Hard-Hitting Dragon Iconography

Getting my first real tastes of Keep of Kalessin's new release, Reptilian, and three-quarters of the way through the first song I'm already twice as excited as I was after hearing "The Dragontower" a few months ago. If "The Dragontower" was prog mixed with NWOBHM, "Dragon Iconography" is power metal mixed with the kind of brain-crushing heaviness that made me buy The Discipline of Fire & Demise after hearing thirty seconds of "Thorns on My Grave." If you've been on the fence about giving Keep of Kalessin a try in the past, this seems like it might be the album to start listening.

Again We Rise: Emperor - The Discipline of Fire & Demise

True to Iron Maiden's promise at Madison Square Garden in 2000, the decade that followed has seen a resurgence of metal that not only obliterated the specter of death staking the genre in the 1990s, but makes previous heydays seem puny in comparison. Metal in the 2000s was all about proliferation: new styles emerged, old ones regenerated, and - thanks to the Internet - exposure spread like a virus. To highlight all of that success , we're launching Again We Rise, an occasional feature that will celebrate the releases that rose above the voluminous crowd to become classics. Today, Emperor's Prometheus - The Discipline of Fire & Demise.

In the summer of 2000, I was working a job whose intellectual rigors were so intense that they permitted endless amounts of web surfing. On one of my journeys, I found an interview with Ihsahn where he discussed the dichotomy of quality: his dissatisfaction with the quality of Emperor's output to that point, but his hopefulness about the future, as each new release fixed the problems of the past. The statement related in part to the progress of recording Prometheus, which I bought a bit over a year later after hearing a sample of the first thirty seconds of "Thorns on My Grave" on Amazon: the layering of drums and guitar makes for such an impressively heavy composition that I had to hear more.

Despite my initial hopes, it took me a good four or five years to realize Prometheus's genius; perhaps because I was expecting another Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk or IX Equilibrium, I fell into later category of listeners described by the All Music Guide's John Serba:

"Those willing to invest a significant amount of time into Prometheus will be thoroughly rewarded on intellectual and emotional levels — especially when drawing parallels between the album's elaborate concept and Emperor's musical reign — while more practical listeners unwilling to slap on headphones and willfully ingest the lyrics will find the record impenetrable."

"Impenetrable" is the word: the album's multitude of layers, swirling textures, and dueling instruments; its rampaging melodies that present a nefarious mindfuck by individually stretching the very concept of tonality while collectively delivering some of music's more glorious aspirations; the lyrics, where a concept just barely comprehensible when read on a page stands nearly veiled by the individual phrases that describe the action; these are not the elements of an easy listen. Digging further, phrases start to collect in the brain and continuity establishes itself - I can remember how "Depraved" sounds, for example, because I remember the feeling evoked by the chilling arpeggio that opens the track - but on the whole there is the whispered beginning that starts the record, the final rush that ends it, and the wonderful, bleak-as-hell maelstrom in between. That Emperor managed to put together such an effort is impressive enough; that they did so while walking the tightrope between wankery and creative desire and emerged with something complex and cohesive is almost unbelievable.

Anaal Nathrakh: Sitting on the Proper Side of Intensity

I'm listening to Anaal Nathrakh right now for the first time (after reading a review snippet that sold the band enough to catch my attention) and it's intense. The first song went from a nice black metal texture to grindcore to a passage with "Thus Spake the Nightspirit"-type vocals and back again in a matter of minutes and the next few songs have had the same level of agility. It's rare that an album is so effectively brutal and evil-sounding that it makes me feel physically uncomfortable, but these guys have done the trick. Hats off to them: I'm loving it.

Delving Into the Sorrow of the Moon

After getting waaaay too excited about Paganfest 2009 a few days ago, I decided it might be a good idea to check out the bands (who are not Eluveitie; they're half the reason I'm so psyched to begin with) on the bill. My download site of choice's musical association algorithms called up Moonsorrow, so I started with them, grabbing the AMG-recommended Verisäkeet and taking it out for a spin. First time through, I wasn't particularly impressed until I got to "Jotenheim," when the band's combination of the metallic (death metal vocals, some blast beats, plenty of high speed riffing, some balls-out rock 'n roll screams), the epic (Viking choruses, symphonic strings, Pagan instruments, Emperor-style marching bridges), and the atmospheric (well-placed acoustic/clean electric lines awash in reverb, sound samples of sighing wind, crackling flames, and quorking crows) all lined up to create the type of immense experience that generally tickles my auditory fancy. Think Braveheart or Lord of the Rings in album form and you'll get the picture.

Along the way, I noticed that Moonsorrow doesn't deviate from their native Finnish in their lyrics...so I have literally no idea what these songs are about. To be honest, it doesn't matter too much: I normally can't understand a death metal growl, even when the singer is croaking along in English; why should it matter if they're choosing to do in another language? Either way, I'm excited to see these guys next spring.

Rethinking Victory Songs

I was going to use the word "apology" somewhere in the title of this post, but I see that I never bashed Ensiferum (in this blog, anyway) outside of my comments on their Paganfest performance. I've been trying to be more organic in my listening patterns lately, selecting those albums with whatever song has gotten stuck my ear today, rather than forcing myself to listen to something new or relatively new or otherwise not sufficiently explored (have I mentioned I'm a little odd about my music geekery?). This change has resulted in some self-perpetuating selections - I listened to nothing but Ihsahn, Emperor, and Opeth yesterday because I woke up with portions of "Depraved" running through my mind - but it's also led to the resurgence of Ensiferum's most recent album, Victory Songs, in my esteem.

I liked Victory Songs enough to hold on to it after I downloaded it, but at the time, flush with the riches of my post-Paganfest discoveries, I couldn't help but feel that Ensiferum was Turisas-lite. Fast forward to this past Friday, when their album cover jumped out from my iTunes list and I decided to give them a second chance. 50 minutes later, I was a fan: the songs are sufficiently epic, the hooks of tracks like "Ahti," "One More Magic Potion," "Raised by the Sword," and "Victory Song" sufficiently strong, the energy sufficiently infectious to get me bopping around the room, dreaming of sword-in-hand victory. As it turned out, the attraction was strong enough to last several days: when I got to work this morning, "Wanderer" was running its way through my head, setting up a reprise and this blog post. Victory Songs might suffer a bit from overreliance on the same set of tools, but I'm glad I hung on to it.

More Thoughts on Lords of Chaos

Towards the middle of the book the authors interview two men who write for what the book describes as Norway's "cultural newspaper," Morgenbladet: a Satanist of the old (Aleister Crowley-influenced) school and a Christian who writes on theological matters. They were both discussing the rise of the association between Satanism and Black Metal in Norway and had some interesting theories, but what I found resonant enough to write about was their comparisons of Ihsahn and Varg Vikernes; how after speaking with Ihsahn, they both found his beliefs to be far more sophisticated in both their level of development (more because he had abandoned the idea of evil for evil's sake and settled on a philosophy that was pro-Satan and not just anti-Christ) and their desire for elegance. After reading their thoughts, I realized that the same desire for elegant evil was what I find so attractive about Ihsahn's music, both with Emperor and as a solo artist.

I'm a big fan of evil music - if that wasn't obvious from the blog's title - but I also need my evil music cloaked in different forms (which should also be obvious from the blog's title) to keep it interesting. Alternation between different types of metal certainly does the trick, but a closer examination of the albums I come back to time and time - Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, Blackwater Park, Images and Words (to name a few), and more recent additions like angL and Kolossus - reveals a fascination with brutality mixed with elegance. Beat me over the head with high-speed shreds, thunderous bottom ends, and bone-crushing pounding of drums; screech your images of destruction, alienation, and soul-destruction into my ears; put me through the mill of your sonic pain machine, but while you may earn my respect, you'll only win my lasting love if you mix that assault with elegant constructions that emphasize the beauty in your chaos.

Euronymous Was a Huge Douchebag

I'm reading Lords of Chaos, a recounting of the exploits of the Black Metal kids in Norway in the early 90s and their crazy, church-burning ways. The thread of unintentional comedy running through the story is thick with fibers, because these were a group of individuals who took themselves far too seriously. By the time the two journalists wrote the book at the end of the decade, all of the major players (Ihsahn and Samoth of Emperor, Hellhammer - even Varg Vikernes to an extent) had realized most of their views from the time were at best extremely immature, so they spend a lot of time backtracking, but if there was ever a reason not to combine adolescents and celebrity, the whole Black Circle scene exemplifies it to a T.

The one major player who wasn't around to interview in the mid-90s was, of course, Euronymous, who had had the misfortune of getting himself perished. As a result, Lords of Chaos has to rely on existing source documents and the recollections of others for material for their chapter on Euronymous, or - as I like to call it - the Exploration of a Douchebag. Because really, when you come right down to it, that's what the man who, for all intents and purposes, founded the scene really was: a charismatic guy with a lot of extravagant ideas and public persona built on the world's biggest see-through facade. Really, it's a testament to the average Black Metal kid's naivaite that someone didn't stab him sooner, because I can't imagine talking to him for more than few minutes without calling him on all of his bullshit (my favorite story relating to this mismatch between who Euronymous was and who he pretended to be was when he said in a letter that Deicide, Sepultura, and Napalm Death weren't extreme enough and then ended it with a death wish for all trendy people and the word "Aaaaargh!," coming off like a whiny emo kid on a LiveJournal blog). Also, look at this picture: how could you not want to punch him in the face on sight?

I guess the whole reason for this speaking ill of the dead - besides the inspiration garnered from Lords of Chaos - is the sharp contrast between the biographical Euronymous and the Euronymous of my previous experience, taken from interviews with Ihsahn done at the end of the last decade that I read in 2000. The respect Ihsahn had for his late friend was palpable and from his words I developed a mental picture of someone with a far steadier hand and mind than the one I've read about in the past few days.

In Which Ihsahn Becomes My Favorite

While I've written a bit in the past about my love for Emperor, I really haven't said all I should, particularly when it comes to Ihsahn. After years of waiting, I finally got my chance to see Emperor on their reunion tour two years ago, an event that left me drooling at the mouth at the sheer awesomeness of the evening, despite its brevity.

Ihsahn impressed me that night by emanating the sort of evil that you see in creepy psychotics in psychological horror films; more Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter than the cartoonishly garish "evil" represented by black metal bands in corpse paint and spiky armor (although Ihsahn pulled that look off pretty well back in the day, too). It wasn't that I expected him to kill anyone, but more that he looked like someone who could offer intelligent discourse on the aspects of extreme individualism in Satanism and not sound like a douchebag when doing it. He had gravitas.

Anyway, not long after that he released Adversary, which was very good, and now he's just released angL, which defines new levels of awesome and makes me wonder why I thought I could ever write music in the first place (seriously, it's that good. Buy the album and listen to it while driving through some dark, snowy coniferous woods or something similar and discover new emotional depths in your soul. Maybe if enough of us do so, he'll come tour the album in the US and make my year). Today, though...today Ihsahn reached new levels of awesomeness in my esteem.

About a month and a half ago, I had a dream where I hung out with Mike Portnoy, and I woke up wondering what we would have really talked about. Today, I watched the second part of a documentary done by two guys from MetalKult, who flew out to Norway and toured Ihsahn's studio while he explained the uses of each piece of gear. The charismatic front man with the on stage heart of black ice turned into the recording gear geek, talking about how he'd sequenced "Opus a Satana" in Cubase 2 hooked up to a Roland synthesizer because he wanted to learn how to use the equipment, or how the microphone he just bought is a special edition full of tubes they don't make any more. It was glorious, and now I know what we'd talk about if the two of us were ever to grab a beer: we'd geek out about studio equipment.

Live! Tonight! Sell Out!

Going back to the topic I touched on two days ago, let's talk about the other side of the experimentation coin: the all-too-frequent accusation by fans that a band has sold out because they changed their sound.

An example: I was in high school when Metallica released Load. As anyone who follows the band knows, Load marked the culmination of a direction hinted by Metallica, but rendered far more shocking to the metal community by new hair cuts, riffs that were far more hard rock than thrash and Kirk Hammett's incredible collection of facial piercings. The most metal dude I knew at the time (the only metal dude I knew at the time) was a guy named Josh Woodard, a true fan of metal who had hair that hung down his back, a spiked bracelet, wicked shredding ability and an "Up the Irons!" sticker on his guitar. He introduced me to Emperor by playing the opening to Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk over the PA speakers in my school's auditorium, instantly sealing a love for all things black and Norwegian in my heart. After Load came out, such was his outrage that he never referred to Metallica as anything but "Alternica" for the rest of the time I knew him. At the time, I was a callow, inexperienced youth and didn't know enough about either metal or Metallica to recognize a departure when I saw one; later on I became a callow, experienced youth and took up the banner of "they were better before..." and "sell out!" with all of the anger of a disappointed adolescent. Hell hath no self-righteous fury like an idealistic, pig-headed, disappointed teen.

What is selling out? Thus rages the debate. I think Greil Marcus said in Lipstick Traces that selling out as a defamation really took flight with punk rock and the punk movement certainly pushed the concept much further into the consciousness of pop culture, justifying the hanging of anti-heroes with sell out rope with generations of youth rage and idealism. Of course, for all that, there's no official punk rock definition; some might say it's making money off your art, others would draw the line at some level of money making that separates punk bands from rock gods who live in excess, spoiling the purity of the music.

Purity seems to be a strong element, as if the ancient Judeo-Christian customs that glorify the clean and the virgin lurked somewhere in the back of pop culture, affecting even those who scorn them. Purity also means avoiding the dirty taint of the suits who run the music business. Ian MacKaye never sold out in popular opinion because he's embraced DIY and used it to keep the purity of his music, even though he runs a record label. Selling out, therefore, is the destruction of the purity of art through the contamination of money and polluted touch of the profit-oriented hive mind, the classic battle of David (the fans) versus Goliath (big corporate interests). With ideological grounds like these, is it any wonder people get so worked up when they smell sell out?