(This is the third in a series of guest posts by NCS supporter Utmu in which he poses questions and seeks answers.  In the last installment, he sought reader input for a paper about metal that he has been preparing for a college Composition course, which we may be seeing here soon.  And in this post, he’s asking for reader opinions again. Please leave your thoughts in the Comment section after the post.)

I’d like to apologize for the untimely manner in which I’m going about my paper. My composition class ended on August 2 and I’ve been on break since then. The reason why I’ve been reluctant to submit it to Islander is because I want to make a few changes with the structuring. Also, I’d like to proofread it to make sure that it impresses upon people in the way that I want it to, and I’d also like to make sure all of my arguments are cogent. But to the matter at hand!

In the last installment of RitV, I surveyed you all about the general well-being of metal in order to gather information for the paper. Part of me thinks that the results weren’t what I was looking for, but the other part of me does. Regardless of whether or not my respondents understood what I was asking depended entirely on the way in which I asked it—that is to say, any faults in the survey were my doing, not the respondents’. I’ve diagnosed the possible faults of my survey as a symptom of not actually knowing how to conduct one. Specifically, I don’t know when I’m leading my respondents and when I’m informing them (my instructor intended for this to occur as a form of “on-the-job training”, I suppose). However, I still got the general idea from the respondents that metal is indeed alive and well.

Now I’d like to take a moment and ask you how you define living metal. What makes metal alive? Is it based on the extent of perceived innovation in the music? Or is it a function of the simple fact that new music continues to be made, whether innovative or not? Perhaps you would subscribe to a different explanation entirely. Continue reading »

The week before last Jordan Campbell, one of the editors at Last Rites, wrote a piece entitled “Your Carcass Is Leaking – The Surgical Steel Saga”, in which he took the Nuclear Blast label to task for withholding promos of the new Carcass album (Surgical Steel) from web zines, accused DECIBEL magazine and NB of colluding to promote the album, and suggested that NB had intentionally leaked Surgical Steel to justify its discriminatory treatment of bloggers in the handing out of promos.  I thought he was off-base, and wrote a rejoinder.

To my pleasant surprise, I got a nice note from Jordan (who I didn’t know before then) suggesting that we continue the debate, and I agreed.  We traded arguments by e-mail, and I’m now posting the dialogue (with Jordan’s consent).  I don’t know whether it sheds more light than heat.  Judge for yourselves.

After the first pair of e-mail exchanges occurred, my messages got sufficiently long-winded that Jordan started putting his responses after each paragraph of what I originally sent him.  So I’ve divided our debate into parts in an effort to make the chronology of the back-and-forth more clear. Continue reading »

(Here’s Part 2 of Andy Synn’s two-part article, the first part of which you can read here.)

In part one of this short series of musings on the place of “technicality” in today’s metal world I made some short mentions about how the specificity and restrictive nature of the “Tech Death” moniker is often seen as a wholly negative epithet. However, you could equally say that it also grants those bands an instantly recognisable identity. You know it’s going to be “Tech” and it’s going to be “Death”, and the sheer brevity of the name gives you a clue that it’s going to be an all-out, no-frills assault on the senses. And sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

By contrast, however, there’s been a big thing for a while now of bands proclaiming themselves (or being proclaimed as) just “Tech Metal”. And I’m not entirely certain what to make of it. Certainly, the bands seem to be saying that they don’t fit within, and shouldn’t be associated with, any one particular sub-type of Metal (Thrash, Death, Black, etc) and they’re often right to make this distinction – after all, few things are more irritating than bands miscategorising themselves in an attempt to graft on some credibility. But this very lack of a specific identity seems to BE the identity for many of these bands. It’s as if the entire sub-genre is composed of left-overs.

Obviously, though, high-speed intensity is not the only way to display technicality in your music, and one thing indeed that defines much of the “Tech Metal” movement is a tendency for less extreme speeds (and less extremity overall), while retaining a similar level of complexity, particularly when it comes to shifting time-signatures and clever, often wonderfully complex, rhythmic transitions. Continue reading »

Earlier this week, I posted an article listing five albums that changed my life, the ones that led me down the path into heavy music, and invited readers to share their own lists. I can’t claim credit for the idea — it was inspired by a similar article written by Topon Das of Fuck the Facts. But it has turned out to be the most-read piece at NCS this week and it led to a lengthy and fascinating group of comments — 100 of them so far — in essence a collection of short memoirs about personal musical journeys. It has spawned more posts along the same lines at NCS (with more to come), and now the idea has spread to another blog.

This morning, fellow blogger Full Metal Attorney posted his own list of five albums that changed his life. In the preamble, he explains why the idea for this kind of list has proven to be so interesting:

“This isn’t, ‘What are your five favorite albums?’ That’s pertinent information, yes. But it only tells of current taste. It doesn’t tell you anything deeper. But this question asks for your history, your personality, your memories. It invites you to tell a story.”

Full Metal Attorney’s list, and the explanations for the five albums that appear there, is yet another personal story. I won’t spoil the discovery of what’s on there, but I’ll say it includes two albums that I didn’t see coming. Continue reading »