This is turning into Invisible-Oranges-link-week. A couple days ago we wrote here about a post at that site on the “Top 10 Most Overused Words in Metal Journalism.” The list unfortunately included some of our favorite words, including the word “fucking.” So, of course we had to litter our own post with F-bombs, just to make ourselves feel better. And that drew some pretty goddamned funny comments, which also made liberal use of F-words, including an observation from Cosmo Lee that we were all starting to sound like Frank Mullen.

At the same time as I stumbled across that Top 10 post at Invisible Oranges, I also read Cosmo Lee’s review (here) of a new album by a German black-metal band called Imperium Dekadenz. That beautiful review really grabbed me. As we try to do at our site, Cosmo Lee included a track from the album to stream — and the song just floored me. So without delay I bought the album the quickest way I knew how (iTunes) and listened to the whole thing — and I was even more floored.

I thought, there’s a chance some of our readers at NCS might not also follow Invisible Oranges, and this is music I really need to share. So my original plan was just to tell you the album is awesome, point you to Cosmo Lee’s review, make a song available, and quit while I was ahead. That would have been the smart thing to do, because seriously, I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell I could improve on Cosmo’s review.

But I’m not so smart. It occurred to me that although I couldn’t improve on that review, I could translate it into the kind of verbiage we tend to use here at NCS. You know, language written by and for mentally impaired people. And then I thought, what the fuck, I might as well go all-in and channel Frank Mullen while doing that!  So here goes:  (read on after the jump, if you’re mentally impaired . . .)

[Editor's note: If by some tiny chance you don't know who Frank Mullen is, you can go here and see some high-quality video footage we posted of Frank and his band Suffocation performing recently in Holland. On the other hand, that footage includes none of Frank's legendary stage banter. For a sample of that, try this.]

All you motherfuckers out there, put down your fucking joints and shots and listen the fuck up. Are you ready for some fucking brutal, old-school death metal? (NCS readers scream and yell.) I can’t fucking hear you!  (Louder noise from NCS readers.) Well, you’re not gonna fucking get it today, so shut your fucking pieholes. Today, you motherfuckers, I’m gonna tell you about some fucking black metal, so dig the wax out of your ears and listen the fuck up!

You fuckers know black metal when you hear it, don’t you? I sure as hell do even if you motherfuckers don’t. But some bands that are late to the scene — they try to talk the talk, with the fucking spidery logos and two-tone fucking artwork and all that fucking retarded corpsepaint, but do they walk the walk? Fuck no, they don’t! I mean, shit, you don’t have to burn down any goddamned churches, but if you’re gonna call yourself a fucking black metal band, you should at least sound like fucking black metal when you play. Amiright?

Take Imperium Dekadenz. On their first two albums, those motherfuckers sounded like they might have fucked around with covers of Burzum and Darkthrone in their cold-ass basement practice rooms, cuz that’s what you were supposed to fuckin’ do, but what they were really into was churning out that classical-sounding shit. And I don’t mean classics like Death and Morbid Angel. I mean shit from the Dark Ages, like Chopin and Segovia.

I mean, those Dekadenz motherfuckers could play some mean fucking piano and acoustic guitar, along with the black metal, but man, slapping that shit together cheek by jowl was fuckin’ jarring on those earlier albums. And speaking of jarring, I wanna see some action in the pit right fucking now! Stir that shit up, you motherfuckers!

Well, at long fucking last, these German dudes have put out a new album called Procella Vadens that hits the fucking sweet spot, dead center. But I have to ask, where did that fucking name come from? That don’t sound like any fucking language I ever heard. Come to think of it, where did these dudes get their fucking band name? I can’t even pronounce the motherfucker.

But hey, I guess they can call their fucking band and their fucking album whatever the fuck they wanna call it, even if none of you motherfuckers have the slightest fucking idea what it means.

But man, the music on the new album is the fucking shit! I kid you not. They’re like fucking Suffocation — they’ve done something original and they’re not backing down, not for one fucking minute! Try to cram themselves into someone else’s idea of black metal? No they fucking did not!

Now, all you motherfuckers know that I like to bang my head and turn out some brutal as fuck noise — and by the way, I wanna see a fucking old-school circle pit right fucking now! Move that shit around!

Where was I? Oh yeah, I remember. What you probably don’t know about Frank Mullen is he’s got a softer side too — even though you wouldn’t catch me dead letting any melodies into our fucking music.

Look, we’re all damaged people. We all had fucked up childhoods. We’re a bunch of outsiders, judged by other assholes our entire lives, and we all took a blood oath to death metal, extreme metal, whatever you wanna call it. Am I fucking right? Yes, I am fucking right! And all you motherfuckers know that Suffocation stays as far away as we can from beautiful, lush melodies in our own music.  We set out fucking rat traps to keep that kind of shit away.

But that don’t mean we don’t appreciate it when we ain’t on stage. Cuz we do appreciate it. And this new Dekadenz album is some beautiful shit. It’s got that piano. It’s got that acoustic guitar. It’s got that female vocals. Even the black-metal picking and blasting has got that beauty flowing through it, just like a fucking flowing current of evil beauty.

But that don’t mean it ain’t heavy, no sir! Because it is! It is heavy as a big old pair of brass balls, I shit you not! Shit has got some punch to it! Shit you can bang your fuckin’ heads to, even when that fucking current of dark beauty is moving through you.

These are anthems for everything we’ve fuckin’ lost.

So, listen up people! Yes, I do mean you, all you motherfucking readers out there! Listen the fuck up! We’re gonna play you some killer music from Imperium Dekadenz, because that’s what we like to do — we want to fucking kill all of you with the music. And this will fucking slay you — you can take that to the fucking bank!

Imperium Decadenz: Ocean, Mountains Mirror

P.S. Just in case you have any confusion, I’m a huge fan of Suffocation and Frank Mullen. I would listen to Frank read the phone book.

This weekend I spent a little time catching up with other metal blogs I like. If I weren’t so fucking wordy in my own writing, I’d have more time to read on a daily basis and wouldn’t fall behind. Anyway, there’s one post I wish I hadn’t read. It was Justin Norton‘s feature on the “Top 10 Most Overused Words in Metal Journalism” at Invisible Oranges. It made me cringe. Here’s how it started:

“Writing about metal is a lot like covering sports. Dozens of releases drop week after week like games stack up during a season. Just like sports writers try to find ways to make a touchdown pass sound like a major event, it’s tough to find a novel description for the umpteenth grindcore or black metal album. So the same words and phrases show up again and again.  Trust me, I’ve used them all.”

And then he proceeded to catalogue the 10 worst offenders — the overused, cliched words that metal writers litter in their album reviews like Big Mac wrappers on the sidewalk. You know, our oldest friends — the words we use constantly here at NCS, particularly No. 9. We can’t bear to include the painful descriptions that followed each word in Justin’s post, but here’s the list:

1. Brutal
2. (Enter genre) and add a y (e.g., progg-y, doom-y)
3. Epic
4. Blackened
5. Melodic
6. Majestic
7. Any adjective hinting at bodily harm (e.g., pummeling, bruising, scorching)
8. Full-length
9. Fucking
10. Lots of adverbs (e.g., kick-ass)

(Groan. . .) Kind of hits the mark, doesn’t it? But is there another side to this story? Shit, we hope so. (By the way, “shit” wasn’t on the list, so I feel safe in using that word.) For example, if I had to write a whole review without being allowed to use the word “fucking,” I’m afraid I’d have some kind of seizure. (more after the jump . . .)

Justin’s post drew a number of comments on the Invisible Oranges site. I read them, hoping to find some feeble, self-serving rationalization for my own frequent use of words on that cringe-inducing Top 10 list.

And sure enough, I did find some rationalizations. Here’s my distillation of them:

1.  Some of these words (e.g., “blackened”) are efficient, accurate, and effective ways to capture a sound on paper for a reader who’s never heard a band before; using them gives readers a decent (fucking) idea about what to expect

2. Most readers don’t go reading metal reviews expecting or needing to be blown away by variation in the vocabulary; they’re still going to listen to the music for themselves, and what they want from a review is to be pointed in the right (fucking) direction

3. These words, if used occasionally, are fine — but if that’s all you see, then it’s possible the writers don’t know what (the fuck) they’re doing, or why

4. For some of these words, there are no substitutes that will capture the concept as well (e.g., “fucking“)

5. Some of these words make a review more entertaining (e.g., “fucking“)

7. Some of these words have a definite meaning, and just because they’re often used inappropriately doesn’t deprive them of their usefulness when employed correctly (e.g., “fucking“)

These thoughts made me feel better. And some of them are actually valid, more or less. But there’s truth in the original criticism, too. So, let’s see if I can produce a synthesis:

As I see it, people read album reviews for one or more of three reasons, and how much weight they put on each reason depends on the reader and what the reader knows about the artist and the music. First, they’re looking for help in deciding whether to spend their time (and maybe their money) on the music. Second, even if they already have their own opinion about the album, they’re curious about how the particular writer has reacted to it and why. And/or third, they’re looking to be entertained by the writing.

On the first point: If the reader isn’t already familiar with the artist, it helps to know something about the band’s musical style, and genre descriptions are useful, even if they’re necessarily just a starting point. Since metalheads are all more or less part of a community with a shared language, using terms like “brutal death metal” or “melodic death metal” or “blackened proggy math metal” or “fucking deathcore!” gives readers a few shorthand clues about whether they should even bother to continue reading, depending on their tastes.

But those kinds of genre terms only take you so far. They can open or close the door to the reader’s interest, but if the reviewer never bothers to get much deeper into the subject matter than slapping on a genre label, the review will be pretty fucking worthless. And without more detail, the reviewer’s ultimate opinions about the music aren’t going to carry much weight. Using even more adjectives that are vague or too broad (like “pummeling” or “bruising” or “awesome” — but not like “fucking“) won’t fill the void.

Trying to give a more meaningful description in words about something that will appeal or not appeal based on its sound isn’t easy. And when you find words that seem to suit that task, it’s easy to get stuck repeating them — particularly when they really are the best words to use in conveying certain ideas. (Like the words “fuck,” “fucking,” and “fucked” — there’s really just no adequate subsitute for those words.)

But if the words a writer persists in using again and again don’t really communicate much useful information in the first place (unlike the words “fuck,” “fucking,” and “fucked“), then you’ve got a problem.

Of course, describing music with enough detail and accuracy to give readers useful direction in deciding whether to bother with an album isn’t all most of us are looking for. (Most of us are also really interested in “fucking” or getting “fucked“).

Sometimes we already have a pretty good idea whether we’re going to track down an album, maybe because we worship the band already and would listen to them eating  (or fucking) if we could. In those cases, what we’re really after is something that’s entertaining to read.

And who doesn’t want to be entertained, even when they’re mainly after some useful information and advice? Maybe we like to read good writing, regardless of the subject. Maybe we want to laugh our fucking asses off at the end of a discouraging day.

Overuse of cliched phrases can suck the entertainment value right out of a review — but sometimes those cliched phrases, if used sparingly and in conjunction with other more imaginative verbiage and rhetorical flourishes, can turn something otherwise dull into a majestically epic fucking review that will appeal to your blackened little hearts.

Shit, I feel better already. If you have anything to add to this dialogue, leave a fucking comment, won’t you?

P.S. I do a lot of writing in my day job, but writing about metal is something I never attempted until my Co-Authors and I started this site. I’m still working on how to make album reviews better — trying to do all the things described in that synthesis above. It’s a work in progress, and I try to learn from people who do it really well — like the contributors at Invisible Oranges. But somehow I have a feeling there are some words I’ll never be able to let go of. Can you guess which ones?

For all you horn-headed stat geeks out there, Cosmo Lee has compiled some fascinating numbers that you can read about in detail at his Invisible Oranges site. In a nutshell, in 1986 (which Lee uses as a baseline), 458 full-length metal releases came out. Assuming you had wanted to, you could have listened to all of them at the rate of 38 a month. Last year, there were almost 5,000 full-length metal releases. You’d have had to listen to more than 400 albums a month to cover all of them. And that’s not counting demos — there were more than 4,000 of them released last year.

We can guess about why this flood of metal has built to tsunami-like proportions over the last 23 years. For example, advances in technology have made DIY digital recording much easier and cheaper, and the netz have made it vastly easier for bands to get their music out into the world (regardless of whether the music is worth a shit or not).

None of this means those thousands of metal bands releasing new music every year are making any more money than the 458 who released albums in 1986. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if those 458 metal releases generated more total sales (in constant dollars) than the almost 5,000 released last year. Sure, the population has grown since then (in the U.S., from about 240 million in ’86 to about 304 million in ’08). On the other hand, file-sharing and downloads have just about succeeded in putting a stake through the heart of CD sales.

One thing is for sure: The flood of metal has populated every metal micro-genre with lots of choices and has made it increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff if you’re a listener. As Lee astutely observes in his post:

Such multiplicity means that consensus is likely impossible to reach nowadays. Year-end lists show much less overlap because people have many more choices. . . . In the past, people had limited, overlapping access to information — the same few TV channels, record stores, and so on. Now technology has blasted everything wide open. The only year-end list that matters now is yours.

The latest issue of Decibel magazine arrived in my mail on Friday.  Big photo of Mastodon staring me in the face.  Says on the cover that it’s the January 2010 issue.  My calendar says that Friday was November 20 in the year 2009.  Okay, that’s not so unusual — every magazine advance-dates their copy.  (Even a weekly like Time has got an issue on the stands right now dated Nov 30).  I’m not sure when advance cover-dating started or why.  Maybe you know.   I guess if you publish a magazine you can put whatever fucking date you want on the cover.

But guess what’s inside the “January 2010” issue of Decibel:  Their list of the “Top 40 Extreme Albums of 2009.”  Why does that strike me as odd?  Find out after the jump, and I’ll also give you the Decibel Top 40 list.  

Why does it seem odd to find a Decibel “Best of 2009″ list out now?  Well, think about it:  In order to get this issue into my mailbox on Nov 20, I’m guessing Decibel’s writers and editors had to agree on that list by around Nov 1.  I mean, for fuck’s sake, they had to write the blurbs that accompany each band listing in the Top 40, they had to lay out the copy and the graphics, they had to proof it and get it to the printers, the printers had to print, and the distributors had to get the mags and put them in the hands of the US Mail, who then had to get one to my mailbox.

I don’t really know how long all that takes.  Maybe you do.  The point is that when this “Best of 2009” list was compiled, there must have been approximately two months left in 2009.  So, the issue should have been called something like “The Top Extreme Albums of January – October 2009,” but who would have bothered to read that?  Anyway, bands who released new music in about the latter half of November or who plan releases in December are just shit out of luck – assuming any of them really care about making Decibel’s “Best of 2009” list.  Who might those bands be?

If you want to see an evolving list of what’s coming between now and year-end, have a look at Cosmo Lee’s list of Upcoming Metal Releases over at Invisible Oranges.  Most of those bands probably had no chance anyway, but still, I’m actually looking forward to some of those releases.

Turns out that jumping the gun on “Best of the Year” lists, like advance cover-dating, is pretty common too.  Just browsing at my friendly neighborhood newsstand yesterday, I came across this random sampling of “Best Of” lists blaring from the covers of these mags, all of which boasted a cover date of December 2009:

• Atlantic:  ”The Best Books of 2009″
• Popular Science: “100 Best Innovations of the Year”
• PC World:  “100 Best Products of the Year”
• MacLife:  “Gear of the Year 2009”
• Glamour:  “Women of the Year”
• GQ:  ”Badass of the Year” (Clint Eastwood)
• Oxygen:  ”Tight Glutes & Sexy Thighs”  (Oh, wait a minute, wrong subject . . . .)

Not to be outdone, some kind of personal finance rag called Kiplinger’s claimed on the cover that the issue would be devoted to “The Best of EVERYTHING 2009.”  Yeah, right.  And the “December” ’09 issue of Money blares on its cover, “Make Money in 2010.”  Shit, what about making some money in the last two months of 2009?

And then there’s the current issue of Fortune with a big photo of Apple’s Steve Jobs on the cover beneath a headline proclaiming him “CEO of the Decade.”  Just think how embarrassed Fortune will be if, say, next month (still in the current decade) someone discovers Steve Jobs ass-fucking a dead girl or a live boy.  (Of course, that assumes Fortune is capable of being embarrassed by anything.)

And speaking of “Best of the Decade” lists, Decibel has already got one of those out, too (“The Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums of the Decade”).

I vaguely remember a time when “Best of the Year” lists didn’t come out until January, or at least late December.  I don’t know why these lists now come out in November.  Maybe you do.  Maybe next year, publishers will start the race even sooner and bring out these lists in October.

On the other hand, maybe no one but me gives a fuck about when the lists come out.  Maybe a more pertinent question is why they come out – why does anyone bother to compile them or read them, particularly in the case of “Best Of” metal lists?  I’ll get to those topics in the next post, in addition to saying a few things about the albums on Decibel’s “Best of 2009” list.  In the meantime, here’s that Decibel list:

1. Baroness – The Blue Record

2. Converge – Axe to Fall

3. Coalesce – Ox

4. Napalm Death – Time Waits for No Slave

5. Cobalt – Gin

6. Kylesa – Static Tensions

7. Slayer – World Painted Blood

8. Tombs – Winter Hours

9. Marduk – Wormwood

10. Isis – Wavering Radiant

11. Immortal – All Shall Fail

12. Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse

13. Obscura – Cosmogenesis

14. Magrudergrind – S/T

15. Nile – Those Whom the Gods Detest

16. YOB – The Great Cessation

17. Mastodon – Crack the Skye

18. Paradise Lost – Faith Divides Us, Death Unites Us

19. The Atlas Moth – A Glorified Piece of Blue Sky

20. Asphyx – Death . . . the Brutal Way

21. Altar of Plagues – White Tomb

22. Mournful Congregation – The June Frost

23. Funeral Mist – Maranatha

24. The Gates of Slumber – Hymns of Blood and Thunder

25. Burnt by the Sun – Heart of Darkness

26. City of Ships – Look What God Did To Us

27. Goatwhore – Carving Out the Eyes of God

28. Gaza – He Is Never Coming Back

29. Katatonia – Night Is the New Day

30. Keelhaul – Keelhaul’s Triumphant Return to Obscurity

31. The Red Chord – Fed Through the Teeth Machine

32. Brutal Truth – Evolution Through Revolution

33. Krallice – Dimensional Bleedthrough

34. Culted – Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep

35. Goes Cube – Another Day Has Passed

36. Suffocation – Blood Oath

37. Javelina – Beasts Among Sheep

38. Municipal Waste – Massive Aggressive

39. Millions – Gather Scatter

40.  Funebrarum – The Sleep of Morbid Dreams