Obituary - Cause of Death

As far as I can remember, Obituary's Cause of Death is the only album in my collection that I intentionally got rid of, and then bought again.  Their World Demise album was one of my very first death metal albums and it was something of a revelation at the time.  The fuzzy guitars, the vocals that sounded like a cross between growling and vomiting.  I remember getting into it in middle school and coming in to tell my friend excitedly.  His response was simple: "I didn't see that one coming".  I think it was obvious that I was heading down the path of brutality.

I eventually picked up this album, since it was without question the most revered Obituary release, and supposedly a death metal classic.  It didn't do much for me though.  In the time between my purchase of World Demise and Cause of Death, I had become a more educated metal fan.  I had discovered Opeth, late period Death, and Meshuggah.  Obituary just seemed totally boring and simplistic.  I think my general sentiment was this: Obituary has one of the greatest vocalists in death metal.  Too bad it's wasted on such boring music.

Flash forward 9 years and I now consider this album one of the essential death metal releases, at least to the point of buying another copy.  In some ways my perception of Cause of Death hasn't really changed that much.  I still think the vocals are the most noteworthy thing about the sound, and I still think the music is fairly standard.  It's just that my values have completely changed.  

For a good six years, the crux of my musical taste evolved according to the notion that metal was a genre that could be just as respectable, artistic, and proficient as any other style of music.  I made forays into other "adventurous" genres of music; I made parallels to other visceral styles.  And somewhere in there I think that the pure feeling of glee at hearing a grown man puke into a microphone was beaten down.

In the last couple years I have apparently come full circle.  In my current estimation, the immediacy of the drumming, the jagged distortion of the guitar, the primal screaming - these things define value in death metal far more than the intricate and analytical progressions of an album like Individual Thought Patterns.  And in that regard Cause of Death has gained considerable ground.  In a phase of life where I wanted metal to withstand the scrutiny of (popular) critical opinion, the vocals could hold no greater status than a superfluous, if amusing, ornament.  But in the sense that death metal's value is derived from its raw intensity, what could be more crucial than throat ripping vocals?  

It's not that I no longer believe in the capability of death metal to be ambitious in scope and musicality.  But to downplay the aesthetic aspect of the music is to ignore the most blatant point of all: nobody listens to this stuff if they don't enjoy, on some level, the sound of musical chaos and aggression.

It’s a natural tendency to want others to respect your musical taste, and I wonder to what extent that drives many people to “grow out” of metal when the capacity to enjoy it never really left.  But maybe what I’m talking about is really just the self-imposed repression of being an adult.  My friend Vinay used to talk about this a lot.   Most people never stop liking many of the things that kids enjoy, like running around outside.  Adults only run around after assigning the behavior a constructive purpose and putting on clothes which signify that the behavior is non-threatening.  How very un-metal.

That was off-topic, but the point is that I think I had to come to terms with the fact that my musical taste is completely unjustifiable to the majority of reasonable adults before I could fully re-immerse myself in the world of unapologetic, zero-crossover appeal death and black metal.  And it’s significant because I truly believe that that’s the form of metal which has the most artistic significance (despite most critics thinking the opposite).  As I’ve alluded to before in this blog, if the value of a work of metal is derived from its crossover elements, then the entire genre becomes the musical equivalent of the WWF – a soap opera with just enough gleaming muscle to achieve male legitimacy.

In retrospect, I think the point when I stopped caring about justifying my musical taste to others coincided pretty closely with the point when I began identifying myself much more with my work.  In the first couple years of college, I know of at least one instance when I verbally referred to myself as a “metalhead who did engineering”.  Needless to say I would never think that way now.

To summarize, Cause of Death is pretty good.

Megadeth - Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?

It's safe to say that I was a pretty big Megadeth fan back in high school.  I owned every album they had released, except for Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?, which I only had a burned copy of.  The first album had been remastered in 2001, and somewhere in there I had obtained a copy of both the original and the reissue.  They were easily my favorite band, so in 2004 when Dave Mustaine decided to release remixed and remastered versions of albums #2-#8 (along with MD.45's The Craving), I did what any reasonable fan would do.  I went out and bought all 8 albums the day they came out.  I even saved the receipt for a while as a token of my fanboyism - I think I spent something like $90.  On albums I already had.  (Except for The Craving).  Only the first few really warranted a remaster at all, but the spines of the eight made the face of Vic Rattlehead when you put them together, and it just looks stupid if you only have half of his face sitting there on your bookshelf (exactly the reason why I can never buy Iron Maiden's Powerslave unless it has catalogue number RAW CD 131 - those dudes have released about 10 versions of everything and two of the reissue series have made the face of Eddie, but not compatibly - a fact I wish I knew before I bought Somewhere in Time and totally screwed up the middle of his face).

I guess I don't regret buying the whole set, because it was the ultimate display of my badass metal fandom, but I've since come to the conclusion that the reissues pretty much suck.  From Countdown to Extinction onwards, it doesn't really matter.  The drums are punchier, the tone is thicker, whatever.  But Peace Sells and So Far, So Good...So What! were the pinnacle of 80's thrash.  They were written by a heroine addict who was so drugged out that he got kicked out of Metallica and made his band with the sole intent of being heavier and faster than them.  And I think that general vibe shines through the original albums.  

More generally though, the sound of thrash is intimately tied to late 80's production values.  I hated Testament's First Strike Still Deadly, I hate all 21st century retro thrash, and I hate these remasters.  When you listen to classic thrash albums, I think the hardcore/punk roots are clearly there, and along with it comes a visceral immediacy that made the music so great.  Remaster them 15 years later, and you are layering on aesthetic sensibilities that don't reflect the original era - loud bass, punchy drums - things that accent the thickness and crunch which is characteristic of modern metal and not the blurred out speed of the original sound.  I'm sure it seems counterintuitive, but albums like Peace Sells actually sound more aggressive to me with their original thin production.

But beyond the general points, I think it's problematic to have an artist remixing his own work 15+ years after the fact.  You've got Mustaine sitting their at the knobs, in a phase of his career where he's making crap music which he probably thinks is good, and making "improvements" to his classic work.  I am definitely not one to say that the artist knows best - some of my favorite albums (like None so Vile or Transilvanian Hunger) were almost certainly brilliant despite their creators lack of artistic vision.  Lord Worm said they were drunk the entire recording of NSV, and Fenriz thinks their early material was easy to write and that their current stuff is better music.  Most of the time, metal needs that youthful abandon to be truly definitive, and maturity obviously doesn't do people like Mustaine any favors.  

So the point is, I may not like remasters to start with, but a remix is just blasphemous to me.  Listen to the riff of "The Conjuring" for example, after that shout of "Obey!".  That riff was not all stacatto like that, all the reverb was taken off.  It sounds way crappier to me.  And it's changing history.

It probably sounds like I'm latching on to trivial things out of some irrational commitment to the originals, but that really isn't it, and here's my evidence:  perhaps my favorite metal album of all time, Sepultura's Beneath the Remains.  I left it in my friend's car in high school, and after several weeks I got back the disc, but the case and artwork were gone for good.  I just couldn't have that, so I bought the remaster.  This was a point in my life when I assumed that remasters were always better (exactly the reason that I bought the whole Megadeth set).  For a year or two, I just listened to the remastered BTR, but it never really grabbed me anymore.  It was nothing conscious, I just assumed that I didn't like it as much as I used to.  But after gradually realizing that the Megadeth remasters sucked through side by side comparison, it dawned on me that this was the problem.  I went back to the original BTR, and it returned to its rightful place as one of my favorite albums, and has remained there.

I guess this shows how large a role aesthetics plays for me in thrash metal (and that goes for death and black metal as well).  This wouldn't really help my case if I were trying to convince an outsider of the genre's merit, but it really is true.

Long story short, after 7 years I've filled in the hole in my collection of two-copies-each of the first 8 Megadeth albums.  All because the other day I was listening to the album for the first time in a year or two, for the first time ever on a decent pair of headphones.  It was like hearing it for the first time, and it was amazing.  So I thought what the hell, I'll shell out the $8 for a non-remastered version of one of the best metal CD's ever recorded.  Why not.  It's just a shame that future metal fans will grow up on an inferior version of these classics (and don't even get me started on Rust in Peace - rerecorded vocals, it's too painful for words).  I guess they won't know the difference, but that doesn't make it easier to live with.

P.S.  The new version also deleted the words "Vic Realtors" from the For Sale sign on the cover.  Sure it was cheesy, but it's history!  You can't rewrite it!

Samael - Ceremony of Opposites

I've had Ceremony of Opposites for a long time.  This is a relic of the good old days when I would walk to the mall with friends and buy any album I could find by a metal band I had vaguely heard of.  Most of those albums have been sold on ebay by now, but a few turned out to be pretty good.  And nearly 10 years later, when I finally got into black metal, this one turned out to be one of the best.

Most of my blog posts are about albums which I've only recently heard.  But this post was inspired by a particular memory of my middle school life.  As soon as I put this album on, I am brought back to the guest bedroom at my grandmother's house.  It was one particular time, I was staying there and listening to this album.  It just stuck with me unexplicably.  That happens occasionally - I also have a memory of one particular Napalm Death cd which I was listening to at one particular intersection in Maine.  Weird how that works.

It seems pretty ridiculous that I own an album which depicts Jesus bleeding from his skull, and I associate it with sleeping at my grandmother's house.  Clearly this is the album responsible for my atheism.  Actually, at the time that I bought this, I was still heavily influenced by my Catholic upbringing.  One of the last songs had the lyrics "I spit at your god's face, I piss on the cross, I vomit on the holy bible, I shit on the blessed whore and her bastard son".  I was legitimately traumatized.  I think it turned me off of the album for a while.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here.  I've been drinking a little bit and I don't feel like writing this anymore.  The album fucking owns.  Ben and Antonia should listen to it.  The end.

Agalloch - Marrow of the Spirit

A letter from John to the Beninthians:

Before hearing this, the idea of a new Agalloch CD held a similar status in my mind to a new Katatonia CD.  I expected it to be a proficient example of modern, melodic, arguably overproduced metal.  Something that I would get a lot of enjoyment out of listening to for the first several spins, but which I would ultimately view as little more than the metal version of a pop album.  As much as I enjoy Ashes Against the Grain or Night is the New Day every time I listen to either of them, I don't sense much ambition in the music beyond being metallic ear-porn.  So I wasn't even in a hurry to download Marrow of the Spirit when it first leaked, and the decidedly mixed reactions I read online only supported my prejudice.

Luckily I was wrong about this thing.

From the opening drum roll of "Into the Painted Grey", this album took me by surprise.  If there was one word that came to mind to describe that opening, it was the word "awkward".  The timing seemed just plain wrong - and in a completely superficial way, I loved it.  Like every other crossover death or black metal band to use clean vocals and acoustic guitars in the last 10 years, Agalloch has garnered their share of Opeth comparisons.  But the unapologetic stream of blastbeats that followed had me thinking more about Darkthrone.  And that's the last thing I thought would happen.

Regardless of its role in the unfolding of metal history in 2010, I think I would find Marrow of the Spirit to be an enjoyable album.  Yet I've noticed an unintentional running theme of Opeth bashing in my blog, and my one reader may have noticed it as well.  In the same way that Opeth is coming to symbolize the destruction of extreme metal in my narrative, Marrow is the Messiah.  In the early 90's, they were working alongside my other favorites like Dark Tranquillity and Amorphis to take the death metal template and expand it into something that could transcend the genre, while retaining its original spirit.  And we were graced with classics like My Arms, Your Hearse, The Gallery, and Tales from the Thousand Lakes.  But for nearly 10 years now, all of these bands have been churning out increasingly streamlined, proficient, and perhaps worst of all, critically acclaimed albums.

The problem with critical acclaim is that, while these bands have (to varying degrees) ostensibly brought some legitimacy to the genre, they sacrifice the immediacy and aggression that were initially its hallmark.  I remember one significant moment when I played Immortal's Battles in the North for an indie-listening friend.  He seemed shocked to hear the unapologetic, sloppy fury coming out of my speakers.  A (no doubt well intentioned) metal-listening friend had convinced him that metal was essentially beautiful music, but distorted.

Isn't that what all of these recent Opeth albums are about after all?  Beautiful music, distorted?  That's fine in its place, but it's worrying to think that this could be the only form of metal with any lasting critical or popular recognition.  A style of music which is just like "normal", but with distortion, seems like the definition of a superficial and useless style.  If extreme metal has any significance at all, it's because its fundamental rejection of popular notions of taste, melody, and structure are philosophically sound - not simple stylistic trappings to be shed away with maturity.  Or as Napalm Death said on the most commercial album of their career, Words from the Exit Wound:  "If maturity wipes the slate carefree, keep me infantile".

So, the point of that long-winded, self-indulgent blog post is that Agalloch has taken their position as critical-darlings of post-metal, and used it to affirm a lot of the things that I love about black metal.  A drummer that uses exhausting, tasteless blast sessions and awkwardly jagged fills as a stylistic device to preserve the immediacy of the music while displaying just enough proficiency to signify that he's doing it on purpose.  An organic production that celebrates natural distortion and noise instead of compressing everything into a synthetic, lifeless block.   

To me, Marrow of the Spirit is easily the most dynamic thing that Agalloch has done, and hopefully it will convince some people that metal is more than just normal music, mandated by testosterone to sound like cookie monster.

Annwn Revisited

This blog started with my attempt to discuss Ocrilim's Annwn, but I realized in the process that I wasn't going to even start to understand the album by just letting it play while creating the blog.  Since that time, I've played it 4 or 5 times while working in the lab.  A decent amount of the time, my lab activities don't require much of my attention - I'll set up the experiment, and then have periods of 5 minutes while I wait for the system to take the data, then make a small adjustment and do it again.  Also, there is a lot of low frequency noise from the equipment.  The bulk of the action on this album is in the higher registers, but of course that makes it an incomplete listening experience.  In this environment, Annwn works pretty well.  The activity keeps the music from ever getting monotonous, but when I do focus on it, it's complexity makes it very interesting and keeps me from getting bored during the tedious parts of my work.  So I guess I could describe Annwn as great background music...for the demented.

Today was the first time I ever sat down and listened to the album in its entirety.  That's 80 minutes of nothing but 7 tracks of distorted guitar and bass playing abstract compositions.  According to the CD case, there are two bass tracks, 2 lead guitar, and 3 main guitar tracks.  Most of the time the music is so complicated that I can't pick out the individual lines, and even when it slows down everything seems to just blur into one pulsating wall of sound.  I could definitely pick out 1 bass and 3 guitar lines at various points, but I certainly could never differentiate more than that.  I don't think it's necessary or even desirable for the listener to be able to do this, but it makes it all the more unfathomable that Mick Barr can compose this stuff.

For the first couple tracks, I was flying through this without a problem.  Part 1 is my favorite track on the album at this point (and also the one I know the best), and Part 2 had me in awe of the brilliance of Mick's playing.  But each track seemed to over stay its welcome a bit after the 10 minute mark, and by the time Part 3 rolled up, the introspection kicked in.  Why do I listen to stuff like this?  There's still an hour left.  Can I survive that?  Thankfully it was only a momentary weakness, because by Part 4 my strength was largely back.  There was only one point when my mind wandered to something completely different, and that was the end of Part 6.  So I guess I survived.

Part 1 exemplifies what I like most about this album.  It starts with each instrument repeating a single note at the same speed, but each instrument is picking the note rapidly so the sound kind of pulses, and it's a really interesting noise.  There are various points throughout the album where a certain sound is sustained like that, but Part 1 is the only track that builds the entire piece around it.  The sound seems to swell at times.  I don't know if it's the strings bending or what, but it's great.  This sustained sound has a kind of ambience, and it is periodically interrupted by bouts of Mick's traditional Orthrelm-style shredding.  The shredding reappear more and more frequently as the song progresses, until it completely takes over.  This interplay is one of the only times in the album where it's pretty easy to see the structure of the song.  For some reason, though, there is a point after this where it sounds like the track should logically end, but it continues in a seemingly unrelated way.  Maybe Barr just couldn't stand to make such a linear track.  Or maybe I haven't listened to it enough to see the connection.

A number of tracks on the album have sections where everything slows down and the music becomes more ambient, and those are the parts that grab me the most.  For one thing, they always act as a release since Barr's shredding can really numb your mind after a while.  But I also just think it's interesting that he's able to create ambience by layering all these heavily distorted electric guitars over one another.  It's hard to hear exactly what he's doing that's creating the effect.  

I think it was really helpful that I had let the album wash over me several times before trying to focus on it for 80 minutes, because most of the songs have what I'll loosely call a hook which, if you recognize them, help provide some sort of reference in the general cacophony.  Occasional riffs even seem to have an emotional arc to them, similar to some of the catchy yet undeniably-Barr riffs in Krallice songs.  The funny thing is, these riffs don't seem to occupy any preferential position in the songs.  It's as if it's only by chance that they are less mechanical and alien than the other guitar lines.  And that kind of sums up the question that the listener has during the bulk of the album.  Does any of this mean anything?  Is this a purely experimental exercise meant to inform Barr's future playing, or is it intended to be an actual listening experience?  Barr has said in an interview that he wouldn't care about his music if he wasn't the one playing it.  Sure, that may be nothing but self-deprecation, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't really pay any attention to how a listener would experience this record.

The only thing that changed this perception was Part 7.  I was fully expecting the album to end completely uneventfully, in the same way the previous 75 minutes had progressed, as if to say "I didn't tell you to sit through this".  But that's not what happens.  Part 7 is by far the most accessible and melodic song on the album.  As I result, I actually think it's one of the less interesting, but it sends an important message from Barr.  "I know that this album hasn't been the easiest to sit through.  But yes, I really do know what I'm doing.  Come back for more".

I think I will be.

Disillusion - Back to Times of Splendor

Back to Times of Splendor was the debut album from the German band Disillusion.  It was released back in 2004, but I only finally picked it up this year after hearing great things about it.  The timing worked out well, because I needed a good "progressive metal" fix after the massive disappointment of the new Orphaned Land disc (2004's Mabool being probably the best progressive metal album ever as far as I'm concerned).

The progressive metal label is kind of a misnomer a lot of the time.  I'm willing to bet that for 90% of metal fans, the first band that comes to mind is Opeth, and the general sentiment would be that their later discs are the most progressive of all.   But the term "progressive" was initially applied in the late 60's or early 70's to describe bands who took the basic instrumentation and stylistic devices of rock and brought them into a different context with the intention of creating something greater.  To me, that's what defines progressive music - working from the template of one genre, but reinterpreting the style to create something new.  In that sense, the ultimate progressive metal would be something like Gorguts' From Wisdom to Hate.  It's not avant-garde, despite what people may say - structurally, the songs are not far removed from conventional metal.  But it is undeniably progressive; there isn't a single element that is uncommon in metal, but the end result is something unique.  Yet I'm not holding my breathe for Gorguts to come up in a discussion of progressive metal anytime soon.  

So what's so progressive about Opeth anyway?  They combine metal with some other influences, but it tends to be in alternating passages.  With the exception of a few isolated instances, during the metal passages things stay fairly conventional.  Incorporating a few different styles into your sound is all well and good, but does nothing to progress the metal genre itself.  The problem, of course, is that "progressive rock" became a genre with just as many stylistic cliches as any other, and then the progressive adjective became used in reference to the cliches instead of the original intent of the music.  

What this long-winded discussion is leading to, of course, is the question of whether Back to Times of Splendor is actually progressive.  I'm voting yes, because of the bands ability to incorporate riffing from disparate metal styles, turning something that you thought was completely annoying into something very effective.  Take for example the pre-chorus riff in "And the Mirror Cracked".  It's a textbook example of this terribly overused melodic death/metalcore riffing style which usually makes me scream in pain, yet in this context it works perfectly.  Or in the second track, when the guitarist rocks on the harmonic - I thought only nu-metal guitarists did that?  Disillusion seems to disregard metal stylistic boundaries altogether - you'll hear straight up thrash metal beats or even blast beats in certain areas.  Yet somehow the whole thing retains a cohesive sound.

But forget all of that, because the songs are just damn catchy in the first place.  There's so much going on that you keep hearing new things even on the 8th listen, but at the same time there are enough vocal hooks to draw you in on the first listen.  Although I'll admit, on first listen I wasn't quite sold on the vocal delivery, or what I still consider to be a slightly awkward transition to the chorus on the first track - the only part of the album that I could even remotely complain about.  But now that I'm used to it, it honestly doesn't detract from the song.

I feel slightly bad for crapping on Opeth so much, because I do like the band, but basically everything Opeth does that I hate, Disillusion does the opposite.  Sure, Mikael Akerfeldt is a better singer than Disillusion's Vurtox (hey, I don't make this stuff up), but he certainly doesn't let you forget it either.  Ok, I got the message on Still Life; you've got the pipes of an angel.  Now do something interesting already.  The vocal delivery on Back to Times of Splendor couldn't be more varied short of some King Diamond-style wailing.  And then the other thing.  Everything on the last 5 or so Opeth albums sounds so damn perfect that I just wish they would take a risk or make a mistake.  And every second is so self-consciously proficient.  The playing on Back to Times of Splendor is unbelievable across the board, but it never sounds like they're playing a clinic.  The production probably helps with this - everything comes across clearly and sounds great, but it's not overly processed, which is something I really can't stand about a lot of prog-metal.

I mentioned the disappointment of the new Orphaned Land.  Basically everything I hate about Opeth, Orphaned Land decided to do.  Go figure it was produced by Steven Wilson.  He got bitten by the Opeth bug a few years ago, and now he's messing with Orphaned Land.  Where will it end?

Apparently Disillusion released a follow up to this album entitled Gloria, but it's in a completely different style.  I'm excited to check that one out as well.  I'm sure it will be interesting if nothing else. 

Disembowelment - Transcendence into the Peripheral

Transcendence into the Peripheral is one of those albums that I've been hearing about for years and periodically picked up and thought about buying whenever I was in a store.  It was released in 1993, basically the golden year of death metal, and came out on Relapse back when virtually everything they released was cool (as opposed to now, where it's all trendy sludge metal with the token generic deathgrind band).  I've always heard it described as a classic.  Disembowelment is one of these bands who are popular enough that most people know of them, but obscure enough that you get some points if you name drop it.  Basically I was positive that this album would be awesome.

Well, listening to this I think I can see why it has some cult status, but I can also see why it wasn't legitimately popular.  Disembowelment was a band that seemed to have a fair amount of creativity and obviously had a good idea of the general sound and atmosphere they wanted to create.  The music is mostly crushingly slow, doomy death metal with the occasional grinding section thrown in.  This is interspersed with melodic, effects laden guitar lines giving the whole doomy affair a transcendent quality (OK, I went there).  

This can be kind of a challenging listen since a good portion of the album is painfully slow (particularly "A Burial at Ornans"), and because of that I still don't know if something about the music will click as I keep listening to it.  But as of now, I can say that while the band has a fairly distinct and deliciously heavy old-school sound, some of the execution seems a bit lacking.  For one thing, the actual death and doom riffs are fairly generic.  The clean guitar work seems to make the songs more interesting, but when you listen to what's actually being played, it's generally a simple melodic line repeated over and over.  

As for the drumming, none of it sounds particularly proficient either.  However, I happen to be a firm believer in the idea that a bit of slop in the drumming can be beneficial for certain more visceral types of death or black metal.  Take the most doomy sections of Transcendence.  The drumming sounds positively lethargic, which is exactly what the music requires.  I wonder if a highly trained drummer would even be capable of playing such parts.  It seems like the temptation to throw in something technical or musically interesting would be too great.  And if Disembowelment succeeds at cultivating any sort of atmosphere with their music, it's one that would be destroyed by a jazzy fill.

At the end of the day, I like the sound these guys create, but it can't completely hold my interest.  I know I complained about the simplicity of some of the guitar lines, but I think if the overall package was drawing me in I could easily ignore these things - it's not as if simplicity is bad in and of itself.  It just may be that I'm not enough of a doom fan to fully appreciate this at the moment.  Time will tell.