Spent seven days giving "nothing but black metal november" a try, but there's simply too much out there to listen to that isn't black metal. (I also confused Opeth for Mastadon, a good sign I sufficiently soaked myself in corpse paint). HOWEVER, I would consider the past seven days a success for two reasons: I've expanded my music library to include some phenomenal new bands and I've really begun to appreciate black metal.
Reason the latter: Black metal may be the least accessible form of metal, if not one of the least accessible. It's taken me months and months to begin to appreciate it enough just to listen to an entire album. now i fucking love emperor, burzum, and deafheaven. I could listen to them for hours. Before, black metal was noise: fast, insanely distorted, without changes in dynamics, devoid of tri-tone riffs, blast beats, and with weird screechy vocals that had to be an octave higher than anything I normally listen to. But I swear by the time the seven days were up, there was a beauty to the intricacies of the arrangements. There are patterns to the guitar parts, the distortion delicately integrated, subtle changes in dynamics, the blast beats fit perfectly, and the vocals held a powerful meaning and symbolism I never knew of.
I rewatched the documentary "Until The Light Takes Us" in late october, and it rekindled my desire to get more into black metal. Before then (having not really given the film much thought the first time seen), it was a bizarre and irritating genre. It had some weird european history and was devoid of all other stylistic elements of metal. I've tried for months to get into it, going with a periodic brute force method. compared different eras. nothing. But then I gave "Hvis lyset tar oss" a listen after rewatching, and it all began to click. This wasn't just a couple guys mad at the world making music that was supposed to literally sound black. It was a very small, unique extreme counterculture movement, one that has roots in developing music of earlier eras (which I always find fun) and roots in social unrest.
These guys (the members of bands like Burzum, Immortal, Mayhem, Darkthrone) were deeply inspired by Bathory, Venom, and Mercyful Fate. they developed that into their own thing, deeply bathed in the social unrest that drove the scene. That unrest, at times, fueled a fundamentalist approach: church burnings, murders. Black wasn't just a genre, it was its own lifestyle. Most genres can't say that. The way black metal struck back at musical norms was also fueled by this unrest: the more lofi the recording, the bigger "fuck you" to the clean, expertly recorded and cut records that didn't question why clarity should be the norm. I feel this comes out in the music, especially in Burzum, Mayhem, and Darkthrone.
The dankness of "Filosofem" and "Under a Funeral Moon" suddenly make all the sense in the world. (I'm a big melodeath/folk metal fan, and we like crisp, clean mixes (see: Wintersun's "Time I")). The grueling wall of guitar noise and blast beats sounded instead like a violent cacophony, wanting to reach out and punch anything that hated it. The vocals had a melancholy quality to them, even within the underlying pent-up aggression. And that's just my revelation concerning '90s Norwegian black metal.
There are two waves of black metal in terms of rock history: the first wave (early 1980s Bathory and Venom), and the second wave (early 1990s Norwegian bands). There's a third wave developing right now in the U.S. Bands popping up incorporating post-rock/metal and shoegaze elements are growing. These guys are being inspired by the music of the '90s and reinterpreting it for themselves in the form of current U.S. black metal, and it's a kinda great result. These bands have locked in on the emotiveness of black metal, someone I never noticed before. There's a much different type of melancholy in this emerging wave, something very post-rocky a la every Sigur Ros song ever. What it is, I don't exactly know yet. and that's rather exciting. (But the answer is definitely not Liturgy's frontman's 'transcendental manifesto').
Reason the former (yup, I finally got there): I don't scroll through my music library and instantly skip over the various black metal bands. It legitimately used to feel as if I blocked them out completely, like they weren't there at all. Scrolling through my library now makes it look a whole lot more full. I have so much more to listen to now, and I can never have enough music to listen ton. I can unwind by putting on some black metal and letting it block out all the noise. I'm going to enjoy it while it still feels new.
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