#getting metal

24/156

Autopsy - Mental Funeral (1991)

Another one I listened to with a bad attitude at the beginning of January. I’ve since relistened, and what a difference mood makes.

Listen A) Agitating. My teeth are sanding each other down, because it just keeps going and going and I GET IT. Grumble grumble body horror apocalypse goo everywhere. I feel much more resistance from myself trying to relax into this than say a campy, disgusting horror movie. Why?

Listen B) There’s actually some cool, focused dissonance going on here. Like, not just noisily, but harmonically. And I get it. Grumble grumble goo horror. But getting it doesn’t make me grit my teeth and sigh. It’s kind of silly but it’s not totally mindless or heartless. Like an early Cronenberg film.

What’s the difference between then and now? I’ve finally stopped traveling 8000 hours a week and have given myself time to really relax during downtime. I’ve been working on my tendency to ruminate on what I can’t control and have resumed being the centered dude I know I can be. I’ve been fanning away the fog that collected around what I’ve taken for granted and have taken back my vision for my life. I know what I want, motherfucker! This could all be temporary, as it has been before, but I appreciate it with full awareness now.

Shaun, my band’s drummer, has gone from having a mysterious untreated pain in his leg to working on healing from leukemia. It sounds worse of course to have leukemia than a vague pain in the leg, but I find knowing what the deal is has been relieving to me as his friend. What I’m getting at is that Listen A was an abstract pain in my leg and Listen B was a blast of chemo.

23/156

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence (1991)

I listened to this in early January. I was coming down from the high-octane Christmas season, going through some strange personal turmoil, and feeling a little (or a lot) exhausted from my monthlong metal binge.

Instead of helping me process my angst, this album just agitated me. I felt, intellectually, that I could jive with the anxious, jazzy movement of this music, but emotionally I was ticked off by what I heard as pseudo-enlightenment in the lyrics. It was all too reminiscent of the righteous ramblings of a mentally ill friend of mine, whom I miss incredibly.

Outside of the music, I kept circling around the themes delusion and disillusion. The sentence that kept coming to me was, “Why can’t people just be truthful with themselves?” I expect this most of all from artists, which is perhaps unfair of me, given how much myself and my friends, as artists, suffer from equal self-unsureness and delusion.

I’m letting myself feel anger about the fact that people can’t always be truthful with themselves. I’m not letting that anger get in the way of compassion for those people, including myself. I’m trying really hard not to let my attitude be coloured by self-directed anger. And all these swirling emotions aren’t attached to either action or repression, which is new territory for me. I discover I’m a stranger in a strange land, and that strange land is my own consciousness, and the only thing to do there is hang out.

Oh great, now I’M the Messiah of pseudo-enlightenment!

13/156 Converge - Jane Doe (2001)

No.

NO.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. All the lists, all the recommendations, all the reviews led me to believe this would be the great key to the metal dimension for sensitive folksy jazz nerds like me. Even the lyrics, apparently often beside the point in metal, were supposed to be mindblowingly reveIatory and psychologically deep.  I was looking forward to this and I am driven to nausea with how disappointed I am.

I can get into the energy of Jane Doe, no problem. I find this kind of heavy organized chaos deeply appealing in every sort of art. But the one-tone screeching made the thing too inhuman to grasp, and reading the lyrics sheet all I see is unfocused cliche imagery and, in cliche’s absence, vaguery. 

I can’t help but feel duped. 

I was telling @junesprout that since this was essentially a critically-acclaimed break-up album, I expected to hear the depths of those emotions explored in a groundbreaking way. When I said that instead I found a raging idiot learning nothing, exploring nothing, signifying nothing, she explained so patiently and elegantly that many people have trouble regulating or finding the nuance in their own emotions, and so sorrow and anxiety and grief may all come out singularly as blind rage.

Of course, she’s right.

But I guess I don’t think such emotional funneling makes for interesting, instructive, or empathetic art, much less people, and I’m realizing a large and defiant part of me does not want to legitimize this kind of surface-sourced, unselfconscious rage as a way of shedding anger (as opposed to fumbling and grappling with the feeling and thereby dealing with the source of pain), because it echoes so vividly the behaviour of those who kick their dogs when the TV’s not working, or narcissists who treat their lovers like garbage then flail like the victim when they finally defend themselves. 

21/156

Angel Witch - Angel Witch (1980)

30/156

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Hey! Wow! This is dark and brutal and slow and I really like it. The vocals are like the grunt of the executioner, or the thud of wind pulled by the music’s hammer, which comes down right over your upturned face, over and over again.

And it’s an enjoyable experience! Although, it’s not a masochistic thing. It just feels honest about what it is and what it illustrates (that is, the dark, brutal, slowness of this horror of being human). It feels honest about what much of the other metal I’ve listened to has only felt postured about.

Yes, so I haven’t added to this blog since Corona came down on the world. I think this necessary isolation is bringing me closer to a friendship with my internal anger. Like, this was instantly accessible to me. Also, bourbon, yes.

29/156

Pantera - Cowboys from Hell (1990)

I can't hold onto what's going on here. I don't hear anything that strikes me as important or honest. If there's a single thread holding these songs together, it's the feeling of "badass" - like, the surface sense of something being badass without any particular joy or power. The effect is pretty similar to Judas Priest.

Musically, it chugs along and the solos are kind of fun, but so far it hasn't rewarded relistens. I will say this: it exists, and that's ok with me. Is this progress?

28/156

Machine Head - The Blackening (2007)

I like the vocals here. Compared to many of the other dudes I’ve heard so far, they don’t seem as cartoony or as performative/virtuosic. I mean, I can feel what their throats are doing, and they sound sincerely disgruntled. I also like that I can understand the lyrics, because I am a conservative grandmother.

Speaking of the other dudes I’ve heard so far, where are the female metal-makers at? Did I neglect to throw any on my list?

Are there any conservative grandmothers making metal?

DM me.

27/156

Deftones - White Pony (2000)

This is youuuthful and angsty. 

There are songs about bullying, songs about unhealthy romance, songs about drugs... I mostly like it, but I do feel something inaccessible and incongruous about it. It’s just not the way I experienced angst as a teen, or even during my early years of university. I mocked the teenage desperation for a place in the social heirarchy, I didn’t pursue or admit my sexual and romantic feelings, and I held it as moral and intelligent to shun drugs and alcohol. 

What I mean is: I definitely felt angsty, but not because I was growing up and making mistakes. I was growing up too anxious to do anything lest I make a mistake. So I’m not writing this to claim teenage victory; I look back at my gangly years as cringefully as anyone.

I’m writing this out to say my attitudes during those years are part of this gap I often feel between me and the metal-loving adults I know today. So many of them are among the most open, warm, and adventurous people in my life, and will often shrug and laugh that they were pretty shitty kids. I would like to access this attitude, to revel in it with them. I would like to destroy the gap. This is really why I started this project.

White Pony itself had me thinking about this:

I don’t have harrowing tales to share from my schoolyears, few lessons collected from my own irresponsibility, and yet I have so many things I wish I could apologize for, and things that I wish I’d felt free to do. All my struggles have been internal, and no one, not even me, has thanked me for my service. And expressing these regrets feels wrong of me, because they are regrets of non-action, and because a self-righteous voice keeps telling me I should be glad I didn’t get into fights or go around breaking hearts or popping pills.

My brain cells are proud of me! My parents are proud of me! I fucked nothing up!

But I’ve since acknowledged that I also long for others’ excitement and warmth for me (please!), that the ups and downs of the heart are part of the vibrancy of life (hellyeah!), and that occasional intoxication does a swell job of freeing the spirit from its own chains (correct!). I’m realizing I’m jealous of the kids that did fuck up - the ones that survived, I mean. They have a shared history to laugh about, and binders full of lessons I’m only learning to grapple with much later. 

So that’s what Deftones made me think about. 

I wonder how teenage me would have reacted to this album.