And sometimes we look to the end of the tale that there should be marriage-feasts, and find only, as it were, black marigolds and a silence.
—Azeddin el Mocadecci
Below is a podcast version of last Friday’s 7-9pm 95bfm radio broadcast, wherein I was the guest of the wonderful Renee Jones. I pop up at the halfway mark and introduce some of my favourite 2020’s music, by artists you’ll have read about in these pages - Zheani, Frog Power, aprxel, Mona Evie, Jockstrap, Ängie, plus a rediscovered classic album by Kendra Smith from 1995.
https://95bfm.com/bcast/the-gang-of-four-with-renee-11?fbclid=IwAR1rlvq3aXqRmftz6jGnoFD3N17Iq0v-D5IkQ-6AD3RRu2asyCCmzC7xt_4
In 2022 my discovery of trap metal and what we may as well call industrial dance metal led me to check out the recent history of metal and think about its modes and meanings. I was of course initiated in the early 1970s by hearing ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Smoke On The Water’, reasonably big hits, on the radio - I also remember hearing ‘Paranoid’ on a UKTV cop show (over the scene where the vigilante hooligans fire-bombed a gypsy encampment by night). In other words, metal then was accepted as pop music - vide David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World, a pop album made in a very accurately-observed heavy metal style. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was the theme music for Top Of The Pops. But metallers would also be outsiders, proto-punks intent on scaring off the mainstream and épater les bourgeois, with a treasure trove of ghoulish and blasphemous imagery to draw on.
I first heard what was then known as heavy metal played live by Watchdog, when I was in my earliest and most impressionable teens, in the form of Uriah Heep’s ‘Gypsy’ and 'Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’. Two brilliant riffs, two potent songs. But Watchdog also loved glam and had prog ambitions; the live band who specialized in Black Sabbath covers was Butler, four Māori lads from Rotorua who toured the country ceaselessly in those years and looked the part, in black leather, silver crucifixes, and long black hair. They made one LP (one more than Watchdog, alas) and the extracts on YouTube show them giving the hard rock treatment to two pop songs, ‘Bang Bang’ and ‘Reach Out’.
Here’s an original, ‘Mistake’
And what might be funk-metal in Tilda Jane.
There’s little on this album that seems like what people call metal today (although the styling of songs like ‘Reach Out’ is very close to Uriah Heep’s) but they are named after the guy who invented it. And metal in 1973 was a thing half-formed; it’s only with hindsight that the reductive brilliance of those first Black Sabbath albums can be seen as the perfect template for it, although Uriah Heep’s Look At Yourself (1971) may be the beginning of hair metal, pomp metal, and all the gaudiest Liberace excesses of the genre.
Butler’s Black Sabbath covers may be lost, but those of The Cardigans will live forever. ‘Iron Man’ (twice), ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and an acapella ‘Mr Crowley’. Here’s their first, and heaviest, version of ‘Iron Man’. I wish they’d make a whole album of Sabbath covers.
My reborn awareness of metal in 2022 lead me to watch Lords of Chaos and a Mayhem documentary, both good, and buy up some compilation CDs I’d find in op shops, once giveaways with metal magazines like Metal Hammer and Terrorizer. They gave good overviews of the scene or scenes of a decade or so earlier, including several acts, such as Mastodon, that are still going strong today but also some interesting bands that didn’t make it far at all. Indeed, facebook tells me that the bands behind my two favourite tracks, both on a Terrorizer compilation, have since called it a day.
Greg(o)rian, a UK “blackened sludge trio” who disbanded in 2015, give us some beautifully tense doom metal in ‘Janis Joplin in Mastodon’s Body’, from(?) their album Settlements And Burial Chambers (it’s not on the Bandcamp version).
Amongst The Survivor’s track ‘The Greatest Deprivation’ is called ‘The Greatest Depravation’ on the Terrorizer sampler. What I particularly like about this is the evil screaming in a higher register, a creepy goblin sound which stands out from the deep screamo voices on the tracks that surround it.1 There’s some wild energy here. I dunno about that edit at the end, but I suppose metal songs can’t just fade out nicely.
When I put my own contribution to metal, The New Existentialists’ INVOCATION, on Soundcloud it was liked by a German doom metal duo called Epic Down - here’s a recent song of theirs, more song-like in its changes than a lot of of doom, called ‘Doom Fairy’.2
King Yosef, a multi-instrumentalist from Portland Oregon, was the producer of Zheani’s I Hate People on the Internet, which was the exact record that made me want to listen to metal again. His solo work is heavier and more relentlessly dark than that was. ‘Echo (ft ghrins)’ from the album An Underlying Hum might come closest to an industrial dance metal sound. Love those drums.
And here’s the slower, more melodic ‘Shame’s Mirror’ (2024), its lyric a modern approximation of decadent fin de siècle antiheroics. A soft metal texture, like Deftones but in brambled witchhouse colours, with explosions of electronic trap metal - I remember back when dubstep was all the rage in NZ and I was struggling to understand it till I realized the riff dynamics were those of metal, and thinking “you know if they just discipline this sound a lot more it could absolutely rejuvenate metal” then I forgot all about it but lo it has come to pass.
Beneath the shrapnel and between the worms
Held in fragments where lust burns
I wanna know shame
I want to feel what’s real
I want to pick apart what I was made to feel
Researching Mona Evie more recently also brought up this poppy take on trap metal with a killer hook from Vietnam’s RAF Kelly, ‘JETSKI (feat. Diva808 & HU550)’, from the 2023 album 2 MUCH TIME.
If I have a point here, it’s that metal was fused with pop music once and this can happen again.3
Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ve heard something new here and liked it!
If you want to call someone ‘creepy’ in Old English, a literal translation would be *𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘨𝘰𝘭: ‘tending to creep, penetrate, or burrow’. (IPA: [ˈsmæɑ̯.ɣɔl])
I think I’ve written as many as three metal songs in my time - ‘Dr Brill’, ‘Valhalla’, and ‘INVOCATION’.
‘Paranoid’ reached number 4 on the UK singles chart in 1970.