A Woman's Place...

The joke goes like this:

"The only metal a woman knows is pots and pans."

Otep doesn't really help disprove this, of course.

 
In 2018, with the #metoo movement in full swing, it's harder to laugh at a statement like that. Mainly because one, it's demonstrably false. There's more tr00 female heshers than at any time I've ever been able to recall. And two, publicly laughing at that statement in 2018 means you're possibly taking a side in the cultural shitshow between cock-hating Third Wave Feminists and the human toilets that comprise the online communities of Mens Rights Activists, Incels, and Alt-Right cum stains to whom disparaging women isn't a laughing matter but a very real vocation in between their sessions of playing Call of Duty, eating Hot Pockets, and generally avoiding the sun.  

There really isn't a sadder more pathetic community on the internet than the Incels.

But as women in metal become more commonplace, periodically we see articles on the various blogs and forums on the topic of "female fronted" bands. Recently long terrible and thankfully long inactive nu-metal band Kittie opined that they shouldn't be thought of as a female fronted band. Quite ironic, given that when their record label first presented this Canadian embarrassment to music to an undeserving world, pretty much all of their hype centered around their gender and age. It was widely speculated shortly after their debut that at least some of the "musicians" in the band were even so inept that they couldn't competently tune their own instruments.

All these members. Yet so little interesting music.

It is a fair point, nevertheless. Should it really matter what the identities of a band's members happen to be? It seems like "female fronted" is a poor label to use to distinguish bands based on their sound. Arch Enemy, a band guilty of blatantly using an attractive female vocalist to gather attention in an otherwise over-saturated melodic deathmetal genre, sounds pretty goddamned different from Nightwish, purveyors of frilly froo foo symphonic powermetalish horseshit. My strong opinions about these artists notwithstanding, the only common denominator between artists in this manufactured "genre" is that the bands feature females as vocalists. It is pretty shitty to therefore isolate bands featuring female membership and to judge them not as bands on equal footing with the rest of the genre but only in comparison to other bands featuring prominent women. 

This is marketing, not creative brilliance.

Metal should be exclusionary. It's an outsider genre of music and a subculture for people that feel like outsiders. That said, I don't see why that label only fits white heterosexual men like myself. In fact, if any group of people in western society based on gender and ethnic identity are insiders, it's people like me. I see no reason why people with vaginas, or people of color, or people with various sexual, gender, ethnic, religious, or even political identities cannot identify with the alienation of feeling like an "outsider" and feel drawn to this type of music. 

Metal is not a goddamned pie. Just because more people decided they want to try it doesn't mean you get to have less.

At the same time, if a band wants to be judged on its merits and not the identity of its members, then that band needs to present itself that way. Kittie chose to market themselves as angry teenage girls and when they became thirty somethings and weren't getting respect as serious musicians outside of a dwindling fanbase, that's when they said "stop calling us a girl band." When Butcher Babies two front women put their tits all over everything and say "we're selling serious music", that's basically bullshit. There's nothing wrong with tits or pushing sexuality, but using sex appeal to get attention to sell shitty music doesn't make the music better. I've got no problem with someone being comfortable enough to push themselves that way, but you can't really complain that no one buys you as a musician when you're selling sex rather than music. (Though in the case of Butcher Babies, that's probably a smarter financial move.)

They could be selling basically anything here.

There's plenty of women involved in metal bands that are producing great music. Nervosa's entire lineup is female, and Haemhorrage, Eluveitie, Electric Wizard, Bolt Thrower, Abnormality, and My Dying Bride come to mind right off the top of my head as bands with female contributors. I don't think it matters if you've got a cock n' balls or a vag; if you're making good music then you're making good music. It's really not much more complicated than that.

An honest to goatlord decent solid thrash band.

In short, a woman's place is wherever she wants it to be. That includes within the metal scene. And women shouldn't have to leave their femininity at the entrance to the hall, either. But if women in metal bands use their gender to distinguish themselves from other bands in the genre, then it's hypocritical to then wonder why their bands aren't evaluated the same way as other bands. If you want to be accepted and fit in, then fit in.

When Bands go "Cold Lake"...

Would you believe these guys once released "To Mega Therion"?

It's inevitable that almost every band will have a subpar effort in their catalog of albums. That many bands will take a swing and miss on a stylistic shift is a given and perhaps even a necessity. Not every artist is destined to be Motorhead or Cannibal Corpse and can regurgitate the same album over and over without diminished returns. Some bands need to take a left turn and explore a little uncharted territory before returning to what made them good. Paradise Lost is a wonderful example of that. Sometimes a band needs a lineup shift to rekindle their inspiration and get back on track with that they do best with a renewed energy. Amorphis is a great example of this. And sometimes bands just make inexplicably crap records that otherwise interrupt careers of strong output. Rotting Christ and My Dying Bride have both done this.

Even a band as badass as fucking Vader has occasionally released a forgettable album. See also: "The Beast".

And sometimes bands just go completely off the deep end and make enormous career shifts and decide to release awful records.

I'm inspired to rant about this because right now I'm listening to the new Machine Head album Catharsis, which sees the band abandoning a string of solid, groovy thrash records to revisit their unfortunate adventures in nu-metal. With online media blogs deciding that nu-metal's revival is now imminent I guess Robb Flynn decided to take one more stab at the "moronic-extra-chromosome-carrying-previously-disowned-yet-for-a-brief-time-commercially-viable" relative to proper metal. What is awful is new again, right? (For example, supposedly JNCOs are "back".) Not that it should surprise you, but yes, Catharsis sucks. It's muddy downtuned "grooves" and infantile lyricism is a sharp departure from the epic, intricate nature of The Blackening or even the classic metal influences that crept up since. 

I can't believe Robb Flynn thought revisiting THIS was a good idea.

One often wonders what leads to the decision making for an otherwise established band that seemingly has found its niche to make an abrupt shift in style. Clearly fan perception about whether such a shift has even taken place is one thing to consider. For example, how far a shift was Cryptopsy really making with The Unspoken King? While clearly globbing onto the deathcore wave of the late 2000's, it at least remained an "extreme" metal album, if only relative to what mainstream music happens to be. Fan outrage, as well as my own critique, was that Cryptopsy was an established institution that transcended trends in the metal underground and did not need to cater to the aesthetics of a passing moment. Nobody listens to Cryptopsy to hear clean vocals, excessive keyboards, or grooves. They want speed, hyperblasting drums, and acrobatically extreme vocals. The overwhelmingly negative backlash obviously didn't go unnoticed and after several lineup changes, Cryptopsy seemed to right the ship with their eponymous effort and the followup Book of Tomes EP.

In a sense, that's what Celtic Frost did in following up the colossally massive failure of Cold Lake. This was the bad record by which all other bad records are defined. Ironically, it was from one of the genre's most forward thinking and progressive bands during the 1980s, yet upon achieving wider success on their own terms, the band seemingly sabotaged themselves by releasing an utterly unlistenable glam rock album, complete with hairspray. Tom G. Warrior would later call it his biggest mistake ever, and attribute it to a combination of a happy love life and letting a new lineup determine the creative direction. Still, the band would "right" things by responding with the oft-ignored Vanity/Nemesis before returning from hiatus many years later, existing as though Cold Lake never happened.

Happy people make shitty music. Its just a fact.

Then there's the bands that spend years and several albums cultivating fanbases, just to make an abrupt shift and never turn back. Opeth is a great example of this. Always heavily inspired by 70's prog rock, Opeth delivered 9 albums of varying brilliance, seemlessly interweaving said prog with thunderous death metal to create somber, compelling music. Thriving off the support of a death metal scene all too willing to hype Opeth to non-metal peers as proof of metal's ability to be more than mindless noise, Opeth grew from a little band from Stockholm, Sweden into one of metal's most universally beloved darlings, seemingly incapable of doing wrong. Then they released Heritage, an album devoid of any of its metal trappings in favor of pure 70's prog-nerd worship. The album was completely polarizing (the music media loved it while older fans hated it), and objectively not as "good" as their previously death metal inspired albums. The response of the band has essentially been confusing; follow up releases The Pale Communion and Sorceress basically doubled down on the pedestrian sounding non-metal. Yet the band still includes songs from their previous back catalog in their live set, and have left open the possibility of returning to a heavier sound in the future. Essentially Opeth has made it clear they don't want to play death metal anymore, yet they want to lead fans on so they will continue to attend shows and buy each new record with a hope that just maybe the the glory days of the band will return.

Maybe this nerd is just as confused about Opeth's direction as the rest of us.

Meanwhile, there's In Flames. In the year 2000, In Flames was at their peak. Their catchy formula of melodic death metal, extra heavy on syrupy sweet melodic guitar harmonies, was at once tremendously enjoyable and it seemed palatable enough for mainstream ears for In Flames to be the underground metal band that was going "make the leap." They so thoroughly outdrew Earth Crisis on a co-headlining tour that Earth Crisis actually broke up midtour. I personally witnessed an incredible performance on a tour they headlined with Nevermore and Shadow's Fall in a sold out club. It seemed like bigger venues and Ozzfests were in their future. And in some respects it was, just not how long time fans had envisioned. See, In Flames had dropped hints all along; expressing fandom for artists like Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit. And sure enough, just as their light was shining at its brightest, the band abandoned its Gothenburg-style roots for downtuned nu-metal, emo lyricism, and borderline whiny vocals on 2002's Reroute To Remain. And for the period of the last days of nu-metal's viability, In Flames was able to reach Ozzfest, and get picked up on bigger package tours. Yet it really seems like they basically swapped one fan base for another, and with the passing of nu-metal's wave, they just release albums in their adopted style every few years to a chorus of metal fans who remind them of how much better they used to be.  

Basically how In Flames feels about their old fans. But hey, matching jumpsuits.

I guess bands could reach the point of releasing a Cold Lake in a variety of ways. Desire for commercial success. Boredom with a style they've played for multiple albums. Internal discord within the band. Using Metallica's post-black album career as an example, perhaps a paranoid desire to stay relevant. How bands respond to it seems to vary as well. Some rebound, some double down, some hedge their bets on their new sound, and some, like Metallica, swing wildly for the fences again and again, hoping to stumble on the right formula; in their case it seems to be to settle down into a mediocre, watered down version of their past glory with Hardwired To Self Destruct.

Boredom can be dangerous.

So how does a fan "cope" with this? As a long time metalhead who has seen this play out multiple times, I've learned to not take it personally as 16 year old kid the first time their favorite band "sells out." I think it involves understanding that bands are made up of human beings, who evolve and change over time. Who develop new interests and become bored of old ones. I think more than anything, a band should always make "honest art", which is to say that they should follow whatever is in their collective heart in a creative sense. If you make a shitty record for the right reason, who cares? Hell, if you make it for the wrong reason, is it really that big a deal? Those old Opeth and In Flames records haven't gone anywhere. I can still listen to My Arms Your Hearse or Whoracle and those records are just as amazing today as they were when they were originally released. The fact that both bands made abrupt decisions to turn to shit doesn't change that. The fact that Machine Head has just released an absolute turd sandwich of an album and are whiny bitches about the fact most of their fans hate it doesn't make Burn My Eyes or The More Things Change... less crushing.

Still one of metal's greatest albums.

As a younger fan, I probably would develop some sort of irrational animosity towards a band and its entire catalog because of a Cold Lake-moment. But in 2018, with so many streaming services and torrents of so many other bands it just seems silly. I'm not suggesting bands should get a pass for releasing a bad record. I still haven't "forgiven" Hypocrisy for releasing Catch 22 and attempting to cash in on ripping off Slipknot. But I am thankful I haven't disregarded the band since; albums like End of Disclosure and A Taste of Extreme Divinity are worthy additions to the band's legacy and have deserved their repeated listens.

I guess the overarching theme of what I'm getting at is that the longer a band exists, the more likely they're gonna do a shitty record. And the more likely they're gonna shift styles at some point. The confluence of diminished inspiration and style shift is what creates a Cold Lake. It's bound to happen yet rather than spending a ton of time upset about it, just remember that we live in a time when there's constantly more new records coming out that are going to be up your alley if you just take the time to look.