Heavy metal’s primary contradiction: given a fanbase that is often concerned with detecting what is and isn’t “real” metal, so much of what constitutes “real” “metal” is made up of 100-percent pure fantasy. Sometimes this results in a certain cultural conservatism. But mostly it just means that the true-est metal fan is the one who is (at least mentally) young enough to even care about both ends of this contradiction. Meaning that metal’s longevity – the way it has evaded becoming just another musical fad – depends largely on its ability to attract a continuously new fanbase, one that springs to life and puts its fork and knife on the (kiddie) table of metal consumerism.
By my measure, the most significant reinvention of metal in the last decade or so has been a complete fabrication: specifically, Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse cartoon. Its fictional death-metal anti-heroes, Dethklok, have set a new bar for consistently high-quality brutality that somehow manages to transcend the fact that the band isn’t “real.” With the metal underground currently undergoing a crisis of faith that has allowed similarly fake bands to rise to supremacy whilst eschewing things like songs, vocals, beats, riffs, and substance (substitute instead: a smoke and mirror show centered on naked amplifier worship, dry ice, capes, and hieroglyphic mumbo-jumbo), it’s rewarding to see a fake band that actually gives the kids what they want. The greatest death-metal band of all time could never exist in real life, so it had to be invented.
Dethklok is the creation of Brendon Small, and although he’s a cartoonist by trade, he is also an absolutely bitching guitarist. He has an almost superhuman ability to play dementedly complex riffage whilst simultaneously bellowing precision death-metal lyrics. His touring band, composed of former Zappa sideslinger Mike Keneally and a big dude on drums who was in Exodus or Testament or one of those metal bands whose logo was made to look like it was bolted together from shiny metal sheets, were absolutely shredadelic. They played in perfect syncopation with a gigantic screen depicting the cartoon band running through the song. In the live show, as in the Adult Swim television series, the editing favors an ever escalating series of quick cuts juxtaposing images of grotesquery – which effectively doubles as a strobe light matching time with the drummer’s blast beats. The effect is one of complete and utterly disorienting nausea. Each song built inevitably to a double-time conclusion of seizure-inducing visual overload coupled with the band’s own race toward speed-metal insanity, complete with wah-assisted lead guitar doodledy-doo. It was powerful, it was funny, it was fatiguing, it was beautiful.
Often during the set, I tried to pry my eyes away from the cartoon to focus on the human players. This proved to be a futile endeavor, since a) the visuals on the screen were always far more interesting, and b) watching the band was kind of like watching a pit orchestra during an opera. The band was there front and center to remind you that they were physically capable of playing their inhuman music in the flesh and matching it up perfectly with the video on the screen – and they pulled it off with a precision that was laudable but oddly mechanical. If there is one chink in the Dethklok armor, it’s that in sticking so close to a pre-determined script, they short-circuit the unpredictability that “true” metal has always promised.
Before Dethklok destroyed the universe, we were serenaded by three of metal’s current reigning titans: a dream bill that only a cartoon could have thrown together. Three hours before Dethklok hit the stage, we were assaulted with the galloping assault of High On Fire, a band born from the ashes of stoner metal pioneers Sleep. Lead axeman/vocalist Matt Pike is essentially stoner metal’s Mark Farner: a wild, shirtless, longhaired bohunk who leads his more-than-serviceable rhythm section through a stomping and energetic set that gives him plenty of opportunity to put one foot on the monitor as he mercilessly shreds to oblivion, hair in face, evil grimace revealing an impeccably crooked set of chompers. Pike is the kind of dude who, if stoner-rock hadn’t put a Les Paul in his mitts at a crucial age, would probably be halfway to becoming Dennis Hopper’s character Feck from River’s Edge, another Cali burnout marking time until that one crucial motorcycle wipeout puts him on painkillers for good. As it stands, he will go down as one of the more influential axemen of his era, mixing an ability to mercilessly bludgeon an audience with riffage upon wonderful riffage with a penchant for letting leads take flight into a bleeding sunset of Nevermore.
The audience seemed not too aware of who the band was. (At one point in their set, a woman next to me leaned over and asked “What’s this band called?”, an amusing query considering that the band’s name was emblazoned in 15-foot-high lettering on the screen behind them). Identity? Who needs one, when we’re all being crushed under the horsehoof thunder of crushers like “Cometh Down Hessian” and “Waste of Tiamat” (the latter a showstopper with its twin dropout drum solo stutter breaks a la Slayer’s “Angel of Death”). Concerns of metal recognition (T-shirt sales, even) became insignificant when it feels like orc hordes are storming the gates to lop your head off with dirt-crusted daggers.
I found it odd when “hometown heroes” Converge galloped onstage with the line, “It’s great to be in Boston!” and that sort of rah-rah nonsense. Frontman Jake Bannon was nothing if not a metal-punk posi huckster, walking a fine line between pandering-to-his-minions and sarcastically-mocking-the-uninitiated-who-were-flipping-the-band-off-for-the-crime-of-not-being-Dethklok. Converge is riding the cresting wave of hype surrounding its new Epitaph long-player Axe To Fall, and this tour is a parable for their career – in that it thrusts an idealistic hardcore-ish band into the juvenile world of mainstream modern metal.
Even more difficult than navigating that particular knife’s edge is the prospect of selling Converge’s knotty brand of math-wound spazz metal to a broad audience. Axe To Fall is in some ways a bid for greater comprehension, which probably explains why the band stuck to the new platter when plying new ears. Before the show, I was near the Converge merch table where I overheard a request for the new album on vinyl. The response (“Yeah, we don’t have it yet, they’re held up by the pressing plant in Prague, but dude they are going to be so SICK”) kind of summed it up: the band’s ascendence could come too fast for their typically fussy approach to keep up with. Album opener “Dark Horse” was a mid-set highlight, as drummer Ben Koller dispensed with his spastic King-Crimson-run-through-a-woodchipper polyrhythms in favor of a more direct approach – one that hit the audience like a two-by-four to the face. The set ended with some quasi-confrontational sludge, as the band morphed material from their Jane Doe album with a bizarre cover of The Melvins’ “Hag Me.” It was far and away the most trebly set of the evening, and maybe the most straight-up energetic in terms of pure human excitement.
Which led us to Mastodon, a band that, while amazingly accomplished, isn’t always the most exciting. I guess I’ve always found them impressive – but with an admiration that’s never flowered into actual fandom. And if I’m honest, their set – full of razzle dazzle and jaw-dropping proficiency – was not a game-changer, not even the frankly terrific runthrough, at the set’s closing, of Thin Lizzy’s classic “Emerald.” Maybe it had to do with this being months and months into the world tour supporting their new album, Crack The Skye. Just like the last time they pulled through town, this time they played the album in its entirety, a move that tends to alienate even hardcore metal fans, who view with suspicion anyone who hasn’t memorized a band’s entire recorded catalogue. In its defense, Skye is a dense work whose tunes work better in context than on their own — but it’s also an album best enjoyed with headphones, under blacklight, whilst perusing the album jacket for hidden hieroglyphics. In the flesh, the album is occasionally a chore to get through, and the band seemed to exude a sort of let’s-get-this-over-with weariness, even though they were playing with some bitching gear. (Lucite clear custom-made aluminum neck flying V’s? Fuck yeah!)
Things livened up significantly when they dipped into encores from Leviathan andRemission (and the aforementioned Lizzy cover). At which point I began to disagree with everything I just wrote and decided that this band is pure dynamite: possessing a near-telepathic ability to syncopate slalom-like guitar runs with impossibly complex drum fills, producing a form of metal combustion that, absorbed in one sitting, is incomprehensibly walloping. The new album has brought this band so close to having comprehensible songs that you just kind of wish that they would commit full-bore and ditch the show-offy pyrotechnics for a change. With their multi-media assault, they have already surpassed their heroes in Neuroses and are on course to supplant Tool in the technical-metal-overlords sweepstakes. And yet in the band’s tight harmonies and diversions into chug-boogie and atmospheric dry-ice ambience, you can see glimpses of what could be if they completely forgot to pander to a metal audience at all. Here’s to hoping that they continue this progression.
