New Wave of British Heavy Metal mix; Download NWOBHM here.
1. Shot You in the Back — Motorhead
2. Gypsy — Uriah Heep
3. Street (Live) — Eegor
4. After Forever — Black Sabbath
5. Death Penalty — Witchfinder General
6. Sorcerers — Angel Witch
7. 22 Acacia Avenue — Iron Maiden
8. Lady Love — Dark Star
9. Into the Fire — Deep Purple
10. The Prince — Diamond Head
11. Leper Messiah — Metallica
This is the end of a Metal Apocalypse series.
This was first published on Madeloud. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Anti-semitism is very much frowned upon these days, so I don’t often get to see the mass media reduce me to an invidious exploitative stereotype for the amusement and titillation of my peers.
In that sense, the 2009 episode of the TV show Bones titled, “Mayhem on the Cross” was a stimulating novelty. Not that it was anti-semitic — of course not. It was anti-metalhead.
Admittedly, I’m not a pure metalhead — I don’t attend concerts very often, and I listen to lots of non-metallish music, from Mariah Carey to Donovan. Still, I identify sufficiently to have found the Bones episode alternately hysterical and irritating.
Let’s cut to the tape:
The opening Norwegian black metal band doesn’t sound remotely like Scandinavian black metal — the vocals are crappy Eddie Vedder via nu-metal, not black metal’s demonic screech, and the music is lumberingly catchy rather than atmospheric. There’s even a stadium rock adrenaline chorus, for pity’s sake. One of the performers is shown using a chainsaw…an amateurish, anything-goes move that could certainly occur at a punk show, but which just is not black metal at all. The band who played the song is in real life named “Tondra Soul” — and, yeah, black metal bands don’t use “soul” to mean “soulful” and if they want a made-up-language word for “thunder”, they take it from Tolkein, not from fucking Esperanto.
Psychiatrist Lance Sweets more or less correctly characterizes the difference between death and black metal when he explains that, “Death metal is about brutal technical proficiency while black metal is about emotion.” So points for that. But then Sweets goes on to insist that both death and black metal “exploit adolescent feelings of alienation, depression… “ The problem here being that extreme metal isn’t especially aimed at adolescents — at least not by pop music standards. You go to a metal show, you see folks in their twenties and thirties and older — and that’s in the audience, not just on the stage. You want to see young people’s emotions being exploited, you need to go see Beyonce or Lil’ Wayne or Vampire Weekend live. While there are no doubt some teens who love the head-banging, for the most part the alienation and depression in metal are aimed at the adult and the comfortably middle-aged.
One of the characters declares, as if she’s reading from an encyclopedia: “Death metal enthusiasts prefer morbid horror-centric venues for performance.” What? Since when? They’re not theatrical troupes! They’re not combining metal and performance art! They book shows in clubs, for crying out loud!
Expanding on the point above — death metal bands? They don’t wear make-up. That’s black metal bands. Get it straight, people.
Of course, the main point of confusion here is the idea that metal is overall a dangerous, violent subculture. Certainly, Scandinavian metal in the ’90s did involve murder and assault and church burning — but to the best I can tell, that’s largely over. Some performers are still interested in Satanism, but that just makes them irritating blowhards, not a menace to society. As for American extreme metal — I doubt the guys in Cannibal Corpse even trash their hotel rooms, y’know?
But if it knew what it was talking about, it wouldn’t be television. I do wish they’d done enough research to have actual metal on the soundtrack, though. “Tondra Soul” — yeesh.
This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Death knows no boundaries, and neither does death metal. Like its moldering extreme metal cousins doom and black, death metal is tied to no separate zip code or scene, instead festering indiscriminately across the face of the globe. From Florida to California to Scandinavia to Brazil to Holland to England and on and on—with death metal it’s not where you live, but how you rot.
There’s certainly no way to tell that the Coffins are from Japan. Ancient Torture—their recently released two-CD compilation of work from splits, comps, and EPs released between 2005-2009—includes no clues as to ethnicity or venue. The cover art is not particularly Eastern; on the contrary the scythe-wielding inquisitors on the front cover sport crosses and appear to be hideously disemboweling their cadaverous victim in some sort of medieval European setting. The inside illustrations are all similarly unspecific gothic. And, as with death metal worldwide, the song titles—”Wasteland of Terror,” “Evil Infection,” and “Torture”—are in English, the universal language of degradation.
The music is distinctive, but not in any way that makes you think of traditional Japanese music or J-pop. Instead, the Coffins purvey a universal mixture of death and doom, all grunting, pig-like Cookie-Monster vocals and detuned trudging. The band drags itself through layers and layers of feedback, pausing every so often (as on “Mortification to Ruin”) for a classic rock guitar solo to pull itself from the swamp before being sucked under again. The awesomely named “Acid Orgy” has a Ramones-esque three-chord hook slooooooowed down as if Joey and the gang were attempting to perform despite severe and repeated blunt trauma. You can almost hear the Japanese accent as the singer repeats “Acid Orgy” over and over again, but really it sounds more like his voice is strange because he’s vomiting barrels of fish guts. “Offalgrinder” gets up to a fast shuffle, as if the band is trying to decide whether to be hardcore or doom and the whiplash buries the singer’s voice completely; he sounds like he’s been interred in a well and then had 1000 barrels of muck dropped on him. “Ebony Tears” dispenses with all that punk crap and just goes for eight repetitious minutes of doom, doom, doom, doom, the heavy Sabbath-worthy riff repeated over and over, the singer retching and growling inarticulately, a canticle for stoned pachyderms.
The anonymity of death metal is probably a large part of why it’s so widely disliked by non-aficionados. The sexless, inhuman vocals that turn every singer into the same death’s head; the technical prowess and heavy rumbling that turn even relatively disparate influences (hardcore, Black Sabbath) into sludgy, undifferentiated pummeling; the abject horror movie lyrics. If you listen to indie rock or R&B or rap or jazz or cock rock you’re there for the swagger and personality, which is why national scenes, or national identity are an important touchstone. Bjork isn’t Bjork without her outré Icelandic charm; the Boredoms aren’t the Boredoms without that manic avant Japanese-ness; Dre isn’t Dre if he’s not representing the West Coast. But the Coffins? They look like a corpse wherever they happen to have grown up.
Diversity and personality are certainly enjoyable in their own right; the vertiginous variety of the capitalist buffet, where everything is new and shiny and different and your local ethnic spice can tingle the pallet of consumers far and wide. But there’s a perverse one-world underground appeal to death metal as well. In the U.S. or Brazil, Thailand or Japan, force and hate and death stare through the same sockets at the same bleak, blasted landscape. If most music tells us that the world is our playground, death metal reminds us that, wherever we live, it’s also our coffin.
This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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I bought British band Meads of Asphodel’s The Murder of Jesus the Jew expecting to hear some terrifying evil black metal. And that’s exactly what I got. At least, if by “terrifying and evil” you mean “show tunes.”
I do have a hideous attraction/repulsion for show tunes, and I think it makes sense to think of them as the music of the Antichrist. Especially if the show tunes are written by Andrew Lloyd Weber. And I dare anyone to listen to the second half of the song “Addicted to Christ” without having major Jesus Christ Superstar flashbacks. There’s a lonely horn that wanted to be jazz but had its soul stolen by music theater, and then a choral refugee starts singing like a chipper thespian—“Who is God? I am God? Are you God? But what God? I’m no God, it’s my God.” Soon enough we’ve got contrapuntal voices reciting bitter lyrics in an uplifting back and forth (First cheerful voice: “God hates you all!” Cheerful choral response: “Circumcise!”) And after not too long, again like Lloyd Weber, we launch into some classic rocky concept-album strut. Even the end, with a more traditional metal vocalist and a heavier roar, still has the busy crescendos and prog-rock shifts that strongly suggest Vegas.
In short, Meads of Asphodel is busily pissing off purists of all sorts. Whether you’re a committed Christian or a committed metal head, your idols are spat upon, your faith mocked, and your sacred rituals left to die slowly in a befouled orchestra pit..
And yet…is this really the blasphemy it’s supposed to be? Musically, conceivably this could be seen not as a hideous imposture of black metal, but as a roots exploration. Black Sabbath was really, really proggy—“Fairies Wear Boots” could’ve had a chorus line. Pat Boone’s tacky desecration of “Enter Sandman” was funny because it wasn’t a desecration: metal really does often sound like Nelson Riddle conducting a brontosaurus. Meads of Asphodel’s nine-minute “Genesis of Death” with the syncopated exotica shimmies and the ridiculous Spanish guitar moments and even the David Bowie-esque wailing at the end—obviously it’s ridiculous, but it’s not ridiculous in an unmetal way. It sounds like Rush, it sounds like Pink Floyd, it sounds like King Crimson or Uriah Heap—like all these bands which aren’t usually considered proto-metal, but which have solid claims to being just that. Meads of Asphodel is maybe apocryphal, heretical metal, but apocrypha and heresy are part of the tradition too. To me, at least, Meads is keeping the faith far more religiously than High on Fire or Agalloch, bands which sound more like metal to the uninitiated but deep in their souls emote like indie rather than lumbering like Sabbath.
And what about Christianity? There, too, Meads of Asphodel may be more devout than they appear. In a blandly secular age, to record album after album of theological arguments is not exactly the act of unbelievers, even if the theology expressed is that of unbelief. “Addicted to Christ” mocks the idea of a different God for each individual—“A man God, a fish God, a black God, a white God, a gay God, a sad God, a blind God, a dead God”—a mockery which is perfectly reconcilable with monotheism. Similarly, the ambient keyboard washes and oh-so-Lloyd Webber emoting of Jesus in “Dark Gethsemene” is notably sympathetic. “It’s over, no, not after life. No second change in paradise…A glimpse of hell is all that’s left. A crown of thorns upon my head.” That’s sinful despair…but Christ is supposed to have had moments of virtually sinful despair. Which is to say that the song’s unbelief is buttressed with an appeal to a not-especially-unorthodox Christ. It’s a Christian atheism.
Along those lines, it’s fairly clear that the Meads of Asphodel website, which includes vocalist Metatron’s extended essays about each and every song on the album (let me repeat that—extended essays about each and every song on the album) is not the work of someone indifferent to Jesus’ existence. Here for example, is a representative paragraph from Metatron’s annotations of “Apostle of the Uncircumcised” (spelling errors are left as is.)
But contrived exaggerations of Jesus by the early church fathers made him into what he is now. Would not a God of such infinite power be beyond the trappings of mortal frailty? Why would a God produce only a single son whose message has since become lost in church corruption and human error? Surly a God would foresee the futility of what has become the Christian Church in all its crumbling out of date teachings. Why send a Son to save the sins of man and leave his doctrine to a few disciples who themselves could not ensure his words would be preserved until at least 30-50 years after his death? For what reason would the world have to suffer even more unspeakable cruelty two thousand years on to this day? Why would all this mystery be locked in a maze of religious jargon that is so at odds with itself the very church has splintered into various denominations each proclaiming to be the purest doctrine of Christ?
You don’t go on like that for page after feverish page if you don’t care about Christianity. If a theologian could answer those questions to Metatron’s satisfaction, Metatron would care. He’s an argument away from believing—which is to say if you’re throwing stones at the church, you’re just not that far away from the church. The Murder of Jesus the Jew is a ridiculous mess of an album, but it’s not a random mess. Rather, it’s the inspired mess you can only get from following your twisted faith—in metal and in Christ—wherever it happens to lead you.
This first appeared on Madeloud. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Death metal has to be one of the most inaccessible forms of structured noise ever to have passed itself off under the loose rubric of “popular music”. With vocals that are more growled than sung, drumming that sounds more like a jackhammer than a beat, a brutal insistence on lack of groove, and lyrics that embrace Satanism, decay, and being torn limb from limb — well, let’s just say that the genre isn’t everyone’s cup of steaming pus.
It’s true that if you like only twee indie pop with the occasional foray into folk, you should probably stay far, far away from death metal. But if you have any appreciation for heavy, from Guns N’Roses to Zeppelin to Black Flag to Iron Maiden, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to find something to appreciate in death. Here are a few easy entry points from someone who, long leery of the genre, has finally seen the black corpselight.
Slayer — Reign in Blood
Slayer’s 1986 masterpiece is thrash metal, not death — but there’s no death band that doesn’t worship at its unholy altar. Dave Lombardo’s blazing double bass throughout the album is the touchstone for death’s fist-to-the-face percussive roar, and the demonically-fueled, resolutely unbluesy, riffs-as-bludgeons laid down by guitarists Hanneman and King are almost as influential. These death elements, though, come in a package that is, for neophytes, relatively accessible. Tom Araya sings like a human rather than an ogre; the production (by Rick Rubin) is much cleaner than most death albums, and the songs, for all their breathtaking speed and power, are constructed around brutally effective hooks. In short, this is the perfect place to jump off into some real death.
Possessed — Seven Churches
Recorded the year before Reign in Blood, Seven Churches may be the first actual death metal album. Jeff Becerra brings the cookie monster vocals, and the band blazes along like Motorhead with double the amphetamine prescription and a twisted theological bent. The songwriting is significantly more rudimentary than on “Reign in Blood” — or, indeed, than on most fetishistically technical death metal albums to come. But Becerra’s charisma is considerable, and the album’s single-minded rush has an easily appreciated visceral charge that was (more-or-less deliberately) jettisoned as the genre solidified.
Malevolent Creation — The Ten Commandments
Part of the influential Florida death metal scene, Malevolent Creation’s recorded their first album in 1991. The Ten Commandments is top quality, straight ahead early death metal. The songs are only a short step removed from thrash; fast, brutal, adrenaline-fueled, and relentless. The title-track, Malevolent Creation, is one of the few songs by any death band anywhere that actually gives Slayer a run for its black and bartered carcass.
Vader — Future of the Past
The Polish band Vader is one of the most revered 90s European death metal outfits. Future of the Past, their 1996 third album, is composed entirely of covers — which makes it unusually accessible. In the first place, choosing songs by a multitude of different writers gives the album a welcome variety. In the second place, every song just kicks ass. “Storm of Stress” (originally by Terrorizer) is 1:15 of breakneck brutality, punctuated by a single bass run pause so you can take a breath and contemplate the blood pouring out of your ears. “Dethroned Emperor” (originally by Celtic Frost) slows down for a classic doom slog, with thick detuned minor chords thumping to the floor like rough-skinned and slaughtered ungulates. Covers by classic thrash acts like Sodom, Kreator, Dark Angel, and Slayer are also top-notch — and give you an incentive to go check out lots of bands to see whether the originals can possibly be as loud and fast as Vader’s covers.
Morbid Angel — Blessed Are the Sick
Morbid Angel is both totally validated classic Florida death metal and flat out weird in a genre not known for encouraging idiosyncrasy. Released in 1991, Blessed Are the Sick was actually dedicated to Mozart, and while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to fans of Amadeus, the album’s song structures are definitely unique. Throughout the album, the band liberally mixes in elements of doom, while drummer Peter Sandoval throws in off-kilter rhythms and weird accents between blast beat pummels as if he has secretly sacrificed his soul to Bill Bruford. The result is a dexterously lurching masterpiece, fierce enough to appeal to purists while open-ended and inventive enough to draw in fans of great heavy songwriting, from Zeppelin to Nirvana.
Therion — Of Darkness
One of the founders of the important Swedish death metal scene, Therion has moved more and more into orchestral death metal, actually performing at some concerts with symphony players. Back in 1991 when Of Darkness was released, though, those impulses were still incipient — the album takes the sweep of classical music while remaining resolutely death. The songwriting is remarkable, with brutally ranting chunks of death incorporated seamlessly into larger structures. The sense of development makes each track a mini-epic, with rapidly changing tempos and dramatic arrangements. Fans of black metal, especially, should find a lot to like here, but the emphasis on composition makes this one of the least monotonous and most engaging death metal albums out there for any listener.
If you’re still with me at this point, I’d also highly recommend early Deicide albums like Deicide, Legion and Once Upon the Cross, Grave’s gloriously guttural Into the Grave, and Decapitated’s fearsomely proficient Winds of Creation. Also great are Cancer, Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Death, Dismember and (early) Entombed. And from there you’re free to follow the blasphemously infected trail on your own. Happy torment!
This first appeared on Splice Today. It’s part of a week long Metal Apocalypse.
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Metal has always been an uneasy critical sell. Too uptight to be rootsy, too formulaic to be arty, too earnest to be clever, and too remorselessly sexless to be sexy, metal has droned, trudged, and howled its own way between rockists and poptimists, occasionally hailed by one or the other, but never exactly embraced by either.
So it makes perfect sense that High on Fire is the critically validated metal It band of the moment—since, in most ways that matter, the group isn’t really a metal outfit at all. Oh, sure, High on Fire has many metal trappings. The songs are long, loud, and prog-inflected. The vocalist growls as much as sings. There are guitar solos.
But despite all that, High on Fire’s energy is not metal. It’s punk. More specifically, it’s metal-tinged pop punk, in the vein of Guns N’Roses or Nirvana or all those grunge bands that critics loved because beneath the thin metal veneer they were actually trying to be rootsy, or arty, or clever, or sexy, or some combination thereof.
You can hear High on Fire’s actual sympathies in the opening title tune, with the repetitive, fist-shaking chorus (“Rise up! Fall down!”) that gets lodged in your brainstem like an overcarbonated bleacher cheer. You can hear it in the emotive sincerity with which Matt Pike emotes like a cross between Eddie Vedder and a constipated pachyderm on “Bastard Samurai.” And you can read it in that damn name: High on Fire. That’s an inspirational slogan for your mildly edgy corporate event, damn it—it’s not a metal band.
Metal is about being ground into anonymity beneath a giant iron heel. Punk’s about raging against the machine. The latter is in general the option more likely to wow a cultural arbiter, since people, or at least critics, like to feel that they’re fighting the power rather than being devoured by it. And, you know, if you’re creative, smart, and funny—like the Dead Kennedys, or Motorhead, or even Nirvana—fighting the power can be really entertaining and worthwhile. High on Fire, though, has neither the wit of great punk nor the remorselessness of great metal. Instead it’s just lumberingly literal adrenal rush; music by which to run on your treadmill or invade a sovereign nation, or shout “Shit yeah!” while drinking yourself into a stupor.
Which is fine, I guess. But I wish they wouldn’t call it metal.
A version of this essay appeared in The Chicago Reader. This is part of a weeklong Metal Apocalypse.
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To most civilian bystanders, there could hardly be two less simpatico white pop genres than metal and folk. On the one hand you’ve got fascist Vikings grunting gutterally about blood, Satan, and Leatherface; on the other you’ve got tree-smooching hippies warbling about peace, love, and gently blissed-out mammals. Short of some scene of hideous pillage, it’s pretty difficult to imagine any intercourse between them. “Welcome, corpse-painted stranger! A flower for your gard….eeeeearrrrgh!”
And yet, intercourse there has always been. Led Zeppelin was as much a folk band as a metal one, and that tradition is carried on by horror-movie-at-the-Renaissance-Faire outfits like folk metal band Finntroll. Genre designations are, of course, notoriously slipshod, and it’s true that a joke horror outfit like, say, Venom doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the earnest protest music of, say, Pete Seeger. But if by folk you mean acoustic music with medieval English roots, and if by metal you mean thrash, death, doom, and especially black, then there’s a lot of common ground. It’s no accident that Forest is the name of both a black metal band and a 60s British folk outfit, for about both thundering metal orcs and tinkling elvish folk lingers the spirit of Tolkein and the distinctive scent of weed. If folk and metal are opposites, it’s not because they have nothing to do with each other, but because they’re mirror images — different takes on the same pagan Northern-European obsessions.
The two latest offerings on that unholy altar are the best releases of the summer: Karen Dalton’s Green Rocky Road and Pyha’s The Haunted House. Both document almost-lost recordings created in virtual isolation by eccentric quasi-legends. Dalton was an almost-famous Village folkie from the ’60s. Her musical legacy for the most part consists of ingratiating, bluesy guitar tracks in which she sings like an improbably docile Billie Holiday. This disc of recently unearthed home recordings from 1962, mostly on banjo, is the first record of a starker musical personae. Pyha is even more obscure. A native of South Korea, he recorded The Haunted House , his sole black metal opus, by himself in 2001 when he was 14 years old. Circulated on CD-R in Korea, it fell into the hands of the metal aficionados at tUMULT, who managed to track down the perpetrator. It had its official release, with extra tracks, in July.
Sonically, the two records couldn’t be more different. Rocky Road is so bare-bones it makes Alan Lomax’s field recordings sound polished. Even to call the two-track record “produced” seems a stretch. “Katie Cruel” is interrupted by a telephone ringing; part of the beginning of “Nottingham Town” is erased. Even without such cock-ups, Dalton’s voice and banjo-playing are incredibly harsh; each phrase and plunk seems to come scraping out of some abandoned hollow.
The Haunted House, on the other hand, is a dense, claustrophobic landslide of sound. The record’s signature noise is burst out static; the sound of recording technology dying in agony. Slabs of sound lurch into each other like lumbering tectonic zombies. In “Tale From The Haunted House Part 1” the background hiss and wail just…stops, to be replaced by whispering over a ghostly synthesized chorus, which in turn cuts back to giant distorted screaming and a mid-tempo drum beat that goes on and on, mindlessly repeating. Throughout the record, each of black metal’s requisite layers of sound (guitars, drums, synths, shrieks) seem manually lifted and dropped, one on the other. This sense of grinding effort reaches its peak on “Song of Oldman,” where the buzzing static actually seems to overwhelm the mics, cutting in and out in random, painful bursts, while the wailing, almost human synths distort into a horrible scraping noise, like a metal bar being dragged across your teeth.
Yet, for all their differences, Green Rocky Road’s empty space and The Haunted House’s dense maelstrom meet on the same bleak wasteland; bleached skulls calling hopelessly to each other in dry, mutually incomprehensible tongues. Given too much space or not enough, the songs and, indeed, the singers seem lost, abandoned, dead. Tempos on both albums stutter and grind down almost to paralysis. Pyha’s music is leaden enough to almost qualify as doom — on “Tale From The Haunted House Part 3” the drum machine is positively stoned, thudding down just behind the beat so the track sounds like it’s slowing down all through its 4 1/2 minute length. Dalton’s album is similarly stupefied. The banjo line on “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” turns the familiar lyrical melody into a wavering slog, unrecognizable until Dalton’s voice comes in, off the beat and even off-key. On the endless “Nottingham Town” her picking and singing have even less to do with each other; the banjo speeds up, stretches out, trips over itself, and plunks notes so far out of tune that you’d swear the tape speed was screwy. She sounds like the Shaggs on a serious downer.
Nottingham Town” is an eerie, traditional tune with intimations of loneliness and the grave, and Dalton’s broken attack intensifies the uncanny sense of isolation and despair. In contrast, the last track of The Haunted House, “Wanderer Death March”, is not unpredictable, but insescapable. Anchored to repetitive, buzzing cymbals, increasingly strained synth washes, and throat-shredding howls, the song is a soundtrack for armageddon — a slow camera pan across clashing armies being devoured alive by mechanical insects. It, and the rest of the record, are intended as an anti-war statement, but this isn’t any kind of hopeful, or even outraged protest. Instead, it’s a vivid, bitter surrender before the crushing power of violence. Pyha seems pulverized by hate and terror; Dalton collapses in aphasia — for both, in different ways, individuality and artifice seem to disintegrate in agonizing slow-motion, falling to dust as the apocalypse approaches.
Folk and metal — and, indeed, the cold northern European culture that they epitomize — share a particular fascination with death, and, as a result, a particular take on authenticity and art. Punk tends to equate realness and sloppy incompetence; jazz, and hip hop link cred to invention and élan; blues and gospel tie it to personal emotional expression. As a celebration of the performer’s skill (or lack therof) the music is about individuality, and so about life. In folk and metal, on the other hand, the demands of the form tend to obliterate personality. In the true mountain tradition, Dalton’s singing is without affect; when she says “they call me Katie Cruel” her lack of inflection lets you know beyond a doubt that she is as heartless as she claims. Similarly, Pyha is swallowed in his own effects — snippets of taped ephemera, muffled bellowing, some poor soul gasping its last in the midst of a crackling fire — his own voice is everywhere and nowhere, neutered in its multiplicity. To be authentic is, for both, Dalton and Pyha, to be depersonalized; to be real is to be nobody. You show your commitment to the material by letting it bury you. When there is individuality, it comes across as weakness, stuttering — a falling away from the perfection of oblivion. Folk and metal are about being crushed by death — about the cold joy in self-immolation which links Protestants, and Norsemen alike.
Neither the American Dalton nor the Korean Pyha actually come from Northern Europe, of course. But their distance is, itself, part of the point. The form is as implacable as it is imperial; death doesn’t care if you’re folk, volk or other. Whether you’re cavorting with the fairies in Stonehenge, torching churches in Norway, or wandering somewhat further afield, a dirge is a dirge for everyone. Dalton’s keening and Pyha’s buzz are part of the same sexless drone, swallowing hippie and Viking alike in the abject ecstasy of annihilation.