A Year of Music

Black metal is a style that lends itself to easy mockery; as Cosmo argues, even in its supposedly hypermasculinist misanthropy, it has a curiously overwrought emotionalism that suggests traditional notions of feminine hysteria:

I would argue that black metal is metal’s feminine side…and that it was a subconscious response to the hypermasculinity of the previous dominant paradigm, death metal. The first time I heard black metal, I thought I was hearing witches. Perhaps there’s some gender play at work, too, what with all the makeup and anorexic physiques…

For a long time, it was this combination of epic, minor-key romanticism with overwrought, screeched vocals that kept black metal at the fringes of the metal scene. Even after being embraced by the metal mainstream, black metal (especially of the more witchy, Cradle of Filth or Emperor variety) is often the butt of jokes. (One of black metal’s saving graces is that it trades the stereotypical misogyny of heavy metal for a more totalized misanthropy – nobody will escape the blackened apocalypse. Pity about the rampant homophobia, though – which in the end just buttresses Cosmo’s point.)

On Defective Epitaph, Xasthur demand to be taken seriously. Malefic puts everything on the same level when he mixes, with so many layers of distortion and reverb and other sonic chowder juxtaposed that the result is smeared across the soundstage like a heavy, greasy paste. This obscures the complex composition style he favors, which trades the easy minor-key “evil” chord changes featured by most of the more epic black metal bands for something more atonal and nuanced – which the untuned guitars, muffled percussion, deliberately overdriven recording and lo-fi mixing neatly conceal. Xasthur have turned the stumbling, inadvertent incompetence of old black metal demos into a consciously developed aesthetic of considerable power.

The effect of this on careful listeners is immediate and powerful; Defective Epitaph evokes a hypertrophically dismal landscape that is cartoonish in its twisted bleakness but exceeds caricature. The sound is relentlessly, tangibly industrial, a forced march through a broken-down old nightmare factory, and in context the harsh grating of the distorted vocals is completely dehumanizing. Some metal aspires to be pagan, or Teutonic, or outright Satanic. Defective Epitaph is beyond that; it evokes the complete negation of life itself. It turns hundreds of years of musical development against itself, and in its dissonance produces a work that is powerfully evocative despite its monumental ugliness.

Not too many people seem to know about A Sunny Day in Glasgow (who have an extremely whimsical attitude towards naming – they’re not from Scotland, where it is often the furthest thing from sunny, and keep an eye out for their bizarre song titles), and that’s too bad. They have a blown-out, echo-drenched sound that combines the the clattering percussion and up-front mixing of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound with the electronic sparkliness of the Magnetic Fields (really early Magnetic Fields, back when Stephin Merritt had the knife-making Arizona woman with the pretty voice singing for him). There’s some of the experimentation of early His Name Is Alive in evidence, too, but HNIA were never quite so resolutely poppy, nor as clearly indebted to Phil Spector’s phalanx of 60s girl groups. On “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” and “One Change Into Rain is No Change at All (Talkin’ ‘Bout Us)”, in particular, all the pieces snap into focus, and the results are lethally catchy experimental pop.

On the first few listens, they might seem like some kind of nu-shoegazer unit, but really they’re not. If they’re like any other band, it’s long-gone and lamented weirdoes All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, who had a similar no-holds-barred approach to making noisy post-everything music.