The Theme Song Will Not Be Written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key

The Theme Song Will Not Be Written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key 

1. Metallica, "Blackened"
2. System Of A Down, "B.Y.O.B."
3. Faith No More, "We Care A Lot"
4. Black Sabbath, "War Pigs"
5. Anthrax, "Bring the Noise"
6. Gojira, "Ocean Planet"
7. Testament, "Practice What You Preach"
8.  Living Colour, "Cult of Personality"
9. Suicidal Tendencies, "Send Me Your Money"
10. Lamb of God, "Now You've Got Something to Die For"
11. Revocation, "Pestilence Reigns"
12. Megadeth, "Peace Sells"
13. Ministry, "Thieves"
14. Sepultura, "Refuse/Resist"
15. Rage Against the Machine, "Killing in the Name"
16. Slayer and Ice-T, "Disorder"
17. Misery Index, "Traitors"

A post-elections gift for some of my fellow campaigners, culled from a few of my past political metal mixes.

Tool, "Forty Six & 2"

A friend recently sent me one of those "What Your Favorite Band Says About You" articles, and one passage in particular stuck out to me:

"Tool: You’re either really smart or really dumb."



Tool is a little like metal's Chuck Palahniuk, an artistic, sensitive and homoerotic talent with a dedicated fanbase of bros. Radio metalheads like to sing along and like to shoot their gun, and one can almost see the band mocking their unsuspecting admirers by getting frat boys to wear t-shirts with the word "TOOL" printed across the front. Yet Tool are also favored by nerds and Liberal Arts kids who enjoy their long, mathematical compositions, abstract lyrics and music videos modeled after the Brothers Quay. The result is a band that sells millions of records, wins Grammys and packs large venues despite barely doing any interviews and refusing to put their music on iTunes.

Another way that Tool is akin to Palahniuk is that all their art is pretty much alike. Tool devotees (and boy, are they devoted) can tell me that 10,000 Days is more conceptual than Undertow, and I'm sure that if you listen to both of them 10,000 times that's true. But for those of us who also want to make time for other bands, 1996's Ænema, featuring "Forty Six & 2," will satiate our alternative prog-metal needs just fine.

"Forty Six & 2" is inspired by the Jungian Shadow, referring to the human unconsciousness. Tool also references Jung's idea of gaining two more chromosomes in the next evolutionary stage, hence the title. But more impressively, Tool signified the next evolutionary stage in heavy music, building on Metallica's thrash symphonies, Nine Inch Nails' industrial intimacy, Neurosis' post-metal artistry and the Melvins irreverent unpredictability with their own artistic stamp. Tool may not have evolved since Ænema, but as heard in bands like Gojira, Opeth and Intronaut, they got metal to evolve for them.

Cavalera Conspiracy, "Inflikted"

Few songs display the powers of band chemistry like Cavalera Conspiracy's "Inflikted."


After ruling the death metal landscape through the first half of the '90s, Max Cavalera left Sepultura (and his brother, drummer Igor) to form Soulfly. Neither Soulfly nor Max-less Sepultura ever released anything worth listening to more than once, but I attributed that to Max's inevitable artistic decline and the fact that Sepultura lost their main songwriter, respectively. Whatever the case, both bands went deeper into the Cavaleras' fascination with world music, but no amount of tribal percussion could disguise how far the songwriting had slipped.

But for 2008's Inflikted, the Cavaleras reunited to create their best music since the classic Sepultura days. It helped that they had Gojira's Joe Duplantier and guitar wizard Marc Rizzo on board, but the Cavaleras have always worked with great musicians. Inflikted really scores becauses Max and Igor bring out the best in each other--hearing them apart is like hearing Eddie without Alex, or Dimebag without Vinnie. Check out how little there is to the title song--outside of the chaotic breakdown, there's nothing that a beginner guitar student couldn't play, or no lyrics that any moron couldn't write. But Max's phrasing on both the guitar and vocal lines proves that he never needed any of Soulfly's bells and whistles, just his brother to kick his ass a little.

I am thrilled to see that James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem is producing an EP with Max and Igor Cavalera, described by Igor as "a metal version of the White Stripes." If the jump from Soulfly and recent Sepultura to "Inflikted" is any indication, we have a lot to look forward to.

The Chariot, "All's Well That Ends Well"

By all logical thinking, The Chariot should suck. The idea of a Warped Tour-playing Christian mathcore band led by a former Norma Jean vocalist sounds like a metalhead's answer to the "Most Unwanted Song" experiment, but somehow The Chariot transcended their reputation with murderous live shows, artistically DIY music videos and most of all, the frenetic punk metal of albums like Long Live and One Wing. The last time I saw them, they opened for Gojira. I doubt that many progressive death metalheads came for The Chariot, but they were able to fill the room about fifteen minutes into their set.

This week, The Chariot announced their final tour with this sweet video chronicling their ten years as a band. Their final tour (October 10-November 16) is going to be a doozy.

Dissidents

How does one make a political metal mix for someone who already has "War Pigs," "Peace Sells," "Cult of Personality" and "Bring the Noise?"



Dissidents

1. Metallica, "Blackened"
2. System of a Down, "B.Y.O.B."
3. Faith No More, "We Care a Lot"
4. Living Colour, "Pride"
5. Guns N' Roses, "Civil War"
6. Suicidal Tendencies, "Send Me Your Money"
7. Marilyn Manson, "The Love Song"
8. Saul Williams, "List of Demands (Reparations)"
9. Lamb of God, "As the Palaces Burn"
10. Revocation, "Pestilence Reigns"
11. Megadeth, "Symphony of Destruction"
12. Ministry, "Thieves"
13. Gojira, "Vacuity"
14. Motörhead, "God Save the Queen"
15. Sepultura, "Kaiowas"
16. Rage Against the Machine, "Wake Up"
17. Body Count, "Cop Killer"
18. Misery Index, "Traitors"

Answer: It's hard, but not for lack of songs. How to pick just one selection from Rage Against the Machine or System of a Down? Is Tool's "Ænima" political enough? Is Saul Williams' "List of Demands (Reparations)" metal enough? There are already enough political metal mixes, with names like Psalm 69 and As the Palaces Burn. How can anything compete with those?

I ended up pulling up a little from everything. This is for someone who probably agrees with Cattle Decapitation philosophically if not melodically, so I'm throwing down the biggest metal trump cards. I picked "Blackened" over the other ...And Justice for All contenders by virtue of the fact that it rocks the hardest, and "Symphony of Destruction" for not having a verse about the Punisher, plus being still sadly relevant in an era of Morsis and Putins. Sepultura's "Kaiowas" landed here for proving that a metal band didn't need amps, or even lyrics, to send a message about forced evictions of natives in Brazil. I also dug up "We Care a Lot" from Faith No More's pre-Mike Patton days, a gleefully incisive takedown of the Live Aid and "We Are the World" celebrities which I'd still pit against anything Bono and Bob Geldof are doing today. I'll add that "We Care a Lot" predated The Book of Mormon ("I am Africa") and Get Him to the Greek ("African Child (Trapped in Me)") by at least 20 years.

More recently, the Political Metal flag has been raised by French progressive environmetalists (sic) Gojira and relentlessly confrontational deathgrinders Misery Index, the latter of whom earn the Thomas Paine and John Brown references on "Traitors" by being one of the only metal bands to put as much care into their lyrics as their music. But my favorite is Revocation, whom match their politically-charged lyrics (they recently debuted a song called "Fracked") with the most sophisticated metal that these ears have found over the past few years. "Pestilence Reigns," a chilling depiction of air raids, solves all of my problems with neo-thrash and technical death metal, giving the former a death metal makeover and the later a sense of songwriting direction.

Finally, I couldn't put together a political metal mix without including the most controversial metal single of all time. If you haven't heard it, that's because it's been banned from CD release since 1992.

Metalie

Natalie asked me for a metal mix. I know that she enjoys Loretta Lynn, the White Stripes and Marilyn Manson, so I took it from there.



Metalie

1. Metallica, "Battery"
2. Nine Inch Nails, "Wish"
3. Goatwhore, "Apocalyptic Havoc"
4. Torche, "Healer"
5. Motörhead, "Ace of Spades"
6. Judas Priest, "Breaking the Law"
7. Lamb of God, "Now You've Got Something to Die For"
8. Living Colour, "Cult of Personality"
9. Anthrax, "Got the Time"
10. Black Sabbath, "The Mob Rules"
11. Monster Magnet, "Power Trip"
12. Iron Maiden, "The Number of the Beast"
13. High on Fire, "Rumors of War"
14. Deftones, "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)"
15. Ministry, "Jesus Built My Hotrod
16. Suicidal Tendencies, "You Can't Bring Me Down"
17. Rage Against the Machine, "Guerilla Radio"
18. Gojira, "Vacuity"
19. Slayer, "Angel of Death"
20. Converge, "Last Light"

I tried to sequence Metalie around an ideal jukebox night at the Lucky 13 Saloon. You come for your hits--your "Ace of Spades," "Breaking the Law" and "The Number of the Beast." But you stick around to find out that there's an American death metal band that rocks like Goatwhore, or to remember that the best Dio-era Black Sabbath song was on the Heavy Metal soundtrack.

I also took a few cues from Natalie's sister, whom I've known to teach Suicidal Tendencies in her classroom and throw horns to Monster Magnet outside of it. I've even included a few songs from a mix I made for Natalie's sister, most notably the Metallica/Nine Inch Nails combo that kicks things off. I wanted to try something new, but couldn't resist the way that the two sound together, or think of many bands that stand up next to either of them. They didn't become the great crossover metal and industrial artists by accident. In any case, consider Metalie a Sister Mix to her sister's mix.

But Natalie is her own lass, and she gets her own songs. I'm hoping that the Torche, Gojira and High on Fire tracks are all winning endorsements for modern metal. Maybe Natalie will hear Jeff Hanneman's immortality in "Angel of Death" and a Lamb of God song that wouldn't exist without him. Maybe this mix will provide endless headbanging delights, or maybe she'll forehand it into the garbage by the time she gets to "Guerilla Radio." But if that isn't metal, I'll eat my Motörhead box set.

Metal and Moby Dick

Of the Great American Novels, Moby Dick is by far the most metal. Blood Meridian comes in second, and plenty of metal bands owe more to Naked Lunch, For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Stand. But as far as transcendent, irrefutably classic required reading goes, nothing comes close to matching metal's brutality, integrity, ambition and scope as Herman Melville's masterpiece. When trying to describe Moby Dick, I find myself using much of the same language that I use to describe Master of Puppets. The book certainly shares more adjectives with Metallica's creative output than F. Scott Fitzgerald's.

1. Led Zeppelin, "Moby Dick"

The best-known metal tribute to Moby Dick is the first one, the penultimate track on Led Zeppelin's second album (their most metal record, with "Whole Lotta Love," "Heartbreaker" and their best songs about The Lord of the Rings.) It's generally remembered as John Bonham's signature, and some less discerning Zeppelin fans would direct you to a live version first, where Bonham's drum solos could go on for up to 30 minutes. In person, it must have been mind-blowing, but on record you're still best off with the original, a hard-charging instrumetal (sic) that speaks to Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones' talents just as well as Bonzo's. Had they never met Robert Plant, Zeppelin would've been a mighty power trio.



2. Mastodon, Leviathan

Following up the most promising metal debut of the 21st century with a concept album about Moby Dick sounded like the kind of audacious career-killer that bands aren't supposed to make until at least album number five or six. But with Leviathan, Mastodon rewrote the novel as their own magnum opus, sharing a place claimed by Herman Melville for over 150 years. Succeeding where film and TV adaptations failed, Mastodon honored Melville's prose in songs like "Seabeast," "I am Ahab" and "Iron Tusk," while putting their own original stamp on the story with pulverizing riffage and a game-changing drummer. There has never been a more laudable book-to-album adaptation in modern music, metal or otherwise.



3. Demons and Wizards, "Beneath These Waves"

Wearing their Zeppelin influence on their gauntlets, Demons and Wizards covered "Immigrant Song," cited Lord of the Rings and sang of Moby Dick on their 2005 album, Touched by the Crimson King. If Hansi Kürsch (Blind Guardian) and Jon Schaffer (Iced Earth) didn't quite match Ahab's insanity in this first-person narrative, they definitely conveyed the doggedness and conviction, quoting the captain himself as "madness maddened."



4. Ahab, The Call of the Wretched Sea

German doom metal band Ahab took not just their name but their entire first album from Moby Dick, adapting nearly all of their lyrics from Melville's book. Of course the band rendered said lyrics irrelevant by burying them in death growls and a muddy mix, but that may have been their most Melville-inspired move at all--keeping its mythical beast lurking below.



5. Sodom, "Tribute to Moby Dick"

10 years after Waldo's sonar cries in the "Hot for Teacher" video and 10 years before Gojira pleaded for the whales on "Ocean Planet," Germany's Sodom based an entire song on whale echolocation sounds. Someone probably should have reminded them that sperm whales don't squeak like that (humpbacks do,) but maybe that fact was lost in the German translation. It's still a good song.

Ten Metal Bands to See Before You Die

NME's list of 50 artists to see before you die is problematic, as these lists always are, but it raises some good questions. Who are the artists that you need to see? Is it worth it to see Ozzy, who gives it his best shot but can barely keep up with the songs, just to tell your grandkids that you shared a room with the Godfather of Heavy Metal? Is it better to see a band like Gojira, whose songs you know, or GWAR, who puts on a real show?  Should you go to shows to discover new bands or to enjoy the ones you already like? How much of either?

My belief is that you go to shows to experience them. The only time I ever saw the Rolling Stones, there were plenty of big shots (and at least one Fox News commentator) there who probably couldn't tell Keith Richards from Charlie Watts. They got to live-tweet the show and tell their friends that they saw the The World's Greatest Rock n' Roll Band. If I ever go to a show for either of those reasons, I will stop running a music blog.

Keep in mind that this is for the state of metal in 2013, when Slayer and is down to two original members and Mastodon aren't having fun. On some nights, I'm sure they're all great--mind-blowing, even. But for consistency, if you only see ten metal bands from hereon, make sure that it's these ten. I'll be counting them down over the next few days.

Three Ways to Improve Your Album

Five minutes from Sylosis' Monolith. 67 more to go.

Every year, my admiration for artists who pour themselves into creating and sequencing a full-length work of art swells. In the face of YouTube, iTunes, American attention spans and singles acts, a select few still care about making a great album. Imagine if most popular books only had two good chapters, or if most movies had a couple of good scenes. That's the state of albums today. Dependably creative artists like Converge are both rare and crucial to modern music, just as someone like Jonathan Franzen is to literature.

However, if we are going to keep putting great artists on a pedestal, we still need to hold them to high standards. There are many reasons why music isn't selling as well as it did in decades past. I'll argue that one reason is that in general, most new albums and artists, metal included, aren't as great as their predecessors. With music sales bringing in less revenue than ever for record labels, artists have enough creative control to indulge their best impulses more than ever, but also their worst. Bands as varied as Rush, Gojira and Baroness released good, even great albums this year, but with minimal effort they could have been much better. Here's how.

1. Keep it short.

This seems like the biggest problem for many of today's metal bands. A CD can contain up to 80 minutes of music, but that's no reason for your band to use all 80. If you're lucky enough to find an audience, you should leave them wanting more, not less. To paraphrase Lou Reed, 30 minutes is fine, 40 is pushing it, 50 and you're into jazz.

This isn't a recent phenomenon. Some of the world's finest metal bands have run out of steam over hour-plus long players. Guns N' Roses were the best band in the world when they recorded Use Your Illusion I and II, and even they couldn't get through two-and-a-half hours without "So Fine." But let's look at the good. Slayer's Reign in Blood, one of metal's only indisputable classics, doesn't make it to the half-hour mark. At the Gates reshaped death metal in 34 minutes on Slaughter of the Soul. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, all legendary for their epic compositions, found ways to end their best albums in under 45 minutes. Don't point out that you love all 65 minutes of Metallica's ...And Justice for All until you remind yourself that your band isn't Metallica.

2. Cut the interludes.

Hip-hop is the worst at this. Intro skits, outro skits, intermission skits, phone call skits--these are among the reasons why anyone with a considerable hip-hop collection dreads the shuffle option on their preferred listening device. Metal is also culpable, but instead of skits, they use musical interludes. This year, Veil of Maya, Between the Buried and Me and the Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza littered their records with tossed-off, minute-long pieces that went from being entertaining to skipable over a few listens. Elmore Leonard once said of writing, "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." The best musicians record albums the same way.

3. Save some of the best for last.

Nearly every metal album I've heard in the past several years, even the great ones, are unarguably front-loaded. You don't play all your best songs in the first half of the show, and you also shouldn't play all your best songs in the first half of your album. Slayer ended records with "Raining Blood" and "Seasons in the Abyss." The Number of the Beast closes out with "Hallowed Be Thy Name." How many people who buy Lamb of God records can name a song on the second half of Sacrament or Ashes of the Wake? Those are both great records, but will anyone ever put either of them on a countdown near Rust in Peace? "Tornado of Souls" and "Lucretia" are on side two.

With most listeners sequencing their own playlists these days, some will contend that these gripes don't matter. But maybe listeners would be less inclined mess around with bands' intended tracklists if more artists proved that they knew how to make an album.

The Ten Best Metal Records of 2012

Alphabetical order.

1. Cattle Decapitation, Monolith of Inhumanity
Funnier than Meat is Murder.



2. Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind
Punk rock is a fine place and worth fighting for.


3. Deftones, Koi No Yokan
No matter how hard you try you can't stop us now.


4. Goatwhore, Blood for the Master
Decibel: 8. Pitchfork: 4.8.


5. Gojia, L'enfant Sauvage
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.


6. High on Fire, De Vermis Mysteriis
So do Motörhead, AC/DC, the Ramones and Little Richard.


7. Meshuggah, Koloss
Your djent is too short to box with gods.


8. Pig Destroyer, Book Burner
Sorry, pig. And book.


9. Revocation, Teratogenesis
The free, internet-only, Scion-presented EP that roared.


10. Torche, Harmonicraft
Flying outside now, too.

Dear Randy Blythe,

I am a huge fan of your music and a fellow Virginian. I can't wait to see Lamb of God with Gojira and Dethklok in August. The charges against you seem unfair to me, and my best thoughts are with you during this difficult time. I very much hope that things work out for you, and I encourage others to support you as well.

However, with your well-being in mind, surely you know at least one person who can get you a suit and tie. Court is literally the only place in the world where it is never cool to wear an Obituary hoodie.

Best wishes,
Ben

With a Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Sound

When Gojira's From Mars to Sirius stormed the US in 2006, earnest but lazy stateside listeners called the band "a French Mastodon." Now that their fifth album, L'enfaunt Sauvage is out, no one with shrewder ears than Jann Wenner will be making that mistake.



Unlike the Georgia Giants, whose every record seems to reflect a new direction, or Lamb of God, content to stomp on their burnt palaces from heron, Gojira have found where they're going and gone deeper over their past few records. The oddly dry The Link excepted, each Gojira album succincts and out-brutalizes the serrated riffage and tribal drumming of the record before.

How Gojira can make death-prog this ingratiating is still a mystery. On L'enfant Sauvage, the band is wiping out old things like hooks and time signatures and rendering their Inconvenient Truth-worthy lyrics indecipherable. The push-pull of brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier is the kind of chemistry that comes around once in a metal moon--check out how Mario's cymbal precision glows under Joe's palm-muting in "Explosia," or how the drums infiltrate the guitar lines of "Liquid Fire" and the title track. A professor of tones, slides and pinch harmonics, Duplantier is one of the 21st century's guitar gods, whether turning "Born in Winter"'s mellow drone into a savage melody, eliciting cries under his brother's beatdown on "Pain is a Master" or dropping in on the ocean in "The Wild Healer." Unless Converge or Pig Destroyer can do better, this will be the year's best metal album.

High Five for 2012

By now you've either heard that Fiona Apple has the best record of the year so far, or you've heard The Idler Wheel... and know that it's true. But with Fiona already riding a 90 on Metacritic, she doesn't need my endorsement. Instead, may I suggest you support the five best metal records for the first half of the year, in alphabetical order.

Cattle Decapitation, Monolith of Inhumanity 

San Diego's favorite misanthropes reinvent jazz as grindcore.

Goatwhore, Blood for the Master

You see us coming and you all-to-geth-er-run-for-cover--we're taking over death metal.

 

 

 

 

 

Gojira, L'enfant Sauvage
Ishirō Honda, meet François Truffaut. Discuss.

High on Fire, De Vermis Mysteriis
Pike's Peak. Again.

Meshuggah, Koloss

The Black Dahlia Murder's arms are too short to box.

Happy listening! See you in December with the top ten.

Meshuggah at Terminal 5

One of the best things about metalheads is that they pay to see bands like Meshuggah. In no other genre, except jazz, will you see a band with no conventional tunings, rhythms or choruses headline a 3,000-capacity venue. Meshuggah's compositionally-subversive non-metal peers probably don't whip their fans into the same kind of visible delirium, but that may have more to do with the band's intangible powers than the forces of death metal.

Meshuggah are death metal's Slayer. Entire subgenres--technical death metal, djent, deathcore, Gojira--have been founded on the idea of outplaying them, but no Summer Slaughter act has ever conjured up the ferocity amassed by the five guys that make up Meshuggah. Watching them wipe the floor with Terminal 5 last week under Godzilla-sized riffs was a reminder that Meshuggah are still at the top of the games that they founded.

Openers Decapitated, one of the better bands to stem from Meshuggah's shadow, drove the crowd into a floor-encompassing pit for the entirety of their set. Sticking to tracks from last year's Carnival is Forever, Poland's heaviest seemed to overcome the venue's stifling acoustics by sheer force. Guitarist Vogg has made a name on passing expectations, losing two members in a fatal bus crash and rebounding with their most consistent record yet, and drummer Krimh honored the mindwarping style of deceased drummer Vitek without imitating it.



Baroness, the evening's odd band out, are famous for classic rock-inspired beard metal. They'd be better suited for a bill with Mastodon or even Bonnaroo, but at Terminal 5 they were able to emphasize their stoner-prog melodies by offering the night's most drastic change of pace. Not once did they pander to the tech death audience, opening with a slow drone and and serving Kyuss-like riffage under often harmonized vocals. The crowd gave them their due, taking a 45-minute break from moshing to absorb the hypnotic progressions of "A Horse Called Golgotha" and "The Sweetest Curse." I'm not sure that I could enjoy a double album of it (as we'll find out when Yellow & Green drops July 17,) but I'd see them again and invite friends.



Impressive as they were, neither Baroness nor Decapitated could steal the show. From the bass-heavy first tones of "Do Not Look Down," Meshuggah unleashed a dizzying set, focused mainly on their two most recent albums, this year's Koloss and 2008's career-peak ObZen. The former's slowed tempos and the latter thrash touches melded into a cinder block-heavy show of horns-flashing music theory classes, graced with a congruent stained glass stage design and a nearly blinding light show. Who knows how much of Terminal 5 would've survived were the Meshuggah fans not relatively subdued by the flashes.

On record, Meshuggah's leaders are guitar wizards Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström and polyrhythmic master Thomas Haake, but onstage frontman Jens Kidman is the star. A good if not mind-blowing singer, his robotic movements and omnipresent samurai face are an unforgettable visual to the sci-fi nightmares behind songs like "The Demon's Name is Surveillance" and "Future Breed Machine." Under the frantic waves of "Combustion," he was the eye of the band's hurricane,  moving just slowly enough to make the case that he was about to destroy the room. Compared with other death metal frontmen, his performances are like his band's music--not the fastest or most dynamic that you can find, but all the scarier for their guile.

Meshuggah will be no one's gateway metal band, but for those of us who like our jazz to come with blast beats, we couldn't have asked for more.