Yes, metal has played a small but key role in the 2005 version of Being Me. The fires of BLACK HORRIBLE DEATH were stoked last year, as I finally (after far too many years and countless recommendations) heard Darkthrone's lo-fi masterpiece "Transilvanian Hunger". Mainly, I'm digging the grinding, ambient drone guitar crunch of bands like Sunn 0))) and bORIS. My craving for this type of music started in the mid-90's with bands like Brighter Death Now (as discussed in the Wolf Eyes live review) but it took me a few years to get around to figuring out where to find more stuff that sounded like that.
I've never heard anything from Justin Broadrick that is as powerful, noisy, and suffocating as the latest Jesu record. Both Isis and Jesu's music has been described as shoegaze metal. Both bands crank out extended jams stuffed with dense guitar noise, but while Isis take their cues from Mogwai and other post-rock acts, Jesu are ... well, they're just more METAL. More than any other aspect of the music, it was the cavernous timbre that attracted me to bands like Gehenna back in the mid-90's. Ahead of the subject matter they were singing about, or how the songs were structured, I cared first and foremost about the whirlwind of sound that lept from my speakers -- these records sounded *gigantic*, moreso than anything I'd ever heard to that point. And that's the strongest trait of the Jesu album -- it's HUGE.
Are Ulver metal anymore? They've straddled boundaries before, but on their newest album "Blood Inside", they're treading into Bark Psychosis, cabaret, and a healthy helping of WTF. My head is spinning.
No comments:
Post a Comment