HELM SKOOL

Yet another massive missive from everyone's favorite Contributing Writer-in-denial, HELM. As usual, 99% of the words are his, while 75% of the images are mine. PAY ATTENTION.

- Cobras

The Heavy Metal listening experience

The beauty of music is a personal matter and anyone who seeks to instruct another on "how to enjoy it right" is trying to achieve some control on them even if they cloak their intentions with outward benevolence.
That said, the below points are borne more of panic than a desire for manipulation: it seems to me that the paradigm for music appreciation is slowly shifting towards more epidermic consumption habits and it is in the spirit of antagonism to this trend for shallow living in general that I write the following article. Take it as a bridge between listener generations that are increasingly misunderstanding each other and not as individual condemnation for "doing it wrong".

I posit that before we endorse a record or band, before we write a glowing review, before we put them on our year's end favorites list, we should have reached the standard of experience outlined below. This sounds dangerously formulaic, but isn't the same expected from people who critique books or film? Isn't it expected of us before we give out opinions on a movie, that we watched its full length with undivided attention sometimes multiple times? That we have attempted to parse its messages and that we approached it on the level? It is in a similar spirit that I suggest a return to the neglected record-listening methods of the near past.

Turn the volume up

If I'm listening to a new record and I'm playing it at a comfortable level and it's not doing anything for me or I find my attention wondering, I try turning it up slightly (or more than slightly) above my comfort level. Heavy Metal trades dynamic range for impact, so giving it a chance to pummel me might help me see its virtue. While vacuous music will not be saved by sheer volume, listening to profound music at an inoffensive level is certainly not helping it any.
As a sub-pount: listen to music on a powerful system. The story I like to tell often on this point is when I had met some friends and we were trading formative experiences with music and I mentioned that a decade ago when I first heard In The Woods... on their "Heart of the Ages" album, their vocals freaked me out as much as they enthralled me and now they're one of my enduring favorites. One of those friends expressed some interest in listening to them and so we rushed to a laptop that was handy, and youtube. Needless to say, top-of-the-lungs screaming normalized at whisper level, coming out of two shitty little speakers is not very impressive nor captivating.

Even metal music that is often best appreciated at future listens on low level due to complexity, like say, Divine Regale. Play it as loud as you can take once in a while. The song "Change" off of their record, "Ocean Mind", used to do nothing for me when played at speaking level, and especially when I'm doing other stuff at the same time. At top volume and commanding attention though, it brings tears to my eyes. Yes even the swooshy Rush synths.

Why get any Neil Peart into you if he's so tiny?


Stop browsing the internet at the same time

This is a hard one, I know. Popular conception of music is as a background to good times. Pop video clips concede to this fully, giving us extravagant visual spectacle to sway us while the music makes its inoffensive pass at our wallet. Heavy Metal has a strong visual component too, but it doesn't overshadow the music during the listening experience. There's a lot going on in Heavy Metal music besides riffs and double-bass that requires full attention and perhaps more importantly, as romantic art, it demands a degree of reverence to be effective. To let it work its violence and lust on us, it shouldn't be vying for attention along with other, often completely random and disconnected stimuli. I'll admit there are some winning combinations that one might stumble upon



but really, if I need the internet to keep me company while I'm listening to Heavy Metal then it's very possible I'm treating it like something it's not. Not all loud music is Heavy Metal and it can only wound me to go search for romantic beauty where there is only double-bass.



Read the lyrics

If you just went "well duh" then trust me, this dates you. When some of us got into Heavy Metal, buying a record was a risky venture because it meant that we wouldn't get another one for sometimes months. And most of us didn't yet have the internet to distract us while playing our newest acquisition, so we sat down with the record sleeve and followed the lyrics with the music. For some younger readers, that last concept in particular I suspect is mind-blowing.

I don't mean to be patronizing. I appreciate the ability to download and sample music before I have to commit to any purchases as much as anyone (one out of three records I bought as a fresh listener were just awful and I'll never miss them) but when it comes to Heavy Metal, the aesthetic legacy of this type of music comes from the archetype discussed above. The musicians that made the metal classics were the type to sit down with lyric sheets in hand alone in their rooms too, so that's the sort of music they aspired to make. We must honor the implicit agreement and give the words their chance to color the sound.
And before whining about how there aren't any good Heavy Metal lyricists we must remember Sabbat, Fates Warning, Manilla Road, Depressive Age, Mercury Rising, My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, Primordial, Queensryche, Savior Machine or Secrecy, to mention a few. If it doesn't have great lyrics then that is the fault of the band, not the genre.
Now, the next generation to make metal music was the product of its hyper-stimulated environment and went on to make music that downplayed the importance of lyrics. This gave us the astonishingly aesthetics-heavy but meaning-light post metal era and although there were some standout records produced, I'm sure not many will argue that we need much more of that.


this should cover the whole last decade, actually

Listen to only a couple of tracks at a time

This will strike some of the older crowd as heresy because Heavy Metal records are meant to be listened to all the way through and anything less than that is not committing to their potential greatness, dammit. Well, first of all, Heavy Metal records had to be listened to a vinyl side at a time before base proactivity was required (getting up and flipping the record). Also keeping in mind vinyl didn't usually run at more than 45 minutes. This means the classic bands required about twenty minutes of solid attention by the listener before giving them a choice to commit to the flipside.

With CD technology, side-long divisions were slowly abandoned (though you'd be surprised how many Heavy Metal CD-only releases still explicitly mention 'sides' on the back of the jewel case) and full-length times were pushed to the attention-deficit-nightmare that is 75 full minutes. But there's still good reason to listen to those cds at twenty minute chunks. Barring concept albums (whom are expected to have premeditated lulls and breathing spaces in their running time exactly for this purpose) most metal music is so loud and impactful that ear fatigue becomes a real problem, fast.



Our ears do natural compression to protect themselves from loud noises and after some abuse will stop discerning details in the sound. Furthermore even if the level isn't so loud but the listening session is prolonged, the brain will get used to the noise and attempt to disregard the sensory input (just like right now, you're not tactilely aware that you're wearing underpants) so it can devote processing time to more immediate concerns. Effectively, in most cases when I'm listening to loud music for hours at a time I'm not listening to anything else other than vague melodies robbed of their impact and context. Sometimes that's fine when I'm listening to records I already know very well, but for new music, this doesn't count as listening at all.

Heavy Metal is reasonably composed music, where detail has merit and often augments the meaning and feeling of a recording. I strive to play about a side's worth of a record at one time, and then have ten minutes of silence or some minimal ambient to juxtapose it. Then the next side is going to sound fresh and impactful again.

Headphones in the dark, man

So let's say I know all the lyrics by heart and I've appreciated the finer points of the compositions with full attention many times. The apex of Heavy Metal appreciation for me is then to listen to the record completely alone at night, on headphones, without anything else to guide the imagination but the familiar journey. The ultimate ritual.
Headphones facilitate deep listening because they cut out all other sounds vying for attention (like instant messenger bleeps and phone rings) and the darkness cuts off visual stimulation to the point where effectively one is in a makeshift sensory-deprivation construct.



I argue that one hasn't really let a great Heavy Metal record do its work unless in these conditions. What may have sounded only like pleasant series of riffs and vocal lines before, may now that it is mapped inwardly and explored in solitude, become a strikingly impactful synaesthetic experience. Knowing - and more importantly - anticipating the lyrics allows for the music changes to inform internal correlations between sound and memory, while the brain, in lack of any other stimuli, will take the emotions that result and run with them.

Now I realize the night's mostly spent sleeping and that many readers lead hectic lives where such rituals are no longer a priority. I'm also aware that overindulging in such practices may lead to a lonely existence. My hope by writing this is is to inspire balance and to suggest that we should always make the time for artistic appreciation, as we, no matter how swamped we are with work and pending obligations, must make time for our loved ones. It is in monument to the positive impact of Heavy Metal for those that have dedicated themselves to it that they return to its ritual and do and succumb to the model that a hectic everyday life demands of us.

BROMANTIC INTERLUDE #14: The Return of The Revenge of The Son of HELM

You guys know Helm already. And you know of his propensity to discuss pet subjects... AT LENGTH. I will keep my introduction brief, as you will need all your energy to fully digest what you are about to read. The subject is the oft-requested subgenre of Technothrash. Most images (besides custom compilation cover art) are my addition. All text is his. Get comfortable.

- Cobras

Hi, this is Helm again. We talked about Greek black metal and about progressive metal and now we're going to have a go at Technothrash. Techno-thrash. Technical thrash. Flash thrash. Progressive Thrash.

God, you know what this is about, right? You can picture it in your head right now. It has a marble gray cover and the bass is missing in the mix, angry but vague socio-political lyrics, choppy songs with too many interchangeable parts, on the back the band members have their sternest faces on, and yet... there's a humanity there, underneath the guitar clinics and all the rusted machinery ticks a skipping heart.

Metallica's "...And Justice For All" characterizes a brief sideways movement of thrash metal but it's not its spearhead, that is to say, it's a reaction to it than its instigator. If you're interested in 'what could have happened' if thrash had taken a turn towards the technical like in "...And Justice for All" instead of mutating into death metal, then I have good news for you. This happened, only not very many people noticed. Some interpretation of history follows.

The term 'techno-thrash' belongs to Austin Texas quartet, Watchtower

"complex, abstract techno-thrash!"

And I sincerely doubt they ever meant it to become a metal sub-genre in its own right. Keep in mind that in the second part of the '80s, Heavy Metal bands were trying to carve out their own individual niche that secured them some marketing visibility. A lot of what we now consider prescriptive labels like speed metal, power metal, black metal and indeed technothrash were once merely descriptive brands for the individual artists that devised them.

When it comes to black metal or power metal, so so many bands came after - Venom and Helloween respectively - that it's warranted to talk about these genre identifiers without deferring back to the source all the time (which makes Venom's consistent claim that "we are black metal and nobody else is!" all the more the frivolous) but given how few the standout technothrash bands were, it usually all comes back to Watchtower. Well... almost, as we'll see below.

Also a note on "Why technothrash?". Why not use 'progressive thrash' or 'technical thrash' when discussing this in 2010? After all 'technothrash' has a confusing connotation that it might be Detroit techno mixed with Megadeth or something (although that sounds awesome for a few seconds). And as I myself say above, the term was a fabrication by one band that didn't largely catch on to become a subgenre staple. My reasoning is two-fold. First, there's lack of a better choice. Technical thrash means nothing to me because thrash was already technical music, all of metal is largely technical music as compared with rock and roll. Progressive thrash is unhistorical because progressive metal happened after technothrash and as such it's revisionist to apply a tag that was woefully overplayed in the 90's (we had progressive death metal, progressive power metal, progressive black metal, progressive my ass) to something that happened under a different set of circumstances years before. The only reason to do that is to serve some rock journalism warped sense of continuity in naming, as if we're indebted to record stores and have in mind their plastic record tag categorization schemes when we examine the history of music. Nonsense.

The second reason is that technothrash is the only term that was historically used at that period to describe the efforts of at least one band that was trying to do something different in the thrash metal field than copy Exodus or Anthrax. It may be the case that the others that followed were not aware of the term 'technothrash' at all, but it doesn't matter, it describes what they attempted to do just as well as it does describe Watchtower. So yes, it's a fabrication and a largely unpopular one today (searching online for "progressive thrash" as opposed to "techno-thrash" tells the tale) but I'm trying to do my part to return to a terminology that at least has a reference to historical continuity. These are the things that are important to me, good god.

Now, speaking a bit more broadly, technothrash has its roots a couple of other bands besides Watchtower, namely the Canadian outfit, Voivod and the German one, Mekong Delta. An argument could be made that Megadeth (and perhaps Annihilator, Forbidden, Destruction, Kreator) also contribute to the form but that's neither here nor there. The three originators basically characterize three different but similar approaches to teching up thrash that from my own long examination of the genre seem to hit all the bases to the point where extending ownership to satellites like Kreator is not needed to explain the genre to a newcomer. It goes without saying that technothrash bands listened and were influenced by other thrash or Heavy Metal bands or whatever else bands and so should you. You should do exactly what I tell you to.

Watchtower were clearly there first. They mixed the rhythmic sensibility, expansive guitar chords, very prominent and active bass of Rush with the novel thrash metal guitar and drum technique, as innovated by Overkill and popularized by Metallica. On the morphological level, that's all there is to it, really. On the aesthetic side, socio-political paranoia and disaffection reign. If there is a characteristic that makes techno-thrash a strongly modernist and therefore dated movement, is that it blossomed and thrived during the peak years of the Cold War. Imagery of impending nuclear holocaust dominates, FBI conspiracy theories, biochemical warfare and so on. Once the Berlin wall comes down, the clock starts ticking in reverse for techno-thrash and in three years or so, that electrical fire hazard of a genre is quickly extinguished. Metal loses the socio-political mandate and techno-anything readily mutates into death metal and its various grotesque strands. But for now, think Reaganomics, think Red Dawn, think end-of-the-world.

This isn't to say that there was no humor in Watchtower's approach, quite the opposite. Their whole thing seems darkly cynical but strangely playful. The color of their work is one of bright individuals struggling against a dark futile futurity that vastly overtook individual effort: geopolitical trajectories locked on a course of mutually assured destruction. One can only laugh at that, or go insane. That is the feel technothrash captures, what is the thinking being, the self-determined individual (as Neil Peart of Rush had educated the metalheads, the objectivist) to do against forces vastly overpowering them?

Mekong Delta's story is characteristically similar. Originally conceived as a 'secret super-group' by several German thrash/speed metal musicians and under the guidance of producer and bassist Ralph Hubert, their raison d'etre was to take what Metallica did with "Fight Fire With Fire" and push it to a higher level of technical excellence and intensity. I'm not simplifying things here, that's pretty much what happened, straight from the Shoggoth's mouth, as it were. Some time in 1985, Jörg Michael plays said Metallica song for Hubert, whom decides to employ rhythmic technique borrowed from Romanticist classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Modest Mussorgsky to one-up the - in relation - rudimentary thrash assault of the Americans (worth noting is that when it comes to Mekong Delta, it's one of the few times where claiming metal music has classical inspiration and heritage is largely warranted). They adopt a secretive and obscure image, complete with funny H.P. Lovecraft-inspired nom de plumes and refusals to do interviews or be photographed and put out a series of records that do exactly what advertised: with a characteristically German attitude they sternly augment the Metallica blueprint to the point of becoming neoclassical technothrash. Whether Mekong Delta had heard of Watchtower is debatable, as they certainly had ample time to (Watchtower debut in 1984, Mekong Delta get together in 1985). What's important is that they sound nothing like them, yet they too represent a widely influential technical take on the thrash rudiments.

Aesthetically these Germans had a morbid fixation that spans from the socio-political doom-mongering customary to the genre to much more personal tales of horror that for all intents and purposes seem to be directly indebted to the work of writers as the before mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and similar pulp. Although the sonics of Mekong Delta were to be imitated by the whole 'German school' of technothrash, their particular literary fixations were largely not, leaving them a very distinctive and idiosyncratic band to this day.

Voivod are an article in themselves but in the context of technothrash they're not so much important because they were themselves never in this genre with both feet. They're important because nearly any technothrash band in the 1987-1990 period seemed to have an affinity for Voivod chord voicings (say that three times fast) and some even adopted similar brands of weird that characterized the Canadian outfit.

This makes sense because Voivod strongly predate technothrash and had a very established identity before Metallica put out "...And Justice for All", in fact they are contemporaries of that band. Forming somewhere around 1982 and putting out their first - and absolutely crude - demo in 1983, full of Venom, Priest and Motorhead covers, this is in some ways in direct opposition to techno-thrash sophistication.

But Voivod were a characteristically progressively-minded band. No two records of theirs sounded the same and through sheer work they eventually reach a point where their music is certainly technical, and certainly thrash, through through a very different trajectory to the above-named bands. This sense of 'outre' is I believe the defining appeal of Voivod and the reason so many musicians followed their aesthetic blueprint, they seemed outside the metal paradigm, which meant people that enjoyed aspects of Heavy Metal without necessarily subscribing to its subcultural cliche finally had a way in. Weird metal was born.

Voivod are included because of this aspect foremost. Technothrash is on the whole, a genre outside the metal paradigm circa 1988. Thrash, especially American thrash is characterized by a meathead mentality. Crushing beer-cans on the forehead, out to party and slay posers. Think of Paul Baloff of Exodus. The people that love thrash, love it because of this belligerent and irreverent attitude and this is clear to see in the waves of recent retro-thrash outfits that ape those characteristics.

Technothrash however took another page from Rush in that it was music by nerds, for nerds. They were attracted to thrash technique because it was demanding and complex enough to accompany similarly complex ideas (or ideas that seemed so by young adults, let's not get too much into the actual intellectual validity of it all). By the time technothrash arrived to fruition, it was a genre generally opposed to the vanilla thrash archetype. And this is easily felt by sampling the listeners of regular thrash and technothrash and seeing there's a very small overlap in that Venn diagram. Most real thrashers find technothrash boring or pretentious and most technothrashers (all three of them) find endless variations of a slayer riff for no purpose to be nonsensical. Guess where I stand.

So, that's a general interpretation of the historical outline. Below is a mix that includes the foundational bands and then a series of deliberations and variations by lesser known outfits. If you're interested in 'what happened after technothrash?' you should read my Progressive Metal piece.

Click on image to download!

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In fine tradition, extensive liner-notes follow!

(General note of warning. The music here is pretty demanding, so it may be best to listen attentively to 3-4 songs at one sitting and then go do something else or put on some ambient music just to cleanse the palate. As with all music that tends to extremes, the edge is dulled from overexposure.)

Watchtower - Meltdown

Although I consider their second and so far final record, "Control & Resistance" their best material, historically this is where a compilation on the technothrash quasi-genre needs to start. This recording features original guitarist Billy White who had at a time a more straightforward style than his eventual replacement, Ron Jarzombek. This sounds like a thrash song, right? But keep in mind that this recording is from 1984. Metallica had just set the bar with "Fight Fire With Fire" and the sharp compositional stop-starts, the frenzied but nuanced guitar phrasing, the hysterical vocals frankly demolish that bar. That muted scale run at 3:52 must have been some of the most intimidating picking you could hear in metal circa 1984. Innovations that we consider now public domain in technical music start here.

Everybody in the Texas metal underground at the time were aware of what Watchtower were doing and if one delves into the archives of that time the influence is clear across the board. There were many lesser technical thrash bands springing up and even reactions to that like doom stalwarts Solitude Aeturnus had extra chops to keep up in that climate. Also, Helstar were peers (from Houston, but still) in that era and Helstar and their Bach... you know. It must have been a pretty heady time to be a metal musician in Texas.

I think if the unaccustomed listener approaches what Watchtower are doing here with an ear to the Rush influence, it'll make more sense, at least as I got into Watchtower slightly before I got into Rush, when I finally put things in order there was a huge 'oh, I see now!' moment for me. The chromatic coda to the verse riff, straight out of La Villa Strangiato (only in ascent instead of descent). The whole middle segment with the riff variations and manic drum fills commenting deliberately on the leitmotif signifies a slight shift in the scope of thrash metal. It moves it from its more punk-derived 'three riffs and we're out' initial conciseness to a premeditated self-examinatory space where the musicians are not only playing frenzied crazy fast metal music but have the desire (and chops) to comment on it playfully and intelligently. I think that was the point of awe that cemented the future trajectory of thrash metal as technical, not just extreme music.

The lyrics are about imminent nuclear plant catastrophe! Two years later Chernobyl happened. Watchtower wrote another song on the subject on their sophomore outing that is resonant even today.

Mekong Delta - Without Honour

This song is terrifying if you're listening along, with the lyric sheet at hand. I don't know what it is, something about the distant reverberated vocals back in the mix while the guitars and drums pound mechanistically in the forefront. This isn't even a 'riff' exactly that Mekong Delta are so fond of (variations of it can be found in every single of their records, really) it's a snippet of Stravinsky crescendo is what it is, repeated over and over the bass drum sixteenths. People go on about how Bolt Thrower capture the sound of warfare and I agree but back in 1987, this must have sounded really shocking in the same way. The lyric is pretty literal, and one of the few cases where the band's choice of name is relevant to their mythos. The cover is very telling of where their priorities lie in terms of aesthetics. Mekong (a soldier) Delta, and above a huge Lovecraftian horror.

The think that's horrifying about the lyric is where it goes 'mutilated limbs, and no one knows from whom they are' and singer Wolfgang Borgmann accents the end of the line with a demented laugh, it really gets me. It gets me because it's not the usual politically correct moralizing of thrash bands like Anthrax, "prejudice, something we all can do without!" that rests so much on the assumption that we shouldn't do bad things because they're impolite, basically. Mekong Delta here, with their German-English and whatever other failings, paint a picture and the horrifying thing is the internal representation of it they force on the listener. You can only laugh at that sort of madness. When art can achieve such a thing inside a receptor, that's more real than anything they see on the outside. The abstract solo creates almost a metaphysical distance from the carnage and it's really impactful for me how the lead melody is repeated two times, book-ended by more chaotic leads and then the second time it's advanced to a conclusion that seems to reach a realization. Of futility? Of hopelessness? The crescendo keeps hammering the picture in the mind's eye.

'Without Honour' isn't the best Mekong Delta song musically by any stretch (seek "Dances of Death" for that) but it's very striking existentially and a clear foundation for the 'socially aware intelligent individual trying to survive a Cold War reality' identity of techno-thrash.

Voivod - Macrosolutions to Megaproblems

A year later, Voivod have found their voice and it's a weird one, at least in the context of what other thrash bands were doing. Lots of open space where Exodus-clones would put constant open-E palm muting, high-pitched and unusual chords that outline the nodes of a melody line the listener is invited to fill in themselves, almost pointillist in a way. Open mix, more relative to a post-punk band than a metal one. Again, Voivod reach their peak for me with next year's "Nothingface" (complete with Deluxe Paint pixel artwork) but for a discussion on technothrash, this is a much more pertinent document.

The thing with Voivod is, they make sense but it's a strange sort of ran-twice-through-babelfish type of sense. The lyric genuinely feels as if it's trying to say something (and I think I get it) but its wording is so incongruous and open-ended that it could just be words in a random order. As the melodies invite filling in and interpretation by the listener, so do the words

"It's gonna be, hostility

Hypothetic is liberty

Anti-being society

As directed reality"

That's why the people that are into Voivod really love them, I think. When I listen to them intentionally, I'm collaborating on what all of this could mean. This is a gentle process which is not often encountered in Heavy Metal, thrash metal much less, where the message, if there is one, is usually ham-fisted and right there. Voivod are instead a strange new language that when internalized, can only lead to peculiar but personal poetry.

For me the best way to get into Voivod is a very roundabout one. Play, if you can, the game 'Captain Blood' on the Atari ST (emulators exist) or just watch a video of it being played.



THIS is Voivod. You think this makes no sense? It makes perfect sense. Once you - I shit you not - learn its own brand of peculiar sign language. I once had, and I could write you little haiku-type primary emotion poems in it. I might not remember the lexicon as well as I could 10 years ago but the emotional-neural connections are still functioning in cryohibernation mode.

Look, I know that I'm telling you that in order to get Voivod you need to parse an even stranger fifteen-year-old French 8-bit cosmic adventure game, but tough, this isn't Anthrax, this is technothrash.

Sieges Even - David

This is some of my absolute favorite music in the genre, stellar, magnificent, still unparalleled. It sounds like a confusing mess at first, right? It did for me although it was attractive even when I didn't understand it because I could tell something tangible was there. After years of inattentive listening and finally, a couple of weeks of attentive listening, I started to map out what's going on in this music and then, I was hooked for life.

Sieges Even were Watchtower clones on this, their debut (from the second record "Steps" and onwards, they were clones of nothing). Watchtower were said to have been informed someone was ripping off their style and were annoyed at this, but this many years later when it's all said and done and there's been so few worthy competitors to Watchtower one kinda wishes more bands would have outright tried to out-Watchtower Watchtower, you know?

Which is what Sieges Even achieve here. However the Watchtower that they're outdoing is the 1984 incarnation, not the concurrent 1989 version that did "Control & Resistance" which was by then, even farther outside the stratosphere. That isn't to say that Sieges Even hadn't heard some of the Watchtower material from what was to be their second, definitive record, as the recording process of that album was much belabored and demos existed for at least a couple of years before release. And okay, Sieges even have a song called "Repression and Resistance" in here, also it's named "Life Cycle" (another Watchtower song is "Life Cycles") so there's isn't much argument as to what an inspiration they were.

But the clone argument is overplayed as this really, once you've come close to it, sounds very little like Watchtower. More thrash, certainly more dense rhythmically, more chopped up (infinite amounts of stop-starts in these songs, perhaps they liked Mekong Delta too, or perhaps it's just Rush again), more chromaticism in the riffs, and due to its German heritage the whole thing comes across as extremely serious. Severely so, perhaps. Humor wasn't in the artistic lexicon. Bertolt Brecht is quoted in the inner sleeve ("he who doesn't know the truth is a stupidhead, he who knows it and tells instead a lie is a criminal"), and this song is about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime (and before and after that also).

Where Anthrax wrote bullshit PC anthems about problems they'd never actually encountered, here Sieges Even come across as very informed, aware and sensitive to the actual core of the issue instead. This isn't the "serious song on the album we can play to our mom to prove we're artists and then back to the moshing and beer drinking" that the hateful Anthrax gave us every second record, the whole record is like this.

"Back in the days of doubt and dissent,

From the soil of Palestine

A wandering began, matchless

In the annals of history and time

Exiled and expelled, trapped in the walls

Of Babylon, only a leg on their way

A consequence unheard-of, dispersion

And pursuance for no rational cause

Symbol of compassion, held in contempt

An endless voyage through time

Prejudice, unreason, contagious seed

Today we shake our heads, can't comprehend

In medieval times the Christian church

Made itself a part of the crime

Conversion and judgment in blind infallibility

Executed upon the Jews

Bigotry and prejudice are persisting

Basic characters of man

As essential feature not to accept dissenters,

It's so easy to judge

But at nightfall of civilization,

When reason fell and fascism prevailed

A malpractice tarnished the world,

Rendered by a subservient mass

Accustomed to misuse and fear

We're looking back insensibly

What happened then won't happen anew,

Close your eyes in arrogance and simply forget

So much injustice and grief

Done unto the star of David

Remind unsound doctrines of an Aryan race,

The concentration camps, the relentless exodus

Some folks say it will never come again,

Are they oblivious? Full of unconcern?

So look at Pretoria and the fascist-like regime

Will man ever listen to reason?"

Scream the last word with them, I always do. Ah, the positivist fantasy where the whole globe has a little sit-down and talks their problems out and sees they're just not rational and so everything is solved. I'm not kidding when I say that as a younger boy my mind was blown by the synergy of lyric and music in songs such as this. They really impressed on me the weight of the social situation in ways that more traditionally instructive sources could not. Heavy Metal taught me how to think, I'll never underplay its influence and that's one of the reasons I can never empathize when people complain Heavy Metal doesn't have good lyrics and lyricists.

Realm - Slay the Oppressor

If you're wondering, the juxtaposition is intentional here. Realm were amazingly technically proficient, but the lyric is as base as that of many metal bands earlier in the decade, in stark contrast to Sieges Even above. But boy, do Realm here let the instruments do the talking.

I'm very drawn to the riffs that include unbalanced triplets over eighth notes as finishes, Psychotic Waltz do that a lot too. Quintessentially thrash triplet-heavy riffs over polka beats married to the playful technical flourish usually found in fusion and jazz playing. And there's a tasteful breakdown as well! The only other entry in this compilation hitting the same cues is the Forced Entry one below. As is clear, the American style of technothrash, post-Watchtower, is much more involved in trying to be both fancy and bludgeoning thrash at the same time. Perhaps Annihilator, Forbidden and Megadeth had an influence in shaping this aspect of the situation.

Medieval Death - Desperate Calls

Here's a Greek oddity that came out in 1989. What I enjoy most about Medieval Death is how they fluidly converge their romantic aesthetic, lyric and vocal style, with the otherwise forceful thrash. You wouldn't expect romantic thrash to work and I don't think there's too many other examples to go from, but Medieval Death will always have a place in my heart for this. "Tomorrow I'll be crucified but I'll just fly away. I'm still alive, I'm still living, I'll fly away".

I feel that thrash metal, barren as it generally was aesthetically (given its punk and hardcore pedigree) left a contribution to Heavy Metal that could best be described as technical and production-relevant. Thrash might have not have been about much but the guitar and drum technique, along with the production approach, but these few things were very impactful on nearly any type of metal that came after it. So it's not so strange to see some Greeks in 1989 writing romantic prose that could perhaps fit well with a gothic sound but furnish it instead with robust thrash styling.

Forced Entry - Bludgeon

Remember how I said that techno-thrash was mostly music by nerds for nerds? Well these guys, taking their page from Forbidden, certainly projected a different feel. Untactful and visceral, almost tough-guy in a way, they take their stop-start odd-meter riffs and hammer them violently. There's still grace and nuance of course, but the end result feels much more low-brow than say, the Sieges Even track above.

That said, I have a soft spot for both Forced Entry records. Can't deny talent I guess. I don't usually go for mosh parts and gang choruses and that sort of pastiche, but there's a lot to redeem it here. The rhythmic acuity, the choice of where to put the vocal line... I know that sounds kinda trite but if one's tried writing complex music with a lot of stop-starts and changes of tempo/feel they'd have probably noticed how difficult it is to make it cohere and even more to make it have a gut impact. So I respect Forced Entry for the highbrow beating, really.

Aspid - Comatose State

Talking about violence, here's a Russian lost offering, recently unearthed and issued on CD by Stigmartyr Records. Absolutely essential addition to a technothrash library even if I have no idea what the Russian lyrics are about. I've heard it enough to have sorta made up my own stories to go with the venomous delivery and the razor-sharp riffs and it's mostly about how pissed off these gents are with everything.

But the best thing about their take on the Cracked-Brain-era Destruction techno-thrash is their touch of Russian class, really. They're such great players and with purposefully idiosyncratic flourish. I can tell the guitarists here know their way around interpreting classical music for the guitar instead of say, having learned how to play by copying Metallica. This is a common feel in a lot of Russian metal, the almost arch sophistication. Also worth checking on that level are Valkyria, Credo, Magnit and so on.

The first few times I heard this, hell let's not lie, even now, I wondered how everyone kept count of the changes here, and screw keeping count, how they all hit the cues so forcefully. I'm aware it's a matter of practice but there's also a degree of innate talent for that sort of thing I believe, otherwise bands such as these would never get to writing more than two songs, given the amount of rehearsal that would go into making those few cohere.

Deathrow - Events in Concealment

Here's another German offering of note from 1988. The story behind it is a bit sad though and perhaps tarnishes its initial impact but a truth is always more interesting than a lie so here it is. Most of the original Deathrow members resent this record somewhat because it's the brainchild of a then-new member and guitar wizard, Uwe Osterlehner, (who also went on to collaborate with certain Psychotic Waltz personnel on a lesser technothrash item 'End Amen'). The rest of the band was given to a more Kreator-type raging thrash idiom and doesn't now feel the more technical approach of the record whence this song comes from (and to a lesser degree of the final record that followed it) represents the ambition of the band. They consider their legacy to be more about their first two albums, and as a person much enthralled with their technothrash period, I don't want to hear that, you know?

There's just so much to love in this record. Again note triplets over eighths in so many riffs, quirky syncopation that accents the claustrophobia inherent in the song theme, unpredictable chord and lead choices in a disharmonious dialogue, perfect. And how tight it all is (barring some drumming issues that become all the more apparent if you play this right after Aspid, heh). The Germans certainly had the technothrash thing down instinctively. And the lyric is very well-done and thoughtful.

In the end I kind of see their point in how this record is derivative of a scene that Deathrow didn't have in their original intention to enter. One can hear it, the one side of the guitar mix (Uwe Osterlehner's, I'd expect) is much more playful than the harmonies on the other side, and the drummer is struggling with some of the changes. But as I said, there's so little great music in this idiom it's often worth paying closer attention to the diamonds in the rough too.

Wolf Spider - Inclined

Here's something from Poland in the same period. Now, Wolf Spider wanted to be part of technothrash very clearly. And I applaud them for taking a difficult road to get there (the one that also involves writing songs, not just playing guitar in a fancy way). The guitarists use some unexpected chord voicings sure and there's so much inventiveness in the relatively few themes presented in the song but perhaps most strikingly, this is one of the catchiest songs in the compilation, due to the quirky vocal melody lines. It's a bit unfortunate that the vocals are mixed so high, but hey, this is Poland in the '80s, I'm glad the guitars sound like guitars, let alone that I can hear the chord shapes through the distortion (a difficult thing even with today's production technology).

There's a very clear Rush feel here, from how they return to the second verse on the up-beat, the various expressive chords and certainly the singer's attempt at Geddy-range (a valiant failure, but charming). The thematics of the song are slightly marred by English-as-a-second language phrasing but the point of it is one worth considering.

"We are so inclined to

Tell these funny lies, stupid lies

Lies exhaust your mind,

Filling you with fear, turning mad

I have killed truths myself

Some of them killed me in turn

Cheated for my tender heart

Nurtured with the kindest evil

I am clad in truthful lies

Falling face down on the drivel"

Again, in light of how much Heavy Metal music is maligned for being lyrically vacuous, I posit a band from Poland in 1988, writing about a subject any sensitive adult will have had to negotiate at many times in their lives, as evidence to the contrary.

Anacrusis - Explained Away

Talking about great lyrics, here's one of the best lyricists in all of Heavy Metal. Kenn Nardi feels like a friend to me. Kenn Nardi has said no lies. I've never met the man nor have I even exchanged a polite e-mail, but his music has been in valuable dialogue with me for a decade now and I've only become a better human for it. Let's look at the whole lyric here

"Donning a sweet contented mask

Acquiring bliss, a grueling task

Adoring a regretful past

Wondering how long it can last

Frequenting a cold empty void

And fearing I am, paranoid

Obeying this despondent way

The crumbling hopes, the price to pay

Contorted veil of false fulfillment

So easily explained away

Nothing changes the future past

Pretending to the very last

Contorted veil of false fulfillment

So easily explained away

Driving onward, must gratify

I'm posing in a satisfied lie

Disregarding this emptiness

And settling, now, for so much less"

This existential issue, of not really being able to tell how I feel about my life, if I'm content (or 'content enough?' what a curious notion) is one I've had to deal with for as long as I've noted I exist and Anacrusis helped in letting me know I'm not the only one, at a formative stage. Not to say I've had to live a difficult life, perhaps exactly because I haven't had to live a very difficult life from an external point of view (I didn't lose a leg to a mine or half-starve to death, for example) it's so hard to navigate these feelings of worthlessness and at the same time, of a hunger for something better. Society tends to mock the middle-class and semi-comfortable for their existential distress, juxtaposing it with the real horrors of the world. Heavy Metal often goes into gruesome detail about death and destruction, but even there I see what Kenn Nardi is saying here much more directly: isn't the fascination with the extremes of experience belying a current discontentment with the middle-ground of everyday existence? That I think drives most of Heavy Metal.

Musically the defining characteristic of Anacrusis is the bi-polarity between the subdued melancholy of their softer passages and the violent energy of their all-out thrash. Some complain this is an unfortunate precursor to the teenage-angst nu metal paradigm. To this I say (somewhat polemically, but Anacrusis are worth it) teenage angst is a very real thing and if nu-metal sounds contrived and annoying to you it is not because it is referencing a set of real emotions that people have, for as long as humanity existed, tried to negotiate through art. The thrash that is always-full-on like Slayer isn't a more honest depiction of the human psyche. Anacrusis tried a very difficult thing and I think they're startlingly successful: making modernist metal bent on describing the human condition in non-contrived, personal terms. I could only wish other metal bands in the future are inspired by them and attempt to cut deeper to the bone.

Coroner - Pale Sister

Alright, truthfully, I have no idea what the lyric is about even after all these years. Perhaps you can help me.

"With wounded knees

And the musty scent

Of incense in her hair

Captured by the barbed hook

Of eternal devotion

Stigma bleeds

In the book that leads

To her final end

Civitas Dei

She lives on your planet

But not in your world

She speaks the same language

But you can't understand

The weight of chastity

Makes her eyes cast down

And the skin of humility

Is white as snow

Stigma bleeds

In the book that leads

To her final end

Civitas Dei

She lives on your planet

But not in your world

She speaks the same language

But you can't understand

Paralyzed she's followin'

The ancient message

It's more much more

Than just belief"

Any of that ring any bells? Civitas Dei means "City of God" if my Latin serve me, and the church bells make me feel there's an ecclesiastical theme going on but otherwise, I'm all out. I get the feeling 'Pale Sister' refers to something literary that would be the key in understanding what got Coroner's attention enough to write a song on.

But this is an awesome display by Coroner, musically. Really, nobody else has ever come close to copying them at any point in their multi-faceted trajectory through and beyond Heavy Metal (well, Aftermath were a Coroner clone, but whatever). Fluid solos and neoclassical leads stacked against harsh and almost atavistic two-chord riffs that stop-start and leave little time to breathe. Listening to Coroner is a disorientating experience for me still, and man, I've listened to Coroner more than is healthy I think sometimes. But they're just so good. It's generally the mark of a great band for me if I change my mind about which record is my favorite every other year. Usually it's "Punishment for Decadence", sometimes "Grin", recently it's "Mental Vortex" from whence this song comes.

Coroner were one of the most convincing power trios in the thrash field. There is never the problem of a band sounding as if they'd be augmented by the inclusion of a second guitarist. And though this is due to double-tracked rhythm guitars in their recorded material, one can check them out live on youtube and be startled at how full they sound.

This is a real oddity from 1989. Little-known Spectral Incursion (what a name!) remain obscure. I've found them through the wonderful Corosseum some years ago and I'm still digesting their two demos and EP with much interest.

The cover art for this is spectacularly horrid/awesome, I simply must share:

This seems kind of 'outside' like Voivod but I can't place what about it makes it so. It's certainly more structured and conservatively melodic than Voivod, no pointillist space, the guitarist is going on pretty much straight through the song. I think it's the joyous over-exposition of melodic ideas that makes this sound not-exactly-metal, in a sense. I feel as if someone's playing a mini-suite for me, he just happened to know how to play metal guitar instead of piano. And yet, unlike piano, as this is a power trio, it sounds so monophonic! Not to say it sounds bare, the guitarist plays enough notes for three guitarists, but it's just so... on-off. Here's half a riff. Here's a scale run for a coda for the riff. Oh, here's something else. All linear, in a row. Well, I lie, there's a guitar solo overdub in the middle but that's the only bit where this sounds like something a different band would play, perhaps.

I sincerely don't know how many listeners would enjoy this sort of music, but for me it hits all the spots that I think some of these ironic-rock-with-lots-of-riffs bands like The Fucking Champs hit for others, and is also delightfully unaware of itself. Oh and if you track down the EP, it's not all instrumentals, I just happen to prefer this cut the best.

Depressive Age - Never Be Blind

We close this examination of a small quasi-genre now forgotten in time with a message that should be timeless.

"I see love and I see hate

I see pleasure and I see disdain

I see hypocrisy and sincerity

I see famine and gluttony

And I will never be, never be blind

I see torture and I see cure

I see patients and freaks very cool

I see mockery and sympathy

I see greed and I see modesty

And I will never be, never be blind

I see yesterday and I see today

I see sunlight and I see dark night

I see meanness and generosity

I see misery and luxury

And I will never be, never be blind"

That's it. Techno-thrash may have traveled into doubtful directions in its guise of progressive metal in the 90's and Heavy Metal on the whole might have lost the onus for existential examination in the last decade. Whatever may happen in the future certainly will happen. Even if we're not prepared to accept it, we must allow ourselves to gaze at its horrid multitude of acts and thoughts and desires and make an interpretation, our reality. At the end we'll count our final score and chisel our initials on a gravestone, let it be written under them, as Jan Lubitzki of Depressive Age would hope, "I was never blind".

RELEASE THE SPORES: Illogical (Team!) Interview With Slough Feg's Mike Scalzi

I am sure you're all familiar with Patrick Swayze's character "Dalton" from the 1989 film Road House (right). Loved by women and feared by men, Dalton packs not only a punch but also a degree in philosophy from NYU -- a thinking man's warrior, of sorts. He is the Ultimate Bouncer, a deadly blend of strength, brains, agility, and mysticism.
Mike Scalzi is basically the Dalton of heavy metal, right down to the degree in philosophy. Singer, lyricist, and guitarist for the mindbendingly shredderiffic (Lord Weird) Slough Feg (read a super lengthy IC post about them here), Scalzi has been successfully marrying folklore and metal for over 20 years now, and showing no signs of fatigue. Dude is a champ.
So imagine my unbridled giddiness when homeboy agreed to an interview with IC. Sweet!

But this ain't your "average" interview. No less than four members of the IC Team contributed to this post, making it a virtual CROSSFIRE OF Q&A BRUTALITY. Watch as Scalzi strikes us down, one by one, into the raging fires of Hades. The horror!


(These first three questions come courtesy of Brother Seanford AKA Seanu Reeves, whose band, Professor, recently shared the stage with Slough Feg in L.A.)

1) When I saw you last Saturday in Los Angeles, I noticed that there were a considerable amount of hot girls in the audience. Was that an anomaly for a Slough Feg show? Did it make you nervous?

Was it strange to have girls in the audience? Not in San Francisco, we usually get a few girls around here. But in somewhere like Arizona of Chicago it would be weird, unfortunately. Why the hell would it make me nervous? I get nervous when there’s nothing but a bunch of overweight fan-boys in the audience with tattoos of my face on their calves, that makes me nervous!!!

2) I noticed Adrian (Maestas, Slough Feg bassist) was wearing a spandex leopard print shirt. Is this something you often fight about?

Left: The dudes in question.

This is a stupid question. Of course we don’t fight about it. Adrian dresses like a queer, that’s good. That’s what skinny little rockers are supposed to do. You see the shit I wear on stage, well, sometimes people try to ask me stupid questions about it, as if I actually take all of this seriously. Well, I do take it seriously, I’m serious about putting on a show and keeping people’s attention, my wearing gay looking clothes does just that-----if you haven’t noticed musicians have been doing that since before we were both born. Its called performing, wearing a flashy costume----not putting on baggy jeans and a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt with your hair in a pony tail and staring at the floor for the whole show because you mommy and daddy didn’t have the sense to make you watch Mr. Rogers and learn to look people in the eye with confidence when you address them----particularly when you’re performing on a stage for them. 99% of the bands you see these days have no business being put on a stage for a “performance”----they can’t perform their way out a paper bag. No wonder shows are so poorly attended and people seem so bored, because the bands are never holding up their end of the bargain and putting on a show. If I want to see a bunch of insecure phony punks scowl and roll their eyes and act like fourteen year olds I can go teach philosophy classes!!

3) You have a considerable cult following, however your fans are in need of branding ala the kiss army, dead heads, and juggalos. Do you prefer Sloughdiers or perhaps simply Trekkies?

This is a actually a decent question, and a decent proposal (want to be in charge of our fan-club!?!?). There was one guy on our message board who started addressing everyone as “Feggots”, which I thought was rather appropriate, seeing as there are maybe three Slough Feg fans who have ever seen a naked woman (besides their mother)------sometimes I do feel like I’m at a Star Trek convention when I’m doing a show. Ever seen the 1985 Saturday night Live that William Shatner hosted: “get a life you guys!! Move out of your parents’ basement and get a job!! You ever kissed as girl?!?!” I’ll have to work on a good fan-club name, but I’d prefer someone else came up with it. Now that we have more female fans, perhaps we can call it the “feg hags”, or something.

(The next two questions come courtesy of Manslaughter, who has boozed down with Mr. Scalzi at his place of employment -- The Attic in SF -- on several occasions.)



1) So it's pretty obvious that you pump metal, but it seems that you pump iron as well. What do you listen to while pumping said iron? I know I personally like to listen to a lot of German Thrash while getting totally torqued. Can you give us a Scalzi workout playlist?

I usually don’t talk in public about pumping things, but this is an interesting question-----very evocative. I’ve never thought of myself as “torqued”, but I have been called “yoked” before. I don’t pump much Iron, as much as I used to, but you’re right, I do go to a gym when I can get there. Often I’m too tired for weeks, and that bothers me, because if I don’t exercise I get angry and irritated and depressed. I just went yesterday for the first time in almost a month. Unfortunately I don’t have much of a choice of what I listen to there, because I go to a very ghetto gym. Its right across the street from my house, and it’s a free community center, meaning lots of ex-cons and halfway house guys go there. Its more like a prison weight room of an outpatient prison!! The guys in there can’t afford gym memberships and all came up lifting in gyms. They taught me how to lift a lot when I was younger because I had to lift the weight they were working with, but now I find it annoying. I don’t say this to sound tough or anything, it’s just inexpensive and it's across the street from my house so it's hard to imagine going anywhere else. They listen to a boom box in there on some horrible hip-hop/R&B station. It’s annoying, I actually prefer silence when I’m working out.

2) I heard a rumor that you have a love for the Piano Man. Billy Joel. Can you tell us how that came about and what your favorite Billy Joel album is?

I grew up with Billy Joel. I’m from central Pennsylvania, and I’m old enough to remember his AM radio hits when they came out in seventies. Billy was the shite on the east coast back then, especially if you were in grade school. My older sister’s first 45 was “Moving Out”. I remember before we knew who he was that song kept coming on the radio (back then a lot of cheaper radios were AM only), and the line about “trading in his Chevy for a Cadillac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac” sounded really wild to us. It was the most gritty thing we’d heard at that point (at about age 7). So she bought it , and I remember thinking this was the most “realistic”, street-wise type of music I’d ever heard (we’re talking about the height of the disco era, and as a 7 year old I hated disco----I though the bee gee’s were sissies). So, like every other kid I knew, we got really into Billy Joel----we kinda felt like his records were about us, about our lives, all the stuff on those late seventies albums sounded believable. They were stories about regular people. When I was ten he put out “Glass Houses” and I played that record until the grooves wore out, and lent it to every other 10 year old on my block. When I listen to it now I still get distinct memory-flashes of playing football, or playing with Legos, or whatever I was doing and age 10. At the time my parents forced me to take piano lessons, which I didn’t like at the time, but the redeeming factor is that it makes me more like Billy. He was a man’s man in a small, pug little package. Try to tell me he wasn’t bad-ass when you consider a short, poor, ugly Jewish guy from Long Island who really can’t sing scoring the no. 1 super model of the seventies, and then dumping her because she bored him. Holy hell, what a role-model.

(Nad-pumpingest song ever?)



(The next four questions were contributed by yours truly, Shelby Cobras.)



1) I have heard a couple different accounts now of your signature stage maneuver, which I like to call The Scalzi Axe-Toss. Although I've never witnessed this complex ritual myself, I have confirmation of its occurrence in at least two locations, with two separate people. Once, toward the end of a Slough Feg set at Slim's in SF, you took your guitar off mid-song, jumped off stage, and threw it to Josh from The Fucking Champs who improvised a solo on the spot. The second time it occurred at The Alibi in Arcata, where you once again removed your guitar and chucked it at Blake from Professor, who also shredded accordingly.
My question is this: How do I end up on the business end of a Scalzi Axe-Toss? Do you think you could spot me in a crowd, and if so, is there anything I can do to make the Axe-Tossing easier for you (placement in regards to the stage, protective padding, etc.)? I wail pretty hard, what are my chances?

I’ve certainly never heard of this before. I never thought much of it, or thought of giving it a name. I suppose I’ve done it plenty of times, without any forethought whatsoever. I suppose you could simply ask for it. It usually happens during the cheesy “guitar solo” section of “Warriors Dawn”. But I don’t think I’ve done it in over a year. I think those two events you described occurred on the same tour, and then I was doing it a lot. I suppose maybe I should start again. Last week at the Parkside would have been an ideal occasion, I do admit, it just never crossed my mind. I’ll keep that in mind. If you’re ever around when we’re doing “Warrior’s Dawn”, I guess get up towards the front and be ready.

(This is the song I will be playing lead axe on at the next Slough Feg show:)



2) I know you read the semi-obsessive post I wrote about your band here on IC recently. Adrian said I got most of the details right, but were there any glaring errors you'd like to correct? I think I've figured out the mythology and storylines behind most of your albums, with the one exception being Atavism. There's some crazy Greek mythology shit going on in there, does that all relate back to the Slaine stuff or is it a whole other tangent altogether? Lay it out for us.
PS I've decided to name my next born son "Eumaeus The Swineherd".

Well, I skimmed over most of that article to be honest with you. I liked what I read but didn’t have time to go over it thoroughly, but it looked pretty great, and it was long. Thanks!! I think a common problem with writing about our band (and perhaps other bands as well) is that the writer assumes that everything about the music is totally pre-meditated. It’s not. A lot of the lyrics are somewhat random and just sound good (in my opinion) over the music. Don’t try to get too particular about their content, because often I don’t-----I just pick a general theme and add details that sound interesting. But actually “Eumaeus” is an exception. It’s about Homer’s Odyssey. All the references in that song, and “Curse of Athena” are quite specific to that book. Also, Slaine is not the inspiration to very many of my lyrics. Slaine is based on an old Irish Epic about a cattle raid called the Tain. This is where most of the ideas for the Celtic lyrics come from. But you’re in the right general area. Also, some of the lines in “Hiberno Latin Invasion” are taken directly from the surviving versions of Brutus’ (the guy who murdered Julius Caesar) war diaries, as the first Roman general to enter Albany (England) and encounter the Celts.

3) I've noticed at the last two (local) Slough Feg shows, you perform a quick costume change before the epic "Baltech's Lament". At the DNA Lounge, you changed from a leather vest into a long-sleeve silk shirt, and at Thee Parkside, it was some sort of silky vest OVER your leather vest. Is it something about the song itself that demands silkiness and comfort? Or is it just that, at that point in your set, you need to work with a garment that breathes a little easier?

Right: The garment in question.

Neither. I just like to put something else on when that songs comes up. First of all the guitar comes off so it gives room to put something else on. Also, it just adds to the performance atmosphere (painfully missing from most metal shows) at that point in the set, when the mood gets a little more dramatic. People seem to enjoy it, as I do as well. In any real performance that last for more than twenty-five minutes, like a real theatre production of any sort, there’s always costume changes, set changes etc. It keeps things interesting. God knows there are so many opportunities to get BORED during you average rock band’s performance these days (mostly because the band usually just plain stinks!)----I try to minimize these opportunities. It doesn’t always work, but I’m getting better at it. But at the Parkside I kinda failed. The two vested thing doesn’t really come off---it's just all I had around to put on at the time. I prefer the silk shirts, or something a little more showy.

(The jam in question: )



4) 2010 is the 20th year of Slough Feg's existence. What are a couple highlights and/or lowlights the band has seen in the last two decades?

Well, all twenty years were sort of a low-light (heheh……) No. That’s not true. Getting a record deal in Italy and being able to tour Europe in the late nineties after years of abject failure was the first real high point. Before that, I guess the real significant event (besides moving the band from Central Pennsylvania to the Bay Area eight months after its inception) of the early nineties was the decision and success of the whole band putting on war-paint and dressing like savages, and throwing bamboo spears and chicken and pig guts into the audience. This happened in ’92 as an act of desperation to get a rise out of the audience. I remember the conversation when we came up with it. It was after a practice in our basement of Haze and Webster Streets, in SF, when I told the band that if we didn’t do something drastic, that they audience had never seen before, we could go on playing forever around SF and no one would give a flying shit. So for the next show we put on grease-paint and burned tiki-torches in the club, and threw cow bones and silly shit at the audience and it totally worked. Best show we’d ever done, and people suddenly talked about us. So that really was an early high point. Then years later the European thing happened. Twilight of the Idols and Down Among the Deadmen were a big deal, made a real underground splash in Europe, and metal heads knew us. The shows over there became great and talked about. That was around 2000. Then we were able to tour America a few years later, and things kept growing in baby steps from there, and still are. Baby steps. We’ve never had BIG steps or successes, just gradual, steady progress. It’s all just hard work, but I’ts perpetual to some extent by now, and won’t easily be stopped.

(The next three questions are from Illogical Brother Number One, RPG, metal, and comic book master Helm.)



1) Do you prefer Glen Fabry's rendering of Slaine to the more popular Simon Bisley version? I've always found the Fabry renditions to be more human and nuanced whereas Bisley took him in his characteristic hypermuscular idiom. Pat Mills' writing keeps it continuous but everytime I sit down to read the Slaine comics chronologically I tend to give up when I reach the Bisley era. Am I missing out on much?

I don’t know who Glen Fabry is. I never liked Simon Bisley’s art much. That graphic novel stuff is all too cheesy for me, I’m not a big Fantasy guy. The only Slaine comics I was inspired by were the original “quality comics” that came out in the eighties. The art was by Mike McMahon, and was a totally different style. His style was sketchy and rough, really barbaric. That’s what inspired me about Slaine, the rough and chaotic pen and ink art of McMahon. He only did like the first four or five issues. To me, comic books should look like comic books-----sketchy and quickly done, with maximum emphasis on action----like the old Jack Kirby stuff, quickly and roughly done, but with totally action style. The later Slain of the graphic novels reminds me too much of slick metal, it's like comparing the first Iron Maiden album to Queensryche or something. Way too processed and cheesy. The MacMahon artwork reminds me of early Slough Feg riffs----tough and fast and chaotic, but catchy and full of aggressive energy.

2) A lot of Heavy Metal bands subscribe to a roughly Nietzsche-inspired philosophy where free willpower is the initial force that sets destiny in motion. Unless I've misunderstood the aesthetics of the band, The Lord Weird Slough Feg are informed of this but also of more deterministic points of view where Freewill and notions of metaphysical willpower do not belong. A heroic ontology against the base inescapable "anatomy is destiny". Are these facets reconciled somehow? Perhaps there is no need?

What the hell are you talking about? You seem to be implying that the free will vs. determinism debate has something to do with the ideas behind Slough Feg songs. If you want to go there, first of all as you know I’m sure, heavy metal bands who claim to be Nietzschean never know what the hell they’re talking about. I suppose I’m playing right into your hand by saying this, or even engaging in this kind of debate, but what the hell. You caught me during the interview off-season (I haven’t done one for a while because we haven’t had an album come out for awhile) so I have the patience to engage. First of all Nietzsche does NOT stand of the free-will side of the debate. He’s much more of a biological determinist----his Will To Power as the sole motivation for all human action and thought is almost the antithesis of “free will”. There is not free will! Only the will to Power------which mankind cannot help.

Secondly, I don’t know what the hell “metaphysical will power” is suppose to mean, or for that matter what you mean by the “anatomy of destiny”-----but if you want to understand the true relationship between the experience of deliberation or “free will” and the seemingly casual character of all objects of human thought or observation (from which the empirical character of all of our quantitative sciences are built----with the incorrect assumption that all “being” must be quantifiable), then read Schopenhauer---the pre-cursor and inspiration for any of Nietzsche’s brief sojourns into metaphysics. All observed phenomena (data, scientific or otherwise) appears to us in the forms of (Kantian) intuition, which are space, time and causality----and under such conditions, all events are explainable by antecedent causes, i.e. the principle of sufficient reason. But this is only half of the ontology----the will, or “thing in itself”----the internal, subjective form of all observed phenomena (even in the case of the human mind observing its own content) is not subject to this causal interpretation-----free will and determinism are two sides of the same coin (read Spinoza!!!)-----the will in itself (as the necessary subject, or necessary ground for all objective experience) is free of antecedent causes, and thus is experienced as free, or capable of pursuing any number of alternative actions. The free subject is a necessary foundation for all observation or experience of the object----just as the object of consciousness, necessary quantifiable and ensconced in the forms of intuition--- space, time and causality, is always determined by antecedent causes. You can’t have one without the other, but it all seems mysterious to us, like a “Philosophical Problem” because we refuse to acknowledge that the mind itself, human consciousness can never be quantified, for it is the necessary condition for quantification. You can’t see into your own eyes for the very same reason. But because we are so couched (eternally) in Platonic philosophical problems (which we now call “science”) which in reality simply boiled down to an unhealthy, decadent worship or “reason” (thanks to the ever-decadent Socrates) that we attempt to reduce our innate subjectivity to just another “object” of our consequences, which is the most two-bit error in the book----and one any pre-Socratic Indian or Arab mystic could have explained away in 800 BC. Okay. So that’s the problem with our society!! Seriously.
And by the way, there is not one Slough Feg song that has even remotely anything to do with all of this!! (but I’ll give you one thing, you sure knew how to push my buttons----)

3) You rolled snake eyes. Should the referee let you apply DMs or should that be considered a natural fumble always?

Snake eyes?! What the hell kind of fairy-weapon uses six-sided damage rolls?!?!

Well said, sir. My thanks to the three interviewers and ESPECIALLY the one interviewee who took part in this barbaric melee. That shit was EPIC.

Now go HERE and buy all of Slough Feg's stuff.