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Editor's Thoughts: Quick Hits on Inquisition and Handouts...

5/8/2014

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There's been a considerable amount of chatter recently about whether or not Inquisition is a Nazi band. That's nice for headlines and click bait, but the bottom line is, "Who cares?" They are a middle of the road black metal band on an extremely independent label. They aren't exactly spreading their message to the masses, whether that message is racist or not. Furthermore, this is art, right? Is Inquisition unable to create the art that they want to create? Isn't it up to the music community to choose whether or not to buy the albums? If you're uncomfortable with whatever those dudes are doing, just ignore them. It's not your job to warn others of potentially offensive content, unless you are Tipper Gore and you think you are important. In an era where we have dickheads hiring folks to kill their wives or sick bastards using their "fame" to seduce women in order to molest their children, should we really be concerned about whether or not a dude from an underground black metal band complimented a guy on his swastika tattoo 8 years ago in a rented van? Wow. If that's interesting news, then you're looking way too hard.


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There has been a recent rash of Cincinnati bands using Kickstarter or similar campaigns to fund recording projects. I don't know if this is big in other cities, but with this being Cincinnati we're talking about, I'm sure we're the last city to go this route. Everything that happens in Cincinnati already happened in the rest of the country 5 years ago. For example, people are still obsessed with limp wristed, effete indie rock around here. Enough said. Regardless, I'm just not comfortable with the idea of asking friends, family and complete strangers for money to record an album. It's not like you have cancer or something. Recording an album is a privilege. You are not entitled to recording fees just because your mom thinks your band is neato. I don't know any of these bands or their members personally (and I'm not aware of any metal bands participating in the disgusting trend), so I can't jump to conclusions, but the whole thing seems like the result of the spoiled, entitled generation that spawned out of the 90's. What happened to working hard, saving up money, and then recording an album when you are ready? One of these dudes even went so far as to ask the general public to help support his "life's work". There's a one in a billion chance that this becomes your life's work, pal. I didn't ask anyone to help me become an engineer (or a fake journalist, for that matter). Quit looking for handouts and get back to practice. That's how you make music your life's work. As an aside, I've supported bands on Indiegogo for tour funds, but that feels different to me. If you get offered a once-in-a-lifetime tour, you might need to come up with some funds pretty quickly or you might have to pass on the tour. I don't mind throwing $20 in the pot for that. An album on the other hand, that can wait until you raise the funds on your own.

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Editor's Thoughts: Why I Don't Understand Black Metal...

5/2/2014

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Despite the title of this blog, I'm not only interested in covering doom metal. I'm interested in almost all subgenres within the glorious world of heavy metal. Doom, in this sense, is just a qualifier for all things heavy. Plus, I just find it humorous to add "of doom" to the end of things, even mundane everyday things like "the vegetable garden of doom". That being said, one metal genre that I have always struggled to understand and appreciate is black metal. I get so many black metal releases at the Headquarters of Doom these days and I have a really hard time distinguishing what's bad from what's good. I just go by my instincts, but I always wonder if I'm missing something deeper than the music. Maybe I'm completely upside down on my black metal recommendations. I would never recommend something here on the blog that I wouldn't personally listen to, so any black metal recommendations on here are legitimate. I've made a serious effort to understand black metal in the past year. I fought my way through all 405 pages of psychoanalysis in Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and I sat through an hour and a half of black metal musicians giving half-assed answers and trying to act tough in the 2008 film, Until The Light Takes Us. Maybe it's just not to be for me. If I have to put in that much effort into understanding something, is it even worth it? The saga continues, but for now, here are the barriers to my entry into the world of black metal.

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Corpse Paint

This is probably really petty, but I just can't get past this shit. I just don't understand what's going on here. Are you supposed to be dead or something, because I don't think corpses look like that? The face paint thing was lame for Kiss and it was lame for King Diamond and it's lame for every single black metal band that played along. If you're trying to be as underground as humanly possible, why would you participate in any sort of trend or uniform appearance? That's always bothered me. It seems to me that a lot of today's black metal bands have ditched the paint, but those who were involved can't ever deny it. And I'll never be able to take them seriously.

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Lo-Fi Production

Black metal, from what I can tell, has made huge strides in this area, but the classic bands are nearly impossible for me to get into because they purposefully made their albums sound like shit in a misguided attempt to sound "evil" or something. If you're just making a record for you and friends to listen to while you paint your face like a lizard and go creep around in a cemetery, that's one thing. But if you're planning to release your music to the masses, wouldn't you want it to sound as great as possible? Don't you want people to actually be able to hear the fruits of all of your hard work? I must be missing the boat on this one, because it's still fairly prevalent in the black metal releases that come across my desk. I tend to really enjoy the well-produced, atmospheric black metal records, but the stuff that was recorded on a four-track (or worse) gets about 30 seconds of my time. I don't mind if the vocals are buried, because black metal vocals tend to be boring, but burying the guitars and making them as tinny as possible seems counterintuitive and counterproductive to me. That leads into my next issue...

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Blast Beats

Ugh. This is my absolute least favorite thing about black metal. I understand that you're trying to sound abrasive, but does anyone really need 30+ minutes of the same fucking bass-snare pattern over and over and over again? This is especially galling when the drums are out in front on some of the basement recordings, presumably because the 10-watt amp used on the recording simply couldn't keep up with the drum volume. I'm not a drummer and I've never even sat behind a kit, so I don't know the skill level involved with blast beats. Maybe it's super difficult and everyone should be in awe of the percussive mastery on display here, but it still sounds like shit. You're wasting some bad ass tremolo riffs. Mix it up a little.

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Deafheaven, et al.

I'm not qualified to judge who can and can't play black metal, but I think we can all agree that whiny, angsty dudes need to take their complaints elsewhere. Singing about Satan is one thing, but singing about your teenage breakup is just weak. This appears to be the same technique used by labels when they were trying to make Cradle of Filth trendy. It's kind of an age-old argument though, isn't it? Is the metal community better off when the labels start pushing some subpar shit out and proclaiming it to be the "next best thing"? Maybe the kids who like Deafheaven will eventually get into the good stuff and start bands and make incredible metal. Who knows? On the other hand, maybe someone hears Deafheaven and totally dismisses black metal, or metal in general, because they think it's all this terrible. We need empirical data on this and I'm too busy right now to solve all of the world's problems. Let's get someone on this ASAP.


Despite these barriers, I do appreciate some black metal. I enjoy a couple of Immortal records, despite the goofy imagery. I'm really digging the Winterfylleth pagan black metal sound and there are a handful of bands in the Quebec scene that I can appreciate, like Monarque and Sombres Forêts. I'm not trying to dismiss an entire genre or make light of it. That's not the point of this article. I want to understand black metal. I want to enjoy black metal. There's so much music out there that I feel like I'm missing out on. I just need someone to explain the point to me, or point me in the right direction. All comments are welcome. -JO
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