Deep Voices #99
Metal week
Deep Voices #99 on Spotify
Deep Voices #99 on Apple Music
Some housekeeping and links:
Shawn Reynaldo asked me to write a guest recommendation for his very good newsletter First Floor. Read about how I Shazam The Bear here.
I wrote a review of the also very good Naemi album for Pitchfork—thank you to Jeremy Larson for the edits and assignment.
Next week’s Deep Voices will be an experiment: I’m going to start sending a playlist of the best new music of each month and it will be behind a paywall. If you’re already a paying subscriber, thank you! If you want to upgrade your subscription ahead of next week’s post, you can do so below. Thank you!
After that, Deep Voices will break for a week before returning with the 100th edition of the newsletter. For that, I need your help. I’m looking for Deep Voices readers to share a song they love that they wish more people loved. It feels so great to be able to help other people discover music, so I thought it would be nice to open up that opportunity. Utopian or lazy? You decide! Send me a song in this Google Form.
I’m grateful to everyone who has been reading for the past four years! Ok, read on for some death metal.
Ahead of the 100th edition of Deep Voices, I thought I’d do something indulgent: make a playlist of metal. Though I am the person who chooses the music each week, and I of course like all of it, I have you, dear reader, in mind. I want to make your life better through listening. It’s what music has done for me and—to borrow a philosophy from Haley Joel Osment—I want to pay it forward. Well, not this week. This week, I want to listen to some blast beats. While I hope that some of you may share this urge, I understand that this may not be a full-on people pleasing playlist. Apologies.
Though I have always loved hardcore and its spinoffs, I came relatively late to metal. Both genres share aggression and loudness as key components, but hardcore is so potent because of its looseness, it’s uncontrollability. Metal is loud, but precise. The musicians are pro, the song structures are rigid. In any given band, some guy may be yelling from the bottom of his throat, but the guitarist is basically virtuosic. It took a while until I found this concept appealing, the combination of rigidity and power. But, eventually I found it useful. It provided not a full body catharsis, like hardcore, but a way to dip my toe into the tide pool of anger without being overtaken by it. I guess I needed to grow up and chill out before I found a place for it. I don’t want to say it’s grown-up music—it’s not—but that’s how it worked for me.
I haven’t listened to metal much in the last few years. As I wrote in an essay a while back, after my son died, I found its pantomime of pain to be cartoonish at best, foolish at worst. All these guys obsessed with death, albums illustrated with skulls and tombstones, lyrics about and suffering like they had anything relevant to say on the matter. Cannibal Corpse had as much valid insight into death as The Joker does to mental illness. In fairness, some bands have otherworldly, fantasy-style lyrics, others are vehemently anti-religion or pro-drugs, but even with the most generous of hearts and ears, it’s not like you can understand they are saying. Also, metal is an almost comically male scene. Of the 13 bands on this week’s playlist, not a single one of them has a female member (I fact checked this). One guy does at least wear a clock on his head while performing.
In the last month or so, as some of my distaste has worn off, I’ve put some metal on here and there, mostly while walking or, weirdly, while writing. The speed really works for me. Like the music is being assembled by very efficient workers on the factory line. It makes me want to be more efficient. I walk home quicker when I’m listening to Origin, up my daily word count with Nile on headphones. It isn’t really getting me in touch with my anger, it’s just making me productive. Double time drums, double time work. The music hasn’t changed, but I guess I have.
Playlist notes:
Music photographer Rob Coons used to have a must-read column in Maximum Rocknroll and, when His Hero Is Gone’s first 7-inch, The Dead of Night in Eight Movements was released, he wrote about it like it was the greatest thing he’d ever heard. Which it probably was. I knew I needed a copy. So I ordered one in the mail. But, before it came, I got in trouble at home (I was 13), so my parents confiscated it as punishment. I’m generally a rule follower, but I could not deal with having the record in the house, the future of music teasing me from arm’s length. Fortuntately, my parents didn’t hide it very well, so, after school, when they weren’t home, I snuck into their closet and took the record out of the sleeve and listened to it. Rob Coons was absolutely right.
Confidential to nerds: I know His Hero Is Gone is not technically considered metal. But I think this is an aesthetic distinction as much as a musical one. They were from Tennessee, skated, played with crust punk bands. So their legacy is tied up with the hardcore scene. But, sonically, I’ve always felt they sounded like black metal. Not that I had any idea what black metal was when I first heard them. So I’ve included them here as a bridge between worlds. (Their best album, Monuments to Thieves is not on streaming, head over to YouTube to check that out.)I know I said I wasn’t into metal until I was older, but I did like Brutal Truth because they also were sort of genre-malleable and played with hardcore bands. I had a VHS tape of them playing a show in Philly with Spazz, Black Army Jacket, and His Hero Is Gone that I used to watch constantly. (Actually, I just cleaned out my childhood bedroom and so I still have this tape.) During one of the bands, you can see Brutal Truth’s beast of a drummer Rich Hoak, standing to the side, smoking weed before their set. At the time, I didn’t know you smoked weed from a pipe—I only knew about joints—so I honestly thought he was smoking crack.
One of the saddest things that can happen to a metal musician is going bald. Immolation look so cool in this 1991 interview, with their long, youthful hair and their T-shirts tucked into their tight jeans. Guitarist Rob Vigna has a proto-Garth Algar blonde fringe. Bassist and singer Ross Dolan has classic, cascading brown metal hair, the same beautiful locks he has today; the band is still together. Somewhere along the line, though, Vigna lost his hair. He’s got a close-to-the-dome shave happening now. Respect to him for accepting what was happening. He’s a great musician, but you have to feel like he’s lost some power, like Sampson. I say this as a bald man, not a metal musician. I never had the hair for it. Or, I guess, the skill. Whichever.
The clockhead guy is the vocalist of Portal and he goes by “The Curator.” Nothing scarier than the art world. To be clear, the clock is a cuckoo clock, a heavy wooden triangle thing. It looks awesome. The other band members dress like a combination of executioners and bank robbers. Slightly less awesome, but a notch above your average Halloween costume. This video is a good example of what the deal is. He seems to have retired the clock, though, and replaced it with a black Pope costume. Portal is Australian and I read on Reddit that they are “really nice.” Which is disappointing.
I really identify with the need to be older to listen to metal. Also, it’s basically cliched by now, but Deafheaven in 2013 helped me get into all sorts of other metal from the past 20 years. Nirvana obviously served the same function for hundreds of hardcore and punk bands in 1992.
Nifelheim made baldness work, well...partial baldness.