Essay: Manifesto for the moderates - 83%

Perhaps it's just the internet, the Metal Archives itself, or the newcomers who wish to define themselves as something they think the surroundings will appreciate. Maybe there is a rift accross the field of metal, or possibly the world of metalheads is splintering into groups that all fend for themselves and find "the other side" somewhere where it never was before. Perhaps it's just an illusion. Or perhaps the old days are indeed gone and "metal" alone is not good enough for the generation that has downloaded the things people in the 80s had to spend some serious money on, or were forced to see the trouble of tape trading without the benefit of email and cell phones.

"I think Napero has lost it, and he's just mumbling."
"Yeah, that's it, his walker has been confiscated by the Domestic Coyote, and he thinks he's back in the 80s."
"Durrr...."

The Metal Archives have been corrupted by a strange phenomenon lately. There's something rotting under the floorboards, and something gnawing on the beams that keep the shack upright. Somehow, some confused individuals have failed to appreciate the greatness of Holy Diver, found fatal flaws in Death's works and rated them somewhere below 10%, and even stated their serious dislike of such monuments as Altars of Madness. More often than not, the keyword is "overrated". What, it must be asked, the fuck is this? Have the really important works suddenly been turned to crap by the likes of Dying Fetus and Trivium making something more precise and more brutal? Have the real, original blueprints of metal been surpassed by the skills of newcomers so profoundly that the new generation finds nothing to appreciate in them any more?

"Nappy needs to take his medication and empty his colostomy bag before he goes to bed."
"I think he's demented. Probably drives a Harley Parkinson these days."
"Durrr...."

The new breed of reviews and opinions finds its manifestation in the low scores instead of the positive ones, and that's the worrying part in the strangeness going on. The positive scores are reserved for the obscure demos of bands that, in the final analysis, too often play something with a "retro" tag in front of them, and essentially bring nothing new to the table: their value is in the very obscurity. The negative scores, when given to essential works in the history of metal, seem to serve as the separating thing between the reviewer (and his kind) and the rest of the metal crowd. So, instead of finding a suitable classic or well-known album and giving it a positive score, a lot of eager and ambitious guys take the easier way of defining themselves and making their mark, and bash something. And behold! they often find the choir they wish to preach to. What an odd way of making a name for oneself, indeed!

"He had better start talking about Opeth soon, or I'll contact the owners and get him fired."
"Yeah, I'm not wasting my time on this, he'll be talking about the pea soup he had during the Winter War soon... but that's better than Opeth, right?"
"Durrrrr...."

Opeth has been one of the focal points of this oddity for half a decade already. Why is that? Well, of course, a certain somebody started the Tr00ness Olympics (TM) by making a value-laden attack on Master of Puppets, but for some strange reason, Opeth is the battleground to many. The averages on their albums tend to remain in the higher end of the spectrum, but the variance is incredible. There are the 92...100% reviews, and the 1...17% reviews, and very little in between the extremes. The fanboys - and Opeth has a lot of fanboys - of course rave on the excellence with foam in the corners of their mouths, as is the case of any fanboy of any of the 60 000+ bands on the MA... of which roughly 500 is worth anyone's fanboyism, to be honest. But the amount of extremely negative reviews is staggering, and the scores are often way too low to be truly honest.

"He's circling it. Not brave enough to tackle Opeth. Loser..."
"It's, like, look mom no hands! I'm reviewing Opeth without mentioning Opeth! What a coward!"
"Durrr...."

Assuming that progressive metal in the form that it's often seen on the MA is considered metal in the fundamental sense, there's actually very little that can objectively be levelled against Opeth. It's OK to dislike them, and it's easy to see that they are not meant for a thrash metal maniacs or deathmetalheads. But in the essence, despite the excessive acoustic parts and sometimes sleep-inducing mellow sections, Opeth plays metal, and it's difficult to consider them anything but progressive. Extreme? Depends on the definition, but in the eyes of a lot of people, certainly. In the eyes of a long-time thrash and death metal fan, not really.

"That was mellow... He's afraid to say anything, just believe me."
"Mellow? Durrr... Napero is an acoustic part on a swedish album...."
"Durrr...."

Once the objective objections have been forgotten, it's time to see what the real beefs against Opeth are. Yes, indeed, they have written the same album about 11 times now. The usual path of progression of a metal band is there, and they have mellowed and polished the product a bit from the days of My Arms, Your Hearse, for example, losing some of their edge, but the basic product still is the same album. So they are repetitive, and making one of the albums acoustic in a mid-career goofiness crisis does not change that. Also, Opeth still is sleep-inducing, especially once they undertake one of their excessive acoustic sections with clean vocals. But on the other hand, Opeth obviously aims for "atmospheric" music, and those mellow sections are just that, atmospheric. Sure, they are not to be listened to when driving a truck for the 14th hour in the middle of Kansas at 3 am, but in suitably small dozes, they can be rather emotionally charged pieces of musical scenery.

"Told you! He's an emo! I win!"
"OK, the next Bud is on me."
"Budweiser! The best beer in the world!"
"Napero probably drinks some belgian monk-piss."
"Durrr...."

The progressive part is difficult to describe without getting technical, and since being technical in this context is difficult and requires a functional brain and some esoteric knowledge of such things as "time signatures", "notes" and "music", that shall be skipped for now. Suffice to say that Opeth's music is not the standard fare for the most part, but they still concetrate on the atmosphere more than on wankery or metallic fury, and the comparisons to 70s prog rock are not far-fetched, either.

"He's a moron, too! Ignoranite dullard!"
"Yeah, my cousin is writing a new über-patriotic sludge album in 9/11 time, I'd love to see the loser reviewing THAT!"
"Durrr...."

OK, so the albums of Opeth are progressive, atmospheric, either boring or brilliant depending on the listener's attitude, and somewhat complex pieces of work. Now we arrive on the shores of the Big Question: why is this worth hating by so many? Why do a lot of people take the time and pain to listen to it, write a review that most probably takes some serious effort to become the 21st approved review on the album, and then simply bash it and rate it at 7%? Because no matter how you look at it, Opeth is far from being offensive or abysmal; the music is actually extremely inoffensive, mostly works well as background music for a game of Carcassone or chess, and it sure doesn't fill the definition of "crap" in any dictionary. It's not something you're supposed to like, but if you really think Blackwater Park is worth 6%, you've obviously never heard BAD music. The stuff on many MySpace pages is worth 6%, but that rating, subjectively, assumes that the music is indeed unlistenable, offensive to the ears, and in large dosages, causes hemorroids. Burzum's Dauði Baldrs is such music, as is Vomit Sodomy's only glam metal album Lipstick Menuette, but finding such lousiness in music with Opeth's level of professionalism is a strange idea. Are you really sure this is the worst thing you've ever heard? Seriously?

"I knew it. He's an Opeth fanboy. Likes Åkerfeldt's starry eyes and sad poetic face, I tell you."
"That little circle on top of that A looks like a sphincter..."
"Durrrr...."

So, the motivation for the extremely low scores is hardly the low quality of the music, unless we are talking about reviewers who either like Barbie Girl by Aqua more than metal, or have grown up in a plastic bubble to avoid infections and have since childhood been subjected to heavy bombardment of True Metal only. And as far as that remained a feature of Opeth's discography, all was well; but once it started to infect the rest of the albums of well-known bands, it became obvious that the motivation is to be found somewhere else. The main hypothesis here is is cruel: it's obviously much easier to find your 15 minutes in the spotlight by bashing something a lot of people like than by writing a good positive review on something. And what could possibly be a better target than Opeth, a band with a relatively fanatical fanbase that is easy to get yelling on the ramparts and flinging feces at the author of a review with a single-digit score? None. Except... hey, even more people like Black Sabbath than Opeth here... Get the power drill and the toilet brush! We have a septic tank to stir here!

"He's gone off the deep end now."
"I didn't know septic tanks have a deep end."
"Durrr...."

Is there a message here? Should the approval criteria be tweaked a little, or the most obvious trollings be nuked? Should we adopt a narrower view of the reviewing process and try to please the middle of the road more? Should we discourage extreme views, and perhaps even take a more critical rejection stance on negative reviews on popular albums. Well, duh, no. For Lucifer's sake, no! The heart of the message is simple and quite opethian, in the sense that it's really inoffensive and blends into the ambience: when reading the reviews, take the extreme rating with a grain or a spoonful of salt. There might be something else in work if the scores have a huge variance in them. In Opeth's case, it's rabid fanboys vs the people with virginal minds when it comes to actually crappy metal. Or something to show to a group of others, perhaps. Kind of like Bart Simpson jumping that canyon on a skateboard...

"No harsh new policies after all that ranting? That sure was an anticlimax..."
"Yeah... Durr.... Eh... I like to climax... How do I do that backwards?"
"Durrr...."

Blackwater Park is very much like the rest of the Opeth discography: mostly mellow progressive metal with some pretty nicely executed semi-extreme parts to provide a nice contrast, all performed in a very tightly controlled and professional manner to keep the atmosphere intact and the mood of the album in one piece. If you've heard one, you've heard most of their full-lenghts, really, but they do have an original and instantly recognizable way of writing their songs. That much is evidenced by the number of reviews in the MA with a title that suggest "Opeth emulation" or "Opeth worship" or something to that effect; a song written and performed in opethian manner is bound to sound like Opeth, and anyone straying down that path will get the deserved mentions of emulation in reviews here. The production is very polished and virtually perfect for the purpose, and even Åkerfeldt's growls are restrained to near inoffensiveness.

Not absolute shit by any honest standard, but nothing that makes the ground shake, either. Decent music, professionally executed, for a purpose that probably isn't even close to being the most brutal band on the planet. And certainly nothing to get your knickers in a twist over, more like completely harmless. Perfect for a 100 km drive in the night when the rest of the family is sleeping, or perhaps for a night shift in a grocery store or a gas station.

Is it really that hard to have a moderate opinion on things?

Initially, I had no plans of looking at SikTh (I promise this is the only time I'll do the capitalization thing), because in my mind, why would I? Going back to the internet landscape of the mid 2000s before djent was a term that meant anything, Sikth was seen as a weird mathcore type thing and that's just how I've always perceived them (same reason I still consider Meshuggah (and djent as a whole) to be an offshoot of prog metal). But with the advent of djent as a codified scene, Sikth has been retroactively pegged as another one of the early progenitors, with even Periphery, to my knowledge one of the biggest and most successful acts in the scene, being massive fans who went out of their way to give them the main support slot on a US tour (Sikth's first ever) after their reformation and have even gone so far as to claim that they as a band wouldn't even exist without them. The benefit of hindsight really backs this up, because back in 2005 I thought that first riff on "Bland Street Bloom" was basically nu metal, but nowadays it's so obviously an early djent riff.

For a more nuts-and-bolts assessment of Death of a Dead Day, it helps to look back at the band's debut, the frustratingly lengthily titled The Trees are Dead and Dried Out... Wait for Something Wild. I tend to prefer the debut on most days simply because it's one of the most unabashedly anarchic albums I've ever heard. From minute zero it is a befuddling whirlwind screeches and tapping leads and punishing grooves and catchy vocal hooks and god damned everything. Punctuated with gorgeous solo piano pieces, spoken word poetry, and even a Nick Cave cover, it's one of those beautiful strokes of genius that breaks every single rule and owns the fuck out of it. Death of a Dead Day, by contrast, contains most of the same elements but they're much more refined, focused, and about ten trillion times heavier. I prefer the youthful exuberance of The Trees are Dead but it's very obvious that this is the same band and it still carries like 95% of the magic from debut.

The one thing that everybody notices whenever I show them Sikth for the first time is the vocal attack. They employ two vocalists, Justin Hill an Mikee Goodman. I list them in that order because Hill is much faster to talk about. He is very much the "straight man" in the duo. His screams hit the same way early emo and post hardcore screams do, and his clean voice is incredibly smooth and emotive. He could front any emotional rock band from that era and fit like a glove. Goodman, on the other hand, is the vocal equivalent to The Riddler. He ranges everywhere from deep death metal-esque growling to weird monkey howling to decrepit-old-man grumbling to obnoxious shrieking. I've been affectionately referring to the band as "roostercore" due to Mikee's vocals and I'm still confident in that moniker now that I'm relistening for the billionth time in 2021. You'd figure Hill's role would be to help ground the music in contrast to wild bursts from Goodman, but it really doesn't work that way. Goodman is unquestionably the main man here, the majority of the vocal parts are his, he's the lyricist, he takes center stage at every opportunity, he's the defining factor that made Sikth so much more than they could've been if literally anybody else was there. Their vocal tradeoffs are so fucking insane that they wind up being a disorienting whirlwind push-and-pull between two different flavors of delirium that you have no time to find your footing. Check out the verses of "Bland Street Bloom" for the ur-example of this effect. If you want a more practical example to help distinguish them (if that's necessary), then check out the climax of "Sanguine Seas of Bigotry". The "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BIGGER CLOUT" part is Justin, and the "SO I'LL SEE YOU BY THE BaAaAaARRRRR" part is Mikee.

(Fun fact: Mikee has occasionally ventured into the realm of voice acting (which is an obvious career choice considering how wildly versatile his voice is) and he struck gold by voicing the narrator in Disco Elysium. So if you've played that, you will instantly recognize him here)

On the instrumental front, the rest of the band tends to match Mikee's unabashed weirdness with a touch more restraint. You get occasional blasts of spastic noodling but they're much more focused on solid grooves and great hooks. "Part of the Friction" is loaded with relatively "normal" riffs with an exquisite sense of melody and rides on a painfully simple one note groove (another easy example to point to when seeing how this album was integral to djent's codification). On the other end, you can have a track like "Summer Rain" which is wild noodling nearly the entire time, with disorienting slap bass in the verses, yet once again is anchored by a groove so infectious that I'm pretty sure it gave me a rash. And for a best-of-both-worlds scenario, look no further than "Flogging the Horses" which starts with heavy chugs and sharp staccato dissonance before shifting into one of those angular cyclone riffs that Protest the Hero made their bread and butter before shifting again into a downhill sprint straight into pummeling metal. "Another Sinking Ship" also stands out because, despite sounding like a pretty typical SikTh song for most of the time with how much it jumps around with weird screechy bends on the upper strings and all, the soloing section is one of the only times they ever cranked out something that was 100%, unquestionably, pure molten heavy fucking metal. That entire section could've been written by fucking Deicide, I'm serious. If any wayward metalheads are sticking with this serious and have gotten this far, check that track out and see if that helps prime you for the rest of the insanity on display.

The only real flaw of the album is the stretch from "When the Moment's Gone" to "Where Do We Fall?", a three track stretch that just pulls the fucking dragchute on the album's momentum. "Part of the Friction" is a good heavy one for the middle of the trio but it's still the least insane heavy song on the album and has an abundance of emotive parts that keeps it thematically similar. The album kicks off with a six track stretch of total insanity (excepting "In This Light", which is the "Peep Show" of this album) before this moment so it starts off as a nice respite that winds up lasting like fifteen minutes and I wind up skipping it nearly every time despite my love of the album as a whole.

I brought up the "they should have sent a poet" scene from Contact in the last review about Meshuggah, and secretly, that's what writers better than I would call foreshadowing. SikTh and Meshuggah are both progenitors of djent, but the former blows the latter completely out of the water for me because Mikee Goodman literally is a poet. All of Sikth's studio records contain tracks that are purely spoken word poetry (when I saw them live he actually performed "When Will the Forest Speak?", which was unbelieavably ballsy to halt a high-energy gig for a few minutes of spoken word poetry), the lyrics don't flitter around pontificating about abstract philosophy and instead aim straight for the heart and touch on very human issues surrounding failing relationships, environmentalism, urban decay, etc, my biggest complaint about Meshuggah is that they sound more like science than music, and Sikth is pure emotion. I can't listen to that fadeout in "As the Earth Spins Round" without feeling something, I can't not sing along in desperation with the chorus of "Bland Street Bloom", I can't listen to "Summer Rain" without picturing a certain face, I can't listen to the climax of "Sanguine Seas of Bigotry" without wanting to let loose and cathartically punch holes in all of my neighbors, it just goes on and on. I know a guy who bumped into Dan and Pin at a pub in Wales back in 2006ish, and when he asked about some complex musical technique they employed in a particular song, Pin just laughed and admitted that he didn't know a fucking thing about music theory and just played whatever felt right. That is so evident when listening to this. Meshuggah constructed weird shit out of algorithms and Sikth constructed weird shit simply because they're weird guys playing whatever weird music falls out of their weird brains. This is what makes Sikth so special to me while at the same time makes them such a squishy band on the whole. When a band pours so much of their heart into something like this, almost by definition it's going to affect everybody differently. For me, it punches me right in the dopamine.

So the bottom line is that Sikth is being covered here simply because they're an early progenitor of the djent style before it ever had a name, influenced some of the biggest names in the genre, and then broke up right before it took off and almost wound up being a tragic tale of a band way before their time that never got their due, and it likely would've turned out that way if they weren't always spoken of so fondly by much bigger bands and their reformation a few years ago wasn't such an immediate success. Death of a Dead Day is a surrealist fever dream that perfectly encapsulates the kind of off-the-wall nonsense that heavy music can produce when rules are thrown out the window and I love everything about. Sikth is likely going to be the least djent of all the djent bands I cover, but they're place in history is undisputed and I've been a gigantic fan for like fifteen years so I've been dying to talk about them. And now I have. And now I'm happy again. Listen to fucking Sikth.

In total honesty, I wrote the first two parts of this series without actually doing any research (though I went back and edited in some detail I learned later), so I genuinely didn't have any idea what to expect beyond a vague memory of a few Periphery songs I had heard like eight years ago. Imagine my surprise when my research led to me being told that one of the most beloved albums to get the "djent" tag attached to it was actually After the Burial, a band I had never listened to but had admittedly always assumed was some flavor of metalcore based on era and aesthetics alone.

Rareform seems to be a pretty strange album since the more acclaimed version (and the one I'm reviewing) is actually a partial do-over from barely a year later when the band got a new vocalist and remixed the drums. It's not often you see a rerecording (even a partial one like this) so quickly after the original album. Part of me is curious to see what the difference really is but a larger part of me is just really fucking lazy so we're going with the green version here.

The other strange thing about this is how... not exactly revolutionary it is? Despite being pegged as one of the seminal transition albums when it comes to djent as a whole and apparently an instrumental turning point in introducing djent to the metalcore scene, it's not really integrated in any particularly novel way, nor is it a huge shift from one sound to another. Rareform is, in the most reductive way I can describe it, basically a metalcore Arsis with really bendy breakdowns. The Meshuggah influence is there, obviously, but this really feels like what I remember The Faceless's first album or Through the Eyes of the Dead sounding like if their guitarists had a James Malone-level knack for making obscene technicality catchy as fuck. Like, "Ometh" and "Drifts" are Arsis as fuck, the first riff on either song could've been lifted straight from United in Regret and I'd've been none the wiser. This isn't a bad thing, by the way. Arsis is a noted frenemy of mine but when they're at their best I think they're spectacular, and After the Burial tends to take influence from the best elements of that band.

I think the reason I was kinda caught off guard here is because I'm tackling this in a djent series so I was expecting way the fuck more actual djenting here. The lion's share of this album is pretty straightforward high octane metalcore brutality with a great ear for hooks. Think of a more distinctly metal A Plea for Purging or Architects. The first half of the album in particular runs at a really high tempo, with "Drifts" and "Berzerker" being total barnburners and "Cursing Akhenaten" being devastatingly explosive. "The Fractal Effect" hits the exact kind of super fast melodic death metal that I adore when The Black Dahlia Murder does it. In general, it hits a very specific niche that metalheads can feasibly love despite the stigma around metalcore in the metal scene at the time. It's very melodic, sure, but it never utilizes wimpy clean vocals and keeps the pace manic the entire time.

However, this is a djent series, and this was recommended to me based on a list of important djent albums, so if this is just metalcore, why am I talking about it? Well, Rareform may lack the algorithmic precision of Meshuggah or the atmospheric tone worship of the later bands, but there's no denying that it approached several of the chugging breakdowns here with that same super deep, bendy, staccato riff style that would define the genre. The title track, "A Vicious Reforming of Features", and especially "Aspiration" push those riffs to the forefront and present them exactly as heavily as Meshuggah did on Nothing, but the X factor that pushes this over into solidly enjoyable territory is that those parts are all surrounded by fast, spastic, melodic brutality. My problem with Meshuggah is that they're very one-note and lack color, but After the Burial seems to have easily washed that problem away by using the djent influence relatively sparingly, instead relegating it to window dressing around otherwise super exciting melodeath. A major complaint about -core hybrids is that too many of them treat the meat of their songs as irritating necessities before getting to the actual good parts of the breakdowns, but Rareform puts just as much effort into the fast parts as they do the punishing parts, and the breakdowns here are largely djenty as shit. "Berzerker" is a great primer for the album as a whole, with ruthlessly intense riffage that gives way to off-kilter swinging beatdowns. The breakdowns here aren't relentless slams as much as they're flashy super-combos. There's a lot of understated finesse here, and I think that's why I'm finding it so much fun. It's like writing curse words with high-level calligraphy.

So three albums, three completely different approaches to djent (it certainly helps that this is the last album I plan to cover before the genre really took off). Meshuggah hits a planetary heaviness but doesn't do anything exciting with it, SikTh kinda does it by accident but winds up being hugely influential in the process, and After the Burial plays a particularly nasty style of metalcore where the breakdowns are surprisngly clean and bendy, giving the riff style more of a complementary role than a starring one. While it lacks the emotional weight of Death of a Dead Day that will always keep in contention for one of my favorites, I can't help but give Rareform a pretty shining endorsement on its own merits. This is what I wish The Faceless actually sounded like.

I'm skipping Animals as Leaders here despite knowing full well that they're one of the most influential acts in the scene, but it's entirely because I'm going in chronological order and Periphery came out a few months later, and for my money, this is the first huge departure that signals djent becoming its own genre instead simply a particular style of guitar tone or riff. The three albums I covered prior to this are all pretty different, but you can hear seeds of Periphery being planted in all of them to an extent. Meshuggah is always going to get credit for starting all of this, but Periphery's arrival is more akin to the scene in Jurassic Park where the main cast all watch a velociraptor egg hatch. This was the new breed and there was no mistaking it... I think? In hindsight, looking back twelve years in the past as a guy who is just now trying to learn more about this genre, this album feels like an obviously clear demarcation point in the evolution of the genre. Before, there was a burgeoning scene developing around a singularly unique band; it involved a lot of parallel thinking and as a result a lot of cool new ideas were popping up. After, it's now obvious that these new ideas were germinating into a genre, and this is the final draft of its blueprint.

And then that paragraph has been sitting there for two years because HOLY SHIT Periphery is boring as hell and it turns out I'm really not all that interested in djent beyond a social curiosity and it turns out it's *really god damned hard* to write hundreds of words about something you don't find engaging and don't actually care all that much about. Fuck this I'm just gonna post the Meshuggah review and forget about this whole idea. asdfasdaodsufsdoiubopsdayoepa