How War Came: The Immediate Origins Of The Second World War by Donald Cameron Watt

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

Where The First World War lurched into existence, almost despite itself, due to a confluence of accident, preemptive alliances among European nations, and considerations pertaining to mobilization schedules for the armed forces, the origins of the Second Great War of the twentieth century can be directly attributed to a spirit of appeasement widely prevalent in the aftermath of that first, most gratuitous slaughter of human beings in history. Still recovering from the near-fatal body blow to the ideals of the Enlightenment on which Europe based much of its civilizational hauteur, not to mention severely ailing economies following the economic depression of the early thirties, the major players on the scene lacked the desire – and the stomach – for a fresh round of hostilities.

All except one, of course. Adolph Hitler, driven by the idea of lebensraum, an almost-painful need to avenge the humiliations foisted upon the German people by the Treaty of Versailles, and vendettas against Communism and Jewry, two components which he held directly responsible for the weakening of German constitution and whose eradication he considered non-negotiable for her resurgence, engineered his rise from the streets to all-encompassing power using a mix of bullying, bluffing, and a subliminal death-impulse, and in the process pushed Europe and her far-flung empires to the brink of oblivion. And though that eventuality didn’t quite materialize in the way he anticipated, the world that emerged from the ashes was still a drastically different one from the old order.

How War Came documents the diplomatic wrangling behind the scenes in the eighteen months between the Anschluss or reunification with Austria in March, 1938 and the outbreak of the war proper with the invasion of Poland on September 2, 1939. Hitler’s irredentist tendencies and disregard for Versailles had been evident since the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the industrial heartland of Germany entrusted to France to keep any expansionist designs in the near future at bay, in 1936, and only grew progressively more unambiguous with the occupation of the Sudetenland, the predatory overtures towards the Balkan states, and the reintroduction of propaganda over the Danzig corridor with Poland which was to be the fuse that eventually lit the war.

Yet, despite clear and present signs of the conflict to come, an attitude of placation, suspicion, and downright cowardice, prevailed among the gatekeepers of the European peace. One by one, they succumbed to Hitler’s railroading: France meekly gave up the Rhineland and switched to a defensive posture with the construction of the Maginot Line. Then, Great Britain and France joined hands with Germany and Italy at Munich to accept the annexation of the Sudetenland, thereby setting in motion a flutter amongst the pigeons of Southeast Europe who tried desperately to organize themselves into a defensive bloc. The Scandinavian countries stayed resolutely neutral, or tried to anyway until they ran out of choice in the matter. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, equally suspicious of both the capitalist West and Hitler’s rabid anti-Bolshevism, procrastinated and prevaricated, not willing to give away its hand, always weighing where her interests lay. That she eventually calculated it to be in a non-aggression pact with Germany is but one in a long litany of indictments of human shortsightedness and the politics of expediency.

Mining through diplomatic archives for minutes of staff meetings and telephone conversations between and within embassies, Watt peoples his book with premiers, foreign ministers, ambassadors, and their intrigues which often worked at cross-purposes to their intended goals. With Hitler on the move, the states surrounding Germany – Poland chief among them – and her reluctant partner Italy tripped over themselves to secure guarantees of protection from Great Britain and France who were simultaneously locked in a dead heat with Germany for the Soviet Union’s attentions, a deal with the devil for all parties concerned. These deliberations were to continue until the declaration of the Soviet-German agreement on August 23, 1939, which freed up Hitler’s east flank and allowed him to focus exclusively on Poland. His brilliant record at playing chicken till that point in time precluded him from imagining that Great Britain would ever fulfill her commitments to Poland and throw herself into the fray. His impression of Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, based on the Munich compromise was justifiedly unflattering but he seems to have made a grave error in gauging the mood inside the British parliament and among the British people themselves, many of whom had lived through one great conflagration and were outraged to find that a new one was being provoked by the foe they had seemingly vanquished. At the back of his mind must have also lurked the disconcerting shadow of the United States. Despite her mixed-isolationist stance, it was inevitable that she would throw in her near-limitless resources if Britain decided she had after all had enough. In hindsight, the outcome of the Second World War may have been decided as soon as it started, long before Operation Barbarossa ran aground in the Russian winter and Pearl Harbor invited the full-scale wrath of the American juggernaut upon the Axis states.

Watt’s writing isn’t exactly absent of bias. He is an old-fashioned British chauvinist and has the choicest ridicule – at times deserved, but often just spiteful – for concerned figures of all nationalities other than his own, for whose ingenuity and probity he has boundless admiration. Prejudicial overlay aside, however, the salient takeaway here, other than the historical record itself, is that the best intentions can fall flat in the face of an adversary possessed by the demon of conviction, misplaced or otherwise, and that the facade of conciliation can stay on for only so long before it lapses into pusillanimity. The victors of World War I shared a spiritual kinship with Germany, so long in the vanguard of European cultural and intellectual achievement. They were prepared to reintegrate her within the greater European community, to even look the other way while she went about correcting the injustices she felt to have suffered in the past. The tenor of the new currents in German polity, building to a crescendo through the years of decay of the Weimar Republic and beyond, however, was unmistakable and ought to have been apprehended and guarded against long before things came to an irreversible pass.

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Metal and strength training

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

Strength, vigor, persistence, and the naturalistic, amoral will to power. Metaphors for what we find most attractive in heavy metal can be discovered in various physical pursuits. Combat, long-distance running, mountain climbing, and countless others, all have a definitive element of straining against our perceived limits till we eventually surmount what once seemed insurmountable, only for new horizons to be revealed and striven towards. Metalheads, with their predilection for the martial aesthetic, would be only too glad to know there is an undeniably martial ethos inherent in all such activities too. Not in the sense of fighting an actual foe in a tangible, kill-or-be-killed war of attrition, unless the foe happens to be one’s own formerly weaker self; rather, in the severity and discipline, the almost sadomasochistic glee, involved in subjecting oneself repeatedly to the discomfort entailed therein. In a world going increasingly soft around the edges, an unwavering adherence to such a punishing way of life helps to shape and balance the individual, both physically and psychologically.

Lifting weights is what I can speak to in this context, by virtue of having done it for a long time without it ever devolving to a chore or an obligation. But also because in weight training and the peripherals surrounding the process, is detectable some of that same martial spirit evident in much of metal. As opposed to a merely hedonistic interpretation of metal, there also is a latent self-denying aspect palpable in some of its finest achievements, a renunciation of the greater community and the advantages that participation in it offers in favor of an intellectual and emotional rigor that refuses to cede ground to the humanistic and the populist, a drawing close about itself of a circle of impermeability that is both a symbol of danger for the outsider and a very sanctum of strength for the one in its midst. Once this subtle realization dawns upon the metalhead, it is but a matter of time before he seeks an equivalent for it in the physical world, something that transmutes or brings his instinctive understanding of metal into alignment with his corporeal existence. Fetishes like spikes, bullet belts, and combat boots are just outward manifestations of this phenomenon, far too often reduced to little more than props, and though they undoubtedly play a role in establishing a link with a certain state of mind, it is only a tenuous connection at best until the metalhead makes a conscious effort at bending and remaking the stuff of his physical constitution in the light of those sentiments.

An increase in strength is always a net positive, whatever the motive, but there is a difference between strength gained as a means to an end, be it aesthetics or superior performance in some other endeavor, and strength treated as a goal in itself. In the first case, there is either an appeal to an external standard or a specialization intended to aid a particular movement pattern. The latter, however, returns strength to first principles, makes of it an irreducible ideal worthy of aspiring to solely because of its innate purity. Yes, one can say that assorted strength work is also only a tool to achieving a bigger lift, whatever that may be, but that does not change the fact that a bigger lift by itself, in isolation, is also a demonstration of an undisputable increase in strength. The same cannot be said for a bodybuilder posing on stage or a tennis player executing a forehand, at least not with as much unambiguity. This near-instant, unequivocal feedback makes strength training a uniquely quantifiable process with little to no wiggle room. You are either stronger than yesterday or you are not. The iron does not lie.

There is very real satisfaction in seeing numbers increase in the gym room, but it is the road to that precious pocket of space – long, humbling, pitted with setbacks – both in and out of the gym that one learns to appreciate over time. Man after all is a creature of habit. Vocational libertines and iconoclasts may scoff at this well-worn notion, but the appropriately structured routine provides him with a framework within which he can channel and realize his better impulses. The determination to abide by that routine despite the occasional lapse in judgement, to return to it, day after day and year after year, to create and sustain each link in a chain of cause and effect that stretches from the mundane and the mechanical to the peaks of exhilaration, in turn breeds a strength of character that helps him weather the more turbulent events of life with relative composure. The changes happen gradually, almost unbeknownst to him. The body is quick enough to reveal its as-yet concealed potential, but the mind develops its fortitude in stages, through repeated exposure to ever-increasing levels of stress, through the intrepid will required to place oneself under that stress in the first place when every protective, evolutionary instinct screams out to the contrary. Not counting injury, the toll exacted can be immense but over time one grows inured to this cost, in fact regards it with a certain stoicism even for the sake of the singular state of near-meditative equanimity that prevails in its aftermath as the body begins the process of recovery.

This then is a view of strength training, and indeed a view of life, shaped by metal. No doubt much of it is shared by people of diverse backgrounds, but for the metalhead, if metal is to mean more than just escape, if it is to be a significant enough mover in his orientation towards the world beyond the size of his record collection and assembly of patches, then understanding the nature of the strength at his disposal becomes key to understanding the esoteric nature of metal itself.

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Terry Riley – In C (1968)

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Metal ballads?

Posted on April 21, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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?

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Abigor – Taphonomia Aeternitatis (2023)

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Crucifier – Led Astray (2024)

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Ares Kingdom – In Darkness At Last (2014)

Posted on April 13, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Judas Priest – Invincible Shield (2024)

Posted on April 11, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Metal as tactile sensation

Posted on April 11, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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Trouble, All Is Forgiven?

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Old Disgruntled Bastard

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.

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