As I’ve said before, if heavy metal were supposed to be taken seriously, Rob Zombie wouldn’t be doing it. It’s easy to get bogged down in the grinding riffs and ripping solos when you’re mid-pit and covered in Emo blood, but it’s always nice to take a step back every now and then to fully appreciate metal for what it is, in-between gut-punching hippies.
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| That’s the spirit |
Metal is the most expressive and experimental miasma of musical genres out there, from the melodic to the dirty to the “Oh my god, my stomach! You bastards! How could you? You wrote it into a song, you sadistic wankers; you wrote the brown noise into a song!”
I don’t want to sound like a douche, but I honestly do feel a little bad for people who don’t have the patience to sit down and learn how to appreciate all the gut-churning awesomeness that Metal has to offer.
SA has some amazing metal bands out there, from relatively well known ones, like A Walk With the Wicked and the truly amazing electro-prog Lark, to the more obscure, such as Juggernaut and The Weekend Was Murder. When you watch these bands, you really get the feeling that they’re performing for the love of music, and that writing Metal was a natural progression for them
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| Born with the voice of an angel. Also, it’s heart, wrapped in plastic, tucked under her mattress. |
There is, of course, the other side of metal, the Muppets who firmly believe it’s all about making noise, getting boozed, getting coked, fighting, hailing Satan, hating stuff and generally being uncomfortably angry all the time. They’re the jackasses who play metal because they want to be metal, because, somewhere down their frazzled line, some mop-head wino convinced them that it was a great way to simultaneously get tanked and rebel against their mom.
Well, here’s the kicker, douchebags – the face-stomping, Satan-hailing, I’m-just-so-gosh-darn-angry mentality was invented by your mom. It was an overreaction by a bunch of bible-bashing geriatrics aimed at a form of expression they didn’t understand in an era that was literally bursting with pent-up, Christian anxiety. Psychologists were diagnosing Satanism like it was 80s A.D.D. Metal became the boogieman for every white-collar dad and valium popping mum, threatening to leap upon their kids at any time.
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| Pretty fucking metal |
Would any of you boots-and-shorts clad, tea-bagging, unshaven limpets like to know who shares their demonic origins with your hell-raising, “embrace my whiskey fueled, nihilistic lifestyle” METAAHHL, the vile crew that danced hand-in-hand with the devil under the same hate fueled gaze of your parents, pastor and nursery school teacher?
My Little Pony and the Ninja Turtles.
So go ahead and indulge in your wanton anarchy. Sure, most metal-heads have a tendency to overindulge, but if you’re going to get hammered, do it for the right reasons – jamming with rad okes and rocking out to some kiff chunes. If you’re going to insist on carving pentagrams into your skin with 2B pencils, tattooing 666 onto your wrists and naming your band The Fetid Blood of Beelzeballs, you just go ahead and keep it in the garage. As far as I’m concerned, you closest living relative is Pikachu, and we don’t take kindly to Pikachu around here.
On that note, here are a bunch of local guys getting it just right.
This may be one of the coolest music videos to ever grace the South African interwebs. Based here in the glorious C of T, Strident are a bunch of dudes successfully putting the third ‘E’ in STEEEL.
Power metal from space. You can’t not be excited by that.
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