To Mega Therion

Re: Communication Breakdown

If you've been listening to Katy Perry (or Guillaume de Machaut) all week you might reasonably balk at the task: Train your blissfully undamaged ears to distinguish between some two dozen willfully inaccessible subgenres of extreme metal (inasmuch as the genre distinctions are substantive and not meaningless inventions of the music press). Well, put your misgivings aside! We do not have any choice but to climb the metal taxonomy tree because, as George Mallory put it, it is there.

We shall bypass the NWOBHM roots of the extreme metal phyla, preferring the aberrant outgrowths therefrom, with one outstanding exception: Motörhead. Hurtling through old-time rock and roll on enough amphetamines to power Tokyo, Lemmy is bigger than metal itself, and he and his warts have long been considered trustees of punk rock.

Let's also get a nod to Metallica out of the way. They, like Green Day, functioned as a gateway band for many of us of a certain age, and we pay our respects. That being said, I have previously summed up thrash metal in one word: Slayer.

The following patchwork of notes pertains to my initial experience with the pioneers of black, doom, power and death metal.

The prehistory of extreme metal ends with Venom, the hallowed Geordie trio who first applied the brute aggression and DIY production of hardcore punk to heavy metal; their first album (Welcome to Hell) is prototype for the sound of America's thrash metal and textbook for the blasphemous lyrical and iconographic fixations of Europe's black metal. (The sonic template for black metal, however, was later set down by Bathory and Celtic Frost, to whom I'll return.) Critics invariably note that Venom were rather amateur musicians, but myself — coming from a position sympathetic to the one-chord wonder of punk rock, I hear an unsettling authenticity in Venom's professions of allegiance to Lucifer that slick production and showy fretwork would only undermine. Their primitive woodshed recordings never sound like anything other than three blokes banging on cheap instruments, and that's exactly what I imagine unhinged devil freaks do.

For pure entertainment I point to the farcical posturing of the black metal prince of Copenhagen, Mercyful Fate; good clean fun, in the unholy scheme of things — I challenge you not to snicker the entire time. Every song is a precious ritual diablo, drawn as precisely as a pentagram, and the stratospheric castrato cackle is exactly as threatening as Skeletor. Plus they can boast the hands-down funniest album cover in the long tradition of ridiculous metal artwork: a horned skull half-submerged in a wall of flames, with outstretched hand pointing directly at YOU and the terrifying admonition, "Don't Break the Oath". I want to drive all night with my evil friends and be awesome.

Now let's switch sides and be the good guys! Just reverse your reversible cloak and join ranks with the Excalibur-wielding wizard heroes of this most mystical tale — presto, power metal! You've been rocked by the DragonForce song on Guitar Hero III so you know how friggin' sweet Gauntlet-based rock and slash can be. The elder lords of this dorkus magnus genre are Hamburg's non-non-non-heinous Helloween; mandatory listening if ever you calculated THAC0.

If you prefer piracy to sorcery: Alestorm.

The village-stomping doom metal of England's Witchfinder General is what Black Sabbath would sound like if I liked Black Sabbath. (The thing about Ozzy Osbourne, let's face it, is that he is and always has been a whiny git.) More accessible to those who fear immoderate shredding, Witchfinder blew away my expectations (abstruse druggy drivel) with tight, stripped bare songcraft and gleefully calamitous burn-a-wench-drink-a-beer attitude. Smell the bitch cooking as the prior looks on with cool approbation. Cheers as well to a goddamn brilliant band name.

Most of these groups inspire a mixture of amusement and awe, but when listening to Bathory I feel an urge to fall to my knees and proffer a goat. The fourth track on Under the Sign of the Black Mark made me scream aloud in distress at what I was hearing. I had to shut it off and put on Robert Johnson just to chill the fuck out. Jeez...I felt like a Baptist schoolmarm reacting to Blue Suede Shoes, This is the devil's music! It's hard to say exactly what horrible images are brought to mind, but I think that's part of Black Mark's potency: it's an abstraction of pure terror.

To Mega Therion conjures more tangible nightmares. The second album issued down from the nape of the alpine glacier where dwell in isolation Celtic Frost, inventing and discarding the sounds that later bands would take up and call black or death, is announced by the baleful sounding of the horns of Hannibal's decimated legion. The muscular thrash that ensues is at times accented by the ringing of iron on anvil — hammer falls no doubt shaping some fell implement — and the coldblooded song of revenant whores. Lead vocals are frequently punctuated by a Hetfieldian Ooh! Indeed, Celtic Frost has been referred to as Europe's Metallica both in terms of their orchestration and unparalleled influence.

Death metal is however an altogether American folly. The sound can be described as Slayer, only more so. Frankly I'm having a hard time getting into it, at least the early stuff. As gestated in Florida by Death and Frisco by Possessed on such albums as Scream Bloody Gore and Seven Churches, the squalling infancy of metal's most brutal branch presents a serious challenge to the listener: the monotonic delivery deadens what should be very colorful subject matter. The death growl and blast beats and other raw materials are there — leave it to the Swedes to figure out what to do with them (I'm eager to visit the more melodic Gothenburg metal). But I've peeked into the later work of Death, which transitions into the frightening prospect of technical death metal, and am happy to report that upon hitting maturity in the early nineties the American scene is a well articulated monster.

Further up the tree it gets pretty woolly. Hold on to your butts.