Jazz for Metal 3: Stanton Moore

Photo used from press kit found on Stanton Moore's home page.

The early days of hard rock, the sixties and seventies were an interesting, chaotic primordial sludge that only hinted at where the genres would go in the future. Loudness, bombast, distortion and excess were the defining characteristics of the nascent genre. Harmonically, still grounded by the blues yet rhythmically and melodically taking flight, electrified, white boy blues, hard rock and heavy metal were just starting to take shape. Guitarists along with singers stood at the forefront, Hendrix and Jimmy Page encouraged virtuosity, mad genius.

So what about the rhythm section?

Drummers and bassists still played like they were in jazz bands, only louder. Where bassists would later break out of their traditional role thanks to imminent funk, soul and fusion revolutions (James Jamerson, Bootsy Collins, Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke), they were still boxed in by walking lines, poor amplification and hifi setups not yet capable of reproducing their representation (the excellent work of Jack Bruce notwithstanding)..

Drummers meanwhile would experience a remarkable simplification after birth. Listen to John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell and Bill Ward, in addition to playing hard they boogie, swing and play in what sounds at times like an undefined cyclone on top of, around and underneath the guitars. Time has seen a transformation in the concept of time, contemporary drummers, hemmed in by the urge to create "perfect" recordings have become far more linear, precise and deliberate. This is not inherently negative, after all even today, Fear Factory's Demanufacture still holds a powerful robotic, metronomic thrill and the crystal clear drum sounds on Behemoth's Evangelion are equally moving. Then there is Stanton Moore.

New Orleans native Stanton Moore better known for his hip hop groove and jazzy swing had a famous encounter with metal via Corrosion of Conformity's In the Arms of God. Do not be mistaken, Reed Mullin is more than a competent drummer, he has served the band well for two decades. Mullin is frequently inventive, groovy and knows how to hold the pocket. However, Moore in the same situation is a revelation on how things could be in metal if that is we want.

Moore's snare work alone is outstanding, he caresses, bashes and shakes that single drum in so many directions as to render obsolete the concept of ghost notes. Where many drummers wanting to fill would get tom happy-heavy, Moore summons up squalls of snare white noise. His hat and cymbal work is simple and unadorned yet unmistakably jazzy and where most drummers in the present tend toward double kick excess, Moore's work is an exercise in syncopated, push-pull restraint. When the guitars gallop forward Moore ducks, dips and bobs.  When he goes nuts it sounds like the drum kit is about to start falling over.

Moore is an exemplary rock, jazz, groove drummer and renowned for his ability to lay back and let others shine, yet when dropped into a hard rocking doom context he managed to recall a time, spirit and approach seldom seen today. I for one could stand to hear far mo(o)re jazzy drumming by jazz drummers in metal. Or at least more of Mr Moore in metal.

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.

Another lost summer

Though it is winter, and the north:
I see them.
An echo of colour
overlaid on flap, flutter and rise
Up through the grey, the brown,
the chill.
A distant summer splash.

Wot? No grafiks?

You may have noticed a distinct lack of images in the last few posts. This is the result of two experiences.

1.      My home computer situation is rather dire at the moment. The relic I am using groans to simply output a significantly usable wifi signal from the access point adapter in its USB 1.0 ports. Old faithful does not arrive for another three weeks or so which makes most processing tasks long and tedious.

2.      I recently read about the ethics of image appropriation and was mildly shocked at the blatancy of theft and recirculation of personal, public and corporate images without permission. I too am guilty, although I have yet to turn a profit from my use of copyrighted images on this here blog.

What does this mean for this blog? Well, aside from appearing a little sparse for the time being, from now all images used here will be with permission of the image/copyright holders or else photography done by yours truly. While this may slow things dow in does have a number of professional advantages including: rectifying rampant theft by correctly asserting ownership and building concrete relations with those artists and designers responsible for the images. Oh, and it gives me another channel to put my interpretive, painfully bad photography out there into the world.

Stay tuned…

Sweet Tooth

From the first pages I was inescapably caught up in this paradoxically hyper local yet global tale of a hybrid deer boy trying to find out who he is and where he came from. The stark, impressionistic artwork and peerless, compact, original writing elevate Jeff Lemire’s future classic into a stratosphere high above his end-of-the-world/apocalypse creating contemporaries. Human frailty, affection and compassion are at the heart of this adventure which strikes out across a number of familiar landscapes, breathing new life into a genre I thought was definitely past its “use by” date.

The final issue which came out earlier this month is an elegant masterpiece of comic literature and moved yours truly to tears. It ties up loose ends without abruptly ending them, is emotional without melodrama and it is as a good ending should be, rewarding the reader and surprising as well.

All images sourced from Jeff Lemire's blog and used with permission.