Heavy metal and Christianity don’t generally mix, though there are some pale imitations of metal bands that call themselves Christian — like every Christian imitation of a secular idea, they’re shit. In fact, whole subgenres have sprung up revolving around the hatred for Christianity or the joy of being a satanist. A lot of this is of course playacting, or just done to shock the bourgeoisie, but trust the Norwegians to have made it all real: the rise of Black Metal as a seperate genre in the early nineties saw a spate of church burnings, threats against more mainstream metal bands as well as at least one suicide and one murder. All this didn’t necessarily improve the music….
Venom – Welcome to Hell
Entombed – Left Hand Path
Mayhem – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas — at the time of this album’s release, the lead singer had suicided and the guitarist had been murdered by the lead singer of a rival black metal band.
Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…
At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…
Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot
“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”
Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.
Nobody told me there was going to be an Adèle Blanc-Sec movie!
Bonus: Tardi at the drawing table:
Adèle Blanc-Sec is one of those series that should be a lot better known in English speaking countries than it is. I mean it’s got a feisty heroine, dinosaur monster, strange albinos, weird science and crazy scientists, all set in turn of the century France. Perhaps the movie will chance this relatively obscurity.
