New England Metal & Hardcore Festival: Baroness, Municipal Waste, Holy Grail (Boston Phoenix, 4/21/10)

HEAVY MIDDLE: “Sometimes at festivals we feel like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl,” says Baroness’s John Baizley (second from right), “whether it’s because we’re too metal or not metal enough.”

Let’s cut to the chase — metal is back. And not just as a popular musical style, but as a subculture, freely seeping into the mainstream in a variety of strange ways, from the bullet belts you see on a dance floor to the devil horns being thrown by everybody and your uncle’s band. It’s hard to believe that, not long ago, mainstream America girded itself against the Satanic threat of heavy metal, combing record grooves for backward messages and blaming teenage suicide on innocuous Ozzy lyrics. I guess when the world around us starts to look more and more like a mid-’80s Nuclear Assault album cover, it becomes harder for the Man to crush metal — especially when, in 2010, the Man probably grew up with his parents throwing away his Twisted Sister cassettes.

Scott Lee has a sensible explanation: “People are angrier, and they want angrier music!” Besides being a long-time promoter and booker of (mostly) metal shows in Massachusetts, Lee is also co-founder of the annual New England Metal and Hardcore Festival. Now in its 12th year, the fest takes over the Worcester Palladium this Friday and Saturday for two all-day multi-stage shows. And Lee and company have outdone themselves, bringing in enormous-venue fillers like Mastodon, Cannibal Corpse, Baroness, Municipal Waste, and Holy Grail. “Not only are people angry,” he elaborates, “but the marketing of metal has gone through the roof, and it’s just far more accessible now.”

Part of the key to metal’s accessibility of late (aside from the usual talk of technology and social networking and whatnot) is the way the underground has gradually surfaced. Instead of trying to refine their sound for the mainstream, bands are seeing their respective niche styles attracting flocks of diverse new fans. “A band that we might have booked as an opener seven years ago can now headline,” Lee concurs. “When bands like All That Remains and Killswitch Engage get played on the radio, it opens up a bigger picture for other underground bands. Moreover, metal fans are loyal. They get behind a band the way people get behind the Red Sox.”

With the major-label star system rapidly failing, and access to new music easier than ever, getting into metal for a fan means entering a dizzying barrage of bands and sounds, with new strains and trends constantly hitting their stride. Anyone who complains that there’s nothing new or nothing good going on in metal is not paying attention.

Baroness singer/guitarist John Baizley agrees, though he suspects there might also be something more philosophical at work. “Since the turn of the millennium, there’s been a new movement that has been hesitant to have a strict adherence to metal, because that would limit them to that orthodoxy. These are bands from a punk or hardcore background with a greater open-mindedness in terms of music styles.”

In other words, metal bands are declining to admit they’re metal — in the same way that many grunge and emo stars of prior decades rejected the orthodoxy of their genres. Baroness and Mastodon have shown that an outfit can climb damn near the top of the metal heap without entirely being a metal band: both create dense polyrhythmic soundscapes fitted into intellectually rigorous thematic frameworks rich with crushing riffery and vicious breakdowns. This high-wire act has allowed them to stand out amid the metal masses. “Although sometimes at festivals we feel like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl,” says Baizley, “whether it’s because we’re too metal or not metal enough.”

But if Baroness can seem guilty of overthinking metal, others are taking quite the opposite tack. “There are a lot of know-it-alls in metal, people who try to put us in a corner, in terms of what they think we can or can’t do,” says Tony Foresta, vocalist of thrashmasters Municipal Waste. “It forces us to punch our way out, and in a way, that shit drives us. When people put us down, it makes us more creative. Spite can be a hell of a motivator.”

SPITE MOTIVATES: Municipal Waste lurched away from the drink-and-puke mentality toward something darker and meaner.

Foresta knows whereof he speaks: for nine years, the Waste have been cranking out slab after slab of increasingly taut jams that meld metal, hardcore punk, funny party rock, and dead-serious bummer metal. They hit the big time with their third album, The Art of Partying (Earache), only to lurch away from the drink-and-puke mentality toward something darker and meaner. “We probably would have made a lot more money if we just did songs about beer and whatnot,” Foresta allows, “but if we didn’t progress, we’d end up hating it. We didn’t want to be a band that relies on gimmicks.”

James de la Luna was trying to avoid a career full of gimmicks when he quit his happening retro-metal outfit White Wizzard to form the progressive metal juggernaut that is Holy Grail. “Wizzard was very passionate about a traditional movement,” he points out. “We are into that — we didn’t just like old-school metal. We wanted metal that was broader.”

A comparison between de la Luna’s old and new bands may reveal a shift from British Steel–era Priest metal to, uh, Painkiller–era Priest, but in a world of metal microgenres, Holy Grail’s inclusiveness is refreshing. (So is the jaw-dropping lead-guitar work on their Prosthetic-issued debut EP, Improper Burial, which is meant to tide us over till their full-length debut, Crisis in Utopia, hits in the fall.) The band’s not-so-secret weapon is de la Luna’s pipes, which hit castrato highs that would put Ian Gillan’s Deep Purple glass shattering to shame. “My singing style is not very conventional,” he allows, “and it might not be the popular way to sing right now. But it’s the only way I know how, so I have to go for it. Because, right now, we’re just really in for the kill.”

Trends and styles come and go; what remains timeless in metal is the desire in fans and bands alike to push it to the limit. Give Scott Lee the last word: “Making metal people happy is tough. Ultimately, though, metal fans are hardworking people who want hardworking music. These bands deliver, this festival delivers, and everyone is psyched! When it works, it’s such a beautiful thing.”

NEW ENGLAND METAL AND HARDCORE FESTIVAL | Palladium, 261 Main St, Worcester | April 23-24 | All ages | $40 Friday; $46 Saturday; $80 two-day pass | 800.477.6849 or metalandhardcorefestival.com

Yearend: 2008 Top Ten Albums (Boston Phoenix, 12/31/08)

1. Metallica | Death Magnetic [Warner Bros.]
2. M83 | Saturdays = Youth [Mute]
3. TIE: Ladyhawke | S/T [Modular] ; Lady Gaga | The Fame [Interscope]
4. T.I. | Paper Trail | [Grand Hustle/Atlantic]
5. CSS | Donkey [Sub Pop]
6. 3-WAY TIE: The Sword | Gods Of The Earth [Kemado]; Witch | Paralyzed [Tee Pee];  Torche |  Meanderthal [Hydra Head]
7. RTX | JJ Got Live Ratx [Drag City]
8. Judas Priest | Nostradamus
9. TIE: Boris | Smile [Southern Lord]; Gang Gang Dance | Saint Dymphna [The Social Registry]
10. Mercury Rev | Snowflake Midnight [Yep Roc]

See everyone else’s Top Tens here:

Judas Priest: Nostradamus (Boston Phoenix, 6/17/08)

This 23-song, 104-minute double-CD behemoth is distinctive in the Priest œuvre for, among other things, being the first of their albums that you listen to and don’t think, “Wow, how could I have not figured out before that Rob Halford is gay?!” For all that moments hark back to, say, the more epic tracks on Sad Wings of Destiny and Painkiller, the operatic grandeur and the way the cuts all flow into one another make this album an anomaly of pomp previously unheard in the JP catalogue. If Priest have always been the Stones to Iron Maiden’s Beatles, then this is the band’s Their Satanic Majesties Request (though in scope and lyrical focus it’s closer to Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway): a concept album about the life of Nostradamus that’s as straightforward, in its lyrics, as Maiden’s “Alexander the Great.” Am I making Nostradamus sound lame? Don’t mean to: it’s a ridiculous album, sure, but take Defenders of the Faith, replace the Metallion with Nostradamus, double the number of awesome riffs, add the occasional pan flute and symphonic embellishments, and you have the most grandiose metal record likely to be released this year.

“Can’t Be Bought, Can’t Be Sought”: Maiden, Priest, Sabbath, and Walt Disney: Metal In Middle Age (Boston Phoenix, 6/27/08)

Watching Iron Maiden last week, I was struck by something that might seem like an odd thought: “Wow, people seem to really love Iron Maiden!” This might seem like kind of a duh, but when you consider how thoroughly this audience knew every word and every lick of these songs, and when you consider that Iron Maiden shirt-wearing had saturated a good 80% of the audience market, you begin to get a grip on the sheer adulation this band gets from its audience.

A lot was made of how no one liked their last tour, where they played their new album in its entirety. Although there was groaning from metal hipsters and ironists, though, at the show last year from my seats all I could sense was that everyone else around me had really done their homework: everyone there seemed to know every word and air-guitar riff from the new album. As an aside, at an Iron Maiden show a few years ago, I witnessed a sight that I will definitely take to my grave: in front of me for most of the show were two teenage boys air-guitaring along to every moment; and in the middle of one song, I swear I witnessed one of the boys correct the other one’s air-guitaring, as in “No, it doesn’t go like this, it goes like this.” Genius.

Anyway, my theory on Maiden is that they took the molten confusion of 60’s and 70’s rock culture and made a Disneyland attraction/ride out of it, with a degree of opera-derived camp that wasn’t far off from the then-ongoing Ice Capades craze and presaged the 90’s and 00’s Broadway musical trend. They also aren’t far off from the intents of the original Disneyland: pillage folklore and myth and create a technically masterful piece out of each one. The same way that a kid in the 70’s probably knew of Snow White and Pinocchio through the Disney animated films, a metal fan in the 80’s probably was more aware of “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, “The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner”, and Winston Churchill’s infamous “We shall go on to the end” speech from Iron Maiden’s records than from their sources.

Maiden of course come from a pre-Internet world where knowledge of arcane tales was cool, and it was ultimately the same world where Dungeons & Dragons could flourish unironically. It’s hard to remember a time where Area 51 and Roswell was not common knowledge, and instead of wikipedia’ing “Alexander The Great” you might have to go to a library and look something up in an encyclopedia, which is pretty much what it sounds like they did when writing said tune.

Metal and indeed rock in general has always plundered history and culture for source material, but in some ways the brazen way in which Maiden appropriated/pillaged was just in line with the burgeoning culture of “metal” from its origins on. We all know about Zep’s swipes from Lord of the Rings (not to mention Rush’s subsequent swipes from the same) and the way that Sabbath’s very name is from the 1963 Boris Karloff/Mario Bava horror flick (imagine how pretentious metal would have become if the Sabs had named themselves after the film’s original Italian title, I tre volti della paura) – but it’s arguable that neither of these bands had their sights set on the cohesive branding that a band like Maiden would later put together. Although the Sabs did pull the hat trick of same-song-name/band-name/album-name on their debut (which Maiden would of course pull themselves), Satanism and black masses was surprisingly not necessarily an ongoing lyrical preoccupation for the band, and in the end they are essential celebrated for being a great rock/metal band.

If the genesis theory of metal begins with the holy trinity of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and (always in third) Deep Purple, then it’s pretty understood that the second coming involves the Beatles/Stones dialectic of Maiden and Priest. And while Judas Priest were arguably campier, more flamboyant, and more aggressively “metal”, Iron Maiden have always stood for ideals that will forever define what metal is for generations of kids: large themes, grand scales, and straight-up fantasy.

You see, the rock crit line has always been that metal is part of a long line of androgynous sashayers drawing from such disparate sources as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Mick Jagger, etc: and indeed, you could pick a few points on the graph and show a straight line from, say, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Freddie Mercury to Ian Anderson’s cod-piece to Rob Halford to pretty much any emo-metaller nowadays—however, this emphasis on androgyny only works if you think that metallers are all about creating confusion and exploring society’s grey areas and dark themes, which works fine until you attempt to fit Iron Maiden in the equation, and then it all falls to shit. Why? Because Maiden are the wholesome and unconfused literalists in a sea of metal fatigue and ephemeral metaphor-peddlers.

Black Sabbath’s most enduring hit is a song called “Paranoid”. It was famously written quickly, lyrics and music, and as such it doesn’t entirely make a whole lot of sense. The word “paranoid” is never used in the song, and indeed it could have probably been called any number of other names and worked just as well. It isn’t a meditation on the concept of paranoia or anything, it’s a confused and emotional tune of heartbreak and emotional numbness; it’s lead guitar break is so fuzzed-out and jarring that it has always sounded, to me, like when you are trying to talk in a dream and can’t quite make the words out. Ultimately, the underlying theme of the majority of Black Sabbath tunes is “frustration”.

This is no longer true by the time you get to Maiden and Priest. Priest worked hard at being self-consciously “metal”, with lyrics and imagery that attempt to unite its teen fanbase in a leather-clad army of teen rebels. Priest’s mascot is a creature called The Metallion: never mentioned in song but adorning the cover of “Defenders of the Faith” as an art deco demon, he is part of the overall attempt by Priest to create metal myths with intimidating creatures meant to represent the power of their teen following. Songs like “United” especially lay bare the band’s naked thirst for fomenting teen rebellion.

Priest’s main weapon of coercion is sexual predation: if you didn’t know Halford was gay during Priest’s heyday, you would at least have known, by a cursory perusal of their tuneage, that the guy was as sexually aggressive as Freddie Mercury before him. It’s just a fine line between the aggressive camp of Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” and Priest’s PMRC-targeted tune “Eat Me Alive”. “I’m going to force you at gunpoint!”

It’s clear that Halford, closeted at the time, was trying to test the bounds of what he could get away with without giving the game away, and his hypersexuality in the band lent them their individuality and force. The opposite is true of Maiden: their tunes are completely devoid of any sexual content at all (unless you count a song about Jack The Ripper as sexual). Instead, Iron Maiden systematically work through coherent themes, and attempt to turn those themes into exciting showpieces. This approach worked to limited means with first singer Paul Di’Anno on their first two albums; although Di’Anno had a powerful presence that worked within the milieu of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that Maiden ostensibly came out of, his limited range meant that he could never take the songs to the stratospheric heights of Maiden’s 70’s heroes, bands with banshee shriekers like Zep, Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, etc.

(As an aside, I’d like to offer a quick defense of the rock band Uriah Heep. Sometimes people don’t realize that in order for the rock behemoths of today to exist, many others had to fall by the wayside to make the current ascendancy possible. This is especially true for a band like Heep, whose supernatural lyrical preoccupations, impossibly tight arrangements, blazing fretwork, extended themes, and glass-shattering approach to vocal histrionics not only laid a straight-up blueprint for Iron Maiden, but for metal itself. Laugh all you want, but the Heep delivered.)

Anyway, once Maiden had Dickinson, they finally had everything in place to take “satanic” metal mainstream: compare “Number of the Beast”, from Dickinson’s first LP with the band, to, say, the self-titled Sabbath tune, and you can see Maiden’s genius: whilst Sab’s tune is a dirgey testament to self-flagellation and eternal damnation, with a lone tri-note theme encapsulating seven centuries of banned music into a singular ode to one man’s shame and torment, Maiden’s tune is pure voyeurism: the protagonist witnesses the sights and sounds of a black mass. “6! 6! 6! / The number of the beast! / Sacrifice is going on tonight!”

In song after song, Maiden created self-contained worlds that act as adaptations of themes. “Flight of Icarus”, “The Prisoner” (after the 60′s British TV show), “Transylvania”, “Quest For Fire”, “To Tame A Land” (a ditty about Frank Herbert’s Dune), “The Phantom Of The Opera”, etc are straight-forward stories being told, with no real metaphor or hidden meaning at all. “Number Of The Beast” isn’t an investigation of evil, or a metaphor for the modern day’s banality of cruelty, or any of those things: it is a straightforward account of a black mass.

This is unusual for the world of the pop song, where everything is buried within symbolism and hidden meanings; but it is not unusual for the world of musicals and opera, which is really aesthetically where Maiden are coming from. From where I was sitting last week, Maiden’s pageantry of themes and settings is like nothing so much as when one enters the hallowed halls of Disneyland, and sees this:

Rock, and metal in particular, is about harnessing the power of rock, and presenting that power in as big a way as possible. In a post-Disney world, where spectacle, imagery, symbolism stripped of context, and the history of the world and its mythology can be reshaped and represented at will, is there really anyone better at harnessing this power than Iron Maiden? It doesn’t seem like it. Bands before Maiden attempted to harness this kind of power of imagery, but they all tended to get lost amidst their own personalities and emotions: whether it was Jim Morrission attempting confusing crowd manipulation, or Led Zeppelin sending conflicting messages of power, authority and fey sensuality, rock titans pre-Maiden tended to miss the untapped market of straight-forward arena-filling adaptation-rock. Think of “Run To The Hills” as similar to Disney’s “Pocahantas”: it presents the European/Native American interface from both sides equally (only the Maiden song has a lot more bloodshed and a lot fewer cute animals).

If you go outside of the US/UK rock market, you will start noticing that the only visible indication that rock culture exists at all are the constant flurry of Maiden t-shirts. Like the ending of Spinal Tap, smart money for post-baby boomer rockers is on exporting to the world at large, something that Maiden has always done exceedingly well. Last week’s show was introduced with a video of Maiden piloting a jet to what appeared to be Rio for a series of mammoth concerts that made the Mansfield gig look like a weeknight at the Abbey by comparison.

The set proper, pre-encores, closed with “Iron Maiden”, a kind-of clunky punkish number from their debut that still, to me, sounds like their baby steps in attempting to write the kind of epic historical pieces that they would later become famous for. “Oh well, whatever” is a pretty half-assed line to begin the chorus of a signature song of a band, and the final line of “Iron maiden can’t be bought/Iron maiden can’t be sought” doesn’t make much sense whether you are talking about the band or its eponymous “medieval” torture device* But perhaps it only sounds out of place when played at the end of a set by a band of Maiden’s calibre 30-some-odd years into their career.

* Kind of like the band Anthrax, most metal fans probably didn’t know what an “iron maiden” was when they first placed Maiden at the forefront of the N.W.O.B.H.M.– but by the first Bill and Ted’s movie, the saturation of the meaning of the name was pretty much complete in metal culture. Oddly enough, some research into the history of the “iron maiden” as a medieval torture device reveals that it is actually the result of a bizarre hoax. From wikipedia here:

Historians have ascertained that Johann Philipp Siebenkees created the history of [the iron maiden] as a hoax in 1793. According to Siebenkees’ colportage, it was first used on August 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger. The Nuremberg iron maiden was actually built in the late 18th century as a probable misinterpretation of a medieval Schandmantel” (“cloak of shame”), which was made of wood and tin but without spikes. Accounts of the iron maiden cannot be found from any period older than 1793, although most other medieval torture devices were extensively catalogued.”

Meaning, I suppose, that the power of the imagery was enough that the thing didn’t need to actually be used in order to represent the horrors of the Dark Ages to those in the 19th century and beyond. Bogus!