(Can’t) Get(ting) back: free choice killed my roots (and I don't mind)

Make no mistake. I’m older. We all are. I’ve been actively, consciously seeking out new music to excite me for twenty-five years. It has been an expensive habit. CDs used to cost $30 each. I’ve bought, sold, owned, rented and even accidentally stolen hundreds of them. Then there are all the records still in the boxes they were stuffed into for an aborted migration to Australia… over two years ago. Still unmentioned are the hundreds and thousands of individual audio files obtained thanks to file sharing.

Since I first started this, a lot has changed. As physical media gave way to owned digital media which has given way to streaming the amount of available music has grown as explosively as its monetary value has diminished. A vast collection of music, even within the most jealously guarded, narrowly defined genre ghettos is available within moments of committing to a keyword search.

With very few exceptions (and thankfully they do still occasionally appear), I can own it all. I can hear it all. The only obstacles are science: biology and physics. There are only so many hours a day that I can stay awake. Only so many minutes I can commit to listening.

The inevitable outcome is that anytime I am presented with an opportunity to listen, I face a deep existential problem: reflection or exploration? Listen to something old, for memory’s sake, for nostalgia, for deepening, for resonance or listen to something new, for excitement, titillation and the potential to add to the list that defines me musically. Naturally, had I the time, then the question would not have the weight it does. Nevertheless, this problem lies at the heart of my daily listening and more often than not is resolved as I fall asleep with headphones on at the end of another long day.

Where once I had clear musical “roots”, now my location stretches to the horizon. What had been a small, neat garden has been replaced by an unruly and ultimately unknowable forest. Although I maintain a degree of lament for this change, as in a real forest, walking, watching, noticing, reflecting… all of these activities connect me to a wider whole. I suppose that what lies at the crux of the earlier question is a persistent, low-level angst that at any one time in the forest, I can only know what is immediately around me. And that in a finite temporal stream, both the desire to know and the desire to return, both tradition and hope are simultaneously bi-directional and proportionate.

Which leaves me to lead to a single conclusion. Admit the angst and just keep movin’.

Corrosion of Conformity - Deliverance

 

This review started out quite different to its current form. But it
read like something on Metal Archives or Angry Metal Guy so I had to
kill and reincarnate.

Take two...

It must have been the end of a southern-hemisphere, sub-tropical
winter in an insignificant rural town. I say "must have" because I
remember it being cool and comfortable as I lay on my bed, listening
to Deliverance. I know I was "comfortable" because I fell asleep and
had one of those precious dream sleeps influenced by music seeping in
without me being conscious.

Twenty years later, I am still listening.

I used to think I owned this album, however, truth be told,
Deliverance owns me. First on CD, later on cassette, mp3, CD again and
soon, in the trail of crackling energy of its just passed twentieth
anniversary of release... at long last... on deluxe vinyl reissue.

I have in quiet moments, fantasised about which albums crucial to the
development of my musical personality I would do a special vinyl
release for, should I ever win the lottery. Deliverance has been at
the top of that list.

More than almost any other album, I have puzzled over the lyrics,
unpicked the riffs, replayed the solos in my mind while riding through
dusty dusks. I simply can't wait to start doing it again.

Deliverance is available for pre-order at Prosthetic Records.

The! Projuis-arrrghz!

Dunn gaht sumfin stuck in mah craw.

One day the metal internet woke up and discovered production. The next day it learned about mastering. Someone used the word "dynamics" and with an unnaturally intimate connection with wikipedia the modern armchair producer was born.

Make no mistake, I am appreciative of the technological leaps that occur year on year, the kind that make the prohibitvely expensive studio tools of yesterday, today's plugins and freeware. Cockos' Reaper DAW changed my life in all the right ways.

However, just as these innovations brought me joy, so too did they turn somewhat annoying audio-nerds into opinion belching internet annoyances. Their knowledge is kind of like a fart in an elevator or a sexist remark by a "friend" in the wrong/worst possible context - inappropriate and unwanted.

That is correct, dear reader - they hear a hard mastered album and scream "brick walled". They run it through their favourite audio editor to proove for once and for all that they are objectively right! They proclaim judgements of value, complain loudly and say how it should (have) been...

Yet languish at home without a single audio production credit to their names...

All the while listening to low-bitrate streams through cheap/laptop/smartphone speakers... somebody better be collecting my sighs because they could be making a lot of money.

A Southern Paradox.

I am from the south. Not that South, but a south. And not the "south of the world"that Sepultura sang about. Further south than The South but by fluke of geography and the British Empire, merely an oversized outpost in view of the Southern Cross. Though if that's not south enough, then being born in the year of the horse, the corresponding year of said annum being south (look it up - or check out the diagram below) surely qualifies me to some extent.

So where does all this come from? It is not about authenticity but it also is in part.

Ever since I played the Civil War computer game, North South at my friend's house as a child, I was enamoured of The South. As a child, I always cheered for the baddies. Not necessarily because I believed in their "causes" but because they always had the better colours, better uniforms, better tech and more interesting characters. In North South the south were the baddies but the game let you play as them.


It was not and is not the case that I am a proponent of slavery and other parochial, exploitative and unjust traditions embedded in the society and geography of the time. Rather it is that I am a country boy myself. I grew up surrounded by agriculture, I remember a time when rivers were not just dirty, polluted drains for industry. I remember a time before franchises and pride taken in local production.

It is the deeply felt connection with nature so critical to constructing images of the south that still resonates with me. The smell of warm mud after rain in the summer, cicadas, willow trees and endlessly blooming oleandar, crepe myrtle and local flora, the humidity... just as an agrarian lifestyle was wrenched away from the south at the conclusion of the civil war, so too was the torpid pace of my own historic homelands.

What most people tend to think about the American Civil War is that it was all about slavery. In reality, slavery as a condition of unification and motivation for the Union was a late (yet rational and necessary) addition to the cause. The American Civil war was first and foremost political and economic. It was a war over the right of secession and a war of (futile) resistance against the march of industrialisation as the new economic standard.

Of course, it would be ignorant to say that slavery as a custom and socio-economic system was somehow separate to secession and "way of life". It was not. Nevertheless, it was the last gasp, the rallying of resources on an American scale, the gall to resist that rings true with me.

I have no gilded view of the south in the United States. This little essay is not an attempt to mask or otherwise obscure the real and pernicious, ongoing legacy of deep racism, the psychological and intellectual mauling of people's hearts and minds by peculiar American interpretations of Christianity as well the crippling and far too common blight of poverty on numerous communities.

However, this troubling little writing is about the loss of connection between metropolitan, always connected human lives and nature. It is about generations of children born into a world in which the subjugation of nature is simply given. It is a lament (to follow a previous tearless lament) to an economy that existed before unsustainable, neurotic scales of economy. The civil war was won by the industrialists. The industrialists went on to rule the world.

Yet, a little version of the confederate flag waves within me. Sure, it is dirtied by wrong deeds and injustice, it is bloodied and often wrong headed. But it dares to stand proud and remember a past that for only concepts remains tangibly close.

I got both head and heart, both North and South.

Done got taken: a distant, tearless lament.

Before hope and desire could congeal around digital (semi) immortality there were quiet, inarticulable dream spaces. Nascent revelations, explorations clung to the extreme peripheries of consciousness. A kind of reverse nostalgia, a premonition of deja vu, a familiar echo from the futures. Bound concepts, so familiar yet too subtle, too fragile to be teased into the concrete.

When on past occasions, when extracted from cognitive-mystic space, a concept's initial reach was less than today but the price of restricted distance was balanced with an increase in depth relative to time in rumination.

Before the tools for forgery, for forging, exceptional will was required for the process of extraction and so many facets, possibilities received gentle nourishment in daydreams and in the spaces created by forgetfulness and the misremembered.

In-betweens and never-weres, such sad yet beautiful non-existences. Their form, their cling to the unique contours of inexpression, given passion through elision. Just when apprehension appears certain, they retreat, millions of filaments realigning with myriad other ideas.

So I am left with an explicable red man, cyberpunks who lost the war and friends who cannot but still return to familiar paths. We meet at these intersections and glimpse, just close enough to recognise? Question and cherish the tender squeeze on my heart.

Slight return but not to the same. Each and every flight and fancy, seeds both immature and premature are carelessly broadcast. Each one, on its own insignificant but with the grim weight of repetition become not monstrous in the sense of chaos but monstrous in its ordinariness.

So that which should have been left in dreams, left between cognitive interruptions, eruptions is born as a forever-incomplete chimera hardened into permancy through high frequency oscillating electric signals.

And so I lament what never was, and shed not a tear.

A Tri(vium)p Ascending the Lane

I remember my return to metal. At the dawn of the torrent age, discrete P2P software was still the norm. Many of the big programs had central servers shut down, moved toward contemporary iTunes style interfaces or just faded out as torrents took over and google plus megaupload, mediafire and rapidshare filled the gap for instant gratification.

This was just around the time of the best-before date of "nu metal" as a mainstream offering of heavy metal. If you can recall, this was the dawn of the age of metalcore, a hardcore resurgence, post-metal (a term whose actual execution never lived up to its potential)  and emo/screamo. Hip-hop was being excoriated from the genre, baggy pants burned, sportswear retired and bands were dropped from labels.

In 2004 Roadrunner released Trivium's debut as a four-piece, Ascendancy. Ascendancy made its presence felt by going back: an extended acoustic guitar piano introduction, grand melodic movements and cool harmonised, dueling leads. The production was crisp, protagonists young and inspired and seemed to represent a simultaneous return to classic metal values and fronting the vanguard of the genre's new forward movement.

At the time, I thought it was great. Then I thought it was not. Then recently on a dark and cold mid-November late night car trip home from work, I finally "got it".

The problem with Trivium is that for whatever reason they never really clicked with a diverse metal audience. Perhaps it was their age, their looks or workingman-esque lack of overt charisma, maybe it was even certain questionable stylistic decisions made around the time  of the crusade. What can be said about Trivium though, is that they are good at what they do even if their latter day execution has yet to live up to the promise of their debut. The Crusade was middling. Shogun was stunning. In Waves had its moments and Vengeance Falls is similar to its predecessor.

Going back to Ascendancy after all these years (and why the hell doesn't it have a current vinyl print?) after all these years makes it possible to discover a few somewhat surprising things. It is a really solid, traditional thrash metal album. Sure, the lyrics are somewhat immature and heart on sleeve but have you ever read thrash or death metal lyrics. So while the subject matter combined with the melodies can move the listener toward cringe worthy emo territory on closer listen it sounds like Heafy is doing his best The Real Thing era Mike Patton. Soaring vocal melodies over weedling guitar and a giant rhythm section sounds great. Furthermore, even though the album came out during the metalcore flood it is actually far less formulaic and with an abundance of solos and old-school thrash arrangements and tension buildings... it's a rock solid classic metal album.

Ascendancy deserves a re-listen or a first listen if you were scared off the first time. Metal!

Dandelions, Jasmine and Wisteria

Away from my own. I borrow. Soil. Wisteria disappears too quickly at summer's strange start and the dandelions seem too few. Portent? Pattern? Jasmine stands with gentle clouds and warm grass, sweet reminder of different dirt.

Death Metal and Horror

 Death metal and horror are closely related. In the past I have explored concepts such as the grotesque and extremity and their relationship to the genre. This time I want to unpack horror in death metal. Before proceeding, however, it is worthwhile to define, to clarify just what I mean by death metal and horror.

Death Metal

Death metal, simply defined, is one of the genre offshoots of heavy metal known as extreme metal. Extreme metal includes but is not limited to: black metal, grindcore, sludge and certain types of doom and ambient metal. There are many sub genres of death metal including old-school, Swedish, technical, melodic and brutal. Furthermore there are more distant, third generation relations such as deathcore which occupy a contested space within the genre (more on this below).

The defining musicological elements of death metal are: fast tempos, disorienting time changes, low tunings, chromaticism and what are known as guttural (low, grunted, shrieked, shouted) vocals. While these elements may be similarly found in other genres within metal what makes death metal distinct as a genre is its conceptual focus on violence, horror and the grotesque.

Death metal represents an extreme expression of the nihilism integral to punk and later thrash. When these genres failed to produce legitimate shock value, death metal went for the conceptual jugular. In a world of constant shocking visual news via first broadcast television and later the infinite repetition of the internet there is very little that disturbs the modern citizen for more than enough time it takes to change the channel. Death metal ramps up the abject to absurd levels taking horror to extremes. It creates a sonic and conceptual hurricane of the grotesque and invites the listener to take part.

In my opinion death metal has long ago exceeded its capacity to shock. Infinite repetition, duration, appropriation and imitation have lessened its impact. Furthermore, its innovators continue to age and either leave the “scene” or stay on, continuing to compose and perform with varying levels of success. However, newer groups, especially those within the subgenre known as technical death metal have found new ways of expanding on musical complexity by combining it with conceptual complexity.

Groups such as Obscura, Decrepit Birth and the Faceless take a speculative, science fiction based approach finding horror in the unknown infinity of space and physics. Gorguts famously plumbed the depths of the psyche, laying bare the total and utter despair of depression to a cacophony of dissonance and non-standard noise. Spawn of Possession encapsulate whole horror tropes within single compositions exploring themes such as occult apocalypse, maniacal murderers and child abuse.

To say that death metal is without nuance or subtlety belies the understandable ignorance of a novice listener. That said, the number of albums featuring covers and songs about violating, molesting and abusing women tend to outnumber the more intelligent articulations by a significant factor. The same can said though of hip hop and if we were to take a cheeky leap, the horror of most contemporary pop music and its insistence on status quo is as equally disturbing.

Horror

To me there are two primary definitions of horror: emotional and the genre as it exists within the creative arts. Better and more complete definitions exist all over the internet, so I will instead focus on a personal interpretation. Etymologically, the experience of horror is dread, veneration and religious awe. Over time it comes to be associated with fear generally as well as a bodily trembling. Horror is an emotion of which we have little to no control. It seizes and releases us on its whim. Horror even while sharing similar properties to shock is far more extreme in both intensity and duration. Shock requires exposition, demonstration. Horror meanwhile can be communicated through implication, indefinitely. Let me demonstrate via personal experience.

As a child I felt the constant horror of my father’s mental illness. While certain actions of his were shocking in the sense that they seemed instantaneous and irrational (tying his left hand behind his back because it was “evil”, torching his car, destroying all the furniture in the family home with one hand) it was the lingering threat of his illness that carried the most weight for me long after his institutionalization and so-called rehabilitation. For years I was afraid, to the point of dread and trembling that he would suddenly appear on a street corner or at the front door late at night for an encore. As a young adult I continued to feel this horror as it mutated into a general feeling of disease and low level fear whenever in public. It was not until many years later, living in Japan away from that whole context that I realized I had lived with his horror for such a long time.

Perhaps this experience was what drew me to horror as a genre in the first place, a sort of organic, internal homeopathic “treat like with like”. Horror had a resonance for me, it was one of the few modes of artistic expression where I saw myself accurately reflected. As I watched and read the accounts of others in horror, being horrified and horrifying I slowly started to build the emotional and psychological strategies required for decoupling the continued daily horror in my life.

But now, post-personal-horror, what keeps me affixed on the genre? Is it familiarity, nostalgia? As I have said elsewhere one of the key attributes of horror as a mode of artistic expression is that it is able to go to abject corporeal and moral extremity without apology. Total destruction, annihilation is permitted and to me this kind of active breaking down of concepts is a valuable intellectual and emotional exercise. In this way it is not unlike S&M, it is a consensual excursion into extremity and intensity not normally sanctioned in typical social contexts. We all feel intensely about certain things, for some people it is their preferences in whatever field they operate (friends, behaviours, foods, animals), some people achieve this intensity through courtship, sex and friendship as well as bullying, animosity and anger. Whatever the case, as I have written elsewhere, extremity and intensity are integral aspects of human existence and to me horror offers a productive space for the exploration of extremity from fear to liberation.

The connection

Death metal has long played with horror. Its obsession with nihilism and the abject means it shares many of the same tropes. Artwork frequently makes use of sexualized, dismembered corpses evoking both mass media representations of serial killers and the existing repertoire of horror. Lyrics read like movie scripts and are horrifyingly descriptive at times disgusting and offensive. Early death metal was especially successful in conveying a horror aesthetic due to the limited distribution of hard core horror and its relative lack of availability. Its locrian melodies, reverb and blast beats evoked horrors that we all knew of but had never experienced. Vocalists sounded like demons, beasts, people possessed.

However, over time access to legendary horror texts and the ability to create video and mass distribute it have significantly dulled the implied imaginary horror of death metal. Furthermore, infinite repetition and imitation have seen once original and terrifying ideas reduced to genre tropes readily available for re-assembly. One expression of this is the genre offshoot known as deathcore. Taking the low tunings and vocal techniques of death metal and utilizing typical horror imagery combined with the emotional intensity and musical simplicity of hardcore, deathcore willingly decontextualises and appropriates the aforementioned tropes. Marketed toward a younger audience the capacity of death metal to horrify is further disrupted.

By and large, death metal no longer has the same gut level capacity to horrify. But this is where the technical death metallers mentioned above begin to assert their authority and start exploring horror in more literary, intellectual ways, drawing on the traditions of horror as a rich and complex genre with a function greater than simply shock. Musically, however, is it possible for death metal to horrify anymore? I believe so. Possibility is found in the 2009-10 resurgence of old school death metal (sometimes known as “wind tunnel death metal”) in the vein of Teitanblood, Vulvark and Nocturnal Blood. These bands rearticulated the horror and terror of death metal’s earliest incarnation in a way that was more personally and psychologically risky and less fashionable combined with a less defined production aesthetic. The overabundance of reverb, buzzy guitars and rumbling drums make it sound like some sort of undead horror creature killing mercilessly in the next room. Then there is Portal.

Perhaps the greatest single encapsulation of horror and death metal aesthetics I have experienced is Portal’s Seepia. By taking production and compositional techniques to lateral extremes, this Australian death metal band is able to open a portal of horror. Rhythmic and melodic phrases twist and double back on themselves, emerge from and disappear into a sonic maelstrom. From beginning to end the whole experience is disorienting, bewildering and disturbing. And strangely, fascinating. There are few opportunities for us to consensually enter into horror-scapes without denouement, happy endings or plot twists. However, the unblinking relentlessness of Portal is quite different to that found in voyeuristic animal cruelty documentaries, snuff flicks and security camera footage. What makes Portal’s music such a perfect articulation of horror is that it relies on the imagination and interpretive capacity of the listener, there are few traditional hooks or melodic anchors for orientation.

Visually, conceptually and sonically death metal and horror have a tight interrelationship. I contend that the capacity for death metal as defined along traditional musicological-genre lines to horrify as significantly diminished as a result of the information explosion provided by the internet. However, I also argue that death metal has the full capacity to horrify in the original etymological sense of awe by combining musical complexity with speculative fiction style conceptual sophistication. This type of horror is about unraveling the artificial stasis of everyday perception and causes awe through unsettling preconceptions around identity and the physical universe. Finally, it is also my argument that death metal as practiced only by a minority such as Portal retains the capacity to be musicologically horrifying even as the genre as a whole becomes increasingly sanitized. Death metal has yet to give up the ghost and I am sure that even when it does it will likely fuck the ghost with a knife (or be fucked with a ghost knife).

Mysterious Traffic

One of the things interesting to me about my blog that no one reads is what does on occasion draw traffic here.

Misogyny and death metal

How to make guitar harmonies like Death

Allan Holdsworth Death Metal

Sean Reinert, Gay

Chuck Schuldiner AIDS

What is more, just this morning (January 31, 2013) on checking my traffic stats I noticed a large volume of traffic to my site directed from Facebook. As readers will know, I retired from Facebook some time ago. Even when I was using that site the traffic to this blog from my Facebook page was negligible. So why the sudden increase? Who knows? However, the particular entry that has been drawing increased numbers is my Death Metal and Misogyny entry. I'm quite happy that people are viewing my blog but if only they would leave comments as to why, I could be happier.

It is humbling to know that it is not my writing on comics or just about anything else that brings people here. The constant draw card aside from google image searches is obviously death metal. I need to start thinking about what else I can create, can link to the genre. Perhaps this site will become a repository, a Lovecraftian multidimensional shrine to mortis ferrum. Frankly if that is the case, I have no qualms about moving in this direction. What is a writer with no readers?

I have noticed throughout the time I have kept this blog that my own voice is one of the few critical and reflexive voices within death metal, a critic and a fan. I have strived for a serious analytical tone yet tried to balance it with a fan’s perspective. I have employed theory to crystallize certain conceptual relationships yet I am not interested in typical theoretical analyses of the music that I love.

Academic encounters with death metal (and heavy metal music) tend to occur from within a sociological or literary, cultural studies analytical framework. The drawback of these methodologies is that they are frequently interested. What I do here is certainly not disinterested and I have never attempted objectivity. The interested-ness of academic approaches forces analysis into a paradigm of peer-reviewed publishing, conference papers and book chapters designed to demonstrate the usefulness of certain theoretical and analytical methodologies. My aim has never been to legitimize death metal in an academic sense. Rather, it has been to create a space where it can be analysed, discussed and appreciated on a level beyond “like/dislike”, where its conceptual nuances and history can be unpacked from the perspective of a listener and fan without fear or favour.

So where to now?

After my recent declaration regarding moving towards seeking permission to online use of copyright images from owners and creators I have found myself in increasing contact with the individuals responsible for creating these products. Even though they are all a world away this is a very rewarding experience as an artist and a fan. Before this digital age and the collapse of the creative arts market I would never have had such expectations. But now, I am starting to see the importance of person-to-person online networking. Building a web of connections has become transparent, with a little hard work and genuine commitment it is possible to create an ecosystem of creativity that exists parallel to and independent of mainstream, commercial practices. I can create independent, new knowledge about others, in collaboration with them.

So here is another declaration: the overriding theme of this blog will henceforth be death metal. I will still write about other topics as they interest me but the overall tone will move to a fuller engagement with the subject that brings people here. Stay tuned for big things ahead.

Big Bottoms: A response

Photo by Peter Matis, Supplied by Jeroen Thesseling

Used with permission.

Last week Metal Sucks 'John Myungnotta's* inaugural Big Bottoms (interviews with metal bassists) regular feature was posted with Killswitch Engaged's Mike D'Antonio as the first interview subject. As a metal (head and) bassist myself I am always looking for flickers of resonance and recognition of metal's (quite often deservedly) unsung laborers. Starting with D'Antonio marks an interesting choice, Killswitch Engaged are not exactly renowned for their up front bass grooves. They are however a popular and polarising band and as suggested in the commentary beneath the original article, have the potential to bring a greater volume of traffic and therefore a greater potential future readership to the site. Nevertheless, D’Antonio’s perspective does require some unpacking.

While D'Antonio certainly appears to enjoy his craft, again as noted in the comments his attitude is (stereo)typical of a certain type of bassist: stay out of the way, don't practice, don't "muddy up the sound", be simple and don't practice. It is no wonder that with this attitude bassists tend to earn little respect as musicians in metal. However, let me be clear: bassists in most musical situation are wing (wo)men. Their sound frequency range, their chosen timbre does not always lend itself to prominence. Some of the best non-metal bassists do stay in the background, in the pocket, pushing and pulling the beat and swangin' that thang in a way that most (non-musicians and for that matter many musicians as well) are unable to cognitively apprehend.

One of the zeitgeist metal memes is the colonisation of the bass space by extended range (seven, eight etc stringed) guitars. Commentators frequently argue that the bass (guitar) is becoming irrelevant to an extent because a lot of the low end can now be provided by these new guitars which frequently have tunings that extend into the standard bass range (in fact, yours truly has an 8-string tuned to F# sailing up the Pacific to one day find home again). But just like bassists who use high gain distortion in their signal path these meme makers are missing the point.

Despite the common stereotypes the bass (guitar) is a complex instrument. Many guitarists display contempt for the bass, deriding it as “simple” for its mere four strings and decrying as unnecessary when it has six or more. But we hardly call the trumpet with its three buttons simple, the same again for the measly four strings of the violin and the cello. But what makes the bass guitar so complex. I would go so far as to argue that the electric bass is almost two instruments in one. As many a bassist knows (and usually doesn't let on) the low E and A strings have a completely different timbre to the high D and G strings. Many anonymous bass players rarely stray beyond the two lowest strings and almost never again above the fifth fret. And it that's what gets the job done in their context, more power to them. What I am moving toward here is a different approach to the bass, an approach taken by a significant few in which the bass guitar is conceptualised not merely as "an octave below the guitar" but as a guitar with a unique timbral range.

Jeroen Thesseling has demonstrated in both Obscura and Pestilence how a bass can seamlessly fit with, augment and enhance low tuned guitars while still being heard. His fretless tone blooms and slides underneath the guitars, moving between registers to fill space but also to provide it. Go and listen to Pestilence's Doctrine, even tuned to F# (yes, he is using a 7-string, extended low range fretless bass) his tone is audible and engaging. Steve Digiorgio does the same with Death and Sadus: he locks in with the drums with a sense of groove not normally possessed by linear thinking guitarists and knows exactly how and when to shine - even when the guitars are also at the forefront.

Then there is Roger Patterson from Atheist, where innovative, rhythmically complex thrash/death is composed on the bass guitar. The same applies for doomy heshers, Saviors. One would think that in bands such as Pantera, where the focus was all about stellar guitarist Dimebag Darrel, there is little chance for the bass to be noticed - but it is. The band and their production knew what they were doing and while Rex Brown is no Les Claypool, neither is he a slouch. Crank up Cowboys from Hell, you can even hear his bass back in the bad old days of smiley face EQ settings, over compression and over dubs. In short, even when guitars start to encroach on the bass frequency range (in actuality, they always did, such incursions aren’t always cognitively audible is all), recording smarts alone can be enough to bring out the bassist in a mix. With a solid understanding of timbre coupled with bassists willing to go the extra mile, who practice and get to write their own parts his/her role is safe from harm.

Meanwhile, groups such as Meshuggah and Gojira blend the bass into the overall guitar sound. In these situations the bass is not particularly distinct but it does contribute to the overall guitar sound of the album. It adds timbral depth and complexity.

Big Bottoms will hopefully engage many more bassists with different perspectives and willing to talk technique over equipment. The role of the bassist in metal needs a serious re-think by bassists and metal listeners equally.

*Presumably, like the rest of the Metal Sucks staff, a pseudonym.