Terry Riley’s groundbreaking work of minimalism is a backwards trek through musical consciousness, illustrative of how something resembling music can arise from the most fundamental constituents of the sound phenomenon. Music after all is nothing more than a collection of notes at discrete intervals. Of itself, in isolation, an individual note holds little significance, but enough of them strung together in their limitless possibilities of color and rhythm give voice to all of man’s aspirations, to the state of his being itself.
A group of performers are given a fixed number of phrases to cycle through. Only the most general directives guide them on their journey, in particular those pertaining to the bookends of the piece and certain “algorithmic” imperatives, but for the most part they have autonomy over repetition, tempos, and pitch. The result is outwardly composed and internally stochastic; deterministic as to its substance, but entirely ambiguous about its temporality.
Perhaps an analogy can be found in the evolution of species. Nature has an array of organic building blocks at her disposal from which rudimentary life is formed. As time proceeds in its linear manner, living organisms receive feedback from their environment and continue evolving. The timescale on which this process occurs is not pre-ordained; given the same initial seeding conditions, even assuming – and it’s a pretty contentious assumption – that the physical evolution of an organism would culminate similarly under all iterations, it is not inevitable that each such run would complete in the same amount of time. Actually, let me retract that statement, for there is a latent contradiction involved in it that might throw a spanner in the deterministic side of the debate. If evolution is in constant operation behind the scenes, beyond just the grossly visible changes our myopic perspective can account for and appreciate as a new taxonomical branch, then variable timescales, despite the same initial impetus, would necessarily imply different degrees of evolution in each completed instance; in effect, a constitutionally new organism would have been said to arise at the end of each evolutionary pass, assuming we have notional cut-offs for time.
Circling back to Terry Riley’s work, then, each rendition of In C, despite its claim to being a composition, owing to the unpredictability introduced in its delivery, is essentially, philosophically, a new piece of music. But neither is it free-form or avant-garde as a signifier of the outré, and in that lies its elusive appeal. Intellectually, it is both this and that, as well as neither this nor that, a composition that belies itself by being in a state of perpetual flux. Emotionally, it has little resonance, as one would expect; this, after all, is sound as precursor to the dawning of awareness. Not cold, exactly, rather a witness to the magisterial work of accretion prior to that moment.
The metal ballad is an oxymoron to some. The intransigence we associate with metal has a hard time being reconciled with the painfully self-conscious and melodramatic nature of the traditional ballad. Metal is all intrepid thrust, the epitome of the masculine, impregnating principle. The ballad is involuted monomania and treats of man at his most vulnerable: pliant, soft, and giving. Metal prefers to fixate on the inevitable conquest ahead of doubt, but the ballad is impeded by the doubt itself. Human qualities on both sides, but one set is infinitely more appealing to the worldview that heavy metal has formed around itself.
The resulting schism is a somewhat unfortunate one. If we maintain that metal is a romantic genre, that at its most potent it can invoke the numinous or the otherworldly, then it becomes crucial that the artist playing metal place himself not only in a condescending position in relation to his environment, but at the mercy of that environment as well. As opposed to imposing his will on nature all of the time, he has to be willing to let nature have her way with him too, to be the supplicant for a change and let her impressions wash over him. Once the magnitude of this new relationship and his subordinate role in it dawns on him, how can he not retreat into a more introspective mood and the music which he creates under its influence not carry a humbler and gentler aspect about it?
Of course, all ballads in metal are not made equal. Some are obvious attempts at appealing to a large audience and cross over into gauche sentimentality the likes of which even a ballad apologist would find hard to defend. The good ones, however, nearly always retain some of the attack we commonly identify with metal, and in the process elevate the merely melancholic into the realm of the heroic. And isn’t this transcendent dichotomy, this metallic communion, existing before and after and with each other, one of the reasons why we gravitate to this music after all? Here are a couple of ballads to drive home the point.
Armored Saint – Isolation Armored Saint ballads on their first four albums followed predictable enough patterns; soft arpeggiated intros, a slashing main riff, John Bush’s utterly inimitable voice, and a brilliant Dave Prichard solo. The lyrics are obvious signifiers on ‘Isolation‘, but for those among us who continue living lives of solitude, either of choice or by choice forced upon us, who can’t but be subject to the many shades of contemplation that all the hours of day afford, this one’s for you.
Queensryche – The Lady Wore Black Queensryche at their peak had a legitimate right to being regarded the greatest heavy metal band ever. Geoff Tate certainly remains unsurpassed in my mind – more importantly, my heart – as the finest singer in all rock and metal. ‘The Lady Wore Black‘ is a dark Victorian masterpiece, the equivalent of a M.R. James ghost story set upon the moors of North England, and one of the best examples of scene-setting in heavy metal: a genuine manifestation or a finger of yearning reaching through the diaphanous wall between dream and the waking life?
Taphonomia Aeternitatis has moments of transcendent quality in light of which the intricate web of sounds the band have made its calling card begins making sense or at the very least stands out in greater relief. It is the latter which deserves more involved treatment because Abigor literally bash the listener with the kitchen sink. Within the context of black metal, and even against the wider cultural backdrop from which the band hail, this music is both of the baroque and the avant-garde tradition; layered, ornate, theatrical, cacophonous, even rousing, an abundance of creative channeling always rooting for a melodic out, always challenging, but never peremptorily dismissible.
There is a cthonic aspect to much of what Abigor do. Overtly, these songs are intended to be Satanic hymnals, but digging through the detritus of mythological overlay, the Satanic element itself can be thought of in terms of the world of experience in its many facets ranging from the temperamental to the indifferent. And as without, so within. Man relentlessly anthropomorphizes both spheres, but these are fundamental instincts that he has inherited over the span of deep time since awareness first dawned in the slime. Orthodoxy and social conditioning attempt to relegate them to a barely-lit annex of his waking consciousness; probably for good reason, too, as evident from the spectrum of seemingly inexplicable behavior humanity is prone to exhibit, both individually and as a species in rank concert. It may be tempting to dismiss various spiritual knowledge systems as hogwash, but all they’ve done, historically, past layers of obfuscation – and is it even obfuscation if it might in fact be preparing the groundwork for a more amenable reconciliation between the surface and the subliminal – is to guide the acute practitioner through trials of ritual discipline towards a firmer and safer grasp of these things, to ultimately teach him to live life as a unified whole and not a mess of perpetually warring opposites.
Earth, Sulphur, Steel :: Grace, Vengeance, Indomitability :: Harmony, Dissonance, Stasis. Music imperceptibly, by degrees, imbues the abstract with identity, before finding an analogue in nature itself. A descent in stages, from the highest in conscious expression, through its fracturing into discrete ideals, down to inanimate matter in the end; but not really a terminus, rather the closing of an ever-rejuvenating loop and upwards again. From such triune composites, Taphonomia is made. Perhaps it will be asked if an album as richly textured and ostentatious as this can ever answer to any level of metaphysical enquiry. We tend to associate the latter with a certain austerity and restraint in the arts; but if all art is essentially units of information, then can the degree of artistic – musical – pointillism i.e. the realization of an idea through fine, incremental, and accumulative detail, be reasonably held against it?
And Taphonomia certainly is an album of musical aggregates. Songs are frequently introduced and driven forward by a cluster of five or so notes of the chromatic scale, played in half-step couplets across successive octaves, tentatively probing up and down the register, building energy and direction until a floating or opportune resolution is found in an ascendant semitone or a new chord voicing altogether: a heralding, a liberation and an emergence from the unlight of constituent shapes into a more equitable and irrefutable relationship with the world of thought and matter.
A wide range of vocalized polemic drapes itself all over these songs – somewhat overzealously it must be said, but also on at least one occasion with startling effect. See: ‘Forniotrs Weltenreise‘ – thus actually making songs of them. It is an obvious distinction between the instrumental piece and the song proper, but one that is often overlooked in the Nietzschean quest for absolute purity. The latter, however, is but an ideal and a hypothesis, at least as far as metal goes. Singing, on the other hand, is an elementary human activity, probably the oldest of all artistic pursuits, and therefore has its right of place in any appropriately creative expression. It seems overly analytical, even somewhat self-punishing, to dismiss or downgrade out of hand a piece of music only because it can’t help giving voice to an innate generative impulse.
Whether Taphonomia Aeternitatis is black metal, or even metal, may be a discussion best reserved for another time, if one cares enough about such things. It certainly possesses the drama and spirit of black metal. Technique, maybe not so much, not all of the time anyway, but this might be somewhat moot if, as we maintain in our loftier idealizing, technique lies in the service of the spirit. Within reasonable limits naturally. In any case, a band consciously placing itself this far outside the norm is obviously not trying to adhere to established patterns. There is a place for experimentation, perhaps more so within black metal than any other subgenre. It is up to the listener to decide whether it is worth engaging with.
On at least half of Led Astray, Crucifier want to play and transmit the idea of dungeon black/death like Incantation, Demoncy, and Prosanctus Inferi but ever so often step into minor key progressions, guitar solos, and a jauntiness of rhythm that mitigate the rottenness the band so desperately want to convey. It used to be the modus operandi of any number of projects from the late 90s now lost to time. Not dishonest, exactly; I suppose the intention was to suggest the melancholic sincerity that any young person naturally finds himself aspiring towards as he comes to terms with his nature and that of the world around him. The underground was a much different place then, a time when gothic influences from the 80s greatly informed metal and bands were a lot less self-conscious, for both better and worse.
Led Astray therefore is something of an anachronism, but I find its split personality disruptive of the kind of mood I look forward to in metal. Treated in isolation, there is nothing inherently wrong with the diverse facets found here; but the wedding between musical elements is a subtle admixture and revealing of the band’s grasp of its own influences beyond the sentimental. There is a reason why Incantation have never veered away from their roots in chromatic note choices even in the midst of their extended doom/noise/feedback workouts. Demoncy may occasionally, and only just, insinuate a sweeping melody, but as a device to deepen mood, not alleviate it or render it innocuous; you’d certainly never catch them dead with a leaping rhythm more at home on Piece Of Mind. Prosanctus Inferi put out a modern classic in Noctambulous Jaws Within Sempiternal Light with more riffs and guitar solos than you could shake a stick at, but these were of a nature utterly twisted and inverted, mocking convention while using that very convention to achieve its blasphemous ends.
The above are used not as comparisons but references and illustrations. Crucifier can be their own band but they have to first determine what kind of band that is.
Ares Kingdom have always been the natural successors to the Bathory sound on Blood, Fire, Death, which makes the criticisms leveled at them on account of their speed metal roots a little hard to understand, especially when said Bathory album is almost universally held in the greatest regard by those very critics. By-the-numbers speed metal is unquestionably a dead end for metal because it does so little in terms of thematic variation and is implicitly riddled with filler. But like Bathory, Ares Kingdom have succeeded because in their hands speed metal technique is a tool and not an end in itself, used to tell stories and minor epics, with all the variety in mood and texture that such an endeavor necessarily entails.
In Darkness At Last has to be the most brutal album Ares Kingdom have done yet. It certainly isn’t as instantly memorable as the first three full-lengths, but neither does it feel disjointed like By The Light Of Their Destruction. The first half of the album is particularly severe in sound; lyrically centered around Chuck Keller’s perennial fascination with the stars, dressing celestial phenomena in alchemical-mythological garb, these songs are almost savagely restrained. Open chord clusters and syncopated note choices are the chief melodic movers here, herded together and driven onward by a violent pedal tone i.e. the colorless, bass-string chugging so beloved of speed/thrash metal. Said open chords, as and when they happen, however, are occasions for great percussive bombast, Mike Miller accentuating them with extra notice.
The second half scales back from the cosmic to the historical, affording the band the ideal opportunity to exercise their more epic stylings. Melody previously isolated in discrete silos now finds its way into the interstices of the song, chugging that was once static now assumes a motive-narrative place in the overall dynamic. It’s a subtle change in approach, but one that illustrates how even seemingly-tired tropes can be employed towards a holistic end by a band in touch with its vision. Vocabulary is limited, but expression doesn’t have to be.
It feels churlish to call the new Judas Priest disappointing. It makes all the right noises, the band feels rejuvenated, Halford’s in top form, and the music makes no concessions to modern trends, at least none that the band themselves didn’t help invent in the late 80s. But that precisely is the crux of the thing. Priest fans usually fall in one of two camps: those that are enthusiastically aboard the Painkiller bandwagon, and those that look back wistfully at what went before, a slightly simpler time high on evocative quotient. Undoubtedly there is an overlap between the two sides and appropriately so; it would be disingenuous to call Painkiller a bad album, it’s a great album, actually, but it certainly is a watershed in the band’s catalog, one which helped keep them relevant in the midst of a younger, hungrier, and ever-more-extreme scene. But something was lost in the process…what, exactly, is harder to pinpoint, intensely subjective as it is.
The most obvious change since Painkiller has been Scott Travis’ immensely muscular and athletic drumming. Easily the best drummer the band ever had, his presence galvanized Tipton and Downing to exercise fully the considerable chops at their disposal in a more pugilistic, occasionally even dissonant, paradigm. A grinding and a churning became increasingly evident in the riffs, groove too, not far removed from what one would reasonably expect on the Southern-fried doom of the era (think Crowbar and Down). Lastly, Rob Halford came to fully assume his larger-than-life, Metal God™ avatar, sacrificing the playful romanticism of yore for a more self-conscious playing up to tropes.
Dave Holland was obviously a far more limited drummer than Scott Travis, but out of those limitations also came a sense of swing which forced the band to stay on top of the beat and in some ways be more harmonically inventive in the scaling of the musical register. In other words, the music seemed to breathe more. To me, the most memorable songs still remain the slower ones; ‘Crown Of Horns‘ and ‘Fight Of Your Life‘ here, but that’s been the general trend since Redeemer Of Souls.
Otherwise, there’s plenty to like on Invincible Shield if one equates heavy metal almost exclusively with bombast and fireworks. Richie Faulkner is a fine guitarist in the same neoclassical vein as Glenn Tipton, although that has now left something of a void in the blues-classical dichotomy that Downing and Tipton once shared. Halford’s voice acquits itself well for his age, but as hinted at, he has been a self-serious conductor of vengeance and hail fire for a long time now. The Halford I grew to love, however, frequently had an unmistakably impish smile concealed in his delivery which has sadly all but disappeared from newer Priest material and that I reckon is an observation that can be applied to Invincible Shield as a whole.
Tactility is associated with the sense of touch or that which is physically and intimately tangible. This would naturally seem at cross-purposes with music which, other than the medium producing it, exists on an altogether different plane than the material. However, there has been since ancient times a school of sonic architecture that tries to link sound with space in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Closer to our age, and probably more pertinent to the message of this post, are the acid-doused hippies of the 60s with their cliches of hearing colors and seeing sounds, but could there be something more than just chemical-induced euphoria to their ravings?
It is a somewhat tenuous concept to get one’s head around. For instance, Bruckner’s symphonies are often likened to the spires and vaults of Gothic cathedrals. But what is once seen cannot be unseen, and however apt that analogy may appear to us now, it is necessarily a posteriori; the description made by whoever was eloquent and perceptive enough to devise it in the first place will from here onwards guide the listener’s imagination and his experience of the music in an extremely narrow, pre-determined channel. Perhaps it can even be said that the amount of agency i.e. the ability to stay open to interpretation, lost by a piece of music is directly proportional to how concrete and fleshed out its most popular description is. Lyrics are an even more flagrant “violation” of this postulate because they leave the mind in no doubt whatsoever as to what it’s supposed to make of the accompanying aural stimuli, hence also the criticism leveled at the very nature of lyrics themselves in metal by other writers and the ensuing case for absolute metal.
Abstractedness, then, is what we’re after, but an abstractedness like some shade come visiting, just about verging on this dimension of mud, blood, and shit, that by degrees achieves near-substantiality, so much so that it comes to resemble at the fringes of vision a heaving, writhing thing, ugly and covered in nascent afterbirth yet somehow refulgent with life-affirming potential underneath, pulsing with power and pure psychic energy. This phenomenon by necessity is providential; no musician, I imagine, is capable of transmitting such an image, but intent, conviction, skill, and complete momentary immersion in the unconscious can conceivably align to make for just such a favorable event. A listener receptive to such frequencies and aided by a suitably fevered mind then completes the circle.
I point the reader to Manilla Road‘s final appearance at the Keep It True festival in 2017 and naturally, as one would expect, to Mark Shelton’s playing throughout the concert. From small beginnings come great things; no other guitarist in heavy metal qualified more to this little platitude, and I refer exclusively to Shelton’s playing style, assembled from basic pentatonic blocks in an ever-evolving cascade. It’s not that Shelton was a particularly technical player or even one of especial finesse; calling him sloppy might be uncharitable but he possessed a certain looseness, the instinctiveness of the self-taught, which made his playing relatable and that much co-extant with the listener’s world. Certain guitarists leave one confounded as to their method, but there was no such quandary with Shelton; his guitar runs throughout this show and indeed his career were constructed from fairly elemental licks and phrases in key with the core theme of his songs that left little room for ambiguity and yet when piled atop one another in outwardly concentric eddies of motion came to achieve a progressively grander existence like the undulations of…but wait, overt description kills the mystique, remember?
I think sheer volume has something to do with it. Noise has a tendency to overwhelm the waking consciousness to the exclusion of all other stimuli, to the extent that it being the sole foci of the subject’s perception begins achieving a quasi-physical status by virtue of the “stirrings” it induces in the immediate vicinity. But, also, musical technique, as described above; exaggerated embellishments and discrete jumps aren’t an accurate simulacra – if anything ever can be – of the state of human being, behind the layers of obfuscation that help us function in a dysfunctional world. A homogeneity through continuity, however, may model those occasions when we are least distracted by that world, and in tune with our selves. And such times of dissolution and meant surrender might just be the crucible in which the distinctions between the physical and the ethereal blur, and something new and strange and beautiful rises among us.
Trouble are rightly considered doom metal legends, Christian roots notwithstanding. The evangelical hectoring might get overbearing if you have little patience for such things or are concerned with maintaining a pose for your peers or even for the coherence of your own painstakingly-assembled identity, but different paths can lead to the same destination; in music, that being a curiously weightless state of equanimity and equilibrium, perfect mental poise and indeed a sense of oneness with the universe. Trouble‘s first four albums are some of the most tastefully crafted heavy metal of the era, never given to lapse into the kind of frothy gratuitousness that characterized the 80s, always committed to a consistently heavy and pensive vibe – whilst staying entirely musically literate and within the boundaries of their chosen genre – that could even be said to be a portent of more dark and extreme forms of metal to follow.
‘All Is Forgiven‘ is the last song on Trouble‘s self-titled album from 1991, etched in my mind for the change of chord at 2:10 and the guitar coda that serves as an appropriate bookend for the album’s themes of regret and redemption. Forgiveness isn’t exactly a quality that abounds or is even considered desirable in our music; a man who doesn’t learn from the folly of trust broken is no man at all, or a very stupid one at the least. But what does forgiveness even entail and who is it that we condescend to forgive? Is it the person who has transgressed against us, who is now suitably contrite for his transgression, and thus deserving of our sympathy? Do we forgive to feel better about ourselves, through the comfort we’ve granted him? A subtle transaction, this second one, but no act of altruism is ever completely absent of egoistic validation. The sum good achieved in the world serves to disguise this slightly unsavory fact, but it’s there all the same.
Neither, in my view. His guilt and conscience are his concerns alone and have nothing to do with us. Every man is responsible for his own mental upkeep; looking outside of oneself for what can only be assuaged internally is guaranteed failure. Rather, my idea of forgiveness comes from a more self-centered place, rooted in the fact that harboring a grievance in perpetuity is corrosive to our own sanctity of mind and therefore it behooves us to forgive ourselves for the resentment we hold towards another. If, in the process, the other party derives some relief, then good for them, but again the intention isn’t solicitude or even a reforging of ties, the latter being contingent on one’s appetite and appraisal of risk-reward as well as the sheer egregiousness of the original trespass, but rather self-care and a spur to put an unpleasant past behind us.
How does Monstrosity‘s rhythmic pounding stack up against Todessehnsucht‘s free-breathing fabric? Read on to discover in this Round 2 face-off.
1. Riffcraft Todessehnsucht: This is an album of pronounced world-building, where every technical nuance adds a little more information to a musical tableau which, when fully realized, is as rich and evocative as any in genre history. Death metal as laterally descriptive as this – discursive, endlessly mutating, and with a great deal of instrumental autonomy – can easily become an ambiguous mess, lost in a self-gratifying maze of shiny odds and ends; it is Todessehnsucht‘s great achievement that despite never resorting to verse-chorus strategems, it still retains frightening cohesion of narrative throughout. Eighth-note alternate picking, inspired by progressive speed metal bands like Mekong Delta and Deathrow, evokes the sensation of a beast always on the prowl, while the lead guitar often uses odd intervals discordant with the underlying rhythm, to present a picture that is simultaneously confrontational and abstract. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom: Instinct makes Imperial Doom one of the finest examples of abstract death metal there is. Like most death metal from Florida, it carries a free form flair but one that is almost violently pulled in before it reaches obnoxious levels. Riffs come in one of three flavors: (1) a single line used as refrain, (2) a call-response, where the second half of the riff acts as if in response to the first, and (3) a question as follow-up to the original call, ending on a note that doesn’t quite create an air of resolution. Groove as well as lingering dark melody are used with great prejudice as a device for releasing tension amid some of the smoothest segues in genre history. But all said and done, the overwhelming vibe here is of a distinct and unrelenting feeding frenzy, best exemplified by rapid sixteenth-note rhythms subdivided over a cluster of notes from the chromatic scale, a technique which would be freely adopted by George Fisher’s future band. (Points awarded: +1)
2. Melodic Continuity Todessehnsucht: One rarely sees dynamics in death metal the way they are ubiquitous in, say, classical music. Death metal bands usually go full bore, not caring so much for modulation of volume; tempo, yes, but never volume, especially not as an integral part of songwriting, separate from production. The vibe on Todessehnsucht, however, is such that certain sections are seemingly played in a more introverted spirit, with strings caressed not struck, skins grazed not pulverized. On an album as adventurous as this, such restraint establishes an organic variation within the song, a deadening before the eruption, and a sense of grand theatre. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom: Band comes to a dead stop in the middle of a full-on movement, only to gather and fling itself headlong into what at first seems like an altogether unrelated maneuver, but on close inspection is found to be a parallel development, which further down the line dovetails nicely back into the original theme. It is something of a lost art in death metal these days, but used to be second nature to all bands from the genre’s heyday, and Monstrosity excelled at it better than most. The trick here is to make a break, but not a clean break, thus retaining some guiding fiber from the initial impetus on these tangents. (Points awarded: +1)
3. Role of percussion Todessehnsucht: Drums are dexterous to an extreme on Todessehnsucht, a rhythmic implement every bit the equal of the guitar in the songwriting hierarchy. They operate with complete impunity, but great art too, mirroring the intricacy of the riffs with more than a few flourishes of their own. While never the melody-makers in any ensemble, it is still possible to imagine on Todessehnsucht that they might be the prime movers after all. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom: Lee Harrison is the conductor par excellence behind these songs, singularly responsible for creating, perpetuating, and preserving their stubborn momentum. Many are the times when, with no discernible change in the underlying riff from one bar to the next, he manages to change the entire dynamic of the song, tempo-wise and feel-wise; listen to the inflections in groove on the second iteration and third bar of that identifiable “busybody” riff on opener “Imperial Doom“. Harrison’s performance is “in-the-pocket” as drumming parlance goes, technical yet understated as befitting his role of chief songwriter of Monstrosity, but above all else, it is a lesson in pulverizing death metal, and occupies a place of pride besides forebears like Pete Sandoval and Steve Asheim from the early years. (Points awarded: +1)
4. Progressive aspiration Todessehnsucht:Todessehnsucht is as ambitious as death metal gets without dissipating into nebulous avant-garde. It is also as European in conception as its opponent in this round is American, open to a wider palette of textures and improvisation on the fly. Recapitulation of prior themes is understated and never in the clunky, copy-pasted manner of speed metal. Providential would be a good way of describing it: Todessehnsucht isn’t structurally dogmatic or prescribed, and is content to evolve open-endedly until the breach in continuity becomes too severe to countenance. Literary would be another, for there is definite narrative-setting on display here, occasioned by the use of samples and classical overtures which the death metal proper then manages to reproduce in spirit. Perhaps it is not such a bad idea for bands to preface their music with inspiration from other genres if helps them to somehow inject that same inspiration within their own material. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom: There is no bullshit to be found on Imperial Doom and in that it is quintessential death metal Americana. Its unremitting intensity and generally instinctual nature are admirable and, yes, progressive, characteristics in their own right. Far too often “progressive” is used as a label for a specific kind of music with overt displays of virtuoso playing, but death metal doesn’t need such qualifiers because it inherently is a cut apart from the mainstream just by virtue of its overall aesthetic. Of course there are degrees to such things within the ambit of death metal itself; for example, one wouldn’t mistake a Slowly We Rot with, say, a Piece Of Time. Viewed from this perspective, the progressive quality of Imperial Doom does not lie in its technicality or its lexicon, both of which are common to all true death metal, but in the ease with which it manipulates the disparate tones of that lexicon into cascading torrents of energy. (Points awarded: +1)
5. Success as an album Todessehnsucht:Todessehnsucht could conceivably be just the one song with perhaps some judicious segues inserted to maintain continuity and it would work as well. Which is not to say that these songs lack individuality; ‘Godless Years‘, ‘When The Sky Turned Red‘, ‘Necropolis‘ are all songs with memorable motifs in their own right, but the point here is that Todessehnsucht, despite its saw-toothed nature, is borne of a unifying vision, in concept and execution, from the first lingering notes of the eponymous song to the reprise at the end consummating itself in flames. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom: The songs on Imperial Doom are fully self-contained and yet exhibit the common creative state of mind that a band must necessarily occupy to create a lasting work. As such, any of these songs can be heard in isolation to obtain a complete picture of the Monstrosity sound at this point in time. While this lives up to the band’s mandate i.e. onward at all costs, it also means there is little dynamic variation across the album. For the student, the technician, and the pyromaniac, there is plenty to learn and enjoy here, but as an aesthetically diverse experience, especially in comparison to an album like Todessehnsucht, Imperial Doom leaves something to be desired. (Points awarded: 0)
6. Contribution towards a philosophy of death metal Todessehnsucht:Todessehnsucht means a longing for death but rather than being a mere suicide note, a glance through the lyrics sheet reveals this to be a meditation on the collective death impulse of the species. Ours has not been a graceful evolution; we have somehow managed to reach the stage we are at despite ourselves, on the backs of the genius of a few, but the unabating litany of bad decisions continues to dog our trail, ever closing the gap until the time is near when we drown in our hubris and ignorance (and when aren’t those two sides to the same coin?) The will to survive may be innate to all living organisms, humanity not excluded, but the propensity to self-destruct might be even more immanent in us, always overriding our nobler aspirations and pushing us one step closer to the precipice. Perhaps there is no precipice either, no such discrete point of no return; likelier that decay is gradual and ongoing, creeping by degrees while we lie supine and distracted by the illusion of progress. (Points awarded: +1)
Imperial Doom:Imperial Doom is abstract, it represents the will to motion in death metal, but what does any of it really mean? The seed of an idea takes root somewhere in the mind; at this early stage, it is but one level removed from being formless and carries only the vaguest imprint of an impression from its environment. The skilled practitioner isolates and focuses his entire being on it. In his hands, it starts achieving a fuller shape, its boundaries expanding, ravenously bringing more and more of the world into its fold. The process is ceaseless and wholly instinctual, the musician but nature’s implement as she strives to realize herself on this plane. Extension, amplification, ambulation, immolation, all in service of that original and essential kernel of conception, now become a thing of terrible vitality, existing as both metaphor and instance in the same breath. Imperial Doom is accomplished. (Points awarded: +1)
Points Result: Todessehnsucht: 6 Imperial Doom: 5
Verdict: The points award sees Todessehnsucht shading Imperial Doom on album-wide variation, and while not a slur against the latter or its aspirations, is enough in this context to see the Atrocity album go through to Round 3.
Words and images may be perennial accompaniments to the way we consume heavy metal, but the more experience one gains and the more one thinks about it, it becomes evident that music is its own language and bears virtually no relation to the emotions we routinely associate with it. No doubt that a piece of music can make one feel happy, sad, and every conceivable emotion in between. Music can also evoke strong, almost painful remembrances of past events in our lives; nostalgia, in other words, that is limited not just to experiences inextricably commingled with the music in question, but, as if by magic, capable of inducing a psychological displacement in space, time, and even in one’s sense of identity.
It should be no surprise then that a form of expression as transcendent as this refuses to be held down by mere symbolism. Ask yourself why it is you regard a piece of music as being sad. Because of the feelings it inspires, you might say, and while this is a perfectly reasonable answer, considering our feelings are all we have access to on an immediate and relatively tangible level, does it really say anything definitive about the music? After all, it must have an existence of its own, too, independent of what it may signify to us or how it makes us feel. Again, you might be tempted to ask: but doesn’t that music originate from a fellow human consciousness and therefore must be privy to and imbued with all the sensations and emotions that we as a species are collectively capable of registering?
Not according to Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Music And Words‘. In his view, one in which he was heavily inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, music is the purest representation of the human Will. The Will is the fundamental, binary impulse through which everything in a human life happens. We find something in our environment agreeable or disagreeable at the most granular level imaginable; in line with that determination we pursue a course of action or inaction to realize that determination, and in both cases we are said to have willed that thing into existence. Successive iterations of this process, increment by increment, lead to the constitution of what we understand as an idea, or a collection of conceptions by which the world as we know comes into being.
If we follow this chain of progression in the context of a musical composition, then it would seem that the idea, or feeling, of, say, sadness, would come to be associated with the music at a much later stage in its evolution. Furthermore, it might not even necessarily arise from the music itself; rather, seeing as how the idea of sadness is already fully-formed in our minds and replete with associations from elsewhere, it might simply be a symbol or a metaphor for interpreting the music at a given stage of its development. And if that’s the case, then our cherished mental image of the tortured musician sitting down to compose a piece based on mood, a vibe, an emotion, lies dashed upon the rocks of Nietzsche’s thesis. To him, the sincere musical impulse has to come about in an atmosphere empty of such preconceived notions; the inspiration to activate that impulse comes from a different, mystical place altogether.
Admittedly, this is a hard and somewhat conflicting premise to get fully behind. Our mental conditioning demands a one-to-one relationship between sound and emotion, but there is no concrete, unequivocal argument why, for instance, an opportune string bend in the course of playing a minor scale should bring a lump to the throat and all the melancholic connotations associated with it. It appears then that there may be other forces at play in the linking between the two phenomena, forces that might owe their origin to extraneous factors – a biochemical sensitivity to frequencies for all I know – but unless one is consciously attuned to such a possibility even existing, our deep-cut grooves of perception, thought, and association blur the boundaries between signifier i.e. emotion, and the thing to be signified i.e. sound. And so we come to think in terms of a sad music™, when in reality there is only music and the assortment of experiences we have collected under the label of sadness and which we see fit to retroactively attach to that music.
I don’t personally find there is great value in consciously neutering one’s emotional apparatus, if such a thing is even humanly possible, while experiencing music. We might be creatures of limited sensory abilities, incapable of grasping the true nature of things in themselves, using emotions as convenient metaphors and symbols; but these are the facts of our lives, happy or sad as you’ll have it, so it makes sense to come to terms with them as gracefully as we can. But we also pride ourselves on being an intelligent species, dubious as that claim may sometimes appear, and therefore an awareness of our limitations while experiencing music can help us get past the morass of perfectly democratic, emotional relativity and that much closer to appreciating music in its true aspect.
This much groundwork out of the way, Nietzsche then touches on the subject of setting music to lyrics that already exist. As one might guess, to Nietzsche this is a fool’s errand, akin to the “son birthing the father”. In this paradigm, the directional flow of phenomena is reversed: lyrics are a world unto themselves, pregnant with the most sophisticated conceptions imaginable. How is one to then devise music out of this world, already so rich, music which according to the foregoing explanation is the primal representation of the Will, and hence occupying a place anterior to all such becomings?
Doubling down further, Nietzsche says that lyrics are little more than a distraction and that they do nothing to enhance the musical presentation; on the contrary they go a great way in sullying the music’s pristine aspect. He spares no quarters on this front, even taking on the might of Ludwig van Beethoven who, apropos the vocal aspect of “Ode To Joy“, suggested that it marked the birth of a new kind of composite music, in which the composition and the choir reciting the poem together made for a more holistic experience. Nietzsche is having none of it; to him the composition is already self-sufficient and harmonious, and requires no such addendums. From the perspective of the listener, the vocal singing becomes just another musical instrument, to be absorbed into the overall wall of sound, while the content of the lyrics mean next to nothing for him while they are being rendered. Lyrical content, in Nietzsche’s estimation, only has significance for the singer or for those participating in the sing-along, and hence is distinct from the music it is designed to represent.
I think fans of extreme metal that doesn’t place emphasis on verse-chorus arrangements and uses vocals as a stream-of-consciousness device, or in rare instances does away with vocals entirely, can relate to this position. We don’t pay heed to lyrics, rather we don’t need to pay heed to lyrics, not only because they have become cliche, but also because the music is already of a piece without their presence, and in so much at least, approaches the non-conformist ideal of absolute metal.
But consider the off-chance that a listener comes across the well-written lyric and finds that it provides an adequate, even enriching, representation of the music to suit his sensibilities, refined or otherwise as they may be. Is he then to shrug it off because his intellect demands of him to reject all such chaff? Is such a thing even possible? Human beings don’t exist in a vacuum after all; there are osmotic, symbiotic, and mutually reinforcing loops all around that we are constantly navigating and exploiting to make sense of our life and the accidents that happen in it. Willingly draining ourselves of all such associations to reach some reductionist promised land in which the music will reveal itself in all its naked glory, is that really deserving of the limited time we have to ourselves here? Moreover, is that befitting of our humanity?
I feel like I’m repeating myself here; after all, both emotions and lyrics are the same thing in so much as they are metaphors and symbols representing the elusive true nature of music. There is no harm in using them in this capacity, as long as we don’t lose sight of the fact – and this is Nietzsche’s view, too – that they are only proxies and intermediaries to help us get to the middle of the road, but beyond this point lies a whole world unto itself, mysterious and magical, which can only be approached without recourse to these aids.
Old Disgruntled Bastard 