#sinate

From ‘black’, to ‘death’ to ‘goregrind’, Auckland’s extreme metal scene comprises a maze of sub-genres. Rose Hoare went to Newton for an Audience with the Devil.

Published in Metro magazine [Warning: some language may offend]

“I’m not going to get as caned as I did last year. Passing out from total alcoholocaust is blegh!”

“Fingers crossed for Aphelon and Corpse Feast to be in the line-up!” “Will definitely be making the trek up. Wouldn’t miss it.”

Within hours of this year’s Audience with the Devil metal concert being announced on the forums of nzmetal.com in March, extreme metal fans online were psyched.

The poster for the gig at the Kings Arms Tavern in Newton depicted a neon-green devil frowning intently (the traditional satyr variety, rather than the cape-and-trident greaseball), his muscly arms raised in an air guitar gesture. The line-up comprised Ulcerate, Aphelon, Sinate, Gomorrah, Odiusembowel, Asphyxiate, Creeping and Trial by Fire, an ecumenical gathering of extreme metal styles, the various merits of which were debated online fairly closely over the intervening months.

The taxonomy of metal is labyrinthine. If I were to shoehorn the whole history into a few words, I’d say that at one point, you had your glam metal on the one hand (Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe) and your thrash or speed metal on the other (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth). Glam metal failed to survive the aridity of the Seattle grunge era and thrash metal split off into a maze of sub-genres such as Vedic metal, which has Hindu themes, grindcore, which has hardcore punk leanings, funeral doom, brutal death metal, the style peculiar to Gothenburg in Sweden, which is not to be confused with Florida death metal... I could go on.

Of the bands playing at Audience with the Devil, Trial by Fire play melodic thrash metal, Creeping play black metal, Asphyxiate play death metal and so do Sinate, who just got back from Sweden, and Odiusembowel play goregrind. Aphelon, from Christchurch, eschew affiliation with any particular scene or “mass-minded social culture”, profess “no interest in high-level recognition or any other creative poisons” and — although some people say they play black metal — are not into Satanism “or any such monotheism”.

Ulcerate, the headlining band, play ‘technical’ or ‘mathematical’ death metal, a sort of virtuoso metal. Concert promoter Gareth Craze (his real name) says only some jazz and some classical music rival technical death metal in terms of the musicianship required of its exponents. “And stuff like maybe Joe Satriani.” A review of Ulcerate’s demo by a US fanzine advises us to “imagine a mix of Cryptopsy (but not that over the top), a dash of Suffocation, some of the Florida classics, and even a few more modern shredding riffs akin to the Polish scene”.

Actually, Ulcerate originate from Hamilton, but they typify an approach to extreme metal that’s considered characteristic of the nascent Auckland scene. “Metal music coming out of Auckland is a bit more complex, it’s a bit more intelligent,” Craze says, whereas Christchurch bands, for instance, favour “the guts-and-goreside of metal. The lyrics are all about mutilation, rape, things like that. Wellington used to be a bit more like that, but it’s moving in the Auckland direction now.”

According to Craze, extreme metal’s popularity, which crescendoed in the early 1990s, is blossoming again. “Auckland is probably the strongest and biggest metal scene in the country.” There are still only enough fans to support a gig every two to three weeks, but Audience with the Devil’s attendance, at around 300, stacks up well against Christchurch’s Satanfest, Dunedin’s Convention of Mass Destruction and Wellington’s Hellington.

When we walk into the concert, the night of the weird, foggy Super 14 final, my husband immediately turns to me and whispers excitedly, “I feel scared”. Gomorrah, a grindcore band from Wellington, are playing, and their vocalist, Kallie Sparkles, is stalking the stage, emitting some improbably deep and menacing Linda Blair-in-The Exorcist sounds.

Gomorrah drummer Otis Chamberlain later assures me that Kallie Sparkles’ voice is au naturel: “She was classically trained when she was younger so she can produce ‘notes’ from the bottom of her stomach, as opposed to the back of the throat.” I think I can actually feel the air around my feet vibrating from all the distortion. Apart from a kid with blond dreadlocks headbanging solo down the front, very few people are moving. Most just stand there, peering intently through the gloom. There are unidentifiable smells throughout the bar. Almost everyone is wearing black. Between songs, rather than applauding, the audience throws goats. Not literally, in any kind of Ozzy Osbourne fashion, but in the sense of raising the fist with index and pinky fingers extended. What most startled and then fascinated me was that some would also growl casually in appreciation. Apropos of nothing, just standing there, handle of beer resting on crossed arms, they’d make a low, loose, rumbling, gurgling sound.

Nggghhhhrrrrr!

I know what you’re thinking. I’m familiar with the images you subpoenaed as soon as you read the words “extreme” and “metal” in the same phrase: long-haired white men in black jeans debating over Woodstock bourbon and Cokes the point at which Metallica ‘went gay’ (was it their highly successful 1991 “black album” or was it the inclusion of the worryingly acoustic “Fade to Black” on Ride The Lightning all the way back in 1984?), or scrawny, acne-pitted self-mutilating teens making lists of classmates to kill in secret diaries filled with ghoulish illustrations.

“There are brain-dead, dumb, bogan-style people,” Craze concedes,” but I’m saying that in a non-derogatory way.” In a scene as small as extreme metal, there’s plenty of space in the till for all kinds of ticket-buyers’ money.

Don’t be fooled, Craze says, by the fringe-dwellers, the highly visible minority who might get heavily into the fashions and postures and trappings of a scene, more than its music, thereby claiming to be more representative than they are. There’ll always be those who get into metal “because it’s what everyone they hate doesn’t listen to”, but those people are jobbers.

In a thread on nzmetal.com titled “White Supremacist Chic”, a poster wrote of feeling “embarrassed to be a bogan” because of racism encountered among metal fans and went on to invite all racists to explain themselves. A long, largely earnest and liberal-minded discussion followed, with only the occasional racist salvo. In reply to one such post, someone called “Vile” explained that terms such as “Jew, nigger, gook” are inherently offensive no matter how they’re applied, “but, I dunno, this thread’s getting gay”.

Craze acknowledges the accusation that metal fans are homophobes who use ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘a bit shit’ but says that’s just “lingual evolution”, that plenty of metal fans like Queen, that no one cared when Judas Priest frontman Rob Halpert came out.

“Having said that, homosexuality as a culture and metal as a culture are diametrically opposed, and that’s not through the fault of either culture, it’s just the way it’s happened. They’re mutually exclusive cultures. They don’t need to be, but if they continued to be mutually exclusive, I don’t think either culture would give a shit.”

Christians are less welcome. One poster declares, “Metal is about shoving a pitchfork up the arse of the Christian majority and being a grim cunt, not whining because some fucker’s a racist.” Craze says metal abhors the mainstream and if Islam were the dominant religion in the West, metallers would be against Islam. A “strong number” identify themselves as Satanists, “but not occultist Satanists, more like stylised atheists”. During the last election, there were roughly equal numbers of National and Labour supporters on the nzmetal.comforums, with a disproportionate number of Act voters, although this spread may have changed since Rodney Hide began dancing with the stars.

After Gomorrah finish, Ulcerate begin setting up a very complicated drum kit. “Hurry up, ya poofs!” yells a man at the front with a handle of beer. The vocalist, responding in an emotionless monotone, says, “Fuck up.” His t-shirt has a “Cephalic Carnage” logo on the front. (They’re a Rocky Mountain hydro-grind band from Denver. Don’t ask. I think it’s something to do with hydroponics.)

Metal bands being especially susceptible to personnel changes, Ulcerate have had a new vocalist since the beginning of the year: Ben Read, who is also in 8 Foot Sativa. Bassist Paul Kelland, at 20 the youngest member of the band, is the group’s third bass player (the first one left to focus on his jazz bass playing) and he is in two other bands — Asphyxiate and Vacuum Cleaner Abortion. Still, Ulcerate’s debut full-length album, the Beckettian-sounding Of Fracture and Failure, is slated for release this summer.

They begin, and I’m immediately lost. The music is dense, crowded, unwieldy. Even watching the drummer carefully, it’s hard to follow the beat. The vocals are of the gravelly, viscous ‘cookie monster’ variety, (urrggghhhrrrr!) yet several members of the audience seem to be singing or lip-synching along. Probably more singing than lip-synching. (To give you an idea of their lyrical preoccupations, the title track of their EP The Coming of Genocide features the lines “Ashes of dogma are swept away in winds of oblivion/As masses asphyxiate from inhalation of truth”.)

Although I can’t follow the melody, rhythms or lyrics, I’m aware of something barely perceptible that’s passing between audience and band, and it’s like overhearing a conversation in a foreign language. At certain points in the performance, both band and audience members nod to each other, in tacit acquiescence about the music.

Down the front, several have taken up a wide-legged stance, their shoulders braced squarely, jaws set. Some are throwing punches into the air at the shins of the guitarists. Others just throw themselves, arms and legs flailing, backwards into the throng, shoving furiously.

It looks like a fight, until you notice that those on the perimeter are shepherding people back into the centre of things and even helping up those who have fallen over. It’s all much more consensual than it looks, and when our photographer is knocked over he receives an energetic apology.

The song ends and someone yells, “Fuck yeah!” as does someone else. Soon, a chorus of fuck yeahs has broken out. I count 16 times. It’s funny, in a very dry, restrained metal way.

Despite the aggression down the front, the countervailing atmosphere around the bar and outside is friendly, even jovial. A trestle table at the back is selling rare local releases, t-shirts and tickets for the Raffle of Satanic Fury. It feels like a family reunion or a conference. There is a sausage sizzle out the back. Some people seem to be greeting friends they’ve met on the nzmetal.com forums and haven’t seen since the previous year’s concert.

Craze says that if people who find mainstream culture oppressive have something that helps them combat feeling marginalised, then good for them. For those who aren’t marginalised, who just get a bit cross sometimes, metal acts as a release valve on the everyday pressures that send others out dancing to house music. It’s just a different kind of release.

“Thematically it’s all about darkness, hatred, scorn, being antithetical to what most people believe are society’s greatest virtues, and that’s perfectly natural. Hatred is as natural a human emotion as love, and for bands to express themselves through that hatred and for people to reciprocate and pick up on that vibe in a positive way, that’s one of metal’s great foundations. It’s just saying that anger and hatred and darkness are all natural human qualities and if you repress them when those feelings are naturally there in you, that’s a negative thing. If you can harness them in a way that makes a lot of people happy and makes you feel a part of something, that’s a positive thing.”