Black Metal Christmas 2
Happy Holidays to everyone. We had our big day with the kids yesterday, so today consists of sitting around listening to new music, new movies, eating Christmas candy, drinking coffee, and new books.

I'm upstairs right now, rocking out to the The Hookers Casting the Runes: From the Battle of Contlarf to the Gates of Valhalla 2 disc set, and I'm thinking that The Hookers were quite frankly better than 90% of the bands playing rock and metal during their time in the scene. Just as good as The Hellacopters, Turbonegro, Gluecifer, and gang. They were laughably better than anything that ever got played on the radio -- but yes, you can argue that's a different audience. We're not talking about the mindless deluded masses who rely on radio to bring them the best music available, or who just don't care. Anyway, I'm biased toward The Hookers because I've hung out with them and seen them live enough times to blame them for part of my hearing loss, and they were very cool dudes very dedicated to rock. So, long live The Hookers. The legacy of this band can continue if you help spread the word, so .... word! \m/

Anyway, onto the new stack of tunes, I had to chuckle yesterday as I was sitting up here during a break from festivities listening to Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. It was another black metal Christmas; last year for Christmas, Angie got me a book called Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. The book chronicles the notorious antics of a few black metal bands in Norway in the early 90's.

The young men in these bands took their subject matter much more serious than genre predecessors. They practiced a mix of Satanism and neo-pagnism, some of their philosophies more reasoned than others. Organized groups of these black metallers are responsible for burning a bunch of historic Norwegian churches. A few of these guys went on to kill people (one killed a gay man in a park in the middle of the night, another stabbed a bandmate in the skull), or kill themselves. Reading about them sent me on a pilgrimage to listen to the bands and see how their philosophies translated to the music, if it did it at all. I listened to it to try and get a feel for if they were for real, or if they were just putting on a show and a handful of unbalanced individuals went a little too far. Even after reading the book and listening to the music, the division between showmanship and reality is still not so clear cut for a handful of them.

Over the next year, I developed an affinity for the music of a few of these second-wave black metallers. I listened to Venom and Bathory and Hellhammer long before there were many labels for sub-generes of metal. As a fan of those bands, who were later considered the founders of Black Metal, I already had an idea of what I liked about it. The Swedish and Norwegian black metal bands had certainly advanced the sub-genre well beyond the point I thought possible; particularly in the hands of the bands Immortal and Enslaved. Dark Throne is okay. Burzum is interesting to listen to, but did not warrant repeated listenings for me. Dissection's Storm of the Light's Bane was an excellent contribution for that period, and Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse is a contemporary black metal classic. While I had listened to a couple of tracks off of it, I had not yet obtained a copy of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, so I placed it on my Amazon wishlist, where it was found this season by my lovely Angie, who kindly purchased it as one of my Christmas gifts. And so, yet another holiday comes 'round to find me hanging out in front of the computer listening to the most Satanic music I can find this side of Mercyful Fate.

Regarding this album -- the main reason that Mayhem stayed so long on my wish list was I had heard a few samples from the album and was not overly impressed. It seemed, from the few songs that I'd heard, Mayhem's black metal musicianship did not exceed their notoriety. I think there are some very good black metal tunes here, "Funeral Fog," "Freezing Moon," and "Buried by Time and Dust" are all solid pieces of work, maybe on par with some of Emperor's stuff at the time. But ultimately, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is of greater value to a collection for its historical value than for any sort of genre-bending musical merit. The vocals seem too disparate and out of sorts. The music is inconsistent in quality, and half the time not particularly compelling. (Granted, one must find themselves in a particular mood to find black metal compelling.) Still, there is an art to it, and Mayhem has the tools, they're just applied with varying degrees of skill on this album. That said, I have no doubt that the band's main songwriter Euronymous would have honed his skill, if only he'd lived long enough to make another album.

Euronymous, born as Oystein Aarseth, was a magnet for mayhem, indeed. He ran a record shop called Helvete, where many participants of the early church burnings were said to have congregated. Tragedy struck early in the career of Aarseth's band Mayhem when their lead singer, ironically named Dead, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. When pal Aarseth found Dead's corpse, he reportedly climbed into the room and took pieces of the singer's brain and skull to make a necklace before calling the authorities to report the death. Later on, Aarseth's decision to have Varg Vikarnes (Burzum) join Mayhem, and to later release some of Burzum's music, would end up in a fatal conflict between the two when Vikarnes, according to one account, paid a visit to collect unpaid royalties. Vikarnes stabbed Aarseth in the head and killed him in a fight in the stairwell of his apartment building. Miraculously, and seemingly beyond the reach of cosmic justice, both Mayhem and Burzum still produce records that sell. Primarily due to all of the hub-bub, no doubt.

Okay, enough grim talk. It's Christmas after all. I did get a few other CD's. It's not all devil music. I mean, I got Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales remastered on disc, Destruction's Sentence of Death and Infernal Overkill, yes, but I also got Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Home, and a 1991 H.C. Robbins Landons's interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, conducted by Sir Georg Solti. I got a copy of John Jakes's "The Bastard," some horror novels and DVD's, some cologne, and gift certificates (thank you, family!). So, you see, I am not hopelessly immersed in darkness and evil. I got some other cool, normal stuff, too. Really.

Anyway, I just wanted to sign on and post to everyone for the holdays. Merry Christmas! I'm going back down for coffee and some of that Christmas chocolate.