I’ve always liked metal, but it took me a long time to come around to black metal. First, there’s the culture. I have a strong negative reaction to the self-righteousness of white males slavishly copying a handful of mentally ill teenaged white males from decades ago. Besides the cultural *shudder* “purity” of a movement, there’s the sonic rigidity. The tropes of #trveNorwegianblackmetal are so rigid that I struggle to tell any of the thousands of copy cats apart. But black metal is ubiquitous, so it was inevitable that I would find a few bands to enjoy. In fact, one of the best concerts I’ve been to in recent history had a line up heavily skewed towards black metal. Mostly I enjoy groups whose blackness is polluted with other colors, or bands who blacken other genres. Anyway, here are a few black metal and black metal adjacent bands I’ve enjoyed lately.
In December of 2015, the ski season in Washington had just gotten started. We spent the holidays in Arizona, and on that trip visited Chiricahua National Monument in the southern part of the state. Imagine our surprise at finding almost as much snow on the ground just a few miles from the Mexican border as we had just a few miles from the Canadian one.
Despite the snow, it wasn’t particularly cold, and the sun was shining. Our group ranged in age from 7 to 70-something, so we didn’t pick anything too challenging. But we still had a couple of really nice hikes in the desert. With snow.
With the rest of the opera season canceled – everywhere – The Met has been offering free nightly streams of operas previously recorded for their HD broadcasts. Scheduling time for an opera in front of the TV is in some ways harder than making time to attend a performance, but on Sunday, April 5, I finally blocked out an afternoon for my own Sunday matinee stream of Norma by Bellini.
Last Friday wrapped up the fourth week of pandemic homeschooling. Just when we thought we had a routine going, the schools came up with new systems based on the state’s new requirements for “continuous learning.” Since previous assignments were optional, most of the new schoolwork was covering old ground for the kids who kept up on academics all along. But it still gave us a taste for the potential workload. So week four was a lot about figuring out the new school system, but we had a few projects worth updating, too. Here’s how our first month of pandemic homeschooling wrapped up.
When I wrote about Asian metal I like, a few mistakes were made. Some album covers were switched, some bands in my notes were overlooked. Plus I keep running into more great Asian metal. So I’m doing another post on Asian metal I like.
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Laang
I had already heard and liked Taiwanese one-man project Laang 冷 when I wrote that earlier post, and don’t know how it slipped my mind. It even has a dramatic backstory. The album Hǎiyáng 海洋 was written as a response to – almost a description of – the artist’s experience of being carjacked, shot in the head, and surviving a coma. I think it is literally impossible to be more metal than that.
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Symphony of Horror
I rarely look at email promoting music (hard enough just to keep track of emails from my editors). But the message alerting me to the existence of Symphony of Horror and their album Gekommende Aus Abaddon caught my eye, because it contained the word Kazakhstan. I’ve never heard music from Kazakhstan before, but I once had a boss from there, and we sometimes would talk about music. She preferred 70’s style prog to the heavier metal I like. Like Kazakhstan itself, my boss was both Asian and Russian; but Symphony of Horror, inexplicably, seem to be singing in German. Nevertheless, I had to click through for old time’s sake. And what I found was symphonic metal, but it was, dare I say it, tasteful? So much symphonic metal banks in too-muchness. Symphony of Horror has just enough.
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ZaRRaZa
Kazakhstan doesn’t make the news much, but when it does, it seems to be heavy metal. And I usually like it. So when I saw that ZaRRaZa is from Kazakhstan, I had to give a listen.
Their album wasn’t out yet, so there were only two videos. I ended up watching them over and over again and not just because they were badasses playing guitar in the snow wearing tank tops. One was “The Grudge19” which reminded me of a heavier The Hu with its use of traditional instruments and images of nature. The other was Failed Apocalypse19, a much more straightforward bit of death metal that grabs you by the throat and shakes you around – but in a good way. (BTW, both songs have ’19 in the name because the album Rotten Remains is a collection of old demo songs re-recorded in 2019.) I loved them both.
I’m a total cheapskate, but you can bet I pre-ordered Rotten Remains. It barely cost more than a double latte.
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Takafume Matsubara
Grind is not usually my subgenre. But I’m always interested in music from Japan, and I’m a sucker for a good backstory. So when I read about Takafume Matsubara and his battle against hand paralysis in the Bandcamp Daily, I was intrigued. Not all good guitar playing is virtuosic, but grind’s speed seemed like a big ask. Add to that his background in the martial arts and his self-description as “just a salaryman,” and of course I was curious. So I listened to Strange, Beautiful and Fast – and it was.
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Facelift Deformation
Facelift Deformation only put out two promos on Bandcamp (three songs total) back in 2017. I only discovered them because they share a name with another band I like – which might be the same one? This Hong Kong Facelift Deformation is not quite the same sound as the OSDM of the Facelift Deformation on Cybernetic Organism Atrocity released by Realityfade on Bandcamp. But both bands are anonymous, and the timelines fit together…But anyway, the Hongkies play(ed) a brutal kind of music I didn’t think Hong Kong was capable of. I think I like the newer (album/band) better. But you have got to love the title Dim Sum Massacre.
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Coffins
On Beyond the Circular Demise, Japanese band Coffins 東京都 presents an anthology of every death metal element I love, with none of the ingredients I don’t like. On all of my many trips to Japan I have searched for music like this and never found it. But Coffins has been spewing this vitriol since 1996. They are even scheduled to play Seattle in May, although I have no faith that concert will actually take place. Now that I know they exist, I’ll be looking forward to seeing them in the future.
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