Music

Metal Monday: Bolt Thrower

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Just in time for Metal Monday and by pure coincidence, I found the following: Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal & Politics, “a snapshot of the Second Global Conference of Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics held in Salzburg, November 2009”. Yes, apparantly there are now academic conferences on heavy metal, but then again, there are academic conferences on everything these days. I found this book via a post at Kings of War, which focused on the relationship between heavy metal and war.

Cover art for the first Bolt Thrower album

Which brings us neatly to the subject of today’s Metal Monday: Bolt Thrower, the grindcore/death metal band from Coventry. Grindcore is a mixture of death & thrash metal influences with hardcore punk style, with short and sharp songs, fast guitars and fast, pounding drums with little sophistication. Perhaps the most famous grindcore band is Naplam Death; Bolt Thrower started out with a similar sound but migrated to a more standard death metal, even doom metal approach: slower with lower tuned guitars and drums. In both incarnations their subject matter remained the same: war, both fictional and historical. Their first album even featured artwork from Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 RPG, which is set in a brutal future where a fascist human empire are the good guys. Don’t think that Bolt Thrower glorifies war however; their best album, The IVth Crusade is a concept album showcasing the madness and folly of war. Not a particularly original theme, but brought powerfully. Of course, like so many other metal bands, Bolt Thrower is not blind to the “kewl” side of war, so there remains a tension between this adolescent fascination with wartoys and the genuine revulsion of the results of it…

The IVth Crusade:



Cenotaph:



For Victory:



What’s your favourite Bolt Thrower track?

The Dog, The Dog He’s At It Again

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I love this song so much. BBC4 is repeating its Prog Rock Brittannia programme from a few years back again –and why all of those [foo] Brittania showcases are such sausagefests is a question for another day — which is why I had to find this again. Caravan might just be the most English band of what in any case is such an English genre of music anyway and this perhaps their most English song. Gentle and calming and witty.

Metal Monday: Anthrax

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Right, there are four classic thrash metal bands, right? Metallica is the one everybody knows, good but overrated, Megadeth, the one started by the guy kicked out of Metallica, Slayer, serious and scary and finally Anthrax, not at all serious but the best of the lot (some of you might want to substitute Sepultura for any of the first three bands). And the reason they are the best of the big four is because they didn’t take everything so damn seriously. They didn’t sing about nazis and evil and death and satan, but had songs about Judge Dredd (as seen last week) and John Belushi. They were also one of the two bands that turned me into a metalhead back in ’87, ’88 or so, the other being Maiden. Discovering yank comics at the same time, nothing was as cool as reading the shoutouts to Watchmen, Batman and Judge Dredd in the liner notes of Amongst the Living.

Welcome to the Belly of the Beast.



NOT!



Bring the Noise.



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