I’ve just completed reading the 2011 “best of” lists from a number of popular websites. The results are predictably dismal. Are these people incompetent or just deaf?
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Tags: 2011, abhor, amebix, apocalypse command, beherit, best of, Black Metal, blaspherian, blotted science, cianide, Cruciamentum, death metal, death strike, deceased, Esoteric, gridlink, heresiarch, morbus 666, nunslaughter, Obsequiae, primordial, rudra, sorcier des glaces, ungod, vallenfyre, war master
Here is a list of common terms, as used in trendy metal reviews on indie-rockpost-2000 “metal” sites, and their actual meanings as the album reviewer will cynically tell his friends but not you the reader, because your job is to buy the product. You can use this to decode mainstream and “true underground” reviews alike, since the “true underground” got captured by indie rockers and so is about as underground as Stephanie Meyer at this point. Note that if confronted, music reviewers will deny use of these terms, but if you go through your average metal magazine and highlight how many times these appear, you will see how scattering these terms through music reviews allows your average underpaid reviewer to write enough about the latest crap from the labels to make it seem important.
Innovative = new arrangement of cliches
Melodic = plays on the higher strings
Brutal = incoherent
Gauzy = low-fi style distortion
Self-indulgent = self-pitying
Unique = crap but the label likes it
Sublime = really obvious
Emotional = target audience is losers
Straightforward = repetitive
Evocative = catchy
Dynamic = random changes
Soulful = repetitive and catchy
Heart-wrenching = emo
Sui Generis = new arrangement of other genres
Je ne sais quoi = so bad I have nothing left to write
Faithful = derivative
Chops = masturbatory
Epic = either (a) dramatic or (b) Manowar
Bombastic = obvious
Progressive = knows open chords
Enormous = big dumb riff
Dazzle = deceive
Atmospheric = slow drums
Authenticity = popularity
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Death MetalStructuralist, atonal, modal metal that combines hardcore punk compositional technique with metal riffs and song structure. “Only death is real,” its guiding statement, pointed out that most of social mores and morals are illusory, and that we need to pay attention to the structure of reality instead. Its specialty is seeming random until you hear the piece as a whole.
Demigod – Dead Soul
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Black MetalLawless romanticism that praised isolation from the crowd, denial of individuality in the face of nature, natural selection, war and conflict, this genre used melody to construct atmospheric emotion. It guiding statement might well have been “the cut worm forgives the plough,” and its feral explosion left murders and mayhem across two continents.
Darkthrone – En As I Dype Skogen
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Speed MetalPunk technique applied to neoclassical heavy metal with the use of muffled strumming made the most enigmatic heavy music ever, thanks to the use of the muted strum which produced a buffeting, battering sound. This was closest to heavy metal in composition but began the evolution of the phrasal riff as used in death metal.
Nuclear Assault – Nuclear War
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ThrashHeavy metal riffs in punk song structures, with a combination of the epic view of history that metal favors with the punk anarchist criticism, resulting in one long questioning of the experiential value of modern society and its impact on people, especially teenage skateboarders (“thrashers,” hence the name). Many songs under thirty seconds; direct ancestor of grindcore.
Cryptic Slaughter – Nuclear Future
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Heavy MetalProgressive rock, Celtic folk and heavy rock forged this genre from the ruins of pop music, designed to sound like a horror movie and shock flower children into reality. Its innovation was the moveable power chord riff, creating for the first time rock compositions made of phrases and not based around open chords to which vocals harmonize.
Candlemass – A Sorcerer’s Pledge
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GrindcoreGrindcore combined thrash, hardcore punk and death metal vocals to create a blur of intensity whose goal was to sound muddy, offtime, semi-coherent and like an ugly churning manifestation of the outsider underworld. Incorporating the organic post-political concepts of death metal, many grindcore bands expressed themselves through lyrics about gore, death and other limits to human control.
Blood – Linear Logic Intelligence
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Other MusicOther genres influenced metal as it evolved. Ranging from ambient music, horror film soundtracks, punk hardcore, industrial noise and progressive rock, metal’s many influences are documented here, with an emphasis on those that reflected a paradigm shift in their time and passed that on, through their music and ideas, to metal out of compatibility with the spirit of metal.
King Crimson – One More Red Nightmare
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After hardcore made music harder and faster, speed metal upgraded heavy metal by mixing hardcore speed and aggression with the architectural riffs of NWOBHM, and downgraded the reliance on pentatonic scales in favor of minor-key complex riffing. The technique that defines speed metal is the muted strum, where the palm of the strumming hands rests on the strings, making a short percussive blast of distortion instead of a ringing chord. As a result, speed metal sounded like the machines of the 1980s: blasting like factories, rattling like tank treads and chattering like computers and their printers.
House recommendations: Metallica and Prong.
Death metal uses tremolo strummed power chords in phrasal riffs, creating an internal dialogue of melody to project a narrative which takes us from a starting point through internal conflict to an ending radically removed from the start. This often complex music relies heavily on chromatic scales and solos that resemble sonic sculpture more than a reliance on scales or harmony, and use “modal stripes” or repeated interval patterns (such as a half interval followed by a whole) to maintain a mood. Inherently structuralist, death metal can be recognized by its “post-human” perspective, seeing the world through biology, history, warfare and mythology instead of the “I/me/mine” viewpoint of a modern society.
House recommendations: Morbid Angel, Slayer, Monstrosity, Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Therion and Vader.
Projections of a Stained Mind (C.B.R. Records)
Harmony Dies Vol. 1 (Slayer Magazine)
Pantalgia (MBR Records)
Live Death: Vol 1 (Restless)
Sampler Volume I (JL America)
Deterioration of the Senses (Morbid Metal)
Book I: Induction (Hits Underground)
Reviews have mp3 sound samples for each album, coverscan, tracklist and label contact information.
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Black metal took the lawless extremity of death metal and added a greater use of melody, creating swelling surges of sound that sweep the listener away with raw emotion and then arrive in a wasteland devoid of inherent value. Songs fashioned from primitive elements end up telling complex tales, embarking on a journey where the greatest human fears — meaninglessness, predation and violence — end up being salvation from the frustrating world of entropy-bound stagnation. Thematically black metal represents an assault on the pillars of modernity, namely egalitarianism, consumerism and tolerance.
House recommendations: Burzum, Emperor, Ildjarn, Graveland, Summoning and Sacramentum.
1. Burzum – Hvis Lyset Tar Oss
2. Immortal – Pure Holocaust
3. Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse
4. Darkthrone – Transylvanian Hunger
5. Graveland – The Celtic Winter
6. Bathory – Blood, Fire, Death
7. Ildjarn – Det Frysende Nordariket
8. Summoning – Dol Guldur
9. Gorgoroth – Antichrist
10. Beherit – Electric Doom Synthesis
11. Enslaved – Vikinglgr Veldi
12. Havohej – Dethrone the Son of God
13. Mayhem – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
14. Sacramentum – Far Away From the Sun
15. Mutiilation – Remains of a Dead, Ruined, Cursed Soul
Under the Pagan Moon (Cyclonic Productions)
Nordic Metal Compilation (Necropolis)
Firestarter Compilation (Century Media)
Reviews have mp3 sound samples for each album, coverscan, tracklist and label contact information.
Heavy metal started when Black Sabbath merged heavy guitar rock with the soundtracks from horror films. They did they by exclusively using power chords, which because they do not contain the notes that mark them as major or minor chords, lend themselves to moving in streams, like a melody played in chords. The result is that Black Sabbath structured their songs around the interplay of these melodies, instead of focusing on a transition between points of fixed harmony like rock music, and invented a new style of music that took nearly thirty years to grow into the musical ideal first suggested back in 1970. Lyrically, Black Sabbath rejected the flower love delusion of the hippies and replaced it with hard knowledge: the obliviousness of individuals creates a mythological form of evil that manipulates and destroys us.
House recommendations: Cathedral and Helstar.
We continue our mission of invading Examiner.com to spread the filth of underground metal through its pure, socially acceptable and capitalist-consumerist gates:
23 CommentsWhenever NPR gets involved, you know you’re listening to state-sponsored propaganda. They also tend to favor any topic that humbles the strong and caters to the weak of spirit.
NPR’s favorite “metal” albums of 2011
Other than a few honorable mentions, there are no metal albums here. Only the indie, post-rock, punk, sludge, emo and shoegaze mixture that is popularly infused with a few metallish riffs to become the non-mainstream form of nu-metal.
6 CommentsTwo awesomely oblivious places to visit. The people here have bought into the plastic facade, but they insist it be covered in granola, life failure, twee sycophancy, social nuance and novelty, and of course the purple-assed baboon showing submission while picking your pocket.
Allahu ackbar!
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