Metal sucks.

I\’m only half kidding. My personal relationship with metal has been relatively short-lived and my feelings about the genre are complicated and inconsistent. During my very impressionable pre-teen and teenage years my jam was mostly Weird Al and nerdy new wave/post punk, so I completely missed the metal boat at a time when I imagine most metalheads would get into metal in their lives (it\’s a figurative metal boat, by the way, not, like, you know, an aluminum boat, or something). I was 25 years old when I gave it a fair shot and maybe 26 or 27 before I could really say that I genuinely liked what I was hearing, so with such a vast and varied subset of music I hardly think less than half a decade of critical listening is enough time to make a judgment call already. But I will anyway! And I look forward to reading back on this post 10 years from now chagrined to all hell about my premature opinions on one of the most revered musical genres in existence by insecure white males aged 13-60.

Frankly, I\’m not comfortable reviewing metal right now. I\’ve clocked many hours of metal listening, easily of thousands hours by now…but as you dig deeper into the rabbit hole of metal music you\’ll find catacombs of subgenres and sub-subgenres, bands going strong into their fifth decade with jaw-dropping discographies, and more albums than any listener can reasonably hope to listen to in a lifetime, let alone absorb and attach any emotional value toward. It\’s a genre that begs to be listened to with breadth, not depth, and that\’s my problem at least. I try so hard to listen to everything that I\’m not coming out with any deep-seating feelings about anything. That\’s what happens when you try to pick apart the nuances that categorizes \”atmospheric black metal\” separately from \”post-black metal\”, or \”grindcore\” separately from \”deathgrind\”. As I write this right this very moment I\’m listening to Helloween, which sounds like Gamma Ray which sounds like Hammerfall which sounds like Sonata Arctica which sounds like Stratovarius which sounds like Edguy which sounds like Sabaton etc. etc. etc. forever to infinity. Anyway, the whole classification system fascinates me, and the metal classification system is one of the most daunting phenomena existing in popular music today (with electronic music hot on the heels). Even the most dyed-in-the-wool seasoned metalheads are unable to describe their absolute favorite albums without language like \”the riffs are amazing\” and \”it\’s fuckin\’ heavy and in-your-face\”. I have a hard time sifting through written reviews, professional or otherwise, that don\’t just fall back on these base emotional sentiments…unless it\’s some band on the hipster radar like Deafheaven or Baroness, and then the reviews are completely bloated with purple prose and over-intellectual musings. It\’s almost like metal\’s really difficult to write about? It\’s almost like there\’s nothing to write about? It\’s almost like every metal band who is pumping out their 17th album already made 16 other similar albums so what fresh perspective can one actually bring to the table without resorting to comfortable commentary on the great riffs or the not-so-great riffs? Until I\’m ready to elevate myself over this limited vantage point I don\’t see myself as being able to write a good metal review.

Needless to say, people like me approach the genre as bean counters observing through a microscope instead of becoming one with the music and culture. Maybe it\’s for the better; I find the fashion to be atrocious and the overall metal attitude tends toward the juvenile and close-minded. So, as a result, I\’m perfectly comfortable continuing to appreciate metal through a sort of an outsider lens in a spiritual sense. That means I get to enjoy the blisteringly caustic industrial blastbeats of Anaal Nathrakh AND enjoy the precious teenage high school romantic musings of Tegan and Sara without feeling any shame whatsoever! The cool thing about avoiding prescribing myself to a scene is that I don\’t have to feel bad about listening to literally anything. And I think that\’s what seemed pretty unappealing at first about the metal scene way back when I was an impressionable youngin\’, that one has to GO ALL IN on it or they\’re not a true believer or a true fan or some similarly stupid shit. I\’m 33 years old, that way of thinking has been meaningless to me forever at this point. Now I\’m surprising myself at what I\’m willing to listen to and enjoy. Heavy, power, death, black, speed, thrash, doom, folk, sludge, avantgarde, you name it. I like it all.