Down­load: Bat­tered — “Obliv­ion Awaits”

Can of worms: opened. Artmetal.html says it all, but then there’s an argu­ment pre­sent­ed in the sev­en ensu­ing pages meant to edi­fy an unfa­mil­iar audi­ence with “intel­li­gent” met­al. It’s a vari­ant of the high/low cul­ture debate, usu­al­ly reserved for sun­der­ing HipHop, or from a “pop­ulist” per­spec­tive, mod­ern art, but applic­a­ble to all kinds of dis­en­fran­chised or out­sider scenes that aren’t com­mer­cial­ly grat­i­fy­ing. The arti­cle imparts a self-sat­is­fied supe­ri­or­i­ty to read­er and musi­cian alike, at once obscur­ing South­ern Lord’s bou­tique nov­el­ty as well as the met­al scene from which they sprang.

Now that cer­tain heavy met­al artists have reached a lev­el of salien­cy, their pres­ence in the ether war­rants the sort of detached cov­er­age usu­al­ly reserved for curi­ousi­ties found on This Amer­i­can Life. Recent­ly, bands like Mastodon and High on Fire crossed over on the basis of strong ties to famil­iar antecedents. Unlike those bands, Sun­nO))) and Boris enjoy cachet with­in the avant garde as well as fans of heavy music and noise gen­er­al­ly speak­ing. That said, it’s unec­es­sary to parse them into groups; in reac­tionary met­al ver­nac­u­lar, these so-called intel­lec­tu­als are the new­com­ers after all.

Heavy met­al and its often dis­turb­ing sub­ject mat­ter, focus­ing on the apoc­a­lyp­tic, misog­y­nis­tic and mor­bid are often tak­en lit­er­al­ly. Painful­ly for­mal­ist inter­pre­ta­tions turn met­al into a shal­low genealog­i­cal cesspool reserved for the back­woods spawn and their ilk, thus neces­si­tat­ing a false dichoto­my between “art met­al” that draws its inspi­ra­tion from cos­mopoli­tan influ­ences like Zorn and Mahler, and the gut wrench­ing moral clar­i­ty and sheer endurance that only youth affords. Divorced from those images and sub­ject mat­ter with near clin­i­cal detach­ment and veiled beneath gauzy spec­ta­cle, Sun­nO))) also enjoys immu­ni­ty from casu­al dis­missal from their van­tage in the gloam­ing, while Boris astounds audi­ences with Kevin Shields’ sen­si­bil­i­ty of bru­tal ele­gance and Japan­ese fetishism.

Wray’s coy omis­sions result in telling throw-away obser­va­tions — “Like Sunn0))), Boris is almost star­tling­ly cos­mopoli­tan in per­son” — sen­tences that come off as more than a lit­tle con­de­scend­ing to both his inter­view sub­jects and his audi­ence alike. Wray’s unwill­ing­ness to view bands like Boris and Sun­nO))) with­in the met­al tra­di­tion is most puz­zling, par­tic­u­lar­ly because he prods O’Mal­ley and Ander­son for their high cul­ture nich­es, instead of prob­ing their intro­duc­tion to heavy music gen­er­al­ly speak­ing and work­ing for­ward his­tor­i­cal­ly. It’s an equal­ly inter­est­ing path from Napalm Death and Swans to Sun­nO))) as it is from Berliosz and Wagner.

Whol­ly sep­a­rate from false notions of puri­ty and authen­tic­i­ty, “Heady Met­al” proves provoca­tive for all the wrong reasons.

Rec­om­mend­ed read­ing: ILM thread — Huge Frig­gin’ Sun­nO))) Piece in NYT Magazine