Teitanblood came to notoriety with Seven Chalices ten years ago, an album though harsh compared to its contemporaries still containing enough nods to conventional death metal tropes. All that went out of the window with 2014’s Death; on this album, for all intents, Teitanblood became the archetypal modern war metal band, combining the droning repetition of black metal with the short explosions of grindcore. This approach distilled to its basics sacrifices tonal variety and narrative evolution for sonic violence and by now has rendered the sub-genre more or less redundant. And yet, feeling persists among supporters that this band differentiates itself from the grain, that their music is more than its parts and in some way a realization of the extreme potential inherent in death metal and black metal.
The Ajna Offensive/N.E.D. bandcamp stated the following in anticipation of Death: “The second Teitanblood album corrects the misconception about Death Metal being music“. It is a catchy but also needlessly provocative statement and one that is patently untrue in light of the genre’s very musical achievements. But for the sake of argument, let us try and empathize with the philosophical motive behind it; death is decomposition after all, of flesh most obviously but also of identity if one is (un)fortunate enough to leave behind a grave barren of mourners and no legacy to taint. Music…sounds, representative of such an unfeeling perspective on mortality would have to be obliged to live on the precarious ridge between structure and dissolution, of what once was and what will soon not be, navigating a gradient both precipitous and transient all at once. On face value at least, Teitanblood operate within the paradigm of death metal and black metal; do they, then, possess the tools to capture some fragment of this ambitious mission statement? Does their assault on the senses progressively scrape away at the life-affirming qualities that even the best death metal carries to reveal the howling nothingness underneath?
Here’s a paradox that the objective listener confronts when listening to a band like this: he keeps ears peeled for just a tendril of logic, melody, or rhythm to coalesce from an otherwise universal wall of sound, something around which he can orient himself. And yet, that same sort of attentiveness is precisely what does disservice to an album like Death. This is not meant as an insult either; Death is a strongly impressionistic album, coming on in wave upon wave of contracted suggestive energy before which the only recourse is to lie prone and let it wash over. Through this act of surrender or resignation, as the case may be, it becomes possible to siphon out the forces at work: what at first comes across as an impenetrable wall of sound is found to shift by scarcely perceptible degrees and the narrative inertia so all-pervasive before comes to be replaced by a very real movement almost unbeknownst to the listener. He in effect has been displaced in sound, and now finds himself in a place tangibly, if still only tangentially at best, different from the one where he started.
This transitory nature, this movement by stealth as it were, paired with an intentionally muddy production, makes it easy to dismiss Death as elevator music; monolithic riff shapes and drums more felt than heard, like the dread footsteps of a steed of the apocalypse, induce a nervous lassitude in the listener not usually associated with music so vehement. Death invites no participation from its audience, only submission, an observation that applies to both this album and the biological process itself. Is this then the parallel that Teitanblood/N.E.D. imply with their grandiose statement, that the subject is to inevitably become nothing more than a mute spectator to forces beyond his control, swept along in their wake with no agency of his own?
Make no mistake, Teitanblood care about things like structure, rhythm, and even an understated sense of melody, subverted as those musical aspects may be by adherence to a self-denying niche of the genre. The disintegration of sound that Teitanblood are purportedly after on Death, this slow verging on decay, is best achieved by a juxtaposition of convention with chaos, by more intricate riff-play that remains in synchronization but only just. The riffs on Death are broad and bludgeoning, to be precise, and share equal space with colorless quasi-noise, but the combination always tends towards a final resolution and a descent into apprehension. That they achieve this end by employing diverse techniques like accruing eddies of drone, ritualized percussive breakdowns, or ambient industrial electronica is besides the point; Teitanblood on Death are in fact playing ambient black/death metal, in vision and in execution, whatever theoretical conflicts that might give rise to.
Ossuarium demonstrate the existential crisis that has beset many new death metal bands. Like bargain-bin patchwork quilt, their influences cover the gamut of popular stylings in contemporary metal: from cavern-core dissonance to ambient tinkerings to somewhat bathetic transformations into Candlemass-lite doom and even the ill-advised groove of metalcore, Living Tomb is an album birthed into confusion and schizophrenia. Perhaps a democratic distribution of songwriting duties is partially responsible for this state of affairs: when everyone has an equal say in proceedings, regardless of the merit of what they’re actually saying, the outcome is liable to be fractured.
This is most clearly seen in repeated fade-outs of sections for new, unrelated riffs to emerge. While cessation of hostilities to make a lateral break in narrative is a much-cherished facet of death metal, this temporary relaxing of contiguous logic has to be used not only with economy but also intent and aggression to match what has gone before. It certainly is no pit-stop or lay-and-pray strategy or some miraculous fountain for inspiration lacking. It also isn’t something any amount of drone, distortion, or clean notes gilded in portent can hide.
But there is an abundance of feeling in the scene that atmosphere trumps all, that because death metal as a genre contains the word “death” in it, any musical styling of a suitably morbid flavor can be shoehorned into this music. Great death metal – all great metal, in fact – however, sustains itself on a precarious balance between both style and genre, an idea that seems lost on bands like Ossuarium. Torn between styles, and then when they do choose one, oblivious to the effect their execution can have – for example, something as elementary as the disconnect caused by using a diminished fifth and a perfect fifth in the same cavern-core song – Ossuarium need to take a step back and meditate first on what they want to convey, and then select with great precision the tools they can use in that expression.
Roiling, churning, riff-intense progressive death metal is what Garroted play on this their second recording. The band should be praised for overcoming the distractedly frenzied nature of debut demo In The Court Of Nyarlathotep; the new songs have an equally high work-rate in riffs, but from all appearances, the band now thinks of their songs as a greater composite on the way to achieving a specific mood. Accordingly, riffs are developed as variations on an original theme and then led by the nose across the breadth of the EP through many permutations. This most certainly is not background music; like Deeds of Flesh, it demands the listener’s fullest attention lest he become inextricable from its dense riff mazes.
The payoffs are diverse, on both intellectual and visceral levels. The first two songs, ‘Otherworldly Subversions: Parts I & II’, are essentially one composition, split in two halves through clever changes in tempo and differently oriented groups of notes. The rhythm guitar technique is greatly influenced by early Morbid Angel and bands verging on death metal like Sadus, meaning it is fiercely syncopated with phrases rarely reaching the kind of extended development synonymous with black metal. Yet, just like with those bands, these songs are not without an acute melodic sense, rather so that that sense is only reflected in a shattered mirror, each shard encapsulating an insinuation in the desired direction.
That end is found in ‘Into The Shivering Forest‘, a decidedly atmospheric note to sign off on. Built on past achievements as well as nods to conventional heavy metal and black metal, this song is of a kind with the band’s extra dimensional thematic aspirations and works well in this setting. But bands like Tribulation have previously done the same before reneging entirely on their metal credentials. The test for Garroted now is to not lose touch with their identity as a death metal band and use external influences, if at all, with restraint.
On their new album, Ares Kingdom have traded the anthemic qualities of their first three albums for a deliberately spacier and obscure sound. Appropriately, the band has mined its own past for inspiration; as on Order from Chaos‘ farewell An Ending In Fire and previous side-project Vulpecula, the themes on this album are astronomical, tracing constellations and star clusters across the night sky and connecting them with their etymologies in mythology. The approach proves a natural fit for the Ares Kingdom sound which, despite its roots in speed metal, has always evoked in the abstract the rise and ruin of great endeavors. It is also a tacit acknowledgement of the deep-seated human need to balance the secular with what Robert Graves described as the mythopoetical, in the absence of which the one becomes pedantic and the other fluff.
The guitar tone on By The Light Of Their Destruction is fat in the middle and dissipates progressively towards the edges, which, to use a fitting celestial analogy, is not unlike the sun’s corona jutting out from behind a lunar occultation. The effect is decidedly ambient in the sense of a broad wash of static bleeding into the music at all times. It also signals a departure from the songwriting approach of at least the last two albums; where songs on those were structured along conventional heavy metal formats, and built around identifiable melodies, By The Light Of Their Destruction feels looser on purpose and instinctive in nature. It is a fine example of what I like to think of as “body metal”, something the Miller-Keller combine has always excelled at. Think ‘Angry Red Planet‘ or the breakdown in ‘Forsake Me This Mortal Coil‘. The cue here is to ride a groove and a riff for all its worth, not because of a shortage of ideas or as a gratuitous end in itself, but as a very real form of psychosomatic release. To enter this pocket of expression is to become a vessel and a servitor to whatever channels musical inspiration works through; to relinquish it prematurely feels like self-mutilation.
In the band’s trajectory, however, By The Light Of Their Destruction will occupy a curious place. It is mostly without the rousing highs of Incendiary or the greater melodic accessibility of The Unburiable Dead. Neither is it made to sound of a piece as a suite of songs like those albums. The straight line of progression from Return To Dust to The Unburiable Dead appears broken, but perhaps this is a mixed blessing: lamentable, because seemingly lost is the pinnacle of album-wide cohesion and narrative achieved on The Unburiable Dead; welcome, however, is the resurgence of a more feral vibe. Whether this is because, as word goes, these songs were based on ideas culled from old demos is for the band to answer, but the way forward will require a balancing act of some skill.
Published in 1948, Norman Mailer’s debut novel The Naked And The Dead remains an incisive depiction of the soldier’s state of mind. The book is set on an island in the Pacific theater, as the United States tried to roll back the Japanese threat in the final stages of the Second World War, and thrusts the reader into the trenches alongside members of a platoon. The plot, consisting chiefly of the American effort to take control of the island, is thin, and little more than a backdrop against which we get to know the platoon and the motivations that drive the military chain of command. In this, Mailer is remarkably successful, and by the end we are intimates with the motley bunch, privy to their hopes and fears. Some characters emerge in a more sympathetic light than others, but not one is unequivocally evil. Mailer seems to be saying that their actions, heroic or cowardly, cannot be judged in isolation, that the way they react in the face of adversity is a composite of their experiences in combat but also from their lives before the war, and that the strength of their survival instinct is in direct proportion to the optimism with which they regard a future after the war.
Throughout, the rigors of military life on the island are interrupted with vignettes from each character’s past. The most detailed of these belong to Lieutenant Hearn and General Cummings; Hearn comes from an aristocratic family but has wandered off to become the stereotypical bourgeois liberal, idealistic, insubordinate, and flirting with communism. Cummings, on the other hand, is an authoritarian, brutal in his assessment of human nature, and philosophical over the nature of conflict. In one passage, he draws a Spenglerian analogy between the parabolic arc of the mortar shell as it travels from out of the cannon towards its target, and the life-and-death cycle of civilizations and that of the individual human being himself. At another time, in what today reads as a prescient analysis of future world-power dynamics, he describes how war is essentially a tool for converting a nation’s inherent potential energy into real and concerted action. German expansionism during World War Two owed chiefly to this latent potential, her excesses no more a result of a moral vacuum than that of the limited physical resources at her disposal. Cummings predicts that the next hundred years or more will belong to America, on account of the sheer energies, both material and political, unleashed in the service of the war. He postulates that America will become increasingly convinced of her “manifest destiny” as a global hegemon, and orient all of her institutions towards that end with the ambition and ruthlessness befitting of a true empire.
The exchanges between Hearn and Cummings crackle with homosexual tension and comprise the intellectual heft of the book. It is the other members of the platoon, however, the average grunts in foxholes, that humanize this narrative. Collected from across the breadth of American life, they are in many ways postcards from that country’s experience; the frontier mentality, respect for hard graft, casual racism, and beatnik irreverence, all find expression in their banter and reminiscences. Some of them are wizened veterans of several campaigns, convinced after witnessing so much senseless death that the bullet with their name on it must not be long in coming. Others are young men newly drafted with dreams of moving up the army hierarchy but quickly robbed of those illusions. Nerves taut and bodies broken, most of them verge on giving up at one time or another, but the one note of optimism that emerges from their precarious condition is that men, despite all their prejudice, forge a brotherhood in the face of shared tribulations, to lend some of their reserves of strength to those who have none left.
Two passages of special note stand out, and both revolve around the premise of death, in the abstract and as a real thing. In the first, Gallagher’s wife dies on the mainland during childbirth. In a sequence of events that feels macabre at first but eventually achieves a poignant climax, he continues receiving the letters she wrote him leading up to her labor. The post, however, delivers on a slow and sporadic schedule, often a long time after the letters were written. Gallagher receives news of his wife’s death from the chaplain and goes numb, only to be greeted with fresh dispatches from her not long after. As time goes on, he synchronizes the post’s time table with her letters, until the day comes when he knows that the letter in his hands would have to be the last one she ever wrote. He avoids opening it to delay acknowledgement of what has already happened, knowing full well that he won’t put his wife to rest until he has read her last words.
The other account is a vivid and protracted description of what a slow death by degrees might feel like. Shot in the stomach during an ambush, Wilson alternately hallucinates and lapses into agony; his physical world achieves strange dimensions and his fevered mind scrambles his memories. His litter-bearers are tormented by his pain, flinching at his screams as if his wound were their own. Exhausted as they are, they deliberate whether it would be better to give him up for lost, but they are called to see within themselves and realize they are made of nobler stuff than they thought before. These men, the salt of the earth, may be too coarse to articulate their impressions in the manner of a Hearn or a Cummings, but they receive those impressions all the same, more or less as a mist that works its way into their subconscious unbeknownst to them to evoke an equally powerful emotional response.
There is a curious intimacy to these parts and they are written with delicacy. And yet, for all the existential issues it deals with, and despite its 700-pages length, The Naked And The Dead is a surprisingly breezy read. Mailer uses a lot of dialogue in the vernacular to speed things up, but even his scene-setting and military set-pieces, of which there are copious quantities, are not without a certain rhythm. Some have accused this novel of clunky character development; that complaint may have some basis, seeing as how Mailer tries to distribute time more or less equally among a large ensemble. It may be helpful, however, to view these characters as archetypes and receptacles for experiences shared by all participants to conflict through time. Faces change and contexts vary, but the humanity underneath stays the same. Seen in that light, the experience itself becomes an overarching character in its own right.
Deathspell Omega‘s new album is an Orwellian critique of today’s ideological Left presented as an address from would-be demagogues to their cadres. Some may say that the band’s commentary can be applied to either side of the political spectrum, that both Left and Right are equally confident in the virtue of their assertions to the exclusion of all others. That may be so, especially as pertains to the nature of totalitarianism and propaganda through the ages. The difference between Left and Right, however – and I bring up these polarities only as a convenient way of discussing two opposed lines of thinking – is that what the Right considers to be proper applies only to a niche subset of interests and therefore remains localized. On the other hand, the Left’s model of propriety is inherently universalist, reducing all humanity to a common putty, homogeneous and indistinguishable in all respects, and hence fit to be inscribed with intellectual formulations which may or may not have a basis in reality. But be that as it may, that the Left presumes to speak for all men, imbues it, at least in its own collective consciousness, with a legitimacy and a hubris far greater than what the parochial Right can muster. With this charge fabricated from self-serving pretenses, then, the Left proceeds in solipsistic bliss, bullish in its moral rectitude, to enlist, to admonish, to purge, and to vilify. The high ground belongs to it and it alone, built as it is from the loftiest utopian ideals, and from this bridgehead it conducts its operations, seeing fit to consign those who fail to toe its line – frequently, even those from among its own ranks, for after all ideological purity can never be pure enough – to the wrong side of history.
Deathspell Omega can’t help but be a product of their time and therefore it is unlikely that their guns only accidentally happen to be trained on the most conspicuous leftist cultural developments of the last thirty years. Thematically, The Furnaces of Palingenesia is as unesoteric as the band have ever been. These observations will resound with all those who with keen eyes and common sense not so common have discerned the preoccupation with the self that has come to be the hallmark of post-millennial life, where individualism is cynically promoted as an exercise of free will but is in fact group-think acting guilelessly in the service of greater interests. True to their own tradition, Deathspell Omega refuse to rail against this sorry state of affairs, instead considering man’s squalor as his native raiment, fit to be celebrated and even embellished with fresh decrepitude, as the noose which he has woven with delusions of grandeur now tightens through warm and welcoming degrees around his own neck.
These ideas are fleshed out in no small detail by the band and enunciated as an unwavering monologue unconcerned with the punctuation and emphasis of traditional song-lyric formats. The music itself has influenced for better or worse nearly all black metal and death metal since the Kenose EP of ten years ago; however, the question that continues making the rounds in underground circles is whether Deathspell Omega in their zeal to stand out from amid a stale black metal genre have burned one bridge too many and if their oeuvre is even representative of black metal anymore.
Here are a few qualities above and beyond stylistic devices that I believe black metal should overwhelmingly possess:
(1) Mood: A much-maligned and a much-abused term, mood is in fact what separates black metal from its immediate cousin in death metal. How it is conveyed separates the bawdy from the sublime, but the best black metal is more felt than heard; not coincidentally, then, it is also best experienced during certain seasons and at certain times of the day.
(2) Duality of tone: Black metal, fully realized as a genre in its own right, allows melodic expressions of music more readily than other genres of metal. This glimpse of beauty however is contemporary with harsher undertones; like blood dripping from a wolf’s fangs as he sits enthroned inside a palace of eviscerated flesh, magnificent in power yet terrible in what he portends, pregnant with uneasy dichotomy, and ultimately a simile for just how tenuous, and yet, beautiful and necessary, too, the relationship between life and death in nature truly is.
(3) Continuity of movement: Black metal can be riff-based like the first wave, or it can utilize repetition as songwriting trope, but in either case it advocates a continuity of movement. Disruption in this flow may conceivably contribute to either mood or tonal variation, but it is never an end in itself. What has been described as the wallpaper effect elsewhere is anathema to black metal; that black metal can ensorcell as well as it can invigorate should not be used as an excuse for lapsing into a miserable quiescence. The best black metal always rouses one to the cusp of emotional vitality, albeit across an emotional spectrum wider than that available to other genres of heavy metal.
(4) Transcendent theater: The best black metal rises above the stuff of daily reckoning. Be it the advanced themes of Emperor or the primal convulsions of Beherit, true black metal brings the mind out of the material and into the plane of the ritual, the aetherial, and the cosmic. In this much, it can be regarded escapist, but this escapism isn’t trivial; rather it is the same fiercely ascetic state of mind that has influenced, and in turn been influenced by, religious liturgy through time. Perhaps it is this shared lineage with traditional perspectives, arbitrarily designated to be superficial to human needs by the secular materialism of the present time, that makes black metal amenable to being used for explicitly conservative purposes.
Deathspell Omega’s sound does not conform to any particular regional aesthetic as black metal goes; while enjoying music is not predicated on taxonomical concerns, the band ostensibly still considers themselves black metal, therefore it is only fair to judge this album as such. The Furnaces of Palingenesia remains rooted in the post-Si Monumentum style, meaning, this is still intensely dissonant and syncopated music; however, it is also more recognizable as a batch of songs than anything the band has done in this period. Where previously identity, slim as it was, resulted from clean, arpeggiated bookends soon enough subsumed in a welter of clashing tones, the stuffing of this album benefits from a more rounded and accessible aspect to riffs. Riffsets themselves are resolved into arrangements easier to anticipate than before, while the rhythm, chopped up as ever, at times carries a groove that helps to dilute the more volatile tendencies of songs.
However, the mood derived from these technical flourishes is not one normally associated with black metal. The frequent addition of coloring notes to chords coupled with punk rock-style strumming and picking has the effect of brightening what otherwise ought to be uncompromisingly dark music. Perhaps it is pertinent to mention here that Deathspell Omega, over the past decade, have concerned themselves thematically with the plight of man, fallen, forsaken, debauched, undeserving of grace and beyond redemption. A vision tethered to the earth such as this is liable to be informed with the sentiment of melancholy, but from there is only a step before it changes into a kind of wallowing narcissism; after all, a man who laughs in the face of adversity is heroic, but he who derives happiness out of self-pity is an embarrassment and a cancer.
On previous albums, chaos prevailed against order, so that entire songs resembled one unanimous churning until the odd sliver of melody pierced through seemingly as an afterthought. That balance has been appreciatively changed in favor of the melodic on The Furnaces of Palingenesia which, on the surface, should make contrast or duality of tone be heard in greater relief; the thinking here being that a drop of melody barely makes a ripple in a sea of white noise, but a violent tear in the fabric of melodic progression should make those melodies resonate even further. This never quite materializes in the way that it should; the obsessive tinkering with time signatures ensures that no such melodic progression achieves its full potential before it is interrupted with a spastic dissonance, which in turn renders said dissonance meaningless. It is no coincidence that the single, ‘Ad Arma!‘, the most straightforward song on the album, is also one that feels most suited to achieve the band’s mission statement.
These many breaks have a decidedly retarding effect on momentum, whatever may be the band’s intentions in including them. The Furnaces of Palingenesia may suffer less on this front compared to prior albums because of its more pronounced melodic bent, but there is something distinctly gratuitous about this approach to writing. Improvising within a bubble, as instrumental release more or less, and in a dissonant paradigm at that, does no service to the greater composition. It is an influence borrowed from outside of metal at large, and obstructs the propagation of a true and consistent emotional energy within the song.
As commentary on current socio-cultural power dynamics, The Furnaces of Palingenesia is worth investigating on a lyrical level. It is also a better album than anything else done by the band in this style; however, that does not absolve the style itself of inherent flaws. The greater prevalence of melody is welcome, but by being constantly juxtaposed with staccato measures, it also appears more discontiguous than before. As black metal, however, it feels spiritually enervated compared with previous achievements in the genre; there is no latent thread of greatness to it, nor any spur to a liberation of dormant energy; it is curiously empty but simultaneously all-too-willing to obfuscate in the absence of inspiration.
Ozzy Osbourne’s first four albums, and especially the two with Randy Rhoads, present a strange dilemma for metalheads. While they resuscitated Osbourne’s flagging career after being dumped from Black Sabbath, and though they are fondly remembered for Rhoads’ contributions to heavy metal guitar, they have generally been consigned to an ever-receding smudge – nostalgic, if slightly redundant, but no more – in the rear-view mirror. Most metalheads might even recoil at calling these albums “metal”; which is unfortunate, really, and a case of not judging the past on its own terms and worse, judging it based on the present. Metal sensibilities may have been coarsened beyond recognition over time, but for 1980 and 1981 – 1980 and 1981! – parts of Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman feel like a veritable revolution for heavy metal, and not just in any conciliatory, mealy-mouthed “heavy for its time” way.
The lines between hard rock and heavy metal, especially in our music’s incipient stage, were frequently blurred, but even from that nascent, coalescing slop, the things that stand out as metal, if only sporadically, are ambition, aggression, and a heaviness, of both sound and soul: ambition, to aim for the stars despite every possibility of falling flat on one’s face; aggression, in how one attacks life; and heaviness, like a weight that settles ponderously into the fabric of perception and subsequently colors one’s outlook towards that life. Music being emotion filtered into co-harmonious frequencies, the best metal bands found a way of transferring these abstract ideas to their instruments; hence the inherent drawback in analyzing heavy metal along purely analytical lines.The stuff of nobleness is frequently found beneath the surface, in the interstices, of a true metal song, and it is from there, like a slow-spreading dye, that it proliferates to inform our sentiment about the music.
It is often seen that people who acquire even a cursory, first-hand knowledge of that which they once admired as simple fans turn around to rubbish the legitimacy of those same past achievements. So is observed in the case of Randy Rhoads, who is derided for post-humous popularity as in the case of others that died young, for bad guitar tone, for unnecessarily busy playing. He is compared with greats that went before, Ritchie Blackmore, Uli Jon Roth, Eddie Van Halen; sometimes he is even compared with those that followed in his footsteps, and, in both cases, found wanting in taste and sensibility.
Someone else may be better qualified to comment on those criticisms; Rhoads undeniably built on the blueprint laid by those exemplars, but that is par for the course for all history; evolution occurs on the shoulders of giants past, after all. But Rhoads’ unique creativity took flight every now and then in the midst of these albums’ more populist overtures, and in those moments, the fault-lines between hard rock and heavy metal loom almost as large as chasms. Attacking the guitar with a young vitality that was almost unheard of previously – perhaps people like Michael Schenker and Glenn Tipton captured some of the same crunch and energy – Rhoads’ playing was the kind that has made successive generations of metalheads bunch their fists and tense their muscles into rigid knots; empowering and not a little confrontational in its choice of notes, phrasing and punctuation, and just all-around hustle.
That constitutes aggression, but what of ambition and heaviness? Paeans have been written to Rhoads’ study of classical guitar, how he transplanted those influences onto a heavy metal aesthetic, thus inspiring, alongside the other guitarists mentioned, every shredder to come along in his wake, and how, in Ozzy’s hilariously inebriated recollections, he was planning on using “chords with embedded notes” on their third album. But in all seriousness, Rhoads was also a composer and a song-writer par excellence who, despite the proactive nature of his playing, somehow managed to arrange his parts with delicate economy. No better example of this exists than the eponymous ‘Diary of a Madman‘, a song perhaps inspired by Black Sabbath‘s ‘Supertzar’, but unlike that next of kin, it betrays its operatic aspirations long before operatic accoutrements make themselves felt, and then proceeds to make several devastating dents in the emotional continuum. From its manipulation of meter to control over how and when to transform the pastoral into the visceral, this song is a classic whose semi-balladic format has inspired every heavy metal band since, often with equally poignant results.
And then, presiding over all of it, is Ozzy and his banshee’s wail of a voice. Nasal, reedy, quivering, vulnerable and yet somehow guilelessly trusting these weaknesses to the hands of those who choose to hear him. Ozzy Osbourne. A husk today of what he once was, ridiculed in all quarters for his excesses; probably – and I speak from sentiment, not fact – an unwitting participant in humiliations orchestrated by others. Ozzy Osbourne. Not fully together anymore, but still capable of moments of astoundingly naive honesty. What proves a singer’s true mettle? Virtuosity? Sense of restraint and melodic placement? Longevity? To varying degrees, yes, but surely, most importantly, it has to be to what degree he elevates his band’s music; it is incontrovertible in my opinion that any song Ozzy has ever participated in has been the richer for it. More so than turning his obvious shortcomings into strengths, those shortcomings have existed alongside his strengths, and have helped humanize him like no other singer in the genre. Ozzy Osbourne. There will only ever be the one.
All metalheads want their favorite bands to be suitably obscure, hidden away from the mainstream. Deathspell Omega remain steadfastly aloof, giving a grand total of two interviews in fifteen years, both couched in arcane references; their music, as it is, is chaotic and breaks entirely with all allusions to black metal, and their lyrics are some twisted variant of Sunday school. Mgla have followed much the same path, faces masked, identities undisclosed, to purportedly do away with peripheral matters and focus all attention on the music. Countless others sell their music in limited numbers or on obsolete media with the intention of shunning the assembly line ethos of record labels, though what this means for a genre already on the fringes is anybody’s guess. Analog demo-level productions are back in vogue, aparently to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of audience quality. The motive behind all these actions is to restore underground metal to its rightful position out of the spotlight; the unsaid assumption is that these actions, sincere though they may be in conception, will also give free rein to the creative energies of metal musicians.
Yet, each of these phenomena attracts its fair share of ears and eyeballs, and not always because of the quality of music on offer. Your average lay person may not be able to tell Immolation from Intolitarian and thus be appropriately turned off by the war metal juggalo’s dedicated use of genocidal motifs, but to anyone remotely schooled in the underground, it is self-evident that deliberate attempts at manufacturing obscurity come with a dog-whistle riding its underbelly, anticipating a crowd whose tastes are aligned or worse, determined, with assertions of purity. Once the listener participates in this arrangement, he tacitly declares his allegiance to the intellectual over the musical, in whatever hue it is presented; what starts as a noble endeavor thereafter devolves into yet another race, driven by equally banal preoccupations, to outdo all others in the obscurity sweepstakes.
For the bands, it is a classic catch-22 alright, and makes me feel not a little hypocritical when I call them out as soon as they sell out but then in the same breath turn around and damn them when they show the temerity to renounce conventional avenues to fame. But it is what is, an indictment of the time we live in: people are desensitized and people are alienated. The one leads to a demand for the ever more novel while the other goads them on to become obedient little rebels in a cause which they think makes them stand out from everybody else. Metal bands, perhaps unbeknownst to them, then have chanced upon the ideal marketplace to disseminate their music through the currency of an artificial integrity.
What are they to do then? How do metal bands remain obscure without explicitly rallying to arms under the pennant of obscurity? What does obscurity even mean in the context of heavy metal and the present time when technology provides so many temptations to prostrate oneself before the wider world? Is obscurity even desirable? Surely, to avail of that same technology to sell one’s art is no crime; art does not exist in a vacuum; it is made to elicit a reaction and in what is a mutually reinforcing loop, the artist thrives on this reaction, be it positive or otherwise. Why would any self-respecting artist then willingly short-circuit the extent to which his work can be promulgated?
In my opinion, this shouldn’t even be a matter for debate, much less something a band feels the need to bang on about. I’m only projecting, but to me metal is an introverted music, and therefore the desire to keep it obscure should be a natural-subliminal extension of the musician’s personality. This introversion I speak of is not necessarily that of the cliche skinny nerd locked up inside his bedroom; most of us are reasonably functioning members of society, if not out of choice then because of a grudging acknowledgement of its rules, but that does not preclude us from retreating from its corrosive glare at every given opportunity (and no, hipsters bandying their introversion through memes on social media do not count). As the root of the word suggests, the introvert inverts attention back upon himself and constantly struggles to modulate his behavior to keep himself honest.
Bands of course are a composite of different personalities but I find it hard to imagine that some of my favorite bands – Deceased, The Chasm, Mortem – don’t contain at least a kernel of this disposition, however personable they might appear to be otherwise. Their obscurity is not premeditated on grandiose disavowals but manifests itself almost despite themselves. They exert the utmost effort into the most important thing of all, the act of creating music. They promote the fruits of that labor but only as something that any creator would want to genially share with like-minded souls. They do the tour cycles if they’re so lucky, they interact with the people who admire their work, and they then retire into the background until it is time to repeat the process. One might say this is the normal, old-fashioned way of doing things, but I can’t help but infer from this a sort of half-smiling, shake-of-the-head acknowledgement of the way the world works. After all, Deathspell Omega and Mgla, despite appearing content to remain in the shadows, are far more popular than The Chasm, Deceased, and Mortem, and only a rube would credit this solely to the respective quality of music.
But there is more than just resignation. There is pride there, too; pride in a job well done, confidence in letting the music speak for itself, and above all else, faith in that unsaid credo of heavy metal – you don’t find the music, it is the music that finds you.
Prosanctus Inferi return after five years with a collection of demos in anticipation of a proper full length later in the year. No other contemporary band in death metal has quite managed to capture the idea of music as blasphemy in the manner heard on Noctambulant Jaws Within Sempiternal Night; harking back, perhaps even signifying the culmination of developments first introduced by Havohej, Incantation, and Immolation, Prosanctus Inferi turn sound itself against the conception of holiness on a primal, subconscious level. Music is classically described as that which most closely approximates the essentially unquantifiable nature of God and the soul, but in the hands of this band, it becomes a weapon against those hallowed assumptions, a twisted distortion and desecration of cadences, even when heard in the light of a genre that has regularly flouted conventional harmony. That they achieve this effect while staying adamantly musical and song-oriented, without resorting to avant-garde detours or overt minimalism, makes them one of the most important death metal bands in the modern era.
The songs on Pulpit Sycophants represent the outline but no more of what can be reasonably expected on the full-length. Conspicuous by its absence is the lead guitar, such an important tool on previous recordings where it routinely squirmed all over the rhythm in myriad scrambled and inverted configurations. As such, it now becomes possible to discern just how big an influence Havohej and Dethrone The Son Of God are on the Prosanctus Inferi sound; in terms of note choice and variations in rhythm, these songs unmistakably reference the older band, whilst ironing out its slightly impulsive nature and addiction to groove. Jake Kohn’s vocals consciously mirror Paul Ledney’s larynx-shredding eruptions more than ever before, stretching out each syllable to its breaking point and quite possibly having an effect on the elongated phrasing of the underlying composition. Unlike Havohej, however, Prosanctus Inferi excel at creating more than just a quilt patchwork of potent dissonant riffs; this is a band that is adept at surreptitiously varying the texture of the call-response aesthetic within the same bar of music, toying with listener expectations and as a subliminal consequence also making way for a vaguely hypnotic lilt in proceedings. Melody is used with understated effect but it undeniably exists and frequently gives these songs an epic-tragic flavor that belies their fundamentally chromatic nature. Like Condemner, Prosanctus Inferi stitch their riffs out of many moving parts across the chromatic register and not always in a linearly ascending/descending manner; all it then takes for a relatively stable melody to emerge from this cluster of notes is a strategic point of resolution.
They say swans are some of the only creatures to choose a lifelong partner and that when one among them dies, the other doesn’t live long after. How does either member of a couple that has grown old together cope when the other passes? Accustomed to each other’s living rhythms, presaging each other’s thoughts, even taking on the other’s physical appearance as years reduce features that were once sharp to so much moldable putty, two individuals that through shared experience have for all intents and purposes become as one, but now at the very end, that union is rent asunder, and only one is left behind to deal with the profound silence that has stolen into the dusk of his life. Friends, relations, and routine, if he is so lucky to have these entertainments, distract for a time, but every man goes to sleep alone at night, and what manner of shapes must haunt his moments of solitude then? Memories come unbidden, and not just those touched with guilt and regret, but even joyful recollections, now marred with sorrow because of the fresh dent next to him in bed, give way to the cruel necessity of choking those reminiscences so as to preserve in them some semblance of the purity they do and should represent, to cleanse them of the grief they otherwise would become irrecoverably polluted with. To be a man that once reckoned himself stoic, resilient and self-sufficient, who now has to endure this slow wasting away by degrees, must be an experience humbling enough to render him as helpless and disoriented as an infant. The physical infirmities of dotage bring along their own pile of humiliations anyway, but a man’s frailties are shored up to a great extent while he still feels responsible towards another, while that another still makes him feel worth a whole. The sudden extinguishing of that sense of duty, which really is a rock in the storm of his dwindling, must challenge the very foundation upon which he views himself as a man.
Argus‘ fourth album may not be about the perfect man, but it is about the man of conscience. It is about taking stock in the wake of past mistakes and it is about possessing the courage to look into one’s inmost recesses, which is where the self-known truth usually resides. It is about love and loss, too, and having the grace to let go without requital or recrimination. This classy American heavy metal band, modeled after Thin Lizzy, Solitude Aeternus, and Slough Feg, has no particular calling card, but as has been the case on previous efforts, From Fields of Fire grows exponentially in power and atmosphere once it gets into its stride. Appropriately, the opening to the album is more defiant in tone and tempo, as befitting the state of mind in which previous transgresses have only just registered but their repercussions have not as yet made themselves felt, when one can almost delude himself into thinking that things can still be set aright. But fortunate are those to whom such allowances are made, and Butch Balich’s simple yet powerful voice conveys the despair in finally realizing the injustices visited on those we wouldn’t otherwise wish ill upon. The backing instruments regularly build up to a crescendo and an open space for him to deliver his most potent choruses, but Balich does more than simply following the chords underneath; chords in heavy metal insinuate, but the fine heavy metal singer molds that insinuation to his will through minor inflection and embellishment and sheer conviction, and thus completes the song. The final quarter of From Fields of Fire aptly retreats from the use of precocious NWOBHM rhythms and other exotic motifs to contemplate greatly on singly-plucked notes, unambiguous progressions, and Balich’s direction of theatre. This is doom, then, in the best sense, more human and more intimate than any other form of metal, yet completely separate and unique in intensity from mainstream expressions of the more pensive side of life.
