Anywho..
Something I noticed is the promotion for the upcoming Black Dahlia Murder album. A lot of metalheads bash this band and they have been labelled as metalcore since day one. I don't particularly mind them. To my ears, this band has been consistently melodeath for as long as I've ever known them, which is FINE, it's just not my thing anymore. Sure, when I was 16 and I had heard maybe two death metal songs in my life, "Elder Misanthropy" was the shit. Truthfully, listening to that song again, I definitely prefer it to anything more recent Ive heard from them. It must be the vocals. In short, I think that band is a completely inoffensive, authentic-if-not-somewhat-derivative group (then again, what band isn't derivative in some way?)
For some reason, though, they were always pigeonholed with the more egregiously unoriginal and commercialized metalcore bands of the mid-2000's, even if their actual music had less in common with said groups. Maybe it's Metal Blade -- think of all the crap bands Metal Blade began to pick up around 2005. It could be the band's sometimes jocular song titles, especially on Miasma. "Statutory Ape*." That speaks volumes. Obviously song titles and subject matter in your average death metal band are reasonably tongue and cheek, to a point (and I'm just using this one song as an example). Having a pun right in the title kind of butts up against the requisite air of mystique one's band is expected to have. Breaking kayfabe like that may very well strike some metalheads as flippant. Me, personally, I don't care much but maybe that's one thing about this band that pisses other metalheads off.
(*It should be said, this line of thought forced me to go back and read their lyrics, which are actually pretty good. Surprise! Cool.)
Anywho, starting around Nocturnal, I, like many people no doubt, began to notice a return to more "classic" aesthetics: songs about fucking dead bodies, generally macabre/occult lyrical content/song titles and spooky album art. I haven't listened to that in years and I was pretty over it by the time the next album came out (2009??) but evidently it's more of the same in that respect.
(Interestingly enough, by around 2008 I was really burnt out on death metal, mainly due to the sheer fatigue of listening to all these modern bands like TBDM and Behemoth, with their overly-loud, hi-fi production. Had I not meandered into classic Floridian and Swedish death metal, I might have been off of death metal forever. I digress.)
I wish to now approach the heart of what have in mind. The promotion and artistic approach of Ritual seems like the most extreme logical conclusion of this push for authenticity, in a way slightly similar to how the newer Job For A Cowboy began sounding like something between Morbid Angel and Suffocation.
The album is evidently a concept album about Satanic rituals, which may be a gross generalization of the thematic content, pardon. Quoth the band: "All of the lyrics to Ritual are bound by a common thread of black magick and the occult, the worship of darkness, and the preservation of inner strength and will." They continue: "Yes, we are an evil band. Yes we sing about Satan. But really, how I see it, our evil is for your own good! The character Satan in our music represents the freedom to think for yourself… the strength to see through the facades of the norm that is presented to us at birth, and the courage to live your own way, free of the burden of guilt and shame. That’s how it’s always been for us and this record is no different."
Gotcha. That's par for the course, considering the ubiquity of Satan in metal, in general, and that is totally a-okay with me. Satan, as a concept representing individualism and the rejection of blind faith, etc etc has always been very poignant to me, so, I don't have any qualms there.
What strikes me as somewhat fishy is the very sudden shift from this somewhat light-hearted approach (see their dvd) to selling a deluxe edition of their upcoming album with a ouija board, incense, and powdered dragon bones or whatever the hell. It seems somewhat incongruous. Maybe I'm alone here. Or, maybe I'm creating a false dichotomy where a band can't joke around and sell a deluxe version of your album with special occult artifacts, like demon farts in little glass vials, but the whole thing seems just a little too forced and somewhat unnecessary. While on the one hand, most of the criticism against this band also seems fairly misguided, besides them being sort of unoriginal (which is FINE! It's completely okay and there is nothing particularly bad about TBDM), but on the other hand, it seems like this lingering stigma of them being phonies (which I don't buy, again) has forced them to really ham it up on the occult/whatever-the-hell-else department, which is a shame, because I think the music spoke for itself well enough, which I concede to, even though I don't really dig melodeath anymore.
I think that's all I had in mind. Now, I'd like a beer.
-W.F.
For more on the release:
http://grafwall.indiestar.tv/2011/04/black-dahlia-murder-bdmmetal-discuss.html
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