Comments

Yeah, I looked into that aphorism while writing this thing – it's actually older than Picasso and of uncertain origin, but I feel like a lot of people miss its hyperbolic / tongue-in-cheek tone.

Yes, to be clear: cover art doesn't have to literally steal from other people to be insanely boring and shitty, haha.

Aaron is currently locked in a law school torture chamber of some kind, but hopefully he'll deliver his usual dramatic overshare today

I asked Aaron to cover Artificial Brain this month because I'm too personally friendly with them to feel good about doing so myself, but: Let it be known that the new album features several songs which are EVEN BETTER than the one we featured here.

It ain't just you re: Pallbearer — I'm also somewhat immune to their charms. The quality is definitely there, but the songwriting doesn't really speak to me. My loss, I suppose. As for Dawn and Thorns, I think they're both donezo. I still spin Slaughtersun on a regular basis, though. Thx for the kind words re: Pyrrhon — we're done tracking and just gotta mix the thing now. Should be out some time in late summer / early fall.

This will probably sound weird to you guys given most of the Pallbearer coverage on SG, but now that Mike isn't doing TBM anymore, they don't have a real hard-charging champion in the crew. Aaron likes'em though, so maybe he'll push for them to get a spot next month.

Oh, we'll get to that one – it's not out until April, and so we held off this month on the grounds that other songs on the album are even better than that single.

I feel like you can put most early death and black metal + grind in this category, TBH. Recent attempts to imitate the glories of the early extreme metal scene never sound quite right, because modern bands have a template to work from while the originals were just making it all up as they went along.

I would love Eternal Nightmare a lot more without the Goofy-falling-off-a-cliff vocals.

Yeah, this probably goes without saying, but our opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Stereogum's main staff, haha.

You are putting an awful lot of words in my mouth.

Aw man, and I was trying so hard to be gentle with their delicate feelings, too! Hopefully they enjoy reading Rob Darken interviews at deathmetal.org instead of this unnecessarily aggressive leftist propaganda.

As noted above, a sprawling subculture like metal can produce a lot of good music and still have a relatively bad year for cultural & structural reasons. (Or because it simply put out fewer compelling albums this year than in the previous one, which is, y'know, a matter on which someone might validly differ from you.) Disagreeing w/ Michael about whether metal's ongoing balkanization matters is one thing — I like it, personally — but saying "BEHOLD, MANY GOOD ALBUMS CAME OUT THIS YEAR, AND THEREFORE I'M GOING TO ACCUSE YOU OF BEING A WHINY CHILD FIVE TIMES" isn't productive or even a meaningful response to the essay.

Katatonia is one of the worst live bands I've ever seen, energy-wise. Totally lifeless onstage. I know their whole schtick is depression and all, but guys....there's more to performing than playing the notes right.

I like chunks of Slow Forever, but if we're being real, I'm going to reach for the Cobalt albums with blasting instead of it every time.

That's true in a lot of cases, but how true it is depends on the band. It's definitely a big part of the AN story for me. A lot of their appeal relies on the element of surprise, as it were – the "whoa!" feeling you get from the band's ridiculous rhythmic / tonal extremity, especially juxtaposed with their relatively conventional song structures & use of traditional melody. They inevitably can't retain that feeling for like 9 albums in a row, and since I've been following them since Domine Non Es Dignus, it's long since worn off for me. There are other factors at play too — the quality of the songwriting has declined since they started putting out an album every 18 months circa Passion IMO, and I really don't like the increasingly dancey electronic elements that they've brought in to stand in for novel riffs, but those things are more about my preferences than their career arc.

I was very busy not recording LPs this year, haha.

Obviously I'm not going to speak for Michael. However, I would respond that many of the apparent contradictions that your pull quotes – and yes, your snarky comments – gesture towards fall somewhere between uncharitable readings and bad-faith misreadings of what the essay actually says. This piece deals with a lot of subjective impressions of the trendlines in a massive cultural space that involves thousands and thousands of people. These impressions get drawn without clear-cut supporting data by nature, since there is no DATABASE OV ALL METAL KNOWLEDGE to draw on. (Though if anyone could take advantage of such a thing, it’d be Michael, since he’s got serious stats chops.) They’re an unavoidable part of this kind of cultural criticism. I appreciate your praise for my work, but I do this sort of thing all the goddamn time — see my column intro from last month, for instance. The part of the essay that you seem to be taking issue with is Michael’s habit of qualifying these subjective impressions — such as, “metal’s decentralization means that nobody’s having the same conversation anymore,” followed by “there is one album that everyone thought about at least a little.” These things really aren’t mutually exclusive; the former can broadly be true at the same time that the latter is. It’s fine to prefer harder-charging prose with fewer qualifications, but that doesn’t mean that the project of including qualifications is illegitimate or “Trumpian,” especially in the context of a piece that has a pretty clear perspective, and ESPECIALLY on a subject where the available information is subject to multiple valid interpretations. (What is “good” for the genre? What is “bad”? Even the five of us don’t agree! I hated Edison Lot MDF!) There are a number of other suspect readings like this one in your post. Another example: you suggest that Michael somehow contradicted himself by pointing to both decentralization and metal’s declining economic viability as evidence of a crummy overall year for the genre. But these trends are pretty clearly related. Or your suggestion that metal can't have a relatively bad year and still produce a bunch of good albums, which is either a deliberate misreading or a failure to understand that "relatively bad year" for a huge subculture does not mean "everything was terrible." And do you really require hard data to prove that Pantera-loving meathead reactionary bros and proudly apolitical power metal nerds both exist in substantial numbers? So no, you didn’t get rid of a “not” with an ellipses, but you’re granting less than zero benefit of the doubt in your efforts to criticize, at the very least.

It's almost like you can make any piece of writing look incoherent by deleting most of it and tying together a handful of its claims with your own snarky commentary!

I genuinely love their first 4-5 albums, but they done run out of ideas circa In The Constellation... IMO. Not feeling the hyperdigital turn their production approach has taken either.

OH AND ALSO: Withered - Grief Relic

Haha, disqualified!!

PG and Gorguts way outperformed the new DSO for my money, though I love DSO's best work as much as anyone. I also don't feel the urge to signal-boost a dickhead like Mikko Aspa right now.

Internal opinions are divided, which makes sense because they're an insanely weird band. I really dig it, though.

Some beloved albums that didn't make the list: Chthe'ilist - Le Dernier Crépuscule Ehnahre - Douve Brown Angel - Shutout Camel of Doom - Terrestrial Howls of Ebb - Cursus Impasse: The Pendlomic Vows Psalm Zero - Stranger To Violence Slomatics - Future Echo Returns Terra Tenebrosa - The Reverses Dysrhythmia - The Veil Of Control Cognizant - S/T Mithras - On Strange Loops Madder Mortem - Desiderata Noisear - Utopian Armageddon/Submission Accomplished Helcaraxë - The Last Battle

Yes, he did indeed go on to join a noted Misfits cover band!

Yeah, there's definitely a delicate back-and-forth dance on the subject of masculinity in the classic "sad" doom formula. It's worth noting that the musical characteristics the subgenre entails are all about projecting a sense of stately, deliberate rhythmic power — a stereotypically masculine quality — rather than fragility or vulnerability. You might sum up the underlying philosophy by saying, as J. Lebowski once did, that "strong men also cry." Pleased and flattered to hear that the column has been of some help to you in these increasingly shitty times. We all met b/c we worked on Invisible Oranges back in the day, and the sustained, quality conversations that went on in the comment sections back then were what drew me to that site in the first place. It's cool that we've been able to recapture some of that dynamic here. Thanks for reading / contributing.

TBH this piece is essentially a longform rewrite of one of Cosmo's pieces from near the end of his run: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/why-lyrics-matter/

Yeah, I actually just got a promo for that album a couple of days ago, so you're right that it got picked up. I haven't really processed what's going on there yet, but the crazy wire-crossing he's doing is pretty compelling prima facie. Not sure if it's something that I'll really end up liking, but I'm certainly intrigued.

Yeah, we've naturally been watching Bolzer's development pretty closely (in part because they've been so hyped that they're hard to avoid). I can't totally speak for the other guys, but generally I'd say that we've been disappointed by their post-Aura output. The new album is an almost complete dud for me – some cool riffing ideas dotted throughout, but rushed, messy, and often poorly executed. The clean vocals remind me of Biz Markie on the chorus of "Just A Friend." Plus, yeah, we don't need that "IT'S A SUNWHEEL" mess in our lives.

Haha, I love that version too. They don't really do anything to elaborate on the original, but it's fun hearing Patton sing a classic.

That's a good point, and reflective of the dangers of speaking in broad generalities about huge, variegated cultural spaces like metal, haha. I was mostly thinking about the rest of the metal genre spectrum, which really do tend to prize machismo and aggression above vulnerability. And even doom, DSBM, etc. are frequently mocked by adherents to other styles for being wussy sadboy music.

I think I've mentioned this here before, but the Inter Arma drummer – TJ Childers – is also their chief songwriter. Aside from that just being generally impressive, I think that fact really comes out in their live performances; he really drives the band's momentum and sets the tone for their loose, interpretive approach. Contrast with a lot of other metal bands, where you can tell that everyone is playing along to the songwriting guitarist.

Writing angry letters to Flipside, OR, judging by Rollins's Black Flag tour diaries, trying to beat up the offending musician. I think you're right about the influence that those guys had in heavy music more broadly, though perhaps less so in metal specifically at the time — an analogous figure in metal might be Peter Steele. It's obviously a lot more common these days (see Converge, Pig Destroyer, etc.), but there will always be a bunch of meathead ding dongs standing in the back and slinging slurs on the matter.

It's ironic that you should bring Slugdge up, because a lot of their lyrics are thinly veiled environmentalist allegories! Matt Moss, their singer, leans pretty far left politically and has a background in hardcore & grind, which comes out in the stuff he writes for Slugdge too.

I'm not sure I'd call Suicidal Tendencies a metal band. But more importantly — how many youth crew types do you think called him a homo for some of the weepier ST lyrics? That kind of expression obviously happens in metal (& hardcore) sometimes, but there's pushback from the trogs when it does.

They got absolutely torpedoed by bad sound at MDF in 2015, but I saw them in a small club later that year and they killed. Very good band.

Make sure to stick around for at least some of their set. They're a stellar live band, and Jeff Walker's one of the few metal frontmen whose jocular stage banter is good for a laugh instead of a cringe.

You guys should see some of the insanely derogatory ways Aaron described this band in private conversation. Evanescence came up, a lot.

I love the first 5 Anaal Nathrakh records, but the recent ones have let me down. Cold, industrial vibes have obviously been part of the band since the beginning, but recently their productions have gotten so outrageously digital that I feel like I'm listening to EDM instead of metal most of the time, and they've been releasing music so quickly that the songwriting has noticeably suffered. The Whole Of The Law is a marked improvement on Passion / Vanitas / Desideratum in the songwriting department, but when I wanna hear Anaal Nathrakh, I'm just not gonna reach for an album where every instrument sounds like a synth.