May 2024: You can't kill the Metal...
#NotMyStadiumMetal controversy, plus reviews of Maybeshewill, Bossk, Sithu Aye and Ba'al
“This ain’t metal, it’s a g*ddamn pop song”
A brief ripple through social media last month after this Stereogum article by Eli Enis made the rounds. It's a highly entertaining ‘State of the (Metal) Nation’ piece which captures well what the former and current echelons at the top of metal look like, and doesn't pull its punches eviscerating almost all of these bands for their myriad flaws, both small (Rage Against The Machine hate each other) and large (Avenged Sevenfold becoming NFT shills).
The central thesis of the article boils down to a classic refrain - that metal is dying at the top level, its bastardisation by its biggest proponents turning the genre’s classic components into punchlines, to be deployed as cosplay by undercover commercial pop acts. Despite its initial protestations that this doesn't apply to the broader metal scene, it does have Big ‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’ Energy. This is fine - it's a remarkably entertaining energy, and to its credit, the point is well argued. Though I think that the outlook is much less bleak.
For a deterioration to occur, there has to have been a heyday - and for metal, the cited era is from the 80s to the 2000s, with the NWOBHM behemoths of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, followed by the Big Four of thrash (but in particular Metallica), and then the emergence of the alt-metal and nu-metal giants such as Slipknot, Linkin Park and, uh, Korn I guess. All of these get ragged on (many for being geriatric by this point) - but these criticisms aren’t exactly new in most cases. Metallica's late 90s / early 2000s output (Load, Reload, and the execrable St. Anger) was bad at the time and hasn't improved with age, their continued success for the past two decades mostly down to popular culture reheating of the classic thrash era and Black album singles. Korn always sucked, at least in the UK. Linkin Park built a fan base on two amazing nu-metal albums and spent their popular years as a mainstream rock band.
The truth is that the arena-filling and festival-headlining acts in metal were often built on revisionist glorification (or, less cynically, latent value realisation) of their foundational works. This wasn't helped by the cautious approach of festivals in picking metal headliners. In the UK, Metallica only reached Glastonbury headliner status in 2014, to a chorus of raised eyebrows. More damning are the metal festivals, which were a closed shop to all but the Big 4, Maiden and Priest for many years. Enis does call out this “upper-middle-class” tier of the likes of Killswitch Engage and Mastodon not ascending to the headliner throne, perhaps let down by fears of the likes of Sonisphere, which collapsed financially when it couldn't book those big six acts every year.
The new generation is arguably a reaction to this - an attempt to push into those heretofore denied heights. Sleep Token is singled out by Enis with the heaviest criticism, which naturally drove lots of engagement for the article. And I get it - it's both easy and fun to dunk on Sleep Token, both for the aspects within their control (selling £50 commemorative coins as an exclusive gig merch item) and outside (the creepy parasocial fan base going to insane lengths to doxx their members). Hell, I've done it myself in this very newsletter! Some of the argument here is that metal is used as an accessory, a ‘fun dynamic’ amidst an otherwise “pop-forward” sound. I'm not convinced this is the case - but regardless, the reason Metallica, Iron Maiden and Slipknot enjoy the popular success they do versus, say, King Diamond, Anvil, and Machine Head is that they knew how to be “pop-forward” for their time. Metallica songs are full of hooks! You can sing those solos! Most Anthrax songs are… not?
Here you veer into the question of leveraging pop for metal versus metal for pop. Such an argument hits differently if you consider the background of musicians today versus 10-20+ years ago. I've previously touched on the idea of the ‘genre melting pot’ effect of streaming services, and their liberation of an entire music writing generation from the restraints of ‘the records you could afford/borrow’ that existed when physical media dominated and radio followed strict genre lanes. To expect the evolution of music in this day and age not to leverage that, and to play with and break the scriptures of “killer riffs, abrasive vocals, and provocative imagery” cited as the key tenets of metal, is to reject progress.
This argument is hardly unique to metal. Adam Neely's recent video essay on Laufey and her impact on / lack of embrace within jazz highlights the same shift. Except jazz is a much older genre, and its evolutions (jazz fusion, nu-jazz, broken beat) have been similarly derided and later accepted into the canon. Those changes in sound may not follow the same rulebook of their forebears, but metal is far too young a genre to want to set things in aspic.
The other factor here is the capitalist context of musical success in this decade. A recent Guardian article highlighted the barriers to profitability for bands as the costs for touring rise and the income streams from music releases dwindle. The level you need to reach just to hit a point of profitability that lets a band survive, much less a level of comfort that isn’t one bad album cycle from ending the entire enterprise, is vastly higher than it was 10-20 years ago. Combine that with the frosty reception of new entrants in metal to the upper echelons of touring bills and festivals, and it’s no surprise that acts turn to experimenting with sound forms that will sell. Not to say there aren’t genuine creative drivers here, but we can't pretend that creative endeavour exists in a vacuum separate from capitalist reality.
But does this matter? The core argument is that the decline of metal at the top will relegate the scene to the underground, more akin to punk or blues, and limit discovery for a new generation. I don’t quite buy this? My metal discovery came through school friends recommending the up-and-coming likes of Bullet For My Valentine and Funeral for a Friend in the UK, or through early streaming services like Pandora redirecting my classic prog interests to a world of US prog-metal and the likes of Dream Theater, Kamelot and Symphony X. Today there are so many new routes to discovering these genres (and bizarre routes to popularity - see Dan Ozzi’s excellent article on the TikTok-driven revival of screamo) that the death of a scene whose underground is so robust seems unlikely to me. Metal’s stadium class may not look as it once did, but I don’t believe it to be worse, or for its changes to be intrinsically bad.
From the Pit: Maybeshewill & Bossk
The Garage, London, 19 May 2024
A double headliner show! What a delight. Who knows if this is more or less risky as a financial touring proposition - you can charge more and split costs, but also the revenues, and you’re relying on that Venn diagram of interest to sit just right to pull the crowds. It helps if the bands are Bossk and Maybeshewill; diverse entrants in post-metal and post-rock respectively, but united by undeniable talent.
Bossk have grown in stature and impact steadily over the last decade, drawing larger crowds and refining their sound year-on-year. Touring alongside a new album, .4, of collaborations and other new material, we open proceedings with The Reverie x Maybeshewill and its solo guest piano spot, before launching into the heavy hitters - the visceral Menhir and later HTV-3 and those thunderous screams, and a ten-minute run of Kobe and Heliopause that showcase the best the band has to offer bridging glistening vibes and pummeling riffage.
There’s a timelessness to the blues-inflected approach of the band - so much so that eight years on, their debut album Audio Noir feels more and more like a masterpiece. Amidst the frenetic pace of modern life and the ADHD tendencies of many bands I cover here, Bossk provide an antithesis - patient and assured, happy to take their time to reach sonic nirvana as incense burns at the back of the stage. Add to that a serious sonic craft - there are shoegaze levels of attention paid to every aspect in crafting the sound, both on record and live, that belie the stoner-metal groove elements foregrounded.
It’s tough to review Maybeshewill as they are one of my favourite bands - this is the fifth time I’ve seen them live in ten years, forever chasing the dragon of an out-of-body experience borne of exhaustion and catharsis on the last day of a festival in 2013, and a terrific one-off reunion orchestrated by The Cure’s Robert Smith in 2018. The band’s material still hits as hard as ever - guitarist Robin Southby is a dynamo on stage, breaking out emotional tapping and lead lines on a guitar bearing the flag of Palestine, whilst his fellow axeman John Helps crunches out blazing riffs and chunky chords. You get songs bathed in dazzling piano and string lines on Red Paper Lanterns and In Amber, atop pacy and impactful drumming on the likes of To The Skies From A Hillside. A special call-out must be made to Zarah off the most recent album; a climate disaster polemic that elevates its core sample of a political speech from the eponymous Labour MP into wrenching drama.
It’s not for nothing that Maybeshewill have ascended to greater heights following their reunion in 2020. The talent was always there and the sound has matured without losing its ethos or impact. Amidst a well-reviewed new(ish) album and high billing on a range of festivals, it’s clear that the rest of the world has finally caught up with how cool this driving, heart-on-sleeve post-rock sound can be.
Augmenting the evening was the support provided by Barcelona-based Lys Morke - a female-fronted electronic/industrial act in the vein of Nine Inch Nails or GGGOLDDD, who I can confirm are Pretty Fucking Cool. At their best when leaning into the weird and intense - backlit by a screen projection of a red-saturated boxing match; drowning the audience in pounding kick drums and glitches; ethereal vocal lines dancing amidst the darkness. There’s a musician draped over an inverted MIDI controller, hands rapidly dancing over its illuminated pads as if summoning dark synths and samples via arcane magick. Highly recommend.
On Rotation: Sithu Aye & Ba’al
It’s that time of the year when the new music comes thick and fast to take advantage of the festival seasons - and the playlist this month is filled to the brim with top-tier bangers (check it out below). Seems a perfect time to highlight a couple of under-the-radar releases you might otherwise miss.
Sithu Aye - Kindness
Self-released 11 May 2024
My dabblings in music put me in the category of “bedroom guitarist” - minimal collaboration, mostly practising or (at a stretch) composing in my house as a hobby. Sithu Aye could also be described as a “bedroom guitarist”, though here the term means full end-to-end self-production of highly technical, instrumental metal guitar music, with a catalogue of releases spanning over ten years and a strong social media following. These two things are not the same.
The last few albums and EPs from Sithu Aye have been themed - a two-album series on space travel adventures (Set Course For Andromeda, Homebound), and a triptych of releases celebrating Japanese anime soundtracks and culture (Senpai). Here we’re back to basics with a five-song EP, Kindness, initially intended to be a jazz fusion record but evolving into a more diverse yet metal-focused affair. Opener Run It Down kicks off with that signature sound - playful guitar runs, intertwining and soloing over each other, with some heavier palm-muted fare adding a little grit alongside a permeation of sheer fun and abandon. Zero Sum Groove hits those jazz fusion cues, borrowing some of those influences from the Senpai releases but adding sophistication and maturity.
As a set of individual songs, this is probably his strongest release yet. Each track is distinct and memorable, from the modern pop lick of Obsidian that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Ed Sheeran single, to the Phrygian major vibes imbued in Fear Is The Kindness Killer (a reminder that writing songs that sound like the soundtrack to The Mask Of Zorro is the easiest way to win my adoration). The themed concept releases are a lot of fun in creating a continual canvas of sound, but on Kindness, each song earns its place as a distinct entity. It’s a refreshing and delightful change of approach, and a must-listen for fans of technical guitar music looking for a little more zest and fun than the archly serious tech-metal aficionados.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
Ba’al - Soft Eyes
Self-released 3 May 2024
I have a confusing relationship with black metal. Apart from being the worst-named subgenre (worse when used as an influence adjective - I refuse to describe anything as “blackened”), its core traits such as shrieking vocals and lo-fi production values are generally enough to put the more casual listener off, and don’t top my own list of top genre tropes. And yet - when it’s executed well, combined with some eclecticism and the expansive feel of post-metal, it can be incredible.
Step forward Ba’al and their new EP Soft Eyes - brought to my attention by the ever-excellent Ripcord Records, whose range of interests sometimes goes a little too avant-garde for my tastes. Here though they’ve uncovered a gem - three songs of continual invention, pummeling intensity broken up into full songcraft journeys, taking in ambience, passages of tense introspection not out of place on an emo record, and the double-kick driven full-on shrieking intensity of the best that black metal has to offer. There are interesting syncopations, zen-like arpeggiations, and a concept song about The Battle of Bamber Bridge, a dark and bizarre chapter of American racial violence in provincial Britain during World War Two. If you’ve been tempted but put off this side of the more progressive yet impenetrably heavy subgenre of metal in the past, you could do far worse than give this record a go - a brilliant half-hour.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
This Month’s Playlist
This Bank Holiday weekend is Portals Festival - a two-day post-rock / math-rock indoor festival at the EartH venue in Dalston. I reviewed the Saturday last year - a brilliant day of live music. Tickets for this edition, featuring a ton of international bands, are still available at DICE - I’ll be there covering the event, so reach out if you’re coming along!
…The Metal will live on (if you subscribe)