2021: It was...um...a year?

Two weeks into 2022 and I haven't gone through the customary ritual of drafting a list of albums I enjoyed over the previous year. It's not because I stopped listening to music, because I definitely haven't. I certainly have continued to buy and enjoy albums by establish artists and newer bands alike. It has been, however, quite a year since the last time I posted an update on this little blog. The last 365 (+14) days saw my country almost experience a successful coup, a pandemic that developed a solution only for conspiracy wingnuts who pop dick pills and oxycotin all day to suddenly become skeptical of "Big Pharma" to reject en masse, and the price of everything to spike up because, y'know, more demand than supply in an economy that's underpinned by cheap labor. On a personal front, I was worked nearly to death feeding 'Murica while I finished my MBA (with a 4.0 fuckers!) and M got a new job, but we also found time to have some some pretty amazing adventures in places like Terlingua, Texas, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Jackson, Wyoming, and Bar Harbor, Maine. I even let M talk me into a week in Orlando visiting theme parks.

Getting lost in damn near Mexico with M and a stack of random metal records is my happy place.

 

 

True story: M used the unfortunate death of my grandmother as an excuse to drag me here.

Buffalo are massive animals that either plod about or can suddenly go 45 mph and bludgeon everything in their path. That makes them like the doom/death of the animal kingdom.

Would you believe this was taken on Memorial Day weekend in Maine? Kvlt as fukk.

With a vaccine, live events have begun happening again; I was able to go to a hockey game and tentatively have a couple more of those planned. I still haven't been to a metal show since December of 2019, but my tickets for MDF in 2022 are valid and who knows, maybe I see a show or two before then. Of course, I have some other stuff in professional world to look at; updating my resume and obtaining some post-degree credentials but largely it's kinda time to relax and take a breath. With a lot of uncertainty about what this year promises to bring, I don't know where or what I'll be doing. I do feel confident that the soundtrack remains the same. 

 

This movie wasn't a satire of 2021, it was a fucking mirror. I really hope 2022 is somehow miraculously less depressing...

Biggest Disappointment of 2021

I think that a silver lining of the pandemic, if there is one, is that it forced bands off the touring cycle and it kinda forced them to spend more time refining and revising the albums they'd end up releasing, which in turn meant that overall quality of releases was much better than recent years. I don't think I bought or took an interest in any albums this year that didn't basically satisfy the itch they were meant to scratch. I live in a bubble of course, so I'm sure I could pick up an album that would let me down...but nothing comes to mind for memorable suckage. I mean, if you shoved a Rob Zombie or Five Fisted Circle Jerk(?) album in front of me I'd expect that to suck; the bigger surprise would be if it didn't (supposedly according to at least one online arbiter of metal that I respect was posting that the new Cradle of Filth album doesn't suck, which would be a considerable surprise to me.)  So I'm just going to stick with the fact that I didn't get to see any metal live and in person for two full calendar years now as my disappointment. If anything, I don't think there was a release that I heard that made me say "that's an all-time great album" but just a whole lot of really good quality releases that made it a bit difficult to separate the best of the bunch. I imagine that I could create a different list on another day and still feel good about it. 

(If someone wants to tell me why Spiritbox is supposed to be cool I'm all ears because I'm kinda sick of seeing them blowing up my Social Media feed.) 

Honorable Mentions

A Pale Horse Named Death Infernmum In Terra (SPV)

Aborted Maniacult (Century Media)

Aeon God Ends Here (Metal Blade)

Baest Necro Sapiens (Century Media)

Becerus Homo Homini Brutus (Everlasting Spew)

Be'lakor Coherence (Napalm Records)

Black Hole Deity Lair of Xenolich EP (Everlasting Spew)

Blood Red Throne Imperial Congregation (Nuclear Blast)

Burial Inner Gateways To The Slumbering Equilibrium At The Center Of Cosmos (Everlasting Spew)

Carcass Torn Arteries (Nuclear Blast)

Crypts of Despair All Light Swallowed (Transcending Obscurity)

Deiquisitor Humanoid (Dark Descent)

Diabolizer Khalkedonian Death (Everlasting Spew)

Dread Sovereign Alchemical Warfare (Metal Blade)

Endseeker Mount Carcass (Metal Blade)

EyeHateGod A History Of Nomadic Behavior (Century Media)

Felled The Intimate Earth (Transcending Obscurity)

First Fragment Gloire Eternalle (Unique Leader)

Flesh Hoarder Relic Of Putrescent Filth (New Standard Elite)

Fossilization He Whose Name Is Long Forgotten (Everlasting Spew)

Full Of Hell Garden Of Burning Apparitions (Relapse Records)

Harakiri For The Sky Maere (AOP Records)

Hooded Menace The Tritonous Bell (Season of Mist)

Hypocrisy Worship (Nuclear Blast)

Laceration Demise (Rotted Life)

Monolord Your Time To Shine (Relapse Records)

Moonspell Hermitage (Napalm Records)

NecroticGoreBeast Human Deviance Galore (Comatose Music)

Nightfall At Night We Pray (Season of Mist)

Ophis Spew Forth Odium (FDA Records)

Panopticon ...And Again Into The Light (Bindrune Recordings)

Pathology The Everlasting Plague (Nuclear Blast)

Portal Avow (Profound Lore)

Soen Imperial (Silver Lining Music)

Stabbing Ravenous Psychotic Onslaught EP (Comatose Music)

Swallow The Sun Moonflowers (Century Media)

Tribulation Where The Gloom Becomes Sound (Century Media)

Werewolves What A Time To Be Alive (Prosthetic Records)

White Stones Dancing Into Oblivion (Nuclear Blast)

 

10.) Wolves In The Throne Room Primordial Arcana (Relapse Records)

After John Haughm decided to edge-lord a little too hard and the other members of Pillorian decided to pack up shop, Wolves In The Throne Room kinda took up the altar of "band that sounds closest to Agalloch that you're gonna find in 2022." Which kinda makes sense given that WITTR also call the Pacific Northwest home. An example of a band that I came a bit lately towards but now I'm enjoy the chance to delve into their entire discography.

9.) Alluvial Sarcoma (Unique Leader)

Is this deathcore? Progressive death? I dunno. It's definitely modern for the genre, with lots of huge riffs, big breakdowns with lots of space to breathe, etc. Seems to fit in well with the modern Unique Leader sound I guess; it feels more dynamic than you'd expect but still oppressively plodding yet pit friendly. 

 

8.) Cannibal Corpse Violence Unimagined (Metal Blade)

Zero surprises here; it's a Cannibal Corpse record that sounds like a Cannibal Corpse record. That said, Eric Rutan is the best thing that ever happened to this band. The fact that they remain this extreme as they've become 50 year olds deserves a lifetime achievement award.

 

7.) Alustrium A Monument Of Silence (Unique Leader)

These guys sound so tight and technically proficient that I initially mistook them for part of the Quebec tech-death collective. It's not just their ability to doodle on their fretboards though; Alustrium infuses their brand of tech-death with catchy hooks and actual song structure; there's melody to be found amongst the varied growls and ceaseless bombast of drums. Busy yet restrained in all of the right ways.

 

6.) Khemmis Deceiver (Nuclear Blast)

Along with Pallbearer and Spirit Adrift, you could almost consider Khemmis part a "big 3" of American doom since the 2010's. Each band draws back to the foundations of the genre to achieve something classically inspired albeit in different ways. Pallbearer writes haunting dirges, Spirit Adrift occupies something of a 1979-1982 era of doom meets cock rock currently, yet Khemmis retains the huge riffing and sludgy heft of doom in what they bring to the table. Deciever is less bass heavy (makes sense; this time around the bass guitar parts were performed by the two guitarists), but still full of downtuned grimy agony and a varied vocal delivery; this time around the growls are slightly more prominent. If Pallbearer aims for loftier "high art" and Spirit Adrift seeks to be the soundtrack for taking psychadelics and getting into an orgy with gals who have the "big bush", Khemmis seeks to crush you with misery, while occasionally adding some swagger with it. 

 

5.) Aenigmatum Deconsecrate (20 Buck Spin)

Bombastic blackened-death from 20 Buck Spin. Aegnimatum delve into multiple death metal adjacent subgenres while remaining a distinct entity, combining a bit of Athiest with the dischordant progressions of 2nd wave black metal, but delivered with the ferocity of Nile. Trying to find reviews that give points of reference to compare these guys to is difficult, but that speaks to the distinct character of what they've put together here. The meandering bass guitar lines underpinning all of this cacophony is a nice detail.

 

4.) Pyrexia Gravitas Maximus (Unique Leader)

Holy fuck. I'm sure there's a ton of recency bias here but this is the best album this long running NYDM band ever released. And yeah, I'm including the legendary Sermony of Mockery record with that. This album is so good it makes me want to revisit that post-Sermon discography, because until now I don't feel like these guys ever lived up to that album following it's release. That's not an issue with Gravitas Maximus, full of chugging slams, breakdowns, gravel throrated growls, and steady doses of blastbeats and double kick runs. When this style of death metal is executed at the competency that Pyrexia displays here, it is hard to beat. At just 25 minutes or so, it comes fast, hard, and leaves you speechless. At number 4, I may be underrating this one. 

 

3.) Obscura A Valediction (Nuclear Blast)

Is this the 5th or 6th album this German prog-death troop? I dunno, but as someone who felt deeply burned by Opeth when they went limpwristed 10 years ago, Obscura has scratched that niche well in the years since. There's fretless bass lines, lush accoustic interludes, plenty of the fretboard wizardry to appease Cynic fans, enough venom to fit comfortably alongside the catalog of post-Human era Death, and still enough hooks and songcraft to make A Valediction a sufficiently ambitious if familiar journey. It gets a ranking rather than honorable mention because of their peerless execution. 

 

2.) Eye of Purgatory The Lighthouse (Transcending Obscurity)

Holy fucking Edge of Sanity, Batman! Everything about this recaptures that mid-90's era of ambitious death metal that sought to progress while maintaining the focus on riffs and aggression. The production and tones all gives vibes of Sunlight Studios...in spirit if nothing else. It all makes sense when you realize that the most prolific guy in Swedish death metal, Rogga Johansson, is the mastermind behind this band. Rogga, also the driving force of other more caveman-esque bands like Paganizer, Ribspreader, and Those Who Bring The Torture gets a pass for the "lack of originality" here since we're essentially discussing a seminal figure in the "non-Gothenburg" side of Swedish death metal. Big riffs, melodic leads, a use of keyboards that takes an appropriate backseat to meaty riffing. I get it that you could just listen to Purgetory Afterglow or Crimson and get the same experience, but I still can't help but feel like Rogga did an outstanding job of breathing fresh life into previously used template.

 

1.) The Crown Royal Destroyer (Metal Blade)

I'm not sure if anyone else will hold this album in this level of esteem, but in a year that's hard to separate between a lot of really good albums, I think this may be one of the albums I listened to the most. This is ham-fisted Scandinavian death metal that borrows elements of thrash and melodic death metal to bring forth a filthy yet well produced, crushingly heavy slab of bangers. Songs like "Motordeath" are respect-filled nods to influences such as early Metallica, and I can confidently say that "We Drift On" is the best song never written by In Flames or Amon Amarth. Royal Destroyer is a confident effort by an established, well polished band who know what they do well. 

       

I guess now that I'm done with my university studies (for real this time!) I'll try to update a little more than once annually. I felt like I had some topics I wanted to riff on, and I may well get around to them in the next few months. In the meantime, I'll "shout out" to establishments both real and virtual that kept me supplied with metal over the last year.

Brick and Mortar Stores:

The Sound Garden- Baltimore, Maryland

Vinyl Altar- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 

Bull Moose- Maine and New Hampshire (especially Portsmouth, NH and Portland, Me)

Extreme Noise Records- Minneapolis, Minnesota

Twist and Shout Compact Discs, Records, & DVDs- Denver, Colorado

Waterloo Records- Austin, Texas  

Online Shops and Distros

Comatose Music  

Everlasting Spew

Night Shift Merch 

Season of Mist USA  

HorrorGorePainDeath Productions

Hell's Headbangers 

 

At least it's over- Best of 2020

Whelp, did this year suck or what? 2020 is one of those just abysmally awful years like 1939, 1929, 1860, 1349, etc…that was just tremendously awful for the entire planet. Here in the United States, we’ve been governed by a kleptocrat with the support his cult of the “stupid, ignorant, and desperate” who are fearful that a brown person somewhere somehow has a dollar more and a shinier smart phone than they do. Said orange faced kleptocrat has done fuck all to respond to a pandemic that as I type this, has killed more than 300,000 Americans who may not have otherwise kicked the bucket except for the malice and incompetence of this pitiful, weak, small quasi-man. Oh, then there was the fact that when cops were seen literally murdering a black man on cellphone video by choking him out, that after the initial shock subsided, we got more of the same “can’t we just all get along so I don’t have to worry about my property being stolen” bullshit. Heaven forbid the fucking police have to abide by the same doctrines regarding the use of deadly force that our military does. 

 

That whole thing about those who don't learn from the past...etc...

Not that the other side of the political aisle has done anyone any favors either. Diamond Joe, strategically speaking, barely won under the stupid ass rules that govern our elections despite having 7 million more votes. This was mainly because Team Blue would rather pander to token “representation” rather than deliver a meaningful actual change that may ask our economic and business elites to sacrifice a marginal percentage of their monopolized wealth for the good of everyone else, at least at its highest levels of leadership. And your arm gets twisted into voting for this bullshit, because your only viable alternative to going along with the diet soda version of Republicanism is so bat-shit incompetent they throw away a previous administration’s pandemic response playbook and since getting beat in an election are currently peddling some bizarre conspiracy that somehow Hugo Chavez’s rotting corpse has conspired with China’s Winnie the Pooh and the “Epstein/Clinton Reptilian Pedophile Crime Syndicate” to swing votes via rigged voting machines that somehow managed to allocate votes to Biden instead of Trump, but didn’t alter any down ticket races to give Biden a legislative majority. Yeah, this shit is wild… and by wild I mean comedic stupid and bound to get worse because Y’all-Qaeda thinks government mandates to wear masks and limit gatherings of people to reduce the spread of Covid-19 is somehow is an oppression of their freedom. 

 

Did I even mention that RBG dropped dead and was replaced by the Queen Bitch of Gilead, and for that we are now under his watchful eye, or at least that of a 6-3 conservative dickhead Supreme Court majority, with a president-elect too fucking pussy to stack the court, create new liberal states, or otherwise lock in some changes for the better? Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s some snarky socialist types lounging their parents basements with a bachelors degree in sociology along with a mountain of student loan debt, but at least those heroes come armed with a bag of dirt weed, Cheetos, internet pornography (or at least pics of AOC’s feet) and some dank memes to bring about “the revolution” once they’re done playing Animal Crossing and listening to Chapo’s Trap House. 

Look, they make me laugh too sometimes but if you think that these clowns are gonna bring about your political revolution, then rest assured that our elites can sleep well at night.

Fuck my country, man.

That’s a lot of political ranting and run-on sentences but the last 4 years of Trump’s awful reign has been exhausting in an all consuming way unlike anything else in my lifetime. It’s been the car wreck you want to take your eyes off of but you just can’t. That said, 2020, like much of the last few years, has been more positive for M and I than perhaps the public at large. I type this 4 classes away from completing my MBA from a directional state university with a Division 2 football team; I even have a 4.0 GPA to boot. M and I managed a couple fun trips, including adventures to several National Parks in Colorado and Utah, a lovely few days on the beach in Georgia that left us both so sunburnt as to be red as tomatoes, and we made to Oklahoma and New Mexico for the first time which has us down to 3 remaining states to visit to have completed the entire United States. I even managed to lose 50lbs. Sure, I need to lose another 50, but it’s a start, right? Hah.

It hasn’t been all fun and games though. M had her work hours briefly cut back at one point, my annual college football road trip got shit-canned, and I haven’t been to a fucking metal concert since December of 2019. I didn’t get to see either of my 90 year old grandmothers for Christmas this year, and my plans to finally get on an airplane were thwarted, as M and I had intended to make it to Las Vegas for Psycho Las Vegas in 2020, as well as to swing by a couple of National Parks (Death Valley, Grand Canyon, maybe Zion?) in a loop.

I’m not sure what 2021 holds but at least in theory the vaccines for our new plague are now starting to be distributed and by mid year we may be able to actually have fun again if we manage to live that long and/or if there’s any restaurants or concert venues that aren’t boarded up by that time. Until then, I’ve got another semester of college coursework ahead of me, some time spent screaming at the TV as the Green Bay Packers will get destroyed in the playoffs by a team with a strong running game, the Washington Capitals will grow older and waste more of what’s left of Alex Ovechkin’s prime, and hey, maybe a little more of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla to keep me occupied. With that said, here’s my take on the year in heavy music for 2020.

 

Our hero in DC is only getting older, and once he retires we're not winning shit.

Most Disappointing Record- Katatonia City Burials

I was a bit surprised to reach this conclusion, but this album came out back in April and I had almost completely forgotten it was a thing. I know that M listened to the song “Lacquer” a lot and I don’t think the album begins all that badly, but it ends up just being completely forgettable background music. Katatonia’s style is already relatively subdued for a metal band, but I thought the previous album “The Fall of Hearts” was amazing. I’m certainly willing to embrace and sit down with post-metal type stuff and don’t demand blood and gore as you, clearly bored individual reading this, will note on my actual list, but City Burials just didn’t have staying power or memorability. An example of a band I just expect more from.

Honorable Mentions:

Anaal Nathrakh Endarkenment
Athme Mephitic
Bedsore Hypnagogic Hallucinations
Benediction Scriptures
Contrarian Only Time Will Tell
Convocation Ashes Coalesce
Deathwhite Grave Image
Deeds of Flesh Nucleus
Demonical World Domination
Desolator Sermon of Apathy
Devoured Elysium Extermination Policies
Disavowed Revocation of the Fallen
Earth Rot Black Tides of Obscurity
Gaerea Limbo
Hinayana Death of the Cosmic
Incantation Sect of Vile Divinities
Incinerate Sacriligevim
Khora Timaeus
Molested Divinity Unearthing the Void
Napalm Death Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism
Necrophobic Dawn of the Damned
Necrot Mortal
Paradise Lost Obsidian
Shed The Skin The Forbidden Arts
Skaldr Scythe of Our Errors
Solstafir Endless Twilight of Codependent Love
Ulthar Providence
Vader Solitude In Madness
Valdrin Effigy of Nightmares
Void Rot Descending Pillars
Werewolves The Dead Are Screaming
White Stones Kuarahy
Winterfylleth The Reckoning Dawn

10.) Spirit Adrift Enlightened in Eternity

M will challenge me on this pick, as she seemed to prefer this band when they just played slow and frontman Nate Garrett didn’t express himself as an overconfident rock star in interviews, but I appreciate that Spirit Adrift didn’t repeat the same album they had released on twice previously. In a miserable, depressing kind of year where nothing about society seems capable of functioning properly, there needed to be an album that offered…ummm...well…hope and resilience? The chorus of the opening track to this album makes that manifestly clear and I’d dare say a bit of an internalized slogan for myself this year.

“If we make it through the night, we will ride into the light.” 

 

9.) Xibalba Anos En Infierno

I discovered this band while hanging out with a homie at the last college football road trip, and I had some anticipation for this release. It’s exactly what I was hoping for, sludgy and grimy, a good bit raw, heavy as all fucking hell, straddling the line somewhere between old school death metal, 90’s hardcore, and doom. I dunno if they’re actually doing anything new, but they certainly sound fresh to these ears. 

 

8.) Valkyrie Fear

Speaking of the retro train, Valkyrie delves deeply into the same well of 70’s and early 80’s rock that bands like Graveyard, or In Solitude, or Sumerlands indulge in, complete with theatrical guitar work, extensive harmonies, imperfect but effective clean vocals. In a world where Ghost has become one of metal’s biggest bands, there’s clearly a space for quality bands like Valkyrie to occupy and I’ve certainly redeveloped my appreciation for these kinds of classic sounding bands. 

 

7.) Godtrhymm Reflections

Take early Paradise Lost, Saint Vitus, and maybe a bit of the first Pallbearer record, let it simmer for hours, then run it through a strainer of Serenades-era Anathema, and you’ve got Godtrhymm. Godrhymm is the labor of love produced by Hammish Glencross, recently exiled from My Dying Bride, and who had previously also played in legendary doom metal act Solstice. This is plodding miserable stuff, with riffs that are both massive, monolithic, yet memorable and vocals that reach for that territory Nick Holmes was treading in during Gothic and Shades of God. Absolutely top notch. 

 

6.) …And Oceans Cosmic World Mother

A welcome return, and they avoided some of the weird experimentation and bizarre indulgences of their later records to just focus on ripping, melodic and somewhat symphonic Scandinavian black metal delivered with precision. You always wonder about reunion albums and if the band should have even bothered, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that this album is well balanced between its ferocity and it’s melodicism, sharing most in common with the band’s debut The Dynamic Gallery of Thoughts, which I also recommend if you can find it. A welcome throwback to that vibrant mid-late 90’s period of black metal. 

 

5.) Cytotoxin Nuklearth

I feel like this is a year where I heard a lot of really good, but not great brutal death metal records. Not that “elite-tier” anyhow. I mean, Molested Divinity’s Unearthing the Void was awesome and the Disavowed reunion was much welcomed but while I enjoyed the new Defeated Sanity album, I wasn’t nearly as impressed with it as other fans of the brutal death metal sound. Nuklearth, however, stands out. Cytotoxin scores points on a couple levels; their Chernobyl gimmick is original, their musicianship is next level, and they bring both the technical and the brutal in equal abundance. Nuklearth rips hard, furiously blasting while also providing those breakdowns without going overkill on it.

 

4.) Uada Djinn

A vocal minority of the tr00 brigade will complain about this album. The rest of us, who like ugly heavy music, will see this for what it is: the album where Uada escaped the Mgla comparisons and became the Judas Priest meets Dissection band they always were aiming for. This record opens with a post-punk sounding drum beat and ends with one of the absolute most epic Iron Maiden inspired guitar solos ever recorded in metal. Yeah, listen to the last 3 minutes or so of “Between Two Worlds” and tell me that’s not what you hear. Much like Behemoth has proven, just because you draw from many non-metal influences, it doesn’t mean that your extreme metal has to become “less metal” as a result. 

 

3.) Wayfarer A Romance With Violence

I love everything about this album and consider it a possible top album of the decade if not for the two albums above it; one of the best and most close together top 3 albums I could rate in quite a bit of time. Wayfarer really dives in deeper with the “cowboy western motif” as A Romance With Violence is very much more conceptual than previous Wayfarer releases; closely examining the westward expansion and just how grim and chaotic reality was for settlers in a lawless hinter-region of the United States. If you’ve ever driven across the Western United States, the vastness of the distances between cities is enormous and the hours upon hours just on the interstate can be relaxing in its solitude but it could also be scary, as mother nature unleashes ferocious storms and many of the folk who live in those rural, geographically isolated outposts can be rather rough around the edges, if you’re lucky. Wayfarer captures all of that perfectly, as they blend their black metal with clean, semi-acoustic spaghetti western vibes seamlessly, capturing the wild west for the morbidly dark, death and despair filled wasteland that it was. 

 

2.) Ulcerate Stare Into Death And Be Still

The idea that a 3 piece band can sound this heavy, this fierce, this ominous, this dark, this…horrifying? Ulcerate is the darkest, most terrifying sounding act in death metal at this point, as their 6 to 8 minute compositions have gradually moved away from their clankier, most discordant elements of their early sound to something that still is connected to that, but pulls at you with greater, almost black metalish despair without any high pitched shrieks or corpse-painted silliness. This is guttural growls and some of the most impressively bombastic drumming in any death metal band ever. While accessible…by Ulcerate’s standards, this is far removed from the caveman brutality of the 90’s and certainly a challenging record for people who may prefer their death metal…dare I say less intellectual? For those who want an involved, captivating listen that builds to peaks and crescendos instead of verse/chorus/verse, this delivers in spades. I was convinced it was going to be my number 1 album, except for the band that follows…

 

1.) Pallbearer Forgotten Days

With their 4^th album, it’s just time to stop only thinking of Pallbearer as a tremendous doom metal band, but just flat out the best band active in metal in 2020. The tr00 d00mmmm crowd will dislike the shorter song lengths and faster tempos, but an album that’s easier to listen to is no crime. Rather, the fact that Pallbearer can write songs at different lengths and tempos and still sound haunting, miserable, and full of raw, sludgy goodness is a feather in their cap. The fact they’re playing up to their classic rock influences while still foundationally being a slow band who play long songs full of low end sludge I think has only made the band even better to listen to. 

 

Fuck You, Pay Me: the T-shirt Edition.

So on my social media feed, I just read this article where Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth is quoted saying that he'd love to get his band's shirts into Walmart because he'd like the money. Walmart, as I'm guessing the 3 of you that are reading this are aware, sells band merchandise for a variety of well known, mainstream rock artists. For example, their website offers a wide arrange of hideous looking KISS merchandise from many resellers.

Unfortunately, the KISS Kasket is not among their offerings.

Of course, they also sell stuff right on their shelves, and as crazy as it sounds to a 40 something like myself, there's kids who are out there wearing Nirvana t shirts from Walmart that couldn't name a song by them. Metal has it's rules of conduct, and only wearing a band's shirt if you actually listen to that artist is most certainly one of the core tenants. So while the likelihood of someone running afoul by buying a Metallica replica tour shirt at Walmart in Bumfuck, Indiana is rather unlikely, should more obscure bands be trying to get their shit into Walmart?

You can't name their third album or their original lead singer either, you fucking poser.

I get that Dani Filth is a tiny little drowning kitten of a metal vocalist in a band that has only ever written a smattering of good songs entirely by accident but I don't think he's wrong to have those aspirations. If anything, it'd be brilliant given that while CoF themselves might be a bit too edgy for Walmart, for other bands to get their merchandise on shelves would represent a revenue stream at a time when bands aren't really selling their music (outside of a few luddites like myself who still buy CDs or the vinyl snobs who have money to re-purchase their entire collections) band merchandise represents probably their best income stream besides touring and playing shows. It also promotes awareness of the bands themselves, which you'd hope would lead to people streaming their music on Spotify or YouTube and eventually buying a ticket to the concert, or ordering the album on vinyl. Or another shirt when 18 of their peers also have the same shirt that they bought at the same Walmart.

It's pretty likely that the teenage'd me would be rather confused, but with the disappearance of record stores in every shopping mall and music sales in general, trying to cling to an old model because it represents some idea of "cool" or "true" just doesn't make a lot of sense. If musicians or artists want to devote themselves fully to their art, they need a revenue stream to finance their endeavors. That's why so many bands have expanded their merch from just t shirts to shot glasses, thongs, action figures, and yes, the KISS Kasket.

I just want to remind you again that yes, this was a thing!

I guess this has all been shaped by two semesters taking post-grad classes in Marketing, but if your goal is to make your band bigger and promote awareness, then by all means you should not just be producing merchandise branded with your band, but you should be pursuing an "omnichannel" approach to distribution. Not just at concerts, or through a bandcamp website, but if you can pull it off, by getting it into a big box store. Get it in front of people in as many ways as possible, and perhaps it's time for me to come around and reshape my own thinking. Instead of saying you already need to know the band before getting the t-shirt, maybe the year 2020, getting the t-shirt makes the kid search the band on Spotify. Maybe in the near future having an eye catching logo and creative merchandising really will be just as important as the music itself for successful bands (after all, fans who are wearing your band's logo across their chest are literally providing free advertising for your art.)

Marketing Genius. Still sucks at vocals.

I'm agreeing with Dani Filth. Interesting times we live in!

How Heavy Metal Saved My Life: A True Story (No, Really, It Is!)

A few years back when talking about something to do with my childhood/teenage years, M and I somehow ended up on a toot about music, identity, and how for me personally, a lot of my life was shaped by my relationship with this obscure, mildly rhythmic noise. So as I sit here with a vacation largely interrupted by our ongoing COVID-19 Apolcalypse, which neat enough, is being broadcast in real time on Cable TV news while a reality show president only somewhat coherently rants each evening about how we should ignore science and send old people to die in the name of boosting the stock market so said buffoon can get re-elected in November...holy run-on sentence batman! These are fucked times, and as M and I are largely staying at home to avoid the latest, greatest, newest plague, I guess I have some free time on my hands. So I dedicate this post to M, who has occasionally pestered me to put this in writing.

I think this whole pandemic is really just marketing to get us to watch this guy's Netflix series.

I suppose in a sense this has to be autobiographical. It's largely a story of coincidence as well. So let's get right to it. I was born just over 40 years ago and raised in the outskirts of a small southern college town in the middle of Virginia. The kind of place where said college town equates to the "big city", and said college is the "center of the universe" that gives locals a certain sense of inflated importance. As though there aren't several hundred similar towns scattered about the United States. Residents here can be split into two groups; somewhat snooty white collar people (the Gilded Caste, if you will) who are brought from outside the area because of some affiliation or relationship with said college, or the "townies"; the "Jesus, Guns, and NASCAR" crowd who work in the service economy that serves said affluent crowd. There's a noticeable tension between these two groups. This became magnified as any type of blue collar factory work evaporated in the 1980's and 90's via globalization, free trade agreements, yadda yadda.

My hometown, inside of city limits...

and outside of city limits...

I was born to a teenage mom and a dad who was a factory worker, so it's easy to see what the anticipated trajectory of my life would be. "Townies" are just that, the people that never leave the damn place. My family, on both sides, goes back many generations, as people from the surrounding mountains that gradually gravitated towards said college town since it was a hub of commerce and economic activity...

So my family, if you went back enough, were like the Central Virginia equivalent of the Hatfields or McCoys.

(Side Rant: okay, so my mom's side basically relocated there after being forcibly evicted from what would become Shenandoah National Park, you can read about it here or here. The TL:DR is that during the New Deal, it was determined to be too expensive to bring electricity and sanitation infrastructure to the hillbillies of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so they were given a pittance as compensation and thru eminent domain evicted to create the National Park and Skyline Drive. Somewhere in the vicinity of Jarman's Gap Overlook on Skyline Drive is where my great grandmother was born; she passed away only in 2013. This is relatively recent history that still lives for many people. Interesting story really.)

...and took up jobs serving the general economy of the college town. They stayed, their children stayed, etc....I'm pretty sure that only two relatives that I can identify off the top of my head don't currently reside somewhere in Central Virginia within 45 minutes or so of "college town." You're born there, you go to school there, you get married there, you find a shit job there, eventually you die there.

So where does heavy metal fit into all of this?

I wish I was awesome enough to say that in 1987 I was listening to Sodom and Bathory, but I was in 2nd grade and that wasn't what they were playing on MTV.

Remember that I'm a product of the 80's, born right before Reagan was elected. So as a young kid, I'd play in the field with the kid next door that was close to my age. Now and then we'd go over to his house since he had a Nintendo (I wasn't that cool, I just had a Sega Master System. I guess having both between us was kinda cool though.) Anyhow, his older sister was all in with the glam rock/hair metal thing going on at the time, so via her, we were exposed to the hairspray and spandex shit like Whitesnake, Poison, Motley Crue, etc. We're talking late 80's so it also turned out that Guns N Roses was breaking big, and a particular California band had released their first ever music video.

Metallica was heavier, darker, and absent the spandex and hairspray, looked more identifiable and relatable. I was immediately hooked. Quickly, I became addicted to staying up late on Saturday night's to watch MTV's Headbanger's Ball seeking to hear not just Metallica, but other heavier bands, which at the time for me meant stuff like Ozzy, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, etc. Remember that my exposure was entirely due to cable TV; I've never known my dad to listen to ANY kind of music to speak of, and my mom's tastes were a combination of pop/country and whatever played on the "oldies" FM station. Why staying up so late though? Because my mom was convinced that heavy metal was "vulgar" and "satanic."

Fuck you, Geraldo Rivera.

Anyhow, at school, the children that would be my classmates in elementary school were either the children of the Townies or the Gilded Caste of Central Virginia. If you were the kid of a Townie, you generally liked to roughhouse around, bully other kids, and your social circle was probably mostly the other Townies. Likewise, the Gilded Caste would keep to themselves. I liked comic books and heavy metal. I didn't really fit with either group, which was fine by me because for someone who is quite verbose, I'm very much an introvert. Oddly enough, classes from the time I was in elementary school were broken up by academic ability, and curiously enough the "mediocre" group was the Townie kids, and the "gifted" group were the Gilded Caste. (These would eventually become the "rednecks" and the "preppies" by high school.) Someone fucked up somewhere, because I was grouped with the "gifted" kids. Talk about being a fish out of water in terms of peer group.

I will say that being grouped with these kids in elementary school is probably the number one thing that prevented me from developing the stereotypical "Southern Accent" that the entirety of my family is infected with to some degree, ranging from that dignified "Gone with the Wind" variant to more of a barely coherent mumblespeak. With only the occasional embarassing voice "breakage" to remind me that I am white trash at the core, I generally speak with an almost neutral, perhaps Midwestern dialect (except I don't do anything stupid like call Coca Cola a "pop" or a water fountain a "bubbler.")

Anyhow, developing niche interests has a way of bridging across gaps that otherwise exist among groups based on dividers like ethnicity, economic background, etc. Turns out, some of these other kids were also into comics and heavy rock music, and I began to form friendships with kids who were otherwise part of the Gilded Caste. That means meeting the parents of these kids, who were doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc. People who had traveled and been to places.

Owning a copy of this definitely broke a lot of ice in 5th grade.

For perspective I had never left the Eastern Time Zone in my life until I was 28.

What that did was open my eyes to what was possible, and in a sense what normal life looked like for a lot of people. Why couldn't I be one of those things? After all, for the kids I was befriending, it wasn't aspirational, but an expectation to be those things.

As the 80's became the 90's and hair metal became grunge rock then an entire alternative subculture, it became this broader subculture around which I grew up and understood life; because it was still "small college town", the goths, punks, stoners, and dwindling number of metalheads all kinda had to be around each other by necessity; there just weren't enough of us to further splinter up into sub-cliques. Unfortunately (or maybe not?), some of the collection of misfits and broken toys weren't the greatest people for a variety of reasons, or I just didn't "click" with them, or whatever. Certainly wasn't doing much to help with the old dating life. Lucky for me, the internet became a thing. And with that, there was a deep rabbit hole of obscure bands to discover and vile online trolling to engage in. To the point that I began to realize that I basically had nothing in common with the people around me; as I became captivated by the still fresh drama of the Norwegian black metal scene and was discovering exciting new bands via the My Dying Bride mailing list and those fold outs that came in Century Media CDs you'd get from mailorders, I was losing any sort of cultural frame of reference with the people around me as I increasingly nerded out on heavy music (they had all moved onto whatever new hip thing among the "alt-scene" was.) And here's the thing; the smart members of that alternative scene went to college elsewhere or packed up and moved but somehow got the fuck out of that small college town. The ones who stayed behind...were becoming Townies. But at least via the internet and chat forums and whatnot, I had a connection to a world beyond. Made friends. Some that are still friends to this day.

You'd probably quickly get tired of being around people like this too.

My life sadly through this point wasn't particularly stable; between family and school, I was basically accused of being some combination of "drug addicted", "homosexual", and "devil worshipping", with a bunch of people who thought they were doing the right thing for me by wrecking my life and making everything 50 million times harder. All because I wanted to have ordinary teenage fun and had a proclivity for the color black and listened to angry music. The eventual outcome of this was dropping out of high school and moving in with people I went to high school with for a few years.

By 2005 or so, life circumstances, as they're wont to do, provided me with a pair of options. I could accept my fate and try to make the best of it pumping gas or whatever in small college town, or I could pack up my life's belongings in my Toyota Corolla and relocate to the Washington DC area. I had a job opportunity via my McJob and had made enough friends and acquaintances via a shared love..of extreme metal music of all things. This was the "shit or get off the pot" moment. So I packed my shit up and slept on an air mattress in someone's apartment and put together a life. Someone I met online because of...a shared love of extreme metal music.

My new home, or at least across the river from it.

Washington DC and the surrounding metro area, thanks to lots of government contracting and IT money, offers a lot of economic opportunity for someone willing to work hard. I was done with making excuses or just "waiting" for the right opportunity; it took 25 years of waiting to get the hell out of that small college town. Free from distractions, burdens, and excuses, I enrolled in community college, transferred to McState University, earned two degrees from McState, and began earning a professional salary. A lot of that was pure work ethic, because I'm no genius or savant; I just wanted better for myself. But that very pathway was opened up, really, because I was able to network with people via a shared love of heavy music.

Perhaps even more remarkable, and for which I'm incredibly thankful for, is that it was also heavy music that brought M into my life. It was M sending me a random message on social media because we had a shared love of doom metal that brought her into my life...almost 13 years ago. A really awesome, fun filled 13 years that saw my life accelerate on hyperdrive; and it all began because I knew useless heavy metal trivia about her hometown (neat fact: Sepultura and Sarcofago are from her hometown. Way more awesome than what my town gets to claim) and didn't make dumb assumptions about her country of birth.

Another Ice Breaker.

So yeah, every good thing that happened in my life can be attributed to heavy metal. Imagine that. It's probably why I still get excited about hearing the latest 5th generation Devourment clone and still sacrifice sleep now and then to go see a show in the warehouse of a brewery with 50 people. It's why I've probably spent too damn much money buying tour shirts from bands who have had their tours dates cancelled by COVID-19/Coronavirus. It's probably why my walls of filled CD shelves still bring me joy when other people are downsizing their collections and "growing up."

Thanks for everything guys.

Ultimately, it was heavy metal that got me the fuck out of that small college town, a place that feels more foreign to me each time I return to it for whatever obligation. The longer I am away, nothing is more obvious to me than how small town life is the death of the possibilities and optimism that comes with youth. It horrifies me to even imagine what would have happened had I not escaped. I don't know where I'll eventually drop dead, but hopefully it won't be for a long time and I'm reasonably confident it won't be there. And for that, ultimately I owe a completely ridiculous subculture of obnoxiously loud, blatantly offensive, barely listenable "music." Funny how life works.