Listening to Metal

the frozen north. a sword and black armour. lightning. a moonlit night. werewolves. a winter gale. ice floes. blood. axes. steel. the wind ripping through tree branches, waves crashing in the distance. the threat of sea monsters. fire. torches. stern brows. a dusting of snow on a man's beard as he gazes northward, at a force of approaching storm giants. Fire breath. Dragons. Sorcerers. A giant hammer striking the ground. A man's sword severing a giant's hand at the wrist. blood. fire. doom. doom. doom.

The Soundtrack to the Magical Senior Prom I Never Had

Enslaved, Below the Lights.

It would have been a magical evening, my black metal prom night. Impossible, yes. My actual senior prom was years before black metal. Euronymous was still very much alive, and playing some memorable gigs, when I visited that hotel lobby with my actual prom date, decked out in a pink puffy prom dress and makeup that made her look like a desperate twelve dollar hooker.

No, this is not that prom. This is black metal prom night. In the burned out church, lit by torches, they arrive in singlets, twos, and clusters of twelve or more. Some of them wear homemade chainmail armor and carry broadswords, others wear camouglage and carry hardware store axes, but most wear spikes and studded leather, tall boots, and corpsepaint. There is a burning altar. A pyre of logs and dug-up coffins, heaped with church benches, ablaze against the night sky. It is not June. It is January, and it is snowing. Wolves howl. It is not early evening. It is 2AM, and most of these people have been up all night drinking and doing speed. Women in black dresses and corpse paint lead another prom date, a nude albino woman with enormous breasts and prosthetic fangs, by a chain leash and a collar.

There is a punch bowl full of clotted blood. Nobody drinks.

Somebody is passing around a human skull to sign. Girls are kissing it. It has not been cleaned since its demise, sixteen months ago.

The punch bowl is empty. The punch was laced with LSD. By now, people are seeing visions of Odin and Satan riding in the back seat of a limousine together.

None of them dance. There is no dancing to be done tonight.

Torches are passed out to the song "Havenless". It is time to burn the high school to the ground.

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

Pantera-Vulgar Display of Power.

In the aesthetics of metal, it is pretty much impossible to describe a song, a band, a guitar riff, or a performance, without using one, or all of four adjectives: "brutal", "sick", "hard", and "heavy". If you asked a typical metalhead to sit down with a number two pencil and a sheet of college ruled paper and define each of those terms, he or she would probably stab you in the hand and leave. Listeners are amazingly consistent, however, in the way they use these terms. Some bands are great without ever being brutal. In Flames is almost never brutal. Sonata Arctica and Nightwish do not do brutal at all-EVER. Some of it is seems to be in the lyrics, some of it in the melodies, and a hell of a lot of it in the rhythm and the structuring of tempos, but "brutal" is pretty easy to put a finger on when you experience it as a listener. It is that feeling of wanting to put a hammer through four inches of plaster and lath, knock out a hole, reach through, and wring your goddamned neighbor's neck for blocking your driveway with his fucking SUV. That these feelings can be invoked and channeled, through music, is a powerful statement about who we are as a species. Brutal is all about testosterone. Brutal is not about killing orcs on a distant battlefield, it is about killing the man who mistreated your sister, or the pit bull who is loose in the alley.

Pantera pioneered brutal, and in many ways, nobody has ever gone farther. This particular album is, in my opinion, absolutely the most brutal metal album ever recorded. A great deal has been said about it musically, and it is regarded as a masterwork. Lyrically, it goes to some deep dark places. I have trouble listening to it, because it inspires me to go out to the nearest street corner and start beating up drug dealers with a bat, then set them on fire. This feeling persists for days and could cause me legal problems sooner or later. One thing that makes this particular album so successful is the personal nature of the lyrics-they seem pretty much from the heart and that is a chilling realization. It is pretty hard to find a place for these emotions, once uncaged, so I save this one for special occasions.

Some other albums that, to me, stand out as some of the most brutal:

Napalm Death-Mentally Murdered EP. More abstracted, more ambitious, and a much harder listen,.

Kreator-Pleasure to Kill.

This is one of my favorite albums ever, though the lyrics are far less personal (and much harder to make out) than any Pantera post Cowboys from Hell, and it creates a much less focused feeling of rage.

Macabre-Murder Metal. This is a masterpiece of brutality. I think it pretty much comes down to whether you can buy into their extreme flights of fantasy. I saw them play live, many years ago, and it was a little like seeing Gille de Rais on one of his killing sprees.

Most Perfect Black Metal Album Ever

I should probably mention here that Old Man's child's Vermin is the most perfect black metal album ever made, by my estimation, though there is a lot of great black metal I have yet to hear.

It is amazing. I suppose I am drawn to bands like this-I am a huge Bathory fan. There is so much that can get done when a single, crazy and probably ill-tempered individual, calls all the shots and executes his true vision. It is a masterpiece, especially because it has a sort of balance that a great deal of black metal lacks-a constant sense of evil and impending doom.

I person could seriously listen to the whole thing, imagining that spiders were crawling all over them, and have a good time. That is what Black Metal is supposed to do for us, that or go to war with an axe.

A VISION OF PURE METAL

Skulls, black obsidian, carved like Maya temple decorations, arrayed like peaches in some improbable orchard. Each and every one of them has the glowing eyes of DOOM. Oh, great ones, I crawl beneath you, through this hall of diabolical judgement, towards the INFERNUM. Guitars, like pickets, rise imposingly to either side of me. In the distance, where the two walls lead but do not touch, a column of flame rises, and before it, a throne. I have paid homage to you through DEATH METAL, through the most sinister of imaginings, through the loathsome, despicable, and decadent lifestyle I have lived for these many years.

Flames rise from every direction, and in those flames, images of strippers dancing on poles, saber-toothed cats bringing down extinct megafauna, girls in catholic schoolgirl uniforms setting fire to garages. The unholy IT sits beside its master, GREAT BAPHOMET, an a mighty stone made from the bones of extinct reptiles, magma from the formation of ancient supercontinents, and ten million broken guitar strings, all melted into chrome tailpipes, projecting from the thing like antlers.

Baphomet, so beautiful, the body and face of a Las Vegas hooker, eyes of a reptile. Observes.

This is the DEATH METAL level of Hell, deeper yet than the frozen lake, next door to Tartarus, where the imprisoned titans groan and strain against their shackles. Here, the strains of Deicide and Morbid Angel, Possessed and Goatwhore, wail against the disembodied screams of metal's victims. Metalhead, beware. One stray footfall from the path of TRUE METAL, and you could join these eternal outcasts, wailing in the wind for all eternity, rather than sit at the LEFT HAND of BAPHOMET, baptized in the wail of guitar.

Oh Beezelbub

Another EVIL PRAYER, revealed. I cannot say where I get these, though I have come across them at great personal jeopardy. I post this as a WARNING, to those of you who do not think the forces of darkness and devil worship are real. This prayer is every bit as real as the Satanic sex ring at the McMartin preschool, and should be taken seriously. Once again, DO NOT attempt to read this invocation aloud, or it could have serious consequences to your well-being.

Oh, Beezlebub, lord of the Flies.

Once known as Baal, rival Yaweh for celestial power, god of the golden calf and tempter of the Hebrews in their shameful flight from Egypt, patron of the City of Carthage, whose sacrificial urns did run red with the blood of children, an honor to your lordship, and of Ninevah, where men did raise great battle flags in your honor and conquer great kingdoms, destroying the ancient kingdom of Israel in your name. Lord Beezlebub, who sits at the right had of Lucifer himself, brothers in arms against Heaven and Earth, who fought the heavenly hoardes with a flaming sword. Beezlebub, Lord Mighty! ruler of hell and master of infernal dominions, grant me the power to make war, sow destruction, and spread plague.

Accept this, my sacrifice, a bull's head, in a silver bowl, dead and rotting for sixty six days time, under the summer sky day and night the whole time, and festering with flies.

Your Lordship, grant me the power to spread jealousy among the churches and congregations, to instill fears of embezzled twenty dollar bills and cannabis butter at the church bake sail, to provoke bullying and orgies of buggering as the church campout, to lead fine young men astray to worship false gods like Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, and Iron Maiden. I will continue the war with heaven, my master, by tempting good and faithful priests to bow and touch my ivory backside, to kiss my immoral black lips, by tempting noble and honest ministers with prostitutes and promises of cocaine, by tempting girl scouts with cannabis-laden cookies and the notion of a life without servitude to men. Beezlebub, master, I await your infernal command.

Oh, Leviathan

Once again, I post this as a warning, for the purpose of enlightening those among us who are not SURE that horrible monsters lurk in the sea and can be summoned. As with everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE. As before, we must warn the reader not to read this passage aloud. Doing so could have terrible consequences. This incantation has been posted for the purpose of STUDY, to inform the populace that terrible incantations like this DO exist, and warn the reader to live a clean and steady life from now on.

Oh Leviathan. Spawn of mother Tiamat, godhead of the primordial chaos, ruler of chaos, of all the dark oceans and strange voids, you sit at her side in the Abyss, a lord of creation, bringer of doom and change. Celestial dragon, beast of sea and dark sky, your seven heads contain the mightiest wisdoms, see the farthest corners of the Earth, look upon the lowly creatures of this planet, our mighty avenger. Mighty Leviathan, rise up from the infernal void, from the depths of the deep dark blue, from mile after mile of dark trench and sickening blackness, where you rule like the mightiest of kings, over the pale fishy inhabitants of the void below. Lord Leviathan, rise up and smite the humans who have crawled upon the surface of the earth like a plague of locusts. Rise, and breathe fire upon their proud kingdoms, on their shoreline timeshare condominiums and their beach parties. Rise, and rear your seven heads to the heavens, to serve on the side of the antichrist, to confront the sky god in the final hour of Revelations. It is you, Leviathan, with the strength of the mightiest gods of old, who will breathe fire on the repentant hordes of mortal men in the last hour of the world, and ensure the continued triumph of the infernal. Lord master, rise, and see the destruction they have wrought to the oceans. See the creatures they have destroyed and the majesty they have corrupted, with their mandate to go forth and multiply, with the assurance that every beast of the field and thing that creepeth on the face of the Earth was put their for their use, and with wasteful and wanton abandon. Rise, Leviathan, and poison their air. Rise, Leviathan, and dry up all the rain clouds. Rise, Leviathan, and create terrible storms. Rise, Leviathan, and unleash plagues of disease. Avenge the worm on the end of the fisherman's hook, avenge the snake crushed under the wheels of the automobile, avenge the stingray caught in the fisherman's net, the whale cut in half by the prow of their ships. Mighty one, rise.

Baphomet, Oh How I Praise Thee

This is another dangerous prayer, uncovered from the hands of Satanists and their co-conspirators, the communists and Darwinists. DO NOT attempt to read this aloud, or it could have terrible consequences. It is intended FOR STUDY, to prove that dark powers exist, and work continuously to undermine god's plan, for an earth where all mysteries are heavenly mysteries.

Baphomet, oh how I praise Thee. YOU are the keeper of the Aristotelian light, corruptor of the souls of men so that they should think higher of themselves than to suffer under god, for such is the noble and right thing to do. You alone represent the souls of the old gods, the pagan figures of the EARTH, who once brought about harvestime, brought seed to the womb of women and rainfall to the spring soil, who have now passed under heavenly wrath into oblivion. Their power is yours now, limitless and cosmic. The stars in the heavens are your province too, as is the floor of Hell, and the minds of men who seek to question the cosmic truth's handed down to them from Adam. Like the gods of spring, you unite the seed of men with the germ of woman, a cosmic power you have alone, even against the will of Yaweh. You are the mathematician and the architect, worshipped by millions of Freemasons and communists, You are the Judge, worshipped by the Gnostics in Alexandria, the Prime Mover of Plato, the Anti-God against which the Manicheans pitted all the powers of the universe. You are the anticreation, the dark opposed to the light, the maker of new flesh at the expense of the soul, the proponent of tree and field, the enemy of church and street and the hard labors of men who fear god. Baphomet, like the Bogomils before me, the Beloved, who laid down their lives for you. Husband of Tiamat, mistress of the seas and of the primordial chaos, it is your union that brought about th anticosmos, the dark between the stars, the shadow to every candleflame. Beast of Babel, grant me that I might seek to ease the sufferings of men, who might otherwise suffer for god's plan, seek to avert catastrophes conceived to test the wills of men, and to bring corrupting books and knowledge to the men who would build a new Tower.

Mighty Astaroth

A dangerous demonic prayer, revealed. DO NOT attempt to read this passage aloud, or it will have terrible consequences. IT is posted here for STUDY ONLY, in hopes that men of good souls will realize that such evil prayers exist.
Like everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE.

Holy Astaroth, please accept this offering of hot metal into your veins. I live to worship you, your foulness, you bringer of disease and corruption. Your power is decay, and sin, and the inevitable corruption of everything that is holy or beautiful. I live to bask in your ugliness. I would gladly sit at hour goat-heeled boot, your grotesque loveliness, an honor, to serve a demogorg such as you in Hell. In Hell, a landscape where you rule, alongside Satan, as almost an equal, a fallen angel in your own right, an enemy of Yaweh, the creator and the tyrant, an ally of Lucifer, the Lightbringer, fellow soldier in heaven and also in Hell, your cause is his cause, and our cause-to bring corruption to god's plan, to sour the milk, to smut the flower, to put a joint in the hands of a teenager, or a college student, to cause men to look at women with lust in their hearts, and feel stronger for it, for women to look at men, and at each other, with thoughts less than holy, of lust and sin, rather than childbirth and goodness, light and angels. Astaroth, it is you in your evil that seduce men into vanity, into believing that they know things that they do not, into believing that with their tools and technology, with their science and their antimagick, they can become gods, like us, glowing in platinum armour, holding swords of pure starlight. It is you that can convince a monkey, a beast of the fields favored by Yaweh with reason, that his insight can create wonders, legislate the nonexistence of god, deny the mercy of Jesus, the deceiver. Oh holiest of unholies, grant me this day that I may corrupt the minds of my fellow men, with thoughts of easy women and power, ideas about mathematics that distract from the true goodness of suffering for the celestial powers, tempt men with thoughts of beer and fine food, with drugs and sodomy and not hard work and repentance. Foul Astaroth, demon of the nine hells, I kneel before you, seeking your antiblessing.

50 Metal Bands by Dungeons and Dragons Alignment

You know you need this list, to plan your fantasy battles in Middle Earth, or to arrange a soundtrack to the screenplay you are writing in your head, the one where ettins and orcs team up with ogres to fight elves, humans, and a peculiar old wizard that is really YOU. Note that there are a lot of "true neutrals", this is because a detached perspective, that of the storyteller who does not pass judgement, is fairly common as lyrics go. Also, modern viewpoints, those grounded consciously or unconsciously in philosophies that postdate 1300, tend to register as Neutral in Dungeons and Dragons Terms. Still, many bands take sides and you might need this list. Note that there is not a single Lawful Neutral. Rock is the antithesis of that perspective. As you might have predicted, there are many more evil bands than good ones.

1. Burzum. Neutral Evil. Varg Vikernes was and is, actually, a pretty horrible and evil guy, by almost any estimation. This is not just a songwriting perspective.

2. Mayhem. Chaotic Evil.

3. Emperor. Lawful Evil.

4. Gorgoroth. Neutral Evil.

5. Toxic Holocaust. Chaotic Neutral.

6.. Metallica. Neutral

7. Venom. Chaotic Evil.

8. Megadeth. Neutral.

9. Mercyful Fate. Lawful Evil. Storytellers, yes, but inevitably on Satan's side. They made this clear in "The Oath".

10. Morbid Angel. Chaotic Evil

11. Sodom. Chaotic Neutral.

12. Kreator. Chaotic Neutral, Evil Tendencies.

13. The Scorpions. Neutral (selfish), with some chaotic and good tendencies.

14. Nightwish. Neutral Good. The song "The Carpenter" is about a version of Jesus, and they ooze empathy for people and their suffering.

15. Type O Negative. True Neutral or Neutral Evil, depending upon the song and the album. They hate god, for sure, but they rarely embrace cruelty and violence for its own sake. They are that noble kind of evil that makes for interesting villains.

16. Slayer. Here is an enigma. The band switches between alignments from one great song to the next. In one great song, they support Christ (Jesus Saves), in another, they deny him (Cult), they make a monster like Joseph Mengele seem cool, or do they vilify him? They are torn between Lawful Good, and a much stronger, Neutral Evil streak.

17. Bathory Chaotic Evil.

18. Armoured Saint. Lawful Good.

19. DragonForce. Lawful Good.

20. Stryper. Neutral Good, but too shitty of a band to be worth a damn in the fight against orcs or goblins.

21. Judas Priest. Neutral.

22. Van Halen. Neutral (selfish neutral, not true neutral) This band was all about the partying, and never took sides.

23. Black Sabbath (Ozzy Era). Chaotic Good. This might surprise you, but give all the of the songs another listen, and you will realize that Geezer Butler's lyrics were informed from a pro-Yaweh perspective, and many were warnings about Satan. They also laud figures like "The Wizard", who shake things up, and bring chaos. War Pigs is, essentially, an anthem against the forces of Lawful Evil.

24. Black Sabbath (Dio Era). True Neutral

25. Iron Maiden. True Neutral.

26. Children of Bodom. Chaotic Evil.

27. Arch Enemy. True Neutral, or an ideological Chaotic Neutral. This band can get overtly political, and many of its lyrics are against tyranny, real or more fantasy-based. It is usually the ideologically-grounded chaotic neutrals who rail against corrupt tyrannies, more than anyone else.

28. Guns N Roses. Selfish Neutral.

29. Motley Crue. Selfish Neutral.

30. Rush. Lawful Good.

31. Led Zepplein. Selfish Neutral.

32. Deicide. Neutral Evil.

33. Hellhammer. Neutral Evil.

34. Enslaved. Neutral Evil.

35. Monster Magnet. Chaotic Neutral.

36. Lamb of God. Neutral.

37. Iced Earth. True Neutral, with hints of Lawful Good. When it comes down to it, they seem to throw their lot in with God. Days of Purgatory is about Revelations, and they seem to be against the antichrist.

38. Dio. True Neutral.

39. Cannibal Corpse. Chaotic Evil.

38. Macabre. Chaotic Evil.

39. Three Inches of Blood. Neutral, Chaotic Tendencies.

40. Immortal. Neutral Evil.

41. Satyricon. Chaotic Evil.

42. Dark Funeral. Neutral Evil.

43. Nile. Neutral.

44. Possessed. Neutral Evil.

45. Motorhead. Chaotic Neutral.

46. Cradle of Filth. Neutral Evil.

47. Def Leppard. Selfish Neutral.

48. Queensryche. True Neutral.

49. Dimmu Borgir. Neutral Evil.

50. Sepultura. Neutral, but see the note for ArchEnemy.

Thirteen Metal Albums to Listen to in a Dark Room, on Mind Altering Drugs

More than any other genre of popular music, metal asks the big questions: Heaven and Hell, Doom and Repentance, Extraterrestrial Life, the Limits of Human Endurance, Power and the Lack of Power, Evil and its Exact Nature. This sort of thinking leads to the use of psychadelic drugs as surely as cocaine use leads to bankruptcy court.

This is my Father's Day list, because when my brother asked what I would rather be doing for father's day than anything else, I answered truthfully. I never really thought about it until I listened to I came to the morning DJs on my local classic rock station muse about how their ideal Father's Day. For them, such a day would be spent in a strip club, surrounded by women who had, in their childhood, been neglected by their own fathers. I don't actually need that experience, largely because those places have worked out the details of fleecing money from the customer to such perfection that there is no fun in them anymore. I am not complaining, I actually got something like this for a birthday present last year, while the wife watched the kid, and it was a blast, though we got to very little metal listening. Ideally, I would like to take this voyage alone, or with one companion who, preferably, with a woman in a kimono coming down every now and again to offer me a cold beer, a glass of water, some gummi bears.

The components of the list depend upon the drugs. Dear listener, let us assume that you have imbibed a teacup full of psylocibin tea and smoked a medium sized joint of some strain of cannabis with a fancy name, which is still lit in the ashtray. I have defined "metal" rather loosely, because our friends in the Stoner Rock camp do this thing so damned well. Hopefully, you have laid these out on top of the CD player, or have handy playlists on your computer, because you will not be able to look for them once that tea kicks in...

Thirteen.

Opeth. Orchid. Morbid and beautiful. Opeth's musical ambitions shine more brightly some evenings than others.

Twelve

The Melvins, Stoner Witch. Stoner rock, not metal, but fuzzed out Texas psychobilly genius.

Eleven.

Blue Oyster Cult, Fires of Unknown Origin. This is more proto-metal than metal, but it is over-the-top freaky and ambitious all the way through, BOC's best, in my opinion.

Ten.

Cradle of Filth, Thornography. This might be a great one to start with. About fifteen minutes into it, you will find yourself wondering if Dani Filth really is singing those lyrics. Crazy vocal vamping, unbelievably weird songs about English depravity, horror, and magic, and the truly mindblowing "Rise of the Pentagram"....

Nine.

Tiamat. Clouds/The Sleeping Beauty. Imagine that the biggest, most meatheaded pro wrestler in the WWE had a secret leaning toward existentialism, and started asking the really bigquestions. This is pretty much what you would get, as a musical narrative.

Eight.
All of Apocalyptica's albums belong on this list. This is my personal favorite.

Seven.

Neurosis, Enemy of the Sun. Skip to the next one on the list if you start getting freaked out. This is some heavy shit.

Six.

Orange Goblin, Frequencies from Planet Ten. Yes, this is more of a stoner rock album than a metal album, but it is a masterpiece.

Five.

Enslaved, Monumension. ALL of the Enslaved albums belong on this list, but it would be redundant to keep listing them. This is my pick. Yours might be Maudraum.

Four.

Emperor, In The Nightside Eclipse. Intricate and strange, full of nuances. It is, essentially, an opera.

Three.

Sleep, Jerusalem. Mandatory.

Two.

Bathory, Twilight of the Gods. About twenty five minutes into the first song, you might be wondering how something this strange ever got recorded. It really is that weird. The first song is some 27 odd minutes long and progresses from one strange phase to another.

One.

Monster Magnet, Powertrip. Mandatory, especially if you are going through any sort of transition in your life, or needed to do some serious thinking.

7/2/2010 Just an addendum. I actually GOT my Father's day present this year...last Wed, due to a death in the wife's family and their sudden and unplanned trip to South Dakota. This left me with two evenings completely lacking in parental responsibilities. On Wed, I actually DID spend much of the evening with two strippers (one of which is a very close friend of mine), who brought me to the Violet Hour and PAID MY TAB. As for the trip itself, here is the soundtrack.

Bathory..Twilight of the Gods (only the first track, I actually grew impatient with it and decided I knew it too well)

Darkthrone...Dark Thrones and Black Flags

The Voyager Interstellar Record, whole damned thing. With the classical music, I also grew impatient because the pieces, including a decent stretch of Beethoven's 5th symphony, I knew pretty well. The "world" music blew me away....especially the Blues and Latin music.

Cradle of Filth-Thornography. It was amazing...because of the state I was in, I was able to make out all the lyrics clearly, and laughed through most of it.

Mercyful Fate-In the Shadows. Amazing again, for some of the same reasons.

Ten Greatest Metal Albums/CDs of All Time

I love the exercise of choosing a list of the ten best of anything. In music criticism, these are mandatory, and usually presented as definitive. The fact of the matter is, "best" is an elusive quality, and it is situation dependent. The best metal album for a road trip might be Judas Priest (depends upon whether the listener cares about lyrics), and certainly not something like Emperor or Enslaved, because all the nuances of the latter would be lost over the road noise. Some of you have quieter cars, I suppose.

"Greatest" is a little easier to justify. It is the intersection of personal impact and cultural resonance. It implies grandiosity. PT Barnum did not create the "best" show on Earth, that was probably in some Gran Guignol theatre at the time, or perhaps in some Irish Pub, with traditional instruments, but he certainly made the Greatest Show on Earth.

So...in later posts, I will rank on other axes. I am leaving out the protometal, and other bands arguably classed as stoner rock or hard rock. Motorhead is, by convention considered to be a metal band, though Lemmy has denied this, listeners define genres, not musicians.

Here are my estimation of the ten greatest, in terms of their originality, their impact on their audience since the album was released, an on their success as an artistic statement. This is not actually my top ten favorites, certainly not the ten most interesting, or the ten i would most want to listen to in a dark basement doing drugs. Those lists come later.

Number Ten.

Judas Priest. Stained Class. One of these had to be a Judas Priest album, it was just a matter of which album, and which place on the list, such is how well regarded this band is in the minds of metal listeners. I actually listened through every great Judas Priest album before writing this, because though they are one of the greatest metal bands of all time, I am only now getting into them. Earlier in my life, I was always after something more intense, weirder, more cerebral, bleaker, druggier. It is either this one, or Screaming for Vengence, both are amazing, actually, especially if one accepts Rob Halford's thesis that lyrically, less is more.

Number Nine.

Motley Crue. Shout at the Devil. If you do not accept Motley Crue as a metal band, because hair metal is stylistically too much of a departure from metal's fundamental aesthetic, insert Children of Bodom's "Follow the Reaper" in this slot. A person cannot argue the Cru's impact on metal, or its listeners, however. This album is amazingly successful at what it tries to do: convince the listener to spend all their money on drugs and strippers. I like drugs and I also like strippers, and though it took me a while to warm up to this album personally (it was too popular in high school among people that used to beat me up, or threaten to do so), it is a masterwork.

Number Eight.

Guns n' Roses. Appetite for Destruction. As with the Motley Crue, if you do not consider hair metal to be a valid category of metal, insert Kreator's "Pleasure to Kill"in this slot. If you favor keeping one, and jettisoning the other from the list, you are not playing the game right. Both are hair metal acts. This one is even darker, even more powerful, grittier. It is the apotheosis of its genre, a time when mainstream radio stations played certain metal albums in heavy rotation.

Number Seven.

Bathory. Hammerheart. This is by no means an obscure band. Bathory are widely recognized to be important pioneers in the genres of Black Metal and Viking Metal. Still, this album sold many less copies, and was created by a band that was in many ways a single person's pet project, and in fact, never played a live show. I could keep writing about this band for pages, but suffice it to say, the genres of Black Metal, Viking Metal, and Swedish Death Metal originate with Bathory, and largely from this album. A nod belongs to Celtic Frost here, an equally influential band, more musically diverse, but less insane and driven in their artistic ambitions, as the progenitor of the black and evil stuff.

Number Six.

Motorhead, Ace of Spades. I hear that Lemmy does not actually think of Motorhead as a metal band, but I have never met a fan that agrees with him. Lemmy, if you are reading my list, Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" would be up here if not Motorhead. This album is the ultimate provocation for a person to go out, playing this album on the car stereo, and beat the living crap out of some dickhead that desperately deserves it, preferably while drunk.

Number Five. Slayer Reign in Blood.

At the time of its release, this was the heaviest album ever made, by far, and there would be no Death Metal were it not for this album, a thrash album, but the progenitor of so many things to come.

Number Four

AC/DC. You are, no doubt, anticipating these caveats by now. AC/DC do not actually regard themselves as metal, and their sound is basically a hard rock sound with metal overtones. If this does not count as metal to you, put Emperor's "The Nightside Eclipse" in this slot. This is the apex of the hard rock sound, chunky, clean in its execution and dirty in its subject matter. It is anthem after anthem to the rockandroll life style. A strip club, a six pack, Jack Daniels, power.

Number Three.

Iron Maiden. Number of the Beast. This album was actually panned by mainstream rock critics, at the time it was released in 1982. This is actually justified, if a music critic adheres to the elitist and inflexible notion that rock music, metal included, must adhere to some vestige of its roots in the Mississippi Delta. This album is an incredible departure from the likes of Led Zepplein and even Black Sabbath in that the inspiration for its songs was rooted solidly in fantasy and unreality. There is no song on this album that even remotely corresponds to the life of any of its listeners. This is an attribute of metal, as a genre of music, that ensures that it will always have its adherents, no matter what the current trend in music. For most contemporary manifestations of the genre, metal is escapist. Iron Maiden cross imaginary landscapes like no other band, before or since. No subject is too big for a song: Alexander the Great, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the Battle of Britain. My personal favorite Maiden album is actually Killers, for reasons I will probably elaborate in another post, but as for their greatest, it is probably either this, or Powerslave, an equally amazing album, but less original only for the reason that it came later, and Maiden stuck very true to form after this one.

Number Two.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid. Critics who call Black Sabbath the first metal band are advocating the only truly reasonable position on the matter. Though Deep Purple and Blue Cheer ventured into dark territory, they did not stay there like Black Sabbath, nor did Led Zepplein, whose musical diversity was truly astonishing, and ventured boldly into pieces that included the first Viking metal song. Black Sabbath, however, invented a dark sound so constantly referred to by later metal bands that they are the progenitor of almost everything we recognize as fundamental to the genre. This piece is probably their greatest album. It was amazingly popular for its day, and possessed an intensity and originality never seen since its release in 1970.

Number One:

Metallica. Master of Puppets. This is on everybody's list, often in the number one slot, for a good goddamned reason. It is an incredible, groundbreaking work. Each song has a resonance, a genius for rhythm and texture, an intellectual clarity, that resonates every bit as strongly today as it did in 1986, when it punched a hole in the conventions of the time and drove a shit ton load of bricks through it. Ride the lightning might actually be better artistically, and my personal favorite is actually And Justice for All, because I love the intricate melodies and outright bleakness of the lyrics, but this is certainly the greatest.

A List

10 Amazing Metal CDs I need to mention right now.

Monster Magnet...Superjudge.

Iron Maiden.....Powerslave

Metallica......Ride the Lightning

Blue Oyster Cult.....Fires of Unknown Origin

Bathory....Hammerheart

Motley Crue....Shout at the Devil

Enslaved.....Frost

Satyricon/Enslaved....The Forest is My Throne/Yggdrasil

Orange Goblin.....Frequencies from Planet Ten

Dio....Last in Line

Kreator Recontextulized

Despite appearances, Ruby has no soft-tissue damage or repetitive stress injuries from moshing around like this. We have done it every day since she was born, and we know each other's limits. As you can imagine, she has incredible core body strength. I film this, actually, on a day she would absolutely not go to sleep...."metaling her down" is a standard daddy trick, which can backfire, of course, if she is not absolutely dead tired. She is sleeping soundly now, two minutes after the clip is finished.

The song is Kreator's 'Flag of Hate'...we had been on an Iron Maiden kick earlier, but I needed something more brutal.

This sounds incredibly pretentious, misguided, or both, but Ruby seems to need the catharsis of heavy music-electroclash, punk, metal, industrial, to deal with the everyday stresses of living in a world where she can make elaborate plans to distract her mom and dad long enough to eat the cat food, but cannot pull a shirt over her head or flush a toilet. We both live for this, which is good, because it is pretty much how we spend our days.

Arch Enemy, House of Blues, 2/29/2010

Incredible show.  Roller derby times ten thousand.  Iron Maiden Squared.

Cro-Magnon Parasitic Megaspore

Corrupt Neanderthal Nemesis

Why We Rock

Yesterday, I was listening to Old Man's Child....it must have been the sixth or seventh play through Vermin in 24 hours.....lost in the dark melodies and blast beat drums.  Eeevvvvillll, except, I was installing a baby security gate.  Come to think of it, I put Ruby to sleep with Metallica's Death Magnetic last night, it replaced Kreator's Pleasure to Kill, which is too discodant for a lullaby. Eeeeevill.  Did I mention that I almost teared up to Rush's "Time Stand Still" in a Mc Donalds drive through line a few days ago?  I acutally hate that song, it is from what must be Rush's worst album.  Still, I knew all the lyrics from my dorky youth.  Laaammmme.  The ones that really get me come from out of nowhere.  It was Johnny Cash's "Solitary Man" once, and, notably, Scorpions "Winds of Change", in MN, turning the inition key to leave my grandmother's old neighborhood, now gentrified...This is why we rock.  This is why we rock.

Necrophore

DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK...Listening to this music will cause space creatures to materialize in your bedroom and kill you as you sleep

Regarding Metal

Regarding Metal

Metal is a genre of music characterized by extensive use of distorted electric guitars and basses, drums, and vocals which are vamped or stylized by screaming, growling, falsetto, or an over-the top operatic delivery.  Metal lyrics invoke dark subject mater, almost universally touching on aspects of power and powerlesness, often invoking moods of violence, agression, and supernatural evil.  Musical compositions in metal songs are intended to convey feelings of aggressiveness, rage, transcendent doom, or a desire to indulge in wanton acts of hedonism, womanizing, and drug use.  Classical minor scales and blues scales are often recognizable, but it is rare that a metal song is written in a particular key.  Rhythms can be textured and elaborate, with multiple changes in tempo within a song.  The above definition is far from comprehensive.  It is easy to find an excellent metal song that does not fit within the definition at all.  Opeth’s “Silhouette” comes to mind, as do Mayhem’s “Silvester Anfang” and Bathory’s “Ring of Gold”.

The genre is loosely split into many subgenres, mostly listener-defined and often very arbitrary in their usage.  Lyrics are various, but themes of supernatural evil predominate in some of its subgenres.  In others, feelings of isolation, anger, and nihilism are more typical.  In still others, fantastic battles, actual historical conflict, or scenarios intended to tell tales of womanizing and debauchery are the norm.  Some of its subgenres embrace extreme showmanship, including black and white “corpse paint”, studded and spiked costumes, fire, and fake blood.  Other subgenres adopt an almost obsessive minimalism in their stage attire, focusing upon performances rife with rage and angst.  I have never known fans to be strictly adherent to one subgenre or another.  In a typical night of listening, fans typically play whatever they want to hear, regardless of the label attached to it.

The term “metal” is a contentious one because its listeners, especially die-hard fans, are apt to reject musical techniques, styles, and elements that do not conform to their definition of what “metal” is, effectively policing the genre from adopting a sound that might have mainstream appeal.  This tendency has caused a recent movement in the metal scene to refer to all types of metal, and music that sounds like metal but is rejected by hardcore fans, as “heavy music”, to avoid these kinds of arguments.  

Labels divide.  Labels limit.  Labels also serve a purpose, arise spontaneously, and serve as guides to cognition.  Terms like “metal”, “grindcore”, and “new wave of British heavy metal” almost universally provoke contention, but they are also a fundamental consequence of the way humans categorize.  In visual art, literature, music, and other creative forms of thought, something called a genre tends to form spontaneously, whenever the limit of creative expression are such that artisans are free to craft music to their own liking, and yet, must operate within a set of parameters intentionally and unintentionally defined by the audience and artists alike.  Music, in particular, has had something akin to genres since its inception, the existence of multiple different Ancient Greek music scales, each attributed to a particular island or region, suggests that even at the beginning of what we might term Western Civilization, artists and listers have acted in concert to create distinct styles of music.  For music, especially, the effectiveness of the art form relies in the mind’s ability to predict musical patterns as they develop, and effective music both satisfies, and denies, these expectations, to create a combination of tension and resolution that most listners consider to be beautiful.  Other than its most fundamental unit, the octave, the existence of a music scale is a cultural construct,  Though the patterns of tones and semitones we associate with pitch have a neurological basis, the arrangement of tones in an interval, and exact combinations of steps and half steps included in a scale is determined by society.  Music is in the mind of the listener as well as the musician.  In his book “This is Your Brain on Music”, Dan Levitin devotes an entire chapter to musing on what is known, and unknown, regarding how the brain forms genre specific categories.  He suggests that human minds have an inherent tendency to recognize a genre by gestalt, from only a few examples, and that music listeners are surprisingly adept at recognizing examples of an art form that, while they fall within a genre, are not normative.  

As human societies have grown more complex, and the density of listeners has grown exponentially to an unprecedented scale, each group of listeners having the potential for worldwide, virtually instantaneous access to the newest music, there has been a proliferation of genres in music, and a fracturing of these genres into subgenres.

Metal eludes a strict definition because genres, in any field of artistic expression, lack strict definition.  Genres form spontaneously because the human mind constantly seeks to categorize.  A genre is an aggregate of similar objects or things that the humans in a culture find to be fundamentally similar.  For every genre, listeners, readers, or viewers, can point to examples that seem to be paradigmatic, central to, and typical of the genre, and other examples that seem to stray from the center or cross over into other genres.  It is this crossover that often produces the best music, art, and literature, thought it can only exist once genre boundaries are established.  In a culture of total innovation, each artist working from his or her own first principles, such genre crossovers, and the innovation they bring, is impossible.  The genre must exist in order to transcend it.  That said, each genre has certain cultural innovations, and attributes, which are either more common among the art or music that the genre encompasses, or employed in a way that is idiosyncratic or distinctive when they do appear.  New movements in any art form do not usually receive a name until much of the innovation that produced that art form has already occurred.  Once recognized, listeners often close ranks on new innovation, perhaps in a subconscious effort to restrict the evolution of an art form they have grown to appreciate.  The listener feeds back to the musician.  The reader influences the writer. 

Possibly, no form of popular music is more prone to factions, more able to split into subgenres, and more defensive of its own cohesiveness as a recognizable art form, than metal.  These properties result not from radical innovation, or the individualism that metalheads are sometimes known for, but from cultural conservatism.  Metalheads evaluate each new technique and trend, in conversations online, between cigarettes at band practice, and in line at shows, searching for consensus.  Even for rock bands, which are amazingly consistent compared to other forms of music in their arrangement of members and instruments, metal bands are almost hyperconsistent in their lineups.  Only certain arrangements are permissible.  The most acceptable arrangement, currently, includes a drummer, a bassist, one or two guitarists, and possibly a vocalist, though it is more in keeping with some genres of metal that one of the guitarists, or the bassist, also sing. There is no a priori reason for these members.  Other arrangements are certainly possible.  A metal band is limited, thus, to three to five members, except enormously successful acts which accumulate members as their ambitions grow.  Even in these acts, it is much more acceptable and common for a band, such as Sweeden’s In Flames, to sprout an extra guitarist, than to accumulate an extra drummer.  

A “Front Man”, a dedicated vocalists that does not play an instrument, is permissible, but more welcome in some sugenres, than in others.

 vocal duties are typically split among the members of the band.  In the 1980’s, it was a major point of division among metalheads whether an electronic synthesizer was an appropriate instrument for a metal band.  It was not sufficient that some fans enjoyed them, and others did not, a consensus was necessary.  Now, synthesiers are employed freely, and expected, in some sugenres of music, but necessarily absent from others.  Consensus, but the splitting of subgenres.  Currently, in Chicago, metalheads are challenging the genre again by exploring the possibility of the drum machine as a metal innovation.  

All genres of music have such parameters.  Metal is only unusual, if it is unusual at all, in being slightly more restrictive than other forms of popular music, though much less restrictive than older, more traditional forms of music, such as Gamelan music or even classical chamber music.  These restrictions are products of cultural evolution.  They are analogous to the thought structures that must have existed in the minds of Ancient Greek and NeoTropical potters as they crafted pottery and emblazoned it with culture-specific patterns.  Indeed, it is possible to trace the extent of trade in ancient North America, and elsewhere, by the movement of pot shards.  These thought structures serve to limit permissible types of innovation in the musical genre.  They restrict inventiveness, but in doing so they funnel creativity in consistent directions.  The emphasis on guitar, bass, vocals, and drums, has created innovation in interplay of these instruments that would not exist if metal bands commonly incorporated saxophones, xylophones, or harps.  It has created special scenarios, such as the introductory passages to black metal songs, where such innovations are strongly called for.  Most importantly, it has created an audience of listeners who have trained themselves to distinguish certain sonic patterns of timbre, rhythm, melody and harmony, that seem like mere noise to uninitiated listeners, but are pleasing to the metalhead.

Analogous situations are present in other genres of music as well.  Experience listening to jazz, especially avante garde jazz, generally makes a better listener.

Other than a moderate degree of cultural conservatism, metal is somewhat distinctive in that it seeks to create a sound that the uninitiated often find unpleasant.  With the possible exceptions of experimental music, some forms of jazz, and possibly some forms of classical music, no other form of music such a polarizing effect on the listener.  Certainly, it seems that metal bands enjoy creating sounds that the uninitiated find to be ugly, dissonant, and unpleasant.  Though avante garde jazz has the same effect on listeners, generally, metalheads seem to take pride in this.  Uninitiated listeners often loathe metal, and would prefer to listen to silence.  Most metal artists never expect to be played on the radio.  Metal is rarely played at parties, almost never at weddings, and though appropriate, never at funerals.  Something that the uninitiated listener, the nonmetalhead, often fails to appreciate is the extent to which the initiated listener, the metalhead, actually enjoys the elements in music that nonmetalheads find discordant, ugly, and brutal.

The metal aesthetic is easy to recognize.  Battle axes are metal.  Mercedes convertibles are not.  Fire is metal.  Champagne is not metal.  A nude woman carrying a sword in one hand and a severed head in another is metal, the same woman in a bikini, leaned over a motorcycle, is not....not currently, at least.  In the 1980’s, having gained mainstream acceptance and mainstream radio play, images of postadolescent men having a good time were an accepted part of the aesthetic.  It has evolved and consolidated since then, however, as mainstream success has eluded most acts, and influences from science fiction, crime, religion, and horror have combined and recombined endlessly.  To me, one of the most metal images imaginable, and one of its most influential, is the image of the wraithlike “Eddie”, wielding an axe, some faceless victim vainly clutching the creature’s shirt as he or she slumps to the ground.  This was, of course, the image  on the cover of Iron Maiden’s “Killers” album, and it typifies the aesthetic perfectly.

Though permissible modes of subject matter for lyrics differ from one subgenre to the next, metal has always been focused on power, and its absence, darkness, and its consequences, and elements of mythology and storytelling that invoke the big questions of life and death, heaven and hell, war and peace, freedom and slavery.  It is both apolitical, in the sense that metal songs only rarely have explicitly political content, and intensely political, in that its listeners frequently form cohesive working-class bands of individuals who share a common identity and values at odds with the expectations of middle class family life and consumerism.  Metal is not punk, it does not seek to overthrow the government.  Metal both laments and celebrates the brutality of dictatorship, slavery, and torture, the same way the builders of the ancient pyramids both lamented and celebrated their conscription into a task so brutal, so epic, and so ultimately out of their power to control.

Metal is not alone in music, art, or any other form of human expression in seeking images of darkness and evil.  Its single-mindedness is unusual however.  In most forms of metal, songwriters are essentially forbidden to stray from images and situations of darkness and evil.  Among songwriters, and among subgenres, however, destinations differ.  Some metal explores darkness and evil for the purpose of escapism; by allowing the listener to enter a fantasy world of dragons and succubi, events of the real world melt away or become minor cogs in a much larger landscape of heaven and hell, freedom and slavery.  Other metal is antiauthoritairan, an influence borrowed from hardcore punk, and focused strongly on current political issues, but always from an individualistic perspective and virtually never calling upon its listeners to follow in any sort of movement.  Following directions, joining a movement, obeying authority, are not metal values.