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HEAVY METAL HIPPIES

Part 2: The ENVIRONMENT

In my last installation of Heavy Metal Hippies I attempted to explain why vegetarian/veganism is a normal thing in Black Metal because that music is all about hating humanity and loving the things that humanity kills and disregards. So it's only natural that Black Metal takes up the cause of environmentalism.


The above picture depicts a member of Wolves in the Throne Room who are well-known hippies. Much has already been said about this idea so I now refer you to a blog post called Environ-Metal: Where green is the new black, the name of which I swear I did not intentionally rip off. But rather than blather on endlessly about BM bands that are hippie environmentalists, I suggest you read that little blog post. If you are unwilling to read that much, a short recap is basically that Scandinavian bands pioneered the idea with songs like "Into the Mighty Forest" by Satyricon. And, as tends to happen, subsequent metal bands took up the cause with more intensity.

My personal musical taste has gravitated me closer to the USBM hippies like Agalloch (Oregon) and Panopticon (Kentucky). Here's some of their stuff:

Here's a nice little Agalloch tune called 'Our Fortress is Burning...II - Bloodbirds' from their Ashes Against the Grain album. It's lyrics don't begin until halfway through the song and they aren't nearly as overtly environmental as some of their others but you get the point.


When I think about metal environmentalism I like to imagine eco-terrorists who bomb ski lodges and put huge nails in trees so that loggers will have their chainsaws backfire on them. Now that's metal. But, like all good environmentalists, Agalloch are against this sort of extreme activism. Here is a Q/A quote from an interview making them sound like the peace-loving hippies that they are:

Are you warning against abuse of the Earth - perhaps there's a closest Greenpeace activist within you?
JWW: You don't have to be a member of Greenpeace to admire nature. On the whole, I can't stand those activist groups, they repeatedly do unnatural things in the name of nature.
Haughm: In Oregon a couple years ago, we were having a lot of problems with 'eco-terrorists'. These fanatical environmentalists would do things like burn down SUV dealerships and logging sites in an attempt to make a statement. Though their hearts are in the right place, their actions did absolutely no good and just put a stigma on environmentally conscious people. Actually, It's quite similar to the Norwegian church arsons of the early 90's...

Panopticon is a band that now lives in Kentucky and they recently released an album appropriately title 'Kentucky' that deals with the atrocity of strip mining the Appalachian mountains for coal. Like all hippies should, they bemoan both the environmental effects of blowing off mountaintops with dynamite and the detrimental conditions to which miners are subjected.

In case anyone doesn't know or remember, there was a major explosion due to questionable mining practices at Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia in 2010 where 29 miners died.


And it's good to remember why we need this coal. Very few people care, but Panopticon do. Hippies!


These things drive Panopticon to write songs like this one, which I love:



That's probably enough heart bleeding for now but remember, fuck people and their endless appetite for non-renewable natural resources. Peace

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Heavy Doom

I've been off of drugs for quite a while and along with them went the sub-genre of Doom Metal, which used to be one of my favorite things. But I still get cravings and I've found myself riding that old doom dick again lately. That said, I'm a little bit over the classic stoner doom sound and find myself going for the heavier sub-sub genres. Funeral Black Death Doom seems to be what I'm looking for but I have no time for genre classification, especially as there about as many Doom sub-genres as there are Nicolas Cage films so I'm not going to quibble over that.

Being off the demon weed, I don't find myself listening to Electric Wizard much anymore, or any of the hundreds of Doom bands who sound exactly like them (groovy, bass-heavy, slow, etc). However, I do still occasionally appreciate that sound. I really like the new Cough/Windhand split for instance. The music is pretty great and the cover art is beautiful. I'm always a sucker for images of a human with the head of a goat.


But I'm after the heavier stuff really. Probably my favorite Doom band right now is Wormphlegm, a band from Finland. I love their combination of evil vocals, standard rock-n-roll instrumentation, and extremely slow pacing. Their 'Tomb of the Ancient King' album is a masterpiece.


I'm hoping to add more installations of Heavy Doom and, although this journal hates democracy, I would like to hear suggestions if you have any. I can always spend a few hours on Encyclopaedia Mettallum looking for more but I will appreciate this community's suggestions because there are only so many hours in a day. And I like to spend my time doing the things that this music accompanies nicely: taking long walks, bike rides along the river, and doing yoga. Namaste

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

more Heavy Doom

I've been down in the doomhole for so long now that I think I need to put my sanity first. But before I leave it, I want to share some more of this beautiful evil.

One of the bands that initially intrigued me is Funeral Mourning, one of my favorite progenitors of sorrow. Here listen:


And another of my favorites is a band called Thergothon. I'm too depressed to write commentary right now so just listen to this song if you feel like killing yourself.


And I've gotten so bogged down by this shit that I have turned to the silly stoner bands for a bit of levity. Here's a doomy death metal song by the everloving Cannabis Corpse:


Now please excuse me, I need to take some time for self care.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

The Batlord

Damn you, I wanted to check these guys out for a possible spot on my Scuzzy Metal thread. Whatevs, you didn't say much about them so I can still do it anyway.

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Engine

Fucking Toronto

There are big cities in Canada. Weird, I know. Some of my favorite heavy bands come from there, er one. I won't talk about ridiculously lame bands like Rush or silly ones like Anvil, but there were some good ones.

Some people up there are angry, and they live in Toronto. Watch this short documentary if you don't believe me:


The man vocalizing in Mare is called Tyler Semrick-Palmateer and he is a throaty-screamy-singing genius.

He was also in a band called The End, and was featured on their album called Transfer Trachea Reverberations from Point: False Omniscient. He left the band pretty early and without him they began to suck pretty badly and went on to release music on Relapse Records. Here's some of the good version of The End:

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

It was remiss of me to imply that Canada hasn't given the world a significant amount of good Heavy Music. It really has. I think. Let's see...

There was this metalcore craze that wasn't always totally silly. Even though we had to deal with bands like Atreyu (American of course), there was a lot of good stuff out there. It was comprised of followers of Neurosis, Isis, etc.. heavy bands who didn't exactly fit into any existing metal scene but were too metal to be considered hardcore. One of my favorite bands of that era was called Buried Inside. From Ottowa, they dicked around for a while before they released a great album in 2005 called Chronoclast. It was produced by one of the leading heavy music guys of the time, Matt Bayles. I have quite a few complaints about Bayles' work in general but I love this album and I think he did right by the band. It also featured pleasantly symmetrical cover art that complimented their sound and concept. The concept of this album was the idea of time as it factors into certain philosophies and ideologies. Pretty neat.

I had the pleasure of seeing the band on their tour for Chronoclast and they delivered the heavy really well. The album comes across as an amateurish Neurosis album with the songs varying between balls-out heavy and kind of a slow heavy, usually with a long buildup. The singer sounds exactly the same throughout: a monotone scream/yell but he does it really well and after a while it becomes comforting. In fact I'd say the vocals are the glue that holds it all together.



So.. I realize that there are influential bands from Canada. And I do love them. But most of them just don't fit both of my requirements for this thread (heavy, good) so I'm going to stop talking about the subarctic wasteland above the United States as soon as I mention one more band, a popular one:


This is a much talked about band and I don't have a whole lot to add. Thrash originators. Technical innovators. You know what I'm saying. I just don't feel that it would be right to end my Canada thing before I featured one of the noisiest, most beautiful thrash songs of 1984: Warriors of Ice

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

The Batlord

Great thread, and while I love their later stuff I have to stop you. Voivod's first album was unlistenable garbage. I bought that album years ago since I heard people talk about it so much, and tried time and time again to find any redeeming qualities about it, but aside from a song here or there that was okay, that album is stanky ass.

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Engine

I can see your point because I rarely if ever listen to War and Pain anymore. But I don't feel that the album is stanky ass, and in some ways I like it better than their more classic later stuff. I definitely think it was good for 1984. Still, I was originally going to post something from one of their more groundbreaking late-80s albums but then I realized that their "progressive thrash" direction made them.. less heavy.

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

FRED HALE SR.

Stanky ass would never come to mind when thinking of Voivod circa 84.

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" I slashed and burned thru my 15 minutes of fame."