Metal Mondays!
So, CJ and I were talking about doing a “Metal Mondays” feature on the blog because… uh… it’ll be fun. And why not, right? I don’t really know what we’re actually supposed to be doing in the space, but I figured I’d kick it off by doing a quick and dirty run-down of some of the different types of heavy metal music that are out there. (Note to any other metalheads reading: this list is not intended to be exhaustive. If I didn’t write about your favorite genre or you think I’m giving short shrift to Vagina Carnage Goresnot or whatever your favorite group is, get over it. I don’t care).
So, if you give two squirts of demon piss about metal, read on. If you don’t, read on anyways, weakling.
The first step to getting to know and love metal is understanding what you’re dealing with, which is why I decided to do a rundown of different genres. Plus, lists are cool. Everyone loves reading lists.
First, we’ll start off with what’s just generally called “heavy metal.” The archetypal heavy metal band is, of course, Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath’s first album came out in the late 60’s and, along with the Velvet Underground’s first album, was pretty much a huge “go fuck yourselves” to the whole peace-and-love bullshit hippie scene. Sabbath wrote about Satan, drug addiction, war, and, of course, weed. Their best album is “Master of Reality.” I’m listening to “Master of Reality” right now. If you don’t own “Master of Reality,” you really should. After four classic albums and a string of not-so-classic albums, Ozzy Osbourne went on to his own solo career and Sabbath put out a trio of fine albums with ex-Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio, who also ended up leaving Sabbath and recording some classic fucking heavy metal.
Other notable heavy metal bands include Judas Priest and Deep Purple. Sometimes Led Zeppelin gets tossed in there, too, but I’ve never really bought that. Still, a lot of the early “heavy metal” stuff was always in between being “hard rock” and what we’d consider “metal” these days, so whatever. It was the 70’s and early 80’s. Shit hadn’t really congealed yet. Think leather, booze, and bikers.
In any case, you should own “Master of Reality.”
Another important development in metal was the emergence of what’s become known as the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM) Iron Maiden is probably the best known example of this style, which is characterized by a markedly less “blues” influence than the early heavy metal bands and (generally) a faster tempo. NWOBHM bands also tended toward a higher level of musicianship than a lot of the older bands. Other NWOBHM bands you might’ve heard of include Motorhead and Venom. A lot of NWOBHM vocalists were, like Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, rather operatic and fucking impressive and rad.
If you need one NWOBHM album, I’d recommend either “Powerslave” or “Number of the Beast” by Maiden, though any of their first like… seven albums or so are pretty golden stuff.
The other big metal movement in the 80’s was, of course, thrash. Thrash was always more aggressive than NWOBHM (though Motorhead was always pretty fucking aggro), and really emphasized speed and technicality. A lot of thrash is heavily influenced by hardcore punk, and there were a number of crossover bands. A current crossover thrash band that’s riding the wave of the recent thrash revival is Municipal Waste. Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer were easily the best known thrash bands, though all of them eventually moved on from the style (though one could make the argument that Slayer has kind of stuck with it to some extent — certainly moreso than the other of the big four). Vocals are all over the place, from Dave Mustaine’s high-pitched whine to Tom Araya’s bark to James Hetfield, whose voice went from being harsh in a cool way to sounding like a shithead cowboy pirate or something.
Any of the first three Metallica albums are classic thrash records, though I’d recommend “Kill ‘Em All” for a good “raw” thrash album.
Where to go from here?
Alright, grindcore. You’ve probably never heard grindcore. You probably never want to. Think of the hardest of hardcore punk bands you can imagine and make them even faster and more brutal, with unintelligible screamed lyrics. Then smash all of that into songs that average about 1 minute long. If that sounds unpleasant and unappealing, then you’ve pretty much got the gist of grind. A lot of the early grind bands, such as Napalm Death (which is probably the first) and Carcass went onto more death metal territory after a few albums, because grind is pretty limited as a genre, with sub-genres like gore-grind and pornogrind being set apart chiefly by their lyrical subject matter. Nevertheless, there are still great grindcore bands out there doing their thing. One of the more famous recently has been Pig Destroyer. I picked up an album by a band called Scrotum Grinder a few weeks ago because it was a grindcore band fronted by a female vocalist. It’s pretty good.
It’s hard to recommend a “definitive” grind album, but Napalm Death’s “Scum” seems as good a place to start as any (since it was kind of the official start of grindcore). That new Pig Destroyer album, “Phantom Limb” is excellent and also readily available, though I don’t think it’s “definitive” by any means.
Since I mentioned death metal, I might as well talk about that next. First and foremost, I’d like to impress upon you the fact that SLAYER IS NOT DEATH METAL. Just so we’re clear on that. Calling Slayer “death metal” is like calling Chuck Berry “psychadelic rock” or something. That said, a lot of Slayer’s lyrical concerns (“Angel of Death” is about Auschwitz) are prevalent in death metal. Dark subject matter, thrash’s technicality and grindcore’s brutality all kind of fed into death metal, and what you got was both one of the most recognizable styles of metal as well as one of the most reviled. Stylistically, death metal is all over the map, with “melodic” death metal arising in Scandinavia and becoming exceedingly popular, to gold-standard death metal groups like Morbid Angel and Deicide coming from Florida, and brutal-as-all-fuck bands like Suffocation coming out of New York. A lot of death metal groups utilize the famous “cookie-monster” vocals, and many (but not all) eschew conventional song structures, preferring a continuous narrative to a verse-chorus-verse structure.
Furthermore both death metal and grindcore make extensive use of what’s known as a “blast beat”, which is basically a fast 8th note pattern on the snare and drums. It sounds simple enough, but it makes shit sound tough and doesn’t sound at all like a rock beat. So whatever.
You should check out “Blessed are the Sick” by Morbid Angel or “Effigy of the Forgotten” by Suffocation for good examples of death metal. Then compare it to “Seasons in the Abyss” or whatever by Slayer and tell me you think Slayer sounds like death metal.
On, then, to black metal. Black metal’s probably my favorite style of metal. It arose as something of a reaction to the ridiculous technicality of death metal, and found its inspiration in bands like Venom (who we’ve already mentioned as an example of NWOBHM) and Celtic Frost, who were an amazingly inventive dark thrash group who killed their reputation by putting out a super commercial, super lame album (it’s called “Cold Lake,” don’t buy it). Anyways, one of the first black metal groups was really a one-man project (one man bands are very common in black metal) called Bathory. Bathory, though, moved on from black metal and put out some crappy thrash albums and invented Viking metal (which we won’t really get into here) before Quorthon died of some sort of heart failure. As I said, black metal largely rejected a lot of the technicality of death metal, and focused more on conjuring up a very dark and evil, grim and frostbitten sort of atmosphere. Black metal vocals tend to be high-pitched shrieks, gurgles, and whispers, as opposed to death metal’s “cookie monster” vocals, and black metal musicians, as you can see, often wear “corpse paint” to make themselves look… well… like corpses.
In any case, the black metal band you’ve probably heard of is Mayhem, since they were involved in all sorts of murders and church burnings (though most of that was carried out by part-time bassist Varg Vikernes, who recorded under the band name Burzum, though Burzum was another one-man project). Other big-name black metal groups aside from Mayhem and Burzum include Immortal (pictured above, and whom are pretty much the best fucking thing ever), Darkthrone, Dissection (who are also about the best fucking thing ever, except for their last album, which sucked and after which the frontman killed himself), and Emperor.
While death metal has lent itself to crossovers with genres like industrial (think: Fear Factory), black metal has successfully adapted itself to incorporate a lot of symphonic elements (think: Dimmu Borgir) and folk elements (Ulver’s “Bergtatt” and Dissection’s “Storm of the Light’s Bane” both utilize a lot of acoustic guitar).
I could hardly begin to name a single “necessary” black metal album, so I’ll name a few: Darkthrone’s “A Blaze in the Northern Sky,” Mayhem’s “Live at Leipzig” (with original vocalist Dead who is now… dead), the aforementioned “Storm of the Light’s Bane” by Dissection, and “Eld” by Enslaved (which also drinks deep from the well of Viking metal) are all outstanding black metal albums.
Phew. This post is getting fucking long, so I’ll just outline a couple more.
Doom metal, of course, can’t be ignored. The aforementioned “Master of Reality” by Black Sabbath is basically the blueprint for doom metal. Blunted riffs, slow tempos, and a general worshiping at the altar of Tony Iommi is the name of the game for doom metal. Great for listening to when you’re intoxicated one way or another, a lot of doom metal is actually pretty accessible, especially if you’re used to stoner rock like Clutch or bands like Queens of the Stone Age. Like I said, the name of the game is “SLOW”, and some doom has evolved into hip-as-shit “drone” metal (next time you hear some hipster kid starts talking about metal, chance are he’ll be talking about SunnO))) or some other drone-y sort of band like Jesu or something). SunnO))) (named after Sunn amps, and a play on the name to the band Earth, to which they formed in tribute), for instance, is known for slowing their riffs down to the point where you can’t even tell they’re riffs anymore, just drone-y, distorted waves of sound. It’s cool as all fuck, really, but you’ve really gotta listen to “The Forest of Equilibrium” or “The Ethereal Mirror” by Cathedral or “Sleep’s Holy Mountain” or “Dopesmoker” by Sleep. Sleep, for those interested, broke up and the members formed High on Fire, who’re big news right now, and Om, who themselves just broke up, but not before putting out the album “Pilgrimage”, which sounds like if you took Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” drew it out to about a half hour, and threw in some heavy riffage in the middle. Fuck. Yeah.
Sample lyrics from Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” (which is a song that clocks in around one hour): “Drop out of life with bong in hand/Follow the smoke to-uh the riff-filled land/ *GUITAR SOLO* /Proceeds the Weedian/Nazareth.
Indeed.
Finally, I’m gonna talk a little about power metal. I used to be a lot more into power metal than I am now, but it’s ultra-cheese factor means I’m not pulling “Nightfall in Middle Earth” off the shelf too often. Power metal is all about like… demons and wizards (in fact, there’s a band called Demons & Wizards), hobbits, Gandalf, and like… other sorts of weird fantasy things. A lot of bands, like Iced Earth and Blind Guardian, are heavily influenced by thrash. Dragonforce is influenced by video game music. The lead singer to Cellador is operatic like Bruce Dickinson (a good thing). Power metal bands love technicality and revel in amazing production. If you think Dragonforce is cool, then you should check out other power metal bands. They never get really brutal and most of them are fun and accessible. But cheesy. Really, really cheesy.
So there you have it. My quick and dirty run-down of different kinds of metal. Sure, I could’ve talked about Dillinger Escape Plan or Lamb of God or Godflesh or whatever, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve got a headache and have been hammering away at this thing for awhile now, and I’d like to have some dinner.
Metal Mondays have been officially kicked off. Whatever form they end up taking, now you’ll have some kind of lexicon for talking about heavy metal with people. It’s a valuable skill. Just remember the 3 take-home points here:
1) You need “Master of Reality” by Black Sabbath.
2) Slayer is not death metal.
3) Proceeds the Weedian. Nazareth.
