Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Doomed by the Living Dead


       
Four months from now, I will begin celebrating thirty years as a fan of the Heavy Metal music. It was in January of 1983 that, after becoming entranced by Judas Priest’s, “Screaming for Vengeance,” I heard Iron Maiden’s, “The Number of the Beast” on a crappy cassette dub, through inadequate headphones plugged into a Sony Walkman, in the electronics section of the Wal-Mart in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. I was standing on the precipice of some vast new universe of sound and reality.


I can’t count the number of times since then that I’ve been mocked, laughed at, eye-rolled, dismissed, and underestimated as I maniacally thrashed, headbanged, flailed, and air guitared in religious ecstasy, told that one day I would outgrow this music and subsequently listen to something more age-appropriate and emotionally mature. I’m not naïve enough to claim that that day will never come, but it hasn’t yet.



Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson once explained that, unless you’ve got some part of you that is the eternal heart of a fifteen year-old boy, you just won’t get this music. I think there is much truth in that. That heart, that vision and hope, that belief in absolutely infinite possibilities is something Life has not pounded out of me.



So here we are in 2012. I’m 44 years old, a father, provider and husband. What still stirs the emotions, ignites the spirit, and engages the engines? Thirty years later, what current sounds could possibly inspire the battered, rusted, and dusty remnants of that once fifteen year-old Judas Priest/Iron Maiden fan? Much to my own bewildered amusement, there are still fifteen year-olds at heart, both young and old, making music that sets my stage alight. This year, records by Asphyx, Evoken, Nachtmystium, Dawnbringer, Master’s Hammer, and Pallbearer have all prompted heart-slaughtering swooning, furious headbanging, shrieks of primordial terror, uncontrolled giggling and the dusting off of the old air Flying V for the performance of some serious riffing and solo shredding.

After a number of years pondering, debating, and exploring my motives and tastes, I’ve realized that not all new metallic sounds are going to birth pleasure and transcendence. There are many new vistas being explored by this metal music where the particulars of my interests do not take me. Much Black Metal, Drone and Stoner/Sludge Metal does not connect with me. In any way. At all. However, if your “hammering anvils” contains some history, some path back through all the twisting and turning of metal’s dark narrative, I’m in and I’ll gladly Live the Storm.

This brings me back to Pallbearer and their 2012 debut LP, “Sorrow and Extinction.” It is an album that really gives me just a little bit of almost everything (excluding speed) that I could want from a heavy metal album. First: that band name. Pallbearer. Yes. Music for a funeral procession. The dark descent, a collapse, a caress into oblivion. Next, the album title: “Sorrow and Extinction.” Here, the giggling begins. Exquisite. If the sixteen year-old Chris Dalton had seen the title, Pallbearer, “Sorrow and Extinction” in his Heavy Metal mail order catalog in 1984, his check/money order would have been in the mail before hearing a single note, before reading a single sentence about “Sorrow and Extinction’s” contents. Those words. Those words are enough.

Then there is the perfect album cover art by Sean Williams. It immediately sparks memories of staring for hours at album covers while standing at the used bins in record stores. I’m talking about record jackets conjured by Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews and David Roe that adorned moldy, smoke-stained old copies of records by Uriah Heep, Nazareth, Budgie, and others. I never viewed those realms of fantasy, those realms of imagination as sanctuaries of escape for a timid introvert who wished to hide from the harsh gloom of existence, but rather looking glasses into alternate realities which allowed an individual to more clearly see what was already present in the waking world, though obscured by the mundane and daily distractions.

When the needle descends into the grooves, what you have is a direct line back to 1970, back to Birmingham, England, and back to Black Sabbath after passing through the ‘90s and a visit to the mighty Cathedral and past the ‘80s, with glimpses into the aural orbs of Candlemass and Chicago gods, Trouble. After two minutes or so of acoustic guitar, feedback briefly signals the entrance of riff so gorgantic and majestically beautiful that it sounds as though you’ve just dived into the surface of the planet Jupiter from twenty miles above. Wave after wave carries you forward until the vocals of Brett Campbell tear out your heart with his aching melancholy. Sad and glorious, Brett sings--not growls, not shrieks--tale after tale of bewildering loss until death. This continues throughout the opening piece, “Foreigner,” and the remaining four tracks. Final epic, “Given to the Grave” (dragged helplessly but willingly to the grave?) announces the grande finale with the saddest Mellotron part since they days of earliest King Crimson. This is acid-burning. This is bone-crunching. This is the law. And Heavy Metal is the Law.

Pallbearer will be playing Raleigh at the Hopscotch Music Festival this week, along with Profound Lore lablemates The Atlas Moth and Altar of Plagues. 

Which brings us to Profound Lore. Profound Lore Records are another reason why this aged Metal fan is still so in love with the Heavy Metal. I’ve not been this interested in a Metal record label since Jonny Zazula’s Megaforce records first put began issuing records by Raven, Manowar, Mercyful Fate, Anthrax, Exciter, and Metallica. 

Profound Lore strikes me as Heavy Metal’s answer to the indomitable 4AD, my favorite label of all time, original home of Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Throwing Muses, and the Pixies and current home to The National, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Bon Iver, and St. Vincent. 4AD’s dedication to a vast diversity of sounds, constantly high standards of both music and packaging/artwork are thoroughly echoed in the output of Chris Bruni’s Profound Lore, a label that is a labor of love, where funeral doom, classic heavy metal, avant-garde noise, black metal visionaries and death metal traditionalists and much more all get equal attention.

In addition to Pallbearer’s performance at The Pourhouse, Profound Lore’s diverse stable of sounds will be on display at Hopscotch when Chicago’s Atlas Moth and Cork, Ireland’s Altar of Plagues bring their most assuredly modern, even futuristic, takes on crushing mid-tempo atmosphere and West Coast post-rock-flavored black metal, respectively, to the stage of Kings on Friday, the 7th of September. 

If while on the streets of Raleigh for Hopscotch 2012, you see a seemingly old man in vintage Avia high-tops, gray mullet waving in the waning summer breeze, tattered, sleeveless Krokus t-shirt on, just know that the furious flames of heavy metal thunder still burn brightly within the eyes of the Heavy Metal Hurricane. And THAT is a light…that never goes out. - Chris Dalton

1 comment:

  1. thank you for the kind words and for sharing my video - its great to hear that the feelings you were trying to evoke were realized - Sean Reynolds Williams - Animetalphysical

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