Music I Like – Metal-Inflected

No, that’s not “metal infected” although I guess you could call it that. I recently enjoyed an Alcest album, then had a hard time figuring out where to put it in on the blog. I realized that I listen to a lot of music that gets lumped with metal, but really isn’t. Sometimes bands start out really heavy and then mellow or become more sophisticated with age. Or a metal musician does a side project in a different genre. Sometimes, there are weird social dynamics that get an artist lots of metal fans, even though their music doesn’t have any of the sonic markers of metal. So here’s a bunch of metal-inflected music that I like.

Opeth

Well, I already mentioned Alcest, so of course I’d have to lead with Opeth. Opeth isn’t really metal anymore, but they still play metal festivals and have mostly metalheads for fans. Right now, everyone is talking about In Cauda Venenum, and that is surely an excellent metal-inflected album – that you’ve probably already listened to a lot lately. But recently I read a 20th anniversary retrospective on Invisible Oranges about Still Life that made me go back and give it a fresh listen. You can call it metal, or metal-inflected, or whatever. But it’s damn good.

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The Electric Mud

The Electric Mud is proudly not a metal band. Instead, hard rock, blues rock, or stoner rock are all apt descriptors. This is music I like very much, and much of my listening as a teen was dedicated to this music – which, at the time, I and nearly every one around me considered metal. Songs that sounded like The Electric Mud’s Burn the Ships got regular air play on the local “heavy metal” radio station, and the bands that played those songs routinely showed up at heavy metal music festivals – in fact, they still do. Metal and hard rock (especially of the stoner variety) are kissing cousins, and I like them both.

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Lamassu

Heavy metal had a rough patch in the ’90s, but I didn’t really notice because I was listening to a different kind of heavy music. To me, grunge scratches the same itch as metal. It might have been a fad everywhere else, but I spent my college years in grunge’s hometown, and it will always sound good to me. I don’t know what grunge means to Aussies, but Lamassu gets it right. Chris Fisher sounds as much like Chris Cornell as any singer I’ve ever heard. And the rest of the band, well, I guess you could say Lamassu is a Soundgarden clone. But you know what? We’re not getting any more Soundgarden, and when Into the Empty could almost be mistaken for a newly discovered unreleased recording, imitation is not just flattery, it’s good music.

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Kontinuum

I was downright obsessed with Kontinuum‘s first album Earth Blood Magic back in 2012. I even interviewed their singer when I went to Airwaves, and published parts of the interview on No Clean Singing and on Three Imaginary Girls. Members of the band have black metal roots. Singer Birgir has a killer scream that I can’t get enough of, but he’s also got a great clean baritone that dominates most of the tracks. And overall, the music scratches more of a gothy, dark pop itch. But with metal inflections.

Somehow I missed their second album Kyrr. But their latest, No Need to Reason, still has all the elements I loved the first time around.

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Hvile I Kaos

Honestly, if you want to argue that Hvile I Kaos (Norwegian for “rest in chaos”) fits squarely in the black metal wheelhouse, I won’t fight you. But Black Morning, Winter Green is a cello album, which I think would make it unique among black metal albums. Hvile I Kaos’ Bandcamp description says:

Hvile I Kaos is a Black Ritual Chamber Musick project

which pretty much sums it up.

It’s black metal, but it also feels like my favorite sarod raga with serious Riders of Rohan vibes. Chamber music should blacken more often.

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