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Copyright © 2020 by J. J. Anselmi

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Set in Dante

Previously published material used with permission from
The A.V. Club, Noisey, and CVLT Nation.

Photography by Sally Townsend and Bronson Karaff

epub isbn: 9781644281321

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Anselmi, J. J., author.
Title: Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom , Sludge ,
and Post-Metal / J. J. Anselmi.
Description: Includes bibliographical references. | First Hardcover Edition |
A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA:
Rare Bird Books, 2020.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280645
Subjects: LCSH Heavy Metal (Music)—History and Criticism. | Sludge Metal (Music) | Doom Metal (Music) | Punk Rock Music. | Rock Music—History and Criticism. | BISAC MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Heavy Metal
Classification: LCC ML3534.A558 2020 | DDC 781.66—dc23

For Remy, Leighton, Sarah, & Roselyn
and
for the doomed

Contents

Foreword

Why I (Still) Play Sludge

Part One

Omens & Portents

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Be Forewarned

Harbingers

Figure in Black

Bringers of Light and Darkness

Doom Till Death

Burnt Altar

To the Riff-Filled Land

Land of Golden Dreams

Land & Sea

Part Two

Sniffing Glue on Your Cousin’s Porch

Post-Amplification Blues

Of Concrete and Glass

Sweat and Swagger

Boy Crazy

Thee White Wall

Something in the Water

Part Three

Machinery of the Throat

Through Blood

The Limits of Control

The Sun & The Earth

How to Approximate the Khanate Listening Experience

The Sun & The Earth

The Saddest Thing I Ever Saw

Ache Like We Ache

The Unraveling

Doomed Future

Endnotes

Additional Sources

Acknowledgments

Foreword

By Cat Jones

There’s a line on Kyuss’s first record in 1990, on the song “Deadly Kiss,” where John Garcia yells—with his crackly, pubescent vocal cords—“Look into my face now, stare into my eyes, hellfire in my veins!”

Now, if you can put aside for a second the fact that Kyuss were from Palm Desert, California, not Birmingham, England, or Portland, Oregon, or any other dreary, gray place in the world where one imagines doom thriving, that line encapsulates what it feels like to be a fan of doom.

See, for those who love doom metal, there isn’t a drug in existence that can make you feel more euphoric than standing in a dark venue watching a band playing in front of a tower of amplifiers, closing your eyes, and letting the slow, ominous, sinister riffs build up and reverberate all over your body. In a world where we’re becoming increasingly more disconnected and isolated; rights for women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ are being stripped away before our very eyes; jobs wear us into the ground only to pay for our student loans, rent, and little else; and news outlets profit off of delivering worldwide horrors to our pockets every day and night—sometimes the only antidote is to do a slow, full-body headbang in what feels like a hot bath for the soul. Indeed, it feels like an injection of delicious, cathartic hellfire, straight to the veins, turning us into invincible, impervious beings for just a few hours.

Doom metal has been delivering that sweet, sloth-paced sense of impending death and destruction since the very first, terrifying tri-tone at the beginning of “Black Sabbath,” the track that kicked off the eponymous Black Sabbath record in 1970. (Or, as I often argue—especially after a few beers—since the stormy, sultry, repetitive buildup in the middle of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by The Beatles when they released Abbey Road the prior year.) It’s had its classic days that launched the careers of a few rockstars; it’s had its underground, pre-internet days where you had to know which record stores stocked records from the labels who believed in everything slow and low; it’s had its early social media days where hashtags and online groups helped build international communities of fans and inspire a new crop of musicians; it’s had its bloated, arguably corny-as-hell era where every band with a downtuned guitar and slow tempos had a weed reference in their name, and has led us to where we are today in 2019, where doom’s time on the throne is likely up, and many musicians have traded in the slow and dirgy for upbeat, fun things like noise-rock, punk, and hardcore.

But listen: Doom was, in fact, doomed to fail from the start. And that’s fine—success was never the point. If you play this music, it isn’t because you’re trying to become the next Metallica. It isn’t because you believe there will be all-expenses paid trips around the world and groupies lining up at your bus. (Though both occasionally happen, and it’s even more special and celebrated when they do.) People play this music because they love it, they couldn’t live without it, and they want to continue being a part of the communities forged by the genre at festivals, shows, and living-room turntables worldwide. Even if, from the outside, the music seems miserable, evil, and dark, the people involved know that the feeling it brings is one of immense power.

Doom metal is not for the impatient or quick to judge. It’s not for the hurried and the rushed. It’s for those of us who believe in slowing down time, even if just for an hour or two, and letting the riffs rid us of of our pain. And if you don’t get it, that’s all right. But if you read J. J.’s book, take his recommendations, and learn about the history of doom through his eyes…you might just get a small taste.

Why I (Still) Play Sludge

The riffs seemed too good to be real. Pushed by drums that swing like gargantuan pit bull testicles, the guitar and bass swallowed my brain. It was one of those “I’ve been waiting to hear this forever but didn’t know it until just now” moments. I was fifteen and had been listening to Black Sabbath since I was twelve. This was the first time I heard one of the heavy bands that followed in Sabbath’s mammoth-sized footsteps.

It was Sleep’s “Dragonaut.”

The fact that I first heard a post-Sabbath doom track in the context of a BMX video—fittingly titled The Beginning—only intensified its impact. It was 2000, and I lived in a coal-mining town called Rock Springs, which lies in the Southwest corner of the sparsely populated state of Wyoming. All I cared about was riding my bike and listening to metal. As you might guess, Wyoming doesn’t have the biggest music scene. If I’d lived somewhere else, I might’ve heard about doom and sludge earlier. Here, BMX videos connected me to the world of underground metal.

I felt the same way about my hometown as the members of Black Sabbath felt about theirs, Birmingham, England. Rock Springs seemed like an industrial wasteland. Most people who grow up there end up working in a coal mine, oil field, or power plant, the latter being the case for my dad. All those hours at the plant and what did he get? A fucked-up back and crushing depression. Everything about my hometown made it seem like a dead end, and I wasn’t the only one who saw it that way. Rock Springs, and Wyoming in general, has a staggering suicide rate. I’ve known more than a few people from there who have died by their own hands. When I was nine, my dad’s best friend shot himself in his trailer, with a shotgun. Suicide became a fact of life from then on.

Luckily, I discovered metal at a young age, first in Black Sabbath, then in nü metal acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and next in thrash gods Metallica, Slayer, and Pantera. When I first heard Metallica’s “Battery,” I knew I’d found the real shit. The social alienation, the depression, the anger, and the preoccupation with death: it was the music I needed, right when I needed it.

My dad bought me a drum kit when I was twelve, even though he didn’t make much money at the power plant. From the first moment I sat behind the drums, I knew that I’d discovered an immovable part of myself. No matter how pissed I felt, beating the shit out of the drums made me feel better. I understood right away that music could help me do something productive with my anger.

In sixth grade, I started jamming with my two best friends. The guitarist’s older brother, whom we idolized, loved Black Sabbath. We followed his lead, trying to cover “Paranoid” and “Iron Man,” even though we could barely play our instruments. It was a sloppy mess, but the few moments when we locked in opened something in my brain, a small room that pulsed with power. Pure electricity.

I wish I could say I was cool enough to stick to Sabbath covers in junior high. My next band, Sterile, was a shitty blend of nü metal and grunge. That band showed me the power of playing live, though. In addition to a small battle of the bands, we played our school’s talent show. For a few minutes, the angry kids wrested control of the auditorium. We had the microphones, drums, and guitars—and the teachers had to listen.

When I discovered thrash a few years later, it only made sense that I would want to play that style of metal, with its unbridled aggression and death-obsessed lyrics. I saved up a few paychecks from working maintenance at my uncle’s motel and bought a double kick pedal, wanting to shred like Lars Ulrich, Dave Lombardo, and Vinnie Paul. Little did I know that double bass would become my drumming nemesis. I sat in my parents’ basement day after day, for hours upon hours, trying to learn the secrets of the double pedal. The best I could do: little triplets and quadruplets. Sixteenth note rolls at thrash tempos just eluded me, no matter how hard I tried. I could roll for a measure or two, but it always devolved into a garbled mess.

So there I was, a Hessian drummer who needed to play music but couldn’t play double bass. That’s when I discovered Sleep. The bummer riffs, caveman drumming, and tripped-out vocals floored me. As with the thrash bands I loved, Sleep told me that they knew exactly how I felt about the world. I was beginning to realize that, no matter how good things seem, I’m doomed to see life through a pessimistic lens. Call it the metalhead’s curse. Whereas the speedy and dexterous percussion of Metallica, Slayer, and (especially) Pantera made my brain smoke, I could see myself playing Sleep’s slow and plodding beats. Chris Hakius throws in tricky grooves and fills, but his drumming gave me a place to start. I’d discovered the rejects of the rejects—metalheads who need to play music but aren’t technical wizards. At the time, I also loved Sex Pistols, Ramones, early Misfits, and Black Flag. Sleep put off a similar vibe, telling me that anyone could be a musician.

Hearing Eyehategod for the first time sealed my fate. My life was again changed by music I discovered in a BMX video, this time in FBM’s All Time Low. As a rider tries to grind a handrail and slams his face onto cement, the first note in “Blank” hits. A dirty bomb exploded in my chest. Grimy hardcore riffage lunges through the opening, after which the song breaks down into pugilistic sludge. It’s the musical equivalent of a car accident. Eyehategod is a drunken brawl between Black Sabbath and Black Flag, which tickled my little heart to no end. I could immediately picture myself playing that shit. The band started when its members where teenagers, and Eyehategod has always kept its original rawness intact.

That rawness is an invitation.

Sludge and doom are, in part, genres that push people away. Like, Oh, you want to hear pretty, happy-go-lucky music? Well, here are the ugliest sounds I can make. I hope it ruins your day. For the doomed, however, the music is a call to arms. If you want to play, what are you waiting for? Pick up an instrument.

Sixteen years later and here I am, still playing sludge. I had to move out of Wyoming to find people who want to play that style, and, like every musician, I’ve had my off periods. But the hooks have sunken too deep. Heavy music always pulls me back. No other style feels nearly as powerful to play.

After Sleep and Eyehategod, I discovered Isis and Neurosis, bands that break backs with subtlety and compositional prowess. In my early twenties, I realized that, even though Sabbath might sound simple at times, Tony Iommi, Geezer, and Bill Ward are world-class musicians. They could swing with the best in their prime. Of course, I’ll always love the Neanderthal simplicity of bands like Weedeater and Noothgrush. What I’m trying to say is that there’s space for virtuosity in doom and sludge, an excellence you can spend your life trying to attain. Just listen to Harvey Milk or Sunn O))). That shit is as sophisticated as any symphony. Sludge and doom are also for those of us who can’t read music and have become unapologetically proud in our musical ignorance—those of us whose fucked-up techniques are too ingrained to rectify.

Before I get into the history of this music, I just want you to know that you can be doomed, too.

Part One

Omens & Portents

Doom, like every other branch of rock, stems from black blues musicians in the South. Black Sabbath pioneered the genre by playing blues-based music at a snail’s pace and through thundering amps. Doom, sludge, and post-metal also follow blues’ tradition of confronting the underbelly of existence.

In the midst of horrors I can’t begin to comprehend, slaves found meager refuge in music, singing call-and-response work songs while breaking their bodies. Those songs functioned as an outlet, distraction, encouragement, and coded attacks on the cruel and ignorant whites who built and perpetrated that system. After toiling for interminable hours, enslaved workers found community by joining together in spiritual songs that promised solace in death. They tapped out rhythms passed down from their ancestors on makeshift drums.

Plantation owners forced black musicians to perform for them. Those musicians used pianos and acoustic guitars inside whites’ houses as a foundation for their singing, intermixing European instruments into their music. As freed African Americans sought ways to earn money during the late 1800s, they took that new musical style on the road.

Born in 1882, singer Ma Rainey—rightfully hailed as the Mother of the Blues—toured throughout the South at the turn of the century, exposing scores of people to her gritty and unflinching music. Rainey’s visceral singing and lyrics blew her audiences away. Although white musicians like Hart Wand have been credited as publishing the first blues songs, it was black players and composers such as Rainey and W. C. Handy that pioneered blues song structures and scales. White composers just tried to get credit for it.

Blues and its high-energy offspring, jazz, consumed the US. At the end of the 1920s, a young guitarist from Mississippi named Robert Johnson emerged, destined to become one of the most influential musicians the world has seen. Born into a life of horrific oppression, Johnson watched both of his wives die from childbirth. Reeling from those losses, he spent the rest of his short life traveling through the South and playing guitar.

When Johnson’s first wife passed away, her relatives said it was punishment for his decision to write songs about his own life, rather than devoting his music to a God that didn’t seem to care about him or his loved ones. People called that secular artistic path “selling your soul to the devil.” The saying transformed into a myth that Johnson had brokered a deal with the Evil One in exchange for his otherworldly singing and songwriting abilities. That myth struck people in similar ways as many doom bands’ flirtation with the occult, shrouding Johnson in a veil of mystery that made more people gravitate to his music than it turned away.

Robert Johnson’s impact upon rock and metal is hard to fathom, given that it’s so far-reaching. He laid down all of his twenty-nine recorded songs from 1936–1937, making his legacy even more jaw-dropping. Following in Ma Rainey’s footsteps, Johnson sang about the crushing strife he faced every day, and the hopelessness that consumed him. In songs like “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” and “Love in Vain Blues,” Johnson’s broken croon hovers above sparse, dirt-caked guitar notes. Slow it down, mix up the singing with yells, funnel it all through copious amplification, and you have doom.

•••

If blues provided the raw ingredients for doom, the rise of amplification and distortion was the style’s gas-powered stove.

During the 1920s, acoustic players used PA systems at venues to amplify their instruments, but a California-based inventor named George Beauchamp knew that the guitar could be its own agent of amplification. Using a pickup—a coil of wire that translates magnetic disturbances into electric signals—from a Brunswick phonograph, Beauchamp built a single-string electric guitar out of a two-by-four. Vibrations from the string traveled into the pickup but died in the wood. Beauchamp soon improved upon his device, building a crude guitar whose strings passed through two horseshoe magnets and over a coil, translating the strings’ vibrations into electricity.

Ecstatic, Beauchamp asked Harry Watson to design a proper guitar to house the pickup. Watson built a bastard contraption with a circular body and long, thick neck. They called it the Frying Pan. Beauchamp publicly heralded his new electric guitar as “the most Marvelous Musical Invention of all time.” He wasn’t exaggerating by much. Nothing in music has been the same since.

Chomping at the bit to mass manufacture the Frying Pan, Beauchamp started a new company, Electro String, with Adolf Rickenbacker, who owned the largest deep-drawing sheet metal machine in California. Beauchamp and Rickenbacker enlisted radio wiz C. W. Lane to design an amplifier for their guitar. Lane came back with a small, ten-watt amp encased in a box of wood. The Frying Pan descended on the market in 1931. When you ordered one of those rudimentary guitars, it came with one of Lane’s amplifiers.

Amps didn’t exceed a meager ten watts until 1947, when Leo Fender loosed the Super Amp upon the world. Fender’s 1947 amplifier pushed eighteen watts and created a bracing increase in volume. Guitarists across the country scrambled to get their hands on a Super Amp, quickly discovering that the device had another gift to offer: when you turned its volume up all the way, the amp went into overdrive, wrapping guitar notes in fuzzy distortion. As with many world-changing advancements in technology, guitar distortion came about by accident.

About two years earlier, Western swing lord Junior Barnard designed a rudimentary humbucker pickup for his guitar, combining two pickups to buck the unpleasant hum of a lone single coil and produce a fuller tone. Barnard played with percussive fury, routinely snapping his strings. The more powerful electrical output of his proto-humbucker combined with his violent playing to push his amp into overdrive. Legions of country, Western swing, and blues players had been searching for a dirtier sound, a sound to reflect the grit of their music. Barnard’s earthy tone became gospel.

When word got out in 1947 that you could get a tone similar to Barnard’s by cranking the Super Amp, every guitarist that wasn’t a square bought one—or started saving up to buy one. Overdrive swept the country like a nasty flu. Fender soon improved upon the Super Amp’s original design, increasing its output to fifty watts. Competing amp companies followed suit. The fifty-watt amplifier was a machine gun, changing music in the same way that the weapon had changed warfare. Opponents with lesser technology became targets.

Technology is only as good as its user, though. The fifty-watt amp needed pioneering musicians to put it on the map. Leave it to a guitarist like Goree Carter to fire what equates to rock ’n’ roll’s shot heard ’round the world. Music coursed through Carter like blood. Born in Houston’s violent and poverty-stricken Fifth Ward—also known as the Bloody Fifth—Carter began playing the blues at age twelve. He wanted his music to capture the intensity of growing up in the stomach of a hyper-racist city, state, and country. With a fifty-watt amplifier, he could project his frustration, heartache, and joy in a way that mimicked those feelings in raw form. What he loved even more than the amp’s loudness: if he dimed its volume, the amp smothered his guitar notes in fuzz.

Working his ass off in a rice mill during the day, Carter formed The Hepcats and quickly became a force in Houston’s competitive music scene. Heavily influenced by T-Bone Walker, The Hepcats’ version of the blues was fast and aggressive, much like the automobile culture that was devouring America. In 1949, Carter and his band laid down “Rock Awhile,” widely recognized as the first recording of an overdriven guitar. The song was a ton of bricks dropped onto the world’s unsuspecting dome.

Carter splits open the ground with the first guitar lick of “Rock Awhile.” He strums with murderous precision, dousing his notes in distortion. All the instrumentation in the track is thrilling, but Carter’s guitar cuts through like a ray of light in a pitch-black room.

Carter’s distortion was groundbreaking. But the fuzz tone that has become such an integral part of doom, sludge, and post-metal didn’t emerge until 1951, when Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats, an alter ego of Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, unleashed “Rocket 88.” The Kings had a nuclear warhead in its ranks: guitarist Willie Kizart. Although Ike Turner’s reputation overshadows that of the other members of the group, Kizart is the name that should echo through the ages.

No one knows for sure how Kizart’s amp got fucked up before the “Rocket 88” session. It might’ve fallen off the top of the band’s car on the way to the studio, crashing onto pavement. As Ike Turner remembered it, rain seeped through the trunk and messed up the amp’s wiring. In the end, the “how” doesn’t matter as much as the sound the damaged amp produced. Kizart didn’t realize that his amp was messed up until he turned it on in the studio. He immediately fell in love with the filthy sound. “Rocket 88” is a standard boogie played with more speed. Kizart’s guitar tone, on the other hand, was a revolution.

Before you listen to “Rocket 88,” try to imagine that you’ve never heard fuzz distortion before. You’re drinking at a bar in 1951, somewhere in the Dust Bowl. The vocal-driven music of Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett dominates the airwaves. In hits like “Too Young” and “Because of You,” instrumentation comes second, working in service to the vocals. Without quite realizing it, you’ve gotten tired of that stuff. You want something new. Suddenly, you feel like someone has stuffed velvet ribbons into your ears. You walk over to the jukebox, thinking the speakers must be blown. Kizart’s notes swallow your brain.

•••

Ten years later, Grady Martin used a shoddy preamp in a recording console to create an even fuzzier form of distortion for Marty Robbins’ song, “Don’t Worry.” An otherwise harmless country tune, Martin’s distortion tears open the earth at the 1:26 mark.

To try and recreate Martin’s filthy sound, electronics wiz Orville (Red) Rhodes built a rudimentary fuzz pedal for his friends in The Ventures. Gibson capitalized on the idea, unleashing the Fuzz-Tone pedal in 1962, which became one of the standout characteristics of The Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” A year before Keith Richard’s guitar sound sent people across the US and UK into a frenzy, Dave Davies of The Kinks slashed the speaker cones in his guitar cabinet with a razor blade to get a gnarlier tone. The result is the knockout-punch distortion of “You Really Got Me.” That sound sent listeners for the ropes.

The sixties became an arms race for manufacturers of amps and distortion pedals, opening new realms of possibilities for musicians. A genius in so many ways, Jimi Hendrix made fuzz and reverb integral parts of his chaotic live shows, using those tools as their own instruments—an approach drone legends Earth and Sunn O))) have since taken to an extreme. Heavily influenced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience and armed with a distortion-boosted arsenal of amps, San Francisco’s Blue Cheer started to scratch at that elemental orb we now know as doom metal.

The trio’s 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum, is Robert Johnson-style blues laced with fuzz. The album opens with a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” As with any good cover, Blue Cheer’s version is its own animal, beginning with a brief section of overwhelming heaviness. Paul Whaley hammers out a caveman rhythm on his toms, which guitarist Leigh Stephens douses in distortion. The section only lasts nine seconds before Blue Cheer leaps into the rockabilly hop of Cochran’s version. Even still, it looms over the rest of the song like a portent. It wasn’t doom, but it was close.

Five months after Vincebus Eruptum came out, heavy rockers Vanilla Fudge released Renaissance, featuring an exceptionally creepy cover of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” Though not overtly heavy, the Vanilla Fudge version strives for unease. Two months later, Cream put out Wheels of Fire, which starts with the dramatic intro of “White Room.” That section’s slow tempo is a steppingstone to Black Sabbath’s crawl in the world-changing “Black Sabbath.” Iron Butterfly’s title-track from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida exploded in the US, sounding like music by The Doors’ evil cousin. Deep Purple also put out Shades of Deep Purple and The Book of Taliesyn in 1968. The raw energy and edge of those albums coupled with the sinister vibe of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” to communicate a prophecy: rock was only going to get heavier.

The year 1968 gave people another jolt when Gun (aka The Gun) released its eponymous album, featuring “Race with the Devil,” a song that infiltrated England’s top 10 chart. The track starts Gun with cinematic crescendos, evoking a similar portentousness as “White Room.” The LP moves between Benzedrine boogies and grooving hard rock, with horns adding extra spice. Gun’s cover depicts a hellish orgy/battle with a variety of reptilian demons, coming across as a cartoonish version of Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell, but also creating a precursor to doom’s obsession with frightening imagery. Chicago’s Coven pushed all that to a much darker place.

Coven played shows with Vanilla Fudge and Jimmy Page’s The Yardbirds in 1967 and ’68 before releasing the highly influential Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls in 1969. The LP is the Big Bang of eerie, occult-obsessed rock. Its cover is far creepier than any other of the time. Singer Jinx Dawson, bassist Greg “Oz” Osbourne, and drummer Steve Ross stare blankly, each one wearing a necklace with an upside-down cross pendant. Flames burn behind the album’s title, and a human skull sits at the bottom edge of the cover. True to that vibe, Coven’s live performances were full-blown Satanic rites, making Alice Cooper’s theatrics seem chintzy in comparison.

Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls begins with “Black Sabbath,” a grooving psychedelic rock track that’s shrouded in cadaverous organ notes. In tune with Dawson’s vocal training, the LP is operatic in scope and arc, not quite stepping into metal but nonetheless conveying an overwhelming sense of impending doom, in no small part because of Dawson’s spectral wails. Dawson sounds like Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane if she’d found truth in the dark arts, in addition to LSD. Nearing the end of Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, the music is interrupted by funeral bells and a man delivering a Satanic sermon. Ghoulish voices chant along as the rite closes the LP. As with Black Sabbath’s music, you have to think about this section in context to really understand its intensity. Today, we’ve long seen Satanism in music and movies. It was taboo and terrifying to people in 1969.

From name to aesthetic, Coven’s influence on Black Sabbath seems obvious. As Ozzy, Geezer, and Iommi tell the story, however, Sabbath got its name from a 1963 horror flick called Black Sabbath. The group operated for years as Earth but then discovered another band had claimed that name, so the members decided on Black Sabbath. Jinx Dawson and several others have challenged their version of events. In Wicked Woman: Women in Metal From the 1960s to Now, Addison Herron-Wheeler points out that Coven’s debut came out “several months prior to Earth’s first appearance as Black Sabbath.” In addition to “Black Sabbath,” Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls features a track called “Wicked Woman;” Sabbath’s eponymous LP includes the song “Evil Woman.” The fact that Coven appeared alongside England’s The Yardbirds (probably spurring Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult) and widely touring American rockers Vanilla Fudge in 1967 and ’68 makes it seem very unlikely that the members of Black Sabbath had never heard of Coven before they chose the name, which they’ve claimed on numerous occasions. Word travels fast in the music world, where everyone is constantly on the lookout for the next big thing. Coven’s Satanic creepiness was novel and deeply affecting, so whispers of the band spread quickly through the rock community. In her book, Wheeler quotes Dawson as saying, “A lot of bands [of the late sixties] began to copy us. I think the Black Sabbath boys went a little too far.” To send a warning to Black Sabbath, Dawson and her bandmates “painted blood on their dressing room doors…at a show in Memphis.”

In 1986, MTV’s Martha Quinn asked Tony Iommi about Coven’s influence on Black Sabbath. Quinn pointed out that Coven’s guitarist goes by Oz Osbourne,1 and also that the first song on Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is called “Black Sabbath.” She then highlighted some glaring aesthetic similarities between Coven and Sabbath. Putting on a straight-up bad acting job, Iommi said that he’d never heard of Coven. Quinn (half-jokingly) confronted him with the fact that Coven’s debut came out before Black Sabbath—and also that Sabbath had operated as Earth until 1969, putting out a demo under that moniker the same year. Iommi still played dumb.

Countless bands get their names from other bands’ song titles. Deep Purple, Blonde Redhead, Boris, Radiohead, Godsmack—the list goes on and on. You have to acknowledge it, though. Regardless of whether Black Sabbath got its name from a Coven track (likely) or horror movie (not so likely), the moniker is taken from somewhere, which is art in a nutshell. We steal ideas, concepts, and approaches from each other constantly. That’s why people say art is a conversation. But you have to give credit where it’s due. Iommi’s outright denial of having heard of Coven made the guitarist, who deserves praise in so many other respects, sound like a fool. The other part of the coin is that Sabbath’s music is its true legacy. So why not say, “Yeah, we were inspired by Coven as far as our vibe and name, but our music is really different.” Instrumentally and tonally, the difference between Sabbath and Coven is the difference between Sabbath and every other rock band of the time: the groups inhabit different genres. Coven is dark psychedelic rock. Black Sabbath is heavy metal. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Coven is one of doom’s most influential precursors, whether or not Iommi and his bandmates ever admit it.

A little-known band called Led Zeppelin also put out its first LP in 1969, roughly a year before Black Sabbath was released. Jimmy Page furthered Hendrix’s experiments with abrasive and unruly amplification. Along with Bill Ward, John Bonham is a deity to worshippers of the slow and heavy. Bonham’s weighty, behind-the-beat groove is the Rosetta stone of heavy drumming. I’m far from the only drummer who’s asked myself (on countless occasions), “What would John Bonham do?” The answer: beat the shit out of the drums, but make it groove.

Led Zeppelin starts with “Good Times Bad Times.” Bonham’s drumming in the track is a revelation to this day. He uses chops that other drummers of the time were flirting with, but he plays them with more definition and force, hammering each note like the carpenter he was. When I first heard the song in eleventh grade, I thought he was playing the bass drum bursts with a double-kick pedal. My jaw dropped when I learned that he executes them with one foot. Girding the track with a lurking backbeat, Bonham also interjects deft and energetic fills. My condolences to Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones: the drumming on “Good Times Bad Times” easily outshines its other instrumentation.

Side one of Led Zeppelin closes with the Ent-like stride of “Dazed and Confused.” John Paul Jones’s hulking bass provides a tectonic foundation for the other instruments. Following an eerie, tripped-out verse, the song explodes into the heaviest pre-Sabbath music in recorded history. Bonham and Jones conjoin in a lead submarine of rhythm, plunging through town-destroying waves of Page’s distortion. It’s the closest thing to doom without fully crossing into that territory.

The blues’ grit + Coven’s menacing vibe + Led Zeppelin’s bombastic power and amplification + a toxic dose of industrial alienation + an extreme aversion to flower power = Black Sabbath. There was unquestionably some heavy music before the Birmingham quartet emerged. But comparing Sabbath to any other band of the late sixties is the same as comparing a bobcat to a Siberian tiger.

1 To be fair, Ozzy and Oz have long been common nicknames for people named John, especially in England. Ozzy says that he got those letters tattooed on his left knuckles when he was sixteen. Because of Sabbath’s unwillingness to acknowledge Coven’s influence, though, it all seems suspicious, even though the Ozzy and Oz thing might well be an unfortunate coincidence.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

It’s no coincidence that Black Sabbath hails from Birmingham, England. That city is the Jerusalem of heavy metal, and much of the grit and bleakness that informs Sabbath’s music can be traced directly back to the area’s coal-black history.

As the textbooks tell it, Birmingham played a central role in shaping modern industrial society. The blast furnace and cotton mill both saw key innovation there. Large-scale production of sulfuric acid and alkali were also developed in Birmingham. And then, in 1776, the Soho Manufactory, a template of the modern factory, opened. That’s where the assembly line was born, where businessmen discovered that dividing the manufacturing process into simplified steps would make it easier to train—and also discard—workers. A deep sense of worthlessness seeped into the hearts of the now-expendable proletariat. What began as a seemingly egalitarian breeding ground for inventiveness soon revealed its potential to destroy and abuse. Roughly nine years later, Matthew Boulton and James Watt unveiled a powerful new version of the steam engine, which exponentially increased the factory’s ability to manufacture goods. The engine also made jobs more mechanical, more dehumanizing.

The city was decimated 115 years later by Germany’s air force during the Birmingham Blitz. From 1940–’43, the Luftwaffe destroyed those things that made Birmingham a cultural jewel: its workplaces, schools, churches, and shopping centers. All told, over 2,000 people died, more than 3,000 sustained critical injuries, and another 3,600 were wounded. That type of destruction lingers for centuries, haunting buildings, roads, and inhabitants. Just four months before Germany started bombing the city, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls wrote a memorandum at the University of Birmingham that unveiled new information about how to build a nuclear bomb, giving the allies a crucial push in their frenzied quest to construct that apocalyptic weapon. The city that breathed life into modern society also produced the recipe for its annihilation.

Although grim, Birmingham’s history became the impetus for some of the most important music ever made. Tony Iommi was born three years after WWII ended, and it’s hard to think of another musician who more profoundly bears the scars of that city. Iommi’s story of getting his fingers mangled in a factory accident has become the stuff of legend—and deservingly so. Working at a Birmingham sheet metal factory at the age of seventeen, Iommi caught the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand in a massive cutting machine. He jerked back, tearing the ends off those digits.

The injury was devastating for the left-handed guitarist. Iommi didn’t think he’d ever play again. But then he discovered French jazz legend Django Reinhardt, who’d suffered a severe burn to his left hand that led him to develop and master a two-fingered (and mind-blowing) approach to fretwork. Reinhardt’s perseverance and accomplishments motivated Iommi to find a way to overcome his own injury. With an industriousness that perfectly aligns with Birmingham’s spirit of invention, Iommi melted pieces of plastic soap bottles into small gobs and sanded them into thimbles. He then covered the thimbles in leather to provide better grip on his strings. Standard guitar strings were too thick for him to navigate with his DIY prosthetics, so he began using lighter ones.

Iommi found a kindred sense of aggression and pessimism in Bill Ward, and then in John “Ozzy” Osbourne and Terence “Geezer” Butler. From 1967–1968, Iommi and Ward played in a blues rock band, Mythology, that sounded similar to Cream and Blue Cheer. Following the dissolution of that group, the two musicians sought a new project. They found an ad that Ozzy had posted at a local music shop: “Ozzy Zig needs gig—has own PA.” Ozzy had been playing in Rare Breed with Geezer. When Iommi contacted Ozzy, he learned that Geezer was part of the package. Geezer played guitar but switched to bass at Iommi’s urging. Iommi and Ozzy realized that they’d gone to school together, though they ran in different crowds. Ozzy was a poor ruffian who’d spent six weeks in jail for robbing a store. Iommi was a bright student whose mother owned and ran a store. The earliest incarnation of Sabbath included a saxophonist and slide guitar player, but Iommi, Geezer, Ward, and Ozzy worried that those members lacked drive. They carried on as a four-piece, calling themselves Earth.

Not long thereafter, Iommi joined flute purveyors Jethro Tull but quickly realized that he’d never be more than a hired gun in that group. Wanting more creative clout, he returned to Birmingham and got Earth back together. Taking cues from Jethro Tull’s intense work ethic, Iommi, Geezer, Ozzy, and Ward began putting a lot more energy into their band. Needless to say, it paid off. Earth released its demo in 1969. The recording blazes with racing solos, tenacious vocals, and deftly swinging rhythms. It lacks Black Sabbath’s ominousness but still pulses with aggressive energy.

As Geezer has told it, he started dabbling in black magic and the occult around that time, influenced by horror films such as Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) and the occult-themed novels of Dennis Wheatley. Geezer’s version of events seems a bit too convenient in light of Coven’s, though it’s also worth bearing in mind that, as the optimism of the 1960s died, something eerie and portentous crept into the resulting psychic space for people all across the world. Occult spirituality became an appealing alternative (or addition) to tripping on LSD. Whether through Coven, Black Sabbath, or Pentagram, it seems inevitable that music of the time would convey a doomed spirit.

Geezer has said that, following the release of the Earth demo, he experienced a chilling vision:

The occult was interesting for me and it was very fashionable at the time. Once, somebody sent Ozzy this really old book about witchcraft. It was all in Latin and it had to be 300 years old. I got this weird vibe off that book. I was living in this one-bedroom apartment at the time with a shared bathroom. I didn’t want this book in the same room as me, so I went out into the hall and shoved it in the bathroom cabinet where the towels were kept and went to bed. In the middle of the night I felt this presence. I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed, and I couldn’t really make out what it was, but I could just see the outline of it. It frightened the pissing life out of me. When I jumped up to turn the light on, there was nothing there. I thought, “It’s that pissing book.” So I went out at four in the morning to get the book to throw it in the bin and it was gone.*

Before Geezer saw the apparition, he and Ozzy claimed, they’d been discussing the idea of making music that scratched at the same fear and curiosity that makes people watch horror movies. Using his vision for inspiration, Geezer teamed with Ozzy to pen lyrics describing a “figure in black which points at me,” lyrics that ultimately warn people away from black magic, which is where Sabbath’s depiction of the occult and Satanism diverges from Coven’s.

Just before composing the music to the better-known “Black Sabbath,” the quartet discovered that there was another English band called Earth. Geezer said that Bava’s Black Sabbath was playing at a theater right by the band’s practice space—and that’s how he, Ozzy, Iommi, and Ward decided on the name. Even though the members of Black Sabbath might be lying about its origin, the moniker provided their band with an aesthetic direction that directly reflected their upbringing in an industrial wasteland. “N.I.B.,” “Sleeping Village,” and “Behind the Wall of Sleep” gushed from Black Sabbath’s coal-black heart, almost as if writing themselves.

Growing up in Birmingham, the members of Sabbath couldn’t relate to the flower power ideals that defined the 1960s for many people. Ozzy recalled,

When I was a kid, I was hungry. I had my ass hanging out of my pants. I hated the fucking world. When I heard the silly fucking words, “If you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair,” I wanted to fucking strangle John Phillips [of The Mamas & The Papas]. I was sitting in the industrial town of Birmingham, England. My father was dying of asbestos from industrial pollution, and I was an angry young punk.*

Controlled by cannibalistic industries and still displaying the scars of war, Birmingham called for ugly sounds. On Friday, February 13, 1970, Sabbath delivered with music that seeps from speakers like ash from smokestacks. The phrase heavy metal cropped up in rock culture throughout the late sixties and early seventies, but it was most accurately applied to Black Sabbath.2 The quartet’s sound was molded by life in a steel-worker’s city whose population is patient zero of industrial alienation. Since I was sixteen, I’ve wished that I could go back in time and hear Black Sabbath as people did in 1970. All these years later and it’s still one of the heaviest records on wax. No other album from that time comes close in weight.

The LP begins with thirty seconds of rain and portentous (Coven inspired?) bell tolls before tearing a void in space-time with the first gargantuan notes of “Black Sabbath.” Iommi’s riff is a monolith built upon the foundation of Geezer and Ward’s crawling groove. About writing that iconic tritone progression, Iommi said it “paved the way. When I first played that riff, the hairs stood up on my arm and I knew, ‘This is it…The rest of the album came from there, and everything fell into place.’”* Sometimes there really are single, clearly identifiable moments that kickstart cultural evolution. The riff in “Black Sabbath” was one of those moments.

Like Iommi’s guitar work, Ward’s drumming is more aggressive and intense than virtually everyone else’s from that time. He batters his cymbals, snare, and toms like a blacksmith pounding unwieldy pieces of iron, an approach that was likely looked down upon by traditional drummers who thought there was no need to hit that hard. Far from belligerently bashing his kit, however, Ward’s drumming in this song (and every other Sabbath tune) is guided by an assassin’s precision. After the crushing opening, “Black Sabbath” retracts its fangs, slithering into a den of quietude. Atop sparse guitar, bass, and tom work, Ozzy speaks of a malevolent presence that promises doom and destruction before the band mirrors that negativity with the heaviest music the world had heard. As a teenager, I saw in that evil figure a life of backbreaking labor in the coal mines or oil fields of Wyoming, a destiny that loomed above me, flapping its ugly wings. Geezer, Ward, Iommi, and Ozzy heard a similar end calling their names in Birmingham. They’d watched friends and family get crushed by bleak and spiritually draining factory work, a life they’d have to pursue if music didn’t work out.

It’s hard to think of any individual song that’s had such a tremendous impact as “Black Sabbath.” Four and a half minutes in, Iommi leads the band into a furious waltz, providing a template for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal style that Judas Priest and Iron Maiden would later perfect.

“The Wizard” arises from the rubble with a haunting harmonica melody, courtesy of Ozzy. Ward’s drumming takes center stage as he injects nimble fills into a backbeat groove with its own gravitational pull. I’ve always imagined that the lyrics, which speak of a benevolent wizard spreading joy to a hopeless world, are actually about Ward as a drummer. “Behind the Wall of Sleep” also showcases Ward’s playing, this time highlighting the fact that he could swing like a motherfucker. Iommi and Geezer are right there with him. If they felt so inclined, they could’ve formed a jazz trio instead of Black Sabbath. (I don’t think Ozzy would’ve been invited.) Sabbath presents an inviting starting point for musicians, showing people that caveman simplicity can be profound. But the members’ musical prowess always undergirds that simplicity. “Behind the Wall of Sleep” morphs into a gelatinous bass solo that finds final form in the notorious “N.I.B.” riff. Returning to ominousness, “Sleeping Village” crawls out of a forest of raw singing and acoustic guitar to assail listeners with its doom.

Love or hate it, you can’t deny that Black Sabbath changed the world, providing legions of disaffected people with a sonic haven and inspiring them to pick up instruments. Did I mention that Sabbath recorded the LP live, in one day?

Black Sabbath reached number eight on the UK Album Chart and twenty-three on America’s Billboard 200. Wanting to retain that buzz, the group entered the studio to track a new album just four months after its debut came out. Sabbath already had most of the Paranoid LP written by the time its eponymous album came out. Befitting the times, the band would get hired to play multiple sets at a bar in a single night. “We only had enough material from the first album, which lasted for about an hour,” Geezer remembered,* “so we had to make stuff up for the next seven hours. We jammed about onstage and gradually came up with most of the Paranoid album.”

Paranoid trains its eye on the societal negativity in Birmingham and the world at large more directly than Black Sabbath. War had been ravaging Vietnam since 1955. Images and stories of that violence were burned into Black Sabbath’s collective brain. The band members watched the world’s superpowers intervene out of a colonialist drive to spread political ideology rather than genuine concern for the people of Vietnam. The damage of WWII was still glaringly apparent in Birmingham, so Geezer, Iommi, Ward, and Ozzy knew that intruders could physically and emotionally move on from the destruction they wreaked upon Vietnam after retreating home. And they knew the people of Vietnam wouldn’t have that privilege. Geezer distilled his anger into the lyrics of “War Pigs,” the first song of Paranoid.3

After Black Sabbath, Iommi began using lower tunings to fatten his guitar sound. That gummy thickness floods the opening of “War Pigs.” Ward shoves an electric cable into the swamp, jolting the song forward with an abrupt tempo change. Ozzy finds a middle ground between singing and shouting lyrics about a gathering of sadistic generals who plot destruction for their own benefit and pleasure. Geezer’s lyrics envision those warlords through occult imagery, using witches, sorcerers, and cultish gatherings as metaphorical vehicles for social commentary. When the instruments coalesce around a black-hole drum beat, the lyrics become more direct, excoriating politicians for their modus operandi of “treating people just like pawns in chess” and “leaving that role [of fighting] to the poor.” The power of those lyrics is multiplied by the music’s verve. Solos flying like flags, Iommi leads his battalion through a series of peaks and valleys until the track detonates in a crazed tempo build.

Only one song could possibly follow: “Paranoid.” Like “N.I.B.,” the main riff of “Paranoid” has been a starting point for countless guitarists. When I was twelve and tried to cover the song with my friends, we played something that only loosely resembled the opening section, chorus, and verse. But even playing facsimiles of those parts showed us the power of music. I’ve gone back to “Paranoid” multiple times over the years, trying and failing to play Ward’s beats and fills note for note. He drives “Paranoid” with relentless and fast eighth notes on his kick, bookending each section with glass-smooth snare rolls. Legions of bands have covered the track, but I have yet to hear anyone play it with the grace and attack of Black Sabbath.

Like countless other metalheads, I felt disconnected from most people in high school. During those years, the lyrics of “Paranoid” speared me in the chest. Ozzy shouts about the negative outlook that a depressed and anxious mind can breed. As an adult, I still have days when I focus on the worst in everything, days when I feel like I’m viewing life from the corner of the room. On those days, “Paranoid” still gives me goosebumps.

“Iron Man” has a similar effect—it’s just magnified by the obstinate stomp of Iommi’s iconic riff. The track tells the story of a man who travels into the future and witnesses an apocalypse that will erase humans. Upon returning, he passes through a magnetic field, transforming him into an iron man who can’t speak. Geezer’s narrative was inspired by Ozzy’s comment when he first heard Iommi play the “Iron Man” riff. Ozzy told Geezer that “it sounded like a big iron bloke walking through the city.”† Seething with anger that I mostly held close to my chest, I often felt like the iron man as a teenager, trapped in my own head and unable to communicate with most of my peers. Beyond all that, “Iron Man” is just a badass song. You know the scene in Detroit Rock City where Hawk knees the disco-loving meathead in the balls? The director chose “Iron Man” to play during that part for good reason: listening to it makes you feel like you just kneed a sadistic meathead in the balls.

With its tar-spill trudge, “Electric Funeral” dives into a depressive void. Expanding upon the social commentary of “War Pigs,” “Hand of Doom” matches form with content, mimicking the arc of a war veteran’s heroin addiction by beginning with a soothing groove and then spiraling into punishing heaviness. While the swine who sent people to die in Vietnam looked on from their mansions, soldiers returned home with scarred minds and eviscerating habits. The music and lyrics of “Hand of Doom” tell that story, once again highlighting Sabbath’s ability to intensify its lyrical messages with staggering heaviness.

Add “Rat Salad,” which features a blistering drum solo, and the nervous intensity of “Fairies Wear Boots” to this batch of songs and you have what might be the heaviest album ever recorded, especially considering its context. The month Paranoid came out, The Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, and The Osmonds released albums. Black Sabbath’s second LP was a musical nuke.

With 1971’s Master of Reality, Sabbath squashed the misconception that it promoted occult spirituality. Jinx Dawson and Coven represented the Satanic side of things, so Black Sabbath stepped into God’s light. As if in conversation with Coven, Ozzy started wearing a white cape, as well as a white-winged suit, whereas Dawson and the rest of Coven wore witchy black wardrobes. In addition to Coven putting blood on Sabbath’s dressing room door in Memphis, a different occult figure supposedly put a curse on Black Sabbath. The quartet was asked to play the Witches’ Sabbath at Stonehenge after Black Sabbath was released. “We refused to go,” Geezer said.* “So, apparently, the head warlock put a curse on us.” To ward off that evil, they started wearing large (right-side up) crosses on their necklaces. Iommi also had Gibson decorate the frets of his signature guitar with crosses.

As if publicly embracing the cross wasn’t enough, Sabbath openly started to praise the Christian God in its lyrics. Master of Reality’s “After Forever” starts with energetic rock and then devolves into a neck-breaking groove. Amid that heaviness, Ozzy sings,

Have you ever thought about your soul, can it be saved?

Or perhaps you think that when you’re dead you just stay in your grave

Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?

Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?

As with much of Sabbath’s lyrics, Geezer penned those ones. So the same guy who wrote “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” and “Iron Man” also believed in the power of God’s love.4 Considering that Satan had appeared as both a real and metaphorical villain in Sabbath songs, perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. “After Forever” continues with its pointed spiritual questions when Ozzy wails, “Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say if they knew you believe in God above? / They should realize before they criticize that God is the only way to love.” Keep in mind that Ozzy sings those words atop music with a deeply pessimistic bent. To audiences in 1971, the instrumentation of the song would’ve sounded like Primitive Man does today—bleak, abrasive, and depressing—which complicates and maybe even resists the light Geezer wrote about.

“After Forever” is preceded by “Sweet Leaf,” a song that places weed on a similar pedestal as any god in its ability to provide purpose and meaning. (With its joyful clomp, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the track lights up the same neuroreceptors as marijuana.) “After Forever” is followed by the proto-NWOBHM chug of “Children of the Grave,” which warns the world’s youth of a nuclear apocalypse that will destroy humankind if they don’t get off their asses and do something to stop it. Master of Reality ends with “Into the Void,” a song driven by some of Iommi’s finest riffs—heavy and catchy in equal parts—and a rhythm so fat it clogs the veins.

Throughout the LP, Sabbath advises the world’s youth to find God and stop nuclear warfare. But “Into the Void” says the world is beyond fixing. The track steps into a speculative reality where abandoning earth is the only viable response to how fucked up things have gotten. Ozzy croons, “Back on earth the flame of life burns low / Everywhere is misery and woe / Pollution kills the air, the land, and sea / Man prepares to meet his destiny, yeah.” As humanity inches closer to a war that will ultimately be a “final suicide” for our species, a group called the Freedom Fighters flee the earth. They eventually “find another world where freedom waits,” discovering “love upon a land, a world unknown.” Just to be clear, it’s “Satan and his slaves,” not to mention the politicians and warmongers that embody those evils, who’ve destroyed the world. Black Sabbath never seemed to hold out much hope for humans to save ourselves from the ills we’ve created, at least not in this lifetime.

•••

In my heart of hearts, I want to dive into a lengthy analysis of every Ozzy-era Sabbath record. Instead, here are some highlights (plus a few I missed from Master of Reality). Bear in mind that Black Sabbath put out six perfect records in five years.

Master of Reality (1971)

Bill Ward’s tight, grooving, behind-the-beat drumming. His solo that brings “Sweet Leaf” from its up-tempo bridge back to its stoned Goliath groove is stunning.

Before listening (or relistening) to this record, read John Darnielle’s 33 1/3 installment about Master of Reality. The narrator, a young Hessian named Roger Painter who’s been sent to a mental institution against his will, describes Ozzy as sounding like some random guy off the street, which is a brilliant way to hit on that inviting, everyman quality of Sabbath. He also describes Iommi’s riffs as sounding like the eruptions of underwater volcanoes.

The delicate, thirty-second track, “Embryo,” and how it magnifies the primitive fury of “Children of the Grave.” See also: Neurosis’s bestial cover of “Children of the Grave.”

The acoustic daydream that is “Orchid.”

As with those of “Into the Void,” every riff in “Lord of this World” is a masterpiece.

Vol. 4 (1972)

Bill Ward’s tight, grooving, behind-the-beat drumming.

The unexpected and perfectly executed transitions from lizard brain riffage into folk-laced rock in “Wheels of Confusion.”

“Supernaut” pulses with optimism and features another great Bill Ward drum solo, although it’s not what you might expect, especially comparing it to the “Rat Salad” solo. See also: Coalesce’s filth-drenched cover of the song.

The cocaine fever that is “Snowblind.”

The opening of “Cornucopia” wanders through town like a drunken gorilla looking for a fight. Don’t get in its way. It boggles my mind to think those sounds came from 1972. That section is heavier than most contemporary doom.

“St. Vitus Dance” and its gift of another inimitable Iommi riff. For the doomed, his riffs are like family heirlooms that we store in the locked jewelry box of our brains.

“Under the Sun / Every Day Comes and Goes” starts with trudging doom and moves into a violent swing. Lyrically, the track rails against self-righteous spiritualists—Christian preachers and purveyors of black magic, alike—and the hubris of telling anyone what to believe. That’s my favorite of Sabbath’s spiritual messages: to figure it out for yourself.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

Bill Ward’s tight, grooving, behind-the-beat drumming.

The title track will disintegrate your bones.

“A National Acrobat” has one of the sweetest guitar leads ever written. When Iommi adds a second layer of harmony, it sounds like Thin Lizzy skinny-dipping in cough syrup.

When I was eighteen, I got “Killing Yourself to Live” tattooed on my left wrist. While the song is mostly about addiction, lines like “you work your life away and what do they give? / You’re only killing yourself to live” speak to the proletariat struggle of working harsh dead-end jobs, only to be paid with a broken body and spirit. The chorus riff is an earworm, but one that weighs in at two tons.

Sabotage (1975)

Bill Ward’s tight, grooving, behind-the-beat drumming.

The cover of the record shows the band standing in front of a large mirror, reflections staring on from behind. Perhaps a bit absurd (Bill Ward’s red tights don’t help), it alludes to the band members’ struggle of balancing unruly public personas with an everyday sense of self. (Considering The Osbournes, it could be argued that Ozzy lost that struggle.) If there was ever any doubt that Sabbath was consuming its weight in cocaine at this point (there wasn’t), the cover photo of Sabotage is irrefutable proof.

“Hole in the Sky” comes close to tearing a hole in earth’s atmosphere. See also: Pantera’s cover of the song, if only to hear Dimebag put his own spin on Iommi’s classic riff.

The first half of “Symptom of the Universe” is one of the most pugilistic pieces of music Sabbath ever wrote. It charges like a wolverine, sounding like a sludge-punk anthem from the early nineties. Imagine how it sounded in 1975.

Following the cinematic intro of “The Thrill of it All,” Ward and Geezer drop out to highlight Iommi’s chain-smoking construction worker riff, after which Ozzy grunts, “Yeah,” in a tough-guy voice. It’s funny but also exactly how that riff will make you feel.

“Supertzar” sounds like an extended and creepier version of Cream’s intro to “White Room.” This epic song anticlimactically transitions into the radio-friendly “Am I Going Insane,” which could’ve been cut from Sabotage. That way, “Supertzar” would lead right into “The Writ,” a monolithic track that finds Ozzy railing against greedy label executives and roosting in the higher vocal registers that would define his solo career.

Sabbath moved into new territory with Technical Ecstasy (1976) and Never Say Die! (1978), the final records with the original lineup. Technical Ecstasy has heavy moments, but it’s peppered with songs like “It’s Alright.” The cheesy title captures exactly how it sounds. Written and sung by Ward, it’s a shoddy impersonation of The Beatles, which is off-putting. No one wants to hear Black Sabbath mimic The Beatles. Multiple other songs on Technical Ecstasy feel like attempts to capture the attention of a wider, less angry audience, though the record also features angular, King Crimson-inspired changes. Not as visceral as Sabbath’s previous albums, Technical Ecstasy is still cool. Never Say Die! is similar—moments of heaviness amid what ultimately feels like an attempt to make friendly music, and not in an interesting way. “Johnny Blade” is inarguably badass, though. Even as it travels through a neon tunnel of synth, the track surges with viciousness, becoming a full-grown werewolf when it breaks down into half-time.

For better or worse, I’m one of those (annoying) purists who doesn’t like much of Sabbath’s output after the original lineup fell apart. As the story goes, Ozzy completely lost control of his partying. He was in Black Sabbath, so that’s saying a lot. Ward, Iommi, and Geezer kicked him out and enlisted Dio for 1980’s Heaven and Hell. That LP has plenty to offer. Without Ozzy, however, the group doesn’t have the same bite. Don’t get me wrong. Dio is a legend. His vocals are just too spot-on, too precocious, for Sabbath. The band needs Ozzy, whose vocals are rough around the edges, like Birmingham. When Vinny Appice replaced Bill Ward for 1981’s Mob Rules, it wasn’t Black Sabbath anymore. After ten albums, including the reunion-minus-Ward album 13 that came out in, you guessed it, 2013, and enough tours to kill any band, Black Sabbath played (what was billed as) its last concert in February 2017, again featuring the original lineup except for Ward, who refused to do the tour with a backup drummer in tow—a pinch hitter in case Ward couldn’t play on a given night—which was one of the stipulations of the contract he refused to sign.

Of course it was disappointing to see a legend like Ward get shit on by his former bandmates. Sadly, it wasn’t surprising by that point. Let’s argue about that and the post-Ozzy albums another time. What really matters is that Black Sabbath changed the world. Heavy metal is a fitting label for the band, but doom is more accurate. It’s music with a perpetual chip on its shoulder, focusing on humans’ capacity for evil and our propensity to avoid looking at reality as if it was the sun. Through Black Sabbath’s eyes, there’s no happy ending, even if you believe in God.

2 See the “Harbingers” chapter for a brief history of the phrase as it applies to music.

3 Sabbath originally wanted to call the record “War Pigs,” but Warner Bros. deemed it too offensive as an album title and changed it to Paranoid. “War Pigs” itself was originally called “Walpurgis,” but the label didn’t like its Satanic connotation, so Sabbath named it “War Pigs.”

4 If someone had made me confront that reality during my adolescence, a time when I listened to Slayer almost as much as Sabbath, my little brain would have melted.

Be Forewarned

“Few would say it, but nearly everyone felt it: the end was near. The end of that world which a generation had worked to build for itself.”

—Devin McKinney, Magic Circle: The Beatles in Dream and History

Today, it’s easy to dismiss the flower power ideals of the 1960s as naïve bullshit. Of course acid, free love, and jam bands were doomed as agents of revolution. But it’s also understandable why people needed to believe that LSD, hedonistic sex, and folk songs could fix the world’s problems. Corporations started to reveal just how deeply their fangs sunk into politicians’ necks; wealth and racial inequality seemed too deeply entrenched to ever rectify; and our military killed people for reasons that made no sense.

According to legend, flower power died in 1969. Two years prior, a young man named Charles Manson was released from prison after serving seven years for procuring and violation of probation. A singer-songwriter wanting to hit the big time, Manson moved to San Francisco, where a movement fueled by hallucinogenic drugs and optimism was in full swing. Surrounded by disaffected youth that were desperate for spiritual enlightenment, Manson convinced multiple young women that God spoke messages of love through him and his music, gathering a small but dedicated following. It all began in San Francisco: Ken Kesey and his acid tests, the Haight-Ashbury scene, and an active culture of resistance. The murderous pseudo-cult that would help kill those ideologies started there, too.

Knowing there were more opportunities for stardom in Los Angeles, Manson led his disciples south, eventually crossing paths with The Beach Boys’ drummer Dennis Wilson. Manson convinced Wilson to let him and his followers stay at his house. Wilson gave Manson and his ragtag family, which now included a handful of greasy and aimless young men, the boot after weeks of them leeching food and drugs from him. They ended up at the nearby Spahn Ranch, a decaying property that once provided backdrops for western TV shows and movies. Ever the conman, Manson persuaded the elderly George Spahn to let him and his disciples stay. Spahn Ranch became a key refuge for the Family. Around that time, the small, wiry man and his followers started partying at a house in LA that was known for hosting violent occult rituals. Manson’s vision of leading people through song morphed into one tinged with blood. The volatile Tex Watson glommed onto the Family around the same time, changing the prospect of violence to an inevitability for the group.

Wanting a sanctuary to call his own, Manson ventured to Death Valley, where he found two abandoned ranch houses, as if they’d been left there just for him. His followers wanted to stay in LA. Desperate for them to follow him into the desert, Manson manically instructed his disciples about an impending and unavoidable race war called Helter Skelter that would eradicate most of humanity. He’d long been paranoid about America’s racial tensions escalating into widespread violence. Listening to The Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter,” he realized that the British band was sending him messages about the race war and how to proceed. If Manson’s followers remained loyal, they could hide out in Death Valley with him during Helter Skelter and then emerge from that violence as social leaders—their destined role.

In a botched attempt to help one of his followers out of a drug deal gone wrong, Manson shot and killed Bernard Crowe, an African-American man, in July 1969. He immediately worried that he’d set the race war in motion. But then again, Manson figured, maybe that was how things were supposed to play out. The Manson Family had long been a drug connection for people. Right after Crowe’s death, a relatively harmless manufacturer named Gary Hinman produced a shoddy batch of mescaline and sold it to a hostile biker gang, a deal Manson had set up. Pressured by the bikers to recover their cash, Manson and three Family members paid Hinman a visit. Manson left, and his disciples ended up stabbing Hinman. With their leader’s fevered theories spinning in their brains, Manson’s followers saw that murder as a way to set Helter Skelter in motion by convincing whites that their race was under attack. They used Hinman’s blood to scrawl the Black Panther paw and the words “Political Piggy” on the wall.

Manson embraced his role as Helter Skelter’s catalyst after Hinman’s death. There needed to be high-profile murders to incite the world into violence, he realized. He told Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to go to a wealthy part of LA and murder people in the most horrific and fear-instilling (“witchy” is the word he used) ways possible. He also wanted his followers to create links between those murders and Hinman’s that the police and media would pick up on. Wandering around an upscale neighborhood in a haze of LSD (they were all tripping constantly), Manson’s followers came across director Roman Polanski’s lavish house, where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, and Wojciech Frykowski were about to meet a horrific end. Tex spearheaded the brutal killings, but each attendant member of the Family took part. Before fleeing, Atkins soaked up Tate’s blood with a towel and used it to paint “Pig” on the wall, attempting to link that scene to Hinman’s murder. Discontent with how his cronies had executed the Tate murders, Manson himself ventured out with Tex, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten the next night, when they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, more of Los Angeles’s wealthy elite.

As the bizarre and convoluted details surfaced about Manson and his Family after they were captured, a horrible truth reared its head: the same fervor and tools that were supposed to create peace were equally, if not more, useful as agents of manipulation, confusion, and violence.

Along with the Manson murders, the December 6 violence at Altamont Speedway in Northern California tore flower power at its seams. In the golden hills outside San Francisco, an estimated 300,000 people gathered to watch The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Wanting to finish off their US tour with a bang, The Rolling Stones decided to put together a festival that would rival Woodstock. From the beginning, Altamont was a shining example of piss-poor organization. Its promoters didn’t secure a venue until two days before it took place. Scrambling to get everything in order and wanting to save money, The Rolling Stones made the now infamous mistake of hiring Hells Angels to work security. They paid the bikers in beer. Explaining that tragically stupid decision, guitarist Mick Taylor told Rolling Stone, “I think we expected probably something like the Hells Angels that were our security force at Hyde Park [in London], but of course they’re not the real Hells Angels, they’re completely phony. These guys in California are the real thing—they’re very violent.”

With grizzled, tattooed bikers getting loaded and staring down hippies throughout the day, negative vibes loomed from the get-go. Numerous fights erupted. As if taking cues from William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, three factions formed: the crowd, the Angels, and the bands. Denise Kaufman, guitarist for The Ace of Cups, was hit in the head with a full can of beer, fracturing her skull. In a raucous hullabaloo during Jefferson Airplane’s set, The Ace of Cups’ singer, Marty Balin, was punched and knocked out by a Hells Angel. Grateful Dead was scheduled to go on after Jefferson Airplane, but the band fled Altamont after Balin was accosted. By the time The Stones took the stage that evening, the air pulsed with anxious energy.

Just twenty feet from the stage, Hells Angel Alan Passaro stabbed and killed concertgoer Meredith Hunter, allegedly for pointing a gun at him. Hunter was eighteen. Unaware of the killing, The Rolling Stones finished their set. Passaro was later tried and acquitted for murder, claiming that he stabbed Hunter out of self-defense.

Three years before Altamont, Hunter S. Thompson attended a party at Ken Kesey’s house alongside several Hells Angels, which he recounted in his 1967 book Hell’s Angels. The gathering predictably took a horrific turn. Kesey and The Rolling Stones were operating from a similar delusion: that good vibes, love, and LSD could stamp out the violent impulses that beat inside the human heart. But Kesey’s party and the violence at Altamont just underscored what writers like Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion had been saying for years: it was foolish to believe that the brutality of the human spirit could be dissolved by getting (really goddamn) high.

If Manson and Altamont weren’t enough to turn even the most optimistic hippies into cynics, the massacre at Kent State in Ohio put the final nail in the coffin. When Nixon took office in 1968, he promised to end US involvement in Vietnam. And then, in 1970, he ordered American troops to invade Cambodia alongside soldiers from the Republic of Vietnam, enacting more cruelty and further entangling America in a convoluted war. Activists across the country hit the streets.

On Friday, May 1, 1970, around 500 students gathered at Kent State University in Ohio to protest the invasion of Cambodia, engaging in peaceful chants. The protesters dispersed at 1:00 p.m. for class. Some of those students got fired up at a bar in the town of Kent later that night as they drank and proselytized. They threw bottles at cars and vandalized buildings. Several other citizens, also enraged by the US invasion of Cambodia, followed suit. A small bonfire blazed on one of the town’s main streets. Around 120 people had gathered by the time police arrived. The crowd started to antagonize the police, yelling and hurling anything they could get their hands on. The entire Kent police force, as well as officers from nearby communities, struggled to control the situation. In true small-town-mayor form, LeRoy Satrom rashly declared a state of emergency and sought help from Governor Jim Rhodes.

Rumors of threats to local businesses and city officials flowed through town. Those rumors ballooned into Satrom’s misguided fear that highly organized revolutionaries aimed to destroy Kent and its keystone university. Students planned additional protests for May 2, so Satrom requested that Governor Rhodes send officers of the National Guard—none of whom had experience with protesters or crowd control—to intervene. Prone to the same illogic as Satrom, Rhodes complied. By the time the National Guard arrived that night, a demonstration was in full swing on campus. People set fire to Kent State’s ROTC building. Firemen quickly contained the fire, and members of the Guard arrested several activists and dispersed the crowd with tear gas.

The next day, Rhodes held a press conference at the Kent firehouse. “We’ve seen here at the city of Kent, especially, probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups,” he declared, speaking with the hell and brimstone fury of a crazed preacher. “We are going to eradicate the problem…I think that we’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”

Students gathered again that night, and guardsmen again used tear gas to diffuse the crowd. Activists also held a sitting protest at a busy intersection in town, demanding to meet with Satrom and University President Robert White. The National Guard called for an 11:00 p.m. curfew, prodding students back into their dorms with bayonets.

Student activists scheduled another protest for noon the next day. The National Guard ordered them to disband, launching tear-gas canisters into the crowd. A strong wind blew, thinning the gas enough so protesters could hurl the canisters back. The seventy-seven-man-strong National Guard formed ranks and marched toward the protesters, bayonets extended. Students fled, scattering between Blanket Hill, Prentice Hall, and a campus parking lot. Unsure of how to proceed, most guardsmen turned their attention to the parking lot, some of them aiming their rifles. As protesters assailed them with rocks, Sergeant Myron Pryor began firing into the crowd with his .45 pistol. Several other guardsmen followed his lead. Four unarmed students were killed. Nine others were critically wounded.

News of the massacre spread like wildfire. Like so many police officers and soldiers guilty of heinous violence, the guardsmen who perpetrated the Kent State killings were indicted but ultimately acquitted of charges. The LSD faithful had long believed that, if everyone could expand their consciousness with acid, society would become less violent. But Kent State was just another stark reminder that America controls its citizens with an iron fist. No drug would ever change that.

•••

As people across the country wallowed in hopelessness and confusion, Pentagram formed in the small city of Alexandria, Virginia, funneling that cultural depression into its music. Influenced by Coven, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, and Sir Lord Baltimore, singer Bobby Liebling and guitarist Geof O’Keefe started their band in 1971. Wanting to invoke dark energy, Liebling called it Pentagram. He and O’Keefe changed the name multiple times within that first year, but Pentagram best suited the band’s ominous music, so it stuck. Liebling has also said that he was deeply fascinated by the underbelly of spirituality:

I was practicing all kinds of black arts and occult and Satanism, and I was a member of the Satanic church in the DC area. I did a lot of incantations and was in an actual coven. One night I was at my friend’s house. We always kept a couple of copies of Anton LaVey’s original Satanic Bible around, and books on witchcraft and spells and the occult. It was July 4, and we were completely sober. We were sitting in the basement and reading from the Satanic Bible, and all of a sudden I started to blow a little fog out of my mouth. I was into the reading and hadn’t noticed that the room had gotten ice cold. All the pipes in the entire basement formed droplets of water that became icicles. The basement windows were covered with frost and the entire room was about twenty-five degrees. And this was in a matter of ten to twenty minutes…It scared me so badly that I just dropped the idea and threw all the artifacts away that came along with the game.*

Despite that chilling experience, Liebling kept Pentagram as the name for his band. Joe Hasselvander, a later drummer for the group, surmised that Liebling’s flirtation with occult spirituality is one reason why his life has been so fucked. “Bobby conjured up something that scared him to death, and he ran out of the house and never came back. Of course, you’re supposed to close those doors, but they never did. And I think that’s part of why he has had so many problems in his life with drug addiction and a lack of financial success,” Hasselvander said.*

O’Keefe and Liebling filled out the original Pentagram lineup but almost immediately changed it, beginning the band’s tradition of ongoing personnel changes. O’Keefe switched to the skins because the previous drummer didn’t hit hard enough. Bassist Vincent McAllister took over on guitar after wowing the band with his skills, and Greg Mayne of Space Meat joined on bass. For Pentagram purists, this is the classic lineup.

From 1972–’74, the quartet released a handful of singles, but they didn’t get exposed to a wider audience until Relapse compiled them on 2001’s First Daze Here. Those original releases nevertheless creeped through America’s underground, finding fans in people such as Scott “Wino” Weinrich, who, heavily influenced by Pentagram, formed The Obsessed and sang on Saint Vitus’s heaviest albums. Relapse released another compilation of Pentagram singles called First Daze Here Too in 2006, which combined with the first reissue to inspire throwback bands like Witchcraft, Graveyard, and Blood Ceremony.

Flower power groups like Grateful Dead reveled in a dreamy, cushioned version of psychedelia. The early Pentagram recordings evoke the lead-blanket dread of an acid trip gone horribly wrong. LSD might’ve been a way to expand consciousness for members of Pentagram, but they harbored no delusions that the drug could fix the world’s problems. The title-track of the band’s first single, Be Forewarned, trots in an anxious waltz as Bobby Liebling threatens listeners: “So you be forewarned / I’m coming after you.” McAllister plays a surf riff slathered in black paint, making the song feel like the bastard child of The Doors and Black Sabbath. “Lazy Lady” then jolts forward with high-energy rock before reverting to knuckle-dragging half-time.

That first recording hints at doom, whereas the songs that Pentagram laid down at Bias Recording studios in 1973 cross the line ten times over. Unfortunately, only four of those tracks would see light until Relapse released First Daze Here. The songs on the Hurricane and Under My Thumb singles are great. With the exception of “When the Screams Come,” however, they don’t come close to the heaviness of the tracks that were buried away for nearly thirty years.

Boffo Socko put out Hurricane, consisting of that song and “Earth Flight,” in 1973. “Hurricane” has a bouncy groove, and “Earth Flight” wanders in a creepy fog before building into cocaine-addled rock ’n’ roll. Under My Thumb saw an extremely limited pressing in 1974. Similar to the tracks on Hurricane, “Under My Thumb” remains rooted in the hard rock of Deep Purple and UFO. On the other hand, “When the Screams Come” unquestionably traverses into the depressive and metallic realm of doom. The track moves with a murderous backbeat, over which O’Keefe’s fills flow like a stream of calf’s blood. The lyrics admonish those obsessed with wealth, greed, and a narrow, day-to-day view of reality. Liebling promises that, for people who only think about “how to get by,” Satan is waiting with open arms. McAllister and Mayne’s portentous guitar work make it seem like that fate is right around the corner.

In addition to the tunes that appear on Hurricane and Under My Thumb, Pentagram tracked “Forever My Queen,” “Walk in the Blue Light,” “Review Your Choices,” and “20 Buck Spin” in 1973. Had those songs been unleashed on the world that year or the next, Pentagram’s career trajectory would’ve been quite different. Next to Sabbath, it was easily the heaviest music around. In “Forever My Queen,” McAllister’s riffs lurk above O’Keefe’s obstinate beat in noxious clouds of distortion. Liebling’s unpolished vocals make him seem like some townie with a killer voice that Pentagram just found at a bar, and his lyrics locate the band in the hopeless zeitgeist of post-sixties America. “I ran away with myself,” Liebling sings. “I think I ran a little too far.” Although hallucinogenic drugs can be a path toward enlightenment, they can easily become a means to journey “a little too far” inward and lose objectivity. Some would call that the definition of insanity, a mental state Liebling knows all too well.

Taking cues from jazz gods Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, O’Keefe plays his entire kit, making drums a focal point rather than a supporting instrument, which is nowhere clearer than in “Walk in the Blue Light.” If you didn’t know better, you might think O’Keefe plays the deft quadruplets that push the song forward with a double bass pedal (or two kick drums), but he executes those palpitations by fluidly integrating his toms and kick drum. Boisterous drumming has proved to be one of the enduring elements of heavy metal, and O’Keefe helped establish that.

The opening riff of “Review Your Choices” is one of the finest of its time. It’s gnarled blues played at a casual slither, a soundtrack better suited for lone motorcycle rides than peace rallies. Liebling’s vocals hang above the band’s lurching groove, warning those prone to hubris to “look before you leap,” words he would’ve been well-advised to heed himself.

Despite how good Pentagram was in its early days, and how influential its music would become, large-scale fame eluded the band, but just barely. Well-connected in the industry, the band’s manager, Gordon Fletcher, arranged for Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss to check out a Pentagram rehearsal in 1975. The band practiced in Greg Mayne’s basement, where the sound was less than stellar. As Mayne told it in an interview for the 2012 documentary, Last Days Here, he and Vincent McAllister worked as janitors at the time. On the day Simmons and Stanley came over, they had to work. They didn’t have a car, so they hitchhiked there and back, showing up late to rehearsal. Tired from cleaning bathrooms, Mayne and McAllister didn’t play well. To further fuck things up, Mayne’s landlord stormed in and demanded that the band turn their amps down. Pentagram ultimately failed to impress Simmons and Stanley with an image of a metal band destined for stardom. To those icons, Pentagram seemed like a group of pizza-faced kids who didn’t know what they were doing.

After that letdown, Fletcher convinced Columbia records to fund a Pentagram demo, recorded by legendary Blue Öyster Cult producer Marty Krugman. Pentagram was exactly what Krugman was looking for: “a street Black Sabbath”† who would’ve been the perfect bridge between Led Zeppelin and The Sex Pistols.

At a studio in New York, Pentagram quickly laid down instrumentation for three tracks. After Liebling completed a take, Krugman told him it was good and to come in the mixing booth to listen. Liebling couldn’t live with the take, even after Krugman told him they could polish it up in postproduction. The recording was for demo purposes, so Krugman persisted in trying to get Liebling to move on to a different song. The singer called Fletcher into the vocal booth, at which point he asked his manager—over the mic so the producer could hear—why Krugman was being such an asshole. Krugman left and decided not to work with Pentagram, killing the band’s chance to sign with one of the biggest labels in America.

Almost forty years later, O’Keefe and Mayne still remembered that day with frustration. The Krugman mishap left both musicians repeatedly asking themselves, “What would’ve happened to Pentagram if Bobby had just moved on?” That incident took its toll, and the classic Pentagram lineup dissolved. O’Keefe, Mayne, and McAllister tried to find a new singer before deciding to give Liebling another chance, but the reunion didn’t last.

In 1978, Liebling met drummer Joe Hasselvander, whose band needed a vocalist. Liebling owned the rights to the Pentagram name, so, shortly after joining Hasselvander’s group, he and the other members decided to take on the Pentagram moniker and play some of the band’s old songs. That lineup released the Livin’ in a Ram’s Head single in 1979, which features an alternate version of “When the Screams Come.” Imagine Black Sabbath playing a cover of Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” and you’ll have a solid idea of what “Livin’ in a Ram’s Head” sounds like. Despite its obvious potential, that Pentagram lineup folded under the weight of addiction and personal tensions, again leaving Liebling without a band.

Jump to 1980, when Hasselvander met guitarist Victor Griffin and bassist Lee Abney, who’d recently formed a band in Tennessee called Death Row. Griffin and Abney moved to Virginia and started jamming with Hasselvander, who brought in Liebling on vocals. Abney was then replaced by bassist Martin Swaney, who played on Livin’ in a Ram’s Head. Throughout 1982 and ’83, Death Row recorded songs that would later appear on Pentagram. Hasselvander left the band after tracking those songs, and Stuart Rose filled the drummer slot. Soon after, the group decided to call itself Pentagram instead of Death Row. In 1985, the quartet self-released its first LP—roughly fourteen years after Pentagram originally formed. Peaceville rereleased the record as Relentless in 1993.

Despite the laundry list of fuck-ups and what-ifs in Pentagram’s story, the band’s music has left defined footprints on the faces of doom and heavy rock. Pentagram sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of an empty well with every instrument, including vocals and drums, filtered through a Boss Heavy Metal distortion pedal. Led by flagbearers Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was in full swing when Pentagram was released. That sound is apparent in the gallop that opens “Relentless.” Following that, Griffin opens the earth with reptilian chugging as Liebling threatens to kill listeners with an electrified axe.

“Sign of the Wolf (Pentagram)” has the anthemic feel of British Steel-era Judas Priest, which emphasizes the heft of third track “All Your Sins.” That song creates the sensation of getting swallowed in distortion, and its riffs are blueprints for Wino’s guitar work in The Obsessed: caveman simple yet unforgettable. Pentagram is as crushing as the albums that Slayer, Anthrax, and Celtic Frost released the same year, just in a different way. While metalheads across the world obsessed over speed, Pentagram reminded listeners that slow and heavy can win the race.

The following tracks on Pentagram also move between mid-paced metal and eerie doom, finding standout moments in “The Ghoul” and “20 Buck Spin,” a dual-harmony-driven track that Pentagram wrote in its earlier days. Pentagram furthers upon Black Sabbath’s ominous groove, showing enough potential within that style to motivate bands like The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Candlemass to keep it alive. Along with Coven, Pentagram also set the stage for Electric Wizard and scores of other doom bands to dive headfirst into occult-themed lyrics and imagery. Sabbath might’ve pioneered doom, but Pentagram was a crucial messenger.

In the thirty years since Pentagram came out, the band has gone through a dizzying list of lineup changes, also releasing seven LPs, many of which feature updated versions of vintage Pentagram tracks. Each of those records kicks ass, but member changes and Liebling’s never-ending struggles with addiction and mental illness prevented Pentagram from playing live regularly. Argott and Fenton’s documentary provides a harsh and unswerving look into Liebling’s life. The first portion of the film finds him living with his elderly parents who support their middle-aged son while he spends his days lying on a couch, smoking crack. About his drug use, Liebling said,

I should have died twenty-five years ago. I should be dead ten times over. I’ve been addicted to heroin for forty years and methadone for thirty years. I was on methadone and shooting heroin on top of it seven days a week and smoking $500 to $1,000 of crack every single day around the clock. I’ve had lots of near-death experiences. The last one I had, I had just taken my methadone. I had been awake around the clock smoking crack for six days straight before a gig. No water, no food, not a minute of sleep. And I was debuting a brand new Pentagram lineup at a packed house at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. I wasn’t aware that I came out onstage twice and then fell into the drum set and blacked out. Then, of course, I seized because of all the drugs. I flatlined twice on the way to the hospital. Next thing I knew, I was going down a tunnel of light. Many people who have died and then been revived talk about the tunnel of light. It’s all true. I couldn’t believe it. There’s a tunnel, and at the end of it there are globule amoeba-type things. One had my grandmother’s face, but they’re translucent and out of focus, and they kind of glob together like an overhead light show projector. Everyone is beckoning you with their hands, telling you to come to the light. And you’re sliding down the slide, tranquil as a baby. I almost got through the tunnel. Then it felt like there was a kaleidoscope closing up the hole in the middle with these propeller-like flaps, and I felt like I got sucked back up a sewage pipe, and I realized I was alive. God told me I wasn’t ready. I’m a very strong believer in God nowadays, regardless of the name of the band.*

Last Days Here has a somewhat hopeful ending as Liebling gets his shit together enough to live on his own and start playing with an updated lineup of Pentagram, although anything involving Bobby Liebling is tenuous.

Pentagram’s unfortunate story doesn’t end there. In the summer of 2016, King Woman and Wax Idols embarked on a tour with Pentagram but cut it short because Liebling sexually harassed members of both bands. (I seriously doubt it was the vocalist’s first foray into sexual harassment.) Speaking with Cat Jones, Wax Idols singer Hether Fortune said, “Bobby made several absurdly gross, inappropriate comments to all of the women on the tour, but the worst thing was that a fan told us that she left the Pentagram show and was super disgusted because he was making rape jokes onstage. And he was. He did. He makes jokes onstage about how the legal age of consent is only sixteen.” In the same interview, Kristina Esfandiari of King Woman added, “we all know people in Pentagram are insane, especially Bobby, but we didn’t expect anybody to invade our space the way that they did, or be so disrespectful to fellow musicians.”

Of course Pentagram’s management-issued response is a trash fire:

This is one of the most unfounded and grossly opportunistic situations that we’ve ever encountered…Bobby Liebling offended someone from one of the opening bands. He said something to the effect of, “I approve of you being on the tour because I want options.” Pentagram as a band sincerely apologized for Bobby’s comment. Bobby verbally hit on this girl, that’s as far as it got. It’s no secret that he’s attracted to women and that’s not a crime. He’s a single man. He may have been uncouth but there was no touching.

Doom has long been overpopulated by men. When any scene, from music and writing to skateboarding and BMX, is dominated by guys, those dudes often regress into unchecked misogyny in thought, speech, and action. From the first time I heard a doom record, I knew that I’d found my place in the world. Anyone who gets the same feeling from this music shouldn’t have to question if they should delve into the scene because it makes them feel unsafe. I’m not trying to put myself on a pedestal. Like most guys, I’ve said some extremely stupid shit that I regret. But I try to acknowledge when I fuck up and do my best to not let it happen again. Liebling and Pentagram’s management could start there. Pentagram’s legacy is etched in stone. The band carried the torch of doom when it was fizzling. None of that means we should let Liebling off the hook.

Maybe there’s something like justice in King Woman’s sound. The group’s 2017 LP, Created in the Image of Suffering, travels through labyrinthine thickets of heaviness and clouds of ether. Esfandiari’s ghostly croon inhabits each song like an all-powerful spirit. The band wouldn’t sound like it does if Pentagram never existed, but King Woman has produced music heavier, creepier, and more profound than any Pentagram release.

And maybe there’s something like justice in the fact that, despite Liebling’s legacy of misogyny, women in bands like Acid King, Electric Wizard, Blood Ceremony, Windhand, Witch Mountain, Muscle and Marrow—and so many more—have, along with Esfandiari, put their own spin on Pentagram’s music, taking ownership of those sounds.

Harbingers

1

Sir Lord Baltimore formed in Brooklyn in 1968, a time when the city was a dying animal, left to rot. About to lose over half-a-million manufacturing jobs that breathed life into its working class, Brooklyn was plagued by violent robbery, assault, and arson. “As a result,” Mike McPadden wrote for Noisey, “the broken bottle/cracked concrete/all-night arson milieu from which…Sir Lord Baltimore arose shares spiritual DNA with the factory towns that birthed metal elsewhere, like Black Sabbath’s Birmingham.”

Growing up in that environment didn’t make the members of Sir Lord Baltimore want to play Beach Boys covers. Drummer-vocalist John Garner, bassist Gary Justin, and guitarist Louis Dambra started jamming together shortly after they graduated from high school. Flipping through Village Voice one day, Garner came across an ad that read, “Heavy band needed for recording.” He responded, setting up an audition with Mike Appel, a talent scout and manager. The nascent band blew Appel away. Under his tutelage, Sir Lord Baltimore started work on Kingdom Come, tracking songs in New Jersey. Dee Anthony caught wind of the trio, and, after usurping Appel as manager, arranged for Eddie Kramer, who’d produced records for Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Kiss, to mix and master Sir Lord Baltimore’s 1970 debut.

Singing about epic voyages, golden chariots, and majestic beasts, Garner executes operatic vocals throughout Kingdom Come while simultaneously blazing across every inch of his drum kit. Dambra’s guitar roars like an electric yeti. Sir Lord Baltimore threw critics for a loop, although Mike Saunders’ famous 1971 Creem magazine review of Kingdom Come is one of the earliest known uses of “heavy metal” to describe a style of music.5 Saunders said that the album included “all the best heavy metal tricks in the book.”

Sir Lord Baltimore opened for Black Sabbath at Fillmore East in February 1971. To those who saw it, the trio’s lack of experience was apparent, making them come across as awkward kids instead of rock gods. But the band used that defeat as motivation to write a heavier record, and Sir Lord Baltimore, released the same year, is indeed a marble slab. Opener “Man from Manhattan” sounds like a rock opera written by Tony Iommi and sung by Captain Beefheart. Carried by Garner’s vaudevillian warble, the track rises and falls with a rollercoaster’s unpredictability. Spacious guitar notes lurk beneath the rails. Channeled through fuzz, those notes would sound at home in any of Candlemass’s epic doom tracks. Even without much distortion, “Man from Manhattan” creates a cinderblock-on-the-chest sense of dread.

“Chicago Lives” is a concrete laborer groove that’s decorated with off-kilter dual harmony guitar lines. The atrociously titled “Woman Tamer” is belligerent classic rock, and final song “Caesar LXXI” returns to the rock-opera-doused-in-ether vibe of “Man from Manhattan.” The overall weirdness of Sir Lord Baltimore prevented it from becoming the hit record Mercury had envisioned, so the label dropped the trio. Sir Lord Baltimore disbanded a few years later.

England’s Wicked Lady emerged in 1968 as well. Pairing abrasive distortion and feedback with a confrontational stage presence, the (regrettably named) band found its core fan base in surly bikers, turning Wicked Lady concerts into raucous events. In 1969, the group self-recorded The Axeman Cometh, which, along with 1972’s Psychotic Overkill, didn’t see proper release until the nineties, when Kissing Spell reissued both albums. As with Pentagram’s early material, it’s borderline tragic that Wicked Lady’s music was locked in the basement until twenty years after the group dissolved. The Axeman Cometh mostly dwells in hard rock, but Martin Weaver’s guitar work has a sharp, metallic edge. The recording reaches peak heaviness in the druggy jamming of its title track, which reaches toward the cosmos but always returns to the landing pad of its deliberate drum beat. “Life and Death” is also notable, its hazy pessimism cut from the same cloth as Pentagram’s early material.

Following that album, Wicked Lady buckled under the weight of booze and drugs but reformed in 1970 with Del “German Head” Morley replacing Bob Jeffries on bass. Pulsing with renewed energy, the trio wrote and recorded Psychotic Overkill. Opener “I’m a Freak” bulldozes forward in unadorned rock. “Tell the Truth” follows course before regressing into primitive doom that sounds similar to Pentagram—except darker, heavier, and more hopeless. Liebling always wanted his music to make people consider suicide, so that’s saying a lot. Martin Weaver’s guitar notes blur together to form a smothering fuzz cloak, revealing another hardened chunk of embryonic doom. Listening to the song is akin to watching one of those videos of an ancient water creature growing legs and emerging onto land.

Wicked Lady concerts eventually became too unpredictable—because of the band’s antics and biker fan base—for promoters. To fuck with people one night, the trio played the same song over and over until the pub manager shut off their amps. A decade or so later, Saint Vitus would adopt a similar spirit of antagonism. Unable to get solid gigs, Wicked Lady broke up shortly after recording Psychotic Overkill.

•••

As for heavy music in Scotland, not much was happening until Iron Claw came along in 1969. The group started as a blues trio. Bassist-vocalist Alex Wilson’s view of music was then shattered when he saw Black Sabbath at a small concert hall in his hometown. He immediately decided that Iron Claw should pursue a heavier sound. Wilson hired Mike Waller to take on vocal duties, and, wanting to understand how Sabbath harnessed such threatening vibes, Iron Claw started playing Black Sabbath in its entirety at gigs, working on original material on off-days.

The next time Iommi and the boys played Scotland, members of Iron Claw excitedly gave their heroes a copy of their recent demo. Black Sabbath’s management responded with threats to sue Iron Claw because of the recording’s similarities to Black Sabbath. Wilson, Waller, guitarist Jimmy Ronnie, and drummer Ian McDougall were crushed. The thing is, Iron Claw’s demo takes obvious cues from Black Sabbath, but it’s also a different animal.

From its outset, the recording has a blown-out sound that works in its favor, adding a layer of zoned-out harshness. First song “Clawstrophobia” smashes through concrete. Like “Hand of Doom,” the track utilizes transitions between quiet grooves and anxious fast parts to intensify its Neolithic main riff. As expected from its title, “Skullcrusher” swings its muscled arms at everything in its path. Atop McDougall’s lurking backbeat, Ronnie plays a riff that spits venom and bears more resemblance to Pentagram than Black Sabbath.

Although it was shitty of Black Sabbath to threaten legal action against the fledgling Iron Claw—and hypocritical considering how much Sabbath appropriated from Coven—the group’s demo does have a few sections that too closely resemble moments of Black Sabbath. “Sabotage” most obviously falls into that when it gains traction with a bluesy lead that’s virtually identical to Iommi’s guitar strut in “Wicked World.” But if Sabbath sued every band that plays similar riffs, it would create a war of lawsuits that would far surpass its members’ time on Earth.

Despite the potential that Iron Claw’s demo shows, the blow from its heroes steered the band into the fantastical realm of prog. With second guitarist Donald McLachlan and new vocalist Wullie Davidson playing flute and harmonica, Iron Claw started to take more influence from King Crimson. The band’s name comes from a lyric in “21st Century Schizoid Man,” so the shift wasn’t completely out of the blue. Iron Claw wrote some cool prog jams, but its members weren’t skilled enough to hold ground with the virtuosos in King Crimson and Yes. A song named “Winter” pretty well captures the music Iron Claw wrote during its second go-round. A blueprint for Iron Maiden’s soaring dual harmony riffs, Jimmy Ronnie’s lead guides Iron Claw through the sky before the song dive-bombs into self-indulgent flute solos. Seeming like a musical dead-end to its members, Iron Claw broke up in 1974.

2

From 1970–’72 a handful of bands released albums that aren’t metal or doom, necessarily, but nevertheless include weighty, influential songs. Featuring drummer Marc Bell, who’d later become Marky Ramone, Dust arose from the same gritty streets as Sir Lord Baltimore. Unable to tour because its high-school-aged members couldn’t get their parents’ permission, Dust had a short life. But the band’s self-titled record and follow-up, Hard Attack, sent ripples through America’s hard rock underground. Hard Attack’s ninth track, “Suicide,” is Dust’s most badass song, with its Motor City drive and stiff upper lip. Its lyrics tell the story of a young rocker killing himself by standing in the rain with his electric guitar. Meanwhile, Bell jolts the song forward with nimble quadruplets. In the early seventies, Dust led a charge of bands that wanted to push hard rock into the heavyweight division.

Even lesser known than Dust, Zior put out its self-titled debut in 1971. The group consisted of musicians who’d cut their teeth in England’s R&B scene but had grown bored with sappy love songs and aloof audiences. Following in Coven and Black Widow’s6 footsteps, the group started using occult-inspired stage setups and adopted a more threatening live presence. Zior also crafted a heavier album: 1972’s laughably titled Every Inch a Man. Much of Zior’s second LP sounds like Deep Purple on (even more) downers, but the beginning of “Entrance of the Evil” harnesses the malevolent undertow of “Black Sabbath.” Distorted guitar notes linger beneath piercing screams and lecherous laughing, all of which rapidly pans left and right to dizzy the brain. The track moves into upbeat territory, but the intro’s bad vibe is a stain on the sonic canvas. Zior unfortunately called it quits soon after Every Inch a Man7 came out.

To the North, Toad was trying to prove that the Swiss could rock as hard as anyone else. About to release an album with Brainticket in 1970, bassist Werner Fröhlich and drummer Cosimo Lampis ditched that group to start Toad with guitarist Vic Vergeat, who’d previously played in the almighty Hawkwind. During ’70 and ’71, the trio furiously worked on its eponymous record, which Hallelujah Records put out. Toad opens with “Cotton Wood Hill,” a barnburner through and through. Vergeat’s guitar tone has a molten thickness, and Lampis’s amphetamine drumming gives the track a frenetic energy. “A Life That Ain’t Worth Living” lopes like a wounded moose and seethes with pessimism. By far the heaviest track on Toad, “Life Goes On” claws out of dirt with a riff that would make Saint Vitus proud. Putting Sabbath’s timeworn tactic to good use, “Life Goes On” builds into a fast-paced car chase before crashing into a brick wall groove. In addition to Toad, the band put out “Stay” in 1971, a hefty single that unexpectedly climbed the Swiss charts and inspired a wave of heavy psych bands. Toad trucked along through the seventies, eighties, and even into the nineties before throwing in the towel in 1995.

Germany’s Night Sun operated on a similar wavelength. Formed after its members’ jazz group, Take Five, broke up, Night Sun put out Mournin’ in 1972. With a drawn-out intro, creeping pace, and hyperactive changes, “Got a Bone of My Own” rumbles the skull. A lot of jazz-trained musicians aren’t great at playing heavy music: it often sounds too thin and polished. Night Sun’s jazz background only makes its attack more vicious, as the group is well aware of when to lay back and let simplicity become the driving force. The record closes with “Don’t Start Flyin’,” the atmospheric eeriness of which is enhanced by an oily saxophone. Night Sun disbanded a year after Mournin’ came out, damning itself to become another entry on the list of proto doom bands that could’ve done so much more.

•••

Cirith Ungol was born in Southern California in 1972 but didn’t release a proper album until 1980. Drummer Robert Garven Jr. and bassist Greg Lindstrom met in a high school English class, bonding over their shared obsession with The Lord of the Rings. When they formed a band with guitarist Jerry Fogle, Cirith Ungol seemed like the perfect name: roughly translating to “pass of the spider,” it refers to the cave system where Shelob lies in wait. Inspired by Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, and Mountain, Cirith Ungol combined those bands’ weightiest sounds with lyrics about Middle Earth and fantastical realms of its own devising.

Neil Beattie joined Cirith Ungol as its first vocalist. Lacking interest, he quickly dipped out. The group played around LA as an instrumental trio before roadie and friend Tim Baker joined on vocals. Baker’s hair-raising wail quickly became one of Cirith Ungol’s hallmarks. The quartet put out Frost and Fire on its own label, Liquid Flames, in 1981, which Enigma Records rereleased in 1984. Cirith Ungol’s debut mostly showcases jogging heavy metal, though it does traverse into slow gloom with “I’m Alive” and the guitar dirge “Maybe That’s Why.”

Unable to secure a major label deal, the quartet8 self-recorded and produced its sophomore effort, King of the Dead. Enigma put out the album in 1984. It wasn’t the big time, but Enigma gave Cirith Ungol more freedom than a major label would have. King of the Dead gallops in the battle-ready tempos of Frost and Fire, but songs like “Black Machine,” “Master of the Pit,” and “Cirith Ungol” prowl in doom-darkened chasms. Throughout King of the Dead, Baker sounds like a blood-crazed imp, spreading word of burning worlds in his madman screech. The record’s title track moves with a deliberate march. Fogle’s riffs crawl out of primeval murk, only to be met with Baker’s theatrical squall and Garven’s Hulk-fisted drumming. There’s no two ways about it: King of the Dead spitefully holds ground as one of the heaviest records from the early 1980s.

Both One Foot in Hell (1986) and Paradise Lost (1991) show Cirith Ungol adopting a fuzzier version of Judas Priest’s sound while still integrating Sabbathian riffage. The band dissolved after releasing its fourth LP. In 1998, Fogle died of liver failure. Although the remaining members long dismissed the possibility of getting back together, Cirith Ungol headlined 2016’s Frost and Fire Festival with Jim Barraza on guitar. Largely ignored during its original run, Cirith Ungol has garnered praise from publications like Decibel and Metal Injection. The group’s fantastical approach to doom also lives on in the lyrics and vibe of several contemporary bands.

3

Pagan Altar crawled onto England’s rocky shore in 1978. By then, Judas Priest had evolved from a classic rock band to pioneer the NWOBHM style with Sad Wings of Destiny, Sin After Sin, Stained Class, and Killing Machine. With its combination of punk’s sneer and heavy metal’s distorted aggression, Motörhead’s self-titled record set 1977 on fire. By 1978 it was crystal clear: speed was destined to reign in heavy metal. Pagan Altar wanted to jam a spear in that chariot’s spokes.

Singer Terry Jones and his guitar-wielding brother, Alan, started jamming in their suburban home in Brockley, England, seeking to wed Sabbath’s power with Black Widow’s occult obsession to make for a deeply unsettling musical experience. The Jones brothers found three like-minded souls to complete the Pagan Altar lineup and started playing venues around London. Live, the band went all out: hooded sorcerers meandered across a stage riddled with upside-down crosses, skulls, coffins, and other props designed to terrify people. Cheesy from a modern view, Pagan Altar embodied the then-novel ethos of capturing audiences’ interest by scaring the shit out of them. Everything about the band was menacing by the standards of the 1970s.

Aside from the stalwart Jones brothers, Pagan Altar’s lineup shifted a few times before solidifying with bassist Trevor Portch and drummer John Mizrahi. Following a botched recording attempt at Abbey Studios in 1980, and still without a record deal by 1982, Pagan Altar self-recorded a demo with the hopes of capturing major label interest. But the wave of speed in metal was too strong for any labels to sign on. Even still, the demo made its way through England and America’s tape-trading underground.

Pagan Altar might not have found a large-scale audience, but its fans went on to form hugely influential bands like Candlemass and Cathedral. Listening to the Pagan Altar demo feels like discovering a rare fossil, one that newly illustrates a link between two species. Monkish singing reverberates at the beginning until those sounds smash into a steel door of doom. Alan’s riffs are cauldrons of evil intent, and Terry pours every ounce of his soul into his vocal delivery.

Pagan Altar slogged it out for a few more years in London’s bar scene before ending the band in 1985. Renewed interest in doom during the 1990s led Oracle Records to release the Pagan Altar demo in 1998, at which point Terry and Alan decided to regroup with a new rhythm section. The band put out The Time Lord EP and Lords of Hypocrisy in 2004, and then Mythical & Magical in 2006. Featuring updated versions of classic Pagan Altar jams, those recordings highlight the group’s earthen heaviness. Terry passed away in 2015 after a bout with cancer, also leaving his band to rest. Thankfully, Pagan Altar’s music emerged from its dungeon of obscurity before he died.

Two years after Pagan Altar formed, vocalist Zeeb Parkes and guitarist Phil Cope started a band in the West Midlands town of Stourbridge, naming it after Witchfinder General, a movie that tells the story of a murderous lawyer-turned-witch-hunter named Matthew Hopkins who stoked public panic about black magic during the 1600s and staged hundreds of witch trials that ended in public executions. Musically, Witchfinder General combines the Harley Davidson cruise of Priest with the down-tuned guitar, drag-beat drumming, and raw vocals of mid-seventies Sabbath.

Before recording its 1982 debut, Death Penalty, Witchfinder General shuffled through a handful of drummers, hiring Graham Ditchfield to play on the album. Unable to secure a permanent bassist by the time of recording, Cope plays bass on Death Penalty but gives credit to a fictional Woolfy Trope. “Invisible Hate” opens the album with acoustic guitar and quiet singing that changes into a rollicking, Vol. 4-esque stomp. “Death Penalty” begins as a backbeat charge and then moves into a brutish crawl that’s spearheaded by Cope’s gnarled riffs.

Witchfinder General put out Friends of Hell in 1983, an album that showcases the group’s NWOBHM propulsion with better production. Cope’s syrupy guitar tone gives Friends of Hell a heavy undercurrent that was missing from most straight-ahead metal bands of that era. Witchfinder General disbanded not long after releasing that album and then briefly regrouped in the early 2000s, when people started to show renewed interest in proto-doom.

Witchfinder General, Pagan Altar, Cirith Ungol, Night Sun, Toad, Zior, Dust, Iron Claw, Wicked Lady, and Sir Lord Baltimore: members of a downtrodden troupe that carried doom’s tattered flag across hostile grounds.

5 Before Saunders, William Burroughs called a character “the Heavy Metal Kid” in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine. Barry Gifford then used “heavy metal” in his 1968 Rolling Stone review of Electric Flag’s album, A Long Time Comin’. That same year, Steppenwolf crooned “heavy metal thunder” in “Born to be Wild,” describing the sound of a motorcycle roaring down the road. Mike Saunders utilized the term to describe Humble Pie’s As Safe as Yesterday in his 1970 review of that record before applying it to Sir Lord Baltimore. He used the phrase positively with Sir Lord Baltimore, but it had a pejorative connotation in his Humble Pie review. Saunders later became widely known as Metal Mike for coining the phrase.

6 Formed in 1969, Black Widow sounds like The Doors with an occult spin.

7 I defy you to say that title out loud and not laugh (or cringe).

8 After Frost and Fire, Michael Vujea replaced bassist and founding member Greg Lindstrom.

Figure in Black

Scott “Wino” Weinrich is doom, through and through. He’s shown us time and again that doom is much more than a label. It’s an ideology and way of life that, now in his fifties, the veteran musician continues to embody.

Wino was born in Rockville, Maryland.9 He always loved music, finding a childhood favorite in The Beatles. And then, at the age of twelve, he witnessed Black Sabbath. “I saw Sabbath on my twelfth birthday, during the Paranoid tour, a gig that changed my life,” Wino said.* “From the time I saw Sabbath, I knew I wasn’t into that happy music. The music…has to hit you hard in the gut.” Wino also found early influence in proto-punk bands such as The Stooges, The Dictators, and The Saints. While the speed and concision of those groups might seem antithetical to The Obsessed and Saint Vitus, Wino has always channeled the raw attack of punk in his music.

In high school, Wino formed a hard rock band called Warhorse. A low-quality video of a 1978 concert at Wooten High School shows the group playing Zeppelin and Sabbath covers alongside energetic originals. Wino’s guitar got increasingly out of tune throughout the set, but the performance didn’t suffer. His music created divisive reactions even then. The video ends with a student testimony. “Let’s put it this way,” the teenager said. “I’d rather be grocery shopping with my mother than watch that concert…The music is just too out of it. You’ve got to be a big freak to watch that concert.” Like many disgruntled reactions to heavy music, the guy’s criticism doubles as a compliment. People don’t forget Wino’s visceral music, even if they hate it. Wino doesn’t seem to care much either way. He just wants to jam.

Warhorse evolved into The Obsessed, a band that’s left a crater on the face of heavy music. After a few lineup changes, The Obsessed released the Sodden Jackal EP in 1983, with Wino on guitar and vocals, Mark Laue on bass, and Ed Gulli on drums. Awash in fuzz, Sodden Jackal has more of an edge than Sir Lord Baltimore and Cirith Ungol—blades Wino discovered in Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains and then reworked for his own purposes. “It’s heavy music,” Wino said,† “but there’s a punk spirit there.”

The Obsessed recorded its self-titled LP in 1984, but the album didn’t get released until 1990. Like Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Sabotage, The Obsessed is tinged with hope and joy but also wallows in anger and hopelessness. Keep in mind that thrash had consumed America when The Obsessed recorded this record. Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax had already released albums that defined the sonic-boom-inducing genre, and they were gearing up to release ones that would perfect it. The Obsessed had no interest in jumping on the thrash bandwagon. Although Metal Blade once expressed interest in releasing The Obsessed, the Los Angeles label ultimately decided against it because of how heavily thrash dominated the market.

Rockville is only a forty-minute drive to Washington, DC, a city with one of the most impactful hardcore scenes in America. With such heavyweights as Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and, later, Fugazi calling DC home, the city also bore witness to a long string of influential touring bands. Fueled by a mutual disdain, tension between hardcore and metal fans often erupted in violence. Talking about The Obsessed in 1994, Henry Rollins said, “If you had no hair and someone had long hair, it meant friction.”‡ That animosity didn’t deter The Obsessed from playing shows with hardcore bands—a very punk thing to do. Having loved punk since its inception, Wino thought the dividing lines between punk and metal were bullshit. In 2004, he said, “I was always influenced by the punk energy, but before the punk thing hit, we were already totally into The Stooges, we totally loved Raw Power, we listened to The Saints, The Dictators…I really felt that we could hold our own with the punks, so we tried to prove that at every turn.”§

Wino and The Obsessed won over hardcore heroes such as Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins by being authentic and refusing to back down. Describing a show when The Obsessed opened for Bad Brains, MacKaye said, “to our punk aesthetic, [The Obsessed] sounded a lot like a dumb heavy metal band.”‡ The Obsessed had a dedicated following, and, according to MacKaye, “there was really a lot of friction” between the band’s fans and hardcore kids. The Obsessed nevertheless continued to play with hardcore acts, even though MacKaye and his friends “would get into fights with [The Obsessed fans] and run into problems with each other.” Wino eventually bonded with MacKaye over their mutual admiration for The Faith, leading the unwitting straight-edge godfather to realize that Wino was just a rabid fan of underground music, much like himself.

Henry Rollins revered Wino for similar reasons. “He just has no need to lie,” Rollins said in 1994. “The guy’s got no bullshit.” Authenticity is the holy grail in punk and hardcore, so among those who were smart enough to see beyond the petty rivalry between punkers and metalheads, Wino and his music had a huge impact, paving the way for musicians to combine hardcore and doom into the caustic stew that is sludge.

While The Obsessed taunted punkers in DC, Saint Vitus also battled surly hardcore kids with the war hammer of doom. Formed in 1979 in Lomita, CA, when it was still a grimy industrial town, the band named itself after Black Sabbath’s “St. Vitus Dance,” finding primary influence in the Birmingham quartet. Originally consisting of Dave Chandler on guitar, Scott Reagers on vocals, Mark Adams on bass, and Armando Acosta on drums, Saint Vitus faced similar difficulties as The Obsessed. Because most metalheads were more interested in thrash than doom, promoters didn’t want to book Saint Vitus. Thankfully, the band refused to compromise.

Members of LA crossover punk band Overkill10 witnessed Saint Vitus live and decided to start booking shows with the quartet, even though the groups sounded nothing alike. One of the earliest amalgams of hardcore and thrash, Overkill understood that punk and metal would inevitably breed. Overkill was signed to SST, a label run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, so Chandler “asked if there was any way that they could get someone from Black Flag to come to” a Saint Vitus show.¶ He “was just curious to see what their opinion of [Saint Vitus] would be if they did show up.” Overkill followed through: Ginn, Chuck Biscuits, and recent vocal recruit Henry Rollins came out to watch Saint Vitus one night. Impressed by the band’s heaviness and confrontational vibe, Ginn asked if the group would want to release a record through SST. Saint Vitus jumped at the opportunity. Ginn then booked the band to open for Black Flag.

Describing the first time Saint Vitus played with Black Flag, Chandler said, “I believe there were three other bands and Black Flag headlined. The stage was about a foot tall from the ground up, and the place was completely jam packed with about 400 crazy punk rockers, who gave us no response whatsoever. You could hear crickets after our songs.” Pissed at the lack of response, bassist Mark Adams started taunting the crowd. Chandler remembered,

Now everyone in the crowd is pissed off, violent, throwing things, and showering us with spit. Black Flag of course loved this and the word got out among the punk underground that if you wanted to have a really violent worked-up crowd, just have Saint Vitus open for you. We took beatings from punk crowds at every show all the way from 1981 through our first tour with Black Flag in 1984. In those days punks were very particular about what they liked and didn’t like, and even though they found us utterly boring and cliché, the fact that we would not give up or change our style somehow endeared us to them. By the time we did our second tour with Black Flag in the summer of 1985, a lot of the same people who trashed us now liked us and gave shit to the people who were still trashing us. Eventually this led to us playing to ALL punk rock crowds. It would be rare to play to a metal fan.¶

Thrash bands were playing bigger venues and becoming increasingly disconnected from crowds. The Obsessed and Saint Vitus directly interacted with audiences, infusing doom with the ethos of accessibility that defines punk and hardcore.

Saint Vitus recorded its self-titled EP in 1982. Because of legal troubles SST faced, the record didn’t come out until 1984. Saint Vitus takes Sabbath’s crawl to a primal extreme, replacing the jazz flourish with Neanderthal simplicity. Exactly like Black Flag and Minor Threat’s music, part of the LP’s appeal is that it doubles as an invitation, encouraging fans to play music. The first track, “Saint Vitus,” is mid-tempo hardcore doused in distortion—and quite possibly the first sludge metal song on record. Crooning like Bobby Liebling, Reager’s vocals surf atop a toxic wave of Chandler’s guitar and Acosta’s drumming, which has its own riptide. Halfway through, a punk choir yells, “Saint Vitus / Saint Vitus / Saint Vitus Dance!” brilliantly utilizing hardcore’s trope of group vocals in a metallic context.

Saint Vitus reaches peak heaviness in the closer, “Burial at Sea.” The track clocks in at over eight minutes and lumbers at a slower pace than “Black Sabbath.” That would’ve been mind-blowing in 1984. Chandler plays torturous power chords and tremoring single notes before “Saint Vitus” charges forward with snarling, punk-laden thrash—but only to regress back to the prehistoric gait of its opening. The track exaggerates key elements of Sabbath’s sound—the slow parts are slower, and fast parts faster—in a move that countless bands have used since.

SST released Saint Vitus’s Hallow’s Victim LP and The Walking Dead EP in 1985. The title track of Hallow’s Victim begins with striding doom but then bursts into a hardcore sprint, making for another perfect example of proto sludge. As for The Walking Dead, its eponymous song moves at a sloth’s pace while “Darkness” and “White Stallions” mix Sabbath’s swing with the feral violence of early Metallica.

Touring for those releases in the winter of 1986, Saint Vitus accidentally left Reager at a rest stop in Virginia, after which he decided to head home, forcing Saint Vitus to finish the tour without him. Before that, Reager had already decided to quit because Saint Vitus wasn’t “making any money and he couldn’t afford to be in the band anymore.”¶ Chandler talked Reager into doing the tour even though the vocalist’s heart wasn’t in it. When his bandmates left him at the rest stop, Reager thought they did it on purpose, hastening his decision to leave.

Knowing the band needed a singer, a friend set the group up to meet Wino on that same tour. The Obsessed had recently become defunct, and, like a mosquito needs blood, Wino needed a band. Saint Vitus couldn’t have asked for a more apt vocalist: someone who’d also cut his teeth playing doom to antagonistic punks. Although Wino played guitar first and sang second, Chandler convinced him to become Saint Vitus’s lead singer.

When Wino joined, Saint Vitus already had most of Born Too Late written. The band didn’t dillydally, releasing that album half a year after Reager left. Producer Joe Carducci remembered that Saint Vitus practiced in a backyard shed in Lomita.** The owner of the house sold crack, adding another layer to the negativity Saint Vitus channels on Born Too Late.

Whereas Reager’s croon sounds similar to that of Bobby Liebling, Wino’s vocals are gruff, giving Born Too Late an added layer of toughness. Looking at Wino—long, gnarled hair, biker tattoos, and a hawkish face—his vocals are exactly what you’d expect from such a figure. In opener “Born Too Late,” Wino sings about social alienation in a narrative similar to “Iron Man,” except it’s grounded in real life, not a sci-fi universe. Much of the record moves with the foreboding lurch of that track, but there are also faster songs like “Clear Windowpane” and “H.A.A.G.” Even when Saint Vitus picks up the tempo, it sounds like music played by a troupe of yetis.

Just one year later, Saint Vitus put out Mournful Cries, another masterful and genre-defining album. Opener “The Creeps” finds the quartet returning to its roots by rampaging forth with walls of fuzz punk. “Shooting Gallery” depicts the misery of life in a heroin den, matching lyrics like “I saw women and men / Kill themselves again and again” with equally hopeless instrumentation. Saint Vitus often focuses on concrete negativity, summing up its worldview in the lyric “the world is fucking sad.” Mournful Cries also includes “Dragon Time” and “The Troll,” the latter mixing a fantastical character with the bleak perspective of “Born Too Late.” As with Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus’s pessimism is complicated by the fact that its members believe in a Christian God,11 which is why, in addition to wanting to separate themselves from Satanic bands, they decided to include a cross inside the “V” of their logo. Saint Vitus has also maintained that it never wanted to be known as a Christian band.

SST dropped Saint Vitus after Mournful Cries. The quartet released its fifth LP, creatively titled V, on Hellhound in 1990. V is another Saint Vitus record, which is to say that it’s crushing and progressive for its time. Of particular note is the unnervingly evil “Patra (Petra)” and Chandler’s frenetic guitar solos throughout the album. The production value of V is higher than Vitus’s previous efforts, bringing Acosta’s war club drumming to the forefront, exactly where it should be.

Hellhound put out The Obsessed’s then-unreleased self-titled album the same year as V. That renewed Wino’s passion for his first band, so he left Saint Vitus and reformed The Obsessed in LA with bassist Scott Reeder (later of Kyuss) and drummer Greg Rogers (later of Goatsnake). The Obsessed signed to Hellhound, unleashing Lunar Womb in 1991. Though Lunar Womb dwells in hard rock more than Saint Vitus ever did, the LP is still infused with vitriol. Powered by the finely tuned machine that is Reeder and Rogers as a rhythm section, Wino’s riffs and vocals clamp down and refuse to let go. He’s one of those musicians whose material has its own aura. When Wino sings or plays guitar, there’s no question that it’s him.

Scott Reeder left The Obsessed to join Kyuss following the release of Lunar Womb, at which point Guy Pinhas joined on bass. Seeing potential in doom as an untapped market, Columbia signed The Obsessed, putting out The Church Within in 1994. Front to back, that record is badass. Despite glowing reviews from several publications, however, the LP didn’t perform as well as Columbia had hoped. The Obsessed broke up, leaving Pinhas and Rogers to start Goatsnake with Greg Anderson and Pete Stahl.

After The Obsessed disbanded for the second time, Wino spent time living homeless in LA, addicted to meth and booze, before returning to Maryland. In 2004, he said, “My lifestyle in California had peaked: my use of methamphetamine and alcohol had led me to death’s door. I felt that some last vestige of survival somewhere inside me was telling me to get out. So I got the fuck out of California and went back to my hometown.” Still drinking heavily, Wino moved into his parents’ house. And then an intense mushroom trip gave him a wake-up call:

I was experiencing a lot of dark and light thoughts, experiencing a kind of serpent-like energy, which in a way felt good, but also seemed to have nefarious feelings, too. And then on the other side, there were all these “cat” feelings where there was this jaguar spurring me on, which felt very empowering. I was really feeling this incredible duality between the two, this position between light and darkness, which I took to mean the influence of the snake and the jaguar…

Now, right in the middle of this fucking trip, I heard this big ol’ voice in my head say, “You know what, buddy? You’d better stop fuckin’ drinkin’!” This certainly wasn’t something that I didn’t already know. I wasn’t in any kind of denial prior to this trip, because sure, I knew that I had a serious problem. I knew that from day one. But the bottom line is, the trip became a supreme motivator.††

After a much needed, and yet relatively short, break, Wino formed a new power trio, Shine, which became Spirit Caravan after another band named Shine issued a cease and desist. Spirit Caravan released two LPs, Jug Fulla Sun and Elusive Truth, as well as a handful of EPs. Wino then formed The Hidden Hand and has since served time in Place of Skulls and Shrinebuilder, a supergroup consisting of Al Cisneros of Sleep, Scott Kelly of Neurosis, and Dale Crover of Melvins—musicians who’ve made some of the most groundbreaking records in heavy music. Wino also appears on the Probot LP, Dave Grohl’s 2004 project that features the metal heroes he worshipped as a teenager. Saint Vitus tentatively got the Born Too Late lineup back together in 2003, though the group didn’t release its next full-length, Lillie: F-65, until 2012. Original drummer Armando Acosta passed away in 2010 after a long battle with heart problems. The band recruited Henry Vasquez to fill Acosta’s gargantuan-sized shoes.

Throughout the years, the numbing allure of hard drugs has continued to beckon Wino. “I just ended a seven-year methamphetamine bender,” he said to The Quietus in 2014, “which was fucking great and fucking fun, but I wanted to live and stay out of jail for me, my loved ones, my fans and my spirit. We all know that drug is hard as hell, but I loved it.” Six months after that interview was published, Wino was deported from Norway in the midst of a Saint Vitus tour. Border patrol found eleven grams of meth in his bag. As journalist Kim Kelly wrote, “That’s a fuck-ton of speed.”

And yet, not even addiction to one of the planet’s most intense and life-ruining drugs has stopped Wino. As Corrosion of Conformity’s Pepper Keenan said back in 1994, Wino is the definition of a lifer, someone who simply has to make music. The 2008 documentary Such Hawks Such Hounds found Wino enjoying life and showing off his prodigious garden between clips of him discussing how to summon the evilest sounds from a guitar. If the present is any indication, it seems like Wino has reached a similarly healthy stasis. After a twenty-three-year hiatus, the original lineup of The Obsessed returned in 2017 with Sacred, an LP that captures the same don’t-fuck-with-me attitude of the trio’s early records, showing a new generation that Wino is a force of nature. Whatever lays ahead in his life, one thing’s for sure: the man is doomed to play heavy music. I witnessed The Obsessed in 2018. Wino unsurprisingly stole the show, playing guitar and singing with the same tenacity he had in 1978.

9 If that fact appeared in a novel about an infamous rocker, it would be way too cheesy. But it’s just one of many things that contribute to Wino’s mythos.

10 Not to be confused with the better-known thrash band of the same name from New Jersey.

11 The band has some other beliefs that are a bit out there, one being that the spirit of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of entertainers, has been, as Chandler told Decibel, “with us from the very beginning.” When Wino OD’d at Chandler’s house, the guitarist put his arm on Wino’s shoulder and told him, “You’re not gonna die here. This is Vitus’s house.” “Within ten minutes I felt better,” Wino said. “I can’t say for sure what happened, but that’s a true story.”

Bringers of Light and Darkness

Venom loosed Welcome to Hell on the world in 1981, with its iconic goat head pentagram on the cover. Playing songs like “Sons of Satan” and “In League with Satan,” the English proto-thrash band stirred fear and fascination in fans. Slayer put out Show No Mercy two years later. On that cover, the band’s logo sits inside a pentagram, with a goat-headed warlord wielding his blade alongside. Death and black metal bands would soon take that Satanic imagery to more sinister places. Trouble looked toward the light.

Guitarist Rick Wartell started Trouble in 1978, when he was in high school. Growing up in Chicago, a city known for its high murder and crime rates, Wartell wanted to capture the heaviness of the times in sound. He also believed in God’s power and love. He recruited a rhythm section and began playing shows, covering vocal duties until 1981, when Eric Wagner responded to a “Vocalist Wanted” ad Trouble had placed in the Illinois Entertainer. Having grown up Catholic and still adhering to those beliefs, Wagner fit right in. After bassist Tim Brown and drummer Jeff Olson replaced the original rhythm section, and Bruce Franklin joined on second guitar, Trouble began firing on all cylinders.

A gritty blend of Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, UFO, and Judas Priest, the band captivated audiences across Chicago and the Midwest. In February 1983, a fan recorded Trouble’s performance at Aurora’s Deaf Club. The tape burrowed through the underground. Brian Slagel started Metal Blade records one year earlier. A fat finger on the hand that molded thrash, Metal Blade put out the earliest recording of Metallica on a compilation called Metal Massacre in 1982, not to mention Slayer’s first album in 1983. Trouble was definitely not thrash, and yet, when Slagel heard the band’s live tape, he immediately decided to sign the quintet. Poking fun at the recently coined black metal moniker, he labeled Trouble as white metal because of the group’s Christian beliefs. But with songs like “Bastards will Pay” and “Son of a Bitch” appearing on that live recording, it was clear that Trouble’s take on Christianity was anything but bright and shiny.

With Slagel working as producer, Trouble tracked its 1984 debut LP, now called Psalm 9.12 In the Bible, the ninth verse of Psalm 9 reads, “The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, / a stronghold in times of trouble.” With a band name, album title, and lyrics that support belief in a Christian God, it’s almost hard to understand why metal fans embraced Trouble, especially during a time when open disdain for organized religion had become a given for so many Hessians. Psalm 9 is simply too loud and powerful to ignore, even if you hate Christianity.

“The Tempter” starts the LP with swirling noise and a tom pattern that tips its hat to Ginger Baker’s drumming in “White Room.”13 When the slug-paced guitar, bass, and drums kick in, the song becomes a black hole. Wartell and Franklin’s guitar notes ooze, gaining traction in swaying harmonies. Speaking from the Evil One’s perspective, Wagner barks, “I am the tempter / Ruler of hell / Bringer of evil / Beware.” Trouble unmoors a battle-worn chariot of heavy metal as Wagner wails about humanity’s ill-fated spiritual battle: “We are damned for what evil has done / You know now the Tempter has won.” When Trouble again moves into a doomed stride, the transition from fast to slow multiplies its power. Franklin and Wartell’s main riff in “The Tempter” is hands-down one of the heaviest songs to emerge from the early 1980s.

“Assassin” sounds too much like Hell Bent for Leather-era Judas Priest, but “Victim of the Insane” more than makes up for that mimicry with its death knell march. Lyrically, the track comes out of left field compared to what other metal bands of the time were writing about. Wagner urges people to love and respect each other. The morose instrumentation seems to contradict that message, but it functions as a warning: negativity will consume your life if you choose selfishness over love. “Revelation (Life or Death)” showcases riffs whose weight could buckle a bridge. Although fuzzed-out, the guitar tone is defined. You can discern every note. “Bastards Will Pay” thunders downhill with a swinging chug and then demolishes unsuspecting villages with a battering-ram groove. “The Fall of Lucifer” and “Endtime” follow suit.

In a way, “Psalm 9” and its praise of God is creepier than many bands’ open support of Satanism and the occult. Olson hangs on the back of Wartell and Franklin’s time-slowing riff while Wagner’s trance-inducing monotone looms in the background. “The Lord shall endure forever,” he drones. “For He hath prepared His throne for judgment.” It’s a band saying, “Don’t fuck with that Satanic stuff, because it will eat you alive. We’re going to create sounds that mirror hell; hopefully that will scare you into living a good life.”

Orange County-based Christian hair metal band Stryper released its first album, The Yellow and Black Attack, the same year Psalm 9 came out. Putting those records next to each other is the same as comparing a white-toothed Christian infomercial to a burned-out preacher from some no-name town in the Dust Belt. With its upbeat songs and tinny guitars, Stryper’s version of Christianity seems like a gimmick, much like the band’s uniform of yellow-and-black spandex. In “From Wrong to Right” Michael Sweet belts, “Why lose when you could win? Give God a try.” Join the winning team! Christians rule! By contrast, Wagner’s urging for listeners to follow God’s path feels desperate, partly because he was also speaking to himself. At the time, the members of Trouble were beginning to wrestle with that hydra known as addiction. They knew what hell looks like, and they thought people deserved more.

The band followed Psalm 9 with 1985’s The Skull. Featuring the epic “The Wish” and enforcers “Wickedness of Man” and “The Skull,” the LP doesn’t tap into Psalm 9’s intensity. If you’ve ever been in a band, you know that it becomes more like a web of romantic relationships than regular friendships. People’s personality flaws immediately bubble to the surface. Following The Skull, Trouble bent under that tension, amplified as it was by its members’ tendency to obliterate themselves with drink and drugs. Facing those problems, Trouble was still able to hammer out 1987’s Run to the Light. Even more so than Psalm 9, that album is laced with spiritual desperation as Wagner tries and fails to see the light in himself and the world around him. As the mid-tempo “On Borrowed Time” treads forward, Wagner confesses, “I feel so sad, the world is driving me mad…/ It’s getting hard, hard to live in a place / Where nothing is real.”

The doom flagbearers needed a break, which might’ve turned into a permanent one if it weren’t for Rick Rubin, who breathed new life into Trouble by signing the group to Def American in 1989 and then releasing Trouble in 1990, the band’s strongest material since Psalm 9. Now battling a different behemoth musical trend—this time grunge instead of thrash—Trouble once again refused to sway. Featuring Barry Stern on drums, Trouble includes all the things you’d want from a Trouble record—heavy riffs, earnest vocals, and grooving rhythms; it also ventures into new territory with the blues-soaked ballad “A Sinner’s Fame,” highlighting the fact that heaviness and catchiness are far from mutually exclusive.

Although 1992’s Manic Frustration is Trouble’s best-selling record, it’s watered down by noticeable tinges of hair metal. Eric Wagner, whose voice is elemental for Trouble’s sound, left the band following the 1995 album Plastic Green Head. Exhorder vocalist Kyle Thomas filled Wagner’s shoes until Trouble finally decided to disband. Twelve years later, Wagner, Olson, Wartell, Franklin, and new bassist Chuck Robinson released Simple Mind Connection, after which Wagner left again. Olson then left the drum spot to Mark Lira and the band once again found a new bassist. With vocalist Kory Clarke now on board, Trouble is still chugging along. The band put out The Distortion Field in 2013 and toured alongside NOLA sludge legends Crowbar in 2016.

In the Probot liner notes, Dave Grohl says that Psalm 9 gut-punched him in the same way as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s an apt comparison. The Beatles expanded people’s view of psychedelic rock. Trouble showed us that Black Sabbath had only just begun to explore the possibilities of slow, blues-infused metal.

•••

Krautrock was Germany’s main musical export from the late 1960s to mid-1970s. Influenced by theoretical conceits of jazz and musical minimalism, bands like Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, and Can played swirling rock with lots of space for improvisation. That spirit of intertwining rock with concepts from the art world crept up to Sweden and influenced several anti-capitalist bands that labeled themselves as “progg” (not to be confused with the other prog—King Crimson, Rush, Yes, et al.). Gudibrallan, Träd, Gräs och Stenar, and Älgarnas Trädgård espoused leftist sentiments in lyrics and played festivals that doubled as political demonstrations.

It’s interesting stuff. But for much of Sweden’s youth, especially those from the working class, progg dripped with pretension. Hunter S. Thompson once wrote about going to Timothy Leary’s house and getting snubbed by the higher-than-thou LSD guru. Young musicians in Sweden experienced that same elitism from progg figureheads: If you don’t get what we’re doing, go to college, major in art, drop acid, and then come back when you’re more enlightened. You can see in progg the problems of the hippie movement. It’s too lofty, idealistic, sure of itself, and exclusionary. Much of the genre’s songs also build up to a warm, utopian calm. Candlemass responded to that trend by crushing people’s bones. In 1990, singer Messiah Marcolin said, “I can’t listen to acid music. I want to kill people when I hear it.”*

In 1984, Leif Edling’s band, Nemesis, broke up, prompting the bassist to form a new group with guitarist Mats Björkman and drummer Matz Ekström. They named it Candlemass. The Stockholm trio wasted no time, recording two demos, Witchcraft and Studio Garage, that first year. As word of the demos spread, Candlemass tracked an early version of “Bewitched,” a monolith that, far heavier than anything else coming out of Sweden, caught the attention of French independent label Black Dragon, who signed the band.

Edling had been handling vocals up to that point. The people at Black Dragon liked his style and urged him to sing on Candlemass’s first LP, but Edling wanted a proper singer. Ekström brought in Johan Längqvist. Candlemass also wanted a second guitarist to fill out its sound. Surrounded by progg guitarists and players who just wanted to mimic Angus Young, the band struggled to find a fifth member. As Edling recalled, “The problem was that our area of Stockholm was full of great guitarists…But they were all into AC/DC or UFO. They hated the sort of heavy music we were doing.”† Christian Weberyd played on the Bewitched demo but dipped out, at which point Candlemass convinced Klas Bergwall to play guitar on its debut LP. Even though that lineup dissolved immediately after recording, it’s left a fist-sized dent in doom’s thick skull.

With its first LP, Candlemass ventured beyond blues scales and into more brutal and epic territory, also cementing doom as a moniker in the metal lexicon by titling the album Epicus Doomicus Metallicus. The band had been describing its music as epic doom metal for years. But when Ekström suggested the dog Latin version of that as a title, Edling hated it, calling it “utter shite.” The band couldn’t agree on an alternative, so the title stuck.

Black Dragon cut Candlemass a check, and the group entered Thunderload Studios in January of 1986. Shredder Yngwie Malmsteen had recorded a demo there, and the members of Candlemass loved it. With a fucked-up heating system, the studio was far from cushy, especially in January, when temperatures routinely dive below zero in Sweden. “You’ve no idea how cold it was—totally freezing,” Edling said.† “The radiators didn’t work, which made it even worse…We were all dressed in fur coats, woolen gloves, and long-johns. Trying to play guitar with cold hands is almost impossible. I know we’re a doom band, but this was suffering way beyond the call of duty.” Längqvist hopped around to keep his circulation going while he tracked vocals. Steam rose from his body when he exited the booth. With only five days booked at Thunderload, the members of Candlemass didn’t want to waste time partying, so they endured those brutal conditions without the warmth of booze or drugs. Their hunger and drive from that time gives Epicus Doomicus Metallicus its virulence.

Längqvist opens “Solitude” with a soliloquy about wanting to die.14 Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, and Trouble’s urging to embrace God’s love? Gone. Instead: “Torment is delight to me / Death is my sanctuary / I seek it with pleasure.” Björkman and Bergwall follow with a riff whose avoidance of blues scales makes it entirely bleak. Ekström crushes his toms like enemies’ skulls, throwing in short double bass rolls while still hanging on to the beat’s gnarled back. As the instruments coalesce, “Solitude” sucks the air out of the room.

“Demon’s Gate” begins with muffled kidnapper speaking that’s encased by wraiths of synth. Modern black metal groups like Dimmu Borgir have credited Candlemass as a core influence. As far as Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, that comes across most clearly in its spine-tingling keyboards. Beneath pirate ship dual harmony guitars, Ekström plays a double bass groove that rumbles the deck. “Crystal Ball” and “Black Stone Wielder” are mid-paced juggernauts that transition into molten doom. “Under the Oak” is told from the perspective of humanity’s lone survivor after the devil has decided to purge our species, coupling that story with instrumentation that’s summoned from the depths of hell. Epicus Doomicus Metallicus is a bone cruncher, but it’s also a dexterous record that showcases Candlemass’s virtuosity. There’s no better album to go down in history as having coined doom as a label.

Längqvist and Bergwall left Candlemass after the Thunderload sessions. As if that wasn’t enough, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus tanked on the sales front, at least initially. Like many progressive pieces of art, EDM was also lambasted in early reviews. But the album’s lack of immediate success became a boon for Candlemass. Edling said, “In the end, the failure of the album to sell immediately was such a boost. You see, firstly Black Dragon dropped the band, which allowed us to sign a new deal with Active Records. Then, the metal underground began to discover the album without any media prompting or hype. So, things started to mushroom and explode all on their own.”† Epicus Doomicus Metallicus highlighted doom’s potential to become harsher and more grandiose than Black Sabbath had ever envisioned. It captured the ears of metalheads across the world and inspired fellow Swedes to form Entombed and Dismember, helping the country become more well-known for metal than progg.

The shockwave induced by Epicus Doomicus Metallicus pressured Candlemass to deliver an equally powerful second LP. But first the band needed to secure a singer and lead guitarist. By sheer luck, one of metal’s most unique and talented vocalists, a young guy named Bror Jan Alfredo, who called himself Messiah Marcolin, showed up on Candlemass’s doorstep. The former singer of Mercy, Marcolin was looking for a heavier band. He fell in love with Candlemass when a friend gave him a copy of EDM. Marcolin heard that Candlemass needed a vocalist, so he got in touch with Edling and began pestering him for an audition. The singer lived six hours south of Stockholm. Without any guarantee that he’d make the cut, he uprooted his life and moved to the city. The members of Candlemass nearly shit their pants when they heard Marcolin’s piercing wail. Edling recalled, “Me, Mappe, and Matz were very skeptical at first, because here was this ogre-y looking guy with this ridiculous hairdo saying that he’s the best singer in the world and that he’s going to blow us all away with his voice. And it turned out, he was exactly right.”‡

If it weren’t for Marcolin and his tenacity, Candlemass might’ve withered on the vine. Mercolin remembered,

When I went in to audition, I knew the songs better than they did. They hadn’t rehearsed since they had recorded Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, so I had to basically remind them of how the songs went. Who knows—if I hadn’t joined Candlemass, I don’t know if they would have continued at all. I just really wanted to continue what they had done with Epicus Doomicus Metallicus. I think I really influenced Leif to continue with the doom idea and making it as heavy as possible.‡

Candlemass soon convinced Mike Wead, Mercyful Fate’s guitarist, to join. Knowing that Ekström was getting bored with doom, Marcolin asked Wead if he knew any drummers. Wead introduced Jan Lindh into the fold, who loved to play slow, making each hit as impactful as possible. “When you play guitar with Jan’s drums,” Björkman said, “you have to actually wait a millisecond on every beat because he’s hanging with his snare drum, and that’s the Candlemass sound.”‡

This beefed-up version of Candlemass recorded a demo and mailed it to David Constable of Active Records. A fan of EDM, Constable was broke and couldn’t decide if he should sign the group; so he played the demo for a Hessian cabbie, using the guy as a cut-rate focus group. The cabbie loved it, convincing Constable to sign Candlemass. Soon after, the quintet once again entered the frozen recesses of Thunderload, this time to record Nightfall.

As they began tracking, Lindh, Marcolin, Edling, and Björkman realized that Wead’s playing was too busy for Candlemass. The group played loudly at practice and didn’t actually hear what Wead had been doing until they began tracking individual instruments. Time was extremely limited, but the band still decided to kick him out and find someone else. A guitarist named Lars Johansson had recently moved to Stockholm. Candlemass gave him a shot. Johansson remembered,

I met Messiah at the Hard Rock Café in Stockholm, and he asked me about joining Candlemass. I wasn’t really familiar with this thing called “doom” at the time, but I went down to the studio to check it out. I’ll never forget that first meeting. I said, “Hi, I’m Lars. I play guitar.” They introduced themselves and then hit play on the tape. The first song was “Samarithan,” and I remember saying, “Is there something wrong with the tape machine? Is it supposed to be that slow?” In the mid-to-late eighties, everything was very Yngwie Malmsteen-ish, and everybody was trying to play as fast as possible, even faster than possible in some cases, like when you had some guitar players in America using power drills with three picks attached and ended up getting their hair stuck in the drill! Ouch.‡

Lineup changes create wrinkles that can take years to sort out. Despite the difficulties of navigating a new band chemistry, Candlemass was able to track Nightfall within the time Active could afford. As if the band hadn’t dealt with enough headaches, Candlemass didn’t like the final mix that the Thunderload engineer produced. Fixated on the goal of making Nightfall as heavy as possible and unwilling to settle, the group hired Mats Lindfors to mix the album. According to Marcolin, Lindfors single-handedly “saved Nightfall and made it sound so heavy and so good.”‡

Nightfall hit stores in November of 1987, just under a year and a half after Epicus Doomicus Metallicus was released. All the trouble Candlemass went through to finish Nightfall turned out to be more than worth it. Theatrical keyboards soar as Marcolin’s operatic vocals erupt from the doom volcano of “The Well of Souls.” Considering his masterful singing, many fans assume that Marcolin went through classical training. He’s actually self-taught. When Messiah was a kid, his dad would play Pavarotti on repeat. The music of that Italian legend left imprints on Marcolin’s impressionable brain. Messiah combines Pavarotti’s style with Ian Gillan’s urgency. Längqvist is a great vocalist, but Marcolin can cover a wider spectrum and hold on to even the highest notes with a death grip. “The Well of Souls” stomps with a riff that pays homage to Trouble with its beckoning melody. Lyrically, Candlemass delves into fantastical realms with an emphasis on detail and narrative. As Marcolin said, “Candlemass is not a Satanic band or a religious band. It’s just basically stories about good and evil.”* “Codex Giga” and “Samarithan” skulk the hinterlands, creating a setting for those stories with dramatic, classically informed guitar work.

Running further with that classical influence, Nightfall features a bastardized cover of Chopin’s “Marche Funebre.” The original is fitting for a ceremony commemorating the death of a single person. Candlemass’s cover, with its bombastic percussion and towering guitars, sounds like a dirge for humanity. Lindh opens a cavern with the rhythmic pattern of “Dark Are the Veils of Death,” from which a monstrous riff rears its head. “Mourner’s Lament” and “Bewitched” explore similarly dismal realms before the record drifts to a close with “Black Candles,” composed by Mike Wead.

Epicus Doomicus Metallicus is a weightier record, but Nightfall encouraged a legion of European metal bands to dive headfirst into fantasy. Unlike its debut, Candlemass’s sophomore effort saw immediate success. Messiah Marcolin, who wore a monk’s robe onstage to enhance the medieval vibe of Candlemass, recorded two more records with the group before departing to form Memento Mori. Candlemass hired Tomas Vikstrom to sing on 1992’s Chapter VI. Faced with a drought of interest from fans, Edling decided to end the band and explore different musical avenues. After releasing two LPs with Abstrakt Algebra, Edling cobbled together a new Candlemass lineup for Dactylis Glomerata in 1998, and then convinced Johansson, Björkman, Lindh, and Marcolin to reunite for 2005’s Candlemass. Offering several courses of choice riffage, those records, along with the band’s more recent output (Candlemass is the only album to feature Marcolin after he left the first time), don’t live up to the grandiosity of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus or Nightfall. Although the group announced 2012’s Psalms for the Dead as its final LP, Candlemass returned in 2019 with The Door to Doom, a record featuring EDM vocalist Johan Längqvist and a track with Tony Iommi on guitar. While the record has some grade-A riffs, it ultimately comes across as ersatz Candlemass.

In the end, those mediocre albums take nothing away from Candlemass’s legacy. Musicians have long complained about inaccurate genre descriptors, as well as the idea of genre itself. Candlemass embraced doom as a label from the outset, knowing full well that the moniker only enhances the vibe and message of its music.

12 The record was originally self-titled, but the band changed it to Psalm 9 in 1990 after releasing a different self-titled record.

13 Psalm 9 closes with a cover of “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” so the Cream influence is no surprise.

14 Edling writes Candlemass’s lyrics.

Doom Till Death

There’s a system of subterranean caverns—some call it death-doom, others call it funeral doom—inhabited by burdensome tempos, horrific growls, copiously down-tuned guitars, and atmospheric keyboards. The inhabitants of these caverns, bands like Paradise Lost, Winter, My Dying Bride, Katatonia, and Thergothon, are guided by an impulse antithetical to the one that motivates the prisoners of Plato’s cave to seek sunlight: rather than escaping the cavern, these bands seek its deepest recesses, hunting those parts of the human spirit that refuse to evolve.

Entrance Zone

Paradise Lost was born in Halifax, a bleak region north of Birmingham, in 1988. It was a watershed year for death metal and grindcore, with Carcass putting out Reek of Putrefaction and Napalm Death releasing From Enslavement to Obliteration, its hyperspeed follow-up to Scum. The members of Paradise Lost sought to wed the brutality of death metal with the hopelessness of The Cult and the gloom of Candlemass. According to guitarist Gregor Mackintosh, Paradise Lost’s drab aesthetic was molded by its environs.

Part of it comes from the area where we grew up. Not sure why, but all the other bands that also came out of the Bradford/Halifax/Leeds area also made very depressing music…I think it’s because we’re all just miserable…the area has still got this grim, miserable edge to it. There’s a saying around here that goes “it’s grim up north,” and it was very true for us. We were always pretty miserable about stuff. We’ve lightened up a bit now, I think. I think it’s an acceptance that life is a bit shit.*

With low annual amounts of sunlight and high chances of rain pretty much constantly, it’s not hard to understand why many people from Leeds and its surrounding cities might have a bleak outlook, which is why so much important goth emerged from the region. The members of Paradise Lost came of age at a time when local pubs were blasting Sisters of Mercy records, which may or may not have been a way to make customers more depressed and thus more likely to buy too many drinks. Guitarist Aaron Aedy recalled, “In Bradford we used to go to a number of clubs where one minute they’d be playing serious gothic music, and the next minute they would have on Kreator or something.” Vocalist Nick Holmes added,

We were also into the Melvins at the time and they played really slow. I remember an album they did called Gluey Porch Treatments. It was so slow. We liked the idea of combining the sort of Sabbath riffage, but making it even slower to get the whole doom thing going. But honestly, we were so obsessed with the death metal stuff in those days that we didn’t really venture that far outside our own musical field.*

In 1990, the group put out Lost Paradise through Peaceville Records, Paul Halmshaw’s label that would release albums that became the stone slabs upon which death-doom is based. Throughout Lost Paradise, Holmes’s screams lunge with preternatural force as Aedy and Mackintosh unleash death metal riffs that have undergone a mutation in which they’ve become large as trolls—only, with the bigger size, they have to plod instead of sprint. A humming drone with growls in the background opens the record, a precursor to the grueling atmospheres Sunn O))) would craft with Attila Csihar. “Deadly Inner Sense” begins with a funereal death metal procession, Sabbathian guitar work reaching from the hearse with skeletal hands.

Part of why Paradise Lost pursued slowness instead of speed was because its drummer, Matt Archer, wasn’t very good at playing fast. It also took some time for him to excel at playing slow. He anxiously sits on the nose of the beat throughout “Deadly Inner Sense,” rushing when he goes into fills and double bass rolls. Archer is able to settle into the sea monster chug of “Paradise Lost” a bit more, and it seems like he got more comfortable with slow tempos as the record progresses. As for the doom aspect of the LP, “Rotting Misery” is the clearest example. The track lumbers with Candlemass’s gait before becoming an atonal fortress, unsettling piano strikes ringing through its bricks. For Paradise Lost, the Lost Paradise era was all about the combination of Holmes’s grisly vocals and Mackintosh and Aedy’s towering guitar work. It’s Carcass dying of hypothermia. “Frozen Illusion” is a microcosm of the record in that it’s half doom and half death metal, starting with a tortured crawl and transitioning into a metallic jog, and then going back-and-forth to create a fight-or-flight tug.

Lost Paradise was mind-blowing for its time, showing people the brutal potential of mixing subgenres rather than staying restricted within one mode. Paradise Lost followed the first album with another massively influential one in 1991, Gothic. And yet, despite Decibel placing the record at number six on its list, “The Top 100 Doom Metal Albums of All Time,” Gothic is death metal channeled through a doom aesthetic—but still death metal at heart as it surges with driving double bass, galloping chugs, and energetic solos. Some great doom riffs do rear their heads on the record, but Gothic spends more time in mid-paced death metal than trudging doom. It’s funeral doom in the way that My War’s B Side is sludge, which is to say only as an antecedent. All that said, Gothic has influenced virtually every death-doom band in existence. Both Lost Paradise and Gothic showed people that doom can be as taxing as blistering death metal, clearing foliage from the entrance of the cave for future adventurers. Having remained active since its inception, Paradise Lost released what might be its heaviest record in 2017, Medusa, which goes far beyond the death-doom threshold, venturing into caverns that have never known light.

Twilight Zone

Formed the same year as Paradise Lost, New York’s Winter has seen nowhere near its critical due, especially considering that the group unveiled Into Darkness, what many see as the first proper death-doom record, in 1990. Moving from a cave’s entrance into its twilight zone, there’s significantly less light and vegetation, and the temperature drops. Winter’s 1989 demo, with its mix of Cro-Mags-tainted death metal and harsh, unchanging doom, inhabits that region.

Growing up, the members of Winter spent more time listening to Discharge and Amebix than Sabbath or Trouble. They liked the brutality of death metal but couldn’t take Satanic imagery seriously. From the outset, Winter set itself up to be an outlier. Live, the band wasn’t well received by thrash or death metal enthusiasts, finding unsuspecting fans in the audiences of Born Against and Nausea. Speaking to The Obelisk in 2012, guitarist Stephen Flam said,

The death metal people, man…Death metal was different then, and thrash heads—it was still divided, and we were not really accepted. What was happening at that time period was Sepultura. Your big dogs were Slayer, Sepultura, and all those groups on Combat Records, so like Possessed and Exodus and all that thrash stuff that happened at the time. Those people didn’t like us. So we were not really a part of that, and all the groups that were more into the death metal scene sang about Satan and stuff like that. Couldn’t really relate to them either, because lyrically, that’s not where we were at anyway. Our stuff might have been apocalyptic as far as lyrics, but we were socially aware of what was going on around us, more like an Amebix, or a Discharge, or Antisect, or Conflict. Those are the groups that I think, lyrically, made us think.

Like I said, I love Slayer, I love [Celtic] Frost. I like them musically. As far as lyrically, it was always more the punk groups that grabbed me, because it was like reading the newspaper, what was here today and what was going on currently. But I liked the mysticism of how it was written. Certain people, like Tom Warrior [of Celtic Frost], had a way of taking certain things and not making it sound too in-your-face.

Winter’s music occupied a similarly liminal space as its lyrics. John Alman’s vocals throughout Into Darkness sit somewhere between hardcore shouts and grindcore growls as the band cuts sauntering doom with a deathcore jog. Winter’s use of keys for atmosphere provided another barrier in reception, although that would eventually become another of the group’s lasting contributions to funeral and death-doom. In the instrumental opener of Into Darkness, the guitars and bass wallow in misery with barely-moving riffs. Frank Casey keeps the band chained to frozen ground with barebones drumming and periodic forays into double bass grooves and extended tom rolls. Tony Pinnisi envelops those sounds with swirling keyboards, making the track sound like a combination of what Neurosis and Grief were doing at the time, but filtered through a death metal sensibility.

The inclusion of Pinnisi in Winter was strange in itself, as he was much older than the rest of the band. Flam said,

[Pinnisi] was in his sixties, and he played Hammond organs and stuff, and we met him through a friend. He used to manage a record store out on Long Island, and he was just a regular guy who had a bunch of organs in his basement. Next thing I know I played him the record as we were recording it and we had him come in and lay down the tracks. We told him what we wanted. Even the engineer was like, “Where the hell did you find this guy?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, man. He manages a record store.” And he ended up being this amazing keyboard player.†

After the taunting lurch of its opening track, Into Darkness finds momentum in “Servants of the Warsmen.” Pushed by Casey’s driving rhythm, Alman barks, “Dark shadows and expectations / Defiance unspoken truth / Doom-filled ignorance and lust / Betrayal of sacred prophecies,” sounding like a genetic hybrid of Lee Dorrian and Henry Rollins. The lyrics might seem fantastical, but, as Flam said, Winter’s apocalyptic imagery is a way to depict real-world ills, like humans’ endless drive to kill each other. Flam added, “there’s imagery of things, ancient civilizations or whatever, and the problems they had at their time—uprising against power or whatever—are the same things we have going on in the current day. We just chose that as the vehicle of where the lyrics should be written.”†

Winter follows with the broken crawl of “Goden,” an eight-plus minute track in which Pinnisi crafts constricting atmospheres. Flam and Zachary Bushey’s cave-dwelling riffs are unmelodic, leaving the harmonic work to Pinnisi’s keyboards. When a guitar solo emerges in “Goden,” it’s a beast with its head cut off, bleeding out in isolation. “Power and Might” is possibly the slowest metal song of the time, dragging its lacerated stomach across concrete at a pace so slow it becomes disorienting. The death drive of “Destiny” and “Eternal Frost” lead into the torturous title track. Starting out in a vitriolic trot, the 9:25 “Into Darkness” drowns in a well of unvarying doom.

The static brutality of Into Darkness is taxing. Originally released by Future Shock in 1990, reissued by Nuclear Blast in 1992, and then reissued again by Southern Lord in 2011, the LP was exemplary death-doom long before that term was coined. Thrash people didn’t like it, nor did the growing legion of death metallers, and same for many disciples of the fuzz. It was too slow for speed heads and too bleak for Sabbath worshippers, characteristics that have since helped the record rise above the fray.

In 1994, Winter released the Eternal Frost EP, which contains rerecorded (and more cleanly produced) versions of “Servants of the Warsmen” and “Eternal Frost” in addition to a few new tracks. The group disbanded not long after. Winter didn’t start to see its due recognition until playing Roadburn in 2011, the same year Southern Lord reissued Into Darkness. Overlooked musicians often look back at what could’ve been with bitterness, but Flam mostly seems grateful that people finally see Winter as the cave beast it was.

•••

Considering the gothic tinge of My Dying Bride, it follows that the band emerged from the same area as Paradise Lost. My Dying Bride formed in 1990, the year Lost Paradise came out. In addition to bleak post-punk, both groups were fans of gothic literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley wrote about violence with refined elegance. That tone guides 1992’s As the Flower Withers, which was released by Peaceville. The LP begins with dramatic classical instrumentation, a tactic that heavily influenced groups like Cradle of Filth. “Sear Me” moves with processional grandiosity, Andrew Craighan and Calvin Robertshaw’s guitar harmonies resting on pedestals of cascading violins. Aaron Stainthorpe’s vocals sound like the musings of a demonic cyclops. Although growled indecipherably, My Dying Bride’s lyrics are written with the mannered cadence of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In “Sear Me,” end-of-days symphonics get swallowed by doom-laden ugliness. My Dying Bride then leads a charge with the brutalizing “The Forever People.” At top speed, As the Flower Withers still glides with melodic beauty, even if the ground is soaked with blood. “The Bitterness and the Bereavement” slogs through muck with chipped wooden wheels, setting up “Vast Choirs” to decimate foes with its prototypical blasting. The record finds an epic pinnacle in the trying “The Return of the Beautiful,” a nearly thirteen-minute track whose doom crawl and death charge inflict equal damage. “Erotic Literature” (with its laughable title) closes the album with a thrashing assault in the spirit of Venom.

Turn Loose the Swans of 1993, also released on Peaceville, hones key elements of As the Flower Withers—the symphonic layering, storm-battered riffage, and Stainthorpe’s bestial growls. The result is a seamless and sprawling death-doom record. Coupled with Lost Paradise and Into Darkness, My Dying Bride’s first two albums laid an indestructible groundwork. Any band that dabbles in funeral doom will forever be indebted to the English group. Over the span of its nearly three-decade career, My Dying Bride has released a dozen studio albums and gone through multiple lineup changes and hiatuses; but the troupe is still intact.

•••

When Swedish teenagers Jonas Renkse and Anders Nyström discovered death metal, they had to start a band. It was less desire than biological need. The only problem: they didn’t know how to play any instruments. Subsisting on a diet of Paradise Lost and Iron Maiden, Renkse and Nyström decided to go for it anyway, with Renkse handling vocals and drums and Nyström taking on bass and guitar. In contrast to the sharpened velocity of Carcass, the slower tempos of Paradise Lost gave the incipient musicians a place to start. Renkse said,

When we grew up, it was when death metal grew up and came along. We were so hooked on that and really wanted to be in our own band, so we started [Katatonia] without even knowing how to play our instruments or anything. But actually, when we started listening to Paradise Lost, who we’re touring with now, that gave us that extra spark we needed to actually get a grip and start composing real songs.‡

Katatonia officially began in 1991, recording and releasing its demo, Jhva Elohim Meth, in 1992. The recording’s stark brutality, slow tempos, and arcing harmonies caught the attention of Tomas Nyqvist, who ran a small label called No Fashion. It’s worth repeating that, just a couple years earlier, Renkse and Nyström didn’t know how to play any instruments. And now here were the precocious seventeen-year-olds, both playing multiple instruments and learning how to compose music at a jaw-dropping rate. The demo also caught the attention of bassist Guillaume Le Huche, whom Renkse and Nyström welcomed into the fold. In April of 1993, Katatonia tracked its heaviest album, Dance of December Souls, which No Fashion put out the same year.

Dance of December Souls finds Renkse and Nyström combining the harmonic sensibility of Iron Maiden and Paradise Lost with the steel-toed gait of My Dying Bride. What were you doing when you were eighteen? Me, I was playing ersatz Nirvana beats in my parents’ basement. Renkse and Nyström were busy defining a branch of extreme metal. Sure, there are a few moments when Renkse loses control on the drums, but, conceptually, Dance of December Souls is a masterwork. While his true calling is as a vocalist, Renkse knows how to write drum parts that enable Nyström’s ghostly harmonies to fly, carrying the narrative weight of each song. In a nod to the opening of Lost Paradise, “Seven Dreaming Souls” opens Dance of December Souls with a portentous drone, underneath which lost voices beg for forgiveness. “Gateways of Bereavement” storms the gates with its death-metal-in-slow-motion riffs and harrowing screams. As with those of Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, Katatonia’s lyrics are written in nineteenth century vernacular. The driving force in the group’s grandiosity, however, is Nyström’s weary and courageous guitar harmonies, which provide a guiding light for Dance of December Souls.

In order for future adventurers to venture deeper into the caverns of death-doom, Katatonia had to slay the beasts that inhabit the twilight zone. The hopeful stride of “In Silence Enshrined” is the knight of Katatonia crossing chasms and killing demonic creatures of every ilk: those that fly, those that charge, those that crawl, and those that slither. The desolate trudge of “Without God” marks the knight’s first encounter with the as-yet hidden gatekeeper that guards the fabled dark zone: a monolithic Balrog. Renkse howls as if in pain, and, for the first time on the album, Nyström’s riffs cannot find light. The Balrog’s claw ruptures the knight’s stomach—an almost fatal wound. The delicate clean guitar of “Elohim Meth” finds the warrior retreating to the mouth of the cave, where he’s calmed by the patter of rain as he nurses himself back to health.

“Velvet Thorns (of Drynwhyl)” hunts the Balrog with a bloody vengeance. This time around, the knight of Katatonia offsets his deliberate plod with an up-tempo drive, catching the beast off-guard so the knight can pierce its heart with guitar harmonies that glint like Excalibur’s blade. The mercuric dynamics of “Tomb of Insomnia” place the knight inside the dark zone for the first time, but he’s severely wounded and disoriented, which is conveyed by Nyström’s cyclical solo. “Dancing December” tells of the knight’s pained trek home with its injured slog. Alas, by the time he reaches his doorstep, he breathes his last breath as his two young sons look on helplessly.

With 1995’s For Funerals to Come, Katatonia moved to Avantgarde Music, who released Brave Murder Day one year later. Nyström’s guitar performance, whether acoustic or electric, is mesmerizing on For Funerals to Come, harmonies soaking into the deepest tissue of the heart. Although not quite as epic, Brave Murder Day is a strong album, but it suffers from thinner production than Katatonia’s first two records.

For Funerals to Come and Brave Murder Day find the knight’s two sons navigating their own paths to the dark zone, carving alternate routes that place them at the gates, only to find different iterations of the Balrog lying in wait. Like his father before him, the son of For Funerals to Come endures a brutal defeat before slaying the gatekeeper. He returns home in recovered state, having healed himself with naturopathic remedies he found on the way back. In his absence, his village has been wiped out by a warring clan. Thinking him dead, his family moved away with the remaining inhabitants. He spends the rest of his days searching for them in vain. Having thoroughly punished his vocal chords with Dance of December Souls and For Funerals to Come, Renkse enlisted the help of Opeth vocalist Mike Åkerfeldt for the screams and growls on Brave Murder Day: trying to outwit destiny, the second son enlists the help of a seasoned warrior to accompany him on his journey. While they eventually kill the version of the Balrog they’re destined to fight, the beast’s teeth sink deeply into both warriors’ flesh, inflicting wounds that relieve them of life just as they emerge back into daylight.

Following those two records, Renkse decided to perform only clean vocals for Katatonia, which aided the band in its quest to combine darkly catchy rock with sorrowful death metal on 1998’s Discouraged Ones. Today, the knight’s family tree burns brightly. Katatonia has endured multiple lineup changes and music industry-related setbacks over the years. But, with Renkse and Nyström as its foundation, the band continues to flourish.

Dark Zone

There’s no light in the dark zone; its creatures are biologically engineered to survive in total darkness. Outsiders simply cannot endure. Thergothon was the first beast to claim that realm as its own. Bane’s derision toward Batman could’ve been issued by Thergothon to other doom bands of the time: “Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but blinding. The shadows betray you, because they belong to me.”

Founded by keyboardist-vocalist Niko Sirkiä, guitarist Mikko Ruotsalainen, and drummer Jori Sjöroos, Thergothon emerged in Turku, Finland, in 1990, starting as a straight-ahead death metal band. The world didn’t need another brutal death metal band, though. Europe, especially, was oversaturated with that style. Wanting to go in a different direction, Thergothon acquired a second guitarist, Sami Kaveri,15 and began crafting the slowest and most torturous music the world had heard. About the change in direction, Sirkiä said, “I guess the logic was simply that we were totally sick and tired of the death metal wave that had been on steady rise those days. We decided to distance ourselves from that as much as possible.” For the members of Thergothon, a comatose trudge felt truer to their states of mind.

I think each of us was suffering from the kind of existential angst common to most teenagers everywhere…we were influenced by Bathory—especially Blood, Fire, Death and Hammerheart—Paradise Lost, Cathedral, Black Sabbath, Tiamat, Mana Mana, and obviously my lyrics were influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. As for places, I’ve been interested in all kinds of desolate and abandoned surroundings since I was a kid. The atmosphere felt in those places might have been an influence on some level.§

Paradise Lost and Cathedral provided glimpses of the bleakness Thergothon wanted to harness. “But I think we considered them only halfway down that road, and we wanted to go way slower ourselves,” Sirkiä said,¶ a bold statement that Thergothon more than delivered upon with its 1991 demo. Moving with a sedate drone, the instruments coldly echo, sounding like they were recorded in a forgotten cavern beneath Mount Halti. A vacuous and punishing recording, it caught the attention of Italian label Avantgarde, who released Thergothon’s Stream From the Heavens in 1994. It’s only recently that groups like Bell Witch and Un have begun to touch upon the stark and crushing loneliness of Stream From the Heavens. Recorded in 1992, its thin production marks the LP as a product of its time. That can be addressed by playing it as loud as possible. At full volume, Stream From the Heavens unimpeachably stands as one of the heaviest doom albums of all time.

The record wastes no time as “Everlasting” begins with glacial guitar harmonies, dilatory drumming, and otherworldly growls. Sirkiä’s eerie keyboards inch through those environs in the method of troglobites, creatures for whom light is a foreign concept. Following a passage of choral moaning, the track’s weighted slowness intensifies, moving forth in indifferent walls. While “Everlasting” seems like the deepest recess of the cavern, “Yet the Watchers Guard” journeys further as Ruotsalainen, who performs all the guitar work on Stream From the Heavens, sends chugging tremors from the heart of the Earth’s core. With a seemingly innate talent for creeping tempos, Sjöroos keeps Thergothon locked in chambers that barely exceed forty beats per minute. “Yet the Watchers Guard” inflicts existential disorientation, making every human act seem like an exercise in futility. (That sounds hyperbolic, I know, but only outside the context of Thergothon’s music.)

“The Unknown Kadeth in the Cold Waste” starts as a guitar drone in the spirit of Sunn O))) that’s ruled by malevolent spirits who express themselves in ethereal whispers. The track was recorded a year before Earth 2 came out, which was Sunn O)))’s impetus. Even so, (a better-produced) “The Unknown Kadeth in the Cold Waste” would sound at home on 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions. The track slithers into a den of synth and acoustic guitar to find a glimpse of light. With its malicious trudge, “Elemental” reveals those sounds as mere dreams of light—and those crafted by the minds of creatures who’ve never seen the real thing. “Who Rides the Astral Wings” follows course before “Crying Blood + Crimson Snow” enacts a ceremonial mourning for every living organism our planet has known.

By the time Avantgarde released Stream From the Heavens, Thergothon had already disbanded. While a handful of people immediately saw the record for its innovation, it would take nearly a decade before Stream From the Heavens would be recognized as one of funeral doom’s heaviest offerings. In 2011, Sirkiä said, “Back in the years the band was active, there were maybe ten people in the world who really cared about our music. Luckily a few of those people ran record labels.” Peaceville reissued Stream From the Heavens in 2009, providing a public service by showing the world the genius of Thergothon.

15 Kaveri only stuck around long enough to record a demo with Thergothon.

Burnt Altar

Cathedral came to life in Coventry, England. Just seventeen miles east of Birmingham, Coventry also crumbled during WWII. On November 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a mission called Moonlight Sonata, seeking to rupture the city’s industrial heart. The first attack obliterated roads, waterways, and electric grids. Via incendiary bombs, the second attack set Coventry ablaze. The Coventry Cathedral had long been one of the city’s architectural jewels. Along with much of downtown, the cathedral burned during Moonlight Sonata. Firefighters watched in horror as flames consumed the church. The members of Cathedral came of age when the monument had been rebuilt, but relics like the Charred Cross inhabited the church like ghosts, reminding people that any human structure can be wiped away.

Lee Dorrian began his life in music as the vocalist of Napalm Death, the Black Sabbath of grindcore. After that group’s original vocalist left, Napalm Death enlisted Dorrian. Inspired by the DIY attitude that fueled Birmingham’s punk scene, Dorrian put together a zine called Committed Suicide. He also booked shows in Coventry. Impressed by the kid’s verve and vocal abilities, Napalm Death drafted Dorrian to record the second side of its genre-defining LP, Scum. Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, numerous labor strikes in Birmingham escalated into riots. Politicians had initiated wage caps across England, and the proletariat youth struggled to find work. That social strife permeates Scum. Throughout, Dorrian roars with unhinged fury.

After releasing two more landmark albums with Napalm Death, 1988’s From Enslavement to Obliteration and 1989’s Mentally Murdered EP, Dorrian decided to pursue a different avenue. Inspired by Trouble, Candlemass, Witchfinder General, and of course Birmingham’s most important cultural export—bands he listened to before discovering punk and grind—Dorrian wanted to play slow instead of fast. He started Cathedral. The lineup shifted right away, then temporarily gelled with Dorrian on vocals, Ben Mochrie on drums, Garry “Gaz” Jennings and Adam Lehan on guitar, and Mark “Griff” Griffiths on bass. The quintet self-recorded In Memoriam, a 1990 demo Dorrian released on his fledgling label, Rise Above. He’d started his own label a few years prior to release seven-inches and receive an allowance through Margaret Thatcher’s enterprise Allowance Scheme, which provided a salary for people who started their own business.16

Cathedral’s demo speared Digby Pearson of Earache Records in the chest. After signing with underground metal’s keystone label of the time, Cathedral came to the painful realization that Mochrie was too much of a loose cannon. With a full LP written and mounting pressure from Pearson to record it, Dorrian contacted Mike Smail, who played drums in a Pennsylvania thrash band called Dream Death. Remembering how random it was to hear from a singer he’d never met, Smail said,

Back in the days before the internet, I got a letter in the mail one day. It was from England. I’m like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I open it up and it was Dorrian saying that they had studio time booked and their drummer at the time—I don’t know if they were having problems with him or what the story was. I think I do remember something about, like, he jumped out of a window or did something…and he broke a leg or he broke an arm…and they already had studio time booked…Lee and Gaz were fans of Dream Death. They were kind of sitting around thinking, “Who are we going to get to play drums?” And they were like, “Hey, let’s see if Mike will play.”*

Dorrian sent Smail a demo of Forest of Equilibrium with his letter. The drummer knew about Napalm Death, but Cathedral was a new project with no guarantees. He nevertheless did what any sensible twenty-year-old Hessian would: he flew to England to record a legendary doom record with only twelve days to learn the songs.

It just so happened that Cathedral’s practice space was next to Black Sabbath’s. Smail remembered, “We’d always hear Sabbath songs coming out of the room next to us, and it turned out it was actually Black Sabbath. They were warming up for Dehumanizer.”† The members of Cathedral had grown up idolizing Sabbath, and now here they were: going to lunch with Tony Iommi and Geezer and hearing doom’s forefathers write a new album. Black Sabbath’s time as the heaviest band on earth had long passed. Cathedral was about to steal that torch.

The group sought to push slowness to the same extreme that Napalm Death had pushed speed, and 1991’s Forest of Equilibrium indeed moves at a glacier’s pace. Some musicians write off doom as dumb and unchallenging. As anyone who’s tried to play really slow—and in time—knows, it’s much easier said than done. About making sure that the tempos on Cathedral’s debut were punishingly slow, Dorrian said,

I always used to be quite strict about keeping it slow enough that it’d make you feel a bit uneasy. You don’t want to go too slow, where it loses any impact, but I was being quite a pain, making the guys go through the songs over and over again. They’d almost get to the end, and they’d start speeding up, but it was so important to get it right because it was our first album and we were obviously trying to make a statement.†

Dorrian’s strictness irked his bandmates—especially Mike Smail, who tended to put in too many fills and ramp up the speed (his background was in thrash, after all)—but it resulted in a record that helped doom branch further away from hard rock and evolve into its own facet of extreme metal. That said, Forest of Equilibrium begins with a nod to seventies prog. Acoustic guitar and flute paint a pastoral scene that falls under the shadow of Lehan and Jennings’ monolithic riff. “Commiserating the Celebration” then chugs through mid-paced muck as Dorrian unleashes subhuman growls. His roars helped Cathedral develop a new methodology of listener punishment, painting Forest of Equilibrium in coats of bleakness that make Black Sabbath seem downright cheery. For Dorrian, there was no separation between his music and everyday life:

I forced myself to get more and more depressed so I could get the album to be what I wanted it to be. I had to completely debase myself to write lyrics—just get totally wasted and feel negative about everything. We had a few laughs in the studio, but to perform in general, I had to completely put myself down. I think if you’re gonna be in a situation where you’re gonna do something that means that much to you in every possible sense—the whole concept and everything—you have to live your life accordingly. It’s not something you can just go onstage and fake and get off again. I couldn’t really say that about Cathedral since then, but on that first album, especially, we really had to get down to get lower. I just tried to make myself lonely and give myself more solitude. And then I’d go out at night and get more wasted and suffer through more hangovers and just get more depressed and drink too much coffee that was too strong and then smoke loads of spliffs, read dark literature, listen to depressing records, watch depressing movies—whatever it took.†

Maybe not the healthiest approach, but Cathedral’s unswerving dedication to its hopeless vision made Forest of Equilibrium one of the most draining albums of its time. “Ebony Tears” totters in tortured slowness while Dorrian utters, “The only pleasure is pain,” sounding like a crazed cult leader. Dorrian’s vocals are double-tracked, one take slightly higher in pitch than the other, giving his roars and yells a ghastly undertone. Guiding Cathedral through a crawling groove that derails in punishing half-time, Smail bookmarks each section with fills that flow across his entire kit. Meanwhile, Jennings and Lehan tap into funereal harmonies that would’ve made Beethoven want to jump off the highest balcony he could find. Taking note from Candlemass, Cathedral deliberately avoids the comfort of blues scales throughout Forest of Equilibrium, residing in more hostile, and often atonal, territories, which has become a defining element of funeral doom. The band’s guitarists send symphonic solos arcing through sky—but in a way that feels like the last gasp of an army’s archers.

“Serpent Eve” follows a more monotonous trajectory with its deathbed cadence. “Soul Sacrifice,” on the other hand, is a grooving death metal barrage with a defined Carcass influence, giving Smail a chance to stomp his kick pedals like enemy skulls. The plodding “A Funeral Request” repurposes D. P. Barnitz’s macabre poetry, which heavily influenced Dorrian and Griffith’s lyrics. Forest of Equilibrium closes with “Reaching Happiness Touching Pain,” a title that’s reflected in the organ work, and how it gets engulfed by a violent maw of distortion, primitive drumming, and ominous choral vocals.

Following the release of 1993’s The Ethereal Mirror, a tighter record that trades Forest of Equilibrium’s masochism for a live-fast-die-young swing, Cathedral secured an opening slot on a Black Sabbath European tour. By then, Dorrian and Jennings were the only original members left. Perhaps because of the psychic toll of wallowing in the negativity of Forest of Equilibrium, Cathedral’s proceeding records are (relatively) more upbeat, rollicking in punchy rhythms and riffs that Hells Angels would love. Dorrian decided to put Cathedral to rest after releasing a final album, The Last Spire, in 2013. But Dorrian’s work as a vocalist only accounts for part of his asteroid impact on doom.

Even while touring and recording, Dorrian continued to run Rise Above. Named after Black Flag’s infamous barnburner from Damaged, the label has released some of the most revered and influential albums in heavy music: Electric Wizard’s Come My Fanatics, Goatsnake’s Flower of Disease, and Sleep’s Jerusalem. From 1988 to 2013, Dorrian operated Rise Above single-handedly, wedding the work ethic of Coventry and Birmingham’s laborers with the DIY philosophy of those cities’ punk scenes. Most major labels have never given two shits about doom. Instead of letting his preferred flavor of metal rot on the vine, Dorrian created an invaluable habitat for it to flourish and grow.

According to Dorrian, Electric Wizard’s 1997 LP, Come My Fanatics, was the album that shaped Rise Above into what it is. Dirt-caked tones, tortured singing, and bare bones drumming—Electric Wizard perfected those modes on its sophomore record. True, it’s Sabbath worship; but it’s far grimier than anything Sabbath ever produced, falling somewhere between doom and sludge and influencing countless copycats over the years. Dorrian recalled,

Come My Fanatics blew everything apart and sent everything off the scale because it was a completely fuck-off sounding record. No frills but done with such fucking venom but also otherworldliness. When I first listened to it I was like, “Fucking hell I can’t hear the drums” but realized it was a good thing that they were completely buried. I just got completely stoned and listened to it on my bed and thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard.‡

After putting out five additional albums through Rise Above, Electric Wizard and Dorrian parted ways, and not on the best terms. Even so, the impact of Rise Above and Electric Wizard’s alliance will long outlast any resentment between them. Flower of Disease and Jerusalem sent similar shockwaves through the underground. Those records continue to inspire musicians across the world.

Dorrian will always be a metalhead with great taste, which is precisely why he’s accomplished so much with Rise Above. Discussing how Rise Above functions, he said that putting out records he doesn’t love would be “a disservice to the record-buying public, because you’re just churning out stuff you’re not even that into yourself…We put out releases that we completely believe in. And whether they sell 500 or 5,000 or 10,000 or whatever, artistically these bands and these releases are equally important in their own way.”§

It’s easy for label owners to spout similar ideals, but Dorrian is one of the few who’s put his money where his mouth is. Rise Above has only been turning a profit since around 2010. Before then, Dorrian worked for years at a clothing warehouse. The label has finally gotten to the point where he can employ a handful of fellow fanatics, though he still dedicates a huge chunk of his time to running Rise Above, that haven for the doomed.

16 That same allowance led Digby Pearson to start Earache.

To the Riff-Filled Land

Riff worship—jamming on a good riff for extended periods because 1) it’s fucking good, and 2) it can invoke a state of hypnosis—and copious amplification: no one has done it better than Sleep.

The band came to life in San Jose, the locus of Silicon Valley. It was clear by the late 1980s that computer technology would only dominate the world in increasingly pervasive ways. IBM and Macintosh loomed over San Jose like cliffs. The city became a holy land for tech worshippers. People moved there in droves, triggering one of the sharpest cost-of-housing increases the US has seen. Unlike Sabbath’s black-lunged Birmingham, Sleep’s Silicon Valley reveled in plasticity and shininess, most companies outsourcing manufacturing to the cheapest bidder. Birmingham was fucked up during the 1960s and ’70s, but its bleakness was apparent. At first glance, San Jose seemed like paradise: mild climate; close proximity to the ocean and mountains; and hordes of tanned, good-looking people. For those fortunate enough to find work and build a foundation there, that ideal might’ve held up. For most, San Jose became a walled-off kingdom.

Surrounded by superficiality, Sleep focused on the dirt of existence. Before Sleep there was Asbestosdeath, a sludge-prog band formed by guitarist Matt Pike, bassist Al Cisneros, drummer Chris Hakius, and guitarist Tom Choi. After attending military school in Colorado, Pike headed to Northern California in search of a bigger metal scene. In ninth grade, he befriended Cisneros and Hakius and started jamming with Asbestosdeath. The quartet recorded two seven-inches, Unclean and Dejected, both of which deal in the odd timings and angular changes of early Neurosis. Wanting to move into more nihilistic territory, Choi left Asbestosdeath to form Noothgrush. Guitarist Justin Marler joined, and the band changed its name to Sleep. Pike poetically recalled, “Me and Al were just sitting around on LSD or doing bong hits or something, and Al came up with Sleep.”*

Sleep recorded Volume One with Marler, the only album to feature the second guitarist. As only the most astute observer might notice, the LP’s title and music pays tribute to Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4. Sleep’s debut has some great moments, but the instruments don’t quite gel. Not long after Volume One came out, Marler decided to quit playing music and become a monk. Considering Sleep’s goal of seeking enlightenment through meditative heaviness, the change wasn’t as out of the blue as it might seem.

Volume Two of 1991 makes it clear that Sleep was meant to be a power trio. Pike and Cisneros begin to tap into that sublime tone for which Sleep is known, and Hakius harnesses his ability to inhabit the deepest recesses of a groove. Volume Two features two songs that would get polished and appear on Holy Mountain, the 1993 album that put the band on an international stage. Sleep sent Volume Two to Earache, and Digby Pearson loved it. Armed with a freshly inked record deal, the trio entered Razor’s Edge Studios in San Francisco with Billy Anderson, who essentially became a fourth member of the band. Those mountainous tones that make Sleep’s albums so recognizable? They wouldn’t be nearly as magnificent without Billy Anderson.

For an idea about how Holy Mountain’s opener, “Dragonaut,” will make you feel, watch Harmony Korine’s Gummo. In a scene featuring the song, two gnarly kids—one wearing a sleeveless vest with no shirt underneath, the other wearing a jean jacket, each balancing a BB gun on his handlebars—coast down a hill on their BMX bikes as Pike begins his skull-digger chug. It’s that feeling adulthood kills: the sense of not giving a fuck about anything as you cruise down the street on your bike, ready to destroy. Hakius’ beat swings like a python from a branch, and Cisneros finds a hypnotic middle ground between chanting and singing as he utters, “Ride the dragon toward the crimson eye / Flap the wings under Mars’ red sky.” As if “Dragonaut” didn’t accomplish enough, it’s one of those rare songs that transitions from a blues swing into straight rock—and back—without feeling awkward.

By the time they tracked Holy Mountain, Pike and Cisneros had jumped headfirst into amplifier worship, both using powerful boutique tube amps. The result is a tactile thickness that sticks to eardrums like honey. So yes, (really) expensive amps and cabs are part of Sleep’s sound. At the end of the day, though, the trio’s heaviness revolves around each member’s unique style and how they coalesce and complement each other. Like the best writers, Pike, Cisneros, and Hakius each have an unmistakable voice. Those voices, which fit together like puzzle pieces, became fully realized on Holy Mountain.

As Pike worms across his frets in “The Druid,” he makes each chord tremor, giving the riffs a wavering fluidity that, just like his refusal to wear a shirt onstage, has become one of his trademarks. Cisneros shouts about a mythic forest dweller while sending out gelatinous bass frequencies. In its early days, Black Sabbath could make up amazing shit on the fly: the group wrote most of Paranoid by jamming onstage. Sleep showcases that same ability in songs like “Solomon’s Theme”—everything stems from an organic, jam-driven center. A brief interlude of Pike playing steel guitar, the forty-eight-second “Some Grass” creates just enough breathing room between the third and fifth tracks, which both shake the ground.

Hakius hangs on the back of Holy Mountain’s every riff, almost to the point of being off time, but never getting there. When a drummer plays at the front of the beat, it sounds like the rhythm jolts the other instruments forward. Jazz, thrash, punk, and grindcore drummers often inhabit that space. In rock, Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones is a classic front-of-the-beat player. He leads Keith Richards and co. into every change, giving Stones’ songs that caffeinated get-up-and-go. Hakius dwells on the opposite side of the spectrum. The result is that every note feels bigger, like it’s taking up more space. Lots of drummers play behind the beat with their kick but in front with the snare. In “Holy Mountain” and “From Beyond,” Hakius’ snare and kick both follow the beat’s pulse like wolves stalking prey. Driven by cyclical riffs, those tracks hint at the trance-inducing path Sleep would take with its follow-up record. The sparse, lightly distorted “Nain’s Baptism” is the red curtain for Holy Mountain, feeling like those last fleeting moments of a high before you drift back to reality.

Holy Mountain became a cult classic in the blink of an eye. A few major labels started to circle Sleep. Instead of writing a more palatable batch of songs to appease those companies, the trio decided to craft an unwieldy one-track album, Jerusalem, which clocks in at fifty-two minutes (sixty-three for the Dopesmoker version). Even though the release was doomed from a mainstream standpoint, London signed on. Talking about the writing process for Jerusalem, Cisneros said,

We toured Europe and the United States on Holy Mountain, and we were really reaching the point where we had to have some new stuff. So the song formulated at sound checks, and then we’d work on it some more in motel rooms or at friends’ houses. We’d just keep coming up with ideas, and the song just started to assemble itself. At our last show before we decided to settle down and make the record—it was here at Slim’s in San Francisco sometime in early or mid ’94, and I think we played with the Melvins—we played a much shorter, much more up-tempo version of the song. But it was pretty much the same song that you hear on the record. And it was long—the intention was to just keep cycling. We had lots of riffs that kept answering each other in a series, so we said, “Shit, if it’s a long song, it’s a long song.”†

Listening to Sabbath and Iron Maiden riffs as a kid, Cisneros always thought they should go on much longer. He realized that idea with Jerusalem.

As Sleep geared up to record, the ground beneath the band’s feet shifted. First, Pearson refused to let the trio go from Earache without a fight. Jerusalem felt solid enough to the band to record it by 1995, but Pearson wrestled with London for a year-and-a-half over the contract’s buy-out terms, knowing he could get a big payout. Amid that mess, the guy at London who orchestrated the deal to fund a one-song album—and to give Sleep creative freedom with the final product—was transferred, forcing the young musicians to spar with a large company that wasn’t keen on paying for such an unconventional and challenging record. Unsurprisingly, the band has spoken about that time with resentment for both Pearson and London.

Being forced to wait so long to record only worsened the situation. Cisneros said, “Comparing our collaborative creativity to having a child together or something, it was like we were forced to watch the kid suffer. It was killing us. The song was begging to be given food, and it was terrible.” To the bassist-vocalist, the song was the pinnacle of all the time he, Hakius, and Pike had spent jamming together since ninth grade. According to Hakius, the song also morphed during that seemingly interminable wait.

When we finally went into the studio, the song was starting to take on a different form for me personally than what we had originally envisioned. We recorded it one way, and then we wanted to try it another way, and it turned into a conflict…We spent a couple years working on the song, and then when we went to record it, it started turning out a little differently and creating a lot of anxiety. We could reasonably handle that, but as we were going along, the record label wanted to hear what we were doing, and they were scoffing at it from what I could tell. So that added more stress and anxiety, and it started piling up. Then we had some equipment failure at some point, and the whole thing just started to kind of feel like it was doomed. We’re still good brothers to this day, but it made us fight about nothing.†

Sleep and Billy Anderson spent a month tracking Jerusalem (and second-guessing every detail) in a studio in the northern California woods. Anderson said in an interview for Such Hawks Such Hounds that “no expense was spared” in production. They were working on London’s dime, so why not spend $75,000 on guitars and amplifiers? Why not stack instrument tracks as if recreating the Tower of Babel with sound? When they emerged and sent the masters to London, the higher-ups employed a team of engineers to remix the album in a misguided attempt to make it more marketable. London’s team went so far as to splice different parts of the track together to make something grotesquely resembling a radio-friendly edit. “In a certain sense,” Cisneros reflected, “all the horror stories we had heard from bands that had gotten onto a major label came true.”† Trying to release the boundary-defying album through a label that only cared about the bottom line was like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.

Three years of corporate bullshit ensued. The only version of Jerusalem that initially saw the light of day was the label’s promo for the track, and that was far from a proper release. Finally, in 1998, Rise Above agreed to put out a version of Jerusalem that London’s engineers had mixed. Rise Above didn’t market the release as much as Sleep wanted, so the band worked with Tee Pee to put out a different version in 2003, aptly titled Dopesmoker.

To Cisneros, Dopesmoker most closely coincides with the mix that Sleep and Anderson originally approved. An alternate take of the song, it’s longer than Jerusalem, and it moves more slowly. By the time Dopesmoker came out, however, the band was jaded with the release and had begun to tune out the back-and-forth of the never-ending licensing deals—and even the releases following those deals. “There are literally three or four versions out that I never OK’d,” Hakius said. “I didn’t even know about half of them, and I think Al was the same way. Once we were done recording, there was a lot we didn’t know about what happened with it.”† If you see Dopesmoker in a store today, it’s likely the 2012 Southern Lord reissue that features Sleep-approved cover art by Arik Roper.

Despite the many headaches and frustrations surrounding Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, the album has blossomed into the cult phenomenon it was meant to become. Stoner metal often gets thrown around as a descriptor for Sleep, doubling as a category for the many bands that worship at the trio’s smoke-enshrouded altar. Of course weed adds to the listening experience that is Dopesmoker, my preferred version of the song. But the record is also a psychoactive substance in itself. Its circuitous repetition alters your brainwaves.

When I listen to Dopesmoker, an animated film inspired by Cisneros’ lyrics and Roper’s artwork plays in my head: Somewhere beneath an ocean of sand rests a wraith-like creature made mostly of sentient weed smoke. It wears a thick, velvet shroud. According to legend, the wraith’s name is the Weedian.

The Weedian has been resting in an underground cave for the past 3,000 years. Stirred by the world’s spiritual starvation, it begins to wake, slowly conjuring itself back into being. The Weedian spends the next 420 days readying its caravan with a store of every known marijuana strain. When the Weedian is ready to embark on its pilgrimage, a mountain of sand opens. The creature emerges into scorching desert.

Pulling its caravan with a piece of worn rope, the Weedian traverses massive expanses of sand, finding nourishment and energy in dank herbage. As the sun reaches its pinnacle one day, the creature sees an oasis: a palm tree next to a glassy pool. The Weedian slurps the clear liquid, thinking it’s water. The substance is actually a potent hallucinogen, similar to DMT. The dose sends the Weedian reeling, lost in dense thickets of mystic psychedelia.

Call it luck, or call it fate, but a kindred wraith-creature, the Hashishian, finds the tripped-out Weedian and nurses it back to consciousness. The rejuvenated Weedian joins forces with the Hashishian, and the mythical duo moves onward together, passing through multiple desert towns. People gravitate to the creatures, knowing in their hearts that these beings will lead them to the riff-filled land.

On the morning of the 420th day of the Weedian’s pilgrimage, the creatures and their followers stumble into a different dimension. There, a temple rests under gargantuan trees, awaiting their arrival. Every being in the assemblage sparks up simultaneously. Clouds of smoke coalesce, mutating into a serpentine plume that slithers through the temple, infusing the ancient structure with electricity. Transformed into a massive amplifier, the temple emits a universe-shaking tone, the reverberations of which are felt in every dimension.

•••

The capitalistic nastiness surrounding the making and release of Jerusalem turned Cisneros and Hakius off from making music, at least publicly, for years. Pike immediately funneled his energy and frustration into the metallic war beast that is High on Fire, which has been unleashing scorching records since 2000’s The Art of Self Defense. In 2003, Cisneros and Hakius felt ready to play music together again. They formed a two-piece called Om with the intent of exploring improvisation as a form of meditation. The duo crafted three perception-altering albums and developed a reputation for playing four- and five-hour shows, a form of communal meditation between the band and audience. Hakius eventually left, wanting to focus on different areas of life. Om has moved on with Emil Amos on drums and Robert Lowe of Lichens playing guitar and performing additional instrumentation.

Praise the Weedian, Sleep’s story doesn’t end there. The band reunited for two shows in 2009, after which Hakius decided to retire, leaving his spot to Jason Roeder of Neurosis, one of the few drummers mighty enough to replace him. The updated version of Sleep has gone on multiple tours and played several festivals, also emerging from its recording slumber to release The Sciences in 2018.

Word of a new Sleep LP had been circulating since the band put out “The Clarity” single in 2014. Pike, Cisneros, and Roeder kept the release date of The Sciences close to their chests, suddenly putting out the album on 4/20 without launching the large-scale promotional campaign you’d expect for such a release. With nutrient-dense production and fields of perfect riffs sprouting from that dirt, plus a chanting, Om-style vocal approach from Cisneros—and some of the heaviest drumming since Bill Ward’s heyday—The Sciences is indeed a Sleep record. Song titles like “Marijuanaut’s Theme,” “Antarcticans Thawed,” and “Giza Butler” highlight the sense of humor the band has developed during its time as supreme ruler of weed metal.

I was fortunate enough to see Sleep in 2016. After a twenty-minute audio sample of one of the Apollo landings blasted from the house speakers, Sleep opened a door to a different realm and invited us in. We all followed.

Land of Golden Dreams

Pt. 1

“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can
almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave
finally broke and rolled back.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

The dreams of 1960s San Francisco might’ve looked like a high-water mark from Hunter Thompson’s perspective. These days, they seem like ghosts. Maybe it’s been romanticized to the point where no reality could match the legend, but the Haight-Ashbury of today feels entirely manufactured: the cultural equivalent of a plastic bong. Tell someone on a sidewalk in the Tenderloin district that acid and free love are the answers to their problems and they’ll laugh at you. The story of modern-day San Francisco is one of poverty, homelessness, gentrification, and a buried worry that the Bay Area is due for its next great quake.

Guitarist-vocalist Lori S. harnesses that in Acid King. She formed the band in 1993 with drummer Joey Osbourne and bassist Peter Lucas at a time when heavy music was flourishing in San Francisco. Describing that scene, Lori S. said,

Melvins, Sleep, Eyehategod, Buzzoven, Neurosis, and REPEAT! These bands were on club rotation in the mid-nineties. Sprinkle in Kyuss, Monster Magnet, The Obsessed, and Hawkwind, and top that with the Bay Area thrash scene. [All this was happening at] small to medium venues like The Kennel Club, which was a 500-capacity venue. I guess it’s safe to say there was a lot of cool stuff happening and most of the bands are still happening after all these years.

She got the name Acid King from the story of Ricky Kasso, which added fuel to America’s Satanic panic during the 1980s. A small-time dealer of PCP, acid, weed, and mescaline, Kasso seemed both scary and badass to the suburban youth of Northport, Long Island. They called him the Acid King. Constantly high on some of the world’s most perception-altering drugs, Kasso loved heavy metal and hard rock. He also had a nascent interest in Satanism, mostly because it freaked people out. He was a badass of the suburbs, a creepy guy whose talk of violence seemed like an act—until he murdered seventeen-year-old Gary Lauwers.

Lauwers had stolen PCP from Kasso when he found him passed out at a party. Lauwers paid Kasso back for the angel dust, and the two seemed to have made amends. Not long after that, Kasso, his friend Jimmy Troiano, and another stoner kid, Albert Quinones, invited Lauwers to trip with them in the woods. Quinones remembered how quickly and strangely a fight between Kasso and Lauwers escalated into a stabbing:

I was peaking out, tripping out. And they were just fighting, punching each other and shit, and I didn’t think anything was going to happen. I mean, I could see Ricky’s point, too, which is that he was friends with Gary, and he just turns around and steals ten bags of dust.

So they were just rolling on the ground and shit, and Gary got up to his feet after Jimmy had ran up to him and kicked him in the ribs and shit, and Gary had gotten up to his feet, and Ricky just bit him in the neck, bit him in the ear and then he just stabbed him…

After Ricky stabbed him, Gary took off, ran, and Ricky got him, just like that. Jimmy picked up the knife after Ricky had dropped it, and he gave it to Ricky. And Ricky made Gary get on his knees and say, “I love Satan.” Then Ricky just started hacking away at him, man. He just kept stabbing him and shit, and then Gary was just screaming, “Ahhh, I love my mother.” It was really fucked, man. And they grabbed him by the legs and dragged him in the woods. Ricky and Jimmy dragged him in the woods. They came running out of the woods after they just threw leaves on him and shit. They told me that he started stabbing Gary in the face and shit…

I wasn’t going to rat them out, because what’s, like, another body? Man, it’s no big deal. I mean, you see them kill once, you just don’t think, like, they’re not going to kill you.*

Word of Lauwers’ murder spread quickly among Northport youth. Kasso showed the body to his friend, and soon several kids had gone to see. Kasso and Troiano were arrested within two weeks. After two months in jail, Kasso hanged himself in his cell because other inmates dared him to do it.

Kasso had been talking about suicide for years. Desperate, his parents tried to place him in a mental health facility. Psychiatrists diagnosed Kasso as antisocial but didn’t think it necessary to have him committed. Constantly high on PCP, a heinous dissociative coursing through NYC at the time, he joked about starting a cult and clumsily tried to host a Satanic ritual in his friend’s bedroom. After he hanged himself, the media sculpted a cartoonish picture of Kasso as a Satan-worshipping mastermind. As with Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris after Columbine, people misguidedly pointed to the music Kasso listened to—AC/DC, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy—as a large part of the teen’s motivation to kill.

Naming the band after Kasso separates Acid King from anything resembling an optimistic take on psychedelia. It’s with people like him and his friends where the promises of the 1960s truly died, where drugs that were supposed to liberate minds and promote peace became agents of nihilistic escape at best, and catalysts for insanity and violence at worst.

As it happens, Acid King’s music would go hand in hand with smoking PCP in the woods on a school night. Lori S. grew up in small-town Illinois. Like Kasso and his buddies, she and her friends used to party in the woods because there was nothing better to do. In “Lead Paint,” the first song on 1994’s Acid King EP, she belts lyrics about eating paint chips while ushering her tonally masterful riffs into the universe. “Cracked window paint,” she croons. “Lead paint doesn’t taste so bad / Slow that’s the only way I know / Just one more trip around the block / I’m not ready to go / That’s the only way I know.” It’s a journal entry from that kid we’ve all known who took everything too far, the one who’d huff spray paint when the weed ran out. Any of the teenagers from Kasso’s world could’ve scrawled those words in their notebook while an English teacher droned on about Shakespeare. Appearing on 1997’s Down with the Crown EP, the song “Teen Dusthead” is a direct reference to an oral history of the Gary Lauwers murder,17 channeling that same disaffected voice as Lori S. belts, “You come to my house and you bring me down / Teen dusthead forever / One hit, that’s all and you bring me down / You’ll never live to see tomorrow.”

If 1995’s Zoroaster LP refined Acid King’s recipe of jam-laden psych doom, 1999’s Busse Woods perfected it.18 That album starts with “Electric Machine,” which features one of the band’s most iconic riffs. Lori S. summons a tidal wave of sugary distortion, leaving Osbourne and Lucas to surf down its face. Amid that grooving heaviness, Lori S. urges people to “head into another end,” effectively giving the void a middle finger. A fan video for the song uses it as the soundtrack for scenes from an old biker movie, and for good reason: Acid King’s music is the next-best thing to cruising through Death Valley, high as a kite, on a “borrowed” Harley. Coupling heavy riffs with narratives about riding motorcycles is the stuff of destiny, especially in the hands of Acid King. “Drive Fast, Take Chances” also pays homage to that union with murderous biker lyrics and music that crawls like lava.

For Acid King, the pairing of Sabbathian riffs with biker culture is best captured on the 2005 LP, III. Osbourne, Lori S., and new bass recruit Guy Pinhas, who played in The Obsessed from 1992–’95 and in Goatsnake from ’96–2000, roar toward the California sun in “2 Wheel Nation.” Lori’s hypnotic vocals ride molasses swells as she sings, “Ride away from falling ground / Ride away from the big black cloud / Ride away until the day comes / That we all live in a 2 wheel nation.” In those moments, I see a grainy video of the guitarist-vocalist speeding down an empty highway as the city recedes behind her.

“Many of the songs were influenced by my awesome 1971 Triumph Trophy,” she said about III. “I was totally obsessed with Hells Angels history. I read many books and saw all the movies. When I moved to SF and actually saw real Hells Angels, it was pretty cool. Historical motorcycle culture has always been a big influence.” With the crawling “Heavy Load,” Lori S. sings about taking to her motorcycle on those days when life just feels a bit off. Meanwhile, Osbourne and Pinhas steer a 1500cc rhythm.

For squares like myself, listening to Acid King and reading Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is likely the closest we’ll get to that unhinged sense of possibility people find on motorcycles. But riding her ’71 Triumph is far from Lori’s only influence, which, she said, “vary depending on what year it was and what I was doing with my life. It could be anything from motorcycle riding to a shite day to just a love for heavy riffs. Heavy riffs bring out despair, release, and freedom in an organic way that comes from the gut.”

Acid King’s music still comes from that place. Except for a few periods of inactivity, the band has kept roaring down doomed highways. In 2016, the original drummer Joey Osbourne and longtime bassist Mark Lamb relinquished their spots to skinsman Bil Bowman and bassist/rhythm wizard Rafa Martinez, who also lays down mindfuck drumbeats for Black Cobra, a feral sludgecore duo. Before Osbourne and Lamb called it a day with Acid King, they and Lori S. recorded Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere, a 2015 album that carves out another system of roads through post-apocalyptic deserts. As of late, Lori S., Bowman, and Martinez have been traveling the world, doling out that record’s heavy psychedelia to audiences like a crazed biker gang selling hits of LSD.

Pt. 2

What do you see in your mind’s eye when you think of Los Angeles? Star-studded movie premieres? The Hollywood sign? Celebrities driving around in expensive cars? I see parched drainage ditches reaching across the city like hardened veins. I see shanty towns. I see trash-strewn sidewalks and bars in windows, but also clean, “revitalized” areas meant to keep more people out than they bring in. I see palm trees with blackened trunks. And I hear Goatsnake, an LA quartet that reflects its home while also laughing in its face. Goatsnake’s response to that doomed city: “If the world is dying, let’s have some goddamn fun.”

After playing in The Obsessed, drummer Greg Rogers and bassist Guy Pinhas started jamming with guitarist Greg Anderson of Burning Witch and Sunn O))). Although he was living in Seattle at the time, Anderson leapt at the chance to jam with former members of The Obsessed. Vocalist Pete Stahl, cofounder of the DC hardcore band, Scream, that featured Dave Grohl on drums, fell in with them to form Goatsnake. The band immediately started work on Goatsnake Vol. 1, a 1999 record released by the influential Man’s Ruin label, which put out music from such bands as Kyuss, Entombed, Barkmarket, and Unsane. About recording that first Goatsnake album, Stahl remembered,

I had just joined the band—those guys had already been working out a bunch of different tunes and they asked me to come in and sing. They were old friends of mine. At the same time I was traveling and working…They would give me songs, I would work on them away from the rehearsal room, and we would have to cobble them together that way…It probably took a good year to get everything recorded and mixed.†

Reflecting on Goatsnake Vol. 1, Anderson said,

I feel like the album is a great document of a moment in time where the band was at…there’s a bit of shine but there’s also a lot of raw truth on it. There’s mistakes all over that record, and I think that’s what gives it its charm, keeps it loose and really adds to the heaviness of it…

There’s a school of thought that stuff should be corrected and it should be as good as possible—especially these days with the technology, it makes it so easy to do that. But I think a lot of the charm and character is lost when you go back and fix the mistakes. If you hear a hard rock or metal song or a record from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and even some of the nineties—they all have mistakes. This music isn’t pretty, it’s not perfect. So to try to make it that way is to me not honest, and it’s just not the kind of band we are.†

Countless streets in LA are covered with a scrim of rubber and oily dirt. So is Goatsnake Vol. 1. “Slippin’ the Stealth,” “IV,” and “Mower” thunder like Harley engines while “What Love Remains” and “Lord of Los Feliz” carry humanity’s bleak future on hunched shoulders. Stahl plays harmonica on “Innocent,” which couples with his simultaneously creepy and pretty singing to make you feel like you’re getting high in some weirdo’s trailer in Pasadena, listening to him explain the world’s problems as you stare at the yellow grass outside his window. All that said, Goatsnake Vol. 1 doesn’t quite gel as an album, likely because the songs were written during such a spread-out span of time. The record feels like a few compiled EPs, departing from its core spirit most noticeably during the Buzz Osborne-produced song, “Dog Catcher.” But Goatsnake’s first LP laid the tonal groundwork for 1999’s masterful Flower of Disease. It’s also encouraging to hear a record with warts, especially by a band that went on to perfect its sound.

Flower of Disease, and its self-titled track, will always make me think of Fresno. I lived in that thirsty Central Valley city for four years, and it was there that I started listening closely to Flower of Disease. Driving south on Highway 99, I would stare at the red sun burning above dusty farmland while blasting the title track. The Central Valley is a windless pocket. Smog funnels in from the Bay Area and mixes with agricultural pollution to create a white chemical blanket, which is why so many people there suffer from asthma, sinus infections, and a host of other respiratory problems. It’s not far off from the California of Bladerunner 2049. When you’re in Fresno, it’s hard to believe that humans can fix all the wrong we’ve done.

Flower of Disease was perfect for those drives. Goatsnake plays in subterranean tunings, making songs like “Flower of Disease” feel as if they’ve been marinated in petrochemical ooze. The track starts with a backward loop of its main riff, which Rogers kicks through to open a path for Goatsnake to plow dying fields. Like so many timeless riffs, the core of “Flower of Disease” seems easy to play. But the way Anderson and Pinhas slide and lock in with their vibrato makes it so that no one could play it quite like them. Rogers’ beat is a semi lurching through the desert with Stahl at the helm. Stahl’s vocals have a humid gospel feel, which is enhanced by Petra Haden’s soaring backups. He switches to harmonica during the bridge, which feels more like a tunnel leading to an underground bunker than an above-ground bridge as it follows a pummeling tom groove. Rogers eventually jumpstarts the song with an up-tempo beat as Stahl repeatedly moans, “Watering this flower of disease.” As with Los Angeles, Fresno sprawls like there’s no tomorrow, making you wonder if it could ever exist beyond automobile culture. Both cities are flowers of a disease we’ve created, but we have to keep watering them.

“Prayer for a Dying” bathes in doomed joy as Stahl croons, “As the darkness covers me / I begin to dream / Of visions that I long / Yeah, you got to rock the roll / Set your fancies / A chance yet to be free again.” Our ship might be sinking, but Goatsnake is throwing a party on deck. In “Easy Greasy,” Stahl bounces a jaw harp while Rogers trudges forth, mixing a bar of 7/8 into a 4/4 backbeat without being obnoxious about it. Anderson and Pinhas’ riff cruises with the trashy panache of a Le Baron as Stahl drops the jaw harp to sing about getting loaded and roaring into oblivion. He picks up the harmonica again to open “El Coyote,” giving the song’s sandy riffs a menacing feel that would make it an ideal soundtrack for a yet-to-be-made season of True Detective that takes place in Salton City. The fact that Anderson’s boogie-doom riff in “A Truckload of Mamma’s Muffins” has been ripped off by so many stoner rock bands is a testament to how good it is. Stahl backs up the song’s amazing title with one of his most poetic lyrics: “Jacked up on cold caffeine,” he warbles, “Dragging my nuts through Valvoline.” Following track “Live to Die” is exactly what it should be: driving blues rock with lyrics like, “Got my wheels in motion / Revved up high…Out for a ride while I’m alive.”

After Flower of Disease came out, Pinhas left Goatsnake and joined Acid King. Featuring Stuart Dahlquist on bass, Goatsnake put out the Dog Days EP in 2000, following that with the Trampled Under Hoof EP in 2004, which features J. R. Conners of Cave In on drums and Scott Reeder of Kyuss on bass. Goatsnake hibernated as its members focused their attention elsewhere until 2010, when the original lineup reunited to headline the Roadburn Festival. That gave Rogers the itch to write a new Goatsnake album. It wasn’t hard for him to get Stahl and Anderson on board. They recruited bassist Scott Renner and began work on Black Age Blues.

Released in 2015, that album showed a new generation of doom heads that Goatsnake is not to be fucked with. “Elevated Man” is a high-energy stoner jam that feels like Goatsnake channeling Guns N’ Roses until it breaks down in an oil-choked groove. “Black Age Blues” and “Coffee and Whiskey” boogie until there’s no booze left, and “House of the Moon” follows with caveman doom, making the urge to head bang very difficult to deny. It’s also one of five tracks on Black Age Blues to feature backing vocals by the soul trio Dem Preacher’s Daughters. The Daughters’ gospel harmonies amplify Stahl’s haunting vocals and, by contrast, make the riffs they accompany feel like small miracles of nastiness. “A Killing Blues” provides a fitting endcap to the record, beginning as a cruel dirge and eventually regressing into squealing feedback. Amid that squall, Dem Preacher’s Daughters harmonize as Stahl repeatedly croons, “Lightning / Thunder / Wash my soul to the ground.” Everything aside from Stahl’s vocals drops out, briefly returning the listener to the mud from which the album arises before the band sends one more weighty riff roaring into the void.

If we’re relegated to watching our own ship go down, we might as well blast Goatsnake and make a day of it.

17 “Kids in the Dark” by David Breskin.

18 Billy Anderson produced Busse Woods, so of course it’s sonically massive. The album’s title comes from the Illinois forest where Lori S. and her friends used to “drop out of life with bong in hand,” so to speak.

Land & Sea

It was born in the woods. Since the beginning, the three-tiered, Ent-like being has seemed elemental, less from the ocean of Oregonian trees in which Eugene rests than of those trees, carrying their calm and awesome strength. They call it Yob.

In case you need a refresher on your Tolkien mythology, Ents are conscious, tree-like creatures that appeared on Middle Earth at roughly the same time as the industrious dwarves. Accounts of who or what conjured Ents into being differ, but it’s generally understood that the species emerged to keep the natural world from harm, as dwarves and orcs both have a predilection to ravage any and all resources they can find. Old legends refer to Ents as shepherds of the trees, protectors of that most powerful herd.

Ents had the capacity to communicate long before they encountered elves, though any elf would proudly claim that they gifted ents with language. At any rate, the exact history of how the species’ unique qualities developed is less important than what Ents have accomplished. In service of Sauron’s caustic will, Saruman the White ordered orcs, trolls, and Uruk-hai to fell entire forests. Through the eyes of the ancient Ents, killing trees is akin to killing children. The otherwise-peaceful creatures had no choice but to join elves, dwarves, and humans in war. Yob is doom metal’s Ent, a conglomeration of peaceful humans that have been called upon to wage sonic warfare.

Feeding off the energy of the monolithic trees that engulf his hometown, Mike Scheidt started Yob in 1996 with Greg Ocon on drums and Lowell Iles on bass. Bassist Isamu Sato and drummer Gabe Morley then took over as Yob’s rhythm section. The second iteration of the trio—Scheidt, Morley, and Sato—recorded Elaborations of Carbon, Yob’s 2002 debut. Although heavier than marble, the first LP doesn’t quite capture the majesty of Yob’s later recordings. Consisting of three monstrous, Dopesmoker-esque songs, 2003’s Catharsis hones the group’s elemental language. The first time that language shifted Earth’s plates: The Illusion of Motion, released on Metal Blade in 2004. Morley recorded drums for the twenty-three-minute title track of Catharsis, but Travis Foster stepped in for the glacial “Aeons” and “Ether.” Both great drummers in their own right, Foster’s playing has more of a downward pull. As such, The Illusion of Motion is a planet around which its songs revolve.

Ghostly wind blows as Scheidt conjures smoke in “Ball of Molten Lead.” With that element of the world formed, rocky plains emerge in the form of a quiet guitar rhythm. Foster evokes a battle hymn on his snare, using kicks for punctuation as Scheidt sends high notes echoing off canyon walls. Foster lays down a leafless version of the Purdie Shuffle, hitting just enough of its notes to create that multidimensional feeling known as groove. As “Ball of Molten Lead” reaches a seeming pinnacle, Scheidt educes a mountain range with towering escarpments and cavernous chugs. His vocals soar above this volatile world like commands from the Witch King of Angmar. Scheidt’s singing and growls, as with his guitar work, are unmistakably his own. He’ll operatically sing like Geddy Lee’s doppelgänger one second and then unleash Uruk-hai roars the next. Yob might be a being of peace, but it’s also capable of great destruction, channeling darkness as much as light. “Death on the horizon / Consciousness asleep,” Scheidt peacefully intones, “Struggling to know / The truth to this bardo.” Suddenly tapping into an ancient rage, he bellows, “The ball of molten lead…Trying to dislodge the ball of molten lead.”

Yob has a tendency to create plateaus that seem like peaks but reveal themselves as stepping-stones. Let’s call it the Yob effect: “This is some of the heaviest shit I’ve ever heard,” and then, “Holy shit, how did it get heavier?” And then that dumbfounded feeling you get when you see a mountain range rising from earth and your existence seems miniscule in comparison. “Ball of Molten Lead” executes that move with knowing grace. The track again becomes a call-and-response between light and dark when Scheidt sings, “Feeling found and lost together,” then roars, “Gone too far to turn back now,” then sings, “King of death is overthrown,” then roars, “Bid this world a last goodbye.” In the spirit of Candlemass, Yob’s lyrics focus on battles between good and evil, and not for moralistic purposes. To close “Ball of Molten Lead,” Foster orders an up-tempo attack, creating the perfect opportunity for him, Scheidt, and Sato to pound a crater into their own planet when they transition back to half-time.

If the first track of The Illusion of Motion is a formation of plains, canyons, forests, and mountains, “Exorcism of the Host” is the album’s churning core. In a nod to Coven and Black Sabbath, the song’s bell toll intro is the opening ceremony to a warrior’s funeral. Scheidt’s growl has the circular jaws of a sandworm. The rest of that beast finds form in dilatory drums, bass, and guitar. “Exorcism of the Host” moves at a volcanic thirty-nine beats per minute, which falls into the tempo spectrum known as Grave. Torturous to hear and much harder to play (in time), the tempo is just over half the rate at which the human heart beats. Yob carves varying amounts of space between its plate-shifting notes to ensure the maximum impact of each one. The track gradually embraces tattered peace, heralded in with one of Scheidt’s brilliant solos that balance an uncanny ear for harmony with a virtuoso’s ability. “Doom #2” returns to the world’s surface in the form of a flash flood, exhibiting the most movement of any track on The Illusion of Motion, but in the shortest timespan.

“The Illusion of Motion” clocks in at over twenty-six minutes and earns every second. The song delivers the promise of its title, moving so slowly for so long that it’s similar to walking toward a mountain peak: you can see it for miles but seem to make no real progress as you step forward. When “The Illusion of Motion” reaches a triumphant peak of dissonant doom, there’s not much to do other than gaze at its majesty.

Each its own world with its own moons, The Unreal Never Lived (2005), The Great Cessation (2009), Atma (2011), Clearing the Path to Ascend (2014), and Our Raw Heart (2018) find the peaceful eye of the human spirit, but only after unleashing floods, fires, earthquakes, wars, and volcanic eruptions. Like its tendency to ascend to ever greater heights of heaviness in each song, Yob gets more intense, sprawling, and majestic with each record.

Live, Yob shakes the world at even deeper frequencies. Following a temporary breakup, the trio reformed in 2008 with Aaron Rieseberg on bass. Yob tours with a quiver of top-of-the-line amps and speakers, but the trio’s heaviness has more primeval origins. Scheidt wails with otherworldly power as he molds riffs from granite. Foster hits his drums as if they’re mortal enemies, always keeping Yob firmly rooted. Rieseberg’s bass arises from those earthen rhythms and opens into canyons, which yawn beneath Scheidt’s guitar and vocals. Together, the musicians build a tumultuous world and surround it with dense atmospheres. Yob induces nothing short of a metaphysical experience through music, gifting audiences across the globe with cathartic enlightenment before returning to the land of trees, where it lies until called forth for battle once again.

•••

If Yob is of the forest, Bell Witch is of the sea. A Seattle two-piece formed in 2010 by bassist-vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer-vocalist Adrian Guerra, Bell Witch explores the most punishing and majestic depths of tempo and long-form composition. Harnessing the true power of the bass guitar, Desmond evokes swells of sound that break on barely moving reefs of percussion. Inhabiting those reefs are creatures who growl deeply enough for the sound to travel through water.

After releasing a demo in 2011, Guerra and Desmond teamed with Profound Lore to put out 2012’s Longing, an album that summons the horror of death as well as its cold majesty. The record’s yawning riffs are made terrifying by Guerra’s bloody shrieks and growls. Four Phantoms of 2015 takes a path more elemental and ethereal, its four songs coming together to form a mid-ocean range and sanctuary for lost spirits.

Following a European tour for that album, Desmond made one of the hardest decisions of his life. Guerra had a severe drinking problem. By continuing to play in a band with him, Desmond felt like he was enabling that self-destruction. “I told him fix it or I would move on,” he told Noisey’s Joseph Schafer. “Adrien didn’t want the band to continue without him, but we had just released a record, we had booked tours, we had momentum…I was enabling [Adrien], and I felt responsible.”

Desmond’s housemate, Jesse Shreibman, tried to mend the fabric of Bell Witch. “Whatever issues that were happening,” Shreibman said, “I was trying to solve them.” Despite those attempts, Desmond asked Shreibman to take Guerra’s place. One of those rare drummers who can play fast and slow with equal grace, not to mention his ability to utter bestial vocals while doing so, Shreibman was torn. “After much deliberation and a heart-to-heart conversation with Guerra,” Schafer wrote, “Shreibman took his place behind the kit (and microphone). Bell Witch 2.0 immediately began composing their new record.” As Desmond and Shreibman dove into the muck of writing a new album, they received news that Adrien Guerra died in his sleep.

When the time came to decide the future of Bell Witch, Desmond and Schreibman contemplated whether or not to continue, the drummer-vocalist feeling especially conflicted about executing Guerra’s drum parts and vocals from Longing and Four Phantoms. Creators at heart, the duo decided to continue on, but with the stipulation that they put every ounce of themselves into Bell Witch. Shreibman told Noisey, “We agreed that if we were going to go on, [the new record] had to be something remarkable.”

A visceral examination of life, death, and everything between, Bell Witch goes far beyond remarkable with Mirror Reaper. On paper, it’s one eighty-three-minute song. More precisely, it’s a tightly interwoven mass with two sweeping movements, each of which traces a narrative arc on the grandest of scales. Mirror Reaper inhabits a similar aesthetic realm as Beethoven’s funereal symphonies. While playing so slowly that it’s difficult to even track the tempo (usually somewhere in the Grave range but often slower), and making each hit feel like a tidal wave’s crash, Shreibman growls from depths previously unexplored by humans. He simultaneously plays organ with a foot pedal system, giving the melancholia of Mirror Reaper mass and weight. Desmond performs the work of an entire string section with his six-string bass, notes soaring and diving with a killer whale’s agility and ferocity. When Mirror Reaper submerges into quietude, he sings with lugubrious earnestness, as if delivering a eulogy.

It’s trying to listen to Mirror Reaper in its entirety, but that optimizes the record’s impact. It’s an aural environment, a snow globe that allows you to escape into its world, shedding the confines of the self. At both its heaviest and softest, the piece will make you feel like you’re floating in a sensory deprivation tank, limbs slack as the mind reverts to pure imagery. What I see: a hooded entity of the sea is summoned, it knows not why. The entity is sadness, hope, and sorrow in a form not unlike a gigantic Nazgûl, but swathed in gray rather than black. As it emerges, the ocean surges in slow, towering waves instead of a chaotic chop. The reaper rises, encapsulated by an aqueous orb. Gazing coldly at sprawling forests, the entity sends life raining down while also obliterating it with walls of water. Soil and rock rejoice and recoil in a deluge that defies time. Gradually overcome with broken acceptance, the reaper drifts back to its primordial cave, far beneath the surface of the ocean.

On record, Mirror Reaper is an event of the spirit. Live, that event is communal. In both forms, it’s a Viking Funeral for a fallen warrior, and one of the most moving pieces of music that can be categorized as doom.

Part Two

Sniffing Glue on Your Cousin’s Porch

Growing up in a small town will make you weird. There’s bad weird: salty townies who fear change. There’s also good weird: outcasts who come of age consuming any and all culture that crosses their path, and who don’t see distinctions between genres the way city kids do. Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover of Melvins fit into the second category.

Osborne was born in Morton, a rural Washington town with a population just over 1,000. His dad worked in the timber industry, moving his family to the Montesano area when Osborne was in sixth grade. Back then, Osborne said, he devoured every piece of music he could get his hands on.

Where I lived during my formative years as a music fan, you couldn’t even buy a record. People don’t really have any concept, today, what it was like in rural America before the internet. The one-stoplight town where there’s no record stores, and ten miles might as well be 10,000 miles. If I wanted to buy a record, I bought it mail order. When I was twelve, I would give my mom money from mowing lawns or working in the woods. She would write me a check, and I would order records from places like Creem magazine. Then it was six-to-eight weeks minimum before you got your David Bowie record. I didn’t have older brothers or people I knew that were cool. I didn’t get along with people where I lived, so I didn’t have anyone showing me the new Jethro Tull record or anything like that. I just got into those bands simply because of the way they looked. Same with punk bands like Sex Pistols and The Clash. From that I went into The Stooges and MC5 and just took it from there. I listened to all that stuff way before I saw any of the shows. Seattle was 150 miles away, I didn’t have a car. I wasn’t sixteen.

In cities, and especially suburbs, you’ll find a collective nostalgia for small town life, a hazy idea of simpler times and kind townsfolk that’s only alluring for people who’ve never lived in rural America. Osborne’s experience is that people in small towns are more often spiteful, nosy—he hates the “I saw you went to the post office today” bullshit—and unwilling to accept difference. “Just try to be different, and see what happens…The tallest sunflower gets its head cut off,” he said.

Although he didn’t start playing guitar, at least seriously, until he was eighteen, music was the only thing that made sense to Osborne. Finding like-minded weirdos in those places is equivalent to finding $100 on the sidewalk. It doesn’t happen often, so when it does, you appreciate the shit out of it. Osborne met bassist Matt Lukin and drummer Mike Dillard in high school, but they didn’t start jamming together until after they graduated. The trio originally played heavy rock in the vein of Cream and Zeppelin before moving on to punk, inspired by bands they saw in the basements of Olympia and Seattle. Osborne worked at Thriftway with a generally disliked guy named Melvin. He thought it would be funny to name his band after his surly coworker.

Hardcore was a full-on movement by 1983, with figureheads like Black Flag, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat operating at full force. The guys in Melvins loved that music. They also saw how narrow-minded hardcore could be. “I realized by ’84 or ’85 that hardcore wasn’t going to work for us,” Osborne said. “Even by then, I was sick to death of most of it. We wanted to do something that was more confrontational.” He’d already dealt with too many people who operated in rigid ideological boxes, and who tried to force others into those same parameters. He decided to start slowing hardcore songs down until they turned into something even more antagonistic: the ugly spawn of punk and metal we now call sludge.

Melvins can’t be credited as the genre’s sole inventor, however. San Francisco’s Flipper crawled ashore in 1979. The group’s feedback-drenched groove-punk had more in common with the abused dolphins who played Flipper on the TV show than the chipper version of the creature audiences loved. Album—Generic Flipper (1982) and Gone Fishin’ (1984) sputter in noisy belligerence, an unhinged sound that inspired bands like The Jesus Lizard and Unsane in addition to Melvins. Saint Vitus released its eponymous record, featuring the sludge jam “Saint Vitus,” in 1984. That same year, Black Flag put out My War, the B-side of which wallows in slow hardcore. Black Flag toured relentlessly for 1981’s Damaged, spreading hyper-fast, bullshit-devoid punk across the country. Guided by the idea that anyone can be a musician—not just people who grew up in musical families or have spent years studying music theory—hardcore was a reaction to the polished, overly-professional, and sterile version of rock that dominated the 1970s. But hardcore became its own box, policed by muscle-bound jerks who saw mosh pits as excuses to get in fights and beat the shit out of people. More in tune with hardcore’s taunting spirit than those fans realized, the B-side of My War is a brilliant troll.

During his early years with Black Flag, Henry Rollins sported a razor-shaved head, a middle finger to long-haired burnouts that had the added benefit of being a really cheap haircut. While writing and recording My War, he and guitarist Greg Ginn grew out their hair, yanking the carpet from under the feet of people who thought hardcore musicians had to look a certain way. It was also an attempt to alienate racist skinheads who mistakenly saw Rollins as one of their own. Hardcore kids across the board reacted to the slow songs on My War the same way they did to Saint Vitus: it pissed them off. The slap in the face those crawling songs deliver is accented by the fact that the first half of the record sprints like Minor Threat.

Of course the aesthetic of irritating people would appeal to Buzz Osborne, who’d developed quite a chip on his shoulder from living in towns where people threatened to kick his ass because they didn’t like the expression on his face. Osborne and Lukin started to write painfully slow songs—even slower than Flipper and the B-Side of My War—that blended elements of metal and hardcore. As Melvins’ sound began to change, it became clear that Dillard wasn’t the right drummer for the band. Dale Crover played in a cover band in Aberdeen. The teenager’s skill was obvious to Osborne and Lukin, so they convinced him to join Melvins. Crover loved punk but could also play Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath songs, plus he could hang with the weird timings and changes Osborne and Lukin threw at him. Oh, and he hit his drums with the grace of a jilted orangutan.

A 1985 C/Z records compilation of Washington bands called Deep Six features four Melvins songs: the first time the band’s music saw light. That label also released the trio’s first EP, Six Songs, the following year. Listening to Six Songs is like walking through a lightless house with rusted nails jutting from the floorboards: pain is inevitable but unpredictable. Featuring the classic “Easy As It Was” that appears in even uglier form on Gluey Porch Treatments, the EP was not, shall we say, well received. Melvins embarked on its first tour, playing the Six Songs material and most of the as-yet-to-be-recorded Gluey Porch Treatments.

“We toured part of the US in 1986,” Osborne recalled, “and we vowed never to tour again. It was a bunch of skinheads who wanted to kick our ass. They were not at all interested in our music.” It’s tempting to romanticize hostile reactions from crowds, of which Melvins have seen more than their fair share. But hearing every asshole shit on your band night after night would suck. “I went home a very discouraged fellow,” Osborne remembered. “We nonetheless recorded Gluey Porch Treatments afterward. We just felt like we had to.”

Listening to Gluey Porch Treatments alongside Flipper, “Saint Vitus,” and Black Flag is like comparing Sabbath to Zeppelin. They might drink at the same watering hole, but Sabbath and Melvins are clearly apex predators. From the start, Gluey Porch Treatments makes no attempt to invite listeners into its grimy world. Lukin starts “Eye Flys” with an obnoxiously lumbering bass line. Crover clobbers his toms at awkward moments, each hit going against what you expect to happen. Atop that racket, Osborne taunts listeners with grating feedback. Instead of moving into something melodic and palatable, the track builds into a slow-motion collision between instruments—a car crash you know is about to happen but can’t stop or look away from. Nothing about Gluey Porch Treatments gets easier. The album is a flaming bag of dog shit on your doorstep: you have to put it out even though it’s going to ruin your shoes.

If you think distinguishing between doom and sludge is academic, compare “Heater Moves & Eyes” to Sabbath, Trouble, or Candlemass. Those bands’ songs, although slow and ominous, are often driven by easily digestible melodies and choruses, and they follow discernable narrative arcs. “Heater Moves & Eyes” is instead angular, nonsensical, and deliberately sloppy, putting off a very different vibe than Sabbathian doom. Because sludge is slow metal often written by people who grew up playing punk, there’s a sneering irony you won’t find in doom. Instead of depicting that most epic battle between good and evil, or reaching for spiritual truth, sludge is typically more grounded, delving into life’s negativity while laughing at its absurdity. That’s all true of Gluey Porch Treatments.

Crover pushes “Heater Moves & Eyes” back and forth with weirdo tom rolls that blur into tottering, left-of-center grooves. Trying to figure out his beats will make most drummers (including myself) feel mentally tongue-tied. Walk into any drum shop and Crover most likely won’t be the drummer you hear clerks talking about. At first glance, it’s easy to write off his playing as sloppy, dumb, and even out of control. But it’s all intentional, making Melvins sound meaner, dirtier, and more unhinged. Often throwing in awkward hits, fills, and rests, he’s always a zit on the ass end of the beat.

“Influence of Atmosphere” is a red-headed stepchild, lashing out with unpredictable metallic jabs. Messing up the flow of Gluey Porch Treatments is a handful of songs that clock in at less than a minute: “Exact Paperbacks,” “Glow God,” “Big as Mountain,” “Flex With You,” “Clippng Roses,” and the title track. Sometimes moving at the speed of hardcore, sometimes with the stride of up-tempo rock, and all featuring disorienting changes, those songs disrupt Gluey Porch Treatments, which is itself disrupting. Amid atonal chugging, precisely deployed feedback, and muscular drumming, a honey-sweet riff emerges from “As It Was,” a song that may or may not be about golden showers. The LP ends with the cruel instrumental “Over From Under the Excrement,” which churns for several minutes after you expect (and wish for) it to stop.

Gluey Porch Treatments is genius. It just took people a while to catch on. It “came out to a resounding thud,” Osborne recalled. “No one gave a shit about that album.” While it’s a template for sludge, the record is also its own animal, an inside-out version of metal that Sonic Youth might’ve crafted, had that band decided to pursue heaviness. Melvins’ subsequent releases fall more into that deconstructive schema.

Sick of Washington, the band relocated to San Francisco not long after Alchemy Records put out Gluey Porch Treatments. They still kept ties to a few Washington weirdos: Kurt Cobain, who grew up in the same rural area, and Krist Novoselic. Both musicians were heavily inspired by Melvins. Cobain and Novoselic recruited Crover to demo songs for Bleach, and a few of those demos made it onto the record proper. Lukin moved back to Washington and formed Mudhoney. Shirley Temple’s daughter, Lori Black, joined Melvins to record Ozma, a slightly more refined album than Gluey Porch Treatments that sounds like The Jesus Lizard covering Venom. Featuring a garbage disposal interpretation of a Kiss song, Ozma came out on Boner Records, who coupled that LP with Gluey Porch Treatments as a single CD release.

Nirvana took over the world with Nevermind in 1991. Major labels sniffed around that trio’s scene like hounds, looking for another breakout success. Melvins signed to Atlantic, knowing full well that the label’s interest was a fluke. The band released Houdini in 1993, and Stoner Witch in 1994, through the corporate juggernaut. Before that, the group put out the untouchable Bullhead and Lysol, albums that underscore Melvins’ stolid determination to avoid stagnation, which the band upholds to this day.

Melvins has cemented its reputation as one of the most prolific and progressive bands under the umbrella of heavy music, routinely challenging and redefining what that means. From the raw sludge of Gluey Porch Treatments to the grungy earworms of Stoner Witch to the noise attack of Prick (1994) to the dual drummer onslaught of (A) Senile Animal (2006) to the simultaneously laid back and unsettling Hold It In (2014), Melvins has become its own genre, releasing timeless records for over thirty years. Even when Osborne and Crover are old enough to move into a retirement community together, they’ll find new ways to approach Melvins.

Post-Amplification Blues

New Orleans, Louisiana. With a homicide rate seven times that of the national average, this Southern city has been known as a murder capital for years. Corruption courses through the varicose veins of the New Orleans Police Department, so there’s not much help there. Over the years, NOLA cops have received felony convictions on charges ranging from drug trafficking to murder.

You want heroin? Meth? Cocaine? You can score all three within minutes of walking the city’s streets. It doesn’t get too cold here, making it a haven for those outcasts labeled as homeless. Despite all the Americans who’ve fooled themselves into believing that racism is no longer a problem, New Orleans is glaringly segregated, leaving many neighborhoods poverty-stricken and underserved. Did I mention that the New Orleans police are notorious for racial profiling and brutality?

It’s a city that’s writhing and vomiting, like a junkie trying to kick a habit.

Piercing feedback and filth-drenched riffs; barbaric drumming; depressive bass playing; feral-cat-on-meth screams: Eyehategod is the negativity of New Orleans in musical form.

The band formed in the spring of 1988 when guitarist Jimmy Bower and vocalist Mike Williams decided to start a band that would mix equal parts Black Flag and Black Sabbath. In that way, Eyehategod was a metalcore band long before legions of mall metallers (Avenged Sevenfold, et al.) would make that moniker a dirty word. But there’s a more fitting classification for the group: sludge. By combining plodding, distortion-infested blues with bursts of manic hardcore, Eyehategod has played an integral role in shaping that facet of aggressive music.

The origin story of Eyehategod’s name, according to Jimmy Bower:

We had a crazy friend, his name was Chris Hillyard, and he’s the guy who came up with the name Eyehategod. We’d go over to Mike’s house and take a bunch of acid and listen to Swans, Chrome, SPK, Melvins—all this shit. And I remember, we were tripping, and [Chris] was like, “Dude, a great name for a band would be Eyehategod…Spell it E-Y-E—one whole word.”*

Bower and Williams’s reaction: “That rules.” In addition to bands they discovered through the tape-trading underground, the young musicians were inspired by local heavyweights Carnivore and Graveyard Rodeo.

Williams and Bower soon met Joey LaCaze, a nineteen-year-old kid who hit the drums like an enraged gorilla. On the first day they jammed together, Bower played his guitar through LaCaze’s parents’ stereo. Bower described LaCaze as “looking like he was ten years old but beating the drums like he was John Bonham.”* The union was electric. That day, they wrote four songs that would appear on Eyehategod’s 1989 demo, Garden Dwarf Woman Driver, most of which would get further refined for the band’s first LP, In the Name of Suffering, released in 1990 by Intellectual Convulsion, a small label out of France.

After teaming with LaCaze, Bower and Williams recruited Marc Shultz on second guitar and Steve Dale on bass to secure the lineup for In the Name of Suffering. Within the first twenty seconds of “Depress,” Eyehategod lays the cracked foundation for its infamous sound. Steve Dale plays an obnoxiously simple bass line as Bower and Patton shove a middle finger in the listener’s face via nerve-pinching feedback. The instruments congeal around Dale’s earthen bass to form a wave of toxic mud, at the pinnacle of which are Mike Williams’s unintelligible screams.

In short: Hi, motherfuckers. We’re Eyehategod.

Touring for In the Name of Suffering, Eyehategod “got into some shit” with Steve Dale, as Marc Shultz put it.† Schultz filled the bass slot, and the band played a few shows as a four-piece before enlisting guitarist Brian Patton. He, Bower, and Williams had played together before, so Patton fit right in with the tight-knit Eyehategod. He also happened to be one of the few people who liked the band at that point. “Eyehategod started as a way to piss people off,” Patton remarked.† “All the heavy music around here was fast, thrashy stuff, so Eyehategod slowed it down as much as possible and made a bunch of noise, basically. It was a way to say fuck you and make everyone hate them. And it worked, man. People fuckin’ hated them. For the longest time, I was one of the few guys who actually enjoyed the hell out of it.” About his band’s modus operandi, Williams said, “That was the concept of Eyehategod in the beginning: to play as slow and aggravating as possible and just destroy people.”†

Intellectual Convulsion folded not long after putting out In the Name of Suffering, but Eyehategod was soon picked up by Century Media, who released the endlessly influential Take as Needed for Pain LP in 1993. Heralded as EHG’s magnum opus by magazines and fans alike, the album showcases a band that figured out how to distill doom and hardcore into a vat of skin-eating glue.

When Eyehategod started, its members didn’t have serious plans. But after getting signed to Century and touring with Crowbar and White Zombie, they siphoned every ounce of energy they had into the band. During that time, Bower said to journalist J. Bennett, he and his band mates consumed “a lot of acid [and] any opiates we could find…We were all twenty-three, twenty-four-years-old and out of our fuckin’ minds.” Adding to the aura of unease that surrounded Eyehategod, Williams’s living situation was far from ideal.

I had been kicked out of my house by an ex-girlfriend, and I was living in the French Quarter on the street. I was totally homeless while we recorded that entire record. I would stay at people’s houses every now and again, and sometimes I’d stay above this strip club on Bourbon Street called Big Daddy’s. There were these horrible, horrible little apartments up there—me and my friend, this girl Jessie, had like half a room that was infested with fleas. The cool thing was that the studio was like a block away, on Canal Street.†

Eyehategod recorded Take as Needed for Pain in a studio on the thirteenth floor of a defunct store. In the heat of day, Canal Street emits a nauseating stench. Filth has been ground into the concrete, and it wafts into the air in an odor that combines old mayonnaise, shit, and motor oil. Take as Needed for Pain confronts listeners like that smell affronts tourists. Try as you might, you won’t soon forget it.

“Blank” busts out of the gate with frantic hardcore, made weighty by LaCaze’s backbeat and sharpened by Bower and Patton’s metallic chugs. A minute later and Eyehategod dives into cough syrup—the old kind, with morphine in it—breaking down into a riff that swings like a drunken sucker punch. Amid a chugging groove, a sample of what sounds like a TV psychologist sermonizing about “suffering from addiction to drugs” invades the song’s airspace, making you feel like you’re sitting on a couch in a New Orleans drug house, staring at static on a broken TV.

Schultz opens the tastefully titled “Sister Fucker (Pt. 1)” with mean-spirited swing. Great blues musicians are able to capture their personality in their playing, even with simple licks. In line with its troll title, the music of the song is yet another of Eyehategod’s dirt-caked middle fingers, which indeed reflects the band’s personality.

Eyehategod is an edge lord band. Some edge lord humor can be funny, but more often it belittles an entire culture or group’s oppression. The name Eyehategod is, to me at least, funny. Adolescent? Maybe, but people will still get pissed when they see you wearing an Eyehategod shirt. It disrupts their equilibrium in a small but necessary way. It’s like flicking a speck of poop onto America’s obsession with Christianity. Many see it as a given that we should be bombarded by that religion’s values and imagery at every turn. In that context, a band called Eyehategod needs to exist. But then there’s the dumb-shit aspects of the group, like Jimmy Bower playing a Les Paul emblazoned with a Confederate flag that has marijuana leafs instead of stars inside the blue stripes (he recently donated that guitar, but he played it for a really long time), and deciding to call the fourth track on Take as Needed for Pain “White [N-word].”

Bower said the title pokes fun at bassist Marc Schultz and how he used to appropriate black culture. Williams explained, “You know, we are from the South—and we’re proud to be from the South—so people just assume we’re racists.”† To him, the title was a way of saying, “If people just assume all Southerners are racist, and there’s no way I’m going change their minds, then I’m going to fuck with them.” Years after the song came out, however, Williams admitted, “Honestly, I have regretted that title. I stick by it, and I’m not gonna take stuff back, but there’s times when I think it’s not worth all the bullshit. And I definitely don’t want people to think I’m a racist—that’s horrible.”†

To Bower, living in a city as diverse as New Orleans created a context in which he and his bandmates felt comfortable enough around black people and confident enough in their respect for African American culture—and how their blues-addled metal underscores that respect—that they could make those jokes. Eyehategod has long described its sound as “down to earth motherfucken post amplification blues.” Having grown up in New Orleans, the band’s members could never disconnect their music from the black suffering that shaped the blues—and the fact that they were co-opting that style, unlike white musicians from other parts of the country. “It all goes back to slavery, all the drum rhythms brought from Africa,” Bower said about music in New Orleans.* “There’s a place downtown called Congo Square, and slaves were allowed on Sundays to congregate there and practice religion and music. That’s the true backbone of the New Orleans sound…There’s a lot of cultures in New Orleans, and you can either be an idiot, racist dude, and live your life that way…or you can learn from it.”

Although blues-based rock from The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Black Keys is a form of appropriation, you likely won’t hear members of those bands say so, at least not with Bower’s directness and awareness. Appropriation has always been inescapably obvious to the members of Eyehategod. To them, the horribly titled fourth track on Take as Needed for Pain, as well as Bower’s guitar, was also a way to make fun of themselves: five white dudes playing loud blues in New Orleans. But it takes a lot of sideways reasoning to get there. The reality is that there’s no humor in that negativity, no wiggling away from the ways in which racist speech and imagery reinforce oppression. When Quentin Tarantino says the N-word in Pulp Fiction, not to mention the many times he wrote it into the scripts of Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, he’s operating under the same delusion: that he has so many black friends and is so far beyond being racist that he can joke around that way. It doesn’t work like that, though.

Over the years, the members of Eyehategod have realized they made a mistake with the song title, and now refer to it as “White Neighbor.” In 2016, Bower talked to CLRVYNT about coming to understand how the shit he and his bandmates once thought was funny can be damaging, even if they were trying to be ironic. “I have a daughter now,” he said. “I wanna raise her like I was raised—to be respectful of everyone and to judge people by who they are, not what they look like or what religion they are or whatever kinda bullshit people judge people for.”

All this is a damn hard pill to swallow in order to listen to Eyehategod. It’s understandable (and probably the right thing to do) if you skip over the band and this chapter. I hope to see you in the next one. Of course I feel conflicted, and sometimes sick to my stomach, when I listen to Eyehategod, and when I think about the fact that the band has played such a huge role in shaping who I am. Before I knew about the highly problematic elements of Eyehategod, I heard “Blank” in a BMX video. Its unfiltered rawness beckoned, telling me to play music. I could feel in my bones that EHG captured something true and essential about my blue-collar surroundings. But I can listen to Eyehategod because I’m a white dude from Wyoming, where I was able to ignore America’s racist backbone. It wasn’t the South, where the realities of slavery and the Civil War perpetually linger. When friends from school had Confederate flag patches on their backpacks and they told me it was the rebel flag, I was dumb enough to think that it really did just signify being a nonconformist, no different from the anarchy “A” so many of us scrawled onto our notebooks, lockers, and desks.

I avoided thinking critically and in-depth about race until college, which is when I first began to question and examine the fact that Eyehategod has long been one of my favorite bands. Sometimes I feel like I’ve reached a plateau where I can criticize the band’s mistakes as well as recognize its accomplishments; other times, I can’t get over the fact that a band who invited me into the world of heavy music has done so much to turn people away. I considered leaving the band out of this book, but that would be too easy. Heavy music as a whole, and especially sludge, wouldn’t look remotely the same without Eyehategod. More than that, if I left the band out, it would be disingenuous, an attempt to make myself look better, to pretend that I don’t have serious and regrettable flaws.

Take as Needed for Pain’s fifth song, “30$ Bag,” essentially consists of three riffs, yet LaCaze makes each one groove in multiple ways, a tactic from the book of New Orleans blues drummers. The longest song on the LP, “Disturbance,” divides the album into two chapters, working as a gruesome interlude. Taking cues from noise antagonists SPK and Whitehouse, “Disturbance” stacks multiple tracks of someone giving instructions on how to insert a catheter on top of rumbling noise, which eventually swallows the sample. It’s an overlooked yet key piece of the record, isolating the part of the brain that creates discomfort and putting it in a vice. LaCaze was the mastermind behind the track. He remembered,

At the time of that record, I was living at my mom’s place, and across the canal are some really fucked-up areas, and every night we’d hear gunshots. I mean, like, automatic weapons and shit. You could literally hear people shooting each other, and it was weird, because it’d be totally quiet and in the silence of the nighttime, you’d just hear gunshots and you’d think, “Someone probably just got fucking killed.” So “Disturbance” was inspired by that. I had these police scanners set up, so I’d hear gunshots, and then I’d hear the cops on the scanner responding to the call.†

The coded cop chatter only made that violence more disorienting and confusing for LaCaze, which is how “Disturbance” functions. The same goes for the feedback that opens so many Eyehategod songs, such as “Take as Needed for Pain.” Those elements transform EHG’s music into a mechanism of confrontation. The band knows how to riff out and party, but its antagonistic spirit always ruins the good time.

In “Who Gave Her the Roses,” Mike Williams spouts broken mirror poetry alongside cyanide chugs. An underappreciated lyrical mastermind, Williams’s writing in lyrics, as well as his book, Cancer as a Social Activity, filters edge-of-sanity ramblings through a style that combines Charles Bukowski’s rawness with William S. Burroughs’ harsh abstraction. He upsets his imagery with bizarre diction, yet his lyrics are quiet about their poetics. The CD booklet for Take as Needed for Pain splices seemingly random textual materials with Williams’s lyrics, creating “just more confusion,” according to the vocalist.† “People couldn’t figure out which song each set of lyrics was to, and it drove them insane. I just like the idea of throwing something different into the mix. I like making people think, though. It confuses them and probably frightens them a little bit.” The stark collision of images that comprises the album’s cover19—old medical photos surrounding a picture of a woman wearing a crown of flowers—combine with his words and the group’s music to make Take as Needed for Pain a white-trash art piece, similar to Gummo in its aggressive portrayal of human ugliness. Fucking with the audience one last time, “Laugh it Off” glues together multiple layers of samples, many of them slowed-down, to form a bacteria-infused collage.

The impact of Take as Needed for Pain was immediate. Several Eyehategod worship bands cropped up, most of which are pretty awesome. That’s how you know a band is onto something real: the bands who copy that style outright are still good. But few have done sludge so well since—except, of course, for Eyehategod.

In addition to many metal journalists and fans, the band members themselves consider Take as Needed for Pain as the album that best captures the essence of Eyehategod. But 1996’s Dopesick is rawer and more venomous. When I contacted EHG’s management for an interview about Dopesick, they told me the band would most likely not want to speak about that album in any depth. Dopesick reflects an especially fucked-up time for Eyehategod, which is saying a lot, since the band’s entire history is so depraved.

Taking Henry Rollins’ advice to Get in the Van, Eyehategod toured for the better part of two years in support of Take as Needed for Pain. Mike Williams and Jimmy Bower have spoken publicly about struggling with heroin addiction, and countless musicians have said that hard drugs become most tempting on the road. No member of Eyehategod has ever been a choir boy. Everyone in the band operated in a haze of booze and hard drugs during that nonstop touring period. Eyehategod has always been underground in spirit and record sales, so its tour life was less hair metal party and more eat-at-gas-stations-and-get-fucked-up-in-the-van, a lifestyle that would wear anyone down.

For a short while after those tours, Bower focused on playing drums in Crowbar and Down. The dude has an immediately identifiable style on guitar and drums, when most people struggle to find an original voice on one instrument. Williams spent more time on his Metal Maniacs column while living in New York, and Patton recorded a brutal sludge-grind record with Soilent Green. Marc LeBlanc then replaced Schultz on bass. After that, Eyehategod began the violent process of writing and recording Dopesick.

People describe heroin withdrawal as a rebellion of the body, a war your skin and internal organs wage against themselves. That violence is immediately apparent in “My Name is God (I Hate You).” Williams, who split his time between NYC and NOLA to record Dopesick, moans like a dying man before letting loose a rabid howl and then smashing a bottle—all of which is caught by a hot mic that funnels each sound through sharp feedback.

Williams cut himself on the bottle and bled everywhere. Instead of cleaning it up, his bandmate took cues from Charles Manson’s disciples and wrote on a wall with his singer’s blood. Williams recalled,

That whole session was bizarre. We got a garbage can and thought, “Let’s scream over it for the intro,” but it got out of hand. I was probably intoxicated and ended up cutting my hand open and dripping blood all over the studio. I don’t know if it was Joey but someone started writing “Helter Skelter” or some kinda Manson stuff. The guy from the studio was this huge cocaine addict, and the guy who owned the place didn’t know what to say and freaked out. He called our label, saying, “These guys are insane, you gotta get them out of here!”‡

LeBlanc’s obstinate bass line saunters from that pained opening, pouring the groundwork for one of Eyehategod’s heaviest sections: vocals and instruments hit on the same exact notes to form a densely concentrated slog. Courtesy of Pepper Keenan from Corrosion of Conformity and the masterful Billy Anderson, the production of Dopesick is more lo-fi than that of Take as Needed for Pain, cloaking the vocals and instruments in a noxious cloud.

It’s not hard to imagine that the title “My Name is God (I Hate You)” is a reflection of how Williams felt growing up: if there is a God, he had it out for Williams. The singer said,

I hate playing some sort of pity card, but my childhood wasn’t exactly a bed of roses…Growing up in North Carolina wasn’t a lot of fun, I suppose. From a young age I would watch my dad beat my mom, fire guns off, beat my ass for no reason after we would come home from fucking church, stash his porn and booze bottles all over the house. You know, junk like that. My mom died when I was nine, dad at eleven. My older brother committed suicide a week after my dad passed. Those are just the things I can talk about. I do remember the good times too, however. But anyway, what you gonna do? Life is life.§

About halfway through Dopesick’s opener, the band hops on a runaway coal car of nihilistic hardcore. The mine car quickly derails, crashing into a polluted swamp that bubbles in half-time. The guitar solo has more often than not been used as a tool for wankery, but the aggressively simple solo in “My Name is God (I Hate You)” adds to the track’s menace, stumbling along the crooked steps of some greasy hillbilly scale.

“Dogs Holy Life” is a lesson for heavy bands that write unnecessarily long songs. In one-minute-ten-seconds, Eyehategod lands a succession of speedy jabs with backbeat-driven hardcore and then tackles the knees with a sludge-corroded groove. Bower calls those rhythmic shifts “the drops—you know, we’re playing one tempo, and then we slow it down and it makes your knees buckle.”† A drill of feedback burrows through the opening of “Masters of Legalized Confusion” (Eyehategod’s mission statement), a track that expertly navigates changes in tempo and feel that could only be recorded live, as a whole band. Robotic, play-like-a-computer-program musicians could never pull that shit off. The members of Eyehategod react to each other in real time, something that can only be mastered by jamming with other musicians.

As with Take as Needed for Pain, listening to Dopesick is both crushingly depressing and fun, sometimes at the same time. “Ruptured Heart Theory,” “Zero Nowhere,” “Broken Down but Not Locked Up,” and “Anxiety Hangover” fill the lungs with gravel; whereas “Methamphetamine,” “Peace Thru War (Thru Peace and War),” and especially “Dixie Whiskey” capture Pantera’s keg-in-the-backyard spirit. Take as Needed for Pain is a relatively focused record compared to Dopesick. The latter spills over at the edges, just like Eyehategod.

Combine drugs and booze with the built-in difficulty of managing band relationships and you get a royal mess. The members of Eyehategod needed time away from each other after touring for Dopesick. They had gone on the road with the likes of White Zombie, Pantera, and Neurosis. From 1998–2000 Bower focused on drumming for Crowbar; Patton funneled his energy (and misanthropy) into Soilent Green; LaCaze worked on experimental sound and percussion projects; and Williams tried to get his life on track. It was just enough time to stop hating each other.20 Eyehategod found a new bassist in Danny Nick, compiled several demos and singles, released them as Southern Discomfort, and started writing songs that would appear on 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives. With cleaner production than Dopesick, that third LP finds the quintet cutting its sludge with syncopated rhythms and nimble changes.

Eyehategod hit highways across the world in support of Confederacy of Ruined Lives. Still tangled in the messiness of a major label deal, the group put out 10 Years of Abuse (and Still Broke) in 2001 to complete its contract with Century Media. Eyehategod then signed with Emetic, a label that actually cares about the band’s musical legacy. Bower is one of those people who bleeds music: even though EHG was functioning again, he wrote and recorded an album with his swamp jam band, The Mystick Krewe of Clearlight, played drums on Down II, and mimicked the sounds of a car crash with each of his riffs on the first two Superjoint Ritual records. Antsy to play, Williams, LaCaze, and Patton teamed with former Eyehategod bassist Marc Shultz and guitarist Gary Mader, who later replaced Danny Nick as EHG’s permanent bassist, to form Outlaw Order, releasing the snarling Legalize Crime in 2003.21

And then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina upended the band’s world.

The floods. The drownings. The looting. The evacuations. The overwhelmed, understaffed, and (already) trigger-happy New Orleans police. The lack of immediate government aid. Pets trapped in abandoned houses. Fires. Poisonous water. Violence, confusion, and destruction. Violence, confusion, and destruction.

The members of Eyehategod reached out to each other, quickly realizing that no one had heard from Williams. Imagine for a second the suffocating stress you’d feel trying to figure out if your friends and family members are alive after a hurricane—and if so, where they are. They pieced together info and discovered that their singer had been arrested in nearby Morgan City. Telling the story two years after the fact, Williams said,

I think it was August 29 that the storm hit, and you know, every time there’s a hurricane in New Orleans, no one thinks it’s gonna be the big one. This one was a lot different, obviously—but we stuck it out, as usual. About eight hours in, the power went out, but we had a little battery-powered radio we were listening to and we could tell things were getting bad. People from the Ninth Ward, where the levee broke, were calling into the radio station saying they were trapped on their roofs. I lived in the Lower Garden District, and [after the hurricane passed] the water in my neighborhood went down, but that was probably the worst thing about it, because that’s when people got really violent. If you called 911, you got a busy signal. And that gave everybody ideas right there. My neighborhood was on higher ground, so it became a focal point for people from other neighborhoods to come to. I live in a flophouse-type of place—a bunch of apartments in this old, old building—and we had people sleeping in the hallways that we didn’t even know. The first thing we noticed that morning was a body on the corner about three blocks away from my house. It was this homeless lady from the neighborhood who I guess got hit by a car the night of the hurricane. You’d see cop cars ride by with the lights on—no sirens or anything—and they’d just pass by her. A couple of us got a blanket and covered her up, but she stayed there for days.¶

Talking further about the chaos in his neighborhood as people flocked there, Williams remembered,

That’s when the looting, fires, and all of that crazy stuff started. We tried to stay through that, but it just got too insane, so we left…

You would hear gunshots in our neighborhood anyway, but the power had been out for days. You couldn’t call 911 or get a cop if you needed one. People were just getting crazy. There were gunshots constantly. People were walking down the streets stealing cars. People were looting all the stores and stealing alcohol. It was like something you’d see in a movie. Then you’d look at the horizon and see houses burning.**

Adding even more urgency to the situation, he didn’t have enough methadone when he and his girlfriend decided to flee.

I was on a methadone program, and they gave us a couple of bottles to take home, but not enough…When we were walking around, people were telling us there was free water at the grocery store down the street. So, to make up for my prescribed government medicine, we happened to acquire a few pharmaceutical amenities. A lot of my neighbors are on the same stuff, like heroin or whatever, and I knew that eventually they were gonna realize we had something in our apartment. People were desperate, and I’m sure they could take a hint if we weren’t getting sick, you know? So that was another thing that frightened me—I figured eventually someone would kick in our door. I had a friend that said they’d let me borrow their car, so I was kind of planning on that. The night before we left, Alicia went outside to smoke a cigarette. Now, I used to hear gunshots in my neighborhood often, but you’d hear a lot more after the hurricane. Anyway, she came back in and put a chair under the doorknob. I guess some guy had pulled a gun and told her to come with him. But she totally bullshitted the guy and said, “Hold on, let me go get my shoes.” I heard him coming down the hall, so I threatened to blow his head off, and he left. We slept at my neighbor’s apartment, and as soon as the sun came up, we borrowed my friend’s car and took off. We took our cat with us. Someone adopted her, but at least we saved her. Then we ended up in Morgan City, and I heard my house burned down.

We got a hotel room, but Morgan City is so small that I think that if they see anyone with long hair and tattoos, they think they’re suspicious. Plus we were from New Orleans, which they knew because we had to show ID to rent the hotel room. So the cops totally came into the hotel room, and that was that.¶

They found Xanax.

The original charge was fifteen counts of distribution, but they ended up dropping it to eight counts, and then through the lawyers and all that, it ended up at one. It could have been a lot worse if I had gotten caught in New Orleans…[In Morgan City] I was looking at fifteen years at least, or something, but if they were putting looting on there and all that…that’s alleged, allegedly looting. I’m not going to say whether it happened or not. There’s people doing time right now for doing that during the hurricane and they’ve got like twenty years for stealing…The cops would come to the neighborhood and say, “Hey, there’s Robair’s. They broke into Robair’s if y’all need some food. Go head over there and get what you need.” I mean the cops were telling us this. Wal-Mart and places like that, the cops were in there stealing stuff. There were cops stealing jewelry and TVs. I saw all of that. It really happened. The cops were at the drug stores, too. The cops were doing the same thing the people were doing.**

Factoring in Williams’s previous charges, a Morgan City judge set his bail for $150,000. Phil Anselmo of Pantera, a longtime friend of Williams’s and supporter of Eyehategod, paid the sum. “The Katrina thing just brought a lot of people closer together,” Williams told The Austin Chronicle. “I think that was something Phil felt like he needed to do. There’s not that many [metal musicians] left down here that have been in the scene for that long.”

While Williams was arrested, released on bail, and, finally, able to find respite on Anselmo’s property outside New Orleans, Mader, Bower, LaCaze, and Patton dealt with their own versions of the Katrina nightmare. Speaking with VICE a few months after the storm ravaged his city, Mader said

Once we got out of harm’s way, me and Jimmy started making calls to see if anybody had heard from Mike or Alicia. But nobody had. Everybody feared the worst…

Once everyone who could get out got out, the city erupted into chaos and there was no help in sight, just a lot of photo ops for public officials. It quickly became every man for himself, and that included law enforcement officers. It was help yourself or die, literally. If you are really poor and your resources are limited, you were left to die. At least until federal aid turned up two fucking weeks later…

People should know that there are so many things that happened in New Orleans you will never read about now because they are trying to gloss over the situation. Like the story where the cop allegedly shot the guy who raped a seven-year-old girl in the Superdome so he could stop a howling mob from tearing the guy to pieces? That one never got out…

I will say that there were some good cops who did their best to protect the city in the face of absolute anarchy. There was no chain of command, no communication other than person-to-person, and 200 officers walked off the job in the midst of it all. The Army did their job when they were allowed into the city. Had they deployed earlier, the body count would have been halved, but our local and state officials have too much pride to admit that they had lost control of the city, and innocent citizens died because of that. Once the city was secured, the situation did spiral out of hand on the enforcement side. The military confiscated legally owned arms from citizens, took water and food from those who were literally dragged from their homes, and illegally confiscated generators. They denied the press access to certain areas so that the rest of the world could not see just how much death happened here.

When Mader finally made it back to his apartment above a tavern in the French Quarter, the place was destroyed, reeking “of shit and decay.” Bower recounted his Katrina experience in the same interview. “There were dead bodies, fires, gunshots going off, rapes,” he said. “It was basically humans being human in a survival situation. It was sad, very sad.”

•••

Over the next few years, Eyehategod slowly began picking up the pieces, playing a few shows, and writing some new songs, like the stomping “New Orleans is the New Vietnam.” Williams got relatively clean. The band gradually started to heal, along with its city.

I saw Eyehategod for the first time in 2010. It was one of the very few hour-plus sets I’ve seen where I didn’t get bored at all. I always knew that LaCaze was a unique drummer, with a musical voice as distinct as Hunter Thompson’s writing. Seeing LaCaze live, I realized that he’s nothing short of a legend. He hit his drums like Rocky hitting cow carcasses, a little smirk on his face the whole time. Every song took on different life from the recorded versions. LaCaze exaggerated and emphasized every drop, making us headbang like it was our last night on earth. Little did anyone know, that tour would be one of LaCaze’s last. Having suffered from asthma for most of his life, the drummer died from respiratory failure on August 23, 2013. He was forty-two.

Before LaCaze passed, Eyehategod was able to write and track one more record with him. The band decided to self-title its fourth LP, having earned the right to an eponymous record more than any band I know. Eyehategod weds the syncopation and break-neck changes of Confederacy of Ruined Lives with the earworm riffs of Take as Needed for Pain. “Agitation! Propaganda!,” “Medicine Noose,” and “The Age of Bootcamp” find the quintet playing faster than ever, though it’s always tightly controlled, as exhibited by those songs’ tendency to stop on a dime and dive into filth. In “Trying to Crack the Hard Dollar,” “Nobody Told Me,” and “Worthless Rescue,” LaCaze locates unexpected rhythmic turns in each riff like an MMA fighter finding pressure points. Hitting the nail on the head, Kim Kelly wrote, “LaCaze’s signature drumming style married swaggering looseness with powerful physicality, and his presence is felt all over [Eyehategod]. It’s a fitting epitaph for such a larger-than-life talent, and an excellent sign for the future.” Perhaps illustrating that most clearly is “Flags and Cities Bound,” a seven-minute song that uses feedback-stained space to put Williams’s rusted-nail poetics on a pedestal. LaCaze leads the band in and out of abandoned buildings with a cement roller waltz. Near the end of the song, Eyehategod lets its drummer loose, meeting him on widely spaced single notes. Between those hits, LaCaze plays fills that sound like an orangutan rattling its cage.

Pain emanated from Bower when he talked about LaCaze in 2014, though he also smiled as he remembered “a dude who just had a groove about him.”* I’m sure Eyehategod had some tough discussions about how to move forward, and if they even should, after LaCaze’s tragic and untimely death. A creator at heart, the drummer would’ve wanted Eyehategod to keep going, which is exactly what the band has done.

By the time Eyehategod released its self-titled record, the group had secured Aaron Hill as its new drummer, luckily finding one of the few players with a style as uncompromising as LaCaze’s. While the late drummer played with the ferocity of a cornered gator, Hill’s drumming is laced with the anxious malice of a trapped opossum.

Not long after Eyehategod started touring with Hill, the band was once again stopped dead in its tracks, this time because of Williams’s failing liver. In 2017, he admitted,

The whole thing started years ago…I had cirrhosis of the liver; my liver was totally destroyed, man. Honestly, from years of drugs and alcohol, to be truthful. I’m not going to lie about it; that’s the truth. I found out probably two or three years ago, but I continued to do what I do and drink a bottle of vodka a day and not give a fuck. I was trying to forget about being sick, and I really did more and more damage to myself, until it was to the point where I was unable even to function.††

Randy Blythe of Lamb of God and Phil Anselmo filled in for Williams at a few Eyehategod shows when the vocalist finally decided to get surgery. A testament to Williams’s impact and influence is that his friends and fans provided him with financial support before and after the surgery, which has motivated Williams to take better care of himself and develop a new appreciation for being in one of the most influential, iconic, problematic, and beat-to-shit bands in existence. He returned to the stage in 2017, looking really skinny but still carrying his feral cat resolve. People call him Mike IX for good reason: he seemingly has nine lives. As I write this, the band has completed multiple post-liver-op tours. Patton stepped down in 2018 to spend more time with family. Eyehategod has continued on.

I recently saw Eyehategod at LA’s Fonda Theatre. The band still rattles skulls as a quartet. Williams looked healthy, caterwauling like a dying animal and periodically making smartass comments to the crowd, most of whom were there for Black Label Society. A new liveliness pulsed in the singer compared to the last time I’d seen him—about four years earlier in Fresno, a show that Williams, who basically passed out on his feet onstage, likely doesn’t remember. Hill, Bower, and Mader played a tight set with characteristic nastiness. Mader sent dirt devils into the room. Bower filtered Tony Iommi’s heaviness through Greg Ginn’s raw aggression, grinning and laughing to himself the whole time. Hill dragged it all back to the earth. Most of the audience didn’t care about Eyehategod, which was very different from the other times I’d seen the band. People usually lose their shit at EHG shows. Each member still played his ass off. Anyone can play to a welcoming crowd, but there’s no clearer window into a band’s true intent than how it reacts to indifferent or hostile crowds. Eyehategod has been around for over thirty years, yet the group has none of the entitlement common to veteran acts.

No matter how many times he gets shot, blown up, hit by trains, and/or hurled from cliffs, Wile E. Coyote just reappears, seemingly unscathed. That’s Eyehategod, except its wounds leave actual scars. In spite of the countless attempts the universe has made on the band’s life, Eyehategod just keeps crawling back for more.

To Whom It May Concern:

I’m writing to recommend Kirk Windstein, founder and chief of NOLA sludge forerunners, Crowbar, for the position of Riff Master General. Mr. Windstein was among New Orleans’s first purveyors of sludge, which is to say he was one of the first purveyors of sludge, period. From Shell Shock and The Slugs to Down and, of course, Crowbar, Mr. Windstein has orchestrated hundreds of perfect riffs—the ones that buckle knees. His riffs are written with the structural integrity of the most enduring architecture. They’ll stand up for as long as humans are around.

Before Crowbar, Windstein played in Victorian Blitz, covering heavy metal classics by the likes of WASP and Judas Priest. Not long thereafter, he joined a crossover thrash band called Shell Shock, wedding the primitive attack of Cro-Mags with the blistering speed of Slayer. Jimmy Bower played drums—so yeah, it was good. In 1988, the band’s singer, Mike Hatch, committed suicide. He was one of Windstein’s best friends. Windstein immediately channeled that pain into music, holding band practice the day after Hatch’s funeral. When faced with crushing pain, Mr. Windstein uses it as the impetus to write riffs of great emotional weight. He knows that we live in a heavy world that demands equally heavy music.

After Hatch died, Shell Shock became After Shock with Kevin Noonan taking on vocal duties. The band went through a few more name changes, first to Wrequiem and then to The Slugs, enlisting Todd Strange on bass after Mike Savoie left. The Slugs fell apart fairly quickly, but the people at Grind Core Records didn’t know that when they called Mr. Windstein to sign his band. He hurriedly formed a new band with Noonan on lead guitar, the mighty Craig Nunenmacher on drums, and Strange on bass, handling vocals and guitar himself. They called it Crowbar. Listening to Crowbar is like getting bludgeoned by an unwieldy piece of steel, so the moniker is one of those rare examples of a band’s name perfectly matching its sound. Having existed in several different iterations since then—always with Windstein at the helm—Crowbar has been unleashing formidable albums for nearly thirty years. As with Wino, Mr. Windstein is one of those people who will be writing badass riffs until there’s no air left in his lungs.

Crowbar embarked on multiple tours with Pantera throughout the nineties. Fans of that band will recognize Mr. Windstein from his appearances in Pantera’s sophisticated video productions, Vulgar Videos (From Hell), aka The Home Videos. Pantera did not fuck around when it came to partying. Windstein fit right in. During those tours, he’d run around in full Hulk regalia for shits and giggles. He was also known to paint his face like Peter Criss of Kiss and run around, holding his hands up like claws and hissing. Cocaine was involved. Windstein and Crowbar also gained notoriety from their appearances on Beavis and Butthead. Videos for “Existence is Punishment” and “All I Had (I Gave),” both from the bridge-buckling Crowbar LP (1993), aired on the show as its protagonists provided such insight as, “This music is slow and fat.” These appearances helped to establish Windstein as a mythic figure in the metal world. Of course, his riffs are his true legacy.

In the early days, Crowbar trafficked in relentless heaviness, slowing down caveman hardcore to a knuckled crawl. That vibe comes across on every Crowbar album. From 1995’s Time Heals Nothing onward, Mr. Windstein has also illustrated a penchant for dynamic eeriness, intermixing brutish heaviness with foreboding ether. Neurosis is a fitting analog to Crowbar: both bands have evolved from unadulterated aggression to embrace haunting quietude. Both bands still educe tremors.

When it comes to choosing a favorite Crowbar record, some prefer the no-frills pugilism of Crowbar. Others gravitate to the sonically varied Odd Fellows Rest. To me, 1995’s Time Heals Nothing and 2001’s Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form are peak Crowbar. Through-out the former, Nunenmacher circles Windstein’s formidable riffs like someone trained in jiu-jitsu, finding syncopated points of attack. Opener “The Only Factor” sprints in a forceful D-beat and then gives listeners cauliflower ear with its sludgy chokehold. The song’s end section grooves so hard that it’s not safe to listen to while driving or operating heavy machinery. The title track, “Time Heals Nothing,” is a metallic New Orleans funeral procession for Mike Hatch that would’ve made the singer proud.

As for Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form, “The Lasting Dose” envisions Master of Puppets’ guitar harmonies through a watery opiate blur. Bower and Nunenmacher have laid down a plethora of staggering and unique Crowbar beats over the years, so it’s understandable why many people favor the records featuring those drummers. Tony Costanza of Machine Head plays drums on Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form. His percussion nods to Nunenmacher and Bower, but Costanza is also his own animal. “To Build a Mountain” finds the skinsman emphasizing those notes in Windstein’s riffs that make headbanging a biological imperative. Some of my favorite guitarists play guitar like a percussion instrument, which is to say that they play with violence. Windstein plays guitar with violence. His riffs pinpoint rhythmic pressure points, so their heaviness is something you feel as much as hear. You can tell that he hears drums in his head when he writes guitar parts by the way his riffs move. The opening section of “To Build a Mountain” showcases another signature Windstein tactic: putting skull-digger chugs alongside rubber-legged single notes. Windstein’s riffs are unmistakably his own. There have been many impersonators but no duplicators in terms of impact. Same goes for his gravel-throated yowls and the way his lyrics vacillate between determined encouragement and hopelessness.

As you might know, Crowbar is not Mr. Windstein’s only foray into spine crunchingly heavy music. Back in the early nineties, he started jamming with Phil Anselmo, Jimmy Bower, Pepper Keenan, and Todd Strange in Down, releasing the classic NOLA in 1995, a record that inhabits the same shelf of prestige as Paranoid, Reign in Blood, and The Great Southern Trendkill. It feels weird when people call Down a supergroup. That makes it sound cynical, like a marketing ploy. Down started as five buddies jamming, which NOLA perfectly captures. Those friends were members of Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Crowbar, and Eyehategod, so it’s a little better than what you or I would produce with our friends after a night out. In the way those guys’ styles gel, it’s so clear that their bands were guided by the same energy—not ripping each other off, just drinking from the same dark current. A lot of NOLA’s riffs are obvious collisions between Windstein and Keenan’s styles. Look at “Lifer” and how its linebacker chugs (Windstein) stomp through Sabbathian syrup (Keenan). There are also parts of the record that sound like pure Windstein: namely “Bury Me in Smoke” and the way it finds melodic movement between notes so close together, not to mention its heavyweight plod.

In conclusion, I ask that you consider the sheer number of timeless and emotionally dense riffs Mr. Windstein has given us: Eleven Crowbar LPs, four Down LPs, and three LPs with Kingdom of Sorrow, his band with Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta. Again, that’s literally hundreds of riffs that stand like marble columns. While the distinction of Riff Master General might be invented—a bit silly, even—it feels like a more accurate way to talk about Kirk Windstein than as a guy who plays guitar. Thanks for your time and consideration. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

A fan

19 Eyehategod’s album covers are a visual offshoot of William Burroughs’ cut-up writing style in books like Naked Lunch.

20 If you’ve played in a band and say that you’ve never hated your bandmates, you’re lying.

21 It’s basically Eyehategod sans Bower—and with more hardcore parts.

Of Concrete and Glass

1

When it comes to bands like Grief, 13, Noothgrush, Corrupted, and Primitive Man, the distinction between sludge and doom becomes hazy, at best. The sonic difference between a sludge and doom band is sometimes clear as day. Other bands meld doom and sludge into an indistinguishable stew. So part of me can see why people say those labels don’t matter, that it’s all just really slow metal at the end of the day.

A different part of me sees good reason to distinguish between doom and sludge. Like I’ve said, sludge is typically of the world, whereas doom tends to reach for something larger and more ethereal. Even when the punk influence is more buried than it is in Melvins or Eyehategod’s music, sludge bands often focus on social ills like economic disparity, humanity’s incessant drive to poison the earth, and widespread addiction. They typically provide snapshots without solutions: Look at this shithole world, here’s music to match it.

I’ve never heard a poet say that distinguishing between romantic and concrete poetry is pointless. Sure, in the broadest sense, it’s all just words on a page divided into lines and stanzas. Those words come from very different places, though. Romantics sought spiritual enlightenment through language. Concrete poets focused on images from daily life, wanting to ground their art in the real world. The latter is true of many sludge musicians.

This is a long way of saying that Grief is a sludge band. The Boston quartet began near the end of 1991, when Disrupt guitarist Terry Savastano started jamming with drummer Pete Donovan. Bassist Randy Odierno and guitarist-vocalist Jeff Hayward, both of Disrupt, became part of the fold to form Grief. Disrupt is a rancorous crust band in the spirit of Doom. Similar to Lee Dorrian, Hayward utilized harsh screams that, in the nineties, were more common to anarcho punk and grindcore than sludge, making Grief’s painfully slow music even more, well, painful. Instead of the sprawling narrative arcs that undergird many doom tracks, Grief’s songs are unmelodic and monotonous—musical flatlines. It’s hardcore punk drowning in existential quicksand.

Grief released its first EP, Depression, in 1992. With a cover that shows a sea of trash reaching toward a blank factory and smokestack, the three-song record feels like one long and horrible bummer of a track. If you want to ruin a dinner party, just play Depression. Same goes for 1993’s Dismal LP. That album’s noxious, bass-heavy tone is a plastic bag over the face of hope. On its cover, a forlorn child sits on a mound of trash, resting his head on his palm and staring at the ground. From beginning to end, Dismal hardly varies, which is why it’s so crushing. The LP mostly adheres to a single crawling tempo, and most of its riffs are similar, so it all congeals into one toxic mass. Sabbath’s riffs seem like Britney Spears hooks in comparison. All told, the LP is an exercise in erosion—of the self, optimism, and, if played at the correct volume, the eardrums. Listen to either of those early recordings, or any of Grief’s albums, in full. If you said you don’t feel hopeless afterward, I wouldn’t believe you.

Grief hooked up with Century Media for its 1994 follow-up to Dismal. With improved production that doesn’t dilute the band’s toxicity, Come to Grief has become the group’s best-known record. Even with major label support, however, Grief was always destined for the underground. As it turns out, getting your self-esteem grinded to dust isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

I’ve been listening to Come to Grief on my commute from Long Beach to Santa Monica, a thirty-mile stretch that’s typically gummed up enough by traffic to make it a two-hour drive. Similar to Dismal, Come to Grief feels like one long piece, riffs blurring together to achieve the same draining effect as an album of harsh noise. Savastano and Hayward lock themselves in a box, limiting their parts to low notes that are barely distinguishable from each other. Hayward’s gravel-gargling screams dwell in a similarly confined space while Donovan bludgeons his drums. With those bleak sounds coming from my speakers, I absentmindedly stare at red taillights slithering toward a smog-obscured horizon. During the writing of this book, I relocated from Minneapolis to Southern California for work, and to escape winter. Of course I get drunk on the sunshine, but I also think a lot about the Big One, that ultimate and perhaps inevitable earthquake that could destroy the West Coast. I also think about the extinction phases the Earth has seen, and how many scientists believe we’re at the beginning of another. Whether it’s through an extinction phase or some other catastrophic environmental event, it’s not hard to imagine that our planet would eventually slough us off like fleas. Even people who deny climate change know in their hearts that we’re only beginning to see the extent to which we’ve shit in our own nest. And yet we line I-405 like ants, climbing over each other, rubbernecking, and huffing carbon monoxide. Come to Grief is a fitting soundtrack. Aside from a few isolated sections, like the blues-drenched riff that closes third song “World of Hurt,” and the drunken swagger of the title-track, there aren’t any earworms on Come to Grief. It’s aural misery.

After putting out that album, Grief underwent a few lineup changes but still managed to release three more caustic and draining records: Miserably Ever After in 1996, Torso in 1998, then …and Man Will Become the Hunted in 2000. The group disbanded in 2001. Savastano then returned with Come to Grief in 2014. Come to Grief’s two crushing EPs, both released in 2017, show no sign that anything resembling happiness has crept into Savastano’s worldview.

2

Guitarist Liz Buckingham and drummer Ellen Mieczkowski formed Thunderpussy 13 in New York in 1990, shortening the name to 13 in 1992, when Alicia Morgan joined on vocals. Operating on similar negative wavelengths as Grief, 13 combined the immediacy of punk with the power of doom. The group’s brief life was an active one: two demos in 1992; a split with Grief and a seven-inch in ’93; and two splits with Eyehategod, one in 1994 and the other in ’95. Early 13 recordings find Buckingham playing sneering punk riffs choked by fuzz. On the Hollow / Bound seven-inch, Mieczkowski locks the band in slow-motion tempos while Morgan unleashes harrowing growls. Arguably 13’s strongest material, that seven-inch shows a band that was developing into a behemoth. Whore, 13’s side of its 1994 split with Eyehategod, embraces more of a groove—antipathy abounds, but the record has sonic footholds. Released on Slap-a-Ham in 1995, Wrong dwells in similar murk. Morgan’s throat-destroying vocals and Buckingham’s lung-puncturing guitar work are stepping stones that have led to such records as Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s 2016 sludge masterpiece, Arc.

The band shared the stage with Saint Vitus, Pentagram, Buzzoven, and Cathedral but broke up in 1996. Morgan, Mieczkowski, and Marmo have put out music since then, but Buckingham has become the best-known musician from the 13 camp, having played in the villainous Sourvein before joining Electric Wizard in 2002. Throughout her time in 13, Sourvein, and Electric Wizard, Buckingham has honed a tone and style that’s unequivocally her own. About that process, she said,

When I started with 13, I was just learning how to play guitar, and just learning about everything, really. It was total experimentation. I knew exactly what sound I wanted, but it took a number of years before I was able to achieve it. My first amp was a really nice amp, actually: at the time, nobody really wanted seventies amps. It was a 1971 Marshall Super Bass: it had an amazing tone, but it was nowhere near loud enough for me and it was always breaking. I used a Turbo Rat pedal that had insanely uncontrollable feedback, which I eventually became accustomed to and learned to use as an effect…After 13, I started to learn a lot more about equipment, having used other people’s, so I thought getting a bass set up would get me that heavier low-end sound I really wanted. I started using a Sunn Beta Bass amp, an old sixties Ampeg 2 x 15 cab, and a Big Muff. I used this set up with Sourvein in the beginning, but again, still not loud enough! Then I got the Laney and I never looked back…I’ve always played the same SG with all three bands, except at the very beginning with 13 when I played a Gibson Les Paul for a little bit.*

Since her days in 13, Buckingham has crafted tones with the touch of a master vintner. From 2004’s We Live to 2017’s Wizard Bloody Wizard, her sound plays an integral role in Electric Wizard’s heaviness.

Misogyny has been accepted in metal for far too long, so of course Buckingham has dealt with macho bullshit over the years. Buckingham spoke to Kim Kelly about her experience as a female musician in the worlds of doom and sludge—and her ambivalent predictions for the future:

When I first got involved in the metal scene, it was very male-oriented/dominated. There were hardly ever any girls in the audience, let alone onstage, whereas today, I definitely see a lot more girls into metal and playing it than back then. But despite that, I don’t really see that the playing field has leveled out—maybe a tiny bit. I think I personally deal with a little less [disrespect from male musicians] just because I’m in a better-known band now, and I’ve been playing for so long. When I first started, it was very hard to gain respect in the metal world, and I feel like it’s pretty much the same.†

Buckingham has persisted nevertheless, refusing to surrender the power she’s found in sludge and doom. “Something about the heavy simple riff just resonates deep within me,” she said. “It’s empowering.”†

3

In Dr. Seuss’s book There’s a Wocket in My Pocket, a stubborn, bird-like creature called a Nooth Grush appears on the narrator’s toothbrush. “But that Nooth Grush on my toothbrush…” the boy says, “Well, some are nice, but he is not.” Same goes for the band.

Noothgrush came to life in 1994, arising from the punk scene that spawned Neurosis. A cornerstone of that scene was Berkeley’s 924 Gilman St. venue, which has always championed progressive and anarchist politics. By then, Neurosis had already begun its (still ongoing) exploration of the unconscious mind. Noothgrush followed a route similar to the concrete poets, focusing on the most negative aspects of humanity. Inspired by Grief, bassist-vocalist Gary Niederhoff and drummer Chiyo Nukaga wanted to craft the slowest, most aggravating music they could, finding like-minded musicians in Luis Davila and Tom Choi, former guitarist of Asbestosdeath.

Noothgrush wasted no time, recording three EPs that first year. But Choi and Davila weren’t long for the band. In 1995, Noothgrush found its permanent guitarist, Russ Kent. Like a lot of underground bands who tour and record tirelessly with no prospect of making a living on music, Noothgrush has seen its fair share of lineup changes, with Kent, Nukaga, and Niederhoff serving as core members. They comprise the current Noothgrush lineup along with vocalist Dino Sommese of sludge-grind legends Dystopia.

Considering the group’s lack of commercial appeal, it’s no surprise that most labels wanted nothing to do with Noothgrush. Slap-a-Ham Records, run by Chris Dodge of powerviolence originators Spazz, had been releasing an eclectic mix of grind, powerviolence, sludge, and everything between since 1989. A fan of Noothgrush, Dodge put out the band’s first proper release, a seven-inch called Embraced by the Anti Self, in 1996. Spazz’s music is berserk, moving from sandpaper blasts to grooving bridges to caffeinated D-beat to snarling punk in the blink of an eye—and always keeping the chaos tightly controlled. It sounds like jazz musicians trying to murder people with sound. Dodge immediately saw that Noothgrush was closer in spirit to Capitalist Casualties, Doom, and his own band than Pentagram.

If sludge is horribly slow hardcore, then Noothgrush is one of the genre’s purest practitioners. Its songs are dissonant punk burners steeped in sewage. From 1996 to ’99, Noothgrush didn’t really stop releasing seven-inches, feeding music to labels such as Monkeybite, Bovine, Reservoir, and Clean Plate. As if the group’s hardcore roots weren’t clear in its sound, that tenacious approach to releasing music firmly located the band in punk’s underground. Noothgrush put out nine splits—some with heavy bands like Corrupted and Sloth, and some with powerviolence groups like Black Army Jacket—within that three-year period, compiling those songs on 1999’s Erode the Person. If I ever start a suicide cult, I’ll play that record on repeat on our big day.

Via Slap-a-Ham, Noothgrush put out another compilation, Failing Early, Failing Often, in 2001. It shares songs with Erode the Person but feels more cohesive, which is to say that it’s a gelatinous void. As with Eyehategod, Noothgrush utilizes samples from TV shows and movies to create a sense that its music is just another artifact floating in a sea of cultural detritus. “Dianoga” begins with a sample of Mr. Rogers, that white-bread, awkwardly sincere TV personality, talking about angry music. “When you’re feeling angry or sad, or maybe when something makes you feel afraid,” he says, “do you ever make up a dance, or stomp your feet, or punch an old pillow? Or do you have a loud song that you can sing when you’re angry?” And then, as if intentionally introducing a Noothgrush song: “Here’s some loud music, which just seems like it’s saying, ‘I’m angry. I’m very, very angry.’” An iron curtain of sludge crashes down. From the Robitussin trudge of “Oil Removed” and “Encasing” to the sadomasochistic crawl of “Useless” and “Sith,” that curtain weighs on the chest for the entirety of Failing Early, Failing Often.

Sludge’s promise that anyone can play music has unfortunately been digested by more white dudes than anyone else. Chiyo Nukaga, who plays drums with boulder fists, shows the genre’s potential to evolve. Speaking about her musical beginnings, Nukaga said,

Music brought me to Oakland from San Jose in 1998. I was renting a room in a three-story, nine-bedroom, brown shingle house on McArthur for $187 a month. The house was affectionately known as The Compound. I remember Asunder played in my roommate Jerry’s bedroom. It was awesome. It was a grittier scene at the time…When bands like Sleep, Grief, Eyehategod, and Nausea started coming through, I was inspired by sludge and the slower, doomier side of drums. Ellen of 13 and Lori Black of the Melvins have been two of my biggest female inspirations musically and otherwise…Style-wise I wanted to drum like Chris Hakius.‡

Nukaga’s brother first inspired her to play heavy music. From there, she discovered the Bay Area’s vibrant underground scene. “I fell in love with 924 Gilman St. in the late eighties,” she said.§ “After seeing local bands like Neurosis and Asbestosdeath, I realized how lucky I was to be living in the Bay Area.” Some of Nukaga’s favorite Noothgrush shows have been ones with grind and powerviolence groups, shows when her band was by far the slowest on the bill. Those mixed bills were common to the Bay Area throughout the nineties, inspiring people to experiment with melding sludge, grind, and other sub-genres to craft ever more negative vibes, an approach Primitive Man has since perfected. In addition to Noothgrush, Nukaga played drums for the monolithic Graves at Sea and also spent time in Amber Asylum.

About what made her gravitate to sludge, Nukaga said, “The feeling I get from playing sludge is absolute bliss and sadness. I think sludge can bring a lot of emotion up from within that can be very exhausting because of the nature of truth. It seems sludge always has a place in life because of all the sadness and anger the world has, based on earth and the decaying part of it. When I think of doom, I think of bands that are more metal influenced, with sad melodies. Sludge is more punk influenced. Like slowed down crust and often more political, lyric-wise, than doom.”

Noothgrush dissolved in 2001. With labels such as Emetic and Southern Lord putting out reissues of the band’s recordings, however, renewed interest led Noothgrush to play a few shows in 2011 and subsequently release a long-lost eponymous tape that was recorded in 1994. The group then put out a split with Coffins in 2013. Noothgrush’s three songs, “Humandemic,” “Jundland Waste,” and the arduous “Thoth,” might well be the band’s most crushing material, showing its tortured core through the refined lens of modern production. Noothgrush followed that with a 2017 split with Corrupted entitled Question the Purpose of Human Existence, contributing two tracks that grind bones away by hand. There’s no question: Noothgrush has left deep claw marks on the throat of sludge.

4

Driven by fierce politics and a need to destroy conventions, Japan’s Corrupted is akin to the Fugazi of sludge. Coming to life the same year as Noothgrush, Corrupted has released splits with that band, Grief, and several powerviolence, grind, and hardcore acts. The group has long avoided interviews and photographs, wanting people to focus on its music and intent. Corrupted deployed this statement in answer to interview queries:

We’ve never done an interview and we don’t let professional photographers take our picture. This is our policy—more an attitude—that we’d like to keep. Our expression of being Corrupted is in the sound, lyrics and artwork of our records. Of course, we always appreciate the people who buy our records, see us play and support us along with the fanzines, labels, distributors and event planners. We do not reject all media, or bash writers who express themselves through articles or reviews. All are free and it’s only through our personal expression of using the media that we exclude interviews.

Instead of press, the band tries to maximize its reach by writing lyrics in Spanish, the most widely spoken language next to Mandarin. The group’s deliberate avoidance of interviews keeps the identity of each member opaque, making Corrupted seem like a collective rather than a band of individual musicians. Much like punk legends Crass, everything the Japanese sludge group does stems from a defined and well-thought-out ideology.

Corrupted released a split with Grief in 1995, following that with three EPs of punishing, socially conscious sludge. The band perfected that approach on Paso Inferior, a 1997 LP that was originally available only in Japan. Corrupted makes literal the term “wall of amplification,” its music morphing into a monolithic presence. Even when a giant sloth riff lumbers forth on Paso Inferior, it’s enshrouded by droning feedback and distortion. Mother Sii growls in subterranean registers, and Chew Hasegawa plays drums with the immediacy of a sea turtle. Corrupted takes as much influence from Grief and Cathedral as it does from Japanese noise legend Merzbow, and like many of Merzbow’s records, Paso Inferior is less a collection of songs than an immersive sonic environment. Corrupted conjures boulders of electricity and shapes them into riffs. Paso Inferior simultaneously pushes against those parameters and threatens to unravel into chaos. Its cover shows an old man sitting on a tilted chair in a pit of rubble, staring at the destruction surrounding him.

After taking torturously slow and monotonous metal to its logical extreme with Paso Inferior, Corrupted began to transcend genre altogether, utilizing extremes of quietude to enhance the arduousness of its sludge. Llenandose De Gusanos of 1999 lurks in fog as Sii provides spoken-word narration. Both Se Hace Por Los Sueños Asesinos (2004) and El Mundo Frío (2005) juxtapose classical instrumentation with brain-compressing heaviness. Echoing the all-consuming bleakness of the album, the cover of Se Hace Por Los Sueños is a negative image of a small farm, defamiliarizing the pastoral scene by turning it inside-out. El Mundo Frío consists of one seventy-one-minute track, making it feel like a symphony, but in the ugliest possible sense. Perhaps post-metal is a better way to categorize Corrupted’s music after Paso Inferior, or perhaps no moniker can accurately describe the dynamic, draining, and structurally masterful records the group has crafted. Corrupted’s focus on environmental destruction and human injustice continues to align with the tradition of sludge, however.

The band quietly released Felicific Algorithm through Cold Spring in 2018. With doom and sludge seeing a surge in popularity, it’s as if Corrupted returned to remind us that Earth has yet to see a mightier band. And yet the group delivered that message quietly instead of deploying an extended promotional campaign. Replacing the delicate classical instrumentation of the past few Corrupted records is yawning noise that sounds like a battle between Merzbow and Sunn O))), making Felicific Algorithm one of the group’s most torturous efforts.

5

In the first episode of Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen sing a song called “The Dream of the Nineties is Alive in Portland.” Primitive Man is a destroyer of dreams. The hopelessness of Grief, 13, Noothgrush, and Corrupted is alive and well in the Denver trio.

Guitarist-vocalist Ethan Lee McCarthy has DIY written into his DNA. In addition to playing in grind bands Clinging to the Trees of a Forest Fire and Vermin Womb, he’s run multiple all-ages venues in Denver, providing a necessary alternative to the bar scene. When I lived there, McCarthy, along with some other die-hard musicians, ran a space called Blast-o-Mat. With hard-to-find records and merch in front and a dilapidated skate ramp in back, Blast-o-Mat shows felt vital and down-to-earth. Primitive Man’s music contrasts starkly with that welcoming vibe, reflecting the negativity its members see in the world with hope-eroding walls of noise-laden sludge.

The band formed in 2012 with McCarthy on guitar and vocals, Jon Campos of Wyoming’s Reproacher on bass, and Bennett Kennedy on drums. Primitive Man recorded its critically praised debut, Scorn, at Flatline Audio with Dave Otero during October of that year. The LP spends much of its time in waves of atonal sludge—be it mid-tempo or achingly slow—but it’s also jolted by charges of D-beat and grind. The fast sections strengthen the punch of the slow parts and vice-versa. Originally released on Throatruiner and Mordgrimm Records, Relapse reissued Scorn in 2013. With Spy Soto filling in on drums, Primitive Man put out four splits in 2014. Multiple of the trio’s songs on those splits devolve into minimalistic noise. In 2015, Primitive Man unleashed the brutal Home Is Where the Hatred Is EP. McCarthy does the artwork for his band’s records, communicating his broken worldview with photographic juxtapositions that depict the waste, chaos, and terror of modern life. The cover of Home Is Where the Hatred Is shows three naked people with American flags covering their heads like plastic bags; they sit at a picnic table covered with guns and knives.

Every Primitive Man release deserves praise, but 2017’s Caustic is the fullest realization of the band’s misanthropic intent. With commanding amplification captured through brilliant production, courtesy of Dave Otero, the LP epitomizes the depressive sludge aesthetic Grief, Noothgrush, and Corrupted developed. Caustic has spurts of grind and hardcore, but most of the record stays anchored to one monotonous tempo that lurks in the forty-five BPM range. That’s slow enough to alter brainwaves. As with the aforementioned band’s albums, Caustic erodes the psyche, especially when played in full. Joe Linden became Primitive Man’s permanent drummer in late 2015. His drumming is stripped of ego, with sparse hits that worsen the bludgeoning of McCarthy and Campos’ riffs. As in opener “My Will,” the drummer also integrates glassy double bass grooves that show the chops of a seasoned player, but only when it’s appropriate. While playing riffs that snap like rusted machinery, McCarthy introduces abysmal roars into the hostile ecosystem of Caustic. He doesn’t scream about wizards and dragons. About the record’s lyrics, McCarthy said,

I write about race relations in it—I’m black and white, so I have a perspective on that which I haven’t written that openly about for Primitive Man, ever. I wrote about some of that stuff, as well as depression and mental illness. And then about direct conflict with people, which I haven’t really done with Primitive Man, either. There were some recent events in my life that I was affected by so strongly that I had to write about them, and there were a couple deaths I had to write about as well. I guess if I could sum it up, I was having a hard time in my personal life, and I felt like the world around me was turning to shit.¶

When weed was legalized in Denver, it brought a lot of changes: some good and many bad. Denver’s economy saw an immediate boost. Developers bought cheap property and demolished old buildings and houses to make room for breweries, dispensaries, and high-end burger joints. Rent in those areas skyrocketed, and people were torn from their neighborhoods. While many Denver businesses are thriving, people are also struggling to make ends meet with paychecks that haven’t caught up with the price of development. In “Commerce,” Primitive Man’s static trudge combines with McCarthy’s roars to reflect those harsh realities. “Shackled to / The bottom / Of the bottle,” he bellows, “Of the socioeconomic slavery / That rules / And runs my life…Work to ruin / Infected with poverty / Left in the gutter / Overworked / Underpaid / From a system meant to fail us.” Amid the aberrant slog of “Disfigured,” McCarthy utters, “Though light skinned / I will never be free…A ghost and an alien / Eviscerated by race relations.” In the same way the wounded deer riffs of the record congeal to paint one grisly canvas, so too do McCarthy’s lyrics. As if wage struggles weren’t enough, the vocalist points to the fact that we live in the opposite of a post-race society, despite what Fox News pundits would have us believe. Saw teeth of grind and raw hardcore crop up throughout Caustic, and “The Weight” disrupts the record with sparse noise and samples.

All told, the LP’s social commentary is on par with Public Enemy, but Primitive Man’s form does more to echo its content. Caustic is a broken mirror, reflecting the world in all its ugliness.

Sweat and Swagger

Tampa, 1993. You came out to see Eyehategod and Buzzoven but there’s an opener you haven’t heard: Cavity. As you watch the band set up, you think, “These guys just look like regular Joes. How heavy could they be?” With their tattoos, grungy hair, and out-of-it demeanor, the members of Eyehategod and Buzzoven look like what you expect sludge metal musicians to look like: ex-cons. The members of Cavity are the type of guys you see but don’t really register on the street—normal haircuts, plain T-shirts, maybe a few tattoos, but nothing crazy. They’re all business as they set up their instruments and check vocal levels. Then they nod at each other and a wild cat vibe courses through the room. The guitarists and bassist turn on their amps and unleash piercing feedback, keeping their backs to the crowd. The vocalist wrestles with his mic stand as the rest of the band saunters into slow, plodding hardcore. The singer suddenly crashes into the drums, knocking down two cymbals. Everything stops.

“Fuck you, Rene,” the drummer yells. And then to his other bandmates: “I hate that fucking guy. That’s it. I’m not playing with him anymore.” He’s tensed up like a coiled snake but walks backstage instead of punching his singer. The other band members look at each other. The bassist and guitarists walk backstage, which is just a back corner behind a ratty curtain. You and the rest of the crowd—about fifty people—can hear what they’re saying.

“I’m not going back. I hate that guy.”

“Dude, you have to come back, we’ve got a show to do.”

“We’re going to get paid. We have to do this, we’re performing.”

“We can’t just do the intro and quit.”

He still refuses. The guitarists and bassist come back and talk to their singer, who’s just been standing onstage awkwardly, listening to the exchange and knowing he shouldn’t talk to the drummer himself. They collectively shrug their shoulders and pick up their instruments. Before they start playing again, Jimmy Bower of Eyehategod yells out, “I’ll play drums.” The members of Cavity look at each other like, Fuck it, might as well, and then Bower is behind the kit. Whatever they’re going to play, it’ll be interesting.

The dense Florida air is charged. Bower holds his sticks in the air, starting the count: “One, two, three…” But then the drummer is back, saying he’ll finish the set. Bower laughs and hands him the sticks. As if nothing happened, Cavity launches into blazing punk that sounds like The Descendants playing through Melvins’ amplifiers. The drummer is visibly pissed. Face red, he’s beating the hell out of his drums. Cavity steers that dirty hardcore riff into a brick wall, gutting the tempo and leaving it to crawl across the floor. Rene howls with kinetic violence, sounding like a trucker getting whipped with motorcycle chains—and kind of liking it. The crowd becomes a seething mass, similar to the audience when you saw Cro-Mags. The band is playing individual songs, but the set feels like one continuous burst. You get elbowed in the face but don’t care. You get punched in the ribs but don’t care. Someone spills beer on your shirt and you kind of care. It must be the last song because Cavity’s guitarists and bassist throw their instruments to the ground. They start messing with the knobs on their amps and pedals to produce this horrible feedback.

You realize the singer is missing. There’s a loft above the stage, and you hear a hurried shuffling up there. Someone grunts and you can see a mattress teetering on the rail, about to fall onto the stage. Rene is up there trying to push a stained mattress over the rail. He eventually gives up and collapses in a heap. The band members turn off their amps. They take a few breaths but then start hauling their gear off stage like nothing happened. They’re drenched in sweat; otherwise, you’d have no idea they just played such an intense set. It was pure, unfiltered aggression, the likes of which you’ve only seen in a handful of hardcore bands.

“Things were pretty volatile for us back then,” Dan Gorostiaga, bassist and stalwart member said about Cavity shows throughout the nineties. “Anything could happen.” He and Rene Barge started the band around 1992. Gorostiaga recalled,

Even before then, like in the mid-eighties, we were going to hardcore shows down in Miami. We’d see bands like The Exploited, Seven Seconds, Youth of Today, and a bunch of others. We had a big venue in Miami, so all the touring bands would make the trip down there, which was crazy. Miami is the last point on the map, basically. I guess their guarantees must’ve been good. All the big bands would come through: Cro-Mags, Descendants, All. So that was our high school, basically. When I went to high school, I didn’t have many friends myself. All my friends went to other high schools, and we’d congregate at this place every weekend. You’d get to know a lot of people. There were posers, people there just for the fashion, but also a lot of people there for the music. You had the weekend skinheads and weekend punks with their mohawks. We met a lot of people there and started playing in bands. My friends and I were more active than a lot of other people, because we wanted to get involved and start bands and fanzines.

After playing in a few hardcore bands, Gorostiaga started to meld metal and punk in a group called Killer Kane. He appreciated the heaviness of Sabbath and Deep Purple, but he didn’t like the rock star attitude so prevalent among metal musicians. To him, Cavity was always closer in spirit to Karp, Am Rep-style noise punk bands, and proto-metalcore acts such as Rorschach.

It was around the time when bands like Born Against, Citizen’s Arrest, and Rorschach were popping up. We were all just kids playing music. Karp popped up, and I would compare us with that crowd. We got lumped into the whole metal thing, but if you see us live it’s really different. A lot of bands have that metal image, the long hair and all that. We weren’t like that at all. Birthday Party and the Laughing Hyenas were also big influences. It was people just doing whatever they wanted. I was in Killer Kane for about three months and then we broke up.

Rene was around during that time. He used to work at this local record store. When I told him that my band broke up, he was like, “Oh, man, I’ve been wanting to sing. Let’s get together and do something.” We were listening to a lot of the Am Rep and Touch and Go stuff, as well as other stuff that was more underground. It was a mix of punk influences as well as a bit of metal, I guess—the darker stuff. But we were more influenced by bands like Karp. That’s the main band I would compare us to as far as where we were coming from. They played heavy music but were also just regular Joe-looking kids. We just didn’t fit the image of the whole sludge metal thing.

Part of what Gorostiaga and Barge didn’t like about metal was the separation between the band and audience, especially with bigger bands. If there weren’t barricades and security, members of those bands inhabited the stage like it was an elevated realm. Cavity wanted to confront audiences, striving for a collective exhalation of anxiety. “Metal for us wasn’t really on our radar,” Gorostiaga said. “We were way more about in-your-face shows in backyards and basements, not in big clubs with barricades and bouncers. We didn’t grow up in that environment. The whole punk thing was about being there all together, and it was really immediate. And we were all the same. There wasn’t the separation you see in metal.”

Cavity released its self-titled tape in 1992, following that with the Scalpel seven-inch a year later. Both recordings include core members Gorostiaga and Barge, as well as drummer Joey Iglesias and guitarist Raf Luna. Those releases pulse with nervous misanthropy, putting the band on the radar of underground music fiends across the US. Cavity put out its first LP, Human Abjection, in 1995, which features drummer Jorge Alvarez, who plays on most of Cavity’s LPs. Much of that record lumbers in midtempo sludge, sounding like Noothgrush bumped up a few BPMs. Sections of feral powerviolence and hardcore—always filtered through tar—also pop up on Human Abjection. Alvarez’s raw drumming injects urgency into every song. Throughout the LP, Barge howls like he’s just chugged a tall glass of bleach. In addition to John Bonanno, Steve Brooks of Floor plays guitar on Human Abjection, starting Cavity and Floor’s tradition of sharing members.

Considering the amount of feedback-drenched sludge that’s found its way into the world these days, it’s easy to underestimate just how confrontational Cavity was, especially during its early years. If crowds of the time were reacting to Eyehategod with outright hostility, the same must’ve been true for Cavity. Miami has long been known for its club scene and dance music. If a Miami DJ played Human Abjection in 1995, he would’ve cleared the club and lost a gig, and quite possibly gotten his ass beat. Cavity wouldn’t have had it any other way. Miami punks saw their city’s club scene like kids from Vegas see the strip: as a blight. But it made for a common enemy, galvanizing the community. Gorostiaga said that people in Miami who played in aggressive bands made it a point to support each other.

There were two or three places to play in Miami. We were just a bunch of regular people, and we all knew each other and would go to each other’s shows. So it was easy to be in and out of bands. It was a small scene filled with people that wanted to play music. There were a bunch of short-lived bands. The big venue closed down, so we started going to this place called Churchill’s Hideaway. They’d let anyone book shows there. That’s how we met Floor. Their drummer Betty [Monteavaro] played with us for a little while. We didn’t have a drummer, so she filled in for one show for us and then stuck around for a record. Floor was the other main heavy band in Miami. We got to know each other, and then Anthony [Vialon] started playing with us. Steve recorded Human Abjection with us. He did a few shows with us and then he got busy with Floor. Floor was the main band we switched members with. There were bands called AAA and then The Crumbs, and people from both those of those bands played with us at some point.

Cavity unleashed the Crawling seven-inch the same year as Human Abjection, compiling songs from both releases, plus a few new ones, on 1996’s Drowning, which is basically three different EPs, recorded during different sessions, put together. With Gorostiaga and Alvarez on every song, the first half of the record features Anthony Vialon of Floor on guitar. The second half finds Vialon on vocals, leaving guitar to Bonanno, Ed Matus, and Brian Bush. About Cavity’s routine lineup changes, Gorostiaga said, “Cavity has really been a revolving door with members, and that made a big difference on each record.” Since the band’s music is all about feel and vibe, each player heavily impacted Cavity’s output. While Gorostiaga thinks the band “could have grown a bit more with permanent members,” he also recognizes that those changes kept Cavity from stagnating. More so than guitarists, he said, the group’s sound has been shaped by its drummers. After Human Abjection, Alvarez’s drumming started to take on a woozy swing in the spirit of Chris Hakius and Joey LaCaze. That feel is the foundation for 1997’s Somewhere Between the Train Station and the Dumping Grounds, Cavity’s most blues-soaked record up to that point. The album simultaneously pulses with hardcore’s tenacity and unpredictability.

Coming from the South, at least some blues influence was inevitable for Cavity. But Gorostiaga doesn’t think of Cavity as a Southern sludge band, at least not in the same way as Eyehategod or Buzzoven. “Miami is not a Southern town in the typical sense,” he said. “There’s just so much going on. It’s in the South, but you also get people who think and act like New Yorkers, although they live in Miami. A lot of people doing weird, avant-garde stuff. You have a lot of influences. It’s just a huge melting pot.” At the same time, place always has an influence on musicians, consciously or not. “The Southern type of sound wasn’t really something we were looking for, it just sort of happened,” the bassist stated. “We’d want to play something simple, and maybe the riff would sound more bluesy for whatever reason. It wasn’t intended, it just sort of came out.”

But Cavity’s take on the blues has been minced by a blender with Black Flag, Void, and Minor Threat for blades. From “Goin’ Ann Arbor” to “Shake ’Em on Down,” the band weaves in and out of a filthy swing, periodically leaping forward in anxiety-ridden punk. Sludgecore gets thrown around when it comes to classifying Cavity, and that’s most apt when applied to songs such as “Your Funeral, My Time.” It speeds forth in virulent hardcore, stops on a dime, and then plows through mud. Taking cues from Noothgrush and Grief, tracks like “One Last Broken” seethe with agonized hopelessness. Somewhere Between the Train Station and the Dumping Grounds is a brilliant record, in no small part because of Barge’s no-holds-barred vocal attack. Timing and placement-wise, his yells and screams claw with the unpredictability of a cornered badger. Just when it seems like he’s veered too far into his own world, he punctuates exactly the right note to transform a riff’s jab into a knockout punch.

In 1997, Cavity released a handful of seven-inches and of course went through lineup changes, with Alvarez temporarily bowing out. After recruiting Juan Montoya (later of Torche) on guitar and Betty Monteavaro of Floor on drums, the band entered Morrisound Studios to record Laid Insignificant, which wouldn’t see light until 1999. According to Gorostiaga, Monteavaro contributed largely to the record’s panic-inducing feel. “For Laid Insignificant, Betty from Floor played with us,” he said. “That one was really fast, and she worked well for that. She kind of gave us a new identity in a way. We had another guy named Dan Norris, and he did the Sabbath and Germs covers. Everything sounded a lot different with each drummer.” As for her percussion on Laid Insignificant, Monteavaro sounds like she’d been drumming for Spazz in addition to Floor. Vitriolic hardcore sections in the title track, “9 Fingers on the Spider,” and “Spine I” are pushed by punker blasts, with Monteavaro inhabiting the spearhead of the beat. Her snare is tuned high, which enhances the nineties powerviolence feel of the record. When the fast parts derail into sludge, it’s crushing every time. Monteavaro plays half-time beats with the swagger of Chuck Biscuits, throwing in fills that match Barge’s vocals in their unpredictability.

“I May Go” opens with somber instrumentation, similar to the uneasy soft sections of Neurosis’s Souls at Zero. Barge belligerently barks into the microphone, sounding like a disgruntled roughneck. The band eventually meets the vocalist’s intensity with serrated chugs, making “I May Go” the closest thing Cavity has to a ballad—but it’s bastardized, wallowing in nihilistic self-loathing instead of whimsical longing. If we’re going to use sludgecore as a label, Laid Insignificant should be filed as the sub-subgenre’s idealized form.

Throughout the Between the Train Station… and Laid Insignificant years, Cavity never toned down its live shows. Gorostiaga recalled,

We’d sometimes play with our backs toward the audience to mess with people, or we’d start that way and then turn around. It was loud with a lot of feedback and noise, super loud. All the shows were pretty crazy. We could start with one song and then just do three and that’s it. Everything would end for some reason. Either the way we were feeling toward the music or the audience—it would just be done. There were always just a bunch of unpredictable factors. Every show was really its own performance, dictated by the environment or anything else.

Again, not to rag on metal, but it all seemed pretty staged to us. The performers didn’t move much on stage. There’s kind of a formula that they follow. We wanted it to be more avant-garde. We’d have shows randomly with three guitar players. We’d do new stuff all the time. Once we had a problem with a guitar player and he got left behind on tour, so we just did a show as a three-piece: bass, drums, and vocals. So we had all kinds of crazy stories. As far as playing live, every show was unique.

After recording Laid Insignificant, Cavity signed with Man’s Ruin, a prestigious underground label of the time. But that achievement was accompanied by major setbacks: Barge decided to part ways with the band, and Monteavaro vacated her drum spot. Not willing to pass up a deal with Man’s Ruin, Vialon stepped up to perform vocals in addition to playing guitar and writing songs. Cavity enlisted guitarist-vocalist Ryan Weinstein and Floor’s powerhouse drummer, Henry Wilson, to round out the lineup for SuperCollider.

Released by Man’s Ruin in 1998 and then reissued by Hydra Head in 2002, SuperCollider might be Cavity’s best-known album. True to Gorostiaga’s idea that the band’s sound was always molded by its drummer, Wilson’s fat, no-frills backbeat is that album’s center of gravity. His behind-the-beat grooves put Cavity’s riffs on pedestals, setting them up to worm into permanent memory. Vialon shouts with punctuated clarity, also following clearer patterns than Barge and his edge-of-sanity wails. All told, SuperCollider is a bit more palatable than the band’s previous efforts, though it’s far from an easy listen. “Xtoone” is nails-on-the-chalkboard noise, and “Damaged IV” trudges through swampland like a member of Grief looking for a place to dump a body. That said, Barge’s absence is felt on SuperCollider. It’s a solid record, but it underscores how large of a role the singer played in giving Cavity its raucous and unpredictable feel.

In 1998, the group contributed to Hydra Head’s multi-volume series, In These Black Days: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, paving the way for Cavity to work with the label again to reissue SuperCollider and put out 2001’s masterful On the Lam. After some time away, Barge and Alvarez entered the fold again. Vialon and Wilson shifted their focus to Floor as that band geared up to record and release its self-titled album, and Weinstein stuck around on guitar.

It’s fitting that Hydra Head put out On the Lam: it’s metalcore, but not at all in the generic sense, making Cavity a perfect addition to a roster that’s included Coalesce, Converge, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. From “Cult Exciter” on, On the Lam moves with a loose violence, carrying the intensity of Cavity’s unhinged performances. The song begins with a vicious punk ’n’ roll stride and then sidesteps into greasy, up-tempo swing. Barge’s voice crackles like he’s yowling through a loudspeaker. Throughout “Cult Exciter” and every other track, he yells with a slight drawl, combining with Weinstein’s whiskey-marinated riffs to make On the Lam a Southern sludge record, through and through. Alvarez leads Cavity into tempo shifts and breakdowns in a way only a human drummer could. No grid in sight, just dirty metal whose edges bleed. About three-quarters of the way through “Cult Exciter,” Weinstein and Gorostiaga repeat a gap-toothed riff over and over, filling in the space with expertly deployed feedback. They take what many musicians see as a mistake and turn it into its own mode. It doesn’t get much more punk than that. Fifth cut “Willy Williams” utilizes that same tactic when it degenerates into a minutes-long squall.

On the Lam is one of those albums that paints a defined setting from the get-go—and it never steps out of that world. “Boxing the Hog” starts with a side-eye riff that delivers on its title’s promise, creating an undeniable urge to punch a hog. “Sung From a Goad” jogs in angular punk reminiscent of Laid Insignificant, and then “Pulling Up the Stakes” menacingly swerves between double and half-time with Alvarez always at the wheel. On paper, both tracks have a lot in common with stoner rock, a genre that’s gotten watered down to the point of losing relevance. “Sung From a Goad” features a swaggering solo, and the switch between between half- and double-time within the same riff in “Pulling Up the Stakes” was used by every stoner rock group from the nineties. But Cavity’s fangs shoot venom into those cliché moves. That’s the blues for you: two different guitarists can play the same exact notes, but one’s playing will make your blood boil while the other’s will put you to sleep.

“Pulling Up the Stakes” finds additional power in its nod to metalcore. As the song transitions into increasingly slower sections, “breakdown” might not be the word that comes to mind, but that’s what’s happening. The members of Cavity saw firsthand how Rorschach, Converge, and Coalesce’s breakdowns short-circuited people’s brains. It follows that the band would put its own spin on that tactic, as well as taunting buildups, to maximize impact. Seventh song “Leave Me Up” features Cavity’s most rib-crushing breakdown. At the end, a tough hayseed riff cycles, slowing down multiple times, like it’s getting beat up in a bar fight until all it can do is crawl. Screaming group vocals add weight to each repetition. It’s not hard to imagine how “Leave Me Up” might move an audience to pile on top of each other in a massive group sing-along—but this one’s for weird hick kids instead of jockish New Englanders.

“On the Lam” is the paint-huffing sibling of Laid Insignificant’s “I May Go” with its antagonistic linger. While a quiet drum and bass groove slithers, Barge takes center stage with his unintelligible, loudspeaker croon. “I May Go” feels like he’s picking a fight with you. “On the Lam” sounds like he’s picking a fight with the universe, his aggression latching onto everything in its path. Weinstein waits behind the corner with barely perceptible feedback, taking his sweet time before unleashing a riff with alligator jaws. Time and again, On the Lam weds the aggravated punk spirit of Laid Insignificant with the swagger of Somewhere Between the Train Station and the Dumping Grounds, making it the perfect bookend for Cavity’s first life.

Cavity didn’t see the glorious implosion you might expect, especially given its history as a live band. As Gorostiaga remembered it, the band members just started to lose interest after On the Lam came out.

We broke up back in 2001, after we put out On the Lam. We’d try to book tours and someone would back out. People were pulling in different directions for different reasons. So I decided to go to school. We did one last show in Tampa with Cutthroats 9. We also did a few with High on Fire before then. But we had to do some of those shows without Rene because of his job in the film industry. When a shoot starts, they have strict schedules and can’t get time off. We did a mini tour in Florida with High on Fire as a three piece. Jason Landrian, the guy from Black Cobra, was playing guitar and singing for us then. Then Rene came back and we did a few more shows. The one in Miami went well, but then Tampa was a mess again. It was so loud the drummer couldn’t hear what was going on. And then at some point, Rene just disappeared. He went to the bathroom during the set. So we were all pulling in different directions. Some of us wanted to get more serious, but we just decided to call it at that point. We were all planning to move. We just couldn’t keep it together.

Gorostiaga moved to New York for school and focused on that for the next several years, eventually getting his MFA. People would still ask him about Cavity, though. When he returned to Florida, he got the itch to play again.

I moved back to Florida after finishing my MFA, and I did approach Rene and Anthony, but they weren’t really into it. I kept getting show offers though, so I kept asking them. In 2015, a good friend of ours from Miami got in a freak accident. She was on top of a ramp, and the ramp collapsed. She fell down and got paralyzed, basically. She can’t move her thighs. She was looking to buy a custom van and wanted to do a fundraiser show, and she wanted Cavity to play. So I asked everyone and they were really into it. That’s what got the whole thing rolling again. We did the reunion show, and then we just decided to keep playing music. We wrote After Death with Ed Matus, who’s been playing guitar with us for a while. We had Rick Smith from Torche fill in on drums for us for a few shows, but he’s the type of guy who’s playing in like three or four bands at once—who are all touring. So it can be hard to get a hold of him since he’s so busy. We did After Death with just me, Ed, and Rene. Ed did most of the drumming.

We don’t want to go out there and just rehash the past. The reception to After Death was pretty mixed. Everything was done in a studio where I’d record bass tracks, and then we’d put everything on top of the bass tracks. Since then we’ve still been writing. We just finished four new songs.

It’s not hard to understand why After Death would throw people for a loop. Matus pounds out minimal tom rhythms, giving the album a punishing, nigh-industrial vibe. After Death also veers into threatening quiet with unexpectedly light instrumentation—think Cavity channeling Neil Young. It’s mellow compared to the band’s previous efforts, but like anything Barge and Gorostiaga do, there’s a lurking menace.

Cavity might never be as violent or prolific as it once was. If After Death and 2019’s Wraith are any indicators, however, the band will continue to release music that refuses to be ignored. Having perfected their ability to recede into the blur of mundanity, Barge and Gorostiaga both teach high school. These days, Gorostiaga lives in a sleepy fishing town called Stuart. He sometimes surprises his students by showing them Cavity records or videos of old shows. Otherwise, kids probably think he’s just a cool art teacher. It’s a fitting life for someone who always approached hardcore with a regular Joe mentality: look plain but play music that destroys people. They won’t expect it, which makes the beating that much more memorable.

Boy Crazy

Things are progressing, but the metal world is still pretty damn heteronormative. Rob Halford of Judas Priest famously came out in 1998, and there are a handful of other openly gay metal musicians. Still, go to a metal show and most attendees will be straight dudes. That said, the world of heavy music is learning to become more welcoming. Steve Brooks of Floor and Torche has played an important role in that progress.

He’s done so both by openly discussing his sexuality and melding pop melodies with car-compacting sludge. In 2012, journalist T. Cole Rachel commended Brooks for his willingness to publicly talk about his sexuality. Brooks responded, “You know, I can’t not talk about it when I get asked…When I was younger, there was no internet and I didn’t have any gay friends, so I guess it’s nice to know you’re not alone—especially when you’re a musician playing more aggressive music.” Like Brooks’s goal to make queer-identifying people feel welcome in the metal world by talking about his personal life, Torche and Floor’s music is inviting, cushy even. Both bands are cement crushers, but their songs are catchier than most of Madonna’s hits. It’s metal for the masses—hipsters, Hessians, and everyone in between—and not in a dumb way.

Brooks formed Floor in Miami in 1992 with bassist Anthony Vialon and drummer Betty Monteavaro, who was replaced by Jeff Sousa in ’93. Remembering what it was like to play heavy music in Florida back then, Brooks said, “The heavy scene was mostly metal, and I was distant from it when I formed Floor in ’92. I spent more time around a diverse bunch. In the early years, we shared members with Load, Cavity, Machine, Katharsis, The Basils, Ed Matus’ Struggle, and more.” In 1993, Brooks and Vialon started using bottom-dwelling guitar tunings that killed the need for a bassist. That two-guitar-no-bass approach is Floor’s secret sauce.

Floor’s early material seethes with nihilism, similar to that of Cavity. Talking about his early influences, Brooks remarked, “Melvins and Godflesh were a few of my favorite bands. I wanted to do something that heavy, fucked-up, and noisy.” Within its first few years, Floor released numerous singles, including 1994’s Loanin’ / Figbender seven-inch. “Loanin’” features wrecking ball chugs and eardrum-eroding feedback, over which Brooks shouts indecipherable lyrics in a caveman yowl. Describing his struggle with his sexuality as a young man, Brooks said, “When I was about eighteen or nineteen, I figured out, ‘Man, this isn’t a phase’…And I was pretty angry. I didn’t talk about it with anybody. Eventually, I went to a shrink, just to try and feel comfortable about it.”* That conflict is palpable in the tortured crawl of “Loanin’.”

Floor has long been introducing parasites of harmony into its sludge stew. Along with Loanin’ / Figbender, Floor recorded Dove in 1994, an LP that didn’t get released until No Idea put it out in 2004. “Who Are You?” pulses with anxiety. “Namaste” is driven by a filthy, swinging riff that will have you humming it for days, while “Dove” and “Nothing I Remember” are painful dirges, consuming hope in the same way as a Noothgrush record. Dove also features “Figure it Out,” a fifties-style pop song filtered through a wall of tar, which Floor eventually rerecorded as “Figured Out” for its self-titled album.

Two years after recording Dove, Floor temporarily broke up. Then, in 1997, Brooks and Vialon recruited drummer Henry Wilson, played one show with him, and practiced sporadically for a few years. The trio finally decided to buckle down and record Floor during the summer of ٢٠٠١. Jeff Sousa’s drumming on Dove palpitates with manic energy, but Henry Wilson’s behind-the-beat pounding added a gravitational pull to Floor’s sound. The trio tracked its self-titled album in a swelteringly hot warehouse in Tampa. The brain will force the muscles to slow in that type of heat. Listening to Floor creates the same sensation.

In “Scimitar,” Brooks and Vialon grill up Wilson’s Megalodon backbeat and slather it with buckets of hot glue. Right before Brooks croons the song’s title, Floor stops on a dime, punctuating the rest with a Bonham triplet and bomb string tremor. Brooks initially discovered his notorious bomb string by mistake. As Brian Cook wrote, “Brooks broke a guitar string mid-song and liked the way the slack made the note so low that it registered only as an amp-rattling, earthquake-sized rumble.” Brooks has been using the bomb string ever since. It might be the closest anyone’s gotten to that Holy Grail of sludge and doom known as the brown note: a note so low it evacuates the bowels. The bomb string’s rumble creates more of a bodily sensation than a sound.

“Downed Star” and “Iron Girl” move at the pace of a defective asphalt grinder and feature melodic, Nirvana-in-slow-motion choruses. Neither of those songs surpasses the three-minute mark. The longest cut on Floor, “Night Full of Kicks,” clocks in at just over 3:30. Throughout the LP, Floor wears its hardcore influence on its sleeve while delivering earworm hooks. “Twink” is a sleek, directly-to-the-point cut without a smidgeon of filler. It begins with well-manicured rock and breaks down in a section that’s equally melodic and crushing—a blueprint for many Torche songs. The fifty-three-second track is a can of sonic Pringles. It’s difficult to only listen once.

The eighth cut, “Assassin,” was my introduction to Floor, and I’ve been in love ever since. (Of course I first heard it in a BMX video.) Atop Wilson’s stutter-step groove, Brooks and Vialon play guillotine pick rakes before launching into a busy verse. The chorus doubles as a bone-disintegrating breakdown. Surfing on a wave of virulent fuzz, Brooks belts “Crazy for the boy” in his beautifully lopsided voice. When I was nineteen and beginning to admit that I was curious about fooling around with other guys, that lyric helped to quell my guilt. I was a young metalhead, so Brooks’s words were meaningful to me because they’re propelled by tar-soaked riffage and caveman drumming. Here was one of the heaviest songs I’d ever heard, and it told me that it was okay if dudes sometimes turned me on.

Nowhere is Floor’s mishmash of pop and sludge better executed than “Figured Out.” It’s a doo-wop hit drowning in cynicism and Promethazine. Most male singers from the 1950s sang about straight desire, so Brooks’s take on the Goldie oldie flips that trope. With copiously down-tuned guitars alongside ice-cream shop vocals, the song is steeped in irony, suggesting that love and lust can never be “Figured Out.”

Just one year after releasing Floor, the band broke up, seemingly for real this time. Brooks formed the effervescent Torche,22 and Wilson put all of his energy into singing and playing guitar in his band, Dove, a trio that mixes D-beat hardcore, sludge, and ferocious, High on Fire-style metal, throwing in plenty of sucker-punch changes and surprising accents. Dove of 2004 is criminally underrated and a for-real perfect record. A guitarist before he was a drummer, Wilson’s riffs move with the graceful aggression of the best BMX riders.23

Floor reunited for a few shows in 2010. Wilson and Vialon started thinking seriously about writing a new Floor record, but it wasn’t so easy to get Brooks on board, as he was more motivated to pursue Torche than Floor. It took some elbow grease, but Wilson and Vialon eventually convinced him to do it. Vialon started writing riffs and lyrics like a one-person sludge factory, and Floor began crafting what would become its unimpeachable 2014 LP, Oblation.

Oblation furthers Floor’s legacy by using more intricate song structures and rhythms to emphasize its heaviness and hooks. The LP is Floor in idealized form, with a tightness and control that does nothing to diminish the trio’s weight and power. When I asked Brooks if that’s a fitting description of Oblation, he responded enthusiastically, saying, “Yes! It’s a record I wish we wrote right after the self-titled album.” From “Oblation” to closer “Forever Still,” Wilson finds pressure points in Vialon and Brooks’s riffs with cymbal chokes and precisely placed snare and bass drum hits, transforming those accented notes into sonic uppercuts. Throughout Oblation, Wilson does what the best drummers do, playing in service of each song and riff rather than trying to show off his chops.

The best way I can describe Oblation is to describe a BMX video that follows Chase Hawk on a cement skatepark adventure through Washington. Hawk is a style rider. He doesn’t do the circus tricks that dominate many contests, instead putting his own flavor on moves that have been around since the beginning of freestyle: tabletops, turndowns, and 360s. Thousands upon thousands of riders have done those tricks. But when you see a clip of Hawk doing them, you immediately know who it is. It’s BMX as art. In the Washington video, multiple songs from Oblation play as Hawk darts around concrete bowls, occasionally blasting into the sky. His tires zip as he roasts transition. Time stops during his airs. Much like Oblation, Hawk’s riding oozes with ease and nonchalance, which bands and BMX riders can only attain after years of hard work. The record’s effortless groove will make you feel like you’re carving cement bowls on a BMX bike.

When I (finally) saw Floor in 2014, it was obvious that, rather than losing a step, the trio was firing on all cylinders, modified with a few new ones. In my mind, Floor is as epic as Judas Priest, so I was surprised to see the small LA venue at half capacity. Brooks, Wilson, and Vialon played like it was a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl. At Torche and Floor shows, a goofy-ass grin always spreads across Brooks’s face between his from-the-gut vocals. That show was no different. When the go-to for many metal bands is to be dead serious to the point of ridiculousness, it’s refreshing to see someone like Steve Brooks play. He makes you feel like you’re in on this great joke with him—and the joke is that sludge metal is both ridiculous and amazing.

Speaking with Brooks, T. Cole Rachel said, “As a fellow gay person…I appreciate the fact that you are so open about that. It seems as if there are only a handful of people in the metal world who are comfortable being openly gay.” Heavy music is better because of Steve Brooks. Sludge is for everyone, and luckily for everyone, we have multiple albums by Floor and Torche that we can play whenever we want. Maybe we’re not quite so doomed after all.

22 To this day, seeing Torche for the first time easily stands out as one of the most fun show experiences I’ve had. Juan Montoya crowd-surfed while playing perfectly. Steve Brooks smirked while singing, playing, and hitting the button on a smoke machine too many times. The crowd: a mass of happy people jumping and bumping into each other like Lilith Fair attendees.

23 Wilson is also the mastermind of House of Lightning, whose music is in the same ballpark as Dove, but with this weirdly fitting Miami Vice vibe. It’s sludgy thrash under neon lights.

Thee White Wall

“How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Jucifer has been recording, touring, and pushing boundaries for nearly three decades. Most bands are lucky to survive five years and put out one good record. Jucifer has gifted the world with seven LPs and five EPs that refuse to be fucked with. Singer-guitarist Gazelle Amber Valentine and drummer Edgar Livengood pour punk, thrash, grind, black, and old-school death metal into a reservoir of sludge, unleashing it all through a monolithic wall of speaker cabinets, powered by a grid of amps. They call it Thee White Wall Ov Death.

Originally from Athens, Georgia, a college town that’s nurtured groups such as R.E.M. and Harvey Milk, Valentine and Livengood have spent the bulk of their life as a band living nomadically. There’s the hard road and then there’s Jucifer embarking on its lifelong musical journey without the convenience of a road crew. “It’s pretty grueling,” Valentine said about living in an RV.* “But living in a vehicle we could tour in, a.k.a. touring in a vehicle we could live in, was really the only path we saw to be this weird extreme underground band we are and survive.” From Crass to Fucked Up, the idea of playing music that aligns with a defined philosophical framework and honestly adhering to that ideology is a notion more common to punk than metal. But Jucifer has always carved its own path. “We’ve structured our whole lives around our band,” said Valentine.* “It’s exhausting and risky, but our priority hasn’t been security or ease. Everything we do is so we can play this music we love and believe in, for the people who share that love and belief, as often and as many places as we can. We named our record label Nomadic Fortress because that’s what we’ve created, a safe haven for our music within this incredibly unstable existence.”

Nadir, Jucifer’s first EP, follows the downer trajectory of Noothgrush with tortured riffs and vocals that are sharpened by the primitive tools of Livengood’s drumming. The 1994 EP has glimmers of the entrancing pop and shoegaze for which Jucifer is now known, but Nadir is mostly hopeless sludge. The word nadir refers to the lowest possible point of something, whether it be a planet’s orbit or the human psyche. The members of Jucifer were clearly inhabiting that space when they wrote the EP. By contrast, 1998’s Calling All Cars on the Vegas Strip combines the switchblade catchiness of Bikini Kill with Nirvana’s unadulterated verve and the slow tempos of early Melvins. It’s Jucifer becoming Jucifer.

Calling All Cars on the Vegas Strip was originally released by Crack Rock Records but then reissued by Capricorn. Founded in Macon, Georgia, in 1969 and eventually moving to Nashville, Capricorn put out records ranging from The Allman Brothers to nineties darlings Cake and 311. For Jucifer, the prospect of getting its debut full-length released on Capricorn must’ve been exciting. Calling All Cars… plausibly could’ve broken the band to the mainstream. It’s not hard to imagine the record’s hypnotizing songs playing between Fiona Apple and Marilyn Manson on MTV. Mainstream audiences of 1998 would’ve eaten it up. But then Napster dropped on June 1, 1999, destroying the structural foundation of the entire music industry. Capricorn folded at a time that couldn’t have been worse for Jucifer. The label reissued Calling All Cars on the Vegas Strip in January of 2000 but went out of business in December of that same year. Of course Capricorn couldn’t properly promote its artists while watching itself dissolve. A handful of the label’s staff moved on as Velocette Records, making sure to keep Jucifer onboard.

Released on Velocette in 2001, The Lambs EP combines the heaviness of Nadir with the hooks of Calling All Cars on the Vegas Strip. The Lambs was my introduction to Jucifer, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was in college and feeling burned-out on the machismo so prevalent in metal. Jucifer’s The Lambs showed me that aggression, beauty, grace, wackiness, and vulnerability can be wrapped up into one heavy-as-fuck present. Or maybe only Jucifer can do that.

It’s a shame that EPs don’t get as much critical attention as LPs: most publications focus on LPs in reviews and those coveted year-best lists. The Lambs is as dynamic, sprawling, and realized as any full-length. Valentine’s quiet singing opens the first song, “Lambs—Part 1.” “That little girl,” she croons, “got a new black dress.” A blank pause yawns before Valentine looses a flood of aqueous distortion, stopping the main riff before it resolves. As her guitar quiets, she sings the same unsettling line while Livengood hammers out a chunky backbeat. Jucifer opens the sludge-gates again as Valentine intones, “And she looks good in it.” She and Livengood enact that call-and-response twice more until they finally allow the Sabbath-on-codeine main riff to stretch its legs. Valentine pushes the song into a midtempo trot before gifting the world with another gem of a riff, this one tracing a similar harmonic pattern as her vocals in the first part of the song. It’s sludge, it’s pop, it’s Gluey Porch Treatments-era Melvins backing P. J. Harvey. It’s genius.

A venomous frog, “Lambs—Part 2” lunges from a puddle of dirty punk. Valentine howls like Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy while matching Livengood’s raw D-beat with Bad-Brains-through-Goatsnake-amps guitar work. The Lambs is an interwoven whole, each song blurring into the next. “Lambs—Part 3” emerges as a somber dirge, Valentine filling space between sparse piano notes with melancholic singing. Jucifer goes back to the business of demolishing everything in its path with “The Lambs—Part 4,” a track that finds a barrel of pop sweetness in a Pipeline wave of mud.

“Platinum High” and “White Devils” feed off each other in parasitic harmony. The former begins with a burst of snotty hardcore and then saunters through fuzz as Valentine whispers, “You made me so fat and ugly.” The track sprints, devolves into primitive slowness, and finally sidesteps into dissonant noise rock. Livengood opens “White Devils” with an anxious tom roll that finds form in grungy, up-tempo funk. In what might be the finest moment on The Lambs, the song opens like Moby Dick’s jaws, revealing a maw of toothache riffage and cavernous percussion. All Valentine needs to do is sing “Yeah” a few times, and it’s perfect. The cut’s transition from energetic rock into maple syrup demands repeat listening. Thankfully, Jucifer provides that gift once more before “White Devils” fades out.

The razorblade grunge of “Gunsick” dissolves in a fog of plaintive indie-folk before blossoming into sharpened rock that sounds like a collaboration between Garbage and Kyuss. When bands combine multiple genres and approaches, it often feels contrived and scattered. Jucifer uses its genre-bending tools to craft one massive jawbreaker, sludgy at its center but encased by several tooth-shattering layers. Much like Melvins, Jucifer has since evolved into its own category—its own galaxy, really. The Lambs is that galaxy coming to life.

From I Name You Destroyer (2002) and War Bird (2004) to If Thine Enemy Hunger (2006) and L’autrichienne (2008), Jucifer has created multiple planets and moons. The duo has all the while lived on the road. Not, the band tours so much it’s like living on the road: Jucifer lives in RVs and vans in any country where it can string together enough dates to make for a worthwhile tour. Livengood and Valentine are like those demented surfers who travel the globe in pursuit of the best waves. Without major label support or mainstream success, they’ve embodied the platitude “music is life” in ways that very few (if any) other bands have.

Jucifer’s most recent albums, 2010’s Throned in Blood, 2013’s Beyond the Volga There is No Land For Us, and 2014’s District of Dystopia, show the duo jamming a stick in the wheels of expectation by integrating feral grind, death, and black metal into its multifaceted sound, which still lives in a pit of sludge. The past two decades have seen some notable duos emerge—Black Cobra, Mantar, and Big Business to name a few—but none quite so powerful as Jucifer, especially live.

Hearing Jucifer’s White Wall in person is unforgettable. No recording can touch that power. Pieced together over several years, Thee White Wall consists of about twenty cabinets of varying size, power, and purpose, as well as an arsenal of world-class amplifiers—all painted white. Valentine and Livengood typically need between three and five hours to construct their wall. Like Captain Ahab, only Valentine knows the secret to the whale: she’s the sole person who knows how to make Thee White Wall function. Try to fathom touring for the better part of eighteen years. Now try to imagine building that monolith every night for eighteen years without the help of roadies. Jucifer is Sisyphus pushing his boulder. By way of explanation, Valentine offered this: “We just want to feel it and hear it, this mass of sound. And I want to shape it, ride the feedback.”†

I saw Jucifer at Denver’s Larimer Lounge some years back. Watching Valentine and Livengood lug each amp and cabinet from their trailer to construct Thee Wall, it was hard to comprehend how they could build and break down that monstrosity every night. The stage and venue were, for all intents and purposes, too small for the sonic event. In the 200-capacity bar, Jucifer played with the amplified power of Motörhead when that band was known to shake plaster from the ceilings of larger venues. From the first notes on, I felt like I was swimming at the bottom of an Olympic-sized pool. Air was pushed from my lungs as sound weighed on my chest. Livengood played a drum set built for a yeti with a massive kick and two huge floor toms, one of which was a repurposed kick drum. Valentine stood in front of her White Wall with Captain Ahab’s death-drive resolve. She called forth ungodly waves, straight from the depths.

Something in the Water

Pt. 1

I think the difference has to do with where we’re from,” bassist-vocalist Dave Collins said when I asked him how his band, Weedeater, differs from doom acts like Candlemass and Yob.

We’re surrounded by blues, bluegrass, and country musicians. We just do our own thing down here, like our friends from Eyehategod in New Orleans. There’s just something about it, where Southern bands have a bit of a different feel. With bands like Rwake or Deadbird, you can tell where they’re from: you can tell they’re from Arkansas just like you can tell we’re from North Carolina.

I think a lot of it has to do with the influence of black blues musicians and how blues originated here. That’s where it all comes from, every bit of it. People say all the heavy bands are ripping off Black Sabbath, which is true, but Black Sabbath was ripping off the blues. So was Zeppelin and Blue Cheer. It all stems from the blues.

It’s geographical as hell, for sure. It’s palpable. You can taste it in the water, feel it in the air.

He’s right. Put on a Weedeater record and the air becomes hot, sticky. Life seems to move at a slower pace. Regardless of lyrical content, every Weedeater song feels like it’s about North Carolina.

Along with guitarist Dave Shepherd and drummer Keith “Keko” Kirkum,24 Collins formed Weedeater in the mid-nineties. When Collins’s dog ate a bag of his weed, he called her a little weed-eater, which is how the band got its name. Not long after Weedeater started playing shows around Wilmington, its hometown, Collins joined the outlaw sludge outfit Buzzoven, a band that deserves credit alongside Eyehategod for pioneering the genre. As Collins sees it, one thing that makes bands from the South special is their inability to be anything but themselves, showing warts alongside their good qualities. Buzzoven is mostly warts.

Collins joined on a whim when Buzzoven came through Wilmington without a bassist. “I went and saw them at the Mad Monk,” he said. “I ended up leaving on tour with them that night, learning all the songs at one of their friends’ houses between here and the next stop. It was all on the fly.” Playing in the band never calmed down from there. About Buzzoven shows, Collins said,

They were all pretty ridiculous, honestly. There was no trick behind the band’s persona. It was definitely for real and still is. I love Kirk [Fisher] to death, he’s a great dude, but he’s also insane. The entire band always lived the music. The wheels are constantly on the verge of coming off, and they either do for a minute and then things get worked out, or sometimes they don’t. We’ve been chased out of cities with beer bottles crashing onto the back of the van on many occasions. New Orleans for sure, Richmond, Atlanta. But we also made lifelong fans at those shows. People might come to throw bottles, but we always throw them back.

After completing several tours and cutting multiple records with Buzzoven, most notably 1998’s pugilistic …At a Loss, Collins decided to take Weedeater more seriously. “There was a bit of a hiatus with Buzzoven with Kirk trying to get himself right, or as right as he can be,” Collins said. That’s when he shifted his focus to Weedeater.

Vein-clogging riffs, throat-ripping vocals, and caveman drumming: Buzzoven and Weedeater have some obvious similarities, but the bands are distinct entities. Weedeater’s sludge jams are catchier, relatively speaking, with more of a groove, whereas Buzzoven tracks have a sharper punk edge. Weedeater also jokes around more. Consider the title of the trio’s 2001 debut, …And Justice for Y’All, which puts a Squidbillies spin on Metallica’s …And Justice for All, or the cover of 2003’s Sixteen Tons. On it, a tired-looking statue holds the scale of justice, one side hoisting a pig wearing an Uncle Sam top hat and the other holding a trash collage: a dog, a toilet, a picture of Anton LaVey, some gold bars, George W. Bush, a bottle of moonshine, and a bunch of other random crap. It’s that tongue-in-cheek Sex Pistols attitude, making fun of the world from the gutter, not a pedestal.

Like many sludge musicians, Collins cut his teeth on punk and hardcore. He described Wilmington as an anomaly as to how it compares with the rest of North Carolina, which is part of why he found out about that music: it goes hand-in-hand with skate and surf culture. “Growing up here is probably more akin to growing up in Southern California than it is to the rest of North Carolina,” he said. “I live right on the beach, and we grew up skateboarding and surfing and listening to punk rock and hardcore music, and of course metal as well.” About discovering that music during the pre-internet age, Collins said,

There was a radio show from some college kids in Greenville that would play punk and metal, which is how my friend’s older sister heard about that stuff. And then she’d give us tapes of bands like The Clash, The Accused, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Dr. No, and Minor Threat. New York hardcore was pretty big here for a while, although I didn’t get too much into that aside from Cro-Mags’ Age of Quarrel. We listened to all that stuff as kids, just skateboarding around and getting in trouble.

This was around 1984, when you’d go to the record store and buy a record because of the cover. If you didn’t like it, you’d just scratch the shit out of it and take it back and say it was scratched when it came out of the sleeve. You had to figure out a lot of stuff for yourself and maybe read some of those early magazines, like Maximum Rocknroll.

There were also aspects of Wilmington more in tune with the rest of North Carolina, like the city’s penchant for country, bluegrass, and blues. In Weedeater, Collins throws all of it into a backwoods stew, combining the earthiness of blues and country with sludge metal’s weight, and then filtering it all through the impish spirit of punk.

…And Justice for Y’All is a cube of fat left to melt in the sun. It leaves grease stains on everything it touches. Recorded by Chad High and mastered by Billy Anderson, the LP finds Collins dialing in his signature bass tone, which is thick and humid as a North Carolina summer. “Free” wears a Black Flag patch on its ratty sleeve, disrupting the stoner groove of the LP with jittery punk. Also featuring a cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Southern Cross,”…And Justice For Y’All is undeniably solid. The guitar and drums sound thin, though, especially for a Billy Anderson production.

He more than redeemed himself with 2002’s aptly titled Sixteen Tons. With matured song writing, the LP shows a band unearthing its voice. For Weedeater, that voice comes from a salty coal miner drinking High Life on his couch, eating Cheetos, and yelling at Dale Earnhardt to drive faster, even though the race is on tape.

From the first note on, Sixteen Tons places you in that guy’s living room. In opener “Bull,” Shepherd plays a blues riff that wades through old motor oil. When Kirkum and Collins join, the groove lands like a truckload of manure atop a ramshackle house. Kirkum accents notes that maximize the weight of each riff, playing drums with the delicacy of a rabid boar. Collins’s bass tone is fat enough to choke a horse, and he screams as if trapped in a cave-in. The sample that opens second track “Potbelly” perfectly captures the soul of Sixteen Tons. “I was born in South Carolina, man,” a guy says, dead-serious. “I can’t read.” Shepherd follows with an appropriately belligerent riff, over which Collins screams about getting drunk and going downtown specifically to get his ass beat. The catchy “Time Served,” the slow creeper “Dummy,” and the unapologetic ode to Dale Earnhardt Sr., “#3,” follow with riffs and grooves that collect on the skin like days-old sweat.

“Woe’s Me” showcases that integral, yet often glossed over, aspect of Weedeater. Channeling the spirit of North Carolina, the track is broken-bottle blues, during which Collins plays acoustic bass and sings like Tom Waits’ son—the one Waits left on the doorstep of a shitty dive bar. Sandwiched between the quarrelsome swing of “#3” and the squirm of “Buzz,” “Woe’s Me” adds a quiet dynamic to the record without stepping out of the living room. It pulses with the same misanthropy and self-hatred that permeates Sixteen Tons’ heavier songs, just without the help of drums or amplifiers. Whether it’s in film, writing, painting, or music, the best artists tap into a voice only they can. Weedeater did that with Sixteen Tons and has since used the record’s structure as a sustainable and malleable template, similar to Converge with You Fail Me and Neurosis with Times of Grace.

During the five years between Sixteen Tons and 2007’s God Luck and Good Speed, Weedeater toured with a roughneck’s work ethic. A typical Weedeater show: Collins wears a grimy baseball cap, pulled down low. When you can see his eyes, they’re usually crossed. Between screams he dances a signature jig; between songs he takes swigs of whiskey and/or cough syrup. He might totter a bit by the last quarter of the set, but he plays perfectly. Wearing a camo ball cap, Shepherd chills on stage-right, playing riffs that move like dying oxen and periodically chuckling to himself about it. With shitty little dreadlocks atop his balding head, Keko barely falls short of shaking the ground with each cymbal crash. (In 2013, Keko was replaced by the stick-spinning Travis Owen, who hits pretty damn hard himself, and comes across like Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights with his endearing cockiness.) Whether it’s to a packed bar or empty room, the members of Weedeater always play their asses off.

In 2007, Weedeater released God Luck and Good Speed through Southern Lord. The band decided to mix things up engineer-wise, recording with Steve Albini at Electric Audio in Chicago. Albini’s approach has long been to capture the essence of how a band sounds live, which is exactly what he did with Weedeater’s third LP. From the sneering heaviness of the title track and “Weed Monkey” to the up-tempo stride of “Wizard Fight” and “$20 Peanut,” God Luck and Good Speed moves with a relaxed dirtiness. It’s kind of like Pig Pen accepting who he is and learning to celebrate his filth. Mixing things up, fourth track “Alone” is a beautiful banjo tune that shines like an Appalachian sunrise until Collins starts in with his misanthropic lyrics. “You don’t know me,” he warbles. “Leave me alone.” Lyrically, it’s like farting during the middle of church. But his low singing is delicate and earnest, which injects the track’s surliness with authenticity.

Weedeater stomps through unfriendly wilderness in “It Is What It Is.” It’s no secret that Collins likes to party. When asked about his cocaine use in an interview for the old Stoner Rock website, he replied, “It is what it is.” There’s a country boy wisdom to the phrase that says, People can’t really change who they are, so we might as well accept the fucked-up parts. The seventh cut is a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s politically nuanced “Give Me Back My Bullets.” Even if you’re against gun ownership, though, Weedeater’s beefed-up version of the tune will get you singing along. God Luck and Good Speed closes with “Willow,” a piano ditty that moves with a lugubrious honky-tonk shuffle. The image it paints is of Collins sitting alone at a grungy bar in Wilmington, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey long after the staff has gone home. They all know him. Sometimes they just lock up and leave him there, knowing he’ll pass out eventually. With no one around but some creaky floorboards, Collins sits down at the piano and jams.

Weedeater toured tirelessly in support of God Luck and Good Speed. The same year that album came out, Buzzoven returned with Revelation: Sick Again. So it was a busy and productive few years for Collins. By 2010, Weedeater had written a new record, Jason… The Dragon. Ready to return to Albini’s studio, the trio was derailed by an incident that could only happen to Weedeater: Collins blew off his big toe while cleaning his favorite shotgun. Recounting the accident, he said,

I just got stupid. I wasn’t drunk or anything, it was just carelessness. I got off work and had two drinks, which is nothing, and went to my house and met a friend of mine. We were going to go out for his birthday and have some drinks. So I’ve got the shotgun resting on my toe as I’m attempting to spray down the outside, just to keep it from corroding, and he goes to hand me a bong, and I just accidentally pulled the trigger. My gun’s never usually loaded, but I’d loaded it on New Year’s Eve to shoot one shot into the air at midnight and afterward just passed out and left the other shell in. Nine days later I blew my big toe off with it, trying to do two things at once…

The doctor that treated me actually said that as far as shooting yourself anywhere, I was about as lucky as you can get. Had the barrel been two inches farther back, I would have blown all my toes off. And the fact that it was so close meant that the heat cauterized it, so it barely bled. I was lucky in several ways. I lost a little more than half my toe, but as far as shooting yourself, I was about as lucky as you can get. My soccer career’s over, but I’ve still been able to skateboard and shit.*

As for his recovery, Collins had to spend a month in bed. After two weeks of getting around on crutches and then another two of using a cane, that was it; he was ready to rumble. Doctors originally estimated that he’d spend a year on crutches and another two on a cane. Collins was out on tour within a few months after murdering the little piggy who loves to go to the market. Weedeater aptly called that outing the 9 Toes Tour. The band recorded Jason… The Dragon not long after that.

A wise man once said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Weedeater took that to heart, using a similar approach from God Luck and Good Speed for 2011’s Jason… The Dragon: some heavy-ass jams mixed in with a couple quiet Carolina creepers. Taking cues from Buzzoven and Eyehategod, the record begins with an ominous sample before moseying into the porch swing groove of “Hammerhandle.” With titles such as “Turkey Warlock” and “March of the Bipolar Bear,” it’s clear that Weedeater’s sense of humor is intact. Instead of making the trio a joke band, however, that humor creates a fitting nonchalance, which helps the group avoid the pitfall of hyper-seriousness that’s so prevalent in metal. Sixth track “Palms and Opium” is the trippiest of Weedeater’s soft songs by a long shot. Collins’s yowl couples with his bright slide guitar to sound like something Early Cuyler might write if he found a trunk full of mescaline. Kirkum pounds out a solo in the minute-long “March of the Bipolar Bear,” which leads into the malicious swagger of “Homecoming.” With flowing water and croaking frogs in the background, “Whiskey Creek” brings the record to a close. It’s a relaxed bluegrass jam that gives way to another of Collins’s lone barroom hymns.

Roughly a year after Jason… The Dragon came out, Kirkum and Weedeater went through an unfortunate split. Kirkum said on Facebook that Collins’s drinking had gotten out of hand. Collins and Shepherd issued this statement in response:

The simple truth is: Being in a band is like being in a relationship. Sometimes all parties involved need a break and sometimes they just don’t work out, despite all efforts made. Whether it be the actions of one or the whole, sometimes it is necessary to part ways. This was not a management decision; this was a necessary one. The exact reasons shall remain confidential to protect the privacy of all involved, but as painful as it has been, it is simply not possible for us to function with the original lineup for the upcoming tour, or the writing and recording of our new album. So, rather than scrap years of hard work, stop doing what we love and disappoint ourselves and our fans, we thought it would be better to continue onward. For those of you intrigued, on the short run for Maryland Deathfest, Travis Owen will be on the drums, a friend of the band and seasoned drummer. You might know him from Whores (who rule) from Atlanta, or his other various endeavors.†

Owen and Kirkum certainly have different styles, and that comes across most clearly live. Kirkum simply beat the hell out of his drums, putting every ounce of himself into each hit. The same can be said of Owen, except he does so while twirling his sticks and executing other flashy, Tommy Lee-approved moves. I don’t say that sarcastically. It’s a blast to watch because Owen is obviously having fun, which makes Shepherd and Collins have fun. And if you’re not having fun playing Weedeater songs, well, shit, what’s the point?

In September of 2014, Weedeater again entered Electric Audio, this time to record the masterful Goliathan. Released by Season of Mist in 2015, the LP begins with the seemingly sweet organ tune “Processional,” which becomes not-so-sweet when Collins croons, “I really hate your face / I hate the things you do / I know you don’t like me / I’m going to bury you.” Before he starts singing, the track has the innocent feel of a Daniel Johnston song, but Collins simply can’t help himself from letting another wet one rip during the middle of church.

Flipping off the fans who doubted he could fill Kirkum’s Sasquatch-sized boots, Owen pulls “Goliathan,” and every other song on the album, through mud. A crusty banjo track, “Battered and Fried” makes for a bridge between the first and second half of the record. Goliathan doesn’t let up with the heaviness after that. “Reprise” revives the main riff from the title track to give the album a circular resolve, and “Benaddiction” closes things out with a spacy drug nap.

Owen vacated his spot in Weedeater in 2017, needing a break because of health problems. He was replaced by Carlos Denogean. After only a short time with the band, however, the young Denogean tragically and unexpectedly passed away in August of 2018. Weedeater has kept moving forward with Ramzi Ateya filling in for Owen on tour. As of now, it seems like the trio will simply keep doing what it’s always done: crop-dust the world with its dirty sounds.

Everything about Weedeater reminds me of the tough-as-nails coal miners and roughnecks I’ve known. Considering the band’s sound and vibe, I was surprised to hear Collins say that Wilmington’s economy is quite a bit different than you might expect, especially nowadays. Most people know North Carolina for its coal mining, farming, and manufacturing. Collins said the Wilmington of today is more of “a service industry town, catering to tourists and the kids that come here to go to college.” But it was different when he grew up.

My father worked for DuPont down in South Carolina, and he was transferred to the Cape Fear DuPont plant on the Cape Fear River, and that’s why we moved here. Industry since then has pretty much died in this town. It’s mostly service industry now. You either wait tables, or you do construction for that industry. There are a few industries still, like PPD built a pharmaceutical headquarters here, and General Electric out by the airport still manufactures all kinds of stuff, like a lot of airplane parts, and there’s a corning plant. But most of those places, if anything, are downsizing. It’s not like there’s a reason to move here and work for those places.

Solid blue-collar jobs might be dying out in Wilmington, but Weedeater keeps the city’s proletariat spirit alive with its smartass, down-to-earth metal. At every job, there’s that dude who works harder than everyone but who won’t pass up an opportunity to mock a supervisor or crack a joke. Weedeater is that dude reincarnated as a band. If you’ve known that guy, then you know he’s tough as hell. Giving up isn’t in his vocabulary. Same goes for Weedeater.

As if the band hadn’t faced enough strife, Wilmington got hammered by Hurricane Florence in September of 2018. They city’s major roadways were flooded, destroying the insides and outsides of buildings and driving people from their homes. At least twenty-seven people died in storm-related incidents in North Carolina. Like New Orleans after Katrina, it’ll take several years before Wilmington heals. But if any band is tough enough to keep going, it’s Weedeater.

Pt. 2

Savannah’s history is laced with ugliness, from unspeakable racial violence and discrimination to the struggle of transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrialized one. Much like the Wilmington Collins described, Savannah is now performing that awkward juggling act of sustaining an economy that’s based partly on manufacturing and largely on service. It only makes sense that the city would birth Blacktusk, Baroness, and Kylesa, bands that mix punk, metal, and rock in what’s now referred to as the Savannah sound. But before those groups, there was Damad.

Kylesa cofounder/guitarist-vocalist/recording engineer Phillip Cope played in Damad alongside the notorious vocalist Victoria Scalisi. Formed in 1991, Damad combined the biting rancor and dissonance of Dystopia with Cavity’s towering riffs and raw energy. Scalisi’s vocals are sandpaper to the ears, making Damad’s transitions between grinding punk to mid-tempo sludge unequivocally brutal. Her screams have a dying-prisoner aura, and it’s chilling. For nine years, Damad delivered poisonous sounds to small-yet-diehard audiences across the country, the musical version of that deviant who puts cyanide in candy for kids during Halloween. All the people who gobbled those Tootsie Rolls never forgot Damad. A large part of that stemmed from Scalisi’s inimitable presence.

Remembering Scalisi’s power as a vocalist, Cope said,

The first time I heard Victoria lay down vocals for Damad I got goosebumps. I was blown away even though I was familiar with her talent from our previous band, Rogues Gallery. We had decided to go in a heavier, darker direction with Damad. I wasn’t sure what to expect; she had told me she wanted to go lower with her voice, like what a lot of the crust and death metal guys were doing. When we first started playing, a lot of people were shocked, as they had never heard a woman with a voice like that. It was pretty awesome seeing the looks on people’s faces at shows in the early days. Her hard work and support paved the way for so much that happened and came out of Savannah.‡

Hessian-musician Aesop Dekker remembered her as:

an absolutely gregarious and welcoming soul off stage that could summon a feral witch demon when the amps went on. One thing I will always remember was the violence; the weird way she demonstrated her joy and affection might be to simply kick your ass. One night at a party at Damad’s house, after much alcohol, I was the recipient of a perfectly executed roundhouse kick to the ear that sent me flying across a table littered with empty bottles. I was initially embarrassed and angry, but as I came to know Vic, I knew it was endearment. Not to mention, it was so well done, and I most likely deserved it. Victoria was rowdy in the best way, but when you needed her to listen, or advise, she never failed.‡

From 1994–2000, Damad put out a handful of demos, EPs, seven-inches, and two acidic LPs: 1997’s Rise and Fall and 2000’s genre-dissolving Burning Cold. Damad’s music is a head-fuck, and not in a “Look what I can play!” type of way, but more along the lines of eroding listeners’ self-esteem. Burning Cold is like Dystopia’s Human = Garbage, recreating the band’s misanthropic worldview so well that it could plausibly push someone to build a cabin in the woods, cut off all human contact, and die alone. It’s also another Billy Anderson production that redefined heavy music.

“Kick in the South” opens the album with a looping sample of what sounds like a 1920s blues riff played backwards. Christian Depken busts through with a fast tom rhythm, and Cope’s harmonic riff smiles with broken teeth. As if the track wasn’t vicious enough, Scalisi comes in with demonic vocals that sound like Linda Blair from The Exorcist when she roars at the priest. She follows with clawing screams and then starts switching between the two ferocious modes. There’s not a hint of hyperbole in saying that Scalisi’s vocals are some of the most brutal the world has heard. If Pig Destroyer’s J. R. Hayes and Today is the Day’s Steve Austin fought to the death with their bare hands, something akin to Scalisi’s shrieks and growls would emerge from that battle.

“Wordless,” “Hide and Seek,” and “Landscape” highlight the vocalist’s affinity for hypnotic singing, making Cope’s wavering guitar work all the more hallucinatory. Driven by Depken’s primal drumming, “Token” is a portent for many Kylesa tunes. The serrated “Link” closes out Burning Cold, dwelling in dissonant post-hardcore and then swan diving into dirt. Damad has yet to see the widespread recognition it deserves. Among those who’ve heard Burning Cold or any of Damad’s other output, however, there’s no disagreement about the band’s greatness and influence.

After nearly a decade of pushing the envelope of what aggressive music can look and sound like in Damad, Cope, Depken, and bassist Brian Duke decided to form a new band with guitarist-vocalist Laura Pleasants. They called it Kylesa. From its beginning in 2001, Kylesa was a pissed-off Cottonmouth, striking at anything and everything in its path with tissue-dissolving sludge.

Like so many of us, it all started with Black Sabbath for Laura Pleasants. From there, she discovered the raw aggression of punk and hardcore. She said,

My parents bought me my first electric guitar when I was sixteen…I didn’t have an amp. I bought this sort of jack you could directly link to your stereo. It sounded terrible. Then I would call my friends and tell them: “Hey, I can play ‘Iron Man!’ And I would play the song at the phone.

Grunge was very important for me, too. I was entering high school when that crazy scene exploded in Seattle. I fell in love with Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Melvins. Melvins were probably the most important influence of all: I think they were the real forerunners of what we now call sludge.

Eyehategod was a crucial band as well. They came out just after Melvins, and I’ve always loved them. Kylesa has been really punk-influenced. We have always listened to a lot of punk and hardcore stuff. The first bands I got into from that scene were Misfits and Black Flag. Minor Threat and Fugazi were very popular at the time, too. I managed to see Fugazi live in ’99, only a few years before they quit. It was amazing.

Early nineties metal was really important. I’ve listened to a lot of Jane’s Addiction, Tool, and Nine Inch Nails records. You know what? Pantera too. I was fifteen when I saw them live, and I can still remember that show’s power. It was insane. I also have some soul and R & B in my background. When I was about fourteen, my mother gave me her collection of CDs. She had loads of albums from the Motown scene, but I found some sixties folk records mixed in with stuff from the great rock bands of the time…

It’s hard for me to rank all these different genres. They’ve all had a great influence on me. I was like a sponge: I absorbed everything I was able to listen to. Now I feel lucky because my growth as a listener permitted me to approach my musical career with an open mind.§

Each of those spices comes out in Kylesa’s metal-shavings-sprinkled porridge. The group began recording its self-titled LP not long after forming. As Kylesa neared the final stages of completing the album, Duke died in the thralls of an epileptic seizure. Reeling from that sudden loss, Pleasants, Depken, and Cope decided to finish Kylesa, getting Michael Redmond to track the remaining bass. They wanted to gift the world with the last of Duke’s rib-shattering bass work. Taking the crusty sounds of Damad to an even grimier place, the album finds Cope and Pleasants exploring those dissonant Kylesa melodies that squeeze the nervous system like a stress ball. Whether it’s dealing in fiery sludgecore or murderous quiet, Kylesa never eases its grip.

In the three years between Kylesa and To Walk a Middle Course, Brandon Baltzley replaced Depken on drums, and Corey Barhorst came in on bass and vocals. That’s when Kylesa honed those elements that fully separate it from Damad: the unsettling guitar harmonies; the deftly grooving drums; the hardcore group shouts; the mix between Pleasant’s jagged screams and Cope’s percussive yells; and the fine balance between heaviness and drive. To Walk a Middle Course has it all. The 2005 LP still harnesses elements of Damad’s violent sound, but it’s aural documentation of Kylesa carving its own path.

Cope and Pleasants always wanted to have two drummers in Kylesa, but they weren’t able to make that happen until 2006’s Time Will Fuse Its Worth, when they recruited Jeff Porter and Carl McGinley. The band’s sophomore LP came out on Prosthetic Records—and just on the heels of Melvins’ (A) Senile Animal, that group’s first album with two drummers. For Kylesa, Time Will Fuse Its Worth is an exercise in learning how to combine the crust-groove attack of To Walk a Middle Course with the sonic possibilities that two drummers unlocked. Melvins hit the nail on the head right away: Willis and Crover surround Osborne and Warren’s tongue-in-check riffs with a whirlwind of woozy percussion. Kylesa needed a feeler record to figure out the dual drummer approach. Time Will Fuse Its Worth is impressive, and there are plenty of moments where Porter and McGinley hit that polyrhythmic sweet spot. It just doesn’t compare to the percussive masterpiece that is 2009’s Static Tensions, for which Eric Hernandez took Porter’s place and Javier Villegas replaced Barhorst on bass.

With Static Tensions, Kylesa was more deliberate about integrating two drummers, with Cope and Pleasants playing straightforward riffs during sections where “Eric and Carl can really go off,” Pleasants said.¶ Writing the drum parts, McGinley would figure out “the basic beats but knowing in the back of his mind that Eric could add something on top.” Hernandez lived in Miami, driving to Savannah when he could. He and McGinley would practice with the full band and on their own, figuring out when to add rhythmic layers and when to double up on a particular section to make it more of a gut punch. Melvins’ two drummers create a tripped-out disorientation. Kylesa’s approach on Static Tensions is both more controlled and layered. If Kylesa was a Cottonmouth in its early stages, Static Tensions evolves that serpent into an ouroboros with hundreds of centipede-like legs, propelling it forward like a circular saw.

Jingling percussion opens “Scapegoat.” The track quickly mutates into a call-and-response between McGinley and Hernandez. With the controlled ferocity of Bill Ward on Black Sabbath, Kylesa’s two drummers exchange fire with rapid fills before joining forces to bolster Pleasants and Cope’s sludge-encrusted punk. The drummers remain tightly linked through the verse and chorus but also shoot off warning fills that demonstrate their polyrhythmic firepower. If that sounds pretentious, “Scapegoat” is anything but, always rooted in no-bullshit sludge. Following a solo that glides like a cheetah, the song finds its bridge when the guitars and bass dissolve and McGinley and Hernandez craft a percussive dirt devil. As they rotate around their kits and complicate each other’s fills, it creates a multi-dimensional effect, like the drummers are spinning around you on a rotating platform.

“Insomnia for Months” blazes with similar energy, in no small part because of Pleasants’ movement between cascading croons and gravel-throated screams. McGinley and Hernandez summon a storm of blast beats in “Said and Done” before returning Kylesa to the corrosive swamp it calls home. Following a swinging breakdown, Pleasants, Cope, and Villegas open a window into the cosmos, through which McGinley and Hernandez send rays of light, hitting on a similarly celebratory vibe as Sepultura’s acoustic jam, “Kaiowas.” Always pulsing with a punk spirit, Kylesa defies the idea that sludge can only focus on matters of the physical world. The interdimensional and euphoric drumming of “Said and Done” is, for lack of a better term, spiritual.

Taking influence from the trance-inducing rhythms of Neurosis, Hernandez and McGinley propel “Unknown Awareness” with their backbeat tom groove, adding and taking away layers as the song demands. Pleasants’ vocals are gauzy light in a dark tunnel. Even during the quiet moments, percussion pulses beneath the ground, creating a sense of dread. With its creeping rhythms and movement into a chugging, harmonic riff that’s just off-kilter enough to make it menacing, “Running Red” delves deeper into the caverns that house spirits. The song also wards off intruders with moats of sludge. In “Nature’s Predators,” Kylesa takes the familiar form of a feline swamp predator. The final tracks of Static Tensions slink back to subterranean caves, periodically finding awe-inspiring domes, but only after wading through skin-eating ooze. So much more than a record featuring two drummers for the sake of novelty, Static Tensions is a virtuosic composition that happens to fall under the umbrella of sludge.

Spiral Shadow of 2010 follows the same multi-legged ouroboros through earth and fog. Ultraviolet (2013) and Exhausting Fire (2015) give that creature wings and usher it into the clouds. With Pleasants, Cope, and McGinley as the lasting core of Kylesa, those LPs feature various bassists and other musicians. The spiritual bent of those records gives them extra weight, with Exhausting Fire serving as a channel for Cope and Pleasants to deal with intense personal loss.

In 2016, after fifteen years of recording and touring, Kylesa announced an indefinite hiatus. Not long after that, Damad confirmed a few live dates, igniting hopes for a new record. But Victoria Scalisi’s death in 2017 laid Damad to rest forever, leaving holes in the hearts of her bandmates and loved ones. In the form of her music and influence on bands like Baroness, Blacktusk, and of course Kylesa, Scalisi continues to live. While Kylesa’s future is up in the air, Pleasants recently started a project called The Discussion, and Cope formed a group named Oakskin. Both bands journey through unique visions of psychedelia and show plenty of promise. Regardless of what the future holds, Damad and Kylesa have irrevocably tainted the already-corrosive river of sludge.

24 His cutesy nickname is like naming a 400-pound gorilla Cocoa. Keko looks like a burly Hells Angel.

Part Three

Machinery of the Throat

Unemployment rates in Birmingham rose steadily after Black Sabbath’s heyday. By 1981, many young adults couldn’t even get the torturous factory jobs that made their parents miserable. Joblessness and poverty injected new levels of anger and frustration into the collective psyche of Birmingham’s proletariat youth. Discharge’s politically conscious D-beat and Venom’s proto-black metal spread in England like invasive weeds, providing the elements for jilted children of Birmingham to create the most antagonistic music the world had heard: grindcore. Bands like Sacrilege and Napalm Death channeled those styles, as well as thrash and death metal, through the urgency of hardcore, pioneering sonic weapons such as the blastbeat along the way.

But Grindcore wasn’t the only musical innovation occurring in Birmingham. As Napalm Death explored possibilities of speed, teens G. C. Green and Paul Neville were combining programmed beats, electronic noise, and churning riffs in a project called Fall of Because. Napalm Death guitarist Justin Broadrick convinced Green and Neville, his longtime friends, to ditch the drum machine and let him play drums for their band. Broadrick split his time between that band and Napalm Death for a few years. Fall of Because recorded its sadistic demo, Extirpate, in 1986, multiple songs from which Broadrick and Green would rerecord under the Godflesh moniker. Extirpate blends the violence of Swans and Whitehouse with a metallic interpretation of Throbbing Gristle’s monotonous rhythms to make for a listening experience that constricts the throat.

After laying down guitar for Side 1 of the world-changing Scum, Broadrick left Napalm Death and joined industrial noise rock troupe Head of David in 1986, recording a Peel Session with the band in ’87. Broadrick’s focus on Head of David led to the dissolution of Fall of Because. Wanting to craft more abrasive sounds, he eventually split with Head of David as well. Inspired by the electronic mania of Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo, as well as the concrete-smashing stomp of Public Enemy, Broadrick formed Godflesh with G. C. Green in 1988, recording the legendary Godflesh LP that same year. Black Sabbath and Napalm Death reflect the negativity of industrial life, but Godflesh recreates the factory and its indifferent thrum. The band’s self-titled album forces the brain down conveyer belts and through a maze of steel compactors that never seems to end, mirroring a life of toiling alongside machinery that could so easily grind your bones into dust.

About life in Birmingham, Broadrick remembered, “Living in council estate flats in grey areas, hearing the factories churning out all night and the smell of chemicals in the air, and just the grim faces of people on the street.”* For him, heavy metal was a natural outlet for that alienation. It would just be a type of metal the world had yet to hear. That new style, Broadrick said, came from wanting to separate himself from the played-out elements of the scene:

The most popular metal when Godflesh became popular in 1989–’90 was the back-end of the hair metal thing, and Godflesh played with a lot of bands, a lot of tours in America like that, and I became quite repulsed by the whole circus of heavy metal. But, essentially, I’ve always been excited by what’s central to heavy metal, which is the sound, the texture of heavy metal. That was it for me. Godflesh was about pure reductionism, minimalism, reducing heavy metal to its absolute primitives. But also these elements of electronica, machines, quite literally the very primitive stages of being able to program computers and use machine beats, which for me, initially, was as informed by Public Enemy and Eric B. and Rakim records as it was anything beyond that, plus being able to create beats bigger than a human drummer could.*

Godflesh is propelled by a weaponized backbeat. In “Avalanche Master Song” and “Ice Nerveshatter,” programmed kicks combine with Green’s down-tuned bass to create the musical equivalent of a car compactor. Broadrick’s metallic chug gives the machine additional power as he grunts like a laborer shoveling coal in a boiler room. The corroded drive of “Veins” takes cues from sneering noise rock while “Godhead” torturously plods through industrial trenches. The album closes with “Streetcleaner 2,” a chemical-noise compound that works as a paint thinner for happiness. Godflesh wears listeners down in the same way as a long workday. Each individual task is monotonous and depressing on its own, but it’s the accumulation of those worthless tasks that crushes the spirit.

Just one year after putting out its self-titled record, Godflesh released Streetcleaner on Earache, the label Digby Pearson started with money he received from Margaret Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Trying to combat widespread unemployment, the program gave money to people who started their own business. It just so happened that Pearson used that money to release music that attacked Thatcher’s corporation-worshipping politics. On Streetcleaner, Broadrick, Green, and Paul Neville, who plays guitar on the second half of the album, are crystal clear in their stance that corporate industry destroys people, inside and out. I wonder how Thatcher would’ve reacted had she heard Streetcleaner—or, better yet, seen its cover: a graveyard of faceless people nailed to crosses, behind which an apocalypse of fire roars. The commentary is unequivocal: industrialization has been an extended persecution of the working class.

While deploying the crushingly minimal riffs of Godflesh, Broadrick yawps like a sadistic foreman throughout Streetcleaner, crafting a cruel and militaristic persona that dominates the record. Like Ahab’s fevered goal to kill the white whale, the foreman’s unwavering drive to produce becomes a mechanism of self-destruction as he orders workers to feed the factory at a rate that cannibalizes the entire operation. Broadrick’s Streetcleaner persona is a play on the wizard from The Wizard of Oz, reimagining that presence, but without deceit or remove. Rather than hiding behind a curtain, the foreman is everywhere at once, creating a state of relentless surveillance so workers dare not rest. With Godflesh, the band creates its own factory. Streetcleaner is that factory pushing itself into oblivion. Industrialized nervousness builds throughout the LP so that, by the end, the brain is reduced to its most primitive mechanism: fight-or-flight.

Streetcleaner eventually saw the praise it deserves, though it took some time. Godflesh followed with 1991’s Slavestate, an LP that mixes the punishment of Streetcleaner and Godflesh with more palatable songs aimed at capturing fans of Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Skinny Puppy. Riding a wave of popularity, Godflesh toured the US with Napalm Death and landed a spot opening for Nirvana. Not long thereafter, Neville parted ways with Godflesh. Broadrick and Green then recorded the Cold World EP, as well as 1992’s Pure, during the same block of sessions. Perhaps more than any other Godflesh release, Pure showcases Broadrick and Green’s ability to write unapologetically badass metal riffs. With busier and sometimes swinging beats, Pure channels the mosh pit stomp of Vulgar Display of Power-era Pantera, which makes sense considering that Broadrick crafted remixes of “Fucking Hostile” and “By Demons Be Driven” that same year, shattering the thrash-groove classics into broken-mirror industrial. Pure also combines hammering syncopation in the vein of Meshuggah with the bleak industrial metal Godflesh is known for, finding an epitome of nothingness in the soaring and grating noise of “Pure II.”

Wanting to push Godflesh to the same plane of mainstream popularity as Nine Inch Nails, Columbia teamed with the band for 1994’s Selfless. Although the record serves up a smorgasbord of darkly catchy riffs, mainstream audiences didn’t latch onto Selfless like Columbia had hoped. Godflesh returned to Pearson’s Earache for its fourth LP, Songs of Love and Hate, the band’s first album with a human drummer. Brian Mantia’s drumming guides Godflesh through breakbeat and even dub-step territory, putting Broadrick’s hip-hop influence in the spotlight. But in the years since its release, Songs of Love and Hate has come to represent for Broadrick a departure from the spirit of Godflesh. He’s also expressed bitterness for Us and Them, a 1999 LP that deals in fast, anxiety-inducing techno in the vein of Aphex Twin. Definitely not Godflesh’s strongest material, Us and Them is still progressive and unsettling. Hymns of 2001 once again showcases the group’s metallic roots, deploying nigh-mosh riffs alongside an industrialized version of Helmet’s unadorned rock.

Hymns was a bookend for the first life of Godflesh. Shortly after its release, Green decided to leave the band and go back to school. Godflesh had changed the face of heavy music, and he knew it. Leading up to US dates opening for Strapping Young Lad and Fear Factory—decent bands that don’t come close to the profundity of Godflesh—Green decided to hang it up, despite Broadrick’s pleas for him to continue. Paul Raven of Killing Joke and Prong stepped in, playing bass on tour and working out new material with Broadrick. For the guitarist-vocalist, however, it wasn’t Godflesh without Green.

Everything came to a head for him right before Godflesh was scheduled to embark on a tour with High on Fire and Isis. Admitting to himself that the band had strayed too far from its original vision, he promptly ended the first era of Godflesh, a wrenching decision made more difficult by having to deal with an intense breakup at the same time. Wont as we are to constantly demand elevated art from our favorite musicians but unwilling to accept artistic decisions like Broadrick’s, fans and critics lambasted him for being egocentric; but they ultimately came across as entitled children, especially in light of the fact that Broadrick would gift the world with Jesu only three years later.

Named after the final track on Hymns and conceived while Broadrick tracked that record, Jesu comes from a more peaceful place than Godflesh, embracing nature’s calm while still ensnared in a technological existence. No longer living in Birmingham, rural life enabled Broadrick to make music that’s more hypnotic than punishing. Released on Aaron Turner’s Hydra Head, a label that rivals Rise Above, Southern Lord, Earache, and Relapse in its impact on heavy music, 2004’s Jesu sends majestic waves of distortion over an organic/mechanical percussion hybrid, courtesy of Ted Parsons. All the elements coalesce to sound like Oasis channeling Sunn O))).

In 2007, Jesu unleashed a masterpiece, Conqueror. Further exploring the shoegaze-in-slow-motion aesthetic of Jesu, Conqueror is more sprawling, its atmospheres reaching higher and canyons delving deeper. Just like its cover, a negative image of a factory, Conqueror captures industrial life as it exists in memory rather than everyday experience. With each subsequent Jesu album, Broadrick sheds a layer of industrial alienation, finding something resembling serenity in the dreamy shoegaze of 2013’s Every Day I Get Closer to the Light from Which I Came.

But what’s that old saying about how you can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the boy? After more than a decade of internalizing and projecting nature’s peace via Jesu, Broadrick got the urge to write a new Godflesh record. He said,

As I’ve matured, I’ve realized how scarred I am, living that sort of [urban] existence for twenty-four years, the impact that has had across my entire life: it’s pretty much shaped who I am, and that same misanthropic outlook. Whenever I go back into urban areas I feel totally uncomfortable, and I think Godflesh is still presenting exactly what I grew up with and exactly what runs through my blood…It’s not just some revisitation for me, it really feels like I’ve gone back to what I am in a way. It’s just that sense of opposition, like I can’t suppress what’s naturally inside me when I go back into urban areas, or I go back amongst crowds of people, surrounded by concrete.*

When he asked Green about writing new Godflesh material, the bassist jumped onboard, much to Broadrick’s surprise. In line with the early Godflesh records, the duo decided to return to only using electronic percussion. Illustrating the fact that industrial alienation is a chronic affliction, 2014’s A World Lit Only By Fire and 2017’s Post Self reach inside and snuff out the soul’s flame with a steel hand. Broadrick and Green’s path to realized self-hood has been a process of accepting that the industrial purgatory where they grew up will always be part of who they are. As with the members of Black Sabbath and Napalm Death, the two musicians will always breathe through lungs blackened by Birmingham.

•••

Listening to Godflesh, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could craft more punishing and alienating industrial metal—that is, unless they built an actual sonic factory and, with every live performance, enacted a mechanized battle and communion with that system. Incredibly, that’s what Tristan Shone has done in Author & Punisher. A Southern California-based engineer, musician, and visual artist, Shone builds his own machines to produce sounds far heavier than lead. Author & Punisher’s albums create the same sensation as being stoned during a root canal: mechanical noise reaches inside your brain and scrapes at the tissue.

Shone might not have grown up in Birmingham, but industry and technology have always been integral parts of his life, he said.

I grew up on a farm, but my father worked in various industries and factories that built everything from large pumps to smaller robotic components, and my grandfather invented a cryogenic refrigeration cycle and started a company in Syracuse. So I was influenced by tech and science from a young age. When it came time to go to school, it was a no-brainer for me to go to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which is an old mill town on the Hudson, three hours north of NYC. It was not the most desirable city to go to socially, but I love the history, the old brick buildings along the river and the fact that it was half broken and desolate. These types of vast and mysterious spaces leave room for creativity and innovation. Troy/Albany is where I started playing heavy guitar-based music. I found a great local scene that I connected to right away. I also met some artists working with art and tech and began exploring that world for the first time.

As Author & Punisher, Shone explores his fascination with industrialization through sounds inspired by Melvins, Neurosis, and, of course, Godflesh:

Those bands had very heavy and dark music, but their approaches were innovative and mysterious. They never sold out and could all be considered artists who created their own paths and genres. With visual art, I was really into Survival Research Laboratories, but by the time I found out about them, the more dangerous underground performances weren’t happening anymore, so I only saw a museum performance. I would say with visual art I am more drawn to film. I’m a huge Lars von Trier fan and love Nicolas Winding Refn’s earlier films. Those directors explore the darker psychological side of life and pain, something I dig into a bit lyrically.

Author & Punisher’s progression can be traced by the development of Shone’s machines. The Painted Army LP (2005) and Warcry EP (2007), both recorded while Shone was pursuing his MFA in sculpture, combine plodding electronic percussion and spectral layers of guitars and keys. Shone then built the first of his drone machines: a throttle system that produces bowel-loosening bass frequencies. The throttles push back as Shone struggles to control them, turning notions of our push-pull relationship with technology into a physical ritual. Soon after that, Shone constructed his sadistic percussion device, the linear actuator. Armed with those tools, he crafted the seventy-minute industrial pummeling that is 2010’s Drone Machines.

All told, Drone Machines might be Author & Punisher’s most taxing effort. A slow-moving percussion behemoth treads through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of “Sand, Wind and Carcass,” the first song on the record. “Burrow Below” and “Doppler” hammer out complex rebar rhythms, atop which Shone barks orders to his mechanized legions. “Beginning of End” runs an electrified bath and dies in it. In “Ntg Part 1” and “2,” monolithic walls of amplification rise from scorched ground as a percussive rototiller crawls forward. “Blue Flame” closes the album with unmoored drones and noise, squeezing the lungs as a disembodied voice utters unintelligible cruelty. As with every Sunn O))) album, listening to Drone Machines is far from an easy or pleasant experience. Through Shone’s eyes, when you look closely enough at our relationship and history with technology, there’s easily as much ugliness as beauty.

Shone is careful not to let his machines define his art. He sees them as a product of what his music demands—content determining form rather than the other way around.

I think a mistake that artists and engineers often make is that they find an exciting new technology or gadget and force it into their practice; in this way the technology defines the art rather than that mysterious quality of the artist, which I find to be far more interesting than a gadget. In many ways, that’s why new media art fails again and again, because it’s perpetually based on the newest tech fad. When I first started Author & Punisher, I needed to solve a simple problem: as a one man doom/drone/industrial operation, how can I make live, heavy, electronic music that has that imperfect feeling of three to five organic beings playing together, but who are also just slightly off? I tried fully sequencing everything and playing guitar alongside, and it sounded too preprogrammed. That works for certain music, but not for the loose, syncopated drawl of doom metal; it needs imperfection. That’s the point where technology comes into the design process for me.

I found ways to do multiple things at once by using really simple mechanisms, like a heavy drone wheel with a good thrust bearing to allow it to spin for a long time, and then I could play synth over it as it decreased in velocity, which I programmed as pitch. With my right hand I would cycle a sliding drum trigger to keep a simple rhythm. Over time with the use of microcontrollers and a laptop—and learning about the limits of my body and mind—I was able to develop my current setup. My main goal was never to explore technology, but to use my skills as an engineer to enable one person to play live electronic music. If I didn’t redesign the entire setup, I would be playing guitar with my toes, and mouth harp and kick drum with my right foot like a circus monkey.

After Drone Machines came out, metalheads and art snobs alike were chomping at the bit to see Author & Punisher live. But the massive drone machines that spawned the album were difficult to move and set up night after night. Shone designed and constructed lighter versions, called dub machines, which he used to write 2012’s Ursus Americanus, a record that shakes walls with its harsh industrial thrum.

Then came the masks. Six months after releasing Ursus, Shone fabricated his mute mask, the first in a series of devices that allow him to employ different methods of voice modulation. Now he could scream and have it sound like a rapid-fire nail gun, or a dialup modem giving birth. The album that followed those inventions, Women & Children, is an orb of electric sparks and hazardous wiring that creates the sensation of getting smothered by aluminum foil. Watching Shone produce those sounds only enhances their intensity. Laboring behind his machinery, he yells into intimidating masks, mechanizing his own voice.

Recorded ten years after the first Author & Punisher LP, 2015’s Melk En Honing continues down the path of inducing technological alienation while also exploring new territories. In addition to his arsenal of machines, Shone utilizes guitar, banjo, and other traditional instruments on the record. Eerie vocal harmonies also swirl throughout the album. After creating a metal cocoon of noise and bass frequencies in “The Barge,” Shone plays a sickeningly repetitive kick-snare beat on his linear actuator, which emphasizes his biting shouts. A cloud of wordless moaning rises from that clamor. “Cauterize” showcases a sallow chorus that sounds like one of Björk’s hooks choking on rust. In “Shame,” Shone again utilizes vocal layering, this time making his voice sound like the fox’s from Antichrist.

The 7:21 dirge “Future Man” is the molten center of Melk En Honing. It begins by channeling a mass of electromagnetic negativity, which is broken up by proletariat chanting—an entire factory of discontent metal workers collected into one voice. An elephantine rhythm lumbers through that plasmatic haze, providing the foundation for Shone’s gristmill vocals. With a mourning rather than accusatory tone, he shouts lyrics that allude to how we’ve trapped ourselves in a shortsighted cycle of war, environmental degradation, and greed. “We’ve got no future plan,” Shone bemoans. “Locked up by needs of man.” While many people hope that technology will magically save us from ourselves, Author & Punisher laments that any solutions will be “Too little, much too late / given how far we’ve fallen.”

Following Melk En Honing, Author & Punisher released the Pressure Mine EP in 2017. It’s a flood of aluminum sound, simultaneously embracing the organic and mechanical in similar ways as Jesu. In October of 2018, Relapse put out Beastland, another brilliant Author & Punisher record. The industrial sway of “Pharmacide,” “Ode to Bedlam,” and “Beastland” emerges from a narcotic tarp while tracks like “Nihil Strength” drown dub-step grooves in oil.

For many, the technological question of the day is how artificial intelligence will change us and our world. From Transcendence to Ex Machina and Westworld, many sci-fi creators have envisioned scenarios in which artificially intelligent beings decide they’re better off without humans. While AI’s potential might frighten some, Shone is always ready to embrace new technologies, given that they fit the purview of his music. He also sees AI in music as an inevitability.

Look at how the module synth world blew up over the last ten years. There are so many young innovators and musicians that are having a blast exploring the future of those types of devices and technologies. To have a synthesizer that can play along with you, for example, would be something a lot of people would love to have. I use a ton of automation in my sets to change parameters and act as an extra set of hands. I have always wanted more backend control of my live set, and I think some additional brains to help spice things up would be very helpful.

According to Shone’s form-meets-content ethos, a challenge in utilizing artificial intelligence in music will be to do so in a way that’s not gimmicky. Gadgetry should be a vehicle to most effectively convey content, which is far from saying that it should be avoided altogether. As we grapple with the Bladerunner question—whether or not artificial intelligence systems can have actual consciousness—it follows that musicians would use AI technology as a tool to explore that question. Godflesh and Author & Punisher have depicted and examined mechanization with machines. If they’re not the first ones who make profound aggressive music using AI technology, it’s only a matter of time before someone does.

Through Blood

For many, the mere mention of Neurosis carries weight. It’s like talking about an intense acid trip with people who’ve also sat up all night, and well into the next day, watching the universe’s patterned code dance in music, trees, and concrete—and between those inevitable moments when dying seems like the best response to our destructive world. For those people, hearing “LSD” uttered aloud elicits a shudder of recognition, a physical response. Same goes for Neurosis to those who’ve spent time with the group’s records. Functioning as a collective for over thirty years, Neurosis seems more like its own society than a band. Live and on record, the group invites willing participants into that society. You just have to be ready to bleed alongside its members.

Raw emotion drew guitarist-vocalist Scott Kelly to music, first in heavy rock like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, then in punk and hardcore as he graduated from The Ramones and Sex Pistols to Black Flag, Bad Brains, and The Germs. For Kelly, music has always been about feeling above technicality, the most impactful artists those willing to forego the self and become a conduit for the spirit of their music. When he moved from San Diego to Oakland as a teenager, he found a shared musical philosophy in drummer Jason Roeder and bassist Dave Edwardson. He also found a city eating its own flesh. Crack and heroin decimated neighborhoods and lives, and divisions between the rich and poor were glaring, to say the least.

Roeder and Edwardson were in a hardcore band called Violent Coercion, and, not long after befriending Kelly, they asked him to join. The purview of that project quickly revealed its limitations to the precocious teenagers. Feeling in their guts that they needed to make more profound music, they ended Violent Coercion and spent the next few months conceiving of Neurosis and what they wanted to accomplish before even beginning to write music under that name. Taking influence from the Bay Area’s politically focused punk scene, Neurosis has operated in accordance with a fierce and uncompromising DIY philosophy since day one.

After recruiting Chad Salter on second guitar and vocals, the band wrote and recorded its first album, Pain of Mind, a 1987 record that combines the crusty edge of Amebix with the rhythmic propulsion of Killing Joke. Sounding markedly different from Neurosis’s later material, Pain of Mind nevertheless cleared enough undergrowth to reveal the band’s path. To walk on that path, Neurosis needed the inimitable guitarist-vocalist Steve Von Till.

Kelly first encountered Von Till while playing a show at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. At some point in the set, Kelly’s partner came inside with their eleven-month-old son. In drunken punk fashion, a guy climbed onstage and dove off—right into the baby and his mom. A dude with ratty dreadlocks and a scraggly goatee grabbed the stage diver by the neck and throttled him. Months later, when Kelly showed up at a house to meet someone who wanted to try out for Neurosis, he was greeted by the dreadlocked strangler. He immediately knew that Von Till should be in the band.

When Von Till replaced Salter, Neurosis ushered in a more layered and psychedelic sound without losing menace or intensity. The group sought to combine King Crimson’s complexity with the drive of Pain of Mind, which is exactly what 1990’s The Word as Law accomplishes. The album was released on Lookout!, who put out Green Day’s first two releases. Following The Word as Law, Neurosis wanted to integrate either a third guitarist or keyboardist, ultimately deciding that synth and samples would provide more dimension. The band members additionally wanted to utilize visual projections to trip out audiences and divert attention from themselves. Neurosis brought in Adam Kendall for visuals and Simon McIlroy for keys and additional sonic layering, putting out the dexterous Souls at Zero in 1992 and following that with the slower, heavier Enemy of the Sun in 1993, releasing both albums on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label. Enemy of the Sun wades in subconscious murk, sounds chipping away the ego as the record interrupts its trudge with disorienting changes. But the first time Neurosis fully submerged itself in that murk was on 1996’s Through Silver in Blood, the group’s Relapse debut and yet another canonical LP recorded and produced by Billy Anderson.

Just like the band needed Von Till, Neurosis needed Noah Landis, a guitarist, recording engineer, and longtime friend whom the band recruited after McIlroy stepped down. McIlroy didn’t like touring, and Neurosis toured tirelessly throughout the nineties. Kendall left for similar reasons, at which point the band enlisted its roadie, who goes as Pete Inc., to spearhead visuals. All the pieces were there, but they didn’t magically fall into place. For one, Landis said, samples required a different approach to music than he was used to:

To be completely honest, there were moments where I felt I was in over my head. It sometimes felt like being in a pot boiling over. But Scott and I have always been really close, and we spent a lot of time in my basement apartment figuring this shit out. Gathering sounds, manipulating sounds, learning how to take some little scream or bit of dialogue from a VHS tape and pitch it down or flip it backward. That’s when I started to listen to the world in terms of sounds—where I started a sample library. And that is kind of the beautiful thing about the role that I realized quickly. The sampler is the anything instrument. It’s whatever you can dream up and make a loop and find the rhythm and pitch and tune it to the guitar. We were looking around the house for something that would make a crazy sound. Stick a mic in front of a vacuum cleaner and turn it on. It was less about being a keyboard player and much more about being a sound designer or soundscape maker. Developing textures and layering them. Whether it’s trance-inducing or tearing your head off. And I think Through Silver in Blood has equal parts of both of those things.†

Writing and recording Through Silver in Blood was exactly as painful as its content suggests. Kelly got sucked into the mire of addiction, and each member of Neurosis has said they were dealing with their own vacuous darkness. They needed to purge that negativity, but only after confronting and exploring it, making listeners casualties in that psychological battle. Discussing the writing process, Landis and Edwardson used phrases like “emotional bleeding out” and “bloodletting.”

With the record mostly written, Neurosis tested the songs live to discover which parts were most punishing, and afterward figured out how to make them even more so. Von Till recalled,

At that point we were saying, “Oh that part was brutal at sixteen times, let’s do thirty-two instead.” Or, “Oh, that was really hurting people. Let’s double it.” This period of time for us was absolute war. It felt like sonic warfare. It was war for our souls, it was war for anything real in what we perceived as a fucked-up world with fucked-up situations. As much as we appreciated our audience, it was really like, “Let’s make them pay. Let’s punish those people…”

We needed to have this energy flow through. We needed to bleed and sweat and break ourselves, while exorcising these demons, sonically. At that time, I remember it would literally feel like the sound was coming up from the earth like veins of fucking hot lava and just right up my spine and out the top of my head.†

That primordial energy is the guiding force of Through Silver in Blood. From beginning to end, the album pinches an ancient nerve and doesn’t release pressure. Percussive industrial moans open the twelve-minute title track. Von Till joins Roeder in animalistic tom pounding to induce a murderous trance. As Kelly and Edwardson douse those sounds in negativity, Roeder molds his tribal drub into a circular groove that causes further reversion to the lizard brain. Landis’s synth stays melodically linked to the opening section while Kelly, Von Till, and Edwardson introduce venomous chugs into the already-hostile environment. Neurosis has an unmatched aptitude for arrangements that multiply the viciousness of each element. When Kelly and Von Till’s screams enter the arena, they devour hope, an effect that’s intensified by Edwardson’s subterranean yawps.

One thing missing from many Neurosis-worshipping bands is how the quintet uses angular changes that disrupt without feeling contrived. Five-and-a-half minutes into “Through Silver in Blood,” Roeder slinks into a disorienting groove, its unsettling nature emphasized by Von Till and Kelly’s syncopated chugging and a whirlpool of electronic malice. Just as the cacophony starts to feel familiar, Neurosis cuts a beat off the end of a measure and transitions into a cruel monolith of a riff. That segment gives way to torturous escarpments of distortion with valleys populated by Edwardson’s serpentine bass and Kelly’s repetitive shouting of “Don’t crawl / Seek his burn of war / When the fallout comes / He is fire,” an incantation that Von Till and Edwardson also bellow. When it seems like the abuse of “Through Silver in Blood” is finally over, Von Till, Kelly, and Roeder enact a horrific tom rite that Landis covers with streams of noise.

In “Rehumanize,” Landis mashes together a procession of slowed-down samples to mimic the way cultural pollution—specifically spiritual avowals—eats away at the mind. And then “Eye” escapes into the world. Compared to the rest of Through Silver in Blood, the track slithers at a fast rate before Roeder decapitates it, leaving “Eye” to writhe in half-time. Ethereal noise and haunting guitar notes emerge from the ruins to begin “Purify.” With his distortion-soaked bass, Edwardson guides Neurosis into punishing swells. The moves between delicate and heavy throughout “Purify,” as well as the rest of the LP, are more about juxtaposition than predictable narrative arcs. For Neurosis, light and dark exist as sides of the same coin, but they’re constantly at odds. Kelly and Von Till soon play a riff that wails like a wounded deer, which Roeder punctuates with bestial percussion before he pushes Neurosis into a frenzy that dons the band’s hardcore roots like war paint.

In 2015, Neurosis embarked upon its longest US tour in years to commemorate three decades as a band. Thirtieth-anniversary tours typically entail a band parading around as a husk of itself: sloppy musicianship, forced banter, and a half-hearted stage presence. When I saw Neurosis play “Locust Star” during that tour, however, the song was laced with all the aggression and despair that’s captured on Through Silver in Blood—and played with the same tightness. Von Till and Kelly pulled from their guts with every yell. Roeder hit his drums with barbaric force while Landis and Edwardson cordoned themselves in some other realm. Neurosis recreated, confronted, and purged negativity, a process that always takes a mental and physical toll. Kelly said that the tours supporting Through Silver in Blood were especially difficult “because there’s a lot of energy in those songs that are just not the type of thing you want to reinforce into your body and mind every night.”* Two decades later, that void-like energy still crawled from the stage when Neurosis played songs from its 1996 opus.

The video for “Locust Star” depicts a beleaguered man wandering through harsh wilderness while experiencing a flood of symbolic visions. Religious, natural, and mystical imagery flashes, igniting a forest fire of subconscious connections. During the Through Silver in Blood era, Neurosis used similar visuals live, projected on a screen behind the band, to intensify the plunge into the most primitive regions of the brain. Symbols are the root of language, marking our initial progression from the world of animals; so it follows that Neurosis would utilize that ancient form of communication to induce a feral state of semiconsciousness in its audience and members alike.

“Strength of Fates” initially takes a different path than the rest of Through Silver in Blood, reveling in fragile melancholy. Von Till croons like a man who’s endured some unspeakable tragedy as depressive piano and guitar notes flit through a synthetic atmosphere. After seven minutes of quiet despair, Neurosis dives into a pit of primeval mud. Similar to “Rehumanize,” the seventh cut, “Become the Ocean,” uses tar-soaked samples to create a lead blanket of anxiety, working as a portentous bridge to the final portion of the album.

“Aeon” begins as a dirge with morose classical instrumentation. Again using juxtaposition to make jarring the transition from delicate to monolithic, the band crafts an oddly timed torrent that regresses into violent churning. In the wake of that negativity, Edwardson’s bass hovers like a vulture awaiting carrion, and clean guitar notes inch across the aural canvas. Guided by the bite of Roeder’s drumming, Neurosis releases a flood of venom that builds into majestic waves. The LP closes with the ominous “Enclosure In Flame,” which moves like clouds in a sickly sky before culminating in wolfish sludge.

Through Silver in Blood has played an undeniable role in defining post-metal, and its influence reverberates in the sounds of countless bands. But the album inflicts levels of disorientation, fear, and hopelessness that few records have attained in the twenty-plus years since its release, giving Through Silver in Blood a shelf life that has no expiration date.

Supported by Relapse, Neurosis found itself on much bigger tours and shows—and with varying levels of success. The band played mid-afternoon slots at Ozzfest in 1996 and ’97 in addition to shows in support of Pantera and Gwar. Roeder remembered, “In front of the Gwar audience, it went way beyond not being understood. We had glass bottles thrown at us. We had people heating up quarters with their lighters and throwing them at us.”† Although Neurosis might’ve alienated more people than it wooed in those crowds, the band’s converts tend to be lifers. The group has never been concerned with pleasing audiences, finding equal pleasure in clearing crowds as transfixing them. So Neurosis’s brushes with metal’s mainstream did nothing to dilute its intent. If anything, playing to those audiences cemented the band members’ feeling that they were on the right path.

During the mid-nineties, Neurosis started exploring electronic soundscapes in sister group, Tribes of Neurot. For the follow-up to Through Silver in Blood, Neurosis smartly took the approach of exploring more dynamic shifts between quiet and loud instead of trying to write a more pulverizing record. Through Silver in Blood took a substantial toll on the members of Neurosis. They needed to harness light in addition to ravenous darkness with the next record.

Writing and recording Through Silver in Blood, the band was hypnotized by the possibilities that samples and keys unlocked, going so far as to stack inaudible, though felt, sounds atop several sections. While that approach resulted in a sonic black hole, it made for a painstaking mixing process. With 1999’s Times of Grace, Neurosis focused on excising layers, which is why Steve Albini’s band-as-it-sounds-live approach was perfect for the album. Even still, the members of Neurosis had an urge to surround Times of Grace with unruly atmospheres, so they composed a Tribes of Neurot accompaniment, Grace, which is designed to play at the same time. Both albums stand alone. Together, they swallow the brain and spit it out, changed.

Neurosis recorded Times of Grace at Albini’s studio in Chicago. The band members then tracked Grace with an ADAT recorder, passing it around to each other and making their own contributions, eventually coming together to sculpt the finalized sounds. They mixed the final version at Seismic Sound Studios in San Francisco, releasing it themselves via Neurot Recordings.

The CD insert for Grace is an instruction manual for playing the albums at the same time, suggesting that “synchronization times within five seconds [ahead or behind] are…nearest the ‘perfect’ ideal of the project.” Variations in sync time alter the overall experience, making listeners active citizens in Neurosis’s world. A five-second gap between play times is the recommended guideline. The insert also states, “many interesting and unexpected results are gained through the randomness of longer discrepancies.” Regardless of the difference in time, the end result is to submerge listeners in pools of despair, fear, and rage, out of which can be seen shimmers of light.

Putting out two records designed to play at the same time sounds like something that weird stoner kid from high school might’ve thought up. In Neurosis’s hands, it’s a stroke of genius. Speaking with writer Rick Weldon, Von Till detailed the writing process of Grace, saying, “The first rule was that Grace had to have the same flow, but without rock. And once we decided we wanted the two CDs to play at the same time, Grace also had to happen without rhythm. There’s no way two CDs are going to be perfectly in sync, so it had to be arrhythmic.” Each piece of Grace and Times of Grace complements one another on multiple levels, and Landis served an integral role in achieving that. Weldon wrote, “While working on a Tribes song, Landis would pull samples from the corresponding Neurosis song, drop them an octave, and move them around in the stereo environment.” Landis said, “Those samples are still in the right pitch, and they make reference to the Neurosis album…Even though it’s a different sound and texture, your mind hears the connection.” Working together, the records’ sounds envelop the self in a mercurial cocoon.

Times of Grace begins with “Suspended in Light,” an ominous prelude to the rest of the album. A beeping guitar effect melts into notes that glide across glass. Roeder pounds a portent of war on his floor tom as the guitars linger in gaseous distortion. Grace fills the space between instruments with a mechanical whir that sounds like an old movie projector. Spoken-word vocals float in the background, an unfriendly stranger uttering coded warnings.

On its own, Times of Grace has distinct separations between each song. Grace is an auditory adhesive, gluing everything together. Toward the end of “Suspended in Light,” a subtle-yet-menacing drone arises on Grace and fuses with the pummel of “The Doorway.” The song’s opening pulses in an unsettling meter, carried by Roeder’s syncopated groove and nimble fills. Von Till and Kelly’s screams give the section fangs. Meanwhile, the phantom ether of Grace forms an atmospheric shell. On third song “Under the Surface,” Grace also functions as a sonic sky, beneath which Edwardson’s bass and Roeder’s drumming bore through dirt. When the band transitions into a monolithic groove, the added layers of Grace become a weighted presence rather than clearly discernible sounds.

“The Last You’ll Know” moves from an abrasive, mid-paced dirge peppered with Von Till’s asphalt yowls into melancholy post-rock, over which bagpipe notes linger. Grace emphasizes those notes by reshaping them into ribbons of synth that inhabit the same harmonic space as John Goff’s (Landis-manipulated) bagpipe work. Here, the two albums congeal to create a sense of glimpsing into a different dimension, where everything is inverted yet oddly similar. String and wind instruments flit throughout Times of Grace. Near the end of the record, “Away” lilts with hopelessness as Von Till’s battered voice staggers home, guided by a mournful cello and violin. Closer “The Road to Sovereignty” starts with acoustic guitar and drums, which become the center of gravity for a revolving mass of cornet, tuba, violin, cello, and trombone. Instead of cluttering that tapestry, Grace quietly lurks until everything dissolves, ending the sonic journey with the mechanical whir from “Suspended in Light.”

If there was ever any credence behind the argument that metal isn’t as sophisticated as classical or jazz, the coupling of Grace and Times of Grace lays it forever to rest.

When bands find a formula that works, they often repeat it with little variation, disappointing themselves and listeners when it loses potency. With Through Silver in Blood and Times of Grace, Neurosis unearthed scaffolding it’s utilized on following records, but in new ways each time. A Sun That Never Sets (2001) and The Eye of Every Storm (2004) linger in tranquil melancholy while periodically issuing venom. For the former, Josh Graham, who took over visuals for Neurosis after Pete Inc.,25 created a DVD accompaniment. It’s the group’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall but without narrative or pomp, inviting viewers along for a journey that Carl Jung called the Nekyia, a flipping of the conscious and unconscious minds.

The Eye of Every Storm was released as a collaborative effort between Relapse and Neurot Recordings, proving to be the last record before Neurosis started exclusively releasing its own albums. That decision marked an evolution for the band and label, taking the DIY ethics upon which Neurosis is based a step further. Started as a platform to release the experimental Tribes of Neurot albums, Neurot Recordings has evolved into a formidable outlet for independent heavy music. With a roster that’s boasted groups from The Body and Kowloon Walled City to Red Sparowes and Akimbo, Neurot has consistently released albums that push and defy boundaries. The label is running strong today, having put out Amenra’s Mass VI in 2017 and Chrch’s Light Will Consume Us All in 2018.

Increased focus on Neurot has done nothing to stymie Neurosis’s own output. With 2007’s Given to the Rising and 2012’s Honor Found in Decay, the quintet blends the visceral sadness of The Eye of Every Storm with the drifting attack of Times of Grace. Befitting the three-decade milestone the LP marks, 2016’s Fires Within Fires stirs together elements from each stage of Neurosis’s multifaceted career while exploring new terrain.

Over the years, Kelly and Von Till have each released haunting acoustic records in The Road Home and Harvestman, respectively. Kelly also wrote an album alongside Al Cisneros, Dale Crover, and Wino in Shrinebuilder, and he’s currently putting out cruel industrial alongside Buried at Sea’s Sanford Parker in a project called Mirrors for Psychic Warfare. Landis recently started a no-wave band, The Same, and Edwardson kicks faces in the punk group Kicker. In case I need to remind you, Roeder slams his drums in the mythic entity known as Sleep.

Not to write off all that great music, but Neurosis enables its members to channel something more elemental than they can alone or with musicians outside the collective. As of this writing, the band is active and will hopefully remain so for many years to come. But I urge you to see Neurosis while our planet is graced with such a band.

25 In 2012, Neurosis decided to stop using visual projections live, parting ways with Josh Graham on friendly terms.

The Limits of Control

Neurosis swims through the most terrifying parts of the subconscious. Isis gazes at those regions through panoptic gauze, like an Alcatraz prisoner staring into the ocean. The caveman’s fight-or-flight is there, but the prisoner is under surveillance—instinct struggles against disciplinary control.

If you’re reading this, my guess is that you’ve heard of the band. If not, let me get this out of the way: Yes, Isis has one of the most unintentionally unfortunate band names in history, given the rise of the high-profile terrorist organization. When guitarist-vocalist Aaron Turner, bassist Jeff Caxide, and drummer Aaron Harris formed and named the band in 1997—two years before the extremist group showed its face to the world—that moniker only had the connotation of the Egyptian goddess. Given the way history shapes language, it’s impossible to separate the name from violent fundamentalism and the accompanying responses of Islamophobia, racism, and nationalism. For this chapter, I ask that you at least try to focus on the band’s endlessly influential music. When I discovered Isis in 2005, I was like most Americans, ignorant enough to not be aware of the terrorist group. But that’s what Isis deserves: listeners who approach its music on its own terms.

From the beginning of hardcore, Boston always had a strong scene. Growing up close to DC, home of Ian MacKaye, who first used the term straight edge to describe the choice not to drink or do drugs, hardcore kids in Boston latched onto that lifestyle with religious fervor. They collectively shaped a rigid and cultish version of straight edge that, branching from those adherents’ jockish and militaristic ways of seeing the world, somehow justified beating the shit out of drunk and stoned people at shows and on the streets. Some of those kids did come from poverty-stricken homes where violence was spurred by addiction. Wanting to rebel against a world that encourages alcohol and drug abuse and then taking that impulse to a misguided extreme, straight edge kids in Boston formed bands like Negative FX and SS Decontrol with members starting and joining militant crews/pseudo gangs such as the Boston Crew. From there came the notorious FSU, which stands for Friends Stand United but has the alternate meaning of Fuck Shit Up. That crew has been linked to extortion and severe beatings, eventually getting labelled as a gang by the FBI.

In the midst of that bullshit, the smart straight edge kids focused on music and personal improvement, knowing full well that sobriety is a personal choice not to be forced on anyone. Those kids formed bands like Converge, with other hardcore musicians shedding straight edge altogether, or not even messing with it in the first place. It’s from that environment that Isis arose, gleaning influence from Neurosis, Godflesh, and the East Coast’s blossoming metalcore scene. Speaking about the formation of Kyuss to the makers of Such Hawks, Such Hounds, drummer Brant Bjork mentioned how, when musicians who grew up on Black Flag start smoking pot, the result is often interesting. Same goes for musicians who grew up on the energetic metalcore of Rorschach and Piebald. When those musicians delve into weed and psychedelics, the result is a far cry from jam band bullshit. For musicians like Turner, Harris, and Caxide, the heightened focus and perspective change of weed led them to Neurosis, whose music is psychedelic and crushing.

With Randy Larson of noise-rock/sludge roughnecks Cable on second guitar, Isis put out a demo in 1998. Not long for Isis, Larson left and Chris Mereschuk joined, contributing electronics to the churning Mosquito Control EP, which was recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou long before he became one of the most sought-after engineers in heavy music. One year later, Isis rereleased its demo alongside a handful of new songs on The Red Sea, which features Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s Jay Randall in Mereschuk’s spot. Those early recordings deal in the sawtooth metalcore of Coalesce and Botch, but channeled through the dirty trudge of Neurosis. After The Red Sea came out in 1999, Isis went through one more member change, this one resulting in the permanent lineup with Mike Gallagher on guitar and Cliff Meyer on synth. Isis went on the road with Converge and Cavity and also landed a spot supporting Neurosis, which led to the band finding a home for its 2001 LP, Celestial, on Neurot Recordings.

About that album, Turner said, “On Celestial we were testing our mettle as a band. Figuring out who we were. Prior to Celestial, the lineup had changed a few times, so Celestial was the first recording of the all-time Isis lineup.”* Looking back, the members of Isis have said that the album might bear its core influence too obviously. That’s true to an extent, but they’re also self-deprecating and hesitant to praise themselves. The influence of Neurosis is certainly all over Celestial, especially in its transitions between stomping sludge and dreamy rock; but the record is ultimately a unique endeavor. With a defined Godflesh influence in its static linger, the rusted blade metalcore of Isis’s early recordings also slices through. In “Celestial (The Tower),” perhaps the strongest song on the record, Isis locks itself inside a chugging submarine that’s steered by Harris’s subtly propulsive drumming. That gradual, yet gnawing and incessant, forward momentum also guides 2001’s SGNL>05 EP. At the time, Isis was largely dismissed as ripping off Scott Kelly and co. Oceanic of 2002 drowned that dismissal.

By that point, Turner’s label, Hydra Head, had gained steam, blossoming from the hobby of an obsessive music nerd when he lived in Santa Fe into a full-time undertaking after he graduated from college and moved back to Massachusetts. He first put out recordings by Boston locals Converge and Piebald and progressed from there to issue releases from groups as powerful as Coalesce and Today is the Day. Hydra Head etched into stone its reputation for putting out some of the most progressive and influential aggressive music with Botch’s We Are the Romans and The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity, both released in 1999.

Turner balked at releasing Oceanic on Hydra Head because, as Gallagher said, “Aaron was never really comfortable mixing his business with the band.”* If things went wrong with marketing or distribution, Turner didn’t want to be the one to blame. So Isis found a home for Oceanic on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings, which had a larger reach than Hydra Head anyway. Isis teamed with engineer Matt Bayles, who recorded Mastodon’s impactful Remission around the same time, and entered a studio in Boston.

Everything obviously worked out, but the initial writing process for Oceanic “didn’t start off very well at all,” Caxide remarked.* “I think we knew we wanted to try something different. We had written a couple of songs and worked on them for a long while, but they weren’t going in the direction we wanted…The first song we kept was ‘False Light.’ It was at that point that we knew what we had to do.” Meyer said there “was definitely more of a conscious effort to do something out of the sludgecore scene. We were all getting into Pink Floyd and that kind of stuff.”*

Oceanic follows a narrative arc, but the story is aqueous and hard to pin down. Opener “The Beginning and the End” follows a man who leaps into the sea and drowns himself. It’s told from a voice that inhabits something akin to Jung’s collective unconscious, explaining the man’s existential crisis and decision to die to his loved ones. The instrumentation echoes that story as it moves from tightly controlled and gently dissonant rock into an angry sea that obeys Turner’s punctuated yawps. Harris lurks in the depths of the pocket, accenting unexpected notes and playing with as much power as calculated reserve. The first surge of heaviness in “The Beginning and the End” happens within two minutes of the eight-minute track. Isis then dives into murky liquid, through which Maria Christopher’s vocals cast dim rays of light. The song gains momentum a few times but always reverts back to an aquatic trance.

“The Other” gathers layers, sheds them, and then congeals in momentous heaviness. The countless bands that have aped Oceanic virtually always fail in their attempt to recreate the uneasy drive of Isis’s quiet sections. Instead of only enhancing the weight of the metallic parts, the delicate portions of Oceanic are as dense and interesting as its heaviest moments. Those quiet sections induce a meditative trance, so when Isis deploys riffs as violent and turbulent as those in the middle of “The Other,” it’s startling, like accidentally swallowing saltwater. The song’s lyrics tell of a partner of the man from “The Beginning and the End.” Amid a crushing instrumental surge, “False Light” beckons that person to her own oceanic death, urging her to “hold his hand and crush it” and then “discover bliss and serenity in drowning.” The song’s syncopated chugs evolve the brute attack of Mosquito Control into a deliberate and methodical pummeling.

The unsettling drone in Oceanic’s untitled fifth song is one of the most direct sonic references to Neurosis on the album, doling out a similar ominousness as the samples on Through Silver in Blood. But then “Maritime,” with its seemingly light-hearted electronic percussion, reinforces the omnipresent burden of technology in Isis’s existential quest. “Weight” evolves from particles at the bottom of the sea into a battle vessel that wars against itself, a struggle reflected in a call-and-response between the roaring Turner and the crooning Maria Christopher, who’s essentially the sixth member of Isis as far as Oceanic goes. The joyful clomp of “From Sinking” embraces the idea that, in death, the man does find light. As the lyrics of “Hym” suggest, that light is his acceptance of erasure. The structure of “Hym” echoes the narrative’s unexpected turn by building up to a celebratory stoner metal riff that begs to be repeated several times but instead dissolves in sparse post-rock.

Considering the depth and pull of Oceanic, it’s not surprising that the album would inspire a legion of bands to follow course, ultimately sowing the seeds for much of what we call post-metal. Although most of those groups have fallen short in their attempt to craft a world as realized, hypnotic, and dense as Oceanic, Pelican, The Ocean, Rosetta, Cult of Luna, North, and Abraham have come close.

On 2004’s Panopticon, Isis focuses on surveillance and its mechanizing effect on the human spirit. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon prison in the late 1700s. In it, multiple levels of cells encircle an observation tower, creating the possibility to watch any prisoner at any time—and thus enforcing psychological control on the entire inmate population. Dozens of prisons across the world have utilized variations of Bentham’s design. Postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault used the panopticon as an allegorical framework to examine the ways in which mass surveillance imposes control. By creating a space where it’s always possible to observe citizens, people are inclined to obey because it’s the only safe choice. As reflected by Panopticon, that possibility weighs on the mind like a lead blanket.

Tracks like “So Did We,” “Syndic Calls,” and “Altered Course” are humming engines, moving forward even when moving forward is an illusion, like an inmate’s routine completion of daily chores. In opener “So Did We,” Turner screams, “Our skin worn thin / Our bones exposed / Life reduced to ticks,” decrying the dehumanization that surveillance inflicts. It’s in tracks like these that you can see why Isis never fully embraced its categorization as a metal band. As far as rhythm and instrumentation, the songs have more in common with Failure, Hum, and Fugazi than Black Sabbath. As soon as harsh vocals enter the equation, though, a band is doomed to be placed under the umbrella of metal, although it’s far better to be miscategorized than ignored. Panopticon also showcases Turner’s hypnotic clean vocals, adding another layer to Isis’s nuanced sound. “In Fiction” finds the guitarist-vocalist voicing the despair of the panopticon’s inmates when he belts, “Yet under this mortal sun / We cannot hide ourselves.” He delivers those lyrics just before Isis unleashes what might be the most freeing moment on Panopticon, a majestic riff that calls for many more repetitions than the band allows.

“Wills Dissolve” emerges from an open night sky and descends into the circular purgatory, embracing control simply because there’s no alternative. Caxide plays a hypnotizing bass part that the rest of the band latches onto. In resignation, the prisoners find something akin to relief, expressed in the combination of lyrics like “those eyes and (this) tower have seeped into our open veins…And our souls en masse” with the track’s triumphant metal riffs. Turner has said that Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack was very influential for Isis, and closer “Grinning Mouths” is one of the clearest examples with its plodding twang. The track vacillates between fields of distorted post-rock and serene concrete ditches, giving the album an uncertain end as Turner cryptically asks, “Is it there? Are they there?” from the perspective of a man who can’t forget his imprisonment.

Oceanic and Panopticon received the critical success they deserved, expanding upon Godflesh and Neurosis’s fanbase of intellectually curious headbangers. Modern-prog-disguised-as-alt-metal quartet Tool took Isis on tour in 2006.26 Later that year, Isis put out In the Absence of Truth, an LP driven by Harris’s labyrinthine drumming. In “Wrists of Kings” and “Dulcinea,” the drummer lets loose those cascading fills he hints at throughout Oceanic and Panopticon but keeps in check.

Three years later, Isis put out its final LP, Wavering Radiant, before announcing its plan to disband. Since then, Gallagher has focused on Mustard Gas and Roses, which started as a solo undertaking and has evolved into an earthen metal band with metal journalist J. Bennet on bass. Along with Harris, Gallagher collaborated with Chino Moreno of Deftones on Palms’s hypnotic debut. Turner has been a busy little bee, putting out primate-brained albums in Old Man Gloom and then once again expanding people’s conception of what heavy music can do in Sumac, which chops up the pummel of Oceanic with syncopated and oddly timed rhythms that would get Meshuggah’s stamp of approval. As the transition from physical to digital music gutted mainstream and indie labels alike, Turner closed shop with Hydra Head in 2012 but has quietly put out a handful of releases since then. Playing under the name Celestial, Isis regrouped for a one-off show in 2018 that memorialized the tragically short life of Cave In, Old Man Gloom, and Zozobra bassist Caleb Scofield, who died in a car accident.

I feel lucky that I got to see Isis live. In 2006, I bought a ticket to see the group open for Tool. In typical me fashion at that time, I got baked before the show and underestimated how long it would take to get through the line. My stoned little heart ached as I heard songs from Oceanic and Panopticon rising above the amphitheater’s walls. Isis was done by the time I made it inside. I was luckily able to witness the band later that same year—on a tour in support of In the Absence of Truth, and with Scofield’s Zozobra and Justin Broadrick’s Jesu playing the opening slots. The show was at Denver’s Marquee Theatre, a small venue with an intimacy appropriate for Isis. With improvisational moments breaking up its structurally masterful songs, Isis worked as one unit on a level that I’ve witnessed with few bands. Although the prisoners inhabiting Panopticon might never transcend their mental shackles, the members of Isis congealed into a psychic entity that rose above and momentarily defeated the surveillance state that has only tightened its grip on our throats since then.

26 Tool bassist Justin Chancellor appears on the Panopticon track “Altered Course.”

The Sun & The Earth

Pt. 1

To put it in the mildest possible terms, Earth’s Dylan Carlson has seen some shit. Hailing from Olympia, Washington, he was close friends with Kurt Cobain. Carlson watched firsthand as grunge exploded and then imploded. Meanwhile, he explored amplification, distortion, and repetition in extreme, artistic, and commercially unfriendly ways. He struggled with heroin addiction for years and paid in full when he contracted a rare form of hepatitis. In all of Earth’s music, from the monotonous drone of Earth 2 to the Western twang of The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, you can feel the weight of a life lived in the heaviest ways possible.

Minimalist composer La Monte Young’s practice of allowing notes to float until they reveal new resonances had a huge impact on Carlson. In Earth, Carlson combined that approach with black-hole doom riffs to pioneer new ways for music to weigh on the spirit. He explained,

My musical origins come from growing up listening to Black Sabbath records, seeing the Melvins perform, and reading about musicians like La Monte Young and Terry Riley…I got La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano and The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer that Gramavision put out. At the same time I was listening to early Ted Nugent stuff like “Hibernation” or “Stranglehold,” where he’s using feedback and really repetitive riffs. I always wanted it to be more repetitive. I started thinking that if somebody took those hard rock riffs and played them like La Monte Young then something cool could happen.

La Monte Young wrote some technical articles that I read about the false harmonic that’s generated from the vibration of the ear. Before I started playing with anybody, I took a guitar and tuned it to open strings. I was training myself to hear the overtone series and combining that with a rock or metal aesthetic.

There would be a song where I’d hit a dissonant note and there’d be a vibration. I would count the number of vibrations and go to the next part. [My style came from] listening to that and hearing what was going on in the upper registers of that kind of music. A lot of people think that the drone in music is just making a noise, but there’s actually a structure to it that evolves out of the overtone series.*

To form Earth, Carlson recruited Slim Moon, who later founded the iconic Kill Rock Stars label, and Greg Babior—not because they shared a musical vision; Carlson “instinctively knew they could adapt”* to what he had in mind. “I just had a feeling that this person could collaborate, and I trusted them implicitly to play something that would fit,” he recalled. In a nod to Black Sabbath’s early days, Carlson chose Earth as the name for his project. Moon and Babior weren’t driven to get the band moving, so Carlson enlisted Joe Preston, a young bassist and all-around musician who, after playing in Earth, would go on to have one of the most prestigious résumés in heavy music, spending time in Melvins, High on Fire, Harvey Milk, and his own project, Thrones, not to mention his performances on some of Sunn O)))’s strongest material. Carlson and Preston wrote Extra-Capsular Extraction, with Preston playing drums in addition to bass. Antsy to start tracking, they entered Mike Lastra’s Portland studio, bringing along Cobain and Kelly Canary, who both perform guest vocals on the LP.

Trying in its repetition and tendency to let notes stretch their legs as far as possible, Extra-Capsular Extraction also has moments of relatively straightforward doom. Carlson’s La Monte Young-inspired use of feedback and sustain combines with Preston’s bellicose and experimental percussion to make for a severe and draining listening experience. On Part 2 of “A Bureaucratic Desire for Revenge,” Carlson and Cobain’s ragged singing bolsters Canary’s stringent howls. Extra-Capsular Extraction also toys with extremities of slowness, which Sunn O))) would take much further in years to come. The EP is a template for Earth’s first era as it yawns in rumbling drones, individual riffs less important than the aural waves they educe.

After tracking Extra-Capsular Extraction, Carlson and Preston played shows in Olympia and Seattle, exploring the potential of repetition and resonance to entrance live audiences. Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop witnessed one of those performances and approached Carlson about signing Earth. Sub Pop put out Extra-Capsular Extraction in 1991, the same year Nirvana unleashed its zeitgeist-shaping album, Nevermind. While Nirvana’s hit record motivated many musicians in Seattle to seek their own piece of the lucrative grunge pie, Carlson and Preston began writing more challenging and inaccessible music, which eventually led to the masterpiece known as Earth 2. Preston then got the tap to join Melvins and promptly ditched Earth. Dave Harwell stepped in to track bass for 1993’s Earth 2. Speaking about that album, Carlson said, “With Earth 2 we wanted to make as extreme a statement as we were capable of making.”* The album is extreme to this day. In 1993, it was a catastrophic musical event.

To listen to Earth 2 is to witness the formation of a vast network of underground caverns. Doom riffs clamber through, but the ultimate effect of the record’s groaning repetition and soul-sucking distortion is to create a dissociative state of semiconsciousness. “Seven Angels” opens with a maw of distortion, finding form in harshly repetitive stalactite chugs. Carlson reluctantly transitions between riffs, each one encased by cave walls of fuzz. Fairly quickly on, the riffs all blur together, sacrificing themselves to the indifference of the drone. It’s in repetition and time that the songs on Earth 2 accumulate mass. Seven minutes into “Seven Angels,” the track slows down to the point of causing severe discomfort. Like the growl of the lizard brain, a rumbling drone is ever-present on “Seven Angels.” The second piece of the album, “Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine,” descends to murkier depths, moving more slowly and then abandoning form altogether to drift by as a mass of toxic plankton. Monstrous doom riffs slink throughout the rest of the track, sometimes showing their teeth and other times hiding in shadow. Carlson introduces dissonant chords into the cavernous environment to give “Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine” something of a narrative structure—one that dives instead of climbs. Those chords create the false harmonic sensation that Carlson discovered in Young, reverberating in the ear like voices in a canyon. Earth 2 ends with “Like Gold and Faceted,” a thirty-minute drone experience that disrupts brainwaves.

It takes patience to get there, but once you embrace the gravitational force of Earth 2, the record places the soul in an existential vice. The album is the Black Sabbath of drone metal. Other groups toyed with similar concepts before then and during that time, but none so powerfully as Earth.

Ever the sonic pioneer, Carlson wanted to push Earth’s explorations even further with the next record. But life’s chaos got in the way. With Sub Pop pressuring him to write a new LP, and at a time when his addiction made getting out of bed a challenge, Carlson worked on Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions through 1993 and ’94. About the first recording session for that record, Carlson said,

I showed up late with no equipment and no songs. I walked in and said, “Let’s roll tape.” After we’d been recording for a couple of days producer Phil Atkin went and got a guitar and some other equipment for me to use. Sub Pop was not very happy about that so they pulled the plug on the record. We went back in a year later to finish it and everything was going fairly well until some more bad stuff happened, and Sub Pop pulled the plug again. By then, though, we had about fifty-eight minutes of material recorded, which was enough.*

It might seem harsh for Sub Pop to go back and forth with funding, though the label did release Phase 3 in 1995. At that time, though, giving money to Carlson was anything but a safe bet, given that the endlessly talented musician was making some of the worst decisions of his life. Phase 3 has moments of Earth’s characteristic brilliance. Overall, it feels thrown together, like the songs belong on different records, especially compared to the elemental flow of Earth 2. Considering what was happening in Carlson’s personal life, it’s surprising he was able to make any music at all.

In April 1994, Kurt Cobain shot himself with a shotgun that Carlson obtained for him. It’s obvious in retrospect, and to outside observers, what Cobain would do with that gun. Both Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, routinely bought speed and heroin through Carlson, and it’s not at all out of the ordinary for addicts to buy firearms through their drug connections. They need to protect themselves from the villains that populate their minds. We’ve all seen enough of those tortured souls trying to make their way through the world to know that people don’t think rationally or morally when their existence is reduced to finding the next high. Those of us who have relative control over our lives are foolish to point the finger of blame at Carlson.

As if grappling with the guilt of that tragic decision wasn’t enough, Carlson endured a painful interview with filmmaker/opportunist Nick Broomfield for 1998’s Kurt & Courtney docu-mentary. Broomfield bullied Carlson and went so far as to suggest that Earth’s founder played a role in a bizarre and far-fetched conspiracy: that Love hired someone to kill Cobain. Watching Broomfield’s interview with Carlson is to watch a dazed musician get attacked by a self-righteous paparazzi. Carlson defended himself as well as he could, though it was obvious he was caught off-guard, and he wasn’t sober. Feeding off Broomfield’s indignation, countless Nirvana fans blamed Carlson for Cobain’s death.

Phase 3 was overshadowed by Cobain’s suicide. For 1996’s Pentastar: In the Style of Demons, Carlson decided to upend what people expected from Earth. Backed by a full band, including a second guitarist and organist, Carlson plays twangy, fuzzed-out jams, sounding like Neil Young if he was obsessed with the Big Muff distortion pedal. As exhibited by tracks such as the acoustic “Song 6 (Chime),” Phase 3 is a stepping-stone into the countrified drone of present-day Earth. But the record suffers from growing pains, coming across as a half-realized effort.

By the time Pentastar came out, Carlson said, his life had only become more of a tangled mess.

I lost my contract with Sub Pop. I had legal and drug problems. My lifestyle had become self-destructive. I started out doing drugs and making music. At the start you think that the drugs are helping you create the music, but eventually they become a crutch. I can’t remember the exact date, but I remember crossing the street on my way to score. I also had a meeting with Sub Pop to go to and there was all this other stuff to do. Suddenly this light bulb went off above my head that said, “The drugs should come first and then everything will work out!” From that point on, it just all went downhill. At the time, though, I thought it was clarity.*

Not long after, Carlson went into hibernation. It would take years and multiple attempts, but he did emerge from that pit of self-destruction intact, though far from unscathed.

After the storm cloud of his life finally settled a bit, Carlson joined forces with Adrienne Davies, a drummer who breathed new energy into Earth. Excited by the music they were writing, the newly formed duo started booking shows almost immediately. With those dates fast approaching, Carlson and Davies just decided to jam on a core riff for their set, which is captured on the 2002 live recording, Living in the Gleam of an Unsheathed Sword (released in 2005). Carlson liked “the idea of a live recording being a snapshot of the event—with no overdubbing to make it sound nice.”† It’s one raw and (very) long song that sends willing listeners into a gauzy dream. Living in the Gleam of an Unsheathed Sword is Davies and Carlson performing as a duo, and they’ve been the core of Earth ever since.

The group unveiled Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method the year Living in the Gleam… came out. Pentastar provides a glimpse of where Earth would go. Hex realizes that vision on a scale as grandiose as the Rocky Mountains. Released on Greg Anderson’s Southern Lord label and recorded by Randall Dunn, Earth’s 2005 LP conjoins the depressive country of Merle Haggard with the westward sprawl of Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars. It also utilizes drones and repetition to turn the ear into its own instrument. On Hex, Carlson stopped relying as much on distortion, using acoustic instruments as vehicles for the drone, which is directly in-tune with La Monte Young’s framework.

I think of Hex less as an album and more as an epic Western film with an Earth soundtrack. Influenced by Neil Young’s sagebrush-pocked Dead Man soundtrack, Hex takes that drone-twang approach and uses it to build a dioramic world. The record is violent, dark, and heavy—but not metallic, except maybe in spirit. Davies lays down exhaling beats that move like a covered wagon through parched stretches of prairie, playing with a slow grace that sets the stage for Carlson to send electrified drones into the unsuspecting wilderness. As with its cover, the music of Hex has the grainy feel of a daguerreotype, those olden pictures that always seem to capture heartache, even when the subjects are smiling. In its slow, gruesome arc, the record also takes cues from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel that depicts the gore-soaked story of Manifest Destiny for those who inhabited the West long before anything resembling civilization would take hold. Dan Tyack’s lap steel work on the album magnifies Carlson’s notes, and John Schuller delivers a perfect bass performance on every song by never drawing attention to himself and only letting loose notes that serve as footholds for the rest of the band. While “Land of Some Other Order,” “The Dire and Ever Circling Wolves,” and the mesmerizing “An Inquest Concerning Teeth” follow a clear narrative structure, tracks like “Mirage,” “Left in the Desert,” and “The Dry Lake” paint bleak Western settings with wind chimes dancing to a quiet breeze and a cowbell bouncing as if worn by a sauntering calf.

Compared to Earth 2, Hex moves with peace and acceptance. Though trance inducing, there’s nihilism in the molten churn of Earth 2. Instead of fighting it, Hex embraces the sad reality of life. Explaining the change in Earth’s sound, Carlson said, “There’s enough noise in modern society for me. I don’t want to add to it.”†

Hibernaculum of 2007 is consuming in its fateful twang, sounding like a death knell for the human race. But the magnum opus of Earth’s second life is 2008’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, as it mines some of the sweetest melodies humans have unearthed. Steve Moore plays piano and Hammond organ on the record, which combine with Carlson’s guitar and Don McGreevy’s bass to form syrupy and melodically dense aural snow globes. Each song on The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull conveys startlingly clear imagery—whether it’s of forests, plains, or withering towns that dot the Northwestern coast. There’s simply no need for vocals in Earth’s intricately woven instrumental narratives. In “Omens and Portents 1: The Driver,” “Rise to Glory,” “Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine),” and, shit, every song on the record, Earth builds tension with dreamy repetition. When the changes finally arrive, they’re epic, like that moment when you emerge from a forest to overlook a large body of water. Davies plods like Bonham at his most enchanting but at half the speed and with hardly any fills. Many of the record’s riffs feature pausing rests so that, as the notes float, they reveal different petals of harmony. Listening to the album is like driving across Wyoming: plains endlessly stretch and, just when you think you’re reaching the end, you climb a hill that overlooks another massive expanse of rolling hills, sagebrush, and prairie grass. Majestic in its depiction of both glory and sadness, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull will move even the stoniest eyes to tears. When I imagine Earth recording the album, I see Carlson, Davies, Moore, and McGreevy jamming in a dusty saloon tucked into a version of the Dark Lodge from Twin Peaks. Instead of psychic disturbance, however, this space is saturated with saddened calm.

Though not quite as profound as The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, each subsequent Earth release, from Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 and 2 to 2014’s Primitive and Deadly, is transfixing in its sonic sprawl. In 2017, Earth teamed with electronic musician and producer Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, to craft Concrete Desert, a release billed as a battle—The Bug vs. Earth—rather than a collaboration. Earth’s organic twang wars and conjoins with Martin’s electronic sounds, resembling something like a noise-soaked fight between Earth 2 and Hex.

I experienced Earth live in 2012, at the acoustically perfect Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Like Scott Kelly, Dylan Carlson carries a weighted aura, which comes across most clearly in person. He walked around the venue before Earth’s set, nodding at fans and making friendly chit-chat with people who approached him. He wore a Western shirt with pearl buttons and rolled-up sleeves, ancient symbols inked across his arms, hands, neck, and face. Skinny and with a long handlebar mustache, he reminded me of the tough Wyoming ranchers my dad knows who are, at their core, gentle and kind human beings.

Onstage, Carlson built a sonic chapel the size of the Great Plains and took the audience on a personalized tour. Davies reached toward the sky as she played, swinging her arms in slow circles that enraptured the audience like a preacher’s storytelling. About halfway through Earth’s set, people started sitting down. Silently, we all followed suit. When a drunk Hessian kid walked in from outside and loudly said, “What is this, church?” someone simply answered, “Yes.” By the end, everyone, including the young headbanger, was converted.

How to Approximate the Khanate
Listening Experience

(an interlude)

Unspool a roll of copper wiring with your mouth.

Break glass and roll in it.

Bite a stop sign.

Smoke PCP and wait in line at the DMV.

Smoke bath salts and go to Target.

Scrape the length of a chalkboard with a razorblade.

Film yourself doing it.

Watch the footage on a three-hour loop.

Sit alone in a lightless room for a week.

Make a mouthguard out of aluminum foil, put it in your mouth, dive headfirst into a wall (preferably brick).

Catch a feral cat and give it a kiss.

Stand in the bitter cold and embrace frostbite.

Stand in the relentless heat until you pass out and/or vomit.

Pour a tall glass of antifreeze and drink it.

Chase that with a shot of bleach.

Rip off your toenails with pliers.

Chew on a piece of sandpaper.

Swallow it.

Pass it.

Put on a shock collar and punish yourself for breathing.

Reach into a bag of nails and practice your grip.

Dab your eyelids with battery acid.

Or you could just listen to Khanate systematically deconstruct doom on each of its virtuosic albums, recreating the genre in its own horrific form. Stephen O’Malley’s sinister guitar work unzips its own skin. Tim Wyskida’s drumming teeters the line between chaos and logic, violently swerving between. Alan Dubin coldly drones—the hum of the city cannibalizing the forest’s quiet grace. James Plotkin eviscerates his lungs with each scream. Play every Khanate release, from 2001’s Khanate to 2009’s Clean Hands Go Foul, as well as each EP, in one sitting. Watch your identity unravel in real-time.

The Sun & The Earth

Pt. 2

Sunn O))) transforms amplification and distortion into instruments in and of themselves, the guitar and bass becoming tools to summon electric fields of cosmic proportions. My friend once described Sunn O)))’s music as a funeral for the electric guitar. The duo pushes the elements that make that instrument unique to their logical death.

Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley have never hesitated to remind people that Sunn O))) started as unapologetic Earth worship, the impetus being to play riffs in the spirit of Earth 2, only slower. From its earliest and most straightforward recordings to the symphonic masterpiece that is Monoliths and Dimensions, Sunn O))) has time and again used that modus operandi to craft voids that beckon like Nietzsche’s abyss. Live, the band wears hooded robes to allow its members to shed their identities and evoke menace in its purest form.

O’Malley and Anderson started Sunn O))) in 1998 as the flame of their doom band, the soul-swallowing Burning Witch, began to flicker, at which point they moved from Seattle to LA. Having also played in Thorr’s Hammer together, the two musicians knew how to feed off each other. So when they formed Sunn O))), it was a familiar union, even with Anderson switching to bass. The year 1998 further proved to be a landmark for O’Malley and Anderson when they started their imperative label, Southern Lord.

Looking at song titles from Sunn O)))’s 1999 debut, The Grimm Robe Demos (originally released on Hydra Head before Southern Lord reissued it), the duo’s frame of mind at the time is clear. As if the monotonous roar of the record wasn’t enough to clue people in, song titles “Defeating Earth’s Gravity” and the even less subtle “Dylan Carlson” make it clear that the recording is essentially Earth 2 played through more powerful amps. There’s also a harsh depth to the album that hints at the chasms Sunn O))) would later tear into the universe. ØØ Void, released in 2000, prowls similar territory. With 2002’s Flight of the Behemoth, Sunn O))) fully emerged from Earth’s shadow, creating unwelcoming atmospheres with abrasive noise in addition to copious distortion. Earth’s trajectory has been one of weary acceptance. At its core, Sunn O))) is more chaotic and nihilistic, although the group does occasionally find peace. Sunn O))) typically destroys it, though.

White 1, White 2, and all of Sunn O)))’s records since then bring to mind the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In case you need a reminder, the movie’s first large, flat-black rectangular prism appears as a group of primeval apes sleep in their cave. When they awake, the intrusive sculpture evokes first fear, then anger, and then curiosity as the apes place their hands on it, trying to glean insight about its meaning and purpose. Astronaut David Bowman discovers the third prism during his galactic expedition. Hovering in Jupiter’s orbit, the monolith sends him tumbling through an interdimensional rabbit hole. In the face of Sunn O)))’s music, the monkey brain battles against and then embraces the band’s monolithic distortion before getting sucked into a void in which technology and nature are one and the same.

Released in 2003, White 1 begins with “My Wall,” which features the English occultist-archaeologist-vocalist Julian Cope reciting verse that moves from esoteric symbolism into Sunn O)))’s statement of intent. Anderson and O’Malley’s drone rumbles beneath the ground. Cope becomes feverishly intense in his utterances and then calmly foreboding when he says, “Play your gloom axe Stephen O’Malley / Sub bass clinging to the sides of the valley / Sub bass ringing in each last ditch and combe / Greg Anderson purvey a sonic doom.” After invoking the storm, Cope exits, leaving O’Malley and Anderson to rain down a cataclysm of barely moving notes for the remainder of the twenty-six-minute track.

If “My Wall” evokes 2001’s first monolith, “The Gates of Ballard” is the techno-psychological labyrinth Bowman gets sucked into. Thorr’s Hammer vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter opens the cut by distortedly wailing Norwegian folk lyrics. Featuring impish and borderline nonsensical electronic percussion courtesy of Joe Preston, “The Gates of Ballard” plows forward in an atonal riff that sounds like it was recorded behind mud-caked bed foam. Preston and Rex Ritter are cowriters and performers of White 1, beginning Sunn O)))’s tradition of collaborating with a rotating cast of musicians (live and on record), always with O’Malley and Anderson behind the curtain. Closer “A Shaving of the Horn That Speared You” lurks in nebulous caverns with Gammelsæter groaning like an exiled prisoner.

White 1 pushed Sunn O))) far beyond the confines of metal, and the group has been sending disruptive signals from that plane ever since. White 2, put out by Southern Lord one year after White 1, finds Sunn O))) constructing a monstrous drone-dirge in “Hell-O)))-Ween” and then stuffing that beast into a woodchipper in “bassAliens.” Sunn O))) has a sense of humor with its song titles, even though the songs themselves are cold and humorless.27 “Decay 2 [Nihil’s Maw]” marks one of Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar’s first collaborations with Sunn O))). As O’Malley, Anderson, and Ritter sculpt a hostile realm of cannibal drones, Csihar recites verses from the Indian Vedas, one of humanity’s earliest-known texts. Words cascade from his mouth as he utilizes the ancient technique of throat singing, turning his voice into an instrument of atmosphere instead of a centerpiece. By the end of the record, it feels like Sunn O))) has reached inside your brain and screwed with all the wiring.

Sunn O))) uncaged Black One in 2005. Featuring Malefic of Xasthur, Wrest of Leviathan, and composer Oren Ambarchi, Black One is malice incarnate—and easily Sunn O)))’s most chilling album. Along with Take as Needed for Pain and Through Silver in Blood, listening to Black One for the first time was one of the only occasions when I’ve felt truly scared by a piece of music. Without falling victim to any of black metal’s posturing, Black One harnesses the frozen malevolence that makes Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Burzum so intense. Speaking to The Wire in 2009, O’Malley said, “Rather than being a direction at the time, maybe [the black metal aspect of Black One] was more of an aesthetic.” It’s black metal in the sense that Earth 2 is doom. Carlson channels Sabbath’s heaviness through minimalist techniques. With Black One, Sunn O))) funnels the cold brutality of black metal into its heartless drone.

My friend showed me the record in 2007, on a road trip from Colorado to Arizona. In my head, the subcutaneous hum of opener “Sin Nanna” painted an ancient fortress enshrouded in fog. The bleak tremolo of “It Took the Night to Believe” revealed a predatory chaos that chewed at the fortress walls from outside and within. Gaining energy from Taoiseach’s ambient black metal guitar, Wrest’s vocals in “It Took the Night to Believe” morphed into a Terror Dog that scratched at my mind and fucked up my ability to drive, even though I was sober. Gazing down the indifferent slopes of the Rocky Mountains, I wondered how many drivers had answered the void’s call and plowed through the guardrail. The Terror Dog returned via Malefic’s howls in “Cursed Realms (of the Winterdemons),” oozing from my truck’s speakers beneath a blanket of harsh noise. “Orthodox Caveman” and “Candle-Goat” provided some grounding in the familiar churn of Earth 2 riffage on a cocktail of Quaaludes and steroids. After a disingenuous calm, Malefic ritualistically sacrifices his throat to the blackened drone of “Báthory Erzsébet.” In the weighted silence following Black One, my friend and I (unironically) gave each other that mind-blown-on-acid look, mouths agape.

Like every Sunn O))) record, Black One is not something I can casually listen to. Similar to the psychic toll Scott Kelly described when remembering how it felt to play Through Silver in Blood night after night, Black One demands a tax I can’t regularly pay.

After Black One, Sunn O))) collaborated with Japanese fuzz gods Boris on the multifaceted Altar (2006), abrading happiness with the drones of “Etna” and “N.L.T.”—and then swimming in crystalline ether in “The Sinking Belle,” a song that’s carried by Jesse Sykes’s broken croon. That same year, the duo teamed with Earth for the Angel Coma split, dirt and nothingness pressed onto the same vinyl slab. Sunn O))) put out the Oracle EP in 2007, following that with a handful of live recordings and collaborations. Since amplification and distortion become their own beasts in Sunn O)))’s dominions, each of the band’s performances is unique, which accounts for the large number of live recordings the group has released.

Always searching for ways to defy expectations, Sunn O))) decided to integrate a defined classical element for its 2009 masterpiece, Monoliths and Dimensions. When the LP came out, I would listen to it while riding on bike paths, staring at electric towers that sprouted from marshy grass and loomed above creeks and rivers. It was a good time to listen to Sunn O))) explore ancient parts of the mind via the technological tools of amplification, distortion, and noise. Monoliths and Dimensions tremors with Sunn O)))’s all-consuming drones but also features acoustic instrumentation such as violins and cornets. The LP allows the organic and mechanical to bond, simultaneously pitting those energies against each other.

Attila Csihar appears on all of the record’s tracks save for the battle-weary “Alice,” his presence making tangible the portentousness of Monoliths and Dimensions. Trapped within the dense distortion of “Aghartha,” Csihar speaks like Rasputin on his deathbed as violin, viola, and clarinet scurry from the terror. Choral vocals glide through the gelatinous dark of “Big Church,” which features guitar work from Dylan Carlson. The fourth piece, “Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia),” summons the impenetrable negativity of Black One in its iron curtain of noise, and final song “Alice” showcases O’Malley’s ability to harness Earth’s ethereal twang, his guitar notes soaring on swells of horns and strings like a hawk riding thermals.

Sunn O))) put out Kannon in 2015, which returns to stripped drone form in three (relatively) concise pieces that each dissolve flesh. Soused and Terrestrials of 2014 are collaborative efforts, the former with experimental musician Scott Walker and the latter with the metallic collective Ulver, making Kannon Sunn O)))’s first solo LP since Monoliths and Dimensions. With Sunn O))), “solo” is relative: Kannon features usual suspects Csihar, Ambarchi, and Ritter in addition to multiple other musicians. Throughout the record, feedback buzzes like a cloud of flies as Csihar unleashes ghastly vocal drones. The LP feels like a magnetic pole for the despair that permeates society, which makes sense considering that the album deals with the Buddhist concept of “Perceiving the Sounds (or Cries) of the World.”

In 2019, the group put out Life Metal. Perhaps more than any other Sunn O))) release, the LP finds hope in a dying world. Its riffs aren’t entirely bleak, and the vocals of Hildur Guðnadóttir add a skeptical brightness to Sunn O)))’s drones. Of course, Anderson and O’Malley’s version of hopefulness is not what you would get from a motivational speaker, as Life Metal is still a beckoning void.

•••

I witnessed Sunn O))) on its tour for Monoliths and Dimensions. Surrounded by a semicircle of Sunn O)))’s amps and cabinets, Salt Lake duo Eagle Twin tapped into a fierce animal consciousness to open the show. When Eagle Twin left the stage, Sunn O)))’s wall of speakers became a tool of intimidation and imposition—and before the group played a single note. It was obviously going to be loud, but I’d seen several (really) loud bands by then, like Jucifer. Wearing expensive, custom-fit earplugs, I made my way to the front of the stage with my sister, who also wore earplugs.

By the time Sunn O))) appeared in hooded black robes, the stage was curtained by smoke. For better or worse, band costuming and “dark” theatrics almost always seem cheesy to me. But O’Malley and Anderson’s robes are a way to obscure themselves, allowing the cruel will of their music to reign.

Sunn O))) drowned the audience in tactile sound. Thirty minutes in, I felt dizzy and nauseated from the drones weighing on my chest and skull. I looked at my sister, knowing she felt the same way. We both wanted to stay in front. I watched hallucinatory patterns spin on the ground and walls, even though I hadn’t done drugs in years. Csihar emerged from smoke wearing a cloak and tree mask. Standing at the front of the stage like some dictatorial golem, he sent ancient utterances burrowing into our brains. The medium-sized theatre bulged with bass frequencies, a water tank about to burst. Everyone in the audience just stared forward, jaws dropped, dazed.

As soon as we stepped outside, my sister (also sober) projectile vomited onto the gum-dotted sidewalk. The pressure from Sunn O)))’s amplification made her sick. When she told people why she threw up, they just nodded, unsurprised.

27 My guess is that the titles poke fun at the absurdity of trying to attach catchy names onto unruly sonic environments.

The Saddest Thing I Ever Saw

Anytown, USA: A local economy that revolves around one or two main industries and leaves the town’s children with few options, many of whom will follow in their parents’ footsteps by destroying their bodies for a company that sacrifices its workers to the bottom line. In those places, there isn’t much to do aside from working and getting wasted; meth and pills are easier to score than (good) weed; and the high occurrence of suicide reminds inhabitants that they can always choose death.

Whether it’s the self-esteem eroding blend of sludge and country on Special Wishes or the high octane rock ’n’ (fucking) roll of The Pleaser, Harvey Milk’s music is always rooted in that American landscape. Consisting of Creston Spiers on guitar and vocals, Stephen Tanner on bass, and, depending on the record, Paul Trudeau or Kyle Spence on drums, the band hails from Athens, Georgia. Like many Southern towns, cotton mills drove Athens’ economy during the early 1800s. Because of its high number of factories, Athens was likened to the iron lung factory towns of England. A group of Athens’ chosen sons built one of the first railroad lines in Georgia, connecting their town to Augusta, and, eventually, Atlanta.

Harvey Milk has always channeled the blue-collar spirit of its environs. Throughout 1992 and ’93, the band released a handful of seven-inches and recorded a self-titled LP, which didn’t see proper release until Hydra Head issued a remastered version in 2010. In 1994, Harvey Milk teamed with engineers Brooks Carter and David Barbe to record its first-released album, My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, put out by Yesha that same year. Abstract in its disjointed combination of caustic noise rock, peaceful quietude, and violent sludge, My Love… is a shattered-glass collage, similar to Gummo in the way its pieces battle and conjoin.

The railroad anthem that closes the LP, “All the Live Long Day,” is particularly crushing. Tremors from Tanner’s distorted bass and Trudeau’s floor tom wallop push the song, along with piercing sledgehammer percussion (literally) from Spiers: On periodic upbeats, he slams a railroad tie with a sledge. Those metal-on-metal hits combine with Trudeau and Tanner’s snail-paced rhythm to capture the grueling life of a Georgian railroad worker during the 1800s, an illustration made more brutal when Spiers bellows, “I work hard all day / And this is what I do,” right before pounding the tie. The band has only played the song live a handful of times,28 including at Athens’ 40-Watt club in early 1994.

One year later, Harvey Milk recorded what many fans regard as its magnum opus, Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men, originally released in 1996 by Reproductive Records and reissued by Relapse in 2007. The ten-minute opener, “Pinocchio’s Example,” is a microcosm of the record. Nagging, single keystrokes on an old piano morph into idiosyncratic noise rock that gathers speed before unraveling in a squall of cymbal washes and distortion. The band repeats that anxiety-inducing formula until, nearly five minutes in, Tanner plays a bass riff that moves more slowly than Dr. Gonzo after he huffs ether through an American flag in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. With his ghastly moan, Spiers leads Harvey Milk through chest-high muck. Finally, white noise segues into mournful folk. Sounding like an elderly coal miner with severe black lung, Spiers whispers, “Thin black paint / Shows a smile’s path / Roughhewn veins / Run dry maps,” over sparse guitar notes. The drone of a vacuum cleaner becomes an atmospheric tarp, covering the somber guitar tune. Coupling a cleaning device with Spiers’s catatonically depressed vocals speaks to the true promises America makes for its laborers: unrewarding, underpaid work and unending sadness.

“Brown Water” emerges from that desolate ending with a guitar progression that sounds like a lost intro to one of Vic Chesnutt’s withered folk tunes. Trudeau gently joins, and Spiers’s altar-boy vocals waver. Then Harvey Milk opens the floodgates, unleashing a barrage of filth. Spiers switches to his unintelligible holler while hammering out a distortion-laced major scale. Twangy guitar notes bob their heads above the flood—only to get engulfed by a slow-motion mudslide of bass and drums. Without any of the affectation that accompanies many bands’ transitions from quiet to loud, Harvey Milk deftly returns to the song’s morose origin before releasing another town-destroying deluge of Southern sludge. This time around, the heavy section includes a deconstructive guitar solo that carries the song to its end.

“Plastic Eggs” (an earlier version of which appears on Harvey Milk) begins with a ten-second burst of tom-heavy drumming that abruptly cuts out, like it’s playing on a TV and someone changed the channel. A nihilistically repetitive sludge riff becomes the song’s center of gravity. Long hours at a degrading and physically demanding job are conducive to acidic misanthropy and self-hatred. Countless laborers in Athens’ cotton mills doubtlessly experienced those feelings, which the mean-as-hell “Plastic Eggs” captures in distilled form. Combined with Trudeau and Tanner’s rhythmic abuse, as well as multiple layers of Spiers’s harrowing yells, the riff opens like an abandoned coal mine. The cut is punishingly monotonous, but Harvey Milk occasionally throws in extra beats and oddball changes to keep its rancor intact.

“My Broken Heart Will Never Mend” stutters like a dying tractor, with quarter-note escarpments and rough-hewn breaks that feature broken-winged guitar harmonies. Courtesy…takes a turn with the fragile “I Feel Miserable” and “The Lord’s Prayer,” soft songs that sound like found recordings of an aging field hand playing guitar and piano alone in an empty farmhouse. Spiers seamlessly blends those songs into “Sunshine (No Sun) Into the Sun,” opening with whispered vocals and cheerless acoustic guitar. Twenty-five seconds in, Trudeau hits his snare with an explosive flam, clearing a swath for another defective sludge tractor. Tanner’s rattling bass drills through, and Spiers covers his rhythm section with sandpaper noise. It’s the soundtrack to a horrific farming accident.

As with virtually every other industry, cotton farming and production became increasingly industrialized throughout the 1900s. Factory workers constantly got injured by the machinery they operated. The destructive energy of industrial labor drives “Go Back to France,” the title of which is a sardonic poke at the political ideals often found in rural America. Orchestrated and performed entirely by Spiers, who was a percussion major at a school in Baltimore before he transferred to the University of Georgia and majored in music education,29 the song is a drum assault. It begins with steady kicks and triangle tings, both of which get surrounded by cymbal splashes and a whirlpool of polyrhythmic tom pounding. Roughly halfway through, the percussion briefly pauses, opening the door for grating mechanical noise that, along with the throat-constricting drumming, continues for the rest of the song. When firing on all engines, “Go Back to France” is an assembly line of workers toiling at the altar of the conveyor belt.

A peaceful Hammond hum opens “A Good Thing Gone.” Tanner stomps on that calm with a bass line that reeks of early Melvins as Spiers warbles incoherently. A series of short samples preclude a change back to the Hammond drone, creating an effect similar to the Super 8 clips and overdubs that Harmony Korine uses to disrupt his films. The song also makes for an unsettling segue into Harvey Milk’s dejected rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.” Spiers lightly strums an acoustic guitar and sounds like Waylon Jennings’ unwanted son when he sings, “I lit a thin green candle / To make you jealous of me / But the room just filled up with mosquitos / They heard that my body was free.” Spiers’s singing gradually becomes unhinged, moving from a murmur to pained moan. After singing about a saint who drowns himself and a man with hypothermia, Spiers regresses into a wordless, suicidal wail.

Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men finds an end in “The Boy With Bosoms,” a song with shifts between old-time Appalachian melodies and industrial nastiness. Rather than bellowing, which he does during most of the LP’s heavy sections, Spiers gently croons, as if singing a lullaby. Like a coal miner emerging into the evening sun after an excruciating shift, “The Boy With Bosoms” brims with forlorn optimism. The worker finally gets to go home, but the next workday, and countless others exactly like it, looms.

After Harvey Milk’s 1996 tour with godheadSilo, Kyle Spence replaced Paul Trudeau. Propelled by Spence’s virtuosic, Bonham-at-his-most-coked-out drumming, 1997’s The Pleaser is barn-burning classic rock. The record might seem like a curveball next to Harvey Milk’s other efforts, but it makes perfect sense considering Spiers’s musical past. “The first band I got into was Kiss,” he recalled. “From them I went to Zeppelin and the Beatles and the Stones.” The Pleaser filters the Motor City charge of Kiss through Zeppelin’s musicianship, dancing in front of the jukebox instead of sitting and drinking alone at a back booth, as Harvey Milk is wont to do. “Red as the Day is Long” and “Lay My Head Down” suck good vibes out of the room, but The Pleaser is a fairly celebratory record. It’s a hallmark of growing up when you can return to the music of your youth with joy instead of self-aware criticism. The Pleaser is that moment for Harvey Milk. After wading in the depression of My Love… and Courtesy… it was likely a needed respite for the band. For those who were lucky enough to see Harvey Milk perform during The Pleaser years, they were met with sweat-soaked performances they’ll never forget. It was a small window of time, however, with Harvey Milk going on hiatus from 1998 to 2005, when the group recorded Special Wishes with original drummer Trudeau.

Special Wishes places hopeless sludge tracks like “I’ve Got A Love” and “Love Swing” alongside downer country ballads such as “Old Glory” and “Mother’s Day.” Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men has a jagged edge in the way it combines genres and modes, but Special Wishes doesn’t war against itself quite as much. The album is mean and depressing, sure, but its elements are more open to socializing with each other.

Spiers chuckled when I told him that “Old Glory” is my favorite track on Special Wishes—and my favorite Harvey Milk song in general. “That’s weird,” he said in his gentle drawl, a schoolteacher’s voice that made me feel comfortable on some fundamental level. “It’s such a different Harvey Milk song. Me and Kyle did that all by ourselves one day because we needed an extra song on the record.” Spiers starts the track with acoustic fingerpicking. In a thick croon reminiscent of Johnny Cash in his dying years, Spiers bemoans old glory’s forced witnessing of violence as it hangs above scarred battlefields. The song moves into a towering barroom stride, like Lynyrd Skynyrd on performance-enhancing drugs, returning to its acoustic origin when Spiers sings, “How do you think my father felt / Resorting finally to the belt / Years of patience clearly worn away.” There’s no resentment in his voice, just matter-of-fact resolve.

In 2007, Spence once again took Trudeau’s seat, and the eminent Joe Preston joined Harvey Milk on guitar to write and record Life…The Best Game in Town. The record has some strong moments, like the barfly groove of “Motown.” All told, though, Life… feels like a random coupling of realized songs and practice-room riffs, the latter coming across most in “After All I’ve Done For You, This is How You Repay Me?” and “A Maelstrom of Bad Decisions.” Despite the obvious potential of a Joe Preston/Harvey Milk collaboration, it didn’t quite pan out. My guess is that Preston living in Oregon made writing and rehearsing difficult. The result was Harvey Milk’s weakest record. Preston joining did fuel some media interest in the band, which helped on its 2008 tours.

In 2009, Harvey Milk returned to trio form to write and record the melancholic A Small Turn of Human Kindness. It’s a seamless composition, one interconnected piece rather than a collection of songs, taking its name from the first track of My Love is Higher Than What Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be.

Discussing the writing process of A Small Turn of Human Kindness, Spiers said,

I was living in a house on Beverly Drive in Athens. I was teaching third grade, and writing [the album] on a little keyboard on the couch. It was actually a very formal process. I selected a group of tones and decided on a way to combine them, and then started mapping out the themes I wanted to use, which were basically intervals of sevenths and seconds. It was definitely the most thoroughly composed of the Harvey Milk records.

It was a reaction to the record before it to a great extent, which I didn’t care for, and I thought was a pretty poor effort. I wanted to improve upon it. I guess that’s something I’ve always wanted to do, which is to write something really longform like Tommy, kind of like a rock opera. I also had this idea of expanding the story from the liner notes for the first song of [My Love…], and since I was going to use the story, I also thought I should use some of the musical elements from it. That’s where I got the tones.

As for the narrative of A Small Turn of Human Kindness, which is told in short, concrete moments, Spiers summed it up like this:

It’s a couple. It’s not really established that they’re homeless, but it is established that the woman is pregnant, and they’re on the road in a hobo-ish fashion, camping and sleeping on the sides of the road. It’s just a story of how they’re sitting around the fire one night, and they hear the screech of tires and the thud of an accident. The man goes to investigate, and he comes back to report that what he saw was a car had hit a deer, and the deer had died, but its fawn survived and was just lying next to the deer, licking it. Just kind of lying there not knowing what to do. So, once he reports that at the campfire, the woman grabs a pistol and shoots the fawn. That’s the kindness, I suppose.

Harvey Milk tells that story with the graceful brutality of Flannery O’Connor. The instrumental opener arcs and dips in an epic, melodically uneasy sludge-twang, placing listeners in the dark woods where the man and woman sit and eat in silence. Wounded bass notes saunter through the beginning of “I Just Want to Go Home.” Spence joins with a topsy-turvy groove that refuses to settle on the upbeat or downbeat, and Spiers makes his guitar scream as he wails in existential weariness. Speaking from the woman’s perspective, he groans, “Joey, you’re smiling / What’s fucking funny? / One more fish steak night / Yeah, that’s fucking funny / I’m so sick of this / Why are we out here?” Matching form with content, the music creates a gnawing weariness by refusing to move on from its crawling tempo.

Pushed by Spence’s stutter-step march, “I Am Sick of All This Too” is cinematic in its glorious build. Instead of leading into something up-tempo, however, “I Know This is No Place for You” lets the air out of the tires with dilatory rock that’s peppered with enough weird notes to make everything feel just a little off. Narrative-wise, it’s the couple waking up with a sense of optimism for new adventures but getting met with another day of the same exact shit they did the day before, and the day before that. Continuing the couple’s conversation from “I Just Want to Go Home,” Spiers bellows from the man’s perspective: “I’m sick of all this, too / But what am I supposed to do?” His questions turn inward when he says, “What kind of father will I make / When the baby comes? / There we were / On the edge of Interstate 41.” Although sadness prevails, Hammond organ adds a hint of hope to the song.

Spiers knows full well that, “If you want people to connect to a moment and narrative, you have to describe the detail in a way that’s relatable. And I think that only in the details is the real meaning there.” That’s the same reason William Carlos Williams started using concrete images in poems rather than ruminating on the depth of his emotions. Spiers’s lyrics zoom in on the roaming couple while the music paints empty highways that cut through dark woods.

“I Alone Got Up and Left” is the ugliest song on the album with its repetitive, Courtesy-era sludge and lyrics about the man finding the wounded deer with its fawn. Spence plays a tuberculosis groove that seems like it will fall apart any second as Spiers hollers, “The squeal / The squeal of tires / The scream of tires then / The screech of tires then the thud of the impact.” Capturing the man’s raw heart, Spiers then delivers one of the best lyrics ever written: “I just seen the saddest thing I ever saw.” The man and woman are characters that could’ve inhabited William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and they speak in the rural vernacular Spiers grew up with.

In the way he writes and speaks, it’s clear that Spiers isn’t some slick city boy who thinks country life is “fascinating.” Rural America runs through his blood. Speaking about how growing up in Louisiana shaped him and his music, Spiers said, “I would have to say completely and totally. I grew up in Louisiana in a little community on River Bend Drive. I had a levee in my backyard. Behind that, the Ouachita River was flooded sometimes to the top of the levee. My dad played guitar. He’d have friends over and they’d just sit around and jam on honky-tonk songs, and that’s how I learned to play.” Even with a music degree from a respected university, Spiers has never shed that upbringing, instead finding artful ways to embrace and depict it.

On the heels of the harsh “I Alone Got Up and Left,” the fifth track, “I Know This is All My Fault,” begins with persistent violins. The song peaks in metallic crescendos before getting stripped down to quiet piano and Spiers’s beaten vocals. Taking on the man’s voice again, he apologizes and forlornly tries to show the woman hope in their life when he says, “The trees and the sky / are still something.” A Small Turn of Human Kindness takes on a triumphant finality in the opening of “I Did Not Call Out,” with Spiers wailing about the woman grabbing a .38 from her bag and killing the wounded deer in an act of mercy. As the man sees it, “there was grace” in the killing, but the brutal nature of that grace becomes apparent as the song morphs into grotesque metal, eventually circling back to the wall-eyed bass riff that opens “I Just Want to Go Home.”

A Small Turn of Human Kindness stands on the same pedestal as classical music’s most respected masterpieces. But you’ll never hear Harvey Milk say so. When I asked Spiers what he would tell his sixteen-year-old self about the album if he could go back in time, he said, “I would say it’s going to seem long and boring at first, but stick with it, and listen to it more than once, and you’ll see that there’s thought behind it…Any ideas that you have like, ‘Oh, my God, this is pretentious.’ Yeah, you’re right. You’re right on the money. That’s exactly what it is. Look at it from that point of view.”

Speaking to Self-Titled Magazine, Tanner eloquently described his take on the record:

We came up with the most pretentious music we possibly could, and since that wasn’t enough, we wrote ridiculous words about total bullshit and named the songs in the most annoying fashion we could imagine. But we thought we could keep pushing the envelope; we named the album the same thing as a song on another album of ours and then designed an album cover that truly shows you how much we care—it’s a picture of some trees. We have reached the point of complete and total creative bankruptcy, but at least we made it shorter than the last record, so you can get through listening to it and return it to the store for a refund faster.

Released on Hydra Head in 2010, A Small Turn of Human Kindness saw mixed reviews and has ultimately become a cult phenomenon, not garnishing anything near the respect it deserves. Since then, Spiers has decided to eliminate the intermediary of the record label, releasing solo music exclusively through his Patreon page. Currently working as a substitute teacher, Spiers’s goal is to earn just a little scratch for mastering his craft. As for his material, it’s weirdo rock that mixes equal parts Harvey Milk, Dinosaur Jr., and Depeche Mode. Stephen Tanner put out the 90210-inspired Things Haven’t Gone Well in his project Music Blues in 2014. Spence recently joined indie hitmaker Kurt Vile’s band and is currently playing to larger crowds than Harvey Milk ever has or will.

Given the nod to its first-released album in title and narrative, many (including myself) took A Small Turn of Human Kindness as the swan song for Harvey Milk. In their traditionally opaque and smartass interviews, the band members said maybe it would be the last record, or maybe it wouldn’t. Rumors sprouted up in 2017 about Spiers and Tanner joining forces with Swans’ drummer Thor Harris for new Harvey Milk material, but that didn’t work out. When I asked him about it, Spiers seemed open to the possibility of making another Harvey Milk album at some point but had no concrete plans. Whatever happens in the band’s future, A Small Turn of Human Kindness is a beautiful, full-circle moment for Harvey Milk, harnessing the woeful trudge of Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men in a refined form that also dodges the sterility and cynicism of most groups’ attempts to recapture a past vibe. If it’s the last Harvey Milk record, it would be a fitting end. If not, then we get another Harvey Milk record.

I haven’t encountered much middle ground when it comes to Harvey Milk. People either haven’t heard of the band, don’t get it, or they would donate a kidney to watch Harvey Milk play. The group dismantled heavy music and put it back together in a way that makes it impossible to argue that metal can’t be art in the highest possible sense. Chopin can fuck off. I’ll be listening to Harvey Milk.

28 I bet it’s too much of a pain in the ass to haul a railroad tie to a venue, set it up onstage, and then properly mic it. Just a guess.

29 His specific ideas and demands for the percussion of Harvey Milk make him “a pain in the ass to every drummer,” he said. “I don’t try and control everything they play,” Spiers clarified, “but if I write a song, it usually has a drum part, and I kind of want them to play that part.” Trudeau and Spence always made the parts their own, even if it was with a middle finger directed at Spiers.

Ache Like We Ache

The first time I saw The Body was in 2010 at a DIY space. Lee Buford assembled a red drum kit that appeared to be acrylic but had solid shells (not transparent like most acrylic kits). In a nod to primitive methods of guitar amplification, the bottom of each drum opened like a funnel to make it louder, with no heads on the undersides to optimize projection. Behind Buford, Chip King set up an eclectic wall of amps and cabs consisting of expensive gear coveted by doom junkies as well as smaller and cheaper combo amps and speakers.

I’d been listening to All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, The Body’s 2010 experimental sludge masterpiece, on a daily basis. So I expected a painful set. What I didn’t expect was that King would perform his hoarse, dying-man vocals without a microphone, screaming over the dense amplification that made Buford’s loud-as-fuck drumming seem quiet. King’s screams were perfectly audible. Somehow traveling through the viscous distortion, his vocal-chord-destroying yowls made it seem like he was getting smothered by his own amplification. Forty people, at most, were there. (It was likely closer to twenty-five.) There was a mic set up for King. I expected him to start using it with each new song. He never did. He sacrificed his voice that night—and, as far as I know, every night on that tour.

King’s high-pitched scream turns a lot of people away. He sounds like Beaker from The Muppets if that high-voiced character was locked in a serial killer’s basement and screaming for his life. It hurts my throat to listen, so it’s hard to imagine the level of pain King endures. The Body gets pleasure from causing audiences pain, but for every hurt the band inflicts upon listeners, The Body experiences twice the injury.

The difference between a good and great band is the desire and ability to evolve without becoming something entirely different. The way I see it, a band’s original spirit should always be there, although it can take radically different forms. Melvins did it, Neurosis did it, and The Body has done it. Formed in Rhode Island in 1999 and currently hailing from Portland, the duo put out its self-titled debut in 2004. The Body is vicious sludge with hints of noise rock, though its one-sided feel marks the LP as an early effort, especially compared to the group’s later records. Between that album and its 2010 masterwork, The Body put out two EPs, one of them a seven-inch of covers by Body Count and MDC: Cop Killer / Dead Cops.

As if The Body’s antisocial vibe wasn’t clear enough, multiple of the band’s promo photos have shown King and Buford holding or pointing shotguns and assault rifles. In one, they sit in the center of an arsenal that would make any gun nut drool. The Body has also been outspokenly anti-fascist on social media and merch in a way that would make alt-right trolls dismissively label the group as social justice warriors. That spirit of disruption underlies a lot of what The Body does. Whether it’s through abrasive sludge, power electronics, industrial, or some horrific conglomeration of those modes, The Body has turned fucking with people into an art.

With All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, which was released on At A Loss Recordings, King and Buford use blades they forged on The Body to cut into the nebulous heart of misery itself. “A Body” starts with clipped choral vocals. Those voices eventually get drowned in rusted-knife sludge, though it takes eight minutes to get there. The juxtaposition of King’s vocals and the female singers’ is oil on water: the elements touch but don’t blend. In “A Curse,” Buford’s deft break beat devolves into brutish pounding. “Empty Hearth” then releases a cut-up sample of an intensely chanted prayer into an industrial slaughterhouse. While The Body’s progression from pummeling metal into its current shape-shifting form seemed out of left field to some, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood showed exactly where the band would go, although that’s only clear in retrospect. What’s immediately and unequivocally clear about the LP is that it’s a psychological vacuum. I’m not trying to be cute when I say that if you’re seriously depressed, I don’t recommend listening to All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, at least not in any focused way.

The second time I saw The Body was in 2014, at a grungy bar in Fresno. King and Buford were touring with the (retroactively) proto black metal act Sandworm. After that duo played, King set up his rig: two full-size bass cabinets (one an 8” x 10” and the other a 2” x 15”) and a full stack for guitar. Sitting next to the mixing booth, I heard the sound guy tell King not to turn up too loud. King nodded, only running the guitar stack during sound check. When he and Buford started their set, King fired up his full rig, punishing everyone in the venue and, I’m sure, pissing off the sound guy to no end.30

The Body only let the audience rest for about a minute, total. For the rest of the forty-five-minute set, scathing highs and pressurized lows coming from King’s rig combined with the vocalist’s gruesome screams and Buford’s slamming percussion to bludgeon everyone in attendance. I wore my fancy ear plugs for the set, but the pressure from King’s rig nevertheless made me feel like I was sitting at the bottom of an Olympic-sized pool, the sounds coiling around my chest in a physical manifestation of the anxious misanthropy that drives The Body’s music. My guess is that King and Buford would not have gotten invited back to the venue they played in Fresno, but that place has since closed down, so who’s to say?

After All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, The Body released the similarly draining Christs, Redeemers in 2013 and then I Shall Die Here in 2014, the latter working as a bridge between the band’s early and more recent sound. “To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me” is antipathy laced with sludge and harsh noise. The second track of I Shall Die Here, “Alone All the Way,” carries that same torch before morphing into gelatinous electronica, which “Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain” and “Our Souls Were Clean” also explore. Similar to Sunn O))), The Body is endlessly prolific. In 2015 the duo released collaborative albums with Thou, Krieg, and Vampilia, but 2016 would prove to be more of a watershed year for the band.

On March 18, 2016, The Body put out No One Deserves Happiness on Thrill Jockey. The LP’s bizarre mix of danceable electronic beats, harsh noise, lilting vocals, consuming distortion, and King’s swig-of-Drano screams confounded a lot of people. Discussing the band’s influences for the album, Buford said, “All we listen to is pop music, so it’s kind of inevitable that we would make a pop-sounding record…I mean Chip loves Taylor Swift. He listens to a lot of Taylor Swift. We also listen to a lot of The Weeknd, stuff like that.”* There are definitely pop elements to No One Deserves Happiness, such as the entrancing grooves and singing in opener “Wanderings,” although those sounds get entrapped inside towers of The Body’s doom. The pop influence also comes across on the record’s song lengths, many clocking in around three and four minutes instead of pushing into eight, nine, and ten-minute territory, as so many heavy bands tend to do. That said, it would cause a public panic if any of the songs from No One Deserves Happiness played on pop radio or randomly appeared on a Taylor Swift playlist. Consider the grating noise track “Hallow / Hollow,” or the death cult sludge of “Starving Deserter.” Even with relatively pretty songs like “Adamah,” whose rippling pop-trap beat carries operatic female singing, there’s a savage dissonance at work. What Buford didn’t say is that No One Deserves Happiness is The Body playing pop songs. If there are Taylor Swift or The Weeknd-esque moments, they’re filtered through biting nihilism and despair. King’s vocals are still a dominant presence, making the album an immediate turnoff for most. Maybe not “pop-sounding” to my ears, No One Deserves Happiness is a middle finger to genre classification and distinction, juxtaposing and intermixing conflicting sounds and modes into a ravaging whole.

Just one week after Thrill Jockey put out that record, Neurot unleashed The Body’s collaboration with hardcore/grind unit Full of Hell: One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache. As with No One Deserves Happiness, the collaborative LP is hydrochloric acid for genre classifications. Its title makes a promise that the album delivers on ten times over.

I was fortunate enough to witness the horrific union of The Body and Full of Hell at Minneapolis’s now-closed Triple Rock Social Club. Buford started “One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache” with austere electronic percussion that was quickly swallowed by a nightmare sequence of grind. Full of Hell’s David Bland propelled that torrent with speed-of-light blasts before unleashing a superhuman drum solo that King and Full of Hell’s vocalist, Dylan Walker, smothered with noise. Full of Hell and The Body proceeded to punish the audience with the rigid mechanical trudge of “Bottled Urn” and the noise-grind venom of “World of Hope and No Pain.”

A sadistic experiment in harsh noise, “Himmel und Hölle” is painful on record and even more so live. Throughout, Walker screamed like a black metal preacher giving a sermon on cannibalism. The track degenerated into percussive industrial that induced the same level of alienation as a massive chemical plant in the midst of rolling hills. The musicians bastardized one of each band’s songs before unleashing “The Little Death,” which moved from indifferent grinding into a nihilistic march and back again. As Buford sent electronic drill bits through the air, King yowled and Walker screamed with inhuman force, making the song feel like a treatise for mass suicide. Closing out the set was a steel wool lozenge cover of Devo’s “Gates of Steel.”

Needless to say, I went to bed that night with my ears ringing.

While other groups that release so much material typically lapse into mediocrity, The Body has become what seems like an inexhaustible well of brilliance. More proof is in the poisoned pudding of The Body and Full of Hell’s 2017 joint effort, Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light. In 2018, The Body put out I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, an album that deals in the disruptive modal juxtaposition of No One Deserves Happiness. The band also unleashed Mental Wounds Not Healing in 2018, a collaboration with Uniform that sounds like Aphex Twin trying to stab people with sound, following that with another Uniform collaboration in 2019, Everything that Dies Someday Comes Back, as well as an album with Thou called Everyday, Things Are Getting Worse.

With an emphasis on electronics and studio manipulation on recent albums, the current challenge The Body faces is how to recreate those sounds live—and with the intensity people expect. “It’s always tough to figure out what we can play live,” Buford remarked.* “It’s actually pretty frustrating. We shoot ourselves in the foot on that front. I think it will definitely take some reverse engineering to try to figure it out…Trying to figure out the added instrumentation with just the two of us is tough.” I have yet to witness The Body’s attempts to play the songs from No One Deserves Happiness live. Considering my past experiences seeing The Body, I have endless faith in the duo’s potential to construct tactile masses of negativity, whether produced electronically or with instruments. By the time you read this, my guess is that The Body has figured it out.

30 My recommendation for venues that get pissed at people who use extreme volume: don’t book extremely loud bands.

The Unraveling

Post-metal has become the go-to term for music that follows Isis and Neurosis’s formula of quiet to loud and loud to quiet. If it’s supposed to reflect the transition of modernism into postmodernism, though, the label should apply to artists that explore metal’s spirit by defamiliarizing it, and presenting it in new forms. Or maybe we should approach music like that on its own terms. Either way, there’s no denying that Chelsea Wolfe and Big Brave have made some of the darkest, heaviest, and most interesting music in recent memory. Calling either act metal isn’t accurate. Wolfe and Big Brave have gone somewhere else.

When a musician makes the same record over and over, people are right to be skeptical. How much could they be pushing themselves if that’s the output? Chelsea Wolfe’s progression from the quiet gloom of 2010’s The Grime and the Glow to the stormy, folk-doom atmospheres of 2017’s Hiss Spun suggests the exact opposite—that she sacrifices herself for her art.

Closer to the Central Valley in spirit (if not in miles) than San Francisco, Sacramento has a similarly hollowed out vibe as Fresno, though not quite to the same extent. It’s also a beautiful city surrounded by gauzy hills that blur into gentle mountains. Growing up there, Joan Didion discovered Americans’ great propensity for stubborn illogic, which she details in Where I Was From. Judging from Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s time there doesn’t seem to have been too sunny, either. Not long before Chelsea Wolfe was born, Richard Chase, better known as the Vampire of Sacramento, went on a month-long murder spree during which he drank people’s blood and ate their flesh, tearing himself from the fabric of reality. It’s also where Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, lived a quiet life after terrorizing each major subsection of California—and getting away with it for decades.

Whether quiet or loud, Chelsea Wolfe’s music radiates darkness, which is no surprise considering where she’s from, or her troubled history. “I grew up pretty fast,” she said.* “By the time I was eleven, I was drinking 40s and getting fucked up and getting in trouble and smoking weed.” With a dad who played music, it was a natural outlet for Wolfe to pursue. She sang for a few bands before deciding to venture out on her own for Mistake in Parting in 2006, an effort she doesn’t look back too warmly upon. Between that recording and the album that ushered in the musician people know today, Wolfe found the bradycardic pulse of emptiness and longing.

The Grime and The Glow of 2012 doesn’t need copious amplification or distortion to attain weight. A mix of broken indie and deconstructive rock, the LP plunges into the preverbal depths where emotion is born. Titles like “Cousins of the Antichrist” suggest a metallic sensibility that’s only made itself more apparent in Wolfe’s music. Along with “Fang,” the ninth cut, “Halfsleeper,” highlights Wolfe’s uncanny ability to make utterly haunting music with nothing but her voice and an acoustic guitar. Apokalypsis came out in 2011 and conjures gloom in similar fashion, but with more reverb and moments of frantic tension, which comes across most in “Primal / Carnal” and “Demons.” That dark spirit glides through 2013’s Pain is Beauty as well, Wolfe summoning it via ghostly electronica. “Destruction Makes the World Burn Brighter” is a dance track for the apocalypse, and same goes for “Kings.” Songs like “Reins” and “The Waves Have Come,” however, shine a light on the subterranean canyons Wolfe would map out on 2015’s Abyss.

From the fuzzed-out electronic haze of “Carrion Flowers” onward, Abyss poignantly utilizes elements of doom and industrial, repurposing those genres in the process. The catatonic “Carrion Flowers” trudges like Godflesh before Wolfe’s smoky croon blooms from the mechanized darkness. “Iron Moon” unfolds in swinging folk-doom that feels every bit as big as the night sky with its dense layering of bass and synth. “Dragged Out” then crawls into a wooded maw of consuming drone-doom that’s punctuated by foreboding bell tolls. At its pinnacle, the track becomes a straitjacket of distortion, similar in effect to many Sunn O))) songs.

“Grey Days,” “Crazy Love,” and “Simple Death” slither between fierce quietude, mournful rock, and primordial electronica to showcase Wolfe’s modal dexterity. “Survive” and “Color of Blood” start in ether and attain physical form in driving, bloodthirsty percussion. The former does so acoustically and the latter electronically, which aligns with Wolfe’s practice of placing seemingly binary energies atop each other and then dissolving the distinctions between them. That “The Abyss” feels like the record’s only embrace of light might seem ironic at face value, but it aligns with Wolfe’s aim to dwell in darkness until there’s no choice but to see its beauty.

For Wolfe, the dismal state of our world and emotional tumult in her life has only made her ability to find meaning in negativity all the more crucial. Hiss Spun invites listeners into that process as it unearths transcendent beauty in the murkiest depths. Recorded in 2017 by Kurt Ballou and released the same year on Sargent House, a label that stands alongside The Flenser, Thrill Jockey, and Gilead as a modern day savant of intense music, Hiss Spun also marks Wolfe’s reunion with drummer Jess Gowrie, who played drums in a band for which Wolfe sang before the vocalist journeyed out on her own. It was Wolfe and Gowrie’s jam sessions that breathed Hiss Spun into existence. The LP also features contributions from Sumac’s Aaron Turner, Ballou, and Troy Van Leeuwen from Queens of the Stone Age. The loss and emptiness of Hiss Spun is vacuous and tangible as the record deals directly with Wolfe’s bleak familial history in addition to a relationship that was swallowed by her partner’s addiction.

Hiss Spun does all that through floods of distortion and reverb that are pushed by Gowrie’s intuitive drumming. Throughout, Wolfe’s awe-inspiring vocals soar, dive, and linger with equal grace. There’s some magic in how the elements congeal, setting the ooze that bubbles beneath consciousness to a boil. Gowrie hits her toms with sledgehammer force in “Spun,” which is also pushed by churning bass in the spirit of G. C. Green. Wolfe’s wraith-like vocals dance in the stars above that tectonic upheaval.

Her spectral croon also looms above the cylindrical push of “Vex” when she sings, “The scavenger feeds in hum of low sea / Cast-off exuviae in fragility / I kept my head down and bit my tongue / Until I tasted love,” lyrics that place fingers on the animal pulse of human connection and abandonment. Aaron Turner’s guttural roar answers Wolfe’s call, searching for emotional carrion. Wolfe’s lyrics are often physical images fractured by primeval forces, whereas “The Culling” includes moments of blunt clarity when she intones, “I am depleted by love…/ I’ll never tell the secrets of my family.” A quiet Dylan Carlson-style guitar drone guides the song through the ocean before “The Culling” surfaces for air—but only to dive back into unsolvable familial strife. “Twin Fawn” and “Two Spirit” dwell in nocturnal solitude, creating a context in which the distorted “Scrape” can deliver its promise to the brain.

Journeying through Abyss and Hiss Spun with Chelsea Wolfe is akin to those moments in Stranger Things when we’re invited into the nebulous Upside Down alongside Eleven, using an isolation tank as a portal through the void. Each of those journeys takes something from Eleven. Chelsea Wolfe makes similar sacrifices with each of her albums and performances, allowing us to accompany her on those Nekyias.

•••

Montreal trio Big Brave also plunges into hidden depths of the heart, but only after taking that organ apart and building it anew. The band formed when guitarist-vocalist Robin Wattie and guitarist Mathieu Ball were roommates. They brought in Louis-Alexandre Beauregard on drums and started playing what Ball described as “minimal folk.”† Big Brave soon began reaching for larger sounds, eventually exploring the brute heaviness of Floor through the deconstructive schema of My Bloody Valentine.

On the trio’s first LP, 2014’s Feral Verdure, austere folk couples with vacant drone to paint an abstract whole. “Let Us Rest Our Dead Anon” starts as a reverb-soaked dirge punctuated by Wattie’s shouts and then devolves into a squall of noise, rumbling chugs, and car-crash-in-slow-motion drumming. “A Song for Foxes” rests in quiet indie-drone while the album’s other tracks build from there into massive swells. Big Brave’s debut LP has undeniable emotional weight. The trio’s subsequent albums, Au De La, Ardor, and A Gaze Among Them, are spiritually wrenching.

Au De La (another transformative release from Southern Lord) resists categorization much more than it fits into any genre. The 2015 LP deftly combines the vocal gymnastics of Björk, the stark percussion of The White Stripes, and the sonic breadth of Earth. “On the By and By and Thereon” provides a jarring introduction, beginning with a grating call-and-response between guitars that sounds like two steel mills groaning at each other. Beauregard pushes the track with a Meg White kick-snare groove, and Wattie complicates her discordant guitar work with bounding vocals that combine Kathleen Hanna’s tenacity with Björk’s penchant for abstract syncopation.

“Look at How the World Has Made a Change” follows a mechanical churn with an atmosphere of hypothermic ether, employing delicate electronic orchestration to instill a deep-seated sense of isolation. After Beauregard plays a brief crescendo on his hi-hat, Wattie intones, “Shove my body into the dirt / and make it my own,” a statement of intent about freeing herself from patriarchal shackles. Operating from a framework similar to that of free jazz musicians, Beauregard plays idiosyncratic rolls throughout the remainder of the track, all of which work to emphasize its uneasy core. The song’s isolation-tank smog eventually finds physical form in a primal, post-punk dirge.

With its impossible-to-retype title, the third track thumps with a dirty Am Rep rhythm, which Wattie and Ball drown in sickly curtains of noise. Au De La closes with “(re)Collection Part II.” In it, Wattie and Ball summon cascading drones, above which cellos swirl like angry clouds. Wattie’s haunted chanting emerges from the storm. While the instruments summon catastrophic waves, her vocals dance in defiance and windy reverb, like she’s shouting at the squall from atop a wave-beaten cliff. Five minutes into the thirteen-minute epic, the drums and vocals dissipate, leaving a lonely drone-twang to echo in the canyon of the false harmonic. “(re)Collection Part II” jumps into a serrated Lightning Bolt charge, only to return to a melancholic requiem.

Big Brave deconstructed heavy music with Au De La, though perhaps the trio does so more profoundly with the three-song Ardor, which came out in 2017 and further explores the unruly form of “(re)Collection Part II.” In unskilled hands, the longform track becomes an exercise in self-indulgence. Ball explained that Big Brave’s writing process is about exploring how to strip layers away.

It’s more of a deconstruction rather than a construction of songs. Whenever the music begins to sound a bit too full, then we have to take a second and step back to see if we can make it sound less and take a different path. You can push things by doing more, but by now we have realized that holding back might work to our advantage. Whenever we’re working on something and it begins to sound like a “band” per se, too concrete even, we start to cringe and try to fix it—usually by doing less and peering back.

It’s really fun to play with that. Music is a sonic experience, but then when you do these things with space and silence, you are using a whole different set of tools, instead of the same tools over and over again.†

“Sound” ventures forth as a rebellious mass of amplification. Using Beauregard’s stark rhythm as a touchstone, Wattie and Ball unleash and harness that mass, letting it pierce the gut but then pulling back to let it echo. Big Brave’s use of repetition unlatches the ego and superego to let the id run free. Instead of sending us into that elemental dark alone, Wattie’s lilting voice is a lighthouse that shows the path back to life. But she occasionally loses sight of the sun herself.

The video for “Sound” mirrors the place Wattie’s voice inhabits in Big Brave’s music. An unmoving camera focuses on her as she stands in front of a blank white wall. She wears a black shirt, hair sitting on top of her left shoulder. Then you realize that you’re looking at multiple superimposed versions of Wattie in slightly different positions. The versions sit atop and beneath each other while blurring, separating, and converging, mimicking the fractured-yet-interconnected nature of the self.

For 2019’s A Gaze Among Them, Big Brave further deconstructed its already deconstructive writing process. Wattie said, “We wanted to steer clear from what we believed worked in the last albums or what is, for us, easy to write…We felt we needed to approach this latest record almost as if it was our first attempt at exploring those concepts.”‡ Having written two masterful records, it would’ve been easy for Big Brave to settle into a more comfortable creative process. But the band is not one to stagnate or write music of passing quality. As for A Gaze Among Them, the result of that ethos is a distilled and varied post-punk drone. Featuring Loel Campbell on drums, the album also provides more sonic footholds (or at least ones that are easier to locate) than Big Brave’s previous efforts.

“Muted Shifting of Space” moves with a willful stomp as Wattie and Ball send shards of amplified sound into the skin. As with Big Brave’s other material, Wattie’s fiercely earnest singing is the raw heart of this track, and A Gaze Among Them as a whole. Many vocalists record several takes and layer them atop each other, a bit of widely accepted and used studio magic. Wattie instead chose to use only one layer of vocals on A Gaze Among Them, which enhances the stark sincerity of her singing. She said, “I liked the idea of having a solitary voice…there is something to be said about using just one voice throughout the entire record with no layering, except for the last part of the last song.”‡

Led by Campbell’s driving kick-tom percussion, “Holding Pattern” draws deep from the ocean before cascading in a massive and majestic wave, sounding like a collaboration between Pelican and My Bloody Valentine. The third song, “Body Individual,” deals in corrugated abstraction, unspooling in caterwauling noise and idiosyncratic drumming. One of Big Brave’s shortest tracks, “This Deafening Verity” is a tunnel of cushioned feedback, through which Wattie’s voice echoes. A Gaze Among Them’s closer, “Sibling,” is wild and mechanical, controlled and unruly as it emanates from a leaden core only to be repeatedly drawn back down, like a kite. About writing that track, Wattie said, “In our experimentation, happy accidents are always quite welcome. For example, with the track “Sibling,” the whole guitar line was born out of my having short stubby fingers sticking to the strings.”‡ Big Brave transformed that accident into a virtuosic piece, giving A Gaze Among Them an aptly brilliant end.

My band recently had the privilege of opening for Big Brave. Wattie ran her guitar through a bass amp and a guitar amp, dousing the audience in sound. The bass frequencies and Tasreen Hudson’s definitive percussion kept Big Brave tethered to the ground while Ball and Wattie created aural biospheres. The trio played songs from A Gaze Among Them, but they were all reformed into something new—one-of-a-kind gifts that Big Brave presents to its audiences. Watching the group live, it became clear to me: the trio’s music is a meditation on sound itself. In the dense sonic rooms that Big Brave constructed, Wattie’s vocals were paint on the walls that peeled off in sheets and then self-adhered back to the sheetrock. The group invited us in for a collective exhalation. By the end, we felt like something had been lifted from our shoulders.

•••

Big Brave and Chelsea Wolfe show every indication of becoming musical institutions. There’s no question that humans face a bleak future. Wolfe and Big Brave show us how to live with, examine, and mold darkness instead of fooling ourselves into believing that humans’ redemption will magically appear.

Doomed Future

I know. I didn’t include that one heavy band you love so much. I tried my gosh darndest to trace doom, sludge, and post-metal as distinct musical traditions, focusing on groups that have impacted those styles most. I’ve obviously left out some great bands. Someone could spend a lifetime cataloging every heavy band that’s done something cool. I’ll leave that to Aleksey Evdokimov. In 2017, he released a literal doom encyclopedia, The Doom Metal Lexicanum. Hopefully he’ll continue that work with sludge and post-metal. Or maybe you could do it.

In any case, here are some contemporary bands who are showing the world what heavy music can do.

Spotlights

A trio from Brooklyn, Spotlights is leading the crusade to show people how fucking heavy pop music can be; or maybe the band’s mission is to show us how catchy heavy music can be. Either way, Spotlights’ debut, Tidals, slows riffs and grooves in the vein of Helmet to a controlled slog, off-setting that with synthetic loops that lull the brain into a dream. Love & Decay takes it all two steps further, with bassist Sarah Quintero and drummer Chris Enriquez stomping through odd timings and syncopated rhythms like rhinos who’ve been schooled in modern dance. Mario Quintero’s brusque shouts and riffs flirt with his trance-inducing programming, holding hands as they walk into turbulent seas.

Vile Creature

In response to social and environmental toxicity, Vic and K. W. of Vile Creature have taken to playing torturously churning doom in the spirit of Burning Witch and Corrupted. The duo might play unfriendly music, but Vile Creature, who identifies as an Angry Queer Gloom Cult, is hell-bent on making the world of heavy music a more mindful and inclusive place. Pounding the drums with primeval fury, Vic’s shrieks have a piercing quality, as if issued by a large bird of prey. Guitarist-vocalist K. W. molds earthen hovels of distortion, making the Vile Creature live show a physical experience the body won’t forget.

He Whose Ox is Gored

My friend described Seattle’s He Whose Ox is Gored as being simultaneously mathy and lizard-brained—and it was spot-on. The Camel, The Lion, The Child dances in djent rhythms, but via riffs that stomp like sludge-intoxicated oxen. The quartet is fronted by the mighty Lisa Mungo, who’s also the vocalist of Fucked and Bound, a hardcore band that lovingly tears people’s heads off.

Northless

Milwaukee’s Northless is one of the most criminally overlooked bands in heavy music. Clandestine Abuse, World Keeps Sinking, and Last Bastion of Cowardice: the band has written three perfect LPs of oddly timed sludge that glides in broken-winged guitar harmonies, decimating enemies with D-beat charges. Guitarist-vocalist Eric Stenglein barks into the mic with pit bull force as he guides the band through jagged changes. That said, Northless never sacrifices heaviness for technicality. John Gleisner drums with the instinct of a shark, injecting nimble fills into multifaceted grooves to give the band’s music a nuanced depth. Sometimes I wonder if rock-based music played by actual musicians can go any further. Northless shatters that idea.

Spirit Adrift

Spirit Adrift is from Phoenix, one of the most unsustainable cities in the US, where it’s impossible to ignore our society’s doomed future. With lyrics about both personal and environmental destruction, Curse of Conception features some of the sweetest dual harmony riffs this side of Master of Puppets. Divided by Darkness of 2019 deals more in galloping charges, sounding like a (highly) refined Cirith Ungol. This is traditional doom crafted with a master’s touch.

Hexxus

Seeing Hexxus was one of my highlights of 2016. Tunguska is an awesome record, but it doesn’t come close to conveying how crushing Hexxus is live. My hope and prediction is that the album that unequivocally shows the world the true heaviness of Hexxus is being written and/or made as we speak. Odd timings and angular changes crop up in the band’s music, but Hexxus uses those tools to intensify its attack, not to show off. The trio attacks in the method of the grizzly—fierce, controlled, and devastating.

BlackLab

Self-styled as a “Dark Witch Doom Duo,” Japan’s BlackLab has the unfortunate fate of sharing a name with California’s Black Lab, a forgettable alt rock band. (The good) BlackLab wanders through dense psychedelic forests and summons violent doom in the vein of Church of Misery. Why buy paint-stripper when you can blast BlackLab? Yuko Morino’s screams peel paint from the walls.

Thou

I defy you to find a harder-working band than Thou. Operating with a punk mentality, the Baton Rouge troupe has been releasing gut-wrenching sludge-doom since 2005. On the road, the band often plays two shows at each stop, typically at a DIY house during the day and then a regular bar/venue at night. I saw Thou play in 2007 in a creepy hallway in a punk warehouse in New Orleans. The city was still reeling from Katrina while the rest of the country had stopped caring, or at least paying attention. Thou harnessed that strife and made it press against the walls.

Dark Castle

Floridian duo Dark Castle deals in dissonant quiet, intricate rhythms, and corrosive sludge. Dark Castle reminds us that, when crust punks turn to the slow and heavy, the result is often staggering. Stevie Floyd takes cues from Damad’s Victoria Scalisi with her austere howls, attacking listeners with rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth riffs at the same time.

Brainoil

Formed in Oakland—possibly the United States’s closest city to Birmingham in its impact on heavy music—in 1998, Brainoil is what happens when bobcats learn geometry. The group put out its self-titled debut in 2003, cutting its crusty sludge with curveball changes and weirdo timings. Brainoil attacks from unsuspecting angles, mashing pressure points you didn’t know existed. After a lengthy hiatus, the band started putting out music again in 2011, having lost no viciousness in the interim. Singularity to Extinction of 2018 is true to form, landing deserved space on multiple year-best lists.

Year of the Cobra

Seattle doesn’t fuck around when it comes to heavy music. Look no further than Year of the Cobra for proof. Fronted by bassist-vocalist Amy Tung Barrysmith, the duo builds walls of doom and plows through them with driving rock. Tung Barrysmith’s voice pierces the spine while she and drummer Jon Barrysmith pop musical wheelies with their stripped-down heaviness.

Crawl

A one-man doom-noise act that uses medieval weaponry like maces, clubs, and spears to intimidate audiences, Crawl is on par with Sunn O))) in its ability to invoke menace. It’s worth bearing in mind that the guy builds those weapons himself, hauls them around, and sets them up—in addition to an extensive arsenal of musical gear—alone. That makes a certain sense, because that’s exactly how Crawl’s music will make you feel: hopelessly alone.

Un

Apparently extended periods of rain and minimal sunlight is ideal for the tainted soil from which doom bands grow. Seattle’s Un crafts epic funeral doom with the mournful beauty of Bell Witch, utilizing death metal grooves in the spirit of Katatonia to make its songs more grueling. Guitarist-vocalist Monte McCleery’s growls find bodily entry through the ears and then eat away at the stomach.

Gaytheist

With the best earned band name of all time (singer-guitarist Jason Rivera is indeed a gay atheist), Gaytheist has staked out the snotty pop punk side of the sludge sandbox. Or maybe the group is catchy punk with an Am Rep spirit but only sludgy moments and it makes me feel happy—so I put Gaytheist in here because it’s my goddamn birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to. Either way, Gaytheist combines the verve of Karp with the poppy heaviness of Torche and the balls-to-the-wall musicianship of Mutoid Man. Listen to everything the Portland trio has put out or we can’t be friends anymore.

Matriarch

I have yet to test this claim in any conclusive way, but I’m pretty sure Denver’s Matriarch is the slowest band I’ve ever heard. The group’s music moves slower than glaciers float across water, with tempos close to the velocity at which the world’s ice caps are melting. Rumor has it that Matriarch delves into twenty BPM territory. When I told Matriarch’s guitarist how gnarly it was to hear a band play so slow and with such control, he said, “If you’re going to play that slow, it has to be tight.” Matriarch lives up to that adage, controlling its burdensome tempos with an iron fist. After opening cosmic voids with its cataclysmic riffage, Matriarch fills those spaces with quiet, Isis-on-heroin atmospheres.

Monarch!

Appearing alongside beautiful vocals that don’t seem limited by human range, Emilie Bresson’s screams are vengeful spirits that inhabit Monarch’s visceral doom tracks. Formed in France in 2002, the group is finally starting to capture the attention it deserves. On Never Forever, Bresson’s clean singing is a glimmer of sun from beneath hostile seas of distortion.

Subrosa

Salt Lake City is a weird place. At first glance, it’s hard to see beyond the city’s looming Mormon temples. Spend some time there, however, and SLC’s vibrant music scene will rear its head. Using string instruments to craft world-consuming post-metal, Subrosa embodies Salt Lake’s contradictions, revealing the interconnected tissue underlying elements that seem like opposites. When the Mormon church issued a directive that bars children of queer couples from getting baptized and becoming part of the religion until they turn eighteen—and only then if they disown their parents—Subrosa’s Rebecca Vernon felt compelled to write the sprawling “Troubled Cells,” which closes out For This We Fought the Battle of Ages. Vernon knows firsthand that faith can be beautiful. She also knows that the toxic elements of Mormonism must be purged. Subrosa’s symphonic doom is the perfect vehicle for that message.

Endnotes

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

* Turman, Katherine and Jon Wiederhorn. Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. New York: IT Books, 2013.

† Black Sabbath. Paranoid Super Deluxe, Warner Bros., 2016. Liner Notes.

Be Forewarned

* Turman, Katherine and Jon Wiederhorn. Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. New York: IT Books, 2013.

† Last Days Here. Directed by Don Argott and Demian Fenton. USA: Sundance Selects, 2012. DVD.

Figure in Black

* Papadopoulos, Harry and Dimitris Karametos. Interview with Scott “Wino” Weinrich. Metal Temple, 2010. http://www.metal-temple.com/site/catalogues/entry/musicians/scott_wino.htm

† Kot, Greg. “Wino Weinrich has Never Fit In, But His Rock Music is the Stuff of Legends.” Chicago Tribune, 2001. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-07-15-0107150208-story.html

‡ The Obsessed—Documentary ’94. YouTube Video, 26:30, posted by MMAlign, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwl_5vFQi0

§ Sojo, Guy. Interview with Scott “Wino” Weinrich. Orange Factory, 2004. http://www.orangefactory.be/intervWino07-07-04.html

¶ “Saint Vitus Interview with Dave Chandler.” Hammer Smashed Sound, 2010. http://www.hammersmashedsound.com/2010/01/saint-vitus-interview-with-dave.html

** Bennet, J. “War Starter: The Making of Saint Vitus’ Born Too Late.” Decibel, March 2010, pgs. 57–62.

†† Babcock, Jay. “Heavy Riffing: An Interview with Wino.” Arthur, 2004. https://arthurmag.com/2007/01/31/a-vintage-arthur-interview-with-wino-from-arthur-no-9/

Bringers of Light and Darkness

* Candlemass Interview, 1990. YouTube Video, 3:22, posted by Simon Morris, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwSaqJcS9NU

† Dome, Malcom. “Candlemass: The Story Behind Epicus Doomicus Metallicus.” Metal Hammer, 2007. https://www.loudersound.com/features/candlemass-the-story-behind-the-epicus-doomicus-metallicus-album

‡ Koerber, Scott. “For Your Soul, For Your Doom: The Making of Candlemass’ Nightfall.” Decibel, January 2009, pgs. 37–42.

Doom Till Death

* Koerber, Scott. “An Eternal Classic: The Making of Paradise Lost’s Gothic.” Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, ed. Albert Mudrian. Cambridge, Da Capo, 2009. Interview from June 2005 issue of Decibel.

† Koczan, JJ. “Winter Interview with Stephen Flam: Carving Destiny in Chaos.” The Obelisk, 2012. http://theobelisk.net/obelisk/2012/06/01/winterview/

‡ Sam. “Katatonia (Jonas Renkse) Interview.” Metal Blast, 2012. https://www.metalblast.net/interviews/katatonia-jonas-renkse-interview/

§ Miasnakov, Alon. “Niko Skorpio – Funeral’s Patriarch.” Metalist, 2008. http://www.metalist.co.il/InterviewPrivate.asp?id=303&lang=eng

¶ “Extreme Doom Part III: Niko Skorpio of Thergothon.” We Wither, 2011. http://www.wewither.com/2011/07/extreme-doom-part-iii-niko-skorpio-of.html

Burnt Altar

* Lehtinen, Arto. Interview with Brian Lawrence and Mike Smail. Metal-Rules, 2013. https://www.metal-rules.com/2013/05/14/brian-lawrence-and-mike-smail-dream-death-and-penance/

† Bennet, J. “Doom On: The Making of Cathedral’s Forest of Equilibrium.” Decibel, February 2006, pgs. 42–50.

‡ Franklin, Dan. “Rise Above Records Turns 25: From Electric Wizard to Iron Man.” The Quietus, 2013. http://thequietus.com/articles/14115-rise-above-records-lee-dorrian-interview-cathedral

§ Chainey, Ian. “Interview: Lee Dorrian – Part 1.” Invisible Oranges, 2014. http://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-lee-dorrian-part-1/

To the Riff-Filled Land

* Such Hawks Such Hounds. Directed by Jessica Hundley and John Srebalus. Long Song Pictures, 2008. DVD.

† Bennett, J. “High Times: The Making of Sleep’s Jerusalem.” Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, ed. Albert Mudrian. Cambridge, Da Capo, 2009. Interview from March 2006 issue of Decibel.

Land of Golden Dreams

* Breskin, David. “Kids in the Dark.” Rolling Stone, November 1984, pgs. 30–35, 83–86.

† Cope, Chris. “Goatsnake Vol. 1: An Oral History.” Metal Hammer, 2015. https://www.loudersound.com/features/goatsnake-vol-1-an-oral-history

Post-Amplification Blues

* NOLA: Life, Death, & Heavy Blues from the Bayou. Directed by Fred Pessaro and Jimmy Hubbard. YouTube Video, posted by Noisey, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LWsImITWd4&list=PLCyz0P1MsmGNc6yj-_1GB4IYij-VWCEhy

† Bennett, J. “Hazardous Prescription: The Making of Eyehategod’s Take as Needed for Pain.” Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, ed. Albert Mudrian. Cambridge, Da Capo, 2009. Interview from June 2006 issue of Decibel.

‡ “Interview: Eyehategod—“I ended up cutting my hand open and dripping blood all over the studio.” Thrash Hits, 2010. http://www.thrashhits.com/2010/06/interview-eyehategod-i-ended-up-cutting-my-hand-open-and-dripping-blood-all-over-the-studio/

§ Leli, Brian. “God Probably Isn’t Too Fond of Them Either.” Chicago Reader, 2010. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/eyehategod-mike-ix-williams-empty-bottle-concert/Content?oid=1981448

¶ Bennett, J. Interview with Mike Williams. Decibel, February 2006. Retrieved on Blabbermouth.net: http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/eyehategod-frontman-phillip-anselmo-helped-me-get-out-of-jail/

** Powell, Austin. “For the Sick: An Interview With Michael D. Williams.” Austin Chronicle, 2007. https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/music/2007-06-20/493751/

†† Pratt, Greg. “Eyehategod’s Mike Williams on liver transplant, recovery, and addiction: “I will never regret anything.” Decibel, 2017. https://www.decibelmagazine.com/2017/05/26/eyehategod-s-mike-williams-on-liver-transplant-recovery-and-addiction-i-will-never-regret-anything/

Of Concrete & Glass

* Williams, Rhys. “A Conversation With Electric Wizard’s Liz Buckingham.” Invisible Oranges, 2017. http://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-liz-buckingham/

† Kelly, Kim. “Electric Wizard’s Liz Buckingham: On Heavy Music and Taking the Hard Road.” NPR, 2011. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2011/10/24/141563482/electric-wizards-liz-buckingham-on-heavy-music-and-taking-the-hard-road

‡ Gilhooly-Gage, Tamara. “Bringer of Doom.” Wear Your Voice Mag, 2014. https://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/culture/badass-of-the-week-oakland

§ Kelly, Kim. “California Nightmare.” Pitchfork, 2013. https://pitchfork.com/features/show-no-mercy/9173-california-nightmare/

¶ Bellino, Vince. “Track Premiere & Interview: Primitive Man—‘Commerce.’” Decibel, 2017. https://www.decibelmagazine.com/2017/09/07/track-premiere-interview-primitive-man-commerce/

Boy Crazy

* Reighley, Kurt B. “A Big, Gay Roundtable.” The Stranger, 2008. https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/a-big-gay-roundtable/Content?oid=729140

Thee White Wall

* Sargeant, Nick. “CVLT Nation Interviews Jucifer.” CVLT Nation, 2016. https://www.cvltnation.com/cvlt-nation-interviews-jucifer/

† “On the Road with Gazelle Amber Valentine of Jucifer.” WVRockscene, 2011. http://wvrockscene.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-road-with-gazelle-amber-valentine-of.html

Something in the Water

* Cook, Toby. “Dixie Dave of Weedeater on Guns & Shooting Off His Own Toe.” The Quietus, 2011. http://thequietus.com/articles/06500-dixie-dave-of-weedeater-on-guns-shooting-off-his-own-toe

† Weedeater. “Despite our attempts to keep this all cordial and in the family many harsh words…” Facebook. May 21, 2013. https://www.facebook.com/weedmetal/posts/despite-our-attempts-to-keep-this-all-cordial-and-in-the-family-many-harsh-words/551145568261835/

‡ Statts, J. H. “Remembering DAMAD’s Victoria Scalisi’s Big Heart and Flying Fists.” Noisey, 2017. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/zmmbz9/remembering-damads-victoria-scalisis-big-heart-and-flying-fists

§ Pasini, Elia. Interview with Laura Pleasants. La Caduta, 2013. http://lacaduta.tumblr.com/post/75806719183/interview-kylesa

¶ O’Hagar, Sammy. Interview with Laura Pleasants. Metalsucks, 2009. https://www.metalsucks.net/2009/07/09/exclusive-interview-with-kylesas-laura-pleasants-and-eric-hernandez

Machinery of the Throat

* Horsley, Jonathan. “Justin Broadrick interview: Godflesh, growing up and anarcho-punk.” Decibel, 2011. https://www.decibelmagazine.com/2011/10/07/justin-broadrick-interview-godflesh-growing-up-and-anarcho-punk/

Through Blood

* Neurosis’ Origins, Gnarly Early Years. Directed by Jimmy Hubbard. August 2018, Revolver. https://www.revolvermag.com/premium-video/music/neurosis-origins-gnarly-early-years-watch-part-1-intense-scott-kelly-doc

† Mehling, Shane. “The Great Purge.” Decibel, October 2014, pgs. 41–47.

The Limits of Control

* Dick, Chris. “Sea Change: The Making of Isis’ Oceanic.” Decibel, September 2012, pgs. 61–70.

The Sun & The Earth

* Pouncey, Edwin. Interview with Dylan Carlson. The Wire, November 2005. Accessed on Ideologic: http://www.ideologic.org/news/view/unedited-earthvswire-transcript_via_savx

† Masters, Marc. Interview with Earth. Pitchfork, 2007. https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6686-earth/

Ache Like We Ache

* Schafer, Joseph. Interview with Lee Buford. Invisible Oranges, 2011. http://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-lee-buford-the-body/

The Unraveling

* Appleford, Steve. “Chelsea Wolfe: In Search of Brutal Honesty.” Revolver, 2017. https://www.revolvermag.com/music/chelsea-wolfe-search-brutal-honesty

† Furman, Brian. Interview with Big Brave. Scene Point Blank, 2017. https://www.scenepointblank.com/features/interviews/big-brave

‡ Jones, Jamie. Interview with Robin Wattie of Big Brave. Echoes and Dust, 2019. https://www.echoesanddust.com/2019/04/robin-from-big-brave/

Additional Sources

“Artist Spotlight: Corrupted.” Letters from Las Cruces. 2015. https://lettersfromlascruces.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/artist-spotlight-corrupted/

Bennett, J. “Jimmy Bower on ‘White Power,’ Superjoint and the N-Word.” CLRVYNT, 2016. http://clrvynt.com/jimmy-bower-interview/

Brooks, Steve. Interview with author. 2018

Capper, Andy. “Godhateseye.” VICE, 2005. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5g59jb/god-v12n10

Collins, Dave. Interview with author. 2018.

Cook, Brian. “Sturdy Foundation.” The Stranger, 2011. https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/sturdy-foundation/Content?oid=7768821

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Remy for her undying love, support, and brilliance. You impacted the scope and perspective of this book in the best possible ways.

Thanks to my family for always encouraging my love of heavy music.

Huge thanks to Cat Jones for writing such a killer foreword, and same to Sally Townsend, Bronson Karaff, and Matt Nielson for the badass photos. You all rule. Seriously.

Carl Schultz and Lucy Volpe: you’re my heroes.

Thanks to every friend I’ve made based on our love for unfriendly music: Steve Heward, Jared Spann, Bryan Spann, Paul Oblock, Glen Hooper, Chris Schmidt, Mark Piloud, Pat Dixon, Grant Netzorg, Melissa Netzorg, Joe Myer, Mike Flatt, Jason Andrade, Jason Heller, Jason Millenson, Brian Willson, Luke Fairchild, Jared Mitchell, Andrew ‘Thor’ Thompson, Marcus Allen, Jordy Musselman-Dakin, Laura Musselman-Dakin, Jill Heckroth, Greg Baisch, Ryan Tallman, Justin Stubbert, Brian Duncan, Boone Julius, Mike Britson, Erin Severson, Christian Moser, Brent Ericson, Mike Cushing, Bronson Karaff, Adam Tucker, Jeff Nicholas, Dan Lee, Jonas Kromer Yela, Jonas Malm, Dean Bruhn, Morgan Carpenter, Emma Grey, Natalie Grace, Michael Paradise, Krista Soria, Pete Noteboom, Chris Woznicki, Jordan Koch-Engstrom, Eric Burns, Josh Ans, Jim Schloemer, Bojan Louis, DJ Green, Dave Wahlman, Jeff Owens, Marcus Bryant, Preston Bryant, Joseph Schafer, Mike Underdown, Banner Gwinn, Dustin Daniels, Bill Kielty, Denise Pla, Ricky Isla-Eisenacher, and Ryan Avery. Sorry to anyone I forgot. I love you all.

Special thanks to Decibel, Noisey, Invisible Oranges, Pitchfork, CVLT Nation, and every other metal publication out there—and every one of their writers and editors—for tirelessly documenting heavy music. Thanks to Kim Kelly and Noisey, as well as the amazing editors at The A.V. Club, for publishing parts of this manuscript.

For endless motivation, support, and guidance, thanks to John Hales. Thanks also to Connie Hales, Rusty Birdwell, Jeffrey Gleaves, Carole Firstman, Shane Velez, Steven Church, Bo Wang, Glady Ruiz, and Phyllis Brotherton.

Special thanks to Chiyo Nukaga, Steve Brooks, Henry Wilson, Dan Gorostiaga, Buzz Osborne, Tristan Shone, Dave Collins, Creston Spiers, and Lori S. for being especially rad.

And huge thanks to Tyson Cornell, Julia Callahan, and Hailie Johnson at Rare Bird for believing in this project and being uncompromisingly badass.