(Incomplete) A Heideggerian reading of Slayer's 'Reign in Blood'

“We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death---a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the "they", and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.”

-Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Part 1, Division 2, I.53

“The waves of blood are rushing near, pounding at the walls of lies

Turning off my sanity, reaching back into my mind

Non-rising body from the grave showing new reality

What I am, what I want, I'm only after death”

-Slayer, “Postmortem” from Reign in Blood

Death is a universal and irrevocable entity; thus spoke a bunch of smart people from the past in some form or another. Indeed, in death we find a sense of finality that is difficult to grasp, come to terms with, or even philosophically codify. The above Heidegger quote, which I realize is imperceptible to those unfamiliar with the lexicon of Being and Time, comes at a crucial stage in his systematic treatment of the ontic situation of Dasein (mankind) where he's essentially tackled the “being” part of the treatise, and is now revisiting the “being” section and appropriately shoving in “time” where it belongs by elucidating the intricate relationship between the two. In my eyes, Heidegger's greatest success in Being and Time is in the same spirit of great death metal: revealing death as a fundamental component of being that shapes the way we look at the finite life we must spend (quite literally; there's a great quote along the lines of “time is the only real capital” I recall a philosophy professor mentioning one time, in a Heidegger course, naturally) in a world we're thrown into. Of these great works of death metal, Slayer's Reign in Blood, with its systematic yet visceral investigation of death's various incarnations and conceptions by mankind, rests comfortably in the throne above all.

Metal initiates will immediately find it strange that I prefer to call Reign in Blood a death metal album, but that's of very little importance. Splitting hairs with genres is an exercise in profound pointlessness, and there's far more to slapping a general descriptive label on a piece of music than analyzing its purely sonic qualities. Nevertheless, Reign in Blood isn't just a death metal album, it is the death metal album, par excellence. If we roughly define death metal as the sub-genre of metal that seeks to disseminate the role of death in being (if the two are even separable; Heidegger didn't think so, and neither do I), I challenge anyone to find a more poignant, concise, and utterly moving collection of songs that cover the spectrum of death in ways that “Angel of Death”, “Necrophobic”, “Postmortem”, and “Raining Blood” do. My thesis has been essentially laid bare; and this post will have a slightly more conversational tone than I'm used to. I'd simply like to investigate this colossal album under the framework that has been established above; that is, under the supposition that being itself is essentially being-towards-death, and that death itself is a complex, omnipresent thing (I previously used the term “entity”; the truth is that there is no ideal noun to identify with the strangeness of death) that manifests in innumerable manners as opposed to the oversimplified view of perishing that many harbor to this day.

A prevailing opinion in the general public regarding death seems to be a rigidly uniform and largely arbitrary standard in which life and death are mutually exclusive, with the former being comprised of activity and the latter a single moment in time that acts as the eternal cessation of living activity. Furthermore, I get the impression that many see death as a relatively homogenous experience that everyone must undergo in a relatively similar fashion; that is, the living activity that one engages in previous to final cessation is largely irrelevant in the actual act of dying. The twofold attitude described above is largely erroneous; and its shortcomings are fundamental in nature. Simply put, dying is not something that happens to an individual, but a process that, as stated above, is equivalent to being itself. Being a living organism consists of taking the finite amount of time one is given at birth in a world the said organism is thrown into and spending this time on various possibilities that, once life is “completed”, will comprise the picture of how the said organism used their life. In this sense, we are constantly dying, and in this being/dying we must keep our finitude at the forefront of our minds and allow it to drive the way is which we live/decay (this is the essence of the Heidegger quote I opened with).

As a result of this, dying cannot be seen as a purely biological event divorced of any experiential or ideological influence. On the contrary, attitudes regarding death and its manifestations will accordingly fluctuate with respect to one's ontological orientation. Reign in Blood astutely acknowledges this fact and investigates death from an informed, heterogeneous viewpoint with groups of songs thematically weaving together under the single consistent thematic convention: that death is the fundamental force that drives all aspects of life as opposed to the modern conception of death as a strictly futural event that, as opposed to driving being, negates it.

Analyzing Reign in Blood's labyrinthine structure proves to be fairly difficult, as there is no explicit thematic progression expressed throughout the album's playing time; but there are undoubtedly three “classes” of thematic notions that coalesce into one expression of the indispensability of death in any ontic examination of human life, which are as follows:

1. Historical/societal: Looking at death's role at a mass, often institutionalized level as a destructive event that shapes the way humans proliferate or die out (see: “Angel of Death”, “Epidemic”, and in some ways “Criminally Insane”)
2. Ritualistic: Looking at death as a ritualistic means to an end, often to fallacious supernatural results. (see: “Altar of Sacrifice”, “Reborn”, and in some ways “Jesus Saves”, Criminally Insane”, and “Piece by Piece”)
3. Phenomenological: Looking at death as a personal, essential, and primordial component of the human condition that engenders existential anxiety in every facet of life. (see: “Necrophobic”, “Postmortem”, “Raining Blood”)

I begin by examining the first class of songs that pertain to death as a societal phenomenon.

The Holocaust was at the epicenter of World War II, which itself is an icon for mass death and decay. In that sense, it seems fitting that Slayer begins its disquisition on death with one of the most famous intros in all of metal. A ripping open-Eb tremolo riff sets a frantic pace before Tom Araya delivers his trademark blood-curdling shriek previous found on other Slayer classics like “Kill Again”. This approach is a microcosmic view of the album's general aesthetic: Ripping intensity that relies more on subtle shifts in percussion and tonal variance than more obvious tempo alterations or key changes to set one song apart from another. A fascinating study in contrast, “Angel of Death” views events of The Holocaust through two distinct sets of lens. On one hand, we have the mechanistic view of Josef Mengele, whom the song is named after, and the visceral, tortured experience of a victim of ethnic genocide. However, this is not immediately discernible to the casual ear, as the two views are in many ways entangled in the song's aural violence and the lyrics' slightly impartial approach. For instance, the song begins with the following lines:

Auschwitz, the meaning of pain
The way that I want you to die
Slow death, immense decay
Showers that cleanse you of your life
Forced in like cattle you run
Stripped of your life's worth
Human mice for the Angel of Death
Four hundred thousand more to die!

From the outset, the song seems to be telling the story from the perspective of men like Mengele, who quite literally saw various “undesirables” as subhuman cargo. The lines concerning
“cattle”, “mice”, and the subsequent like about “four hundred thousand more to die” indicate a detached Aryan mindset that is simply fitting a quota to bring about a historical zeitgeist in accordance with their ideological disposition. However, there is a certain normative bent in some of the above lines that seems to underscore the inherent “wrongness” in committing such atrocities, with the “meaning of pain” and “slow death, immense decay” lines. The song's aural intensity certainly provides a backdrop for the grisly exposition of death that follows, first as a pummeling onslaught of the same verse riff that is played during a juxtaposition of the actual experience of torture all at the behest of Aryan “superiors”:

Sadistic, surgeon of demise
Sadist of the noblest blood
Destroying, without mercy
To benefit the Aryan race
Surgery, with no anesthesia
Feel the knife pierce you intensely
Inferior, no use to mankind
Strapped down screaming out to die!

Angel of Death!
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead
Infamous butcher, Angel of Death!

Following this line, however, the song takes a more interesting turn. A sprawling riff ushers in one of the album's few drastic changes in tempo. Here we are met with a brooding, relatively minimalistic section that invokes discomfort suitable for the prolonged litany of tortures that the lyrics recite:

Pumped with fluid, inside your brain
Pressure in your skull begins pushing through your eyes
Burning flesh, drips away
Test of heat burns your skin, your mind starts to boil
Frigid cold, cracks your limbs
How long can you last in this frozen water burial?
Sewn together, joining heads
Just a matter of time 'til you rip yourselves apart

Millions laid out in their
Crowded tombs
Sickening ways to achieve
The Holocaust

Seas of blood, bury life
Smell your death as it burns deep inside of you
Abacinate, eyes that bleed
Praying for the end of your wide awake nightmare
Wings of pain, reach out for you
His face of death staring down your blood running cold
Injecting cells, dying eyes
Feeding on the screams of the mutants he's creating

Pathetic harmless victims
Left to die
Rancid Angel of Death
Flying free

It is here that the song reaches its apex. The divide between sound and word is summarily cast aside as the unsettling dissonance of the lead guitars poke and jab the listener to the twisted picture of death that the lyrics paint. The twofold divide of the song comes through again as we're unsure of what perspective to assume. To the victims of The Holocaust, this is death incarnate in its most horrifying, real of ways. To men like Mengele, death was simply a systematic means to an ideological end. Slayer provides a middle ground by adamantly refusing to descend to moral pandering or straying from simply offering an account of death's essential role in shaping one of the most important and horrifying events of modern history. 

Don't hold me back, this is my own hell: Depression and Godflesh's Streetcleaner

About three months ago, I was officially diagnosed with some bizarre hybrid of clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. It's been an issue of varying severity for a couple of years now, but only became crippling to the point of interfering with every component of my life earlier this year. Before this, my innate disbelief in life's meaningfulness was nothing more than a theoretical consideration. However, as things unfolded, this once-a priori knowledge began to consume every facet of my being. Alcohol went from a fun escape, to a slightly worrisome crutch, to an absolute necessity. My demeanor exponentially diminished from decreased passion for things I once loved, to neutral indifference, to active disgust at the thought of waking up. The only meaningful relationship I've ever been involved in imploded overnight. I stopped eating; and on the rare occasion I did get to sleep, I typically woke up prematurely in order to expunge a cocktail of booze, blood, and bile from my intestines.

So what the fuck does this have to do with Godflesh? During one particularly awful night, after a few weeks of flirtation with suicidal ideation, I decided to mix a rather dangerous concoction of drugs and alcohol. I woke up in the early morning completely unaware of where I was or how I got there, walked home, bought more booze, and came the closest I ever have to making the final leap. Before I knew it, it was 11 AM, I was nearly 20 beers in, and I'm speaking to my concerned counselor, who contacted me after a missed appointment for that morning. Somewhere along the line, I was transferred to what I assume was a suicide prevention hotline, which insisted on sending someone out to my house to diffuse the situation of the gun resting in my lap. I assured them everything was fine and granted them permission to periodically call both myself and my therapist throughout the day. This moment was undoubtedly the lowest I had ever been, so I made the decision to blast Streetcleaner at full volume.

Why I thought it was a good idea to listen to what is certainly one of the most venomous, scathing criticisms of any positive outlook on the world at that point in time bewilders me, but I'm glad I did it. I used to scoff at the notion that altered states or a deficient psychological orientation could further illuminate a work when contrasted with experiencing the work under “normal” circumstances, but Streetcleaner has never made more sense to me than it did in that moment; and each subsequent listen has been an attempt to capture whatever it so lucidly communicated to me that morning.

The prevailing interpretation of Streetcleaner seems to be that it's an iconic ode to misanthropy, agony, and absolute contempt for pretty much everything in the world. In some sense, that's true. It's hard to draw any other conclusion when one is confronted with the atonal, mechanistic, cyclical sound of the album, or when one examines the despondent, sardonic lyrics to “Like Rats”, “Life is Easy”, or “Streetcleaner”. However, failing to go the next step in dissecting just what one should take away from these aural condemnations of moral purity is a fatal error. Yeah, the world is shitty and life generally sucks. Nevertheless, we were thrown into this world and forced to live in it; and instead of blindly reveling in negativity as so many people tend to do in the case of Streetcleaner, we can embrace the senselessness of any ontologically significant meaning or pervasive positivity in life by treating masterpieces like this as meditative aids in coping with all of the bullshit.

If one views the album under this “meditative” framework, a clear schematic between two different types of songs within the album emerges that engenders an active contemplation of the repugnant external and the tormented internal. However, before delineating those two broad classes of tracks, I'd like to briefly touch on the meditative aura that permeates the entire album through the interplay of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Building upon the style so perfectly showcased on tracks like “Avalanche Master Song” from the debut EP, the rhythm section of bass and drums persistently align in recursive patterns for extended periods of time. Over this rhythmic foundation, Justin Broadrick will typically mimic the bass line for a few phrases until introducing wailing vocals and free-form dissonance on guitar that very seldom resembles anything other than cacophonous feedback. Furthermore, aphoristic lyrics are sparse yet meticulous in their placement; and at times it seems as if the song titles themselves are mantras further supplemented by a few lyrics. Consider “Christbait Rising”:

Don't hold me back, This is my own hell
Christbait, Slugbait, Rise and bring you down
Christbait Rising, In your own mind
Christbait Rising, Bleed dry mankind

The 7-minute song itself consists of an intro that is later subtly transformed as a bridge, two main phrases that proceed alternatively, and a dirge-like outro. During the first main phrase, the first two lines of lyrics are bellowed twice, and the next two lines are roared at a higher, more violent pitch. Following this, the second phrase proceeds with vocal silence only being broken to drearily moan the command “RISE”. Much like the entirety of the album, the main allure of this track is its uncanny ability to disorient the listener and cause them to get lost in the hypnotic composition. In meditation, the notion of spatialized temporality (think “clock time”; see Bergson's Time and Free Will for an excellent treatment on the inherent limitations of viewing this as the ultimate standard of “time”) drops out and a spatiotemporal hour may pass in spite of seeming like a moment or an eternity. Such is the effect of the undeniably brilliant “Christbait Rising”, and the album itself when treated as an organic unity.

Earlier, I spoke of two classes of songs that each track more or less falls into. One seems to be a diagnostic sort wherein the external world is scrutinized by a frustrated Broadrick, whereas the other concerns internal dialogues of self-hatred, gloominess, and an insatiable death wish. I examine the first class by briefly examining the two songs I feel embody it best, “Like Rats” and “Locust Furnace” (the latter of which has a companion track in “Life is Easy”, which I only mention because I would feel uncomfortable with not giving it a nod for its wonderfully haunting, nihilistic depiction of human life).

You breed, Like Rats

Breeding
Stylized
Deformity
Don't look back

Breeding
Fade out
Lies
Deformity

Stylized
Deformity
Don't look back
You were dead from the beginning

Perhaps the most unique aspect of this song is the inter-thematic relationship that is established between the rough, percussive guitar riff that opens the song and is played during the first line and the considerably more upbeat riff that accompanies the “Breeding” and “Stylized” stanzas. The first riff and the four words that correspond with it feel as if they're coming from the darker part of Broadrick's mind, whereas the more descriptive lines, while still dripping with vitriol, possess a more sarcastic tone. It's as if the song is expressing disgust at the nature in which most of us senselessly proliferate, then light-heartedly poking fun at the notion of goodness that many people seem to have successfully convinced themselves of. Call it puerile if you'd like, but it's an earnest denunciation of a species that, in spite of possessing “superior intellect”, manages to commit unspeakable atrocities on a daily basis on a multitude of levels, even in the age of postmodern “enlightenment”. Also, it's impossible not to shout along to the first two lines. See for yourself (yours truly in the Portal shirt, at Maryland Deathfest 2012):

While the album opener decries the mindless copulation of humans, the closer is much more dismal in its depiction of Earth as an inevitable grave for anyone that has ever existed or will exist.

The earth, Froze up
One dead, Pale world
And you'll swing, From the reaping hook
And you'll die, By a reaping hook
Locust, Locust
Furnace, Furnace
Corruption, In the goat herd
Flesh crumbles, In the real world
Silence
Barren
My furnace
Appealed
The locust furnace
Earth, Earth
Furnace, Furnace...

Perhaps more of a noise-rock song akin to Cop-era Swans than industrial metal, the subdued violence of this song intensifies the sagacious quality of Broadrick's declaration that we'll all be put on display as parasitic insects to “swing on the reaping hook” after we succumb to death by the very same object. The tone of this song is what fascinates me the most. It contains what are arguably the most apocalyptic and deranged lyrics of the album, but it's almost certainly the most serene. This tone anticipates the manner in which the second class of songs I described excels.

While the above songs paint a picture of a dreary world unfit to live in, the title track and “Mighty Trust Krusher” illuminate the paradoxically life-affirming bent that makes this a complex work beyond philosophically empty misanthropy.

Vision, Escape
Vision, This feels right

Hell, Is where I lie
Now take the power, When we all die

We all die

After an unsettling sample from serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, the tempo of the song picks up to what could very well be the fastest on the entire album. A sense of urgency typifies this track, which is further enforced by the noisy guitar leads that are interspersed throughout. Following this, pitch-shifted vocals add an extra layer to the oddly empowering overtone of the lyrics. The way I choose to view this song is as one of an inner dialogue wherein the fatalistic worldview painted by songs like “Life is Easy” and “Locust World” is viewed as a source of power, not a source of self-destruction. Being cognizant of the basic state of the world we're forced to live in is the first step in simply accepting that bad things happen a lot and they probably aren't getting better any time soon. Note the emphasis of the word “right”, which almost seems to be taking an epistemological stance by asserting a positive truth-value as opposed to a normative ethical claim. In spite of the fact that it might not feel the greatest to admit, the truthfulness of Streetcleaner's worldview is the sensible one that will lead to getting the most out of this planet.

I need this, I need you
On your knees
And we'll pray
Together now

Effortless
Mighty Trust Krusher

I need this, It's in my heart
I love you, My trust is evermore

Hate me, Tread on me
And you taught me, and finally slay me...Now

The cryptic style of these lyrics eludes any concrete interpretation, but a general view can certainly be ascertained if one looks closely enough. The first stanza emerges amid a dissonant intro, with Broadrick desperately pleading to this “mighty trust krusher”, ostensibly in the face of inner turmoil catalyzed by the ugly world the other diagnostic tracks describe. It's the most thematically positive of the songs on the album, but it's one of the most musically jarring and challenging. I've always taken this as a reinforcement of the album's masterful aesthetic of harnessing, in a quasi-Lynchian way, the stream-of-consciousness process of the subject's inner mental machinations.

Make no mistake, Streetcleaner is a work of uniform unpleasantness. However, a smart guy named Spinoza once said that “all things noble are as difficult as they are rare”, and the contents of this album are no exception. In confronting the bleak decrepitude of Godflesh's magnum opus head-on, one emerges a stronger, better person in the face of tumultuous inner uncertainty about an undoubtedly ugly external world. I know that whenever I feel like life isn't worth living anymore, I disappear in Streetcleaner for a short amount of time and realize that things are shitty, but not that shitty. 

Assück- Misery Index: On Hopelessness and Futility

“About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: “The Problem of Socrates”

Assück's Misery Index is one of the most widely lauded works of the grindcore canon, and rightfully so. If one approaches this masterpiece with a critical eye, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that its sonic and lyrical components organically fuse to create a venomous 15-minute dissemination of the modern world that represents the apex of what grindcore had been trying to say since Napalm Death started lambasting anything and everything wrong with the all-consuming nihilism brought about by our post-modern, consumer capitalist world on From Enslavement to Obliteration. However, on Misery Index, Assück sees no light at the end of the tunnel, and the mere suggestion of any hope in our ugly existence, even on a theoretical level, is absurd. Where their 1993 Anticapital was an acerbic fist in the face of corrupt modern government and our increasingly fetishistic attitude toward the technology that will eventually consign the human spirit to non-existence, Misery Index takes things a step further by delineating the “prostitution in everything wrought under the sun” and claiming that “only futility is eternity”. With 17 songs in 15 minutes, the album acts as a brute symphony comprised of diverse micro-movements that is over before you know it, though you lose yourself in it and come out a wiser person when the music (like our utterly fucked world will, in due time) comes to an end. In short, the album is a deeply psychological work that has a simple message: our romantic notions of what is possible as a human are ill-founded as well as biologically untenable; and this is the source of the omnipresent suffering that becomes increasingly amplified as we become increasingly “enlightened”.

While the album is a very complex work, the essence of it is quite simple and is embodied in the structures of the songs themselves and the dialectic of the (utterly brilliant) lyrics. The music alternates between phrases of unrelenting blasts overlaid with spiraling riffs that disorient the listener and mid-paced phrases that include staccato-heavy riffs complemented by vocal delivery of aphorisms that exemplify the thematic basis of each track. Take, for example, “Corners”:

“Time does nothing but work against me. I wake alone and walk alone between the walls that insecurity has built around me. Forced into circuits, into circles, into cycles. I find all my refuge in corners. It's the only place where things meet.”

The first three sentences are repeated twice during two initial breakneck passages, the second of which is a subtle alteration of the first. The effect on the listener is one of intense introspection regarding the existential terror of temporality, and the song's climax is the acceptance of finding solace in finality: the only place where things meet. A companion track is found in “QED”, which examines the senselessness of our lofty pursuits of unattainable ideals:

“Dare to speak of hope and aspiration. These are foul words, manufactured idols and the bait of lemmings. Only futility is eternity. Only one sunrise will tell.”

Since the advent of pre-Socratic philosophy, humanity has deemed itself a privileged species capable of attaining an understand of absolutes that simply don't exist (see: the first lines of “Dataclast”). Each metaphysical epoch has had a different supposed understanding of this. The Platonists saw it in the world of Forms, which only humans were capable of ascertaining any knowledge of. Medieval philosophy saw all absolutions as emanating from God, and, taking heed from Aristotle's conception of nous, saw humans as the only beings capable of understanding (or, to use Aristotelian terminology, participating in) these. Then Descartes came along, ushered in modernity, then everything was seen as an object that could be fully dissected by science to obtain its true essence. Kant comes along a couple of hundred years later and proclaims the absolute thing-in-itself a part of the acausal noumenal realm that certainly exists in spite of the fact that we can't know anything about it. Then something interesting happens...

It could sensibly be argued that modernity was shattered at the advent of Nietzsche. Absolute morality comes into question, the death of God is pretty obvious, etc. Shortly after Nietzsche, physicists discover that we're a speck of cosmic dust in a possibly infinite universe, quantum physics fundamentally uproots our conception of the smallest and most fundamental components of the world, and Gödel shows that even fucking arithmetic eludes our complete understanding with his monolithic incompleteness proofs. The omnipresence of uncertainty is best captured in one of my favorite Nietzsche lines, where he proclaims his distaste for virtually every previous Western philosopher: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity”. Don't try to systematize existence, because shit is fucked. So, where does this leave us? As “QED” would suggest, nowhere; and we just have to fucking deal with it and wait for the inevitable end.

A byproduct of the discord between humanity's highest aspirations and its realistic capabilities is a worldview typified by cognitive dissonance that further exacerbates the inherent misery of existence. Humans are profoundly hubristic creatures, and we could certainly use some humbling. Consider “Unrequited Blood”:

“When will we concede that there is an absolute significance deficit in the concept of the human being? That rape is indigenous to our existence and that already we can never and will never be able to pay the debt of blood upon this land. Burn alive all humankind. Burn it at the stake. Burn it as retribution for its blatant defilement of itself. Burn it for its never ending void of purpose. Burn it on principle alone.”

A succinct summation of the album's philosophy on the whole, this blasting song is permeated by dissonance throughout: a fitting aural complement to the harsh acceptance of nihilism that the lyrics flesh out. One thing that strikes me is the subtle use of the word “concept” when referring to human beings. Think again of the chasm between the grandiloquent conception of what it is to be “human” and the molecular reality of us being hunks of organic matter that happen to possess consciousness, whatever the hell that entails. In spite of the seemingly boundless nature of our mental faculties, racism exists, rape culture is a serious thing that many people seem to have no problem with, the majority of people are avaricious, wasteful, amoral, and indifferent to the widespread suffering of others, and oh yeah, we view everything as a tool for our own purpose (see Heidegger's treatment of tools in Being and Time) and don't bat an eye at destroying everything around us. Paradoxically, this is a “blatant defilement” to both our biological selves in our incessant denial of what we really are, and also a defilement of our fictional, idealized picture of ourselves that is continually perpetuated as we pretend to advance yet ignore the fact that suffering and a lack of purpose in life hasn't disappeared.

To make things worse, we're all a part of the problem. You are, I am, and Steve Heritage is. We find an affirmation of this in “Reversing Denial”:

“I can no longer deny or disavow that there is a part of me that is part of it. A process regenerated by process reciprocating godhead apparatus that never ends. A grip that wrenches and discards threadbare. A piece of that which I abhor.”

As much as we would love to be the exception to the rule, a corollary of the all-encompassing dread that defines our base existence is that no matter how “enlightened” we claim to be, we're still a part of the issue in some way. This further engenders the futility of existence, and while there are many causes and ideals you can exalt in order to keep the hopelessness at bay, this very hopelessness is in fact the only true cause to champion due to the fact that it seeks to do nothing other than negate all other baseless notions of certainty, as “Sum and Substance” will tell:

“And if at any time it should fall, I will raise and carry the banner of hopelessness and lead its war. I would die in theater for that which itself is infallible and undying.”

Again, Misery Index is, in my humble opinion, the definitive grindcore release. It systematically dismantles the notion that we can be absolutely certain of the perplexing world around us, explicates the relationship between human suffering and these ludicrous ideals, and illustrates how we're all a part of the problem. In doing so, it hits a raw nerve of our basest existence. I would try to conclude this properly, but I'm fucking drunk and nothing means anything anyway, right? 

Portal and H.P. Lovecraft

"What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs." 

-from "The Music of Erich Zann", by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

The massive influence of H.P. Lovecraft on heavy metal as a whole is undeniable. To enumerate the number of metal groups that have hearkened to his mastery of cosmic horror as a source of inspiration is an exercise in futility, for there exist hundreds (if not thousands) of such examples. However, while the vast majority of these aforementioned examples utilize Lovecraft's poetry and prose as a mere grab-bag for interesting lyrical fodder or surface aesthetic considerations, no band has fully embodied his work like Portal has with their own inexplicable synthesis of death metal's virility and black metal's immersive aural textures. The totality of this thesis may be adequately summarized by two main points, which are as follows:

i.) One hallmark of Lovecraft's work is the utterly visceral nature of the text that the reader quite literally feels when reading Lovecraft at his finest (At the Mountains of Madness, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", etc.), which is largely due to his surgical control of descriptive language; Portal does precisely the same thing with their convoluted albeit effective diction.

ii.) Much like music, the essence of fine literature almost exclusively hinges on the quality of the structural framework of the piece at hand. The psychology imposed on readers entrenched in a volume of Lovecraftian lore is often a slow-burn of exponentially rising delirium. In examining the skeletal outlines of Portal's work, one finds an uncanny resemblance to the way in which Lovecraft shaped his stories.

It seems appropriate to begin this short treatment with a personal anecdote concerning the path I took that eventually ends in my fervent praise of Portal's music. My interest was piqued around the release of their 2007 album, Outré, and I chose to engage in a few cursory listens of tracks at random. Almost immediately, I rejected them on the grounds that they were the ultimate example of the pseudo-"avant garde" plague of 21st century metal wherein groups operate on the principle of "style over substance"; in the case of Portal I was mistakenly convinced that the band simply relied on a gimmick of costumed live performances and music that seemed discordant and interestingly unorthodox on the surface but utterly banal when viewed through a more critical lens. This proved to be a fatal error on my part, for Portal's music is just like Lovecraft's fiction in that one must view their work from a certain holistic perspective if one is to have the slightest inkling of what they're seeking to accomplish with their work.

In the same fashion as their other full-lengths, the aforementioned Outré bears a single-word title in the form of an adjective that speaks volumes about the work itself. The band's debut, Seepia (a word that crops up in later songs like"Black Houses" as an apparently sentient force of some other-dimensional sort; this will be talked about briefly later) captures the visual component of the band's antiquarian tendencies, whereas 2009's Swarth fully harnesses the band's opaque sonic miasma that fully envelops the listener by means of aberrant fretboard gymnastics and unnerving, non-standard drum patterns. However, it is the title of "Outré" that drives home the crux of the central claim of i.). "Outré" is the past participle of the French verb "outrer", which, in the present tense, is best understood as meaning "to go beyond". The word itself operates in an almost idiomatic manner, as if there is some implicit physical baggage attached to the purely linguistic entity that surges in the listener/reader upon its utterance/appearance of the terminated action of having already "gone beyond". In the case of Portal, the word takes on a meaning that is eerily analogous to Lovecraft's own conception of the operative role of the term "weird" in "weird fiction":

"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen. If any unexpected advance of physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel."

Portal's employment of the term "outré", ostensibly to describe the essence of their music, is akin to what Lovecraft describes as "weird" in the above quote. The band uses this term in a rather sardonic manner by appealing to the futility found in the self-referential nature of language itself: a feeble attempt by humans to linguistically shackle a truly otherworldly phenomenon that our naive senses cannot fully grasp. Indeed, a great deal of Portal's implicit effect on the listener is entirely linguistic in nature. The band frequently opts for alternate spellings of already physically powerful words, thus multiplying the "other"-ness of the music ("Abysmill", "The Sweyy/Swayy", "Werships", "Marityme", "Seepia", etc.). While effective, the truly curious linguistic experiment that Portal uses to further distance themselves from the Euclidean, spatiotemporal realm is the aforementioned use of descriptive words like "swarth", "outré", and "seepia". These three words crop up a number of times throughout Portal's oeuvre, and the band's unorthodox use of them suggests something more than coincidentally similar to the construction of a mythos that Lovecraft sprinkled throughout his fiction. I could author an entire article on the role of these terms in Portal's discography, so a short examination of the term "swarth" will be the sole item of scrutiny for the sake of brevity, as it underscores the point I'm trying to make on its own.

"Souse in ichor, the clique transfuse
Volute the swarth, trawl betwixt phonotic
Scoff the festune"

-excerpt of"Abysmill", from 2007's Outré

"Ubiquitaint Of The Bellows...

Swarth

Hemorosphere Smothre The Othre
PlumeSurfeits
The Candent Recoil

Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ...
Oust The Candent ..."

-excerpt of "Swarth", from 2009's Swarth

 

"Venous Stasis Fey Terminus
Lugubrious EverPuce Perforate/Disseminate
Polymouth Clotting Foul Exsanguinate
Psyphonetaneous Secrete

Caulk of Swarth... Scry"
-excerpt of "Writhen", from 2009's Swarth

The assumed use of "swarth", if it was to be used in everyday language, would effectively function as the archaic noun counterpart of the more common term, "swarthy" (note the subtle antiquarianism that the band, like Lovecraft, revels in). However, the listener is given an entirely different impression with the lyrics in conjunction with the compositions, as "swarth" in these contexts plays a multi-faceted role that suggests it is not so much an adjectival term as much as it is an abstract entity useful to invoke for the sake of incantations and other ritualistic endeavors. In "Abysmill", the visual (and physical) effect is something of an otherworldly cauldron typified by dreadfully ambiguous, indescribable scents emanating from a concoction being brewed for nefarious purposes, with "swarth" being a non-spatiotemporal ingredient for the "mereworking antibody" that the song describes. In the title track of Swarth, the word evolves to an internally consistent force unto itself; an immensely powerful abstract (perhaps sentient) source that one calls upon in order to "oust the candent" (that is, banish light in favor of darkness). Its role in "Writhen" is similar, as the song describes some sort of convulsive process of exsanguination for the sake of shedding the standard Euclidean mortal coil in order to use the corporeal, sanguine offerings (the "caulk of swarth") to perform a truly outré offering (perhaps one similar to those performed by devotees of the Cthulhu Cult or Esoteric Order of Dagon) inexplicable by the language of science.

An obvious criticism of Portal's lyrical madness is the seemingly unwieldy, sometimes incomprehensible organization of verbosity imbued within the text itself (a view I once held); but it is precisely this misguided criticism that highlights the brilliance of the band's lyrical deliberations. With each track, there is a clear sense of direction and meaning with regards to the linear direction that shines through on both the more straightforward, narrative tracks (usually songs on Outré explicitly dealing with actual Lovecraftian deities, such as "Omnipotent Crawling Chaos" and "13 Globes"), or the songs whose ebb and flow is achieved by means of groups of progressively descriptive stanzas that always move the song forward. This direction provides the general setting that houses the viscerally effective diction that usually defies all sense of organizational conventions we're familiar with, which is precisely the philosophical maxim upon which Portal's (and, to some extent, Lovecraft's) work rests.

This direction I speak of is the fundamental compositional convention that underscores the second point of my thesis. Lovecraft's fiction is so successful in physically entrancing the reader largely because of the man's prodigious command over the organic progression of the psychological state/s one would expect to find one's self in if confronted with the inexorable cosmic monstrosities that drive tales like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", At the Mountains of Madness, or "The Music of Erich Zann". In each tale, there is a non-linear cosmic impetus that reveals omnipresent, otherworldly madness at a cripplingly slow rate. In the case of the first tale, aside from an early up-close encounter with an acolyte of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the narrator obtains all of his knowledge of the "Innsmouth look" and other mythical notions about the decaying town from three main anecdotes, each of which top the previous in the physical proximity of dread expressed in their tales (the ticket man in Newburyport, the grocery youth from Arkham, and Zadok Allen, respectively). Each character in the progression of story exudes an increasingly unsettled disposition that culminates in Zadok Allen's hysterical cries that precede his disappearance, ostensibly at the hands of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

From here, the singular sense of dread that permeates the entire story has graduated from the realm of local mythology to a physically pertinent matter. Still, however, as the narrator returns to his precarious hotel room to be disturbed to the point of being forced to flee, neither the narrator nor the reader actually witness the agents attempting to infiltrate the narrator's room. The strangeness is multiplied, however, once he finally manages to escape his hotel room and attempt to flee the town. Short, ambiguous descriptions of a legion of swimming creatures approach from the sea, once again promoting the dread from the physically explicable to a vague semblance of supernatural horror. At the climax of the events in Innsmouth, the narrator is actually confronted with the fish-like creatures that eternally reside in the sea following a short tenure of living as a "human" bearing the blight of the "Innsmouth look". The pinnacle of the physical horror evoked in the mind of the reader, however, comes at the very end of the story when the narrator describes the following years wherein he seeks genealogical information that eventually links him to Obed Marsh, the man thought to be responsible for the ritualistic practices that consigned Innsmouth to a fate of otherworldly strangeness. His stance on the matter gradually transforms from repulsion to immense curiosity, and finally, in the last two paragraphs of the story, a bone-chilling acceptance of his hereditary fate; he has literally been consumed by the dread that has been the subject of the story:

"So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!
 

I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."

-Final lines of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

By the end of the story, the reader has been subjected to a tale in which the horror upon which the entire tale is based has not been explicitly revealed until the tail-end of the final act, with masterful rising action moving the story along at an exponential rate. To demonstrate the relevance of this structural convention to our current investigation, I will simply deconstruct two of Portal's finest examples of this in the forms of "Larvae" and "Werships", respectively.

The former track deals with the birth and subsequent domination of an alien-esque insect horde with cosmic implications. A jarringly dissonant phrase begins the song before the lyrics begin amid a fairly tonal section that alternates between a drum beat suited for the procession of an army and frantic blast beats, all while the subjects of the song are described in esoteric detail:

"Domus Lacunae
Meta Matriculant
Theta Genus
Fait Accompli

OcturKnell Unfurl
Husks of Hearths Litter
Inquilines Dither"

At this point, the song shifts to a short cyclical section in which the incantation "Pupa to pupils..." is recited over and over in order to indicate the physical manifestation of the creatures. From here, Portal utilizes the low register of 8-string guitars to play a creeping, writhing riff that slowly elevates as the scene is set for the inevitable exaltation of the members of this "olde guarde dipteran order":

"Olde Guarde Dipteran Order
Spheres Flous Prod To The Marrow
Fly Anointment Prey Eclipsed"

 

It is at this point that the aforementioned cyclical riff is reintroduced for a similar albeit fundamentally different incantation of "pupils to master...". The creatures have now conquered the Earthly inhabitants of whatever realm they may be occupying, and the song explodes with a palpitating energy that signals the monarchy of this race of beings as vocalist The Curator continually bellows the name of this group, perhaps in some sort of twisted reverence:

"Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous
Olde Guarde Dipterous"

The song speaks for itself, and the points I have outlined above have been sufficiently demonstrated within the analysis of the song's ebb and flow itself. We now move on to "Werships", a colossal song that functions as a clarion call for the adherents of the cult found in "The Call of Cthulhu". An eerie introductory riff in which tones shift in a distinctly continuous manner (as opposed to a discrete process of quickly changing from one of the 12 tones to another) is played alongside a ritualistic march that alternates between mid-paced double-bass and tom drums until the song's main theme in the form of a truly bizarre minor 2nd interval shape is played over and over again to set the stage for the impending invocation. From here, The Curator howls over a rung-out chord of considerable dissonance (I haven't bothered actually dissecting the individual intervals to diagnose a particular chord, but suffice to say, it's unsettling) before the first instance of descriptive lyrics appear right before the three minute mark:

"Fogging Stark Crepuscules
Awash With Squalid Aghast
Course In Septic Blight"

Here we are given a description of the twilight during which this ritual is to take place over alternations between a vertical, "continuous" blasting riff and the aforementioned chord of unspeakable dissonance. The same general pattern follows for the next stanza, but there is a marked difference in the guitars, which have now moved up an octave or so and have begun to play a strangely different pattern in accordance with the shift in subject matter: now the devotees of the cult themselves:

"Drones Of Inequity
Servile Of The Manors Steer
Knell Of Antiquate Tide"

\

The pattern is again repeated to describe the alternate weird Boston landscape that Lovecraft created as the setting at which these entranced acolytes begin the ritualistic proceedings:

"Sub-Ornament Creaking Carcasses
Stagger Blackest Harbours
Moored Frothing Profuse"

It is here that the main phrase that defined the initial rising action is reprised in an entirely different context. The first incarnation of the phrase served to anticipate the oncoming action and vaguely cauterize the listener's psychological state with a sense of ambiguous fear. At this point in the song, the horror has become explicit and undeniable, as song shifts to its final section in which The Curator recites a cryptic mantra to the tone of a phrase that alternates between fast tremolo picking and gradually descending (in a tonal sense), palm-muted chugs:

"Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces
Bow Oh Graving Faces"

The song ends with a sample and sets the stage for the formidably sepulchral album-closer, "Marityme". Much like the investigation of "Larvae", any further word drawing parallels between Portal's mastery of psychological songwriting and Lovecraft's prose would be superfluous.

At this point I'm satisfied with the evidence presented in defending the claims I made at the outset of this post. I conclude by remarking that the grasp Lovecraft had on the spectral and "weird" has only been rivaled by a handful of other authors that have dared to broach a subject of imposing philosophical depth; and the same can be said of Portal within the paradigm of death/black metal.

Pay to die, you sick motherfuckers

If pressed to select a single figure to represent the very essence of the metal underground, one would be incredibly foolish not to immediately grant the title to Paul Speckmann. Speckmann is, for all intents and purposes, the unsung godfather of death metal: a figure exalted to the highest level of genius by a tragically narrow few and condemned to obscurity by most in the shadow of less-deserving figures like Chuck Schuldiner. Speckmann, however, gives precisely zero fucks about the travesty that is his obscurity, as evidenced by his words of indifference regarding the greater success of other early death metal bands such as Death or Possessed. He's in it purely for the music and has been incessantly toiling in the underground for nearly three decades. He's metal all the way down; and the fact of the matter is that his contributions to the genre are of insurmountable importance due in no small part to his succinct, acerbic treatments of grand subjects that, in a fashion very similar to masters (pun intended) of the aphorism like Nietzsche or Shakespeare, express 20 pages of discourse in a phrase or two. Perhaps the most brilliant of his offerings of this sort comes in the form of "Pay to Die".

The song itself is a testament to the immense musical and philosophical potency of this genre. In seven words, Speckmann delivers a multi-faceted message of vitriol when he summarizes the absurdity of modern life with the profoundly simple proclamation: "pay to be born; pay to die". In his own words, from an interview with Jeff Tandy, Speckmann recounts the origin of the song:

"The song was about my father. He was always giving me hell and dragging me to church, and I was arguing with him over the years. Then he got sick and died, and obviously we had to pay to bury him, you know – “pay to die”! The words in the song speak for themselves – you pay to be born, you pay to die. It was real life for me at that time, and it hit really hard."

Jeff replies that the song itself seems to sum up American (read: modern) life, a suggestion to which Paul agrees. It is precisely this concise summary of life that makes it universally appealing. By and large, we live in a world dictated by monetary and utility values. Bouts with impassioned existential anxiety and theorizing on matters of abstraction, that is, activities that comprise the very essence of what it should mean to live a human life, are roadblocks in the modern zeitgeist that "Pay to Die" describes in which life is catalyzed, fueled, and eventually ended by petty material means. The venomous seven-word mantra simultaneously functions as a clarion call to action and a more general lamentation of the dreadful state of affairs in the modern world: a dual-edged blade that makes the song as viscerally moving as any piece of music I can think of.

In observing the development of the song itself from its various incarnations in Death Strike, Master, and eventually Speckmann Project, one can very nearly construct a well-informed history of death metal as a style unto its own. The song's debut on Death Strike's Fuckin' Death, released in January 1985, is best viewed as a microcosm of the formative years of extreme metal when the amorphous styles death metal, black metal, grindcore, and the like were simply a hazy amalgamation of similar influences from both metal and punk such as Venom, Slayer, and Discharge. Speckmann himself even notes that during the early years of Master/Death Strike, the term "death metal" wasn't in popular usage: they simply played "metal". An important feature to note of the earliest incarnation of "Pay to Die" is the eminent importance that the punk tendencies of Discharge play in driving the song. The drum beat is one of complete uniformity, and Speckmann's destructive vocals pay little heed to the inherent rhythm of the song as much as they do exist as an exclusively separate element of the song in their own right.

Move to the version we find on Master's self-titled 1990 album. There are a number of new things brought to the table with this performance of the song, each of which can be traced back to a predominantly greater "metal" orientation than the one found on Fuckin' Death or Master's 1985 rehearsal tape. The song begins with a percussive series of ascending and descending power-chord tones before bursting into the song's main "melodic" line at a slightly more fluid and urgent tempo. The subtle introduction of the second bass-drum in the verse, as well as the inclusion of abrupt fills indicate a movement away from the strict uniformity that defines earlier versions of the song. This movement away from the nascent form of death metal that the 1985 version epitomizes reaches its pinnacle in the version found on the 1992 Speckmann Project album, where the song is filtered through 7 years of fervent stylistic progression by means of the aforementioned movement away from structural and percussive uniformity. Simply put, the song is not only colossal on a philosophical level; it is also a standing monument to death metal as a whole.

The last nuance of the song I'd like to touch upon is the line bellowed at the end of the versions found on Master's self-titled album and the Speckmann Project album wherein Speckmann delivers the impassioned declaration: "pay to die, you sick motherfuckers". In this we find yet another dual meaning that only adds to the legacy of this masterpiece. Quite literally, we can take the term sick in a medical sense, with the line functioning as a juxtaposition of the loss of something as intangible as life with the utterly tangible notion of the modern world's fixation on material ends. The other interpretation logically follows where we may also take the term "sick" to indicate a moribund psychological state; as if Speckmann is diagnosing anyone that falls under the umbrella of defective mind-states the song describes. 

(note: the last video is actually of the version found on the Speckmann Project album).

Mayhem in 1986

Sparse fragments of this video have been on the web for some time now, in compromised quality, but this is the finest and most comprehensive version of it I've seen. To keep it short: this video is rich with metal history and should be viewed by everyone.

My neat observation: Look at how closely Euronymous's corpsepaint resembles that of King Diamond's in contrast to the styles he would adapt alongside fellow death fiends only a few years later. It would be interesting to see a visual delineation of the corpsepaint members of Mayhem used in parallel with commentary on their gradual progression toward (arguably) the archetypal second-wave black metal band.

In Defense of Modern "Old School" Death Metal

An increasingly predominant movement in modern metal comes in the form of death metal that very closely resembles canonical groups such as Incantation, Asphyx, Entombed, and the like in both sound and essence. I've noted that as the number of such bands that bear the dubious descriptor "new old-school death metal" has risen over the past few years, so has the number of detractors that decry the movement as nothing more than a futile retreading of worn musical ground. As an ardent fan of many bands that are routinely dismissed amidst a sea of insubstantial mimes, I feel it necessary to discuss why a great deal of the aforementioned detractors' arguments against the movement rest on precarious footing; and this may be succinctly demonstrated by means of three main points, each of which will be briefly expounded below:

i.) The importance of sonic tradition and reverence for previous masters of the style has always been of eminent significance in the metal craft, and failure to comprehend the stylistically conservative bent that is embedded in metal's history leads to inherently warped views of the bands in question.

ii.) Many bands with rich, fertile musical offerings are summarily and inaccurately assessed as "clones" for reasons that I feel may mostly be attributed to a combination of latent bias against the movement coupled with lazy listening habits.

iii.) Very similar to i.): The artificial construction of an "old-school" epoch in contrast with a post-golden era epoch is a categorical fiction that sits on shaky ground. The development of death metal must be looked at as a continuous, ever-changing lineal process as opposed to the common discrete demarcation of "old-school" and "new-school".

Though it can be said of a number of styles of music, metal is especially notorious for producing bands that morph a general fanbase into a divisive fervor; one is hard-pressed to rattle off a litany of groups that have procured nigh-universal praise. However, such groups do exist, and these classic acts have formed the basis of much subsequent metal on the obvious sonic level; but they have also played an integral role in establishing the extra-musical notions of "poseurdom" that is so omnipresent in the subculture. In a process very similar yet paradoxically antithetical to monotheistic traditions, certain artistic entities such as Celtic Frost, Bathory, Venom, Slayer, and in a more universal sense, Black Sabbath, are sacrosanct; and failure to adhere to their doctrines has traditionally resulted in being cast aside as a "poseur" without exception (the metal equivalent of a heretic/apostate). For me, the sheer sight of the word "Bathory" invokes a visceral yet immensely intricate physiological reaction that encapsulates everything I love about this style of music, and I know I'm far from the only one who feels this way.

What this demonstrates is that the unquestionable reverence for such canonical acts has played a significant role in the development of metal thus far. To rebuke bands like Dead Congregation purely for their use of the same general musical palette as Incantation and Immolation is to commit an act of complete absurdity. The truth is that stylistic development is a perpetual process in any style of any given medium of art; and given the quasi-divine status of the preeminent bands listed above, it's only sensible that we get the movement of death metal that exists in the state it does today.

Failure to acknowledge the content above most certainly plays a role in engendering the sort of attitude that fuels my second point of contention. The criticism of bands I have in mind comes in the general form "Newer Band X sounds like Older Band Y, rendering Newer Band X insignificant", and the problem with this is twofold. On one hand, it's a reinforcement of the dreadful evaluative process adopted by many that simply consists of a binary comparison from one band to another based on surfaces aesthetics, which is intimately related to the second problem wherein the aforementioned assessments are often found to be fatally hasty and inaccurate. Take the case of Vasaeleth, a band I've seen dismissed as a vapid Incantation clone by a number of people. This diagnosis is inaccurate for a number of reasons, two of which deal with the band's approach to song structure and lyrical composition. A structural triumph that is on display a number of times on their debut album, Crypt Born and Tethered to Ruin, is the form that songs like "Wrathful Deities", "Figures of Chained Spirits", and the colossal "Gateways to the Cemetery of Being" utilize wherein an introductory section is succeeded by a section that acts as the classical "theme" of each song as it is reintroduced and manipulated in various contexts throughout the duration of each respective track. This structural convention logically endows the lyrics with a sense of ebb and flow, which is best portrayed in the aforementioned "Gateways to the Cemetery of Being": A song that embodies the chaotic essence of a sacrificial ritual with its abrupt musical changes and staccato-esque libretto.

Qualities such as those explicated above are essential in making Vasaeleth's debut the great work that it really is, and they simply cannot be gleaned from a cursory listen or two that allows the listener to absorb little beyond surface aesthetics. Vasaeleth is only one such case; I could offer equally valid cases for other bands like Grave Miasma and their fittingly miasmic approach to composition that often hints at Demoncy, Dead Congregation's unique mastery of the relationship between music and lyric to, Impetuous Ritual's uncanny ability to create an organic, seamlessly flowing work of art that very much is a ritual unto itself, and many others.

A rather nebulous tendency when looking at the history of metal from its origins to the present day is to bifurcate the developmental process of death metal into two eras of pre-1994/5 and post-1994/5, which is surely where this notion of an "old school" comes from. Now, I can sympathize with this tendency, as I will acknowledge a sort of "golden era" that ended around the release of Morbid Angel's Domination: A work that can retrospectively be seen as a sort of death knell for a once fertile musical style. However, the said bifurcation comes with its dangers; dangers that motivate this entire post. The fact of the matter is that death metal continued to flourish, albeit perhaps with longer intervals of silence, with classic, and most importantly, innovative, works by Immolation, Gorguts, The Chasm, Deeds of Flesh, and many others sporadically appearing from 1996 up until the middle of the new millennium; around the time this modern "old school" death metal movement began to take off with the release of Repugnant's Epitome of Darkness in 2006 (this seems as good an album as any to mark as the arbitrary beginning of this arbitrary "movement"). The corollary of this is self-evident and evinces the central claim of iii.).

Don't get me wrong, there certainly are a number of disposable clones in the modern death metal sphere. However, many groups such as those mentioned above are unfairly lumped in with the dime-a-dozen bands that are rightfully ignored. I only ask that the reader reflect upon what I have written above and consider such points when approaching post-9/11 death metal offerings.  

"Blood on stone and shell. Fragments of dead flesh lay torn in corresponding pattern in parallel to demonic being. Plagues cast on life forms. Fumes of putrid spirit
To bless what comes with the horizon with devotion to the coming death. Wretched curses on dead flesh. The cleansing of stone and shell."