Deafheaven

At least we can rely on them for a good thread, though

I stumbled across this quote from a user review at Metal Archives that struck me as relevant. It's actually about Agalloch, but says:

"One of black metal’s better points was the way it managed to be both artistic in spite of being thoroughly nonacademic -– it was primal as fuck and rather silly but nevertheless articulate -- and managing to blow off or ignore most of what makes radio music sound like it was poured into a mold before release. But it seems to be a continuing theme, especially recently, that the bands in the “metal scene” most frequently praised for their artistry and creativity are the ones who back away from the murkiness of underground metal and move back towards the mainstream’s idea of what artistic music sounds like."

What do you think of this quote, Dominique? (It seems very obviously problematic to me.)

Depends on who's doing the praising. You could record the best and most innovative Death Metal album ever, but it won't get you reviewed on Pitchfork or get you a high Metacritic score. Write a competent metal album that crosses over with shoegaze, indie folk, post-punk or stadium rock, and you will.

The whole review is actually more problematic.

Tension between staying pure to a genre and looking outward for ideas is terribly old (see Dylan/Miles/James Brown/etc). The more problematic thing to me is the automatic conveyance of musical "progress" because a record references acceptable canon or some conventional musicality, but I don't think that applies really to Deafheaven (let alone Agalloch).

I'll only get worried when metal bands start talking about making their sgt pepper.

The quote, especially the last sentence, seems to invite some basic questions. What does "mainstream" mean here? Sales among the general public? Reviews in the music press? Academic esteem? Industry awards? These are all different things. What is "the mainstream's idea of what artistic music sounds like"? Beethoven? Miles Davis? Dark Side of the Moon? Bob Dylan? James Brown? The Clash? Tupac Shakur? Nirvana? Robert Johnson? Adele? Brian Eno? All of these have received canonization as great artists in one way or another. Is epic progressive metal or post-rock really "the mainstream's idea of what artistic music sounds like"?

(Ha, I'd typed this out before I saw your post that referenced some of the same artists.)

xpost

I'll only get worried when metal bands start talking about making their sgt pepper.

oh you will not be worried mister, you'll make a poll of metal sgt pepperses and be stoked. (sc. smiley-face here)

Seems like a lot of black metal was/is just as formulaic as "radio music"

Well, yeah, I really don't think Agalloch or even Deafheaven are guilty of applying 2010s 'radio music' formulae to metal.

It's just a preference of formulae when you get right down to it.

i hate sgt pepper so i wont

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMfSKr1cVkY

Ska/crust punk/black metal/reggae band, Leper from Canada. Wild and Free off the End Progress album.
download album at
http://moshpittragedy.com/info-leper.php

http://i.imgur.com/prrCn9r.jpg

The quote, especially the last sentence, seems to invite some basic questions. What does "mainstream" mean here? Sales among the general public? Reviews in the music press? Academic esteem? Industry awards? These are all different things. What is "the mainstream's idea of what artistic music sounds like"? Beethoven? Miles Davis? Dark Side of the Moon? Bob Dylan? James Brown? The Clash? Tupac Shakur? Nirvana? Robert Johnson? Adele? Brian Eno? All of these have received canonization as great artists in one way or another. Is epic progressive metal or post-rock really "the mainstream's idea of what artistic music sounds like"?

i think i get where the quote is coming from, though you have to see through the phrasing. early 90's norge blackness typically issued from a position of aggressive outsider-dom. fuck you. you think music should sound good? you think it should be played and recorded well? fuck you. you want it to be available in stores? to be morally defensible? to have "artistic quality"? fuck you. the extremity of that positioning gave it strength and character, helped cement its enduring artistic legacy. almost anything else becomes "mainstream" relative to that kind of self-imposed alienation, including all points on the beethoven to eno continuum. there's a reason black metal was early adopted by noise peoples, those listening to whitehouse & merzbow.

http://i.imgur.com/ErB5lUW.jpg

In 7th grade (1998 or so?) we heard that song "Saddam A-Go-Go" by Gwar. It had horns so I was like "it's death ska." My friend Adam went quiet, got seriously mad at me, and eventually barked "it's like you're making fun of ska!" We're not friends these days.

Depends on who's doing the praising. You could record the best and most innovative Death Metal album ever, but it won't get you reviewed on Pitchfork

To be fair, this isn't really true anymore, to P-fork's credit.

Honest question bc I don't know the answer: would a 10 from pfork help or hurt the most innovative death metal album ever among the metal crowd

Obviously, the metal crowd here is open minded and would not backlash

hard to say. sunbather got an 8.9, bnm this year, while gorguts' colored sands got an 8.2. the moderate praise doesn't seem to have hurt the latter's metal cred. so far as i can tell, i'm the only one around here backlashing, and i'm doing that by trying as hard as i can to understand it.

۩ is 41??

Welcome to ILX Deafheaven

yeah I gotta say Pitchfork reviews an assload of metal these days of all kinds, so I don't see that there's a repressive tolerance vibe about picking the approachable thing and celebrating it to the exclusion of stuff that is more centrally within-genre, over all. But full disclosure: I contributed to the Show No Mercy roundup of metal for this year and had Deafheaven in there, along with Noisem and Locrian and Cultes Des Ghoules and un-metal outliers like Brainbombs

to have "artistic quality"? fuck you.

Is this true though? I was just reading this book Precious Metals a comp of Decibel columns where bands discuss the making of extend metal classic. Obv lots of classic black metal. They all sounded like they had artistic goals and ways they approached writing music very deliberately. Feels like ppl project a lot of noble savage bullshit on to them

Also there were also mentioned in some entries the bands being excited to have the budget to go to a "real" studio

yeah it's obvious to me that the posturing of a lot of early black metal came from not having the resources/exposure to do more. of course you're gonna defend your horrible-sounding recordings if you don't have the capability record anything that sounds better.

I don't think the band's opinions about artistic quality are necessarily the same as trve metal fans in this case.

i meant "artistic quality" as defined externally, conventionally, by anyone else's standards. within their fuck-you isolation, they had their own artistic goals, of course. but i'd say many/most of the 2nd wave worked hard to project the noble savage bullshit onto themselves, and that's still an essential component of the genre. corpsepaint dude or dudes in leather & spikes pictured out nowhere inna gloom-bound forest - snowy, foggy, at night, w/e.

and sure, the ubiquity of a common approach - thin budget recordings, harsh blankets of obscuring noise, noble savage rawness, punk simplicity - breaks down as times change & bands progress.

i think i get where the quote is coming from, though you have to see through the phrasing. early 90's norge blackness typically issued from a position of aggressive outsider-dom. fuck you. you think music should sound good? you think it should be played and recorded well? fuck you. you want it to be available in stores? to be morally defensible? to have "artistic quality"? fuck you. the extremity of that positioning gave it strength and character, helped cement its enduring artistic legacy. almost anything else becomes "mainstream" relative to that kind of self-imposed alienation, including all points on the beethoven to eno continuum. there's a reason black metal was early adopted by noise peoples, those listening to whitehouse & merzbow.

"The only metal bands that get praised for creativity are ones that break out of an extremely exclusionary box from 20 years ago."

or: most listeners praise that which is most listener-friendly

When it comes to metal hipsters, I always toss Lars Gotrich in there. Not because of anything bad against him - I don't know him personally nor in social media and I love the stuff he exposes to NPR audiences - but that specific role as kinda the NPR Metal Guy makes him a good starting (or ending) point for what some might deem hipster metal or, since that is considered a pejorative these days, metal stuff that non-metal types with beards seem to gravitate to.

I was mildly surprised to not see the album make his best metal album list of 2013 but he did like the Deafheaven:

While thinking about Sunbather a couple weeks ago — and especially its nine-minute opener, "Dream House" — an Instagram from one of Deafheaven's members popped up in my feed; it was a shot of U2's Best of 1980-1990 taken from one of those airplane music stations. Suddenly, the sonic space of Sunbather clicked. The distant echoes of "Where the Streets Have No Name" don't appear until the last minute here, but I can't shake them.

Since then, it's been hard to disassociate my not-so-accidental voyeurism. I keep hearing The Edge's chiming guitar ringing in my ears, now set against Clarke screaming his aching prose. For the first half of the track, the momentum is exhilarating and relentless, buoyed by a melodic punk bounce not heard since Deafheaven's 2010 demo. But the second half delivers on the ideas stemming from the band's stellar Mogwai cover last year: It doesn't just consider the grandiose pace of post-rock — well-trod territory in metal by now — but also understands what caustic relief resides in it. Sunbather is the sound of a band expanding within its reach, with an open ear dedicated not to what always comes next, but what will remain.

Honestly I don't see Liturgy as being more listener friendly than Burzum

i don't think either one would be a very decisive winner in a mom test

burzum is really listenable. the guitar texture on filosofem is smooth and unabrasive.

people often overlook this but burzum spelled backwards is muzrub

it's the lighthearted sense of play that people really respond to with burzum

people often overlook this but burzum spelled backwards is muzrub

― joe perry has been dead for years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, February 9, 2014 8:01 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I remember muzrub had a verse on an early people under the stairs 12 inch

muzbather

burzum sounds like Jesus and Mary chain but more accessible

Though I've heard it before
Still I need you more and more
But I just can't get away
Grishny kills me every day

the coun's on record saying that he's happy when it rains. one of his many chilling pronouncements.

To me the "not metal enough" criticisms of Deafheaven are misleading. The bay area has always been quite catholic about it's "heavy music" influences probably going back at least to Blue Cheer and Jefferson Airplane, if not the Count Five. Primus was an offshoot of the band that coined the term "death metal" (The Possessed) but was also influenced by the Residents.

Deafheaven are (to me, anyway) the product of a time in late 90's bay area college radio where Burzum, Noothgrush, Gasp, Fushitsusha, and Ebullition style emocore were being played in the same sets. I think they are much more clearly an offshoot of the northern california powerviolence scene (as are Weakling, etc) than any European black metal band. The following is the French emocore band Jasemine, from 1995. If you substitute the Dischargey rhythms for the plodding blast beats of black metal you get something very close to the kind of metal this thread is about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwvvSzScOyw

totally agreed and I dig most of that stuff as well, but imo, deafheaven's songs are way too drawn out for the style. I lose interest pretty quickly when these bands stray too far from quick grindy blasts. this stuff is made for 7" splits.

Oooh, good point about bay area college radio (I was a KALX radio Dj during the era in question and I can definitely speak to the way that KALX and KUSF shows were all about connecting the dots). KALX had a policy in which you had to vary your genre at least three times during a three hour set and you were not allowed to be "the metal girl" or "the noise guy" or "the hip hop lady" or what have you- diversity of genre was *mandatory* and shows as a result would encourage people to see what was similar about, say, doom metal and 90s indie slowcore (tempo) or power electronics/noise and black metal (texture) etc. So metal was always getting lumped in or cross-faded with hardcore or goth or industrial or folk or post-rock etc. It certainly influenced how I thought about music and I would guess that it would have impacted the history of bay area metal anyway (Lord Slough Feg, Hammers of Misfortune, Ludicra, or see Amber Asylum's intersection with Neurosis on a social level and otherwise ...) as well as the obvious overlap of the Aquarius records posse as a social scene with, say, the Lucifer's Hammer club, which was booking important early shows by Enslaved and Mayhem that were attended by lots of indie kids alongside lifer metal bros.

I am totally listening to Sane Asylum right now because of this thread

diversity of genre was *mandatory* and shows as a result would encourage people to see what was similar about, say, doom metal and 90s indie slowcore (tempo) or power electronics/noise and black metal (texture) etc.

how DARE you sir?? *turns on heel and leaves room for somewhere more kvlt*

listened to "sunbather" (the song) on repeat yesterday. when i first listened to this band i was put off by the vocals but now i think those vocals give the music a bit of nihilistic rancour. its a phenomenal track, an epic slice of Cure-gone-metal. count me in the deafheaven camp f'sure.

yeah it's obvious to me that the posturing of a lot of early black metal came from not having the resources/exposure to do more. of course you're gonna defend your horrible-sounding recordings if you don't have the capability record anything that sounds better.

― call all destroyer, Sunday, February 9, 2014 1:27 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was definitely a deliberate choice for most of the 2nd wavers! some of them had the tech capabilities to do better but chose worse as a deliberate stance against what they saw as florid death metal & overproduction becoming the standard