Caught In A Mosh: May 2012

Staring at the cover of Iron Maiden‘s En Vivo! (UME) DVD — Bruce Dickinson exulting in front of what looks like Chile’s entire population — you get a vivid sense of metal’s enduring popularity, something dissected heavily in the book Metal Rules The Globe I reviewed in March.

But for how much longer will there be single bands who can draw an audience this size?

What brings this to my attention is the arrival, this month, of Rhino’s 20th-anniversary edition of Pantera‘s Vulgar Display Of Power — the last great heavy album on which metal fans can reach consensus. After Vulgar — and I don’t know how anyone can blame grunge rock for this — it’s as if metal dropped a mirror that broke into a thousand pieces, all part of the same pane but very much separate and fractured. Korn’s self-titled debut helped launch nu-metal, which gained about as much acceptance among the brotherhood as Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Black metal began washing ashore and springing up in isolated pockets, but its chances for widespread acceptance were even more remote than death metal’s, and equally crippled by internal sabotage. Danzig and White Zombie’s retro horror groove metal dove headlong into industrial, connecting it with the Jim Rose Circus and Marilyn Manson, meanwhile Megadeth stumbled, Anthrax crumbled, and Testament’s Chuck Billy turned into Cookie Monster.

Vulgar represented a band who were henceforth immune to identity theft. Like with all great artists, if you stepped on their coattails, you were immediately denounced as a fraud; there was just no way to measure up to the real thing. But it was so magnetic. When Kiss tried to toughen their post-grunge image, they hired the same director who did “Mouth For War” for their “Unholy” clip. Frontmen started shaving their heads like Phil Anselmo. Diamond (not yet Dimebag) Darrell‘s love for Dean Guitars revived the company despite the fact that the only person who could get away with playing one of those awful-looking (Chicago-born!) things was Darrell.

The lack of a successor, however, is distressing. We’ve pumped Mastodon‘s tires thousands of times, yet even with Opeth in direct support they had trouble selling out the Riviera last month — 2,500 people. Look, I’m not saying that a ton of ticket and album sales validates any given music (anytime anyone suggests to you otherwise, ask them if they own “The Macarena” or “Who Let The Dogs Out?”), but the big shows mix segregated parts of the community, let you see the shirts of what a lot of people are into, and it’s just a different sort of entertainment. Yeah, there’s cachet acquired from seeing Baroness at Empty Bottle with 90 other people. But belting out “The Trooper” with 50,000 fevered Chileans? Yes, please.

• Not that En Vivo! doesn’t have limitations. The energy, execution, setlist: beyond reproach. But it’s also Maiden’s third live set since 2005, a span that has as many best-of packages. Iron Maiden’s legacy division has kicked into hyperdrive, and it imposes a sense of automation and rigidity onto the collection. The band play their hits so flawlessly, you imagine that their concerts are interchangeable. Granted, it’s extremely difficult to lend a production this size much room for improvisation, and playing to such an audience pretty much demands you pitch down the middle. But it wouldn’t kill a group so distinguished and unique to show a little personality, especially with so little left to prove.

• Sleep often get named as one of the best metal bands of the last decade, but I don’t think Matt Pike (now of High On Fire) has the money to buy a party house with a balcony overlooking a swimming pool where the Dallas Stars can dent the Stanley Cup. (Such is life.) Southern Lord, however, have seen fit to reissue the band’s hour-long, doom-metal album/song, Dopesmoker, this month. Included will be an unreleased live version of “Holy Mountain,” and a new batch of artwork.

• On the 15th, Nachtmystium release a limited-edition 45, featuring a Chris Connelly‘d cover of Joy Division’s “The Eternal.” Mixing on the forthcoming Silencing Machine finished at Engine Studios last month with Sanford Parker producing, though neither song on the single appears on the full-length.

• Local duo Number None bridge the gap between screeching, blackened noise and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music on the cassette-only Strategies Against Architecture. As Land Of Decay labelmates with Locrian, there’s some brinkmanship happening here that you might not want to be part of.

Trevor Fisher is taking some time off.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Caught In A Mosh, Columns, Monthly