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

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

The Meads Of Asphodel

They are the most important English black metal band of the past 10  years. I fucking love ‘em! This was an interview done in 2004 for Subterranea.

CHRIST: THE ALBUM

“JESUS,” says Meads Of Asphodel singer/founder/guiding light Metatron, “was a real person. No doubt about it. Except he wasn’t called Jesus because they didn’t have the letter ‘j’ back then. It would have been something like Yeshua. But he was a real person. The fact that he gets worshipped here as a God is mad. He’s not our God, he was a Jewish messiah, their God-Man. He came to save the Jews. He had nothing to do with the West. It was Paul who buggered off to Rome and started the religion and that’s how Christianity got started. From a load of old bollocks, really.”

Metatron is explaining that the next Meads Of Asphodel album will be a concept album called The Passion And Death Of Ioseus about the big JC, an album that he has been planning to do for years.

“It will be about Jesus the man,” he says, “I have my own theories about him.”

Such as?

“I think that he was a Zealot. He came to claim his right to the throne of Israel. He upset the Romans and they nailed him up for it. And nobody rose up because they were scared of the Romans. I mean there never was a crueller race. Hitler only had 20 years but the Romans were at it for fucking ages.”

The Meads Of Asphodel are not a band who think small. On all of their three full length albums and particularly on their latest Damascus Steel they have explored the pernicious influence of all of the Religions Of The Book – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – on world history. Except there’s none of the usual black metal fuck-Christ-hail-Satan bollocks that lesser bands employ as a shock tactic. You can tell that Metatron actually has an idea of what he’s talking about. The debut album The Excommunication of Christ “revolves around the basic concept that Jesus was a mortal man and in no way a demigod. The Christian faith is built upon the resurrection and thus built upon a lie.” The follow up Exhuming the Grave of Yeshua continued the theme, particularly on songs like God Is Rome and A Healer Made God where Christ’s voice says: “I was a preacher of peace/ A healer of the sick/ Just look at me now/ I never wanted this shit/ I’m a God on a cross.”

Damascus Steel is riddled withs theme of Holy War: it starts with George W Bush invoking God in his mission in the middle east like a Crusader of old.

“He’s thrown Christianity into the whole Islamic world, which is madness,” says an outraged Metatron.

The album is shot through with the fallout of the post 9-11 world which now so resembles the era of the Crusades from whence the armour clad Meads draw much of their inspiration. As one of the few bands who are critical of Islam, are the ever the targets of religious extremists?

“No,” he says adamantly, “We’re not out to offend anyone. If we were there’s a lot of stuff that we could do that would be really really offensive but no, we’re just saying what we feel about religion. Islam is where Christianity was at the time of the Crusades. You know, call a Crusade and millions go and die: the Pope announces that all their sins will be forgiven. And that’s where Islam is now. If in another 500 years we haven’t blown ourselves up, then Islam will cease to be as influential as Christianity has ceased to be today.”  

The Meads are one of Britain’s most enigmatic underground bands. Never photographed without their masks and chain mail, they are completely open about everything on the phone but reluctant to do interviews face to face and keep their identity a closely guarded secret. They have never played live as a band – though they have all played live with other bands – though things are afoot.

“We don’t want to do a Therion. I saw them and loved every minute but we want to project this whole Hawkwind vibe projecting this image of everything that we’re about. We’d want to play with the sitar players and tabla players, not to backing tapes. It would be very difficult: we couldn’t wear the armour. I’ve seen some bands do it but they don’t look very well at the end of the gig.”

Although the core members of The Meads Of Asphodel is a masked and armoured three piece – Metatron, J.D Tait the master song- smith and musician, and drummer Urakbarameel – there is a floating pool of associates such as Hawkwind bassist Alan Davey, Mirai [of cult Japanese band Sigh], Max [from electro goth band History of Guns], Huw Lloyd Langton [also from Hawkwind], Alisa Coral [from Russian space rock band Space Mirrors who plays Theremin], the Gnesh Brothers [on sitar and tabla], plus various musicians contributing  violin, trumpet and female vocals all contributing to Damascus Steel.

“This was a really easy album to do,” asserts Metatron. “Everything came together, particularly the Louis Armstrong cover.”

Yes, that’s right. Old Satchmo’s syrupy 1968 hit Wonderful World has been reworked as a portrait of a world in chaos. The original line “I see skies of blue and clouds of white/ The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night/ And I think to myself what a wonderful world” is reworked as “I see ethnic cleansing/ Pain beyond belief/ Whole nations murdered/ Sorrow and grief/ And I think to myself what a wonderful world”

“A lot of people have asked if we’re taking the piss but we’re not at all,”  says, “ It was a really fresh and natural thing. We’re very pleased. We wanted it to split the album in two. Every time we’ve heard that song, it’s often used as an ironic intro to films about war but nobody’s ever done anything with the lyrics before. For years and years I’ve had it in my head. I’ve been working on the lyrics for seven or eight years ad one day I put the last verse to it and I was so happy. If we offend anyone, great. If we make them laugh, even better. If you want misery go and listen to a Cannibal Corpse album.”

Musically this is one of the most expansive albums that the band have made. As well as the black metal backbone in their sound there are snatches of Middle Eastern, Indian and even jazz drifting in and out. They use samples, weird instruments like the ghostly-sounding theremin, organ and brass. On the next album, Martin Walkyrie of Skyclad may be involved. Their artistic ambition knows no bounds though the more sordid business side of things is about to undergo some changes. Every Meads album has been done for less than a couple of grand and released through cult black metal label Supernal, though the band are in discussions with other labels at the moment.

“Obviously the people playing on the records haven’t got a lot of money out of it, so we’ve been helped a lot by them. Supernal is an underground label and it has, given us that underground cred but the bands on the label are so ultra underground that we can only go so far with them. The next step is to find somebody who can get us into the US and Europe. I mean we get mail from all over the world. How they get hold of our stuff is beyond me.”

Through their association with Supernal and their T-shirt slogan English Fucking Black Metal, there’s a perception that they are in some way the offspring of Bathory.

“When you say black metal you’re always going to think of Darkthrone, Emperor, Burzum…the Norwegians basically own it. I don’t think we’re a black metal band in the music, but lyrically, yeah. I think we’re space rock black metal. We’re not one of those bands who start moaning ‘don’t pigeonhole us’. We’d rather be pigeonholed somewhere than nowhere. You’ve got to be something.”

Is it important that the Meads Of Asphodel remain enigmatic and keep the helmets on?

“Oh yes,” he says without any hesitation. “It’s certainly not egotistical…if it was we wouldn’t need the helmets. Playing live, it may be a bit difficult to conceal our identities. We’d either be dripping in sweat or we’d all look like the drummer from Samson. And that would be awful.”

Filed under: Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, black metal, english black metal, hawkwind

Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral

This re-evaluation of The Downward Spiral was written for a 2006 Metal Hammer special on 90s music. This is, for me, an album that’s every bit as important as Highway 61 Revisited, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Bitches Brew, Master Of Reality, For Your Pleasure, Low, Closer, The Correct Use Of Soap and just about any other undisputed classics you care to mention.

In 1997, Trent Reznor was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people, sharing the honor with the cartoon character Dilbert and then US Secretary of State Madeline Albright. He was called “the anti-Bon Jovi” by Time. His “vulnerable vocals and accessible lyrics led an Industrial revolution: He gave the gloomy genre a human heart…Reznor’s music is filthy, brutish stuff, oozing with aberrant sex, suicidal melancholy and violent misanthropy. But to the depressed, his music … proffers pop’s perpetual message of hope: There is worse pain in the world than yours. It is a lesson as old as Robert Johnson‘s blues.” 

Reznor was the latest in a long line of brooding, dark romantic figures that included David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was also an overlooked recording genius, a studio nerd who pioneered a polished, aggressive hard rock sound that is still ubiquitous today.

He seemed an unlikely icon before and an even less credible one today. He’s still a figure of some importance and influence, yet the idea that he was perceived as the spokesman for generation x now seems faintly ludicrous.

Perhaps this is because he is now perceived as the Svengali behind Marilyn Manson, the puppet master who lost control of his creation. And for all his spikiness and the threat to the American way of life that he represents, Manson is more easily digested on MTV than Reznor ever was.

Throughout the 90s Reznor transcended genres and tribes: he appealed to goths because of his emaciated, pale demeanour; he appealed to fledgeling nu metalheads who loved the abrasive guitars and in your face beats; he appealed to ‘cyberpunk’ types who read Wired because it seemed that he seemed to be orchestrating the bleak future world of frazzled tech depicted by William Gibson in Neuromancer. Before the rise of his protégé Marilyn Manson,he was the USA’s most popular nihilist. This reputation rested largely on his masterpiece, the sprawling black hole of despair that was The Downward Spiral. 

Even today you can listen to The Downward Spiral and still discover things that you had never heard before. It’s almost as if the album has kept on growing and changing, updating itself between plays.

The first Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine, recorded in 1988, was essentially an electronic work heavily influenced by Skinny Puppy, Ministry and Depeche Mode, with Reznor as one man band, creating all the songs and sounds in the studio. The abrasive follow up (of sorts) Broken introduced distorted guitars and a hard rock sensibility. These largely appealed to a cult market, the still-thriving industrial underground. But by the time he made The Downward Spiral in 1994, the ‘mainstream’ of hard rock – under the influence of everyone from Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana to post-‘black album’ Metallica – was moving towards where Trent Reznor had already staked out his territory. 

In 1992 Reznor moved to Los Angeles. He had just signed a deal with Interscope that gave him the artistic freedom that he needed to work on his third album. He wanted a property where he could set up his own recording studio.

The Downward Spiral was one of the first albums to be recorded entirely using state of the art digital technology whereby sounds were recorded and stored on a computer hard drive rather than on magnetic tape. They could then be digitally altered – adding effects, reverb or taking such effects off and cleaning the sound up where necessary – rather than just putting the band in the studio, recording the instruments and mixing it together.

The beauty of digital recording is that it can really be done anywhere. The location Trent wanted had to be sufficiently isolated but large enough to accommodate the gear and any collaborators like producer Flood and his main collaborator/assistant drummer Chris Vrenna, whose job was to sift through hundreds of videos for samples to be used on the album. He found a house to rent in the Hollywood Hills, a ranch style bungalow on Cielo Drive. It’s a beautiful, picturesque location, set in the real super-rich Los Angeles populated by movie executives, actresses and musicians. The house he rented at 10050 Cielo Drive, Beverly Hills had had some famous tenants in the past, most notably maverick Polish film director Roman Polanski his beautiful young wife actress Sharon Tate.

One sultry night in August 1969 while the heavily pregnant Sharon and her friends were turning in for the night, a group of hippies broke in. In the space of an hour Sharon watched as her friends Abagail Folger, Jay Sebring and Voytek Frykowski were slaughtered in front of her. Then they killed Sharon, ripping the unborn baby boy from her womb. She was alive to see this. They wrote in her blood the words ‘Pig’ and ‘Healter Skelter’ (sic) on the walls and on the door.

Trent had moved into the house made famous by the so-called Manson murders.

“It’s a coincidence,” he told Rolling Stone at the time. “When I found out what it was, it was even cooler.”

Later, he admitted that he had in fact deliberately chosen the location for the bad vibes but regretted this after a meeting with Sharon Tate’s sister Doris.

At the time they were recording in the house, Vrenna and Reznor nicknamed the studio ‘le pig’, alluding to the word ‘pig’ scrawled on the wall in Sharon Tate’s blood by killer Susan Atkins. One of the strongest tracks on the album was also March Of The Pigs, though Reznor denied that there  was any connection between this and Charles Manson. 

Reznor had been listening to a lot of David Bowie and the influence of Hunky Dory, the 1971 album where he attempted to redefine the way that pop songs were written, had percolated through. Bowie had tried to break away from the traditional verse/chorus/middle eighth/repeat structure of songwriting on that album, something that greatly appealed to Reznor.

While The Downward Spiral was not planned as a concept album, there are linking themes and recurring motifs in the songs. He had been keeping notes on his inner state since his chaotic booze and chemical fuelled stint on Lolopolooza. This provided the conceptual backbone for the songs: “It is personal experiences, but it’s wrapped up in the highly pretentious idea of a record with some sort of theme or flow to ‘em, and it was meant to be…It’s become a kind of a dated 70s concept, but some of the records that influenced me a lot on this album, like [David Bowie’s] Low and even The Wall – I’m sure I’m ripping off Pink Floyd, in fact, I know I am ripping them off. There’s records, although they may appear dated today, that try to do things that are more exciting to me than, ‘Here’s my video track and here’s my dance song and here’s my power ballad.’ All that kind of disposability. It was just me bored, trying to come up with something that I kind of wanted to set the parameters to work within, to focus more.” 

The expectations for The Downward Spiral were almost crippling. Pretty Hate Machine and Broken had – in a sense – both been produced in secret. But the constant pressure from fans, admirers and other bands asking when the new album was out, how it was going, what it would be like, what the songs would be, what colour the cover would be, started to take their toll.

The album was more of a struggle to make than he realised it would be. The original intention had been to make the album quickly. Reznor cited the example of Nirvana who had gone into the studio and made Nevermind in two weeks. But the process was different for him and soon his new record company Interscope were expressing ‘concern’ at the time that album seemed to be taking to make.

Reznor and Marilyn Manson had started to hang out together, Trent was determined that he would sign Manson to his own Nothing imprint. But aside from the music, the two also shared an interest in LA’s seamier side. As Manson recalled in his book The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, much of their time together was spent hunting groupies, indulging in strange sex and getting wasted. The stories of depravity that emerged from the sessions are legendary and not always repeatable for reasons of legality and taste. Suffice to say that Reznor even looked debauched, like some mildly bloated Byronic figure, or Jim Morrison after the booze and drugs had started to ravage his looks.

But Reznor survived. He later said: “I just wanted to kill myself. I hated music. I was like, ‘I just want to get back on the road because I hate sitting in a room trying to, trying to’ –how do you say this?—‘just scraping my fucking soul.’ Exploring areas of your brain that you don’t want to go to, that’s painful. You write something down and you go, ‘Fuck, I can’t say that. I don’t want people to know that.’ It’s so naked and honest that you’re scared to let it out. You’re giving a part of your soul away, exposing part of yourself. I avoid that. I hate that feeling of sending a tape out to someone: ‘Here’s my new song. I just cut my soul open. Check it out. Criticize it’.”

Reznor wanted to finish the album and get the Hell out of LA and back on the road.

“That’s the stupidest fucking reason for doing an album I’ve ever heard,” American recordings boss Rick Rubin told Trent when they ran into each other. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it until you make music that it’s a crime not to let other people hear.”

Somehow shaken by Rubin’s advice, Reznor knuckled under and – taking time out to work with Manson – delivered the finished album almost a year after he had started work. The flurry of writing and recording produced 16 songs and some leftovers that would crop up on b-sides, or would be reworked as material for remixes for Nine Inch Nails as well as other artists.

The songs were like frontline reports from the battlefield of Trent Reznor’s psyche. That they were classic songs of negativity, angst, despair and hatred would come as no surprise. But Reznor’s voice – previously heard only through a bank of distortion and FX screaming in mute nostril agony – was transformed, seductive and even sweet. From the deceptively quiet intro to Mr Self Destruct, through the piano melody on March Of The Pigs to the grandiose almost-pop of Closer, to the tenderness in the hate-ballad Piggy, it was clear that The Downward Spiral was an album with light and shade, with blended colours rather than just blocks of bold primary hues.  There was enough of the cyber jackbeat on Heresy and the intense title track itself that connected Reznor to his earlier work and still had him filed under ‘Industrial’. But the truth is that he wasn’t so much part of a different genre as an entirely new game altogether.

Attempting to recreate the same sense of ‘masterpiece’ about The Fragile, Reznor succeeded in making a great album that could only be listened to in small doses: in The Downward Spiral he made something magnificent that took you on a journey all the way to the heart of darkness. 

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Industrial music, Interscope, March Of The Pigs, Marilyn Manson, NIN, Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor

Metal movies

This was a piece written for a 2007 Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music. Despite what is written in the piece, I’ve subsequently discovered that LaVey did not in fact play the devil in the Rosemary’s Baby rape scene, it was in factr actor Clay Tanner.

THEY say that the devil has all the best tunes. He also has a lot of the best movies. If metal is the devil’s music then what are the devil’s films? How do we define what constitutes a heavy metal movie?

There’s a scene in The Terminator when Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) being pursued by the relentless cyborg from the future (Arnold Schwarzenegger) takes refuge in a Los Angeles industrial metal club called Tech Noir. It looks like the best club on the planet: chain link fences inside, where heavy looking pseudo-bikers and urban Vikings grope and grapple with mohicaned cyber-sluts all to a pounding 80s hair metal soundtrack. It’s all filmed through a blue tinted filter and the neon seems to leap out of the screen at you. To those who hate metal, it looks like Hell has opened up a theme bar here on Earth. It is an evil place: you can imagine that even if Arnold doesn’t walk in and start blasting at her, there are a lot of other pretty nasty things that could happen to Sarah at the hands of these depraved drug crazed leather clad barbarians.

The Terminator is a heavy metal movie: literally, since the character of the title is made of titanium with a fleshy outer coating. It’s not a film about heavy metal and the soundtrack is fairly typical 80s pop-techno, but the overall look and feel of the movie, the pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles city of night, Arnold in his stolen leathers, the gleaming skeletal creature revealed at the end, is pure metal. Even the plot could have been lifted from a Judas Priest album.

The relationship between metal and the movies – particularly horror and dark sci fi – has always been a two way street, though in the beginning it was really only the bands who took their inspiration from the big screen.

Flashback to Birmingham in the late 60s when a local blues band called Earth had a gig cancelled on them because they were apparently mistaken for a better known pop combo of the same name. They decided that once and for all the had to come up with a better name. As if in answer to their prayers, a film called Black Sabbath was playing at the cinema across the road from where they were rehearsing. They decided there and then to call themselves Black Sabbath because, according to Geezer Butler, “no other fucker in the world would have a name like that.”

Evidence suggests, however, that they never actually saw the film. A shame, though they have also gone on record as having said that they were so scared after seeing The Exorcist that they all slept together in the same room. Black Sabbath, originally entitled I Tre volti della paura [The Three Faces Of Fear], was a 1963 Italian film by horror supremo Mario Bava that was released in a badly cut and dubbed version in 1969 to cash in on the horror boom sparked off by Britain’s Hammer films. Black Sabbath was a compendium of three horror stories, the most disturbing of which was called The Wurdalak, which starred Boris Karloff as a vampire who feeds off the blood of his own family. It was no classic but it was indicative of the way that the horror movie was going in the 60s, becoming darker and more serious. In fact, the parallels between the new school of horror film and the emergent heavy rock scene were striking. It was a much heavier kind of entertainment. By the 70s, both cinema and hard rock had discovered an unholy interest in Satan and all his works.

In the 50s and early 60s, horror and sci fi movies were almost exclusively done on the cheap and were usually unintentionally hilarious. Screaming women were menaced by men in bad rubber monster suits,crew cut scientists foiled the plots of men from Mars who arrived in flying saucers that looked suspiciously like car hubcaps suspended from thread. But in 1968 Polish director Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby scared the shit out of audiences around the world. The plot involved a conspiracy by modern day Satanists in New York City to bring the son of the devil (played in the film, incidentally, by Church Of Satan founder Anton LaVey) into the world. It was a revolutionary horror film: paranoid, dark, treating its subject matter very seriously. There was a sense that the film was cursed, too, particularly when the Manson family broke into Polanski’s home and slaughtered his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. It was, in the parlance of the time, ‘heavy’. Interest in Satanism boomed. In the late 60s and early 70s there was a spate of Satanic cinematic treats in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby such as Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Race With The Devil, Mephisto Waltz, The Sentinel, The Devil’s Rain, The Devil Rides Out, and, most notably, The Exorcist and The Omen trilogy.

These were not exactly pro-Satanic movies:in the case of The Exorcist and The Omen, they were informed by the worst sort of Christian rabble rousing. The Exorcist involved a case of Satanic possession in modern day Washington DC. The heroes are two Catholic priests, one a Jesuit doubting his faith and the other a veteran exorcist who has no doubts about the reality of the devil despite the fact that the rest of the church regard a personification of Satan as somewhat archaic. William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel and screenplay of The Exorcist, had once considered becoming a Jesuit and entering the priesthood. Despite the shock value that it generated, the film was well received by the Catholic church who had felt themselves to be under attack from the permissive values of the 60s. One priest said that he loved The Exorcist because it would “scare people back to church.”

The Omen draws its source material from the nuttiest Christian fundamentalist interpretations of ‘the last days’ and the Book Of Revelations. The anti-christ is born to a wealthy diplomat. It’s almost like a continuation of Rosemary’s Baby. It spawned three sequels (though the truly dire The Omen IV went straight to video) and has just been the subject of a dreadful remake.

Yet despite the fact that these were in a sense anti-occult films, their success stemmed from the public’s fascination with the supernatural.

Similarly, despite the fact that Black Sabbath were popularly perceived as devil worshippers, very few of their songs have an actual occult theme and those that do – such as After Forever – are actually pro Christian.

As well as Sabbath, though, there were lots of occult-influenced early metal bands in the 70s: Black Widow, who used to perform a fake human sacrifice onstage, Blue Oyster Cult whose upside down ankh logo suggested that they were also a Satanist sect, and Led Zeppelin, who inspired all sorts of underground rumours regarding their involvement in the Left Hand Path of magick. But while the bands may have been inspired by the movies, or were at least riding the wave of interest that they generated, there was little in the way of a metal influence in the films themselves. The characters were usually straight and suburban, the locations were often very square American small towns and the soundtracks were traditional mock-classical ominous music. Maybe the high school kids in Brian DePalma’s teen-horror classic Carrie or John Carpenter’s gory splatterfest Halloween were into mid 70s proto-metal, but they mostly looked and acted like characters from the 50s.

In the 80s, however, a new wave of horror and sci fi started to take its cues from the look and feel of punk and metal. With the rise of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, thrash and MTV and the video culture, there was a more identifiable metal look as well as a sound. The occult and Satanist influence was more overt: while Sabbath always did their best to deny any involvement in the dark arts, new bands like Venom and Slayer revelled in their notoriety.

Early attempts to put metal bands on the screen, such as 1987’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, were pretty poor: it owed more to the high campness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Phantom Of The Paradise than anything else. Alice Cooper’s big screen acting debut Monster Dog, a spectacularly dire Spanish/Puerto Rican film is one of the most awful films ever made. One neglected gem, however, is The Incubus, a trashy Canadian film that features a cameo appearance from Bruce Dickinson, then lead singer with cult NWOBHM band Samson. 

A new type of low-budget horror movie was emerging in the 80s: so called video-nasties like Return Of The Living Dead had killer soundtracks that included the likes of TSOL and The Cramps. They also looked like the album covers of some of these new school metal bands come to life. It seemed that film-makers had at last found out who their target audiences were.

Films like the Mad Max trilogy – particularly the second and third films in the trilogy The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome – were set after a nuclear war and it looked as though the only survivors had been at a Motley Crue show when the bomb dropped. Mohicans, leather, studs and biker boots became the favoured look of these post-apocalyptic anti-heroes and villains. In the wake of the aforementioned scene in Terminator, this whole genre of films – Bronx Warriors, Robocop, Escape From New York – began to be dubbed Tech Noir.

By the 90s, this Tech Noir look and feel had crossed over to the more traditional gothic horror film. The Lost Boys, Hellraiser and, especially, The Crow mixed up characters with punk rock haircuts dressed in fetishistic leather gear with fairly traditional horror movie themes of vampires, demons and vengeful spirits. The Crow is one of the first films to explicitly recognise that large numbers of goths, punks and metal fans are also big horror fans. The Crow of the title Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) in his leather and corpse paint looked like he had just come from an audition with Emperor. The movie’s soundtrack covered the goth spectrum from The Cure to Nine Inch Nails. It was the forerunner for a whole sub-genre of goth movies that also includes director Alex Proyas’s next film Dark City as well as such direct descendants as Underworld, Van Helsing and of course The Matrix.

The big fear at the centre of horror films in the 70s seemed to be that the boogeyman would come and mess up the cosiness of America’s white-bread suburbia, the new school of metal horror was set in a goth neverland, part Blade Runner urban sprawl, part supernatural necropolis. They became less about scaring people and closer in spirit to the action adventure genre, albeit involving vampires,werewolves and similar children of the night. Today’s vampire hunter isn’t a doddering old guy with a stake and a small glass of holy water. He’s going to dress in Rob Halford-like leathers, will carry a machine gun that fires wooden bullets and will shoot holy water out of a high pressure hose. 

The Matrix has been the most important recent film in terms of a metal cinema crossover. Again, it is the look and feel and soul of the film that is heavy metal rather than anything specific about the plot or soundtrack. For no apparent reason, the good guys in The Matrix favour black leather and PVC clothes while the bad guys go for straight two piece suits. Keanu Reeves looks vaguely like Trent Reznor, his long duster coat and shades look was reputedly the real inspiration behind the misfits who went on a rampage at Columbine.

It’s a case of trying to figure out who is imitating who because The Matrix so quickly established itself as a cult that the look, the themes and ideas all started to filter back into metal videos, album art and lyrics. 

But for all the crossover that there is, it’s maybe remarkable how little there has been in other areas. Given their overwhelming influence on heavy rock from day one, you might have expected that the soundtracks of Conan The Barbarian and Lord Of The Rings might have had some input. They are both pretty metal-looking films but the soundtracks are pretty anodyne. Imagine how much better it would have been to have had the battle of Minas Tirith set to something by Slayer rather than the pseudo-classical orchestral pomp that they settled for. Of course, that would really have upset the Tolkein purists. There’s never really been a great metal sword and sorcery film, though many of those movies – Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Lord Of The Rings – have been hugely influential. We hope in future to see one of the members of Turisas sitting on the director’s chair to make the long awaited film of The Mighty Thor. We can but dream… 

Metal had always been one step ahead of cinema in terms of how shocking it could be. Films like Se7en may have been pretty grim stuff for mainstream audiences but they could hardly compare to the deluge viscera contained on a single Cannibal Corpse song or album cover. But as film-making special-effects got more sophisticated, it became possible to show almost anything on screen. And as public tastes became hardened – films like The Exorcist that were pretty shocking in the 70s looked tame 30 years on – so film became more extreme.

There were, perhaps very sound commercial reasons for making the crossover between metal and movies a more solid thing. When director David Lynch cast Marilyn Manson in a cameo as a porn star in Lost Highway and included a few of his songs on the soundtrack – against the express wishes of his one time mentor turned embittered rival Trent Reznor who was supposedly responsible for compiling the music in the film – he caught the wave of his ascent. The soundtrack album became an artefact that even people who didn’t go to see the film would want to own. And when Korn’s Jonathan Davis compiled the soundtrack for Queen Of The Damned, he made an album that was infinitely superior to that prize turkey of a film.

It was inevitable that the lines between cinema and music would blur further when rock stars began to write and direct as well as act and compose soundtracks for films. To be charitable, though, these haven’t always been wildly successful.

Despite the fabulous title, House Of 1000 Corpses never really lived up to all that director Rob Zombie seemed to promise. It’s a slick, rather too-knowing homage to classic slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it was played for laughs and hence singularly failed to cut it as a great horror movie. The follow up The Devil’s Rejects was better,a grindhouse tribute to 70s exploitation cinema, with fewer laughs and more gore.

Glenn Danzig is currently filming Ge Rouge, based upon his voodoo-inspired comic book of the same name. “It’s gonna be a horror movie like you’ve never seen before. There will be a lot of zombies, all kinds of rituals, snake worship, too much to mention,” Danzig told Hammer before the film went into pre—production.

And Marilyn Manson is currently filming Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, a movie based on the creator of Alice In Wonderland that Manson assures us will “redefine the horror genre”. Manson will also appear in the film as Lewis Carroll alongside teen model Lily Cole as Alice and – reportedly – Angelina Jolie as the Red Queen.

And in the darker realms of the metal and cinema underground, we look forward to Harvest Ritual from cult US death metallers Necrophagia’s frontman Killjoy. It will go straight to DVD and will be the most extreme film that you can imagine, he claims.”There will be things in this film that have never been seen on the screen before,” he says.

We await them all with baited breath. 
 
 

TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL METAL FILMS 

THE WICKER MAN [1973] 

Cult Brit horror about pagan human sacrifices on a remote Scottish island. Inspired Iron Maiden’s song of the same name, and Edward Woodward’s cries as he is led away to be burned is much–sampled by death metallers. 

WITCHFINDER GENERAL [1968] 

Fantastic under-rated British movie set during the English Revolution. Puritan fanatic Matthew Hopkins, played by Vincent Price in one of his best ever roles, hunts for heretics. A very big film for doom metallers like Cathedral and Reverend Bizarre 

THE OMEN [1976] 

How many times have you seen a band come onstage to Jerry Goldsmith’s marvellous soundtrack to this li’l devil? The movie itself isn’t really much cop but without it there’s probably the odd band who wouldn’t know what the number of the beast was. 

THE EXORCIST [1973] 

Several death metal grunters have confessed that they really tried to sing like the voice of the demon Pazzuzzu in The Exorcist. The voice, incidentally, belonged to veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge whose fag consumption gave her the sort of growl that would have got her a gig with Deicide. 

ROSEMARY’S BABY [1968] 

Unfortunately you never get to see the baby, though the scene when she looks in horror in the cradle and somebody says: “He has his father’s eyes,” is priceless. Anton LaVey loved this film as it portrayed Satanists as smart, strong and ruthless. 

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE [1974] 

The first proper video nasty, the title basically tells you everything you need to know. Avoid the smug remake; the original will make you puke with fear. 

DRILLER KILLER [1979] 

The film that launched a million grindcore bands, a completely immoral and horrible piece about mindless slaughter for its own sake. How can you not love it? 

DRACULA [1958] 

The first outing for Christopher Lee in the count’s cape, would there be any goths in the world had he not done so? Blood and big bosoms abound. 

THE DEVIL’S RAIN [1975] 

A group of backwoods devil worshippers led by Ernest Borgnine has the power to melt their victims. Quite why they would need to do this is never explained; some great – and again much sampled – black mass scenes. 

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT [1972] 

Two girls go to the big city to see their favourite band BloodLust. Along the way they meet up with the Charlie Manson-like Krug and his gang and end up raped and murdered. Then a bloody path of revenge follows…really nasty.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism

Black Widow – Sabbat bloody Sabbat

This was a Vault piece from Metal Hammer about the pioneering heavy prog band Black Widow. When I was 10 I heard Come To The Sabbat on my uncle Ian’s copy of Fill Your Head With Rock and it made a huge impression upon me. It was to be about another 30 years before I heard it again. I’d love to travel to the parallel universe where the Broadway show actually happened.

ALTHOUGH Black Sabbath are usually credited as being the first band to forge the link between heavy music and ‘satanism’, there are several other more obscure claimants to the title. In fact, in their early days, Sabbath were often confused with a Leicester band called Black Widow. Shock-horror reports in the Sunday papers about ‘LSD-crazed devil worshipping rockers’ used sometimes accused Sabbath of having performed mock human-sacrifices onstage, something that they never did. Black Widow, on the other hand, built their whose stage show around plunging a knife into a naked virgin.

By 1969, the hippy dippy nursery rhyme psychedelic whimsy of Donovan, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and early Pink Floyd was dead. The dying days of hippiedom coincided with a massive revival of interest in the occult. The new face of the hippie dream was the thousand yard stare of Charlie Manson, who declared himself to be Jesuis and the devil, on the cover of Life magazine.From Hammer films and the novels of Dennis Wheatley to the scary black-robed Process Church cult who used to walk around West London, there seemed to be satanists everywhere. Like Sabbath, Black Widow emerged from a moderately successful local pop act called Pesky Gee who wanted to jump onto the ‘underground’ gravy train and were astute enough to latch onto the imagery of the ‘dark side’.

The stage show (choreographed by members of Leicester’s Phoenix Theatre Company) featured the mock sacrifice of a nude woman, which predictably had the tabloid hacks queueing around the block in search of a story. The band were also reputedly taking advice from self styled “king of the witches” Alex Sanders.

The band were snapped up by CBS and their debut album ‘Sacrifice’ was rushed out in 1970.

“We had a lot of bad luck,” says flautist/sax player Clive Jones who now runs a management company. “CBS released it on the same day as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ [one of the biggest and fastest selling albums of the 70s].”

The pressing plants were working overtime on the soft rock classic and consequently very few copies of ‘Sacrifice’ actually made the shops.

Despite all the tabloid notoriety, it barely scraped the lower reaches of the album chart – though the inclusion of ‘Come To The Sabbat’ on the budget double compilation ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’ helped to spread its unholy word.

The Sabbath/Widow confusion was exacerbated by the fact that both bands shared the same management. But anyone who was looking for a Sabbath knock-off would either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised. 

Although the name Black Widow is such a quintessentially perfect heavy metal name, the actual sound was more in keeping with the emergent progressive rock. Heavy organ-led songs full of jazz structures, folky melodies and unconventional instrumentation – violins, flutes, ‘primitive’ drums – gave it a flavour that was closer to bands like Jethro Tull than to Sabbath.

One track, however, stood out: ‘Come To The Sabbat’ started with ritualistic drumming and chants, launched into a song about a quest for knowledge, before hitting us with one of the most chilling ‘choruses’ of all time. “Come, come, come to the sabbat/come to the sabbat/satan’s there” is intoned over a stark drum, building up into a frenzy. Tame stuff these days, but back in 1969 it must have been enough to have the priests round to exorcise the place.

The band made two more albums but dropped the occult theme in an attempt to reach a wider audience.

According to Clive Jones, this was a central split in the band with two of the members wanting to go ‘mainstream’ and the others wanting to stick to the occult themed show.

Various projects – such as an attempt to take their stage act to Broadway – failed to materialise and the band split up after recording a fourth album – never released at the time – without anyone really noticing.

That might have been the end of the story were it not for the fact that there has been a constant interest in the band bubbling under thanks to the efforts of bands like Witchfinder General and Cathedral who were inspired by Black Widow throughout the 80s, 90s and beyond.

And now a film of the band’s entire ‘Sacrifice’ stage show has been unearthed and will be released next year on DVD.

Furthermore, Clive Jones is working on new Black Widow material 30 years after the original band split. The devil will have his revenge.

 

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

A cosy confab with Marilyn Manson

This originally appeared in Metal Hammer two years ago.

THE air conditioned elevator takes us up to the heart of darkness. The curtains in the tastefully anonymous room are drawn and the lights are dimmed. Manson sits curled up in a chair, sunglasses on, sipping a glass of sickly green absinthe that actually looks a lot like that horrible chalky indigestion medicine. He has just recently risen. From bed, not the grave. Manson is nocturnal but because of the jet lag he has to create his own night in the hotel room. It is only mid-day.

Good absinthe? Hammer asks.

“Grrr, yeah, it’s a great start to the day,” sniggers the 21st century’s greatest goth icon.

Absinthe for breakfast. Well of all things…

Of course it’s all theatre, a personal performance to be reported faithfully to you folks out there in record-buyer land. And reader, even if it was the case, you don’t really want to hear that he was wearing old Adidas trackies and a stained t-shirt and didn’t have a lick of make-up on his face? If you were ever in any doubt, Marilyn Manson is now Marilyn Manson 24 hours a day every day.

During a previous stint – almost in a previous life – when Hammer met Manson while he was struggling to promote ‘Portrait Of An American Family’ there were a few people in the band and the entourage who referred to him as ‘Brian’. Today there are none who would dare to address him as such. But given that his activities now encompass painting, film-making and writing, is there any possibility that some of this work may come with a Brian Warner signature rather than a Marilyn Manson one?

“I think that is all just a matter of semantics,” he says thoughtfully. “For a while there I had no sense of my own identity, or rather I felt that I had lost sight of who I actually was. That was a struggle but now I feel that I have a very clear idea of who I am and what I do.”

He sips the absinthe.

Brian Warner exists in the same way that our appendix still exists: as an unused and forgotten vestige of a less evolved past. Manson’s transformation is total.

We meet on the day after that Korean nut-job Cho has massacred a whole bunch of his fellow students at Virginia Tech. Maybe the Manson fan-base is now a bit older and goes to college and university rather than high school. We ask Manson how long he reckons it will be before the media hang the blame upon him.

“When I was watching the coverage of it I kept asking myself ‘Well what is the agenda here?’ It’s always interesting to look at what else is happening in the world at the moment: a lot of people killed in Iraq today, a lot in Afghanistan, that hasn’t really made the news,” he muses. “I also kept thinking about that film – which I haven’t seen yet but friends of mine are talking about a lot – 23. Y’know, he killed 32 people, he was 23 years old…”

Are you still regarded as a figure of fear in the US though?

“I don’t know,” he sighs. ”It’s not something that I can spend a whole lot of time thinking about one way or another and even if it’s a good thing or not.”

Alas poor Manson. One minute you are being blamed for high school massacres, the Satanic moral degeneracy of ‘generation x’ (remember them?) and the rising tide of black nail polish on the hands of lardy high school jocks. The next you are just another B-list tabloid horrorshow like Britney or Lindsey or Jade Goody. Over the past year Manson has been all over the pages of Hello and Grazia and all those other dumb ‘sleb’ mags that are read by people who move their lips while they read and that have never knowingly heard a note of his music. Manson almost slipped into that niche of being famous for being famous. There was his celeb marriage to burlesque queen and fashion designer Dita Von Teese followed by their high profile break-up and his current relationship with 19 year old actress Evan Rachel Wood, star of the underrated ‘weird’ 90s TV show American Gothic as well as recent independent hits like the disturbing Thirteen.

Manson’s creative energies seemed to be going into his paintings and into a film project called Phantasmagoria that he was planning to direct, a look at the dark side of author Lewis Carrol and his Victorian bestseller Alice In Wonderland. There were hints and rumours that he was planning to quit music altogether, rumours that he now says were not without foundation.

Manson told Rolling Stone magazine that he was moving from music to filmmaking: “I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people – particularly record companies – are turning into a product.”

“I was very serious because as I’ve said I had lost sight of who I was,” he says languidly. “As an artist or a performer I’m supposed to be able to make a lot of people feel a certain way. But the one person who was closest to me was the person I couldn’t seem to reach at all and it made me wonder what I was doing it all for.”

The split was acrimonious. They aren’t ‘just good friends’ or any of that crap. He seems at once eager to put it behind him and to rake over the sordid details at the same time. After a period of reassessment and – frankly – some heavy drinking and partying, Manson reached some moment of clarity around the end of last year and started work on a new album. The resulting ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ may not be his best work ever, but the fact that it exists at all is some cause for celebration.

“It’s the most straightforward album I’ve ever done,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of agonising over the concepts because this time the songs were being written about me. When it starts off ‘Christmas morning 6.30…’ that’s actually when the song was written.”

The title and some of the songs on the album allude to Alice In Wonderland (when Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds a cake labelled Eat Me that makes her grow and a bottle labelled Drink Me that makes her shrink). Hammer asks him if this is in some way connected to the film project.

“No that wasn’t in any way intentional. It’s just that these were things that I was thinking about a lot at the time that I wrote the songs and they had some resonances with my own life,” he says. “We’re going to start shooting the film in October but it is entirely unconnected to the album.”

He has also just made a video for ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’ using Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron’s 3D software. It is an extract from a 3D horror movie which apparently Manson will continue filming with Cameron.

“It looks totally amazing. It was a lot of hard work but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. It’s also I believe one of the most expensive promo ever made. Evan is in it and she got the highest fee ever for a promo.”

How much was it?

“Ah, I’m not allowed to say.”

Was it….one million dollars?

Manson laughs: “Yeah but I see that the dollar is way down against the pound so maybe that isn’t too impressive.”

Manson has also just had a meeting with the great Russian/French/Mexican cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“We’ve already been talking about one script (King Shot)that he has that he wants me to appear in as a 300 year old pope,” says Manson, becoming animated, almost excited for the first time. “But he’s also written another script, a sequel to El Topo, that he wants me to star in.”

Manson seems to practically vibrate with glee.

“I mean I have //got// to make this happen, we have //got// to get the money to do this” he says shaking his head. “For somebody like Jodorowsky who has meant so much to me and to find that he is enthusiastic about me…it’s really mind-blowing.”

If the album is a lot more basic and straightforward does this mean that the stage shows will be toned down.

“No, the opposite,” he says. “We’re got the guy who designed the Diamond Dogs show for Bowie in the 70s doing the sets. It’s going to be spectacular. When I wrote the album I really had this stage show in mind. I had already decided that ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ would be the opening song in the set.”

Interesting that Manson has written his first vampire song: that was one aspect of the whole goth package that he consciously seemed to steer clear of.

“I think I agonised too much over that and yes I very much avoided that in the past,” he says.

He’s on record as saying that it’s the new ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which may come as good news for the undemanding but bad news for those who see Manson as something more than just another goth cliché. It’s easily the strongest song on the album.

As much as ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ was inspired by his break-up with Dita, it’s also about his relationship with Evan.

“I used to wonder why my life couldn’t turn into one of those movies like True Romance or Bonnie And Clyde that I loved so much, why there wasn’t that massively romantic ending for me,” he says.

“I think what amazes me about her is the fact that she finds so many of the things that I do so cool. Like, we went to the London Dungeon last night. And for the cover shoot I covered a room in my house in blood and she loved it so I’ve just kept the room that way.”

Real blood?

“Yeah.”

Your own?

“No. If I used that much of my own blood I’d be dead,” he cracks a smile. “I’m looking forward to seeing headlines about me spraying my room with blood.”

Doesn’t it smell?

“No, but the one thing that gets me…it’s all over the windows and you can see right in, yet none of the neighbours has actually sad anything,” he says. “If I saw that in one of their houses, I would definitely have called the cops by now.”

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism