Romanian Metal Masterpiece

10 years before, these guys made an album called Maiastru Sfetnic.  Then, in 2010, they remade it and called it Maiestritt.  This may be the greatest album that Romanian black metallers Negura Bunget have ever made.  Layered, searingly beautiful, majestic. Not a note wasted; just brilliant.

The almost classical compositions, the heartfelt roaring (I almost don’t want to call it screaming because it never seems pathetic, if you know what I mean), the creative instrumentation and refined power of this album make me return to it time and again. Maiestritt is masterful. 

Black Perfection

I’ve heard Deathspell Omega before, and wasn’t as impressed as perhaps I should have been.  But Paracletus is a different story.  This is a furious work of art.  A perfect combination of teeth-grinding apocalypse and sad musicality. This is what makes black metal so different, to my ears, to other metal subgenres.  There is honest creativity here.  Not technical virtuosity, not pompousness, not “I can thrash faster than you”, but creativity.  I like where they take me.

Riding To War Under A Black Silk Pennant

You know, if you listen to Darkestrah there is little evidence that their lead singer is female.  Admittedly, this is easier with black metal than with death metal, as the growling in the black variety is higher-pitched anyway: like the growl of a small panther rather than the roar of the Lion King.  But there it is. She calls herself Kriegtalith, and in full black-metal regalia she’s almost indistinguishable from her male counterparts:

But I digress.  Darkestrah hail from Kyrgyzstan, and they’ve been around for over a decade. I haven’t heard all their music, but there is a trend towards greater quality through the years.  Their latest album, The Great Silk Road, is quite possibly their best.  I love their pagan black sound.  It is rich and evocative without being cliched, and, like all black metal, it is also comfortingly forlorn. (You can worry about the contradiction if you want; I just enjoy it.)

Urfaust want you to repent in leisure

Imagine travelling in a jet-black, filigreed gondola down the River Styx. Everything is dark, except for the a faint oily sheen on the water and the ultraviolet inner-mouth glare of your gondolier, as he scream-sings to you with aching soulfulness of the fate awaiting you in Hades.

Urfaust are something new, in my opinion. There is such an extreme blending of heartfelt beauty and horror in their work that I find it impossible to stop listening to them.  The album in question is Der Freiwillige Bettler (as you probably know, one needs to be very specific about which album to rave about when it comes to metal bands), and no black-metal album in recent memory comes close to the density and detail of atmosphere that this 2010 album evokes.

Their metal has been described as pagan, black and doom – I think these adjectives all apply to Der Frewillige Bettler – that is, if you can describe echoey wailing as “pagan”.  (Don’t get me wrong, they do the echoey wailing superbly : – )

The singing sounds as if a squad of Prussian foot soldiers had been banished to Hell, and it is now 300 years later and they are still gnashing their teeth in agony and screaming penitently for all the raping and pillaging they had done while alive.  Sorry, I know it sounds like I’m having fun at their expense; but black metal is nothing if not melodramatic.  But as with all good art, everything is larger than life in black metal (or is that larger than death?), so you must expect this kind of … plumminess.  With worms in, of course.

Seriously, though, these guys are incredibly good.  They are not only aesthetically powerful (self-effacingly overwhelming, is another way to put it), but also sincere.  I dare you not to be carried away by their heart-searing music.

Too Much Metal For One Land

Years ago you would have put a "heavy" in front of it, but today it’s more accurate simply to call this breed of music "metal". After all, it has forked into so many subgenres since the halcyon days of Black Sabbath – those crusty pioneers may have been the original heavy metallers, but today you also get metal of the Viking, oriental, symphonic, folk, black, progressive, groove, death, technical death, power, drone, glam, rap, thrash, sludge, stoner, doom, trance (I kid you not), industrial, avant-garde and post-varieties. Not to mention nu metal, metalcore, deathcore, grindcore and mathcore. Don’t be surprised if a few more subgenres have sprouted up by the time you finish reading this article. Metal is booming, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Storming the World

But this isn’t an article about metal’s mutant-octopus family tree. What really interests me about this unabashedly loud music form is the fact that it’s being created and consumed in ever more countries – and wherever it is found, it takes on the colour of its surroundings, acquiring the unique cultural qualities of its host country while still retaining its proudly anti-authoritarian stance. So not only is metal one of the most prolific genres in the history of music, it is probably also the most adaptable. Of course, you may not be surprised to learn that most of the metal produced in the past 40 years is absolute fertilizer. Thanks to the insane volume of metal being produced, though, there is a lot that’s worth hearing. Some of it is even wonderful. The table below offers a taste of present-day metal confections that are both geographically diverse and genuinely worth listening to.

NAME	GENRE	COUNTRY	GRIMACE FACTOR
Alcest	Post-metal	France	12% – very pretty, with a few harsh bits; metal for sad romantics
Behemoth	Blackened Death Metal	Poland	89% – monstrous, merciless, nasty – delightful, in short
Darkestrah	Epic Black Metal	Kyrgyzstan	30% – pretty with a steel backbone, very more-ish
Eluveitie	Celtic Metal	Switzerland	25% – catchy, bouncy folk-type metal with some growling
Grand Magus	Retro Heavy Metal	Sweden	20% – clean, hard, retro metal; time to mosh!
Ihsahn	Post-Metal	Norway	70% – abstract but still fun; much high-pitched growling
KOBUS!	Extreme Metal	South Africa	65% – lekker & bitter. Do not play this during huisbesoek
Mar de Grises	Doom Metal	Chile	45% – psychedelic, slow, fascinating; some growling
Melechesh	Black Metal	Israel	78% – exotic, melodic and violent "Mesopotamian" metal
Moonsorrow	Pagan Metal	Finland	60% – epic, powerful, catchy and addictive; love it
Myrath	Progressive Metal	Tunisia	35% – lovely, mostly in Arabic, tough but melodic
Negura Bunget	Black/Folk Metal	Romania	65% – harsh, but also atmospheric and alluring
The Dillinger Escape Plan	Mathcore	USA	98% – very discordant, lots of screaming, yet fantastic

Metal is even starting to take off in countries such as Brazil and China. Africa is not left in the dark either; there are some surprisingly good metal bands in Botswana, including Crackdust, Wrust and Skinflint. Metal’s growing popularity is however not always welcome; concerts in Iran and Malaysia have been subject to government crackdowns. For a fascinating pair of documentaries on the social dimensions of metal around the world, take a look at Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and Global Metal, presented by Canadian anthropologist Sam Dunn.

A Visceral Reaction to Greatness

How do you know when a metal track is great? Your body tells you: You want to jump, shout and head-butt the air. More importantly, your hand can’t help but do this:

Older than metal itself, this sign was popularised among metalheads by Ronnie James Dio, Black Sabbath’s second vocalist after Ozzy Osbourne. His Italian mother had taught it to him as a traditional sign to ward off evil. In American deaf sign language, it means "I love you".

Too Much Metal for One Hand

And how do you know when a metal track is truly awesome? Well, that’s when there’s simply too much metal for one hand:

From Black Metal, a 2-part graphic novel by Rick Spears and Chuck BB

On the surface, the metal produced in each country often has stylistic differences – this enriches the genre. But dig deeper and you’ll find that metal everywhere has one thing in common: a spirit of discontent, of rebellion. Perhaps the biggest reason why metal is so popular worldwide is because it gives voice to discontent, and energy to rebellion.

Good or bad, metal is a force of nature.

The one thing that causes rape, guaranteed

This Just In … Communication Received from the Animal Kingdom

Despair sounds so much better in French

Les Discrets is a relatively new band that has made a pretty big impact right from the start with its debut album, Septembre et ses dernières Pensées.  Call it light ambient alternative post-black metal, if you want.  No growling, lots of male and female choruses, but still nominally an alternative brand of metal.  Although I think it has more in common with a soundtrack for a movie about discerning, highly educated young vampires on Prozac

Having said that, you can put this album on repeat and bliss out.

Moonsorrow is Magnificent

Make time to listen to this Finnish Pagan Metal. Looooooong songs, engrossing and pitch-black, yet very rich, warm and comfortable.  Their latest album, Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa, is delightful. Here’s a teaser:

Vivat Gorgoroth

Now THIS is black metal.  Gorgoroth are like a bunch of gargoyles in a graveyard, jumping up and down on the disinterred bones of evil men.  It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Pithy arguments for atheism

"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science." [Darwin]

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." [Voltaire]

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." [Einstein]

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzsche]

"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul…. No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living … our dread of coming to an end." [Edison]

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." [Lincoln]

"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?" [Arthur C. Clarke]

"Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies." [Thomas Jefferson]

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." [Kurt Vonnegut]

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." [Bertrand Russell]

Power Makes You Mean

http://gizmodo.com/5803262/how-power-corrupts

Excerpt:

Consider a recent experiment led by Adam Galinsky, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Galinsky and colleagues began by asking subjects to either describe an experience in which they had lots of power or a time when they felt utterly powerless. Then the psychologists asked the subjects to draw the letter E on their foreheads. Those primed with feelings of power were much more likely to draw the letter backwards, at least when seen by another person. Galinsky et al. argue that this effect is triggered by the myopia of power, which makes it much harder to imagine the world from the perspective of someone else. We draw the letter backwards because we don’t care about the viewpoint of others. We don’t give a shit what the maid thinks.

But here’s the catch: We still think we do care, at least in the abstract. That’s because power quickly turns us into hypocrites. In a 2009 study, Galinsky asked subjects to think about either an experience of power or powerlessness. The students were then divided into two groups. The first group was told to rate, on a nine-point scale, the moral seriousness of misreporting travel expenses at work. The second group was asked to participate in a game of dice, in which the results of the dice determined the number of lottery tickets each student received. A higher roll led to more tickets.

Participants in the high-power group considered the misreporting of travel expenses to be a significantly worse offense. However, the game of dice produced a completely contradictory result. In this instance, people in the high-power group reported, on average, a statistically improbable result, with an average dice score that was 20 percent above that expected by random chance. (The powerless group, in contrast, reported only slightly elevated dice results.) This strongly suggests that they were lying about their actual scores, fudging the numbers to get a few extra tickets.

Although people almost always know the right thing to do – cheating is wrong – their sense of power makes it easier to rationalize away the ethical lapse. For instance, when the psychologists asked the subjects (in both low- and high-power conditions) how they would judge an individual who drove too fast when late for an appointment, people in the high-power group consistently said it was worse when others committed those crimes than when they did themselves. In other words, the feeling of eminence led people to conclude that they had a good reason for speeding – they’re important people, with important things to do – but that everyone else should follow the posted signs.

Sticking it to the Man in Rhyming Couplets

"Poetry in my view is a defence of the individual against all the forces arrayed against him. Every religion, every ideology and orthodoxy of thought and manner wants to re-educate him and make him into something else. To sing from the same sheet is the ideal. A true patriot doesn’t think for himself, they’ll tell you. I realize that there’s a long tradition in poetry of not speaking truth to power and, in fact, of being its grovelling apologist. I just don’t have it in me."

– Charles Simic

Red Wine Boosts Superconductivity

Who knew?  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue-superconductive-future.html

Yoshihiko Takano (R), professor of Japan’s National Institute for Material Science and researcher Keita Deguchi display a superconductive metal compound, which is seven times higher when dipped in red wine than for ethanol or water at his laboratory in Tsukuba city, suburban Tokyo. The researchers plan to showcase their surprise findings later this year.

1000-plus women raped every day in DRC

Animals don’t do this. Human males do. Why do men everywhere have such a high opinion of themselves?  Is being a domineering bully who takes and hurts whatever he wants without a thought for the consequences something to be proud of? Why?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/48-women-raped-hour-congo

A rape victim in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The scale of rape has led some to
define the conflict as "a war against women". Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It would be a fine thing if men could become selective in their destruction, i.e. if they left women and children out of their rampages.  But if even that is asking too much, then I hope women find a way of procreating without men, and unleash a virus that wipes out the Y chromosome.