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The co-opting of metal, dare I ask?
Heavy Metal Gets an M.F.A.
By JON CARAMANICA
Published: September 18, 2005
"YOU might not have known it from looking at the audience, but when the Chicago instrumental band Pelican performed at the Knitting Factory in late July, it was playing metal.
Instead of long hair and all-black outfits, the crowd was displaying the trappings of brainy, slightly nerdy indie rock. Young men wore artistically cropped hair and tight-legged jeans, and there was even a smattering of young women in librarian glasses and worn-out Chuck Taylor sneakers.
This is not your older brother's metal crowd. "I've been wearing my Def Leppard T-shirt on tour recently," said Laurent Lebec, a guitarist in Pelican and a fan of that archteypal 1980's metal band. "People come up to me and ask, 'Is that a joke?' I have to tell them that I don't wear T-shirts as a joke."
The particularly dark and aggressive strain of rock called heavy metal has been around for more than three decades. In that time, it has spawned a range of offshoots, but none have been as unlikely as the recent wave of bands using metal as a jumping-off point for a range of experimental styles, dabbling in free jazz, minimalist post-rock, noise and even modern classical music.
This is art-metal, a curious scene populated by a new generation of metal acolytes onstage and younger fans often unfamiliar with metal's headbanger heritage.
"Metal in general has long been unjustly maligned as solely the province of knuckle-dragging meatheads," said Aaron Turner, a founder of the influential Hydra Head Records, which has released three CD's by Pelican, including, recently, "The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw." "That said, there's never been a group of musicians like there is now, who are helping to advance the form."
Heavy metal reached a commercial apex with the hair-metal bands of the 80's, but those spandex-and-lipstick aficionados were often maligned within the greater heavy metal scene. Metal, many argued, should be punishing and morbid, not garish. So while the flashy acts caught on in the pop arena, the metal mainstream focused on technique and form, honing a high degree of technical complexity. By the outset of the 90's, eccentrics like the Melvins and the Flying Luttenbachers were acting on the belief that heavy music was compatible with an avant-garde sensibility. Their peers didn't all agree.
"For years, I felt we didn't have any common ground with anyone - I felt like I was on the inside of it, but not always a welcome visitor," said Justin Broadrick, a member of the pioneering experimental metal bands Napalm Death and Godflesh, who this year released an album with his new band, Jesu, on Hydra Head.
A decade later, those early acts have given rise to others. "Those bands laid the groundwork for us," said Mr. Turner, who also plays in the highly digressive post-metal band Isis. "We're part of a recognizable lineage."
It has produced a scene as noteworthy for its traditional aggression, power and growling guitars as for its appetite for experimentation.
Orthrelm, described by its founder, Mick Barr, as making classically influenced jazz-metal fusion, has just released "OV" (Ipecac), a one-song, 45-minute trancelike tour through seismic noise, North African music and guitar riffs that suggest a needle skipping on an early speed-metal record. Four years ago, the band released the fascinating "Asristir Veildrioxe" (Troubleman Unlimited), which was hypnotic in almost the opposite fashion: 99 tracks lasting a collective 12 minutes. These weren't songs, but rather brainy guitar-and-drum outbursts, each one incrementally different from the others. Mr. Barr called it "the alphabet record, and on our later records, we would use those letters to make longer songs."
Just as influenced by metal, but in wholly different fashion, is Sunn 0))), which borrowed its odd-looking name from the logo of a well-regarded amplifier company. "We take the atmosphere of metal - the barbarism, the unrelentingness - and we apply it to getting the room actually vibrating," said Stephen O'Malley, who also plays with the scabrous and pensive band Khanate. Accordingly, the band's songs, as heard on the slow burn of the forthcoming "Black One" and the just reissued "GrimmRobe Demos," are vast seas of gurgle and drone.
On records, the band haunts. In concert, its members, who perform in druid-style robes and typically use industrial smoke machines, actually alter the feel of the room.
"In that way, the entire space becomes the performance," Mr. O'Malley said.
Greg Anderson, a member of Sunn 0))) and, with Mr. O'Malley, a founder of Southern Lord Records, which releases Sunn 0)))'s albums and has become one of the scene's key labels, argued: "A punk rock ethic has been injected into the metal scene. There's far more room for what we do now, which is good, because what we do wouldn't fly on more traditional metal labels."
Perhaps more than any genre, metal has historically been exceedingly tribal. "When I was growing up, you wore bands' names on the back of your jacket," Mr. Broadrick said. "You would die for them." Throughout the 90's, fierce battle lines were drawn between the metal styles - doom metal, black metal, death metal - that were generally indistinguishable to an uninformed outsider.
But thanks to generational shifts, the current wave of metal experimenters has been less burdened by scene loyalties. "These are people who probably grew up being into metal, but also were into or played in post-rock bands in the 90's, and have finally reconciled the fact that you could fit those two things together," said Andee Connors, co-owner of Aquarius Records in San Francisco, a retail store that specializes in metal.
For a time, as if to drive home its conscientious-objector status, Hydra Head even used the slogan "Thinking Man's Metal."
"It was self-deprecating, but it also exemplified what we wanted to do," Mr. Turner said.
Albert Mudrian, editor of the year-old metal magazine Decibel and author of "Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore," asks: "Is art conscious or unconscious? Up until now, there was art in metal, but there wasn't for the most part a self-awareness about it. Now, these new artists have that, and they want to be painted as such."
Case in point: When Atsuo, the single-named singer-drummer for the sludgy Japanese post-metal band Boris, was asked recently in the online magazine radcompany.net about the influence of Satan on the band's work, he gave a predictably high-minded answer, engaging the question's absurdity - heavy metal's Satanic influenceis one of the genre's great clichés - and then trumping it. "It's simple to talk about Satan as a symbol, but it's important to consider the deeper meaning of the symbol," he said in one of his rare interviews to be translated into English. "To me, the Devil is not a symbol, but a moment that touches on morals. The moment when a person changes - that is the Devil."
"People often mistake us for an ordinary metal band," he warned. "We're not."
The flourishing of art-metal comes as its big brother is beginning to creep its way back into the mainstream. In the last year, acts like Lamb of God and Killswitch Engage have sold several hundred thousand records, and bands that combine the emotional catharsis of emo with the aggression of metal - My Chemical Romance and Coheed and Cambria, for instance, along with several bands on the roster of the Chicago label Victory Records - have begun to appear with regularity on the Billboard charts. Additionally, MTV, which cancelled its metal showcase "Headbangers Ball" in 1994, revived it in 2003 on its sister channel MTV2.
But there are signs that even traditional metal bands are becoming more eccentric. Recent metal albums have paid tribute to authors from Melville (Mastodon's "Leviathan") to Tolkien (Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle-Earth") to Blake (Ulver's "Themes From William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven And Hell"). For good measure, the metal legends Sepultura are preparing an album based on Dante's "Divine Comedy."
Some fear, though, that the self-conscious positioning of art-metal bands has done a disservice to worthy acts who stick closer to tradition, and who are often ignored, if not outright scorned, by outsiders. John Darnielle, the singer-songwriter who performs as the Mountain Goats and writes frequently about metal, said, "People want to listen to harder stuff, but they don't want to venture far beyond their own backyard."
The result is audiences for whom a Def Leppard T-shirt could only be a sign of irony, though there may be hope for further indoctrination. "We never imagined we'd have kids into us who'd never listened to metal at all," Mr. Lebec of Pelican said. "But maybe we can be their gateway."
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