A Year of Music

If I had to choose a single word to describe Anaal Nathrakh’s style of heavy metal, it might be “unyielding”. Another good choice would be “totalizing”. From the very start, their music has been dense, noisy, seamless, enamored of production tricks that saturate the sound field. Whether it’s driving every single channel on the mixing board into the red or expanding and compressing the masters so whispers are at the same volumes as shouts, they don’t miss a trick to make their albums into massive stone walls of aggressive, violent noise. There are even a couple moments on Domine non es Dignus where a trailing sibilant in one of the vocalists’ words completely blows out the rest of the music, the compression’s amped up so far.

What this does is provide a Procrustean sonic frame into which Anaal Nathrakh can stretch the rest of their hyper-extreme music without you noticing how many different things they’re doing at once. They’re sonic magpies (or should I say stormcrows?), scavenging elements and tropes of just about every form of extreme music out there to create something that is both sophisticated and ineluctably British.

“Sophisticated” is not a word that immediately suggests itself when it comes to Anaal Nathrakh; the only time you can clearly understand the vocalists – when they break out into the declamatory tones of operatic power metal – the lyrics become clear in all their blunt misanthropic eschatology and pessimism. Consider narrative song titles like “Between Piss and Shit We Are Born” and “When Fire Rains Down from the Sky Mankind will Reap as it has Sown”. And the compression and unyielding sonic attack of their songs can make listening through entire albums a bit of a slog if you’re in anything other than the most amped-up frames of mind. The blown-out volumes create a sustained noise assault that erases any notion of narration, that creates an eternal suspended Now where a time before or after you were hearing Anaal Nathrakh did not exist.

However, when one of their albums comes up on my iPod, I tend to end up listening to the rest immediately thereafter. Part of it is that all of their albums have at least a couple songs that are brilliant at evoking precisely the frame of mind that makes their music sound good – they’re catchy and get you pumped. An important part of it, though, is that their magpie approach makes listening to any of their three most recent albums – Domine non es Dignus, Eschaton and Hell is Empty, and All the Devils are Here – akin to hearing a kind of greatest hits of extreme metal for the last 20 years. There’s a great deal of variety buried within the churn.

Considering the way they join chromatic, atonal death metal guitar solos (reminiscent of later Carcass) to overdriven drum machine blast beats (redolent of Brutal Truth), for instance, points to the fact that grindcore was just death metal with a punk attitude and a fascination with pathology textbooks. Or the way a soaring, epic power metal vocal (a lá Ulver at their most soaring) immediately followed by hoarse death metal growls (along the lines of Deicide) makes clear the dialectic between the majestic and the abject throughout metal. It’s pointless to try and hang a specific genre around Anaal Nathrakh’s neck: each album builds on ideas from the album that preceded it, and they move fluidly between styles within the same phrase, much less between songs.

What makes this all a very British phenomenon is the way a dour pragmatism seeps out from the edges of the frame: while there are frequent stabs at the epic in Anaal Nathrakh’s composition, they seem categorically incapable of pomposity. This is the main thing that separates their newer albums from the progressive metal madness of the last two Emperor albums (IX Equilibrium and Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire & Demise): those records are full of fantastic compositions and heroic playing by some of the most talented musicians heavy metal has ever seen, but the whole enterprise is fatally undercut by Ihsahn’s irrepressible need to portray himself as the omphalos of Creation. By contrast, Anaal Nathrakh’s songwriting, production and musicianship, while not quite as accomplished, have a lived-in quality that evoke Blake’s 7 or Warren Ellis’s recent portrayal of the Battle of Crécy. Heavy metal as medieval trench warfare: a metaphor I think Anaal Nathrakh could appreciate.

What Anaal Nathrakh remind me of most, though, is something that is also deeply British, and probably close to the hearts of quite a few of Anaal Nathrakh’s English fans: their relentless downbeat cynicism, pessimism, and misanthropy-as-ideology reminds me of nothing so much as the miniatures-based wargame Warhammer 40,000, a game that impresses me more for its ambitious envisioning of a universe of eternal dæmonic conflict than the reality of the game itself. Warhammer subsumes the pan-dimensional evil and intergalactic deicide of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos into a world of Roman prætors and legionnaires, and it’s easy to read Anaal Nathrakh’s eschatological death-lust as a soundtrack to neverending, metaphysically fraught strife.

This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see Heaven.

I, uh, I don’t really know what to say about Abigor’s Fractal Possession. Beyond saying I’m sorry I ever doubted them (in the wake of the tepid Satanized), and ever having said anything snarky about this album. Fractal Possession is stunning and sui generis.

So, here’s a précis: Abigor. Austrian 3-piece with a revolving membership, no bass player, and the style of rattletrap pell-mell drumming that owes more to old grindcore (with its double-footed oatmeal box kick drums) than death metal’s bass-heavy rolling thunder. Possessed of a singular guitarist who can twist the whole chaotic mess around his finger and turn it into something grandiose and beautiful all by himself. Never make the same album twice. Fond of stealing samples from Dom & Roland, who probably stole them all from somebody else.

This album pushes all sorts of buttons for me, with its high-velocity prog/black/technical death metal warped into all kinds of strange shapes by the promiscuous borrowing from industrial, drum’n’bass and metalcore. Samples from Road to Perdition are juxtaposed with Abigor’s inimitable overdubbed twin-lead guitar pyrotechnics and random doomcore synth blats. And just to keep you on your toes, whenever the density peaks and it starts to blur into saminess, things ease up and get more melodic. It’s really quite something. I like it so much I had to listen to the whole thing all the way through twice, which I almost never do.

I posted this comment on this post on Cosmo’s blog, but it’s really too long to be a proper comment, so I’m reposting it here, now with bonus links:

In my alternate universe, there is no TRL, and people find music through their friends and impassioned record store staff and critics who give the music they love the attention and respect it deserves, instead of being prey to marketing and publicity operations and the fifty billion forms of payola that hedge us all in. That’s where I want to live!

I agree that LOTFP is needlessly paranoid; I agree that most of us start with Def Leppard or Lamb of God before we get to Make A Change… Kill Yourself; and I agree that Decibel is not going to suddenly make the trve kvlt disappear in a flash from Avenged Sevenfold’s stage pots. I still think he / they make many acute observations about the relationship between metal’s margins and the musical mainstream, and that the relationship is, and in some ways needs to be, antagonistic. He defends the borders between “us” and “them”, and that kind of policing, as annoying as it can sometimes be, is part of what preserves metal’s energy.

You and I both came up through the e-music underground, so we’ve been through the situation where that tension collapsed, more or less, and it left a vacuum that sucked most of the good music in behind it. It’s not that the mainstream coöpted the margins, it’s that the margins sort of shrugged or ran out of energy, and with the exception of tiny pockets in Rotterdam and Ljubljana and east London, the renegade spirit that animated the early rave / techno / jungle scene is almost totally dead.

At the same time, I agree with Sandy: I want people to like this stuff, because I love it and I enjoy it when my friends enjoy stuff that I love. That’s why I write about music. If it weren’t for the inclusiveness of the metal community (to sound totally corny for a moment), I wouldn’t even be here. In large part it’s the unfeigned enthusiasm of metalheads (in the pit, shivering in long lines waiting to be let into The Pound) that sucked me back into heshing after a long chunk of my life mostly ignoring it.

Metal fans own metal because they control the terms of the debate and have deep convictions about what they like and don’t like, and what they will and won’t accept as “true metal”. Just look at the LOTFP. They can be dogmatic and dictatorial, but also incredibly enthusiastic. Just look at the the wave of American one-man black metal bands (Xasthur, Leviathan and Krieg being the ones with which I’m most familiar – pity about the Twilight album): all those guys are a pain in the ass to work with (or so I hear), and prickly to the point of sociopathy, but they are clearly motivated by deep (if inscrutable) passions. And for all their accomplishments as musicians, I think they’re fans first and foremost. That’s the beauty of metal, or any other marginal art: there is no line between fan, performer or critic. We all have a stake (and the fans and performers get more votes than the critics, which is absolutely how it ought to be).

Stuck in my head this morning: “The Number Knows Its Name” by All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors and “The Eerie Bliss and Torture (Of Solitude)” by Xasthur (from the flawless Xasthur / Leviathan split – Xasthur’s Keeper of Sharpened Blades (and Ominous Fates) does nauseating things with sound and still leaves me slightly in awe), which is what I get for writing about both of them so much over the last few days. Eccentric electronic pop + relentless anti-life black metal = a mashup way more avant garde than Xenakis or Penderecki.

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.

The newest Darkthrone, F.O.A.D. (no prize for guessing the acronym), sounds more like Darkthrone than ever before. It seems like they've finally found a way to combine their original, raw black metal sound with the devil-may-care (ha! ha!) punky thrash / thrashy punk of The Cult Is Alive or Sardonic Wrath. They're as tongue-in-cheek as ever, from the thudding midtempo musicology lecture that is "Canadian Metal" to the drily sarcastic potshots Fenris (the chief songwriter) takes at Nocturno Culto (the only other band member) in the liner notes. They absolutely have a formula, and they have it down cold, and they don't care if you don't like it. They're more likely to get on a plane and fly to your home town so they can piss on your lawn than they are to apologize for making music you don't like, or think isn't blackened enough, or whatever pointless, stupid complaints you feel like making. Ulver once tried to pull off this kind of truer than trve kvlt attitude and it came across as amusingly pseudo-intellectual bullshit (even though Nattens Madrigal is still a total kick in the pants); with Darkthrone there's only a faint whiff of meta hanging around, and by F.O.A.D. it's almost completely gone.