Why Listen to Metal?

It’s hard not to despair when you take off the twin blinkers of denial and escape and take a hard look at the world.

• In large parts of Africa, we roam the countryside in search of albinos to chop up so that we can use their body parts for magical rites.  The witches we just chop up.
• In Pakistan, we throw acid in girls’ faces for daring to go to school.
• In Afghanistan, we flog girls for wearing trousers or simply daring to expose their faces in public.
• In South Africa, we riot for libraries by burning buses.  When we get the libraries, we burn them and the replacement buses while we riot for clinics. Then the striking clinic staff invade operating theaters to beat the shit out of scabs.
• In South Africa, we rape infants because this will cure us of AIDS.
• All over the Middle East, we murder our women for the dishonour they bring on our families by getting raped.
• In Palestine, we justify genocide because it’s them or us. Even though we have all the tanks and fighter jets and nuclear bombs.
• In the Congo, we gang-rape hundreds of thousands of babies, girls and mothers, and destroy their vaginas with bullets, acid and anything else we can stick up there. Those who survive are permanently incontinent and banished from their villages.
• In America, we beat our chests in fearful fury when told outright lies we would not dream of questioning; millions of Iraqis die.
• In America, lobbyists for arms manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies and health insurers achieve victory upon victory over justice and common sense.
• Everywhere we incinerate our planet’s forest lungs to make room for cattle ranches to feed our lust for McBurgers.
• We denude the sea of fish and dump our shit in it instead.
• We pay teachers, nurses and rescue workers next to nothing.  Even though they are among the few who stand between us and total collapse.
• We let our politicians grow obese on pimping out public property and the common weal, century after century, because we would rather not see what is done in our name. All we really want is to be soothed by the best teller of lies, and to have a chance, however illusory, to put on a few pounds of our own.

Metal (at least the kind I listen to) puts a match to that despair. Musically, it is the only appropriate response.

Metal that Matters

Here’s a whittled list of excellent metal.  This post will see many updates.

When metal is done really well, it kind of makes everything else (except for some works by a few immortal jazz artists and classical composers such as JS Bach and Arvo Pärt) pale into insignificance.

• Arcturus: The Sham Mirrors
• Baroness: The Red Album (still deciding about the Blue one)
• Black Sabbath: Mob Rules, Heaven & Hell 
• Converge: Axe to Fall, You Fail Me, Jane Doe, No Heroes 
  Converge may be my favourite metal band. Hardcore punk plus metal equals metalcore.
• Deströyer 666: Cold Steel … for an Iron Age, Defiance
• Devin Townsend: Addicted 
  Making less dense metal than the delicious noise from his Strapping Young Lad days, Devin Townsend now occupies post-metal territory.  Still gigantic, but with pop elements added.
• Dillinger Escape Plan: Ire Works, Option Paralysis
• High on Fire: Snakes for the Divine (must still get Surrounded by Thieves)
• Immortal: All Shall Fall
  Here’s a Nordic band that makes black metal you can groove to. I don’t care for their makeup and silly outfits, but the music is great.
• Meshuggah: Destroy Erase Improve
• Metallica: Metallica (the black album)
  Respek.
• Opeth: Ghost Reveries
• Primordial: To The Nameless Dead, The Gathering Wilderness
  Celtic Black Metal from Ireland. 
• Slayer: Reign in Blood

Metal Meta-review site

Web of Metal aggregates metal-album reviews from several different sites. Since once metalhead’s thrash is another’s trash, this is an important sanity check.

http://www.webofmetal.com/home

Everything is Fire

That’s the title of a 2009 death-metal album by Ulcerate, a quartet from New Zealand.  It’s one of the few metal albums I appreciate more with each listen.  It’s harsh, complex and hard to penetrate, yet it is sublimely rewarding (some technical and mathcore metal albums are complex but devoid of substance, while Ulcerate’s music is dense with it).  It is pitch dark and extremely discordant … yet never before has metal sounded so painstakingly composed, so creatively layered, so mercilessly original, so starkly satisfying.

Yes, it’s an acquired taste.  But I hope this is the future of metal, because it’s new, and rewarding, and it cannot successfully be performed by poseurs.

Visit album page.