During the past couple of weeks I’ve blown my monthly entertainment budget on shows. I’ll refrain from talking about the Todd Snider/Hayes Carll extravaganza here as this isn’t a post about alternative country music (except to say that if you have a chance to see either of them dudes, you should). This is, instead, a post about United States black metal. Seeing as how three of the bands I saw this month, Agalloch, Nachtmystium, and Kreig, are a big deal in that world, I figure it’s that time.
One of the things about back metal that makes it so interesting is that it includes a pretty wide emotional spectrum. Because its got roots in punk rock, extreme metal, artsy occult music, classical music, and European folk music there’s a bunch of different stuff “black metal” can be, sonically or emotionally. It superficially mostly sounds similar, but the purposes to which the screeching, static, and blastbeats are used can vary rather widely. I’m not sure you can say that about other metal sub-genres. I’m not aware of any really sad death metal songs or any really meditative thrash anthems.
The protests of the more-trv-than-yv people notwithstanding, bands in the United States have managed to find their own identity in the black metal. The big thing that give USBM its American flavor, as far as I can tell, is that our black metal bands seems to have more of a connection to the culture and the music of alternative rock. We grew up with NIN, Fugazi, Nirvana, etc. In USBM, sitting next to the blizzard-simulating blastbeats and goblin screams are musical elements that seem inspired less by Mayhem and more by things like industrial music or post rock. We are also a bit less likely to flirt with right wing ideas as a way to get attention. (That’s pretty rare in Europe too, but there is a lot of “panzer” this or that, and every so often somebody says something or other about Jew this or that.) This seems pretty “American,” as right wing politics are not really thought of as threatening alternatives to liberal hegemony here. We live in a conservative country, and the mainstream right is corporatist twaddle mixed with Evangelical Christianity. (And the extreme right is crazy old men who live in the mountains.) If you preach the wrong kind of individualism over here, you sound like Carl Rove. We are also a more diverse country and we’ve been through a civil rights movement.
Anywhooo . . . . we tend to be a bit more “punk rock” and less “militant pagan and metal” in our outlook, and we tend to draw musical inspiration more from the artsy underground tradition. In practice that can mean lots of things. This month I got to experience some of those things up close and personal-like.
Agalloch
Agalloch plays a complicated hybrid of folk metal, black metal, and post rock. Their folk melodies always keep them from sounding like Mogwai or something, but their focus on layered guitar textures and careful dynamics can push their music toward sounding like post-rock soundscapes at times. They are probably the least “metal” band that is universally acclaimed (or as close as is possible) by metal people. They also work with a much more subtle emotional palette than most metal bands (or anybody else, really, outside of the best of that alt country stuff that I like). Their songs can shift from melancholy to quiet menace to rage to joy, but the changes are never jarring. Of course, there’s nothing in Agalloch’s music, except for the American attitude, that isn’t forecast in second wave black metal, but they’ve taken parts of what the Scandinavians did, reconsidered it, and made it their own.
Live they are just flat out great. They sound, more or less, just like they do on record (which, given the shifting textures and subtly rising and fallling dynamics of their music, is quite a feat), only they rock a bit more, sometimes because songs are arranged a bit differently, sometimes because the band leans a little harder on their rhythm section, and sometimes because the band works hard to engage the crowd. They aren’t a particularly theatrical band, although they do use dim lighting, nature paraphernalia (stumps as a part of their stage setup, a little alter looking display with candles and an animal skull on the merch table), and incense to set the mood. At certain points in the show, the atmosphere really sets in and you feel like you are out in the woods. There’s plenty of rocking to be had as the music builds toward that feeling.
It took them longer than one would think to go ahead and actually write a song called “falling snow.” Nature is rad.
The Omaha show I saw a couple of week ago consisted of a loooong set that alternated between relatively concise “hits” like “Falling Snow” and “Limbs” and more heady, introspective (and lengthy) compositions like “You Were but a Ghost in My Arms” and “Faustian Echos.” “Faustian Echos” is, of course, their new EP, and the tour was nominally a promotion for that record. It’s a 20 minutes swirl of shifting riffs and raspy singing interspersed with samples of a production of Georthe’s Faust. As an exercise in extended composition, it’s quite impressive, particularly when it blasts off during the second half. This part is meant to convey, I think, the liberation Faust experiences with his satanically derived knowledge. Seeing as how this is Agalloch, the satanic theme is a bit more subtle and mysterious than what one might expect from metal. This isn’t, to name another extended concept piece about deals with the Devil, Dimmu Borgir’s In Sort Diabli, where, “OMG, evil is actually GOOD YOU GUYZ!” (Don Anderson has a PhD in English, so this subtle, literary approach to Satanism isn’t much of a surprise. It also shouldn’t be a surprise cause that’s how Agalloch rolls. Previous Agalloch albums have included references to Emerson and Thoreau.)
As great as Faustian echos is, and as ambitious as it seems (it is by far the longest and most thematically grandiose piece of music Agalloch have put together), it is something of a throwback. It’s the most “black metal” sounding thing that Agalloch has done since some of their earliest work, with simpler dynamics, more straightfoward metal riffery, blizzard blast beats, and brooding melodic fragments. It’s by no means a step backward, but it does feel like something of a return to core values, particularly after some of the very un-metal music they’ve explored during the past decade. Even though it’s doesn’t break new ground in the way that some of Agalloch’s work has, it’s a very moving, powerful piece of music, even more so live, where the pummeling crescendos can really do their work. That difference, where meditative, introspective music is turned into an exhilarating burst, is the difference between Agalloch on record and Agalloch onstage.
Nachtmystium and Krieg
If “Faustian Echoes” feels like something of a sneaky retrenchment, Nachtmystium’s campaign for Silencing Machine is an explicit one. Nachtmystium, who is Blake Judd and a revolving cast of Chicago’s best underground metal musicians, spent much of the past half decade making increasingly experimental and un-metal music. The two “Black Meddle” albums never completely abandoned heaviousity, but they incorporated the influence of moody bands like Joy Division, Pink Floyd, and Killing Joke into the music, and at points it seemed like Blake Judd was more interested in post-punk than metal. He even committed the heresy of insisting in interviews that he didn’t really like metal anymore.
Silencing Machine has been advertized as a return to black metal. While that’s an oversimplification (there are still spacy keyboards, weird repetition that seems derived from industrial music, and straight up rock and roll backbeats), this is a more streamlined and more viscous record than anything Nachtmystium has done in ages.
The real advantage of this return to basics is not so much that it returns Nachtmystium to it’s pre “Meddle” roots, but that it closes the gap between the trippy experementalists Nachtmystium have been on record and the brutal animal that Nachtmystium is onstage. One of the bands biggest problems during the past few years is that they have depended heavily on studio members, most notably keyboardist/electonic wiz kid Sanford Parker. As wonderful as some of the results of these collaborations have been, they have sometimes threatened to turn Nachtmystium into an experimental collective that plays dark pop music instead of a touring metal band. Silencing Machine doesn’t renounce the contributions of these players (and Sanford Parker contributes wonderfully, if more subtly, to the album), but it does return the band toward playing fast, brutal music that focuses on black metal guitar riffs.
Perhaps its a part of the band’s “back to our roots” campaign, or perhaps Blake just wanted to hang with his pal Lord Imperial (Blake Judd and Lord Imperial are both important players in the Twilight project), but Nachtmystium could not have found a better partner for their Silencing Machine tour than Krieg. Kreig, a long running USBM band, sits somewhere between a being one man project and a band with a constantly changing line up. For this tour, Krieg is Lord Imperial and the three touring members of Nachtmystium (Blake, Charlie Fell, and Andrew Markuszewski). Where Nachtmystium’s experiments have led them far outside of metal, Krieg has worked to find ever harsher ways of crafting queasy, nihilistic music. Krieg might be pegged as a uber-traditional black metal band, but Imperial has worked hard to find new ways to express hostility, and his restlessness deserves comparison to bleak experimental one man projects like Xasthur and Leviathan. (Those dudes are, of course, also Twilight participants.)
Ug. That is nasty.
Krieg is a great touring partner for Nachtmystium because they emphasize that Nachtmystium is a black metal band while demonstrating that not all black metal bands are the same. Where Krieg is a barrage of sinister melodies and thundering noise (and blood curdling screams. . . . man, that dude is a monster onstage), Nachtmystium is a rock and roll band. One key difference is a switch in the drum seat. Andrew, Nachtmystium’s guitarist, plays drums in Krieg, and the sturm and drang of his playing is a bit different from Charlie Fell’s more groove oriented stye. (They are both very good drummers. Judging by his performance with Krieg, I’d say Charlie is a good bass player as well.) Nachtmystium played a set heavily weighted to their oldest work mixed with some Silencing Machine stuff (I counted exactly one song from the “Meddle” albums, a scuffed-up version of “Addicts”), and while they were obviously going for a more “black metal” feeling than they have during the past few years, their version of “black metal” has swagger than is very different from Krieg’s desolate cacophony. Lord Imperial (who I found to be a nice guy when I chatted with him for a bit) wore black doc martins and a sleeveless militaristic black shirt. Blake wore cowboy boots and a denim patch covered vest. That’s two pretty different ideas of “black metal.”
It was a big deal that Sanford Parker was there for Roadburn in 2012. According to the band, the difficulty getting all five of them dudes on the same tour was a motivation for moving in a more guitar oriented direction. Why make music you can’t perform live?
Wrapping it up
This is in no way a summary of all the action going on in USBM, and I’ve hardly mentioned some of the most controversial high profile experiments or the tensions between the “hipster” point of view and the “metal” point of view. In the cases of bands discussed here, that tension, when it’s popped up, has been an absolutely healthy one, but some folks are less enthusiastic about Liturgy, and even Wolves in the Throne Room has gotten some flack. I also haven’t talked about some of the more brutal stuff like Black Anvil or Goatwhore (who present themselves as one of the most approachable, amicable metal bands around). I’ve mentioned, but haven’t explored, the phenomenon of non-touring “depressive” black metal bands. (Not strictly an American phenomena, but there is a lot of that here, particularly in the wake of Xasthur’s success. “A lot” and “Success” are, of course, relative.)
But this post is long enough. I think I’ve started to hint at the richness, diversity and the, well, Americanness of USBM. There’s a lot happening in extreme metal these days, and this is a pocket that I’m particularly interested in. I feel lucky that it’s so close to home.
Adios for now.
jimmymacworld 