framing or forgetting the debate within black metal

"Jesus With The Pharisees" by Friedrich August Ludy, 1843

  

The big questions in life aren't necessarily the big questions in life by anything other than convention.  Beware of the ancient human ability to turn something trivial into something important.  Beware of parodelia, the human tendency to recognize patterns and meaning where none exists.  I try to think of this when considering which battles to fight.  We need to consider carefully our conduct in dealing with those ideas which we find reason to oppose.  Any attention brought to any cause can be transformed into publicity and the mere realization that a debate exists will automatically lend implied legitimacy to the debate itself.  The scientist will debate the creationist, and in doing so will create a feeling of importance about the creationist viewpoint.  The scientist will also create the impression that there is some controversy simply by acknowledging an opposing viewpoint.  But the importance of the debate itself with its implications for scientific literacy (etc.) combined with confidence in the superiority of the viewpoint being argued for make the exercise of debate worthwhile for many.  We are told that Jesus debated the Pharisees, and the fame of this fact can be attributed not to any extant evidence we have of such debates, but to the caricature of debate presented by the gospels.  We are not shown the actual arguments and counterarguments that might have been exchanged two thousand years ago, instead we are presented with an idealized version of the debate where Jesus plays genius as softball theological challenges are lobbed his way.  The targets of derision in these gospel stories are the supposed views of the Pharisees, and it is vital to the rhetorical goal of the authors that the target appear not realistically but as a literary device to be employed as needed.  In contrasting the approaches of the scientist and the evangelist we see the extremes available to us: to engage the opposition directly and openly, or to marginalize the opposition utterly through propagandistic representation.

Metal music exists largely to antagonize, to target a viewpoint for disagreement and to dismantle that viewpoint through criticism and mockery.  Much of metal, punk and hip hop music is conceived in this same confrontational way (as are countless examples from other genres).  Black metal in particular has its historical development inexorably tied into a conflict against Christianity.  The scientist must weigh the best approaches in defeating the creationist while not helping their opponent achieve a greater level of notoriety than they started with.  So too the black metal artist could gain something from considering the various ways in which the opponent can be approached, so as to minimize any counterproductive effects.  Some point between open dialectic and propaganda must be decided upon.

There is a paradox in how Christianity must be kept alive at the centre of the black metal mind so that metaphorical attacks can be raised against it indefinitely.  While it might be argued to what extent the battle has already been won, consider that the Christian shadow in the heart of black metal need not merely be battled against.  We may also build new structures on top of it.  There are two alternate forces of destruction and construction that can be traced from the early stages of the genre, if we consider black metal as a particular style of music built around anti-religious and most significantly anti-Christian sentiment.  Whether or not it can continue to be considered a majority for long, a huge portion of the scene builds art around and against Christianity, or at the least makes substantial use of inverted Christian mythology and iconography.  These are perhaps to be considered the purists, and among them we can discern varied approaches.  Blatant attacks against Christian belief free of subtext and metaphor continue to be composed, but aside from cathartic purposes (which are important) I'm not sure whether any greater purpose is being served.  More popular is the creative inversion of Christian symbols, an exercise in construction alongside destruction.  Irreverence and mockery are emblematic of this approach, making it effective in marginalization.  These tones convey the impression that the black metal album is not one side of a legitimate ongoing debate, but an expression of the self-evident global Satanic status quo.  Christian beliefs are characterized through inversion as quaint or superstitious, or lacking power compared to the true god(s) of Satanism, paganisms, and all varieties of atheistic nihilistic self-worship.

The other side of the dichotomy we're considering here is the remainder of black metal that doesn't deal with Christianity directly and explicitly whatsoever (it is immediately granted that we will run into music here that might quite legitimately be argued to not be properly considered as black metal at all, but should instead be considered as a distinct artistic movement altogether.  For the moment we will simply consider these bands as an outgrowth of the black metal movement if not necessarily an inarguable representation of it.)  The bands in question here are those who embrace Satanism in and of itself, as a complete belief system or library of themes and symbols that may be drawn upon in a wholly post-Christian context.  To be clear, we are speaking of artists obsessed with demons and devils and gods not as champions in a inter-religious battle with Christianity but as independent objects of worship or inspiration.  Think of the majesty of Enslaved on Vikingligr Veldi, the blackness of Mutiilation on Vampires Of Black Imperial Blood, the bleakness of Xasthur on Telepathic With The Deceased, or the focus on notorious historical figures like Countess Bathory and Vlad the Impaler exemplified in many seminal tracks like Transilvanian Hunger:

Feel the call freeze you with the uppermost desire
...
So pure... evil, cold

Such pieces are evidence of something often overlooked: the blackness of black metal, even at its early stages, is not confined to a direct religious debate.  All the blackness of humanity throughout history is part of the same malevolent force that the genre recognizes and has always drawn power from.

While black metal may be considered as either dependent upon or independent from Christianity, we should avoid the temptation to label one path as superior to the other.  While some of the greatest creativity is unlocked as black metal moves deeper and deeper into the amoral darkness of the post-Christian world, other groups are finding inspiration in less obvious places.  These bands retain the Christianity fixation of the purists, but instead of facing the enemy with raw abrasive hatred they take inversion and mockery to extents not immediately imagined by genre pioneers.  Consider The Meads Of Asphodel or Grand Belial's Key, where a comparatively obsessive understanding of biblical stories leads to an in-depth re-imagining of the very world which Jesus comes from.  Grand Belial's Key creates a world where Jesus and his followers lead the sort of life of sexual deviancy that would make the more conservative of his present-day followers go pale.  The Meads Of Asphodel's The Murder Of Jesus The Jew represents this trend at its most conspicuous, as biblical knowledge at least equal to the average Christian is on display alongside the metallic commentary.  Stiller Of Tempests takes the everyday life of a man named Jesus, and takes us along with him on a jaunt around the holy land in a rousing folk stomp (sung in call and response style with "Kyrie eleison"): 

Casting forth the demon seed, walking round the still dead sea
Shaking hands with human scum, giving all to who have none
But I can’t get pissed with the man on the moon
But I can’t eat shit with a make believe spoon
But I can’t go fishing on a red mushroom
But I can’t raise the dead from a cold dark tomb

Even without the cynical chorus lyrics, we see that effective criticism of Christianity doesn't require denouncing Jesus in the most extreme and shocking ways imaginable.  Instead, simply by playing with what Jesus might very well have been based on the stories we have been told about him, a deeper irreverence can be reached.  Jesus as a naive and well-meaning nice guy who hung out with disreputable folk can be just as blasphemous towards the foundation of Christianity.  By inverting the popular image of Jesus into something more mundane and flawed, the entire premise of the religion is ignored in favour of a more human alternative.  Most surprisingly, we find a Jesus transformed from an all-powerful God-man who can do no wrong into an actual relatable and sympathetic character.  For a modern skeptic, this should be more appealing than the endless images of Jesus the failed saviour being defeated by Satan at the apocalypse, because such an approach takes and endorses much of Christianity at face value in order to destroy it.  Even the torture and debasement of Jesus can send an ambiguous message, as such imagery has been used to promote the religion often enough as in Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ.  Such destructive fantasies lend credence to the target of destruction.  This is avoided when instead the very base premises of that target are rejected as the faithful conjecture that they actually are.  Indifference can be as powerful an approach as hostility if the goal is the marginalization of another viewpoint.

The extensive iconography of Christianity has been wholly absorbed at this point in black metal history, the most inspirational images of the church's history borrowed and inverted by wave after artistic wave.  Alongside this process, a parallel stream of thought has developed from the start.  Post-Christian black metal will be a descendent of anti-Christian black metal, first conceptually and later as a historical fact.  Can metal outlive religion globally and absolutely?  It seems hard to imagine any modern styles surviving the thousand(s) of years it might take to do it.  But consider that should the population continue to expand at anything like the present rate for such a period there could realistically be a continuous state attained where there are more people than musical styles to accommodate differences in taste.  That is, there will always be enough people to listen to all the music created by the minority musical artist population because the artist population always makes up a constant(ish) fraction.  So in the year 4000 metal could still have a following of millions in a population of quadrillions thanks to the eternal persistence of digital media.  This is of course barring major unforeseen musical developments, such as a song that becomes such a hit that for centuries the entire human race listened only to that song and that by the time there was a musical renaissance so much forgotten music would have to be rediscovered by historians that a complete knowledge could never hope to be achieved.

These are the big questions.

Morbid Angel, Advent Of Bedlam and the sequel to Heretic

In 2011, the death metal world waited with keen anticipation for the sequel to that classic of modern death metal: Heretic.  Well, not exactly.  Heretic was widely viewed as a misstep by those who were still following the lesson this far into the alphabet (currently on pace for completion in 2061, by which time I assume we will be well acquainted with the idea of elderly persons releasing serious death metal albums, having just listened to Cannibal Corpse's thirty-seventh full length.  "A welcome comeback by the ancient metallers recalling the experimental neo-dubstep tribal phase of albums O through Q," we'll say).  There were some of us who enjoyed it, but aggregates don't lie and Heretic has historically failed to hold its ground against Altars Of Madness, Blessed Are The Sick and Covenant in hiveminds like metal-archvies.com.  Plenty of outright dismissals from the average metalhead followed the release.  Elite metal troll project ANUS doesn't even recognize the existence of the album despite taking the time to offer criticism of Domination and Formulas Fatal To The Flesh, and a cherry-picked review from Teufel's Tomb certifies Heretic "A total waste of time and money!"  And let's face it, the album has many troubling characteristics that are not hard to locate, and we might well start of the discussion with the most glaring example: hidden tracks.  The use of hidden and silent tracks seems inept if it is not intended solely to annoy the listener.  Danzig's 4p is an example of the more standard application of such a technique, where hidden tracks add up to a hidden outro on spooky track number sixty-six.  But the motivations of Morbid Angel are not so conventional.

"I've done this stuff for a long time and I'm in a position where I can do whatever I want with it. I have fun doing that. Like with Pete [Sandoval, drummer], I wanted him to express himself and have his open area since a CD can contain an hour's worth of stuff, so I thought why not fill it up?"
(all quotations come from Trey Azagthoth's 2003 interview with metal-rules.com)

As result we are treated to a drum check mid-album, which sounds like a joke and is indeed just there for fun.  It makes for some rather irregular pacing and an overall listening experience of questionable value.  

These characteristics alone were probably sufficient to prevent Heretic from ever attaining classic status.  Musically it wasn't extremely different from previous offerings, not necessarily an obvious transition but one that is still recognizably Morbid Angel.  I would argue that taking each song in isolation, divorced from the questionable format of Heretic, we are left with a pretty decent pile of death metal songs.  The slightly thin, muddy production brings to mind aural landscapes produced by death metal bands fifteen years previously (though not necessarily the Morbid Angel of that era, perhaps more the pre-brutal brutality of early Cannibal Corpse or Broken Hope might be a closer parallel).  The circuitous riffs recall some of the more obtusely labyrinthine moments of Altars and Blessed, while largely eschewing the more chuggable moments of Covenant and Domination.  So in Illud Divinum Insanus surely a few of us could be forgiven for craving a further exploration of this aesthetic.  But being realistic, and being familiar with the historic trajectory of the Morbid Angel project, this could hardly be considered an especially plausible expectation.

"I get bored fabricating stuff. We never go with what works. We always like to reinvent ourselves. That's what I do it for. That's art-creating as opposed to fabricating. It started with the first two records. ALTARS OF MADNESS was really successful when it came out and a lot of people thought we would do an "ALTARS PART TWO" but we didn't. We did something completely different."

Well said, and an admirable approach.  Such attitudes are often forgotten in the death metal environment where there is an implicit expectation of AC/DC-like consistency from a band (a band being a brand), though gradual evolution in a somewhat predictable direction is always acceptable and encouraged by most who have been around for a minute.  So when you picked up IDI and thought "what the heck is this that I'm listening to?" it was more than just an eight year wait and an old singer coming back into the fold that your ears were struggling to adjust to.  This is Morbid Angel trying to keep themselves interested.  As a result this isn't a discussion of IDI and what it ought to have been.  We will be content to regard it for our purposes here as Good For What It Is.

So what about that sequel to Heretic that I was never promised, the followup that would bring us the next generation of the same great riffs while cutting the unnecessary hidden tracks and drum checks?  Have you heard Mithras?  I haven't really, but comparisons have been drawn.  But that's another band's discography to be hand waved away for another day's exploration.  Today let me draw you a different comparison and point to another place where you might hear what a more learned Heretic might have to say.  Let's jump right into the meat of Advent Of Bedlam's Flesh Over God.  Drums here are less intense in that there is less reliance on consistent blasting.  This allows for more room for a comparatively distinctive guitar tone where individual notes are more readily grasped by the ear.  Production overall is slightly more dynamic, but that Heretic muddiness can still be felt thanks to the multiple vocal tracks that create a noticeably distorted groan.  The serpentine riffs and their linear (but not totally predictable) interlocking structures make for a dissonant vibe consonant with Heretic.  Probably the most discernible similarity is in a particular death metal vocal technique: repeatedly holding the last syllable of a line for a bar or two as it fades into a gargle over the next churning riff that has just begun.  You will find examples of this on most tracks from both Flesh Over God and Heretic. 

There is probably nothing quite as groovy as Enshrined By Grace on Flesh Over God.  Morbid Angel have always been fond of contrasting speed and groove while Advent of Bedlam here take a more holistic approach in their aesthetic.  But even in Enshrined By Grace there is little of the maligned moshability of certain moments of Domination, and the shredded ending of the chorus riff (under "defeat this enemy", "the leach infested", etc.) neatly contradicts the predictability the overall grove otherwise creates.  Where The Slime Lives this is not.  The only thing missing from the Heretic formula in Flesh Over God is a few spaced out solo sections, but whether such ornamentation would suit the bleak thematic approach of the album is questionable.

We should then briefly consider this comparison in a conceptual (lyrical) sense.  "Flesh Over God" isn't about draping skin over anything, but is meant in the sense of choosing flesh over god.

Disbelieve their doctrines!
Dogmas must enlighten instead of blinding.
Use your own instinct
Choose flesh over god!
(lyrics from Nimrod's Rebellion, Flesh Over God)

Advent Of Bedlam speaks of self-empowerment on a very straightforard level, and from it move on to contemplate the concerns of the flesh: political and financial corruption, finding the self in a godless world.  Steve Tucker's Heretic lyrics see flesh not as our individual lot in life, but as a solitary prison beyond which a greater true self may be realized.

Being has overwhelmed the space between the silence of eternity
Vision has intruded upon the light that pours through me, my energy
Substance has veiled, the pleasures long lost, the beauty of emptiness
This very flesh confines, and spoils this demon's seed
(lyrics from Curse The Flesh, Heretic)

"It's about being the instrument of the ancient ones. Allowing the love of the creator to flow through us. Energy of spirit. That's the main influence."

Morbid Angel's tolerance for mythical cosmic transcendence might contrast with Advent Of Bedlam's more nihilistic appraisal of existence.  The same practical conclusions are reached to be sure, as this is still the self as God and the only reliable determiner of our actions (free will!).  Heretic presents this as something that can be arrived at through the flesh, while Flesh Over God finds all that we need (or all that we get) in the flesh itself.  The anti-religionist might find more comfort in the approach of the latter, and the atheist shouldn't find much to complain about either.  On the other hand there is always something to be said for sentiment drowned in allegory, as the more incomprehensible the artistic message becomes the more our collective imaginations are sparked.

The future of Advent Of Bedlam is quite interesting to consider, as their background as a melodic, even keyboard-heavy metal band would surely not be guessed by those discovering them through Flesh Over God (maybe you'd get a hint from the sung passages on Indoctrinated Wrath?).  Creed Of The Void is about as far as they go for experimental soundscapes, and it isn't especially far, just a savage demonic respite from the otherwise relentless project.  Clocking in at a brisk thirty-five minutes also might be considered preferable to Heretic's seventy, which makes maximal use of the CD format at the expense of a decidedly bloated listening experience.  Most people still like their b-sides and their a-sides in separate servings as opposed to being awkwardly integrated into a obligatory "full length" album experience.  Not that Morbid Angel is to be blamed for trying something new, that's why we still love/hate and consequently popularize them.

Advent Of Bedlam - Flesh Over God is currently available for free from their bandcamp page, go download it.

http://adventofbedlam.bandcamp.com/