Are you the kind of vegan with a crazy violent chip on your shoulder? Are you out to prove to your friends that being vegan is the most hardcore decision one could possibly make? Then I think you’ll appreciate the New Vegan Black Metal Chef video. Our super tough, scary, black metal head host teaches us how to make delicious green beans with scary blades and lots of leather and studs. I’ve never been so disturbed by vegetables being chopped up.

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Metal Heads Unite! And thanks to this map, it makes bridging the gap that much easier. Tread the lands of Death, Black, and every other kind of metal you can name.

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A lot of metal people rag on Liturgy (the NYC black metal band recently signed to Thrill Jockey) for being too hipster and false. They’re turned off by the lack of metalhead attire and frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s admittedly pretentious musings on what he calls ‘transcendental black metal.’

But you know, try as I might, I can’t bring myself to dislike their music. I’ve seen them live many times, once when drummer Greg Fox (one of the best drummers I know) was on tour with one of his other bands and Hunter had to play pre-recorded MIDI beats from an iPod in lieu of real drums and it actually kinda worked. I really think they’re a solid, absolutely ripping band who are doing really interesting things, musically. As a vocalist myself, I love the vocal layering they do, though I understand why some might find it grating.

I think if these guys were making watered-down, imitation black metal and selling their songs to Volkswagen, then that would be lame, but if you never heard of these guys and someone put on one of their records (Renihilation or their new one, Aesthetica), would you really think they were some pop band pretending to be metal? I’ll accept any criticism of the band’s actual music, but I can’t help but think the real and primary reason they’re so maligned is their choice of t-shirts and their arty approach. For me, I just don’t care how ‘trve’ a band is.

In the words of Natasha Lyonne’s character in Detroit Rock City, ‘As far as I’m concerned, good tunes is good tunes,’ and even if they’re hipsters, they’re not homophobes, misogynists, neo-nazis, or convicted murderers, like so many of the other bands we metalheads happily listen to. My two cents.

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I’m a huge fan of my friend Karlynn Holland’s art. She designed New York black metal band Krallice’s logo and did the logo and artwork for Dysrhythmia’s last album, Psychic Maps. She has a way with layering wispy and delicate lines to create dense textures and brooding atmosphere.

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Amongst many in the metal scene, there is a great appreciation for spectacularly bad and low-budget black metal. There’s no escaping the fact that early Graveland was laughably bad, but that was part of their appeal. Behold, now, Varghkoghargasmal (say that ten times fast), a completely incompetent German band that decided to make a black metal record without distortion on their guitars. The results are akin to StS’ ‘shreds’ videos on YouTube. Absolutely amazing.
[audio:Trees.mp3]

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My band, Bloody Panda, used to perform on stage wearing executioner hoods. We’ve stopped doing that, but I’m going to suggest that we all wear panda hat/scarves.

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The Meads of Asphodel are hands-down the weirdest black metal band out there, shifting between polka, space-rock, punk, horns, and cryptic narration within their dense, pummeling psychosis. The band’s latest album, The Murder of Jesus Christ the Jew, despite some intentionally provocative song titles and themes, is actually an homage of sorts to the most famous hippie in history.

Also, they always wear armor that makes them look more like extras in Monty Python and the Holy Grail than evil warriors risen from the dead.

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I got to know Thrill Jockey as the label for mellow, contemplative art/jazz bands that wind up being played on NPR. Of late, though, they have been signing some really left-field acts such as Daniel Higgs, Future Islands, Barn Owl, and now Brooklyn-based ‘transcendental black metal’ band Liturgy. I think it’s a good fit because Liturgy doesn’t really belong on a straight-forward metal label.
[audio:http://dodge77.com/playlist/Liturgy-Ecstatic_Rite.mp3]

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With bands like Krallice, Liturgy, and now San Francisco-based Deafheaven firmly establishing a subgenre of shimmering, transcendent black metal, many metal purists are throwing the tag ‘hipster’ around a little too freely. Burzum’s first post-prison album is also a big slab of pretty, so is Varg a hipster too?

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The rainy weather and breathtaking scenery of the Pacific Northwest has been inspiring a lot of amazing metal bands in the past several years — Velvet Cacoon, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Agalloch all emerged from the region. Another great band coming out of Portland is Atriarch, a blackened, sludgy, doom-inspired outfit whose frontman Lenny Smith (aka Behalf) also shreds his vocal chords for the possibly defunct Trees. Hail the New Wave of Pacific Northwest Black Metal.

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My band, Bloody Panda, recently had the honor of opening for Amber Asylum in their hometown of San Francisco. The project of primary songwriter and frontwoman Kris Force, the band specializes in string-and-piano-heavy neoclassical/darkwave that required more attention than some drunken attendees were able to muster on a late Wednesday night.

Still, Force’s operatic vocals and the narrative structures of her songs kept most of us captivated, as if she were a village matriarch singing tales of heroism and sorrow before we went back out into the night to battle our enemies. With a constantly shifting line-up that has featured a who’s-who of the Bay Area metal scene, Force’s band was definitely the epicenter of the SF metal scene that night, and there couldn’t have been a more high-profile show of the genre to play. It was a great night.

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I actually really liked Until the Light Takes Us, the documentary about black metal by Audrey Ewell and Aiden Aites. I say ‘actually’ because I can see why so many people didn’t like it. It’s definitely not for fans of the genre, as there is not a lot of actual black metal featured in the film, and it focuses on the characters involved with the now mythic beginnings of the scene, namely Gylve ‘Fenriz’ Nagell of Darkthrone and Varg ‘Count Grishnackh’ Vikernes.

In turns hilarious and strangely tragic, the film is a sort of meandering character study that lets its subjects speak for themselves without venerating their public personas and the pop culture phenomenon they created. The film touches on themes of authenticity and appropriation, with a lot of focus on contemporary artist Bjarne Melgaard and his sometimes ham-fisted attempts to tackle the black metal aesthetic and mythology into his work.

The Q&A after the screening at the Maryland Film Festival was rather heated, with Ewell and Aites becoming a touch combative when audience members questioned the filmmakers’ appreciation of the actual genre of music, and the conversation verging on full-blown argument when another audience member brought up the uncomfortable contradiction of ostensibly liberal and progressive people appreciating a genre and a culture made by people who have committed extreme acts of hate and violence.

To me, though, the fact that even an apolitical documentary about black metal can generate so much debate amongst fans and laymen alike is yet more reason why I love the genre so much.

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Director Tony Stone’s debut film, Severed Ways, went over the heads of most audiences. The digitally shot film about the Norse discovery of North America didn’t conform to the typical three-part narrative we have come to expect in cinema, it was mostly without dialogue, and it showed one of the Vikings taking a dump.

I think it was one of the most powerful articulations of the core black metal aesthetic, a genre which also goes over (or under) the heads of most people. I’m totally stoked to see Until the Dark Takes Us, a documentary about Norwegian black metal by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell.

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I’ll admit it gets pretty lonely sometimes being a metalhead in a Wham City-dominated town, but when my buddies in Krallice rolled through with amazing San Franscisco black metal band Ludicra the other night, it was heartening to see the long hair and back patches coming out of the woodwork.

Krallice was tight as ever with their dynamic and subtly progressive species of the genre, though some crusties in the crowd seemed incapable of getting past frontman Mick Barr’s decidedly un-metal appearance. Headliners Ludicra, however, finally pushed the crowd past the tipping point, their impossibly precise instrumentation keeping the pit churning while vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman spit throat-ripping rasps and howls – the strain of nearly three straight weeks of tour began to show, but she soldiered through, making up for the cracks in her voice with a terrifyingly intense delivery. The occasional quiet interlude gave moody contrast to the full-throttle pummeling in the set, resulting in the kind of over-the-top histrionics that makes metal such a fun genre.
[audio:http://downloads.betterpropaganda.com/download.php?file=Ludicra-The_Only_Curse_The_Only_Remedy_128.mp3]

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Sigh sound like a black metal demon that fell out of a box of Fruit Loops. Listen to their latest album, Scenes from Hell, while watching the Olympics. You won’t regret it. [Listen to a Sigh song now]
[audio:http://earbuds.popdose.com/ben/Music/Sigh%20-%20The%20Soul%20Grave.mp3]

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Alexander Binder’s affinity for the black metal aesthetic permeates his photos, but beyond being just fan worship, Binder’s work reflects how the the membrane between the kvlt and other areas of contemporary culture has become. Binder’s images have a dark and ethereally sinister quality about them, obfuscating reality rather than merely re-interpreting or altering it as other photographers often aim to do.

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I listen to a lot of bands that espouse questionable ideologies to put it mildly. With the assimilation of black metal into the mainstream, typically left-leaning music fans like me have had to grapple with the fact that some of our favorite bands have at least expressed sympathy for Nationalist Socialism – you know, Nazism – if not fully embracing it. My rationale, however, for continuing to enjoy this music is that if I only listened to music made by people I agree with, there would be very little I could listen to – no GG Allin, no Merle Haggard, no NWA, no Slayer. Come to think of it, 90 percent of the musicians I admire express rather extreme viewpoints, and that’s precisely what I find so fascinating about them.

I never really look for myself in art, I look for insights into things I don’t necessarily understand (“I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” is a compelling lyric, but few Johnny Cash fans, I imagine, have actually committed murder). I first started listening to NS black metal because I wanted to know more about a group of people who were diametrically opposed to people like me – I could download their music, but seeing as I am not white, I would never have the opportunity to talk face-to-face with these musicians. I then realized that so much of the music was about fantasy and escape (not really even overtly racist most of the time), and that skinheads and extremists of all varieties are merely people reacting, however wrongheadedly, to a globalized world in which they feel lost and neglected — it’s no accident that many Nazi metal bands live in former Soviet nations in which their ethnic identities had been suppressed for decades.

With the fall of communism, nationalism has become the new banner under which petty politicians in newly independent states rally their support. In this regard, I don’t consider neo-Nazis to be as virulent a threat as the mainstream politicians who subliminally exploit latent ethnic insecurities – they are merely tools, just as the loudest voices on all sides of politics tend to be.

Additionally, skinheads and neo-Nazis (not necessarily the same thing, in case you didn’t know) tend not to be the elites of their societies – they’re generally working class and disenfranchised, and just like people in the inner cities of America, they have turned to groups that provide them with structure, a semblance of community, and a sense of empowerment that no government program, YMCA, or mainstream institution has so far succeeded in giving them.

Is Nazism a fundamentally more evil belief system than one which condones rape, violence, and frenzied materialism? I’m not so sure, but I still love Burzum as much as love Mobb Deep, and I find it more useful to understand extreme ways of thinking rather than merely condemning or ignoring them.

Another result of these bands finding themselves unexpectedly appreciated by wider, often non-Aryan audiences, is that many of them have tempered their views to the point of even denying that they ever espoused any political ideology at all (inclusion, it seems, is a good tactic for neutralizing extremism). Bands such as Drudkh, whose related projects deal more explicitly with Nietzscheism, fascism, and “Aryan mythology,” had a bit of a crossover hit with 2009′s Microcosmos – the band even issued a statement that, “there is nothing in Drudkh’s music or lyrics that would suggest any political outlook.” Now, their fellow countrymen Nokturnal Mortum have also bounded out of the underground with their latest album, Voice of Steel.

Knowing nothing about this band, one would almost call the record pop. Many of the core elements of the genre – blast beats, screeched vocals, folk interludes, etc. — are still prevalent, but what is truly out of left-field are the Pink Floyd-inspired blues (really, blues!) lines and anthemic, major-key singalong segments.

The band has had an affinity for dueling flutes, violin, keyboard, and clean vocals for quite some time now, but on this album all the elements gel into a decidedly happy celebration of music, nodding to pop punk, psych, classic rock, folk, and black metal as it bops along like a corpse-painted gnome on a rainbow pony. This is easily one of the best metal albums of 2009, dropping just a little too late for most people’s year-end lists.

Despite the views Nokturnal Mortum may or may not still hold, they are making really interesting music that I personally find more compelling knowing that they have views so different from mine. In the end, no metal fan really expects political correctness from metal, and really, why would you accept a group that sings about raping nuns, impaling babies, shooting cops, or beating women, but not one that sings about race wars?

If Indonesian, Thai, French, Mexican, American, and Jewish metalheads of all political stripes embrace these bands, what does it matter if you as a progressive, upper-middle-class urbanite support them or not?
[audio:http://www.label56.com/samples/Nokturnal%20Mortum%20-%20Kolyada.mp3]

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Castevet are a promising new experimental black metal band out of New York. They have a much more complex and technical approach than other bands of this ilk, revealing post-hardcore and death metal influences as evidenced by guitarist Andrew Hock’s work in deathgrind outfit Biolich and Boston jazz/death/doom band Ehnahre.

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Lord Mantis is a mish-mash of several different metal tropes, with slow doom passages transitioning into dissonant black metal parts and vocals that span the styles of the genre – hardcore yelping, black metal screeching, and death metal growls. This is not surprising, given the band’s members are all prominent in the Chicago metal scene, playing in other bands such as Avichi, Indian, and Nachtmystium.
[audio:http://www.stonerrock.com/jukebox/Lord_Mantis-Lord_Mantis.mp3]

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Colin Marston seems hellbent on making other musicians feel worthless with his numerous and prolific projects that include black metal quartet Krallice (with Mick Barr), prog-tech-thrash band Behold… The Arctopus, and drone outfit Byla. One of his most intense endeavors, however, is instrumental trio Dysrhythmia, a band in which he took over bass duties for founding member Clayton Ingerson.

To call these guys ‘technical’ would be like calling a habenero pepper ‘spicy’, yet they’re about more than Guitar Center geekery — Marston’s unrelenting bass attack, Jeff Eber’s polyrhythmic drumming, and Kevin Hufnagel’s scorching guitar parts swirl together into an expressive, melodic, and accessible whole — as an olive branch perhaps to the casual listener, they even lay down some grooves on their new album, Psychic Maps, rather than merely showing off how many time signatures they can shift through in one song. Check out their track Sleep Decayer below.
[audio:http://shop.relapse.com/dbmedia/audio/dysrhythmia_-_Sleep%20Decayer.mp3]

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