Tagged: clee

. . . This exercise has had several purposes. It's a celebration of Metallica's music. It's a natural byproduct of my masochistic nature. And it's a project so crazy that, once spawned in my head, it couldn't not be done. Fitzcarraldo comes to mind. But one reason stands out above the others, even above Metallica themselves. It's the importance of songs. Metallica became the biggest metal band ever by having the best songs. They did so with remarkable consistency over four consecutive records. A few songs are arguably duds, but not only [...]

. . . Some are born into metal, but most enter it from outside. The before/after dynamic is so strong that as a subcultural initiation story, "when I became a metalhead" is, for many, as significant as religious conversion or coming out of the closet. But one brings one's past into metal; that's one of the ideals of folk metal. You don't become a metalhead and lose your identity, hopefully. Beneath that metal uniform is your own self, right? I was raised on classical music, including classical guitar. So when I discovered metal, I gravitated towards [...]

. . . ...And Justice for All sounds like it looks: cold and gray. It's wall-to-wall grim, which didn't jive with the Metallica I read about as a kid. That Metallica wore shades and maniacal grins, and was sometimes called Alcoholica. James Hetfield's "More Beer" Gibson Explorer was often on display. Nuclear scientists on record, party animals in real life - it didn't quite compute. "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" is the closest AJFA gets to solving that equation. It's actually kind of fun. It makes me smile - not in [...]

. . . "[A]boutness is all but terminal in fiction. Stories aren't about things. Stories are things". - Bret Anthony Johnston, "Don't Write What You Know" Substitute "fiction" with "music", and "stories" with "songs", and I'd agree 100%. "Aboutness" is why most political music is dull. It's also what makes me distrust strong authorial intent. I support art, and I support artists insofar as they are vessels of art. But unless artists are actual people in my life, i.e., friends, I care about them as much as other people [...]

. . . If you think about it, it's amazing what heavy metal has become: a beast with thousands of tentacles, some decades long. That Black Sabbath can lead to both Burzum and deathcore is a testament to virality. Ideas spread and mutate, taking on unimagined forms - often to the chagrin of champions of earlier forms. ...And Justice for All is one such unimagined form. It's a long, long way from "The Wizard" to "The Shortest Straw", which is about as extreme as " AJFA -ness" gets. As with much of metal, [...]

. . . Obsequiae's Suspended in the Brume of Eos (Bindrune, 2011) is one my favorite metal records this year. It's esoteric yet inviting, intimate yet robust. Current metal rarely feels "hidden", but this record feels like a tromp through some mythic forest. It turns out that this feeling comes from a medieval influence - not from ren fairs, but from sitting down with musical scores and translating olden times into modern metal. Via email, I asked band members Blondel de Nesle and Neidhard von Reuental about this. They seemed touchy about revealing their identities, even [...]

• MetalArmyUSA - OBSEQUIAE - Suspended in the Brume of Eos

. . . This is my last new post at Invisible Oranges. I have some posts, including the rest of the Metallica series, in the queue that will go up later, but otherwise, this is it for me. The new editor is Mike Nelson, who heads a great staff that will take the site to new heights. Please give him a warm welcome. It's been an honor to have worked on Invisible Oranges. To this day, I'm still amazed that people read it, much less follow it consistently. Having an audience is never something to take [...]

. . . With some things, you just know. Not long after I got Prove You Wrong (Epic, 1991), which turns 20 today, I knew it was for me. I bought the longbox at a tiny record store by train tracks where kids smoked and did bad things. No doubt that store is gone now. But the mystique of the album's artwork - a subtly deadly combination of metal and jellyfish - and its perfect fit for me burn as brightly as ever. Musically, Prove You Wrong is a paradox. It's Prong [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. Dolorian - "Dual - Void - Trident" . . . If you asked me to pick a favorite out of the thousands of records I've covered here, I'd say Dolorian's Voidwards (Wounded Love, 2006, original writeup ). I don't know where it would fall on my all-time list. But I do know that it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about what's "cool" about this site. I've discovered [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. . . . The early days of Invisible Oranges were some of the last days I spent in record stores. If I bought the CD I reviewed - and back then I bought most of what I reviewed - I still remember where I bought it. Case in point: Pagan Hellfire. I bought it at Hospital Productions in NYC. Hospital is small and not a place to find something specific. You just go there to find something. The best way to [...]

Meshuggah, 499 dudes, and one girl . . . One of my favorite parts of doing this site has been hearing people's stories. I'm not a good storyteller myself, which is OK because my life doesn't have many great stories. "So what do you do for fun?" "I run a blog". "People still do those?" "I do". Clearly, I am single. "But that is a choice", I tell myself, daily like a mantra. The end. . [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. Art teaser clip 1 . . . Click here to view the embedded video. Art teaser clip 2 . . . The Devil's Blood have a new album, The Thousandfold Epicentre , coming on 11/11/11. Ván Records has revealed some artwork and sounds in the videos above. The artwork looks great, and [...]

. . . Recently I came across a blog post that articulated something I haven't been able to articulate myself. The post was by ATMF, an Italian record label specializing mostly in black metal. The topic was the alleged National Socialist leanings of Disiplin, a noise act on ATMF. That particular discussion wasn't interesting; it was the usual tempest in a teapot that arises around NS-related music. What was interesting, however, was the following digression: . . . We're strong supporters of what we like to [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. Verdunkeln - "In die Irre" . . . Over four years after its release, Verdunkeln's Einblick in den Qualenfall remains one of the most unique interpretations ever of black metal ( original writeup ). See, for example, "In die Irre", which takes three minutes and 49 seconds to reveal any black metal conventions (rasped vocals). Until then, it's big, reverbed '80s drums, springy clean tones, and Urfaustian singing. Deathrock is the vibe; for [...]

. . . This is the full album stream for Pyrrhon's An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master , out soon on Selfmadegod. . . . Pyrrhon's - An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master [full album stream] [Audio clip: view full post to listen] . . . I've been listening to An Excellent Servant for about half a year now. The record entered my inbox in February, when Pyrrhon self-released it digitally. Now Selfmadegod is giving it [...]

. . . Female clean singing has been scarce on this site. That's due to market conditions and taste; most metal bands using it are of the goth kind, which doesn't interest me or you readers much. Some women sing in traditional/power metal bands, but those bands are also rare. Strangely, there's probably more of a market now for female growling and screaming than there is for singing. Brave seem to be dormant, which is a shame, because their singing is great, and I remember their songs vividly from when I reviewed them in [...]

. . . Since this is my last week at IO (though some of my writing, including the rest of the Metallica series, will post after I leave), I thought I'd revisit some highlights of the first two years, '06-'08. The site was on Blogger then, and hardly anyone read it. It was techically never a Blogspot, since I used the domain name invisibleoranges.com since day one. But in spirit, it sure was. Ah, Minima Black theme. You and I had some good times. It's a trip seeing how my tastes have evolved. When I started [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. . . . "One" is Metallica's "Stairway to Heaven". They're long and popular ballads, which probably means that after a while they become live nooses. Robert Plant said about "Stairway", "There's only so many times you can sing it and mean it". According to Chapter Inc. , Metallica has played "One" live 1232 times. 1232 times! James Hetfield has embodied a limbless landmine survivor 1232 times in front of thousands. What an acting job! The question is not if Metallica ever phoned [...]

. . . After I made the above graphic (which took a while for my meager design skills) and uploaded a carefully constructed mixtape, I realized I forgot about the previous Slow & Low #2 . So I guess we'll have two #2s - oops. Evidently, I am slow as well. Anyway, slow music: I get so much of this stuff - I've yet to make it through 2009's Deutschland's Doomed Vol. 1 compilation, which is eight hours long - that it's hard to know where to start. On my desktop, my [...]

Click here to view the embedded video. . . . Tsjuder have new music! I have awaited it for a while. 2004's Desert Northern Hell (cool title!) is one of my favorite black metal records. It's not post-anything or beard-scratching music. It simply brings the storm. Judging from "The Daemon Throne", Tsjuder have brought the storm again. It carries the band's signatures: speed, power, the defined riffs of thrash. After hearing countless American bands muck about with fuzz, it's refreshing to hear Europeans bring precision to the attack. [...]