WE'VE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE

According to a good number of people, I’m credited with creating the term bestial black metal.

I’m not sure how it happened. Like, I certainly didn’t invent the actual words within this subgenre term: “bestial” has described a good number of things for a good number of centuries, and “black metal” as a phrase can be traced back to 1982 and solely credited to Venom. But putting those two once-separate terms together into one phrase? Really, I can’t take credit for that. But I also can’t think of anyone else using the same prior to when I did.

And When I Did was approximately the spring of 2005. I’m much more modest these days, having had a couple Spiritual Depantsings during the last four years – professionally speaking, the untimely (and still supremely quizzical) demise of Metal Maniacs magazine, by and large the forum where I developed my most notoriety – but back then? Fuck, I was on a mission. I was gonna cram this shit down everyone’s throats whether they liked it or not. (They didn’t.) And given the platform I was with Zero Tolerance and especially Metal Maniacs, cram I did. Nearly four years of verbal abuse followed...where does the time go?

These were good days, professionally if not always personally. They were exciting times, electric times. Vile ugliness became exquisite beauty to me, and I ceaselessly championed those then-few records as if my very life depended on it. (It didn’t.)

First, it was a trickle. Hearing traces, however faint, of Beherit and early Impaled Nazarene in bands? Maybe the Noughties weren’t gonna be so crap for black metal after all. Then came the semantically-more-obvious Bestial Warlust traces, and even a few bands started nodding toward (and even covering) Archgoat. And, of course, rekindled interest in Blasphemy again caught fire – ever so gradually, it must be said – following the release of their Live Ritual: Friday the 13^th record a few years prior. I was witnessing something, and I wanted to chronicle it…and again, whether anyone was actually reading.

I’ll save a (largely semantic) discussion of what constitutes “bestial black metal” for a later post. I’ll also save a far-more-personal recollection of my falling-out/fall-from-grace with such for a yet-later post, as well as the precise moment I felt the timing was right for a deliberate kiss-off to that scene. But back then, as I got the ball rolling with The Mission, I became (hyper-?)aware that there was a growing movement of black metal bands whose touchstones were the aforementioned pioneers rather than, say, contemporaneous Mayhem or Burzum or Darkthrone. This flew in the face of “conventional wisdom” among the metal press about what constituted black metal, its chronological/aesthetic development, etc (which is another Mission altogether: “some other post”). But flying in the face of Conventional Wisdom was the biggest Mission of all, and I took perverse pleasure in it.

Maybe too perverse pleasure. Between 2007 and 2008 was when I was in the thick of it, and was perhaps sacrificing my better judgment for the sake of this Mission. Seemingly any band that worshipped at the altar of the “three Bs” – Beherit, Blasphemy, and Bestial Warlust – I was all over, and especially so if they had some sort of black/white/red cover. I know this all seems rather commonplace now, at least to those of you who follow such things in the metal underground (A: we’re all sad people), and I know it seems disingenuous to sorta go back on what I once wrote, but some things hold up with time and others don’t. And these “things” are bands and records, and they’re fair game for appraisal/reprisal the second a recorded note is heard. Not to mention that I was merely doing my job of capturing the/my zeitgeist.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up. With increasingly painful realization, it dawned on me that all of bestial black metal’s heavy-hitters – namely Revenge, Black Witchery, Diocletian, Sadomator, Bestial Raids, Witchrist, Blasphemophagher, and Proclamation – peaked early on in their careers, all of whom I wrote about or even interviewed years before they became seemingly sacrosanct with Those Of You Who Follow Such Things In The Metal Underground. After that came loads upon loads of pissant trend-hoppers (or kids too young to know any better, to have really imbued the essence of heavy metal - whichever: YOU'RE ALL GUILTY), with loads upon loads of black/white/red-all-over record covers depicting goatwarriors sodomizing nuns sodomizing other goatwarriors sodomizing absurdity and the music, in kind, sounding equally attractive. It was OVER. The other shoe dropped, the shark was jumped. Professionally and personally, I hopped off the trend, and happily.

These days, I’d say I’m a happier person, too. Although, in print since then, I’ve brandished that old chestnut of “I’ve got enough stress enough in my life already” in reference to such brain-bashing decibels – and, now more than ever, that statement holds true – a lot of what I seek out, professionally and personally, is, in the grand scheme of things, “brain-bashing decibels.” I can’t get away from that; I don’t think I ever will. But if you’re gonna bash my brain with your decibels, you better take me somewhere with them: inertia sucks, professionally and personally.

So, what went wrong? Maybe bestial black metal didn’t possess enough aesthetically in its DNA to sustain itself in the long run without some injection of thinking-outside-the-box creativity/creatine. Teitanblood’s Seven Chalices pretty much proved that, making all contenders to the throne look like pretenders, or worse. That album was (and, currently, still is) the peak of modern bestiality as an art-form, as a “thing” that can take me (or you) Somewhere. Then again, lately, Morbosidad’s been absolutely killing it with their splits, with their mostly Texas-based lineup, whereby chaos is contorted inside-out and those very brain-bashing decibels are actually interesting to listen to and subsequently outside-the-box. And speaking of Texans, Obeisance are still doing cool shit, but no one seems to really care – and they’ve been there from the very beginning, long before any of these Metalloid Scum were being introduced to black metal through Cradle of Filth, admittedly or otherwise (A: Some Other Post). Nearly the same holds true for the comparatively younger, under-prolific Nyogthaeblisz; but maybe their dearth of releases over the past decade is their saving grace, a strategy worth pursuing if you must pursue the bestial. (Rewinding a bit: really, Seven Chalices isn’t that monumental of a record. Compare it to Beherit’s Drawing Down the Moon and…well, there’s no comparison. Will anyone be able to take bestiality into a mystical swamp like that? Prolly not, as much as I’d love to see/hear that. But I’m not holding my breath.) And I guess the otherwise-dormant Lust is the furthest, most whacked-out extension of all this, and even then, such idiosyncrasy is for a diehard/hard-living few. Or I just relate to that. And more crucially, continue to relate to that, many years down the line. “Shelf-life,” then, for the rest of the above culprits? Not so much.

Or maybe I went wrong. Maybe I was wrong to begin with. Professionally and personally.