Two Heavy Metal Bands In The Late Capitalist Coffee Shop Rock World (Guitars Is Cancelled part 2)
Last month, North Carolina trad-metal band Children Of The Reptile released Live and Chaotic, a live double-album that collects tracks from all of their studio releases thus far, some new stuff, and a few surprise covers thrown in that show off different dimensions of the band. I talk a lot about End of the World Music and Weirdo Rock and Roll on this blog, and I usually fall into talking about punk rock and new wave music. But Children of the Reptile are decidedly not that — they’re a band of serious musicians crafting anthems to air guitar and chant along too, declaring loyalty to classic rock at a time when that is often scoffed at. But they aren’t throwing back at any one influence or resting on laurels; Children Of The Reptile are craftsman and showmen, and in dark times, they are making their own statement of purpose — that they will rock the fuck out as the world ends around them, and provide a fun, grandiose soundtrack to it.
Over a year ago, punk-rap duo Ho99o9 released a pair of EPs, Cyber Cop [Unauthorized MP3.] and Cyber Warfare. Ho99o9 have released a spat of singles and two full length albums over the last years. While some have written them off as riding the coattails of critical darlings Death Grips, this is fundamentally wrong and reveals the gatekeeping nature of much music press. Death Grips are an experimental hip hop group, who blend elements of hardcore with jazz, sound collages and all kinds of other shit. Ho99o9, on the other hand, are a heavy rock band as much as hip hop group, and they wear this on their sleeve. Last year they toured opening for Korn, and on their debut full-length Dead Bodies In The Lake they sample both Slipknot and the SOURCE Awards. They adapt elements of nu-metal, horrorcore, and traditional punk rock and graft them together with classic boom bap. They’re lyrics are nihilistic, misanthropic, and violent, but while on paper this might make them sound like some sort of juggalo novelty, they’re much closer in spirit to Geto Boys or Minor Threat.
Both Children Of The Reptile and Ho99o9 are unabashedly hard rock bands, proudly identifying with styles that have been deemed reactionary by bloodless salamanders who would rather talk about Car Seat Headrest or Billie Eilish. Children Of The Reptile are producing powerful heavy metal with powerful, crisp musicianship and fun, fantastical energy. Ho99o9 are making music that reflects unpleasant angers that reflects the bubbling anger that so many of us carry around with us, rapping and screaming over digitally manipulated slabs of guitar and bass noise and chopped up and rearranged pounding drums, making a sound that is one hundred percent youthful and defiant of the soft dance ballad R&B and mumbling, lethargic sounding rap that so many people work themselves up over somehow.
They are two of the tightest and most powerful rock acts you will hear right now, rock bands with guts when there isn’t a whole lot of that.
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I simply won’t listen to Fetch the Bolt Cutters. That’s all. It’s not a big deal to not listen to it. Me listen to it doesn’t take anything away from all the people it speaks to. I’m sure it’s good and valid and cool. I’ve heard a bit of Fiona Apple. I respect her. I just, you know. I don’t need to listen to it. I don’t feel a driving need to. I have an idea that it’s a very well done, moody and artsy collection of pop music. And that’s cool. I like pop music. I got nothing against it, man.
But hey, I don’t need to listen to it. If it’s important to you, and to a lot of people, that’s amazing. But I’m kind of done chasing cool pop music trends to keep up on what you guys are talking about. Maybe it’s my age showing (I’m 28, the far side of “young”). I liked Charli XCX. When 1989 by Taylor Swift came out, in a drug and amphetamine induced mania while working overtime at an empty K-Mart, I convinced myself I loved it and that it was actually a fresh-sounding masterpiece. A year later I tried to revisit it and it just sounded gross and polished and, you know, like a product. Because it was a fucking Taylor Swift album.
Still, I tried to get into Lemonade by Beyonce when that came out. And it was, you know, good. It was well-made and the songs were good. I just didn’t really care about it. And I still tried to listen to it. But, you know, I don’t care about it. It’s a very good pop album. And that’s fine. I thought I was missing out on something by not loving it, but I wasn’t. There’s an audience for it that is not me.
I tried to listen to the self-titled album by The Weekend because people I respect said it was good. It was just boring, slow ballads by a creepy sad rich guy.
I will not listen to Carly Rae Jepsen. I don’t care how many freaks in Swans shirts tell me she’s actually real good.
The trend of the last few years to prop up mediocre pop and deride criticisms of it as “rockist” begins from a valid place — rock music was, for decades, dominated by straight, white men who unduly lashed out against other genres as inauthentic or non-musical. So it’s a response to that, and if a bunch of media people want to strain and pontificate on why 100 Gex are actually really relevant and new and hip and not just an update on the type of novelty spazz techno that furries have been making for 20 years now, that’s fine. Knock yourself out.
And hey, if you wanna sit and listen to some lifeless “indie rock” that’s been canonized by a bunch of soft, weepy nerds like Arcade Fire, Car Seat Headrest, Neutral Milk Hotel, again, knock yourself out. That stuff is neither independent, nor does it really rock, that’s cool. Go for it. Some people like boring shit. And that’s fine.
This stuff actually annoys me way more than the poptimist stuff, because it’s considered “modern rock”, and hey, this might sound conservative but none of that stuff gets my blood pumping anymore. There was a time and place where I heard it and got it, or at least wanted to get it, same with the pop stuff, but after a while it’s just like, can you make some NOISE? Can you write a BIG HOOK? Can you YELL? Can you Do Something with all this ambition you’ve put into this record?
Look, all of the days running together is becoming rough on me, I’m not going to lie. It’s been over a month since I got laid off and the state shut down. The first couple of weeks were uncertain, but okay. I managed to ring out some fun from them, and I think I was still manic with all the emotion from everything going on in the world. As I settle into the understanding that this is going to take much longer than I thought, it’s becoming hard to not become even darker in my moods about what is happening right now.
I don’t know if my job will be there for me when businesses are able to open again. I don’t know how much it is going to cost me to repay the taxes off of unemployment. This will probably be the first year when I owe money. I’m trying to put as much into my savings as I can right now, hoping that I won’t have to deplete what I had spent the last year putting aside for the future. But I don’t know.
I don’t know anything and neither does anyone else. The last couple of days I have been getting up early, for two distinct reasons. The first reason is, I keep waking up in the early morning hours, and laying in the dark feeling lonely and desperate and scared, and then I eventually just decide to get up and start my day, because starting my day is easier than staying in bed, trying to sleep when I can’t. The other reason is, because I have a list of things I like to do every day as long as I am not working, and if I get up early and start doing them right away, I can get them done in a few hours.
Right now, with the days becoming a blur, with mounting uncertainties about what the life holds, with a creeping sense of loneliness that becomes more pronounced every day, and yes, with selfish resentment that a pandemic has hit just as I was beginning to feel hopeful that I could get my shit together and start a new band and have a stable life. And I know it’s petty, but I’m really frustrated that everything turned upside down just as I was finally becoming active in the Portland music scene and starting to put a new band together that I was excited about. I was really hoping that I would have another real band up and going and another good album out and play some more shows before I turned thirty. I was really hoping that I would have another real band up and going and another good album out and play some more shows before I turned thirty. I don’t want to have peaked in 2016 opening for Impaler at the Lyric Room in Green Bay.
And, frankly, the LAST thing I need when all of this is going through my head, the last thing I want to hear, is some tired, bloodless indie rock with mumble-ass vocals, some New Century Adult Contemporary. I want to hear some music shitkicking guitars. I’ve talked pretty well at length about the current relevance of punk rock and new wave in some previous posts. The music discussed there is decidedly NOT classic rock, but it definitely is shitkicking music with some edge. But to be clear, that’s not the ONLY good stuff going on right now.
Every half decade or so a new band will come out and penetrate mainstream corporate record label awareness and a bunch of slug A&R people and easily impressed upon dopes will say that it’s the return of “real rock”, “real heavy metal”, whatever. Invariably, it turns out to be some bullshit. In my very youth, I remember being duped into buying albums by such shitty bands as Blue October, Wolfmother, and the Autumn Offspring from hype like this. Couple years ago Greta Van Fleet were the band that everyone was hyping up like this. Not only was this a pale Zeppelin impression (I’m already not a fan of Led Zeppelin, save for “Fool In The Rain” and “Communication Breakdown”, which are just killer songs), but the damn hacks had the nerve to pull a “sick of being compared to Zeppelin” whine after a couple months of fame. And like, look, we all know who you’re trying to sound like. It’s fine. People like it. Not me, but people do.
Look, it’s not like I demand complete originality if the songwriting or energy of a band is good. Everyone steals and it’d be silly to pretend that the only stuff that is good hasn’t been heard before. The problem with “real hard rock” bands like Greta Van Fleet is that they are a brand of throwback rock that has been gobbled up enthusiastically by the same industry machinations that produce mechanically separated tripe, deemed accessible enough to package as a return to rock without actually bothering anyone, and sludged out.
Rock music, all signs seem to indicate, has lost it’s mass cultural relevance. I emphasise the word “mass” because of course there is more good rock music than ever coming out — that’s part of the reason I started this blog. But will it ever be a huge shared cultural experience ever again? My guess is no. I do not lament or celebrate this — it’s simply the way it is.
The internet has made everyone’s taste specialized, and it has had a two-fold effect of making all kinds of music available, while also eliminating the need for a singular massive artist that rock fans, or fans of any popular music, share, or who are at least inescapable. Hip hop and pop music get much closer to this in the mainstream than any rock music now, and even there, there isn’t the sort of ubiquity there once was. The last time rock music truly held a mass cultural currency in the youth was, arguably, the late 90s. Nu-metal was the last moment where new rock music was sweeping out in a mass scale and scooping up huge audience. In the 2000s, the glut of mall-punk emo that attained popularity gradually and comfortably pivoted into an American Idol pop music context, with the exception of My Chemical Romance, who I would argue were probably the last widely popular “classic rock” band. I’m not into them, but I would argue that.
When I say “classic rock” I am not referring to the age of a band, but the tradition that they contribute to — that is, while produced, tight, bombastic bands that play rock music professionally and for it’s own sake, and that are almost inherently NOT punk rock in their production or aesthetic (though they may be influenced by punk rock or new wave). Again, none of these traits are inherently positive or negative, they just provide a framing for what we’re talking about here. My definition of Classic Rock begins, of course, with the British invasion bands, leads into the birth of progressive rock and hard rock in the late 60s and early 60s, absorbs and trades some influences with punk and new wave (power pop bands like Cheap Trick, and more enveloping-pushing heavy metal of the time, like Motorhead, and thrash and black metal in the 80s and 90s occupied both spaces).
Into the 90s we have an explosion of new rock bands that, while labeled “alternative” at the time, were as much a continuation of classic rock as a transgression of it. Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins packed stadiums with energetic performances and studious craftsmanship, and I’d argue that this phase of classic rock reaches it’s zenith in 1994 with Vitalogy and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, both sprawling and ambitous double albums that experimented with various genres and alluded to broader concepts. For all their marketing as “alternative rock”, these albums were much closer in spirit to the epic rock bands of the 60s and 70s than to the crude and self-consciously disdainful subcultures that spawned in part as reaction against Classic Rock.
As much as punk rock gets praised in written histories as being more proletarian and populist and speaking to common people, the truth is that it alienates people as much as it empowers them, and that’s part of it’s nature and it’s appeal, that it alienates people who aren’t part of it. Minor Threat would never be populist the way Queen are. Sure, they were self-taught musicians and kids with their own record label, but their intense music and more intense ideology could never make them truly proletarian the way the bands that fill stadiums are.
But, with the peak of the Alternative Craze in the mid-90s, dramatic guitar music peters out. The rock music that gains popularity in the second half of the 90s is one of two kinds: slick and juvenile power pop that adopts watered down aesthetics of punk and hardcore, and the professionalism of classic rock, but lacks the songwriting or energy of either; and sludgey nu-metal that takes bits and pieces from the remains of grunge, gangsta rap, and thrash metal, and fashions them into a misanthropic stew of angry power fantasies and earnest confessionals. In both the Pop Punk and Nu-Metal camps, their are bands that deserved better than the labels they’ve been saddled with, and absolute dreck with no real immediacy. While some of these bands fit our definition of Classic Rock (ex: Deftones on the nu-metal side, Fountains Of Wayne on the pop punk side), as musical movements they embody something else — the remains of the last burst of Classic Rock, catapulting towards Y2K with either abandon, or gleeful sing-a-long accessibility. As the 90s give way to the 2000s, the remaining nu-metal and pop punk bands either fade away, becoming cult acts, or transition into mellow middle-of-the-road “post-grunge” or “indie rock”.
This music is like air. It’s Coffee Shop Rock, and the people who still listen to the radio a lot even in the internet age hear it a lot and may even passively enjoy it, and might even buy CDs and go to the concerts, but the music itself has no real impact. It’s toothless and respectable and professional. The popular bands that do still aim ambitiously for great peaks are often musically restrained and “sensitive” sounding, muck like Arcade Fire and Coldplay. Yeah, yeah, I know some nerd out there is going to say that comparing the GREAT BAND Arcade Fire to Coldplay is offensive. They’re two boring bands, fella.
But, as we plummet towards the end of the world, I feel like you deserve to know that it isn’t all ugly tape recorded garage rock and anarcho-death sludge that is making my heart pump blood through my boney limbs while I stumble around my apartment trying to make sense of this quarantine. There’s no shortage of metal and hard rock bands that, similar to the lo-fi punk bands to emerge over the last few years, have reclaimed the supposedly antiquated aesthetics and styles of the 70s and 80s, and focused on crafting tight, musical songs. These are not “post-grunge” bands, they aren’t experimental or avant-garde “post-metal” that the music press has decided it’s cool to like, and they definitely aren’t punk bands. These are bands that know what they are doing on their instruments and are capturing them with the best production they can in studio, sounding clean but not polished, crisp but not clipped. The war anthems of of Night Demon, the occultism of Beastmaker, the muddy sleaze of Fuzz Evil — these are heavy metal bands, unquestionably.
Some bands are overly nostalgic, or trade on one trick that they do really well, and might sound good for a while and then just make you want to listen to the classic bands that inspired them. I get this with a lot of modern rock in general, be it punk or metal or prog. When I look for or make new music, I always start with an idea of what I’m looking for, and my interest is in seeing how an artist can take their influences and reinterpret them and blend them together. And the fact is that is harder than it seems.
Which brings us to Children Of The Reptile, out of North Carolina. Children Of The R are built upon a love of dual guitar theatrics and an abiding affection for and understanding of hard rock traditions. Unlike many of their “trad-metal” contemporaries, there is no one classic band they very obviously sound like. There are strong elements of Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Rush, and Metallica, but none of these defines the band. Children Of The Reptile create ambitious, high-energy heavy rock and roll, and lean hard into fantasy lyrics that describe epic battles and Godlike monsters totally unironically, but with a sense of humor that keeps them accessible.
Their 2018 album The End is a masterpiece of modern rock, a concept album about all the ways mankind might be exterminated. It’s a collection of tracks that drive forward, tight and controlled but with a zest and strength that bands like Wolfmother or Greta Van Fleet or whatever goofball hard rock band labels are trying to force on middle schoolers and their parents right now. They can do a tightly controlled thrashy downstroke and then break out into two separate but entangled, flowing guitar solos. They have a rhythm section that reigns chaos in and bursts it forth like a classic jazz combo.
Children Of The Reptile kick you in the fucking chest with their musicianship and their good nature and their unapologetically grand songwriting that conjures epic battles, sorcery, and giant monsters. They will rock out, and do it while, as the industry and society crumbles around them, and they’ll do it better than whatever watery sounding band Rolling Stone is telling you to check out right now.
Children Of The Reptile may explicitly NOT be a punk rock band, but Ho99o9 definitely are, as much as they are heavy metal and hip hop. Ho99o9. In 2015, Ho99o9 released an EP titled Horrors Of 1999, revealing their age. It’s one of their most experimental releases, split between slow funeral dirge spoken word drum-and-bass, and extreme noise tracks. The album overtly references GG Allin and Charles Manson, and alluding to 1999 cryptically like some warped, pained memory shows pretty while where these guys are coming from.
They are making extreme, dark music, and it’s appropriate that they recently opened for nu-metal progenitors Korn. As much as nu-metal is maligned, it’s easy to forget that in their own time, the self-titled albums by Korn and System Of A Down were weirdly artsy, violent sounding albums, with lyrics that could speak uncomfortable truths that even many rock bands weren’t talking openly about at the time. System did it politically, Korn did it internally.
Ho99o9 are a band that, with their horror movie and anarcho-punk aesthetics, with their AC/DC patches, and with their allegiance to 90s gangster rap, nu-metal, and Cro-Mags, many will write off without really listening to as juggalos or, if you’re some self-conscious indie rock wuss, as a less “legitimate” extension of Death Grips (because those people are nerds and think Death Grips were the first people to blend hardcore punk and rap).
But Ho99o9 are a serious band. They take the intensity of Black Flag and Bad Brains, and the sinister street vibes of Esham and Onyx, and seamlessly integrate into a high energy sound that could destroy any current rock club in the world.
Heavy metal, over the last 20 years, been kneecapped in the mainstream by critical consensus, only allowed to be “legitimate” when it is experimental or ironic enough for tools to feel smart admitting they like it. But when you’re stuck in your house this election cycle, and you see those two raw hamburger faced rapists spitting on their voter bases at voters whenever they speak in public during a global pandemic, when you’re full of energy and pissed off at all the people they are hurting and how little they care, you won’t need some coffee shop rock with a sensitive-guy hang up. You’ll need a good metal band, either to escape or to vent, You couldn’t do better than Children Of The Reptile or Ho99o9.
All of Ho99o9’s discography is available on Spotify.
You can buy music and merch from Children Of The Reptile at https://cotr.bandcamp.com/
