Metal Monday

Metal Monday: Bolt Thrower

Published on March 22, 2010

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?

Metal Monday: Anthrax

Published on March 15, 2010

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.

Got the time?

Published on March 8, 20105 Comments

I was both pleased and slightly annoyed last Friday on discovering BBC Four had decided to broadcast a heavy metal theme night. Pleased because metal rarely gets any kind of mention on the BBC, annoyed because if BBC Four was doing a Heavy Metal Brittannia retrospective it meant the genre had well and truly become obsolete. And true to form, the main documentary was indeed an exercise in nostalgia, focusing too much on metal’s pioneers, spending too much time on the sixties and early seventies, with barely a mention of the eighties and the N.W.O.B.H.M. and absolutely nothing on developments since. Even if the focus was on British metal, why was so much time spent on barely relevant acts like Uriah Heep instead of important post-1980 bands like Napalm Death, or Paradise Lost or whatever? Is it cynical of me to think that cutting off the story around 1980 would make metal still reasonably understandable to the BBC Four audience, while not having to mention the more extreme developments since? Still, it’s comforting to know the BBC’s usual slightly out of kilter view of music extents to metal as well — seemingly obsessed with roots and almost unable to move out of the baby boomers’ sixties-seventies time frame, as if everything that’s interesting in rock and pop got its start there.

But though I can fully appreciate the genius of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and the other hard rock pioneers, they’re not metal. These bands all fit in perfectly with the other big rock bands: the Stones, the Who, Cream and all the seventies stadion rock acts. Perfectly normal people could listen to them and go to their concerts and not be looked down upon. They weren’t metal. is metal:

And this.

Not to mention this.

Metal has always been a skeevy sausagefest sort of music, both thuggish and nerdy, listened to by the weird dorky kid with the Tolkien posters in his bedroom and the thicko failing woodshop with a habit of casual violence. It’s never been cool or top forty material, with some exceptions, yet remains popular everywhere anyway. Its image is violent, reactionary and misogynistic but apart from a few of the more loonier Christian pressure groups in the eigthies nobody ever got as outraged about it as they would get over a single fiddy cents video. And I love it.