HEAVY METAL'S NOT ANGRY, IT'S JUST EXCITED

     More than once over the years, after mentioning to someone that I enjoy heavy metal, I've gotten the reply, “Really? You don't seem like an angry person to me.”

      Since when do you have to be seething with rage to like heavy metal? It's the kind of opinion I expect from people unfamiliar with the genre: all metal is grinding, bashing hatemusic, produced by serial killers, for serial killers. Everybody knows that.

      I'm not going to say there isn't a lot of stuff in the genre marketed to frustrated teens and surly twenty-somethings. There sure as shit is, possibly the majority of it judging from the average album cover. But for every ten or so screamer metalcore bands, there's at least one doing interesting things with melody and time signatures, writing genuinely complex, engaging music that demonstrates not only instrumental virtuosity but a uniqueness of vision and imagination.

      Some years ago I started listening to Death again, a death metal band that goes back to around the mid-80's. Their early stuff is pretty standard, fast and growling without an awful lot to set them apart from their peers. The further along in their career you go, however, you begin to hear song arrangements that are intricate to the point of mirroring classical compositions, and technical skill that rivals anything else in the world of rock n' roll. On albums such as Individual Thought Patterns and Symbolic, Death represent themselves less as a band driven by aggression than as one   inspired by a love of the possibilities inherent in metal.

      My taste in metal has, over the course of twenty years, drifted away from the howling angst typically associated with this kind of music, and gone more in the direction of work that attempts something new without necessarily relying on negativity or rage. The angrier-sounding something is, the less likely I am to want to hear it.

      This is probably the key reason I don't listen to Slayer anymore. There was a time when I tapped into the full-on belligerence they're famous for, mainly in my teens and partway into my early twenties. They have a sound that appeals particularly to the frustrated and hormonal. What I find remarkable is that in close to thirty years, almost nothing has changed about their style--except maybe that it has grown more sonically brutal—and never seems to have moved beyond the war/religion/psycho killer subject matter that has suffused every album since the beginning.

This is what Slayer sounds like

      I have a difficult time believing Slayer's professional image is sincere, or a reflection of genuine artistic ambition. What's more likely is that they've found a niche in the music industry and exploit it effectively enough to rake in the cash, the same as a lot of recording artists. Maybe when they were younger and first starting out there was a real spark of inspiration, but after so many years of playing virtually the same thing, song after song, album after album, there must be some part of them, even if it's not a part they pay particularly close attention to, that's gotten a little bored with the whole thing.

      I sure have. And I feel the same way about many bands that subscribe to the hyper-aggro aesthetic Slayer, in large part, set in motion decades ago. I have no problem with an element of aggression in music—as with profanity, it can express a great deal when used carefully. But I find that, as I grow older, the internal discontent that frequently comes attached to an enjoyment of intense metal music has disappeared, and in its place there's a desire to hear something that's still loud, still heavy, still informed by a certain combative attitude, but nevertheless doesn't bury itself alive under six feet of wailing despondency.

The kind that makes you do stuff like this

      What better explains my growing fondness for stoner metal? I know it's a broad generalization that includes many bands that don't focus primarily on songs for the perpetually baked, but it's become a designation for a sub-category of bands that play heavy, down-tempo, often very bluesy metal. Bands like Electric Wizard, Behold! The Monolith, Cathedral, and Graveyard seem to be looking to a past slightly behind the initial rise of metal-as-metal in the 80's, and are drawing as much influence from the fuzzy psychedelic rock of the 60's and early 70's. I really like their interpretation of an older style, and how they've managed to bring new ideas to a sound that could have easily become obscured by the ongoing crush of newer music.

      It's the bands that are wiling to change and experiment that I appreciate the most. My favorite Slayer album? South Of Heaven, the one where they slowed down a few of the songs and allowed for a more brooding and dynamic style. I remember when that album came out. Most of my peers hated it, exactly because it wasn't fast from beginning to end. My memory of how the album was received tends to reinforce my opinion that the most overtly belligerent music appeals mainly to the young and discontented, and in the course of growing up it's vital that we begin to develop a taste for work that is denser and more involved. Slayer, at least on that one record, showed that they have it in them to do unexpected things. A band that fails to do so becomes stagnant. Those who do reflect the same kind of deepening maturity we hope for in ourselves.

      Just look at the Melvins. They've been around since the mid-80's, playing what I would describe as hardcore punk during their earliest period, gliding over into slower, more structurally complex music in the late 80's and early 90's, as well as producing the droning, tonally-oriented work they're best known for on Lysol, Bullhead and Eggnog. Then, during their time on Atlantic Records, they changed again, retaining elements of their earlier period while writing songs that were simultaneously more accessible and very weird, if that's possible. Tracks on Houdini and Stoner Witch display a latent pop sensibility that would come to greater fruition in their post-Atlantic years, particularly on more recent albums; there's stuff on Nude With Boots that I swear would sound perfectly normal if performed by Led Zeppelin in their heyday.

      Mastodon are another great example, and one that is more temporally compressed. In just a little over ten years, they've gone from borderline hardcore to becoming a stellar representative of the progressive metal vanguard. Listen to “The Last Baron” from Crack The Skye—it's absolutely epic, making multiple twists and turns in its approximately thirteen-minute running time, at times laid back and at others roaring with a spirit that is not so much antagonistic as exultant. Like all great metal-as-metal, it exhilarates and thrills the listener, lifting you out of the everyday and into a place that can be as mystical and fathomless as all outer space.

This is what Mastodon sounds like

      For me, and for probably many fans, that's really what metal does: it excites, it deepens and enhances the quality of life, it encourages a positive and energetic response to the world. Far from being something to commit suicide to, metal at its best is life-positive, not life-negative, the same as any other great music.

Listen to Master Of Puppets and tell me I'm wrong.