I just got back from driving around LA listening to what some may call a "blasphemy to the metal scene". It's funny to think that the most dedicated "Metal Heads" will toss aside a genre that is based off of "Metal" but at the same time retaining its unique and fascinating features. This genre that I speak of has no hyphen placed along side the word "metal"; the easiest way of describing the genre is to simply spell it out each component that makes this specific genre stand out, at times even brighter than any metal genre.
It was about 6 years ago and I was still discovering my way through all the different metal styles that began presenting themselves to me. At the time, I was very much into Black Metal and finding my way through Death Metal into Grindcore and my friend sent me an mp3 of a song called "Reality" by a band called "The Berzerker". He told that it was the freshest and most chaotic thing he has ever heard and when I heard the track I couldn't believe my ears. I had to listen to the track a couple times over because I couldn't believe a drummer could snare and bass pedal that fast. I was floored when I learned that "The Berzerker" was using a drum machine and effects to create a noisy, distorted sound for the drum kit. Soon after that, I started to find his older material that consisted of a more "Dance" oriented feel but with ripping guitars and growls that could slaughter any typical Death Metal band in half.
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For years now, I've held The Berzerker's older albums as some of the best examples of how, with creativity, metal can be extended beyond the usual punk, industrial, and grindcore genres. About a month ago, I stumbled across a project called, "Drumcorps" which was comprised of Breakcore, Drum n' Bass, and Hardcore-Metal. It was created by a single person, Aaron Spectre. Apperently, he has a great love of electronica, death metal, funk, and jazz. But on the "Drumcorps" project, he takes his love for grindcore, hardcore, and electronica and fuses them together to make a sound that, on more than one occasion, brutalizes harder than any grindcore song I've ever heard.
I could say exactly the same thing for Bong-Ra and his "Full Metal Racket" album but when I heard that album, I heard more originality in terms of taking his own vision of metal into his own hands. The difference between the Drumcorps album "Grist" and Bong-Ra's "Full Metal Racket" might be that "Grist" is samples based and "Full Metal Racket" sounds actually played to some extent. Hearing albums like these give me a small preview to what metal might evolve into later on down the line' the days of a metal band consisting of guitars, drums, and bass might start to dwindle down to a mic, a guitar, and a sampler.
Growing up a "metal head", I would look down upon a genre that didn't have its own people actually playing their parts on the song. But, once you get a chance to see how these artists create just the sound alone, its amazing to think that most people could actually not take them serious because the amount of time in creating a minute of music is very time consuming. You also have to give these artists a lot of credit due to the level of creativity for presenting these songs in the way they created them; did you ever think you could hear a song with samples of a man talking about how he enjoys the act of necrophilia in front of a crowd? Genres like these, artists like these are the ones pushing envelopes and pushing traditionalists down and leaving them in their dust.
