Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

One World Under Ground

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This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Death knows no boundaries, and neither does death metal. Like its moldering extreme metal cousins doom and black, death metal is tied to no separate zip code or scene, instead festering indiscriminately across the face of the globe. From Florida to California to Scandinavia to Brazil to Holland to England and on and on—with death metal it’s not where you live, but how you rot.

There’s certainly no way to tell that the Coffins are from Japan. Ancient Torture—their recently released two-CD compilation of work from splits, comps, and EPs released between 2005-2009—includes no clues as to ethnicity or venue. The cover art is not particularly Eastern; on the contrary the scythe-wielding inquisitors on the front cover sport crosses and appear to be hideously disemboweling their cadaverous victim in some sort of medieval European setting. The inside illustrations are all similarly unspecific gothic. And, as with death metal worldwide, the song titles—”Wasteland of Terror,” “Evil Infection,” and “Torture”—are in English, the universal language of degradation.

The music is distinctive, but not in any way that makes you think of traditional Japanese music or J-pop. Instead, the Coffins purvey a universal mixture of death and doom, all grunting, pig-like Cookie-Monster vocals and detuned trudging. The band drags itself through layers and layers of feedback, pausing every so often (as on “Mortification to Ruin”) for a classic rock guitar solo to pull itself from the swamp before being sucked under again. The awesomely named “Acid Orgy” has a Ramones-esque three-chord hook slooooooowed down as if Joey and the gang were attempting to perform despite severe and repeated blunt trauma. You can almost hear the Japanese accent as the singer repeats “Acid Orgy” over and over again, but really it sounds more like his voice is strange because he’s vomiting barrels of fish guts. “Offalgrinder” gets up to a fast shuffle, as if the band is trying to decide whether to be hardcore or doom and the whiplash buries the singer’s voice completely; he sounds like he’s been interred in a well and then had 1000 barrels of muck dropped on him. “Ebony Tears” dispenses with all that punk crap and just goes for eight repetitious minutes of doom, doom, doom, doom, the heavy Sabbath-worthy riff repeated over and over, the singer retching and growling inarticulately, a canticle for stoned pachyderms.

The anonymity of death metal is probably a large part of why it’s so widely disliked by non-aficionados. The sexless, inhuman vocals that turn every singer into the same death’s head; the technical prowess and heavy rumbling that turn even relatively disparate influences (hardcore, Black Sabbath) into sludgy, undifferentiated pummeling; the abject horror movie lyrics. If you listen to indie rock or R&B or rap or jazz or cock rock you’re there for the swagger and personality, which is why national scenes, or national identity are an important touchstone. Bjork isn’t Bjork without her outré Icelandic charm; the Boredoms aren’t the Boredoms without that manic avant Japanese-ness; Dre isn’t Dre if he’s not representing the West Coast. But the Coffins? They look like a corpse wherever they happen to have grown up.

Diversity and personality are certainly enjoyable in their own right; the vertiginous variety of the capitalist buffet, where everything is new and shiny and different and your local ethnic spice can tingle the pallet of consumers far and wide. But there’s a perverse one-world underground appeal to death metal as well. In the U.S. or Brazil, Thailand or Japan, force and hate and death stare through the same sockets at the same bleak, blasted landscape. If most music tells us that the world is our playground, death metal reminds us that, wherever we live, it’s also our coffin.
 

Blasphemous Broadway Tunes Are the New Gospel

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This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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I bought British band Meads of Asphodel’s The Murder of Jesus the Jew expecting to hear some terrifying evil black metal. And that’s exactly what I got. At least, if by “terrifying and evil” you mean “show tunes.”

I do have a hideous attraction/repulsion for show tunes, and I think it makes sense to think of them as the music of the Antichrist. Especially if the show tunes are written by Andrew Lloyd Weber. And I dare anyone to listen to the second half of the song “Addicted to Christ” without having major Jesus Christ Superstar flashbacks. There’s a lonely horn that wanted to be jazz but had its soul stolen by music theater, and then a choral refugee starts singing like a chipper thespian—“Who is God? I am God? Are you God? But what God? I’m no God, it’s my God.” Soon enough we’ve got contrapuntal voices reciting bitter lyrics in an uplifting back and forth (First cheerful voice: “God hates you all!” Cheerful choral response: “Circumcise!”) And after not too long, again like Lloyd Weber, we launch into some classic rocky concept-album strut. Even the end, with a more traditional metal vocalist and a heavier roar, still has the busy crescendos and prog-rock shifts that strongly suggest Vegas.

In short, Meads of Asphodel is busily pissing off purists of all sorts. Whether you’re a committed Christian or a committed metal head, your idols are spat upon, your faith mocked, and your sacred rituals left to die slowly in a befouled orchestra pit..
And yet…is this really the blasphemy it’s supposed to be? Musically, conceivably this could be seen not as a hideous imposture of black metal, but as a roots exploration. Black Sabbath was really, really proggy—“Fairies Wear Boots” could’ve had a chorus line. Pat Boone’s tacky desecration of “Enter Sandman” was funny because it wasn’t a desecration: metal really does often sound like Nelson Riddle conducting a brontosaurus. Meads of Asphodel’s nine-minute “Genesis of Death” with the syncopated exotica shimmies and the ridiculous Spanish guitar moments and even the David Bowie-esque wailing at the end—obviously it’s ridiculous, but it’s not ridiculous in an unmetal way. It sounds like Rush, it sounds like Pink Floyd, it sounds like King Crimson or Uriah Heap—like all these bands which aren’t usually considered proto-metal, but which have solid claims to being just that. Meads of Asphodel is maybe apocryphal, heretical metal, but apocrypha and heresy are part of the tradition too. To me, at least, Meads is keeping the faith far more religiously than High on Fire or Agalloch, bands which sound more like metal to the uninitiated but deep in their souls emote like indie rather than lumbering like Sabbath.

And what about Christianity? There, too, Meads of Asphodel may be more devout than they appear. In a blandly secular age, to record album after album of theological arguments is not exactly the act of unbelievers, even if the theology expressed is that of unbelief. “Addicted to Christ” mocks the idea of a different God for each individual—“A man God, a fish God, a black God, a white God, a gay God, a sad God, a blind God, a dead God”—a mockery which is perfectly reconcilable with monotheism. Similarly, the ambient keyboard washes and oh-so-Lloyd Webber emoting of Jesus in “Dark Gethsemene” is notably sympathetic. “It’s over, no, not after life. No second change in paradise…A glimpse of hell is all that’s left. A crown of thorns upon my head.” That’s sinful despair…but Christ is supposed to have had moments of virtually sinful despair. Which is to say that the song’s unbelief is buttressed with an appeal to a not-especially-unorthodox Christ. It’s a Christian atheism.

Along those lines, it’s fairly clear that the Meads of Asphodel website, which includes vocalist Metatron’s extended essays about each and every song on the album (let me repeat that—extended essays about each and every song on the album) is not the work of someone indifferent to Jesus’ existence. Here for example, is a representative paragraph from Metatron’s annotations of “Apostle of the Uncircumcised” (spelling errors are left as is.)

But contrived exaggerations of Jesus by the early church fathers made him into what he is now. Would not a God of such infinite power be beyond the trappings of mortal frailty? Why would a God produce only a single son whose message has since become lost in church corruption and human error? Surly a God would foresee the futility of what has become the Christian Church in all its crumbling out of date teachings. Why send a Son to save the sins of man and leave his doctrine to a few disciples who themselves could not ensure his words would be preserved until at least 30-50 years after his death? For what reason would the world have to suffer even more unspeakable cruelty two thousand years on to this day? Why would all this mystery be locked in a maze of religious jargon that is so at odds with itself the very church has splintered into various denominations each proclaiming to be the purest doctrine of Christ?

You don’t go on like that for page after feverish page if you don’t care about Christianity. If a theologian could answer those questions to Metatron’s satisfaction, Metatron would care. He’s an argument away from believing—which is to say if you’re throwing stones at the church, you’re just not that far away from the church. The Murder of Jesus the Jew is a ridiculous mess of an album, but it’s not a random mess. Rather, it’s the inspired mess you can only get from following your twisted faith—in metal and in Christ—wherever it happens to lead you.

Bend Your Knee

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No lesser a Christian than Martin Luther understood our predicament: Anyone, he wrote in On Temporal Authority, who tried ‘to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and the sword on the plea that all are baptized and Christian, and that, according to the gospel, there shall be among them no law or sword—or the need for either— . . . would be loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would have the proof in my wounds.’

The above is a quote from Eric Cohen’s review of Christian pacifist Stanley Hauerwas’ War and the American Difference: Theological Reflection on Violence and National Identity. Cohen’s review nicely encapsulates the argument against pacifism — that argument being, that pacifism is well-intentioned but dumb, and that it will get us all killed. There are dangerous people out there in the world, and if we don’t use force to stop them, then, well, they won’t be stopped, will they? For Cohen, this logic is so clear that anyone who doubts it must be, literally, crazy. Or, as Cohen puts it, “if Hauerwas’ political theology is the true political theology of Christianity, then Christianity is a form of eschatological madness.”

Hauerwas would probably accept that designation happily enough — with the caveat that the efficient rationality of modernity is its own kind of madness, what with the gas chambers, the drone strikes, the enhanced interrogation, and the nuclear weapons always on the table.

Indeed, Hauerwas’ point is that war is not simply a natural disaster from which prudent nations must protect themselves with the minimal force necessary. Rather, war is its own logic and its own morality. This, Hauerwas says, is especially the case in America. He points back to Abraham Lincoln’s justification of the Civil War at Gettysburg. Lincoln, of course, said that the war had to be continued in order “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” and further “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Hauerwas argues:

A nation determined by such words, such elegant and powerful words, simply does not have the capacity to keep war limited. A just war that can only be fought for limited political purposes cannot and should not be understood in terms shaped by the Gettysburg Address. Yet after the Civil War, Americans think they must go to war to ensure that those who died in our past wars did not die in vain. Thus American wars are justified as a ‘war to end all wars,’ or ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ or for ‘unconditional surrender’ or ‘freedom’. Whatever may be the realist presuppositions of those who lead America to war, those presuppositions cannot be used as the reasons given to justify the war. To do so would betray the tradition of war established in the Civil War. Wars, American wars, must be wars in which the sacrifices of those doing the dying and the killing have redemptive purpose and justification.

“War,” Hauerwas concludes, “is America’s altar.”

Eric Cohen recoils at this conclusion, arguing that

There have indeed been times when we have used massive and terrible power against terrible enemies; and yet, right now, brave American soldiers endure great risk to themselves in an effort to avoid killing civilians. And while the history of America’s wars is hardly a story of moral perfection, it is, by human standards, a mostly heroic story of doing the right thing and doing it for the right reason.

Putting aside for a minute the accuracy of the claim that most of America’s wars have been righteous (the Philippines? Vietnam? the Indian wars?), I think Cohen’s rhetoric here is actually an almost perfect example of Hauerwas’ point. Specifically, from a just war perspective, or from a realist perspective, war surely should be limited and pragmatic, always fought with a consciousness of the tragedy, brutality, and terror which war unleashes. And yet, here is Cohen, responding to that argument, by characterizing America’s experience of war as a “heroic story.” Moreover, that story is not “heroic” despite our history of war; rather, it is war itself that confers upon us heroism. Even our “terrible power” gains a grandeur, since it is unleashed against “terrible enemies” — and never, of course, against children, or civilians. America is moral because of the wars it fights, the ways it fights them — and because of the very terribleness of the conflicts. The obvious corollary is that if we did not fight the wars, we would not be moral — we would not, for example, have the opportunity to exercise restraint by not shooting civilians (except of course, when we do.),

Thus, for Cohen, war provides America with its moral standing and its moral experience; its heroism, its bravery, its sacrifice. This is exactly Hauerwas’ point. War is how America understands itself as a good people; it is how we see ourselves striding across the world stage to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all.

If any war was fought to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all, it was the Civil War. Hauerwaus acknowledges the evil of slavery, and insists that Christians were bound to witness against it. He insists, though, that the witness against slavery should not be war; that the moral opposite of slavery is not killing. For Hauerwas, to argue otherwise is idolatrous.

War is a counter church. It is the most determinative moral experience many people have. That is why Christian realism requires the disavowal of war. Christians do not renounce war because it is often so horrible, but because war, in spite of its horror, or perhaps because it is so horrible, can be so morally compelling. That is why the church does not have an alternative to war. The church is the alternative to war. When Christians no longer see the reality of the church as an alternative to the world’s reality, we abandon the world to war.

When I read that paragraph, I thought immediately of that superstar atheist, Christopher Hitchens, and his bloodthirsty reaction to the September 11 attacks.

Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Hitchens famously denigrates faith…but that’s not exactly a pragmatic, measured, calculus there, dripping with restraint and quiet reason. On the contrary, it’s in the genre of prophetic apocalyptic — it’s a religious statement. And the religion is, as Hauerwas says, the church of vengeance, the church of retribution, the church of death, self-justification, anger, honor, and war.

Hauerwas would like to get rid of war and violence — but what he really wants to get rid of is the church of war. As he says, the abolition of slavery (accomplished in part, of course, through war) did not eliminate slavery. There are still people who are enslaved today around the world. But the anti-slavery movement made it impossible for anyone to justify slavery. The church no longer says that it is god’s will for men and women to be chattel; the state no longer insists that it is righteous for some to be slave and others to be free. The abolition of slavery was the abolition of the church of slavery — and that abolition has had a massive, thoroughgoing effect on how people treat each other on this, our earth.

Hauerwas is asking Christians, specifically, to follow their faith to a similar confrontation with the church of war. He is not saying that all wars will be eliminated, or that all violence will disappear, any more than all slavery disappeared. Rather, what he wants is for the moral underpinnings of war to be systematically knocked out. He’s looking for a world in which Eric Cohen cannot use war to make the United States heroic; in which Christopher Hitchens cannot puff himself up as a savior/prophet in the name of cleansing violence. He’s looking for a world in which war is not the measure of reality or goodness, but rather a sin, indulged in only by those who have deliberately eschewed morality, heroism, faith, and sacrifice.

Again, Hauerwas is definitively, defiantly Christian. His message, therefore, is specifically to Christians. It is Christians, first, he believes, who must determine not to kill each other. It is Christians, first, who must reject the morality of war for the morality of the Cross. On the one hand, this is something of a relief for atheists like myself. Since I’m not a believer, I can cheerfully keep paying taxes for cluster bombs and hating my neighbor just as I’ve always done. Still, there is a bit of discomfort there too. If, after all, Christians were actually to take up Hauerwas’ challenge, if they were actually to bear witness to nonviolence and transform the world — well, I’d hate to say it, obviously, but it would be hard to escape the suspicion that that might actually be the work of God.

Until that day comes, though, we are stuck with war. And since that is the case, it might behoove us all to spend less time questioning the sanity of pacifists, and more time thinking about what this thing, war means to us. Is war our tool, with which we visit justice upon a grateful world? Or, alternately, are we the tools of war, with which it performs the age-old work of violence? Who, in short, do we serve? And is there anything — be it life, honor, love, freedom, or faith — that we will not sacrifice, or have not already sacrificed, in its service?

Death for Beginners

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This first appeared on Madeloud. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Death metal has to be one of the most inaccessible forms of structured noise ever to have passed itself off under the loose rubric of “popular music”. With vocals that are more growled than sung, drumming that sounds more like a jackhammer than a beat, a brutal insistence on lack of groove, and lyrics that embrace Satanism, decay, and being torn limb from limb — well, let’s just say that the genre isn’t everyone’s cup of steaming pus.

It’s true that if you like only twee indie pop with the occasional foray into folk, you should probably stay far, far away from death metal. But if you have any appreciation for heavy, from Guns N’Roses to Zeppelin to Black Flag to Iron Maiden, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to find something to appreciate in death. Here are a few easy entry points from someone who, long leery of the genre, has finally seen the black corpselight.

Slayer — Reign in Blood
Slayer’s 1986 masterpiece is thrash metal, not death — but there’s no death band that doesn’t worship at its unholy altar. Dave Lombardo’s blazing double bass throughout the album is the touchstone for death’s fist-to-the-face percussive roar, and the demonically-fueled, resolutely unbluesy, riffs-as-bludgeons laid down by guitarists Hanneman and King are almost as influential. These death elements, though, come in a package that is, for neophytes, relatively accessible. Tom Araya sings like a human rather than an ogre; the production (by Rick Rubin) is much cleaner than most death albums, and the songs, for all their breathtaking speed and power, are constructed around brutally effective hooks. In short, this is the perfect place to jump off into some real death.

Possessed — Seven Churches
Recorded the year before Reign in Blood, Seven Churches may be the first actual death metal album. Jeff Becerra brings the cookie monster vocals, and the band blazes along like Motorhead with double the amphetamine prescription and a twisted theological bent. The songwriting is significantly more rudimentary than on “Reign in Blood” — or, indeed, than on most fetishistically technical death metal albums to come. But Becerra’s charisma is considerable, and the album’s single-minded rush has an easily appreciated visceral charge that was (more-or-less deliberately) jettisoned as the genre solidified.

Malevolent Creation — The Ten Commandments
Part of the influential Florida death metal scene, Malevolent Creation’s recorded their first album in 1991. The Ten Commandments is top quality, straight ahead early death metal. The songs are only a short step removed from thrash; fast, brutal, adrenaline-fueled, and relentless. The title-track, Malevolent Creation, is one of the few songs by any death band anywhere that actually gives Slayer a run for its black and bartered carcass.

Vader — Future of the Past
The Polish band Vader is one of the most revered 90s European death metal outfits. Future of the Past, their 1996 third album, is composed entirely of covers — which makes it unusually accessible. In the first place, choosing songs by a multitude of different writers gives the album a welcome variety. In the second place, every song just kicks ass. “Storm of Stress” (originally by Terrorizer) is 1:15 of breakneck brutality, punctuated by a single bass run pause so you can take a breath and contemplate the blood pouring out of your ears. “Dethroned Emperor” (originally by Celtic Frost) slows down for a classic doom slog, with thick detuned minor chords thumping to the floor like rough-skinned and slaughtered ungulates. Covers by classic thrash acts like Sodom, Kreator, Dark Angel, and Slayer are also top-notch — and give you an incentive to go check out lots of bands to see whether the originals can possibly be as loud and fast as Vader’s covers.

Morbid Angel — Blessed Are the Sick
Morbid Angel is both totally validated classic Florida death metal and flat out weird in a genre not known for encouraging idiosyncrasy. Released in 1991, Blessed Are the Sick was actually dedicated to Mozart, and while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to fans of Amadeus, the album’s song structures are definitely unique. Throughout the album, the band liberally mixes in elements of doom, while drummer Peter Sandoval throws in off-kilter rhythms and weird accents between blast beat pummels as if he has secretly sacrificed his soul to Bill Bruford. The result is a dexterously lurching masterpiece, fierce enough to appeal to purists while open-ended and inventive enough to draw in fans of great heavy songwriting, from Zeppelin to Nirvana.

Therion — Of Darkness
One of the founders of the important Swedish death metal scene, Therion has moved more and more into orchestral death metal, actually performing at some concerts with symphony players. Back in 1991 when Of Darkness was released, though, those impulses were still incipient — the album takes the sweep of classical music while remaining resolutely death. The songwriting is remarkable, with brutally ranting chunks of death incorporated seamlessly into larger structures. The sense of development makes each track a mini-epic, with rapidly changing tempos and dramatic arrangements. Fans of black metal, especially, should find a lot to like here, but the emphasis on composition makes this one of the least monotonous and most engaging death metal albums out there for any listener.
 
 
If you’re still with me at this point, I’d also highly recommend early Deicide albums like Deicide, Legion and Once Upon the Cross, Grave’s gloriously guttural Into the Grave, and Decapitated’s fearsomely proficient Winds of Creation. Also great are Cancer, Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Death, Dismember and (early) Entombed. And from there you’re free to follow the blasphemously infected trail on your own. Happy torment!

Pop Metal for the Treadmill

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This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of a week long Metal Apocalypse.
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Metal has always been an uneasy critical sell. Too uptight to be rootsy, too formulaic to be arty, too earnest to be clever, and too remorselessly sexless to be sexy, metal has droned, trudged, and howled its own way between rockists and poptimists, occasionally hailed by one or the other, but never exactly embraced by either.

So it makes perfect sense that High on Fire is the critically validated metal It band of the moment—since, in most ways that matter, the group isn’t really a metal outfit at all. Oh, sure, High on Fire has many metal trappings. The songs are long, loud, and prog-inflected. The vocalist growls as much as sings. There are guitar solos.

But despite all that, High on Fire’s energy is not metal. It’s punk. More specifically, it’s metal-tinged pop punk, in the vein of Guns N’Roses or Nirvana or all those grunge bands that critics loved because beneath the thin metal veneer they were actually trying to be rootsy, or arty, or clever, or sexy, or some combination thereof.

You can hear High on Fire’s actual sympathies in the opening title tune, with the repetitive, fist-shaking chorus (“Rise up! Fall down!”) that gets lodged in your brainstem like an overcarbonated bleacher cheer. You can hear it in the emotive sincerity with which Matt Pike emotes like a cross between Eddie Vedder and a constipated pachyderm on “Bastard Samurai.” And you can read it in that damn name: High on Fire. That’s an inspirational slogan for your mildly edgy corporate event, damn it—it’s not a metal band.

Metal is about being ground into anonymity beneath a giant iron heel. Punk’s about raging against the machine. The latter is in general the option more likely to wow a cultural arbiter, since people, or at least critics, like to feel that they’re fighting the power rather than being devoured by it. And, you know, if you’re creative, smart, and funny—like the Dead Kennedys, or Motorhead, or even Nirvana—fighting the power can be really entertaining and worthwhile. High on Fire, though, has neither the wit of great punk nor the remorselessness of great metal. Instead it’s just lumberingly literal adrenal rush; music by which to run on your treadmill or invade a sovereign nation, or shout “Shit yeah!” while drinking yourself into a stupor.

Which is fine, I guess. But I wish they wouldn’t call it metal.
 

Pagan Death Cult

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A version of this essay appeared in The Chicago Reader. This is part of a weeklong Metal Apocalypse.
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To most civilian bystanders, there could hardly be two less simpatico white pop genres than metal and folk. On the one hand you’ve got fascist Vikings grunting gutterally about blood, Satan, and Leatherface; on the other you’ve got tree-smooching hippies warbling about peace, love, and gently blissed-out mammals. Short of some scene of hideous pillage, it’s pretty difficult to imagine any intercourse between them. “Welcome, corpse-painted stranger! A flower for your gard….eeeeearrrrgh!”

And yet, intercourse there has always been. Led Zeppelin was as much a folk band as a metal one, and that tradition is carried on by horror-movie-at-the-Renaissance-Faire outfits like folk metal band Finntroll. Genre designations are, of course, notoriously slipshod, and it’s true that a joke horror outfit like, say, Venom doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the earnest protest music of, say, Pete Seeger. But if by folk you mean acoustic music with medieval English roots, and if by metal you mean thrash, death, doom, and especially black, then there’s a lot of common ground. It’s no accident that Forest is the name of both a black metal band and a 60s British folk outfit, for about both thundering metal orcs and tinkling elvish folk lingers the spirit of Tolkein and the distinctive scent of weed. If folk and metal are opposites, it’s not because they have nothing to do with each other, but because they’re mirror images — different takes on the same pagan Northern-European obsessions.

The two latest offerings on that unholy altar are the best releases of the summer: Karen Dalton’s Green Rocky Road and Pyha’s The Haunted House. Both document almost-lost recordings created in virtual isolation by eccentric quasi-legends. Dalton was an almost-famous Village folkie from the ’60s. Her musical legacy for the most part consists of ingratiating, bluesy guitar tracks in which she sings like an improbably docile Billie Holiday. This disc of recently unearthed home recordings from 1962, mostly on banjo, is the first record of a starker musical personae. Pyha is even more obscure. A native of South Korea, he recorded The Haunted House , his sole black metal opus, by himself in 2001 when he was 14 years old. Circulated on CD-R in Korea, it fell into the hands of the metal aficionados at tUMULT, who managed to track down the perpetrator. It had its official release, with extra tracks, in July.

Sonically, the two records couldn’t be more different. Rocky Road is so bare-bones it makes Alan Lomax’s field recordings sound polished. Even to call the two-track record “produced” seems a stretch. “Katie Cruel” is interrupted by a telephone ringing; part of the beginning of “Nottingham Town” is erased. Even without such cock-ups, Dalton’s voice and banjo-playing are incredibly harsh; each phrase and plunk seems to come scraping out of some abandoned hollow.

The Haunted House, on the other hand, is a dense, claustrophobic landslide of sound. The record’s signature noise is burst out static; the sound of recording technology dying in agony. Slabs of sound lurch into each other like lumbering tectonic zombies. In “Tale From The Haunted House Part 1” the background hiss and wail just…stops, to be replaced by whispering over a ghostly synthesized chorus, which in turn cuts back to giant distorted screaming and a mid-tempo drum beat that goes on and on, mindlessly repeating. Throughout the record, each of black metal’s requisite layers of sound (guitars, drums, synths, shrieks) seem manually lifted and dropped, one on the other. This sense of grinding effort reaches its peak on “Song of Oldman,” where the buzzing static actually seems to overwhelm the mics, cutting in and out in random, painful bursts, while the wailing, almost human synths distort into a horrible scraping noise, like a metal bar being dragged across your teeth.

Yet, for all their differences, Green Rocky Road’s empty space and The Haunted House’s dense maelstrom meet on the same bleak wasteland; bleached skulls calling hopelessly to each other in dry, mutually incomprehensible tongues. Given too much space or not enough, the songs and, indeed, the singers seem lost, abandoned, dead. Tempos on both albums stutter and grind down almost to paralysis. Pyha’s music is leaden enough to almost qualify as doom — on “Tale From The Haunted House Part 3” the drum machine is positively stoned, thudding down just behind the beat so the track sounds like it’s slowing down all through its 4 1/2 minute length. Dalton’s album is similarly stupefied. The banjo line on “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” turns the familiar lyrical melody into a wavering slog, unrecognizable until Dalton’s voice comes in, off the beat and even off-key. On the endless “Nottingham Town” her picking and singing have even less to do with each other; the banjo speeds up, stretches out, trips over itself, and plunks notes so far out of tune that you’d swear the tape speed was screwy. She sounds like the Shaggs on a serious downer.

Nottingham Town” is an eerie, traditional tune with intimations of loneliness and the grave, and Dalton’s broken attack intensifies the uncanny sense of isolation and despair. In contrast, the last track of The Haunted House, “Wanderer Death March”, is not unpredictable, but insescapable. Anchored to repetitive, buzzing cymbals, increasingly strained synth washes, and throat-shredding howls, the song is a soundtrack for armageddon — a slow camera pan across clashing armies being devoured alive by mechanical insects. It, and the rest of the record, are intended as an anti-war statement, but this isn’t any kind of hopeful, or even outraged protest. Instead, it’s a vivid, bitter surrender before the crushing power of violence. Pyha seems pulverized by hate and terror; Dalton collapses in aphasia — for both, in different ways, individuality and artifice seem to disintegrate in agonizing slow-motion, falling to dust as the apocalypse approaches.

Folk and metal — and, indeed, the cold northern European culture that they epitomize — share a particular fascination with death, and, as a result, a particular take on authenticity and art. Punk tends to equate realness and sloppy incompetence; jazz, and hip hop link cred to invention and élan; blues and gospel tie it to personal emotional expression. As a celebration of the performer’s skill (or lack therof) the music is about individuality, and so about life. In folk and metal, on the other hand, the demands of the form tend to obliterate personality. In the true mountain tradition, Dalton’s singing is without affect; when she says “they call me Katie Cruel” her lack of inflection lets you know beyond a doubt that she is as heartless as she claims. Similarly, Pyha is swallowed in his own effects — snippets of taped ephemera, muffled bellowing, some poor soul gasping its last in the midst of a crackling fire — his own voice is everywhere and nowhere, neutered in its multiplicity. To be authentic is, for both, Dalton and Pyha, to be depersonalized; to be real is to be nobody. You show your commitment to the material by letting it bury you. When there is individuality, it comes across as weakness, stuttering — a falling away from the perfection of oblivion. Folk and metal are about being crushed by death — about the cold joy in self-immolation which links Protestants, and Norsemen alike.

Neither the American Dalton nor the Korean Pyha actually come from Northern Europe, of course. But their distance is, itself, part of the point. The form is as implacable as it is imperial; death doesn’t care if you’re folk, volk or other. Whether you’re cavorting with the fairies in Stonehenge, torching churches in Norway, or wandering somewhat further afield, a dirge is a dirge for everyone. Dalton’s keening and Pyha’s buzz are part of the same sexless drone, swallowing hippie and Viking alike in the abject ecstasy of annihilation.

Utilitarian Review 4/14/12

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News

I’m pleased to announce that Kailyn Kent will be joining us as a regular columnist. At the moment, she’s planning for her column to focus on the links between comics and the fine art world. Kailyn’s written several posts for us already, and we’re very excited to have her appear here regularly.

In other news…I’ve mentioned this here and there already, but thought I’d semi-officially let folks know that I’ve gotten a book contract to write about the William Marston/Harry Peter Wonder Woman. As is always the case with these things, it’ll be several years before it’s written and available — but you can start hoarding your pennies now, I suppose! In the meantime, if you can’t wait for WW copy, you can read my past posts on her here. And we’re also going to have a roundtable in the beginning of May celebrating my having blogged my way through all of the Marston/Peter WW.

And…we got our first link from the Dish! To Michael Arthur’s Kpop article (I’m a fan of Andrew Sullivan’s, so I was excited.)

 
On HU

In our Featured Archive Post I talk about Art Young and the black humorist as Christ.

I talked about Marston’s vs. Azzarello’s Amazons.

Erica Friedman talked about the big and small of conventions, from the enormous Comiket in Tokyo to the tiny Yaycon in the Netherlands.

Richard Cook expressed some skepticism about Downton Abbey.

I talk about incest in Twilight and the Hunger Games.

I posted a download mix of Neil-Young_Like music.

Eric Berlatsky on Gilbert Hernandez, fetishes, and phallic mothers.

Eric Berlatsky on Jaime Hernandez, fetishes, and phallic mothers.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Washington Times I talk about the movie Bully and the case for homeschooling.

At the Atlantic I review the strikingly crappy film Lockout.

At Splice I talk about Derbyshire and the right’s anti-anti-racism.

At Splice Today I discuss Neil Young and the black metal band Drudkh.
 
Other Links

Ms. magazine on Katniss as a nonsexualized action hero.

War mongering and atheism apparently go together now.

Alyssa Rosenberg with a really depressing story about the Obama administration harassing journalists.

Matte Harrison on the TV show Bones and birth.

David Olsen on how he learned to love Power Girl.