The Eclectic Metalhead

Old school Death Metal flag bearers Carcass are responsible for one of the most powerful politically charged songs I have ever listened to, R**k the Vote (lyrics here). Heavy, catchy rock’n roll melody with a slight Death Metal touch, profoundly cynical and damn inspiring.

Believe the lie

The lie that you’re told

Doing fine

Just do as you’re told

Is this rock’n'roll or a form of state control?

… will take me to a Marduk concert, the opening of which will be handled by Vader - good old school Polish Death Metal - and Fleshgod Apocalypse - Italian technical Death Metal of astonishing quality.

After a two weeks hiatus I will hopefully find the time to provide something for the next Monday’s issue of Metalreviews. This time I will have the pleasure of writing about the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, one of the best rockumentaries ever made. Forget This Is Spinal Tap or the incongruous Some Kind of Monster. “Anvil!…” is authentic, funny, cynical, melodramatic, excellent in filming and editing, has an explosive soundtrack and is above all inspiring.

Shrink is a feast for the eye. Beautifully filmed. Kevin Spacey’s face in particular is a visual delight and the secondary charachters are quite well built. But the finale doesn’t fit well in the big picture. Things just don’t go away that easy. The movie could have been the perfect existential drama about how the human being deals with loss in complicated circumstances assorted with anxiety, addiction, depression, nihilism, but it failed in the last 15 minutes. Nevertheless the cinematographic performance is exquisite.

I’m a longtime reader of GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog and I’m quite pleased - not at all suprised - to read on his blog some interesting thoughts about the economics behind the length of Metal bands albums (I wouldn’t use the term CDs) :

Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises.  That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future.  Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don’t convince you nothing will.  Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.

I haven’t really asked myself why most of the Metal albums run at around 45 minutes - I’d say 50, but 45 is a good approximation - but neverthelss it is an interesting question. The assertion about Metal fans’ loyalty and the durability of the bands franchise is absolutely correct. Metal fans and Metal culture works this way, when being in a band you will want to think long term and build something durable, the quest for short term fame is almost always doomed to fail. And one of the main reasons is that it takes far more than one try to put out a high quality album and consequently to grow a solid fan base. When you do lengthy songs full of worthless intermezzos that’s nothing more than garbage in garbage out. Metal music is something extremely difficult to play, it requires a lot of effort and personal investment, your brand and sound is mostly build in the uderground local scenes and it takes a lot of time to reach the top, plus the fans are extremely demanding and have very good training at their subject. But once you have them, you have them for life. So when you can come up with 50 minutes of quality Metal music you’re more than good, you’re among the best. But it is indeed true that once you reach that phase you can allow your quality curve to somehow flatten, the fans will still be out there and you have less pressure to always come up with something new. At that point perfecting your art by slow margins - like improving production or marketing - is more efficient than being original which is intrinsically extremely costly. Countless well known Metal bands do this - Machine Head, Blind Guardian, Immortal, Sodom, Megadeth, Slayer, Kreator, Marduk, Children of Bodom, Behemoth, Napalm Death, My Dying Bride and so on - but there are also those who are not afraid to take the big leap of innovation precisely because they have achived the high quality status : Opeth, Satyricon, Carcass, Tiamat, Celtic Frost or Death.

Arch Enemy’s re-recording of the song “Pilgrim” is available for free download so I cannot miss an occasion like this. Pilgrim is my number one song from this band; it dates from their early days when it was first recorded with singer Johan Liiva - available on YouTube in a nice live bootleg version - the vocal duties on the new version being handled by Angela Gossow. What can I say, I’ll stick to the old Pilgrim for mainly two reasons. The modern day Arch Enemy is a vicious bundle of devastating riffs thrown out with surgical precision in the detriment of the melodic line while the old Arch Enemy was a breath of fresh air in the Melodic Death Metal scene with a particular inclination towards catchy melodic lines with enhanced nuance and emotional depth. Johan Liiva’s sometimes exhausted Death Metal grunts contributed a great deal to the emotional side of the songs in absolute contrast to Angela Gossow’s perfectly balanced and highly technical vocal attacks. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy Arch Enemy today, I do, but I would never trade the chorus on Pilgrim sung by Johan Liiva for any other Arch Enemy song out there.

Pilgrim man - What are you searching for?
Believe the tales when everything else fails
Pilgrim man - Deep in your heart you know
Your faith is already bought and sold

Metal Hammer has compiled a nice list of top 17 songs about war. Very good picks, even if I would have kept out of the list songs by bands like Immortal, Turisas, Manowar and maybe even Marduk; while being excelent songs, they don’t exactly deal with the same kind of war as Metallica, Megadeth, Black Sabbath or Guns’n Roses do. On the other hand it’s quite suprising how Sodom and Sabaton have been left out; their repertoire deals extensively with war related themes in a very challenging and intelligent manner.

Insomnium - Across the Dark.

It has been 2 or 3 weeks now that your’s truly has joined the merry crew of reviewers on Metalreviews.com. You can find regular updates of the reviews of Metal albums I upload at this location and more generally I encourage you to  check out the weekely reviews the website publishes. They are of top quality - an obvious reason why I wanted to join in - and the guys on the staff are exceptionally open and cool about what they’re doing. It’s definitely worth your time.

I already laid down my thoughts about Sam Dunn’s conclusion to his excellent documentary Metal, A Headbanger’s Journey. But since this movie marked a crucial point in my view and interest in the Metal culture I think it would be interesting to get back to it and do the exercise all over again. So I will quote Sam Dun once again:

But I set out on this journey to answer one question : ‘Why has Heavy Metal been consistently stereotyped, dismissed and condemned?’. And what’s become clear to me is that Metal confronts what we’d rather ignore. It celebrates what we often deny. It indulges in what we fear most. And that’s why Metal will always be a culture of outsiders. Ever since I was 12 years old I’ve had to defend my love for Heavy Metal against those who said that it’s a less valid for of music. My answer now is that you either feel it or you don’t. If Metal doesn’t give you that overwhelming surge of power that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, you might never get it. And you know what? That’s OK. Because judging by the over forty thousands Metalheads around me, we’re doing just fine without you.

While going once again over the pros and cons in considering his argument that I exposed earlier I suddenly realized what struck me most in the finale of his documentary. It is neither his slighly biased but blunt and sincere conclusion, nor the feeling that I am part of something greater than me that he kind of tries to promote. No, none of those.

What struck me was the sight of the tents in the early summer morning on the Wacken festival area and I instantly remembered the great feeling I experienced last year waking up there and also the year before waking up in the morning mist during the Summer Breeze Metal festival. I wake up, almost everybody is asleep, the grass is still wet and I can barely get on my feet after the heavy partying the night before but I hear echoes of Metal tunes from long distanced tents inhabited by people who don’t seem to notice that one day comes to its end and a new one arises from its ashes. That IS my magical moment at Wacken.

This is the new installment of the Buffer Overflow blog I’ve been keeping for the last 3 years.

Off I go now With Santa and Victorious Weapons. Courtesy of Marduk.