Thursday, September 8, 2011

Metalhit Free Download Series/Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls (SomaFM)

Impasse and Innovation:


This is a development on a train of thought I’ve written about elsewhere, but here I intend to specifically address the issue and fully develop the idea.
I have written elsewhere about a kind of impasse in modern music. I wrote about this in a review I was commissioned to do for the Jerry Magoo art blog of the latest single by the band Midnight and I commented something to the effect that metal and also goth or gothic/industrial music had reached a kind of impasse where the better newer or current bands actually sounded like re-creations of bands from the 80’s, in the case of Midnight they sounded like the 80’s metal band Venom. That is fairly apparent in a lot of what goes on.
Not really wanting to spend a lot of money on music, I’ve been listening to the Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls station on the Internet radio station SomaFM, which has existed for a few years. That’s the gothic/industrial station. I have to admit that I have trouble telling the difference on there between tracks by a more recent band like Collapsar and a track from an early 80’s artist like Legendary Pink Dots or Coil without looking at who’s playing and doing a web-search on that individual artist to see what the years are on them. I am a huge fan of the Metalhit Free Download Series of about a year ago, which was a release of 6 some hours of free music by underground metal bands that stretches from the 80’s to the present. Both Doomed and the Metalhit Free Download Series are full of music I was unfamiliar with, but truth to tell, it can be very difficult to tell modern bands on their from bands that started when I was a child. Occasionally on Doomed they play a track that I recognize like “Double Dare” by Bauhaus or “Last Remains” by Carcrash International, but there’s plenty of it that I have not heard, although a number of these bands are bands from the last 10 or so years that sound like college music of the 80’s. Doomed also does something which kind of annoys me which is they play sound bites from the movie Halloween over and over again. Metalhit Free Download series is much the same way with extreme metal. The bands on there are very good but more recent thrash metal, black metal, and death metal bands on their don’t sound racially unlike bands from the 80’s. In the case of the Folk Metal and Gothic Metal editions of the series bands of the last twenty years would be hard to distinguish in terms of the dates of the bands existence.
This new Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu that’s coming out in two months, though made by older musicians, may help to point away out. By the very fact Lou Reed is on that album it must radically re-configure metal for good or ill. The information released so far about the album would imply that this is the case, because the album has ten songs on it but is nearly 90 minutes long. The gossip webpage Heckler Spray reviewed the album claiming to have an advance copy and they panned it, but I checked back on them they’ve published positive statements about The Strokes, so they clearly don’t know or understand much about music.
That brings up another very basic notion that I have written about at length, which is the extent to which the Strokes and bands of the like represent an even deeper impasse within the human psyche. If you consider the amount of energy that the hipster culture in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn have spent on bands like the strokes taken into account considering the chord progressions that the Strokes and The White Stripes used did not differ greatly from those on early albums by the Kinks from the mid 60’s, that's dismal. It was a phenomenon that existed because American Apparel sent a paycheck to this and that publication; it’s a phenomenon that eclipsed other kinds of artistic expression in the arts oriented press for years. If you take a good long look at some of the things that indie rockers have deemed experimental, let’s say Sonic Youth for example- it remains fairly tame compared to some of the extremes you would find in a body of music like the Metalhit Free Download Series or the playlist for Doomed. That remains true even with the impasse that I’m talking about where bands on those seem to be indistinguishable from music from 20-30 years ago. The thing is that some of that material just was to abrasive to ever be absorbed into a culture for the masses. A lot of that kind of music is going to be of serious interest to, I don’t know, German art students or demographic groups like that. Doom metal has never been for the masses.
Or maybe there was just something magical about the 80’s musically. Certainly the early years of extreme metal and the emergence of gothic/industrial music have a certain kind of magic.

No comments:

Post a Comment