To be completely honest, I don't think it's worth forcing the issue. Some people have an innate affinity for the way loud distorted riffs + aggressive drumming + screamed vocals sound, and some people don't. I think of it as similar to playing contact sports — a percentage of the population is wired to enjoy that kind of thing, but it's just not for everyone.
Personally, my favorite CSR project is Aksumite, whose September release (https://colloquialsoundrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/self-interference) I didn't push for super hard because it was a packed month and Aksumite is more punk than metal. Definitely worth a listen, though. Wyatt and Michael both love APL, though, so that project tends to land a spot through their combined efforts. (And I think Damian tends to focus on it more because it's the most popular of the bunch.) As for Yellow Eyes, I think Michael's the resident fan, but maybe he didn't get around to that one this month.
Yeah, that one was under consideration — I enjoy it, which is unusual for that style. But in the end, it didn't quite make the cut. It's a hard world out there!
The sad truth is that Mortuary Drape and Mgla may well have not made much of anything on that show, and just swung the tour in hopes of breaking even, making a lot of new fans, and having a cool experience touring on a different continent. You see that kind of insanely low pricing a lot in extreme metal though, which is frustrating for bands but which makes live metal accessible to its not exactly wealthy fanbase. Thank/blame Fugazi, I guess.
I actually have quite a lot to say about this subject, since I'm a vocalist first and foremost at this point. It's definitely true that a lot of extreme metal bands — especially a lot of melodic ones, strangely — treat harsh vocals as an obligatory feature that doesn't really merit much creative investment, and a lot of these bands achieve their artistic goals in spite of the boring vox IMO. That said, I also think that harsh vocals can be incredibly evocative and a hugely important piece of the picture in a wide variety of contexts.
Maybe I'll end up writing sayak's piece idea!
I imagine that metal's growing interest in extreme complexity, dissonance, repetitiveness, idiosyncratic instrumental tones, & other left-of-center formal and aesthetic techniques is a huge factor too. The nerdiness factor is off the charts in general for metal post-1990. I mean, think about how much homework you have to do to even comfortably define the difference between death and black metal. You have to be kinda nuts to wanna dive into that rabbit hole.
I certainly wrote Vhol thinking it was gonna be #1. (The first single is one of the best songs on the album IMO, but not my personal favorite.) But then Slugdge dropped, and it turned out Ian and I both really love the Onirik album, and the Baroness tune is Michael's favorite song of the year, and both he and Wyatt are looking at Sivyj Yar as one of the year's best, and...welp, it's a fluid situation we operate in, haha.
Panopticon was half-forgotten, but also half-delayed so that we could pick and choose from the publicly-available songs. Same goes for Revenge to a degree.
We actually did cover that one! It was #7 in March.
http://www.stereogum.com/1790365/the-black-market-the-month-in-metal-march-2015/franchises/the-black-market/
A few other honorable mentions:
1. I second Aaron's Blood Incantation rec. This one would have made the cut for the column if we re-racked the vote. Great fusion of new and old death metal tropes.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/interdimensional-extinction
2. TWIN LORDS - bass-and-drum madness from former Tombs drummer Andrew Hernandez and NJ/NY metal vet Dan Rivera. Great, affecting songwriting by some great players; compares favorably to most other bass-and-drum extreme metal I've heard.
https://twinlords.bandcamp.com/album/devastating-planetary-shift
3. SPEEDTRAP: '80s metal stylings played with the amped-up speed and silliness you associate with '80s party drugs. Total shred guitar bonanza here.
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/speedtrap-straight-shooter
4. VREID: The latest banger from these Windir descendants. Meaty, emotional black metal with an anthemic rock edge. May get some love in October's column.
http://www.metalunderground.com/news/details.cfm?newsid=116299
5. AEVANGELIST: New work from a prolific act that's put out 8 releases in the past 4 years. Death metal, black metal, and ambient layering collide here in a way that privileges the former but still gets weird as hell.
https://soundcloud.com/20-buck-spin/aevangelist-gatekeepers-scroll
6. AKSUMITE: The metallic hardcore project of Colloquial Sound Recordings' Damian Master, though even this band has a pronounced black metal edge at times. My personal favorite of his groups.
https://colloquialsoundrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/self-interference
7. VI: blasting, melodic black metal from members of (related) TBM faves Aosoth and Antaeus. Not quite on the level of those acts, but still pretty goddamn satisfying.
https://agoniarecords.bandcamp.com/album/de-praestigiis-angelorum
8.
I tend to agree with the commenter on that post who pointed out that opening a discussion of the importance of lyrics with a set of words from Kill 'Em All, of all Metallica classics, is pretty ironic. On the other hand, as far as paeans to teenage energy go, you can't really do any better than "Motorbreath."
I think the expectation for Clarke's lyrics you're referring to has in large part been set up by the critical conversation around the band more broadly. Since critics talk so much about how transcendent, sophisticated, and emotionally powerful Deafheaven's music is, both sonically and thematically, you'd expect something really moving and important from the lyrics. Even if I thought Clarke's lyrics were decent, they wouldn't live up to that expectation. And I think they're way less than decent, so I find them to be a major point of dissonance in that broader critical conversation about the band.
For the record, I mostly don't think there's anything wrong with listening to good music and ignoring the associated bad lyrics. It's only when lyrics that are supposed to be great strike me as pretty terrible instead that I get snippy.
Honestly it substantially hurt my love for Converge when I started reading Bannon's lyrics, and even more so when I started reading his press releases: http://lambgoat.com/news/7003/Converge-titles-new-album
Sure, I figure some people actively like the Deafheaven lyrics. I actively dislike them, and could get into a point-by-point discussion of why I think the lyrics on Sunbather are bad, but I honestly don't think such conversations usually lead anywhere.
And Mike's defense on this point wasn't "but I think the lyrics are good". The closest he came to that was saying "they're not embarrassingly, nauseatingly cloying" in an aside. His actual defense was: A) "You can't criticize Deafheaven's lyrics because you like Slugdge", and B) "I don't care what he's saying at all; at least it's not Nazi shit." Taken together, these strike me as a pretty clear condemnation via faint praise.
As an aside, George Clarke totally flirts with Nazi aesthetics in terms of his mode of dress and stage presence, in the finest gothy tradition of Hitler Jugend hairdos and stylish jackboots. So, y'know, Deafheaven could be LESS Nazi.
BIG REVEAL: I am the "lyrics critic" guy in the OP.
Mike, with all due love & respect, I find your response to the criticism in question unsatisfying in a number of different ways:
1. The bit about me liking Slugdge is an ad hominem change of subject from Deafheaven's lyrics, but even if it weren't, I don't see how the comparison makes the slightest bit of sense. You, and many other writers both inside and outside of the 'metal press,' constantly tout Deafheaven as the most important and artistically profound heavy band of their generation. If Deafheaven really are that good, it's not unreasonable to expect their lyrics not to suck. By contrast, I've never seen anyone discuss Slugdge in these terms. In fact, I rarely see anyone discuss Slugdge at all. They're not even signed. So stacking up Deafheaven against an obscure semi-joke band that's never even played live is a weird starting point.
2. It also seems bizarre to suggest that anyone who likes a silly band with silly lyrics has no business criticizing a serious band for their serious but poorly-written lyrics. Different artistic goals come with different standards for evaluation.
3. Along the same lines, I actually think Slugdge's lyrics are noticeably better than Deafheaven's lyrics, because they more effectively meet their own artistic goals.
Slugdge's whole lyrical approach and mythology is basically just a big spoof on the apocalyptic narratives, overboiled quasi-religiosity, and purple prose that populate so many death and black metal albums. The joke is that Slugdge are using the familiar tropes to talk about space slugs, instead of about the typical extreme metal fare: Great Old Ones, or Satan, or Outer Gods, or nuclear war, or resurgent Pagan deities, or Gnostic demiurges, or whatever. It's not the loftiest target, but they hit it hard.
I haven't read the lyrics to New Bermuda, but from what I recall of the lyrics to Sunbather, they aim for something along the lines of "searing poetic insights into George Clark's emotions & interpersonal relationships", and they fall dramatically short. I remember the title track's lyrics in particular as syntactically stilted and overwrought to the point of unintentional comedy — "nauseating" and "embarrassing" both feel like appropriate descriptors to me. And overall, I got the sense that the lyrics were designed to give the impression of profundity without actually saying much of anything. That's a major pet peeve of mine; it's here, if anywhere, that the criticism about Deafheaven being emotionally manipulative rings true. I'd rather hear absurd shit about space slugs.
4. After the Slugdge thing, you basically say that it doesn't matter whether Deafheaven's lyrics are good or not, because you don't care about lyrics in bands with screaming as long as they're not saying Nazi stuff. This seems even weirder than the Slugdge tack to me, for a few reasons. First off, it seems like you actually DO care about lyrics in certain contexts — your Kozelek fandom suggests as much, for instance. While I certainly agree that most metal bands' lyrics are garbage, I also think that treating screamed metal lyrics as irrelevant because they're screamed is a mistake and a self-fulfilling prophecy, for reasons that the following IO post by our mutual predecessor Cosmo Lee articulates really neatly: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2011/02/why-lyrics-matter/
But Deafheaven is NOT "most metal bands" to you. Again, by your and many other's accounts, they are the most important and artistically profound heavy band of their generation. As you said above, Sunbather is one of your favorite albums of the past ten years, and you're a professional music writers, so you've heard a LOT of albums during that period. If this band really deserves the stature you and so many others have afforded them, how can you just hand-wave away the lyrics? This is your favorite shit! Are you really not gonna bother to find out what the vocalist is screaming about? Do you really not care if it turns out that what he's screaming is adolescent nonsense, punctuated with a nonsequitur sample about traffic on the GWB? Shouldn't you hold the thematic content of this purportedly revelatory band to a higher standard than "at least it's not about white-supremacist shit or nazi shit or whatever"?
I suppose the "editorially problematic" factor here is that I could've made it more explicit that we excluded the song in question from the list of 15 songs & accompanying blurbs that make up the bulk of the column, not from the column as a whole. Sorry if that was confusing.
Like Michael said, I'd characterize that intro as addressing why I generally prefer not to use this column to highlight bands LIKE Maiden, Motörhead, Slayer (whom I talked about a little a couple months back), etc. — I think the space is better used to focus on less ubiquitous acts. I'd add that we also wouldn't have included anything from Bad Magic on the same primary grounds that applied to "Speed of Light," i.e. we're not that excited about it. As to why the discussion of that issue focused specifically on Maiden instead of on Motörhead (whom I actually did mention in an earlier draft of the intro), I can think of three reasons.
The first is that Maiden is simply a much more popular band than Motörhead, so they seemed like a more convenient & sensible way to broach the issue to me.
The second is that The Book Of Souls is Maiden's first album in 5 years, it comes right on the heels of Bruce's cancer remission, and it's ridiculously ambitious in terms of scope, if nothing else. All this means the music press is really abuzz about it in a way that they aren't about Bad Magic, and people were more likely to ask after the former than the latter. Lemmy's poor health is sadly getting more attention than his actual album is.
The third reason is that Maiden's career has been more varied (checkered, more frankly) over the past 25 years, so there's a lot more curiosity around what their new material will sound like. By contrast, the consensus around Motörhead seems to be that they crank out basically the same pretty good version of their heyday sound every 2-3 years and will do so until Lemmy croaks.
Absolutely, man. Despite the answer I gave, I definitely take feedback of this kind into account, and I suspect (but can't guarantee!) that you won't see another column with quite this much black metal in it in the near future.
Thanks for reading!
I'm not sure whom you're referring to with the bit about how TBM "just highlight[s] the most interesting new stuff that comes out of the cavernous metal cave of endless subgenres," but I certainly wouldn't describe what we do that way, since "the most interesting" sounds like an objective qualifier, and there's nothing objective about what we're doing here. The best anyone can do with this kind of feature is pick the songs that he personally finds most engaging (or enjoyable, or interesting, or whatever qualifier you like), and then make a case for why other people will find them interesting too.
It's a fair criticism to say that we privilege death metal, black metal, grind, and so forth over other styles of metal, if you prefer metal which falls outside of that realm. But ultimately, our collective hearts lie predominantly with the extreme shit, and I don't think we'd be doing you guys a service by changing our approach and crafting the column with breadth in mind. The Black Market is primarily a labor of love for us, and we'd undermine our own enthusiasm — and therefore the quality of our writing — by forcing ourselves to cover stuff that we're not really feeling.
Well, the group of guys picking the songs is still the same, and we ran many black metal-intensive editions of TBM under Michael too. (He's a bigger fan of the stuff than I am.) We also didn't cover any grind this month. Perhaps things haven't changed as much as you think?
My response is that grind is typically way faster and more frenetic-feeling than IB's music. Even the blasts groove on that album, which is a total death/black metal thing.
Because we had to leave so much good stuff out this month, I'm gonna get in on Aaron's game and post a bunch of honorable mentions here:
BLACKQUEEN: Unorthodox mixture of '70s spaghetti-horror soundtrack music, '80s black metal, and '90s death metal (the Floridian kind). Reminds me a little of Take Over and Destroy, only much more violent.
https://soundcloud.com/catharsispr/black-queen-the-olde-religion
BARSHASKETH: Totally ripping straight-ahead black metal in the riffy Scandinavian tradition. Fast as fuck. If you dig the Spectral Moon song that Wyatt wrote about, you'll love this too.
https://soundcloud.com/blut-3/barshasketh-ophidian-henosis-iv/s-f1b3r
GNAW THEIR TONGUES: Unsettling weirdness that falls just on the near side of the boundary between black metal and industrial/noise music. Surprisingly catchy, memorable songs too. This band has been at it for a long time, but the new album is their first that's really clicked with me. May appear in next month's column. FFO Author & Punisher, the final Altar of Plagues record.
http://decibelmagazine.com/blog/2015/7/13/exclusive-premiere-gnaw-their-tongues-gnaw-through-flesh
AMYGDALA: Knotty, technical grindcore that sneaks a lot of clever melodies into the mix. This is their first release, so there's a ton of long-term upside possible here given how good they already sound. Features Bryan Fajardo (Gridlink, Noisear, Kill The Client, etc.) on drums, and will probably appeal to people who enjoy his other bands.
IMMORTAL BIRD: Aaron gave these guys a shout in his honorable mention post last month, and I'll second him. This band is growing up quick. The new album sits comfortably at the intersection of American black metal and the punkier edge of death metal, with a lot of slippery math rhythms that you don't usually find in this corner of the metal world.
https://immortalbird.bandcamp.com/
Generally speaking, I'd say that I'm actually the fondest of left-of-center weirdo shit of any of the Black Market guys. But that isn't how I'd categorize those last two Mastodon albums. They're weird for the band in that they have different goals from the first four, but structurally speaking, they mostly consist of much more conventional pop songwriting and musical techniques — shorter verse/chorus songs built around hooks, conventional singing, etc. There's no accounting for taste, but I just don't think Mastodon does that kind of material nearly as effectively as the singular, sprawling sludge/prog/tech of their first few releases, which also feels far more 'weird' to me than the newer albums.
And "unrepentant" isn't even an especially obscure word! Why opt for an awkward variant that most of the dictionaries I've checked (an embarrassingly large number) don't recognize?
But then, one might also ask why Tom Araya, a Christian, agreed to all that Satan stuff back in the '80s. Slayer, thy mysteries run deep.
Well, that's kinda what I'm saying — "Their best song since GHUA" is the same thing as saying, "Welp, it's better than Christ Illusion or World Painted Blood." And in the context of their back catalog, that's some seriously faint praise.
In Slayer's defense, dull predictability has treated them far better than the left turns taken by Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and virtually every other '80s thrash titan who survived into the '90s and beyond. And they're still a total force to be reckoned with live.
The thing about High On Fire is that, despite their obvious allegiance to pre-1990 metal tropes, their sound is wholly their own. Part of that boils down to Pike's incredibly distinctive voice and guitar tone, but their particular combination of ingredients was also pretty unique 15 years ago when they got started.
Personally, I think that Royal Thunder kinda suffers from their public alignment with the metal scene. Their music is well on the hard rock side of the rock/metal divide IMO, and they've got appeal that reaches way outside the metal ghetto. They're obviously doing alright for themselves anyway, but I wonder how big they'd be if they weren't signed to a metal label and didn't tour primarily with metal bands.
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