Metal

[snyprrr]

is that not schlock satanism in spades?

and why is it that satanism is so big in the wealthiest, most progressive & secular society on the planet (norway)?  you could probably write some sociology treatise on the subject, but to me its just stupid

a) there is a great book on the subject,... forget the title (it would've been pretty typical),...mmm.... I think either mid-'90s, or @2001. But, it has a great history, and yes, the clash of religions is there...

Aren't the northern countries Lutheran? Perhaps because of the deadness of the northern religious expression (sorry folks, but don't try to argue for the northern's passionate Christian religious fervor,....
                                                                    uh, please don't take this badly, but this is my experience, that this metal, for instance, is a primal need for passion in a society where, particularly, the Christian tradition manifested in quite a plain, "white" blanket of good manners, and no power. The northerns look back to their earlier, passionate history (Valhalla), and, poof, there you are.



Was it Death, or Cynic? I forget, but, totally awesome music, with CookieMonster singing. At least EVERYBODY knows that it is the "cookie monster" from Sesame Street: hey, you hear that, oh thou growling metal singer???, you sound super silly,...it's not evil at all. If you had any sense, you would have taken a cue from the Exorcist, and multi-tracked your voice in different characterizations, a la King Diamond.



"You Light Up My Life" is sooooooo much more a technically "satanic" song, and I'm not kidding!  "The Greatest Love of All" is "loving yourself", not God. Mainstream pop is just as satanic, steals more souls, has all the satanic slime without the need of "scary" things,...ooooo....satan wears a suit, fellas,...uh, even you metal bands on a major label, hahaha,...yea, right, Jesus is the enemy, haha,...



I always thought that true, Biblical, and powerful, "Christian" music, would be of the metal way. How could it not?  Jesus has eyes of fire and a sword for a tongue!



Has anyone seen the "Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny", and the final metal showdown with the devil. Hahaha, not bad!



And, don't forget Spinal Tap!


Has anybody heard of the heavy metal priest, an old guy in a friar outfit singing with a metal band?

[Renfield]

uh, please don't take this badly, but this is my experience, that this metal, for instance, is a primal need for passion in a society where, particularly, the Christian tradition manifested in quite a plain, "white" blanket of good manners, and no power. The northerns look back to their earlier, passionate history (Valhalla), and, poof, there you are.

I think that's actually a fair assessment of the religious angle.


As for weird vocals, though, have you heard Csihar singing for Mayhem in De Misteriis Dom Sathanas.

No cookie monsters there.

[CD]

I've been listening to quite a bit of Sunn O))) lately and finding it a semi-logical step from the "heavier" wall-of-sound shoegaze stuff I've been listening to for years. Is there any more stuff like this that sort of fills the entire sound spectrum? What I've read about Burzum has sounded interesting but I wonder if a human so thoroughly disgusting can make something of real beauty.

[MN Dave]

Arr. I hear that this be a fine album. 

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Record-Baroness/dp/B002LVS4WM

[CD]

Hm, the bands in the "also bought" section for that album include Isis, Converge and Slayer — i.e. not what I'm looking for (but maybe your post wasn't a response to mine ).

[MN Dave]

Hm, the bands in the "also bought" section for that album include Isis, Converge and Slayer — i.e. not what I'm looking for (but maybe your post wasn't a response to mine ).

Indeed it was not.   

[Renfield]

I've been listening to quite a bit of Sunn O))) lately and finding it a semi-logical step from the "heavier" wall-of-sound shoegaze stuff I've been listening to for years. Is there any more stuff like this that sort of fills the entire sound spectrum? What I've read about Burzum has sounded interesting but I wonder if a human so thoroughly disgusting can make something of real beauty.

Assuming your tastes remain as consistent to those of a very good friend of mine as they've been so far (the same one who originally exposed me to Neutral Milk Hotel, incidentally; and listens to almost everything you listen to that I don't ), I would expect you to find Burzum interesting, but not keep your attention in the long term. Vikernes, sadly, made sure his musical ambitions were stifled when he killed 'Euronymous', despite the latter arguably being much worse than the 18-year-old kid the Vikernes was at the time.

As for me, I go the whole way (Emperor), or not at all (softer metal, rock). Burzum doesn't have a niche to fill.

[CD]

Well I guess I'm not really looking for metal qua metal but more crushingly loud guitars/dark ambient/sound experiments-by-way-of-metal, which could of course lead into more archetypal metal. I've looked for recommendations before but a list of "the greatest black metal albums of all time" is about as useless to me as a list of the all-time top 100 classical compositions. There needs to be a sort of transition with me, otherwise I will drop it fairly quickly — even if I find it interesting.

[Renfield]

Well I guess I'm not really looking for metal qua metal but more crushingly loud guitars/dark ambient/sound experiments-by-way-of-metal, which could of course lead into more archetypal metal. I've looked for recommendations before but a list of "the greatest black metal albums of all time" is about as useless to me as a list of the all-time top 100 classical compositions. There needs to be a sort of transition with me, otherwise I will drop it fairly quickly — even if I find it interesting.

That's pretty much what my friend said, nearly verbatim for the highlighted part.

[greg]

Well I guess I'm not really looking for metal qua metal but more crushingly loud guitars/dark ambient/sound experiments-by-way-of-metal, which could of course lead into more archetypal metal. I've looked for recommendations before but a list of "the greatest black metal albums of all time" is about as useless to me as a list of the all-time top 100 classical compositions. There needs to be a sort of transition with me, otherwise I will drop it fairly quickly — even if I find it interesting.

Um- so you're sort of looking for a metal version of Feldman, except with loud notes?

Have you ever checked out the funeral doom genre? That's more ambient and dark, but it tends to put me to sleep.

Hmm... you really should check out Meshuggah. It obviously has a lot of the first element, but also gorgeous moments of the second two elements. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but maybe somewhat close. I think some of the best examples would be "I" and parts of "Catch 33", such as "In Death Is Death," which tend to be lengthy and feature very jerky rhythms and spaced out-sounding clean passages with just guitars. And I should also mention that most of their music is either atonal or very close to it. 

[MN Dave]

http://www.omvibratory.com/

[Lethevich]

I've been listening to quite a bit of Sunn O))) lately and finding it a semi-logical step from the "heavier" wall-of-sound shoegaze stuff I've been listening to for years. Is there any more stuff like this that sort of fills the entire sound spectrum? What I've read about Burzum has sounded interesting but I wonder if a human so thoroughly disgusting can make something of real beauty.

You might want to try Earth (Sunn started as an Earth tribute band), Nadja, Pelican, Isis, Jesu, Boris (their style varies), Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine.

Burzum is way too normal for this, and often too simplistic. Khanate might work if you want to move into an extreme metallish direction, but no matter how much bands in, say, the black metal genre try, they consistently prove that the style is immune to anything vaguely appreciable on a basis of musical theory - it will always be crude or emptily pretentious, and its fans must either accept that or remain ignorant of it. In a way it's neat, because it totally insulates it from any kind of watering down for popularities sake, as every time that this has been attempted, the genre of the music the band plays has changed. Burning Witch have a similar vocal style to Khanate (I love this song), but this goes quite far into doom territory.

Funeral doom is an option, but I don't think it would be right. It's played at the same tempo, but the aesthetic is very middle-ground extreme metal, and the musicality is kind of in the same situation as bm is, it is limited by the style. Sunn was originally condidered a doom band, in around 2001 before the drone doom genre had been "invented", but they swiftly raised their flag on that mast, and the new scene became a home to a whole lot of already-existing misfit bands such as Reverend Bizarre (trad doom taken incredibly slowly), sludge like Eyehategod, progressive stuff like Neurosis (who were post-metal over 10 years before the term was invented) and the ones I listed in the first sentence. The thing that all these bands have in common is their cross-over appeal - and while a lot of metal fans like them, generally they are equally or more popular with followers of other genres (hardcore, noise rock, 80s/90s experimental like the Swans), meaning that while most of them retain some metal elements, they are so far removed from the rigidity (both musical and aesthetic) of that genre that they cannot function as a suitable gateway into that style, as anything the listener hears will sound like a more primitive version of what they already like.

[CD]

Thanks. Limiting aspects of a genre doesn't bother me, really. I guess at bottom I listen to classical and non classical music for the same reasons, but they're filtered through different "sieves", consciously or unconsciously.

[MN Dave]

So Lethe,

Tell us how you got so into metal, please. 

[Lethevich]

Only if you do too

I initially found everything on the radio that kids my age - and especially girls - were listening to to be vapid, and for some not entirely logical reason this caused me to gravitate towards rock. By then I had gotten into a niche where I saw the guitar quartet as "music",* and found other genres like electro or vocal as somehow trying to evade this kind of musical craft by using electronic "tricks" and also often relying on songwriters more than their own creative talent (this may have been correct for much pop music, but turned out to be dead wrong for anything underground). From rock it was a natural progression - "wow, they use two guitars as well as a bass, that is more complex", and the virtuosity element appealed to me a lot, and as a result I was initially drawn to thrash and progressive metal like Dream Theater. I was also addicted to how objective and structured the genre was - with rock, the guitar could often be irrelevent in some forms, heck, some rock didn't even use guitars.

By then I was pretty much infected beyond the point of return, and gradually grew out of those early genres I enjoyed, and moved onto power metal for my melodic cravings, and the more extreme types for the more "overwhelming" kind of experience. Thanks to early filesharing apps (namely Audiogalaxy, before it went legal) I managed to get a very quick overview within a few years. I was particularly into doom from 2002-2004 because it was such an underground genre at that point. Unlike black metal which had an explosion of new bands after 1997, doom took until the internet became widespread to gain a sizable fanbase, so being able to discover new bands as they were forming was very compelling - especially now many of them have become big names. The more I looked into each style (filesharing being a huge part of this), the more I found a lot to enjoy beyond the "big" names, and I often found myself completely skipping them to mine stranger musical corners. As a result, I only have basic knowledge of the output of Slayer, Helloween, Stratovarius, Metallica, Deicide, etc, despite liking all kinds of unknown crap. Your turn

*This is part of what led me to classical and chamber music.

[MN Dave]

Your turn

Oh, I only dabble. If it sounds similar to Judas Priest, I might like it. Black Sabbath is pretty good too. Grand Magus...

I started listening to harder music after hearing Faith No More. I pretty much scoured the harder genres after that. I was into System of a Down for a minute. However, to make a long story short, most of it ended up sounding like crap to me—especially the extreme stuff--therefore I decided that I only need a handful of bands to scratch that metal itch.

Hard rock is a different story. I'm more of a hard rocker than anything metal. But even more than this, I'm a pop guy. Two things I love in music: melody and/or a sense of humor.

Can you say "Ween"?

[Elgarian]

You might want to try Earth,  Nadja, Pelican, Isis, Jesu, Boris (their style varies), Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine. ... Burzum is way too normal for this, and often too simplistic. ... Khanate might work ... Burning Witch have a similar vocal style ... this goes quite far into doom territory. ... Funeral doom is an option, but I don't think it would be right. ... Sunn was originally considered a doom band ... misfit bands such as Reverend Bizarre ... sludge like Eyehategod ... Neurosis (who were post-metal over 10 years before the term was invented)

This is another of those glimpses into another world, deep in the dark recesses of the mysterious wardrobe. Utterly glorious. I feel like cheering you on. Dammit, I will cheer you on. Huzzah!

[Todd]

It looks like the ultimate metal tour is coming up: http://music-mix.ew.com/2009/12/15/metallica-slayer-anthrax-megadeth-tour/  Probably should have happened twenty years ago.

(Who listens to metal past about age 20-25?  Let's face it, it's not very good music.)

[MN Dave]

(Who listens to metal past about age 20-25?  Let's face it, it's not very good music.)

[CD]

Well, I'm 23, so I have at least two more years before I can "grow out" of it.