The fact that we actually have folk black metal–well, that’s a long way from crazy young guns burning churches. But like the Bee Gees themselves once noted, it’s only words, and words are all we have and in the case of Nightbringer, they’re really quite enough, really.

Nightbringer blood-suck every traditional trope of traditional black metal ala Emperor with glee, zest, savagery and total commitment.

The big difference, and its enough to render the Colorado quartet unique, are the syrupy medium tempos favored by core members Nox Corvus (guitars, percussion, vocals) and Naas Alcameth (guitars, vocals). Those in-between meters are terrific for hanging the band’s apocalypses on, they permit butt-bone levels of rumbling kick, heavy-low-end bass, even low end room-sound. It’s like a regular party pack of bass-i-ness.

And so Nightbringer breaks a holy rule of black and/or extreme metal–there’s sex in this music. You and your boy, or girl, or boy and boy or…well whatever–you guys, you could fuck to this music.

Isn’t that amazing? Metal people listen to fuck-less music.

Maybe that’s what ghettoizes us. The only more fuck-less music is, like, modern jazz or traditional Irish folk. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to blend folk into black metal–the sheer fucklessness of both genres are just such a natural fit.

But who knows? With the band’s sense of balls-deep groove, its eerie ambience of echoing chants, peeling church organs just waiting to be burned, and its backgrounds chorales of occult-y grimoire, with all that you’re not just talking about fucking, you’re talking about evil fucking.

And so Nightbringer, whom I’m assuming are into the traditional position of auto-misanthropy, will find themselves as an accidental erotic-humanist force, causing the black tee shirt legions to turn off the RPGs, and get laid, for fucks sakes. Me, I recommend you bathe, get a Rammstein or Septic Flesh-worthy haircut, and buy some killer John Varvatos jeans, but that’s just me.

And I do go on, don’t I? Back to Nightbringer. I’ve always believed that the engineer who applies reverb to a band’s mix should be listed as an honorary band member.

The reason: is there any one production element more essential for creating the dankly oppressive, sonics black metal needs to thrive more than judicious reverb over-use?

No. Of course not. And yes, Nightbringer has that awesome sort of reverb that causes the entire band to sound like a single, immense, black-ichor-drooling monster of screaming woe.

And so the spiraling spirochaetes of antagonized tremolo-picked six-stringers, the occulted howls, the horrorshow string-sample cadences—it all blends into this super massive thing, this black metal version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound (but with new, improved bass!).

You’ll have noticed that I’ve not singled out any single song for praise or dismissal. It’s because, like most above-average trad black metal records, Hierophany of the Open Grave works two ways, neither of which calls attention to single songs.

If you’re of a mood, you can turn it down and repurpose it as punishing wallpaper. If you have time, or if you’re totally baked or better, both, you listen, turn off your mind and float to into the band’s many scathingly beautiful blackness.

You explore the murk for details you can barely grasp, for guitar lines that raise from the gluey dark and obliterate themselves before you’re sure you even heard them, and you’ll keep coming back to find out what you really heard, and because of some ineffable quality that keeps rising from the amassment of guitars, screams, echoed chants and more. Whether you call it traditional, neo or post, this is the good stuff. The really good stuff.

Even though Septicflesh have been giving us really good big ones for a while, with 2008’s Communion flirting with great, they’re sometimes even better at shooting themselves in the foot along the way.

For instance, calling themselves Septicflesh in the first place. “Septic Flesh” doesn’t describe their eerie brand of non-wussy goth metal.  “Septic Flesh” brings to mind images of rot, decay, and general putrescence. It’s a word clump that would work with a Cannibal Corpse side project, not a band that’s sung about Persepolis and Faust.

Despite their inappropriate name, Septic have found a following for their effective merger of dark metal and orchestral support systems without the later dwarfing the former. Septic can even pull off silly and pretentious: check out the ridiculously-titled “Lovecraft’s Death”, where a spidery/spindly guitar figure is so unnerving and the orchestra cues so violent, it sort of does sound Lovecraftian in a big budget, Hellboy way.

But back to shooting one’s self in the foot. After thirteen odd years putting out reasonably titled records under their terrible band name, they’ve decided it was time to up the gross-out ante by titling their new issue, The Great Mass.

Mmmmm. Septicflesh‘s The Great Mass.  A great septic mass of putrescent, rotting flesh. Can’t wait!, say the metal fans that would actually like this kind of music. They probably meant evil mass or something but I kept coming back to something cancerous and gross. Maybe it’s me.

Onward to the music. This press release talks about them basically using orchestras differently than any metal band ever has. It’s true: this is the first band to use orchestras like they’d just seen Inception.

And not just that Brrruummmm!!!! cue of celestial time-space collapse—we’re talking the creator of that Brrruummmm!!!! In general, of Mr. Hans Zimmer, go-to composer for all of Christopher Nolan’s loud, crashy films, The Man for other directors looking for the state of the art in portentous hugeness, for that patentable wall of brass and choirs and more brass and timpani’s and then strings and more brass that only Zimmer seems to have the skill and pluck to provide. That’s what the Septics are trying to replicate here.

So, a new subgenere: Hans Zimmer metal. Zimmercore. Some bands, when they say, “Oh, there’s orchestra on the new CD”, you start having nightmares about vast Celine Dion-esque string sections gone bad.

Well, with Zimmercore, you have nightmares about huge Inception-esque brass sections with the instruments gaining cartoon eyes with an evil mouth and looking at the actual band, Septicflesh, and cackling, “Mmmm, a metal band! I think I will eat it.”

And it does. The mixes here vary between 50/50 and 40/60 with the orchestra winning handily in the splits.

“Five-Pointed-Star” seems an early winner. For starters, it sounds like Septicflesh, and I really like Septicflesh.

But at about 2:24—Inception’s Brrruummmm!!!! blows up any Septicflesh pep the song had and hast la vista metal, hello Zimmercore, as all 150 pieces of the Filmharmonic Orchestra of Prague pretty much absorb the band. (Incredibly, Peter Tagtgren mixes the orchestra’s percussionist louder than Akis Kapranos’s actual hardware, one supposes, to make it sound more, like, classical.)

In the same anti-metal spirit is “The Undead Keep Dreaming”. There’s an initially encouragingly, creepy wall of Septic guitars, a nicely pounding 16th note-based beat, an agonized growl, and you’re feeling all pumped and then, as we say here in Brooklyn, fugheddaboudit.

The orchestra/band stops and starts like some Hulk-sized Kurt Weil, Sotiris V and/or Seth Siro Anton growls like Tom Waits when he tries to sound like Popeye, a string section and men’s’ choir come to the fore, and what has this to do with metal?

Dude, it’s Zimmercore—pay attention.

Picking the best in show here is a cinch: It’s “Pyramid God”. Because 1. It features an actual killer guitar riff and 2. Instead of sundry Hans Zimmer-y cues, it feels imported from Clint Mansell’s endlessly copied circular theme of existential dread from Requiem for a Dream.

And so it goes. But what does the actual band sound like? Well, there are these huge, moderately complex orchestrations, right? And clearly, the guys in Septic, especially guitarist Christos Antoniou, who penned these orchestral arrangements, they went to a lot of time and expense here, to say nothing of how much energy went into organizing and in some way paying for and fretting about studio, musician, producer, engineer, programmer and tea boy time.

So you can understand the urge to want to show for all that agita. And they do. As far as the orchestral stuff goes, we’re talking near- Deutsche Grammophon quality sounds, real audiophile shit.

The band, not so much.  You get the sense the band did everything they could to not get in the way of these excellent orchestral recordings. The drums are muted and controlled, the guitars downright polite in Septic terms. When it’s a choice between a Zimmercore cue and a metal sound, you know which is going to get a thumb’s up, mix-wise.

Putting aside the CD’s designed bloodlessness, Septic has also stranded themselves in an aesthetic no man’s land. Not nearly complex enough to be taken seriously as “classical” or “serious” music, there’s also none of the cheesy pleasure of Cradle of Filth, the enjoyably, hyper-goth symphonic melodrama of Within Temptation, the serious chamber strings musings of recent Sunn 0))), or the refreshingly pure entertainment value of those other semi-Zimmerians, Dimmu Borgir. Speaking of pleasure, there’s none of it in reporting so sourly on a band as inspired as Septicflesh. I’ll just hope this is one of those foot-stepping moments and next time they’ll follow their pattern and return to the brilliance thing.

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, the only questions are how a band plays with and/or tweaks the laws and rules that allow a person able to tell that Cult of Luna is ‘progressive’ and Skindred isn’t and what they bring to the whole kit and caboodle that wasn’t anywhere in the first place. (Actually, I’d argue that Skindred is far more progressive than Dream Theater in the way it embraces genre laws and neatly twists the fuck out of them while being totally catchy.  But as Skindred is not about the ability to play really fast in very odd scales—to name the most obvious ‘progressive’ regulation–so they’re left out of some useful conversations.)

Anyway, Augury. File under French progressive metal, tech/death subdivision. Concealed is a remastered, bonus tracked, blablabla version of the band’s first record, originally issued eight years ago. Yes, it sounds prog, and yes, it’s so much more. A lot of that has to do with acoustic guitars, tablas and girls.

Augury does play by the constricting rules of genre—it’s a matter of stylistic élan, balls and, of course, brutality, that make them really interesting, exciting even.

For everyone in love with that progressive metal version of a skitzy Yes arpeggio, “Skyless” has your back. And if progressive to you means tri-tone-y, multi-meter riffs on the more grey side of black metal, then jump to “…Ever Know Peace Again”.

Tracks like that are reassurances. They cuddle up to the progressive/tech death consumer and whisper sweetly that nothing is amiss. But again, what’s cool about Concealed has to do with straying from the formula, with the band assuming that consumer will go along for the ride. (If they’re one of the 162 people who still buy CDs, they won’t have a choice, of course.)

And so the crashing waves of dark chords roiling the excellently titled “In Russian Dolls Universes” gain extra strange texture courtesy some rubbery, creepy, electric-girl vocals not unlike the rubbery, creepy, electric-girl vocals employed by bizarre-o-world Swedish electro pop duo The Knife. No argument–this is something you have not heard before. To a certain degree, and with aesthetic precision behind it, can there be a better recommendation?

Some lovely, classic “progressive” acoustic fingerpicking plays against a soft rumor of female angel voices in “The Lair of Purity,” counterpointed by madrigal male vocals. In short order, said female vox morph to full-blown operatics, some serious Diamonda Galas type shit. Then the actual metal kicks in with a grinding vengeance and the male vocals go all manly-growly and suddenly we’re in Rotting Christ territory, which I gotta tell you, I totally did not expect. And by the way, all the femme vox are courtesy one Arianne Fleury, and color me impressed.

One of Augury’s endearing perversities is to intro tracks with soundscapes that are begging to accompany a 300 sequel. And so “Alien Shores” opens with some mysterioso sitar-sounding instrument, the patter of exotic percussion and peeling Arabic-ish woodwinds before everything blows up into a nicely crushing metal tango (!) complete with actual cookie monsters and I wasn’t expecting that either.  Actually, singer/guitarist Patrick Loisel’s rogue’s gallery of vocal stylings is both a treat and a slight problem in terms of giving the band a defining identity.

On the other hand, boredom? Not a problem.  For music that gets so savagely loud, the excitement here, the reason you’ll be downloading tracks and listening to them repeatedly, closely, is the quiet detailing of songs, the bit of reverb that renders a guitar mysterious here, the sudden, teasing disappearance of a gorgeous Fleury vocal line there. “Progressive metal”? Whatever. Damned good works for me.

Now that that’s cleared up, what separates this New Mexico band’s brand of industrialized metal from the Factory is the pleasing swing and openness in their Terminator grooves. We all like to claim that while we might claim to lust after the aural equivalent of having our heads relentlessly beaten with an ultra-loud battering ram sample powered by a Commodore 64, the truth is, a little air and swing between attacks is a pleasure and a relief.

Everyone—okay, Metal Hammer, UK— is predicting that the band that seamlessly combines electronics and extreme metal will be a Next Big Thing. I think this is kind of a meh sort of ambition, but on “Introspective”, Kryoburn certainly pull it off.

There’s a wall of techno pads and digital chimes as a Strapping Young Lads-y groove head-slams and and the whole enterprise gains texture and catchiness when the growl-sung lead vox are neatly juxtaposed against a pretty chorus of what sound like male madrigals. (Have you been noticing how many bands have middle eights and bridges filled with amassed voices lately?  Is ‘choir metal’ the Next Big Thing?).

Anyway, Three Years Eclipsed is produced by Tue Madsen (Dark Tranquility, Moonspell, Suicide Silence) and he gives every track a glistening, 2011 surface. Things pop, punch and slide just so and Hey, remember Curve?

“Reinvention” has a distressed voice sample thingee that the 90s pop-goth-metal combo would proudly call its own lacing a Korn-y riff (in a good way!)  And again, out of nowhere, we get a clean vocal singing a line out of Bach or some such shit. It’s like a formula, but only “like”.

“Burning the Doubt” adds Five Finger Death Punch-y macho for immediate ass-kick appeal while “Broken Hero” and its staggering/lockstep riff and slithery-pretty synth legato suggest Rammstein minus the punishing Teutonics.  Less endearingly, “Event Horizon” is all generic Sturm und Drang riffing; when that lonely ‘classical’ vocal shows up it just proves that one idea can’t save every song, alas.

But that’s one failure. When Kryoburn are on their game, it’s the shock of the old that makes them special. Unlike Fear Factory’s now-retro, dot.com-vintage, post-apocalypse digitalism, Kryoburn are doing something that’s essentially modern, in the old, art school sense.

But as Finntroll, Korpiklaani, Moonsorrow or even the relatively rougher Eluveitie prove in endless genre-mix soufflés, things usually collapse under the weight of whimsy, uneven beauty/beasting, or heavy-pretense (yes, I’m thinking of the new Agalloch‘s tendency to meander, or Swan‘s pointlessly relentless gloom). It’s also easy to imagine an imaginary Metal Dad waving a finger to the stray wussy band:  Did you remember to put some metal in your music today? No you did not–bad folk-metal! No sky-cladding for you today!

Maybe it’s 15 years of toil and trouble, maybe it’s just being smart, skilled and inspired, but the Moravian seven-piece Silent Stream of Godless Elegy fall into none of these traps deliciously. Návaz is a one-record study-guide for kids trying to learn the subgenre in garages filled with posters for those other, not-quite-as-good bands, no insult intended. A guide with balls and big-ass guitar-crunch where dulcimers add melancholy and even the violins and violas have a certain edge, playing either literally or metaphorically towards their middle range, towards the parts of the instruments that saw and soar instead of whine and complain.

Male vocals tend towards rich/clean baritones in the Amorphis mode; females from pop-ish noir to dark to semi-operatic. Everything is a good, unexpected deal. “Slava” offer a bonus-pack mix of New Wave-y keyboards, disco beats, and folk viola embroidery. “Skryj hlavu do dlaní” is a metal meditation capped by a small choir not unlike a metal version of Glee‘s New Directions lost in some spiritual dark forest. Of course, even as a nominal American (greetings from New York City!) I have no clue what the band, singing in Czech, is going on about but I rather like it that way. I like their entire raison d’etre misted. Mystery becomes Stream of Godless Elegy.

There’s drama here in spades but not the accidental camp that sinks so many of their peers. Where Nightwish might drag in a choir, Silent Stream‘s vocalists cuddle up to a mic on “Zlatohlav – Golden Head” for intimate,  two-part harmonies while the band Sturm und Drangs behind them and when was the last time you heard that?

There’s plenty of pretty here at the same time there’s nothing saccharine, at the same time there’s just the right amount of heavy metal thunder. I usually avoid it like the plague, but Silent Stream of Godless Elegy simply have good taste.

On the War’s other side: bands fully participating in this, the most drop-dead exciting period in metal history by dressing to match. Bands who understand that what you wear can be, should be, I’d argue, a reflecting image of what you sound like—which is a working definition of one of the many things fashion is about.

These Fashion Bands suffer no ceiling on the size of their audience, what with them appealing to both sexes while Troo Dudes take a perverse pride in their incredibly limited, all-male audience. Which you might say something to do with metal in general being literally, anxiously, and often hilariously homosexual.
But more on that sort of thing later.

Children of Bodom’s Alexi Laiho, Slayer’s Kerry King, and Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli Syke’s have all started lucrative fashion labels based entirely on an understanding that fashion isn’t ‘just’ clothes. It’s also about how we show identity, a silent peer-to-peer declaration.

In the same way that 70s gay men wore yellow or red handkerchiefs in their Levis to let fellow cruisers know what kink they preferred, so a Troo Dudes’ band-tee silently announces to other Dudes his preference of tech death over neo-pagan.

As for what this war actually looks like, a scan of any of this months’ metal mags tells the tale.

On the Fashion Band side there’s Volbeat fusing Johnny Cash bad-ass loner and ‘50s juvenile delinquency chic. The result: sleek designer leather jackets, pompadored hair, indigo jeans. A look that screams swagger and melancholy, just like the band’s songs do.

Just what Triptykon wear, I can’t say. Like the brilliant video for “Shatter,” their clothes are like shadows Tom G. Warrior and his darkened crew paint on their bodies. I kept thinking of Christian Siriano—a winner on Project Runway—and his brilliant post-goth fantasias.

For sheer Holy Shit! value, there’s Melechesh’s S&M bald Arabic torturer look, complete with multiple rosary beads, arcane metallic necklaces, and scary guyliner (!).

For inspired WTF, Dimmu Borgir’s white-dusted, PETA-baiting leather-and-fur medieval warrior gear. It’s uncanny imagery that makes people download out of sheer curiosity: Total fashion WIN.

The inspired variety never ends. From Bring Me to the Horizon’s stylized prettiness to Ghost’s evil-Pope chic (!) to Watain’s gruesome heavy-sigil, Fashion bands appeal sell to both genders—the nerve!–courtesy seductively stylized layers of fantasy, strangeness, gender ambiguity and the sinister in ways only metal, of all genres on Earth, can provide.

And the Troo Dudes, in page after page of band profiles?

Jeans. Band tees. Long hair. Some kind of shoe. Good night and good luck.

Starving for an ‘authenticity’ that doesn’t exist, and would be irrelevant if it did (is In Flames less Troo because they use triggered drums?), the fledgling Troo band that attains the perfect visual blahness can join a legion of other 501-Levi-favoring bands who look exactly alike, with only most obsessed male fans and mags able to tell one band from the other, and with sales to match.

Incredibly, a certain strain of metalcore and post-hardcore find the Troo Dudes too stylish and so the single lasting element that suggests someone might be in a band—long hair—has been shorn to attain a new pinnacle of blah conservatism. And so bands like Underoath, A Day to Remember and Your Demise not only have short hair, but the studied un-cool short hair of the junior banker who turned down your student loan. More interesting bands like Torche and Kylesa have just thrown up their hands and opted out of the War entirely by dressing like indie bands.
Meanwhile, the dis of choice lathered on Fashion Bands by the Troo are ‘gay’ and ‘fag’. This despite the fact that the stunningly gorgeous Ville Valo attracts female fans in Elvis proportions while any given Troo Dude answers sweaty emails from tween boys about classic Charvel neck sizes.

This is what we professionals call irony. And one of several reasons Troo Dudes work so darned hard toto keep up their side of The War, to look dull, loathsome, unbathed, infested by gnats or worse, has to do with what I mentioned earlier, about metal’s intrinsic gayness.

Metal guys constantly joke with varying degrees of nervousness about the subject but that doesn’t change the fact that metal, with sometimes traumatic exceptions we’ll get to in a moment, has always looked hilariously homosexual (close your eyes and think Manowar, Venom, Danzig and Rollins) and that metal operates in a queer fever dream of sweaty, half-naked boys bumping against each other in dark, dingy clubs followed by ritual merch table genuflections before favorite axe masters and poster downloads of Zakk Wilde in extremis.

And girls? Girls? Ha ha ha—you so fooney.

Instead of supporting female metal at least as a way of deflecting charges of being in a genre created in part by delightful gay people like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and horrific ones like Gorgoroth’s despicable Gaahl, Troo Dudes barely know the incredible wide world of female metal even exists.

Sure, there’s Arch Enemy’s Angela Gossow. But Angela, with all respect, rocks a tomboy drag that neutralizes the gender threat lurking in her cookie monster. And there’s Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia. But swell voice aside, Scabbia’s as edgy as a retired Suicide Girl signing autographs at an adult video convention. She has an advice column in Revolver magazine, for crying out loud.

Beyond that? It’s just pitiful or sad—I can’t decide.

Femme-led goth-metal is a joke to Dudes and Dude-identified critics.  Full-blown metal art music by the likes of Karyn Crisis, Julie Christmas and the goddess Jarboe garner passing and/or dismissive praise—or more depressingly, that praise floats from a magazine’s pages into an abyss of reader disinterest.

As Next Big Things are regularly made of much thinner gruel, it’s a sure thing that the face-ripping neo-Bolt Thrower-isms of Landmine Marathon would be headline news if only the band wasn’t led by Grace Perry, whose severe hotness, intense stage performances and gold standard shriek probably has Dudes screaming vagina dentata. Metaphorically, I mean.

It’s also essential that Perry, and the vocal flamethrower that is Firebrand Super Rock’s Laura Donnelly and the liquid smoke that is Anneke van Giersbergen and the angrily fluid folk-metal alto that is Rose Kemp not be given too much attention as it threatens Troo Dude macho hegemony (look it up, dude) which Fashion bands further  throw into crisis by being so un-Dude.

Finally (for now), I really can’t help but wonder how seriously critics, the ones who have a cow over Opeth and Porcupine Tree, would take the demonstrably more inventive, stone brilliant, seriously sui generis prog metal of Madder Mortem if lead singer Agnete Kirkevaag hadn’t chosen to be fat and a girl.
I mean, seriously, what was she thinking?

I don’t think this is garden variety misogyny. I think it’s bizarre-o-world homosexualized misogyny, as in: We don’t hate women, it’s just that we just like, uh, guys.

In its innocent form, this is due the fact that a goodly portion of metal fans are really young and really male, and as such, shit-scared of females. And so they retreat into the anonymous safety of jean-tee chic because Decibel’s featured bands do so.

Less innocent is the repetitive imprinting of these retrogressive, tight-assed, frowny-faced notions of what real guys can and can’t look like and act like and before long you’re like a total douche bag on an episode of Glee except, like, real.

There are reasons why the bands, and many of the critics covering them–who often love to identify themselves as beer-drinking, fashion-oblivious manly-men—insist on staying frozen in fashion amber.

One is that bands, critics and fans have, decade after decade, been in this attraction/revulsion, PTSD relationship with ‘80s hair metal. Especially those who survived the period.

I mean, damn, you look at Angel, Britny Fox, Hanoi Rocks, Faster Pussycat, King Kobra, Poison, Ratt, Stryper, Jon Mikl Thor, Twisted Sister, W.A.S.P. and Ziggy Stardust looks like fucking Daniel Craig in comparison. Just one set of Cinderella PR pics makes one imagine an entire generation of drag queens weeping, knowing there was no way for them to compete.

At the same time that Freddie Mercury looked 100% more butch than Poison—although ‘butch’ was in quotes but what Dude knew about camp?—hair metal bands rediscovered that the most important thing a straight guy could want—female attention—could best be guaranteed by looking like a girl.

Eventually the fad faded but those images and all they suggested had a lasting, inverse effect.  Everything since then has been relentlessly, crushingly hetero. Being crushingly hetero is what, in the case of Pantera, separated that band from the relative pansies in Nirvana.

There’s another real world reason for Troo Dudes’ gather-the-wagons entrenchment in retro non-style—it’s the real sense that metal is being assimilated into the culture at large.

It’s a hoot to see your favorite metal archetypes doing dumb things in Metalocalypse. And don’t tell me you didn’t get a thrill the first time you saw the ads for Iron Man using Black Sabbath’s eternal song. But aside from bringing marginal riches to your occasional Mastodon, unleveraged assimilation is every subculture’s worst nightmare. All the once-precious things used in those entertainments kind of don’t mean anything anymore. They’re just…stuff.

But what seems bad might be super-good: instead of returning endlessly to the same old shit—that is, doing what Troo Dudes do—Fashion bands need to ‘metal-up’ in new ways. Triptykon did. Ghost did on what looks like P!nk’s nail polish budget. If you want dark, forget Hot Topic: go to a gay fetish retailer for state of the art chains, leather and so on.

Or forget that shit altogether and…I don’t know, do something amazing.

But onward. There’s also the annoying semi-threat of indie kids and hipsters not only adopting metal-esque face fuzz and long hair, but also wearing our Maiden, Nachtmystum, and Black Breath tees—sometimes without irony, even. Still, being a pint-of-mead-half-full kinda guy, I like the idea that actually listening to these bands will exert some alchemical power to turn the indie-ites into metal kids. Animal Collective and Deerhoof, begone!

In the mean time, I will assume this Great Fashion War of 2010 will end with at least some of the unbearably ugly, conservative, unimaginative, retrogressive and Troo withering away. Because believing otherwise is just too grim and anyway, good stuff does tend to, over time, wear away at bad.

Yes, we will have to suffer through the visual Ambien of Parkway Drive and the like and roll our eyes while metal media tries to sell us on the idea that the future of a forward-looking genre like metal lies in hyper-conservative iterations of the past, in a nu metal resurgeance, inmore post-hardcore, in more regurgitation, in uniformity when constant chage is really the only viable long-term alternative.

You can make fun of Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli making himself up to look more glam  than the tough girlfriend that you never had, but the fact is that  that  “’Crucify Me” is fucking radical pop metal art, it’s 4:59 minutes of atonal screaming, spazz-riffing, drop beats, and computer-assisted Robo-girl vocals. It’s metal in the process of redefining itself.

And it’s anything by Japan’s Sigh, whose Dr. Mikannibal rocks gender roles with her unholy-hot Hello Kitty dominatrix look while bleating super evil sax while keyboardist Mirai Kawashima, sporting his cyber wizard look, batters you with something akin to fun spaghetti western black metal.And it all works.

No other genre can hold such extremes as Bring Me the Horizon and Sigh and still work as a genre. And yet metal does. And the people who grasp that idea and act on not only win this seemingly silly fashion war, but the way bigger ones that operate in exactly the same way.

Okay, fine. Maybe you’re just cooler than me. Maybe you’ve already been into and tired of the whole blackened death-metal, stripper-friendly, fuck-me groove/philosophy-lecture craze. But me, I missed it. So I was impressed and went on to listen to more of their new disc.

Real quick, I tumbled to the notion that, thematically and lyrically, Otargos is totally against deities. It’s like a thing with them.

So much so that Season of Mist’s PR people felt compelled to explain that “The French [blackened death metal band that plays metal waltzes that turn into stripper-friendly fuck-me grooves you could have intercourse to] base their philosophy on cosmology and an atheistic vision of humanity facing the effects of religions.”

This is included for people who, even after reading that the band’s last CD was called Fuck God-Disease Process, and learning that the new one is called No God, No Satan, still couldn’t suss out a theme of some sort.

Whatever, it’s nice that the four lads have something to be pissed off about, something super big and totally eternal like God. Because, aside from deity-hate being a total death metal tradition, being angry at God—and Satan to boot!—it’s a solid, long-term career move.

Like, all those hardcore crustie bands screaming and yelling about Bush being a scumbucket? Or Napalm Death taking on everything Noam Chomsky warned us about? Or Exodus using the power of thrash and, uh, cartoon album covers to seriously fuck with The Man?

Well, that rocks, sort of. And as for Bush and Cheney — they’re gone and so much for that. And so much for the tee shirts and merch of lesser bands’ careers in a world where the only metal band you can take seriously on a certain level is Iraq’s Acrassicauda because when they say “death metal’ it really could be, you know, death, while here in the US, oh man.

Here in the US, you seriously have to wonder how seriously and for how long can you can take the white-hat/black-hat worldview of any ‘rebellious’ band, no matter how snarly, misanthropic or corpse-painted, when nothing’s black and white anymore except maybe the hate—oh irony help me—except for the bug-eyed hatred spared on a for-real black president by aging white people because that black President is trying to give them healtcare while also trying to perform triage on a country otherwise gone so all-around batshit after eight (8) years of absolute moral nihilism that adult humans are having teaparties dedicated to inflicating deep agony on gays and Islamics while a giggly and glassy-eyed serial liar prone to homilies and moose shootings and who sees Russians from her window is viewed as a prime Presidential candidate.

How seriously can we take any band that says its ‘brutal’ and so-scary when, right now, Iranians are torturing their own people, Haiti is still a heart-wrecking hell, American candidates are seducing voters by being in favor of turning down healthcare for 9-11 first responders and American ex-soldiers are in mad houses for having been forced to torture innocents in a profit-war dreamt up by a fat bird-shooting sociopath given two thumbs up by a Born Again former cheerleader who stole his election as kingpin of the biggest, most violent country on Earth that…

See, I’m trying to make a point here. Two points really.

One: God’s always there for the hating. Take Behemoth, who Otargos resembles both in sound and, alas, image.

Behemoth has been making hay off hating the Divine for two decades—you go girls!—while Watain have already packed a solid decade of anti-ecclesiastical themes under its belt with a limitless future of doing the same laying out before them. And no, I profoundly doubt Nergal’s current ill health has anything to do with it. But we can take this moment to wish our leader swift return.

So again: Dissing on the Deity—great long term career move. But as my rant perhaps suggests, hating an ethereal power is a great escape valve—it’s lots easier and more pleasurable than dealing with an increasingly psychotic, undealable world. Unless you’re in a hardcore depressive doom metal band, in which case, a new wave of antidepressants is being released as we speak.

But I digress. Otargos. They’re really quite good.  Three songs, a catchy trinity of perviness, smart guitar, noise and talk—yes, talk, and lots of it—sum up the band’s oddly endearing oddball brand of blackened Gallic death.

Opener “Hoax-Virus-God” deconstructs Otargos to its abiding interests in scary chants, black metallic shoegaze and stripper-pole backbeat. “Cloning the Divine” drops the chants, and offers deeper, more intercourse-ready grooves in a gorgeous fog of My Bloody Valentine-y guitar where the rasp-vocals are mixed so low they’re just another pleasingly distorted texture. The effect is that of someone screaming in a black wave of bad electricity: I assume it’s a first single, whatever—I like it.

At 10:15, “Cuiusvis Homimis set Errare” is as expansive as “Hoax-Virus-God” is a succinct mission statement. It opens with muted thunder, rain falling on cars on slick city streets, a guy whisper-talking. It sounds like the French translation of Taxi Driver, that scene where DeNiro is hoping a real rain will clean the streets of New York of “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies” but for all I know the Otargos dude is just talking about how much God sucks while trying to sound super sinister but honestly?

By that point I had to grin affectionately. I mean, when the Otargos credits say “vocals” they mean vocals. Along with that that opens sample that I’m claiming is a philosophy lecture sample but really, could be anythin and on to the film noir mutterings of “Cuiusvis Homimis set Errare,” No God, No Satan is jam-packed with men muttering, whispering and so on. For those of us who speak not a lick of French, the effect is that of the band commenting on their own record. Or hanging out at that special sort of men’s-only bath house. I kid, I kid!

One of the CD’s other finest thing is the opulence of its production, the velvety sonic space of it all. Even its high end somehow sounds full, in some way sensuous. Everything has been given their own space. Massive guitars become massive because they have breathing room and are not overdubbed into over-compressed submission. The riff of “Origin” is entirely based on this breathing thing — there’s a huge 16th note band blast, then utter silence, another blast, more silence, and so on. It’s both cheeky and inspired to base a song not on an riff so much as the band’s relationship with the studios’ acoustics.

The sole sound gaffe is a kick drum that excels low-end-wise but has the clackety-clak high-end engineers resort to sometimes to get their blastbeats noticed.

Visually, well that was a huge let-down. I went to the band’s site and watched a video and everything good about the band was instantly negated by some douchebag—a douchebag who might be in the band for all I know—who told the band it was super important to look like, well, like a 2010, post-Behemoth sorta-black metal-y-looking band, replete with deconstructed corpse paint that mainly makes it look like you’ve randomly rubbed and smeared black Crayola all over your face and what could be more evil?

Then there were the bands’ Cenobite leather outfits, because what spells keeping it cvlt more than leather that probably cost about 2,000 US per band member?

Whatever. There’s some real quirk value here. And maybe having trashed both God and Satan, they’ll locate the real darkness and who knows? For now, if looking like last year’s divinity killer gets them in the mood for something as catchy as, say, “Cloning the Divine”, fine by me.

Anyway, he’s a dude somewhat tersely named Phil. This Phil, he’s all about  the cool death metal swagger, like a gene-splice of Cannibal Corpse‘s Chris Barnes and Five Finger Death Punch‘s Ivan Moody. It’s our man Phil who, after a too familiar intro straight outta Gothenburg, identifies this as  Mosfet and not Carcass, Dark Tranquility and/or Soilwork with a sprinkling of Kreator.

Smart-assedness aside, Mosfet do not suck. Nowhere near it. These Austrians have scads of energy, aggression and thrashy riffs galore. They have songwriting skills―they just write songs that sound like they’ve been written so many times before. It’s a situation made more severe due to an aversion to keyboards, to playing in other keys, to in general doing things that would make one song stand out from one another.

Sometimes, though, they’re way better than genre replicants.  “Aurora” has a big-time catchy main guitar hook and all-around smart structure. “Stillbirth” leans more towards In Flames, but in a good way, with a chorus growl becoming a bona fide melody. Okay — the hint of a melody, but it’s there, I swear it is.

I wouldn’t hector about melody if repetition wasn’t such an issue here. As in  “Lawnmower” and “My Hate”, which not only follow one another in the same key, but are also in the same general BPM and sprout riffs so rhythmically similar I kept going from one to the other to check if my iMac wasn’t fucking up in a new, annoying way. But no, it’s just a talented band being their own worst enemy, something that extends into the record’s over-compressed, overly-streamlined production, ‘rock ‘n roll’ lead guitar leads that suck the metal right out of an otherwise killer tracks and, again, that avoidance of keyboards that might add color and texture and variation to the tracks because, I’m assuming here, they think avoiding keyboards is ballsy or something.

The key to how Mosfet could shape up while staying true to itself can be heard on “King of Damnation”, which features a killer main riff that’s equal parts metal and―I kid you not―surf rock. More of this, more of the unexpected, more inspiration more what of Phil symbolizes and Mosfet could be contenders.

And now I’m stuck, like the drowned sailer, waving my hands in a critical ocean of no-fucking-way. As in no fucking way this or any Korn record could be good, and even if it was, any self respecting extreme metalhead couldn’t find the time of day for it — or admit it was good.

After all, there’s the latest Watain to wallow in, a new Devil Sold His Soul after years of frustrating silence. There are heated, hilarious arguments to be had about whether The Devil’s Blood are really metal or just evil Fleetwood Mac. There’s excitement about the new Gojira, there’s Volbeat hitting the road soon. Who could give a fuck about some millionaire nü metal burn-outs?

Certainly not people who like edgy metal. Like, um, us.

Except…except…except if the tin didn’t read ‘Korn,’ I bet this would make many a critic’s Band to Watch lists. There are songs here that suggest a grittier, weirder Alice in Chains. Songs here that sound like the percussion was done by a chain gang in ancient Rome. There are songs here that make you forget how lead yelper Jonathan Davis sounded in the bad old 90s.

Part of Remember Who You Are‘s spasmodic excellence is pure Kismet. At this moment, Korn in is the situation of being trapped between their fanbase’s slavering desire for more shit that sounds like old Korn, a mass market-driven need to update the sound and an audible urge by the band to be artistically relevant. (Just saying, but when nü metal was Faith No More’s “Epic,” people had no problem with it, probably because Mike Patton presented a super cool version of how listeners felt they were.)

Don’t get me wrong — sometimes Davis still sounds like old Davis, with that crushed-balls, stuck-pig, tenor Trent Reznor thing. But about fifty percent of the time of  Remember Who You Are, his voice is the most unpredictable thing going and enhanced by the appealingly raw, four-dudes-in-a-room production style.

On the startlingly inventive “Are You Ready to Live,” we hear a war between musical modes, a battle between being a really good Slipknot song and a really good song by Low, as in the indie slowcore Mormons, complete with Davis sounding like a ringer for Low’s Alan Sparhawk. And you thought we lived in a time devoid of miracles.

Atop pit-ready, rattling track of “Oildale (Leave Me Alone),” which sounds more like a less Greek version of the most recent Rotting Christ CD than anything else I could think of, we get a Davis who’s successfully morphed into the Devin Townsend of Strapping Young Lad. No, for real.

But all is not well. “Pop a Pill” is pleasingly raw and weird with its cool Arabic-scaled riffs.  Unfortunately, it also has the most Korn-y ‘funk’ bass and a return to that vocal style that so troubled us in the 90s. And “Holding All These Lies” is just fucking god awful, not because it’s nü metal, but because it’s crap.

But then you get “Fear is a Place to Live,” which in one song reconciles old and nu Korn. Deep groove disco beat? Check. Indie-pop-ish chorus? Check. Self-loathing monologue (but not a rap)? You betcha. My own critical snarkiness? Can’t lose it, I guess.

And so it goes, back and forth, from inspired to lousy and back.

After successive listens, I started thinking: if Korn are working so hard to move on, why are we so deadset on dismissing them, sound unheard?

Even in this edgy incarnation, the better songs here face-slap us with the reason Korn sold multibillions: the inglorius basterds can write a song, a for-real tune, not a mess of riffs crazy-glued together. Agoraphobic Nosebleed rules, Anaal Nathrakh rips, but it’s downright useful to have something that’s fairly brutal that you can hum along to while you’re being totally teenage and alienated.

And so, listening to the updated Davis machine, I got to thinking that instead of loathing Korn, we should really be grateful.

People seldom start their metal journey with Behemoth, Meshuggah or Napalm Death.  In the 90s, there was easy-to-digest Korn, just like with have  Crack the Skye‘s Mastodon with their ELO choruses, both working as catchy gateway drugs to the harder stuff.

Meanwhile, I think there’s another good reason why Korn makes the metal cognoscenti turn up their noses while similar but more arty, less emotionally naked bands like Deftones are accepted. And please, do feel free to say I’m full of something.

At about the same time the first Korn records came out, the literary world was exploding with its own form of nü metal. It was an abrupt gush of seriously fucked up dark young adult fiction (DYA) that was totally narrowcast at teens, really fucked up teens, or teens who saw themselves as really fucked up. Whatever.

DYA heroes and heroines, usually big music fans, wee often latchkey kids from wrecked families. Incredibly despairing and often literally goth, the books were rife with child abuse, violent incest, vampires who did not glitter but did rape your soul, mothers who either over-medicated their kids of sold them for quick cash and, incredibly, worse.

And so a generation before Twilight, authors like Charles de Lint  and Francesca Lia Block created full-blown publishing empires off this new generation’s seemingly bottomless need for tales of truly fucked up tweens and teens (why they were so fucked up is up to the sociologists).

Cut to: me, trying to cross 7th Avenue  at 8th Street in New York City in the mid-late 90s.

Fuhgeddaboudit.

The street was clotted with hundreds of kids outside a Barnes & Noble packed with Charles de Lint books where one of the Korn dudes was doing an autograph session. All  with a copies of Follow the Leader and Life is Peachy cradled, gently, in their hands. Most of them wearing worn Slayer,  Metallica and Megadeth tee shirts, their  older sibling’ metal. Kids who needed to hear their angst mirrored/validated in Davis’ vocal middlebrow but still effective operatics.

And so I think another reason we might dismiss Korn is because they’re fucking embarrassing; neediness and desperation are not pretty. They’re the opposite of the cool swagger of a Devildriver or Five Finger Death Punch, the blustery maniac shrieks and barks of black metal, the cookie monsters of death metal.

So we have Korn as gateway to more awesome metal and  as accidental metal therapists (along with Remember’s “Are You Ready to Live” and “The Past,” Remember  features the therapeutic “Let the Guilt Go”).

But there’s more.

No matter how good they get—and on Remember Who You Are, they’re often pretty damned good—Korn will always be the musical equivalent of a metaphorical photo of us at 14, 15 or maybe 16, faces sprayed with spots, hormones raging uselessly, porn sites memorized so Mom, whose probably been drinking again, won’t find them when on your crappy Acer computer. Look at it this way and the title Remember Who You Are almost feels like a threat.

But strip the new CD of all that incredible baggage, and what we have is a band trying and half the time succeeding in not sucking in a pretty unique way, a 2010 band and not a relic, and hitting an easy 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

You can hate ’em. You can point out that they’re metal Peter Pans, eternally stuck in angsty adolescence. You can accurately point out that Davis still sounds like a miserable stuck pig here and there and there would be no arguing it. But given all the positive roles Korn have played in the real and greater metal world,  and despite how irritating as they can be, and now as good as they can be, its time to finally accept them as one of us. Remember Who You Are indeed.

Two ten-minute-plus songs bookmark the album, the more impressive of which is “The Swirling Mist,” which lives up to the title nicely, thank you, all guitar grind and crushed organ swamped in band-enveloping, deep cave reverb. It’s all kept in time by oddly groove-informed funereal drums, and laced again with Birch’s high-fret, sky-tracing guitar squalls. Another standout, “The Sons of Bellal” goes deeper, faster–all things being relative in doom metal pacing. With its blatant, grueling down-tunism, “The Sons” drifts dangerously near Sunn O))) land. Lucky for us, The Wounded Kings aren’t happy to sit on one chord for three weeks and call it Art.

That is, with The Wounded Kings, there’s always something going on. There’s beautifully cooing feedback idyls, the tinkle of a keyboard that sounds like Krzysztof Komeda’s theme for ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, and voices whispering like we’re in ‘Susperia’, as in the Dario Argento film whose soundtrack by Goblin that you know these guys have heard.

You’re probably wondering about vocals. Mills, also the producer here, encourages you to wonder. That is, he understands an often-ignored key to this brand of doom: you kind of don’t want to hear the vocals all that much. You want vocals that are lost, God knows where. You want mystery.

And so the vocals―both Birch and Mills get vocal credits―become just another element in Mills’ Candlemass-y wall of sound. They’re woeful, quavering tenor things just loud enough to betray a word here, a sentence there and back in the swamp with you. No NeurIsis scream-howling, or Goatsnake stoner blues, or Kyuss-ish classic rock-gone-bad. There are unnerving moments when you really can catch a touch of generic goth but those are just dreadful moments that pass quickly. Vocal gaffes aside, there’s a true sense of dark sonic architectures here, of us being able to kick back and let go with a deep doom-fan ‘whoah’. The chances of another this rich, this eerie, this, in a weird way, catchy, well the odds on that aren’t very good.