My 2p about metal writing

[[)eadmund]

This thread fucking sucks.

I'd rather blast Bathory and drink Hamms than listen to whatever "new" genre of music is coming out today anyways. I don't care if metal is stuck in "1995" or not, I just want non-shitty music.

I'm not saying that new shit is good even if it sucks just because it's new, I'm just saying that, good or bad, it seems clear to me that metal isn't particularly static or stuck in the past.

Since we're back on the subject of Liturgy, thought it might be appropriate to address this...

I spent a good amount of time and energy over the past couple years trying to defend Liturgy on their musical merits alone, because I give Velvet Cacoon, Leviathan and Burzum the same courtesy. Here's the best I could come up with.

One of the things that's irritating about HHH relates to what Guy (Addo) mentioned in the above post - he has only encountered black metal on the surface level. Because of this, the fellow is unaware of multitudes of bands who have captured a similar ecstatic, weightless atmosphere... and these bands preceded Liturgy by a decade or two on some counts. Are we to dismiss the majesty of albums the like of Om, V: Havitetty, 1184, Frost, and Blood in Our Wells? We must do so in order to lend credence to this so-called "Transcendental Black Metal" of the eponymous manifesto.

The other facet of Henry's argument that grinds my gears is that the second wave Norwegian bands that he stands in opposition toward knew how to write an entire album's worth of material in a cohesive manner, minimizing the frill of extended transitions and noise sections. Aesthethica has 3 or 4 standout tracks, and don't get me wrong, they are very good. "Returner" is welcome in a number of playlists I might assemble. However, as an entire album, Liturgy's hallmark release is weak, unfocused and tedious. It's written like a pop album with some hit singles instead of a metal album that's rewarding from start to finish.

... But yeah, GMD has already discussed the band at length. No need to beat a dead horse.

Perhaps unlike a lot of people here, I'm not automatically opposed to things like manifestos and philosophies in/about metal. But I'm very unlikely to go look up HHH's thing because I've mostly heard bad stuff and generally doubt he's half as clever as he thinks he is. I like a good manifesto but I hate a bad one.

That said, I do like "Aesthethica" pretty well.

You can see what HHH means when he says that black metal tends to kind of stay in one place - like the riffs are repeated over and over in a song but it doesn't sound, you know, like anything is moving or going any place. A lot of times there aren't builds but repetitions. But besides the fact that that's fucking fine (as long as it sounds good), there are also plenty of black metal bands/songs that do have that moving-forward/building sound. Black metal didn't need him to teach it that, lol.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

Aesthetica has about 10 minutes of complete garbage (any part with keyboards or clean vocals) but the rest is pretty cool. It's rare you hear a band shift such ease from fluid rhythms and Romantic melodies to super-precise mechanical rhythms.

The stuff HHH says and writes is really fucking pretentious, stupid and ignorant, but that wasn't exactly uncommon in black metal before Liturgy came around.

You can see what HHH means when he says that black metal tends to kind of stay in one place - like the riffs are repeated over and over in a song but it doesn't sound, you know, like anything is moving or going any place. A lot of times there aren't builds but repetitions. But besides the fact that that's fucking fine (as long as it sounds good), there are also plenty of black metal bands/songs that do have that moving-forward/building sound. Black metal didn't need him to teach it that, lol.

I think it shows that he doesn't really know the genre. Sure acts like Burzum, Paysage d'Hiver, etc. is pretty repetitive, but other stuff like Emperor and Deathspell Omega is all over the place.

But I think his main point was that the ideologies of black metal (nihilism, Satanism, etc.) are ideological dead ends (which I don't think is necessarily true). And then of course that ignores the whole Pagan strand of black metal.