Spells and Incantations:
Being Thee 10th Annual Stereo Sanctity/
Breakfast in the Ruins Halloween Mix CD.

 [Cross-posted with Breakfast in the Ruins.]

As we kick off Halloween week, here, as tradition demands, is a just-under-80-minute mix of ragin’, unholy audio to get you in the mood for whatever safely socially distanced blasphemous rites and abhorrent festivities yourself and your household support bubble/coven have planned this year.

Given that this is the tenth instalment in the series (research gleaned from the long-shuttered archives suggests that the first occurred back in 2008, but that I skipped both 2018 and 2019), you’ll appreciate that the back catalogues of the true greats of Horror-Rock have already been thoroughly tapped by this point, but, as so often in life, metal has stepped up to save the day.

Betwixt the riffage, we also dip a disfigured toe or two into the faddish yet undeniably appealing waters of ‘dungeon synth’, and explore a wide range of atavistic diabolism during the first half, before a brief diversion into lycanthropy ushers us into some unspeakable realms of cosmic terror, concluding with a nod to everyone’s favourite Obeah Man. Dare you stand before the altar and offer up your mortal soul? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, a quick click on the mixcloud ‘play’ button is all it takes.

Alternatively though, if you miss the riskier business of getting naked and throwing questionable fluids around the place, the old school mp3 download link below the tracklist may prove more to your liking.

(As usual, bands and artists who are still a going concern and deserve your support have been linked below as appropriate.)

 

Labels: halloween, horror, METAL, mixcloud, mixtapes

A long-standing – if rarely applied – rule of my record shopping exploits is that any record featuring a picture of some Space Marines or other Warhammer type fantasy battle characters on the front will be automatically purchased. (Yeah, I know, keep me away from those Bolt Thrower reissues…)

In part, this is a childhood nostalgia thing (just leave it, please), but at same time I have faith that any heavy music (and it WILL be heavy music, let’s face it) that seeks to evoke the spirit of… this sort of thing… is liable to be pretty cool. (Yeah, those Bolt Thrower reissues.)

As such, the beautiful rendering of some copyright-skirting DEFINITELY NOT Chaos Marines on the front of this 2012 release from Swedish/Hungarian band Megatomb (you’ll need one of those after a Megadeth, presumably..?) made it a no-brainer.

With only six song titles listed, I was hoping Megatomb might be a doom band, but no dice. Turns out this is actually a 45rpm 12” EP kind of deal. Bah!

In the great crap-shoot of contemporary metal sub-genres, I’d probably peg these guys as blackened thrash, with touch of death on the side. Which I suppose makes them yet another nice example of the boundary-blurring “bit of everything” / “it’s just METAL, FFS” approach that has become increasingly widespread amongst metal bands in recent years, and that, from my POV at least, seems like a very positive development vis-a-vis making the genre more fun and accessible to outsiders.

Specifically, things here lean toward entry level teen thrash riffs abetted by down-tuned/compressed DM low-end, drums that alternate between aspirant blast-beats and leaden, ‘ominous’ breakdowns, and, most prominently, BM style “vokills” executed in that “sneering troll-vampire ranting in his slime cave beneath the ice” type manner that can’t help but sound at least a little bit ridiculous when – as here – it is combined with music anything less than monumentally intense and terrifying.

If Megatomb’s name and artwork betrays the band’s almost heroic disinterest in innovation, a quick scan of their lyrics sheet seals the deal, confirming that the interests of “Kobra” (vokills), “Skull” (guitar), “Kommando” (bass & vokills) and “Fist” (drums) lie entirely in offering a comforting, paint-by-numbers reiteration of extreme metal’s founding aesthetic principles. (Song titles: ‘Dealing With The Cross’, ‘Forbidden Altar’, ‘Nuclear Violence’.) Drop the needle on side A and you'll even hear a “bring out yr dead” type atmospheric intro with half-speed triad riffs and a big, tolling bell; cozy as a teapot on a doily, so far as this genre’s concerned.

Vocals (sorry, voKILLS) are far too dominant in the mix for my taste, but the guitar sound is still suitably thick n’ gnarled, with the bass in particular sounding in-the-red filthy during the chord riffing segments (which certainly puts a nix on the ‘80s nostalgia angle). In fact, the whole thing benefits from a great, raw, black-paint-peeling-from-rehearsal-room-walls kind of sound, which blends in well with the kind of four-beers-in, punk-spirited mid-fi attack that I tend to like from my thrash/death/black/whatever.

The main problem here is probably the drumming, which sounds uncertainly executed (by metal standards), and often gets a bit lost in the mix, preventing the band from ever really hitting a solid groove and leaving us kinda floundering where we should be headbanging. Nonetheless though, this is jolly good, spirited stuff and it gets better as it goes along. If for some unaccountable reason you’re forced to choose in fact, side B is definitely the one to go for here.

The way that the pummelling bass drum intro on ‘Dealing With the Cross’ gradually speeds up is awesome – in fact, both this song and the following ‘Forbidden Altar’ have a dementedly enthusiastic, clod-hopping brilliance to them that I really enjoyed. Sounding like the likely results of a “learn to be Slayer in a day” masterclass designed to keep delinquent teens off the street, these tunes ace it on sheer enthusiasm alone. Reading the lyrics sheet along with them meanwhile is a Venom-level hoot (“Darkness and evil and power from hell / twisting the flesh! / Beasts of death feast tonight / revel in doom!”), and old Mr Kobra’s “Cor, I’m knackered” retching type noises at the end (and frequently the start) of each track are hilarious, particularly given the extent to which they’re boosted into the foreground.

Sadly, a quick internet search tends to suggest that Megatomb have not been very active subsequent to the release of this record in 2013. Perhaps a legal team jointly representing Dave Mustaine and Games Workshop caught up with them and had a quick word…?

Nonetheless, ‘Louder Than a Thousand Deaths’ at least exists, and, though it will change NOT A SINGLE THING about your life, beliefs, or tastes, if you like metal and you like pictures of space marines, it will make a fine addition to your home. It’s a whole bunch of fun to listen to, it looks great and the printed sleeve & vinyl pressing from UK based label Me Saco Un Ojo is of an admirably high quality.

‘Louder Than a Thousand Deaths’ by Megatomb gets a THUMBS UP. 

 

Labels: EP reviews, Megatomb, METAL, old LPs

Hey everybody, Satan’s Satyrs have a new album out, entitled ‘Die Screaming’. That's not the one I’m reviewing here. Instead today, I want to talk about their debut, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’, which was recorded back in 2011, and got a UK release last year on Bad Omen Records.

I’ll confess that when I saw the band’s name and the cover artwork pop up on record shop update emails, I did an “oh-for-gods-sake” eyeroll and moved on. I mean, theoretically it’s the kind of stuff I love forever without question, but I dunno… hitching a ride on all this exploitation/biker movie imagery just seems so *obvious* in this day and age, and I guess I’ve just been burned too many times by all these second-rate, shlock horror-themed bands. (Anyone want an Acid Witch CD? – you pay the postage.) I mean, maybe it was campy surf music, maybe it was sloppy metal, but if they’re gonna put so little imagination into their visual presentation, so little weirdness or mystery, I really just don’t care. NEXT!

Bad move on my part. Because as it turns out, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ represents an absolute riot in the middle of a fire-storm of total, heartfelt rock n’ roll of a rare and beautiful kind. The sort of record that rocks so hard, when you put it on you start to worry that maybe it’s speeding up your heartrate and making you short of breath. Like it’s all just a bit too much, like maybe you’re too old and unfit to safely stand in the presence of this level of rocking-ness? It’s been a while since music made me feel like that (at least not in a good way), but the A side of this thing is like being forced to ride a rollercoaster against your will, and that’s usually an immediate sign of quality when it comes to rock music, right?

The album title and cover art, which I initially took to be the work of cynical grown ups taking the path of least resistance, takes on an entirely new complexion when you reconsider it as the home recorded debut of a nineteen year old kid from the town of Herdnon, Virginia, who, according to this interview with The Quietus, tracked all the instruments himself and then mixed the whole damn thing at home on headphones, because ‘if you want something done right..’ etc. His oft-repeated twin inspirations: Electric Wizard and Black Flag. His available resources: a ferocious, perfectionist talent, insane reserves of teenage energy and (one assumes) a head full of raging, twisted hormones.

The result: ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’. Forty something minutes of pure heavy metal nirvana. If you’re listening on the computer, you’ll probably have to turn it up real loud because it’s really badly recorded with loads of compression and stuff, but WHY WOULDN’T YOU HAVE TURNED IT UP REAL LOUD ANYWAY, FERCHRISSAKE? What kind of a loser are you… ahem.

Anyway. Wow, just wow. This shit sounds like… well… I dunno. Imagine Motorhead or High On Fire or a band like that, if, instead of seasoned professionals, they were just a bunch of delinquent teenagers living in the middle of nowhere making lo-fi punk. And imagine that they drank a bunch of beer one day, and got really psyched up talking about horror movies and stuff, then scampered into the practice room to record a tape solely for the purpose of sending it to the guy from Electric Wizard, in the hope that he’d really like it and invite them to tour with them. So they filled it with MASSIVE RIFFS, and growly, strangulated tough guy vocals, and motorbike noise, shouting about Satan, and sickly, wah-wah covered lead overdubs, laughing and shredding all the way until they collapsed in exhaustion. Well yeah, that’s kinda what this sounds like. And in case you haven’t got the point yet, it sounds AMAZING.

Often, when it gets too ‘professional’ and serious, metal just loses me. When it’s all technical, and ‘conceptual’, and endlessly pummelling; boring and headache-y. I much prefer it when it’s like this, stuck in its most “primitive” stage of development - a raging cacophony of teenage lunacy, bluntly filtered through the most obvious and stupid signifiers of ‘rebellion’ that come to hand.

Even with the all horror movie stuff, I mean… there’s a *very fine line* between bands who seem to pick up on this sort of thing just for a shtick, so they have a readymade fanbase and don’t have to think too hard about their lyrics and artwork, and those who really *get it* - those who sound like they understand the mad, intoxicating power of these movies and really want to try to capture it in their music. The sort of people who, if they could, would probably inject the pure, distilled essence of Werewolves on Wheels straight into their veins. You can probably guess which side of that line I feel that Satan’s Satyrs come down on, in spite of this album’s amateurish cover art. His Satanic Majesty Jus Osborn obviously agreed, as he has now actually drafted Satyrs main man Clayton Burgess in to play bass in Electric Wizard, no less! When the aforementioned Quietus interview was conducted, Mr. Burgess was happily hanging out in Dorset, enjoying “..movie marathons at the ‘Wizard house”. High five dude - that’s what I call a result.

‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ isn’t a perfect record. As mentioned, the murky recording quality will prove troublesome for some, and it’s a very front-loaded album too. Whilst each track on the first half is an absolute ripper, momentum and quality control tends to slip *slightly* through parts of the B-side. It still rules though… actually, forget this stupid, nit-picking paragraph – on reflection, every cut here except maybe the self-titled last one is just completely fantastic, and even that one’s *pretty good*. Actually, who am I kidding, it’s BRILLIANT. Fuck this ‘critical balance’ business, this IS a perfect album. There, I said it. Chances are you’ll know within the first five seconds of the first track whether you’re IN or OUT, and if the former, after that it’s all just gravy. If you still want to hear the spirit of white, suburban delinquent rock music alive and well in the 21st century, refined right down to its stupidest, most degraded, most invigorating form, well… this is it, right here. Bang your greasy locks and gorge yourself ‘til your brain is gone.

Listen on Youtube.

Buy from Bad Omen.

Visit Satan’s Satyrs on Bandcamp.

Also, check out their 'Lucifer Lives' EP - Venom-tastic!

Labels: album reviews, METAL, Satan's Satyrs

Hey everybody, welcome to the next stop on the non-stop obituary express that this blog has recently become. Our sincerest apologies for the delay in getting you here – had the wrong kind of leaves on the line recently, y’know what I’m sayin’ – but the fact is, nearly a week after news of Jeff Hanneman’s passing, I can’t find anything more profound to say than:


Chances are, if you needed this blog to inform you of the bad news, or to encourage you to dial up ‘Angel of Death and ‘Raining Blood’ on Tubify, something has gone slightly wrong with your life, and you should probably reflect on that. As such, I’m unsure exactly what the purpose of a post like this really is (especially a week late), but let’s try another tack:

Imagine an average student dorm room about a decade ago, occupied by a feeble, nerdy indie kid. Imagine he just bought ‘Reign in Blood’ as part of some 3-LPs-for-£15 deal at a record fair in the local leisure centre, cos he thought all that metal stuff sounds like a bit of a laugh, and maybe he should check some out.

Imagine me five minutes later, prostrate before the turntable in the posture of a martyred saint, catatonic with utter disbelief, unable to properly comprehend the sheer off-the-scale power-hurricane I was hearing.

Ten years and innumerable thrash/death/black/doom purchases & random issues of ‘Terrorizer’ later, it still has the same effect. It’s difficult to speak, let alone stand, by the time ‘Necrophobic’ kicks in.

I’m extremely glad that I got to see Slayer’s classic line-up in full effect a few years back, but very sad that there will be no more Slayer, just when we need berserk teenage rebellion music more than ever.

Well, I mean, there undoubtedly will be tours and merchandise and recordings which carry the name of Slayer – that’s how the metal world works – but as far as I’m concerned, there is no more Slayer. Just as there is no more Stooges, and no more Sabbath, regardless of what the marketing men might like us to think. And what a colossal bummer that is. Makes me wanna…. drop the needle, assume head-banging posture, hope for the best. I’ll leave you guys to peel me off the floor when it’s time to turn over for side #2.

Labels: deathblog, METAL, Slayer

Blood Patrol – demo tape

Don’t push me too hard on the hows and whys, but recently I have been spending a lot of time listening to a demo by a band called Blood Patrol, operating out of somewhere in Germany.

I’ll be honest with you – I’ve not really made much of an effort to keep up with recent developments in the world of metal. In fact I am pretty much ignorant of everything that has transpired in the genre since I gave up reading ‘Terrorizer’ four or five years ago. I pick up new records by bands I already know I like, and one or two other things people have recommended to me, but aside from that…

I’m sure that there are dozens, probably hundreds, of incredible, innovative, awe-inspiring metal bands around whose work I’ve entirely missed out on. I daresay you could throw a brick on Camden high street and hit a more innovative, awe-inspiring metal band than Blood Patrol. Hell, most of the members of Blood Patrol are probably in a more innovative, awe-inspiring band than Blood Patrol.

But those other bands are not Blood Patrol.

I should probably say that in capitals. BLOOD PATROL!

What’s special about Blood Patrol?

Nothing.

So why, of all the metal bands in all the world, am I listening to Blood Patrol?

Because, dude – Blood Patrol RULES.

Metal logic. Best logic.

Listening to these demos – rejoicing in the muffled gut-thump of the practice room > portastudio > cassette > mp3 translation process – makes me want to learn to drive, get my licence, and buy a car. This is solely so that I could drive around aimlessly and give people lifts. And as they sit in the passenger seat, I’ll jam this tape in the stereo. I’ll start drinking fizzy drinks again, so that I can slurp from a big drive-thru cup as I say “yeah man, this is Blood Patrol” and start bashing out blast-beats on the steering wheel.

Hopefully it’ll be a long drive, so that I can cherish their expression of cautious relief in the moment of silence when the tape comes to an end… before I instinctively reach over and put it on again. I reckon I could spin it at least six times during an average slog across London.

Looking around me, I see indie records, psychedelic records, garage-punk records, whatever else. I listen to the sound of Blood Patrol from my computer speakers, and I think, fuck man, I’ve been wasting my life. I could have been listening to stuff that sounds like Blood Patrol. Why would anyone want to listen to music that doesn’t sound like this?

A metal review demands sub-genres, so what ‘THIS’ is is…. well I guess it’s kind of a hardcore/thrash crossover thing, with land speed record H/C drumming (not actually blast-beats, despite what I said earlier), low end Entombed/Bolt Thrower guitar chug, deranged ‘Reign in Blood’ whammy bar carnage and grave-soil gargling BM vocals. Perfection, in other words.

Completely devoid of the pretension and dry technicality that dooms much contemporary metal to the ‘not right now thanks’ pile, this tape is about as far as you can get from the pristine, multi-tracked headache factory of a studio death metal album. But at the same time, it doesn’t retreat back to the mysterioso trashcan-holocaust guff of yr average kvlt BM release either. Basically this just sounds like we always wanted metal so sound, before things got all silly – a functional low fidelity recording of some guys in a room, rocking it out with energy of a teenage punk band and the chops of stadium beserkers. It’s just plain fucking FUN. They’re singing about blood and thunder and destruction and zombie bloodbaths and rampaging through the dark night on galloping stallions and tearing monsters’ throats out, and they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exhilarating! It’s rock music! It’s METAL! It’s BLOOD PATROL. It… well, it rules.

Here they are doing ‘Unhallowed & Old’ and their self-titled song:




We ride at dawn for Blood Patrol’s myspace page!

Labels: Blood Patrol, METAL, tapes

Napalm Death –
Rare Tracks 86-88 7”
(white label)

Just like the cover says: a bootleg of unreleased studio takes, split EP tracks and live cuts recorded by the “Scum side one” and “From Enslavement..” line-ups of Napalm Death. 15 tracks on a 45rpm 7”.

If you know the score, you won’t gain much from reading further. What more needs to be said? I guess I’m aiming this one at the uninitiated. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sorta fashion, but let’s face it, I don’t write about extreme metal much round here, and chances are there is a significant portion of what I laughably call my readership for whom the idea of listening to Napalm Death would seem an outlandish, nay abhorrent, suggestion. This one goes out to them.

Ahem.

As my tastes have drifted back toward heavier punk/metal recently, I’ve been playing early Napalm Death a lot, and it never ceases to leave me cowering, electrified and awed, if you’re able to triangulate some combination of those varied reactions. Napalm Death is not of my era, not of my culture, and alien to my social circumstances. Nobody (except possibly John Peel) has ever told me I should listen to Napalm Death, and yet I do.

Well I remember, many years ago, when a friend of mine bought “From Enslavement To Obliteration” as part of some ‘three LPs for £5’ deal. We took it home and put it on. We thought it might be funny, if you can believe that. Needless to say, “From Enslavement To Obliteration” is about as funny as cancer, and at least half as harrowing. Birthed in a whole other universe from the camp bombast of ‘Maiden or Venom’s gonzo Satanism, or indeed from the Anal Cunt/Agoraphobic Nosebleed school of goofball grindcore that infested our schoolboy brains through the ‘90s, the suffocating, cathartic violence of the early ND records has existed to wipe the grin from the faces of “lol, metal” chancers like me, every day since they were recorded.

Even more unsettling was a quick glance at the lyrics sheet, revealing a complete absence of the kind of gore and corpse-fucking I had assumed bands like Napalm Death were supposed to bellow about, their unintelligible outpourings instead forming an expressionistic response to the agonising frustrations of global injustice, with a directness and fury that put most of our socially conscious ‘punk’ heroes to shame.

It was all a bit too much to deal with back then. I didn’t really have much of a feeling for truly malevolent music, how ever much I might have fronted. 2010, and the time seems right, don’t ask me why.

I know this isn’t exactly an original observation, but the more I listen, the clearer it becomes that Napalm Death were less a metal band, more an incredibly intense punk band. I mean, they draw on some metal background for sure, but only the bits that really matter – the lingering post-industrial nihilism of Black Sabbath, the screaming adrenalin overload of Slayer. And who, seeking to fuck people up with extreme rock music in the mid-80s, would not draw upon these things? This is the music of men smart and angry enough to know you’re not going to get very bloody far taking your cues from, I dunno, the Exploited or some shit, and that it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like or what kind of trousers you wear either. In spirit and overall emotional heft, they are closer to Black Flag than anything else – music that foregrounds full spectrum HEAVINESS (in the hippie sense of a ‘heavy cat’) over any genre bullshit. Only difference is, ND had a bigger war in mind, with a lot more casualties. They had a copy of “Reign In Blood” too. More of a lightning rocket attack than ‘Flag’s noble trudge through the trenches. Just keep that in mind, ready your neck muscles and drop the needle.

The very nature of this music and its culture – the extremely short songs, constantly fragmenting line-ups, labyrinthine discography – makes it an effort for anyone without nerd-level scene commitment to get a handle on precisely what the hell’s going on over the course of this 7”. As such, I’ll avoid tripping myself up by trying to identify the specific musicians on different bits, and instead just say that there’s nothing on this disc that suggests the music is anything but the work of a single, unified force, drilled to the point of desperate perfection. The dedication it must take for a band to essentially swap their whole line-up halfway through an LP (as ND did on “Scum”) and yet maintain such a unique and demanding sound is mind-boggling. Where did they find TWO guys who could play bass like that? Two guys who could si - uh, make noises with their throat – like that?

I’ve listened to plenty of doom, but I’ve never heard bass that swings so deep, so cthonic as the sound the guy is getting on the studio cuts on this record – ultimate bass cliché I know, but it’s like being hit in the gut by a chunk of flying masonry. Standing in the room where that sound was happening must have really fucking hurt, a point that’s not lost on the vocalist (Lee Dorrian I assume? Did they have another guy before him?) – twenty five years of absurd metal ‘vo-kills’ later, and still no one sounds like that – it’s like someone’s tearing his fucking soul out. I don’t need to tell you about the drumming – you can guess. Guitar sucks the whole sound into itself like a vortex – indescribable fucking distorto-wall/harmelodic whammy nightmare shit, like you might compare to Ron Asheton or Kerry King were the tone not so cruelly, chaotically vile.

Some song titles: “Your Achievement”, “Deceiver”, “Multinational Corporations, pt. 2”, “Retreat To Nowhere”, “Understanding”.

In short, this disc is a sightseeing tour of a couple of years in which one (or, weirdly, perhaps several) of the most deadly serious, unstoppable, flat-out terrifying rock bands ever to exist were performing under the name “Napalm Death”.

Unless you’re a fan of generic, midfield Death Metal (which is fine), the Napalm Death brand has been creatively redundant since probably about the dawn of the ‘90s. Such is the way with ‘heritage’ punk/metal bands. Somewhere in the record racks though, these guys are still there, ready to play songs for you:


No hurry or anything, but one day you might feel like letting them in.

Labels: METAL, Napalm Death, singles reviews

Metal Funnies.

By and large, I am unable to watch youtube videos at the moment. I did though manage to transcend technological limitations for long enough to experience these two at the weekend.

As I'm sure we are all aware, Metal is a serious business. But is it not the essential disjuncture between Metal as it exists for it's noble practitioners and Metal as it relates to the wider world that frequently renders it such a joy? With such notions in mind, we lovingly present the following, without further comment:






(In fairness to the guy in the second video, he's just saying what I'm usually thinking.)

Labels: Black Sabbath, goofery, METAL, videos

MASTER OF REALITY
A book review / extract.

“I don’t know what’s happening
My head’s all torn inside
People say I’m heavy
They don’t know what I hide”

- Black Sabbath, ‘Cornucopia’

I.

Let’s begin with what (appropriately enough, given the lapsed Catholic foundation of the band’s work) amounts to a confession: I can *really relate* to Black Sabbath songs. I mean, when I put on ‘Master Of Reality’ or ‘Volume 4’ (my personal favourite), I don’t think to myself “wow, this is some awesome, imaginative heavy metal with crazy OTT lyrics”, I think “fuck yeah, they’ve NAILED IT”.

What ‘it’ is, I’m not sure – the apocalyptic, melodramatic feeling in the back of the mind of every weirdo adolescent male perhaps? – but it’s something ‘Sabbath manage to communicate through the very bones of their music, whether they’re singing about religion, deep space or some weird robot stomping people in boots of lead. And, as a grown up with a job and a certain amount of education and a fairly sedate existence, I feel like I shouldn’t really be going so far as to share ‘it’ with them, even as I, like all people of taste, enjoy their incredible music. ‘It’ is not there for me. I should be getting my jollies listening to some dreary alt-country loser crafting thoughtful songs expressing mature concerns, or something.

Well, maybe it’s just another obvious signpost of emotional immaturity, but fuck that. At the end of a crappy, uninspiring day as I trundle on toward my late ‘20s, it’s still ‘Sabbath who’ve got my number.

Strangely, I never got into Black Sabbath when I actually WAS a confused, miserable teenager. I didn’t really discover them until I was nineteen or twenty and beginning to take my by then well-established musical tastes on a forced march back through the ‘60s and ‘70s in order to break away from punk and indie-rock and take in the near endless catalogue of earlier wild sounds awaiting appreciation.

It’s probably just as well I waited actually. As a thirteen year old, idly picking over the bones of grunge and hair metal in search of traces of GNARLY LYRICS and BIG RIFFS, I’m sure one listen to Iron Man would have killed me – I mean, flat out heart-attack-on-the-spot dead.

And a few years after that of course, it was The Ramones rather than Sabbath – and by extension, punk rather than metal – that anchored my darkest teenage years. Thinking about it, the two bands actually have a LOT in common. They definitely provide each other’s analogues in their respective genres, both in terms of making simple, powerful, timeless music, but also by means of helping to create a unifying identity and instant aural comfort zone for disaffected, suburban kids across the decades and across the globe.

The similarity even extends to the roles and personalities of the bands’ members. Think about it: a really strange looking singer who "can’t sing" and has no conventional stage charisma, but who is nonetheless clearly THE MOST AWESOME GUY IN THE WORLD in the eyes of fans; a taciturn, workman-like guitarist with a style so singularly brutish and uncompromising that it went on to define the entire future of heavy music, leaving a rainbow of entirely new sub-genres in its wake; an eccentric, wildman bass player with a killer groove who wrote loads of the lyrics….. I guess the similarity breaks down when we get to the drummers though, in that Bill Ward’s jazz-inflected swing (a vital ingredient that stops ‘Sabbath from ever slipping into the kind of trudging heavy blues sludge that idiots and detractors often deride them as) doesn’t really bear much comparison to Tommy & Marky’s relentless 4/4 perfection…

…but I’m getting off the point here. What was the point again? – Oh yeah…

Black Sabbath rule. That was it. To anyone who is still apt to consider them foremost as a corny millionaire heavy metal band rather than as authentic avatars of youthful defiance, watch this video of them performing ‘Paranoid’ on Belgium TV in the first flush of their fame. The sheer, singleminded *otherness* of the band hits me every time. It’s a wonder the British establishment let these guys *walk the streets* in 1970, let alone ok’d them for international TV appearances. The look in Ozzy’s eyes alone must have been enough to see elderly uncles crashing to the ground before they could choke out “god help us if there’s a war”. But how many frustrated teenagers must seen this and witnessed their own position in the world reflected straight back at them for the first time?



II.

I’ve always kept the 33 1/3 series of books at a distance. The concept behind them has always seemed a thinly veiled excuse for writers and readers alike to indulge in the worst kind of reverential music geek blather. Not that there’s anything wrong with that once in a while, but trust me, I really, really, really don’t need another excuse to spend yet more of my time consuming trivial facts and observations regarding the genius of ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ or ‘Exile On Main Street’ or whatever.

But then, it seems the editors of the series have been doing some good work recently – getting some good writers in, commissioning some daring (by the conservative standards of music book publishing anyway) pieces of writing on some interesting records.

Chief among these for me, needless to say, is John Darnielle’s book on Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’.



Wisely, Darnielle has realised that a wry re-evaluation of the merits of Black Sabbath by a learned, grown up music critic would, in a very profound sense, be missing the point.

Instead, he has decided the best course of action is to take us straight into the mind of one of the people Black Sabbath were REALLY speaking to, someone for whom their music – forever veiled in a distant layer of irony for so many of our culturally complacent indie brethren – meant fucking everything.

So, the book introduces us to Roger. It’s 1985, it’s California, he’s fifteen years old, and his parents have just had him forcibly committed to a secure adolescent psychiatric unit. Roger has been denied access to his walkman and his tapes, and, in a series of increasingly lengthy journal entries directed at his uncaring counsellor, he begins to try to explain, step by step, why he needs them back, beginning with his favourite, ‘Master Of Reality’.

In ditching rock-write expectations entirely and turning in a work of straight-up fiction, Darnielle has succeeded not only in telling us more about the cultural importance of the record than a more conventional treatment ever could, but also in producing one of the most emotionally effective pieces of writing I’ve read in recent years.

Drawing heavily on both Darnielle’s empathy for the fate of underdogs, outsiders and misfit teenagers, as extensively chronicled in his songwriting for The Mountain Goats, and also his own experiences working as a psychiatric nurse, the book’s narrative rings true as a bell, cutting straight to the heart of precisely how much music can mean to people as they’re growing up, of how deep the strange imagery, fantastical words and overpowering sound of rock n’ roll can penetrate our being, of how much we can build ourselves around it, finding strength amid the most shattered and dismal wreckage.

Recalling, and indeed standing alongside, Dennis Hopper’s masterpiece Out Of The Blue as an exploration of those issues, it is, needless to say, essential reading.

Oh, and it’s pretty funny in places too, and tells you loads of stuff about Black Sabbath and ‘Master Of Reality’, so don’t be scared.

III.

Rather than explaining further, I am instead going to spend the rest of this post quoting a couple of extracts from the book. I hope nobody minds. (My email is at the top of the page if you do.) I think they help to express the essence of ‘Sabbath far better than I ever could.

In entries dated October 24th and 25th, Roger tries to get to grips with the appeal of ‘Sweet Leaf’;

To be honest I don’t even know why ‘Sweet Leaf’ is on the album because it does not really belong. Soon when I talk about the other songs on the album, if you go back to ‘Sweet Leaf’, you will have to agree. On the album Paranoid or even on that first album all the songs seem to go together, all the things Ozzy is singing about are like pieces of the same puzzle. But ‘Sweet Leaf’ is just this song about how Ozzy really likes weed. My theory is, there’s no way they could keep the guitar riff hidden from the world, so Tony Iommi wrote it and gave it to Ozzy, and Ozzy was maybe high that day so he wrote about what was going on in his mind and the whole band was like “That’s what it is then.” If I was Ozzy I think I would have wrote the words differently and maybe made a song about living naked in a cave or being afraid that the house is haunted. But I am not Ozzy so I have to respect his decision!

[…]

But this is the thing about you guys and music here. You think that all we are doing when we listen to our music is either looking at the words like they were a bible for us, or looking at pictures of the singers like they were Jesus. It is not like that at all. When you guys talk like that, that is how we know that you are stupid and growing old has made you crazy. Because: music is like a whole world, and there are words and pictures and sounds and textures and smells probably, OK I didn’t actually mean that I just got carried away. Albums do have a special smell though. Old ones smell different from new ones. Anyway you gotta know what I mean about this! It’s like, when you sing “Row row row your boat,” do you really only focus on the boat and the rowing it? And think “Wow this is a song about some guys rowing a boat, fucken awesome!” No of course not. Only if you are totally weird do you think like that. When you are singing, you hear the song, the part that is more than the words, and is also the feeling of just the notes in the air, especially if you are singing it in a round with a bunch of other people. We used to do that in my Kindergarten. You hear a mood which is way higher (not “high” like that, come on) than the words, it is sort of always floating above the words. And that is why bands like The Beatles can be popular everywhere, even where people do not speak English, where to them The Beatles probably sound like trained monkeys trying to talk.

Well OK now that you got that check it out. In “Sweet Leaf,” if you can’t hear the mood that just the guitar and the bass and the drums make without anything to do with weed, you are prejudiced or you are not listening. Imagine that you are a man from space! And you don’t speak English and you never heard of weed, and you landed in California and the first person you met up with took you to his house and said “Hey check out this band.” And then he played you “Sweet Leaf.” In my opinion, the man from space would hear that song, just the crunchy guitar sound and those bass notes, Geezer Butler is the best bassist it sounds like his strings are made of lime jello salad, and he would start banging his head! Because the riff on “Sweet Leaf,” that is something anybody can understand. ANYBODY. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what Ozzy is singing about. The lyrics, that is just what Ozzy thinks of when he feels this groove. But it doesn’t have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter what, because it’s like a physical thing. So when I told you yesterday, that I don’t know how “Sweet Leaf” fits on Master of Reality, I think now I understand. It’s there because the mood is right, even if the words are weird. And the mood comes first. This whole album is just about that mood. That feeling.

Mp3> Black Sabbath – Sweet Leaf

IV.

The second half of Darnielle’s book rejoins Roger ten years later, as he tries to come to terms with his years of unnecessary incarceration and, rediscovering his old Black Sabbath tapes, tries to keep his head above water by tracking down his old counsellor’s new address and continuing his unfinished exegesis;

Pretty soon we learn that all the people we’re supposed to look to for guidance think we’re stupid, or dangerous, or “confused,” which is really insulting. And at that point we’re all out of role models, because any other possible role models are out there in the real world, which we can only visit when we get a daypass. The people we see every day seem to have been made from different parts.

And so we look up to Black Sabbath – to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’ve grown up, we do. Always. Because looking at Black Sabbath – at their album covers, at their handmade costumes, at their lyrics sheets, at the dumb faces they make in their videos now – we can see people like us. It’s nice. I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I can understand the concept of the home team crowd. It’s like, I know that dude. That’s the guy that used to break into people’s houses. Now he’s making money and the whole block is safe. Good for him. Maybe every other band in the world has more brains and deeper meaning, but only Black Sabbath sounds exactly like what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.

Which, by the way, is the actual story of how Black Sabbath got started, although I can hardly stand to think about it now, because it’s dangerous to think about how things might have been different. Still. When Ozzy Osbourne was a teenager, he lived in Birmingham, England. When I was in treatment, I used to try to imagine Birmingham, but all I knew about England was the Queen and Buckingham Palace guards, really. And Shakespeare. Birmingham isn’t like that, I found out later. It’s a town that manufactured a lot of guns in the nineteenth century, and then tyres in the twentieth, and then it got the crap bombed out of it during the second world war. Ozzy Osbourne was born in the late ‘40s, so he probably grew up looking at a lot of bomb craters. I grew up in Southern California, so what I grew up looking at was a lot of strip malls. Same basic idea. The only difference is that my neighbourhood looked like it was waiting to get bombed instead of recovering from the bombing.

[…]

If Ozzy had come from California he would have been sent to treatment, and that would have been the end of that. Instead his dad bought him a P.A. system to keep him out of trouble, and he started forming bands: Rare Breed; The Polka Tulk Blues Company; Earth. Different guys who were also losers started to join up, and then they became Black Sabbath. And instead of trying to make important records that made a big statement, the band decided to stay exactly the same as they were when they’d just been angry young people getting hammered in bars.

This makes them role models. Real ones. Not unreachable dicks like Bon Jovi, who you know got into music with a business plan, and had a bank account under the band’s name before they played their first show. And not like Poison or any of those other bands they have now. When you listen to early Black Sabbath you know the main difference between them & you is that somebody bought them guitars and microphones. They’re not smarter than you; they’re not deeper than you; they’re a fuck of a lot richer than you, but other than that it’s like listening to the inside of your own mind. So when they write songs, they sing about wizards. And witches. And robots. When they try to write a love song, it always ends up being about getting rejected before anything really got started. And they sing about war too, like everyone else who’s making records at that time, but they don’t really have anything special to say about it, except that it sucks. They say they figure things would probably be better if we did not have wars. And they say how the world’s going to end, but we should all be friends.

By the time they make Master of Reality, they’re pretty famous, but anyone who says he can hear a difference between the Ozzy who wrote the song “Black Sabbath”, and the Ozzy who sings “Children Of The Grave” is a liar. It’s the same guy. Same dumb poor kid from a bombed out town in the middle of nowhere. That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They’re just rags. All they have is themselves, and that’s turned out to be enough. For them.

Mp3>Black Sabbath – Into the Void

V.

Buy 33 1/3: Master of Reality from Amazon.

Read more stuff by John Darnielle at Last Plane To Jakarta.

Keep up to date with the rest of the 33 1/3 series (wow, check out that Alex Chilton interview stuff from the ‘Radio City’ book!).

Listen to Black Sabbath.

Labels: Black Sabbath, books, John Darnielle, METAL