think its ascent is best understood in the context of rising crime rates during the post-modern era. While we can point to the origins of slasher pics in "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom," the blood truly gushes with critical mass at the arrival of "Black Christmas" and "Texas Chain Saw Massacre." This style of movie is a largely American phenomenon, and it represents a mostly American crisis. Try to imagine "Maniac" being made in Germany or Sweden. It is not plausible.

But the slasher picture also cuts to the heart of the most nausea-inducing aspect of horror: misogyny. In virtually every instance, the villain is male and the victims are female. The weapon is a phallic blade, and a death sentence is meted out for the crime of sexual independence. This compounds an already prevalent genre trope, and you can see the mentality reflected in any number of metal bands. Sex is understood as a violent act, and the metaphorical affront of la petite mort must be paid for in the most literal way.

And yet, the slasher genre nearly died with the '80s, as did the popularity of nearly all horror movies and metal music. Their 21st century revival has also been synchronous. The two are fueled by similar anxieties and pressures, where a fear of the unknown is a stand-in for the fear of upheaval. We escape from the pressures of daily horror, in so many finished basements, theaters, and concert halls. The lights flicker, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes a matter of interpretation. That curtain may never fall.

Lack of Comprehension: death metal and the x chromosome

I frequently sift through the history of metal, looking for the inauspicious beginnings of today’s big fucking deal. This is often exciting, but sometimes it means accepting things I do not like. I will speak plainly and candidly in saying that I am both a feminist and a metal fan, and sometimes these roles come into conflict. Ground zero for that internal struggle is death metal; a genre that exists to make us uncomfortable.

I could make a solid argument that misogyny is endemic to metal, though it’s often a casual misogyny. Bands such as Black Sabbath and Crimson Glory portray women as either victims to be pitied or villains to be thwarted. That’s when they even bother to acknowledge women. The arrival of death metal heralded a more unsettling theme: portrayals of violence against women, often with sexual overtones.

None of which makes these narratives inherently degrading. We look upon films such as “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” as brilliant works of cinema, giving us morally challenging portraits of complex characters. To steal a quip from Daren “Rap Critic” Jackson I’m convinced you can write about anything, it’s all in how you do it. Macabre may be trolls, but they also challenge us while releasing album after album about deplorable murders and sex crimes. At its best, their music verges on a satire of the American obsession with violence, and with serial killers in particular. You can already hear this on their 1987 debut EP, as they scream about Ed Gein:

“I'm a fiend, I'm so morbid

That I sleep with your organs at night

And have sex with decaying bodies

To me it's such a delight”

A short two years later we plumb to murkier depths with Autopsy. I must confess that Autopsy is one of my favorite old school death metal bands. I’ve seen them live, I own a couple of their albums, and I’ve listened to them ad nauseum. I absolutely love the way that they write riffs and compositions, and I also avoided reading their lyrics for several years. I did that in part because of songs like Dirty Gore Whore and Disembowel:

“I just couldn't take anymore shit

So with a swing of my knife her stomach was split

Putrid bile and guts all over the floor

Couldn't help but laugh at this vision of gore”

The narration shifts our empathy from the victim to the perpetrator, but this decision does not constitute an endorsement. You can put the listener in the shoes of a psychopath without portraying them as a sympathetic character. Instead, Autopsy give us a narrator devoid of subtlety, decency, compassion, nuance, or charisma. The song is not so much commentary as it is tautology, representing the tired view that monogamy and domesticity are inherently feminine and thus the nullification of masculinity. She has taken away his manhood, and the punishment must be death.

But in killing a woman he is also committing an amoral act. This positions our narrator as an outgrowth of counter-culture’s oldest and most treasured pastime: offending the squares. He represents the basis of transgressive art, and the building blocks of inverted populism.

Subverting social mores does not equate to liberation. Like a multi-billion dollar corporation selling images of rebellion, anti-establishment narratives are beloved by reactionaries. It’s not hard to find white supremacists, misogynists, or social Darwinists who believe themselves to be plucky outsiders. Their punitive and authoritarian worldview is cast as a heroic struggle against the tyranny of the inferior masses, even when it promises to free them. Art that seeks to shock and disgust has a valid role, but the legitimacy of its critique depends upon the targets that it picks and the ways in which it unsettles our pieties.

Cannibal Corpse exist exclusively to offend, and apparently even they found Ciris Barnes’ relentless hatred of women to be repellant beyond the pale. It’s one thing if you want someone to drop dead because they’ve legitimately wronged you, but to despise an entire gender because they don’t want to fuck you? Actually being a man means maturity, including the understanding that no amount of sexual congress can assuage your masculine insecurity.

Ms. Anthropia spelled out the effects of this in agonizing detail at Feminist Headbanger, pouring over the Grave song Sexual Mutilation. Already in 1989 we had death metal regurgitating the idiotic blathering that women need to be punished for agency and sexuality. A woman who either enjoys sex, controls her body and destiny, or uses sex for money must be dealt with in the harshest possible manner. For a genre so contemptuous of religion, this view bears a striking resemblance to the most ignorant and base of tribal superstitions. Once again, Grave is telling us nothing new.

Or at least not so far as I can tell. They’ve never released the lyrics for this song, and their 2010 re-recording is listed on Metal Archives as an “instrumental.” It’s a designation that should fool no one over the age of five.

I am often split between admiration and revulsion for extreme metal. I love the wholehearted dedication riffs and composition and arrangement, but I cannot financially support people who are stumping for genocide. I don’t like being affiliated with folks who see me as a race traitor, or my friends and family as subhuman parasites in need of extermination. These people seek the destruction of all that I hold dear.

Upon reflection, I owe misogynists the same contempt. Artists or not, they see women as less than human and unworthy to make decisions about their own lives and bodies. Similarly, they damn me with emasculation when I point this out. If whiteness can be revoked for acts of betrayal, so can masculinity. The cult of the backlash must remain pure, even as it speaks the language of persecution.

Evoken/Beneath the Frozen Soil reviewed

This review was written a couple of years ago, but never published. I've done some re-working and revision, and it's now a fun little chunk of my spleen, vented into hypertext. Enjoy at your peril.
-----------------

Funeral doom is, for those confused by the nomenclature, a metal sub-genre of painfully slow and ominous music. Bands lease their growls from doom death, but the music is slowed to even greater morbidity. The template is insular, dense, and minimalist. A funeral doom band plays with a bitter lethargy that could make your grandmother impatient while waiting in line at the bank.

With a market as small and cultish such as seen in doom metal, funeral doom bands occupy a territory Spinal Tap’s Ron Smallwood might refer to as “more select.” If such remote corners of music evidence a hierarchy, Evoken is near the top of the heap. Since their founding in 1994, the band has grown a tiny cult of devotees, willing to follow their tortured minor chords all the way into the abyss.

Today’s offering is a split EP, divided between Evoken and Beneath the Frozen Soil (a relatively new band with only one EP to their credit). The Evoken half contains extra tracks from their A Caress of the Void sessions. The songs are nothing spectacularly original, but not a regurgitation of their past glories either. Perhaps these are deviations that didn’t entirely belong on Caress, but they are by no means weak. There is a feeling of natural progression and build, where riffs collapse in slow motion, crushing the synth strains and organ melodies. This is music for drinking alone, brooding about the futility of life, and cheering on the collapse of civilization.

Beneath the Frozen Soil are both less despondent and lesser in stature. Their black metal vocals promise an amusing addition to conventional doom-death formulas, but the actual riffs, compositions, and guitar tone are poorly chosen. The two part suite “Monotone Black” wastes over 12 minutes on aimless repetition, being neither infectious, nor thought-provoking, nor adventurous. The elements stolen from bands like Swallow the Sun and Katatonia are uncomfortably respectful reproductions, showing no understanding of why those bands tick or how to reshape an influence into an original identity or theme. These chaps possess prowess, but lack a certain je ne sais quoi that hardens dedication into a diamond. Evoken has gathered enough diamonds for a necklace, Beneath the Frozen Soil offer a cubic zirconia earring.

Pipe Dreams from Five Fiends

Bonded by Blood is a masterpiece. Damned near every metal fan accepts this. What's less commonly known is that these three songs represent what should have been its rightful successor.

Exodus should have been metal legends, not also-rans. They were cut from the same cloth as thrash's "big four," with talent and inspiration to spare. This potential was squandered in legal squabbles with Torrid Records, a general inconsistency of songwriting quality, severe substance abuse problems, and the eventual replacement of thrash maniac Paul Baloff with a pedestrian Bon Scott imitator.

But whenever these problems came to fell Exodus, they were not present on Bonded, and they did not show up on the Pleasures of the Flesh demo. Granted, this tape only contains three songs, but they show the band maturing as musicians, composers, and lyricists. No one will mistake Baloff for Bruce Dickinson, but one perceives a concerted effort to move beyond the basic "poseurs must die" prattle.

The darkness lives forever
within your mind
No dreams, no thoughts
it's only endless time

The artistic ambitions of meth heads tax the imagination of even a warped mind such as your arrogant narrator. It's questionable how far Exodus might have carried these themes before killing themselves or each other, but that's a moot point now. Pleasures of the Flesh was denatured from this boiling vat of caustic solution to a neutral and tepid puddle of used window cleaner. Exodus never returned from the nether regions of mediocrity, and became another case study in self-destructive greatness.

originally written for: http://www.metal-archives.com/index.php

The beginnings of American metal (part 3)

Nineteen eighty-one was the year when metal’s dimly flickering fuse finally met the napalm jelly. The genre dimly illuminated the periphery of musical possibilities in the ‘70s, but the ‘80s is when the music of leather and spikes came into its own. The previous year was a coming out party for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and gave us classic albums from stalwarts like Judas Priest, Motorhead, and Black Sabbath. Ozzy Osbourne also found new life as a solo artist, harvesting bassist Bob Daisley from Rainbow and yanking Lee Kerslake out of Uriah Heep. Discovering a tragically short-lived guitar wunderkind in Randy Rhoads didn’t hurt either.

But Randy was from Los Angeles, and while his influence was immense that story has been told many times over. Our focus moves to the other coast, returning to New York City and to Mark Reale. Reale’s band Riot impressed crowds in the supporting slot for various big name tours, but Capitol Records was less than pleased with the subsequent demos. Their previous two releases spawned no radio hits, and the label grew impatient. The suits wanted a glossier, shinier, top-40 friendly product, as hard rock and metal bands were largely invisible in the USA. The band, meanwhile, was inspired by what it heard on tour in England. Riot sought a more aggressive and heavy European style, and the label would hear none of it. The third album was nearly strangled in the womb!

It is to Riot’s credit that they kept recording, and their hard work paid off via a lucky break. Reale and company had just enough overseas fans to convince Elektra Records to buy the rights for Fire Down Below. The album is now regarded as an American metal classic, not that many Americans heard it at the time. Riot had one foot across the pond anyway, taking cues from Diamond Head and Def Leppard. And yet, something about them remained inescapably American. Our heroes emitted slight odors of funk, soul, and blues; things that were uncommon in British metal bands of the period. A Riot album was a place where you could pay attention to syncopated beats and active basslines. Lyrics emphasized the tension between city and countryside, hinting that America was only differentiated from England by race and space.

But dueling guitars and leather-lunged songs were not what America was looking for. US charts were dominated by pop country and easy listening, with the occasional merciful interjection of new wave. MTV had yet to breathe life into our post-disco stagnation. Riot would shortly disintegrate and nearly flame out due to personal conflicts and corporate ultimatums. At the west coast, another band emerged who had no such problems. The Los Angeles hard rock scene was full of bands who either took after Van Halen or Ozzy Osbourne, if not both. Before the name Motley Crue became synonymous with banal schlock, there was a fun and trashy little band. Their checkered genius connived to mix the emerging sounds of LA hard rock with metal slivers of Saxon and Judas Priest.
“Too Fast for Love” was Motley Crue’s debut album, and it became part of the lore for what we now think of as “beer metal.” It’s dumb, un-subtle, hyper-sexualized music that fits a barroom like its own personal codpiece. The metal elements have the sleaze set nigh unto maximum, paving the way for those all important arena rock choruses. Nikki Sixx actually wrote some quality riffs, which were played with a minimum of technical competence by Mick Mars. Vince Neil sounded like a man having his sinuses cleaned by Drano, which he probably needed to do after the ‘80s. Tommy Lee was actually better than average, so of course he took a backseat in every composition. The singers and musicians of bands like Motley Crue rarely rose above the standard of “adequate,” but the best examples carried a unique charm and the blunt force of irresistible fun. This semi-literate thesis gave us Twisted Sister, Manowar, Warlock, and Anvil; bands who aspired to get asses moving and drunken voices shouting. It’s important to have realistic life goals.

Nearly four hundred miles to the northwest and aiming even further below the belt were Y&T. The San Francisco four piece spent the late ‘70s playing yeoman’s hard rock, cutting two respectable proletarian albums before going metal with 1981’s “Earthshaker.” Y&T were powered by a turbocharged blues engine, adapted from the designs of ZZ Top and UFO. They welded this to an arena rock and metal frame of Van Halen, Scorpions, and Whitesnake. A friend asked me in passing “how much more testosterone infused need a band be, unless you are Manowar?”

I offer only the feeblest defense. Not ALL Y&T songs were misogynist anthems to backstage debauchery with teenage girls, just enough to make me very uncomfortable. I suppose I should say that Dave Meniketti could seriously fucking play, because his guitar work is the first, last, and only reason to listen to this band. In between promises to give the crowd some “rocking” and his genitals some vile satisfaction, Meniketti oozes with passion and style upon the fretboard. That pairing of six string pyrotechnics and pointless macho bravado is a rock n’ roll tradition as enduring as overpriced concert beer and uncoordinated dancing. It goes back through arena rock and glam rock, proto-metal, hard rock, and all the way back to rockabilly and jump blues. Y&T was a supporting strut on an arc of history headed to the dead end of cock rock, where all debauchery centered on the paradoxical fear of women and pursuit of sex.

Unlike those bands, however, the members of Y&T would never be confused with sex symbols, which might be why none of this earned any exposure. Motley Crue went on to fortune and fame, and devolved to something far less interesting in the process. Y&T and Riot attempted to emulate that formula, and received naught for the Faustian bargain. It’s a sad postscript, reminding us that metal’s innovations are not always positive, and that sometimes its worst themes are also its most enduring.

The beginnings of American metal (part 2)

Connecticut is best understood as a state with two universities, a zombie factory town reanimated by necromantic insurance offices, and long stretches of farmland and suburbs. That’s not the usual recipe for heavy metal greatness, but sometimes profound strangeitude hides behind the closed doors of monotony.

Legend’s “From the Fjords” is a very ambitious album. It echoes bits of Rush and UFO, as well as the requisite Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy. The semi-prog compositions require a fair bit of multi-tracking on Kevin Nugent’s guitar, but the rhythm section is equally important to the band’s sound; far more than commonly heard on a release of this sort. Nugent solos sparingly, choosing instead to make every riff and melody count. Meanwhile, basslines perceptibly groove, drum patterns shift with frightening regularity, and both are routinely punctuated by a bevy of inventive fills. The album occasionally dips into softer territory with bits of clean-tone funkiness and synth melody, but even these respites retain a dramatic tension that promises future explosions. First the fun, then the fury.

Legend were a one-and-done band, which was quite common in metal’s early days. Bassist Fred Meillo estimates that roughly 500 copies were pressed in the original vinyl format, and they now fetch extortionate prices on auction websites.

But that was 1979, and what a difference a year makes. Several months later, and operating 250 miles north and west  of New Haven, a band of admirable ability and dubious inspiration were about to make forgotten history.

The Rods’ debut “Rock Hard” is somewhat in the vein of Riot, but slightly noisier, messier, and stripped down to a power trio. The riffs and lyrics have the blues sleaze of AC/DC, but the rhythm section displays the tenacity and quirky personality of Canadian hard rockers Max Webster. The best immediate comparison might be Def Leppard’s “High n’ Dry,” albeit with a mental capacity pounded even further into oblivion. It’s a slightly unexpected and endearing combination, and The Rods certainly were able to impress someone, because their debut attracted the attention of Arista Records, garnering a pair of major label releases in 1981 and ‘82.

Much of the album betrays a small town central New York origin of modest working class ambitions. However, the forcefulness of the band’s conviction to that goal, and their ability to write slimy riffs that move your ass mitigate this problem. Still, for all its charming naivete and impulsive aggression, “Rock Hard” is an album that belongs to the previous decade. American metal bands were still struggling to extricate themselves from the trappings of long hair groovin’ ‘70s dad rock.

This limitation was also and especially apparent with Ventura, California’s Cirith Ungol, but perhaps charmingly so. Jerry Fogle and Greg Lindstrom took their musical inspiration from the common sources of ‘70s British metal, as well as hard rock groups like Night Sun, Lucifer’s Friend, Captain Beyond, and Alice Cooper. The result was a sound with some definite crunch, but also a lo-fi guitar tone ripped straight from a beat-up practice amp. Between Tim Baker’s vulture shrieks and Lindstrom’s use of synth harpsichords, the debut “Frost and Fire” is both resolutely retro and unlike anything that came before it. The problem is that nobody wants a backwards-looking product only one decade after the fact. Nostalgia? No, that’s the stupid crap we just got rid of, and it deserved to die!

Unfair as such views may be, they are important reasons why Cirith Ungol were ignored during the ‘80s. We’re talking about a super-low budget album that, in many ways, has one foot stuck in the proto-metal era, and one in the lake of fire (heh). It’s very endearing and enjoyable and even fun, but it rarely makes your jaw drop from the audacity of it all. Bold grandeur would come years later on Cirith Ungol’s second album, but metal couldn’t wait so long. British bands were now plowing ahead at a mile a minute, and the USA needed to play catch-up. That requires us to go back to the beginning, and perhaps even earlier.