Xasthur and the Circle of Metal

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This ran on Metropulse, way, way back.
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For centuries, scholars believed that metalness was a straight continuum, with bands like Slayer at the top end and performers like, oh, say…Debussy at the bottom. In recent years, though, researchers have discovered that the truth is somewhat different. Beyond St. Vitus, beyond Celtic Frost, out where the black dooms drone, we now know metal curves, and Stephen O’Mally, like a wily ourobourous, takes his tail in his teeth only to discover he’s chomping on the smiling visage of Danny Elfman.

Xasthur’s new album doesn’t sound like Danny Elfman at all, really. But on it, one-man-band Malefic maybe takes a step or two around the circle in that direction that I wish he hadn’t. At his spiky, buzzing best — as on 2002’s Nocturnal Poisoning — Malefic was right in the soul of black, with static and keyboards and shrieking vocals and drums all fusing in a single hissing howl of knives and hate. Xasthur was fierce, brutal, and unrelenting.

And then, on All Reflections Drained, Malefic relents. Oh sure, he breathes out something approaching his trademark evil at the beginning of “Inner Sanctum Surveillance,” or in the middle of “Masquerade of Incisions.” But for the most part, the album just backs off everything a bit — the buzz, the static the shrieks — and all of a sudden we’re listening to a soundtrack for the apocalypse rather than experiencing the apocalypse itself.

What’s even worse is that slowly, horribly, as you listen it becomes clear that Xasthur was always just an inch away from …restful. And…pleasant. Like Jesu, or…Sigur Ros. And, don’t get me wrong, I like Jesu and Sigur Ros. But I liked the old Xasthur more.

16 thoughts on “Xasthur and the Circle of Metal”

  1. Schumann said Chopin was flowers concealing cannons.*

    Metal is knives concealing bubblegum.

    Nothing wrong with that – only maybe with not acknowledging it, which is how people end up disappointed when metal musicians start taking away the knives.

    (*By which he actually meant that Chopin’s music contained a hidden message of Polish nationalism, but it’s also such an apt way of evoking that composer’s combination of suave surface and often violent content that it would be a shame to waste it. And of course it can be applied to Debussy in the same way – though maybe they’re silk flowers in Debussy’s case; after Wagner, everybody needed a break from floral aromas for a while – and like Chopin, Debussy also sometimes just gives you the cannons more or less straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvSjita4TU)

  2. Yeah…I don’t really find your comments on metal especially thoughtful or perspicacious in general, Graham. But that’s okay; every genre can’t be for everyone…

  3. If you enjoy it, it’s for you, so it’s for me. Granted, I probably don’t listen to as much metal as you, but that’s okay; everyone can’t be impartial about every genre.

  4. “If you enjoy it, it’s for you, so it’s for me.”

    I agree with that!

    I don’t see metal and bubblegum pop as being very similar in what I look for in them or what they’re trying to do, for the most part. One is about earworms, one’s much more about atmosphere. I like them both, though (and they can be combind occasionally of course…like Helter Skelter.)

  5. I would say bubblegum is as much about sound as about earworms, if not more so. I mean, Chirst, Phil Spector never wrote an original tune in his life.

  7. Earworms have everything to do with originality. If they didn’t, anyone could write them.

  8. No, I think you’re misunderstanding me. Getting a good earworm is certainly a talent. But you were saying Spector recycled earworms. And so he did! But the point is, earworms don’t have to be original in bubblegum pop. (Thus the brilliance of mash ups.)

  9. Something has to be original in a bubblegum pop record, or nobody cares about it. Often it’s the sound, and how that sound colors the tune, rather than the tune per se – which was my point back at 2:01.

  10. Well…any art has something original and something new! Even exact duplicates, as Borges says.

    Creating gooey new containers for your earworm is still about the earworm…rather than about atmosphere. (I continue to contend.)

  11. If the sound is the original part, and not the tune (it can of course also be both, or other things), it’s about the sound.

    Addendum to previous: Just because you can mash up different tunes – that is, just because they have a lot in common – doesn’t necessarily mean some or all of them aren’t interesting for their own sake.

  16. Actually, earworms can be deliberatey engineered through technology. Think of commercial jingles.

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