Since the late 1980s, all culture has been crypto: it hides in plain sight, it uses its own language and symbols, and it builds itself against the dominant contrarianism that took over in the 1960s and turned rock into propaganda and advertising.

The worst thing about it may be the white lies we tell each other. We pretend that in this endless stream of goo coming out of Metal Inc there is some good, when really it is a tiny part… and it is immediately ignored.

This is what happens when your audience gets captured.

***

Mercyless – Those Who Reign Below: this band really belongs to the interstitial period between speed metal and death metal in Europe so fits in with Thanatos, Coroner, and Necromicon but does a better job of building songs in the death metal style, not so much melodic as structural, with garden-variety Kreator-styled speed metal giving way to more of a faster Celtic Frost feel as the song peaks and concludes, but it is still hard to listen to speed metal (it is all they play in Hell).

Synalegg – hArm0nii tanD3m: sounds like a more major key and melodic scale friendly version of Autechre with some updates to the 1990s sound occasioned by the use of desktop synthesizer and sequencer software that makes complex beat patterns and layers more easily achieved, but in this case they are used sparsely enough to avoid distracting from the simple melodic arcologies that this band produce as a way of deepening a mood before it appears.

Trollwar – Tales From the Frozen Wastes: sounds a lot like Kvist reborn as a power metal band that likes epic presentations and mid-paced gentle hymns that soar and duck like the breathing of a great dragon, clearly far above most of the genre in terms of subtlety and the ability to spin a tune with both hook and development, but songs are very internally similar and fall into a sing-song Alestrom type lilting Celtic holiday restaurant melodic sense which impedes taking this seriously long enough to enjoy it.

Caste Rat – Into the Realm: doom metal has become popular along with emo because both easily transfer to the same old rock ‘n roll stuff, and this band targets the Red Fang and White Stripes zone of people who want stomping riffs in the framework of what are basically 1960s rock songs that even incorporate faint prog elements, but comment on themselves and have nothing more than a really catchy rhythm and some disaffected sounding vocals, sort of like grunge was, a receptacle tip for frustration and creativity both.

The Gates – …of the River Styx: the core of this band is gothic rock from the 1980s complete with crazy vocals but they work in an impressive range of influences from synthpop to mainstream industrial to underground speed metal, and make simple songs circling a vocal hook that give them enough instrumental space to enjoy their musicianship but not so much that the tune gets lost in the shuffle.

Becerus – Troglodyte: if all you got from the 1990s was Cannibal Corpse mated with rabid chihuahua vocals in songs that are piles of riffs arranged around a central premise of two chromatic intervals and an open interval, then you might appreciate this distracted and urgent rush of colliding parts, but but in the end, the band throws together so much random stuff around the central vocals that it makes itself fungible and songs run together because they have the same principle of order.

Dark Vision – Ianos: this band is more heavy metal than black metal or death metal but uses the death vocals, so might as well review this album here which is very similar to Therion Ho Drakon Ho Megas in that it is basically heavy metal with some death metal technique but played at moderate pace with a focus on melodic songwriting as a minor player, aiming to evoke grandeur and emptiness rather than sheer aggression, and the songs hold together and stand out individually, placing it above 99.99% of the review queue.

Doomstress – Sleep Among the Dead: bluesy hard rock with some slowed down riffs and Candlemass-influenced vocals, basically makes for a decent listen if you do not mind how similar these tracks are, and the lack of really distinctive riffing, but it would be hard to argue that these players are bad at their instruments or do not have a good idea how to write a jazz-style tune where everything harmonizes to the riff, even if too often the vocals repeat the melody exactly as found in the riff.

Purelency – Transcendent Unveiling of Dimensions: I forgot I was listening to this half-way through the first track. Purelency plays in the tired grey area between Autopsy, Incantation, and Swedish death metal that, underneath, suspiciously sounds like a bad hardcore band. No risks are taken here: you have cavernous vocals, lo-fi distortion, and percussion that vacillates between the kick/snare stomp, and relentless blasting. Attempts are made at melodic themes that achieve little more than advertising that this intended to be death metal. This is a can of soda labelled “OSDM.”

Massacre – Necrolution: this feels like death metal designed for streaming where enough riffs that fit together constitute a song and no one aims for contrast leading to evolution that produces the moments of frisson in great death, so instead you get a flow of sound like turning on a tap where it feels that bashing out basic riffs was easy enough for this band that they shaped them into songs without any internal interplay to make them enduring.

Nocturnal Sorcery – War in Heaven, Hell on Earth: these are songs about nothing, starting with some classic style riffs and then introducing variation and contrast without direction, but since this relies on very similar technique, it produces a type of sonic decor that achieves little more than the vaguest “feel” of old school black metal without any of the experience of zooming over darkened landscapes to encounter new terrain.

Pentagram (Chile) – Eternal Life of Madness: if your band is known for primitive dark morbid metal, the next step obviously is to get good at playing your instruments and aim for something more atmospheric, which this band does but falls into the metal trap of the post-1990s i.e. songs based on vocals because they are songs about songs by someone else long ago and have lost life of their own. There is much to like here but probably not through repeated listens.

Konkhra – Sad Plight of Lucifer: it is funny how many bands that did not make it to the top tier of death metal have taken to modern metal with great ease, and Konkhra is no different, being happier with the riff-chorus-processional format of modern metal, and working in some clever guitar solos as well as pounding basic three note riffs with no shape, but this is a death metal site and this release is irrelevant to it.

Purgatorial – Fading Whispers of Voidbound Souls: this variety of modern metal likes underground flavoring and borrows the pure rhythm riffing of war metal and the wall of sound approach of Incantation clones but then adds it to Pantera-styled nu-metal bounce and surge without variation in riff shape, so you end up with like Meshuggah some catchy rhythms that pummel you into the consciousness of yeast while ranting goes on that feels like propaganda and advertising at the same time.

Bütcher – On Fowl of Tyrant Wing: this band gets presented as speed metal but more appropriately upholds the NWOBHM tradition with big epic choruses like Manowar grafted on to verses and transitions that have more in common with the Judas Priest and Iron Maiden wing of metal, making this a painless listen mainly because they keep up traditional musicality instead of going for pure rhythm and imagery, even if speed metal is HIV in the punch at a kid’s party.

Valontuoja – Luonnon armoilla: first day of school: physics, chemistry, early english literature, and… black metal; yes, the genre that once broke the rules has now become as studied as full-stack development and consequently, is as rigidly compelled toward finding unique variations of known forms as your average millennial programmer writing a Hello World program using JSON containers and 700mb of frameworks in a kube uploaded from an iPhone.

Within Silence – The Eclipse of Worlds: human cultures tend to snowball after a period of pioneers, meaning that whatever succeeded in the past generation gets combined into a new hybrid which drives people to reject the parts that do not fit, and this power metal band lumps together gospel, oi, and sea shanty style Irish rantings like Alestorm into something with the drama of Babymetal but presentation of later Iron Maiden, dripping cheese and designed for turnip-picking serfs.

Hexenbrett – Dritte Beschwörung: Dem Teufel eine Tochter: someone wrote “black metal” on this promo but it makes zero sense because this is 1970s style stoner metal with Watain vocals over the top that have as little variation as someone reading a phone book, so only pursue this one if you really miss the days when Yes, Pink Floyd, and the Allman Brothers dominated the radio.

Crave – Oblivion: thank the ancient gods, finally a band not having an identity crisis by tossing Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, and Rites of Spring into a blender and coming up with dog vomit, Crave make old-school bouncy heavy metal on the edge of hard rock with a Queensryche edge to the vocals but more of an American sound to the guitars, kind of Seattleish like Nevermore with an undertone of Los Angeles like Motley Crue, and perfectly listenable if you like this kind of thing and have the patience for it.

Dawnrider – Five Signs of Malice: the word “ponderous” needs to come back for incredibly repetitive stoner doom with hipster reverby hammond organ in the background like this stuff, which never lived through the 70s but is trying to ape it through “That 70s Show” and “Slacker” vibes which jar with the need for metal to be idk might-is-right naturalistic realism with a side of anarchy because here we get Macy’s commercials with more weed, glam, and glitz but it is all still so tiresome.

Apex Fallen – Sum of it All: the blender mixes nü-metal with gothic industrial and bouncy metalcore, hiding undertones of later Prong, and turns it into a variety of rock that is at least based around songs but relies too much on vocals for riffs to shine so will be an also-ran because it does not produce distinctive enough atmospheres for its audience to differentiate these songs from each other or from nearby competitors.

Old Wainds – Stormheart: people have been preaching this religion for years for its Burzumy aspects but this band is essentially DSBM picked up to the faster mid-paced style of black metal and then melded into norsecore that drones in a large circular formation before ending in what the artistes think is ambiguity but is actually indecision, really just putting you to sleep unless you scroll Instagram and Reddit constantly to stay stimulated so you feel relevant in a world of pointless emotions and commercial products.

Lunar Aurora – Hoagascht: depressive suicidal black metal sped up to mid-pace with emo-style resolutions to its chord progressions, this stuff is as normie as the gospel-inspired happy power metal that the sweaty Reddit understairs cuckbois like, and even more, has nothing artistically to say; songs use intros that are distinctive to step into what is essentially the same song loop fighting a battle between the same compatible intervals, like pacifism disguised as black metal.

***

For news of the fallen world we have a few items…

The vinyl revolution continues:

In 2023, U.S. revenues from vinyl records grew 10% to $1.4 billion, the 17th-straight year of growth, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Records accounted for 71% of revenues from non-digital music formats, and for the second time since 1987, vinyl outpaced CDs in total sold.

The trend continues this year:

The renewed interest in physical music collections has reached new heights, with the Official Charts Company and BPI reporting that physical album sales have experienced a 3.2% increase in the first six months of 2024, with 8,044,760 units sold. This marks the first time the sector has seen an increase since 2004 when a shift to digital music consumption and streaming began.

And science recognizes a tiny bit of death metal:

Ophiuroids are a group of echinoderms closely related to starfish. Their bodies consist of a central disc from which five thin, snake-like arms extend. The class comprises over 2,000 different species, which live in and on the seafloor of the world’s oceans.

The newly discovered species have been named after several hard rock legends in a new study published in the European Journal of Taxonomy by a team of researchers, which includes members from Lund University. Kansas, Doro, Archspire, Immolation, Obituary, Ian Paice from Deep Purple, Tomas Haake from Meshuggah and John Bonham from Led Zeppelin are just a few examples of what the ophiuroids would have been called if they were still around in our oceans.

Together, the scientists have a long tradition of naming extinct fossils after their musical heroes, with previous examples ranging from Rammstein, Rotting Christ, and Avatar, to King Diamond, Alex Webster (Cannibal Corpse), and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead.

While soymetal continues to get emo:

The headliner of a heavy metal music festival in Florida — and seven other bands — dropped out of the show to protest that acquitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse would be on the bill as a “special guest,” according to reports.

Rockers Evergreen Terrace pulled out of Shell Shock II in Orlando, saying it refuses “to align with an event promoting murderers” — prompting the festival’s founder to slam them as woke phonies.

“As advocates for free speech we are respectfully cancelling (sic) the Shell Shock festival,” it continued.

Free speech, indeed. Woke phonies.

More for the file on how modern lyrics have turned into gibberish:

In essence, we find that lyrics have become simpler over time regarding multiple aspects of lyrics: vocabulary richness, readability, complexity, and the number of repeated lines. Our results also confirm previous research that found that lyrics have become more negative on the one hand, and more personal on the other.

And in parallel, melody in contemporary music has gotten simplified:

Our analysis presents strong evidence for two melodic revolutions in the history of popular music: one in 1975 and another in 2000. In addition, there is moderate evidence for a revolution in 1996.

In the current study, melodic features move in a single direction, either increasing or decreasing steadily since 1950. The number of notes per second in melodies has increased dramatically, while markers of both pitch and rhythm-related complexity in melody have experienced mostly undisturbed decreases.

Funnily enough music has also become sadder:

Our sample comprised over 1,000 Top 40 recordings from 25 years spanning five decades. Over the years, popular recordings became longer in duration and the proportion of female artists increased. In line with our principal hypotheses, there was also an increase in the use of minor mode and a decrease in average tempo, confirming that popular music became more sad-sounding over time. Decreases in tempo were also more pronounced for songs in major than in minor mode, highlighting a progressive increase of mixed emotional cues in popular music.

Dying music for a dying society… and with it, a dying humanity.

In fact, it might simply be becoming louder and dumber:

Much of the gathered evidence points towards an important degree of conventionalism, in the sense of blockage or no-evolution, in the creation and production of contemporary western popular music. Thus, from a global perspective, popular music would have no clear trends and show no considerable changes in more than fifty years. Pitch codeword frequencies are found to be always under the same underlying pattern: a power law with the same exponent and fitting parameters. Moreover, frequency-based rankings of pitch codewords are practically identical and several of the network metrics for pitch, timbre and loudness remain immutable. Frequency distributions for timbre and loudness also fall under a universal pattern: a power law and a reversed log-normal distribution, respectively. However, these distributions’ parameters do substantially change with years. In addition, some metrics for pitch networks clearly show a progression. Thus, beyond the global perspective, we observe a number of trends in the evolution of contemporary popular music. These point towards less variety in pitch transitions, towards a consistent homogenization of the timbral palette and towards louder and, in the end, potentially poorer volume dynamics.

Some argue that this reflects psychological change toward egotism and rage:

Linguistic analyses of the most popular songs from 1980-2007 demonstrated changes in word use that mirror psychological change. Over time, use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased. These findings offer novel evidence regarding the need to investigate how changes in the tangible artifacts of the sociocultural environment can provide a window into understanding cultural changes in psychological processes.

Forever we balance between repetition and randomness in music and everything else:

Represent Bach’s music as a network, however, where each node stands for one musical note, and each edge the transition from one note to another, and a wholly different picture emerges.

Two of the most crucial measures the researchers found that characterize music networks are entropy, or the level of variation in note sequences in the networks, and the degree of clustering. Networks with higher entropy, in which any given node connects to many more other nodes, contain more information, while those with lower entropy contain less information.

The researchers found that Bach’s chorales have much lower entropy than his toccatas, pointing to a difference not just in style—chorales are simple and repetitive, while the toccatas have complex, chromatic passages—but also in purpose: sung in church, chorales are meant to spur meditation and adoration, while toccatas are designed for entertainment.

Entropy means the ability to connect to anything, which is a lack of structure, in which clustering and other concepts refer to how only related things interact. You need some entropy, but not as much as dying civilizations create.

It turns out that the balance between repetition and personality is what drives music appreciation:

In a feedforward and feedback loop, our auditory cortex first responds to the sounds and sends information to other brain areas, like the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and the cingulate gyrus, which helps with attention and emotional processing. This process helps us recognize songs quickly and predict what comes next, making listening to music an enjoyable and familiar experience.

Music lifts us up out of ourselves by forcing cognition in the context of the familiar:

Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

Amazing as it is, The Guardian continues to be a good read despite the propaganda, and sometimes they hit on a coinage worth attending to:

Back on the road with vocalist Emily Armstrong making their back catalogue her own, the hybrid metallers have found a new audience and a reinvigorated sense of purpose

Hybrid metal is a good term for everything that came after 1994. Like the 1990s, it wanted to make a multiswirl instead of find clarity, since any clarity leads to having to confront the questions of living in a dying Roman empire.

For a little bit of nerd history, recall that lots of things happened in 1969 like the closing of an age, including internet firsts like the first message:

As science writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon recount in their 1996 book on the birth of the Internet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, it took a phone call on 29 October 1969 to confirm that the world’s first Internet message had been received. The letters ‘L-O-G-I-N’ had been typed by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and sent some 500 kilometres up the coast to colleagues at Stanford University.

If time travel were possible, we would send back something like KYS F4G just to make everything come full circle.

***

***

A bit of light theory…

First a brutal argument for physical media:

“We’re seeing that with Gen Z, and also with millennials, this real desire to have physical objects because the ephemeral nature of streaming means that something that you want to watch and you put on your watch list, and then you go to revisit it a week later, and it’s gone. It’s ephemeral. It’s never permanent. So, if you’re really invested in learning more about the history of this art form that we all love, I think that investing in physical media is one way to do that.”

If you want to have history or culture, its artifacts cannot reside on someone else’s computer. We can see this because only 20% of music is available out there on the splinternet:

In fact, one survey by the US Library of Congress suggested that less than 20% of all recorded music was available on the internet.

And when a new angle or vocabulary of music breaks down established conventions in order to get closer to the core of music, it may seem futuristic:

“Everything about them was radical, but at the same time it was kind of – what’s the word? – retroactive,” Holmstrom added. “There was sort of borrowing a lot from the past but also kind of futuristic.”

Death metal is more like poetry of contrast than built on inherencies of scale, which means that it embraces relativity between not just notes but directions and the shapes of riffs, so that rhythm and tone are tightly integrated instead of decoupled (except in vocals) like with rock music.

For comedy, some metalheads in the news:

A heavy metal vandal defaced the steps of an Upper East Side synagogue with a menacing drawing of what appeared to be a red eye, cops said Tuesday.

The unidentified man — who can be seen in security footage wearing a “Metallica” T-shirt — used what police believe was a red marker to draw the image on the steps of Temple Emanu-El on East 65th Street near Fifth Avenue just after midnight July 14, cops said.

Future metal will oppose anti-realism or contrarianism in any form, and this means rejecting not just dualism wholesale but also humanism, which is essentially the religion of worshiping the human individual and its narcissistic desires.

It will probably continue its appeal, which is recontextualizing the terrifying and bizarre in the context of the familiar:

The researchers focused on two areas of the brain. First, the amygdala, which is responsible for processing vital emotions. “The amygdala can trigger a fight-or-flight reaction in response to threats,” says Zwiky. The team also investigated the neuronal activity of the nucleus accumbens, known as the reward centre in the brain.

The results were surprising: “We found that fans of action films showed the strongest reactions in both areas. We hadn’t expected this, as action films typically provide many stimuli. Thus, it would have made more sense if action fans had been less easy to stimulate,” Zwiky continues. However, the results suggest that action film aficionados are particularly susceptible to emotional stimuli and find this stimulation appealing. The team found similar brain activity in the brains of people who preferred comedies. A different picture emerged, however, for fans of crime films or thrillers and documentaries. Here, both areas of the brain reacted significantly less to the emotional stimuli than in the other groups of participants. “It appears that people choose the film genres that most optimally stimulate their brains,” concludes Zwiky.

N.B. fans of crime films, thrillers, and documentaries react less to emotional material. Horror films train us to see the world outside of ourselves:

Perhaps strobing oscillations in music stimulate the brain similarly:

The synchronization initiates with temporal theta oscillations, subsequently inducing local gamma oscillations in the BNST-NAc circuit. Critically, the incorporated external entrainment induced a modulatory effect from the auditory cortex to the BNST-NAc circuit, activating the antidepressant response and highlighting the causal role of physiological entrainment in enhancing the antidepressant response.

Confronting the abyss and then holding it in the palm of your hand may reduce fear in the sense of personal instability, and enhance it in the sense of the invigorating unpredictability of exploring reality:

There is a natural human curiosity about the darker aspects of life, including death, tragedy, and the macabre. Dark events often provide a safe and controlled environment for people to explore these themes.

This rejects the repetitive safety of normalcy and embraces a higher-entropy sense of possibility, which in turn makes us reconsider all that we know about life to find out how it works, instead of simply taking an ironist contrarian view as a compensatory strategy to make ourselves feel more powerful in the moment, and discover the transcendent:

Modern thought construes reality to be “neutral,” devoid of inherent meaning; meaning is separated (in Greek, dia-balo) from the object in question, as opposed to the classical view which holds that meaning is inherent to the object itself–it is placed together (sym-balo) with the object, forming an integral whole…and when used according to this meaning, brings our wills into harmony with that of the Creator.

Music indeed resembles language like poetry, adventure stories, or religious devotionals:

We recorded high-density neurophysiological activity directly from the human auditory cortex while participants listened to Western musical phrases. Pitch, pitch-change, and expectation were selectively encoded at different cortical sites, indicating a spatial map for representing distinct melodic dimensions. The same participants listened to spoken English, and we compared responses to music and speech. Cortical sites selective for music encoded expectation, while sites that encoded pitch and pitch-change in music used the same neural code to represent equivalent properties of speech.

It is possible that this darkness in the context of pleasant brain stimulation produces happiness through embracing reality and the transcendent mode in which we much approach it:

Scandinavian countries consistently rank as the happiest in the world, and for good reason. Their societies are trustful and homogenous, with high GDPs per capita, long life expectancies, and reliable infrastructure.

A 2016 survey by the Czech linguist and mathematician Jakub Marian found that, while the United States only had around 72 metal bands for every million citizens, Sweden had more than 428. Finland came out on top with a grand total of 630. Iceland and Norway, which had 341 and 299 per million citizens, respectively, still ranked well above the 69 bands of the United Kingdom, heavy metal’s historic birthplace.

This could explain why humans live in a demon-haunted world:

“Most of us know about possession of humans by demons from pop culture, but the author didn’t only use the term ‘possession,’ he also used the term ‘obsession,’ which is to be tortured or tormented or harmed in some way without the demon taking over the person’s being,” Klepper said.

We need the demons to free us from our obsessions with the mundane, and through confronting our fears — murder, death, disease, sodomy, mind control, occultism, emptiness, nihilism — we come out on the other side with a greater appreciation for life itself.

Of course, our fear of the transcendent anchors itself in fear of Darwinism, also called “inequality”:

Darwinism similarly hides in plain sight. To those who can think it through, it represents a perfected system that improves quality and reduces costs much like capitalism. It involves predation and culling of the weak, so the herd fears it.

Life is not fair. It is not equal. We are little meat sacks tossed on the storm. However, we can see the beauty of the whole, and in this holistic vision, come to appreciate how something greater than ourselves exists in reality itself (possibly including its metaphysical dimensions, but I digress).

***

For some kicks, read about cops studying the occult and of course, how Chuck Schuldiner died of AIDS.

Then it is time for a reminder about nihilism since it is implicated so heavily in metal:

A nihilist declines to believe in the consensual hallucination that there is an absolute, universal, and objective shared space of facts, morals, values, truths, and communications.

One random stunner from the loogie-presse is this statement by Bruce Dickinson:

While most of the discussion is centered around albums that pre-date when he joined Iron Maiden, Dickinson singles out Queensryche’s 1988 concept album Operation: Mindcrime, branding it a perfect record.

We must concur. It and Killers, Don’t Break the Oath, Painkiller, and Everything Louder Than Everyone Else are perfect heavy metal experiences.

Also some brief insight on guitar solos and their role in music:

I hate to say it for all your readers out there, but non-musicians, who are the majority of the fucking listening world, they are not going to remember guitar solos. They are gonna helluva remember a great melody, and they’re really gonna remember a great song – especially a song that’s gonna bring them to a different place from where they were five minutes previously.

Melody and structure make poetry; solos, properly understood, are most often riffing on harmony.

***

Let us consider the Black Sabbath ballet as some kind of cultural mashup gone both wrong and right:

The final act focuses on the legacy of Black Sabbath, their influence on heavy metal music, how music brings people together, and how the band is celebrated all over the world.

One can only hope that black metal made its mark on academia where the ancient ideas are being… well, murdered with contemporary political rhetoric:

Prof Emily Selove, who leads the course, said: “A recent surge in interest in magic and the occult inside and outside academia lies at the heart of the most urgent questions of our society. Decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism, and anti-racism are at the core of this programme.”

Blasphemous crimes seem to follow metal even if they are probably just insurance scams, since that is one of the few remaining growth industries in the free West:

The church’s pastor, Greg Locke, said in a statement posted on Facebook, that the church’s security cameras were able to capture a man reportedly dropping off the trailer before setting it ablaze.

“There was a lady that had driven through the night to get to our church, and she was in the parking lot and was able to get the police officers here quickly, but it was quite the scene to wake up to on my first morning back from Israel,” Pastor Locke wrote.

It is a different kind of blasphemy — against commercialism, itself a proxy for what is popular, itself a result of humans suppressing fears and embracing big lottery wins like sex, money, food, drugs, celebrity, and an easy path to the afterlife — which prompts some metal terrorism:

A Sacramento man has pleaded guilty in U.S. court to threatening on the Internet to kill members of the rock band Korn.

Adrian McCoy faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced April 25, KERO-TV in Bakersfield, Calif., reported Wednesday.

We should remember Mr McCoy not just as a hero in the fight against nü-metal but in the fight against human shallowness, crowdism, conformity, and cowardice as we flee from our fears by listening to monkey jump bounce metal instead of dark endless passages of morally ambiguous naturalism.

Satan and metal seem joined, but that is mainly because metal and darkness are joined, and Satan is the scapegoat used by normies to explain their narcissism:

Lyrically, early black metal fused virulent anti-christian politics with Nietzschean-inspired satanism and ecological mysticism. As the scene grew into the 1990s, however, satanism became a problematic notion and several figures tried to find new ideological backing to their music. One solution, adopted by figures like Ihsahn, the vocalist for Emperor, was to treat satanism as merely a metaphor for Nietzschean individual freedom. Another, far more problematic move was that taken by Varg Vikernes of Burzum, who dropped satanism in favor of Nazism, and emphasized themes of mystical ecologism in opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The third path was to reject satanism for a return to traditional Scandinavian paganism, a move made in the early years by Enslaved, and one which has since spawned a new sub-genre: pagan metal.

This is why metal worldwide works different icons of evil outside the Abrahamic tradition (a mashup of Greek theory, Jewish mysticism, and Babylonian lore):

While heavy metal in Europe and North America has obviously been seen to interact with western religious symbolism and draw on classical icons, the metal scenes elsewhere—especially those in the majority world—draw on a diverse range of imagery, folk tales, and indigenous history to tell their stories and inspire their work. This conference aims to create a wider view of the place of premodern histories and musical traditions within heavy metal.

Like the son of Jéhováh, we embrace the symbolism of the denied:

Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?

Shame, guilt, and morality all seek to steer us away from “evil” methods and teach us to pretend that we are normal, producing people who are simply acting out roles without any idea why any of this stuff is important.

And enjoy this brief detour to the birthplace of heavy metal:

The Crown Inn in Birmingham city centre, dubbed the ‘birthplace of heavy metal’, hosted local bands which went on to become household names including Led Zeppelin and UB40.

It is best known for being the venue where Ozzy’s Black Sabbath – called ‘Earth’ at the time – performed their first-ever gig at Henry’s Blueshouse upstairs.

One wonders what Ozzy thinks of how the world has changed since then. Black Sabbath today would be another ignored stoner doom metal band in a sea of them.

***

Tags: degeneration, lyrics, melody, metal, music