At the start of the shift, around 6PM or so, someone walks in who is clearly a metalhead. The place is rather dead, so I’m pleased, as I suspect he might sit down for a beer, and we’ll get to have a chat. (Yes, sometimes it’s the bartender who’s dying for company.) To my chagrin, he wants only change for the meter. I acquiesce.

Later that same day, around 11PM or so, he walks back in the door. I walk over to the register, thinking he needs more change, but this time he heads for the fridge and pulls out three bottles of Heineken. Says that’ll be all. I ring him up, and while stuffing the bills in the drawer, ask him, “Where are you coming from?”

This question made a lot of sense, because there’s a venue just up the block from the bar, and when shows are over, the bar I work for typically gets overflow. I wanted to know which band this guy had chosen to see.

He misunderstood the nature of the question, however—damn present progressive tense!—and answered me in an adorable Swedish accent, “From Sweden, actually.”

“Oh, really? That’s awesome, man. What kind of music are you into?”
“Well, you know… metal, mostly.”
“Awesome. What kind of metal, though? I mean, if it’s from Sweden, it’s probably melodic death metal or something, right?”
“Yes! Yes, it is! Melodic death metal, yes. Actually, I play in a band.”
“Cool, man! What do you guys sound like?”
“Um… have you ever heard of Arch Enemy?”
“Ha, yeah, man! That’s awesome. Do you guys have a website?”
“Er… yes.”
“Great! Write it down for me, I’d love to hear your guys’ stuff.”

It was at this point that he writes carefully, deliberately, in all lowercase letters, arch enemy, and then excuses himself to piss.

I’m standing there, staring at this slip of paper, reading “arch enemy” over and over again upside-down, trying to piece this together. Maybe he thought I wanted to know the name of the more famous band? No. Maybe they’re a cover band! But with the same name, instead of some lame pun? Unlikely.

Then his girlfriend walks in and stands near the register, waiting for him to come back. As comprehension percolates through my mind, I grip the edge of the bar.

“Who was that?”
“That? That was just Chris.”
“WHAT IS HIS LAST NAME?”
“Amott. Chris Amott.”

This is the moment in the movie when the woman, wearing a corset, swoons. Fortunately, I had left my corset at home that day, and so was able to soldier on through consciousness despite my absolute certainty that the universe was playing tricks on me. I swear there was a second when I entertained the Lovecraftian suspicion that I had fallen asleep at the bar, was already fired, and merely dreaming of meeting Chris Amott.

When he came out of the bathroom, I nearly attacked him, shook his hand, told him I’d been listening to his riffs since I was a kid. All in all, I played it about as far from cool as a guy can get. I even mentioned that our bar was having an open mic night on Wednesday—he laughed, flattered, and his girlfriend poked him, meaningfully—but he didn’t come.

He did, however tip me a dollar.

\m/

This year, MetalSucks is sponsoring a Protest The Hero tour, and arranged to give away a pair of tickets to each show. I won the Philly tickets. This is fucking awesome.

Below the video for “Sequoia Throne” by Protest The Hero. Revel in the insanity.

First lines of the song:

Did you come here to kill, or did you come here to die?
And did you really think that spaceships would descend from the sky?

\m/

This is an album indescribably dear to me. Since I first heard the opening notes of this disc, I’ve never stopped wanting to engineer a way to have passion like this gush forth from my chest and spill into the lives of others. An example of their lyrics:

Make all the cold trees mourn
Their branches frozen in sightless motion
Waving, reaching for the whipping rain

There was silence, and the firmament withdrew
Revealing all, shapelessly and swiftly
In carmine and crimson stood flaming the sky
The relics of myths that exploded and died

—from Silence, And The Firmament Withdrew by Dark Tranquillity on The Gallery, 1995

I’m not convinced that I’ll ever be able to write of the world or worlds in such terms, but fortunately I’m keeping the option open that that’s a good thing.

Here’s the video.

At first, when I noticed the songs were arranged in an order different from that of the album, I was furious. But this person has really done a fantastic job of stitching them all together, and selecting the most memorable melodic passages without too much repetition.

I recommend you check out his blog, which hosts many more similar endeavors, with audio file versions of each one to boot.

“Those empty frames staring at me!”

On the page for The Human Abstract, I found this.

Well, I clicked. Turns out they’re a very, very small band out of Chicago. Only 97 listeners! (Well, 98 now, technically.)

Unfortunately the music is utterly aseptic Gothenberg-inspired American metalcore. I guess the “kick-ass” part is their aspiration toward “prog” tags because sometimes they let the bass player riff for several seconds.

Ah, well. I’m talking about them, aren’t I? Well played, Inocula. Well played, indeed.

1. Cradle Of Filth – Tortured Soul Asylum (#10, Midian, 2000)
2. Dark Tranquillity – Nothing To No One (#1, Fiction, 2007)
3. Paradise Lost – Illumination (#5, Believe In Nothing, 2001)
4. Ozzy Osbourne – Good Times (#9, Under Cover, 2005)
5. In The Woods… – Omnio (Pre) (#11, Live At The Caledonian Hall [Disc 1], 2003)
6. Soilwork – Brickwalker (#8, Figure Number Five, 2003)
7. Exhumed – Totally Fucking Dead (#16, Platters Of Splatter [Disc 1], 2004)
8. The Rolling Stones – Under My Thumb (#2, Still Life (American Concert 1981) 1982)
9. Steve Reich – The Desert Music: III. Part 2: Moderate (#8, Tehillim & The Desert Music (Alarm Will Sound), 2002)
10. The Blues Brothers – Everybody Needs Somebody To Love (#2, Best Of The Blues Brothers, 1981)

I’m calling this one the “What a beautiful beginning!” list.

Enter MetalSucks, by far the wittiest and most censorious metal publication around. Why do I love them so much? First, they turned me onto Metal Inquisition. I discovered Protest The Hero through MetalSucks. And finally, they give me free shit.

We asked you to come up with BBQ-related puns of metal bands, albums or songs, and you delivered. So much so that we had a damn hard time choosing just 1 winner! I wish I could hug all of you, but this is not little league and only one of you can win the following prize pack:

Graveyard BBQ – Greatest Hits Vol. II
Filter – Anthems For the Damned
Kataklysm – Prevail
Sepultura – The Best of Sepultura
Early Man – Closing In
The Sword – Gods Of The Earth

Yeah, I totally won that shit. They’ve already e-mailed me and said the loot is in the mail. The winning entry?

Conor: “Protest The Gyro”

I’m proud. Bite me.

I’ll certainly post again once it’s arrived, but in the mean time, click through and give these guys some hard-earned traffic.

MetalSucks ATE MY BALLS!!~!!!1!!
(click here)

I liked the article, despite its failings to disclose much about the dataset and investigate methodological flaws, because it offered an opinion on metal listening habits other than “metalheads are social scum.” Today, however, I found another article. I honestly wonder whether any research was performed at all, so closely does it adhere to stereotypes.

She said an Australian study of year 10 students had shown significant associations between heavy metal music and suicidal tendencies, depression, delinquency and drug-taking.

An American study had also shown that young adults who regularly listened to heavy metal had a higher preoccupation with suicide and higher levels of depression than their peers.

Who paid to have this written? It’s quite clearly cherry-picking. And lest you think I’m objecting to this article because my genre of choice is being presented in a less than favorable way, take a look at the aggregate findings.

WHAT STUDIES SAY ABOUT YOUR SOUNDS:

POP: Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.

HEAVY METAL: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.

DANCE: Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.

JAZZ/RHYTHM & BLUES: Introverted misfits, loners.

RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

What stuns me about this is that the article author (or the researchers performing the study, but right now I’m blaming shoddy journalism) is clearly looking only for negative associations. What the hell is “overly responsible”?

The Dance category is particularly incendiary in that it implies that only poor people do drugs—unless the rich person listens to Dance music, in which case they don’t belong.

I really hope the article is substantially misrepresented by the media coverage. Maybe I’ll put in a request at my library to get access to the paper, and I’ll see for myself which party is at fault. I must admit, though, that part of me hopes that it’s not the journalist, because on some level I’m really looking forward to when l I get tenure and can jack off like this and call it research.

Without even an acoustic, I almost went mad, so bereft shredding was I.

Now I’m back in the States in a small apartment, and I’ve so far only brought an acoustic guitar with me. It’s not at all how I envisioned my homecoming, which was way more like the duel from Crossroads.

Not having guitars doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them, though. In fact, quite the opposite: I’ve been chatting with metal friends constantly about jamming, and an interesting fellow I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know via the wonders of the internet recently proposed that we work on a musical collaboration. He lives in Greece, but will be moving to Sweden in a few months, at which point I’m sure I’ll lose him to the babes and shredding for which that nation is so rightly famous. So I’d best make the most of it now!

Check out Hermes’s piece called “Time Dissection” available on the MySpace for his project Mandrache. He describes the music as “Metal / Minimalist / Progressive.” I like.

During our conversations today, we started talking about stagnation as a result of too much opportunity. My deprivation period, if you will, in Germany, has very much motivated me to write again, something I’ve always wanted to do but never really bothered with. I had to starve myself to make myself hungry, essentially. We talked about how hardcore sucks, and about experimenting with different tunings, just for the sake of making everything fresh again. After all, Mikael did it.

So today I scooped up my acoustic, tuned it to open D minor, and tried to find chord shapes. Here’s what I came up with, three layers of improvisation.

[audio:opendmjam.mp3]

My favorite part? At the end you can hear police sirens in the background, even though the windows of my apartment were shut when I recorded it. Ahh, Philadelphia. It’s good to be back!

Personally I’m not at all impressed with what came out during this improvisation, but the experience of playing was wonderful for me. I’ve always had a disease where I see music instead of hear it, which means that when I get a great riff idea, I usually experience it visually as a geometric pattern on the fretboard. Everything is shapes, not tone colors at all.

Playing in a new tuning, however, none of the shapes I knew and was familiar with made sense. For the first time since I can remember, I had to play based on how the chords sounded rather than how they felt in my hand. Groping my way awkwardly through oblique motion, I had to piece together melodic sense and rediscover tonality. It took about 40 seconds. I will never forget it.

The intervals between the higher strings, however, where the melody is played, were no different than standard tuning. Thus that melody was plodding and piecemeal, because I wasn’t trying anything new.

I am going to do more of this in the future.

A quick note about the title of this post: Hermes mentioned to me that in the outro to his “Time Dissection” (starts at 5:19, voiced by piano), he bases his phrasing on the Fibonacci sequence. Hopelessly nerdy, no? That’s why I love the guy. He also told me that Tool did something similar in Lateralus, which was completely believable to me, but certainly something I didn’t know. Unfortunately, I believe the guitarist from Tool used drop-D throughout that CD, and not open D or open D minor. So it’s not the best title. But it had a nice story to go along with it!

Update:

It should be noted that I was inspired to try this new tuning by my wonderful friend Sascha, whom I sorely miss. I was tired when I wrote this and never properly credited him for his influence in this. Wasn’t sure how to phrase it, then got distracted by tangents in my writing.

I miss you, man.

I’ve listened to hardcore, deathcore, and post-hardcore bands. They’re OK, they have their thing. Not really my style, but I understand that diversity adds to the scene as a whole, and obviously they believe in what they’re doing. But their fans can all fucking die, every one of them.

At the Summer Slaughter show this week, there was one core-influenced band that brought out all the 14-year-olds from New Jersey in their basketball shorts and sideways caps, and those little tykes kept trying to hardcore dance at a technical and brutal death metal show. It wasn’t a good time for anyone.

Now please, tell me that looks anything but tragically ridiculous.

It got to the point where as soon as a kid would start to slamdance, a death metal fan would step in and punch him in the head. The freaking security guards were sick of the slamdancing! I saw one grab a hardcore kid by the collar and yell, “Mosh right!” and then throw him back in the pit. Everyone has their own style, but this is just about respect and social mores. I’d never go to a hardcore show and start death metal moshing with everyone there. If I did try, I’d expect hostility from the crowd.

The tension built up throughout the night, with hardcore kids repeatedly getting punched in the face. Because they’re from Jersey, they’re all about “representing,” and so they wanted to make a scene. Check out this awesome video of a pit evolving. At first it’s a pretty lame circle pit. The hardcore crowd is standing in the middle of it, representing. The circle pit dissolves around them and they begin to slamdance, fending off invisible ninjas. Then the death metal kids move in again and revive their type of moshing.

What absolutely fascinates me about that video is that the moshing style shifts with the music! Right before the hardcore kids start doing their thing, the band on stage (Cryptopsy, for those interested) launches into a very slam-like breakdown. The death metal fans come back when the faster riffing starts again, right before the guitar solo. Did they plan this?

To get that nasty taste of slamdancing out of your mouth, I present you with a wall of death. (They moneyshot is at 1:10, so hang in there.)

And for anyone wondering why I was in the upper level making videos instead of punching hardcore kids in the head, I’d just come up after watching Psycroptic, Born Of Osiris, and The Faceless. When Kataklysm came on, I went back down and murdered people.

They played “Like Angels Weeping (The Dark)” and “Blood On The Swans”! Goddamn it was a heavy set.

1. White Chapel
2. Psycroptic
3. Born Of Osiris
4. Aborted
5. Despised Icon
6. The Faceless
7. Cryptopsy
8. Vader
9. Kataklysm
10. The Black Dahlia Murder

That is some epic fucking technical death metal right there. Aborted? Those guys are so freaking brutal they make me want to break my own legs and then mosh anyway.

I’ve never heard of White Chapel before, and Vader aren’t my thing, but the rest of the bands are heroes for me. I’m curious to see how Born Of Osiris will handle their set, as their only album clocks in at like 30 minutes. Maybe they’ll play each song twice? Who knows.

What’s certain is that I’m going to headbang so much tomorrow that the Large Hadron Collider won’t have shit on me. Although I’ve heard we’re not supposed to be afraid of that thing anyway.

There were not many cameras present over the weekend, which was a wise decision, as the weather got suddenly shockingly bad on several occasions. We were graced with sunshine most of the weekend, so we spent our time shirtless and writing on each other, and finding broken sunglasses in the mud and trying them on.

A few highlights

It was a long weekend, but I’ll cherrypick some memories. A friend and I were on a mission to make the Opeth set, and since they got one of the larger outdoor stages (as opposed to the indoor club-style venue where most of the heavy bands were playing), we knew we had to show up early if we wanted a good spot. This meant I got to see most, if not all, of Silverstein’s set, and I must say it was a very pleasant surprise. They had a great crowd and some pretty solid tunes. I might not listen to them myself in the future, but I’ll definitely name drop with a few people.

Between Silverstein and Opeth, thunder rolled across the park complex. Wind flirted with the trees, lifting up the branches in an unbearably long arsis before the storm. When the rain came, it was absolutely torrential. Phones, cigarettes, campground maps, anything anyone might have had in their pockets was totally fucked. Those who stayed through it to wait for Opeth to come on were the hardest Opeth fans ever—but then, to be fair, there aren’t really that many people who are casual Opeth fans.

Right before the band came on, the rain turned to hail. It was only pea-sized, but since some of us (<– this guy) left our shirts back at the campsite to get soaked there, it stung like hell. Many people assumed a reverential, contemplative posture of clasped hands and downturned head, probably because they saw what hail can do to somebody’s eye if you look up at the sky while it’s coming down, like what happened to a girl next to me.

When Opeth came on stage, the place went nuts. By this point the mud was just a lake of muddy water and gravel, and the moshers starting sweepkicking to make sure everyone was not only soaked, but filthy, too.

Mikael got on the mic and said, “You guys are all fucking crazy. I? I would’ve just gone home, I think.”

Then they played, as an opener, Demon Of The Fall. Every time I’ve ever seen them, this has been the encore piece, and I think they reworked their set to reward the fans that stuck it out through the weather. Their setlist was so:

1. Demon Of The Fall
2. The Baying Of The Hounds
3. Heir Apparent
4. The Drapery Falls

There might have been a fifth song, but I don’t think there was. That’s the problem of having songs over 10 minutes: you really can’t play that many pieces live, even if you up the tempo (which they certainly did).

The fans there were freaking out, because pouring rain is the best weather to listen to Opeth to—especially anything off Blackwater Park. The acoustic bridge of The Drapery Falls was beautiful in the rain:

Spiraling to the ground below
Like autumn leaves left in the wake to fade
Waking up to your sound again
I lapse into the ways of misery

And then you headbang until you die.

Another great time was during Black Dahlia Murder’s set, when the singer gets on the mic between songs and says:

This song is about… putting your dick in the dead.

I was very near the front on that one, and looked over to one of my shirtless buddies, and we both pointed with our thumbs to the pit forming behind us. That was an awesome pit, which for some reason also had insanely hot girls in it, girls that would fuck you up if you went easy on them. I found that out the hard way. I saw several people land on the back of their head and have to be carried out. Staying up was definitely a bitch, because the floor of the indoor venue was slick with sweat and beer.

My shoes died that weekend in the pits. The soles are barely attached any longer, the shoelaces got ripped, and the holes for them to be fed through along with, holes in the bottom for rocks to get in… I need new shoes. The best part? I wear a size 50 here and I’ve never, ever been able to find a pair that big. I’ve asked all my German friends and they just tell me to go back to freak country where shoes that big are sold.

I guess I only have a week left anyway.

There are thousands of more tales, but I’m short on time this morning. Pretty much all the other stories need massive amounts of gesticulations and crucial comedic timing. Perhaps I shall videoblog some of the more palatable ones in the future.

For now, though, I post.

Story to tell

James Malone is the mastermind behind Arsis. He attended Berklee College of Music for a degree classical composition, specializing in violin performance. During his stay at Berklee, he met Michael VanDyne, “a drum performance major and rumored octopus.” (Sorry, that quote was too good not to link to.)

Previous entries in Arsis’s discography have always floored me because they were recorded by these two men. James handled the lyrics, vocals, guitars, bass (in most cases), and overall songwriting, and Michael hammered away on his kit.

The first album, A Celebration Of Guilt, was met with raving success absolutely everywhere. Ask your grandma, I bet even she’s heard of it by now. Here’s a snippet from what I consider to be the greatest review of anything, ever.

Arsis is amazing. This CD should be called ‘Celebration of AWESOME’.

[...]

Full of skull shattering drum parts and more guitar intricacies than you could ever think was possible, A Celebration of Guilt rises above the rest of most metal albums out there today. In the death metal market which is almost completely capitalized on by the northern Europeans, Arsis stands its ground not moving for anyone and bringing melodic death metal one huge step closer to the U.S.

The CD was so badass, a clique of freaks in New York City who like to perform ballet to heavy music, Ballet Deviare, contacted James and asked whether he’d compose a piece just for them. Which he did. I still don’t understand all of the title track “A Diamond For Disease,” but it’s one of my favorite pieces by the band.

After A Diamond For Disease, James and Michael went on to record United In Regret, a darker and more brooding album, although still furnished with a technical virtuosity that makes my eyes glaze over whenever I listen to it. In my opinion, this downshift in mood could only lead to a more furiously technical next album, but that change was facilitated by other factors, too.

The master’s apprentices

Sadly, Michael did not stay on with James to record the newest album, We Are The Nightmare. When Michael stated his decision to leave the band, James started looking for a replacement—as if any such beast has ever existed, or will ever exist. This led to the induction of several new members, so that Arsis at long last had a full lineup. The timing of the additions was such that the newcomers were able to contribute to the composition of the album, undeniably changing the chemistry of what constitutes Arsis.

The new bandmates are Noah Martin on bass, who served as a session player on United In Regret, Ryan Knight on guitar, and Darren Cesca on drums

Now, Noah seems like a great guy all around, and his playing on United In Regret was fantastic. Sadly, the new album has the bass buried deep in the mix, and his playing is all but inaudible, save for the smooth bass melody line that opens the disc.

Ryan has played with The Knife Trade, a rather uninspired metalcore act. I don’t believe his technical fury was at all utilized by that band, but recording with Arsis definitely allowed—or, with respect to Arsis’s past albums, forced—him to step up the fretwork many notches.

Then there’s Darren. Darren is also a grad of Berklee, majoring in drum performance, and already has a pretty impressive catalogue under his belt. Knowing his drumming only through this new album with Arsis, I cannot question his skill as a drummer. I do, however, take issue with his style. It’s a drastic departure from VanDyne’s drumming, and is for me the stain on We Are The Nightmare.

The empty throne

photo by williamhartz on flickr

Filling VanDyne’s shoes is impossible. While Cesca is a fantastically talented drummer, I don’t think his technique fits in well with the Arsis formula. Here’s why.

In metal, the drums should serve as the chassis of the machine, with all other instrumentation balustraded out from it. To use trite war imagery when describing metal, drums are the treads and the hulk of the tank, rhythm guitars are the main cannon, blasting away at the front, lead guitars the machine guns exploring the four dimensions around the tank, and bass is the sound of the engine grinding away, giving early tell of downshifts or turret rotation.

Drums are the mana in the casting of the spell. If your mana flow is sputtering or chunky, in any way inconsistent or irregular, then the spell will fizzle.

Take this example of VanDyne’s sense of thunder.

[audio:maddeningdisdainintro.mp3]

Now compare with Cesca’s stylings on the new CD.

[audio:servantstothenightintro.mp3]

Cesca’s performance is comparatively meek, reticent to pull out the stops. Now, this could be seen as crediting his confidence and skill. Perhaps Cesca believes he doesn’t need dish out blastbeats for several minutes at a time in order to prove himself; perhaps he’s trying to tone back the drums a bit in order to showcase the guitarwork.

In fact, it might be that Malone specifically requested that he chill the balls, in order to make the guitar intricacy the focus of this album. Maybe that was a bone of contention with VanDyne, that his drumming was almost as arresting as James’s riffing. To be sure, We Are The Nightmare definitely drops the ball on the rhythm riffing, in favor of pretentiously technical lead passages, and thus thunderous drum parts aren’t particularly well suited to the new songs.

Either way, losing the drum thunder was a mistake for the sound of Arsis. But why blame the drummer? The new guitarist’s technique gave Cesca little room to work with.

A new level: quo vadis?

We Are The Nightmare offers almost no churning rhythm riffs throughout the entire CD. Instead, lead riffs are strewn about the halls of the aural gallery, leaving the listener dizzied but never battered. (I have actually gotten nauesous while listening the counter rhythms in “A Diamond For Disease.” This is something even Meshuggah have never managed to pull off for me!) The change in riff styling should definitely be viewed as a progression, but I hope that Malone gets his sense of “heavy” back on Arsis’s next release. A combination of the two is what United In Regret strove to be, and in my opinion, that album came much closer to the vision.

Take a listen at how the calm composure in Malone’s riffing has gone completely out the window. From United In Regret:

[audio:andtheblindonecameintro.mp3]

This track, entitled “…And The Blind One Came,” was long my least favorite on the CD. After having let it digest for a long time, I now think that I disliked it because it was so damn good at what it did. That intro riff is perfectly ugly. I picture a carcass trying to dance, or being animated to dance. The song is sightless and horrifying. A sense of doom pervades the riff, in no small part due to VanDyne’s “maddening beat of vile drums.”

Now compare with the furiousness of this riff, obviously from the new album.

[audio:failingwindsofhopelessgreedintro.mp3]

Technically impressive, to be sure, but perhaps a mite bit uninspired? Maybe because it’s a textbook example of the Necrophagist (technical death metal gods to this day) formula. Listen, and pay special attention not only to the flourishing leads that open each song, but also to the snare-heavy pedal tone riffing that follows. The songs differ only slightly in their third riffs (up until the chorus in the Arsis piece, with is anthemic and catchy in a way Necrophagist would never attempt).

[audio:onlyashremainsintro.mp3]

C’mon, James, you can do better!

Epilogue/Metalogue

This review itself was pretentiously technical, which should at least partly discredit its scorn and criticism. I’ve spun the album only about 10 times so far, and am still within the first week of ownership. I’m certain that int he weeks to come, I’ll soften on it, and I’ll love it.

All in all, We Are The Nightmare is a solid album. The problem is, it’s not their old material. But I admit that’s more a problem in me as a fan than it is in them as songwriters.

I’ve already bought this CD twice, by the way, because I love this band so much.

I do object, however, to having to deal with stupid customers.

Sometimes you get a customer that you just want to grab by the hair and slam their head against a table of cell phones, again and again and again. Of course, you’d have to resituate your grip every few blows, as their hair would be coming out in clumps. But you’d keep slamming, which gets easier as it goes on, because after the fifth blow or so (I presume), they go limp.

But you still can’t get over that they asked where the 0 key was on their cell phone. So you press ever onward, reveling in the burn of lactic acid in your arm. After about a minute, the bone around the temple softens, and things get messy. The display phones are covered in hair and brains, the counter now an altar to intolerance.

But the offering must be complete. You adjust your footing so as not to slip on the gore, now flowing off the table onto the floor. Customers who have yet to be addressed wait patiently in line.

After the splashing decreases to but a spurt every few hits, and the physical feedback becomes less satisfying, as what’s left of the head makes only a soft slap on the table, you situate the body on its knees. In that reverent posture, it is ready to be totemized. You smash the protective casing around a cell phone, any cell phone, and pick away any stray shards of plastic, so as not to taint the ritual.

Then, reaching carefully in through where the ear used to be, you place the phone in the throat of the corpse, while chanting the UMTS creed.

You wipe the the blood off the metal surface of your nametag, and turn to the next customer, addressing them politely in the honorific.

Seriously. He asked where the goddamn 0 zero was. When I showed him—without violence—he argued that it should come before the 1.

I ended up staying at the bar with the tour group until 7pm. I met up with my boss, gave him the money from the tour, received my cut, then kept drinking. People on the tour bought me many drinks, and even kept tipping me at the bar—long after the tour, and long after they had already tipped me.

After leaving the bar, on the walk home I passed an electronics store, one that I know has a pretty decent selection of metal CDs. Because of the extra pay, I figured today was the day, and I bought the new Arsis CD.

/

I was quite drunk upon arriving home, and there, many friends gifted me beer. This means my buzz is still going, even as I write this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give this CD a fair listen while so intoxicated, and tomorrow I work a double shift. That means it’ll probably be Friday night before I give this album the focused listen it deserves, and probably several days (or 10 minutes) after that before I craft a post about it.

The bros in the building are grilling outside tonight, and I’m going to join them. Beer is plentiful, and bratwurst also.

It is a good day to be alive.

But I do.

I miss my guitars very, very dearly. I do have an acoustic on loan from a friend here, but that’s only making me miss my sweethearts back in the States all the more. Recently I went digging through my video directory to try to see if there was any concert footage I could upload to YouTube and show some friends online. (Another story entirely, but I still haven’t been able to get the full version of “Treacherous Gods” at Paganfest up on YouTube. Worst 2.0 site ever.)

Anyway, while scaling the heights of the furthermost branches of that directory tree, I found some old videos of me playing guitar. This one I made two years ago, or almost. It was definitely August 2006, although I am not sure when in that month.

I absolutely love the riffs in this song. Heavy as hell, and no dicking around whatsoever. This CD was utter devastation. Make sure to check out the lyrics, too, as the whole CD was a concept album on the Iraq War, and has some real gem lines.

Try not to headbang yourself down to a lower IQ during the bridge. (“See who gives a FUCK!”)

And man, I have to say it: my guitar tone in this recording is fucking killer. I mean, it’s so heavy, it has its own goddamn event horizon. I am a Line6 fan for life.

One last thing to note: I remember so clearly that this was August 2006 because that’s the last time I cut my hair. You can’t really see my head in the video, but you also don’t see any long curly locks. I had a buzz cut.

Never again.

I decided to practice the song I’ve been listening to constantly since last night, “Omerta” by Katatonia. It’s haunting, and stuck in my head even as I slept last night.

Excuse the gray distortion for the first few seconds of the video. It’s a problem with Quicktime encoding and YouTube’s compression that I still haven’t worked out. Besides, it makes my eyes look even more striking.

Now, I should mention I know I’m not spot-on in a lot of this. It was done in a single take, as I didn’t feel like messing around with it all day, and just wanted to capture the essence of my wonderful Sunday afternoon.

Regarding the chord changes, I’m pretty confident that the main passage (verse, chorus, and bridge) is Dsus2-Am-Am-Fmaj7, Em-Em-G-Am. At least that sounds pretty fine. The bridge riff tosses some kind of Am7sus4 junk in there, and then some chord based around E that I couldn’t figure out. In the outro, I just alternate between Fmaj7 and Em, ignoring that mystery chord.

Regarding my singing, you can go to hell.

Lyrics to the song here.

Last night was Paganfest, easily the best metal festival I’ve ever attended (which, to be honest, isn’t saying very much, as the U.S. isn’t exactly big on festivals). It was a good time. As the venue website declares:

HEIDENFEST

* Nur fürs Paganfest: Met- Ausschank (Trinkhörner sind erlaubt)

[translation]

PAGANFEST

* Only for Paganfest: Mead bar (drinking horns allowed)

That’s got to be the greatest exception ever. Drinking horns were indeed allowed, and how. I was only of the only people there without one, and also without full pelt garb.

Step one: get into a sold-out show

I arrived late to the show, with my Finnish comrade, due to a minor mishap. Having heard from everyone multiple times that there was no way in hell we were getting in without tickets, as the festival had been sold out for weeks, we decided to give it a go anyway. First we tried the back entrance, and acted ignorant when asked for tickets. “Well, we thought the line out front was for people with them, so we figured we’d come back here to buy them. No? Go back out front? OK, no problem, man.” The whole time we were scoping out places to hop the fence, but security was quite heavy, especially around the easily hoppable sections of fencing.

Tuomas isn’t very confident with his German—although his English puts my German to shame—so I decided to do the talking with the security guard at the main gate. She said, “No. No way in hell, without a ticket. This has been sold out for weeks. Yes, I know you guys really want to see these bands, but my job is to make sure that no one without a ticket gets in. Sorry.”

Fortunately, I’m majoring in making friends. I talked with her for a little bit, and spun some bullshit like, “I know it’s completely out of the question for us to get in, but is there anyway we can at least just buy a T-shirt for the festival? We love these bands so much and we just want to be able to have something from the show, even if we don’t get to see them.” That definitely struck a chord of empathy with the guard, and I let it resonate for a bit before trying anything else. She said that maybe if we came back in an hour, there would be merch outside that we could pick up, possibly even at a discount. She recommended another club, with a beer garden, where we could go to kill time.

I of course said this was a wonderful idea, and thanked her profusely. Then Tuomas and I fell back a little bit and discussed our options. I translated my conversation with the guard (into English, not Finnish!) and also explained that I thought there was hope. We were already a little buzzed from the beers we’d had at my place before heading out, so we figured what the hell, let’s hang out and see what happens. Several minutes later, the same security guard comes up to me and says in a low voice, “Leave now. Come back in 10 minutes. Perhaps my colleague can help you.”

We booked it. I set an alarm on my phone for 8 minutes so that we’d be back in just the right amount of time, and Tuomas and I started talking about the bands playing. We were laughing that I hadn’t understood who was playing, because I’d always pronounced the bandname Týr as teer instead of the proper toorr. While joking around and taking stupid pictures of each other, the security guard came up to me again and said, “There, that’s my coworker. Talk to him. He’s on the phone now but when he’s off he’ll help you.”

We hovered so close to the guy we were practically hugging him. As soon as he snapped his cell phone shut, he looked us up and down, then gestured for us to follow him—quietly. We get in through the Guest List Only door, and he introduces us to a colleague of his, who wants money. She says, “That’ll be 28.” Not bad at all! I hand her 40. The guy says, “No, that won’t do. It has to be exact.” Well, shit. I didn’t know what to do about that, and I figured I was just about to get ripped off 12 bucks. Funny thing is, I didn’t really have a problem with this. But a suggestion is made that the woman break my bills, giving me a 20, a 10, and then another 10 in coins. Then I paid the 28 exactly. I still fail to see the point of this, but who the hell cares, because it got me in. Tuomas gets the same deal, we tip the nice man 5 bucks, and we’re on our way to forging through the crowd, trying to get near the stage.

Finding a place in the crowd

The people at this show were all-out diehard fans of folk metal, and it showed.

I think my favorite was this dude, whom I headbanged with throughout most of the show, until I was elected to crowdsurf and thrown over the front rail. (That was during Ensiferum, so I’d gotten a lot of pictures by that point, and it was OK by me. Plus, I loved those guys.)

While still standing near the back upon arriving, Tuomas treated me to a few beers as a thank-you for my rapport-building prowess. Again, as we’d arrived late, we’d already missed Equilibrium and Eluvietie (about whom I’ve heard great things), but we were able to catch Týr setting up, and their set in full force.

The bands

Týr

I love these guys. Their Ragnarok album blows me away every time I put it on, and it’s one of those epics discs that you have to listen to in its entirety, the whole way through, every time. The crowd dug them, hard.

Absolutely epic. I’ve also thrown up a video of the last part of Hail To The Hammer, in which the sound quality is even lower than above, but the crowd’s enthusiasm is even greater.

Moonsorrow

I’ve been dying to see these guys live. I haven’t listened to any Moonsorrow for years, and so as soon as they started playing, opening with Raunioilla (which Tuomas kindly informed me means “Upon The Ruins,” a freaking killer songtitle), I was taken back about 4 years, to the time I used to spin that CD every morning, walking to classes.

As is to be expected from these guys, they were only able to play about 3 or 4 songs during their 45-minute set, but that worked beautifully. Each song has such flowing dynamic contrast that they really worked the crowd, shifting from headbanging to clapping to singing and then back again.

Here’s a brief clip from Raunioilla, by far my favorite song of theirs. I say “brief” when it’s actually the first 3 minutes of a 13-minute song, so beware.

[audio:raunioilla-intro.mp3]

For the record, I freaking love bands who give a mic to everyone in the band. (Yes, even the drummer is wearing a headset.)

Korpiklaani

I was so not ready for these guys. I’ve called them “fratboy folk” before, because pretty much every one of their songs is about drinking, rather than fighting, but I’d failed to realize what this was going to mean to a crowd in Munich. Singing about beer is without a doubt the best way to win the hearts of a crowd in this city, and Korpiklaani wielded the crowd like the gods they are.

To get a good idea of their sound, check out this quip from their Wiki page.

The music of Korpiklaani ranges from the violin-and-guitar paean to the Finnish god of fermentation Pellonpekko, to the “typical” trollish metal “Wooden Pints”, to “Crows Bring The Spring”.

Yeah, that’s about right. Dancing galore. Wannabe vikings, arm-in-arm, spinning round and round and shouting at the top of their lungs things like, “Beer, beer! Beer, beer!”

And, of course, they’re not afraid to get down and folky. I wasn’t expecting it, but the bastards went ahead and did a live rendition of Shaman Drum, of which I only caught the end on camera.

It was far more haunting live than it seems here. As I was making the video, I wanted to make sure to cut off the explosion of cheers from the crowd as the song ended, which I thought it would make for better resonance on video, but I was completely wrong. The crowd reaction would only add to the experience. Ah, well.

Ensiferum

I finally, finally got to see Ensiferum live. It’s a damn shame Jari Mäenpää wasn’t with them, but the dude from Norther did a pretty damn good job on vocals. The opened, of course, with Iron, and the crowd went nuts. Unfortunately for Ensiferum, Korpiklaani had absolutely drained the audience with all the dancing, so the first few Ensiferum songs were met with relatively tame enthusiasm. Still, Ensiferum cleaned up.

My sole complaint regarding the new vocalist was that during the solo for Iron, he didn’t play the original. He referenced it in his sweeps, but he brought in too much of his own technique. I’m still torn as to whether this was a shameless appropriation of a classic song by a newcomer who can’t fill Jari’s shoes, or a reverant reticence to mar a beautiful, untouchable thing with his own playing. In my opinion, it’s more appropriate to lay insufficient offerings at the altar of a metal god than to build a new altar, which it seemed to me like he was doing.

This was partly made up for, though, by one of my favorite moments from the whole night, when Ensiferum fulfilled their duty as headliners and played part of a classic metal song. Being from the North, it would have been completely inappropriate to toss yet another tribute onto Dimebag Darrell’s burial mound. I’m glad they didn’t. They went the extra mile and played the main riff from the father of all battle metal songs, The Trooper.

While the band did play a stellar setlist, they left off Treacherous Gods, which thrilled me—because they did it as an encore. I made a video of the whole song, but it’s pretty poor quality, so I won’t embed it. I’ll see how it turns out upon YouTubeification, and might throw up a link to it later after it’s finished processing.

Probably the highlight of their set was the crowd singing along to the bridge of “Lai Lai Hei,” but sadly I don’t have video of it. Take my word for it, though: it was awesome.

The land of hope and glory

I know this was a disastrously protracted post, but I couldn’t help but gush about this show. I encourage you to listen to all the bands’ material at length, as everyone who played (well, I can’t vouch for Equilibrium) offers absolutely stellar folk metal.

Stay folk.

Give me some time to recuperate from all the awesome, and I’ll throw up a lengthy post, replete with fawning and photos.

Until then, fuck kvlt, stay folk.

Apparently at $40,000 a year, they can’t afford to make their own teaching aides. Then again, it doesn’t seem like they need to. I feel like I just earned a degree, watching this thing.

Their new album, which I’ve been psyched about for a long time, is now officially out, and I can’t find it anywhere. I don’t have a credit card in Germany, so I’m going to bum one from a friend tonight and order the CD right from the label. Fortunately enough, Arsis just got signed to the biggest and best label in the metal world, Nuclear Blast, which is based in Germany. Plus, if I pay $5 extra on the CD, I get an Arsis t-shirt. Yes, please.

In celebration of the album’s release, the band (or their label, I don’t care whom you credit for it) have posted the video for the title track from the album. The video is third-rate and the song is second-rate, and yet I’m still tossing my popcorn around in excitement.

I of course have a few initial reactions to the song played in the video (please keep in mind I’ve done everything in my power to avoid hearing leaked tracks from this album, because I want the store-bought version to be my first experience of it), and while I know that I should wait to hear the album in its entirety before judging, especially harshly, here are some off the cuff gripes.

• This sounds more like a blending of the styles of many musicians than the work of one man. I mean this in a bad way.
• The solos are wankier than I’ve come to expect from Arsis, and it sounds like there are two solos, one right after the other. This technique should only be used when the guitarist playing the second solo has something to build upon, or can somehow complement what the first guitarist just got done expressing. In this case, the second guitarist, whoever the hell it was, just shambled after, copping the tapping runs and overplaying the bends, because that’s what you do when you don’t have anything to say musically in a metal band (although the argument could be made that the same is true in blues and country).
• The drumming is thoroughly uninspired. The drummer doesn’t even give us a decent blastbeat throughout the entire piece, which I guess is acceptable given that this song is supposed to have an anthemic “ballad” feel. Still, the syncopated metalcore-influenced staccato hits don’t fight the rhythm of the guitars enough, and so are boring. This drummer has a lot to live up to in the Arsis pantheon, and this song was not a nice debut in my opinion.
• I do think the that the line “We are the nightmare, we are the chosen silence” is pretty spiffy, given the band’s name, but then, I’ve never had reason to complain about James in any respect. All the gripes here have to do with less James and more of these other buffoons. (Yes, “buffoons.)

That’s about it for now. I’ll order the CD tonight, remain sleepless for days on end until it arrives, then listen to it many times in a row and write a several-page-long blog post about it.

At least you know it’s coming.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/17/dont-you-let-me-down-arsis/feed/ 5 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/09/black-metal-isnt-even-worth-hating/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/09/black-metal-isnt-even-worth-hating/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:57:52 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/09/black-metal-isnt-even-worth-hating/ As MetalSucks quips,

For all its uber-seriousness, you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of black metal.

There truly is nothing in the world more absurd, sad, and awesome to me than black metal. I often impersonate a black metal enthusiast during daily activities, just because it makes my life seem way more intense. These two chaps understand that philosophy, and decided to make a video of black metal cookie baking.

That was pretty extreme. While the video was poorly edited (which is funny, because it’s ragging on low-production-value black metal), the final scene of the two guys running into the woods in their backyard, poorly concealed by either a fog machine or an out of control barbecue grill, made up for it.

After trolling around YouTube (ha ha, get it? black metal is about trolls!), I found some absolutely killer parodies of black metal music videos. Then I looked up the originals and realized it would be funnier to just show those. Enjoy.

Trollech – Ve stinu starych dub (view parody video here)

Immortal – Blashyrkh (view parody video here)

I want to cry and laugh at the same time.

The New Yorker recently put up an article about some Al Qaeda hippie and made sure to draw some bizarre connections to death metal.

Death metal is a severe offshoot of heavy metal, a reaction to the superficiality of eighties popular culture. In the early nineties, bands that played death metal considered themselves part of an élite vanguard. They tuned their guitars in unconventional ways, and some, influenced by classical musicians, composed songs that required high degrees of discipline and technical virtuosity to play. Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense; the genre’s signature vocal style is a heavy growling chant. (“We like it when it’s simply rotten,” one musician told me.) It is a subculture in love with its offensiveness, and obsessive about guarding its artistic purity.

In case you missed it, I’m going to repeat that little gem.

Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense;

I know a fucking lot about death metal, and more than a bit about sweatpants, so maybe I’ll just come off as sounding like part of some “elite vanguard” when I say this, but that passage is a crock of shit and the author has to know it. Here I cite a legendary Facebook thread, in which some guy named Scött [sic] muses:

Florida Death metal is for fat guys who wear black sweatpants, eat Cheetos by the truckload, and get their hair caught in their guitars’ tuning pegs.

Amen, brother. I love Cannibal Corpse and Hate Eternal as much as the next headbanger wasted on too much cheap beer, but the scene is unfortunately fraught with, well, fat white guys in sweatpants and knotty hair.

The author of the New Yorker article doesn’t understand death metal, and I’m fine with that. But why lie so poorly that even the uninitiated can spot your idiocy? I’m as much an armchair anthropologist as my whole lazy wannabe-Web-3.0 generation, but even I find this lack of effort appalling.

By the way, as of today, Google reports 0 results for “Florida sweatpants metal” and only 7 for “sweatpants metal.” I’m proud to be contributing to this great cesspool called the internet.

(via Metal Inquisition)

Update: A recent post on Invisible Oranges references the sweatpants metal meme without an ounce of respect.

There was definitely a jeans era (thrash) and, to some extent, a sweatpants one (death metal).

The post itself is a moderately interesting look at the use of camouflage attire in metal getups.

In particular, there’s one track that has made this entire album and certainly the band completely unforgettable for me. It’s called “Bluecracy” and is obviously within the scope of the concept of this album. Listen to the intro of this song.

[audio:bluecracy-intro.mp3]

I…
Can’t say where you are
Can’t see where you are
Can’t stay in the sun

That vocal melody absolutely haunts me. I can’t shake it. Listening to just the clip of it is now actually rather underwhelming, but this song is burned into my brain. I’ve been listening to it quite often.

And then there’s the solo, just a repeating passage of rippling arpeggios that culminates in a tapping frenzy.

[audio:bluecracy-solo.mp3]

This song has me hypnotized every time I listen to it. It’ll come on and I’ll have to stop whatever I’m doing just to admire it.

I’m going to go space out a little more now that my app is finished.

So I’ve scoped out a couple places I’d really like to work, and narrowed it down to Backstage, the metal club I like to visit, and the beer store on the corner run by the delightful old Turkish lady. I get the sense that the old Turkish lady might like to “keep it in the family” and not hire me, but she freaking loves me, so I have at least a shot.

First things first, I call up Backstage and inquire about the busboy position they have posted on their website. (Excuse the goofy link formatting, it’s how their website is designed. I’d rather see them hiring for a web developer than a busboy, but let’s not get into that.) I mention the position I saw, and the guy on the phone acts a little mystified, and says that I’m welcome to go ahead and submit a formal application with resume per e-mail, highlighting my pertinent prior experience.

That’s right. A formal, written application—for a busboy position. Every time I’ve ever inquired about a similar position in the US, it was always just, “Yeah, sure, whatever, be here Monday around 5.”

I’ll entertain the notion that I could have sounded foreign on the phone, and so the guy wanted to check me out. But far more likely in my mind is that he wanted everything laid out in the clear, so there were no hangups with taxation and hours negotiation and whatnot.

Socialism still wins, even if this is a pain.

Here’s an image of what I think is it fucking up. But given that the band is power metal, it might just be an amazingly capable script. I haven’t decided yet.

Kind of seems like a cruel joke. A cruel, adorable joke.