A while back I went to cover a metal show and my coverage was pretty superficial to be honest. A lot of fans got cheesed at me because I was lightly joking about the band’s stage set-up and it rubbed them the wrong way. (Apparently metal fans are a bit touchy about their music.) But it was a fair complaint in that I wasn’t really a true fan and therefore really had no business reviewing the show. I mean I like metal and it’s fun to see live but it’s kind of like rap for me in that I enjoy it in a very casual manner. By that I mean that I’ll enjoy it and all and there will be songs that I think are phenomenal and really hit home for me but, in a very broad sense, these genres don’t really speak to me. Sure, metal can kick ass but I find its emotional range is kind of limited. Metal is largely over the top uber-epic themes and testosterone fueled aggression. [By the way, I don't consider hair metal Metal so don't post anything about some shitty hair-metal band's ballad as an example] Take Mastodon and Leviathan – an album that does both phenomenally.
I love that song and that album. The riffs are bad ass and it is heavy as hell.
Here is High on Fire with an acoustic opening before getting down to business.
Fucking awesome! This band is epic too.
But here is the thing – I’m not Beowulf. My life isn’t that of a Geat going out and killing monsters and dragons. I mean that is cool and I fuckin’ love Seamus Heany’s translation of that book but it’s kind of an escape from the day to day and has nothing to do with it. Because of that, a lot of it feels like an affectation to me where people are putting on a costume to play a role. It’s fun and all but there is a distance between the music’s posture and anything approaching real emotions and day to day life which is why it’s funny to see Glenn Danzig buying cat litter.
So, for the most part, I tend to listen to a lot of wuss music. Take what I’m listening to this week. I’m on a big Neko Case kick this week (this actually happens every few months by the way) and it’s a good example of what really gets me. Sure she’s “just a girl” and she’s not cranking up the amps but to me there is a lot more going on here in terms of emotions, instrumentation, and composition. No big epic Nordic themes or bro-fists rising in the air but this music is about real emotions and real people. Don’t get me wrong, I like playing and writing dumb metal riffs but there is no way in hell I could ever pull of anything like this and I think that is a large part of why I tend to admire it so much. So here is a you tube playlist of Case’s music and feel free to lay into me in the comments.
Neko Case and Her Boyfriends – Mood to Burn Brides
Neko Case – I Missed the Point
Neko Case – Ghostwriting
Neko Case – That Teenage Feeling
Neko Case and Her Boyfriends – Whip The Blankets
Neko Case – Lion’s Jaws
Neko Case & Her Boyfriends- Set Out Running
Neko Case – People Got a Lot of Nerve
Neko Case – Maybe Sparrow
That’s my buddy Dex Romweber playing guitar on That Teenage Feeling
OH crazy! Flat Duo Jets Dude? I didn’t know that. But that is what I hate about buying my music digitally, the lack of liner notes. I adore that song in particular, something about how it sways!
yes, Flat Duo Jets guy. His last record is pretty bad ass, he now plays with his sister on drums. has been getting some nice PR from Jack White (have you seen ‘It Might Get Loud’?) anyway, Neko sings a duet with him on the song ‘Still Around’ from his Ruins of Berlin record.
re liner notes: buy vinyl, plenty of notes on them these days.
Cool, yeah he played the Continental Club here not long ago.
Yeah I hear ya on Lps but the Ex got the turntable so no LPs for a while. I only just got a stereo system but maybe within a year I will return to the old etched PVC discs.
Please don’t make me bring up the Kate Bush shrine in your dorm room. Because I will.
Hey now, one poster does not equal a shrine. Funny thing is I found that poster along with a lot of other dorm posters. Dude, I had like four R.E.M. posters. FOUR! Now’s that’s pretty wuss!
But to go ahead and take the bait…
Disclaimer: I offer this not in opposition to Neko Case, who I am unfamiliar with and who knows, I might even like if I heard it, but in defense of Metal.
Music is about escape. In fact, most art is about escape. Do you want to read Poe or Lovecraft or Robert Anton Wilson, or do you want to read contemporary fiction about a college professor slowly losing his libido and slipping into alcoholism as his professional career falls apart? Do you want a movie with Kung Fu and spaceships and monkeys wearing combat armor and carrying bazookas, or do you want a movie about a middle aged social worker discovering her latent homosexuality through a relationship with a young drug addict she meets in a therapy session?
I mean, for fuck’s sake – there’s enough reality. Reality sucks. It catches up with all of us, all the time anyway – why wallow around in it? Too much art tries to be heady and edgy by casting harsh, gray fluorescent light on reality in all its ugliness. Fuck that. I want locomotive-sized squid with alien intelligence. I want interstellar overdrive. I want things that make me think about our possibilities – good and bad — not our petty limitations and self-absorbed neuroses. Yes, metal may not be about our everyday lives — and thank God for that!!!
English major types get a big woody for writers like Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner. I found them both about as interesting and readable as a refrigerator manual. Maybe they had something important to say, but if they did I missed it. H.G. Wells had much more to say about the condition of modern man but because he wasn’t as impenetrable and didn’t have as much “technique”, the lit crit crowd couldn’t make thesis papers and future careers out of him. I think that metal suffers from some of the same problems — people don’t take it seriously because it’s pretty fucking obvious. “Hey, here’s a fuckin guitar solo. Hey, here’s a big dumb riff. Hey, here’s some lyrics about subterranean mole men who eat your brains. Hey, here’s some dynamics and a fleecy acoustic part to break up the arrangement”. Like pulp sci fi, metal can be pretty formulaic and predictable even when it’s kind of entertaining. But as you pointed out with a couple of bands that you posted here, metal doesn’t have to be that way. Like great science fiction, at its best it can be pretty liberating, even ambitious.
Meanwhile, I find most indie rock these days to be pretentious, dull, self-absorbed… big washes of sound without any soul or organization… or very precious, overly clever, with an emphasis more on fashion and faux-originality than substance. “Hey, what if we mixed mid-century lounge music with klezmer and featured a ukulele player?” And when college indie rock is bad, which it usually is, it’s unbearable. Whereas metal, on the other hand, is kind of like pizza or sex — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.
I remember being in Amy’s Ice Cream one time, and they were playing some kind of indie rock crap over the sound system. Big slabs of gray, shapeless, saturated noise with a plodding, predictable, tuneless 8-8-8-8 note pattern and some earnest sounding fellow mixed way down, screaming about something that probably really, really mattered – to him. And I looked at the chicks behind the counter who were cute enough kinda alterna-chicks, but I felt sorry for them because I thought, “This music is the soundtrack to your lives”. Their musical present and future was stolen from them by bland, soulless indie rock. And what was even more sad was that they were probably too cool to listen to anything else, like metal.
Oh I wasn’t saying there wasn’t a value in metal or that I don’t enjoy it on some level. But I was just saying how listening to metal when you have a desk job just seems as authentic as… well I think Mike Judge kind of hit the nail on the head with the Micahel Bolton rapping bit in Office Space. That kind of sums it up perfectly.
Well what exactly is “authentic” music for a 40 odd year old cubicle monkey to be listening to? Muzak? Or maybe no music at all, and just the hum of fluorescent lighting. Because there’s no such thing as “authentic” music any more, at least not for white, suburban America. Truth be told, metal is about as “authentic” a musical score for that demographic as you could find.
Actually, You know that would have been better as a seperate response blog.
Yeah that was kinda long…sorry..
OK so I checked out the Neko Case. Not so sure about that sparrow song and that other one at the end. I mean I already heard Natalie Merchant once in college. But the stuff at the beginning ain’t nothin’ but country! Pretty good actually. She should stick with that.
Her newer stuff is decidedly more indie rock as it has been for the last two, maybe three albums. I actually dig the country influenced stuff as you can see since I leaned heavily in this random selection to that stuff but, Maybe Sparrow, comes from Fox Confessor (which is where she completely dumps the country) and I think that’s her best and it’s very indie rock. The penultimate song is kind of a throwaway from her one lame album (her latest) which oddly, as I just saw on Wikipedia, actually charted well despite being so weak.
Anyhow, yeah. It’s not for everyone and it is pretty wuss but ultimately people listen to music at different times in their lives for different reasons. I guarantee you if I was on a base in Afghanistan, I would definitely not be listening to Neko Case.