Queens Of The Stone Age – Rated R [Deluxe Edition]

This is a review of the anniversary deluxe edition, written for Classic Rock.

Rolling Stone’s 82nd best album of the decade. Tits.

There’s a case for saying that we’ve just been through yet another of rock’s golden ages.
The years between – roughly – 1999 and 2008 (please, ‘the noughties’ makes us puke) saw
Jeremiads about the death of guitars once again fail to come to pass. Great years for the
underground but they were also good times for very mainstream bands too, bands you saw on telly that your uncool mates might have heard of too. We got career-best albums from Machine Head, The Foo Fighters, Slipknot, Green Day, Judas Priest and Tool. We had awesome newcomers like Opeth, Mastodon, Coheed & Cambria, My Chemical Romance and The Mars Volta. And even Metallica eventually made a record that wasn’t totally shit.

The first great rock’n’roll release of the new decade/century/millennium was the second
album by Queens Of The Stone Age. Josh Homme never set out to be a trailblazer for
proper rock music, but things just kind of worked out that way. After years when the charts
were dominated by hip hop, pop and R&B, when ‘rock’ was a sickly category, either retro
fallout from grunge or Britpop or heritage acts stumbling onstage to die, here was an album
that sounded the way that a 21st century rock band should. Queens were robust and tough
and vibrant. They were eclectic. Queens had metal, punk rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock,
krautrock, glam rock – every damn variant of cool rock you can think of – wired into their
DNA.

The opening lines of Feelgood Hit Of The Summer “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol” serve notice that this is no album by a bunch of businessmen with guitars. It ain’t U2. They were not here to service a demographic or to provide content between the ads on modern rock radio. Yes, oh my goodness, that’s drugs they’re singing about, mum. Cover your ears.

The self titled first QOTSA album was still really a Kyuss album. It was the last ‘stoner rock’ album that Josh Homme made. Rated R was something else again. Produced by Josh and Chris Goss, a long time friend and mentor of Homme’s, it made enough compromises to get the band on MTV without selling the essential soul of the band. It was made with a loose line-up of madmen and geniuses, a gentleman’s club of cool that included Rob Halford, Pete Stahl, Mark Lanegan, Barrett Martin and of course Nick Oliveri.

Even a decade on, the album well played and imprinted on the consciousness, you hear new stuff all the time. Like the robotic beats and repetitive riff on In The Fade, which call to mind both Neu! And The Groundhogs, sounds slippery and different every time you listen to it. Or the mellower low key psychedelia of Auto Pilot, which sounds strangely contemporary, suggesting a direction not taken that other bands could build an entire career around. And at first BetterLiving Through Chemistry sounded like a failed trip hop experiment; now it sounds futuristic and oddball again. Monsters in the Parasol is almost Doors-like, a dark surreal ode to dropping acid in the desert. Rated R progresses from the singles Feelgood Hit of the Summer and The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret through to the discordant brass annoyance at the end of I Think I Lost My Headache. It’s showing off. Homme wants us to know that this is a band that can do anything. You want MTV friendly fodder? He will just fuck you raw with MTV friendly fodder. You ask when Kyuss will reform? They’re still here, at the guts of QOTSA.

Songs For The Deaf, the third album, is arguably the better. But Rated R is still a magnificent work, seeming much bigger and broader than 11 songs over a mere 42 minutes.

To celebrate a decade since its release and generally reactivate interest in this album – it certainly doesn’t need remastering or anything – there’s a bonus disc of live material, most notably the Reading Festival show, as well as  -sides and oddities. Like all such discs, it adds precisely fuck all to your enjoyment of or knowledge of this album. It does remind you that the QOTSA live experience is not something to be missed. It pads the box nicely, too.

Whether the new golden age of rock’n'roll is already over is a moot point. Too much tongue in cheek retro, too many bands retreating back to the underground: mainstream rock might be in recession again. Josh Homme has been arseing around with joke bands and ironic supergroups for too long now. Hearing this ought to be the wake up call that demands he get back to his proper work. The next golden age is nothing without him.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, albums released 2000, Josh Homme, Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, rated r, STONER ROCK

Buyer’s Guide to Jazz Rock

This is a piece written for Classic Rock in 2008. Normally I hate reading and writing stuff like this. Lists. Consumer guides. But I’m a whore. I did it for the money. I had a bit of ‘guidance’ with the list, so I probably wouldn’t have included Colosseum and would have put something by Soft Machine in its place. And whither George Duke, Spirit, Ian Carr’s Nucleus, Seventh Wave, Alan Holdsworth and newcomers Diagonal? I know, I know…

Let’s begin with a warning: jazz rock can be terrifying and it isn’t for everyone. But you can take comfort from the fact that it alienates and angers as many ‘proper’ jazz ‘buffs’ as it does rock fans. If you think Dylan going electric was a big deal, you should have heard the hissy fits from the hep cats when Miles Davis went on stage in the mid-60s and started playing along with a bunch of crazy muthas with Afros who fed their instruments through wah-wah pedals.

Jazz rock, or fusion, was the last gasp of jazz, the final surge of energy and creative power before lapsing into the hideous heritage industry that it has become today. Jazz rock is pretty hard to define. For bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra it involved hard rock structures but with complex, improvisational elements.

Rock and jazz have a few ancestors in common – the blues, even ragtime – but it wasn’t until the mid-60s that the two converged in what came to be known as jazz rock/fusion. Bands like The Grateful Dead, The Byrds and The Doors cited jazzers such as John Coltrane as major influences (listen to The Doors’ Light My Fire back to back with Coltrane’s Ole), although jazz fans and musicians tended to regard most rock as inferior.

By 1967, rock had become more creative, and for the first time jazz artists began to take influences from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, The Beatles and Sly & The Family Stone. There were also commercial considerations: jazz had waned as the dominant form of popular music.

It was a two-way street: rock artists like Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker and the late, great Tommy Bolin wanted to stretch themselves as musicians, and acceptance by the jazz fraternity was like passing the cycling proficiency test. Had he lived, there’s little doubt that Hendrix would have followed the logical course set by his Band Of Gypsies and become a jazz-rock star.

From roughly 1967 until the mid-80s, the intermarriage of jazz and rock produced some of the most stunning, original and mesmerising music of the 20th century (to be fair, it also produced more than its fair share of unlistenable toss.) Much of what we know as progressive rock – Yes, ELP, post-Red King Crimson – was essentially jazz rock lite. Today we can still hear the influence of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis in bands as diverse as Tool, Mastodon and The Mars Volta.

Essential – The Classics

MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA
Birds Of Fire
CBS, 1972
“A person would be a moron not to appreciate [John] McLaughlin’s technique,” Frank Zappa once said. “The guy has certainly found out how to operate a guitar as
if it were a machine-gun.”
Birds Of Fire was the Mahavishnu Orchestra at their absolute best, a multi-ingredient fusion – jazz, rock, blues, Celtic folk, Indian classical – churned out at an amazing breakneck speed.
John McLaughlin’s guitar work was staggering, and keyboard player Jan Hammer and violinist Jerry Goodman were also virtuosos. The seemingly telepathic interplay and improvisation is a joy to hear.

JEFF BECK
Wired
CBS, 1976
Beck was one of the few rockers to make the transition to jazz. His 1976 masterpiece Wired – particularly his cover of Charles Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat – is one of the few albums you could describe as jaw-dropping and mean it.
Entirely instrumental, and at just under 35 minutes comparatively short, Wired is an album that passes in a blur of high-speed funk, ultra-heavy technoflash guitar solos and thrilling power chords. Yes, it’s Beck shamelessly showing off, but it’s hardly self-indulgent.
It’s like a shopping list of musical ideas and directions, each of which could have spawned an entire album in its own right. Marvellous.

Superior – The Albums That Helped Build the Genre

BILLY COBHAM
Spectrum
Atlantic, 1973
As the drummer with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Cobham was one of the foremost musos of his generation. Spectrum, though, is more than a bunch of difficult drum solos.
Opening with the truly amazing Quadrant 4 – which highlights the high-speed roller-coaster guitar of the young Tommy Bolin – Spectrum is all about the interplay between great musicians, crossing every boundary from hard rock to the soulful heavy funk of Red Barron. The drumming, as you’d expect, is from the realm of the angels – listen particularly to Stratus, where Cobham proves the superiority of the human over the drum machine.

RETURN TO FOREVER
Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy
Verve, 1973
There’s some debate among aficionados as to whether this or its follow up, Romantic Warrior, is the superior RTF album. …Galaxy is a less polished album, leaner and meaner, full of high-jazz musicianship and a low-down hard-rock attitude. The inventiveness on the title track, and keyboard player and leader Chick Corea’s reworking of his own Latin-flavoured Captain Senor Mouse, are definite highlights, as is After The Cosmic Rain which showcases bass player Stanley Clarke’s propulsive style. RTF is kind of the next stage left after Yes’s Close To The Edge.

MILES DAVIS
A Tribute To Jack Johnson
CBS, 1971
Miles Davis always bragged that he could put together the best rock band ever and blow everyone away. With this album, a soundtrack for a movie about boxing champ Johnson, recorded with John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham, Miles lived up to that boast.
Two extended jams, kicking in with Right Off, McLaughlin playing heavy blues rock guitar, breaking down into moody psychedelia, James Brown-like funk and going back to bar-room rock, this is probably a clue as to how the mooted Hendrix/Miles collaboration might have sounded. A good jumping off point for Miles’s electric work.

WEATHER REPORT
Heavy Weather
CBS, 1977
Easily the most accessible jazz rock release here and the most commercially successful, Heavy Weather actually spawned the hit single (albeit a minor hit) Birdland. However, it was possibly that success that closed the book on fusion’s more creative years and gave birth to the ghastly easy-listening mutation that was jazz funk.
Regardless, this album still sounds as fresh today as it did at the time. Weather Report went straight for the jugular, delivering marvellous tunes, keeping the instrumental flash in the background, and made an album that was less jazz rock and almost jazz pop.

Good – Worth Exploring

FRANK ZAPPA
Hot Rats
Reprise, 1969
After he disbanded the Mothers Of Invention in 1969, Zappa surrounded himself with some little-known but extraordinary musicians to record what became his breakthrough album, praised or damned as the Zappa record that people who don’t like Zappa like.
From the instrumental opener Peaches En Regalia, through the scatological blues of Willy The Pimp, this album album heralded Zappa’s foray into jazz rock. While Mahavishnu and even Miles had a sort of spirituality, Zappa remained cynical, deflating the undeniable brilliance of the arrangement, writing and performance with the usual lame dirty jokes. A brilliant album nevertheless.

COLOSSEUM
Valentyne Suite
Vertigo, 1969
Colosseum’s second album finds them reaching beyond their limitations as, essentially, a Cream-influenced blues rock band and groping to create something revolutionary. The extended jazz rock jams and particularly the 15-minute title track are reminiscent of what US bands like Blood, Sweat And Tears, Chicago Transit Authority and Chase were also doing at the same time. Essentially these were the handful of bands from rock backgrounds who were able to make a convincing transition to jazz. Along with King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, Valentyne Suite is one of the early milestones where prog rock and jazz rock met.

TONY WILLIAMS LIFETIME
Emergency
Polydor, 1969
There’s no argument that this album is seriously flawed: Williams can’t sing for toffee, and the production is truly awful. That said, the music made by then-prodigy drummer Williams and his band is pure electric hellfire. To the staid jazz establishment of the time, it must have been as shocking as Anarchy In The UK.
Emergency emphasises the rock in jazz rock, John McLaughlin’s guitar almost anticipates classic heavy metal, while Williams’s drumming veers from hostile to ecstatic joy in the space of a few beats. Years ahead of its time, this album is a slightly ragged and tattered masterpiece.

Also Try

Although the best jazz rock was released between 1967 and ’77, there are a lot of paths and tangents for the explorer to follow. Jazz rock in Britain is best represented by Soft Machine’s Third (’70), with more profoundly avant-garde noises following from the likes of Henry Cow’s Unrest (’74) and cult classics like Centipede’s Septober Energy (’71). The early works of Blood, Sweat And Tears, such as Child Is Father To The Man (’68), the Buddy Miles Expressway – most notably Expressway To Your Skull (’70) – and Chicago Transit Authority’s self-titled 1969 debut represent strand of US jazz rock which came from rock bands rather than from jazzers ‘slumming’ it.
European jazz rock is where things got really weird and wonderful: Wagnerian French band Magma released several sci-fi concept albums, most notably ’73’s Mekanik Destruktiw Komandoh (which reimagined John Coltrane fronting an orchestra from Saturn), while the altogether gentler Gong fused jazz rock with late-period psychedelia on their excellent ’73 album Angel’s Egg.

Avoid

ANYTHING BY KENNY G.
Kenny G represents the dire depths to which fusion eventually sank. Flushed with and egged on by the commercial success of Weather Report’s Heavy Weather, a few jazz-rockers decided to chuck out all that scary, innovative stuff and just play some peaceful elevator music to soothe the folks after a hard day being yuppies.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Frank Zappa, jazz rock fusion, miles davis

Cathedral The Guessing Game

Review of their most recent album from Classic Rock.

Clocking in at a statuesque 85 minutes, this double disc set from UK doom vetrans not only marks a renaissance, but may well be their finest album ever. From the outset, though, it’s obviously a massive break from the doom laden past, piling in with sitars, mellotrons, synths and glockenspiels, creating something that at times sounds like a phenomenal lost British prog album from 1971 (on Vertigo, obviously). Not that it’s in any way an exercise in nostalgia or pastiche: the doom roots are still there throughout and for all that it creates an impression of afghan coats and incense, it’s an albumn that could only really be made in 2010. Songs like Death Of An Anarchist and Funeral Of Dreams (featuring singer Alison O`Donnell of 70s Irish folk rock band Mellow Candle) are classic Cathedral, but with a little bit of a psychedelic twist. The Running Man, a nod to King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, and the pulverising doom of Requiem For The Voiceless (a protest song about factory farming) are the two strongest tracks and the two poles of The Guessing Game. The double disc format allows Cathedral’s imagination to be unbounded. It’s an exciting reboot for a veteran band.
8/10
Tommy Udo

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Krautrock # Kung Fu Hustle # Marilyn Manson # Metal Hammer # Music journalism # NME # Progressive rock, Psychedelia

Progcast One

This is a podcast for the launch of Classic rock Presents…Prog that I took part in last year. It also features editor Jerry Ewing, and writers Malcolm Dome and Nick Shilton.

Progcast here

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, Progressive rock

ROBERT CALVERT Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (Atomhenge/Esoteric)

The great Calvert

Although often described as “overlooked” or “neglected”, Hawkwind’s sometime frontman Bob Calvert’s first solo album  actually scraped the album charts and was – along with an afghan coat, a quid deal of red leb and a Mayflower paperback edition of one of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books – an essential possession for the mid 70s adolescent Brit stoner, filed there alongside Warrior On The Edge Of Time, Fish Rising and something pre-Virgin by Tangerine Dream.

It’s a Hawkwind album in all but name, the line-up augmented by various Pink Fairies, Viv Stanshall, Jim Capaldi, Arthur Brown and (uncredited) Brian Eno. It’s popularity with the ‘heads’ can be put down to the Pythonesque sketches that link the songs – surreal skits about Luftwaffe pilots wearing make-up and dodgy Yank jet salesmen that are even funnier when herbally enhanced – but also to four absolute killer space metal songs The Aerospaceage Inferno, The Widowmaker, The Right Stuff and Ejection. It was everything that Hawkwind promised on Silver Machine and Urban Guerilla.

It’s more straight ahead punk rock before there was punk rock metal, alluding to other Calvert songs and stories, moving “sideways through time”, that sort of thing. Calvert, as a boy wanted to be a fighter pilot but a perforated eardrum put paid to that dream. With Hawkwind he lived out his fantasies – a few years later he appeared onstage dressed as some glam rock combination of Biggles and Lawrence Of Arabia. And in these songs he seems to be flying with an afterburner.

The concept is about the Lockheed Starfighter, sold to the revitalised West German Luftwaffe in the 50s to help build the Federal Republic as a bulwark against the commies at the height of the cold war. The crashed and burned in alarming numbers as poorly trained pilots and ground crews earned them the nickname Flying Coffins and The Widowmaker.

Calvert’s songs have an almost JG Ballard-like fascination with the crashing aircraft, eliciting an almost sexual thrill from the disaster. You sense that he didn’t so much want to fly a starfighter as crash it into the ground.

Of all the songs on the album, the greatest is the masterful Ejection, probably the best song ever written about bailing out of a fighter plane. Legendary rock hack Nick Kent, a longtime champion of Calvert and Hawkwind, described Ejection as having the best riff since (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and although he was no stranger to hyperbole, in this case he was bang on.

The remastering on this edition gives the sound a much needed punch. The only disappointment is the additional tracks: a more complete collection might have included The Widow’s Song, planned for inclusion with Nico on vocals, though eventually recorded by Calvert and his girlfriend just before his untimely death.

That’s a petty quibble though: a brilliant monument to the great psychedelic warrior poet of the English underground.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia, hawkwind, Robert Calvert, Viv Stanshall

Notes from underground

One of my favourite albums ever, recently reissued. This review originally ran in Classic Rock.

The Deviants

Ptooff!

Esoteric

The (Social) Deviants were the great steaming turd in the hippy dippy strawberry incense world of the late 60s London underground scene. First and foremost they were psychedelic hooligans, upsetting the nicey nicey comfy reveries of the docile hippies, scaring them from the stage of the UFO club in the wee small hours. While everyone else was turning off their minds, relaxing and floating downstream, The Deviants were making trouble. They were like The Sex Pistols a decade too early – they were, in fact, one of the first bands ever to be described as ‘punk rock’ – and as well as the sneering attitude and leather trousers, they also pioneered the DIY ethic, promoting community gigs and releasing their first album Ptooff! independently.

Their revolution-first-music-second ethic has borne up rather better over the years than many of their contemporaries. Opening track I’m Coming Home sounds like a low budget strung-out version of The Doors who are just straight enough to grasp a rudimentary I’m A Man riff while frontman Mick Farren sneers and spits his way through the ensuing acid deranged mess. There is the amazing Nothing Man, a Fugs/Zappa-like collage of disjointed music, noise and FX with Farren reciting an equally crazed poem that almost seems to prefigure sampling. The anti-consumerist Garbage is definitely a punk rock song, maybe something by The Fall, that they miraculously managed to channel from the future. The final song Deviation Street is like eight minutes of Bo Diddley playing on an airport PA with lots of stoned-freak conversations recorded and laid over the top. It’s an attack on self-satisfied hippie complacency more savage than anything Lydon would later dish out.

There are two tracks by bass guitarist Cord Rees that don’t really fit, where he mistakenly imagined that The Deviants could be a ‘proper’ band. But in an odd way it’s these glaring flaws and the fact that this is such an amateur effort – in the best sense of the term – that makes Ptooff! an album that is in every way as pioneering as Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Sgt Pepper.

This welcome reissue restores the original fold-out quasi pop-art cover, 1967 sleeve notes by John Peel and new ones by Mark Powell.

No phoney nostalgia here. This is the real sound of the English psychedelic underground and A Whiter Shade Of Pale it ain’t.

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Music journalism, Psychedelia, Boss Goodman, English underground, International Times, Mick Farren, Paul Rudolph, Pink Fairies, Psychedelia, Russel Sanderson

VoiVod now

VoiVod are one of the most important bands ever: without them there would be no Tool, no Mastodon, no Opeth. They were the first to transcend thrash for a new take on progressive rock. And remarkably they continue, having survived the death of founder and inspirational guitarist Piggy. This was written for Classic Rock presents Prog, an interview with Snake about the long and influential history of the band.

Admit it. Something about the term ‘Canadian music’ makes your heart sink just a little. It’s like ‘Irish cooking’ and ‘Scottish goalkeeping’, a description of something that is generally woeful. It suggests ‘like American music, but not quite as good’, music that’s a bit worthy but also a bit dull. It’s unfair, sure, but true nonetheless. In terms of actual numbers, Canadian bands who matter lag way behind the US, UK and Europe. But the good news is that the ones who do matter – Rush, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and of course Voivod – really matter a lot.

Voivod are one of the bands who changed metal in the 1980s, ripped up all the blueprints and forged something whose repercussions are still felt today. Emerging from thrash, one of metal’s most fertile eras, their music pushed beyond the modest expectations of fans and critics in the mid 80s to create, if you like, the First Wave Of Progressive Heavy Metal. Not that it was really much of a wave: you had the embryonic Dream Theater, you had the underground stirrings of bands like Atheist, but we’re not really talking about a ‘movement’. Voivod’s fourth and fifth albums Dimension Hatröss and Nothingface were sort of high concept post-thrash, they defied easy categorisation and sounded like nothing else that any of their contemporaries were doing.

Voivod’s unique manifestation of metal owes everything to the band’s founder and spectacular guitarist, the late Dennis ‘Piggy’ D’Amour.

“The big change really started to take place around the time of [second album] Rrröööaaarrr, ” frontman Denis ‘Snake’ Bélanger tells us. “Piggy really wanted to push the band forward. He was a lot older than the rest of us and he had been listening to a lot of different music for years. Not just 70s prog rock, he had a really weird collection of records. He was also into contemporary classical music, Stravinsky, Bartok, Paganini. He was into a lot of things. We’d go round to his house and just pull stuff out at random. ‘Soft Machine. What does this sound like?’ After Rrröööaaarrr which I think was our last straight thrash metal album, we started to look at writing more and complex music.”

Piggy painstakingly taught the rest of the band the music he had grown up with (“He could play the whole of Yes’s Relayer album backwards!” remembers Snake).

The changes started to manifest themselves on the band’s transitional third album Killing Technology. They had shifted from being a good if not exactly innovative thrash band in the mould of Kreator, to something new, incorporating complex, jazzy guitar attacks and time signatures that were highly unusual in those straight ahead 4/4 days, as well as elements of hardcore punk and industrial music. They had less in common with their thrash contemporaries and more with hardcore bands like Husker Du and Black Flag who were also breaking out of the confines of their particular genres.

“We were actually sitting around listening to things backwards,” Snake recalls. “Piggy would play something and we’d think that’s cool. He was playing us Yes and Genesis, but lots of really odd obscure stuff like Egg. And while I wasn’t a big prog fan, I was listening to a lot of stuff like the Cure, Psychedelic Furs, The Gun Club, so there were a lot of different approaches coming in at that time.”

With Dimension Hatross, released in 1988, Voivod really got into their stride. The music finally gelled, it sounded at times as if King Crimson had followed up 21^st Century Schizoid Man with a pulverising metal album (instead of all that pastoral sensitive Greg Lake stuff). Just when Metallica were pushing thrash closer to the mainstream with …And Justice For All, so Voivod were pushing it right over the edge with Dimension Hatross.

It was a concept album based on an idea by drummer Michel ‘Away’ Langevin, who drew the character on the band’s album sleeves, with lyrics by Snake. The Voivod character, a futuristic post-nuclear vampire cybernetic warrior who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hammerstein from 2000 AD’s ABC Warriors strip, accidentally creates a new universe while smashing particles. He is then caught up in a civil war between the universe’s two factions the Chaosmongers and the Technocratic Manipulators which results in an apocalyptic end to everything. Don’t expect it to be adapted as a west end musical any time soon.

“Michel was a visionary. He was listening to Van Der Graaf Generator at that time and wanted to stretch the kind of lyrics that we were writing. We wanted to mix a lot of influences together and we were really brainstorming about what we would do. We were almost engineering the music as the concept grew. We were adding things all the time. We wanted to make the listener put on headphones and be gone somewhere else for an hour. And I think we achieved that.”

With the follow up Nothingface, generally acclaimed as Voivod’s masterpiece, the concept, the music and the band’s general vibe was as insane/genius as it could ever be.

“Nothingface was actually based on real events,” says Away. “In the town of Jonquière, in northern Quebec, where we grew up, they built the biggest aluminium factory in North America. And of course there has been a high incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease because of the aluminium that people working in the plant and living nearby have absorbed.”

Nothingface uses the material for a cosmic battle between Voivod and the evil forces behind planetary mind rapers.

“It’s about giant factories that look like spiders,”says Away. “They crawl around the planet and dig for aluminium and when there is no more aluminium they fly to another planet. They are like starships, these giant factories. Nothingface is the story about the people living on the planet invaded by spiders. So all those people are losing their legends and their culture because of Alzheimer’s disease.”

And just in case anyone was in any doubt where the band were coming from, the album included a mind melting cover of Syd Barrett era Floyd’s Astronomy Domine.

Both fans and critics of metal often had low ambitions and expectations for the music in those days. Big hair, big egos and tight trousers. The days when Brett Michaels was seen as a real bad ass. Voivod certainly had a hand in changing all that.

Of course, these days the influence of those albums has been well and truly digested and disseminated, you can hear a little or a lot of Voivod in Tool, in Neurosis and particularly in Mastodon. Listening to this year’s phenomenal Crack The Skye, you can unquestionably hear the spirit of Voivod in there. Not imitation, but sincere admiration.

“The first time I toured in Europe was when I was in Today is the Day. We came over with Neurosis and Voivod,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor. “I used to watch Voivod every night. They had such camaraderie in the way that they played, something that I wanted in any band that I formed, something I didn’t have in Today Is The Day because I had joined them very late after they had been together for a long time.”

“It’s something that if you hear it then I’m very proud of it,” says Snake. “I love Mastodon, they are a fantastic band.”

Voivod have always had high profile fans in other bands. Mike Patton is an admirer and was planning a track to an aborted Voivod tribute album, as were Primus. Dave Grohl is an enthusiastic champion – Snake sang on one of the tracks on Grohl’s Probot album while Away designed the sleeve. Sonic Youth, always with impeccable taste, admit a huge debt to and admiration of Voivod.

“Sometimes when I hear the Foo Fighters I go ‘Wow, that’s Piggy’s chord!’ that dissonant chord, y’know,” he says. “I think it proves that we did something new and brought it to others.”

And Norwegian black metallers Darkthrone dedicated Atomic Coming one of the tracks on their 2006 album The Cult Is Alive to Piggy, who had just recently died.

“Hell fuckin’ yeah, Voivod totally rules!” enthused Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto.

Perhaps that’s Voivod’s curse, to be an influential band that other musicians admire but with limited appeal elsewhere. They’ve had their share of misfortunes: sales of Nothingface were disappointing. The follow up Angel Rat fared even less well and fractures started to appear in the band’s line-up. Bassist Jean-Yves ‘Blacky’ Theriault quit the band after finishing work on Angel Rat. The band stumbled on as a three piece before Snake left, a decision exacerbated by drug problems. Eric ‘E Force’ Forrest then joined as bassist and singer and just as the band were regaining some momentum, disaster struck. In what seemed like an eerie rerun of Cliff Burton’s death, Forrest was seriously injured in a car crash in Germany. Piggy was diagnosed with a brain tumour, though fortunately he recovered after an operation to remove it.

After a hiatus, Snake rejoined the band and they made their self-titled 2003 album. It was OK, but seemed like a step back, just another thrash album.

“I think a lot of fans didn’t get us, they might like one album but not the one that came after, because we tried never to repeat what we had done,” says Snake. “We weren’t a band who found a formula and stuck to it. You take a risk. It’s like a mission. You don’t know, if you make experimental music, that everything will work. You just have to do it and see.”

Piggy died after developing cancer in 2005. But the VoiVod story doesn’t end there. With a new album called Infini just out, all of the surviving Voivod members have contributed to songs that were set in motion by Piggy before his death. Using riffs and solos he recorded, the band have constructed a record that once again edges out into the cosmic badlands. Not exactly Killing Technology 2.0, it’s still dense with ideas and may be a jumping off point for a new era of the band.

“I’m just really excited to be doing this, flying over to Europe to play festivals,” says Snake. “I’m glad that progressive metal is just so good and creative just now. It’s demanding and it’s great that people want something more than Poison.”

Filed under: avant garde, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Krautrock, Music journalism, Progressive rock

All hail fucking Mastodon!

This is a piece that I wrote after the Metal Hammer end of year poll in 2006. I still stand by every word. They more than topped Blood Mountain with Crack The Skye. They are also probably the best live band I’ve seen and that list includes the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, Slayer, Oasis, Led Zeppelin, The Who, AC/DC, and, as they say, many more.

THERE is probably – quite rightly – a tendency on the part of most readers to take the results of an annual critic’s polls with a pinch of salt. Not just readers of Hammer, or even the music press in general, but every critic’s poll, from magazines that cover movies to those that deal with specialist fishing equipment, should be looked at carefully. People who write about music for a living, who are fed a vast quantity of product every day, tend to have different values from those with more limited budgets, who can afford to buy maybe one album a month – if that – and tend to make those choices very carefully. Pros can become jaded and sometimes fail to hear in a band what millions of record buyers hear. Similarly, the incredibly difficult albums by East European prog stoner jazz black metallers that get some writers hopping up and down – and let me interject a swift mea culpa here – will more often than not be lucky to sell in quantities that make it to double figures.

At Hammer we like to pride ourselves that we usually sort of get it right, that by and large we have an idea of what our readers want (including the half dozen or so extreme cases who will also be equally excited by the latest Lithuanian difficult music ensemble). Usually when it comes to compiling the list, the choices are fairly obvious as are their positions in the overall hierarchy. This year, however, it was a real bastard.

This has been an amazing year for music. Barely a week of 2006 went by without some absolutely earth shattering new album arriving on our desks. There was one particularly stupid day when we had the new Lamb Of God album, the new Iron Maiden album and ‘Blood Mountain’ all at once. We were like dogs in a circular room looking for a corner to piss in. And that made the choices in this end of year poll extremely difficult. Without getting all bland and banal about it, nearly every album on this list could have been ranked at number two.

But then only Mastodon’s ‘Blood Mountain’ could be at number one.

The editorial staff, writers and contributors at Hammer are a very diverse group with very different musical tastes and specialities. Yet ‘Blood Mountain’ was way ahead of its nearest competitor by a really sizable majority of votes.

You’d probably find that everyone who voted for it had their own reasons and that no two were in complete agreement. I can only chuck in my own personal tuppenceworth as to why it was my number one: for me, ‘Blood Mountain’ is up there with Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’, Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, ‘Deep Purple In Rock’, Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ and Metallica’s ‘Master Of Puppets’. This might sound like the usual vacant hyperbole that you hear from critics all the time – such as the tosser who recently said that Razorlight were as important as The Beatles – but it is meant in all sincerity and with a certain amount of embarassment because these aren’t comparisons that should be made lightly.

In my heart, I know that this is an album that I will still be listening to in another decade (assuming that I’m not dead, deaf or otherwise incapacitated) which isn’t something that I would necessarily say in all honesty about any of the others on the list.

The album sold well, though admittedly not in the sort of quantities that the likes of Green Day are used to, but while msot albums are dead and buried within a few weeks of release, ‘Blood Mountain’ is the sort of album that will continue to grow and to sell for a long time to come. Mastodon are a band who win converts easily, particularly when they play live. They are the only band who broke through the painful conservatism of a Slayer audience when they toured with them. No, they didn’t blow Slayer offstage, but then they are still a comparatively new and young band.

They appeal across genre gaps and generation gaps. And what’s not to love? Mastodon is what heavy metal music is supposed to sound like.

Occasionally we find old issues of Metal Hammer from back in the day and are amused and embarassed by the bands that the magazine went apeshit over. Most of them you’ve – mercifully – never heard of. Some of them you really don’t wanna know. And others we’re not gonna tell you wahat they are. History will judge – with equal cruelty – whether we got it right in 2006. Maybe there’s an obvious album that came out that we have completely missed. Maybe others high up in the poll will be regarded as utter mooses of ‘St Anger’-like proportions in years to come. But Mastodon? Hand on heart, swear on all that’s unholy. We are right. Anyone who disagrees is wrong. It’s that simple.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Blood Mountain, important albums, Mastodon, Progressive metal

ARE YOU FOLKING SERIOUS? THE RISE OF FOLK METAL

This was written back in 2003, since when the folk metal thing seems to have come and gone. But I just got the new Glittertind album Landkjenning recently and it’s excellent which is why I dug this out.

OF any of the many and multiform sub-genres and mutations that metal has spawned the one that is most guaranteed to raise a belly laugh is folk metal. Even those who are denizens of the underground, seemingly well informed about the rise and fall of all those micro-genres of which most of us remain blissfully unaware of, will be utterly incredulous that such a thing could actually exist.

Although it sounds like something from The Fast Show, folk metal is deadly serious and it is undergoing something of a creative explosion at the moment. OK, none of the band names probably mean a great deal to many of us – Glittertind, Cruachan, Korpiklaani anyone?- but all of a sudden, from Scandinavia, from Ireland, from Eastern Europe and Germany, there seems to be a whole generation of bands who were spawned by black metal and Viking metal, who have incorporated elements of their local traditional music into their sound. Some, like Finland’s Korpiklaani, play folk songs in a metal style while others like Glittertind play punk rock with folkish inflections.

It would be a bit of an oversimplification to say that folk metal was all descended from the sort of Viking metal created by Bathory and their ilk – though there is such a crossover between folk metal and Viking metal that it’s an easy mistake to make. Also, although there are similarities to so-called battle metal, there is very little crossover between folk metal and power metal.

It all gets a bit confusing because the definition of what constitutes ‘folk’ music is itself pretty nebulous. Webster’s dictionary defines folk music as the “traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of the people in a community.” Folk music is also a current genre of music that includes not only traditional tunes whose origins are lost in the mists of time and which have been handed down from one singer to another, but newly composed tunes in a folk style. Also “modern” folk song is a “song with a soft melodic sound and acoustic guitar accompaniment.”

If you think that black metal purists are elitist snobs you really want to be in the room when two folkies are having an argument: one school of thought holds that if you know who wrote a song then it isn’t proper folk music. Another holds that if it sounds like folk music then it is folk music. It’s like Israelis and Palestinians, Rangers and Celtic, people who like Marmite and people who don’t: they aren’t gonna agree to differ in a convivial fashion. Nope, they are going to put the sandal in, grab each other by the beard and tear those Fair Isles sweaters off in a big bloody brawl.

Me, I like something that’s attributed to the great Pete Seeger: Folk music is music that folk like.

Folk rock has a long history: in the mid 60s bands like The Byrds incorporated traditional American folk music into their sound. In Britain the English folk song revival in the early 60s fed into the burgeoning post-psychedelic rock bands like Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and the Strawbs. Progressive bands like Jethro Tull, Traffic and Gryphon incorporated folk and medieval music into their high prog style.

Historically, though, metal and folk have rarely found much common ground, though on early Black Sabbath tracks like Spiral Architect you can hear some folky inflections creeping in.

Until the 80s and 90s there are scant examples of folk metal: there was the novelty 1970 hit Jig A Jig by East Of Eden, there’s Thin Lizzy’s Whiskey in The Jar, and there’s the work of a relatively obscure but brilliant Irish heavy rock band called Horslips, particularly their 1973 concept album The Tain (based upon Táin Bo Cuailgne or The Cattle Raid of Cooley, a heroic tale of ancient Ulster).

The first important folk metal works came from another unfairly neglected band, Britain’s own pagan thrashers Skyclad and of course Sweden’s Bathory. Skyclad’s Wayward Sons of Mother Earth and Bathory’s Blood Fire Death pretty much wrote the book in terms of the musical blueprint and the lyrical themes that folk metal adopted. Later bands, inspired by the Viking metal of Bathory, discovered a purer folk sound and bands outside of Scandinavia incorporated their own folk culture into the lyrics and imagery that they employ.

In an increasingly homogenised and globalised world, nationalism is on the rise. Sometimes that takes the form of a backward looking romanticised view of the past that sometimes spills over into xenophobia, and outright fascism and racism. Sometimes, as in Scotland for example, it’s an inclusive nationalism that celebrates the things that make each nation and people unique. But for good or ill, everyone is seeking a sense of identity and folk metal, both in its positive and negative manifestations, is a symptom of this.

THE FOLKS THAT WE KNOW

THYRFING

FORMED 10 years ago, ostensibly as a side project by Pantheon members Patrik Lindgren (guitar) and Jocke Kristensson, Thyrfing began as a rather terrible synth-led pomp band, with pseudo-mediaeval keyboard flourishes supposedly creating a dark age atmosphere. It wasn’t until their 2002 album Vansinnesvisor (which translates as “tales of madness”) with its songs – sung in Swedish – and using odd instruments like the keyed fiddle and home-made percussion, that they succeeded in creating something that genuinely sounded like the sort of metal that actual Vikings might have played. Steeped in the lore and imagery of the ancient Norse culture, Thyrfing were erroneously accused in the Swedish media of having connections with the country’s small but growing neo-Nazi movement.

“There was a witch-hunt in the media to this topic,” says Patrik. “We have absolutely nothing to do with the Nazi scene or their ideology. Some idiots will ask you whether you are a racist if they see the hammer hanging on your neck. Such pathetic questions are a pain in the ass.”

Fiercely nationalistic, they resent the fact that the neo-Nazi appropriation of symbols like the sub-cross and the runes have tainted on the whole legacy of the ancient Norse culture.

Having just signed to Regain records, there will be a new album from Thyrfing later this year.

GLITTERTIND

Glittertind – named after Norway’s second highest mountain – is essentially a one man band, consisting of 20 year old Torbjørn Sandvik. It’s a one man show because as he says. “It was difficult to find others who would be dedicated to a type of music which mixes metal, punk and Nordic folk-music.” Inspired by Finntroll on one hand and the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly on the other, Torbjørn set about recording an album that wasn’t so much Viking metal as Viking punk. Evige Asatro, released last year, is an amazing blend of high energy punk and metal with of folkish melodies. Sung entirely in Norwegian, it celebrates the old pagan culture that was destroyed by Christianity. Like Thyrfing, Torbjørn is at pains to distance his brand of viking-centric Norwegian nationalism/anti-globalism from the bonehead fascists. “This question comes up from time to time, so let’s set the record straight: even though Glittertind holds Nordic heritage high, this does not mean other cultures or histories are inferior, this behaviour often linked to racism is not Glittertind’s point of view.”

Currently working on the follow up to Evige Asatro (which was actually recorded in 2002, he expects it to be released later this year.

MOONSORROW

FORMED in 1995 by the Sorvali cousins Henri (aka Trollhorn of Finntroll) and Ville to create their own folkish pagan themed metal, Moonsorrow are sometimes lumped in with the sub-sub-genre of Forest Metal which is like folk metal except all the songs are about forests and nature. Certainly on their new album Verisäkeet it is forest sounds that provided the ambient background to their grim, mournful Viking folk ballads. Mysterious, moody and doom laden, they are the opposite end of folk metal to the more frenetic Finntroll.

“We’re influenced by lots of things,” says Ville. ”We listen to a lot of progressive rock, but also film soundtracks, films influence us and of course Finnish history, mythology, nature have a large influence. Our roots have their very specific influence on us, both in music and otherwise. We are Finns and we are proud of our origin.”

Unlike many bands who sing in English to gain acceptance abroad, they remain true to their roots by singing in Swedish (which is spoken by most Finns) which gives the songs a really alien quality because it is such an unfamiliar language.

KORPIKLAANI

“KORPIKLAANI’s music is very Finnish and the band does not fear to be labelled ‘yokels’, living as they do in the middle of the forest,” their biography says. Like fellow Finns Moonsorrow, they are sometimes tagged as Forest Metal (Hell, the name translates into English as Forest Family or Clan). Finntroll take traditional Finnish songs and play them with a metal “twist” though employing a full array of distinctly non-metal instruments such as accordions, fiddles and penny whistles. More than any band here they evoke a Heathen pathos on one hand and a joyous sense of celebration with their ‘humppa’ derived dance tunes. They are brilliant but quite mad.

FINNTROLL

Crazy name, crazy guys, you know the score: ancient weapons, oddball instruments, songs about Trolls and battles. They sing in Swedish – despite being Finnish – and they sound like nothing on Earth. A polka-band at a Polish wedding playing Darkthrone tunes? Nutters.

CRUACHAN

Irish band who straddle the world of Celtic music and mythology with black metal also incorporating complex quasi-classical/prog pieces, and medieval music. Their recent is the more satisfactory than their earlier stuff, moving away from black metal to a more mainstream sound.

WAYLANDER

Another Irish band, though despite having some surface folkish elements – their trademark is a penny-whistle intro – they are much more of a straight ahead metal band.

ELVENKING

Italian power metallers who incorporate folkish/Celtic music into their bombastic power metal. They also plunder pagan iconography such as the green man on the sleeve of their 2004 album Wyrd.

SUIDAKRA

German band Suidakra would dearly love to be Irish as you can hear on any of their three excellent melodic black metal albums. They play Irish folk music as only Germans can. It may be easily mocked but it works.

TUATHA DE DANANN

Despite the name that evokes the land o’ the wee folk and the fair Coleens, this lot are actually a Brazilian power metal combo who seem to have overdosed on Enya records.

TYR

Danish band named after the Germanic god Tyr (known in Norse mythology as Thor and in Finnish as Turisas). Formed in 1997, they are probably the only band ever to incorporate the traditional music of the Faroe Islands into metal.

Filed under: Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, bathory, battle netal, finntroll, folk metal, glittertind, humppa, moonsorrow, skyclad, tyr, viking metal

ART OF DARKNESS – THE GROSSEST ALBUM COVERS IN METAL

Originally published in Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music.

AS a veteran of the most extreme manifestations of all things metal, Hammer prides itself on being hard to shock and even harder to nauseate. That changed a couple of years ago with the release of an album by US grindcore outfit Cattle Decapitation called Humanure. The cover was a painting by Wes Benscoter of a cow shitting out human remains, the face and torso still visible in the heap of excrement. We’ve seen albums that depict DIY surgery, demon rape, grossly mutated sexual organs and acts of barbarism so foul that we dare not describe them and merely sighed and chucked them on the pile to be reviewed or – more likely – used as Frisbees. But somehow that sleeve was the one that had us retching our lunch away. If they set out to make people barf then they succeeded wonderfully.

Strangely enough, the band thought twice about the cover and when their label Metal Blade gave them the option of changing the sleeve (Hammer had been sent an early promo) on the grounds that they would find it impossible to have it stocked in any record store anywhere, they chose to do so.

Cattle Decapitation are all militant vegans, and the sleeve was actually making an unsubtle point about the consumption of animals, turning the food cycle around by having the cow eating man.

“We didn’t want the sleeve to gross people out. We think our music and our lyrics do a good enough job of that already,” singer Travis Ryan told Hammer. ”But we were getting complaints that people couldn’t find the album in the shops and that’s exactly why we signed with Metal Blade in the first place.”

METAL album sleeves have offended since day one. Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut featured an inverted crucifix inside, something that raised the hackles of the great and the good eager to save our youth from the forces of darkness. Strangely enough, though, it also managed to piss off the band as well. “We had no say as to what went on the cover,” says Tony Iommi. “It was all down to the label. People keep asking us who the girl on the front cover is and I have to tell them to this day that I have no idea.”

The washed out picture is credited to Marcus Keef, the in-house designer at their label Vertigo records and was actually taken at Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames. The girl on the cover was supposedly an  actress hired for the shoot who later met the band long after the album had been released. The image suggested a witch or a ghost and further reinforced the bands’ links to the occult. Alex Sanders, Britain’s self-styled King Of The Witches, attended several Sabbath gigs and tried to get them to attend his covens supposedly on the strength of the cover alone. Marcus Keef also designed the sleeve for ‘Paranoid’ [which was originally to have been called ‘War Pigs’ hence the blurred picture of the bloke in the crash helmet waving the sword which graced the cover] as well as a poster included with ‘Master Of Reality’.

Although it was all a bit of a happy accident, Sabbath’s first album is one of the few where the sleeve actually looks like the music sounds: malevolent in a way you can’t define, vaguely hallucinatory, the stuff of uncomfortable nightmares. But it wasn’t until the release of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ with its skulls and demons that they got one again that you could argue was at all appropriate to the way that they sounded.

Early metal bands, in fact went through the same corporate cookie cutter as every other band be they prog, pop, soul or even easy listening middle of the road. Usually the record company’s idea of a great sleeve was a cheesy band shot or – worse – one of those vaguely surreal concept photos typically produced by the design partnership Hypgnosis. It wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s that a definite metal style emerged, artwork for album covers, t-shirts and posters that actually gave you some idea of what the band sounded like. It was art that looked as heavy and evil as the music sounded.

The inspiration came from horror comics, science fiction and fantasy art, medieval engravings of demons and devils, the great mad renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch and cheesy porno. More often than not these ingredients were all blended together into a ridiculous whole.

Early metal sleeves came under attack from feminists, and sometimes not without good reason. In This Is Spinal Tap the band are told that their sleeve for Smell the Glove is sexist and won’t be used to which they reply ”Great, we want a sexy sleeve.” In real life, German mullet-haired metal merchants The Scorpions had the artwork for their 1976 album ‘Virgin Killer’ pulled. The sleeve depicted a naked pre-pubescent girl, with what looks like a crack in the glass of a frame obscuring her crotch. It’s a creepy sleeve not least because we can now see that it’s a piece of child pornography and while for most of us it’s hopefully going to be our only exposure to it, for some it may only be their first. There’s still some debate as to what was going on in the minds of the band at the time: some suggest that it was once again the record label pushing them through blatant controversy. If that’s the case it backfired and The Scorpions became successful in spite of the sleeve and not because of it. Whatever the reasons the sleeve was pulled in many countries and the original is now a much sought after collector’s item.

Iron Maiden were one of the first bands whose album and singles cover art had a kind of consistency, an identifiable logo and a style of their own. Maiden’s early art by Derek Riggs was raw and juvenile. They also weren’t above inventing ‘controversy’ for publicity reasons, such as the cover of ‘women in uniform’ which depicts Margaret Thatcher getting stabbed by Eddie. Maiden’s covers are too silly to be truly evil, but Riggs’ apocalyptic horror comic style was to have a big influence on later, more extreme bands.

With the emergence of more extreme music in the 80s, a new and more extreme sort of image was needed to package it in. Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ depicts Hell as a knock off of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights (a painting that has graced many a black metal and death metal album cover, incidentally) but the truly diabolical sleeve was that of ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ which depicted the Slayer logo set in a fascist-style eagle, that seemed to confirm all those rumours about their alleged Nazi connections. Of course they shook it off with the usual “what, us Nazis?” how dare you comments.

But the most Satanic and evil sleeve of that decade wasn’t actually a metal band, it was the much banned 1985 album ‘Frankenchrist’ by The Dead Kennedys which featured the painting Landscape XX, or Penis Landscape by the visionary Swiss artist HR Giger. Giger is probably best known for having designed the exomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien. He had designed album covers for prog bands like ELP (‘Brain Salad Surgery’) and Magma (‘Attahk’) but they were comparatively anodyne. Giger’s style is to blend organic and mechanical forms in a realistic and disturbing way. Landscape XX depicted rows and rows of erect penises inserted into disembodied vaginas. It wasn’t so much pornographic as anti-pornographic: having looked at it and figured out what was going on, you really didn’t feel like shagging for a while. The band was sued and charged with distributing harmful matter to minors. They eventually won the case, but singer Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label was almost driven to bankruptcy.

Giger’s Satanic imagery is said to derive from vivid nightmares that he has suffered from all of his life. His work has always been a major inspiration for the more Satanically inclined metallers. Celtic Frost, Danzig and Attrocity have all used his paintings on album covers and those that can’t afford Giggler often plump for the many imitators that he has spawned.

But while Giger’s art is – regardless of its subject matter – beautifully executed and technically brilliant, the same can’t be said for the visceral nightmares that began to grace the sleeves of bands like Carcass, Cannibal Corpse and Anal Cunt.

As befits a band with songs like ‘Skull Full Of Maggots’ and ‘Born In A Casket’, the art for Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Butchered At Birth’ featured cover art by Vincent Locke (of Dead World Comics fame). It shows two skeletal zombie surgeons performing a gory abortion on a corpse while all around them there are dead foetuses and the skeletons of new-born babies hanging from the walls. Although we are inured to this sort of thing, when they arrived in the early 90s they were probably the grossest things many of us had ever seen. The records still can’t be stocked to this day in Germany in the original sleeves.

This sort of painting harks back to the gory glory days of the uncensored American horror comics of the 1950s such as Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror which eventually became so extreme that there was a backlash against them leading to the comics industry adopting a voluntary code of practice and effectively castrating comics for the next 30 years.

It’s kind of hard to tell people who are shocked by these images that they are actually very funny: sure, it’s dark humour and arguably it’s sick humour but it’s so over the top that it can only be a joke.

Humour, though, can land you in court. When Cradle Of Filth produced their first batch of Jesus Is A Cunt t-shirts, they knew that they would be controversial. Even a decade on there are still hapless teens in out of the way towns getting arrested for wearing them. Oddly, nobody seemed offended by the masturbating nun on the front. It was the logo on the back that got punters into trouble the world over. The t-shirt was condemned by the Catholic League of New York and the Lord Provost of Glasgow, subsequently forcing record shops to take them off their shelves, thereby making it the most sought-after and bootlegged t-shirts in the country.

Christians, despite their unwarranted power in the US politics, are really a soft target and easily offended. And they are fun to offend. You can hardly begin to count the number of ‘blasphemous’ album covers and t-shirts that proliferate in the murky depths of the extreme metal underground. One personal favourite is Christian Death’s ‘Sex And Drugs And Jesus Christ’ which features a junkie Jesus injecting heroin. Marilyn Manson’s ‘Holywood’ depicts him in a crucifixion pose which offended many of the groups whose sole reason for existence seems to be to get offended by Marilyn Manson. Even here in the arguably more secular UK, the fly posters for the album generated a small scale campaign by evangelical types to rip them down and deface them with stickers exhorting us to go to their church.

Interestingly, however, most bands stick with poking fun at Christians. Other faiths, as we now know, won’t exactly take it quite so calmly. Hammer has often quizzed bands who make a big display of how anti-Christian they are why they don’t have a pop at, say, Islam. Why don’t we see t shirts proclaiming that The Prophet Mohammed Is A Cunt or – worse – a pig? Who will be the first band to depict the Prophet on the sleeve of one of their CDs (he doesn’t have to be doing anything: depicting him is enough)? The answer is probably never.

Some bands have said that they would draw the line at attacking Islam because they are not racists (though Muslims are not a race) and that they will only attack things within their own culture. All admit that they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives sharing a hidey-hole with a Danish cartoonist.

Extreme evil art these days is confined to the underground, partly because it has become a bit cheesy but also because of the commercial might of chainstores such as Wal Mart in the US. When Nirvana released ‘In Utero’, whose sleeve depicted a vitrified female corpse displayed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington (wings added by Kurt) the chain decided that they would not stock it as they found it offensive. Nirvana relented and issued it in a different sleeve for Wal Mart because as Kurt Cobain explained, when he was growing up that was the only place that you could buy records.

Wal Mart is notoriously puritan and since they account for millions of sales, artists and labels are only too willing to tailor their product to accommodate them.

As the standards by which we define extreme music shift, so too the power of images to shock is diluted. Every day Hammer receives envelopes full of albums by black metal and death metal bands from countries that you’ve never heard of and many of those have artwork that depicts mutilations, plates of viscera, gory killings and senseless torture. Some are mildly amusing but most are just a little bit pathetic.

Most of the artists who really convey an image of evil and terror do so through their stage shows. Gorgoroth, for example, release pretty dull albums in pretty dull packages but their live show complete with flaming torches, crucified groupies and mouldering goats heads on stakes convey a real sense that you have entered Hell.

And despite the controversy over the cover of ‘Holy Wood’, Marilyn Manson never seems link his paintings to his music. Odd, because they are powerful, dark works depicting murder and mutilation, albeit in a less figurative and more abstract way than most common or garden death metal sleeves.

And while Slipknot may serenade serial killers and the like, their albums are always released in packages that are unlikely to upset the apple-cart at the Wal Mart chain.

One of the most shocking images ever to grace an album cover was that on Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 debut. It was a classic news image of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 as a protest against the oppression of Buddhists by the US-backed government of South Vietnam. it’s a powerful image because it’s an image of a real death, a snuff photo if you like. It isn’t there for a sick thrill; there is a point to it, something that becomes apparent in RATM’s politically charged music.

Perhaps because you can now see really gross uncensored images of the war via the internet and increasingly in the mainstream press – real decapitated soldiers, people burned to death in their cars – the power of a painting or a drawing of some gut-dripping zombies doesn’t really have the same effect as it once had.

Where can the imagery of evil go next? We shudder to think.

Filed under: Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, album sleeves, art, evil, Frankenchrist, gross art, HR Giger