Black Metal!

i know DM was the most commercially successful form of extreme metal in the states in the early 90s, it's basically the bread and butter metal for a lot of people after the thrash generation got old ;), but was it ever actually hip? I dont mean hip as in elite circles of demo tape traders in the late 80s but hip as in actual hipsters like the NY hipster types who are into BM?

well, famously, Peel was into grind. thurston moore and some others IIRC were namechecking DM a little, I think moore's been pretty interested in "extreme" metal from pretty early on. and some of these death metal guitarists are total tone merchants, it's one of the reasons I'm a death metal partisan - there's plenty of black metal guitarists who get amazing tone of course but there's also the sort of autopilot Boss distortion into Boss delay black metal sound that just bores me to tears - and there've always been some from-hipper-circles ppl goin "seven churches is fucking amazing." but anyway yeah - I mean, getting "hip" used to take a lot more digging, but within some hip circles I think there were plenty of artsy dudes seeking out Eaten Back to Life and Mental Funeral and sarcofago or even krisiun and so on.

can re-poll after the wire runs some article about slept-on death metal, it'll get loads of votes then

Fine, I'll pitch this article for the eighth time. Dammit.

ha lol you know I will howl like a hurt dog if people ever actually start acknowledging that 1st & 2nd wave death metal was some of the most interesting music ever made, gotta have my stuff to complain about y'know

Well, FWIW I'm all about the blackness now, but I saw Napalm Death and Carcass on the early tours, and have no problem at all in acknowledging that those were some of the wildest gigs I've ever seen.

Every time someone says DM in one of these threads, I read it as Depeche Mode :-/

I will howl like a hurt dog if people ever actually start acknowledging that 1st & 2nd wave death metal was some of the most interesting music ever made

I sneak it in where I can, like when I got Mike Patton to admit to being influenced by John Tardy.

I sometimes misinterpret it as Dead Milkmen. xp

any love for these dudes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkOVIbI1-xQ

A friend of mine just got Peter Beste's 'True Norwegian Black Metal ' as a Christmas gift which I thought quite droll.

i never really got into judas iscariot. dude's okay. i don't know, i kinda feel like he and krieg were american black metal guys wandering in the wilderness, trying to find an original/interesting style and not really succeeding. but that didn't stop them from putting out a shit-ton of records.

listening to the Cryfemal album from last year, it's kinda cool but I wish they'd mixed the drum machine down a notch, the guitars should be louder, they get a bit drowned out.

i'm going to try to like black metal starting right now.

i downloaded "transilvanian hunger" by darkthrone on a recommendation. apparently this is considered a classik of the genre?

first song - title track

the beat is really weird and stiff...oompa oompa oompa oompa oompa, kinda sounds like a slowed down snare roll...up and down up and down up and down

the guitars are being played really fast in a way that seems really slow, like almost shoegazey or something...

you know? in a weird way the drums almost remind me of johnny cash or skiffle or something that kinda double time snare "train beat", but like more martial marching band.

the production is really midrange and tinny...kinda reminds me of husker du

the chord changes seem really goth

from your descriptions, it sounds like you are listening to an early 90s BM record.

yup, you are definitely listening to an early darkthrone record

now:
Graven Takeheimens Saler

definitely the weirdest song...the chord changes seem a bit "off" in a pleasing way

ha! now there's a fast picked guitar line that sorta reminds me of Dick Dale

the singer sounds like the head Orc from lord of the rings

are these guys one of the racist ones? how could you tell anyway? i guess you'd have to read about them cuz the vox are unintelligible, idk even know what language they are in i guess...though i've heard the word "satan" a couple times

iirc there is like racist artwork on the one you are listening to but i don't believe they are particularly racist, especially when they got older

they executed a few dick moves a long time ago, around the time of this album in fact iirc, but in short, no they're not

this is incredibly monochromatic music...

it's weird, sometimes his repetitive double time oompa oompa marching band beat goes to triple time oompa oompa and it almost sounds like total chaos

These are not drums, it's actually a garden sprinkler.

burzum, who were and are* super racist sound very much the same. tin-can recording, simple bang-bang-bang rhythms, super fast guitar chording that dissolves into a woozy blur, gothy progressions, surf-style fast picking solos. love the sound, but it is monochromatic, but it quickly becomes dull as dirt in the wrong hands. you should listen to emperor's anthems to the welkin at dusk after this! you know, for some variety.

* why do i always talk about bands - singular collective entities, grammatically speaking - as though though they were "he and she" type plural constructs, even when there is only one person in the band?

These are not drums, it's actually a garden sprinkler.

― Siegbran, Tuesday, November 16, 2010 1:54 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha yeah that's kinda it!

So, title track riff out of your head yet?

actually Skald Av Satans Sol is the one that stuck with me more

i don't know what to think of black metal.

i guess i thought it would be different than what it is...idk really what i expected tho.

i basically was a metal kid up thru death metal, then i remember dudes getting all into morbid angel and death and i got off the train...classic era thrash was the last thing i dug really....

man the first time I heard Death I practically leapt for joy

nothing to do with this thread, but i just watched that Until the Light Takes Us doc and it is kinda great to see that Fenriz has turned into a decent grown up dude, but it is always a bummer to be reminded that Hellhammer might be a fucking killer drummer but is still pretty much an unrepentent homophbic douche.

i was washing dishes with j0hnath@n mu11@11y in the kitchen of Big Bob's Our Place when he played Death and Morbid Angels cassettes....i remember thinking i can't hang with this

there's something (actually in this darkthrone album) about the tempos and rhythms, once it gets too fast it sorta ceases to be heavy.

like actually darkthrone sounds like the opposite of heavy to me...it's definitely aggressive and harsh but not heavy.

it's kinda the same w/any hardcore bands...like i only like hardcore bands i was too young to really see (w/a couple exceptions)...

darkthrone kinda reminds me of like goth for ppl who like 90s hardcore or something.

also a certain monochromatic gray quality that reminds me of why i never really hung with much 90s industrial (like true industrial not NIN)

***I want to stress i have heard EXACTLY ONE black metal album and am still keeping an open mind towards the genre, so don't jump down my throat and be all like DUDE LISTEN TO FJELVURKSTASUM's epic symphonic eurofolk freejazz black metal opus "Enraptured In The Sorrowful Dungeon"***

well shit if you have heard fjelvurkstasum yet how can we even have this conversation really

I prefer their early material tbh

nah the demos were even better

listen to the new Nachtmystium! *runs*-*hides*

I think the monochromatism (monochromaticness?) that's been mentioned is what stops me liking true BM. I mostly find it very rhythmically uninteresting as well. Though I'm pretty fascinated by it sociologically. Until the Light Takes Us was a good watch.

I'm willing to have my eyes opened and have been getting into a couple of bands who draw from the genre but inject it with a bit of groove and move outside its confines quite freely, like Agalloch and Cobalt. I find the screechy vocals somehow more soulful and human than Death Metal grunts.

one thing that m@tt mentioned that is def true is that BM is kinda opposed to heaviness in a lot of ways, production, the speedy riffless guitar parts, etc. its def got a predisposition to harshness/rawness instead of weight, which i dig but i like lots of skronky weirdo music so i probably would.

Definitely like my metal with a big fat bottom attached myself.

don't shoot me, it had to be posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8yA2iLE15g

one thing that m@tt mentioned that is def true is that BM is kinda opposed to heaviness in a lot of ways, production, the speedy riffless guitar parts, etc. its def got a predisposition to harshness/rawness instead of weight, which i dig but i like lots of skronky weirdo music so i probably would.

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 2:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but honestly i guess i don't hear much "skronk" which i sorta associate with either atonal or "out" sounding tonality stuff and/or really knotty weird rhythms...this stuff (at least darkthrone on the album i heard) is so regimented rhythmically that it doesn't feel particularly weird to me....structurally it's almost like the ramones to me, like every song pretty much mines the same formula to better or worse results....in terms of the drumming, it's so constantly one beat that even the odd fill seems like a big deal....

I was listening to A Blaze in the Northern Sky last night and found myself thinking of the Cramps ... Ramones is a better comparison. I was expecting murky sound like Transilvanian Hunger but this one was a lot less fatiguing to hear and more fun.

yeah my skronk vibe is more sorta the unfriendly listening sorta thing - that feeling that your pleasure is of little concern to the peeps doing it, idk, the same sorta thing i always got from like the flying luttenbachers i guess, or lotsa pigfuck stuff. part of it is also that i always think of big black guitar tone wrt oldskool black metal.

i def enjoy the later BM more as a rule, although the bleakness minimizes a bit later on. the peste noire album from last year (not to slip into the aforementioned "but but listen to this tho") is a good example of this, totes abrasive and nasty and legit BM at the core, but with lots of interesting things going on around it. their politics are kinda ?? depending on what you read (french nationalism so kinda weird but maybe/maybe not cryptoracist? idk), but that just makes finding it illegally AOK

ok i gotcha, yeah actually i can dig the big black, the kinda sheet metal guitar treble hell thing albini used to do

haha and i don't mind recommendations at all! i just wanted to let folks know that i don't know wtf i'm talking about and my observations are literally based on one album

french nationalism? hmmm...with all the shit going on in france right now that seems kinda suspect...but hell i guess in a genre where comments like this:

iirc there is like racist artwork on the one you are listening to but i don't believe they are particularly racist, especially when they got older

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, November 16, 2010 1:38 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

are "normal", like "well they ONLY had racist artwork so they are totally not one of the worst cases" it seems like i guess ya just have to deal with all the bullshit huh?

i guess it helps that i have no fucking idea what any of the lyrics are saying

it's pretty easy to avoid bands that are definitely espousing racist/fascist/nsbm ideas, but hard to avoid bands that flirt with those ideas.

i didn't intend for my comment to minimize racist artwork btw

don't play this for your dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V7Otl1JRCg&feature=related

is that the band with the parrot singer?

cad:

i didn't think you were minimizing it, just thought it was kinda a telling comment abt the genre

I don't consider myself any kind of expert in the genre but have generally been of the belief that the racist and anti-Semitic crap Darkthrone tossed around in the earlyish 90s was more about them being obnoxious showboaty assholes, rather than anything they seriously believed

how much of a green light that is to dive in, or not, is really up to the individual

well, it's too late, i already listened to darkthrone and now i am a skinhead :(