Give Me More Jagged-Edged, Rusted-Through Heavy Metal Music
A Treatise Against Art-Metal’s Knock-off Sibling, Prog-Core
There’s altogether too much clean, sterile, impotent Heavy Metal music on the market today. Formulaic forays from Nü Metal has-beens dominate the sales charts because Metalheads (the genre’s cult-like followers) are more often dweebs and nerds than real excitement seekers.
If your favorite Heavy Metal albums come with recommendations for Prog Rock and Dubstep acts, you should just quit altogether and put your money towards the next high-end video-game machine instead.
What I’m saying is that Heavy Metal should be anything but slick and binary. The cold precision and predictable song structures that pervade the genre have no place alongside the insane, aggressive, primal shit that inexplicably goes by the same name.
Personally, I like my Metal jagged-edged and rusted-through, with an element of danger. This isn’t some angsty snowflake fuel for white twenty-somethings with a chip on their shoulder. I’m talking about music that makes you uneasy, unsettled, maybe even nauseous because the grinding, churning cacophony isn’t what you signed up for. But damn it if it’s not fascinating — in a morbid, can’t-look-away-even-though-it’s-burning-a-hole-in-my-brain way.
I think it is safe to say that by this point, the chaff has clicked away to their safe spaces (Twitch videogame live-streaming channels and Reddit rants about male underrepresentation in today’s libtard society) and the few brave souls left are ready to experience some next-level fucked up shit.
I’d also like to point out that any great art is in some way disturbing or disorienting. The primal, reptilian nature of Heavy Metal is not the only art that touches these ancient urges in intangible ways. Expressionist painters, experimental choreographers, avant-garde sculptors, art-house film directors, postmodern novelists, and many other artists recognize the ability of art to express these strange human experiences that we spend most of our lives suppressing. If it’s not in a stuffy museum, that doesn’t mean it lacks artistic weight — just that snobby curators fail to see the virtue.
What follows is a series of Heavy Metal recordings for musical adrenaline junkies. Grindcore, Sludge Metal, Art-Punk, and Noise Rock are all represented in a playlist that’s both brutal and brilliant.
Ire Works by Dillinger Escape Plan (2007, Relapse)
Heavy Metal musicians and fans tend to fashion themselves as élitists, looking down on the practitioners of other genres as inferior performers. The logic goes: “speed equals skill,” “Metal is fast,” thus, “Metal fans are a bunch of reductionistic dipshits.”
However, Ire Works is an example of truly skilled musicians who happen to play face-melting Heavy Metal. The incomprehensibly fast unison rhythms on tracks like 82588 or Fix Your Face are indeed impressive — but they’re also artistically satisfying. These tightly packed passages are jarring and visceral, like firecrackers (fireworks?) going off inside a helmet. While other bands want their listeners to dissect their syncopated rhythms to play along at home, Dillinger Escape Plan wants listeners to cower in fear and pray for dawn.
Besides that, these frenetic breakdowns are placed in the context of a rich variety of musical experiences. The Grind/Noise Metal exemplified in the noted tracks above are offset by full-on Pop tunes, like Black Bubblegum and Milk Lizard. Alongside the punchy electric guitars and laser-precise percussion, Ire Works features extended digital delay techniques (with the delay time turned down to almost zero and the sustain up to just below full capacity) and an ornamental use of the glockenspiel.
O God, the Aftermath by Norma Jean (2005, Solid State)
Don’t let Norma Jean’s ironic Greatest Generation moniker or evangelical religious affiliations dissuade you from digging into their work. These southern boys can make some chaos on the bandstand, I tell you what. O God, the Aftermath, the band’s second album, is a messy, gritty Noise Metal barnstormer with elements of Metalcore (a conventional brand of Heavy Metal known for “breakdown” unison instrumental passages) utilized, but keenly kept at arm’s length.
O God, the Aftermath is muddy with distorted guitars, smashing cymbals, cracking snare drum, and deep, throaty screaming. Norma Jean nailed the vibe, alright. But they balance out this brooding timbre with strange, angular melodies that take unexpected rhythmic twists and turns. You can appreciate the album entirely for its mathematical syncopation or for its tonal richness—but the two came together in a compelling way for this one moment in Norma Jean’s otherwise lackluster career.
Nothing (2006 Reissue) by Meshuggah (2006, Nuclear Blast)
In 2002, Meshuggah released their fourth LP, Nothing, with janky detuned guitars of questionable quality and subpar recording equipment. When their prototype eight-string instruments became available, the band went back to the studio and published the new version as a reissue. It’s this 2006 reissue edition of Nothing that’s worth your attention.
Nothing, along with I and Catch Thirtythree, are known to Heavy Metal historians as Meshuggah’s Syncopated Sludge period. Meshuggah performs with churning downtempo speeds, disorienting off-kilter rhythms, and epic suboctave tones. The two guitarists, Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström, act as one, filling the air with the loudest, heaviest fucking riffs ever recorded by mankind. Drummer Thomas Haake supports the band’s diabolical rhythms while anchoring the downbeats with his cymbals, which ring curiously in the background like the flicker of a distant lighthouse in the middle of a tsunami.
Fantasy Empire by Lightning Bolt (2015, Thrill Jockey)
Noise Rock veterans Brian Chippendale (drums) and Brian Gibson (bass) have been structurally endangering music venues as Lightning Bolt since the mid-twenty-aughts — and what a reign it has been. The duo have a cult following of thrill-seekers and daredevils for good reason. From the first cut (aptly titled The Metal East), Fantasy Empire proves itself as the loudest, fastest, funnest noise your ears have ever had the displeasure of enduring on behalf of your more primal members.
What Lightning Bolt do so well as a Heavy Metal band (if they even are one) is wrestle with the music. They barely maintain control of their own material, which is performed with the velocity of a runaway dump truck. And that sumbitch is on fire, driverless, and fully loaded with weapons-grade TNT. All those coldly confident Nü Metal bros should take note: it’s no fun if you don’t break a sweat.
Unlike any of the other acts on this list, I highly recommend every release in Lightning Bolt’s catalogue — because they’re not really career musicians (given to uninspired late-career releases) and they’re actual artists, rather than instrumentalists who got lucky with a mix of ideas and influences.
Shred Earthship by Zach Hill and Mick Barr (2006, Kill Rock Stars)
The end of every epic rock anthem features a dramatic meltdown: cymbals are awash, guitars howl with feedback, keys are smashed down, basses are strummed like great big guitars, and, for a brief moment, it’s sonic bedlam. Shred Earthship is that moment at album length.
Legendary Noise Rock drummer/Experimental Hip-Hop producer Zach Hill performs his characteristic “On Blast” technique (a flurry of drums and cymbals that seem more likely to have been performed by an octopus than a mere human) alongside Mick Barr’s equally dextrous nonstop noodling. Together, the duo creates a wall of sound that starts at track one and doesn’t quit for the next eighteen.
Further Listening
Ex Eye (self-titled, 2017, Relapse)
A highly textural, drone-inspired instrumental Metal album featuring, of all things, the saxophone stylings of Avant-Garde virtuoso Colin Stetson. A blend of unrelenting Nordic Black and atmospheric Doom Metals, not unlike Deafheaven’s magnum opus Sunbather (2013, Deathwish).
Live at CBGB by Daughters (2004, City of Hell)
Daughters are often miscategorized as Mathcore due to their jarring off-kilter rhythms—but Daughters has more to offer than angular riffs. They’re an earsplitting Punk / Metal outfit with a fresh take on the genre and a penchant for sonic violence.
Burned Mind by Wolf Eyes (2004, SubPop)
Wolf Eyes isn’t a Metal band at all. They’re a dark, heavy Noise group with an energy not dissimilar to Metal, and that’s why they’re included here. This shit is fucking brutal, and that’s all I need to say about it.
Remission by Mastodon (2002, Relapse)
Mastodon’s early works (Remission, Leviathan, and Blood Mountain) were instant Metal classics at the time of their release, and continue to inspire Sludge and Stoner Metal to this day. The band’s ear for growling guitar tone and 3/4 (three-quarter) time signature riffs are peerless.
Plague Soundscapes by The Locust (2003, ANTI-)
The Locust bring an irreverent weirdness to loud music that’s either brilliant or annoying—depending on your sense of humor. They’re more of a Noise group than Metal proper…but, by now you’ve noticed that I’m not writing strictly about Metal anymore, because Metal is dead. It died when Nü Metal, Metalcore, and corporate boardrooms at large took over the genre. The Locust hold up a big middle finger to formulaic Hardcore with a beaming smile while they do it.
